The Rudolf Steiner Archive

When anthroposophy is discussed in certain circles today, one of the many misstatements made about it is that it is intellectualistic, that it appeals too predominantly to the scientific mind, and that it does not sufficiently consider the needs of the human Gemüt. For this reason I have chosen Anthroposophy and the Human Gemüt as the subject of this short cycle of lectures which, to my great satisfaction, I am able to deliver to you here in Vienna, my dear friends.

The human Gemüt has indeed been wholly excluded from the domain of cognition by the intellectualistic development of civilization in the last three or four centuries. It is true that today one never tires of insisting that man cannot stop short at what the dry, matter-of-fact intellect can comprehend. Nevertheless, when it is a case of acquiring knowledge people depend exclusively upon this intellect. On the other hand, it is constantly being emphasized that the human Gemüt ought to come into its own again—yet it is not given the chance to do so. It is denied the opportunity of making any contact whatever with cosmic enigmas, and its sphere of action is limited to the most intimate concerns of men, to matters that are decided only in the most personal way.

Today we shall discuss first in what I might call a sort of historical retrospect how, in earlier periods of human evolution, this Gemüt was granted a voice in the search for knowledge, when it was permitted to conjure up grandiose and mighty images before the human soul, intended to illuminate man's efforts of realizing his incorporation into the body of world events, into the cosmos, and his participation in the changing times. In those days when the human Gemüt was still allowed to contribute its share in the matter of world views, these images really constituted the most important element of them. They represented the vast, comprehensive cosmic connections and assigned man his position in them.

In order to create a basis for further study of the human Gemüt from the viewpoint of anthroposophy, I should like to present to you today one of those grandiose, majestic images that formerly were intended to function as I have indicated. It is at the same time one of those images especially fitted, at present, to be brought before men's souls in a new manner, with which we shall also deal. I should like to talk to you about that image with which you are all familiar, but whose significance for human consciousness has gradually partly faded, partly suffered through misconception: I refer to the image of the conflict, the battle, of Michael with the Dragon. Many people are still deeply affected by it, but its more profound content is either dim or misunderstood. At best it makes no such close contact with the human Gemüt as was once the case, even as late as the 18th Century. People of today have no conception of the changes that have taken place in this respect, of how great a proportion of what so-called clever people call fantastic visions constituted the most serious elements of the ancient world views. This has been preeminently the case with the image of Michael's combat with the Dragon.

Nowadays, when a man reflects upon his development on the earth, a materialist world view inclines him to trace his relatively more perfect human form back to less perfect ones, farther and farther back to physical-animal forbears. In this way one really moves away from present-day man who is able to experience his own being in an inner, psycho-spiritual way, and arrives at far more material creatures from whom man is supposed to have descended—creatures that stood much closer to material existence. People assume that matter has gradually developed upward to the point where it experiences spirit. That was not the view in comparatively recent times: it was really the exact opposite.

Even as late as the 18th Century, when those who had not been infected by the materialistic viewpoint and frame of mind—there were not yet many who were so infected—cast their inner gaze back to prehistoric mankind, they looked upon their ancestors not as beings less human than themselves but as beings more spiritual. They beheld beings in whom spirituality was so inherent that they did not assume physical bodies in the sense that people on earth do today. Incidentally, the earth did not even exist then. They beheld beings living in a higher, more spiritual way and having—to express it crudely—a body of much finer, more spiritual substance. To that sphere one did not assign beings like present-day men but more exalted ones—beings having at most an etheric body, not a physical one. Such, approximately, were our ancestors as people then conceived them.

People used to look back at a time when there were not so-called higher animals either, when at most there were animals whose descendants of the jelly-fish kind live in the oceans of today. On what was the ancestor of our earth, they represented, so to speak, the animal kingdom, the plane below that of man; and above the latter was the kingdom embracing only beings with at most an etheric body. What I enumerated in my Occult Science, an Outline, as beings of the higher hierarchies would still be today, though in a different form, what was then considered in a certain sense the ancestry of man.

These beings—Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai—in the stage of their evolution of that time, were not destined to be free beings in the sense in which today we speak of freedom in connection with man. The will of these beings was not experienced by them in such a way as to give them that singular feeling we express by the phrase: to desire something arbitrarily. These beings desired nothing arbitrarily; they willed what flowed into their being as divine will; they had completely identified their will with the divine will. The divine beings ranking above them and signifying, in their interrelationships, the divine guidance of the world—these beings willed, in a sense, through the lower spirits—archangels and angels; so that the latter willed absolutely according to the purpose and in the sense of superior, divine-spiritual will.

The world of ideas of this older mankind was as follows: In that ancient epoch the time had not yet arrived in which beings could develop who would be conscious of the feeling of freedom. The divine-spiritual world-order had postponed that moment to a later epoch, when a number of those spirits, identified with the divine will, were, in a sense, to receive a free will of their own. That was to occur when the right time had come in world evolution.—It is not my purpose to corroborate today from the anthroposophical viewpoint what I have been characterizing; that will be done in the next lectures. Today I am merely describing the conceptions occupying the most enlightened spirits even as late as the 18th Century. I shall present them historically, for only by this method shall we arrive at a new view of the problem of reviving these conceptions in a different form.

But then—as these people saw it—among these spirits, whose real cosmic destiny was to remain identified with the will of the divine spirits, there arose a number of beings that wanted to disassociate their will, as it were, to emancipate it, from the divine will. In superhuman pride, certain beings revolted because they desired freedom of will before the time had come for their freedom to mature; and the most important one of these beings, their leader, was conceived of as the being taking shape in the Dragon that Michael combats—Michael, who remained above in the realm of those spirits that wanted to continue molding their will to the divine-spiritual will above them.

By thus remaining steadfast within the divine-spiritual will, Michael received the impulse to deal adequately with the spirit that grasped at freedom prematurely, if I may put it that way; for the forms possessed by the beings of the hierarchy of the Angeloi, Archangeloi, and Archai were simply not adapted to a being destined to have a free will, emancipated from divine will, as described. Not until later in world evolution were such forms to come into being, namely, the human form.—But all this is conceived as happening in a period in which cosmic development of the human form was not yet possible; nor were the higher animal forms possible—only the low ones I mentioned.

Thus a form had to come into being that might be called cosmically contradictory, and the refractory spirit had to be poured into this mold, so to speak. It could not be an animal form like those destined to appear only later, nor could it be the form of an animal of that time, of the then prevalent softer matter, so to say. It could only be an animal form differing from any that would be possible in the physical world, yet resembling an animal by reason of representing a cosmic contradiction. And the only form that could be evolved out of what was possible at that time is the form of the Dragon. Naturally it was interpreted in various ways when painted or otherwise represented—more or less suitably, according to the inner imaginative cognition of the artist concerning what was possible at that time in a being that had developed a refractory will. But in any case this form is not to be found among those that became possible in the animal scale up to man in the physical world: it had to remain a super-sensible being. But as such it could not exist in the realm inhabited by the beings of the higher hierarchies—angels, archangels, and so forth: it had to be transferred, as it were, placed among the beings that could evolve in the course of physical development. And that is the story of “The Fall of the Dragon from Heaven to Earth.” It was Michael's deed, this bestowing of a form that is supra-animalistic: super-sensible, but intolerable in the super-sensible realm: for although it is super-sensible it is incompatible with the realm of the super-sensible where it existed before it rebelled.

Thus this form was transferred to the physical world, but as a superphysical, super-sensible form. It lived thereafter in the realm where the minerals, plants, and animals live: in what became the earth. But it did not live there in such a way that a human eye could perceive it as it does an ordinary animal. When the soul's eye is raised to those worlds for which provision was made, so to speak, in the plan of higher worlds, it beholds in its imaginations the beings of the higher hierarchies; when the human physical eye observes the physical world it sees simply what has come into being in the various kingdoms of nature, up to the form of the physical-sensible human being. But when the soul's eye is directed to what physical nature embraces, it beholds this inherently contradictory form of the Adversary, of him who is like an animal and yet not like an animal, who dwells in the visible world, yet is himself invisible: it beholds the form of the Dragon. And in the whole genesis of the Dragon men of old saw the act of Michael, who remained in the realm of spirit in the form suitable to that realm.

Now the earth came into being, and with it, man; and it was intended that man should become, in a sense, a twofold being. With one part of his being, with his psycho-spiritual part, he was to reach up into what is called the heavenly, the super-sensible world; and with the other, with the physical-etheric part, he was to belong to that nature which came into being as earth-nature, as a new cosmic body—the cosmic body to which the apostate spirit, the Adversary, was relegated. This is where man had to come into being. He was the being who, according to the primordial decree that underlies all, belongs in this world. Man belonged on the earth. The Dragon did not belong on the earth, but he had been transferred thither.

And now consider what man encountered on the earth, as he came into existence with the earth. He encountered what had developed as external nature out of previous nature kingdoms, tending toward and culminating in our present mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, up to his own physical form. That is what he encountered—in other words, what we are accustomed to call extra-human nature. What was this? It was, and still is today, the perpetuation of what was intended by the highest creative powers in the continuous plan for the world's evolution. That is why the human being, in experiencing it in his Gemüt, can look out upon external nature, upon the minerals and all that is connected with the mineral world, upon the wondrous crystal formations—also upon the mountains, the clouds, and all the other forms—and he beholds this outer nature in its condition of death, as it were; of not being alive. But he sees all this that is not alive as something that an earlier divine world discarded—just as the human corpse, though in a different significance, is discarded by the living man at death.

Although the aspect of the human corpse as it appears to us is not primarily anything that can impress us positively, yet that which, in a certain sense, is also a divine corpse, though on a higher plane, and which originated in the mineral kingdom, may be regarded as the factor whose form and shape reflects the originally formless-living divinity. And what then comes into being as the higher kingdoms of nature can be regarded as a further reflection of what originally existed as the formless divine. So man can gaze upon the whole of nature and may feel that this extra-human nature is a mirror of the divine in the world. And after all, that is what nature is intended to give to the human Gemüt. Naïvely, and not through speculation, man must be able to feel joy and accord at the sight of this or that manifestation of nature, feel inner jubilation and enthusiasm when he experiences creative nature in its sprouting and blossoming. And his very unawareness of the cause of this elation, this enthusiasm, this overflowing joy in nature—that is what should evoke deep down in his heart the feeling that his Gemüt is so intimately related to this nature that he can say to himself—though in dim consciousness: all this the Gods have taken out of themselves and established in the world as their mirror—the same gods from whom my Gemüt derived, from whom I myself sprang by a different way.—And all our inner elation and joy in nature, all that rises in us as a feeling of release when we participate vividly in the freshness of nature, all this should be attuned to the feeling of relationship between our human Gemüt and what lives out there in nature as a mirror of Divinity.

As you know, man's position in his evolution is such that he takes nature into himself—takes it in through nourishment, through breathing, and—though in a spiritual way—through perceiving it with his senses. In these three ways external nature enters into man, and it is this that makes him a twofold being. Through his psycho-spiritual being he is related to the beings of the higher hierarchies, but a part of his being he must form out of what he finds in nature. That he takes into himself; and by being received in him as nourishment, as the stimulus of breathing, and even in the more delicate etheric process of perception, it extends in him the processes of outer nature. This appears in him as instinct, passion, animal lust—as everything animalistic that rises out of the depths of his nature. Let us note that carefully. Out there we see wondrously formed crystals, mineral masses that tower into gigantic mountains, fresh mineral forms that flow as water over the earth in the most manifold ways. On a higher plane of formative force we have before us the burgeoning substance and nature of plants, the endless variety of animal forms, and finally the human physical form itself.

All that, living in outer nature, is a mirror of the Godhead. It stands there in its marvelous naïve innocence before the human Gemüt, just because it mirrors the Godhead and is at bottom nothing but a pure reflection. Only, one must understand this reflection. Primarily it is not to be comprehended by the intellect, but only, as we shall hear in the next lectures, precisely by the Gemüt. But if man does understand it with his Gemüt—and in the olden times of which I spoke, men did—he sees it as a mirror of the Godhead.—but then he turns to what lives in nature—in the salts, in plants, and in the parts of animals that enter his own body; and he observes what it is that sprouts in the innocent green of the plants and what is even still present in a naïve way in the animal body. All this he now perceives when he looks into himself: he sees it arising in him as passions, as bestial lusts, animal instincts; and he perceives what nature becomes in him.

That was the feeling still cherished by many of the most enlightened men even in the 18th Century. They still felt vividly the difference between outer nature and what nature becomes after man has devoured, breathed, and perceived it. They felt intensely the difference between the naïve outer nature, perceptible to the senses, on the one hand, and human, inwardly surging sensuality, on the other. This difference was still livingly clear to many men who in the 18th Century, experienced nature and man and described them to their pupils, described how nature and man are involved in the conflict between Michael and the Dragon.

In considering that this radical contrast still occupied the souls of men in the 18th Century—outer nature in its essential innocence, nature within man in its corruption—we must now recall the Dragon that Michael relegated to this world of nature because he found him unworthy to remain in the world of spirituality. Out there in the world of minerals, plants, even of animals, that Dragon, whose form is incompatible with nature, assumed none of the forms of nature beings. He assumed that dragon form which today must seem fantastic to many of us—a form that must inevitably remain super-sensible. It cannot enter a mineral, a plant, or an animal, nor can it enter a physical human body. But it can enter that which outer, innocent nature becomes, in the form of guilt in the welling-up of life of instincts in the physical human body. Thus many people as late as the 18th Century said: And the Dragon, the Old Serpent, was cast out of heaven down to the earth, where he had no home; but then he erected his bulwark in the being of man, and now he is entrenched in human nature.

In this way that mighty image of Michael and the Dragon still constituted for those times an integral part of human cognition. An anthroposophy appropriate to that period would have to explain that by taking outer nature into himself through nourishment, breathing, and perception, man creates within himself a sphere of action for the Dragon. The Dragon lives in human nature; and this conception dwelt so definitely in the Gemüt of 18th Century men that one could easily imagine them as having stationed some clairvoyant being on another planet to draw a picture of the earth; and he would have shown everything existing in the minerals, plants and animals—in short, in the extra-human—as bearing no trace of the Dragon, but he would have drawn the Dragon as coiling through the animality in man, thereby representing an earth-being.

Thus the situation had changed for people of the 18th Century from that out of which it all had grown in pre-human times. For pre-humanity the conflict between Michael and the Dragon had to be located in outer objectivity, so to speak; but now the Dragon was outwardly nowhere to be found. Where was he? Where would one have to look for him? Anywhere wherever there were men on earth. That's where he was. If Michael wanted to carry on his mission, which in pre-human times lay in objective nature, when his task was to conquer the Dragon, the world-monster, externally, he must henceforth continue the struggle within human nature.—This occurred in the remote past and persisted into the 18th Century. But those who held this view knew that they had transferred to the inner man an event that had formerly been a cosmic one; and they said, in effect: Look back to olden times when you must imagine Michael to have cast the Dragon out of heaven down to earth—an event taking place in extra-human worlds. And behold the later time: man comes to earth, he takes into himself outer nature, transforms it, thus enabling the Dragon to take possession of it, and the conflict between Michael and the Dragon must henceforth be carried on on the earth.

Such thought trends were not as abstract as people of the present would like thoughts to be. Today people like to get along with thoughts as obvious as possible. They put it this way: Well, formerly an event like the conflict between Michael and the Dragon was simply thought of as external; but during the course of evolution mankind has turned inward, hence such an event is now perceived only inwardly.—Truly, those who are content to stop at such abstractions are not to be envied, and in any case they fail to envision the course of the world history of human thought. For it happened as I have just presented it; the outer cosmic conflict of Michael and the Dragon was transferred to the inner human being, because only in human nature could the Dragon now find his sphere of action.

But precisely this infused into the Michael problem the germinating of human freedom; for if the conflict had continued within man in the same way it had formerly occurred without, the human being would positively have become an automaton. By reason of being transferred to the inner being, the struggle became in a sense—expressed by an outer abstraction—a battle of the higher nature in man against the lower. But the only form it could assume for human consciousness was that of Michael in the super-sensible worlds, to which men were led to lift their gaze. And as a matter of fact, in the 18th Century there still existed numerous guides, instructions, all providing ways by which men could reach the sphere of Michael, so that with the help of his strength they might fight the Dragon dwelling in their own animal nature.

Such a man, able to see into the deeper spiritual life of the 18th Century would have to be represented pictorially somewhat as follows: outwardly the human form; in the lower, animalistic portion the Dragon writhing—even coiling about the heart; but then—behind the man, as it were, for we see the higher things with the back of our head—the outer cosmic figure of Michael, towering, radiant, retaining his cosmic nature but reflecting it in the higher human nature, so that the man's own etheric body reflects etherically the cosmic figure of Michael. Then there would be visible in this human head—but working down into the heart—the power of Michael, crushing the Dragon and causing his blood to flow down from the man's heart to the limbs.

That was the picture of the inner-human struggle of Michael with the dragon still harbored by many people of the 18th Century. It was also the picture which suggested at that time to many people that it was their duty to conquer the “lower” with the help of the “higher,” as they expressed it: that man needed the Michael power for his own life.

The intellect sees the Kant-Laplace theory; it sees the Kant-Laplace primal vapor—perhaps a spiral vapor. Out of this, planets evolve, leaving the sun in the middle. On one of the planets gradually arise the kingdoms of nature; man comes into being. And looking into the future, all this is seen to pass over again into the great graveyard of natural existence—The intellect cannot help imagining the matter in this way; and because more and more the intellect has become the only recognized autocrat of human cognition, the world view has gradually become what it is for mankind in general. But in all those earlier people of whom I have spoken today the eye of the Gemüt, as I might call it, was active. In his intellect a man can isolate himself from the world, for everyone has his own head and in that head his own thoughts. In his Gemüt he cannot do that, for the Gemüt is not dependent upon the head but upon the rhythmic organism of man. The air I have within me at the present moment, I did not have within me a moment ago: it was the general air, and in another moment it will again be the general air when I exhale it. It is only the head that isolates man, makes of him a hermit on the earth. Even in respect of the physical organization of his Gemüt, man is not isolated in this way: in that respect he belongs to the cosmos, is merely a figure in the cosmos.

But gradually the Gemüt lost its power of vision, and the head alone became seeing. The head alone, however, develops only intellectuality—it isolates man. When men still saw with their Gemüt they did not project abstract thoughts into the cosmos with the object of interpreting it, of explaining it: they still read grandiose images into it, {Translator's Note: “Saw” them into it, is Rudolf Steiner's expression} like that of Michael's Fight with the Dragon. Such a man saw what lived in his own nature and being, something that had evolved out of the world, out of the cosmos, as I described it today. He saw the inner Michael struggle come to life in the human being, in the anthropos, and take the place of the external Michael battle in the cosmos. He saw anthroposophy develop out of cosmosophy. And whenever we look back to an older world view from the abstract thoughts that affect us as cold and matter-of-fact, whose intellectuality makes us shiver, we are guided to images, one of the most grandiose of which is this of Michael at war with the Dragon; Michael, who first cast the Dragon to earth where, I might say, the Dragon could occupy his human fortress; Michael, who then became the fighter of the Dragon in man, as described.

In this picture that I have evoked for you, Michael stands cosmically behind man, while within man there is an etheric image of Michael that wages the real battle through which man can gradually become free; for it is not Michael himself who wages the battle, but human devotion and the resulting image of Michael. In the cosmic Michael there still lives that being to whom men can look up and who engaged in the original cosmic struggle with the Dragon. Truly, not upon earth alone do events take place—in fact, earth events remain incomprehensible for us unless we are able to see them as images of events in the super-sensible world and to find their causes there. In this sense a Michael deed was performed in the super-sensible realm shortly before our time, a deed I should like to characterize in the following way. In doing so I must speak in a manner that is nowadays discredited as anthropomorphic; but how could I relate it otherwise than by using human words to describe what occurs in the super-sensible world?

The epoch during which Michael cast the Dragon down to earth was thought of as lying far back in the pre-human times; but then, man appeared upon the earth and there occurred what I have described: the war between Michael and the Dragon became ever more an inner struggle. It was at the end of the 19th century that Michael could say: The image in man is now sufficiently condensed for him to be aware of it within himself: he can now feel in his Gemüt the Conqueror of the Dragon—at least, the image means something to him.—In the evolution of mankind the last third of the 19th Century stands for something extraordinarily important. In older times there was in man primarily only a tenuous image of Michael; but it condensed more and more, and in the last third of the 19th Century there appeared what follows: In earlier times the invisible, super-sensible Dragon was predominant, active in the passions and instincts, in the desires and in the animal lusts. For ordinary consciousness that Dragon remains subsensible; he dwells in man's animal nature. But there he lives in all that tends to drag man down, goading him into becoming gradually sub-human. The condition was such that Michael always intervened in human nature, in order that humanity should not fall too low.

But in the last third of the 19th Century the Michael image became so strong in man that the matter of directing his feelings upward and rising to the Michael image came to depend upon his good-will, so to speak; so that on the one hand, in unenlightened experience of the feelings, he may glimpse the image of the Dragon, and on the other hand, the radiant figure of Michael may stand before the soul's eye—radiant in spiritual vision, yet within the reach of ordinary consciousness. So the content of the human Gemüt can be this: The power of the Dragon is working within me, trying to drag me down. I do not see it—I feel it as something that would drag me down below myself. But in the spirit I see the luminous Angel whose cosmic task has always been the vanquishing of the Dragon. I concentrate my Gemüt upon this glowing figure, I let its light stream into my Gemüt, and thus my illumined and warmed Gemüt will bear within it the strength of Michael. And out of a free resolution I shall be able, through my alliance with Michael, to conquer the Dragon's might in my own lower nature.

If the requisite good-will were forthcoming in extensive circles to raise such a conception to a religious force and to inscribe it in every Gemüt we would not have all the vague and impotent ideas such as prevail in every quarter today—plans for reforms, and the like. Rather, we would have something that once again could seize hold on the whole inner man, because that is what can be inscribed in the living Gemüt—that living Gemüt which enters into a living relationship with the whole cosmos the moment it really comes to life.

Then those glowing Michael thoughts would be the first harbingers of our ability to penetrate once more into the super-sensible world. The striving for enlightenment would become inwardly and deeply religious. And thereby men would be prepared for the festivals of the year, the understanding of which only glimmers faintly across the ages—but at least it glimmers—and they would celebrate in full consciousness the festival the calendar sets at the end of September, at the beginning of autumn: the Michael Festival. This will regain its significance only when we are able to experience in our soul such a living vision. And when we are able to feel it in a living way and to make it into an instinctive social impulse of the present, then this Michael Festival—because the impulses spring directly from the spiritual world—could be regarded as the crowning impulse—even the initial impulse we need to find our way out of the present disaster: to add something real to all the talk about ideals, something not originating in human heads or hearts but in the cosmos.

And then, when the trees shed their leaves and blossoms ripen into fruit, when nature sends us her first frost and prepares to sink into her winter death, we would be able to feel the burgeoning of spirit, with which we should unite ourselves—just as we feel the Easter Festival with the sprouting, budding spring. Then, as citizens of the cosmos, we would be able to carry impulses into our lives which, not being abstract, would not remain ineffectual but would manifest their power immediately. Life will not have a soul content again until we can develop cosmic impulses in our Gemüt.

What we basically have been able to foresee for a long time has quickly befallen the world through all sorts of events that have taken place recently. As a result, we have become witnesses of serious events, the full significance of which only a later time will truly be able to grasp. And much, I might say, even in outward form, of what underlies these serious events, is quite beyond our ken today. But for us, my dear friends, one word in particular is significant in these serious times, which I would like to express in the following way: For years we have tried to deepen our spiritual knowledge, we have tried to make the knowledge, feelings and perceptions of the spiritual worlds our own, and also everything that is connected with this knowledge, feeling and perception. But now we are actually faced with having to take a test, in a certain sense, to see if we are able to hold fast to the great ideals that are mapped out for us through the knowledge and feeling of the spiritual world, even under the impact of all the difficulties that are now happening. Where friends sit together in our branches, who are united for the most part by a common feeling, it is certainly easier to hold fast to what spiritual science should bring to humanity, but we must always and everywhere keep in mind the great ideals that are already expressed in our first principle. We are not a society that spreads within homogeneous masses of people; rather, we seek to spread the reconciling spirit throughout the whole earth. In this context, we are subject to a certain test, because it is truly difficult in the times in which we now live to fully develop the sense of objectivity in relation to the Highest, namely in relation to Justice.¹

Precisely for the reasons that will emerge from my words today, the inhabitants of Central Europe, and above all the German people, currently find it easier than others to be objectively just. But even here it is necessary not to abandon ourselves to mere immediate feelings, but as serious anthroposophists we must try to penetrate with understanding into the language that today must express justice in the spiritual sense.

Not because I want to present it as something personal, but because the matter is symptomatic for me, I want to mention the following: the first volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” may be in the hands of some of you. The second volume was printed in the second half of July up to page 204. It ended in the middle of the lines. The passage was precisely what struck me as strange and symptomatic. I had to characterize the two French philosophers Boutroux and Bergson. I tried to do so as objectively as possible. Then I had to make the transition to Preuss, an unheeded, powerful thinker. After presenting French contemporary philosophy, I had to move on to what had been thought this side of the Rhine, in Germany. But the page was blank, because war broke out. I often had to look at the empty spaces of the thirteenth page.

And at that time, various voices came from across the Rhine. You are well aware of those voices. They spoke of German barbarism and the like, and hurled the most hateful accusations and slanders at us. One would say that it was distressing to experience what one was subjected to. Respected representatives of French intellectual life were stirring up hatred and passion among the people. And in this case, the personal can be seen as symptomatic: If in a book on the history of the development of philosophy one had to deal with French philosophy, and if one tried hard to do full justice to it, then it could truly fill one's soul with bitterness when, while trying with all one's might to immerse oneself with the greatest possible objectivity in the philosophy of the West, one had to experience that this philosophy, regardless of all the facts, cries out about the “barbaric nature beyond the Rhine”. It was all the more bitter because one of the worst attackers and haters of the German character was Maurice Maeterlinck.

It is strange: the first work by Maeterlinck to appear, and which already fully expresses his essence and his character, is based entirely on Novalis, is entirely drawn from Novalis, and Maurice Maeterlinck would be nothing without Novalis. All his later works arose entirely from this first foundation drawn from Novalis. This also sheds light on how our time understands justice. Today it is by no means sufficient to hear the voices that are spoken here and there under the influence of passion; rather, it is necessary that we visualize the facts. If one lets these speak, it leads to objectivity. And such objectivity is not the same as being indifferent to these relationships.

Great things are happening in our time, monstrous things. And a future time will need to refer to significant events of the past when speaking of the events of our time, in the sense of how we speak of repetitions. Not just one, many things come together to form a repetition, a composite repetition of significant historical events.

Just as in the heyday of Greco-Latin civilization the Romans had to fight the Punic Wars against Carthage, and just as the memorable Battle of Mylae decided the fate of the Romans, who had to flourishing Greco-Roman culture, against the submerging forces of the Carthaginian Empire, which was still strong on the outside, we find something like a repetition of certain events at the starting point of the present war. This may be said here today. A remarkable battle took place between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians had an enormous fleet, which made Rome, with its few ships, seem powerless. So the Romans came up with the unusual idea of building gangplanks that led from ship to ship and, to a certain extent, transformed the naval battle into a land battle, enabling the Romans to achieve a great victory on familiar ground. Just as something unprecedented happened at that time, something that few people could have imagined took place in Liège, which shows a certain relationship to the events described and which future times will speak of as a very first event. I mention these things only because I want to draw attention to the significance of the events within which we are standing in the present.

These are the very days when important decisions in the East and the West are on a knife edge. It is heartbreaking to consider what is facing each other, and especially in these days, when the decision, so to speak, stands before man's gaze as something uncertain, attention may be drawn to something else that is of tremendous importance to be remembered.

I may speak about these things as I will speak, because I am, so to speak, prepared by my karma. I was born in the realm of which it is said that it contributed so much to the war between nations; but growing up, I see that I was destined to be homeless even in childhood. I had no opportunity to experience the peculiar feelings of connection with my fellow countrymen and fellow people. Moreover, my childhood fell at a time when I myself became acquainted with hatred of Germans in Austria, when German-Austria was still under the impression of Prussia's victories, when even the Germans in Austria hated the Reich Germans. There was no opportunity to create a bias for Germany in me. This homelessness, given to me by my karma, entitles me to speak objectively, fully aware that it is precisely there that the anthroposophical attitude can speak through my words. It is not appropriate today to speak prophetic words. Therefore, he who says: where the victory may remain at last is doubtful, may go unheeded. But a victory, an important victory, which is also connected with a spiritual contemplation, which is indelible for all times to come, has already been won. What is this victory? It was won before the outbreak of the war. This victory can be characterized in the following way: Was not the center of Europe connected with the East for a long time? We are truly not speaking of the people who live in the east of Europe. We are well informed about this nation, and anyone who wants to learn the truth about the relationship of this nation to the development of nations should read the lecture cycle “The Mission of Individual National Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology”. The people in the East are different, and so is the triad that currently stands at the forefront of German intellectualism there: tsarism, Russian militarism, which has suffered a defeat, and the lying pan-Slavism. There were threads that went from the heart of Europe to this triad, even if not to its last leaf.

On July 31 of this year, the declaration of war severed and swept away this thread between Germany and Austria's leadership and Tsarist Russia. That was a great victory... [The following is unclear. The meaning seems to be something like that the events that took place at that time between the European center, the Western Powers and Russia, called for reflection on world history. Cf. also the footnote on page 13.]

Significant features of world history lie therein. One need not close one's eyes to the unnaturalness of the alliance between Europe's west and northwest and the east if one stands on anthroposophical ground of justice. Let us only try to continue to practice in these difficult times what we have learned through spiritual science itself and through some of what has been forced upon us.

When we were in dispute with Mrs. Besant, it was even an Indian scholar who said about the way Mrs. Besant shouted for tolerance, Mrs. Besant was doing it as if you were to call out to a person who has had his hand cut off and is defending himself: Be tolerant, otherwise you will start the fight! It shows a lack of thought not to realize that it is absurd to demand that the other person should let his hand be cut off without defending himself.

I have often had to hear it said in recent weeks that if Austria had not started the war with Serbia, it would have been “tolerant”. — Exactly the same case! You tell the one who is about to have his hand cut off: Be tolerant! - We have many ways of gaining objectivity from what is happening so painfully around us, but to do so we must be able to think properly. Learning to think is also one of the tasks of Theosophy. There is a cycle about the folk souls. But if we cannot understand it in the most sacred seriousness in these serious times, then all our previous work with this cycle would be a theoretical game. Only then will these things have become part of our flesh and blood when we know how to feel our way through them, where it is a matter of gaining clarity as is necessary now. In the penultimate lecture of the cycle, I tried to show that the various folk souls relate to one another in the same way as I tried to describe in the last picture of The Portal of Initiation in relation to the interplay of the three soul forces. The content of the speech, the words that each of the three personalities speaks there, must be spoken exactly as they are, since each of the personalities represents one of the three soul members of the human being.

In the penultimate lecture of the cycle on the soul of nations, you are pointed to how, if we take the nations of Italy and Spain, the third post-Atlantic age can be seen to resonate in our time: the character of the people is expressed as the sentient soul. In the case of France, it is the intellectual soul, in the case of England, the consciousness soul, and in the center of Europe, it is the I.

Do we not know that there can be struggles in our own soul, that the individual members can be in conflict with each other? Attention is drawn to this in the second drama, the “Testing of the Soul”. We can gain an insight into what is taking place in our time if we allow everything that is expressed there to take effect on us. And we must try to bring this image into such clarity in our soul that we know how to seek the I in the center of Europe. Thus, in the midst of these days of peace, we have, as it were, in the quiet spiritual work of that cycle, presented to our souls the foundations of something that now weighs heavily on the world. Basically, much of what is happening now will become clear to us if we consider everything that was expressed in the above-mentioned cycle. Only then will we attain the necessary objectivity.

It has happened in all wars that one side blames the other. For us, my dear friends, it is not appropriate to think like that; for us, it is appropriate to think differently. I will explain it with an example.

Imagine someone has grown old and then place yourself next to a child, fresh and full of strength. Would it be wise for the old man to resent the child and say: You child in your youthful power, it is your fault that I carry the infirmities of old age! It is no wiser, for example, to accuse the Germans of being responsible for the war. We must realize that what is happening is rooted in the karma of nations. In the life of nations, too, there is youth and old age; and just as in the life of an individual the freshness of childhood is not to blame for the fact that old age no longer has that freshness, so it is also foolish to make such accusations in the life of nations.

But we must not be blinded by all the talk; we must look at the facts, at the objective reality. The deeper foundations of current events still elude discussion today – apart from the fact that such a discussion would cause bad blood among some people – but I can draw attention to what is important in a different way.

As Anthroposophists, we know that Europe's I rests in the German spirit. - That is an objective occult fact. I would like to call upon a man who was not a Theosophist - he lived in the German spirit - to characterize what the attitude of the I had brought about. I know that this is not the attitude of a single person. It is the spirit of Herman Grimm, who in the spiritual sense still had Goethe's blood in his veins. He speaks the wonderful words: “The solidarity of the moral convictions of all men is today the church that unites us all. We seek more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious aspirations of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that the ethical world view knows no national distinction. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this can be done through war. The assurance that peace is our most sacred wish is no lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

Take as an answer what anthroposophical teaching brings us. Our spiritual movement wants to bring about the possibility of satisfying such longing. And then there are more words from Herman Grimm: “People as a totality recognize themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which not being allowed to exist they consider a misfortune and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt their inner disputes. With anxious endeavor they seek their right here. How hard the French are trying to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations recognize it, even the Germans themselves!"

In response to this image, let us take what anthroposophy says about the realms of the hierarchies. It is touching to see how the human spirit, in its best and highest personalities, is full of the deepest longing for what spiritual science wants to bring, but passes it by, does not find it, and how then, with anxious endeavor, people seek their right here.

Then there is another remarkable fact. Herman Grimm says: “How the present-day French are endeavoring to present the war they have in mind against Germany as a moral duty, demanding recognition of it from other nations, yes, even from the Germans themselves!” That is all too well thought out. Is the effort to present this war as a moral imperative not noticeable today from what is coming towards us from the West?

And then there is a third saying by Herman Grimm that I would like to read to you. Again you will find how it is fulfilled in what our movement brings: “The inhabitants of our planet, all conceived as a unity, are filled with an understandable sensitivity that even the most primitive peoples sense and are wary of violating. People today recognize the right of individual self-determination in spiritual matters for each and every one. Even savage human creatures can be led to these thoughts.” But in saying this, Herman Grimm expresses nothing other than the very first principle of our society.

There you can see how our anthroposophy is an answer to the call that the German spirit sounded in the voices of the best of its spiritual life. The heart of Europe has a deep yearning for spirituality. This also sheds light on the fact that wherever Germans go, they adapt to the customs of the country, sacrificing their previous ways of life, not giving up their spiritual culture, but sacrificing their nationality.

All this, my dear friends, is on the one hand suitable for us to be fair, and yet not to close our eyes to what really needs to be considered.

There have also been surprises for the occultist in recent times; and I may say that during my course in Norrköping I was able or had to speak a word that was based on such a surprise. It is true: that these events would have to happen could be foreseen for years, and that they would have to happen this year according to fate. But at the beginning of July there was nothing more to say than that we would gather for the Munich cycle, and then, when we would part – so one could expect – we would face significant events. Then came the assassination in Sarajevo. Although I have often emphasized how different things are on the physical plane from the spiritual plane, and how often the opposite image appears, it was still a surprise to me when I was able to compare the individuality that went through this assassination before and after death. Something remarkable happened: this personality became a cosmic force. I mention this to draw attention to the fact that on the physical plane things are symbolic of the spiritual, and that, strictly speaking, all events on the physical plane can only be explained when seen through the spiritual plane. Some of you know that I once said: 'The horror was in the astral world, but could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear. I said: The horror hovered in the astral world, it could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear, which worked against it as a hindrance. — It was on July 20 that I knew that the forces of fear had now become forces of courage, of daring. An indescribably magnificent fact: the forces of fear became forces of courage. It was no longer inexplicable what took place on the physical plane as such a unique phenomenon: that enthusiasm. That is a fact that was unique to me, and as far as I know, was not known to any occultist before.

Now, you have all witnessed how this enthusiasm seized people in a few days, people who were truly peace-loving before, like a wave of courage washing over them.

Soon came the times when one heard with sadness the enormous sacrifices this war demands. And when I was in Berlin in the first days of September, deep pain moved my soul when I realized what blossoms of German souls had to be sacrificed in the field. I could not help brooding over this pain, and this gave rise to occult research, for which I had no merit. It is in pain that occult knowledge is bestowed upon the soul. The anxious question arose before my soul: if the flower of the leaders of the individual corps masses are carried off in particular, what will become of us then?

And there one could see how it was the fallen ones who, after death on the battlefield, helped those who had to fight after them. That was the result of clairvoyant research. When the dead help the living, it is a consolation in the midst of pain. My dear friends, spiritual science must reach into life at the moments when comfort seems impossible, when the right frame of mind cannot be found. Even there, spiritual knowledge can give the right frame of mind, it can still offer comfort. I know there will be souls in our community who will draw courage from such knowledge in the midst of sad events.

From the study of spiritual science, we know that spiritual beings are the guides and directors of the course of humanity. In the spiritual world, it is prescribed that one thing or another will happen by a certain point in time. Let us assume that it was destined for the people of the Earth to achieve a certain degree of love in order to fight egoism by the year 1950 or 1970. All spiritual science wants to produce this ability to love. It does so in a similar way to how wood produces warmth in a stove. It can be generated through the word; and within our current, attempts are being made to generate it through the great teachings of anthroposophy. But if the response of human souls to the word were insufficient, if things were to proceed too slowly, so that by the time prescribed the capacity for love and sacrifice had not been sufficiently developed, then another teacher must intervene.

In Dornach, it has been symbolically demonstrated. Actually, the intention was to have the building completed by the beginning of August. Nothing came of it; it was not predetermined by karma that the whole building should be completed by that time and should look down from its hill, towering above the area from the east and southeast, as a symbol of the spirit. But the columns with the domes rise up into the wide landscape as a spiritual observatory. In our building, the question of how to create a room with good acoustics will also be resolved. I was able to verify that the right acoustics have been found. The sound, as tested from a certain point, showed that the acoustics were the right ones for the building. But in these acoustics, our friends could not first hear the word of spiritual life. Instead, they first heard the echo of the thunder of guns from the south of Alsace. Instead of light from the spiritual world, vast masses of light from the searchlight of Fort Istein moved into the building and illuminated it. A peculiar symbolism! A symbolism that may perhaps be mentioned after all. Sometimes a different teacher is needed!

Was it not an enormous teacher? Does it not stand in violent opposition to materialism? Then think of all that took place in just one week! Think of the sum total of the fight against selfishness! Think of the sum total of the capacity for sacrifice, of human love that arose!

When I recently returned from Vienna, karma put a newspaper into my hand. It contained an account by an Austrian soldier who went to the field. He begins by describing how, during the journey to the theater of war, the soldiers are shown kindness from all sides, and at the end there is a passage – the warrior has in all likelihood never approached Theosophy – in which he says: “We who go into the field try to stand up for the just cause with all our courage and with all we have; but those who stay at home can also work.” Then come the big words, he says: “Those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, gather all their thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory...” and in this way he does his part! For many years we have spoken of the power of feeling. So now in a simple soldier lives what we have cultivated in years of work. No matter what the immediate result may be, one thing the event will produce is spirituality in the human soul, which would otherwise not have found it for a long time.

These events are great. They can only be compared with great events of the past, which cyclically overlap each other. Just as the struggle of the Romans against the Carthaginians, and the wars of the great migrations, were important and influential for the emerging culture of the peoples, so the struggle in the midst of which we stand is no less significant. And from some of the words I speak, one thing will be able to live in your hearts: that those who today shed their blood in the field, in battle, offer this blood as a sacrifice for something that must happen. It must happen for the good of humanity. And when we look at the great sacrifices, at the pain, one thing can fill us, if not with joy, then at least with great inner satisfaction: that holy blood flows, sanctified by the events; and those who shed it will become the most important members for future times. Much will become clear to us if we can bring ourselves to see in the flowing blood a hallowed sacrificial blood. If we imbue our souls with this truth, then the spirit will bear fruit in us. I may say it: what that simple soldier said can be fulfilled in the souls of our dear anthroposophical friends.

The thoughts that are cherished in the anthroposophical soul as convictions will resonate particularly strongly there; and this is necessary if the formula that we put at the beginning of our remarks is to have an effect. Among the fighters there are already those who serve in the right faith.

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,
May your wings bring
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings who trust in your protection,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may help to radiate
The souls it lovingly seeks.

My dear friends! The purpose of my lecture today was to enable us to confront the meaning of what we have learned in our thoughts with current events, so that we can pass the test, so that we can look at events and circumstances with a just eye. Spirituality will also come through that great teacher who is now moving through Europe. But man is born to freedom. Much depends on those who are united with us in the spiritual movement. If the anthroposophical thoughts are now right in the time of trial in your souls, then that space, which is now filled with passions flowing in confusion, will be filled with brightly shining spiritual thoughts, with holy, genuine feelings. Such feelings will live on forever.

Many a night I pray that there may be many anthroposophists sending out such radiant, luminous thought-power; and if we can also find the right volition for it, we will have the opportunity to fulfill our place in true service of love. Let us be mindful of where we may bring love actively into the world. Our karma will bring it about, whether we are here or there, that this or that will be demanded of us, for which we are currently destined.

With tears in my eyes, I read a letter from a young Austrian to his mother, who on July 26 heard the words spoken in Dornach, and how what Anthroposophy can give in terms of attitude and strength lives in his heart, and lets him fulfill his duty where fate has placed him. And the same feelings and thoughts came to me from the letter of another young friend who had also attended that meeting in Dornach and then gone to the front. Such thoughts and feelings are what must live in souls today: where duty presents itself, we seek to fulfill it, exercise our judgment and be mindful where our love is required. Then one thing will be fulfilled in the future: When the peoples of Europe will no longer face each other in battle, the thoughts that we are sending out now will remain, they will be the strongest, they will represent an eternity. What we feel now will be a blessing when it is combined with the feeling that victory is inevitable: the victory of the spirit.

Remarkable words were spoken by a statesman in Germany this spring. Regarding our relationship with Russia, he said that Germany was on friendly terms with Petersburg, which was determined not to pay attention to pressurizing. And in July it was said about England that the relaxation was progressing, that the negotiations with England had not yet been concluded, but that they would be continued in this sense. Such was the language of a notable statesman in July. Read these words again now and try to realize how human judgment stands before the flood of events. But one thing can be illuminated from these words: we did not want the war! Oh, one would like – understand me correctly! – to be non-German, to put it grotesquely, so that these words would receive the attention they deserve, so that they could be given the emphasis they deserve.

But the human soul needs something lasting, not something that is spoken of today in terms that prove untenable tomorrow; it needs something that is the truth today and that is the truth tomorrow. It will only find such truth by connecting with the spirit. We can trust in the spirit's triumph. Those who connect with the spirit will find the right path to that wisdom that can only arise from the connection with the spirit. Just in the week before the outbreak of war, I had to read sentences in a newspaper like the following: Despite Liebknecht's reprimand, I believe that in political life one does not need to tell the truth unless it would come out or harm oneself. The saying is shaped by the materialism of our time, in which we would suffocate were it not for this war, and which our movement has taken upon itself to overcome. In contrast to the incredible nature of such a saying, our movement's first sentence is: “Wisdom lies only in truth.”

This shows how much we need the Spirit of Truth if we want to grasp things in their reality. For it is a matter of penetrating to that objectivity which can only be attained through the Spirit of Truth. Then it will be possible even today to recognize what a later time will recognize: that this war is a conspiracy against German intellectual life.

The saying that addresses the national spirit can help us to achieve such objectivity:

Spirit of my earthly home!
Unfold the light of your age
To the soul endowed with Christ,
So that striving, it may find
In the choir of the spheres of peace
You, resounding with the praise and power
Of the Christ-devoted human sense!

Much can come from this for our souls and for finding the right path if we vividly unite with this soul, which can come to us from such a saying. But then I know that something will happen, that an important link in what is to develop will be there, something that will live in the anthroposophical soul and that anthroposophy will bring into the world, that hopes will be met that I can express in summary with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

That, my dear friends, is what matters: we want to practice labor of love, to watch attentively for the demands of the day. And then we want to look into the circumstances without prejudice and clearly in order to achieve the kind of objectivity that is necessary today and that is so difficult for many to achieve. Perhaps those of our friends from outside the movement who hear these words can also help to clarify them.

If we can achieve such objectivity and such a willingness to work and love, then a strength can arise from such efforts that can be utilized by those spirits who send their work into the destinies of nations and who also stand by humanity to help and guide in these serious and difficult times.

• 1. Note from the editors: The transcription of this lecture cannot be considered completely reliable. There are indications of gaps in the written record of the spoken words, and even of errors. The reader is referred to the notes at the end of the volume.

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.

It will be well to insert some formalities now, so that we can then move on to some factual considerations.

I have already indicated that by putting oneself in the place of one or other of the three constituent parts of the social organism and trying to grasp the full meaning and essence of the matter, one can, as it were, find the right tone. This comes naturally if one has a true understanding of the matter.

Now I would like to present you with a few more ideas in this regard. But I would like to note in advance that, of course, when it comes to practical advice, things can always be a little different, that one can only talk about such things as examples, yes, that one can handle the matter in one way in one case and differently in another. But if I imagine what might be appropriate for your speaking effect in the coming weeks, I would first like to point out that a very specific inner attitude is of great importance for the speaker in every single case.

You see, the worst thing you could do would undoubtedly be to take a subject such as, let us say, “The great questions of the present time in relation to the threefold social order of the social organism, and, since you will be giving a number of speeches at various places during the week, would now repeatedly present this topic, so to speak, with a mastery of the individual formulations from memory. For intrinsic reasons, this is probably the worst method to choose for such a matter. You can only develop a responsible and well-founded manner of speaking if every speech you give is, so to speak, subjective and personal. It is therefore necessary, even if in the way I will describe in a moment, even if you give the same speech thirty times, or, let's assume the somewhat rare case, a hundred times in a row, to still feel it as something new each time and to always have the same great respect for the content of this speech, to let it come to mind again and again in its basic nuance - pay attention to what I am saying - to let it come to mind again and again before you give it, not so much in the individual structure and in the individual formulations, but in the basic nuances, to relive the thoughts in it again and again. How you can adjust to this depends on your relationship to the material. I knew actors and actresses of the highest caliber who assured me that they only really felt they had played a role well when they had played it about a hundred times. Now, of course, in a sense there is a kind of illusion in that; they also had it at the forty-ninth, fiftieth time, but only in relation to the previous times. In any case, however, there is a way to have the same respect for the content of the speech, no matter how often you give it. And basically, only giving the speech with the necessary freshness will keep you feeling as though you never get enough of the material in question, even if it is repeated almost entirely the same.

Anyone who feels that they are already bored by a speech they are supposed to give, or who is bored of giving the speech because they have given it so often with the same content, strikes me as someone who if he has eaten for a whole month and on the first of the next month says: I am now bored of eating, because it is just a repetition of eating from the previous thirty days; I don't want to do that again. Basically, the organism does the same thing every day in a monotonous way with regard to its most important functions, at most varying the order of the food a little. But in the same way, one can also nuance the thoughts of a lecture so that there is a change, just as there is a change in the food on consecutive days. But essentially, for the organism, it remains a monotonous being hungry – being satiated, being thirsty – drinking and so on, and basically it never gets boring.

Our intellect, our soul life in general, deviates from these in a certain way, in that it comes into decadence compared to the living growth of the natural as well as spiritual elementary forces; it deviates in that it wants to have everything only once, and then it just “has” it. In the process of progressing in soul development, one comes back again to what nature and the original spiritual elementary forces have: rhythm, the repetition of the same. And to this return to what is close to the original creative forces, closer than our decadent intellectual and soul life, to this return we must come when we work in the spiritual world, in the sphere of the spiritual. Religions have already taken this into consideration. They do not have new prayers said every morning and every evening, but always the same ones. And they assume that it is not boring, that it is really related to the whole psychological development of the human being, as eating and drinking is to the organic development of the human being. And we can prepare ourselves for our work in the spiritual, especially in a field such as oratory, so that, even if we repeat the same thing countless times, we always go through the content inwardly with the same interest before we present the matter. Only when we go through the content internally, even if it is only for a few minutes at a time, will we develop the right relationship to what we want to express. Only in this way will we develop the right sense of responsibility.

And we need this sense of responsibility when we are in a situation like the one you will be in over the next few weeks. You must be aware that with your speeches you are not just saying something to the people, but that we are at a world-historical moment, and that your speeches have a meaning for this world-historical moment. You must be very clear about the significance of what you are doing. You must say to yourself: I have something to teach people that, when it strikes them, will truly be the only means of bringing the world to ascent, while all around us are the forces of decline.

And if you are committed to this cause, then you will also appreciate in the right way what is asserting itself from all corners as the opposition to our cause and lurking everywhere on the sides of the paths you now want to enter. The opposition is ignored within our movement, even by most of our members. They do not like to concern themselves with it, and that is just a lack of interest in contemporary history. But out of an interest in contemporary history, we must talk and we must act. Only by acting on it can our words carry real weight. We must not take this opposition lightly. Sometimes, especially within our movement, it is almost enough to make us despair when we see how people within our movement remain quite apathetic in the face of the terrible accusations that are being made against anthroposophy, against threefolding, and now also against 'The Coming Day' and so on. In this respect, if one may say so, our opponents are quite different. Sometimes they are quite ruthless crooks. But they have tremendous zeal as the content of their crookedness. And they often, or even usually, find words out of a certain enthusiasm, an enthusiasm born of evil, or out of an enthusiasm born of incompetence that fights back because it cannot assert itself against what is being asserted. But in a sense there is drive in it; there is drive even in the ranting. You can't find the right words if you try too hard. But you can find the right words if you can find them from the overall mood towards the matter. This is what we have to focus on, both in writing and in speech. We must not shrink from allowing the strongest rebuffs to be experienced by those who assert themselves in such a shameless way against anthroposophy, against threefolding and so on. And we must be aware that in this way, basically, the positive also acquires its shade.

The factual also includes the things that we present to our opponents in the midst of our positive speeches, in which we take as little care as possible to defend ourselves. Because, you see, of course, one has to defend oneself sometimes, I have said it before, but what does a defense actually mean against such individuals as Max Dessoirs and the like? On the other hand, it means a lot to characterize what a disgrace it is for German educational and university life to have such people as lecturers. We must find the right words and word nuances to put this general cultural phenomenon in its proper light. And there it is good to describe things, I would say, in a certain colorful way. Then you have to try to find the inks and colors from your life experiences to describe it in color. There is a karma if you only pay attention to it in the right way. This karma already carries the nuances.

You see, in my “Soul Mysteries” I have mentioned the peculiar fact that Max Dessoir is one of those people to whom it is imposed by inner soul destiny to sometimes have to stop in the train of thought, to be unable to continue; that it can even happen to him during lectures that he is suddenly so filled with the full power of what he has to express that, he does not say so, his mind stands still, but it is something similar to his mind standing still. I emphasized this in my “Soul Mysteries”. A few weeks ago I received a letter from a friend who had just attended the lectures in Berlin by Dessoir during which it actually happened that Dessoir's mind stood still. The students called this peculiar university piece of furniture the “beautiful Max” because he had the habit - as this friend writes - of putting on a different colored waistcoat every week and presenting it. It's only an imitation, you see. Greater minds than Max Dessoir's had such a weakness. For example, it once happened with the great philosopher Kuno Fischer that a young student came to the barber who was vis-4-vis the university building in Heidelberg. And this barber was of course very interested in the university and its disciples. And so he also got into conversation with this keen fox, who was about to start college with Kuno Fischer. He told him that he wanted to go to Kuno Fischer. “Today he's writing something on the blackboard,” said the barber. “How do you know that?” asked the young student in astonishment. ‘He was here just now getting a haircut at the back; when he does that, he always writes something on the board; that's when he turns around.’ Well, ‘beautiful Max’ was in a situation one day where his thoughts suddenly escaped him. He started to go wild, of course in the appropriate weekly vest. There sat a man in front of him who had a newspaper in his hand. He lunged at the man and berated him terribly, saying it was his fault because he had read in the newspaper that his thoughts had escaped. After five minutes, he had his thoughts again. - This really happened and can be documented!

You can add nuances to such things. And you will very often find that you can apply some inks when you want to describe the peculiar education system in our present day, as it is rampant at universities. In addition to its harmful, annoying and destructive aspects, it also has its comical aspects. I myself knew, if I may mention it, a chemist; he was a professor of chemistry and technology of organic substances. He said every year once in his lecture: Yes, there are actually only three great chemists: one is Liebig, the second is a more recent one, Gorup-Besanez, and modesty forbids me to name the third.

Now, as I said, the point for us is not to place the main emphasis on the defense, which can of course be incorporated; rather, it is important to present the cultural phenomena as such in all their harmfulness. That we therefore prove ourselves powerful enough to pass judgment on so-called intellectual currents of the present. We can let this flow in everywhere in the positive presentation and will perhaps best get it into the souls that way. For if we want to get through, we must absolutely be able to create in the souls of our contemporaries a repugnance for certain contemporary phenomena. We must be able to plant a correct judgment about the terrible things that are actually rampant among us through the incompetence and especially through the mendacity that is among us. In order to do this in the right way, we must train ourselves to keep a sharp eye on people and not let them get away with anything. We must emphasize the symptoms, the characteristic features. In our time, and we shall always find it, there is a terrible mendacity, especially in the field of so-called science. And this mendacity, which actually becomes all the stronger the more we come from the natural science faculties, the philosophical faculties, to the medical, to certain other provinces, this mendacity, we must not fail to present it to our contemporaries again and again, characterizing it with individual examples. This is of great, of tremendous importance. For today one does not really have a strong sense of what such dishonesty actually means, how corrupting it is in the mind, when the person who is otherwise a scientist is at the same time consumed by a certain dishonesty in his work. And we will even achieve quite a lot in the long run, even if not immediately, if we succeed in making our contemporaries aware of the hypocrisy of our current educational system. But we will find the right oratorical nuance for this if we speak from the kind of attitude towards the matter that I have characterized.

Then, you see, when you are in the situation you will be in over the next few weeks, one thing seems important: that you are fully immersed in the material of what you want to present, that you are, so to speak, constantly struggling with the material, that one's preparation should be such that one can visualize the matter in one's mind in terms of intentions and thoughts, but not in terms of wording, because one must actually fight for the wording before the audience. Therefore, it is good not to prepare a lecture right down to the wording, but only up to certain key sentences. Depending on your subjective nature, you can write down key sentences. Not buzzwords! That is something that usually misleads you. But key sentences, so to speak, the topics of the individual paragraphs. So you write down, for example: “Economic life has its own laws; it turns everything into a commodity.” And then you discuss this, not taking it as a starting point, but as the topic of a paragraph, as something around which everything else crystallizes. You speak in reference to such a key sentence. Then you move on to the next key sentence.

You can only have the first five or six sentences of the lecture literally, but even then not literally in memory, but in mind. Having the rest literally is never good, because it impairs the inner living relationship in a very strong way. But it is necessary to have formulated the first five or six and the last five or six sentences fairly precisely. Because, as a rule, if the person addressing the audience is a human being and not a speaking machine, they will have stage fright for the first five to six sentences. It is the case precisely when they are human and not a speaking machine. This stage fright is a thoroughly good thing. It can take on the most diverse nuances. It can be that the inner liveliness is there through this stage fright during the first five or six sentences, if they are well formulated, but that this formulation gives us a certain inner relationship to it, whereas if we have not formulated the sentences, it can all too easily happen that nothing occurs to us and the like, doesn't it. For example, I knew an otherwise excellent man who usually read his lectures. But once, as if it were still before me, I remember it so well, he wanted to at least present the first sentences, the first sentence, from memory, but it did not occur to him. He had to read the first sentence, the first word, so accustomed was he to the manuscript. So it's good to live completely inside it, right up to the formulation, in the first five or six sentences.

With the last sentences, on the other hand, when you get to the end, if you are just a human being and not a speaking machine, you are under the impression of your whole lecture, and that's how a certain liveliness comes about at the end, and one would not be able to find the right wording in every case so as not to detract from the end if one had not prepared well, especially for the end, for the last five or six sentences.

So that for such “occasional speeches” in the best sense, as you have to give them, especially given the current situation, it is undoubtedly best for such speeches if you bring the first five to six sentences with you, then the key sentences, and again the last five to six sentences. But if I may give you a piece of advice, which I ask you not to take as if it must always be followed under all circumstances and you are obliged to carry out what I have just said with regard to the note that you take with you, then the advice would be: make a note on which you formulate the first five to six sentences, then the striking sentences, then the last sentences. Stick to it. And then – burn it! The next day or for the next lecture, do the same. And burn it again. Do this fifty times rather than allow yourself to keep the note through all fifty lectures.

This is an essential part of the inner vitalization of a person's relationship to his subject matter. One must have come to terms with the living element of the lecture one has given in a certain way, as one came to terms on February 14 with what one ate on the 13th. This is something that can certainly be considered a rule.

For you see, in certain fields of work it is a matter of finding our way back to the elementary conditions of life. Only in this way can we tear spiritual work out of the mildewed nature that is due to the fact that in abstract intellectual life there is something like: one wants to experience something only once; if one has already experienced something, it no longer exercises any sensation, and the like. It is absolutely the case that if one acquires the habit of what I have just characterized, one gradually comes to receive one's spiritual products from much deeper regions than from the highly questionable regions that are located highest in the human being in terms of spatial expansion. And it is tremendously important that precisely the most exalted spiritual things do not come from this main region. For this region is colorless, is sober, is actually such that, however paradoxical it may sound, it actually concerns no one but ourselves. What the intellect can gain in clarity actually concerns only the person who is the bearer of that intellect.

What we have to say to the world is based not on what we understand, but on what we feel and live through, through which we have suffered pain and suffering and happiness and overcoming. And, my dear friends, the content of what you have to say to the world in the coming weeks will be revealed to you anew each day as you go through it in your soul, as overcoming and suffering, and in a certain way, when you feel what is to be, as happiness too, as redemption. Above all, however, you will be able to feel a strong sense of responsibility. All this can be experienced every day. And that is a much better preparation than all the arrangements and everything that is given in some rhetoric. This living inner relationship to the matter is what really prepares us so that those imponderables develop that exist between us and our audience, no matter how large it is.

In general, it is precisely in this area that we have become abstract and theoretical people. I once listened to a lecture that Hermann Helmboltz gave at a large gathering. He took out his manuscript and read the entire lecture from the first to the last word. After this procedure with the audience was over, a theater director, who was a friend of mine, came up to me and said: What was the point of that? The lecture is already printed, it could easily be handed to each of the listeners. And if Helmholtz, who is so esteemed and honored, were to go around and shake each person's hand, it would be a much greater pleasure than having someone read to you for an hour what you can read yourself when it is printed.

We really must keep this in mind: that what is printed, and thus also everything that can be read, that which has already been written down, is something quite different from the spoken word. And even if it happens often enough – for reasons other than purely artistic ones and the like – that the spoken word is written down, that this Ahrimanic art is practised and that it is then read again, one must not deny that this whole procedure is basically nonsense in the higher sense. It must be practised, this nonsense, for certain reasons. But it remains nonsense. For those who take these things artistically, what is spoken is not something that can be printed or written at the same time. So I couldn't help but feel deeply when the director told me that it would have been wiser for Helmholtz to have shaken everyone's hand and distributed his lecture.

These are things that one must keep in mind, because they are basically rhetoric, while what is in the rhetoric is usually such that one cannot actually fulfill it. Because basically it is a thicket, threshed straw, with which one cannot actually do anything if one wants to be alive in one's cause.

Well, you see, these are formalities that can only contain advice, but which, I would not say, have been thought through, but which you could feel through. And if you feel through them, then you will be able to prepare yourself in the best possible way for your profession in the coming weeks. For from the feelings you develop in response to such advice, you will gain an insight into what you should actually do with the material you will be processing in the coming weeks. And what else can be said in this regard is something like the following:

In speeches such as the one you are about to give, even if the topics are chosen as I have indicated, it is nevertheless good to start at the beginning with something that belongs to the day, some current event that is symptomatic of the whole period. We live in a time in which such events actually occur daily. We need only follow contemporary history a little, and we will notice symptomatic events everywhere. We can then start from there. This immediately creates a common atmosphere between us and the listener. For the listener then knows the matter, we know it, and we create a kind of communication, which is of very special significance in lectures on contemporary history, or rather, in those that are to have an effect on the development of the time.

Or one can also relate a more remote symptom. It is often particularly suitable to concentrate attention in the right way if you tell something that seems to have no connection at all with the topic, but which has a much stronger inner connection, and the listener is initially touched by it in a somewhat paradoxical way, not knowing why you are telling it; and then you try to find the transition from something remote to what you actually want to develop.

Another piece of advice is that in certain cases it is extremely good to come back to the beginning at the end. The best way to achieve this is to formulate something at the beginning, which is either presented as a question, or not pedantically as a question, but in a question-like way. Then the lecture is the execution according to the question posed; and at the end one actually comes to the answer, so that the whole thing closes in a certain way. This often has a very, very good influence on the soul of the listener. He retains it more easily than usual.

In certain matters it may even be very good to have a kind of leitmotif, which one returns to after certain paragraphs, even if in a varied form. You will not have a good effect by always putting it in more or less the same words, but if you return to it in a varied form, you may well have a good effect.

Then we will also have to have a reforming effect on the audience through the form of our speech; I could also say “educational” if it did not offend people to use the word “educational”. You can also have a reforming effect through the formality of speech. You see, people today demand that you define as much as possible. Now we want to resist any defining. We always want to characterize. We want to characterize many things from two or more sides, in order to evoke the idea that every thing has different sides from which one can characterize it. We do not want to make this concession, nor any other concession in speech, but this is the least of them: giving people pedantic definitions. We must create the impression that what comes from the spiritual world, what comes from spiritual science, must, even in its form, present itself differently to our contemporaries than what arises from materialism. Whatever comes out of materialism will be materialistic, even if it is permeated, for example, by something apparently religious; it will speak in nouns, even if it is religiously colored. What comes out of the spirit cannot speak well in nouns. For the spirit does not work in a noun way. It is in constant motion. The spirit is entirely verbal. It dissolves nouns. It forms a subordinate clause rather than a noun. In this way it avoids treating the entities like pieces of wood, placing them next to each other like pieces of wood, or like pegs. This placing of things like pegs is materialistic. What is grasped in the spirit dissolves the nouns. And it is important that we make no concessions in this respect to our materialistically inclined present. However, in this case you will not come; the poet in the present more easily; not so much the one who has to speak, what you have to speak - however, if anything is immersed in the visionary or only in the imaginative, then the nouns can also occur. Because then the imaginations are forms. Every style has its own character for its particular field. But what is needed in a certain relationship to bring something new to one's fellow human beings as a teaching, as a view, will, if it comes from the spirit, not feel inwardly compelled to put one noun next to the other.

Then it would also be good for you, I would like to say, to really carry out something moral. When we started our anthroposophical movement, people were almost proud when they could say: I have presented theosophical or anthroposophical views here or there, without saying where they come from and without using the words theosophy or anthroposophy. This denial of the ground on which one actually stands, this not wanting to clearly profess one's commitment to something, has become a real nuisance, especially in anthroposophical circles. Well, I would like to say to you that those people who have been won over in this way, by avoiding speaking clearly and distinctly about the matter, are either not really won over at all or, if they are won over, are not worth anything. Only that which has been won in full truth and in absolute honesty has value for our cause. And if we make this our guiding principle, we may perhaps suffer failures here and there. But where we achieve success, it will be a good success. Under no circumstances should we avoid making people aware of the spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. Even if it acts like a red rag to a bull for a large number of people at first! The problem with such things is not the red cloth, but the bull.

These things are what must be part of the moral nuance of our zeal for the cause in the coming weeks. And we need zeal for the cause. We do not need to feel that we are martyrs for a cause. But we should have a sense of great responsibility. We should definitely have the feeling that we are speaking out of the development of the times, out of contemporary history. The more we have this, the better it is.

Perhaps today I may remind you again of what I have said many times before. Once I wanted to make clear to two Catholic priests how wrong they were with their particular demand, which they made after a lecture I gave. I had given a lecture in a southern German city, which is no longer a southern German city today, about the wisdom of Christianity. Two Catholic priests were also present. It was a long time ago, in the days when the order to fight anthroposophy intensely, as is the case today, had not yet been so intensively carried into the circles of Catholic clergy. And so these two priests were there. After the lecture they came to me. Now, it is not the case with Anthroposophy that one can talk objectively about a subject for a long time, even if a Catholic priest is listening. If he is not set from the outset to fight against everything that does not belong to the constitutionally soldered church, he will not notice that he can bring anything against it. What the Catholic Church has to say against it must come from areas other than the area of truth. So the priests came to me and said: Yes, we have nothing to say against the content of your lecture – at that time the slogan had not yet been issued from Rome – but the way you speak is not acceptable. Because we speak in such a way that all people understand, but you only speak to a certain circle that is prepared. I said that I always have the feeling that in outer life one does not become dishonest when addressing people as is usual in outer life; I say “Herr” to every court official, I say “Reverend” to every Catholic priest. So I said, “Reverend, it does not matter whether you or I think something is for all people. It is self-evident that you and I think subjectively in this way. That is not the point. The point is whether something is entrusted to us out of the impulses of the time, whether it is to be presented or not, regardless of our subjective state. And so I ask you now, assuming this good, subjective conscience, whether all people who want to know about the Christ still come to you in church today? If all people come to church to you, then you speak for all people. I ask you quite objectively: Do all people come to church to you? You couldn't say yes, it wasn't possible. Then I said: Well, you see, I speak to those who no longer come to church to you and who still want to hear something about the Christ. That is objective. We can believe subjectively, you and I, we speak for everyone. That is not the point. The point is that we acquire the sense of learning from the facts as they are, how we should do it. Of course, that did not occur to the two reverend gentlemen, of course, but it is right nonetheless.

So, these are the things that I wanted to tell you today, as a kind of formality. They are not rules, nor are they advice meant to be dogmatic. I myself said at the beginning of my reflections that they are meant more in the sense of examples. They can be varied in many ways. You may be obliged to follow different guidelines in a different situation. But I have considered what those personalities sitting in front of me might need to think about, especially in the situation you may find yourselves in over the next few weeks, and how you might approach your audience in the right way to address your audience in the right way, and above all to face the matter at hand in the right way, regardless of whether you achieve it or not, and to face the matter you have to represent in the right way. And that's when I came to have to tell you what I just said in a formal way.

A basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed, this could seem very weird at first, because many people believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very deeply in reality.

However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature, these limitations of the scientific images do not at all appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere one-sidedness in natural sciences—if it is taken as a basis of the moral-social life—becomes injurious, causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters is that, in which we live during these years.

As peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge, the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate knowledge and penetrating reality.

Now we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the starting point from calling attention to the fact that the consideration of the human being has become relatively one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human being but into his whole nature.

Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control work salutarily on the social-moral life.

It could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not only considers how the human being is active in the wake day life but that one has also to regard the other side of life, the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.

Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious. However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate cognitive means because they want to refrain from anthroposophy.

What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.

I could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them. As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However, already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as bodily tools to the soul being.

The human being has to spend his life as it were,—as well as the single tone can never be music but only in the interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or harmony can originate—in such a way that life condition interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life. Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place fact.

One normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise that—if the human being withdraws from the wake day life if he falls asleep and dreams—that then in him that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in the present world period, has developed little of this everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate consideration cannot prove its nature at all.

Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a dream.

Spiritual science shows that it is true that something prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us which is associated with our future in such a way that it still encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death. The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past. One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the human being is not able to work really with that what works in the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences, certain memories give him from the past life.

All that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream is just something exceptionally significant, considered spiritual-scientifically.

However, the important is something else; it is that one is of the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake. Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious. However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual science searches as coherent, was always found by single outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of reality in us as the dream does.

In the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.

Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the course of the spiritual human development about the nature of the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.

Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one is not immediately aware of it.

Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise, what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.

However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that prevails what one can overview with the usual wake consciousness, but that in the human life—because dream and sleep also penetrate the wake day life—that prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the social, moral, political concepts and we discover that something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is even overslept.

This is the secret of the social life and of the historical life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.

Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science should bring back something to the human being that he has lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and their significance only in such a way as one often does today, one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that these natural sciences have originated in such a way because just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution because the human being was silly and childish for millennia, as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite different reason.

If one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist mental pictures interacted.

Even in our words “spirit” and “soul” are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts historically to a T. The human being has still grown together with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly from nature. The recent historical development means that the human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just, therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to which one got finally, but because the human being could get to a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.

If the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition. Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of the soul life.

The scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of self-reflection.

If one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific concepts have been developed so that the human being has no longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled materialism of natural sciences as something great.

One only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to the big, significant role that the scientific development has in the educational process of the human race. However, what appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake consciousness.

Not such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.

Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive means of natural sciences!

One needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the human being lives, also the sociological configuration of humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development, Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist, three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being develops what is militarily and politically strong from the social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the actually valuable class as the military one. In it the political higher life should develop. As the nervous life originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class should originate from the military. I do not keep characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.

However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level, and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have it.

While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in the history and the social life of humanity. That which humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures work catastrophically if they transition into actions.

The transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.

Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to believe that one can master the social, moral life with the scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?

Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science, which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality, there will be more and more people who realise that one has to turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of single people but because of deeper historical necessities.

We do not need to point to less significant personalities if we want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller (Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what is so often said that one can learn from history for the moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic events: history teaches this, history teaches that.

Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical lectures: “The community of European states seems to have changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I hope.”

This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words that should be prophetic in 1789!

How have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after, and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet was this historian, this genius Schiller?

Why is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one works in such a conception of history with mental pictures which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as well as they are in life, only dream.

History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the moral-social life.

I know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do not experience the historical development so that this experience works in concepts of the wake day life. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.

The art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to understand history with the creative imagination of the people. He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative cognition.—One has to take his starting point from that what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.

That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able to encompass history or the social-political life with the concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists, professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then you will cause the decline of the community with such parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this social-moral life.

Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only describe the decline of the old life with his concepts.—One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate from the dreaming consciousness.

In recent time, these things have become particularly important because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical, in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most consciously.

Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts, impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with Marxism.

Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal with either—or everywhere, but that concepts show one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts, so that he regards them as images of the real from different sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic viewpoint.

One realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself. Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through hard enough.

Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of modern socialism have become socially acceptable.

Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in truth?

To the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx (1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx described the impulses of the last three to four centuries. However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images, but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote his books about what had already become a corpse from which one should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program, lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now—skipping the scientific way of thinking—the social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible consciousness.

Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time can no longer venture to dream only to experience the social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.

One can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a “transition period.” However, it concerns what transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition transitions into the conscious cognition.

In the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the intermediate stage of natural sciences.

In the social it has to find the immediate transition from the instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the social life at this or that place. A time will come where one will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination. One would laugh if he put that as classic example.

As weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is penetrated by social love.

One can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will itself.

The social design of any community can only arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the beholding consciousness.

The legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one messes while one looks for all possible and impossible scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with Intuitive knowledge.

Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but human beings who should become able to put themselves powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the spirit of our time demands.

Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other in life.

One understands that the moral-social life, considered scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this. While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up, that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third. Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts. One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible knowledge.

What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a description of the social-political life in detail would be as if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws. If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the player.

Any child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human being.

However, such a life in the social-political can arise only from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in this direction even today!

In spiritual science one has started studying since many years what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are distributed geographically and historically, which impulses really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts available in the legal life for the first time.

However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a very interesting book in which he wants to show that the peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious, the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples. The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927) describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses. That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams. Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry and science.

This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided considerations show that one has already done the attempt to master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do this only with the beholding consciousness.

I could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.

If one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that the community must develop under the influence of vivid moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent, everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it the idea of freedom lives.

The highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can only prosper where the creation of the community originates from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into this moral-social life with another member of his being.

One may say that the great persons of the past already realised with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is, which embodies itself in history, he found strange words saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites.

How wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one did not understand the dream.—Goethe looks at the history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we have from history is not that “fable convenue” which you read in the history books and which we regard usually as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that which develops as the stream of humanity in the social-political development.

Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is that which the human being has as best from history, but that which can be associated with this dream of history, as a creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the present.

However, this truth can be complemented on the other side, while one points out that one cannot intervene with sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends them.

One needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause that the social-moral life can develop must arise from enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates if one can recognise by the connection of the single human being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by Inspiration, and by Intuition.

As Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life. However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.

In this direction, I wanted to give some indications and suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human life that we need in this catastrophic time.

Anthroposophical friends in Berne have already heard that the aim of the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to bring a new trend into the Anthroposophical Movement. The importance of becoming conscious of this new trend cannot be stressed too often, for the gist of the matter is this: before the Christmas Foundation Meeting—in practice at any rate, even if not invariably—the Anthroposophical Society was regarded as a sort of administrative centre for the content and the impulse of Anthroposophy. This, essentially, has been the position since the Anthroposophical Society made itself independent of the Theosophical Society.

You know that I myself had no place on the Society's Executive, but have so to say held a completely free position within the Society. And in this situation the Society's development has not proceeded as it certainly could have done. The fact is that Members have been too little alive to what might have developed on this basis. What happened was that from about the year 1919 onwards—after the War, during which the problem of leadership of the Society was a very difficult one—all kinds of efforts were made and undertakings set on foot within the Society. These undertakings were the outcome of ambitions among the Membership and proved to be detrimental to the real anthroposophical work—detrimental in the sense that they aroused very strong hostility from the outside world. Naturally, when such undertakings are set on foot in a Society resting upon occult foundations, one must, for esoteric reasons, let them be. For think of it—if from the beginning I had stood in the way of all these undertakings, most of those engaged in them would have been saying to-day that if only this or that had happened it would have led to favourable results. But there is no doubt at all that these things made the position of the Anthroposophical Movement in the world increasingly difficult.

I do not want to go into details but to take a more positive line: let me say only that the time had come to counteract by something positive the negative trend that had gradually appeared in the Society. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I often found it necessary to emphasise that a real foundation like the Anthroposophical Movement—which is in truth a spiritual stream guided and led from the super-sensible worlds by spiritual Powers and spiritual Forces which are reflected here in the physical worlds—should not be identified with the Anthroposophical Society, which is simply an administrative body for the cultivation—as far as it is capable of this—of the anthroposophical impulse.

But since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum this has completely changed. And it was only because of this change that there was reason and purpose in my taking over the Presidency myself, in cooperation with an Executive which as a unified organism can work with great intensity for the Anthroposophical Movement. This means that the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society are now one. Therefore what was not the position before the Christmas Foundation Meeting has changed fundamentally since that Meeting. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Society is to be identical with the Anthroposophical Movement as presented in the world. But it has thus become essential that the esoteric impulse flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement shall also find expression in the whole constitution of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore since this Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach it must be recognised, unconditionally, that the establishment of the Dornach Executive is itself an esoteric matter, that a stream of true esotericism must flow through the Society, and that the institution of the Executive is to be regarded as an esoteric deed. This was the premise on which the Executive was formed.

Further, it must always be remembered that from now onwards the Anthroposophical Society will no longer exist merely as a body for the administration of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy itself must be practised in everything that happens in the Anthroposophical Society. What is done must itself be anthroposophical. That, apparently, is what it is so difficult to realise. Nevertheless friends must gradually get it into their consciousness that this fundamental change has taken place.

As a first step, in the News Sheet appended to the Goetheanum Weekly, an effort has been made to introduce into the Society something that can provide unified substance for the membership, can further a unified flow of spiritual reality through the Movement. A unified trend of thought is made possible, particularly through the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’ which should be a kind of basic seed for work in the Groups. It is really remarkable that so much misunderstanding still exists as to what the Anthroposophical Movement really is.

A short while ago I received a letter from a fairly recent Member of the Anthroposophical Society. This letter expatiated on the alleged incorporation of the Christian Community into the Anthroposophical Society. (The matter is of no importance here in Switzerland, but I mention it as an example.) At a certain point I had made it quite clear from the Goetheanum in Dornach how the relationship between this Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society is to be thought of. I emphasised that I cannot in any way be regarded as the Founder of the Christian Community on the basis of the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Christian Community formed itself, through me, by the side of the Anthroposophical Society. At the time I used the expression “through me as a private individual.” The letter referred to seizes hold of this expression, “private individual,” after saying that a renewal of religion cannot come about through a human being but only from the higher spheres, for a renewal of religion can be achieved only by divine-spiritual Powers. That is quite right, but something has been overlooked ... and it is essential for this ‘something’ to be fully grasped in the Anthroposophical Society. What must be grasped is that the Anthroposophical Movement as such—in which moreover there also lies the source for a renewal of religion—certainly does not owe its origin to a human impulse alone but has been sent into the world under the influence of divine-spiritual Powers and by their impulse. Only when Anthroposophy itself is seen to be a spiritual reality which flows as an esoteric impulse through civilisation will it be possible to have the right point of view when some other body comes into being with its source in Anthroposophy ... and an objection like that contained in the letter cannot arise. The consciousness must be there that henceforward the Anthroposophical Society will be led from the Goetheanum on an esoteric basis.

Connected with this is the fact that a completely new trend will pervade the Anthroposophical Movement as it must now be conceived. Therefore you too, my dear friends, will notice how differently it has been possible to speak since that time. In the future it will amount to this: in all measures taken by the Anthroposophical Movement, which is now identical with the Anthroposophical Society, the responsibility is to the spiritual Powers themselves. But this must be correctly understood. It must be realised that the title “General Anthroposophical Society” may not be used in connection with any event or fixture organised without understanding having first been reached with the Dornach Executive; that anything inaugurated by Dornach may not be made further use of without corresponding agreement with the Executive. I am obliged to speak of this because it is constantly happening that lectures, for instance, are given under the alleged auspices of the General Anthroposophical Society without any application for permission having been made to Dornach. Matters which have an esoteric foundation, formulae and the like, are sometimes adopted without obtaining the agreement of the Dornach Executive ... and this is absolutely essential, for we have to do with realities, not with administrative measures or formalities. So for all these and similar matters, agreement must be sought from or a request made to the Dornach Executive. If agreement is not forthcoming, the arrangements in question will not be regarded as issuing from the Anthroposophical Movement. This would have in some way to be made plain.

Everything that savours of bureaucracy, all administrative formalities must in the future be eliminated from the Anthroposophical Society. Relationship within the Anthroposophical Society is a purely human relationship; everything is based upon the human reality. Perhaps I may mention here too that this is already indicated by the fact that every one of the 12,000 Membership Cards now being issued are personally signed by me. I was advised to have a rubber stamp made for the signature, but I shall not do so. It is only a minor point but there is, after all, a difference when I have let my eyes rest on the name of a Member; thereby the personal relationship—abstract though it be—has been made. Even if it is an external detail it should nevertheless be an indication that in future we shall endeavour to make relationships personal and human. Thus, for example, when it was recently asked in Prague whether the Bohemian Landesgesellschaft can become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the decision had to be that this is not possible; individual human beings alone can become members of the Anthroposophical Society; they can then join together to form Groups. But they become Members as individuals and have the Membership Card as such. Legal entities—in other words, non-human entities—will have no such Card. Similarly the Statutes are not official regulations but a simple statement of what the esoteric Executive in Dornach wishes, out of its own initiative, to do for the Anthroposophical Movement. In future, all these things must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Only so will it be possible to bring into being in the Anthroposophical Society the attitude which, if it were absent, would make it impossible for me to take over the Presidency of the Society.

Through the Christmas Foundation, a new character and impulse is to enter into all our work. In the future, whatever is said will have a spiritual source—so that many things that have happened recently, can happen no longer. A great deal of the hostility, for instance, has arisen as a result of provocative actions in the Society. Naturally, all kinds of questionable elements play a part, but in the future we can no longer adopt towards the hostility the attitude we have adopted in the past. For the Lecture-Courses are available for everyone and can be obtained from the Anthroposophisch-Philosophischer Verlag. We shall not let them be advertised in the Book Trade; their release is not to be taken to mean that they will be handed over to the Book Trade, but they will be accessible to everyone. This fact in itself refutes the statement that the Anthroposophical Society is a secret society with secret literature. In the future, however, a very great deal will flow through the Anthroposophical Movement in respect of which no kind of relation with a hostile outside world will be possible. Much of what will be introduced into the teachings of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be of such a nature that it will inevitably evoke hostility in the outside world; but we shall not worry about it because it is a matter of course.

And so I want to speak to you to-day in this spirit, to speak particularly of how different a light is shed upon the historical evolution of mankind when the study of karmic relationships in world-existence is pursued in real earnest.

At the very first gathering held in Berlin for the purpose of founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I chose for a lecture I proposed to give, the title: Practical Questions of Karma. I wanted to introduce then what I intend to achieve now, namely, the serious and earnest study of Karma.

In the German Section of the Theosophical Society at the time there were several old Members of the Society. They literally quaked at my intention to begin in such an esoteric way. And in actual fact the attitude and mood for it were not there. It was quite obvious how little the people were prepared in their souls for such things. It was impossible at that time to proceed with the theme ‘Practical Questions of Karma’ in the form that had been intended. Conditions made it necessary to speak in a much more exoteric way. But now, with more than two decades of preparatory work behind us, a beginning must be made with real esotericism. The Christmas Foundation Meeting, when the esoteric impulse came into the Society, has actually taken place, and so now a link can be made with that time when the intention was to introduce this esoteric trend into the Society.

What is the historical evolution of humanity, when we consider what is revealed by the fact of repeated earthly lives? When some personality appears as a leading figure in the evolution of humanity, we must say: This personality is the bearer of an Individuality of soul-and-spirit who was already present many times in earthly existence and who carries over into this earthly life the impulses from earlier incarnations. Only in the light of his earlier earthly lives can we really understand such a personality. From this we see at once how what was working in earlier epochs of world-history is carried over from those earlier epochs by human beings themselves. The civilisation of to-day has developed out of the human beings who belong to the present in the wider sense. But they, after all, are the same souls who were there in earlier epochs and assimilated what those earlier civilisations brought into being; they themselves have carried it over into the present. The same applies to epochs other than the present. Only when we can discover what has been carried over by human souls from one epoch into the other can we understand this onflowing stream of the impulses working in civilisation. But then we have history in the concrete, not in the abstract. People usually speak only about ideas working in world-history, about moral will or moral impulses in general which carry over the fruits of civilisation from one epoch into the others. But the bearers of these fruits of earlier civilisations are the human souls themselves, for they incarnate again and again. Moreover it is only in this way that an individual realises what he has himself become, how he has carried over that which forms the basis of his bodily destiny, his destiny in good and evil alike. When, as a first step, we ponder how history has been carried from one epoch into another by the human beings themselves in their repeated earthly lives, then, and only then are the secrets, the great enigmas of historical evolution, unveiled.

To-day I want to show by three examples how karma works through actual personalities. One of these examples leads us into the wide arena of history; the other two deal more with the reincarnations of particular individuals.

Our modern civilisation contains a great many elements that are really not altogether in keeping with Christianity, with true Christian evolution. Natural science is brought even into the elementary schools, with the result that it has an effect upon the thinking even of people who have no scientific knowledge. These impulses are really not Christian. Whence do they originate?

You all know that about six hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Arabism, inspired by Mohammed, began to spread abroad. In Arabism, Mohammed founded a body of doctrine which in a certain sense was at variance with Christianity. To what extent at variance? The concept of the three forms of the Godhead—Father, Son, Spirit—is of the very essence of Christianity. The origin of this lies away back in the ancient Mysteries in which a man was led through four preparatory stages and then through three higher stages. When he had reached the fifth stage, he came forth as a representative of the Christ; at the seventh and highest stage as a representative of the Father. I want only to make brief mention of this.

It is the Trinity that makes it possible for the impulse of freedom to have its place in the evolution of Christianity. We look upwards to the Father God, seeing in the Father God the spirituality implicit in all those forces of the Universe which go out from the Moon to Earth existence. All those forces which in Earth existence have to do with the impulses of physical germination—in man, therefore, with propagation—proceed from the Moon. It must, of course, always be remembered that the human process of reproduction has its spiritual side. From the pre-earthly existence of spirit-and-soul we come down to earthly existence, uniting with a physical body. But everything that is responsible for placing the human being, from birth onwards, into earthly life, is a creative act of the Father God, a creative act for the Earth through the Moon forces. Therefore inasmuch as throughout an earthly life man is subject to the working of the Moon forces, he is already predestined when he enters earthly existence to be exposed to impulses of a very definite kind. Hence, too, it is the essential characteristic of a Moon religion, a religion like that of the ancient Hebrews, in which the Father Principle is predominant, always to attach value in the human being only to what has been bestowed upon him through the forces of the Father God, through the Moon forces. When Christianity was founded, ancient Mystery-truths were still current in Christ's environment—truths deriving, for example, from specific phenomena of life in the earliest period of post-Atlantean evolution. Grotesque as they seem to-day, these phenomena were grounded in the very nature of man.

During the first epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation, the ancient Indian epoch, when a man had reached the age of thirty a radical change, a complete metamorphosis, took place in his earthly life. So radical was the change that, expressed in modern words, it would have been perfectly possible for a man who had passed his thirtieth year to meet a younger man whom he had known quite well, perhaps as a friend, but when this younger man greeted him the other would simply not understand what he was trying to do. ... When the older man had passed the age of thirty he had forgotten everything he had hitherto experienced on the Earth! And whatever impulse worked in him in the later years of his life was imparted to him by the Mysteries. This is how things were in the earliest period after the Atlantean catastrophe. If he wanted to know what his life had been before his thirtieth year, a man was obliged to enquire about it from the little community around him. At the age of thirty the soul was so completely transformed that the man was veritably a new being; he began a new existence, just as he had done at birth. In those days it was known that until the thirtieth year of life the forces of youth were at work: thereafter, it was the task of the Mysteries, with the very real impulses they contained, to see to it that a genuinely human existence should continue in the man's soul. And this the Mysteries were able to do because they were in possession of the secret of the Son.

Christ lived in an age when the secrets of the Son—I can do no more than touch upon them here—had been lost, were known only to small circles of men. But because of the experience undergone in His thirtieth year, Christ was able to reveal that He, as the last to do so, had received the Son-impulse directly from the Cosmos—in the way it must be received if after his thirtieth year a man is to be dependent upon the Sun forces just as hitherto he was dependent upon the Moon forces. Christ has enabled men to understand that the Son-principle within him is the Sun Being once awaited in the Mysteries but then as a Being not yet on the Earth. And so, just as in the ancient Mysteries men had gazed into the secrets of the Sun, it was made clear to them that their gaze must now turn to the Christ, realising that now the Sun Mystery had entered into man. In the first centuries of Christianity this wisdom was completely exterminated. Star-wisdom, cosmic wisdom, was exterminated and a materialistic conception of the Mystery of Golgotha gradually took shape; Christ was thought of as nothing more than a being who had dwelt in Jesus but men were unwilling to realise what had actually come to pass.

Those who were true knowers in the first Christian centuries were able to say: As well as the Father God there is God the Son, the Christ God. The Father God rules over whatever is predetermined in man because it is born with him and works in him as the forces of Nature. It is upon this principle that the Hebrew religion is based. But by the side of it, Christianity places the power of the Son which during the course of man's life draws into his soul as a creative force, making him free and enabling him to be reborn, realising that in his earthly life he can become something that was not predetermined by the Moon forces at birth.—Such was the essential impulse of Christianity in the first centuries of its existence.

Mohammedanism set its face against this impulse in its far-reaching decree: There is no God save the God proclaimed by Mohammed. It is a retrogression to the pre-Christian principle, but clothed in a new form—as was inevitable six hundred years after the founding of Christianity. The God of Nature, the Father God—not a God of freedom by whom men are led on to freedom—was proclaimed as the one and only God. Within Arabism, where Mohammedanism was making headway, this was favourable for a revival and renewal of the fruits of ancient cultures, and such a revival, with the exclusion of Christianity, did indeed take place in the Orient, on a magnificent scale. Together with the warlike campaigns of Arabism there spread from East towards the West—in Africa as it were enveloping Christianity—an impulse to revive ancient culture.

Over in Asia, Arabism was cultivated with great brilliance at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—at the time when Charles the Great was reigning in Europe. But whereas Charles the Great hardly progressed beyond the stage of being able to read and write, of developing the most primitive rudiments of culture, great and illustrious learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. It cannot, perhaps, be said that Haroun al Raschid in himself was an entirely good man, but he possessed a comprehensive, penetrating and ingenious mind—a universal mind in the best sense. He gathered at his Court all the sages who were the bearers of whatever knowledge was available at that time: poets, philosophers, doctors, theologians, architects—all these branches of learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Rashid, brought thither by his genius.

At this Court there lived a most distinguished and significant personality, one who—in an incarnation earlier than the one at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—had been an Initiate in the true sense. You will ask: Does an Initiate, then, not remain an Initiate as he passes through his incarnations? It is possible for a man to have been a deep Initiate in an earlier epoch and then, in a new epoch, he must use the body and receive the education which this later epoch has to offer. In such a case the forces deriving from the earlier incarnation will have to be held in the subconsciousness and whatever is in keeping with the current civilisation will have to be developed. There are men who seem, outwardly, to be products of the particular civilisation in which they are living; but their manner of life enables one to perceive in them the existence of deeper impulses; in earlier times they were Initiates. Nor do they lose the fruits of Initiation; out of their subconsciousness they act in accordance with its principles. But they cannot do otherwise than adapt themselves to the conditions of the existing civilisation.

The personality of whom tradition says that he made magnificent provision for all the sciences at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was only one of the most eminent sages of his time, with a genius for organisation so outstanding that he was virtually the source of much that was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

The spread of Arabism continued for many centuries, as we know from the wars waged by Europe in an attempt to keep it within bounds. But that was not the end of it: the souls who were once active in Arabism passed through the gate of death, developed onwards in the spiritual world and remained connected, in a sense, with their work. This was what happened in the case of the Individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of the wise Counsellor who lived at his Court.

To begin with, let us follow Haroun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death and develops onwards in the spiritual world. In its external form, Arabism is repulsed; Christianity implants itself into Middle and Western Europe in the exoteric form it has gradually acquired. But although it is impossible to continue to be active in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism, in Europe, it is very possible for the souls who once shared in this brilliant culture at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and there received the impulse for further achievements, to work on. And that is what they do.

We find that Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates in the renowned personality of Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon—the distinguished Englishman whose influence has affected the whole of modern scientific thinking, and therewith much that is to be found in the minds of human beings to-day. Haroun al Raschid could not disseminate from London, from England, a form of culture strictly aligned with Arabism ... this soul was obliged to make use of the form of Arabism that was possible in the West. But the fundamental trend and tendency of what Bacon poured into European thinking is the old Arabism in the new form. And so Arabism lives in the scientific thinking of to-day, because Francis Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid.

The sage who had lived at his Court also passed through the gate of death, but he took a different path. He could not come down into a stream of culture as materialistic as that into which Francis Bacon could enter; he had inevitably to remain within a more spiritual stream. And so it came about that in the epoch when the influence of Francis Bacon was also taking effect, another individuality was working—in this case in Middle Europe—one who in his life of soul encountered what had issued from the soul of the reborn Haroun al Raschid. We see the Bacon stream pouring out from England to Middle Europe, from West to East, bringing Arabism in the form it had acquired in its sweep across Spain and France. It is comprehensible, therefore, that the tenor and content of this soul should differ from the tenor and content of that other soul—who passed through the gate of death, during the period of existence in the spiritual world directed its gaze toward Eastern and Middle Europe, and was reborn in Middle Europe as Amos Comenius. He resuscitated what he had learned from oriental wisdom at the Court of Haroun al Raschid inasmuch as in the seventeenth century he was the one who with much forcefulness promulgated the thought that the evolution of mankind is pervaded by organised spirituality. It is often said, superficially, that Comenius believed in the Kingdom of a Thousand Years. That is a trivial way of putting it. The truth is that Comenius believed in definite epochs in the evolution of humanity; he believed that historical evolution is organised from the spiritual world. His aim was to show that spirituality surges and weaves through the whole of Nature; he wrote a “Pan-Sophia.” There is a deeply spiritual trend in what he achieved. He became an educational reformer. As is known, his aim in education was to achieve concrete perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit) but a thoroughly spiritual perceptibility, not as in materialism. I cannot deal with this in detail but can only indicate how Arabism in its Western form and in its Oriental form issued from what arose in Middle Europe from the meeting of the two spiritual impulses connected with Bacon and Comenius.

Many aspects of the civilisation of Middle Europe can become intelligible to us only when we see how Arabism—in the form in which it could now be re-cast—was actually brought over from Asia by individuals who had once lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. This shows us how human Individuality is an active factor in the evolution of history. And then, by studying examples as striking as these, we can learn from them how karma works through the incarnations. As I have said on various occasions, what we learn from this study can be applied to our own incarnation. But to begin with we must have concrete examples.

Let us now take an example in which this country will be particularly interested. Let us take the example of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. The very personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, apart from his poetry, may well arouse interest. He is certainly a remarkable personality. When he was composing his poems which flow along in wonderful rhythms, one can perceive how at every moment the soul was prone to slip out of the body. In the wonderful forms of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poems and of his prose-poems too, there is a quality belonging intrinsically to the soul. Many times in his earthly life he was destined to suffer from a clouding of consciousness when this separation of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body became too pronounced. There was only a loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body—this is quite apparent when we study the poems or the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. We say to ourselves at once that this Individuality which in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation was only loosely connected with the physical body, must surely have passed through very remarkable experiences in earlier earthly lives.

Now investigation of earlier earthly lives is by no means always easy. Disillusionments and set-backs of every description have to be encountered in the course of such investigation. For this reason, what I say about reincarnations is most emphatically not for the purpose of satisfying cravings for sensation but always in order to shed deeper illumination upon the course of history.

As we follow the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, particularly in the light of this loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the body, we are led back to a very early incarnation in the sixth century A.D. We are led to an Individuality who, to begin with, eludes the spiritual intuition with which these things are investigated. Spiritually we are thrust back from this Individuality who in his life in Italy was finding his way into Christianity in the form in which it was spreading at that time ... we can never get really near him. And then we seem to be thrown back again to the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, so that when in this investigation of an earlier incarnation we really seem to have got hold of the incarnation in the sixth century, we have to come back again to the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, without having properly understood the connection between these two incarnations. .. until at last the solution of the riddle dawns. We notice that in the mind of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer there is a thought that puzzles and misleads us—a thought which was also expressed in his story The Saint, dealing with Thomas Becket, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century at the Court of Henry (II) of England.

It is not until we follow the connections of the thoughts and feelings working in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer while he was writing this narrative that we gain any real insight into how his mind was working. We are led as it were from a clouding of consciousness into clarity, then again a clouding, and so on. And finally we come to the conclusion that there must be some special significance in the thought that runs through Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's story; it must have deep roots. And then we hit upon the clue: this thought comes from an impulse in an earlier earthly life, the life when the Individuality of the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived at a minor Court in Italy and played an important part in the development of Christianity. In that life he had an unusual experience. Gradually we discover that this Individuality was sent with a Christian Mission from Italy to England and this Mission founded the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Individuality who later became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was, on the one side, deeply affected by that form of art which has since died out but was prevalent in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and subsequently elaborated in the Italian mosaics. The Individuality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived and worked in this environment and then, filled with the impulse of contemporary Christianity, accompanied the Mission to England. After having participated in the founding of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, this individual was murdered, in strange circumstances, by an Anglo-Saxon chieftain.

This happening lived on as an impulse in the soul. And when this soul was born as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the destiny of that earlier time was still alive in the subconscious ... the murder in England ... it has something to do with the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Just as a remembrance is often evoked by the sound of a word, so it was in this case ... “I once had something to do with Canterbury.” And the impulse becomes an urge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul to describe, not his own destiny, for that remains in the subconscious, but the similar destiny of Thomas Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England and at the same time Archbishop of Canterbury.

The strange infirmity of soul suffered by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer also causes experience of his own destiny to slip over into that of the other personality known to him from history.

During the period of the Thirty Years' War, when such chaotic conditions prevailed in Middle Europe, this Individuality had been incarnated as a woman. And all the chaos of those times profoundly affected the Individuality now incarnate in a female body. This woman married a rather uncouth, unpolished personality who fled from the conditions then prevailing in Germany to the region of Graubünden in Switzerland. And there this couple lived ... the woman deeply sensitive to the chaos of the impressions around her, the man more plebeian.

From the far-reaching events of that time the soul had absorbed all that struggles to come forth again in Jürg Jenatsch. The thoughts and emotions rise up again in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from what he had experienced in those earlier circumstances. The difficulty is that the impressions welled up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul but that he felt compelled to transform them, because his life in the world was such that impulses were constantly rising up into his soul-and-spirit which then, in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, were responsible for the very loose connection between his soul-and-spirit and his physical body.

This will indicate to you how impulses from olden times work over in a remarkable way into a man's thinking, feeling, perception and artistic achievements. The truth of such things will quite certainly never be discovered by speculation or intellectual thinking but only in genuine spiritual vision.

Personalities who attract one's attention in some earthly life are especially interesting from the point of view of their reincarnations. There is a personality who is greatly loved and held in high esteem, above all in this country, through whom we can discern how souls pass through their earthly lives. When we have real knowledge of these matters they turn out to be different from what one would naturally assume.

There is a soul ... I was able to find this soul for the first time occupying a kind of priestly office in ancient Mysteries. I say, a kind of priestly office, for although he was not a priest of the highest rank his position in the Mysteries enabled him to do a great deal for the education of souls. In that incarnation he was a noble character, full of goodness of heart which his connection with the Mysteries had developed in him. About a hundred years before the birth of Christ it was the destiny of this personality, in line with the customs of the times, to serve under a cruel slave-owner as the foreman or manager of a host of slaves whose work was hard and heavy and who could only be handled in the way that was the accepted practice in those days. This personality must not be misjudged or misunderstood. The conditions prevailing in ancient civilisations must be seen in a different light from those of to-day; we must understand above all what it meant for this fundamentally noble personality to have been incarnated a hundred years before the founding of Christianity as a kind of foreman-manager of a host of slaves. It was impossible for him always to act in accordance with his own impulses—that was his hard destiny. But at the same time he had established a definite relationship with the souls living in the hard-worked slaves. He obeyed the crueller personality of whom I have spoken (his ‘chief’ we should say to-day) but in such circumstances antipathies and sympathies are formed. ... And when the one who often with a bleeding heart had carried out the orders he received, passed through the gate of death, his soul encountered the souls who had felt, for him too, a certain hatred. This lived itself out in the life between death and rebirth and established connections of soul-and-spirit which then worked as impulses, preparing for the next earthly life.

In the nature of things, karmic connections are formed between all human beings who have to do with one another. It was also destiny that the Individuality of whom I am speaking, who was a kind of slave-overseer and connected karmically with the chief whose orders he was bound to obey, should have made himself guilty in a certain way—it was really innocence and guilt at the same time—of all the misery caused by the cruelty of his chief. He acquiesced in it, not out of any impulse of his own but impelled by the force majeure of customs and circumstances. Thus a karmic tie was established between the two. In the life between death and rebirth this took shape in such a way that the former slave-overseer was born again in the ninth century A.D. as a woman: she became the wife of the one who had been the cruel chief—and in this relationship lived through much that constituted the karmic adjustment of what I have described as a kind of ‘innocent guilt’ in connection with the cruelties that had been committed. But these experiences deepened the soul: much of what had been present in the ancient, priestly incarnation emerged once again, but overshadowed by great tragedy. Circumstances in the ninth century brought this wedded couple into connection with many human beings in whom there were living the souls, now reincarnated, of those who had been together with them as slaves. As a general rule, human souls are reborn during the same time-period. And again in this case there was a connection in the life on the Earth.

The souls who had once worked under the slave-overseer now lived together in spatial proximity as a fairly extensive community. The official servant of the community—but a servant of fairly high rank—was the individual who had once been the cruel slave-owner. He had dealings with all the inhabitants of the community and experienced from them nothing but trouble; he was not their governor but it was his duty to look after many of their affairs. The wife lived through all this at his side. We find, therefore, that a number of human beings are associated with these two personalities. But the karma that had bound the two together—the erstwhile slave-owner and his overseer—this karmic tie was thereby done with. The ancient priest-individuality was no longer bound to the other; but the tie with the other souls remained, precisely because in the incarnation about 100 B.C. he had been at least the instrument for much that had been their lot. As a woman, this Individuality brought only blessing to the community, for her deeds were performed with the greatest goodness and kindness, despite the infinitely tragic experiences she was obliged to undergo.

All these shared experiences, all that wove the threads of karma—it all went on working, and during the next period of life between death and rebirth (after the ninth century and on into the modern age) impulses took shape once again whereby these human beings were held together. And now, the souls who had once been the slaves and later on came together in a village community—these souls were born again, not in any kind of external community but at least during the same period of time. So that there was again the possibility of relationship with the Individuality—now reborn—who had been the slave-overseer a hundred years before the Christian era, and the woman in the ninth century A.D. For this Individuality was reborn as Pestalozzi. The souls who were also reborn more or less as contemporaries in order that karma might be fulfilled—these souls whose relationship to him was as I have described, became the pupils for whom Pestalozzi now performed deeds of untold blessing!

When one studies life and behind life as it presents itself perceives the working of souls from incarnation to incarnation ... certainly it is disturbing and astounding, for things are always different from what the intellect might conjecture. Yet life's content is immeasurably deepened when it is studied in this kind of context. I think, moreover, that a man himself has really gained something when he has studied such connections. If they are drawn forth—often with very great difficulty—from their spiritual backgrounds, and if one points, as I have only been able to do in sketchy outline to-day, to what is present in visible existence, one perceives how karma works through the course of human life. Verily, life acquires serious backgrounds when we pay attention to studies of this kind; and they can be understood if with unprejudiced minds we observe what then presents itself in the external world.

Anthroposophy does not exist in order to expound theories about repeated earthly lives or to give tabulated details of every kind, but to reveal, in all their concrete reality, the spiritual foundations of life. Men will look into the world with quite different eyes once the veils are lifted from these things. One day, if destiny permits, we shall have to speak of how they can play a part, too, in the actual deeds of men. Such knowledge will certainly show that concrete studies of karma are needed by our civilisation as an impetus and a deepening. I wanted to-day merely to lay before you these actual examples of karma. The personalities in question are well-known figures in history. Study them closely and you will find confirmation of much that I have said.

My dear friends! Today I would like to say a few words about the third area that you have mentioned, namely the actual content of the sermon. Of course, all three areas are intimately connected. We have given some indications about the nature of the cult, which of course must be very much completed and worked into the concrete, into what is needed today. We have at least been able to give some indications of the cultic aspect, and I would like to start by telling you how this cultic aspect is in turn related to the actual content of the sermon in practice.

You see, the sermon element appeals to the parishioner's imaginative understanding. Of course, the sermon must be delivered in such a way that what enters the person through the imagination passes as quickly and as intensely as possible into the feeling, the emotional, and, above all, the will impulse. But nevertheless we must work on the parishioner indirectly through the power of the imagination in the sermon. In all our teaching and instruction we must work on the human being through the power of the imagination.

But the conceptual has something inherently contradictory about the whole human nature. Here we enter a realm where today's science proves powerless from the outset to understand things. If you say something like that: the conceptual has something contradictory about the full nature of man, then you will meet with no understanding at all in today's scientific world view. And yet it is so. The conceptual tends to be absorbed once and then retained by the memory. You will easily see that this does not correspond to human nature.

If you look at the other extreme in man, at the purely physical processes, you cannot say: I have eaten or drunk today, so it remains in my organism, so I do not need to eat and drink again tomorrow - but food and drink must be repeated in a rhythmic sequence. What a person does must occur in a rhythmic sequence. And this is basically the actual human nature, to be incorporated into the rhythm in a certain way, while it is already a deviation from human nature when a person absorbs something once and then retains it, when it becomes permanent for him. And this permanence is the character of the conceptual. In the extreme, the conceptual becomes boring when it is repeated too often; and there is a fundamental sin against human nature associated with this theoretical-conceptual, namely not wanting to have repetitions anymore. You can follow this purely externally. Read good translations of the Buddha's discourses; you will find that these discourses have countless repetitions, you progress through nothing but repetitions. In the West, the foolish mistake was made of taking only the content of the Buddha-speeches and omitting the repetitions, because it was not known that Buddha had taken human nature into account.

There we come upon the point where, out of human nature itself, the mere content must of necessity pass over into something to be rhythmically assimilated. Of course, in the past this was done quite instinctively, by inserting prayer as the rhythmic element into the teaching, inserting prayer as the repeatedly recurring content of faith, even though the individual prayer has exactly the same content. The conceptual element merges with the volitional element when repetition occurs. In another way, one does not get a [volitional] content at all. Thus we already have the necessary flow of the doctrinal element into the cultic element. We have to bring the doctrinal content into such forms that we can present pictorial representations to the community members in a certain way. We have to let what we teach gradually become established in pictorial representations and to set the main points in a certain monumental way, so that they can be repeated again and again as a formula. Without this, we will not be able to bring the teaching content beyond the theoretical-conceptual into the practical-volitional, and this is what we must do. The more we stick to merely handing down the teaching content, the less we get to the practical religious exercise.

This is what shows you directly how something like cultic practice is already present in the Buddha-Speeches. The working out of the will element from the mere theoretical element of imagination is actually present in these discourses. While we appeal to people to repeat the Lord's Prayer, we are working our way out of the merely theoretical into the practical religious realm. But we will not be able to do this at all if we ourselves are not completely imbued with the supersensible substance of the world. And here I come today to certain characteristics of the teaching material, which one must nevertheless take into account if one wants to become a practical preacher or if one wants to have an effect on people through the teaching material at all.

You see, the greatest harm in today's religious work lies in the fact that the Gospels are no longer taken seriously. I do not mean any slight by this, but I do mean that people are not aware that the content of the Gospels goes beyond our sensory understanding. It is most significant that we can approach the Gospels again through anthroposophy and say to ourselves: an otherworldly content flows in the Gospels. We must understand them, we must do everything possible to really understand them. Today, however, people only criticize the Gospels; they do not really want to understand them, and this criticism is largely based on the fact that one does not take the content of the Gospels seriously at all, but takes it superficially.

I must refer you to the third sentence of the Gospel of John. In this third sentence, one usually hears the following: All things were made through the Word, and without the Word nothing was made that has been made. - What is all included in this third sentence of the Gospel of John! In reality, one would have to say: All things that came into being came into being through the Word, and without the Word nothing of what came into being came into being. This captures the meaning of this sentence. The third sentence points with all its might to what has come into being in the world, to everything that is subject to becoming. And of that which is subject to becoming, it is said, first, that it is tangible. Everything we see as having come into being is created and passes away. And secondly, it is said of this created and passing away that it is made by the word, by the logos.

This sentence would not be there if it were not based on the awareness of a contrast, if it were not subject to the sentence that there is also something in the world that is not created and does not pass away, namely the eternal foundations that merely transform themselves. In our modern education, we have only lost this contrast between what has arisen on the surface and the powers that lie in the depths, which Plato, for example, calls the eternal ideas. We must presuppose these eternal ideas as that which does not pass away and which underlies what has arisen and is passing away, which does not exist in the arising and passing away in the ordinary sense, but subsists.

We must distinguish between existence and subsistence. That which subsists all things is the foundation, that which refers to the Father. We must speak to the community in all popularity in such a way that we bring this Father-God as the content of the absolutely eternal to the consciousness of our community children. That is not as difficult as you think. It is only difficult because today the world is intensively economizing on ideas. I can assure you that the people who understand it most easily are the farmers in the countryside. They understand it immediately, while only the people who have been educated in the current way do not understand it. They do not understand it.

We can learn a great deal by looking at the last remnants of the elementary spiritual that still exist in [unspoilt] human beings. It is relatively easy to convey the most profound ideas to people with an elementary soul life. These ideas are rejected only by those who are spoilt, who have been spoilt for the most part by our schools.

We must understand how to teach people in a popular way the eternal in all things and how to distinguish between what is transient, what has come into being and what is passing away. And we must evoke the idea, in all possible ways and roundabout ways, that the Father-God underlies what is enduring and the Son-God, the Christ as the creative Logos, underlies what is becoming and what is the process of becoming. Therefore, one must also seek understanding of the Father-God before the created and the working of the Christ in the created.

Such things must be worked out again, then we come again to concepts that lie beyond mere scientific concepts. But, my dear friends, you must also be able to speak about them in the right way. You do not learn this through logical speculation, because logical speculation itself suffers from the one-sidedness that it works towards being absorbed once. Logical speculation – if it remains only a matter of speculation – is the worst possible preparation for a sermon. If you want to preach, it is not enough to prepare yourself for the doctrinal content of the sermon; the only possible supplement to this preparation for the content is meditation for the preacher himself.

Anyone who wants to preach must first meditate, that is, call something into their consciousness that brings them into a feeling inwardness so that they feel the God, the divine within them. Those who do not prepare themselves in this meditative way will not be able to let the word resound with the nuance with which it must resound if one is to evoke understanding for what one has to say. You will have to speak of immortality, you will have to speak of the Fall of Man, of Creation, of Redemption and of Grace. But you must not speak of immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace with the consciousness that you have gained from modern scientific education, but you must speak with the consciousness that you have gained from your feeling of the divine existence within you. Then your words will be given the necessary nuance that you need to reach the hearts of those to whom you are to bring the truths about immortality, the Fall of Man, Creation, Redemption and Grace. This is what must be understood by preachers as deeply as possible. They will not come to a deeper understanding of the teaching content unless they prepare themselves meditatively.

The kind of composure that you first acquire in meditation, which brings you to be alone with your whole being – even if only for a short time – that composure is what also prepares you for the proper mood for reading the Gospels. You must assume that only the meditative life can prepare you, on the one hand, for reading the Gospels and, on the other, for the special tone of preaching. This is what the preacher must make a habit of. One should not believe that an understanding of worship, an understanding of the right nuance of preaching, comes through intellectual considerations, through intellectual comprehension of the content of the gospel, but rather that it comes through meditative immersion in the spiritual and volitional element at the same time, which stimulates the human being, thus stimulates the whole human being, and that is what it is really always about.

It is certainly a good thing for the modern preacher to realize, by means of outstanding examples, what inner soul struggles must actually be fought through if one wants to penetrate from what one absorbs today through external education, including external theological education, and what determines the whole form of thought, to a real grasp of the suggested idea about the supersensible.

It is really useful for anyone who wants to become a religious leader today to study such personalities as, for example, Newman, the English Cardinal who started out from Anglicanism and who thus moved within a more modern world view, half consciously, and then fell back into Catholicism, which, even within Catholicism, because such people are only waiting for such people, could make him a cardinal. It is interesting to observe the struggles of such a personality. You see, in the beginning, Newman's struggle was based on wanting to understand Christian truths. But he could not get anywhere with that. In the end, he could not find a way to understand Christian truths in modern terms. He was honest enough not to want to come to the mere “simple man of Nazareth” in Weinel's manner, but there was in him the urge for the supersensible. He could not get along earlier than until he said to himself: Yes, at the starting point of Christianity are not highly educated, scientifically educated people, but there are the fishermen of Galilee, and they actually understood nothing of the sayings they did; they did these sayings without logic, without being imbued with a logical understanding. And then, in fact, everything that is modern theology, which works so hard to be logical, which comes to the point of negation in its criticism imbued with logic, only emerged from the simple words of the fishermen of Galilee. And then Newman comes to say to himself: If there is logic, it can only be born out of illogic, out of that which is lived in such a simple way as Christianity was lived by the people who surrounded Christ Jesus in Galilee. —

And so he comes to a particular conception of the evolution, of the development of that which is experienced [religiously], into the more elaborate. But now he is obliged to take the whole Catholic Church with him, because he remains in the actuality of the unfolding [of religious experience]. Why does he remain? Because he negates the possibility that today, through the logical, one can arrive at the super-logical through beholding. Thus he could, [standing between Scylla and Charybdis,] run the risk, on the one hand, of falling prey to Scylla through a purely rationalistic interpretation, or, on the other hand, of Charybdis through killing the rationalistic way of thinking, but then having to accept the whole tradition and falling back into Catholicism. In fact, everyone who thinks this way falls prey to Catholicism. You only have to consider that people who cannot go along with the contemporary way of entering the supersensible, such as Scheler, who is characteristic of our German education for this matter, fall back into Catholicism. If people seek the supersensible and reject the path that anthroposophy wants to take, [they fall back into Catholicism].

Today, in order to avoid falling between Scylla and Charybdis, we have no other choice than to follow the anthroposophical path, even to accept anthroposophy as a supporting element of religious life, in order to access the supersensible truths. Then you will also find — and this is necessary for you because it occurs in community building — the popular, simple form for that which we cannot do within anthroposophy because something else must come first. We still have to express ourselves too strongly in modern forms of education [for the presentation of supersensible truths], because we speak to those who belong to modern education. But if you are a number of people, then it is quite possible to find the simple form to speak to the people in such a way that the high concepts of the supersensible that have been hinted at become concrete again.

I will only hint at the following. You see, do not disdain to speak to people in such a way that you say to them: Look at the stone, look at the rock crystal, look at a mineral object shaped like this, and you will be able to say to yourself: This mineral object, how was it formed? It has been formed out of the earth; you have no reason to think otherwise than that it has been formed out of the earth. It is a piece of the earth, the earth can create such forms, that is a piece of the earth. But now look at the plants; look at what you can always see around you. Can you imagine that the earth produces plants [on its own]? No; what the earth has as seeds within itself must wait until spring comes, until the sun's rays penetrate from outside, and when the sun's rays lose their strength, the earth also loses the strength to produce plant growth. Look at the growth of plants, and you will notice that when plants try to survive the winter season, they take on a woody, mineral quality; they become trees, which in turn lose the sprouting and budding power in their wood, and take on something of the mineral world themselves. The Earth could never produce what is plant-like out of itself; for that it needs what surrounds the Earth. It is necessary to rise above this, to really teach people that the earth could only be a rocky body if it had only its own forces, but that it would never have vegetation and would be permeated by it if the earth did not form a unity with the cosmos, if the cosmic forces did not play a role and have an effect on the earth. The earth would not have a plant kingdom without the spatial heaven.

And if it was possible in ancient times to teach the slave masses in ancient Egypt such truths as, for example, the transition from solar power to the power of Sirius, if it was possible to teach people that at that time, then we need not despair that today, when we can speak to the simplest people about the fact that the Earth owes what it has as a vegetative being to the extraterrestrial cosmos with its forces. And so we can rescue human beings from their tendency towards the merely earthly by teaching them to feel what the earth draws from the cosmic heavens.

I therefore believe that we must work towards directing the soul's gaze to the whole of cosmic space, and that this can be achieved simply by considering the plant world in a way that can be understood by everyone. It is of great help to us to realize how completely innocent nature actually is. It is impossible to speak of anything in the mineral or plant world that is guilt or sin. And if we work through these concepts well, if we really present the innocence of nature and the possible becoming guilty of man in a concrete way, then we can work out what leads people to understand that something comes into the world with man that cannot be found in space at all. Once man has understood that plants owe their existence to space and are innocent, then we have a way of realizing that that which can make man guilty cannot come from space at all, that we are all compelled to seek the essential soul of man outside of space. We must seek this way to go beyond space. And you see, when we have found the way to go beyond space, then we will find further ways.

You can see how difficult it has become for people with a modern education to go beyond space, from the fact that the most intelligent people in the 19th century opposed the idea of immortality on the grounds that souls would have no place in the universe. They could not get beyond the spatial with the concept of the soul. With the concept of the soul, one must get beyond the spatial. And when one has come this far, one turns one's attention to the animal world and tries to bring to life a concept that one gets there, which not only seizes our imaginative life but also our deepest feelings.

We find that minerals and plants cannot become guilty, but they cannot suffer either. Man must suffer, but can also become guilty. And then we turn our gaze to the animal world; they cannot become guilty either, but they must suffer. And when we gradually learn to understand repeated lives on earth, especially when it is not a theory but a clear understanding, when we feel that there is a connection between guilt and suffering, even if it is not trivially practical, and we just cannot find this connection because we direct our attention to innocent nature and would also like to harness man to this unity of innocent nature, then the great world tragedy becomes clear to us, which consists in the fact that we have chained the animal world to us, that the animals must suffer with us, although they cannot be guilty. Then one arrives at the tragic realization that the animal world exists because of man, must share in his suffering, although it cannot be to blame. Feel this concept through, empathize that the animal world shares in evil, although it cannot go along with evil.

When we form a vivid picture of evil in this way – a picture that is also intuitive – we come into contact with the world. We only have to feel the tragedy of existence in the world, which consists in the fact that the animals around us suffer with us, and then we come to realize that there are duties that go beyond the ordinary legal obligations. This is a point where you can lead the human being completely out of the immediate sense world. For in the immediate sense world you find nothing but the legal concepts that regulate the sensual, the external relationships between human and human. The obligation to redeem the animals comes to us from a completely different world. We cannot do this at all in our present existence. We cannot do anything in our present existence to redeem the animals that suffer for our sake. We can only redeem them if we look ahead to a final state of the earth that no longer prevents us from intervening in the laws of nature to relieve the suffering of the animal world. And so we are moving towards understanding a final state of the earth, in which physics has no right to interfere. We are expanding that which lives in us humans to include an understanding of the interconnection of the world.

We must speak to the people of today, because if we speak in terms of the old religious ideas, people will object that from a scientific point of view none of this is possible. But we must try to find such a way that simply cannot be said by science. Because the suffering of the animal world is there, without the animal world being able to be guilty. And here we come directly to the transition; the possibility exists of knowing something about supernatural obligations, or rather, extra-terrestrial obligations, about duties that can be fulfilled when the earth has found its end, the end of its present physical state. We will be able to lead [people] to an understanding of this state of the earth by overcoming purely scientific thinking in an appropriate way.

But we cannot do this if we merely appeal to people's selfishness in our preaching. And that is what has gradually arisen in humanity and has actually made religious conviction so difficult that today, with the best sermons, we basically appeal to human selfishness; and that has come about because we only speak of immortality and not of being unborn.

What is the situation regarding immortality? From anthroposophy it becomes clear. It becomes clear through knowledge. But how does today's preacher speak about immortality? He shakes up — look at the facts — the selfish needs of people, and in doing so he speaks entirely to the deepest soul egoisms; and he would not reach the hearts at all if the desire did not beat towards him: I may not perish with death. Of course, man will not perish with death. But this view must not arise from desire. The preacher does stir up these desires; he speaks to desire and fear, even if he does not do so consciously, because that is how he is accustomed to speaking. You cannot speak of life before conception in the same way. You cannot speak of life before birth from an egoistic point of view; you can make a person indifferent to it, because deep down he does not care about it. Since he is experiencing existence, he is not interested in whether he has lived before. This interest must be instilled in man, and that can only be done by awakening in him the consciousness that he has been given a mission with his earthly existence, that he is a co-worker in the divine world order, which could not achieve its goal if it had to work without the sensual world. That the Deity has released man, that is one thing. What can be grasped is that the human being experiences freedom, which he could not experience if he had not descended into the body. We have to present the human being as something that has been sent down by God. Without realizing the pre-existence, you do not come to a sermon that takes hold of the whole person and not just the desiring person. And that is a great defect of our [present-day] preaching, that it appeals to the desiring on the one hand and to the fearful on the other, and not to that which represents man as an image of the Godhead, which has released man to work in earthly existence.

You see, that word that comes to us from ancient times, that plays such a great role in the Catholic Church, the Gloria, is inserted into the mass between the Gospel and the offertory. Gloria in excelsis Deo – Glory be to God in the highest, and peace on earth, and goodwill toward men. – This is how it is translated in modern times. Now this translation is somewhat misleading, because the concept of glory is not based on the concept of being worshipped; rather, it is based on the same concept as the Greek exusiai: the concept of shining outwards, of revealing itself. And the saying actually means: May the Divine in the Heights reveal Itself, and on earth may Its reflection be the peace of men of good will. — We must arrive at a new concept of glory, then we will also come to an understanding of these things.

Just think how terribly blasphemous it actually is when the Gospel of the Blindborn is translated: Why was this man born blind? Did he sin or his parents? — And the answer: Not he has sinned nor his parents, but the works of God shall be made manifest in him. Is this not blasphemy, that the man born blind was healed so that the works of God might be seen in him? While it is always translated that the works of God are revealed through him, the truth lies in the fact that he preformed blindness for himself in a pre-existent life, so that God might be revealed in him.

We must eliminate this erroneous concept, which appears in many forms; then we can begin to make it clear that the human being stands as an image of God, that he is there to allow the Godhead to work in him. We cannot arrive at this understanding if we rely only on the hope of a post-existent life and not on pre-existence. We must grasp radically that we are here on earth the continuation of the pre-existent life, not merely the beginning of the post-existent life, and that human minds cannot find the way to selflessness if we speak only of immortality and not of pre-existence. These things must be the subject of glowing preaching, then there will be a possibility of reconnecting human consciousness to the supersensible; and then the rest will follow of itself.

You see, if you want to arrive at a concept such as that of Creation, then you have to evoke in people an awareness of the following: if you look at the mineral nature today, you see that the law of the conservation of matter and of force prevails in it. And this world that we are looking at seems to be eternal. But if you realize that this world is only in space and that only minerals from the earthly and plants from the extra-earthly space have been added to space, that something is already coming in with the animal from a pre-earthly state – because what is natural law on earth today cannot of course, cannot make the animal into a human being – if you realize that the laws of nature themselves have a beginning, then you will be able to understand that the concept of creation also includes the emergence of the laws of nature, whereas today we simply extend the laws of nature forward and backward into infinity. This is how we arrive at the concept of creation. It is intended to draw attention to something that can prove to you that, when speaking to simple minds, one can always find a certain understanding for the highest things. When I was young, if one went to an Austrian farmer who had not been educated at school but had only learned to read and write in his village school and spoke to him about nature as one had learned at school, he would stare at one. He could not reconcile this concept of nature with what he knew at all. You couldn't say to him in the usual way, you look at nature, it produces plants and animals, it is beautiful, nature appears in the light - and so on; you might as well have said something Chinese. There was an Austrian dialect poet who used the word “d'Naduar”. But when the Austrian farmer, who had only learned to read and write, who had no sense of the concept of nature as it appears in modern science, spoke of nature, he had a different concept of nature. For him, “nature” was the male seed and without this connotation he could not understand the word nature. He understood that what lives innocently in nature is in him, but it is drowned out in him by what can become guilty. He regarded nature as a part of himself, which is connected with it if one can speak of birth, and he also had the concept that something else enters into man at birth than nature, which is why he calls the male seed nature, the natural thing, however, that is connected with being born. He had this mysterious connection between our being born and being a work of nature.

And as is the case with this striking concept, if one only seeks, even if one wants to move on to the concept of creation, one can still find the possibility of connecting to concepts that are understandable to the simplest mind. The concept of creation can become something thoroughly understandable, but one must really try to move beyond what modern education gives us with good will. And so one gradually comes to make man understand that the creation of man comes before the creation of nature, that man has entered the world at a time when nature had not yet taken effect, when there was no such thing as heredity, fertilization and so on. One returns to a state where heredity and fertilization did not yet exist, where our present world was not yet an external world order, where the apostasy of the spiritual beings could take place, which then later dragged man along with them; one returns to a state in the pre-natural time, where the fall into sin was not yet a possibility for man.

One can and must come to these things if one wants to find a content for the sermon. For this it is not enough for you to present these concepts of the Fall, redemption, and so on, to people in a theoretical way. You will see that if you only count on formal understanding, if you count on mere doctrinal content and not on varied repetition, then you will not be able to hold the community together. If you count on varied repetition, then you can hold the community together. Then you also bring them to an understanding of grace, then you also bring them to the possibility of understanding a new sense of freedom, and you can teach people that man can come to develop, at least in his consciousness, concepts of the innocent and of non-evil [...] gap], freedom [... gap], and that through all our efforts we can indeed become good people inwardly, but that we can only find our connection to the world of the good when grace is at work, when grace comes to meet us.

I can only hint at this, because I don't have the time to discuss these things properly. But to put it briefly: there are ways, if only they are sought, to get out of the conceptual system of today's education and into a fully human system of ideas that has access to the supersensible world; and to do all this, it is absolutely necessary to allow oneself to be fertilized by anthroposophy in a certain sense. People are quite capable of understanding what you say if you find the right tone by first putting yourself in a meditative state.

In recent times, there has been too much abstract, lifeless preaching. And you see, I can say this to you for further reflection — I do not want to impose it on you like a dogma — I can only say: the worst manner of preaching is to stick to abstractions and then become unctuous. To believe that one speaks to the heart by presenting the abstract in a very inward way is poison for the heart. If one speaks of the “simple man of Nazareth”, if one tries to preach about Christ without taking the supersensible into account, if one allows everything Christian to rest, as it were, on his humanity, and wants to teach this to people by adopting an untrue sentimental tone, then one poisons the minds, because then one lives untruthfully about that which should permeate the sermon.

What should permeate the sermon through the feelings is the connection between the preacher and the supersensible content and impulse of the world itself, and the supersensible content and impulse is never given through the abstract. The preacher must be deeply imbued with the humility that the mere use of logical reason is itself a sin, and that the pursuit of science in modern times is killing the religious, that we must redeem the world from the scientific view through religion, that it belongs to the religious to overcome science, and that it is a commandment of Christ Jesus himself to overcome science, that Christ Jesus lives among us precisely for this reason, and that we express his mission to overcome science when we connect with him.

On the one hand, we must be clear about one thing: the human being must work in the world, and so he must already sin by grasping the world with his senses. We see sin as being necessary. And we see that the pendulum, because there is rhythm in the world, must swing to the other side, to the side of redemption from natural science. We will not be able to eradicate it, because we recognize the necessity for man to make the acquaintance of Ahriman, but we must realize that the pendulum must swing to the other side. But we must realize the rhythm, that only in a state of equilibrium can the two things work together. And for that, you see, I must draw your attention to something that may surprise you, but which must enter your consciousness if you want to find the necessary tone for a future sermon.

You see, we actually live today in a consciousness that is a kind of continuation of the ancient Persian world consciousness, which lived in Ahriman and Ormuzd. In Ahriman, he sees the evil god who opposes Ormuzd, and in Ormuzd he sees the good god who destroys the works of Ahriman. It is not known that the ancient Persian was aware that one must follow neither Ahriman nor Ormuzd [alone], but their interaction. And their interaction manifests itself in a figure such as Mithras. Ormuzd is a Lucifer-like figure who frees us from the world when we surrender to her, who wants to snatch us from heaviness and let us burn in the light. Man must find the way between light and heaviness, between Lucifer and Ahriman, and therefore we must have the possibility to think not in any dualism, but to think in the Trinity. We must have the possibility to say: the Persian duality of Ormuzd and Ahriman is today Lucifer and Ahriman, and the Christ stands in the middle of them, the Christ is the one who brings about the balance. Now all religious development so far, especially the theological, has set up a very pernicious equation, it has brought the Christ-figure as close as possible to the Lucifers. It is almost a resurrection of the old Persian Ormuzd when one experiences how Christ is spoken of today. One always thinks only of duality, thus of evil in contrast to good. The world problem is not solved by duality, but solely and exclusively by the Trinity. For as soon as you have duality, you not only have good and evil, but you have the battle between light and darkness, the battle that must not end with the victory of one over the other, but must end with the harmonization of the two. That is actually what must be brought into the concept of Christ. It is not for nothing that Christ sits with the tax collectors and sinners.

You see, my dear friends, the world in which we live has come about in such a way that it was originally formed by all the influences that were at work in the configuration that we experience as the echoes of race, as the echoes of the individual peoples and the like. Consider this world as it emerges from the element of birth, and consider the mission of Christ. The mission of Christ is to overcome all this naturalness, to plant the love of universal humanity in the place of racial life. That which was there at the beginning of the earth, the Adamite, is to be eradicated by Christ. The particularism of a nation, the national egoism, is to be overcome by the Christ, by the general humanity. Redemption does not consist in being in an equally real way as the natural itself, working against the natural, but in taking up the natural and bringing about a balance between the purely spiritual and the natural.

The concept of Christ has not yet been worked out in its purity between Ormuzd and Ahriman, between Lucifer and Ahriman. The concept of the Christ must be grasped as that which leads us to harmonize the opposing poles. For general humanity, human love, is something other than what arises out of families, peoples, races, nations, and so on. But the one is not to be eradicated by the other; rather, race and individual must be harmonized. The mission of Christ on earth will only be understood when it is known that the Father God is connected with the eternal alone, not with the created and the passing; the Christ impulse has come into temporality because it is connected with the created and the passing, and it makes the temporal into the eternal.

We must learn to take literally again what is written in the Gospels: Heaven and Earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away. - Let us translate it into a language that can be spoken today. That which the expanse of space - heaven in the external spatial sense - evokes through the stars in the plants of the Earth, that which the Earth itself brings forth in the minerals, that is, the whole earthly world, will pass away. But when it has passed away, when plants and stones have passed away, then, after this earth has disappeared, that which has come to earth in the Christ will live, that which lives on in the word. And when the Christ is taken up in our word, then, after the destruction of the earth, that which is alive in us through the Christ will continue to live in time, according to the Pauline word: “Not I, but the Christ in me.”

We must rise to the belief that the laws of nature are not eternal, but that the earth will come to an end, and that what exists can only continue to exist because a creative force will carry it beyond when our earth has perished. Stone and plant will perish, but what is in us must not perish, it must be carried out, and that can only be done if the Christ is in us. Only the animals will come with us, and we will then have to release them. Because they are on earth because at the moment when the possibility of becoming sinful entered the world, they were at a stage of development where they had to be seized by that which was only suitable for people. Before this possibility of sin entered the world, there could be no suffering in the world. Minerals and plants do not need to suffer as such, but minerals and plants will pass away. Animals were at a stage of development when they were dragged along by people into suffering. They must be released from it again when this stage of development is over and the earth no longer exists. The laws that now rule our natural world will then rule the world of the soul, which we now only experience inwardly. We cannot comprehend this if we do not also know that man came before the earth.

We must open up access to understanding of these things to people. This must be reflected in our preaching. You do not need to believe that what I have said today you have to say to the congregation in similar words. But you must understand it, then it is already alive in your sermon, even if you preach in the simplest way. For there is not only the ponderable understanding of things, which consists in your mouth speaking and your ear listening, but there is also the imponderable understanding that works from person to person.

Unfortunately, I could only give you these few hints, my dear friends, but I hope that you will have heard many things in my words that want to come from the human being. Without this will, we will not make any progress. It is not a matter of merely stimulating our intellect; we must stimulate the whole human being.

First, in case it should mislead, a word about the English title. The German original bears the formidable superscription: Westliche und östliche Weltgegensätzlichkeit; and the modest little English word “tension” signifies very much more than the diplomatic and political strain, which is more or less chronic now between the Western democracies on the one hand and Russia and the Communist countries on the other. At the same time the book which follows is far from irrelevant to that strain, of which it is in a measure prophetic.

“The spectre of Eastern Europe,” we read on page page 115 (and these words were spoken in 1922), “gazes threateningly across to the West.” But it is only at surface level, and when something specific is amiss, that a “tension” betokens an unnatural strain, or one that threatens disaster unless it is relaxed. Thus both modern psychology, and modern theology, often speak of “holding in tension” as a normal and healthy activity. The clash of two opposites—such for instance as individual freedom and responsibility—will always create a tension. Whether the tension snaps in a neurosis or a war, or whether it is “held” in health and strength and peace, will often depend on whether the clash is merely encountered as a bewildering contradiction, or is understood in depth as a necessary and life-engendering polarity.

Since the end of the nineteenth century the world has been moving steadily in the direction of a single closed economy; and now willy-nilly it seems on the way to becoming a single social unit also. The only question is: of what kind is that unity to be? A living unity, as distinct from the monolithic unity of mere spatial cohesion, always (as Coleridge among others has pointed out) springs from a polarity; and polarity involves, not only the two opposite extremes or poles, but also, as its tertium quid, the vibrant tension in the midst between them. It is a principal object of this book to furnish an understanding in depth of what most unites the habitable globe, historically and culturally, into an organic whole, and this necessarily involves an understanding of the abiding tension between East and West.

To understand anything in depth involves some knowledge of how it came into being, and here the attempt is made to view the relation between typically Eastern and typically Western modes of consciousness in the light of the whole process of the evolution of human consciousness. In this Rudolf Steiner was up against the difficulty that the very existence of such a process was then—and it is still today—not generally recognized. That this is surprising “in an age permeated with evolutionary concepts” has recently been pointed out by Mr. Charles Davy, in his book Towards a Third Culture, in the course of which he defines the evolution of consciousness as “a constant-direction change in the normal experience of the perceived world.” It is the more surprising because it would seem that, without such a concept, little can be accomplished in the way of understanding man and his problems. Examples of this abound in the ensuing pages. Thus, just as the concept of biological evolution is necessary before we can distinguish whether the resemblance of one living form to another is due to a superficial analogy or to a true homology rooted in their nature and growth, so does the concept of evolution of consciousness enable us to discern the purely superficial nature of the resemblance between “division of labour” in oriental antiquity and in modern times. Or again, in the same lecture (8) in which the above example occurs, compare with the usual chatter about “escapism” Steiner's treatment of the old conflict between the image of the artist as a “committed” human being and the image of “art for art's sake.”

In his book, The Yogi and the Commissar, which appeared in 1945, Arthur Koestler began by placing his Yogi and Commissar at the opposite poles of a “spectrum” of human nature or social behaviour—an ultra-violet and an infra-red pole, between which all human types subsist. The Yogi, he said, accepts the inner spirit as the source of energy; he attempts to produce change from within. The Commissar does not believe in any “within;” he attempts to change the behaviour of man by manipulation from without. Koestler defines his Commissar as “the human type which has completely severed relations with the subconscious.” And there is more to the same effect. But this promising introduction is never developed; nor does Koestler so much as notice the paradox implicit in his own striking choice of labels—redolent, as they are, of a polarity between East and West, and yet with the “Yogi” corresponding, not to the Eastern (as one would expect), but to the anti-communist Western pole.

Let the reader contrast with this brilliant but inadequate aperçu the counter concepts of “maya” and “ideology” which Steiner builds up in Lecture 4 on the historical foundations (including a careful appraisal of actual yoga) which he has laid in the first three lectures. They are the fruit of understanding in depth, because they are rooted in a deep grasp of the whole history of man and of his place on earth and in the cosmos.

In the threefold nature of man, as Steiner expounded it, the rest is as it were implicit. Past, present and future; religion, art and science; the slow shift of the earth's cultural centre of gravity from orient to Occident, and with that the transition from an ancient instinctual wisdom to our modern self-consciousness, subsisting in free but lifeless thoughts—all this (such is the message of the following pages) can really only be contemplated and understood in understanding and contemplating threefold man. In his head, taken alone, the human being, qua thinker, does really reach a “commissar's” inner emptiness. He also experiences “the terror of that emptiness,” as Steiner points out on page 104 and as the Existentialists have since so heavily stressed. But there is a way, of which Existentialism knows nothing as yet, by which humanity can fill its experienced emptiness with spiritual substance. If a man is willing to follow that way and to develop his dormant powers, if he will learn how to hold his conscious but empty thinking in tension with the opposite pole of his being, his unconscious but substantial will, then not only his nerves and senses but the whole man can become a sense-organ, capable of re-experiencing in freedom the instinctual wisdom by which mankind was formerly nourished—but also controlled. He finds (we are told on page 94) “the cosmos stored up as recollection inside him.”

Thus the problem of the relation between East and West leads quickly into an exposition of both the philosophical basis and what may be called the “methodology” of that spiritual science, or anthroposophy, with which the name of Rudolf Steiner is principally associated. This is, of course, the original feature that marks our book off from any other on the same subject. It may also be, for many, a stumbling-block in the way of according to the thoughts it contains the candid attention which their intrinsic quality would otherwise command. For, if the method is presented as open to all—as indeed it is—the actual development of the dormant powers referred to depends on certain qualities, of character and otherwise, which few human beings have as yet brought with them into the world. Among those few, though he never expressly makes the claim, Steiner himself was pre-eminent. Readers who become aware, or who already know, how much the findings of anthroposophy, including this very concept of the evolution of consciousness, depend on Steiner's own raids on that stored up cosmic memory (elsewhere more technically referred to by him as the “Akashic Record”) and who are perhaps inclined to dismiss for that reason their claim to attention, will find here a reasoned justification of the method of spiritual science, which asks no more than to be fairly considered on its merits.

For this reason among others “the Vienna Course,” as it is often called, seemed a good choice to make, out of the voluminous material available, for a special book to lay before the English public, under a well-known imprint, shortly after the centenary of Steiner's birth in 1961, when through public lectures, a broadcast talk and other avenues, the attention of many was no doubt drawn for the first time to his work and its practical results.

Another reason for the choice is, that the relation between spiritual science and natural science is here clearly and fully stated at the outset. The reader will be left in no doubt of Steiner's immense respect for the science of the West, as it has actually developed since the scientific revolution; perhaps also in little doubt of his thorough acquaintance with the natural science of his own day. That can in any event in fact be demonstrated from other sources. To the present writer the most significant ground for the claim of spiritual science to be a science, and to merit careful investigation alongside the deferential attention paid as a matter of course to the established sciences, is the one which is glanced at on page 56, and more fully stated on pages 69, 70. It is a ground which has broadened a good deal during the forty years that have elapsed since these lectures were delivered, and it is this. If we look aside for a moment from their proven efficacy in the field of straightforward physical manipulation and consider rather their claim (abandoned now altogether in some quarters) to furnish us with knowledge about the nature of man and the world, it must be admitted that the matter dealt with by the established sciences is coming to be composed less and less of actual observations, more and more of such things as pointer-readings on dials, the same pointer-readings arranged by electronic computers, inferences from inferences, higher mathematical formulae and other recondite abstractions. Yet modern science began with a turning away from abstract cerebration to objective observation! And this is the very step which spiritual science claims to be taking again today. Once grant the possibility that observations other than those made with the passive and untrained senses are possible, and you have to admit that the method of cognition which Steiner describes is more scientific, because more empirical, than the method of the schools.

In addition to the twenty or so books which he wrote, most of which are translated into English, Rudolf Steiner delivered several thousands of lectures, many of them in courses or cycles, in different parts of Europe. His followers saw to it that most of these were taken down in shorthand and afterwards transcribed for the use of the Movement. Later the transcriptions, unrevised by the lecturer, were in many cases made available as printed books; and this is the case here. Audiences varied widely in size, nationality, educational background and other respects, and Steiner was wont to vary his style accordingly. The reader may like to know that these particular lectures were given during a “West-East Congress” of the Anthroposophical Movement in Vienna in June 1922. They provided each evening a sort of temporary culmination of the various themes which had been studied during the day, and the usual number in the audience was about two thousand.

Steiner remarked afterwards, in a written report, that public conferences of this magnitude represented a new departure from his normal practice of approaching only those who were in a manner predisposed to listen sympathetically to what he had to say. Surely it was no small achievement to shepherd an audience of two thousand, not all of them sympathetic, through such unfamiliar and subtle catenations of thought as the reader will find in Lecture 2! Some of those who are familiar with the literature of anthroposophy have detected in this particular cycle a special note—a touch of almost apologetic urbanity—which is found nowhere else. Perhaps this also makes them a suitable choice for the purpose mentioned above.

Rudolf Steiner died in 1925. The years that have passed since then have been crowded and fateful ones, changing the face of the world and the colour of its thought. It would be surprising if there were nothing here that “dated.” For instance, a contempt for Western technological achievement, as something philistine and unspiritual, can no longer be regarded as the characteristic oriental reaction it was in 1922, when he was speaking. Indeed the whole difference between the spiritual—or unspiritual—life of Orient and Occident daily becomes increasingly blurred. But is not this a symptom of the very trend to which Steiner was drawing attention? The elimination of a tension-holding middle between the two extremes leads here, as elsewhere, to their chaotic and sinister interaction. Even in 1922 the typically Western materialism of the German Karl Marx was streaming back to Germany and the West from Eastern Europe. Since then, we have seen the rise and fall of a largely Westernized Japan, the succumbing of China to the crudest materialism of all, the incipient industrialization of India. Almost as these lines were being written the elimination of anything that could be called Middle Europe was carried to its absurdly logical conclusion, and the interval between East and West reduced, in Berlin, to the thickness of a wall.

An Austrian subject, born in a part of Europe which is now just behind the iron curtain, Steiner was himself a child of that vanishing Middle Europe. Nowhere perhaps could the disappearance after 1914 of the old order, rich in ancient hierarchy and symbol, rotten in so much else, be experienced as vividly as in Austria-Hungary. Nowhere was the need so apparent, and (for a short time after the first World War) the opportunity so promising for the construction of a new social order, which might unite in a single organism the impulse of humanity towards the future with the wisdom it inherited from the past. It was this fleeting opportunity which he had been seeking to exploit during the brief period in 1919 and the early twenties when the Threefold Commonwealth Movement was founded and vigorously propagated, and when for a time his name was well known in Central Europe.

The opportunity passed that might have brought quick returns from a lightning campaign. But few of the problems have been solved. That “faith in the supreme power of the State” (page 166) which he noted as accompanying the growth of technology, has only gone on increasing; and everywhere within it, between class and class, between one State and another, and between East and West, antagonisms swell and proliferate. Koestler's Yogi had his emotional energies fixed on “the relation between the individual and the universe,” his Commissar on “the relation between individual and society.” In the second half of this book an attempt is made to show how the two relations coalesce in the threefold nature of man. A reconstruction of society is, no less than is a rebirth of individual psychology, implicit in the findings of spiritual science and would follow naturally and inevitably from a wider understanding of these. Whereas a society “planned” on abstract principles must inevitably strangle all progress, if only because (as F. A. Hayek has recently argued on purely empirical grounds) the unpredictable, free individual spirit is your only source of novelty and change.

Once again all turns on the basic fact of the evolution of human consciousness. On the one hand such an evolution necessarily involves changes in the social structure, but on the other hand that structure, and the changes which it demands, cannot be understood except in the light of that evolution. In the long run the views on diet of a man who had never heard of bread would be about as practical as the views on social reform of a man who is unaware that humanity is evolving from a typically oriental condition, in which the existence of the individual is latent in society, to a typically occidental one, in which the existence of society is latent in the individual. “What is needed,” says Steiner, on page 164, “is prefigured in the unconscious will of mankind in Europe.”

In Europe and, as he elsewhere makes clear, in America. Perhaps few passages in this book could be more immediately fruitful in removing perilous misunderstandings than the closing pages of Lecture 9, where much, over there, of what we on this side of the Atlantic are apt to despise as emotionally crude or intellectually superficial, is related to a certain un-European conception of the human will; and it is emphasized that this very conception, primitive as the terms in which it is expressed may be, nevertheless “carries within itself striking potentialities for the future.”

But it is time the reader was left to make his own acquaintance with the ideas which follow in the form in which Steiner himself expressed them. He will be disappointed if he seeks in them a schematic diagram of the nature or history of humanity or a panacea for its personal and social ills. But it may be otherwise if with an open mind he travels through these pages expecting only what he will find: a patient examination into the way in which we form our ideas and the historical and geographical factors by which that way is conditioned, and, along with that, a preliminary contribution towards the unfreezing of certain hidden reserves of energy, imagination and wit, which would seem to be essential if human civilization is to be rescued from decline.

London,
February 1962.

Owen Barfield

Dr. Steiner: School has just begun, and we want to see how things go. This is likely to be a very important year. What do you have to report?

A teacher asks about purchasing a history textbook for the twelfth grade.

Dr. Steiner: Well, it’s true the students must know something. In the last grade of high school, history class is mainly a kind of review. That is also the case here. Couldn’t you teach from your notes so that a textbook would not be necessary?

You see, what is really very important is that you summarize everything they need to know as efficiently as possible. I happily remember how, when I was in school, we did not have any geometry books. The teacher summarized the important things in dictations. A self-written book gives you reason to know what is in it. Of course, when the children first had to learn everything they need, we could not do it that way. If such things are to be fruitful, it must be possible to summarize what they need to know. Everything they will be asked about history in the final examination can be written down on fifty or sixty pages. It is clear that no one, not even an expert in history, remembers everything in Ploetz. Giving children such textbooks is illusory. They just have chapter titles, but you could summarize all of the material in fifty or sixty pages. It is possible that all the subject teachers would want textbooks, but we should try to avoid that.

In such questions, an efficient summarization is what is important. Other schools have the children underline the things they need to study. They also need to cover things in a given amount of time. You should dictate such history notebooks beginning in the tenth grade.

A middle-grades teacher asks about notebooks according to blocks.

Dr. Steiner: You should give a dictation at the end of the period about what was just covered. Create the dictation with the children. You can summarize the material in a written form during one period and review it in the next. Use key sentences rather than key words.

How are things going in twelfth-grade mathematics?

The mathematics teacher: Very well. We have covered nearly everything.

Dr. Steiner: I have no doubt that they can well understand these elementary concepts of higher mathematics. I would ask the twelfth grade if they can easily solve such examination questions as: Given an oblique circular cone with axis \(\alpha\) making an angle α to the base, with a radius \(\rho\), compute the height of the cone and the length of the longest and shortest slant heights.

\(9x^2 + 25y^2 = 225\). The coordinates are, \(x = 5\), \(y = 2\). Determine the equation of the tangent and its length. They may also need to solve construction problems: Construct the locus of all points equidistant from a given point and a given plane.

Another question might be: Construct the shadow of a surface of a plane bounded by a circle upon a cone. Or further: Draw a cycloid.

The children also need to become accustomed to writing German essays. You could use what you teach in class for such essays.

A teacher: I think we need to teach the children a little about the technique of writing such essays.

Dr. Steiner: You can show them that by correcting their errors. That is true of style also. I would not give any theoretical discussions about that, as they will be disappointed when their essays are poor. A teacher: They have poor punctuation.

Dr. Steiner: It will not be easy to find a reasonable way to teach punctuation to children. We need to look into this question further, including the reasons for punctuation. This is a question we need to examine pedagogically, and I will prepare that for our next meeting. There does not appear to be any natural way of justifying punctuation. Our German punctuation is based upon the Latin and is very pedantic. Latin has logical punctuation. It arose in Medieval Latin at the beginning of the Middle Ages. There was none in Classical Latin.

Morgenstern wrote a poem about that, “Im Reich der Interpunktionen” (In the realm of punctuation marks). Punctuation is something that cannot be understood before a certain age because it is very intellectual. Children can understand putting a comma before an and only after the age of fourteen, but then they understand it quite easily. A book from Herman Grimm shows that there is actually no higher law in regard to these things. You cannot say they are incorrect. You should read the beginning of Herman Grimm’s book about Raphael. He uses only periods. You should also read one of his essays about how a schoolmaster corrected his errors. Grimm gives an answer to that. He gives a very interesting picture in his volume of essays, in the last one. You can also learn a great deal by looking at a letter by Goethe. Goethe could not punctuate. A teacher asks about seating boys and girls together.

Dr. Steiner: It is better to take such dislikes into account when they exist.

A teacher of one of the middle grades asks about “round writing.”

Dr. Steiner: They can do that.

A class had been divided and the new class teacher thought that he had received almost all the poor students.

Dr. Steiner: I do not understand how this opinion could arise. Why didn’t we divide the class such that it would be impossible for such an opinion to arise? There is no reason for dividing in any way other than alphabetically. That is better than when all the good students are put in one class, and the other has only the poor students.

A gymnastics teacher: C.H. does not want to participate in gymnastics and does not want to do eurythmy because of his inner development.

Dr. Steiner: When little H. begins such things, he is starting along the path of becoming like his older brother. He needs to be moved to participate in all the classes. That is simply nonsense. If you give in, he will be just like his brother. None of the students can be allowed not to participate in all the classes without good reason.

A gymnastics teacher: The upper two grades do not want to take gymnastics. The way they come to class makes me really feel sorry for them.

Dr. Steiner: Part of the problem is that the children did not have gymnastics before. They do not understand why they should take it now. That is something we cannot overcome. It was an error when the Waldorf School was started, and something will always remain of it.

On the other hand, it is quite possible to do something we thought was important several years ago when Mr. Baumann was teaching deportment, namely, to have the children learn manners. That is completely lacking in the upper grades. However, if it is taught pedantically, though we do not need to do it that way, they will become uncomfortable, particularly the boys. We must teach them manners with manners, with a certain amount of humor. I still find that quite lacking. We need to bring in more humor. It is important that you bring more humor, not jokes of course, into the school and into your teaching. You are really too reserved in that regard.

The spirit of the Waldorf School is certainly here, but on the other hand, overcoming human weaknesses through anthroposophy—which itself is a human being—is not something general, but something unique for each person. You could become something very different through anthroposophy. A great deal could occur in that regard, so that it is not Mr. X. or Miss Y. who stands before the class, but Mr. X. or Miss Y. transformed through anthroposophy. I could, of course, just as well mention other people. We must continue to free ourselves from this heaviness. There is a feeling of heaviness in the classes, and we must remove it. Seriousness is correct, but not this lack of humor. People need to lose this humorless seriousness. We need to overcome ourselves through our higher I so that the children cannot come to us and justifiably complain about our behavior. The faculty needs to round off the rough edges of one another. You should, of course, not allow things to go so far that one person allows everything to slip by while another continually complains. With X., you could certainly put your hands in your pockets, but not with Z. That would not be appropriate. There must be a style in the school that acts to bring things together so that there is a real cooperation. This might be a topic for a meeting when I am not here.

A teacher reports about the behavior of one of the older girls.

Dr. Steiner: The girl will say, “Thank God.” She probably had an afternoon tea, and I could well imagine that she did not want to do gymnastics. That has nothing to do with gymnastics. You need to get past some of the children’s selfishness. X. would think it quite funny of the girls, whereas you think it is bad behavior. It has often happened that other teachers are not the least disturbed by such things, so the children do not understand the problem. We need to teach them social forms with some humor. Good social forms are something that influence moral attitudes and affect moral development later in life. They do not need to be carved in stone.

We must pay more attention to overcoming what is human through our higher self. That will become more possible as our workload decreases. In Norway, the teachers have thirty hours. This year, we will be in a position where some teachers have less than twenty hours. The fewer class hours we have, the better we can prepare, which also includes overcoming our individual idiosyncrasies. We do not need to overcome our individuality, only our idiosyncrasies. We may not let ourselves go. That is something that may not happen in any event.

The gymnastics teacher: Should P. I. do gymnastics?

Dr. Steiner: Yes, and he should also do some curative eurythmy. He should do all of the consonant exercises in moderate amounts. Do them all, but not for too long. He is inwardly crippled.

A teacher asks about a student in an upper grade who speaks very softly.

Dr. Steiner: It would be good to have him memorize things. See to it that he learns things from memory, but says them poetically, or at least in well-formed language.

A teacher asks about gardening class for the upper grades.

Dr. Steiner: We offer gardening class only until the tenth grade. We should leave gardening out of the upper grades. The children would like to learn grafting, if you can guide them into its mysteries.

The school doctor: One hundred seventy children have taken the remedies for malnutrition.5 I have examined one hundred twenty, and most of them look better. Eighty have gained two to five pounds.

Dr. Steiner: That is not bad for such a short time. The school doctor asks about tuberculosis of the lungs.

Dr. Steiner: Children who have tuberculosis of the lungs often have infected intestines as well. We should examine those who show the effects in their lungs for tuberculosis of the intestines, because intestinal tuberculosis does not often arise by itself at that young age. In that event, it would be best to try to heal the intestines first.

For cases of tuberculosis in the intestines and the pancreas, put the juice from half a lemon in a glass of water and use that in a compress to wrap their abdomen at night. Give them also the tuberculosis remedies one and two. As far as possible, they should eat only warm things without any animal fat, for instance, warm eggs, warm drinks, particularly warm lemonade, but, if possible, everything should be warm.

The school doctor: It is difficult to differentiate between large- and small-headed children.

Dr. Steiner: You will need to go more thoroughly into the reality of it. So many things are hidden. It sometimes happens that these things appear later with one child or another.

I would now like to hear about the first grade. Are the children taking it up? We need to follow the psychology of this first grade. Every class has its own individuality. These two first grade classes are very interesting groups.

A teacher: The little ones are quite individualistic. They are like sacks of flour, yet individualistic.

Dr. Steiner: You need to be clear that all their shouting is just superficial. You need to find out what excites them.

A teacher asks whether the tendency toward left-handedness should be broken.

Dr. Steiner: In general, yes. At the younger ages, approximately before the age of nine, you can accustom left-handed children to right-handedness at school. You should not do that only if it would have a damaging effect, which is very seldom the case Children are not a sum of things, but exponentially complicated. If you attempt to create symmetry between the right and left with the children, and you exercise both hands in balance, that can lead to weak-mindedness later in life.

The phenomenon of left-handedness is clearly karmic, and, in connection with karma, it is one of karmic weakness. I will give an example: People who overworked in their previous life, so that they did too much, not just physically or intellectually, but in general spiritually, within their soul or feeling, will enter the succeeding life with an intense weakness. That person will be unable to overcome the karmic weakness in the lower human being. (The part of the human being that results from the life between death and a new birth is particularly concentrated in the lower human being, whereas the part that comes from the previous earthly life is concentrated more in the head.) So, what would otherwise be strongly developed becomes weak, and the left leg and left hand are relied upon as a crutch. The preference for the left hand results in the right side of the brain, instead of the left, being used in speech. If you give in to that too much, then that weakness may perhaps remain for a later, a third, earthly life. If you do not give in, then the weakness is brought into balance.

If you make a child do everything equally well with the right and left hands, writing, drawing, work and so forth, the inner human being will be neutralized. Then the I and the astral body are so far removed that the person becomes quite lethargic later in life. Without any intervention, the etheric body is stronger toward the left than the right, and the astral body is more developed toward the right than the left. That is something you may not ignore; you should pay attention to it. However, we may not attempt a simple mechanical balance. The most naive thing you can do is to have as a goal that the children should work with both hands equally well. A desire for a balanced development of both hands arises from today’s complete misunderstanding of the nature of the human being.

They discuss a girl. She needs to be immunized since she just went through a bad case of flu.

Dr. Steiner: That lames the senses under the quadrigeminal plate. This is not an easy situation.

A school-age child needs to sleep eight to nine hours. We need to take care of these things individually. I wanted to show only that a child who sleeps too little will have insufficient musical feeling, and that a child who sleeps too much will be too weak for all the things that require a more flexible imagination.

That is how to tell whether the child sleeps too long or not enough. Those who sleep too much will have little capability with forms in geometry, for example. Those who sleep too little will have difficulty understanding music and history.

A teacher makes a comment.

Dr. Steiner: B.B. is periodically rude. He will have times when he is better and others when he is worse. Realistically, it will take many years for that to improve.

Today we will lead on from the lecture of the day before yesterday to certain matters which can promote a deep personal understanding of the anthroposophical life. If we pass over our life in review and make real efforts to get to the root of its happenings, very much can be gained. We shall recognise the justice of many things in our destiny and realise that we have deserved them.—Suppose someone has been frivolous and superficial in the present incarnation and is subsequently struck by a blow of fate. It may not be possible, externally, to connect the blow of fate directly with the frivolousness, but a feeling arises, nevertheless, that there is justice in it. Further examination of life will reveal blows of fate which we can only attribute to chance, for which we find no explanation whatever. These two categories of experiences are to be discovered as we look back over our life. Now it is important to make a clear distinction between apparent chance and obvious necessity. When a man reviews his life with reference to these two kinds of happenings, he will fail to reach any higher stage of development unless he endeavours to have a very clear perception of everything that seems to him to be chance. We must try, above all, to have clear perception of those things we have not desired, which go right against the grain. It is possible to induce a certain attitude of soul and to say to ourselves: How would it be if I were to take those things which I have not desired, which are disagreeable to me and imagine that I myself actually willed them? In other words, we imagine with all intensity that we ourselves willed our particular circumstances.

In regard to apparently fortuitous happenings, we must picture the possibility of having ourselves put forth a deliberate and strong effort of will in order to bring them about. Meditatively as it were, we must induce this attitude to happenings which, on the face of them, seem to be purely fortuitous in our lives. Every human being today is capable of this mental exercise. If we proceed in this way, a very definite impression will ultimately be made upon the soul; we shall feel as though something were striving to be released from us. The soul says to itself: “Here, as a mental image, I have before me a second being; he is actually there.” We cannot get rid of this image and the being gradually becomes our “Double.” The soul begins to feel a real connection with this being who has been imagined into existence, to realise that this being actually exists within us. If this conception deepens into a vivid and intense experience, we become aware that this “imagined” being is by no means without significance. The conviction comes to us: this being was already once in existence and at that time you had within you the impulses of will which led to the apparently chance happenings of today. Thereby we reach a deep-rooted conviction that we were already in existence before coming down into the body. Every human being today can have this conviction.—And now let us consider the question of the successive incarnations of the human being. What is it that reincarnates? How can we discover the answer to this question?

There are three fundamental and distinct categories of experiences in the life of soul. Firstly, our mental pictures, our ideas, our thoughts. In forming a mental picture, our attitude may well be one of complete neutrality; we need not love or hate what we picture inwardly, neither need we feel sympathy or antipathy towards it. Secondly, there are the moods and shades of feeling which arise by the side of the ideas or the thoughts; the cause of these moods in the life of feeling is that we like or love one thing, dislike or abhor another, and so forth. The third kind of experiences in the life of soul are the impulses of will. There are, of course, transitional stages but speaking generally these are the three categories. Moreover it is fundamentally characteristic of a healthy life of soul to be able to keep these three kinds of experiences separate and distinct from each other. Our life of thought and mental presentation arises because we receive stimuli from outside. Nobody will find it difficult to realise that the life of thought is the most closely bound up with the present incarnation. This, after all, is quite obvious when we bear in mind that speech is the instrument whereby we express our thoughts; and speech, or language, must, in the nature of things, differ in every incarnation. We no more bring language with us at the beginning of a new incarnation than we bring thoughts and ideas. The language as well as the thoughts must be acquired afresh in each incarnation. Hebbel once wrote something very remarkable in his diary.—The idea occurred to him that a scene in which the reincarnated Plato was being soundly chastised by the teacher for his lack of understanding of Plato would produce a very striking effect in a play! A man does not carry over his thought and mental life from one incarnation to another and takes practically nothing of it with him into his post-mortem existence. After death we evolve no thoughts or mental pictures but have direct perceptions, just as our physical eyes have perceptions of colour. After death, the world of concepts is seen as a kind of net stretching across existence. But our feelings, our moods of heart and feeling—these we retain after death and also bring their forces with us as qualities and tendencies of soul into a new earthly life. For example, even if a child's life of thought is undeveloped, we shall be able to notice quite definite tendencies in his life of feeling. And because our impulses of will are linked with feelings, we also take them with us into our life after death. If, for example, a man lends himself to fallacy and error, the effect upon his life of feeling is not the same as if he lends himself to truth. For a long time after death we suffer from the consequences of false mental presentations and ideas. Our attention must therefore turn to the qualities and moods of feeling and the impulses of the will, when we ask: What is it that actually passes on from one incarnation to another?

Suppose something painful happened to us ten or twenty years ago. In thought today we may be able to remember it quite distinctly and in detail. But the actual pain we felt at the time has all but faded away; we cannot re-experience the stirrings of feeling and impulses of will by which it was accompanied. Think for a moment of Bismarck and the overwhelming difficulties of which he was conscious in taking his decision to go to war in 1866; think of what tumultuous feelings, what teeming impulses of will were working in Bismarck at that time! But even when writing his memoirs, would Bismarck have been conscious of these emotions and resolves with anything like the same intensity? Of course not! Man's memory between birth and death is composed of thoughts and mental pictures. It may, of course, be that even after ten or twenty years, a feeling of pain comes over us at the recollection of some sorrowful event, but generally speaking the pain will have greatly diminished after this lapse of time; in thought, however, we can remember the very details of the event. If we now picture to ourselves that we actually willed certain painful events, that in reality we welcomed things which in our youth we may have hated, the very difficulty of this exercise rouses the soul and thus has an effect upon the life of feeling. Suppose, for example, a stone once crashed down upon us.—We now try with all intensity to picture that we ourselves willed it so. Through such mental pictures—that we ourselves have willed the chance events in our life—we arouse, in the life of feeling, memory of our earlier incarnations. In this way we begin to realise how we are rooted in the spiritual world, we begin to understand our destiny. We have brought with us, from our previous incarnation, the will for the chance events of this life.

To devote ourselves in meditation to such thoughts, and elaborate them, is of the highest importance. Between death and a new birth too, much transpires, for this period is infinitely rich in experiences—purely spiritual experiences, of course. We therefore bring with us qualities of feeling and impulses of will from the period between death and a new birth, that is to say, from the spiritual world. Upon this rests a certain occurrence of very great importance in the modern age, but one of which little notice is taken. The occurrence is to be found in the lives of many people today but usually passes by unnoticed. It is, however, the task of Anthroposophy to point to such an occurrence and its significance. Let me make it clear by an example.—Suppose a man has occasion to go somewhere or other and his path happens to take him in the wake of another human being, a child perhaps. Suddenly the man catches sight of a yawning chasm at the edge of the path along which the child is walking. A few steps farther and the child will inevitably fall over the edge into the chasm. He runs to save the child, runs and runs, entirely forgetting about the chasm. Then he suddenly hears a voice calling out to him from somewhere: “Stand still!” He halts as though nailed to the spot. At that moment the child catches hold of a tree and also stops, so that no harm befalls. If no voice had called at that moment the man must inevitably have fallen into the chasm. And now he wonders from whom the voice came. He finds no single soul who could have called, but he realises that he would quite certainly have been killed if he had not heard this voice; yet however closely he investigates he cannot find that the warning came from any physical voice.

In deep self-observation, many human beings living at the present time would be able to recognise a similar experience in their lives. But far too little attention is paid to such things. An experience of this kind may pass by without leaving a trace—then the impression fades away and no importance is attached to the experience. But suppose a man has been attentive and realises that it was not without significance. The thought may then occur to him: At that point in your life you were facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life should really have ended at that moment, for you had forfeited it. You were saved by something akin to chance and since then a second life has as it were been planted on the first; this second life is to be regarded as a gift bestowed upon you and you must act accordingly. When such an experience makes a man feel that his life, from that time onwards, has been bestowed upon him as a gift, this means that he can be accounted a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is how Christian Rosenkreutz calls the souls whom he has chosen. A man who can recall such an occurrence—and everyone sitting here can discover something of the kind in their lives if they observe closely enough—has the right to say to himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added such an experience to my karma.—This is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his pupils; this is how he gathers his community.—A man who is conscious of this experience knows with certainty that a path has been pointed out to him which he must follow, trying to discover how he can dedicate himself to the service of Rosicrucianism. If there are some who have not yet recognised the sign, they will do so later on; for he to whom the sign has once been given will never again be free from it.—That such an experience comes to a man is due to the fact that during the period between his last death and his present birth, he was in contact with Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. It was then that Christian Rosenkreutz chose us, imparting an impulse of will which leads us, now, to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are established. Materialistic thought will naturally regard all these things as hallucinations, just as it regards the experience of Paul at Damascus as having been an hallucination. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the whole of Christianity is based upon an hallucination, therefore upon error. For theologians are perfectly well aware that the Event at Damascus is the foundation-stone of the whole of subsequent Christianity. And if this foundation stone itself is nothing but an illusion, then, if thought is consistent, everything built upon it must obviously be fallacy.

An attempt has been made today to show that certain happenings, certain experiences in life may indicate to us how we are interwoven in the spiritual fabric of world existence. If we develop the memory belonging to our life of feeling, we grow onwards into the spiritual life which streams and pulses through the world. Theoretical knowledge alone does not make men true theosophists; those who understand their own life and the life of other human beings in the sense indicated today—they and they alone are true theosophists.—Anthroposophy is a basic power which can transform our life of soul. And the goal of the work in our groups must be that the intimate experiences of the soul change in character, that through the gradual development of the memory belonging to the life of feeling we become aware of Immortality. The true theosophist or anthroposophist must have this conviction: If you so will, if you really apply the forces within you in all their strength, then you can utterly transform your character. We must learn to feel and perceive that the Immortal holds sway in ourselves and in everyone else.—What makes a man into a true anthroposophist is that his faculties remain receptive his whole life long, even when his hair is white. The realisation that progress is possible always and forever will transform our whole spiritual life.

One of the consequences of materialism is that human beings become old prematurely. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked quite different; there are children today of 10 or 11 years old who give the impression of old and aged people. Human beings—especially adolescents—have become so precocious, so old beyond their years. They maintain that lies such as that of babies being brought by the stork should not be told to children, that children should be “enlightened” on such matters. Those who come after us will know that the souls of our children hover down as bird-like, spirit-forms from the higher worlds. To have an imaginative conception of many things still beyond our comprehension is of very great importance. As regards the case in question, it is possible to find a much better imaginative picture than the legend of the stork; the reality is that spiritual forces are in play between the child and his parents or teachers; a kind of secret magnetism is in operation. We must ourselves believe in any imaginative picture we give to the children. If it is a question of explaining death to them, we must point to another happening in Nature. We say to the children: “See how the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. That is what happens to the human soul at death.”—But we must ourselves believe that the Powers behind the Universe have given us, in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis, an image of the soul going forth from the body. The World-Spirit has inscribed such a picture in Nature to draw our attention to what here transpires. It is infinitely important to be always capable of learning, of always remaining young, independently of our physical body. The great task of Theosophy, or Anthroposophy, is to bring to the world the rejuvenation of which it stands sorely in need. We must get beyond the banal and the purely material. To recognise Soul and Spirit as powers operating in life—this must be the aim of the work in our Groups. More and more we must be permeated with the knowledge that the soul can gain mastery over the external world.