The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! I would like to add a few words to what we were considering last time, and then perhaps someone will have a new question.

The question that was asked concerning man's origin can be rightly understood and answered only by looking back at the whole evolution of humanity. The assertion that men were originally animal-like, that they had an animal-like intelligence, and so forth, is nothing but a science fairy tale. It is contradicted by what has been found from the earliest historical times, and what—even though poetic in form—indicates the existence of great wisdom among the human beings who lived during those primeval earth conditions. At that time men did not feel inequality among themselves as they feel it today. The feeling of inequality always comes to the fore in an epoch when men have more or less lost real knowledge.

Only think how at a certain period in ancient Egypt slavery was widespread. But slavery was not always there; it developed at a time when men had lost real knowledge of the world, had lost real science, and no longer knew what slavery signified. And if you think intelligently you will certainly ask yourselves: Why is it that, for instance, a labor movement had to arise with such forcefulness?

Naturally it was bound to arise because conditions made it necessary, because people had come to feel that things could not go on as they were, and they wanted to call attention to how the conditions should be bettered. What makes the labor problem such a burning question is the fact that industry and all the various discoveries and inventions have gone in one particular direction. Before the spread of industry, need was not so oppressive. Why is it, then, that the advent of industry has brought this burden in its train?

As every reasonable person will admit, those few human beings who do not live in actual need—shall we say, the capitalists, as they are usually called—do not create this need deliberately for the pure joy of it. Naturally, they would prefer the needs of all human beings to be satisfied. Obviously, that must be taken into account. But then this other question arises: Why is it that the few who reach leading positions lack the capacity to change conditions so that the needs of the masses will be satisfied?

It is always the few leaders in the trade unions upon whom all the others depend. As things have developed, it is quite natural that it is always the few who lead, but they lack clear insight. And the masses of workers feel that these few do not themselves know what should be done. It has become obvious, especially just recently, that these few do not know what they should be doing. So one must say: Something is quite obviously lacking. And from the view of spiritual science, the thing lacking is knowledge of the spiritual world. This knowledge would confirm that it is absolutely untrue to say that at the beginning of their evolution human beings were unintelligent, dull, and that now they are enlightened. That is the general opinion today and it is simply not true.

At the beginning of their existence on the earth, human beings possessed a knowledge not only of what was on the earth but also of the stars in the heavens. The reason why today this knowledge has degenerated into superstition—I have often spoken of this—is that, as time went on, these things were no longer investigated and hence came to be misunderstood. Originally there was a widespread knowledge of the stars; today the only knowledge of the stars that exists is one that makes calculations about them. But it is unable to penetrate to their spiritual reality. If a being living on Mars were to know only as much about the earth as our ordinary consciousness, our ordinary science, knows about Mars, that Mars being would believe that there is not a single soul on the earth—whereas actually there are fifteen to twenty hundred million souls on the earth! It is the same with the ideas people hold now about the stars; actually the stars are full of souls—only the souls are different.

Of course you may say: But one can't see into the world of stars, so one can't know or observe the conditions there. That is an enormous error! Why can a man standing here see the piano over there? Because his eyes are so organized that he is able to see it. His eyes are not over there in the piano. In exactly the same way—as spiritual science, or anthroposophy, shows—if a human being not only develops from childhood to the level to which our modern education takes him, but develops further than that, he will in very truth be able to perceive what is spiritual in the stars, just as humanity originally perceived it. And then he will know that the stars have an influence upon the human being, each star a different influence. If, for example, it can be shown that Mars has an influence upon the development of grubs into cockchafer—it can also be shown that all the stars have an influence upon man's spiritual life. They have it indeed! But this knowledge of the stars has entirely disappeared—and what has come in its place?

In earlier times, when men looked at the moon, they knew that from the moon come the forces for all propagation on the earth. No being would have offspring if the moon did not send to earth the forces of propagation. No being or creature would grow if the forces of growth did not come from the sun. No human being would be able to think if the forces of thinking did not come from Saturn. But all that people know today is the speed at which Saturn moves, the speed at which the moon moves, and whether there are a few extinct volcanoes on the moon. They know nothing more and don't want to know anything more. They simply find out by calculation what they want to know about the stars.

But now let us turn from the world of stars to the world of men. Industry has come on the scene. In the age when all people could do about the stars was to make calculations, they began to do the same in the domain of industry. They did nothing but reckon and calculate, with the result that they forgot man altogether. They treated the human being himself as if he were part of a machine. And so the conditions have come about that prevail today. Conditions will never be satisfactory if people merely calculate what kind of conditions ought to prevail on the earth; they will have to know something beside that. That is the point. But then it must be admitted that human knowledge has deteriorated to a terrible extent in the very age that claims to be “enlightened.”

I told you that at a recent Farmers' Conference it was the unanimous opinion that all agricultural products have been deteriorating for decades. The reason for this deterioration is that, with the exception of certain peasants who have instinctively hung on to bits of the earlier knowledge, nothing is really known about the way to take care of a farm. But how is such knowledge acquired? Certainly it can never be acquired by calculation, knowing that the moon will be a full moon again in twenty-eight days, but only by knowing, for instance, how the moon forces work in the fruition of grain, and so forth. This knowledge has been entirely forgotten. People don't even know what goes on in the soil in their fields. And they know still less what is going on in the world of men.

Social science has produced nothing more than series after series of calculations. Capital, working hours, wages, are nothing but figures that have been calculated. And calculating does not come to grips with human life, or indeed with any life at all. The curse of the modern age is that everything merely is to be calculated. Instead of things being merely calculated, they should be studied and observed as they actually are, and this is only possible through first gaining knowledge of the stars. Today, the moment people hear the phrase, “knowledge of the stars,” they say immediately: That's idiotic! We've known for a long time that the stars have no influence whatever. But to assert that the stars have no influence upon what is happening on the earth, that, gentlemen, is the real idiocy! And the consequence is that there is no real knowledge left. That is a concrete fact. Take capital, for instance: It can be expressed in figures, it can be counted—and what is the result? If capital is merely a matter of calculation, it is of no importance who owns the capital, whether a single individual or everyone in common. For the same results will invariably ensue. Not until we again take hold of life so that our concern centers upon the human being as the prime reality, not until then will there be a social science capable of doing anything effective, a social science capable of really achieving something.

That is why I also like to say this: Let us see what will come about through anthroposophy. It is, of course, still only in its beginning, and naturally it appears to be similar in many respects to the other science. But it will develop gradually into a complete knowledge of the human being. In the domain of education, for instance, it has already brought into being the Waldorf School. Not until this stage of knowledge has been reached will anthroposophical science be able to be applied effectively to social problems. Today you can only realize that the world's current knowledge is incapable of really effective intervention in life; it comes to a standstill everywhere.

That is what I wanted to add. Are you satisfied so far? (Yes, yes!) Of course, a great deal could still be said, but there will be other opportunities for considering many aspects of the subject.

So now, has someone else, perhaps, thought of a question?

Question: Can anything be known about man's origin? Where he comes from?

Dr. Steiner: That is a question about which many of you who have been here for some time have heard a great deal from me. Those of you who have come recently are naturally interested in such questions, so those who have already heard my answers will perhaps be willing to hear them again.

When we look at the human being as he moves about on the earth, we see his body first and foremost. We also notice that he thinks and feels. If we look at a chair, no matter how long we wait, it doesn't begin to move about—because it cannot exercise will. We perceive that the human being wills. But speaking generally it can be said that we really see only the body.

And it is very easy to form the opinion that this body constitutes the whole of man. Moreover, if this is believed, many arguments in proof of it can be found. (You see, in anthroposophy other people's opinions cannot be treated lightly. All points of view must be seriously considered.) And so it can be pointed out, for instance, that people can lose their memory if they take poison and are not immediately killed by it. The implication is that the body is a machine and everything depends upon the running of the machine. If the blood vessels burst in a man's brain and the blood presses on the nerves, such a man may lose not only his memory but his whole intelligence. So it can be said that everything is dependent upon the body. But that kind of thinking does not hold water if one really examines it thoroughly. It simply does not hold water. If it did, we could say that man thinks with his brain. But what is actually going on in the brain when a man thinks?

Well, a real investigation of the human body shows that it is absolutely incorrect to say that when a man is thinking, something constructive is going on in his brain. On the contrary, something is always being destroyed, demolished, when he is thinking. Substances in the brain are being broken down, destroyed. Death on a small scale is perpetually taking place there.

The final death that happens once and for all means that the whole body is destroyed; but what happens all at once in the entire body when a man dies is also taking place throughout the body during life, in a piecemeal process. Man excretes not only through his organs of excretion, the urine, feces, sweat, but in other ways as well. Just think what your head would look like if you never had your hair cut! Something is excreted there, too. And think of the claws you'd have if you never cut your nails! But not only that: man is all the time sloughing off his skin—he just doesn't notice it. Man is casting off substance all the time. In the case of the urine and feces the process is not very significant, because for the most part these simply contain what has been eaten, material that has not gone into the whole body, whereas what is excreted in the nails has gone through the whole body.

Suppose you take your scissors and cut a fingernail. What you now cut away, you took in, you ate seven or eight years ago. What you ate went into the blood and nerves and passed through the whole body. It needed seven or eight years to do that. Now you cut it away. Just think of the body you have today, the body in which you are sitting there. If you had sat there seven or eight years ago, it would have been in quite another body! The body you had then has been cast away, has been sweated away, has been cut away with the nails, cut away with the hair. The entire body as it once was, has gone—with the exception of the bones and the like—and within a period of seven or eight years has been entirely renewed.

So now we must ask ourselves: Does thinking originate from the constant upbuilding of the body or from the constant tearing-down of the body? That is an important question. If you have something in your body that brings about too much upbuilding—shall I say, if you drink one tiny glass too much, or not just one—most people can manage that—but if you drink enough more so that you know you're “loaded”—what happens then, gentlemen? The blood becomes very active and a terribly rapid process of upbuilding takes place. When that happens, when the blood becomes too tumultuous, a man loses consciousness. Thinking is not the result of an upbuilding process in the brain, but of a process of small, piecemeal destruction. If no tearing-down process took place in the human body, the human being would simply not be able to think.

So the fact is that thinking does not come from our building up the body but from our continual killing of it bit by bit. That is why we have to sleep, because we don't do any thinking then. What is continually being demolished through our thinking is quickly restored in sleep. So waking and sleeping show us that while we are thinking, death is always taking place in the body on a small scale.

But now picture for a moment not a man's body, but his clothing. If you take off all your clothes you are not, it is true, fit for the drawing room, but you are still there, and you can put on different clothes. That is what man does through the whole of his earthly life. Every seven or eight years he puts on a new body and discards the other. With animals there is a clear illustration of this: if you were to collect all the skins that a snake sloughs off every year, you would find that after a certain number of years it has discarded not only the skin but the whole of its body. In our case, of course, this is not so noticeable! And what about the birds? They moult. What are they doing when they moult? They're discarding part of their body; and after a period of a few years they've discarded it all, with the exception of the bones. What is it that remained?

You yourself are sitting there today although you have nothing at all of the body you had some eight years ago. And yet there you are, sitting here. You created a new body for yourself. The soul, gentlemen, sits there. The spirit and soul sit there. The spirit and soul work on the body, building it up all the time. If you go for a walk and find a large pile of stones somewhere, you know that a house is going to be built; you will certainly not assume that the stones will suddenly have feet and will place themselves very neatly one above the other and build themselves into a house! Well, just as little do substances assemble to form themselves into our body.

We receive our first body from our father and mother; but this body is thrown off entirely, and after seven or eight years we have a new one. We do not get this one from our parents; we ourselves have to build it up. Where does it come from? The body we had during the first years of life came from our parents; we could not have had a body without them. But what builds up the second body comes from the spiritual world. I do not mean the substance, but the active principle, the essential being, that is what comes out of the spiritual world. So we can say: When the human being is born, the body he has for the first seven or eight years of his life comes from his father and mother, but the soul and spiritual entity come from the spiritual world. And every seven or eight years the human being exchanges his body but retains all of himself that is spiritual. After a certain time the body is worn out and what earlier came into it as spirit and soul goes back again into the spiritual world. Man comes from the spiritual world and returns to the spiritual world.

You can see, this is also something that has been entirely forgotten—simply because today people have become thoughtless and do not penetrate to the reality of things. Once they have seen how the body is renewed over and over again, they will realize that the force which brings about the renewal is a soul force working within the body.

And now, gentlemen, what do you eat? Let us consider the different foodstuffs a human being eats. The simplest substance of all is protein. Not only in eggs but in the greatest variety of foodstuffs, in plants too, there is protein. Then man eats fat; he eats what are called carbohydrates—in potatoes, for instance—and he eats minerals. All other substances are composite substances; man eats them; he takes them into himself. They come from the earth; they are entirely dependent upon the earth. Everything we take in through the mouth is entirely dependent upon the earth. But now we don't take things in only through the mouth; we also breathe, and through our breathing we take in substances from the air. Usually this process is described very simply by saying: Man breathes in oxygen and breathes out carbon dioxide—as if he did nothing but breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out! But that is not the whole story. Very fine, rarefied substances are contained in the air we breathe. And we live not only on what we eat but also on these nourishing substances from the air. If we did nothing but eat, we would be obliged to replace our body very often, for what we eat is very rapidly transformed in the body. Only think how troublesome it is for someone when he does not get rid of what ought to be excreted within about twenty-four hours. The food that is eaten and then excreted passes through a rapid process. If we lived only on what we eat, we certainly wouldn't need seven or eight years to replace our body. It is because we take in very delicate, rarefied nourishment through the air, which is a slow process, that the replacement takes seven or eight years.

It is very important to know that man receives nourishment from the air. The food he eats is used, for example, for the constant renewing of his head. But the nourishment he needs in order, shall we say, to have fingernails does not come from what he eats but from the substances he draws from the air. And so we are nourished through eating and through breathing.

But now the really important fact is that when we take in nourishment from the cosmos through our breathing, we take in not only substance, but we take in at the same time the element of soul. The substance is in such a fine, rarefied state that the soul is able to live in it everywhere. So we may say: Man takes in bodily substance through his food; through his breathing he takes in, he lives with a soul element. But it is not the case that with every inhalation we take a piece of soul into ourselves and then with every exhalation breathe out a piece of soul again. In that event we would always be discarding the soul. No—it is like this: with our very first breath we take the soul into ourselves, and it is then the soul that brings about the breathing in us. And with our very last breath we set the soul free so that it can go back to the spiritual world.

And now that we know these things, we can make some calculations. Most of you will already know what follows, but it may still surprise you. If you investigate, you will find that a human being draws 18 breaths a minute. Now reckon how many breaths he draws in a day: 18 breaths a minute, 18 x 60 = 1080 breaths an hour; in 24 hours, 24 x 1080 = 25,920 breaths a day.

And now let us calculate—we can do so approximately—how many days a human being lives on the earth. For the sake of simplicity let us take 72 years as the average length of human life, and 360 days in a year. 72 years X 360 days = 25,920 days in a man's life. And that is the number of breaths a man draws in a day! So we can say, the human being lives as many days in his life as he draws breaths in one day.

Now we know there are one-day flies—and there could also conceivably be 1/18-of-a-minute beings! (For the length of time is not the essential point.) So if the human being were to die every time he breathes we could say: He breathes the soul in and out again with every breath. Yet he remains—remains alive for 25,920 days.

So now let us reckon those 72 years as a single breath. As I said before, with his first breath the human being breathes his soul in and with his last breath he breathes it out again. Assuming now that he lives an average of 72 years, we can say: This inbreathing and outbreathing of the soul lasts for a period of 72 years. Taking this period to be one cosmic day, we would again have to multiply 72 X 360 to get a cosmic year: 25,920! If we take the life of a human being as one cosmic day, we get the cosmic year: 25,920 cosmic days!

But this number has still another meaning. On the 21st of March, the day of the beginning of Spring, the sun rises at the present time in the constellation of Pisces. But it rises only once at that exact point. The point at which it rises shifts all the time. About five hundred years ago it did not rise in Pisces (the Fishes) but in Aries (the Ram), and earlier still in Taurus (the Bull). So the sun makes a circle round the whole zodiac, finally getting back to Pisces. At a definite time it will rise again at exactly the same point, having made a complete circuit. How long does the sun need for this? It needs 25,920 years to go around and return to the same point at which it will rise at the beginning of Spring.

When we have breathed 25,920 times, we have completed one day. Our soul remains while the breaths change. When we have completed 25,920 days, we have awakened as often as we have slept. In sleep, as we know, we do not think, we do not move, we are inactive. During sleep our spirit and soul have gone off to the spiritual world for a few hours; at waking we get them back again. Just as we let the breath go out and come back 18 times a minute, so in a day we let the soul leave once and return. Sleeping and waking, you see, are simply more lengthy breaths. We do short breathing 18 times a minute. The longer breathing is our sleeping and waking. And the longest breathing is our breathing in the soul and spirit when we are born and breathing it out again when we die. But there is still the very longest breathing of all; for we go with the sun as it completes its circuit of 25,920 years; we go into the world of the stars. When we think of the soul, gentlemen, at that very moment we leave the earth and go to the world of the stars.

So—this is just a beginning of the foundation for an answer to the question which the gentleman asked. Just think what order and regularity prevail in the universe if again and again we get the number 25,920! Man's breathing is a living expression of the course of the sun. That is a fact of tremendous significance.

So—I have begun to answer the question. I will continue next Saturday at 9 o'clock.⁴¹

• 41. This scheduled lecture did not take place. The lecture of September 24, 1924, concluding this volume was the last Rudolf Steiner was able to give to the workmen. His illness began within a few days.

During the year 1924, before his illness in September, Rudolf Steiner gave over eighty lectures, published with the title Karmic Relationships: Esoteric Studies, to Members of the Anthroposophical Society in the following places: Dornach, Berne, Zurich, Stuttgart, Prague, Paris, Breslau, Arnhem, Torquay and London. English translations of these lectures are contained in the following volumes of the series:

Vols. I to IV. Lectures given in Dornach (49).
Vol. V. Lectures given in Prague (4) and Paris (3).
Vol. VI. Lectures given in Berne (2) Zurich (1), Stuttgart (3) Arnhem (3).

The present volume (VII) contains the nine lectures given in Breslau.

The six lectures that were given in Torquay and London will eventually be republished. They have previously been published as: Cosmic Christianity and the Impulse of Michael. Karma in the life of individuals and in the evolution of the world (1953).

Readers familiar with the contents of earlier volumes will find certain repetitions in the present collection. Such repetitions were inevitable because Dr. Steiner was speaking to different audiences on each occasion. All these lectures were given to members of the Anthroposophical Society only and were intended to be material for study by those already familiar with the fundamental principles and terminology of Anthroposophy. The following extract from the lecture of 22nd June, 1924 (see Vol. II) calls attention to the need for exactitude when passing on such contents:

“The study of problems connected with karma is by no means easy and the discussion of anything that has to do with the subject entails—or ought at any rate to entail—a sense of deep responsibility. Such study is in truth a matter of penetrating into the most profound mysteries of existence, for within the sphere of karma and the course it takes lie those processes which are the basis of the other phenomena of world-existence, even of the phenomena of nature. ... These difficult and weighty matters entail grave consideration of every word and every sentence spoken here, in order that the limits within which the statements are made shall be absolutely clear. ...”

I thank you from my heart for the kind words of the General Secretary of the Swedish section, Colonel Kinell, and in reply I wish to say that it is deeply satisfying, on my journey from Helsingfors, to be able for a few days to discuss again with you in Stockholm those things and truths which touch us all so closely. I offer you a hearty greeting, as warmly felt as the kind words of the General Secretary.

On these two more intimate evenings we shall have to speak of a question, an affair of mankind, which in a double connection penetrates extraordinarily deeply into our souls. First, because the Christ question is such that, for two thousand years now, not only has it occupied countless souls on earth, but from it have flowed for countless earth-souls spiritual life-blood, strength of soul, consolation and hope in suffering, strength and sureness in action. And not only that, but when we consider all that surrounds us as external exoteric culture, created through many centuries, then through deeper knowledge we see that all this would have been impossible had not the Christ impulse taken hold of a large part of humanity. This is one consideration which shows us what strong interest the Christ question must offer if we approach it with anthroposophical knowledge. This is only one side of the interest which we bring to this problem; the other side of our interest comes out of the particular soul and spiritual conditions of our present time, our epoch. We need only look about us in the world and try to understand the yearnings, the seeking of the human soul, and we shall be able to say to ourselves: “Ever more do human souls seek after something which, through the centuries, has been connected in men's souls with the name of Christ, and ever more do they come to the conviction that a renewing of the ways, a renewing of interest, a deepening of knowledge, is necessary if the needs of human souls (which will steadily increase with regard to Christ) are to be satisfied.” If we find on the one side a thirsting for enlightenment about Christ, we find on the other side, among numerous souls of the present day, doubt and insecurity as to the means used up to this time. And therefore, because of the yearning for an answer and because of the doubt that the truth can be learned, this is one of the most burning questions of the present time.

It is thus obvious that a spiritual movement which penetrates more deeply into spiritual foundations has the task of throwing light on this question. Things are like this today, my dear friends, but in a relatively short time, truly in a very short time, they will be entirely different. If we somewhat unegotistically examine what, in relation to Christ, will be needed by those men who follow after our time, then we must say to ourselves that, although many men of the present can satisfy themselves with what there is, souls will feel themselves increasingly unsure and will thirst increasingly for enlightenment. Thus in speaking of Christ today we speak of something which we foresee as necessary for the human beings of a very near future. Anthroposophy would not fulfil its task if it did not put itself in a position to create clarity on these points by means of its knowledge, as far as this is possible today.

As my point of departure I shall indicate the three paths along which the soul, in accordance with human evolution, can attain to Christ. If we mention three paths we must briefly describe the first path, which today is no longer a path, though it once was; which today need not be an esoteric path, as just in our time the anthroposophic path is, but which was a path for millions of souls through the centuries. This is the path through the so-called Christian documents, through the Gospels. For millions and millions of people this path was, and for many it still is, the only possible one. The second path along which the human soul may seek the Christ is that which can be called the path through inner experience, which especially in the present and in the near future numerous souls, out of their particular constitution and qualities, must pursue. The third path is that which, through the anthroposophical movement, one can at least begin to understand in our time, the path through initiation. Thus there are three paths to Christ: First, the path through the Gospels; second, the path through inner experience; and third, the path through initiation.

The first path, the path through the Gospels, need be only briefly characterized here. We all know that, in the course of the centuries, the Gospels became nourishment for the hearts and souls of innumerable people. We know also that the most enlightened, the most critical natures (and these are not the irreligious), begin to have no further relation to this Christ, because it is maintained today that external knowledge cannot know what historical facts really stand behind that which the Gospels relate. Had the Gospels been read by men of past centuries as today they are read by a scholar, by a man who has gone through the current scientific education, they would never have been able to exercise the powerful influence, the life-influence, which has flowed out of them. Now, if the Gospels were not read in past centuries as the educated man of today reads them, how were they read?

To ponder a priori on what may have taken place in Palestine at the beginning of our era, this would never have occurred to the Gospel-readers of earlier centuries, and still does not occur to many Gospel-readers of today. Those who begin to test, in the Gospels, what may have taken place before the eyes of the inhabitants of Palestine at the beginning of our era lose confidence in the historical character of the events of Palestine. The men of earlier times did not read in this way. They read in such a way that they allowed a picture to work on their souls; for instance, the picture of the Samaritan woman at the well, or of Christ imparting the Sermon on the Mount to his disciples. The question of external physical reality never occurred to them. How their hearts warmed, how their feelings swelled in the presence of these great and powerful pictures—this was to them the main thing. What formed itself in their hearts, what force, what life-meaning they gained through these pictures—this was the main thing. They felt that spiritual lifeblood and strength flowed to them from these pictures. When they let these pictures work on their souls, they felt strong; they felt that, without these pictures, they would be weak. And then they felt living, personal connections with what is recounted in the Gospels, and the question of historical reality occurred to them no further. The Gospels were themselves reality, they were present as force, and one did not need to ask whence they came; one knew that men had written them not with earthly means, but with impulses from the spiritual worlds. I do not assert that one must feel in this way today (what one must do depends on the development of mankind), but I assert that men felt in this way through centuries.

How could it be so? On this point spiritual science is now first able to instruct us. When we begin to understand the Gospels in the light of spiritual science, and try to penetrate into what flows down from spiritual worlds and is contained in the Gospels, then we stand before the Gospels in such a way that we say: “We know from spiritual science, quite apart from the Gospels, all that has taken place in human evolution in connection with the Christ-impulse, and then we find what is contained in the Gospels, quite independently of them.”

How, then, do we conceive the Gospels from the spiritual-scientific point of view? If I may use a simple comparison, let us assume that a man has attained enlightenment on some subject. With this enlightenment, he meets a second man and begins to talk with him. At first he will not suppose that the other knows anything of the subject which is so clear to him, but from the conversation he perceives that the other knows it quite as well as he. What must reasonably be assumed? The reasonable thing to assume is that the other has enlightened himself through the same or similar sources. So is it also with the Gospels. We can do this, no matter from what standpoint we approach the Gospels. A society could be formed of people who read the Gospels in the above described way; then there could also be people in this society who were determined opponents of the Gospels, and who would say that, when the Gospels were tested by the methods of science, it would be found that they were written much later than the events in Palestine could have occurred, and that their accounts contradict each other—in short, that these Gospels cannot be regarded as historical documents. Such people might be in such a society, and one could say: “Well, let us at first leave the Gospels in peace, but let us do some research in the spiritual worlds.”

Then, if we did some genuine spiritual research, if we gained genuine super-sensible knowledge, we would find that in the course of human evolution there had once entered a strong impulse, which broke into human evolution as an impulse from the spiritual worlds, from which mighty things have proceeded for humanity; and we would see that at the beginning of our era, this impulse had taken hold of a man who was especially suited thereto. All this, and many other facts which fit into this knowledge and which can be won only through super-sensible research, all this we would have; and those who wished to know nothing of the Gospels would have this as well as others. Then one could approach the Gospels and say: “Well now, at first we did not trouble ourselves at all about these Gospels; yet it is remarkable that, when we read them carefully, we see that they contain what we found in spiritual fields independently of them. Now we recognize their value from an entirely different side.”

Then we are clear that it could not be otherwise, that those who wrote the Gospels must have received their knowledge from the same source which is now opening itself to humanity through the spiritual movement. This is just what now confronts us, what will come more and more, what will make a valid basis for the valuation of the Gospel documents. If this is so, we must say that men will be able to find along other ways what can be known through these documents. And so this knowledge begins to be more and more sacred to us through the spiritual cognition of the present day. It already worked through the force of the Gospels. Because the Gospels are suffused with the holiest knowledge, with the spiritual impulses of humanity, they had an influence even where they were taken in naively. Spiritual knowledge works not only abstractly, not only in theory, but works as a life-force, as life-blood of the soul. And ever more and more will men recognize how consolation and strength flow from this knowledge.

But when we speak of the inner way to Christ, we encounter more and more things which can be understood and felt at the present time only when approached with the right spiritual-scientific understanding. We shall try to speak of the inner Christ-experience in such a way that it may be seen how, independently of all tradition, this may appear in every man. To this end we must, of course, regard the human being with the knowledge which we have found through spiritual science. If we steep ourselves in spiritual science, then we find even the most elementary knowledge becoming fruitful when we apply it to life. We find that we get away from the abstract charts of the seven members of man when we contemplate the growing and becoming of man. The physical body has its especial development in the first seven years of life. We perceive further that in the second seven years of life, from the change of teeth until sexual maturity, the forces of the etheric body play in man. Then the forces of the astral body begin to play, and only later, about the 20th or 21st year, (depending on his whole organization and on the nature of the forces in him) begins what appears in man as the Ego, as the bearer of the Ego, with that force which it really has because of its organization for the whole life of man as the bearer of the Ego.

That the bearer of the Ego first becomes really capable of living in the 20th or 21st year is not often observed in our present time, because we are not yet inclined to pay attention to these things. What does it mean that the bearer of the Ego first becomes really active in the 20th or 21st year of life? Here we must observe, by occult means, the growing man and view the deeper forces of his organization. These forces continually change: from birth until the seventh year, from the seventh year until sexual maturity, from sexual maturity until the unfolding of the Ego. But they change in such a way that they cannot be tested by the methods of ordinary anatomy or physiology. By occult means, one can say that only around the 20th year does man develop his forces in such a way that a self-sufficing Ego-bearer now exists. Earlier this Ego-bearer is not yet formed; earlier the human corporeality, even the super-sensible, is not yet a proper Ego-bearer. So if we consider the members of man in the light of the great world-principle, we must say that, through the peculiarities of his organization, man is really ripe to develop an Ego out of himself only in his 20th or 21st year, not earlier.

With this fact another may be contrasted, namely that in the first years of life, in normal consciousness, we really dream ourselves, sleep ourselves into life, and that only after a certain point of time does life take such a course that our own memory begins. Of what happened before this time we may be told by our parents or elder brothers; after this point the man says “I am who I am.” From the time when he says “I have done this; I have thought that,” the man dates his own Ego; what came before that loses itself in the twilight of the soul. Our memory reaches only to the point of time so described.

What do we have when we put these two facts together; that the real bearer of the human Ego is born in the 20th or 21st year, and that in our souls we describe ourselves as an Ego from the third or fourth year on? This means that in the present cycle of man's development he has an opinion, a feeling, about himself which does not correspond to his inner organization, as this has developed; for the consciousness of the Ego appears in the third or fourth year, but the organization for the Ego first appears in the 20th or 21st year. This fact is of fundamental importance for the understanding of man. When this fact is stated abstractly as an item of spiritual-scientific knowledge, no one gets particularly excited about it; but, because this fact is true, there are numerous experiences available which we all know well, but which we do not observe in the light of this fact. All that man can experience of cleavage between external organization and inner experience, of sorrow and pain in life because (by reason of his organization) certain things are impossible for him, of disharmony between what he wishes and what he can perform; the fact that he may have ideals which lead far beyond his organization: all this leads back to the fact that the consciousness of our Ego goes an entirely different way from that followed by the bearer of our Ego. In this respect we are two men; An external man who is organized to develop his egohood in the 20th or 21st year, and an inner soul-man who already in his fourth or fifth year, as to his soul-life, emancipates himself from his outer organization. Emancipation of the Ego-consciousness from the outer organization takes place in childhood. We go through something in our soul which proceeds independently of our outer organization and which can even come into sharp contradiction with our outer organization. We are inclined, in regard to the inner consciousness of the Ego, to pay no attention to our organization, to what is below in our bodies. In our souls we develop in an entirely different way from that in which our bodies develop.

Thus the course of inner development of mankind is twofold. The development of our organization goes from the first to the seventh year, then from the seventh to the fourteenth, from the fourteenth to the twenty-first, in the above described way; but our inner development is such that we are entirely independent of the above, such that the consciousness of our Ego emancipates itself in tenderest childhood and makes its own way through life. But what is the consequence of this curious fact of human development? Only the occultist can tell us this.

If we survey all that the occultist can teach, we come to a curious fact. We come to see that sickness, frailty of the human organization, all that makes possible illness, age, and death, comes from our being really a duality. We die because we are organized in a certain way and in our organization pay no attention to our Ego-development. That with our Ego we go an independent path, not troubling ourselves about our organization, this is brought home to us when this organization, in sickness and death, places a hindrance before our Ego-development; we are reminded that our Ego-development proceeds quite separately from our organization. Whence comes really this curious fact of duality in human nature?

When we examine man in connection with reality, we see that, if at a certain time in the Earth evolution, namely in the Lemurian time, only progressive forces had intervened in human development, the youthful development of man would today proceed quite otherwise—namely so that it would keep even step with the Ego-development. At all times the soul-development would coincide exactly with the body-development. It would have been impossible for man to develop himself otherwise than in the way now set up as an ideal, for example, in my pamphlet The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. (Anthroposophic Press, New York City) Had only progressive forces been active at that time, the singular result would have been that, in the first twenty years of life, man would have been much less self-reliant than he is now. This lack of self-reliance is not meant in a bad sense, but in such a way that each of you would approve of it completely. For example, human nature in the first seven years of life is completely disposed to imitation. Since grown people, if only progressive forces had been active in the Lemurian time, would do nothing shameful, children between one and seven would be able to imitate nothing bad. In the second seven years of life the principle of authority would reign, whereas now it has come to be a curse of the land, a curse of the world, that persons between seven and fourteen want to be independent and are even educated to form independent opinions. The grown persons would have been the natural authorities for the children. From fourteen to twenty-one, man would have looked much less into himself, upon his own self; he would have turned more toward the outside. The force of ideals, the power of living himself into his life-dreams would have become immensely significant for him. Life-dreams would have sprung from his heart, and then full Ego-consciousness would have appeared in his 20th and 21st years.

Thus there would be in the first seven years a period of imitation, then in the second seven years a looking up to authority, then in the third seven years a springing forth of ideals, which would bring man to his full Ego-consciousness. The sum of those forces also working in evolution which are called the Luciferic forces have brought about a deviation from this path of development in the course of human evolution. Since the Lemurian time they have torn the Ego-consciousness away from the foundation of the organization. The fact that we already have the Ego-consciousness in tenderest childhood is to be traced to the Luciferic forces.

How did the Luciferic forces intervene? The Luciferic powers are beings who remained behind on the Moon, and who therefore have no understanding of the mission of the Earth, for that which should develop for the first time on the Earth for the Ego after the 21st year. They took man as he was on coming over from the Moon, and laid in him the germ of self-reliant soul-development. So that in the hastening of Ego-consciousness, in this peculiar cleavage in human nature, lie the Luciferic forces. Knowledge of such a fact is given for the first time by anthroposophy. It can be sensed by every man of sound feeling, for every man can sense that there is something in him which separates him from his full humanity. All that we call unjustified egoism in our nature, all withdrawing from the activities of men, all this stems from the Ego's not going along on the right path of the organization. Thus do we see man before us, if he can feel. If he says to himself: “I could be other than I am; I have something in me which is not in harmony with myself”—then he feels the strife within him of the progressive powers with the Luciferic powers. This fact had to occur in the course of human evolution; it was necessary because man would never have become really free without the Luciferic beings; he would have been always bound to his organization. What on the one hand brings man into conflict with his organization, gives him on the other hand the first possibility of being free. One thing, however, remains out of this duality of the organization for the ordinary human life; this shows itself in our feeling that the Ego has become incapable, out of its own powers, of transforming the organization.

When we survey the broad circumference of what has constituted and created man, we find the two forces described above; there are the organic forces of our human nature, which are intended to develop in seven-year periods, and there are the Luciferic forces. If there were nothing else in nature or in the spiritual life in the course of human development, it would follow that man could never, through his emancipated Ego, come into full harmony with his nature. Were there nothing else in the field of earth-existence, man could only become ever more estranged from his organization; his organization would become ever more infirm, more dried up; the cleavage would necessarily become always greater. If man only once reaches the point of intensely feeling this as spiritual-scientific knowledge, then he comes to a great moment in his life, when he can say: “Here I stand with my human organization which is given me by the progressive forces that work from seven years to seven years (he need not express this in precise words, he need only feel it dimly). But, because this organization has an opposing force, which develops itself independently, it becomes sick and infirm and finally dies.” In the depths of his soul man feels this. Without knowing anything of anthroposophy, he need only have this feeling of a discrepancy between the inner Ego and the outer organization, and, if he steeps himself in this feeling, then—he knows not whence—there comes into his soul something of which he feels: “I myself, with the Ego which I can trace back, can do nothing against my organization, for which I am no match. But there comes something which I can take into my Ego as force, which I can take into my consciousness as conviction; directly from spiritual worlds comes something which does not reside in me, but which permeates my soul. From unknown worlds something can flow into my soul; if I take it up in my heart, if I suffuse my Ego with it, then it helps me directly from spiritual worlds.”—This which comes from spiritual worlds may be called whatever we like; that is not important; only the feeling is important.

Let us assume that a man is today at odds with life and says to himself: “I must seek through the whole world to see if somewhere a force will spring up which will give me something through which I can come out of the conflict, something which will help me out.”—In the nature of things this man could never find his way with the means of the old religious confessions; in the ancient ecclesiastical ideas he could never find anything which would give him this force that he seeks. But, in order to have a concrete example, let us assume that such a man went to one of the ancient holy religions, that he went, for example, to Buddhism and steeped himself in the extraordinary teachings of Buddhism. If the man felt, however, naturally and in its full strength the cleavage described above, he would feel—I do not say this would come out of a theory, but out of a dim feeling—he would feel that in the personality, in the individuality of Gautama Buddha, something had lived which could appear in the world only on the basis of a long development. This individuality went through many incarnations, achieved higher and higher grades of evolution, and finally came so far that in the 29th year of his life as Gautama Buddha, he was able to rise from Bodhisatva to Buddha, was able to rise in such a way that he need never more return to a physical body. How did that which flows out from this individuality come into being? Every unprejudiced mind can feel what speaks out of the Buddha, can feel all that first came about and developed through the Bodhisatva in earth evolution after developing through many incarnations. In the most beautiful and comprehensive sense all this contains the forces which are found in the periphery of the earth, in the interplay of the forces of the organization and the Luciferic forces. Therefore, because it has gone from incarnation to incarnation, because it stems from the same forces from which the human forces stem, therefore that which flows from the Bodhisatva to the Buddha has such an effect that the unprejudiced mind does not feel anything that can call forth a full harmony between the Ego of man and his organization. The soul feels that there must be something which does not go from incarnation to incarnation, but which can stream into every human soul directly from the spiritual worlds.—When the soul feels that it must have a relation to what streams down from the heavens, then it is beginning to have an inner experience of the Christ. Then the soul can understand that in Christ Jesus something had to appear which was different from everything previously existing. This is the radical, fundamental difference, the difference in principle between the life of the Christ and that of the Buddha.

Buddha rose from a Bodhisatva to a Buddha with the forces which cause man to mount from incarnation to incarnation, as is the case with other great founders of religions. Into the life of Jesus of Nazareth something entered, something worked into the individuality of Jesus of Nazareth, over a period of three years, which streamed down directly out of the spiritual worlds, which had nothing to do with human evolution, which previously was not connected with a human life. We must keep this difference clearly in mind if we wish to understand why, in what the fourth post-Atlantean epoch called the Christ, there was something which was different from all other religious impulses, and why the other religions have always pointed mankind toward this Christ.

If we, in the post-Atlantean time, look back into the ancient sacred Indian culture, we see the seven holy Rishis, in whose souls there lived something of an immediate perception of the spiritual worlds. Had one of the seven holy Rishis been asked about the fundamental mood of his soul, he would have said: “We look up to the spiritual powers from whom all human development has proceeded. This reveals itself to us in seven rays, but above this is something else, something which lies above our sphere.” Vishvakarman, this was the name later given to what the seven holy Rishis thus felt. The seven holy Rishis spoke of a power which had not developed with the earth.

Then came the Zarathustra culture. Zarathustra spoke, when he directed his gaze to the spirits of the sun, of something which should flow into human evolution directly through a streaming out of the spiritual worlds. “What we can give to men,” so spake Zarathustra, “is not that which will one day, from the sun-distances, stream directly out of the spiritual worlds into mankind.” What is spiritual in the sun, this is what the later Persian culture called Ahura-Mazdao.

In the Egyptian mysteries the Christ question was felt with a particularly tragic force. It was felt in the deepest way, if by deep we mean a form of human feeling in which there was an especially strong consciousness that humanity stems from what is spiritual. The Egyptian initiate said to himself: “Wherever we turn our gaze, we feel in what surrounds us the decline from the original spiritual. Nowhere in the outer world is the spiritual to be found in its immediacy and purity. Only when man steps through the gate of death does he descry that from which he springs. Man must first die (in relation to inner experience, not in relation to initiation); then he becomes united with the Osiris-principle (so did the ancient Egyptian name the Christ principle); in life this cannot be done, that is the discrepancy. All that is in the periphery of the earth, this does not lead to Osiris; the soul must first have passed the portal of death to be united with Osiris. Then, in death, the soul becomes a piece of Osiris, it becomes itself a sort of Osiris. The world outside has become such that it dismembers Osiris through his enemy; that is, through all that belongs to the external world.”

And the initiate of the Egyptian mysteries said: “Mankind, as it now is in our culture, is a sort of reminiscence of the old Moon-time. As the culture of the seven holy Rishis is a sort of reminiscence of the old Saturn-time, as the Zarathustra culture is a reminiscence of the old Sun-time, so is the Osiris-culture a reminiscence of the old Moon-time when the Moon and its beings first separated from the sun, on which, however, remained the beings from whom man took his origin. At that time there took place the separation of man from the good forces of his organization, from the source of his life-forces. But, through the yearning and privation for the spiritual which will endure, the time will come for men when Osiris will descend and show himself as something which must come as a new impetus which was not before on earth, because already in the old Moon-time it had separated itself from the earth.”

All that to which the seven holy Rishis and Zarathustra pointed, and of which the Egyptians said that in their time men could not attain it during life, this was the force, the impulse, which for three years revealed itself in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. All great religions spoke of it; it revealed itself in Jesus of Nazareth, to whom all religions pointed. Thus not only Christians have spoken of Christ, but also the members of all ancient religions. Thus something entered into the course of human development which man needs and which is accessible to inner experience.

Let us assume that a man grows up on a lonely island. Those who have charge of his education tell him nothing of that happens in the world in regard to the name of Christ and to the Gospels; they give him only such culture as does not make use of the Gospels or the name of Christ, culture which may have come to birth under the influence of Christ, but divested of the name of Christ. What would happen in this case? In such a man the following mood would be bound to appear. He would say to himself one day: “Something lives in me which is in accord with my universal human organization; this I cannot at once grasp. For that in which my Ego-consciousness lives presents itself to me in such a way that I need something which cannot come to me through human culture, I need an impulse from the spiritual worlds, in order to make the Ego stronger again in its organization, from which it has emancipated itself.” If such a person can only feel strongly what man needs, then something can come over him from which he will recognize that, directly from spiritual worlds, something must stream out which penetrates directly into his Ego. He does not know that this is called Christ; but he does know that in his consciousness he can suffuse himself with it, that in his Ego he can foster this which comes to him from the spiritual worlds. Then something will come to him of which he may say: “Granted, I can be ill, I can be weak, I can die; but from my own Ego I can make myself stronger, I can send into my organization something which gives me strength and force directly out of the spiritual worlds.” It is indifferent what he calls this; if the man comes to this feeling, he is gripped by the Christ-impulse. That man is not gripped by the Christ-impulse who says he can have something from a teacher who has passed from incarnation to incarnation, but he who feels that directly from the spiritual world there can come impulses of force, of strength. Men can have this inner experience; without it men cannot live, without it men will not be able to live in the future. They can have this experience, because once, for three years, there lived objectively in Jesus of Nazareth this impulse which came directly out of the spiritual worlds. As it is true that a man can lay a seed in the earth, and that many other seeds can come from this one, so it is true that the Christ-impulse was once implanted into humanity, and that since that time there is something in humanity which was not there earlier.

This is why the Egyptian life was so tragic. Men felt that in their lives they could not come to Osiris; that they must first pass through the gate of death, to be united with him in inner experience. Of initiation we have still to speak. But since the time of the Mystery of Golgotha that is possible which earlier was not possible: that of his own motion, out of his single incarnation, man seeks his connection with the spiritual world. And this is because the impulse which was given through the Mystery of Golgotha can flash up in every soul, and can enter, since that time, into every man through inner experience. Not the Christ Who was on earth—the soul does not trouble itself about Him—but the Christ Who is attainable through inner experience. Since the Mystery of Golgotha it is possible, in the single incarnations, to win a connection with the spiritual. And because this is so, there happened in the one fact of Golgotha something which can shine out into humanity, which is not given through the achievements of the successive incarnations. Therefore it is impossible that Christ should show himself in a way which is a consequence of many incarnations, as happened to Buddha from his incarnations as Bodhisatva.

Tomorrow we shall see how the path to the Christ in human evolution can be found for the future.

The latter part of the Bhagavad Gita is permeated by feelings and shades of meaning saturated with ideas of sattwa, rajas and tamas. In these last chapters our whole mode of thinking and feeling must be attuned so as to understand what is said in the sense of those three conditions. In the last lecture I sought to give an idea of those important concepts by making use of present-day experiences. Certainly anyone who enters deeply into this poem must perceive that since the time when it arose those concepts have shifted to some extent. Nevertheless, it would not have been correct to describe them simply by verbal quotations from the poem because our mode of feeling is different from what is contained there and we are unable to make those very different feelings our own. If we tried to we would only be describing the unknown by the unknown.

So in the Bhagavad Gita you will find with regard to food that the concepts we developed last time have shifted a little. What is true for man today about plant food was true for the ancient Indian of that food Krishna calls mild, gentle food. Whereas rajas food, which we described correctly for man today as mineral food (salt, for instance), would have been designated at that time as sour or sharp. For our constitution meat is essentially a tamas food, but the Indian meant by this something that could hardly be considered food at present, which gives us an idea of how different men were then. They called tamas food what had become rotten, had stood too long, and had a foul smell. For our present incarnation we could not properly call that tamas food because man's organism has changed, even as far as his physical body.

Thus, in order to understand these feelings of sattwa, rajas and tamas, so fundamental in the Gita, it is well for us to apply them to our own conditions. Now if we would consider what sattwa really is, it is best to begin by taking the most striking conception of it. In our time the man who can give himself up to knowledge as penetrating as our present knowledge of the mineral kingdom is a sattwa man. For the Indian he was not one who had such knowledge, but was one who went through the world with intelligent understanding as we would say, with heart and head in the right place. A man who takes without prejudice and bias the phenomena the world offers. A man who always perceives the world with sympathy and conceives it with intelligence; who receives the light of ideas, of feelings and sentiments streaming out from all the beauty and loveliness of the world; who avoids all that is ugly, developing himself rightly. He who does all this in the physical world is a sattwa man. In the inorganic world a sattwa impression is that of a surface not too brilliant, illuminated in such a way that its details of color can be seen in their right lustre yet bright also.

A rajas impression is one where a man is in a certain way prevented by his own emotions, his impulses and reactions, or by the thing itself, from fully penetrating what lies around him, so that he does not give himself up to it but meets it with what he himself is. For example, he becomes acquainted with the plant kingdom. He can admire it, but he brings his own emotions to bear on it and therefore cannot penetrate it to its depths.

Tamas is where a man is altogether given up to his bodily life, so that he is blunt and apathetic toward his environment, as we are toward a consciousness different from our own. While we dwell on the physical plane we know nothing of the consciousness of a dog or a horse, not even of another human being. In this respect man, as a rule, is blunt and dull. He withdraws into his own bodily life. He lives in impressions of tamas. But man must gradually become apathetic to the physical world in order to have access to the spiritual worlds in clairvoyance. In this way we can best read the ideas of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. In external nature a rajas impression would be that of a moderately bright surface, say of green, a uniform green shade; a dark-colored surface would represent a tamas impression. Where man looks out into the darkness of universal space, when the beautiful spectacle of the free heavens appears to him, the impression he gains is none other than that blue color that is almost a tamas color.

If we saturate ourselves with the feeling these ideas give we can apply them to everything that surrounds us. These ideas are really comprehensive. For the ancient Indian, to know well about this threefold nature of his surroundings meant not only a certain understanding of the outer world, it also meant bringing to life his own inner being. He felt it somewhat as follows. Imagine a primitive country man who sees the glory of nature around him—the early morning sky, the sun and stars, everything he can see. He does not think about it however. He does not build up concepts and ideas about the world but just lives on in utmost harmony with it. If he begins to feel himself an individual person, distinguishing his soul from his environment, he has to do so by learning to understand his surroundings through ideas about them.

To set up one's environment objectively before one is always a certain way of grasping the reality of one's own being. The Indian of the time of the Bhagavad Gita said, “So long as one does not penetrate and perceive the sattwa, rajas, and tamas conditions in one's environment, one continues merely to live in it. A person is not yet there, independently in his own being, but is bound up with his surroundings. However, when the world about him becomes so objective that one can pursue it everywhere with the awareness that this is a sattwa condition, this a rajas, that a tamas, then one becomes more and more free of the world, more independent in himself.” This therefore is one way of bringing about consciousness of self. At bottom this is Krishna's concern—to free Arjuna's soul from all those things that surround him and are characteristic of the time in which he lives. So Krishna explains, “Behold all the life there on the bloody field of battle where brothers confront brothers, with all that thou feelest thyself bound to, dissolved in, a part of. Learn to know that all that is there outside you runs its course in conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Then wilt thou contrast thyself with it; know that in thine own highest self thou dost not belong to it, and wilt experience thy separate being within thyself, the spirit in thee.”

Here we have another of the beautiful elements in the dramatic composition of the Bhagavad Gita. At first we are gradually made acquainted with its ideas as abstract concepts, but afterward these become more and more vivid. The concepts of sattwa, rajas, and tamas take on living shape and form in the most varied spheres of life. Then at length the separation of Arjuna's soul from it all is accomplished, so to say, before our spiritual gaze. Krishna explains to him how we must free ourselves from all that is bound up with these three conditions, from that in which men are ordinarily interwoven.

There are sattwa men who are so bound up with existence as to be attached to all the happiness and joy they can draw from their environment. They speed through the world, drinking in their blissfulness from all that can give it to them. Rajas men are diligent, men of action; but they act because actions have such and such consequences to which they are attached. They depend on the joy of action, on the impression action makes upon them. Tamas men are attached to laziness, they want to be comfortable. They really do not want to act at all. Thus are men to be distinguished. Those whose souls and spirits are bound into external conditions belong to one or other of these three groups.

“But thine eyes shall see the daybreak of the age of self-consciousness. Thou shalt learn to hold thy soul apart. Thou shalt be neither sattwa, rajas nor tamas man.” Thus is Krishna the great educator of the human ego. He shows its separation from its environment. He explains soul activities according to how they partake of sattwa, rajas or tamas. If a man raises his belief to the divine creators of the world he is a sattwa man. Just in that time of the Gita, however, there were men who in a certain sense knew nothing of the Divine Beings guiding the universe. They were completely attached to the so-called nature spirits, those behind the immediate beings of nature. Such men are rajas men. The tamas men are those who in viewing the world get only so far as what we may call the ghost-like, which in its spiritual nature is nearest to the material. So, in regard to religious feeling also these three groups may be distinguished.

If we wished to apply these concepts to religious feeling in our time we should say (but without flattery) that those who strive after anthroposophy are sattwa men; those attached to external faith are rajas men; those who, in a material or spiritual sense, will only believe in what has bodily shape and form—the materialists and spiritualists—are the tamas men. The spiritualist does not ask for spiritual beings in whom he may believe; he is quite prepared to believe in them, but he does not want to lift himself up to them. He wants them to come down to him. They must rap, because he can hear rapping with physical ears. They must appear in clouds of light because such are visible to his eyes. Such are tamas men in a certain conscious sense, and quite in the sense too of the tamas men of Krishna's time.

There are also unconscious tamas men; the materialistic thinkers of our time who deny all that is spiritual. When materialists meet in conference today they persuade themselves that they adhere to materialism on logical grounds, but this is an illusion. Materialists are people who remain so not on the basis of logic but for fear of the spiritual. They deny the spirit because they are afraid of it. They are in effect compelled to deny it by the logic of their own unconscious soul, which does indeed penetrate to the door of the spiritual but cannot pass through. One who can see reality can see in a materialistic congress how each person in the depths of his soul is afraid of the spirit. Materialism is not logic, it is cowardice before the spiritual. All its arguments are nothing but an opiate to damp down this fear. Actually, Ahriman—the giver of fear—has every materialist by the neck. This is a grotesque but an austere and fundamental truth that one may recognize if one goes into any materialistic meeting. Why is such a meeting called? The illusion is that people there discuss views of the universe, but in reality it is a meeting to conjure up the devil Ahriman, to beckon him into their chambers.

Krishna, then, indicates to Arjuna how the different religious beliefs may be classified, and he also speaks to him of the different ways men may approach the Gods in actual prayer. In all cases the temper of man's soul can be described in terms of these three conditions. Sattwa, rajas, and tamas men are different in the way they relate to their Gods. Tamas men are such as priests, but whose priesthood depends on a kind of habit. They have their office but no living connection with the spiritual world. So they repeat Aum, Aum, Aum, which proceeds from the dullness, the tamas condition of their spirit. They pour forth their subjective nature in the Aum.

Rajas men look out on the surrounding world and begin to feel that it has something in it akin to themselves, that it is related to them and therefore worthy to be worshipped. They are the men of “Tat” who worship the “That,” the Cosmos, as being akin to themselves. Sattwa men perceive that what lives within us is one with all that surrounds us in the universe outside. In their prayer they have a sense for “Sat,” the All-being, the unity without and within, unity of the objective and the subjective. Krishna says that he who would truly become free in his soul, who does not wish to be merely a sattwa, rajas or tamas man in any one respect or another, must attain to a transformation of these conditions in himself so that he wears them like a garment, while in his real self he grows out beyond them.

This is the impulse that Krishna as the creator of self-consciousness must give. Thus he stands before Arjuna and teaches him to “Look upon all the conditions of the world, with all that is to man highest and deepest, but free thyself from the highest and deepest of the three conditions and in thine own self become as one who lays hold of himself. Learn and know that thou canst live without feeling thyself bound up with rajas, or tamas, or sattwa.” One had to learn this at that time because it was the beginning of the dawn in self-liberation, but here again, what then required the greatest effort can today be found right at hand. This is the tragedy of present life. There are too many today who stand in the world and burrow down into their own soul, finding no connection with the outer world; who in their feelings and all their inner experiences are lonely souls. They neither feel themselves bound up with the conditions of sattwa, rajas or tamas, nor are they free from them, but are cast out into the world like an endlessly, aimlessly revolving wheel. Such men who live only in themselves and cannot understand the world, who are unhappy because in their soul-life they are separated from all external existence—these represent the shadow side of the fruit that it was Krishna's task to develop in Arjuna and in all his contemporaries and successors. What had to be Arjuna's highest endeavor has become the greatest suffering for many men today.

Thus do successive ages change. Today we must say that we are at the end of the age that began with the time of the Bhagavad Gita. This may penetrate our feelings with deep significance. It may also tell us that just as in that ancient time those seeking self-consciousness had to hear what Krishna told Arjuna, those seeking their soul's salvation today, in whom self-consciousness is developed to a morbid degree, these too should listen. They should listen to what can lead them once more to an understanding of the three external conditions. What can do this?

Let us put forward some more preliminary ideas before we set out to answer this question. Let us ask again, what is it that Krishna really wants for Arjuna, whose relation to external conditions was a right one for his time? What is it that he says with divine simplicity and naïveté? He reveals what he wishes to be even to our present time. We have described how a kind of picture-consciousness, a living imagery, lighted up man's soul; how there was hovering above it, so to say, what today is self-consciousness, which men at that time had to strive for with all their might but which today is right at hand. Try to live into the soul condition of that time before Krishna introduced the new age. The world around men did not call forth clear concepts and ideas, but pictures like those of our dreams today. Thus the lowest region of soul-life was a picture-like consciousness, and this was illumined from the higher region—of sleep consciousness—through inspiration. In this way they could rise to still higher conditions. This ascent was called “entering into Brahma.” To ask a soul today, living in Western lands, to enter into Brahma would be a senseless anachronism. It would be like requiring a man who is halfway up a mountain to reach the top by the same way as one still down in the valley. With equal right could one ask a Western soul today to do Eastern exercises and “enter into Brahma” because this presupposes that a man is at the stage of picture consciousness, which as a matter of fact certain Easterners still are. What the men of the Gita age found in rising into Brahma, the Western man already has in his concepts and ideas. This is really true, that Shankaracharya would today introduce the ideas of Solovieff, Hegel and Fichte to his revering disciples as the first stage of rising into Brahma. It is not the content, however, it is the pains of the way, that are important.

Krishna indicates a main characteristic of this rising into Brahma, by which we have a beautiful characterization of Krishna himself. At that time the constitution of the soul was all passive. The world of pictures came to you, you gave yourself up to these flowing pictures. Compare this with the altogether different nature of our everyday world. Devotion, giving ourselves up to things, does not help us to understand them, even though there are many who do not wish to advance to what must necessarily take place in our time. Nevertheless, for our age we have to exert ourselves, to be alive and active, in order to get ideas and concepts of our surrounding world. Herein lies all the trouble in our education. We have to educate children so that their minds are awake when their concepts of the surrounding world are being formed. Today the soul must be more active than it was in the age before the origin of the Bhagavad Gita. We can put it so:

Bhagavad Gita Age—rising to Brahma with passive souls.

Intellectual Age (our present age)—actively working our way up into the higher worlds.

What then must Krishna say when he wishes to introduce that new age in which the active way of gaining an understanding of the universe is gradually to begin? He must say, “I have to come; I have to give thee the ego-man, a gift that shall impel thee to activity.” If it had all remained passive as before—a being interwoven with the world, devoted to the world—the new age would never have begun. Everything connected with the entry of the soul into the spiritual world before the time of the Gita, Krishna calls devotion. “All is devotion to Brahma.” This he compares to the feminine in man; while what is the self in man, the active working element that is to create self-consciousness, that pushes up from within as the generator of the self-consciousness that is to come, Krishna calls the masculine in man. What man can attain in Brahma must be fertilized by Krishna. So his teaching to Arjuna is, “All men until now were Brahma-men. Brahma is all that is spread out as the mother-womb of the whole world. But I am the father, who came into the world to fertilize the maternal womb.”

Thus the consciousness of self is created, which is to work on all men. This is indicated as clearly as possible. Krishna and Brahma are related to each other as father and mother in the world. Together they produce the self-consciousness man must have in the further course of his evolution—the self-consciousness that makes it possible for him to become ever more perfect as an individual being. The Krishna faith has altogether to do with the single man, the individual person. To follow his teaching exclusively means to strive for the perfection of oneself as an individual. This can be achieved only by liberating the self; loosening it from all that adheres to external conditions. Fix your attention on this backbone of Krishna's teaching, how it directs man to put aside all externals, to become free from the life that takes its course in continually changing conditions of every kind; to comprehend oneself in the self alone, that it may be borne ever onward to higher perfection. See how this perfection depends on man's leaving behind him all the external configuration of things, casting off the whole of outer life like a shell, becoming free and ever more inwardly alive in himself. Man tearing himself away from his environment, no longer asking what goes on in external processes of perfection but asking how shall he perfect himself. This is the teaching of Krishna.

Krishna—that is, the spirit who worked through Krishna—appeared again in the Jesus child of the Nathan line of the House of David, described in St. Luke's Gospel. Thus, fundamentally, this child embodied the impulse, all the forces that tend to make man independent and loosen him from external reality. What was the intention of this soul that did not enter human evolution but worked in Krishna and again in this Jesus child? At a far distant time this soul had had to go through the experience of remaining outside human evolution because the antagonist Lucifer had come; he who said, “Your eyes will be opened and you will distinguish good and evil, and be as God.” In the ancient Indian sense Lucifer said to man, “You will be as the Gods, and will have power to find the sattwa, rajas and tamas conditions in the world.”

Lucifer directed man's attention to the outer world. By his instigation man had to learn to know the external, and therefore had to go through the long course of evolution down to the time of Christ. Then he came who was once withdrawn from Lucifer; came in Krishna and later in the Luke Jesus child. In two stages he gave that teaching that from another side was to be the antithesis of the teaching of Lucifer in Paradise. “He wanted to open your eyes to the conditions of sattwa, rajas, and tamas. Shut your eyes to these conditions and you will find yourselves as men, as self-conscious human beings.” Thus does the Imagination appear before us. On the one side the Imagination of Paradise, where Lucifer opens man's eyes to the three conditions in the external world, when for a while the Opponent of Lucifer withdraws. Then men go through their evolution and reach the point where in two stages another teaching is given them, of self-consciousness, which bids them close their eyes to the three external conditions. Both teachings are one-sided. If the Krishna-Jesus influence alone had continued, one one-sidedness would have been added to another. Man would have taken leave of all that surrounds him, would have lost all interest in external evolution. Each person would only have sought his own perfection. Striving for perfection is right; but such striving bought at the price of a lack of interest in the whole of humanity is one-sided, even as the Luciferic influence was one-sided. Hence the all-embracing Christ Impulse entered the higher synthesis of the two one-sided tendencies.

In the personality of the St. Luke Jesus child Himself the Christ Impulse lived for three years; the Christ who came to mankind to bring together these two extremes. Through each of them mankind would have fallen into weakness and sin. Through Lucifer humanity would have been condemned to live one-sidedly in the external conditions of sattwa, rajas and tamas. Through Krishna they were to be educated for the other extreme, to close their eyes and seek only their own perfection. Christ took the sin upon Himself. He gave to men what reconciles the two one-sided tendencies. He took upon Himself the sin of self-consciousness that would close its eyes to the world outside. He took upon Himself the sin of Krishna, and of all who would commit his sin, and He took upon Himself the sin of Lucifer and of all who would commit the sin of fixing their attention on externalities. By taking both extremes upon Himself he makes it possible for humanity by degrees to find a harmony between the inner and the outer world because in that harmony alone man's salvation is to be found.

An evolution that has once begun, however, cannot end suddenly. The urge to self-consciousness that began with Krishna went on and on, increasing and intensifying self-consciousness more and more, bringing about estrangement from the outer world. In our time too this course is tending to continue. At the time when the Krishna impulse was received by the Luke Jesus child mankind was in the midst of this development, this increase of self-consciousness and estrangement from the outer world. It was this that was brought home to the men who received the baptism of John in the Jordan, so that they understood the Baptist when he said to them, “Change your disposition; walk no longer in the path of Krishna”—though he did not use this word. The path on which mankind had then entered we may call the Jesus-path if we would speak in an occult sense. In effect, the pursuit of this Jesus-path alone went on and on through the following centuries. In many respects human civilization in the centuries following the foundation of Christianity was only related to Jesus, not to the Christ Who lived in Jesus for the three years from the baptism by John until the Mystery of Golgotha.

Every line of evolution, however, works its way onward up to a certain tension. In the course of time this longing for individual perfection was driven to such a pitch that men were in a certain sense brought more and more into the tragedy of estrangement from the divine in nature, from the outer world. Today we are experiencing this in many ways. Many people are going about among us who have little understanding left of our environment. Therefore, it is just in our time that an understanding of the Christ Impulse must break in upon us. The Christ-path must be added to the Jesus-path. The path of one-sided striving for perfection has become too strong. It has gone so far that in many respects men are so remote from their surroundings that certain movements, when they arise, over-reach themselves immediately, and the longing for the opposite is awakened. Many human souls now feel how little they can escape from this enhanced self-consciousness, and this creates an impulse to know the divinity of the outer world. It is such souls as these who in our time will seek the understanding of the Christ Impulse that is opened up by true anthroposophy; the force that does not merely strive for the one-sided perfection of the individual soul but belongs to the whole progress of humanity. To understand the Christ means not merely to strive toward perfection, but to receive in oneself something expressed by St. Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me.” “I” is the Krishna word. “Not I, but Christ in me,” is the Christian word.

So we see how every spiritual movement in history has in a certain sphere its justification. No one must imagine that the Krishna impulse could have been dispensed with. No one should ever think either that one human spiritual movement is fully justified in its one-sidedness. The two extremes—the Luciferic and the Krishna impulses—had to find their higher unity in the mission of the Christ.

He who would understand in the true anthroposophic sense the impulse necessary for the further evolution of mankind, must realize how anthroposophy has to become a means of shedding light on all religions. He must learn to see how the different streams in evolution all flow into the one main current of development. It would be a dilettante way of beginning to do this if one tried to find again in the Krishna stream what can be found in the stream of Christianity. Only when we regard the matter in this way do we understand what it means to seek a unity in all religions. There is, however, another way of doing so. One may repeat over and over, “In all religions the same fundamental essence is contained.” In effect, the same essence is contained in the root of a plant, in the stem, leaves, flowers, the pollen, and the fruit. That is true, but it is an abstract truth. It is no more profound than if one were to say, “Why make any distinctions? Salt, pepper, vinegar, and milk all have their place on the table; all are one, for all are substance.” Here you can tell how futile such a way of thought can be, but you do not notice it so easily when it comes to comparing religions. It will not do to compare the Chinese, Brahmin, Krishnan, Buddhist, Persian, Moslem, and Christian faiths in this abstract way, saying, “Look, everywhere we find the same principles. In each case there is a Savior.”

Abstractions can indeed be found in countless places and in countless ways, but this is a dilettante method because it leads to nothing. One may form societies to pursue the study of all religions, and do so in the same sense as saying pepper, salt, etc. are one because they are all substance. That has no importance. What is important is to regard things as they really are. To the way of looking at things that goes so far in occult dilettantism as to keep on declaiming the equality of all religions, it is one and the same whether what lived in the Christ is the pivot of the whole of evolution or whether it can be found in the first man you meet in the street. For one who wishes to guide his life by truth it is an atrocity to associate the impulse in the world's history that is bound up with the Mystery of Golgotha and for which the name Christ has been preserved—to associate that impulse with any other impulse in history, because in truth it is the central point of the whole of earthly evolution.

In these lectures I have tried by means of a particular instance to indicate how present-day occultism must try to throw light on the different spiritual movements that have appeared in the course of human history. Though each has its right and proper point of contact, one must distinguish between them as between the stem of a plant and the green leaf, and the green leaf from the colored petal, though all together form a unity. If one tries with this truly modern occultism to penetrate with one's soul into what has flowed into humanity in diverse currents, one recognizes how the different religious faiths lose nothing of their greatness and majesty. How sublime was the greatness that appeared to us in the figure of Krishna even when we simply tried to get a definite view of his place in evolution. All such lines of thought as we can give only in outline are indeed imperfect enough, and you may be assured that no one is more aware of their imperfection than the present speaker. But the endeavor has been to show in what spirit a true consideration of the spiritual movement toward individuality in mankind must be carried out. I purposely tried to derive our thoughts from a spiritual creation remote from us, the Bhagavad Gita, to show how Western minds can perceive and feel what they owe to Krishna; what he, through the continued working of his impulse, still signifies for their own upward striving.

However, the spiritual movement we here represent necessarily demands that we enter concretely, and with real love, into the special nature of every current in man's spiritual history. This is a bit inconvenient because it brings us all too near to the humble thought of how little after all we really penetrate into their depths. Another idea follows upon this, that we must go on striving further and ever further. Both of these ideas are inconvenient. It is the sad fate of that movement we call anthroposophy, that it produces inconvenient results for many souls. It requires that we actively lay hold of the definite, separate facts of the world's development. At the same time it requires each of us to say earnestly to himself, “I can indeed reach something higher, and I will. Always it is only a certain stage and standpoint that I have attained. I must forever go on striving—on—and on—without end.”

Thus, all along it has been not quite comfortable to belong to that spiritual movement that by our efforts is endeavoring to take its place in what is called the Theosophical Movement.¹ It has not been easy, because we demand that people shall learn to strive ever more deeply to penetrate the sacred mysteries. We could not supply you with anything so easy as introducing some person's son or even daughter, saying, “You need only wait, the Savior of mankind will appear physically embodied in this boy or girl.” We could not do this because we must be true. Yet, one who perceives what is happening cannot but regard these latest proceedings as the final grotesque outcome of the dilettante comparison of religions that can also be put forward so easily, and that continually repeats what should be taken as a matter of course, the tritest of all sayings, “All religions contain the same essence.”

The last weeks and months have shown—and my speaking here on this significant subject has shown it again—that a circle of people can be found at the present time who are ready to seek spiritual truths. We have no other concern than to put these truths forward, though many, or even everyone, may leave us. If so, it will make no difference in the way the spiritual truths are here proclaimed. The sacred obligation to truth will guide that movement that underlies this cycle of lectures. Whoever would go with us must do so under the conditions that have now become necessary. It is certainly more convenient to proceed otherwise, not entering into another side of the matter as we do by pointing out the reality in all things. But that also is part of our obligation to truth. It is simpler to inform people of the equality and unity of religions, or tell them they are to wait for the incarnation of a Savior who is predestined, whom they are to recognize not by themselves but on someone's authority.

Human souls today will themselves have to decide how far a spiritual movement can be carried on and upheld by pure devotion to the ideal of truthfulness. In our time it had to come to that sharp cleavage, whose climax was reached when those who had no other desire than to set forth what is true and genuine in evolution, were described as Jesuits. This was a convenient way of separating, but the external evidence was the work of objective falsehood. This cycle of lectures may once more have shown you that we have been working out of no one-sided tendency, since it comprises the present, the past, and the primal past, in order to reveal the unique, fundamental impulse of human evolution. So I too may say that it fills me with the deepest satisfaction to have been able to give these lectures here before you. This shows me there is hope because there are souls here who have the impulse, the urge toward that which works also in the super-sensible with nothing but simple, honest truthfulness.

I was forced to add this final word to these lectures, for it is necessary in view of all that has happened to us in the course of time down to the point of being excluded from the Theosophical Society. Considering all we have suffered, and all that is now being falsely asserted in numerous pamphlets, it was necessary to say something, although a discussion of these matters is always painful to me.

Those who desire to work with us must know that we have taken for our banner the humble, yet unconditional, honest, striving for truth; striving ever upward into the higher worlds.

• 1. Dr. Steiner is referring here, and in the following passages, to his break with the Theosophical Society and to the formation of the Anthroposophical Society. A full account of these events can be found in G. Wachsmuth, The Life and Work of Rudolf Steiner, pp. 186–189, available from the Anthroposophic Press, Inc.

In the last lecture, I spoke of a former view of life from which the modern scientific view has evolved. It still combined the qualitative with the form-related or geometrical elements of mathematics, the qualitative with the quantitative. One can therefore look back at a world conception in which the triangle or another geometrical form was an inner experience no matter whether the form referred to the surface of a given body or to its path of movement. Geometrical and arithmetical forms were intensely qualitative inner experiences. For example, a triangle and a square were each conceived as emerging from a specific inward experience.

This conception could change into a different one only when men lost their awareness that everything quantitative—including mathematics—is originally experienced by man in direct connection with the universe. It changed when the point was reached where the quantitative was severed from what man experiences. We can determine this moment of separation precisely. It occurred when all concepts of space that included man himself were replaced by the schematic view of space that is customary today, according to which, from an arbitrary starting point, the three coordinates are drawn. The kind of mathematics prevalent today, by means of which man wants to dominate the so-called phenomena of nature, arose in this form only after it had been separated from the human element. Expressing it more graphically, I would say in a former age man perceived mathematics as something that he experienced within himself together with his god or gods, whereby the god ordered the world. It came as no surprise therefore to discover this mathematical order in the world. In contrast to this, to impose an arbitrary space outline or some other mathematical formula on natural phenomena—even if such abstract mathematical concepts can be identified with significant aspects in these so-called natural phenomena—is a procedure that cannot be firmly related to human experiences. Hence, it cannot be really understood and is at most simply assumed to be a fact. Therefore in reality it cannot be an object of any perception. The most that can be said of such an imposition of mathematics on natural phenomena is that what has first been mathematically thought out is then found to fit the phenomena of nature. But why this is so can no longer be discovered within this particular world perception.

Think back to the other worldview that I have previously described to you, when all corporeality was regarded as image of the spirit. One looking at a body found in it the image of spirit. One then looked back on oneself, on what—in union with one's own divine nature—one experienced as mathematics through one's own bodily constitution. As a work of art is not something obscure but is recognized as the image of the artist's ideas, so one found in corporeal nature the mathematical images of what one had experienced with one's own divine nature. The bodies of external nature were images of the divine spiritual. The instant that mathematics is separated from man and is regarded only as an attribute of bodies that are no longer seen as a reflection of spirit, in that instant agnosticism creeps into knowledge.

Take a concrete example, the first phenomenon that confronts us after the birth of scientific thinking, the Copernican system. It is not my intention today or in any of these lectures to defend either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system. I am not advocating either one. I am only speaking of the historical fact that the Copernican system has replaced the Ptolemaic. What I say today does not imply that I favor the old Ptolemaic system over the Copernican. But this must be said as a matter of history. Imagine yourself back in the age when man experienced his own orientation in space: above-below, right-left, front-back. He could experience this only in connection with the earth. He could, for example, experience the vertical orientation in himself only in relation to the direction of gravity. He experienced the other two in connection with the four compass points according to which the earth itself is oriented. All this he experienced together with the earth as he felt himself standing firmly on it. He thought of himself not just as a being that begins with the head and ends a the sole of the feet. Rather, he felt himself penetrated by the force of gravity, which had something to do with his being but did not cease at the soles of his feet. Hence, feeling himself within the nature of the gravitational force, man felt himself one with the earth. For his concrete experience, the starting point of his cosmology was thus given by the earth. Therefore he felt he Ptolemaic system to be justified.

Only when man severed himself from mathematics, only then was it possible also to sever mathematics from the earth and to found an astronomical system with its center in the sun. Man had to lose the old experience-within-himself before he could accept a system with its center outside the earth. The rise of the Copernican system is therefore intimately bound up with the transformation of civilized mankind's soul mood. The origin of modern scientific thinking cannot be separated from the general mental and soul condition, but must be viewed in context with it.

It is only natural that statements like this are considered absurd by our contemporaries, who believe in the present world view far more fervently than the sectarians of olden days believed in their dogmas. But to give the scientific mode of thinking its proper value, it must be seen as arising inevitably out of human nature and evolution. In the course of these lectures, we shall see that by doing this we are actually assigning far greater value to science than do the modern agnostics.

Thus the Copernican world conception came into being, the projection of the cosmic center from the earth to the sun. Fundamentally, the whole cosmic thought edifice of Giordano Bruno,³² who was born in 1548 and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, was already contained in the Copernican world view. It is often said that Giordano Bruno glorifies the modern view of nature, glorifies Copernicanism. One must have deep insight into the inner necessity with which this new cosmology arose if one is to have any feeling at all for the manner and tone in which Giordano Bruno speaks and writes. Then one sees that Giordano Bruno does not sound like the followers of the new view or like the stragglers of the old view. He really does not speak about the cosmos mathematically so much as lyrically. There is something musical in the way Giordano Bruno describes the modern conception of nature. Why is that? The reason is that Giordano Bruno, though he was rooted with his whole soul in a bygone world perception, told himself with his outward intellect: The way things have turned out in history, we cannot but accept the Copernican world picture. He understood the absolute necessity that had been brought about by evolution. This Copernican world view, however, was not something he had worked out for himself. It was something given to him, and which he found appropriate for his contemporaries. Belonging as he did to an older world conception, he could not help but experience inwardly what he had to perceive and accept as knowledge. He still had the faculty of inner experience, but he did not have scientific forms for it. Therefore although he described them so wonderfully, he did not follow the Copernican directions of thought in the manner of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, or Newton.³³ Instead, he tried to experience the cosmos in the old way, the way that was suitable when the world cosmos was experienced within one's being. But in order to do this, mathematics would have had to be also mysticism, inward experience, in the way I described yesterday. This it could not be for Giordano Bruno. The time for it was past. Hence, his attempt to enter the new cosmology through living experience became an experience, not of knowledge but of poetry, or at least partially so. This fact lends Giordano's works their special coloring. The atom is still a monad; in his writings, it is still something alive. The sum of cosmic laws retains a soul quality, but not because he experienced the soul in all the smallest details as did the ancient mystics, and not because he experienced the mathematical laws of the cosmos as the intentions of the spirit. No, it was because he roused himself to wonder at this new cosmology and to glorify it poetically in a pseudo-scientific form. Giordano Bruno is truly something like a connecting link between two world conceptions, the present one and the ancient one that lasted into the fifteenth century. Man today can form scarcely any idea of the latter. All cosmic aspects were then still experienced by man, who did not yet differentiate between the subject within himself and the cosmic object outside. The two were still as one; man did not speak of the three dimensions in space, sundered from the orientation within his own body and appearing as above-below, right-left, and forward-backward.

Copernicus tried to grasp astronomy with abstract mathematical ideas. On the other hand, Newton shows mathematics completely on its own. Here I do not mean single mathematical deductions, but mathematical thinking in general, entirely divorced from human experience. This sounds somewhat radical and objections could certainly be made to what I am thus describing in broad outlines, but this does not alter the essential facts. Newton is pretty much the first to approach the phenomena of nature with abstract mathematical thinking. Hence, as a kind of successor to Copernicus, Newton becomes the real founder of modern scientific thinking.

It is interesting to see in Newton's time and in the age that followed how civilized humanity is at pains to come to terms with the immense transformation in soul configuration that occurred as the old mathematical-mystical view gave way to the new mathematical-scientific style. The thinkers of the time find it difficult to come to terms with this revolutionary change. It becomes all the more evident when we look into the details, the specific problems with which some of these people wrestled. See how Newton, for instance, presents his system by trying to relate it to the mathematics that has been severed from man. We find that he postulates time, place, space, and motion. He says in effect in his Principa: I need not define place, time, space, and motion because everybody understands them.³⁴ Everybody knows what time is, what space, place, and motion are, hence these concepts, taken from common experience, can be used in my mathematical explanation of the universe. People are not always fully conscious of what they say. In life, it actually happens seldom that a person fully penetrates everything he says with his consciousness. This is true even among the greatest thinkers. Thus Newton really does not know why he takes place, time, space, and motion as his starting points and feels no need to explain or define them, whereas in all subsequent deductions he is at pains to explain and define everything. Why does he do this? The reasons is that in regard to place, time, motion, and space all cleverness and thinking avail us nothing. No matter how much we think about these concepts, we grow no wiser than we were to begin with. Their nature is such that we experience them simply through our common human nature and must take them as they come. A successor of Newton's, Bishop Berkeley,³⁵ took particular notice of this point. He was involved in philosophy more than Newton was, but Berkeley illustrates the conflicts taking place during the emergence of scientific thinking. In other respects, as we shall presently hear, he was not satisfied with Newton, but he was especially struck by the way that Newton took these concepts as his basis without any explanation, that he merely said: I start out from place, time, space, and motion; I do not define them; I take them as premises for my mathematical and scientific reflections. Berkeley agrees that one must do this. One must take these concepts in the way they are understood by the simplest person, because there they are always clear. They become unclear not in outward experience, but in the heads of metaphysicians and philosophers. Berkeley feels that when these four concepts are found in life, they are clear; but they are always obscure when found in the heads of thinkers.

It is indeed true that all thinking about these concepts is of no avail. One feels this. Therefore, Newton is only beginning to juggle mathematically when he uses these concepts to explain the world. He is juggling with ideas. This is not meant in a derogatory way; I only want to describe Newton's abilities in a telling manner. One of the concepts thus utilized by Newton is that of space. He manipulates the idea of space as perceived by the man in the street. Still, a vestige of living experience is contained therein. If, on the other hand, one pictures space in terms of Cartesian mathematics, without harboring any illusions, it makes one's brain reel. There is something undefinable about this space, with its arbitrary center of coordinates. One can, for example, speculate brilliantly (and fruitlessly) about whether Descartes’ space if finite or infinite. Ordinary awareness of space that is still connected with the human element really is not at all concerned with finiteness or infinity. It is after all quite without interest to a living world conception whether space can be pictured as finite or infinite. Therefore one can say that Newton takes the trivial idea of space just as he finds it, but then he begins to mathematize. But, due to the particular quality of thinking in his age, he already has the abstracted mathematics and geometry, and therefore he penetrates spatial phenomena and processes of nature with abstract mathematics. Thereby he sunders the natural phenomena from man. In fact, in Newton's physics we meet for the first time ideas of nature that have been completely divorced from man. Nowhere in earlier times were conceptions of nature so torn away from man as they are in Newtonian physics.

Going back to a thinker of the fourth or fifth century A.D.—though people of that period can hardly be called “thinkers,” because their inner life was far more alive than the mere life in thoughts—we would find that he held the view: “I live; I experience space along with my God, and orient myself in space up-and-down, right-left, and forward-backward, but I dwell in space together with my God. He outlines the directions and I experience them.” So it was for a thinker of the third or fourth century A.D. and even later; indeed, it only became different in the fourteenth century. Thinking geometrically about space, man did not merely draw a triangle but was conscious of the fact that, while he did this, God dwelled within him and drew along with him. His experience was qualitative; he drew the qualitative reality that God Himself had placed within him. Everywhere in the outer world, whenever mathematics was observed, the intentions of God were also observed.

By Newton's time mathematics has become abstracted. Man has forgotten that originally he received mathematics as an inspiration from God. And in this utterly abstract form, Newton now applies mathematics to the study of space. As he writes his Principia, he simply applies this abstracted mathematics, this idea of space (which he does not define,) because he has a dim feeling that nothing will be gained by trying to define it. He takes the trivial idea of space and applies his abstract mathematics to it, thus severing it from any inward experiences. This is how he speaks of the principles of nature.

Later on, interestingly enough, Newton goes somewhat deeper. This is easy to see if one is familiar with his works. Newton becomes ill at ease, as it were, when he contemplates his own view of space. He is not quite comfortable with this space, torn as it is out of man and estranged completely from the spirit. So he defines it after all, saying that space is the sensorium of God. It is most interesting that at the starting point of modern science the very person who was the first to completely mathematize and separate space from man, eventually defines space as God's sensorium,³⁶ a sort of brain or sense organ of God. Newton had torn nature asunder into space and man-who-experiences-space. Having done this, he feels inwardly uneasy when he views this abstract space, which man had formerly experienced in union with his god. Formerly, man had said to himself: What my human sensorium experiences in space, I experience together with my god. Newton becomes uneasy, now that he has torn space away form the human sensorium. He has thereby torn himself away from his permeation with the divine-spiritual. Space, with all is mathematics, was not something external. So, in later life, Newton addresses it as God's sensorium, though to begin with he had torn the whole apart, thus leaving space devoid of Spirit and God. But enough feeling remained in Newton that he could not leave this externalized space devoid of God. So he deified it again.

Scientifically, man tore himself loose from his god, and thus from the spirit; but outwardly he again postulated the same spirit. What happened here explains why a man like Goethe found it impossible³⁷ to go along with Newton on any point. Goethe's Theory of Color is one particularly characteristic point. This whole procedure of first casting out the spirit, separating it from man, was foreign to Goethe's nature. Goethe always had the feeling that man has to experience everything, even what is related to the cosmos. Even in regard to the three dimensions Goethe felt that the cosmos was only a continuation of what man had inwardly experienced. Therefore Goethe was by nature Newton's adversary.

Now let us return to Berkeley, who was somewhat younger than Newton, but still belonged to the period of conflict that accompanied the rise of the scientific way of thinking. Berkeley had no quarrel with Newton's accepting the trivial ideas of place, space, time, and motion. But he was not happy with this whole science that was emerging, and particularly not with its interpretations of natural phenomena. It was evident to him that when nature is utterly severed from man it cannot be experienced at all, and that man is deceiving himself when he imagines that he is experiencing it.

Therefore, Berkeley declared that bodies forming the external basis for sense perceptions do not really exist. Reality is spiritual through and through. The universe, as it appears to us—even where it appears in a bodily form—is but the manifestation of an all-pervading spirit. In Berkeley, these ideas appear pretty much as mere assertions, for he no longer had any trace of the old mysticism and even less of the ancient pneumatology. Except for his religious dogma, he really had no ground at all for his assertion of such all-pervading spirituality. But assert it he did, and so vigorously that all corporeality become for him no more than a revelation of the spirit. Hence it was impossible for Berkeley to say: I behold a color and there is vibrating movement back of it that I cannot see—which is what modern science justifiably states. Instead, Berkeley said: I cannot hypothetically assume that there is anything possessing any corporeal property such as vibratory movement. The basis of the physical world of phenomena must be spiritually conceived. Something spiritual is behind a color perception as its cause, which I experience in myself when I know myself as spirit. Thus Berkeley is a spiritualist in the sense in which this term is used in German philosophy.

For dogmatic reasons, but with a certain justification, Berkeley makes innumerable objections against the assumption that nature can be comprehended by mathematics that has been abstracted from direct experience. Since to Berkeley the whole cosmos was spiritual, he also viewed mathematics as having been formed together with the spirit of the cosmos. He held that we do in fact experience the intentions of the cosmic spirit insofar as they have mathematical forms, for that we cannot apply mathematical concepts in an external manner to corporeal objects.

In accordance with this point of view, Berkeley opposed what mathematics had become for both Newton and Leibnitz,³⁸ namely differential and integral calculus. Please, do not misunderstand me. Today's lecture must be fashioned in such a way that it cannot but provoke many objections in one who holds to the views prevailing today. But these objections will fade away during the ensuring lectures, if one is willing to keep an open mind. Today, however, I want to present the themes that will occupy us in a rather radical form.

Berkeley became an opponent of the whole infinitesimal calculus³⁹ to the extent that it was then known. He opposed what was beyond experience. In this regard, Berkeley's feeling for things was often more sensitive than his thoughts. He felt how, to the quantities that the mind could conceive, the emergence of infinitesimal calculus added other quantities; namely, the differentials, which attain definition only in the differential coefficient. Differentials must be conceived in such a way that they always elude our thinking, as it were. Our thinking refuses to completely permeate them. Berkeley regarded this as a loss of reality, since knowledge for him was only what could be experienced. Therefore he could not approve of mathematical ideas that produced the indetermination of the differentials.

What are we really doing when we seek differential equations for natural phenomena? We are pointing to something that eludes our possible experience. I realize, of course, that many of you cannot quite follow me on these points, but I cannot here expound the whole nature of infinitesimal calculus. I only want to draw attention to some aspects that will contribute to our study of the birth of modern science.

Modern science set out to master the natural phenomena by means of a mathematics detached from man, a mathematics no longer inwardly experienced. By adopting this abstract mathematical view and these concepts divorced from man, science arrived at a point where it could examine only the inanimate. Having taken mathematics out of the sphere of live experience, one can only apply it to what is dead. Therefore, owing to this mathematical approach, modern science is directed exclusively to the sphere of death. In the universe, death manifests itself in disintegration, in atomization, in reduction to microscopic parts—putting it simply, in a crumbling into dust. This is the direction taken by the present-day scientific attitude. With a mathematics detached from all living experience, it takes hold of everything in the cosmos that turns to dust, that atomizes. From this moment onward it becomes possible to dissipate mathematics itself into differentials. We actually kill all living forms of thought, if we try to penetrate them with any kind of differential equation, with any differential line of thought. To differentiate is to kill; to integrate is to piece the dead together again in some kind of framework, to fit the differentials together again into a whole. But they do not thereby become alive again, after having been annihilated. One ends up with dead specters, not with anything living.

This is how the whole perspective of what was opening up through infinitesimal calculus appeared to Berkeley. Had he expressed himself concretely, he might well have said: First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you fit its differentials together again in integrals, but you no longer have a world, only a copy, an illusion. With regard to its content, every integral is really an illusion, and Berkeley already felt this to be so. Therefore, differentiation really implies annihilation, while integration is the gathering up of bones and dust, so that the earlier forms of the slain beings can be pieced together again. But this does not bring them back to life; they remain no more than dead replicas.

One can say that Berkeley's sentiments were untimely. This they certainly were, for the new way of approach had to come. Anyone who would have said that infinitesimal calculus should never have been developed would have been called not a scientific thinker but a fool. On the other hand, one must realize that at the outset of this whole stream of development, feelings such as Berkeley's were understandable. He shuddered at what he thought would come from a infinitesimal study of nature and had to do with the process of birth but a study of all dying aspects in nature.

Formerly this had not been observed, nor had there been any interest in it. In earlier times, the coming-into-being, the germinating, had been studied; now, one looked at all that was fading and crumbling into dust. Man's conception was heading toward atomism, whereas previously it had tended toward the continuous, lasting aspects of things. Since life cannot exist without death and all living things must die, we must look at and understand all that is dead in the world. A science of the inanimate, the dead, had to arise. It was absolutely necessary. The time that we are speaking about was the age in which mankind was ready for such a science. But we must visualize how this went against the grain of somebody who, like Berkeley, still lived completely in the old view.

The after-effects of what came into being then are still very much with us today. We have witnessed the triumphs of just those scientific labors that made Berkeley shudder. Until they were somewhat modified through the modern theory of relativity,⁴⁰ Newton's theories reigned supreme, Goethe's revolt against them made no impression. For a true comprehension of what went on we must go back to Newton's time and see the shuddering of thinkers who still had a vivid recollection of earlier views and how they clung to feelings that resembled the former ones.

Giordano Bruno shrank from studying the dead nature that was now to be the object of study. He could not view it as dead in a purely mathematical manner of thought, so he animated the atoms into monads and imbued his mathematical thinking with poetry in order to retain it in a personal sphere. Newton at first proceeded from a purely mathematical standpoint, but then he wavered and defined space (which he has first completely divorced from man through his external mathematics) as God's sensorium. Berkeley in his turn rejected the new direction of thinking altogether and with it the whole trend towards the infinitesimal.

Today, however, we are surrounded and overwhelmed by the world view that Giordano Bruno tried to turn into poetry, that Newton felt uncomfortable about, and that Berkeley completely rejected. Do we take what Newton said—that space is a sensorium of God—seriously when we think in the accepted scientific sense today? People today like to regard as great thinkers those men who have said something or other that they approve. But if the great men also said something that they do not approve, they feel very superior and think: Unfortunately, on this point he wasn’t as enlightened as I am. Thus many people consider Lessing⁴¹ a man of great genius but make an exception for what he did toward the end of his life, when he became convinced that we go through repeated earth lives.

Just because we must in the present age come to terms with the ideas that have arisen, we must go back to their origin. Since mathematics has once and for all been detached from man, and since nature has been taken hold of by this abstract mathematics that has gradually isolated us from the whole of nature, we must now somehow manage to find ourselves in this nature. For we will not attain a coherent spiritual knowledge until we once again have found the spirit in nature.

Just as it is a matter of course that every living man will sooner or later die, so it was a matter of course that sooner or later in the course of time a conception of death had to emerge from the former life-imbued world view. Things that can only be learned from a corpse cannot be learned by a person who is unwilling to examine the corpse. Therefore certain mysteries of the world can be comprehended only if the modern scientific way of thinking is taken seriously.

Let me close with a somewhat personal remark.⁴² The scientific world view must be taken seriously, and for this reason I was never an opponent of it; on the contrary, I regarded it as something that of necessity belongs to our time. Often I had to speak out against something that a scientist, or so-called scientist, had made of the things that were discovered by unprejudiced investigation of the sphere of death. It was the misinterpretation of such scientific discoveries that I opposed. On this occasion let me state emphatically that I do not wish to be regarded as in any way an opponent of the scientific approach. I would consider it detrimental to all our anthroposophical endeavors if a false opposition were to arise between what anthroposophy seeks by way of spiritual research and what science seeks—and must of necessity seek in its field—out of the modern attitude.

I say this expressly, my dear friends, because a healthy discussion concerning the relationship between anthroposophy and science must come to pass within our movement. Anything that goes wrong in this respect can only do grave harm to anthroposophy and should be avoided.

I mention this here because recently, in preparing these lectures, I read in the anthroposophical periodical Die Drei that atomism was being studied in a way in which no progress can be made. Therefore, I want to make it clear that I consider all these polemics in Die Drei about atomism as something that only serves to stultify the relations between anthroposophy and science.

• 32. Giordano Bruno: Nola 1548–1600 Rome. Dominican, 1563–1576, a great traveler. Main works developed at the English court at the time of Elizabeth I. After he returned to Italy he was imprisoned because of heretical teachings, and was burned in Rome after 8 years in prison. See Riddles of Philosophy, and The Spiritual Guidance of Man, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 33. Isaac Newton, Sir: Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire 1642–1727 Kensington, London. Born as a dwarf-like child. Grew up on a farm and went to village and small town schools until 1661. After he was accepted at the University he was of medium talent until his “flaming” as a genius physicist, astronomer, mathematician 1663–1664. Professor in Cambridge 1669–1701, member of the Royal Society London 1662 and from 1703 until his death, its President. Main work: Law of Gravitation, Mathematically Adapted to the Law of Motion from Kepler, developed 1666, published 1687 in Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica. The idea of an infinitesimal mathematics came from Newton in 1663; three years later he had developed his differential mathematics. His Optics, 1704, put forth the division of light in color as well as emission theory.
  
  Later Newton lost all interest in physics, mathematics, and also in the destiny and consequences of his works. He turned towards chemical and alchemical experiments and studies of their old traditions. In his old age he was interested in religious-speculative studies. Before his death he compared his life with a day, in which a child is playing with sand and mussels and is not aware anymore of the cosmos at his back. Literature: J.W.N. Sullivan, Isaac Newton 1642–1727 (London 1938).
• 34. In Newton's second edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica of 1713 the definition is “But I do not define, because it is well known to all of us.”
• 35. George Berkeley: Desert Castle, Thomastown, Ireland 1685–1753 Oxford. English philosopher and Anglican missionary, Bishop from 1734. Main works: Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, 1710; Alciphron, about ethics and free thinkers, 1732; Siris, concerning metaphysical questions. See: Riddles of Philosophy.
  
  Berkeley said: “One has to do it in such a way”: e.g., as in Paragraph 113 of Principles of Human Knowledge. In the writing De Motu (From Motion) is written in Paragraph 43: “Motion, even though perceived clearly by the senses, was darkened, but not because of its own being, but far more through commentaries by learned philosophers.”
• 36. In the work Optice by Newton, which is the Latin translation of his Optics (1704), published by Samuel Clarke in 1706 and approved with additions made by Newton, the formula appears only at the end of the book at the so-called 28th Problem: “If these questions are answered in the right way, could we then not ascertain the phenomenon that there is a being, unbodily, intelligent, which can perceive the endless universe as it were with its sense organs, and which seems to look into the innermost and is surrounding it with its all-embracing presence, while that in us that is usually feeling and thinking are only handed-down pictures in which we then perceive and observe our organs?” This thought seems not only to be Newton's, but was also presented in a similar way by Henry More, the Platonist from Cambridge who was a friend of Newton.
• 37. For his polemic concerning Newton's color theory, see Rudolf Steiner, Goethe the Scientist (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950), especially the Introduction, “Goethe, Newton and the Physicists”; see also the forthcoming book, Heinrich O. Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press).
• 38. Leibnitz: Leipzig 1646–1716 Hanover. Philologist, mathematician, physicist, lawyer, statesman, priest. Mostly living at princely courts, traveling a lot. Discoverer of the Infinitesimal Calculus 1686, independently of Newton.
• 39. In his writing The Analyst (The Analyst, 1734, included in the book Writings about the Origin of Mathematics and Physics) the Table of Contents is in the form of 50 theses. No. 7, for example, is as follows: “Objections against the Secrets of Belief Which are Made Unfairly by Those who Admit Them in Science;” or No. 13: “The Rule for the Flux of Potency is Achieved through Unfair Reasoning;” and No. 22: “With the Help of a Double Mistake Analysts Come to their Truth, but not to Science, in which They do not even Know How They Came to Their Own Conclusions.” From the Polemic Dispute, which follows The Analyst, an example is: “No big name on this earth will ever cause me to take unclear things for clear ones. They think of one as if it were a crime to think one could see further than Sir Isaac Newton, even above him. I am convinced though that they speak for the feelings of many others. But there are also some ... who think and feel it unfair to copy some great man's shortcomings, and who see no crime in wanting to see further than Sir Isaac Newton, but further than the whole of mankind.”
• 40. Prepared by Mach and Lorentz, developed by Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity 1905, Common Theory of Relativity 1916. Made it necessary to revise Newton's Mechanics with the help of non-Euclidean Geometry. See also Riddles of Philosophy and Georg Unger, Von Bidden, Physicalischer Begriffe, Part 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 100–122.
• 41. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim: Kamenz/Lausitz 1729–1781 Brunswick. Dramatist, essayist, critic. Opens a new epoch in German literature and an. His last writing, “The Education of the Human Race,” (1780) finds it necessary to postulate reincarnation for the sake of the development of the human race. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 42. The reason was a controversy in the magazine Die Drei of 1921–1922, pages 1107 and 1114, as well as in the following years publication (see pages 172–330 about the reality of atoms). See Rudolf Steiner's First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977).

In the last lecture I tried to point out how by means of the kind of knowledge cultivated by Anthroposophy, man may be seen in his whole nature—consisting of body, soul and spirit. I tried to show also how an inner knowledge of the conditions of health and disease can only be arrived at when the entire nature of man can be perceived in this way; and how in learning to know the true connections between the things which take place within man and the external processes and conditions of substances in Nature, we also succeed in establishing a connecting link between pathology and therapy.

Our next task will be to explain in detail what was only given in general outline in the first lecture. And for this it will above all be necessary to observe how disintegration is proceeding in the human organism and how, on the other hand, there is a constant process of integration. Man has, to begin with, an external physical organisation which is perceptible by means of the outer senses, and whose manifestations can be comprehended by the reason. Besides this physical body there is also the first super-sensible body of the human being: the ether body, or life body. These two principles of the constitution of man serve to build up (integrate) the human organisation. The physical body is continually renewed as it casts off its substance. The ether body—which contains the forces of growth and of assimilation—is, in the entirety of its constitution, something of which we can gain a conception when we behold the growing and blossoming plant-kingdom in the spring; for the plants, as well as human beings, have an ether, or life body. In these two members of the human organisation we have a progressive, constructive evolution.

In so far as man is a sentient being, he bears within himself the next member, the astral body. (We need not feel that such terms are objectionable; we should perceive what they reveal to us). The astral body is essentially the mediator of sensation, the bearer of the inner life of feeling. The astral body contains not only the upbuilding forces but also the forces of destruction. Just as the ether body makes the being of man bud and sprout, as it were, so all these processes of budding are continually being disintegrated again by the astral body; and just because of this, just because the physical and etheric bodies are continually being disintegrated, there exists in the human organisation an activity of soul-and-spirit.

It would be quite a mistake to suppose that the soul-and-spirit in man's nature inhere in the upbuilding process and that this process at last reaches a certain point—let us say in the nervous system—where it can become the bearer of soul-and-spirit. That is not the case. When eventually (and everything points to this being soon), our very admirable modern scientific research has made further progress, it will become apparent that an anabolic, a constructive process in the nervous system is not the essential thing; it is present in the nervous organisation merely in order that the nerves may, in fact, exist. But the nerve-process is in a continual, though slow state of dissolution; and because it is so, because the physical is always being dissolved, a place is set free for the spirit-and-soul.

In a still higher degree is this the case as regards the actual Ego-organisation, by means of which man is raised above all the other beings of Nature surrounding him on the Earth. The Ego-organisation is essentially bound up with katabolism; it is of greatest moment in those parts of the human being that are in a state of disintegration.

So when we look into this wonderful form of the human organism, we see that in every single organ there is construction, integration (whereby the organ ministers to growth and progressive development), and also destruction, whereby it ministers to retrogressive physical development, and by so doing gives foothold for the soul-and-spirit. I said in the last lecture that the state of balance between integration and disintegration which is present in a particular way in every human organ, can be disturbed. The upbuilding process can become rampant; in that case we have to do with an unhealthy condition. When we look in this way into the nature of the human being (to begin with I can only state these things rather abstractly; they will be expressed more concretely presently), when we proceed conscientiously, with a sense of scientific responsibility and do not talk in generalisations about the presence of integration and disintegration, but really study each individual organ as conscientiously as we have learnt to do in scientific observations to-day—then we shall be able to penetrate into this condition of balance that is necessary for the single organs and so find it possible to obtain a conception of the human being in health. If in either direction, either with respect to constructive or with respect to destructive processes, the balance of an organ is upset, then we have to do with something that is unhealthy in the human organism.

Now, however, we must discover how this human organism stands in relation to the three kingdoms of Nature in the outer world—the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—from which we have of course to extract our remedies. When we have studied this inner state of balance in the manner described, we shall see how everything that is present in the three kingdoms of Nature outside man is, in every direction, being overcome within the human organism.

Let us take the simplest example:—the condition of warmth in man. Nothing of the outer conditions of warmth must be carried on unchanged when it is once within the human organism. When we investigate the manifestations of warmth outside in Nature, we know that warmth raises the temperature of things in the outer world. We say that warmth penetrates into things. If we, in our organisation, were to be penetrated in the same way by warmth we should be made ill by it. It is only when, through the forces and quality of our organisation we are able to receive this warmth-process which is being exercised upon us, into our organism and immediately transform it into an inner process, that our organisation is in a state of health. We are harmed by either heat or cold directly we are not in a position to receive it into our organisation and transform it.

In respect of warmth or cold, everyone can see this quite easily for himself. Moreover the same holds good for all other Nature processes. Only careful study, sharpened by spiritual perception, can lead to the recognition that every process taking place in Nature is transformed, metamorphosed, when it occurs within the human organism. We are indeed incessantly overcoming what lives in our earthly environment.

If we now consider the whole internal organisation of man we must say that if the inner force of the human being which inwardly transforms the external events and processes that are always working in upon him—for example, when he is taking nourishment—if this force were removed, then all that enters man from outside would work as a foreign process, and in a sense—if I were to express it crudely or trivially—man would be filled with foreign bodies or foreign processes. On the other hand, if the higher members of man's being, the astral body and the Ego-organisation develop excessive strength, then he does not only so transform the outer processes of his environment that enter into him as they should be transformed, but he does so more rampantly. Then there is a speeding-up of the processes which penetrate him. External Nature is driven out beyond the human—becomes in a certain sense, over-spiritualised; and we are faced with a disturbance of the health.

What has thus been indicated as an abstract principle is really present in every human organ and must be studied individually in the case of them all. Moreover the human being is related in a highly complicated manner, to all the different ways in which he transforms the external processes.

He who strives to get beyond the undisputed testimony of up-to-date anatomy and physiology, who tries to develop his understanding so that he can transform the conception of the human organism yielded by a study of the corpse or pathological conditions, observing them not merely in regard to their “dead” structures but according to their living nature, will find himself faced with endless enigmas of the human organism. For the more exact and the more living our knowledge becomes, the more complicated does it appear. There are, however, certain guiding lines which enable us to find our way through the labyrinth. And if I may be allowed to make a personal observation here, it is that the discovery of such guiding lines was a matter with which I occupied myself for thirty years before I began to speak about it openly—which was about the year 1917. As a comparatively young man, in the early twenties, I asked myself whether there was any possibility of research into this complicated human organisation. Were there certain fundamental principles which would enable one to arrive at a comprehensive understanding? And this led me—(I have just said that the study took me thirty years)—to the fact that one can regard the human organisation from three different aspects: the system of nerves and senses, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic and limb system.

What we can call the organisation of nerves and senses predominates over all the others. It is, moreover, the bearer of all that can be described as the life of concepts. On the other hand, what we describe as the rhythmic organisation is, in a certain respect, self-contained. There is the rhythm of the breath, the rhythm of the circulation, the rhythm manifested in sleeping and waking, and countless other rhythmic processes. It was by making a practical and accurate distinction between the rhythmic organisation and the nerves-and-senses organisation that I first discovered how one could distinguish between the different constituent parts of the human being. I was compelled to ask myself the question—it is now nearly forty years ago, and to-day human hearts are more than ever burdened with baffling physiological problems—I was compelled to ask myself whether on this basis it is really possible to say that the whole inner life of thinking, feeling and willing is bound up with the system of nerves and senses. At the same time I felt that there was a contradiction: how can thinking, feeling and willing be bound up with the nerves and senses? Naturally I cannot go into all this detail to-day, I can only indicate it; but when we come to consider the domain of therapeutics much will be explained. For instance, direction: the nervous system and the metabolic system are polarically opposite. As the metabolic-limb-system builds up, so the system of nerves and senses destroys and vice versa. This and many other things demonstrate the polarity. Everything that constitutes the Ego-organisation is intimately bound up with the system of nerves and senses; everything that constitutes the ether body is intimately bound up with the metabolic and limb system; everything that constitutes the astral body is bound up with the rhythmic system; the physical body permeates the whole, but is continually overcome by the three other members of the human organisation. Only when we observe the human organism in this way can we learn to penetrate into the so-called normal or abnormal processes.

Let us take first the organisation of nerves and senses. But first, so that I may not be misunderstood, I would like to make a short digression. A very sceptical naturalist who had heard in quite a superficial way about these members which I posit as the basis of man's nature, said that I had attempted to distinguish between ‘head-organisation,’ ‘chest-organisation,’ and ‘abdominal organisation’; thus that I had in a sense located the system of nerves and senses only in the head, the rhythmic organisation in the chest, and the metabolic-limb system in the abdomen. But that is a very unjust statement. For without separating the systems spatially, the nerves and senses may be said to be organised principally in the head, but they are also to be found in the other two systems. The rhythmic system is principally located in the middle organisation; but it again is spread over the whole man; similarly the metabolic organisation. It is not a question of making a spatial separation between the organs, but of understanding their qualitative aspect and what is living in and permeating the single organs.

When we study the system of nerves and senses from this standpoint, we find that it spreads throughout the whole organism. The eye or the ear, for example, are organised in such a way that they pre-eminently contain the nerves and senses, in a lesser degree the rhythmic, and in a still less degree the metabolic system. An organ like the kidney, for instance, does not contain so much of the nerves-and-senses system as of the rhythmic or metabolic organisation, yet it contains something of all three. We do not understand the human being if we say: here are sense-organs, or there are digestive organs. In reality it is quite different. A sense-organ is only principally sense-organ; every sense-organ is also in a certain way a digestive and a rhythmic organ. The kidneys or the liver are to be understood as being principally assimilatory or excretory organs. In a lesser degree they are organs of nerves and senses. If, then, we study the whole organisation of man with its single organs from the point of view of the system of nerves-and-senses (in its reality, and not according to the fantastic concepts often formed by physiology), we find that man ‘perceives’ by means of his separate senses—sight, hearing and so on; but we also find that he is entirely permeated by the sense-organisation. The kidney, for instance, is a sense-organ which has a delicate perception of what is taking place in the digestive and excretory processes. The liver too, is—under certain conditions—a sense-organ. The heart is in a high degree an inner sense-organ and can only be understood if it is conceived of as such.

Do not imagine that I have any intention of criticising the science of to-day; I know its worth and my desire is that our view of these things shall be firmly grounded upon it. But we must nevertheless be clear that our science is, at present, not able to penetrate fully and with exactitude into the being of man. If it could, it would not relate the animal organisation so closely to the human in the way it does in our time. In respect of the life of sense, the animal stands at a lower level than the human organisation. The human nerves-and-senses organisation is yoked to the Ego-organisation; in the animal it is yoked to the astral body. The sense-life of man is entirely different from that of the animal. When the animal perceives something with its eyes—and this can be shown by a closer study of the structure of the eye—something takes place in the animal which, so to say, goes through the whole of its body. It does not happen like that in man. In man, sense-perception remains far more at the periphery, is concentrated far more on the surface. You can understand from this that there are delicate organisations present in animals which, in the case of the higher species, are only to be found in etheric form. But in certain of the lower animals you find, for instance, the xiphoid process which is also present in higher animals but in their case it is etheric; or you may find the pecten or choroid process in the eye. The way in which these organs are permeated by the blood, shows that the eye shares in the whole organisation of the animal and is the mediator to it of a life in the circumference of its environment. Man, on the other hand, is connected with his system of nerves-and-senses quite differently and therefore lives, in a far higher sense than the animal, in his outer world, whereas the animal lives more within itself. But everything which is communicated through the higher spiritual members of the human being, which lives itself out through the Ego-organisation by way of the nerves and senses, requires—just because it is present within the domain of the physical body—to receive its material influences from out of the physical world.

Now if we closely study the system of nerves-and-senses at a time when it is functioning perfectly healthily, we find that its working depends on a certain substance, and on the processes that take place in that substance. Matter is something which is never at rest; it merely represents what is, actually, a ‘process.’ (A crystal of quartz, for instance, is only a self-contained, definitely shaped thing to us because we never perceive that it is a ‘process,’ though indeed it is one which is taking place extremely slowly.) We must penetrate further and further into the human organism and learn to understand its transformative activity. That which enters into the organism as external physical substance has to be taken up by it and overcome, in the way described in the introductory lecture.

Now it is especially interesting that when the system of nerves-and-senses is in a normal, i.e., a healthy state (which must of course be understood relatively), it is dependent upon a delicate process which takes place under the influence of the silicic acid which enters the organism. Silicic acid, which in the outer realm of Nature forms itself into beautiful quartz-crystals, has this peculiarity:

when it penetrates into the human organism it is taken up by the processes of the nerves and senses; so that if we look at the system of nerves-and-senses with spiritual sight, we see a wonderfully delicate process going on in which silicic acid is active. But if we look at the other side of the question—as when I said that man has senses everywhere—then we shall notice that it is only in the periphery, that is, where the senses are especially concentrated, that the silicic acid process is intensified; when we turn to the more inner parts of the organism, to the lungs, liver or kidneys, it is far less strong, it is ‘thinner;’ while in the bones it is again stronger. In this way we discover that man has a remarkable constitution.

We have, so to say, a periphery and a circumference where the senses are concentrated; then we have that which fills out the limbs and which carries the skeleton; between these we have the muscles, the glands and so on.

In that which I have described as the ‘circumference’ and the ‘centralised,’ we have the strongest silicic acid processes; we can follow them into the organs that lie between these two, and there we find that they have their own specific silicic acid processes but weaker than those in the circumference. Thus in respect of the outer parts, where man extends in an outgoing direction from the nerves into the senses, he needs more and more silicic acid; in the centre of his system he requires comparatively little; but where his skeleton lies, at the basis of the motor system, there again he requires more silicic acid. Directly we perceive this fact we recognize the inexactitude of many assertions of modern physiology. (And again let me emphasise that I do not wish to criticise them, but merely to make certain statements.) For instance, if we study the life of the human being according to modern physiology, we are directed to the breathing-process. In certain respects this is a complex process, but—speaking generally—it consists in taking in oxygen out of the air, and breathing out carbonic acid. That is the rhythmical process which is essentially the basis of organic life. We say that oxygen is breathed in, that it goes through certain processes described by physiology, within the organism; that it combines with carbon in the blood, and is then ejected on the breath as carbonic acid. This is perfectly correct according to a purely external method of observation. This process is, however, connected with another. We do not merely breathe in oxygen and combine it with carbon. Primarily, that is done with that portion of the oxygen which is spread over the lower part of the body; that is what we unite with the carbon and breathe out as carbonic acid.

There is another and a more delicate process behind this rhythmical occurrence. That portion of the oxygen which, in the human organisation, rises towards the head and therefore (in the particular sense which was mentioned previously) to the system of nerves-and-senses, unites itself with the substance we call silica, and forms silicic acid. And whereas in man the important thing for the metabolic system is the production of carbonic acid, so the important thing for the nerves-and-senses system is the production of silicic acid. The latter is a finer process which we are not able to verify with the coarse instruments at our disposal, though all the means are there by which it can be verified. Thus we have the coarser process on the one hand, and on the other the finer process where the oxygen combines with the silica to form silicic acid, and as such, is secreted inwardly in the human organisation.

Through this secretion of silicic acid the whole organism becomes a sense-organ—more so in the periphery, less so in the separate organs.

If we look at it this way, we can perceive the more delicate intimate structure of the human organism, and see how every organ contains, of necessity, processes related to substances each in its own distinct degree.

If we are now to grasp what health and illness really are, we must understand how these processes take place in any one organ. Suppose we take the kidney, for sake of example. Through some particular condition or other—some symptomatic complication, let us say—our diagnosis leads us to assume that the cause of an illness lies in the kidneys. If we call Spiritual Science to the aid of our diagnosis, we find that the kidney is acting too little as a sense-organ for the surrounding digestive and excretory processes; it is acting too strongly as an organ of metabolism; hence the balance is upset.

In such a case we have above all to ask: how are we to restore to it in a greater degree the character of sense-organ? We can say that because the kidney proves to be an insufficient sense-organ for the digestive and excretory processes, then we must see that it receives the necessary supply of silicic acid.

Now in the anthroposophical sense, there are three ways of administering substances that are required by a healthy human organism. The first is to give the patient a remedy by mouth. But in that case we must be guided by whether the whole digestive organism is so constituted that it can transmit the substances exactly to that spot where they are to be effective. We must know how a substance works—whether on the heart, or the lungs, and so forth, when we administer it by mouth and it passes into the digestive tract. The second way is by injections. By this means we introduce a substance directly into the rhythmic system. There, it works more as a ‘process;’ there, that which in the metabolism is a substantial organisation, is transformed at once into a rhythmic activity and we directly affect the rhythmic system. Or again, we try the third way: we prepare a substance as an ointment to be applied at the right place, or administer it in a bath; in short we apply our remedy in an external form. There are, of course, a great many different methods of doing this.

We have these three ways of applying remedies. But now let us observe the kidneys which our diagnosis reveals as having a diminished capacity as a sense-organ. We have to administer the right kind of silicic acid process. Therefore we have to be attentive, because, in the breathing process as described just now, where the oxygen combines with silica and then disperses silicic acid throughout the body, and because during that process too little silicic acid has reached the kidneys, we must do something which will attract a stronger silicic acid process to them. So we must know how to come to the assistance of the organism which has failed to do this for itself; and for this we must discover what there is externally which is the result of a process such as is wanting in the kidneys. We must search for it. How can we find ways and means to introduce just this silicic acid process into the kidneys?

And now we find that the function of the kidneys, especially as it is a sense-function, is dependent upon the astral body. The astral body is at the basis of the excretory processes and of this particular form of them. Therefore we must stimulate the astral body and moreover in such a way that it will somehow carry the silicic acid process which is administered from outside, to an organ such as the kidney. We need a remedy that, firstly, will stimulate the silicic-acid process, and, secondly, which will stimulate it precisely in the kidneys. If we seek for it in the surrounding plant world, we come upon the plant Equisetum arvense, the ordinary field ‘horsetail.’ The peculiar feature of this plant is that it contains a great deal of silicic acid. If we were to give silicic acid alone it would, however, not reach the kidneys. Equisetum also contains sulphurous acid salts. Sulphurous acid salts alone work on the rhythmic system, on the excretory organs and on the kidneys in particular. When they are intimately combined as they are in Equisetum arvense (we can administer it by mouth, or if that is not suitable, in either of the other ways)—then the sulphurous acid salts enable the silicic acid to find its way to the kidneys.

Here we have touched upon a single instance—a pathological condition of the kidneys. We have approached it quite methodically; we have discerned what can supply what is lacking in the kidneys; and we have erected a bridge that can be followed step by step, from pathology to therapy.

Now let us take another case. Suppose we have to do with some disturbance of the digestive system—such as we usually include under the word ‘dyspepsia.’ If we again proceed according to Spiritual Science, we shall discover that here we have to do principally with a faulty and inadequate working of the Ego-organisation. Why is the Ego-organisation not acting strongly enough? That is the question. And we must search somewhere in the functional regions of the human organism for what it is that is causing this weakness of the Ego-organisation. In certain cases we find that the fault lies in the gall-bladder secretions. If that is so, then we must come to the assistance of the Ego-organisation (just as we came to the assistance of the kidneys with the equisetum) by administering something which, if it reaches the required spot by being prepared in a certain way, will there strengthen the inadequate working of the Ego-organisation. Thus, even as we find that the silicic acid process (which lies at the root of the nerves-and-senses system) when introduced in the right way to the kidneys enhances their sense-faculty, so we now find that such a process as the gall-bladder secretions (which corresponds primarily with the Ego-organisation) is really connected in quite a special manner (also in relation to other things) with the action of carbon. Now a remarkable thing to be observed is that if we wish to introduce carbon into the organism in the correct way for treating dyspepsia, we find that carbon—(though it is contained in every plant)—is contained in Cichorium intybus (chicory) in a form that directly affects the gall-bladder. When we know how to make the correct preparation from Cichorium intybus, we can lead it over into the functions of this organ as a certain form of carbon-process, in the same way as is done with regard to the silicic-acid process and the kidneys.

With these simple examples—which are applicable either to slight or in certain circumstances to very severe cases of illness—I have tried to indicate how, by a spiritual-scientific observation of the human organism on the one hand, and on the other of the different natural creations and their respective interchanges with each other, there can be brought about, firstly, an understanding of the processes of illness, and secondly an understanding of what is required in order to reverse the direction of those processes. Healing becomes thereby a penetrating Art. This is what can be achieved for the art of Medicine, the art of Healing, by the kind of scientific research that is called Anthroposophy. There is nothing of the nature of fantasy about it. It is that which will bring research to the point of extreme exactitude with regard to the observation of the whole human being, both physically, psychically and spiritually. The condition of illness in man depends upon the respective activity of the physical, the psychic and the spiritual. And because man's constitution consists of nerves-and-senses system, rhythmic system, metabolic-and-limb system, we are enabled also to penetrate into the different processes and their degrees of activity. We learn to know how a sense-function is present in the kidneys as soon as we direct our attention to the essential nature of sense-functions; otherwise, we only seek to discover sense-functions under their cruder aspect as they appear in the senses themselves. Now however, we become able to comprehend illness as such.

I have already said that in the metabolic-and-limb system, processes take place which are the opposite of those that take place in the system of nerves-and-senses. But it can happen that processes which primarily are also nerves and senses processes, and are, for instance, proper to the nerves of the head where they are ‘normal’—It can happen that these processes can in a certain sense become dislodged by the metabolic-and-limb system; that through an abnormality of the astral body and Ego-organisation in the metabolic-limb-system something can happen which would be ‘correct’ or ‘normal’ only if taking place in the system of nerves-and-senses. That is to say, what is right for one system can be in another system productive of metamorphosis or disease. So that a process which properly belongs, for instance, to the system of nerves-and-senses makes its appearance in another system, and is then a process of disease. An example of this is found in typhoid fever. Typhoid represents a process which belongs properly to the nervous system. While it should play its part there in the physical organisation, it plays its part as a matter of fact in the region of the metabolic system within the etheric organisation—within the ether body—works over into the physical body and appears there as typhoid. Here we see into the nature of the onset of illness. Or it can also happen that the dynamic force, or those forces which are active in a sense-organ (and must be active there in a certain degree in order that a sense-organ as such may arise)—become active somewhere where they should not. That which works in a sense-organ can be in some way or another transformed in its activity elsewhere. Let us take the activity of the ear. Instead of remaining in the system of nerves-and-senses, it obtrudes itself (and this under circumstances which can also be described) in another place—for example in the metabolic system where this is connected with the rhythmic system. Then there arises, in the wrong place, an abnormal tendency to produce a sense-organ; and this manifests itself as carcinoma—as a cancerous growth. It is only when we can look in this way into the human organism that we can perceive that carcinoma represents a certain tendency, displaced in respect of the systems, to the formation of a sense organ.

When we speak of the fertilisation of Medicine through Anthroposophy, it is a question of learning how abnormal conditions in the human organism arise from the fact that what is normal to one system transplants itself into another. And only by perceiving the matter thus is one in a position really to understand the human organism in its healthy and diseased states, and so to make the bridge from pathology to therapy, from observation of the patient to healing the patient.

When these things are represented as a connected whole, it will be seen how nothing that is said from this standpoint can in any way contradict modern medicine. As a first step in this direction I hope that very soon now the book [‘Fundamentals of Therapy,’ by Dr. Rudolf Steiner and Dr. Ita Wegman.] will be published that has been written by me in collaboration with Dr. Wegman, the Director of the Clinical and Therapeutic Institute at Arlesheim. This book will present what can be given from the spiritual-scientific standpoint, not as a contradiction of modern medicine but as an extension of it. People will then be able to convince themselves that it has nothing to do with the kind of superficiality which is so prevalent to-day. This book will show, in a way that will be justified by modern science, the fruitfulness that can enter into the art of Healing by means of spiritual scientific investigation. Precisely when these things can be followed up more and more in detail and with scientific conscientiousness, will those efforts be acknowledged which are being made by such an Institution as the International Laboratories of Arlesheim, [Now “Weleda,” A. G., Arlesheim.] where a whole range of new remedies is being prepared in accordance with the principles here set forth.

In the third lecture it will be my endeavour to consolidate still further (in so far as that can be done here in a popular manner), what has already been indicated as a rational therapy, by citing certain special cases of illness and the way in which they can be cured. Anyone who can really perceive what is meant will certainly not have any fear that the things stated cannot be subjected to serious test. We know that it will be the same in this as in all other domains of Anthroposophy; to begin with, there will be rebuffs, abuse and criticism by those who do not know it in detail. But those who do learn to know it in detail will stop their abuse. Therefore, in my third lecture I will go more into the particulars which will show that we are not evading modern science but are in full agreement with it, and that we proceed from the desire to enlarge the boundaries of Science by spiritual knowledge in the sphere of anthroposophical medicine.

Only when this is understood will the art of Healing stand upon its true foundations. For the art of Healing concerns man. Man is a being of body, soul and spirit. A real medicine can therefore only exist when it penetrates into a knowledge which embraces man in respect of all three—in respect of body, soul and spirit.

Before we can develop all that can be extracted from the significant picture of the ‘Twilight of the Gods’, it will be well to form a foundation, a basis, to work from. For we shall deal with the nature of the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-soul, and from the results of our investigation describe it more minutely. We must see how in Europe the whole collective spiritual life worked in co-operation, how through the activity of the various Folkspirits progress was brought about in mankind, beginning from the earliest ages and proceeding through our present age on into the future.

Each individual people, yea, even all the smaller subdivisions of peoples have their special task in this great collective picture; and you will perceive from what has been said, that in a certain respect it was just to the pre-Christian and post-Christian cultures of Europe that the task, the mission was given to educate the ‘I’ through the different stages of the human being, to form it and gradually to develop it. As we have shown to be the case in the Germanic Scandinavian people, the ‘I’ was in primal ages still clairvoyantly shown to man from the spiritual world. It was shown that this ‘I’ was bestowed upon man by an Angelic Being, who stands between man and the Folk-soul, by Donar or Thor. We have seen that each single individual felt himself to be ‘I’-less, impersonal; to him the ‘I’ was a gift, presented to him from the spiritual world. Naturally in the East, when the ‘I’ actually awoke, they did not find it in that way. There man had already evolved subjectively to such a high stage of human perfection, that he did not feel the ‘I’ as something foreign to him, but as his own. When in the East man awoke to the ‘I’, Eastern culture had already proceeded so far, that it was capable of gradually developing that delicately spun speculation, logic and wisdom, which we have before us in the Eastern Wisdom.

Therefore the East did not experience the whole process of receiving the ‘I’ as though coming from a higher spiritual world, with the assistance of a divine spiritual individuality such as Thor. This was experienced in Europe, and hence the European felt this gradual ascent to the individual ‘I’ as the emerging from a kind of group-soul. The Germanic Scandinavian still felt himself attached to a group-soul, belonging to a whole community, as if he were a part in the great body of his people. Thus only could it come about that nearly 100 years after the Christ-impulse had been given to the earth, Tacitus could describe the Germans of Central Europe as appearing to belong to separate tribes, and yet as members of one organism and belonging to the unity of the organism. At that time each individual still felt himself to be a member of the tribal ‘I’. He felt his individual ‘I’ being gradually born out of the tribal ‘I’, and in the God Thor he recognized the giver, the bestower of the ‘I’, the God who really presented him with the individual ‘I’. But he felt this God to be still united with the collective spirit of the tribe, with that which dwelt in the group-soul. To this group-soul was given the name Sif. That is the name of the spouse of Thor. Sif must linguistically be connected with the word Sippe-tribal relationship,—and this connection really exists, although veiled and hidden. Occultly, however, Sif signifies the group-soul of the individual community from which the single individual grows forth. Sif is the being who unites herself with the God of the individual ‘I’, with the giver of the individual ‘I’, with Thor. The individual man recognized Sif and Thor as the Beings who gave him his ‘I’. The Northman still felt thus about them, at a time when to the peoples in other parts of Europe other tasks had already been given in the educating of man up to the ‘I’.

Every single people has its particular task. There above all we find that people, that collection of peoples, that community of peoples whom we know by the name of Celts. The Folk-spirit of the Celts—of whom from former lectures we know that later he received quite different tasks—then had the task of educating the still youthful ‘I’ of the peoples of Europe. For this it was necessary that the Celts should receive an education and instruction which was communicated directly from the higher world. Hence it is perfectly true that through their Initiates, the Druid Priests, the Celts did receive instruction from the higher worlds which they could not have acquired by their own strength, and which they then had to hand on further to the other nations.

The collective culture of Europe is a gift of the European Mysteries. The progressive Folk-souls are, as they progress, always the leaders of the collective culture of humanity. But at the time when these Folk-spirits of Europe had to direct men to work from out of themselves, it became necessary that the Mysteries should begin to withdraw. Hence with the withdrawal of the Celtic element there took place a kind of withdrawal of the Mysteries into much more secret depths. At the time of the old Celts there was, through the Mysteries, a much more direct intercourse between the spiritual Beings and the people, because the ‘I’ was still united to the group-soul nature, and yet the Celtic element was to be the donor of the ‘I’ to the other part of the population. We might therefore say, that before the actual Germanic Scandinavian evolution began, the mystery-education could only be given to European civilization by the old Celtic Mysteries. This mystery-education allowed just so much to come to the surface as was necessary to form a foundation for the whole culture of Europe. Now out of this old culture, through intermingling with the many different races, peoples and subdivisions of peoples, the most varied Folk-souls and Folkspirits were able to fertilize themselves, and they brought the ‘I’ into ever different conditions in order to educate it, the ‘I’ which has worked its way up out of the foundations of all that lies below the ‘I’ of man.

After the old Greek culture had to a certain extent reached a culminating point in the fulfillment of its special mission, we see quite a different aspect of this same mission in the Roman Empire and its various stages of culture. We have already mentioned that the several post-Atlantean civilizations follow one another in certain order. If we wish to obtain a survey over these successive stages of post-Atlantean civilization, we may say that the old Indian culture worked upon the human etheric body. Hence the wonderfully wise, clairvoyant character of the old Indian culture, because—after the development of the special human capacities—it was a culture that was in the human etheric body; so that we may say, the ancient Indian culture is to be understood somewhat as follows (see diagram).

From the Atlantean down to the later post-Atlantean epoch the Indian Folk-spirit went through the whole of the development of the inner soul forces, without his ‘I’ being wakened. He then returned to his work in the human etheric body. The essential thing in the old Indian culture is that the Indian, with completely developed soul-forces, with soul-forces refined to the highest point, goes back again into the etheric body, and within that he perfects those wonderfully delicate powers, the later reflection of which we see in the Vedas and in a still more refined condition in the Vedantic philosophy. All this was only possible because the Indian Folk-soul had evolved to high degree before the ‘I’ was seen and realized, and this again occurred at a time when man could perceive by means of the forces of the etheric body itself.

The Persian Folk-soul had not progressed so far as this, only so far as to perception in the sentient body or astral body. It was again different at the time of the Egyptian-Babylonian-Chaldæan culture. That part of man which we describe as the Sentient Soul was then able to perceive, and we must therefore describe this Egyptian-Chaldæan culture as working in the Sentient Soul. The Græco-Latin Folk-spirit was directed to the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, and worked in that. He himself was only able to work upon this Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings because it had a sort of expression of its nature in the etheric body. But this form of world-conception which now appeared in Greece was less real, as it were, less objective, it bore less of the stamp of reality. Whereas in the old Indian culture there was a more direct activity in the etheric body, there was a more blurred, a fainter image of the reality, which, as I have said, was like a memory of what these peoples had once experienced, a memory reflected in their etheric body.

In the other peoples which then follow upon the Greek people we have to deal principally with the use of the physical body for the development, stage by stage, of the Spiritual Soul. Hence the Greek culture was one which we can only understand if we try to do so from within, if we realize that in this culture what is important in external experience is that which pours forth from the inner nature of the Greeks. On the other hand the peoples lying more towards the West and the North have the task, under the guidance of their Folk-souls, of directing their gaze out into the world, and of seeing what is there to be seen on the physical plane, and of perfecting that which has to play a part on that plane. The Germanic Scandinavian peoples had also the special task of perfecting this as they alone could, because they still enjoyed the blessing of being able to see into the spiritual world with the old clairvoyance, and to carry the primeval experiences which they perceived so vividly, into that which had to be arranged on the physical plane.

One people there was, which, at its later stage no longer possessed this blessing; which in the first place had not gone through such a previous evolution, but had been placed on the physical plane at one bound, as it were, before the birth of the human ‘I’ and therefore was only able under the guidance of its Folk-soul, of its Archangel, to look after that which helped this human ‘I’ on the physical plane, that which was necessary for its well-being there. This was the Roman people. Everything that the Roman people had, under the guidance of its Folk-spirit, to accomplish for the collective mission of Europe, was for the purpose of giving importance to the ‘I’ of man as such. Hence the Roman people was able to develop that which places the ego among other egos. It was able to found the whole system of the rights of the individual. Hence it was the creator of jurisprudence, which is built up purely on the ‘I’. The relation of one ‘I’ to another was the great question in the mission of the Roman people. The other peoples, which grew out of the Roman civilization, already possessed more of what—coming so to say from the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings and from the Spiritual Soul itself—in some way or other fertilizes the ‘I’ and drives it out into the world. Therefore all the mixtures of races of which external history relates, which occurred on the Italian and Pyrenean Peninsula, in present-day France and in present-day Great Britain, were necessary in order to develop the ‘I’ in the different shades of the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, and the Spiritual Soul on the physical plane. That was the great mission of those peoples which gradually developed in various ways in Western Europe.

All the several shades of culture and the missions of the peoples of Western Europe can finally be explained by the fact that there had to be developed in the direction of the Italian and Pyrenean peninsulas that which could be formed in the ‘I’ through the impulse of the Sentient Soul. If you study the several folk-characters in their light and shadow sides, you will find that in the peoples of the Italian and Pyrenean peninsulas there is a peculiar mingling of the ‘I’ with the Sentient Soul.

Then you will be able to understand the peculiar nature of those peoples who till now have lived in the land of France, if you consider the growth and mingling of the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings, with the ‘I’.

The great world-historical effects, however, which we may consider as represented by Great Britain, are to be traced back to the impulse of the Spiritual Soul penetrating into the human ‘I’. With the world-historical mission that proceeded from Great Britain is also connected that which proceeded from the founding of the external constitutional form. The union of the Spiritual Soul with the ‘I’ did not exist as yet inwardly. If, however, you recognize how this union came about between the Spiritual Soul and the ‘I’ that had been driven outwards, you will find that the great historical conquests made by the inhabitants of that island proceed from that impulse. You will also find that what took place there in the founding of the parliamentary forms of government at once becomes comprehensible, if you know that an impulse of the Spiritual Soul was to be placed on the plane of the world's history.

Thus many shades were necessary, for the several peoples had to be guided through many stages of the ‘I’. If we had sufficient time to follow these things on further we should find pictures in history which would show us how the basic forces branch and work out in the most various ways. Thus did the peculiar constitution of the soul work among the western peoples, who had not preserved in themselves the direct elementary remembrance of the clairvoyantly experienced things of the spiritual world of former times.

In later times, in the Germanic Scandinavian domains, that which proceeded directly from a gradual, successive evolution of primeval clairvoyance and which had already been poured into the Sentient Soul, had to develop in quite a different way. Hence that current of inwardness, which indeed is only the after-effect of a more inward clairvoyant experience gone through in a former age. The Southern Germanic peoples had in the first place their task in the domain of the Spiritual Soul.

The Græco-Latin age had to develop the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings. But it had not merely to give the impulse with this soul, it had to work also with a wonderful premature development that was endowed with clairvoyant experience. All this was poured into the Spiritual Souls of the Central European and Northern Germanic peoples. It worked among these souls as an inner capacity, and the Germanic peoples living more to the South had first of all to develop what pertains to the inward preparation of the Spiritual Soul, to fill it inwardly with the consciousness resulting from the old clairvoyance, but transposed on to the physical plane.

The philosophies of Central Europe, those philosophies which were represented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel as late as in the nineteenth century, are apparently far removed from the sphere of mythology, but they are nevertheless nothing but the result of the most penetrating old clairvoyance, acquired by man when he worked in co-operation with the divine spiritual Beings. It would otherwise have been impossible for a Hegel to have looked upon his ideas as realities, it would have been impossible for him to make the strange statement so characteristic of him, when, in answer to the question, ‘what is the abstract?’, he replied, ‘The abstract is for instance an individual man who performs his daily duties, let us say a carpenter.’ That, therefore, which to the abstract scientist is concrete, was abstract to Hegel. That which to the abstract scientist are mere thoughts, to him were the great, mighty architects of the world. Hegel's world of ideas is the final, the most highly sublimated expression of the Spiritual Soul, and contains in pure concepts that which the Northman still saw as sensible-super-sensible, divine spiritual powers in connection with the ‘I’. And when the ‘I’ was expressed in Fichte, it was nothing but a precipitation of what the God Thor had given to the human soul, now viewed from the Spiritual Soul in what seems to be the simplest of thoughts, the thought ‘I am,’ which is the starting-point of Fichte's philosophy. A straight line of evolution goes from the presentation of the ‘I’ by the God Thor or Donar to the old Northern peoples from the spiritual world, down to this philosophy. This God had to prepare all this for the Spiritual Soul in order that the latter might receive its fitting contents, for its task is to look out into the outer world and to work within that world. But this philosophy does not discover merely the external, crude, materialistic experience, it discovers in the external world the contents of the Spiritual Soul itself, and looks upon Nature merely as the other side of idea. Take this on-working impulse, and in it you have the mission of the Northern Germanic peoples in Central Europe.

Now, as all evolution has to progress, we must inquire: How does this evolution advance? When we look back into the ancient times we can see something remarkable. As we have said, in old India the first culture took place in the etheric body, after the necessary perfecting of the spiritual forces had been accomplished. But there are other civilizations besides, which have preserved the old Atlantean culture and carried it over into the people of the post-Atlantean epoch. Whereas on the one hand we have the Indian, coming thus to his etheric body, and from this and its forces creating his mighty civilization and his magnificent spiritual life, we have coming from the other side a culture which originated in Atlantis and continued to work on in the post-Atlantean epoch; a culture which for its foundation and development works out the other side, as it were, of the consciousness of the etheric body. That is the Chinese culture. If you bear this connection in mind, and remember that the Atlantean culture was directly related to what in our earlier lectures we called ‘The Great Spirit,’ you will understand the details of the Chinese culture. This culture was directly connected with the highest stages of the evolution of the world. But it still works into modern human bodies, and from a completely different side. It will therefore seem quite comprehensible that the two great opposites of the post-Atlantean epoch will one day clash in these two civilizations: the Indian, which, within certain limits, is capable of development; and the Chinese, that shuts itself off and remains rigid, repeating what existed in the old Atlantean epoch.

You really obtain an occult, scientific, poetic impression of this Chinese Empire if you observe it in its evolution, and think of the Great Wall of China, which was intended to enclose on all sides that which came from the primal ages and developed in the post-Atlantean epoch. I say that something like an occult poetic feeling steals over one, if one compares the Wall of China with something which existed in former times. I can only indicate these things. If you compare this with the results that have been obtained by science, you will find how extraordinarily illuminating these things are.

Let us clairvoyantly observe the old continent of Atlantis, which must be sought where the Atlantic Ocean now lies, between Africa and Europe on the one side, and America on the other. This continent was encircled by a sort of warm stream, a stream about which clairvoyant consciousness reveals that, strange as it may sound, it flowed upwards from the South, through Baffins Bay, towards the north of Greenland, encircling it and then, flowing over to the East, gradually cooled down; then, at a time when Siberia and Russia had not yet risen to the surface, it flowed down near the Ural mountains, turned, touched the Eastern Carpathians, flowed into the region occupied by the present Sahara, and finally streamed towards the Atlantic Ocean near the Bay of Biscay; so that it flowed in a perfectly unbroken stream. You will understand that only the remnants of this stream still remain. This is the Gulf Stream, which at that time encircled the Atlantean Continent. You will now also understand that, with the Greeks, the life of the soul is remembrance. The picture of Oceanos arose in them, which is a memory of that Atlantean epoch. Their picture of the world is not so very incorrect, because it was drawn from the old Atlantean epoch. The stream that came down by Spitzbergen as a warm current, and gradually cooled and so on,—the region encircled by this stream the Chinese have literally reproduced by enclosing within their Great Wall the culture which they rescued from the Atlantean epoch. There was as yet no history in the Atlantean civilization, hence the Chinese civilization is also in some ways lacking in history. Thus we have there something pre-Indian, something coming from Atlantis.

Let us now turn, in the further progress of the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-spirit, to the description of what follows it. What happens first of all, when a Folk-spirit so leads his people that the Spirit-Self can specially develop? Let us recollect that the Etheric Body was evolved during the Indian civilization, the Sentient Body in the Persian, the Sentient Soul in the Egyptian-Chaldæan, the Intellectual Soul or Soul of the Higher Feelings in the Græco-Latin, the Spiritual Soul in our own, which is not yet completed. Then comes the laying hold of the Spirit-Self by the Spiritual Soul, so that the Spirit-Self shines into the Spiritual Soul, which, as that is the task of the sixth stage of civilization, must be prepared for gradually. That civilization, which must be pre-eminently a receptive one, for it must reverently await the penetrating of the Spirit-Self into the Spiritual Soul, is being prepared by the peoples of Western Asia and the Slav peoples of Eastern Europe. These latter were pushed forward with their Folk-souls, for the very good reason that everything which is to happen in the future, must in a certain way be prepared beforehand, must already push itself in, in order to provide the elements for what is to follow.

It is extremely interesting to study these advance guards of a Folk-soul who is preparing himself for later epochs. This accounts for the peculiar nature of the Slav peoples at present living to the East of us. Their whole culture gives the Western European the impression of being in a preparatory stage, and they put forward in quite a curious way, through the medium of their advance guards, that which in spirit is quite different from any mythology.

It would be misunderstanding what is being pushed forward from the East as a civilization of the future, it would be misunderstanding this culture if we were to compare it with that which the Western European peoples possess, viz., an impulse that continues in a straight line, which is still rooted in and has its source in the old clairvoyance. The peculiarity attaching to the souls of these Eastern European peoples is expressed in the whole attitude they have always shown when their relations to the higher worlds have come into question. This relation, if we compare it with what appears in our mythology in Western Europe and the strange divine figures worked out even down to the individual character, is quite different. That which it offers appears to us in such a way that we may compare what it gives us as a direct out-pouring of the Folk-spirit, with our various planes or worlds, through which we prepare ourselves to understand a spiritual, a higher culture. For instance, we find there in the East the following conception: The West has received a series of successive worlds, lying side by side. In the East we find in the first place a distinct consciousness of a world of the Cosmic Father. Everything that is creatively active in air and fire, in all the elements in and above the earth, meets us as one great, all-embracing idea, which is at the same time an all-embracing feeling, the concept of the Heavenly Father. In somewhat the same way as we think of the Devachanic world as fertilizing our earth, so do we find this heavenly world, the world of the Father, coming towards us from the East, and it fertilizes that which is felt to be the Mother, the Spirit of the Earth. We have no other expression and can think of no other way of picturing the whole Spirit of the Earth than in the picture of the fertilization of Mother Earth.

Two worlds, then, confront one another there, instead of single individual Divine Figures. And what is felt to be the Blessed Child of these two worlds, stands in front of them as a third world. That is not an individual being, not a feeling in the soul, but something which is the product of the Heavenly Father and the Earth-Mother. In this way the relation of Devachan to the Earth is felt from the spiritual world. There, that which blossoms in the material body is felt as something altogether spiritual; and that which grows and blossoms in the soul, is perceived as the world which is at the same time felt to be the Blessed Child of the Heavenly Father and the Earth-Mother. Universal as these conceptions are we find them among the Slav peoples which have been pushed forward towards the West. In no Western European mythology do we find this conception so universal. We find in them clearly defined Divine Figures, but not that which we present in our Anthroposophy as the different worlds; these we find more in the Heavenly Father, the Earth-Mother, and the Blessed Child of the East.

In the Blessed Child there is again a world which permeates another one. It is a world which is, however, conceived of as being individual, because it is connected with the physical sun and its light. The Slav element also has this Being,—although in a differently developed form of conception and feeling,—which we have so often found in the Persian mythology; it has the Sun-being who so pours his blessings into the other three worlds that the destiny of man is woven into the creation, into the Earth, through the fertilization of the Earth-Mother by the Heavenly Father, and through that which the Sun-spirit weaves into both these worlds.

A fifth world is that which comprises everything spiritual. The Eastern European element feels the spiritual world as underlying all the forces of Nature and their creations. But this we must think of in quite a different shade of feeling, connected more with the facts, creations and beings of Nature. We must conceive of this Eastern soul as being in a position to see an entity in an occurrence of Nature, of seeing not only the physically-sensible, but the astrally-spiritual. Hence the ideas of an immense number of beings in this unique spiritual world, which we may at the most compare with the world of the Elves of Light. It is that spiritual world, which is looked upon in Anthroposophy as the fifth world, which dawns more or less in the feelings of the peoples of the East. Whether they call it by this name or that, does not signify; what does signify is that the feelings are colored and shaded, that the concepts which characterize this fifth plane or spiritual world are to be found in the world of the East. By means of these feelings this world of the East is preparing for that Spirit which is to bring the Spirit-Self into man, in readiness for that epoch when the Spiritual-Soul shall ascend to Spirit-Self, in the sixth age of post-Atlantean civilization, which is to succeed our own. We meet with this in a very unique manner not only in the creations of the Folk-Souls, which are as I have just described, but also in a wonderful preparatory fashion, in the various externalities of Eastern Europe and its culture.

It is very remarkable and extremely interesting to see how the Eastern European expresses his tendency of receptivity towards the pure Spirit by receiving with great devotion Western European culture, thus indicating prophetically that he will be able to unite something still greater with his being. Hence also the little interest he has in the details of this Western European culture. He receives what is presented to him more in broad outlines and less in details, because he is preparing himself to take up that which as Spirit-Self is to enter into mankind. It is particularly interesting to see how, under this influence, a much more advanced conception of Christ has been able to come in the East than in Western Europe, excepting where it has come about through Anthroposophy. Of all non-Anthroposophists the most advanced conception of Christ is that held by the Russian philosopher, Solovioff. It is so advanced that it can only be understood by Anthroposophists, because he develops it higher and higher and gives it an endless perspective, showing that what man is able to recognize in Christ to-day is only the beginning, because the Christ-impulse has as yet only been able to reveal to man a small degree of what it contains within it. But as regards the conception of Christ, if we look for instance at the way in which Hegel understood Him, we shall find that one may say: Hegel understood Him as only the most refined, most sublimated Spiritual Soul could.

But in Solovioff the concept of Christ is a very different one. He fully recognizes the two parts in this conception, and everything which has been expressed in the many theological disputes, and which in reality rest upon great misunderstandings, is put aside, because the ordinary conceptions do not suffice to make the idea of Christ in His twofold nature comprehensible; they do not suffice to make one understand that therein the human and the spiritual must be clearly distinguished. The concept of Christ rests upon clearly grasping what took place when the Christ entered into the Man Jesus of Nazareth, who had developed all the necessary qualities. There were, then, two natures which must first of all be comprehended as such, although at a higher stage they again form unity. As long as one has not grasped this duality, one has not realized Christ in His complete form. This can, however, only be done by the philosophical comprehension which has a premonition that man himself will reach a culture in which his Spiritual Soul will attain to a state into which the Spirit-Self can come; so that man will in the sixth age of civilization feel himself to be a duality in whom the higher nature will hold the lower nature under complete control.

Solovioff carries this duality into his conception of Christ and brings emphatically into notice that there can be no meaning in it unless one accepts the facts of a divine and a human nature, both really working together, so that they do not merely form an abstract but an organic unity, that thus only can this be understood. Solovioff recognizes that two Will-centers must be thought of in this Being. If you take the teachings of Spiritual Science as to the true significance of the Christ-Being, which proceed from the existence of, not an imaginary, but a spiritually real Indian influence, you then have to think of Christ as having developed within His three bodies the capacities of feeling, thought and will. There you have a human feeling, thinking and willing into which the divine Feeling, Thinking and Willing has immersed itself. The European will only thoroughly assimilate this when he has risen to the sixth stage of culture. This has been prophetically expressed in a wonderful way in Solovioff's conception of Christ, which like a rosy dawn announces a later civilization. Hence this philosophy of Eastern Europe strides with giant steps beyond that of Hegel and Kant, and when one enters the atmosphere of this philosophy, one suddenly feels as it were the germ for a future unfolding. It goes so much further because this conception of Christ is felt to be a fore-shining, the morning dawn of the sixth post-Atlantean civilization. By means of this the whole Christ-Being and the whole significance of Christ becomes the central point of philosophy, and it thus becomes a very different thing from what the Western European conceptions are able to offer concerning it. The conception of Christ,—so far as it has been worked out in non-Anthroposophical circles, in which it is comprehended as living substance which, as a spiritual personality, is to work into the social life and the life of the States, which is felt as a Personality in Whose service man finds himself as ‘man with the Spirit-Self,’—this Christ-Personality is worked out in a wonderful, plastic manner in the various expositions Solovioff gives of St. John's Gospel and its opening words. Again it is only on the ground of Spiritual Science that a comprehension can be found of what is so profoundly understood by Solovioff in the sentence, ‘In the beginning was the Word, or the Logos,’ and so on, of how differently St. John's Gospel is understood by a philosophy, which can be felt as a germinating philosophy which points in a remarkable manner to the future. Although on the one hand it must be admitted that in the domain of philosophy Hegel's work represents a most mature fruit, something that is born from the Spiritual Soul as a very ripe philosophical fruit, on the other hand this philosophy of Solovioff is the germ in the Spiritual Soul for the philosophy of the Spirit-Self, which will be added in the sixth age of culture.

There is perhaps no greater contrast than that eminently Christian conception of the State which hovers as a great ideal before Solovioff as a dream of the future, that Christian idea of the State and the people, which takes everything it finds in order to offer it to the down-streaming Spirit-Self to hold it towards the future so that it may be Christianized by the powers of the future:—there is really no greater contrast than this conception by Solovioff of a Christian community in which the Christ-idea is still a future one,—and the conception of the divine State held by St. Augustine, who accepted, it is true, the Christ-idea, but constructed the State in such a way that it was still the Roman State; he took up Christ into the idea of the State given him by the Roman State. The essential point is, that which provides the knowledge for the Christianity which is growing on into the future. In Solovioff's State Christ is the blood which runs through all social life, and the essential point is that the State is thought of in all the concreteness of personality, so that it acts indeed as a spiritual being, but it will fulfill its mission with all the characteristic peculiarities of a personality. No other philosophy is so permeated by the Christ-idea,—the Christ-idea which shines forth to us from still greater heights in Anthroposophy,—and yet remaining only at the germinal stage.

Everything that we find in the East, from the general feeling of the people up to its philosophy, comes to us as something that bears only the germ of a future evolution within it, and that therefore had to submit to the special education of that Spirit of the Age whom we already know; for we have said that the Spirit of the Age of the ancient Greeks was given as an impulse to Christianity, and was entrusted with the mission of becoming later on the active Spirit of the Age for Europe. The national temperament which will have to develop the germs for the sixth age of civilization had not only to be educated but to be taken care of, from the first stages of its existence, by that Spirit of the Age. So that we may literally say,—whereby the ideas of Father and Mother lose their separate sense,—that the Russian temperament, which is gradually to evolve into the Folk-soul, was not only brought up, but was suckled and fed by that which, as we have seen, was formed out of the old Greek Spirit of the Age and then acquired another rank, outwardly.

Thus are the missions divided between Western, Central, Northern and Eastern Europe. I wished to give you an indication of these things. We shall work further on the foundations of these indications, and show what will distinguish the future of Europe, and also show that we must form our ideals from such knowledge. We shall show how through this influence the Germanic Scandinavian Folk-spirit gradually transforms himself into a Spirit of the Age.

By linking much of what has been said lately with various outside information, you will have gathered one thing, namely, that our anthroposophical movement has entered a state that expects of each individual seeking to participate in it that he associate this participation with a profound sense of responsibility. I have repeatedly alluded to this but it is not always envisaged thoroughly enough. Just because we are placed within our movement, we must not lose sight of the terribly grave time presently faced by European civilization and its American cousins. Even if we ourselves would say nothing about the connection between the impulses generated by anthroposophically oriented spiritual science and contemporary historical events—although it is certainly necessary to speak up—such events would make an impact on our activities and inevitably would play a part in them without our having a hand in the matter. Therefore, the point is not to shut our eyes to the importance of what is indicated by such words.

From the interpretations put forward by Dr. Boos²⁰ yesterday, a number of friends who had not realized it before may have understood the necessary and practical connection existing between the idea of the threefold social order and the aims of anthroposophy.

The course of world events presently resembles that of an unusually complicated organism, and from all the various phenomena that must be carefully observed, the direction being taken by this organism becomes obvious. Much is happening today that initially makes an insignificant appearance. These seemingly unimportant events, however, frequently point to something immensely incisive and drastic. Again, things go on that clearly show the extraordinary difficulty we have in freeing ourselves from old familiar ideas in order to rise to a perception of what is in keeping with the times.

You can see from a number of newspaper reports of the last few days²¹ the effect made on the world by what issues forth from Dornach, how certain aspects of it are received by a number of persons. We should give these matters serious consideration, recognizing that every word we utter today must be well thought out. We should not say important things without assuming the obligation to inform ourselves about the course of world affairs in what is currently a most complicated organism. At the earliest opportunity I shall have to go into additional matters that have a bearing here; today I only wish to introduce the subject by saying that because of the connections of our movement with general world affairs it is above all else our duty to acquire a full understanding of the fact that we can no longer indulge in any sectarianism whatever in our movement. I have often mentioned this. The present time makes it necessary for us to rely on each individual co-worker, but each one bearing the full responsibility for what he represents in reference to our movement. This responsibility should take the form of an obligation never to say anything that does not appear through inner reasons to have the right relationship to the general course of contemporary world events. Sectarian activities are least of all in harmony with present-day world events. What is to be advocated today must be of a nature that can be represented before the whole world. It must be free in word and deed of any sectarian or dilettante character. We should never allow fear to deter us from sailing between Scylla and Charybdis.

Indicating a certain Scylla, many people may certainly say: How am I supposed to inform myself about what happens today when the course of events has become so complex, when it is so difficult to deduce the inner trends of facts from the symptoms? However, this should not lead to the Charybdis of doing nothing; it should induce us to steer the correct course, namely, to make us aware of our obligation to be in harmony with world events as far as possible, using all available means. It is certainly easier to say: This is anthroposophy and I am studying it; based on it, I engage in a little thinking, researching one or the other subject which I then represent before the world. If we wish to be active in the way indicated above without looking left or right, wearing blinkers in a sense in face of the great, important events of the present, we head straight for sectarianism. We are duty bound to study the contemporary course of events and, above all, to base our observations on the judgment we can acquire through the facts engendered by spiritual science itself.

Throughout the years, facts have been gathered together here for the purpose of enabling each individual person to form a judgment on the basis of these facts. They must not be left out of consideration when, based on our observations, a person wishes to give an opinion about something that is happening today. I mean to refer to this only in general terms, but plan to discuss it in greater detail at the first opportunity.

Today I should like to present something that will supplement what I said last Sunday about the nature of the human sense organism.²² I shall begin by pointing out a certain contradiction that I have often dwelt on before. On the one hand, without the general public knowing much about it, but nevertheless thinking along these lines, there exists the condition today of being infected in a sense with the natural scientific mode of thinking. On the other hand, we have one type of person still holding to the old traditional belief regarding moral or religious ideals; another has only skepticism and doubt, while for a third it is a matter of indifference. This great contradiction basically stirs and vibrates through all humanity today: How is the inevitable course of natural events related to the validity of ethical, moral and religious ideals?

I now wish to repeat what many of you may have already heard me say.²³ On the one side, we have the natural scientific world concept. It supposes that by means of its facts it can determine something about the course of the universe, in particular, that of the earth. And although it may consider its assertions to be hypothetical, they are imprinted into humanity's whole thinking, attitude and feeling. Our earthly existence is traced back to a kind of nebular condition. It is thought that everything arising out of this nebula is brought about entirely through the compulsion of natural laws. Again, the final condition of our earth's existence is also viewed as being based upon inflexible imperative laws, and concepts are formed about how the earth will meet destruction. Scientists base this kind of view on a widely accepted fundamental concept—even taught to school children—that the substance of the entire universe is indestructible, regardless of whether it is pictured as consisting of atoms, ions or the like. It is thought that at the beginning of earth's formation this substance was in some way compressed, then changed and metamorphosed, but that fundamentally the same substance is present today that existed at the beginning of earth evolution and that it will be present at the end, although compressed in a different form. It is supposed that this substance is indestructible, that everything consists only of transformations of this substance. The concept of the so called conservation of energy was added to this by assuming that in the beginning there were a number of forces which are then pictured as undergoing changes. Basically, the same sum of forces is again imagined to exist in the final condition of earth.

There have been only a few brave spirits who have rebelled against ideas of this kind. One of these I have often mentioned as a typical example, namely, Herman Grimm,²⁴ who has said: People talk of a nebulous state, of the nebulous essence of Kant-Laplace, at the beginning of the earth's or the world's existence. From it, it is supposed that everything on the earth, including the human being, has been compressed through purely natural processes. Furthermore, it is assumed that this undergoes changes until it finally falls back into the sun as a cinder. Now, Herman Grimm is of the opinion that a hungry dog nosing around the bone of a carcass presents a more attractive picture than this theory of Kant-Laplace concerning world existence, and that from a cultural and historical point of view people of the future will find it difficult to grasp how it had been possible for the nineteenth and twentieth century to have fallen victim to such pathological thinking. As I said, a few courageous individuals have opposed these ideas. The latter are so widespread today, however, that when somebody like Herman Grimm rejects them, it is said of him: Well, an art historian need not understand anything about natural science. When someone who claims that he is knowledgeable about natural science raises objections, he is regarded as a fool. These ideas are taken today as self-evident and the significance of this attitude is sensed by very few people. For, if this conception has even the slightest justification, all talk of moral and religious ideals is meaningless, for according to this conception these ideals are simply the product of human brains and rise up like bubbles. The social-democratic theorists label these ideals an ideology which has arisen through the transformations of substance, and which will vanish when our earth comes to an end. All our moral and religious concepts are then simply delusions. For the reality postulated by the natural scientific world-view is of a kind that leaves no room for a moral or religious outlook, if this scientific view of life is accepted in the way it is interpreted by the majority of people today. The point is, therefore, that, on the one hand, the time is ripe and, on the other, urgently requires that a world conception be drawn from quite different sources than those of today's education.

The only sources that make it possible for a moral and religious world concept to exist side by side with the natural scientific one are those of spiritual science. But they must be sought where they find expression in full earnestness. It is difficult for many people nowadays to seek out these sources. They prefer to ignore the glaring contradiction that I have once again brought to your notice, for they do not have the courage to assail the natural scientific world-view itself. They hear from those they look upon as authorities that the law of the conservation of matter and of energy²⁵ is irrefutable, and that anyone who questions it is a mere dilettante. Oppressed by the tremendous weight of this false authority, mankind lacks the courage to turn from it to the sources of spiritual science.

External facts also demonstrate that the well-being of Christianity, a true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, depends upon our turning to the sources of spiritual science. The external course of events does indeed show this. Look at the so-called progressive theologians and what is expounded by the more advanced representatives of Christianity. Materialism has, after all, fastened its hold even upon religion. One can no longer understand how the spiritual, divine principle that is indicated by the name, Christ, is united with the human personality of Jesus of Nazareth. For, today, it is only through the sources of spiritual science that insight concerning this union can be acquired.

Thus, matters have reached the point where even theology has grown materialistic and speaks only of “the humble man from Nazareth,” of a man who is reputed to have taught something more sublime than others, but in the end is only to be considered as a great teacher. One of the most eminent among present-day theologians, Adolf Harnack,²⁶ actually coined the words: “It is the Father, not the Christ, Who belongs in the Gospel.” In other words, the Gospel is not supposed to speak of Christ, because theologians such as Harnack are no longer familiar with the Christ; they know only the teacher from Nazareth. They are still willing to accept his teaching. The teachings concerning the Father, the Creator of the world, belong in the Gospel, but not a teaching about Christ Jesus himself!

Without doubt, Christianity would continue on this path of naturalization, of materialization, if a spiritual-scientific impulse were not forthcoming for it. In all honesty, no conception concerning the union of the divine and the human natures in Christ Jesus can be derived by humanity from what has been handed down to it by tradition. For that we require the uncovering of new sources of spiritual science. We need this for the religious life and also for giving the social conditions of our civilization the new structure demanded by current events. Above all, we need a complete reconstruction of science, a permeation of all scientific fields with what flows from the spiritual-scientific sources. Without this, we cannot progress. Those who think that it is unnecessary to be concerned with the course of the religious or the social life, the course of public events throughout the civilized world or the accomplishments of science; those who believe they can present anthroposophy in sectarian seclusion to a haphazardly thrown together group that is looked upon as a circle of strangers by the rest of the world, are definitely victims of a grievous delusion.

The sense of responsibility in face of the whole trend of present events underlies everything that I say here. It is the basis of every sentence, of every word. I have to mention this because it is not always understood with all seriousness. If people today continue referring to mysticism in the same manner as was done by many during the course of the nineteenth century, it is no longer in harmony with what the world currently demands. If the content of anthroposophical teaching is merely added to what otherwise takes place in the course of world events, this is also not in harmony with present-day requirements. Remember how the problem, the riddle of human freedom has been the central theme of the studies I have conducted for decades. This enigma of human freedom must be placed by us today in the center of each and every true spiritual-scientific consideration.

This must be done for two reasons. First, because all that has come down to us from the old Mysteries, all that has been presented to the world by the initiation knowledge of old is lacking in any real comprehension of the riddle of human freedom. Sublime and mighty were the traditions those mystery teachers could pass on to posterity. There is greatness and power in the mythological traditions of the various peoples that can indeed be interpreted esoterically, although not in the way it is usually done. Something grand is contained in the other traditions that have as their source the initiation science of ancient times, if only the latter is correctly understood. One aspect is lacking, however; there is no reference at all to the riddle of human freedom in the initiation science of the ancient Mysteries, in the myths of the various peoples—even when they are comprehended esoterically—or in the traditions deriving from this initiation science. For, whoever proceeds from a present-day initiation knowledge, from an initiation of today, knows how present initiation compares to that of the past. He knows that in the course of its worldwide evolution mankind is only now entering the stage of real freedom, and that formerly it was simply not necessary to give to human beings an initiation science impregnated completely with the riddle of freedom. Today, hardly anybody has an inkling of what this riddle of freedom includes, what condition the human soul finds itself in when it becomes clearly aware of the burden it shoulders due to this enigma. New light must be shed, after all, on all initiation knowledge due to this riddle of human freedom. We observe how certain secret societies carry on in direct continuation from former times, some of them being quite strongly involved in present-day life. They only preserve the traditions of the past, however, only imitating and continuing on in the sense of the old practices. These societies are nothing more than mere shadows of the past; indeed, they represent something that can only do harm to mankind if it is active nowadays.

We have to realize that if anyone today were to teach even the loftiest former mysteries, they would be detrimental to humanity. No one who understands the nature of present initiation can possibly teach in a timely sense applicable to our age what was once taught in the Egyptian, Chaldean, the Indian or even those still so near our time, the Greek mysteries. After all, what has been propagated up to now as doctrine concerning Christianity has all been produced by these traditional teachings. What is needed is that we comprehend the Mystery of Golgotha anew based on a new teaching. This is what must be considered on the one side.

On the other side, we see the course of world events. We see how the striving for the impulse of freedom rises up from subconscious depths of the human soul; how, at the present time, this call for freedom resounds through all human efforts. It does indeed pervade them, but there is so much that resounds in human striving that is not clearly understood, that only echoes up from subconscious levels yet to be permeated by clear comprehension. One might say that mankind thirsts for freedom! Initiation science realizes that it must produce an initiation knowledge that is illuminated by the light of freedom.

And these two, this striving of humanity and the creation of a new initiation wisdom, illuminated by the light of freedom, must come together. They must meet in all areas. Therefore, a discussion of the social question must not be based on all sorts of old premises. We can only speak of it when we view it in the light of spiritual science, and that is what people find so difficult. Why is that?

Mankind is indeed striving for freedom, freedom for the individual, and rightfully so. I emphasize: rightfully so. It is no longer possible for human beings to cooperate with group souls in the sense of the ancient group system. They have to develop into individualities. This striving, however, seems to be at variance with what is acquired by listening to initiation science, something that must obviously originate from individual persons in the first place. The ancient initiate had his own ways and means of seeking out his pupils and passing on to them the initiation wisdom, even of gaining recognition for them, himself and his Mystery center. The modern initiate cannot allow that, for it would necessitate working with certain forces and impulses of the group soul nature, something that is not permissible today. Thus, humanity's condition today is one where everyone, proceeding from whatever his standpoint happens to be, wishes to become an individuality. For that reason, he naturally does not care to listen to what comes from a human being as initiation science. Yet, no progress can be made until it is understood that men can become individualities only when, in turn, they accept the content of initiation science from other individualities. This is not only related to isolated ideological questions. It is connected with the basic nature of our whole age and its effects on the cultural, political and economic spheres. Humanity is yearning for freedom, and initiation science would like to speak of this freedom. We have, however, only just reached the point in the stage of mankind's evolution where sound human reasoning can grasp the idea of freedom. Today, we must gain insight into much that can be gathered from anthroposophical literature, and that I should like to summarize in turn from a number of viewpoints. It must be understood today what sort of being man is. All the abstract chatter concerning monism misses the point of true monism which can only be attained after one has gone through much else, but it cannot be proclaimed from the first as a world conception.

Man is a twofold being. On the one side, we have what may be called man's lower nature—the word leads to misunderstandings, but there are few words in our language that adequately express what one would like to convey from the spiritual-scientific standpoint—namely, the physical, corporeal organization of which he consists in the first place. I have described the latter to you in my last lecture in connection with the sense organization. Today, we shall not go into that but refer to it again tomorrow. Those of you, however, who have studied anthroposophical literature to any extent at all, have some idea of man's physical, bodily organization and know that it is connected to the surrounding environment. What constitutes the outside world and dwells out there in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, also constitutes us human beings in the physical, corporeal sense. In a way we are its concentration, elevated to a higher level, and figuratively one could say that we are the crown of creation. In the physical, bodily sense we are a confluence of the effects of forces and substances occurring outside and appearing before us through our sense perceptions.

On the other side, we have our inner life. We have our will, our feeling, our thinking and our conceptual capability. When we reflect upon ourselves, we can observe our own will, feeling and thinking, and permeate these with what we call our religious, moral and other ideals. Here, we arrive at what may be termed the man of soul and spirit. Again, this term may easily lead to misunderstandings, but it must be used. We cannot manage if we do not turn the gaze of our soul on one hand to this soul-spiritual human being, and on the other to the physical, corporeal man. But whether we study the facts of nature impartially or contemplate spiritual science, it is necessary to come to the realization: This physical, bodily organization is not really available to what human science, currently existing in the exoteric world, is able to grasp in any sense. If I am to clarify this schematically by means of a sketch, I should like to say: When I condense all that constitutes the human physical organization and its connection with the whole surrounding world (red in sketch), this continues to a certain point. I shall indicate that here by a line. Despite all modern amateurish objections of psychology, beyond this point and polarically differing from it, we have what may be called the soul-spiritual nature of man (yellow), that, in turn, is linked with a world of soul and spirit. That world appears most abstract to present-day human beings, because they grasp it only in the sense of abstract moral or religious ideals that have also become increasingly abstract conceptions. Yet, in regard to both sides of human nature, we are obliged to say: What is looked upon today as science encompasses neither man's physical body nor his soul-spiritual nature. We cannot recognize the physical corporeal nature of man. You can discover the reasons for this in my little book, Philosophy and Anthroposophy.²⁷ For, if man would penetrate into himself with inner vision, that is, if he were to look into the very depths of his being and perceive what is going on there, he would be able to do so exactly in the sense of what modern science deems "exact." Then, however, man could not be the being he is today, for he would have no memory, no facility of recollection. When we look at the world, we retain its pictures in our memory. This means that impressions of the world reach only as far as this barrier (see arrow in sketch). From there, they strike back into the soul and we remember them. What thus strikes back out of our own selves into memory conceals from us our physical bodily nature. We cannot look into it, for if we were able to do so all the impressions would merely be momentary, nothing would be thrown back to form recollections. It is only because this barrier acts as a reflector—after all, we cannot look behind a mirror either, its impressions are reflected back to us—that we cannot see inside ourselves. The impressions are reflected back to us unless we rise to spiritual science. If they were not thrown back, we would not have the reflected impressions of memory in ordinary life. We must be so organized as human beings in life that we have memories. Due to this, however, our physical bodily organization is concealed from us. Just as we cannot see through a mirror to what lies behind it, we cannot look behind or under the mirror of memory and behold the way the physical body of the human being is organized.

This is true psychology; this is the true nature of memory. Only when spiritual-scientific methods penetrate through this reflector in such a way that no use is made of the faculty of memory—as I have already mentioned in public lectures—and, instead, without recollection, one works each time with new impressions, only then are the true forms of body and soul discovered.

It is the same in the other direction. If, with our ordinary powers of cognition, we could penetrate the soul-spiritual concerning which I told you last Sunday that this is what is in truth located behind the world of the senses rather than atoms and molecules—and if we were not prevented, so to speak, by the boundaries and barriers of natural science, there would not be present in us something that is, in turn, needed in human life and must be developed by us between birth and death, namely, the capacity for love. The human capacity for love is created in us by the fact that, in this life between birth and death, if we do not advance to spiritual science, we have to forego penetrating the veil of the senses and seeing into the spiritual world. We retain the capacity of memory only by renouncing all ability to see into our own physical body. Thereby, however, we are exposed to two great illusions. The dogmatic adherents of the natural scientific world conception are at the mercy of one of these illusions. They pay no attention to initiation knowledge and do not come to the realization—in the way I described it to you last Sunday²⁸—that behind the veil of the senses there is no matter, no substance, no energy, of which natural science speaks, but soul-spiritual being through and through. Today, I must still reiterate with the same emphasis what I stressed in my commentary on the third volume of Goethe's scientific writings, namely, Goethe's Theory of Color.²⁹ Out there is the world's carpet of colors, the red, blue and green; out there are the other perceptions. No atoms and molecules are concealed behind it all, but spiritual beings. What is driven to the surface from these spiritual beings lives and expresses itself in the world's carpet of colors, in its relationships of sound and warmth and all the other sensations the world transmits to us.

Those, however, who are dogmatic followers of the natural scientific world view today do not realize this. They have no desire to listen to initiation science. In consequence, they begin to speculate about what is hidden behind color, warmth, and so forth, and arrive at a material construction of the world. However well founded this construction may seem for example, the modern theory of ions—it is always the result of speculation. We must not speculate about what is behind the world of the senses; we may only gain experiences there by means of a higher spiritual world. Otherwise, we must content ourselves to remain within the phenomena. The sense world is a sum of phenomena and must be comprehended as such.

Thus, we are given a picture of nature today which is then extended to include the state of the earth at its beginning and at its end—a picture that excludes an ethical and religious world view for the honest thinker.

The victims of the second illusion are those who Look within. For the most part, they do not go beyond what is reflected. Ordinary man in everyday life perceives the effects of memory—he recalls what he experienced yesterday and the day before, indeed, years ago. Someone who becomes a mystic today brings any number of things to the surface from within which he then clothes in beautiful mystical words and theories. But as I have recently pointed out,³⁰ these things are but the bubbling and seething of his inner organic life. For, if we penetrate this mirror, we do not come to what a Master Eckhart or Johannes Tauler have in their mysticism. We arrive at organic processes of which, it is true, the world today has scarcely any idea. What is clothed in such beautiful words is related to these organic processes as the flame of a candle is related to the flammable material—it is the product of these organic processes. The mysticism of a John of the Cross, of a Mechthild of Magdeburg, or of Johannes Tauler and Master Eckhart³¹ is beautiful, but nevertheless, it is only what boils up out of the organic life and is described in abstract forms merely because one lacks the insight into how this organic life is active. He can be no true spiritual scientist who interprets as mysticism the inwardly surging organic life. Certainly, beautiful words are used to describe it, but we must be capable of taking a completely different viewpoint from that of the ordinary world when referring to these matters. We ought not to adopt the humanly arrogant standpoint and say: The inner organic life is the lower form of life. It is not elevated if its effects are designated as mysticism. On the contrary, we are impelled into the life of the spirit when we discern this organic life and its effects and realize that the more we descend into man's individual nature, the more we distance ourselves from the spiritual. We do not approach it more closely. We draw near the spirit only by way of spiritual science, not by descending into ourselves. When we do the latter, it is our task to discover how the collaboration of heart, liver and kidneys produces mysticism; for that is what it does.

I have often pointed out that the tragedy of modern materialism is that it actually cannot perceive the material effects, indeed, that it cannot even reach as far as the material effects. Today we have neither a true natural science nor a genuine psychology. True natural science leads to the spirit, and the kind of psychology progressing in the direction that we have in mind today leads to insight into heart, liver and kidneys, not the abstractions our modern, amateurish psychology speaks of. For what is frequently called thinking, feeling and willing today is an abstract set of words. People lack insight into the concrete aspects, and it is easy to accuse even sincere spiritual science of materialism just because it leads into the nature of material elements in order to guide us in this way to the spirit.

It will be the specific task of true spiritualism to unveil the nature of all matter. Then it will be able to show how spirit is effective in matter. It must be taken quite seriously that spiritual science ought not to be concerned with the mere logicality of knowledge, but has to aim for a knowledge that is action. Something must be done—with regard to knowing. What is taking place in the process of cognizing must become involved in the course of world events. It must be something factual. It was just this that I was trying to indicate last Sunday and the days before. It is a matter of arriving at the realization that spirit as such must be comprehended as a fact; no theory concerning the spirit may be developed. Theories should only serve to lead to living experience of the spirit. This is the reason why it is so often necessary for the true spiritual scientist to speak paradoxically. We cannot persist today in talking in the customary formulations when we speak about spiritual science; otherwise, we come to what an erroneous theosophy has led to. It mentions any number of the members of man's being—the physical man, the etheric and astral being—each one more tenuous than the last. Physical man is dense, the etheric is less so, the astral being is still more rarefied. There are utterly tenuous mental and other states that are increasingly delicate, a perceptible mist, but all remain a mist, they all remain matter! That, however, is not the point. What does matter is that one learns in substance itself to overcome material. This is why one must frequently employ words that have a different connotation from the one customary in everyday life.

Therefore, we must say—and that matter will become clearer to us tomorrow: Take, on the one side, a person who is of a thoroughly materialistic mind and has been led astray, shall we say, by present-day materialism, one who cannot raise himself to a view of anything spiritual and, according to theory, is a complete materialist, considering any mention of the spirit pure nonsense. Suppose, however, that what he says concerning matter is intelligent and really to the point. This man, then, would have spirit. Although, by means of his spirit, he might uphold materialism, he would have spirit.

Then, let us look at another person who is a member of a theosophical society and adheres to the viewpoint: This is the physical body, then comes the more rarefied etheric body, followed by a more tenuous astral body, mental body, and so on. It does not take much spirit to make these assertions. Indeed, such a theory can be represented with very little spirit. The expounding of such a spiritual world is then, strictly speaking, a falsehood, because in reality one only pictures a material world phrased in spiritual terms.

Where would a person look who is genuinely seeking for the spirit? Will he seek it by turning to the materialistic theorist who has spirit, albeit in a logical manner, or will he turn to the one who makes plausible statements, so to say, but whose words refer only to matter? The true spiritualist will speak of the spirit in connection with the former, the one who represents a materialistic world conception, for there spirit can be present, whereas no spirit need be present in expounding a spiritual view. What is important is that spirit is at work, not that one speaks of spirit.

I wished to say this today merely to clear up certain matters that seem paradoxical. The spirited materialist may be more filled with spirit than the exponent of a spiritual theory who presents it spiritlessly. In the case of true spiritual science, the possibility no longer exists merely to dispute logically about ideological standpoints. It becomes imperative to grasp the spirit in its actuality. That is impossible unless one first comprehends some preliminary concepts such as those of which we have spoken today and shall be considering further tomorrow.

• 20. Dr. Roman Boos's descriptions, given on August 13, 1920, were not recorded. He reported orally on them to Dr. Steiner.
• 21. Refers to a news report carried by the French, German and Swiss press, according to which the German Foreign Minister, Simons, had supposedly told a reporter of the “Impartial” that he was a follower of the reforms suggested by Rudolf Steiner (the threefold social organism). See, among others, “Basler Nachrichte,” 1920, #345, August 14, in which an article is quoted from the “Vossische Zeitung” of August 6. In the lecture of April 22, 1921, in answer to a particularly crude article in which Simons was described as “the favorite disciple of the Theosophist, Steiner,” Rudolf Steiner made the following comment: “In the weekly magazine which is primarily the mouthpiece of widespread public opinion, we note in the last issue that public sentiment was being worked up against Simons' policies. It goes without saying that neither anthroposophical spiritual science nor the threefold movement have anything to do with Simons' politics. It is out of a spirit of deep untruthfulness that anthroposphical spiritual science is lumped together with Simons' policies.”
• 22. See Lecture III of this volume.
• 23. See the lecture of March 18, 1920; printed in “Menschenschule,” Pamphlet 6, 1958.
• 24. Hermann Grimm: 1828–1901, Goethe-Vorlesungen, Vol. 2, Berlin, 1877.
• 25. This law was first proclaimed by Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878), doctor and scientist. See Rudolf Steiner: Erdensterben und Weltenleben, GA 181, Lecture XII (not included in English translation of this cycle). Dornach, 1967.
• 26. Adolf von Harnack: 1851–1930. The quotation literally says: “Not the Son, but only the Father belongs in the Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it.” In Das Wesen des Christentums, Leipzig, 1900.
• 27. Rudolf Steiner: “Durch den Geist zur Wirklichkeits-Erkenntnis der Menschenraetsel: Philosophie und Anthroposophie. Vier Maerchen (aus den Mysteriendramen). Anthroposophischer Seelenkalender. Der Seelen Erwachen, 7.u. 8. Bild,” Berlin, 1918. Compiled upon requests by friends and published in book-form for the German soldiers on the front.
• 28. See Lecture III of this volume.
• 29. See Note #4
• 30. See Lecture II of this volume.
• 31. See Note #17

My dear friends,

In the last lecture here¹ I called your attention to the fact that the conditions obtaining all over the civilised world can be understood in the light of knowledge of the incarnations of the souls now living in the bodies of the different peoples. I said that the truths of Anthroposophy must be recognised in the world of outer reality and that we must cease to think of the historical evolution of mankind merely as a straightforward working of external forces which flow through the generations. Let us realise once and for all that events such as they are at the present time cannot be explained by the forces working through the blood of consecutive generations. Present happenings can never be intelligible to us until we realise that the souls now in incarnation have come from quite other regions than those inhabited by the physical forefathers of human beings living at the present time. In the last lecture I tried to throw light upon this subject and today we will consider the whole situation from another angle.

I shall, of course, have to speak of many things which have been dealt with in other lectures from different points of view, but the deepening of our inner life is essential if we are to prove equal to the tasks confronting us today. The tasks of the present age will be altogether too much for humanity if only a few scattered individuals here and there have any real inkling of their vastness. We are living at a time when the impulse for what ought to come to pass must go out from large numbers of human beings, and we must therefore work to the end that as many souls as possible become conscious of the needs of the day. Men must begin to tread the upward path, they must come to the point where they desire this upward path, for not to desire it means the onset of degeneration.

Now in addition to what I said in the previous lecture about the incarnation of souls into the bodies of the present age, there is another point to be considered.

In spiritual research it becomes quite obvious that a great number of souls who must now come down from the spiritual worlds into physical bodies, look upon their incarnation with a certain antipathy and disinclination. At the present time—and this fact is at the bottom of many of the conditions in which the world now finds itself—there is a certain element of insecurity in the prospect of incarnation into a physical body. In saying this, of course, I am referring to the experiences of the soul—experiences which have preceded incarnation into a physical body and which do not form part of the content of ordinary memory. I am speaking of something of which most men today are quite unconscious, but it can nevertheless become conscious, if the knowledge born of spiritual investigation is brought to bear on the events and phenomena of the present age. This application of spiritual knowledge to what is happening all around us today is a task we must take very, very seriously to heart.

The present age is different in many essential respects from ages gone by. You know well that I never like to speak about an ‘age of transition’. That is a mere slogan, for every age is an age of transition. The point is what it is that is in transition. To say that an age is one of transition means very little, for the important thing is to recognise the nature of the impulses that are coming over from the past into the present and must be overcome, and to know what must be prepared for the future. The conditions of life in this 20th century in which we are living are such that the souls now incarnated in physical bodies are destined to have very significant experiences in their earthly life. Their experiences will be significant and, in a certain respect, decisive. If you think of all that can be experienced at the present time and attempt to compare this with the experiences of human beings of an earlier age, you will very soon realise that no comparison is possible between the events of this present age and those of earlier times of which historical records tell us.

Many examples could be quoted in confirmation of what I have just said, but I will give one only. Speaking from the spiritual point of view of that particular region of the earth where we ourselves are living, one cannot help saying that there is really something terrifying in the rapidity with which changes have taken place in Middle Europe since, shall we say, the middle of the 19th century. These changes are still going on, but as a rule people do not notice what has happened and is actually happening. Those who have any insight will be able to discern an extraordinary difference in the thinking of men of Middle Europe seventy or eighty years ago and their thinking today—and the difference is most of all marked in the life of feeling and perception. Men’s attitude of soul has changed in a most extraordinary way. And there is something more to be said. The truth is that people sleep through the most important happenings—at any rate the majority of people sleep through them. None the less the events happen—whether they are noticed or not.

There are well-meaning writings today, emanating from the pens of English and American authors who profess the greatest sympathy with their follow-creatures in Middle Europe and with their material needs. Such sympathy is all right in its way but Middle Europe must be very wide-awake to what really lies at the bottom of it. For when we consider the conditions of outer life and realise that Middle Europe today stands more than ever in the key position between the East and the West (and by the West I mean those regions where Anglo-American culture predominates) it seems that Middle Europe is threatened with utter ruin, so far as her spiritual life is concerned. Please do not misunderstand me. It is quite possible to be full of sympathetic understanding of the material crisis—indeed that is not at all difficult in these days of dire distress—but to understand the spiritual crisis is quite another matter. And it is the spiritual crisis of Middle Europe that is the crux of it all today. Leaving aside what is said out of prejudice, what you yourselves might say out of prejudice, let us try for once to realise what lies in the womb of current events in respect of the spiritual destiny of Middle Europe. Is not everything tending in the direction of the utter extermination of the spirituality which belongs essentially to Middle Europe? When one faces this fact fairly and squarely, one is surely conscious of an impulse to do one’s very utmost to enable the true spirituality of Middle Europe to live and prosper. If impulses for strong and effective action are lacking, then the East and the West will come together above the head of Middle Europe—come together, to begin with probably in terrible enmity, but finally in an impulse which truly cannot be for the well-being of Middle Europe. This impulse will then grow into a world culture, a world-civilisation.

Now what I am saying here is connected with the antipathy which the souls now descending to the Earth feel towards their incarnation in physical bodies, as physical bodies are today. I told you in the last lecture that many souls who were incarnated in earlier times in Middle Europe are living at present in Eastern bodies. These souls were by no means delighted at the prospect of incarnating in such bodies. Nor did the souls now living in the West, in America and in many parts of England who as you know, were incarnated in Oriental bodies a long time ago—nor did these souls enter their incarnation with anything like the same willingness as they felt in earlier times of earthly evolution. Neither in the East nor in the West are souls living in their bodies in quite a normal way—if one may put it so. This is quite obvious when we study modern civilisation in the light of Spiritual Science.

And now let us think of the human beings incarnated at the present time in the East, and of the kind of bodies in which these souls are living. These souls who are now living in the East and even in the Eastern part of Europe especially the most representative among them—have within them, as a consequence of the antipathy they felt towards their incarnation, the tendency not to enter fully into the arena of earthly events, not to be deeply engrossed in facts and happenings on Earth. There is an inborn disinclination in the souls of the East, precisely in the most outstanding men, to acquaint themselves with and join in with the outer forms of the culture that has grown up in Middle Europe and in the West, with its natural science and its technology. And again, in utter contrast to what was precisely the best quality of soul in the men of Middle Europe in earlier times, it is quite apparent that many souls living there today have also been infected with this disinclination to enter fully into the facts and conditions of life as they are at the present time. This disinclination is due to the circumstances attendant upon incarnation. But let us for once observe life in our age, entirely without prejudice. There are so many today who in quite a wrong way like to hark back to the old spiritual conceptions of the East, who want to take refuge in a mystical life, who would like, in other words, to introduce into our altogether different existence conceptions which were right in ancient Oriental civilisation but have now become decadent.

Mysticism dreamily aloof from the world—that is one thing that is so harmful at the present time. Moreover, it exists in many different forms, my dear friends, it exists in those who are enamoured of anything savouring of Eastern spiritual life. It exists too in a form less patently evident but to which we should be fully alive. Over the whole of the civilised Earth today, from East to West and from West to East, men have fallen into strange grooves in regard to something that is intimately connected not only with culture, but with life in all its branches—namely, speech. The further East we go, the more do we find evidence of the fact that no real endeavours are made to bring speech right down to the physical plane, to let speech be imbued with definite impulses of the soul. There is a tendency to be careless about words, not to be wholly in them, to let speech be carried away by feeling. There is an unwillingness to make speech conform to conditions as they actually are on the physical plane, to let its forces stagnate in a realm of ecstatic, inner experiences. It is symptomatic at the present time, my dear friends, that there are so many who look with scorn upon efforts to make speech really plastic and adaptable. Such people consider this altogether too intellectual, too blatantly expressive of conditions as they are on the physical plane. They would prefer speech to be pervaded with an element of obscurity, and they think that no language can be poetic unless it has this quality of twilight obscurity, as it were. When someone tries to make every word or sentence voice a reality that has been actually experienced, he is not looked upon with favour, for people prefer to chatter on without having really lived with the actualities for which speech ought to be a means of expression. This unwillingness to live in the world of stern realities is very characteristic of large numbers of people today. And the same tendency is more or less common in the languages themselves, the further we get to the East.

On the other hand, the languages of the West have a different characteristic. Efforts are made in the West to bring language into line with actual reality, to get at the realities by means of language, but the language itself is not kept sufficiently plastic. It does not fully adapt itself to what it sets out to describe. This is connected with other tendencies of the West, for the West is, after all, the home of that kind of observation and thinking which never gets as far as man himself. Take Darwinism, for example. And here I am not speaking of the Darwin fanatics, but of Darwinism in its essence. Darwinism is a splendid help towards promoting an understanding of the animal kingdom and makes it clear that man stands at the summit of the animal kingdom, but it does not even try to comprehend the being and nature of man. And in the West too we find the strangest conceptions of social life which really exclude man himself from the picture altogether. In Western economics the essential factor is not man as man, but what attaches to him in the way of outer, material possessions. The personal possessions of a human being really constitute the individuality in the realm of national economies—not the man himself at all. In the West people do not speak of the freedom which has its source in the living being and nature of man. They only speak with conviction of economic freedom—nothing more. And it has been so since the time of Adam Smith and even before that. People talk about economic freedom, about what a man is able to throw into the scales of civilisation because he possesses something: they talk about the things he can enjoy in the world because his possessions make him economically independent, and so on. But one never hears mention of what man really is, of the force that springs from his innermost being—namely of his real freedom.

All these things are indications of much deeper truths. The souls who incarnate with a certain antipathy today in Eastern bodies because outer conditions force this upon them, do not want to let the faculties of knowledge inherent in these bodies come to grips with Earth realities. They prefer to keep their consciousness remote from Earth reality. Such an attitude of soul is eminently Luciferic, and it is this Luciferic element that comes over from the East.

On the other hand, the souls incarnated in the West have a predominantly Ahrimanic tendency. They will not take possession of their bodies in such a way as to enable the senses to interact freely and open-handedly, as it were, with the world. They sink so deeply into their bodies that these bodies are not entirely permeated with the spiritual forces. In other words, the soul lives in a body but does not permeate it fully. There can be only one outcome of such a condition—a condition where the soul is living in a physical body but the senses act as a hindrance to a free relationship with the world around. If a man’s senses function freely and enable him to open himself to the world, then he perceives not only material reality, but the spiritual which is there behind this material reality. This underlying spirituality cannot be discovered if the soul does not fully permeate the body, that is to say, does not reach as far as the periphery. Such is the tendency of the West. And because of this, many Western bodies are so constituted that as the bodies grow on to maturity, the indwelling souls cannot fully express themselves. And when this happens the bodies can become the dwelling places of beings of quite another order—beings who lull to sleep the qualities and forces that are inherent in the human soul. One tendency or mood of soul emanates from the East, and this other from the West. The nature of the tendency which comes over from the East is to preserve ancient and more instinctive modes of feeling, perception and aspiration in man—instinct which do not allow him to come fully down to Earth or really get to grips with the situation as it actually is upon the Earth. And in the West, the tendency is to ignore the ever evolving spirituality that is implicit in all existence and to remain stationary at the point of evolution that has been actually reached. The tendency of the West is to conserve the present state of humanity, to conserve its materialistic consciousness and its materialistic modes of life and action. The tendency of the East is to prevent man from really getting down to material life on Earth, to prevent him from living in the present with alert and wide-awake consciousness. And so from both sides—from the East and the West—influences are at work to prevent man from fully and consciously understanding the present. And these influences are strengthened by a terrible fear which, all unconsciously, is taking possession of mankind. Everyone who can put aside prejudice in his observation of the present age of weighty decisions must face these decisions with alert and wide-awake consciousness. Now it is possible in two ways to spare oneself from facing the decisions that have to be made in this age. One way is to become a fanatical mystic or theosophist and reiterate in a superficial way the phrase: “Ex Orient Lux”—“Light from the East.” This attitude induces a feeling of inner bliss, a desire to flee away from actual happenings. People imagine that they are rising above these happenings. They congratulate themselves on being wonderful mystics or theosophists and they look down with scorn on everything that is going on around them in what they regard as the inferior world of matter. This is the harmful tendency at the one extreme, whereas at the other extreme—which is connected more with Western influences—there are the rank materialists. Being afraid to face the decisions with which the present age is fraught, the materialists declare that man is merely the product of physical and physiological processes, that it is pure nonsense to talk about decisions, and that to speak of the spirit is mere superstition. Men flee from spirituality on the one side and from materiality on the other.

And so today we find two extremes in the life of soul: on the one side materialism which is Ahrimanic, and on the other side mysticism which is Luciferic. Originating in the West and spreading over towards the East there is the tendency of thought which takes matter as the basis of the mechanistic natural science which has such a potent influence upon the whole of our culture. Originating in the East and spreading over towards the West, there is a tendency which influences just as many minds today. And one can only hope that Anthroposophy will not be harmed by those who expound it as if it were fantastic mysticism. This other tendency, the tendency to let the mind linger in realms far removed from earthly realities, is exemplified by the comparatively recent ideas of theosophy. Theosophy has tried to dig up from the East teachings which have long since become antiquated and are no longer suited to the human being as he is today.

These are the two extremes which may well unite, in spite of an apparently bitter opposition caused by outer circumstances and inner contrast. And it is because of the existence of these two streams of influence that the spiritual life of Middle Europe has fallen upon such evil days. Trivial though these words may sound, they express a truly tragic state of things to which we must be fully alive. To put it rather drastically, one would say that Middle Europe ought to represent the higher synthesis, the harmony of these two extremes at a higher level. And it is only this harmony that will promote progress in the human race. Streams of spiritual life have come to the surface in Middle Europe from deep foundations, in spite of the fact that they were overpowered, to begin with, by an intellectualism which manifested itself in German idealistic philosophy. The philosophy of Fichte, Hegel, and finally, Schelling, represented the apotheosis of a stream of spiritual life which could have led on into true Spiritual Science, but the time was not ripe for it.

Nowadays it really seems as if all the world had conspired to nip this impulse in the bud. Let me put it in this way: From the East and from the West, Lucifer and Ahriman swore to each other to make this synthesis impossible of realisation. For just think of it: here, in this central region of the Earth there have been men who although they were in many ways brought to a standstill by the conditions of the times, strove none the less for pure spirituality, and at the same time for a true knowledge and understanding of Nature. In Goethe, for instance, there is a wonderful alternation between his perpetual desire for a spiritual conception of the world and his eagerness to observe the outer phenomena of Nature. How strenuously Goethe endeavoured to find concordance between what the spirit whispered to him and what nature revealed to him. And it is precisely this attitude of soul that is rooted in Middle Europe as a whole.

And yet we have seen this attitude of soul overpowered and gradually succumb to the influence of the West. We have seen it in our science which has become utterly ‘Westernised’—if I may use this expression—inasmuch as its methods reject spiritual altogether. Science is sometimes willing to acknowledge a belief in the spiritual but it is utterly unwilling to do anything to spiritualise the methods it employs in research. And then think of those who work on the principle of obstructing all true aspiration. What have we not had to endure from such people within a civilisation, be it remembered, which produced a work like Schiller’s Aesthetic Letters—a work which could have given a most wonderful impetus to the life of soul and Spirit. And yet within this same civilisation, men turned in large numbers to the twaddle of American mystics, of Ralph Waldo Trine² and others. Compared to the real spiritual substance of Middle Europe, this kind of writing is inferior in the extreme, for it is nothing but an egotistical striving for inner well-being, not for a genuine upliftment of the spiritual life. This is one example of the strength of the tendency which desires that the inherent qualities of the soul in Middle Europe shall be overshadowed and subdued by Western influences.

Obviously, my dear friends—and to Anthroposophists it will certainly be obvious—obviously this is not meant to imply anything against individuals. Equal respect is due to human beings all over the wide Earth. But is that which lives in individual men the same thing as the culture which pervades these souls and forms the atmosphere of civilisation as a whole? Is it correct to say that when one deprecates the nature of the spiritual influences of the West he is thereby casting aspersion upon individual men in the West? No, indeed, he is merely pointing to what is there in the West as a spiritual atmosphere.

But on the other hand there are very many in Middle Europe too who love to get hold of some fragment, whatever it may be, of ancient Eastern wisdom. This craze for dabbling in Oriental wisdom is a source of great pain to men of real understanding. Even in the case of the Bhagavad Gita, which is comparatively easy to understand, we must be quite clear that what a man of Middle Europe can get from the Bhagavad Gita today is at most something he himself reads into it. It is not the true wisdom of the East at all, for the East itself no longer possesses that. Many people are delighted to think that they can meditate on some passage taken from the Bhagavad Gita, but in essence they can get nothing of any real significance. They are merely falling back on something which gives them a sense of inner exaltation and well-being, because they are not courageous enough to absorb the spiritual atmosphere which in these middle regions of the Earth could work as a balancing factor. One cannot help saying that the advent of Eastern theosophy, as it is called, contains elements which for some considerable time now have been a harmful influence in Middle Europe. This, of course, does not imply that certain Eastern terms or certain Eastern concepts should not be used, or that one should not try one’s best to understand the East. It refers to quite other things, namely to those things I have been trying to indicate today.

Let it be clearly understood that devotion, no matter whether it be to the blatant materialism of the West, or to the masked materialism of Ralph Waldo Trine or Christian Science³—for these things are nothing but materialism from the other side—devotion to such things and to forms of mysticism will inevitably lead to retrogression in the realm of spiritual life. The elements that would be capable of furthering progress are there already, although they are under the surface of Middle European civilisation, overlaid by the influences that are striving to come together from the East and from the West.

As you will realise from my writings and lecture courses, the Bible and the New Testament in the form in which we have them today, have suffered essentially the same fate as other writings emanating from the East. We have the Bible, but not in its true form. Its true form can only be revealed through Spiritual Science because Spiritual Science alone can quicken the living intelligence that is essential for penetrating to the heart and core of such writings. And as soon as one tries to make the Bible and the New Testament really living, the official representatives in this domain today—men like Traub⁴ and his type—they are the very first to tell the world that it is all fantastic and thoroughly evil.

Here in Middle Europe there have been men who on the one hand possessed real insight into the widespread world of Nature and on the other have genuinely aspired to the Spirit. And this is what is so necessary today, for only in this way is progress possible. In the realm of knowledge it is just as essential on the one side for men to deepen their insight into Nature, as it is essential on the other to deepen their understanding of Spiritual Science. The whole truth is not to be found on the one side alone. The concordance of both impulses in the soul—this alone reveals the whole truth. And it is just the same in practical life. Progress will never be brought about by a one-sided religious life remote from the affairs of the world, or by the methods of cut-and-dried routine which govern our public life today. Only those can make progress who on the one hand adjust themselves to the practical measures demanded by affairs of the outer world and on the other hand are willing to combine the demands of the outer, material world, with qualities that can be developed in Spiritual Science. Education in Spiritual Science will promote skilfulness—not a superficial skilfulness but a skilfulness which means that our actions will be irradiated by an inner spirituality and determined by a definite attitude of soul. Only so can we hope to prove equal to the tasks confronting us at the present time.

Many people are averse to Spiritual Science today because for one thing it is not afraid to speak frankly and openly of spiritual facts; and also because it speaks, just as physics speaks of anodes and cathodes, of the fact that souls come down into earthly bodies from the spiritual world in moods either of sympathy or of antipathy. Because Spiritual Science directs its attention on the one side to the phenomena of nature and on the other to spiritual facts, it is rejected by many, many people. Spiritual Science is rejected by those who have eyes only for the outer world of nature because they can get nothing from it whatever and think it mere words. It is rejected too by those who like to bask in a world of vague, mystical thoughts and old religious traditions, for such people have made no contact with life as it actually is in the present age. Spiritual Science is also ignored by those whose ideas are altogether lacking in substance and who spin out words and phrases after the style of many modern philosophers and of some, indeed, who found modern ‘Schools of Wisdom’ as they are pleased to call them. But, my dear friends, a lip-wisdom which refuses to penetrate into the facts of nature is no use at all. Vague, fantastic mysticism is no use either, nor can we make any headway whatever with a spiritless science which tries to fathom the things of nature. What we need is a synthesis, a union of both streams, for that alone can give us the reality.

It must be remembered that in Middle Europe the forms which language has assumed imbue it with an inherently plastic quality. The language itself gives the impression that it is one with the innermost being of man, with the whole attitude and mood of his soul. And on the other side, the fundamental forms of the language of Middle Europe strive to pour themselves outwards, really to lend themselves to the flow of events in the outer world. In the language of men like Goethe and Hegel, the germ of this quality is quite clearly evident. And it is a germ that is capable of infinite development.

It is not to be wondered at that Spiritual Science is scorned either deliberately or unconsciously by those who have been infected by Eastern or Western influences. But from its side, Spiritual Science must never cease to realise its task and mission. It has been a duty on my part to speak to you as I have spoken today and it is the duty of those who stand within the Anthroposophical Movement to be absolutely clear about the purpose and aim of Spiritual Science. In Anthroposophy we ought not to be afraid of speaking of spiritual facts, of the supersensible world as a reality, just as we would speak of the physical world as a reality.

Education in Spiritual Science should strengthen the soul and help man to realise fully and clearly the practical necessities of life today. Everyone who stands within the Anthroposophical Movement ought to be quite clear that our practical undertakings must develop with an inner necessity out of our ideas and conceptions of the Spirit. For over against the errors of the world, Spiritual Science must stand in the right light, and we must show the world what its real purpose is. There cannot be too many opportunities for doing this today, for innumerable opportunities when Spiritual Science could have been put in the right light are constantly allowed to slip by.

You may think that I have tried to deal with these matters from too many different angles. But the thing that is important is not that we should be able to listen to one interesting fact after another out of the spiritual worlds, but that we should be able to impregnate the material world itself with the impulses awakened in us by a knowledge of these facts of the spiritual worlds.

It is essential today for wide-awake souls to be fully conscious of the dangers that are threatening the evolutionary process of humanity—dangers arising from the influences which try to keep men’s minds in a state of mystic vagueness on the one hand and on the other from the influences which tend to press humanity down into Ahrimanic materiality. For the tendency of false mysticism, false intellectuality, aloofness from the world which makes a man like to live in a kind of doped consciousness without striving for complete outer clarity and inner light—all these influences, tinged as they are by false Orientalism, lead to inner untruth. They lead to inner untruth just as the Western influence which would drive men to materialistic conceptions and a materialistic attitude to life leads to the outer lie.

On the one hand mankind today is in danger of giving way to inner untruth as the result of false mysticism, and conservatism in regard to ancient religious traditions, and on the other hand it is in danger of becoming outwardly untruthful as the result of materialism. And be it remembered that phrases and slogans are the beginning of direct untruthfulness. Students of Anthroposophy must really be alive to these dangers.

This is what I wanted to impress upon you today as a thought which is not meant to be a theory but a thought that glows with warmth in the soul and gives an impulse to life by its very warmth. Spiritual Science is not what it desires to be if it does not fill the soul with warmth and through this warmth become an active impulse in the whole of life.

If we follow these indications as best we can, my dear friends, our united efforts will be able to achieve something of which the age stands in the direst need.

And now I have one more thing to say which causes me considerable pain. None the less it must be said.

It is no longer possible for me to have private interviews and conversations, for as things are I cannot lead the same kind of private life as before. The work that has to be done takes up the whole of the day and very often a great deal of the night and it ought to be quite evident that there is no time left for private talks. It would seem, however, that some people find this very difficult to understand. There is however a very good way of getting over this state of things—and I admit its difficulty—namely, to work with all our might at the tasks confronting the Anthroposophical Movement. The reason why certain individuals nowadays are so overworked is that we have so few members who really work effectively. People imagine that they can help by working as they like. But the fact of the matter is, my dear friends, that from every point of view we have too many workers for the positions we might be able to create—not too few. Instead of running after positions that have already been created, we must work so well that wider and wider fields of activity will be opened up. That is the only attitude which will help us to make progress.

As I say, it is very painful to me to be obliged to refuse personal wishes, but it is an absolute necessity. Many private affairs will have to be discharged in a different way until more favourable times arrive. There is too great a tendency among us to cling on to conditions which were all very well in their time but which cannot exist again until we become more capable of fulfilling the tasks before us.

We must really get to understand one another in this respect for if we do not, our movement will not prosper. There is far too little realisation of the fact that mutual consultation and self-help is necessary for the spread of the movement today. Just think what it would mean if I had to have personal interviews with everyone who is sitting in this room. Do you imagine, if that were so, that the tasks before us could ever get done? Perhaps many will say that they do not understand what I am saying, but there are certainly some here who know quite well why I have been obliged to say these things.

• 1. Past Incarnations of the Peoples of Today, Stuttgart, 6 Jan 1921 (GA203)
• 2. Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958) was an American ‘New Thought’ writer and philosopher. The New Thought movement was a new religious movement in the United States in the early 19th century which accumulated wisdom and philosophy from a variety of origins, such as Ancient Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Chinese, Taoist, Hindu, and Buddhist cultures and their belief systems.
• 3. Christian Science was founded in 1879 in the United States by Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote in 1875 the book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which outlined the theology of Christian Science.
• 4. Friedrich Traub (1860-1939) was professor at Tübingen University in Germany and author of the book Rudolf Steiner als Philosoph und Theosoph (Rudolf Steiner as a Philosopher and Theosophist), published in 1919.

If we want to fathom the meaning of the materialistic age we need to research how the combination of important fundamental forces add up to the development of mankind. Next we need consider human evolution from a specific angle today. I will link these to various things I have already mentioned recently and reach a clear outcome.

I have often referred to the importance of the time period in an individual's development which co-insides with the change of teeth around the seventh year of life. The change of teeth indicates that certain forces present and active in the organism up to this time no longer exercise their actions as is the case up to the seventh year. From the moment the stage of dentition begins or is taking place the human being goes into a state of metamorphosis. What appears with the pushing out of the second set of teeth is something which had been working in the human body already. When they appear as if freed out of the body then the appearance is by contrast more like a soul force. We discover by researching this appearance, that up to the seventh year a soul force is active within the human being and to a certain extend finds its conclusive work done with the change of teeth. When we develop the inclination and ability to observe such things we will come to see how the child's entire soul constitution is metamorphosed, how precisely from this moment in life the ability arises to construct defined concepts similar to the way other soul abilities occur. Where had these soul qualities been before the change of teeth? They were in the body and were active there. That which later would become spiritual was working in the body.

Here we arrive at quite a different observation regarding the cooperation between the soul-spiritual and the bodily aspects in contrast to how they are depicted by abstract psychological representations, which refers to a psycho-physical parallelism or to an alternate interaction between soul and body. We arrive at a true observation of what works in an important way during the first seven years of the human organism. We gradually see something which is hidden up to the moment it becomes freed to work as a soul force. We only need to develop an ability to observe such things to become aware how a certain process of power gradually works into the bodily aspect during the first seven years of life and how from this moment onwards reappear as something soul-spiritual. Then we also realise what the actual activity within the human body, at least in part, is during the first seven years of life.

When we find ourselves in the condition in life which takes place between falling asleep and waking, something happens which I have just described, in two conditions following upon one another in a meaningful way. We can also observe that a child sleeps in a certain way which is different to the one he or she will become after the change of teeth. It is as if the difference is not apparent, but it is there. The child up to his seventh year is in a state of sleep—a state in which its soul is intrinsically within the state of falling asleep and waking—unable to transmit the same forces which he later sends as soul forces because these forces are related to the physical, to the corporeal organism. As a result the child doesn't send sharply outlined concepts into his state of sleep. It sends very few sharply defined concepts and even less outlined imaginations but these indistinct representations have the peculiar ability to encompass the soul spiritual reality in a better way than through sharply defined representations.

This is something important, the sharper the outlines of our concepts in daily life, the less these concepts are able to enter our sleep condition, understanding realities from there. As a result of this the child often in fact brings a particular knowledge of spiritual reality out of its sleeping condition. This ceases in the same way as I described in the forces being freed during the change of teeth, sharply outlined concepts now come to the fore and can influence sleep life. These sharply outlined concepts subdue to a certain extent the view on spiritual realities as we live between falling asleep and waking.

What I have just said can be proved through supersensible sight which develops the power I have often described which can be found in my “Occult Science” and in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.” When clairvoyant sight attains the power of imagination, when each image appears, as we know, as having a spiritual reality as foundation, then we gradually come to behold spiritual realities amidst the condition of sleeping and waking, and then we can evaluate the difference between a child's sleep before his seventh year and its sleep after turning seven. We can see how to some extent insight is eased regarding what in our imagination we have clarified regarding observation of spiritual realities in whose proximity we are between falling asleep and waking up.

When the change of teeth has come about, the development of puberty starts within the soul element, which can be grasped to a certain degree through imagination. Through simply experiencing our imagination we can see what is forming in the soul.

Man acquires simply through the imaginative experience that which is formed in the soul. The experience I have mentioned regarding the conditions between falling asleep and waking is only one of the experiences which can be made through imaginative knowledge. Under these interesting conditions which take place in the child between dentition and puberty, we see how there is actually a strong struggle taking place in the becoming of the human being. The fight to a certain extent in this period of life is between the ether body and the astral body which undergoes a particular transformation towards puberty. When we consider the physical correlation corresponding to this condition of a struggle, then we can say that it's during this period of the child's life when there is a struggle between growing forces and those forces which appear through physical inspiration, through breathing. This is a very important process in inner development, a process which has to be studied time and again. A part of what becomes freed up for the soul during dentition, are growing forces. Of course a considerable part of these growing forces remain in the body and see to growth, while a part of this is freed during dentition and come to the fore as soul forces.

The growing forces working on in the child resists against what appears essentially in the respiratory process. What now appears in the breathing process could not essentially appear before. The respiratory process is certainly present in the child but as long as it has the forces rising from dentition, so long will nothing in the child happen which is actually as striking, as meaningful as what later takes place between breathing and the physical body. The greatest part of our development depends upon the breathing process. As a result Oriental exercises focus particularly on the breathing process while the human beings who live into the breathing exercises actually come into contact with their inner organisation, brings physicality into an inner movement which is related to perception of the spiritual world.

As we said, before the start of dentition, what breathing actually wants to affect in us fails to become active in the body. Now the battle starts between the growing forces retained in the body against the forces penetrating through the breathing processes. The first meaningful process appearing as a result of the physical breathing processes is puberty.

This connection between breathing and puberty is not yet being examined by science. It is, however, definitely present. We actually breathe in what brings on puberty, which also gives us the further opportunity to step into a relationship in the widest sense between the world and loving surroundings. We actually breathe this in. In every process of nature there's also a spiritual process. In the breathing process exists not only the spiritual but also the soul spiritual. This soul spiritual process permeates us through breathing. It can only penetrate when the forces have become ensouled, forces which formerly worked up to the change of teeth and stopped at this point. What wanted to stream in through the breathing process can now take place.

However, again they come into opposition—a war—of what comes out of the growing processes and what is still a growth process, coming from ether forces in other words. This war is evident between the ether forces rising from the ether body and their correlation found in the material, in the metabolism and blood circulation as astral forces. Here the metabolic system plays into the rhythmic system. We can schematically say: we have our metabolic system but this plays into our blood rhythm; the metabolic system I depict here in white (weiß) and the circulation system playing into it: red (rot) in the drawing. This is what streams from the ether body upwards between the ages of seven to fourteen.

The astral body works against it. We have the inward streaming of the rhythmical in the physical correlation which comes from breathing and the war takes place between the blood circulation and the breathing rhythms in blue (blau). This is what is happening in that period of life.

To speak somewhat vividly in perhaps a radical image: between about the ninth and the tenth year in the life of every child, what had been planned before and appeared as skirmishes before the actual main battle, now goes over into the main battle. The astral and ether bodies direct their chief attack during the ninth and tenth year of life.

As a result this period in time is so important for educators to observe. It is simply so, that teachers, educators and instructors need to give their full attention to something—which may appear differently in nearly each person—taking place in this moment in time.

Here something exceptional can be seen in each child. Some temperamental qualities move into an evident metamorphosis. Marked ideas appear. Above all this is the moment in time where one could start—while before it had been good to not let the child distinguish between the Ego (Ich) and the outer world—allowing this distinction between the Ego and the outer world to come to the fore. While it had been preferable before to use fairy tale imagery to the child, how processes of nature were like human processes, by personifying and clarifying, now the child may be educated about nature in a more instructive manner.

Stories of nature, even in their most elementary forms, should actually only from this moment be presented to the child because the child, as it starts with its first period of life, feels its Ego clearly, while it had just sensed its Ego before. This is a clearly outlined concept, a more or less sharply outlined term linked to the Ego which appears at this time. The child first learns at this moment to really distinguish itself from the surroundings. This corresponds to a definite counter streaming of the breathing rhythm with the circulatory rhythm, the astral and the ether bodies.

There are two sides to this within the human being. On the one side it is present in the condition between waking up and falling asleep. For this state I have just made indications. In the condition between falling asleep and waking, something different presents itself. When we have made progress in Imagination and developed Inspiration somewhat, we may evaluate what happens through Inspiration during the breathing process which has its physical correlation, we discover only at this moment in time—for one child it will be a little earlier, for another a bit later but on average between nine and ten—there is a liberation of the I and the astral body from the physical body during sleep. The child namely becomes intimately connected with his physical and etheric bodies even during asleep. From this time the I lights up as an individual being when actually the I and astral body are not participants of the functions of the ether and physical bodies.

If a child dies before this moment when life had led it up to its fifth, sixth and even into its eighth, ninth year, it still has something which hasn't separated much from the soul spiritual world which is experienced between death and a new birth; so that children relatively easily are pulled back into the soul spiritual world and to some extent only attach something to life which they completed with conception or birth, that an actual cutting off from a new life, if we consider this kind of death, is only really there when children die after this point. Their connection to a certain extent to a new life will be less intensive than the life before. Here clearly conditions are experienced as I've described in “Theosophy” where children who have died earlier are thrown back and then piece life together from what they experience to the life they had led up to their conception or up to birth. One should even say: what we have before us in the child up to the time between his ninth and tenth year of life shows there is much less separation between the soul-physical and the soul-spiritual than in the later human being. Later a person is much more of a dualistic being than the child. The child has the soul-spiritual incorporated into his body and this works into the body. As a duality the soul-spiritual appears opposite the bodily soul element only after this illustrated time. One should say: from this moment the soul-spiritual is less concerned by the bodily element than it had been concerned before. The child as a bodily being is far more of a soul being than the older person. The body of the child is even permeated by the soul forces of growth because it still retains soulful forces even when the largest part of dentition has taken place.

Thus we can say that this battle I have depicted calms down gradually from about the twelfth year onwards and with sexual maturity the astral body takes its full entitlement in the human constitution. That which loosens itself from the human being, which to some extent now is less concerned with the physical is that which the human being takes again with him or her through the gate of death on dying. As we've said, the child in its earlier years is more thrown back to its former life; human beings after this period in time are separated from their former life. What is released here holds within it a seed which allows it to pass through the gate of death. One can really penetrate these things with imaginative knowledge and one can discern particularities precisely. One can point out how the forces rising here lead to sharply defined concepts—which however diminish spiritual realities in whose presence we are during sleep—and make the human being into an independent being.

As a result of the human being cutting off, diminishing the spiritual realities, the human being again becomes the spirit amongst spirits who he must be when he goes through the gate of death. The child always slips, I might say, into spiritual realities; the later human being detaches himself from these spiritual realities and becomes consistent in himself. Admittedly, what becomes consistent can only be seen clearly with imaginative and inspired knowledge, but it does exist in people. This process happens anyhow, as I've indicated yesterday. When human beings don't allow spiritual science to work on them, then it is already so: what is released—particularly during this age in which we receive such materialistic concepts and intellectual ideas, where already at school intellectualism and materialism are imported, because our school subjects are presented materialistically—what is released here is organised in an ahrimanic direction. Because we are asleep in our will even during the day, what becomes released here are trapped by our instincts. We educate ourselves in order to master our instinctive lives by absorbing spiritual scientific concepts.

Intellectuals, materialists or sensualist have an opinion about these concepts, they say these spiritual scientific concepts are fantasy, there's nothing real in them compared with reality. What they mean with “reality” is only what can be perceived by the senses. This is not what is meant by these concepts at all. Everything which appears as concepts in my “spiritual science” does not refer to the outer sense world, it wants to describe the supersensible world. Should these concepts be accepted thus, then they are taken up in a supersensible way even though one can't yet see into the supersensible. Concepts are taken up which are suitable for the supersensible world and not applicable to the senses, physical world, and one thus breaks free from the physical sensory world, in other words, instincts.

This education however is necessary in the human race; without it humankind will enter more and more into social chaos. The actual results—it is like I said yesterday—the actual results of intellectualism and materialism in science, the actual outcome of our present day scientific leaning is a social condition which is chaotic and rising in such an alarming manner in Eastern Europe.

As I said, with logic you can't derive Bolshevism from Bergson's philosophy or from Machsher Avenarius's philosophy; but plain logic brings you closer to deriving it. This is something which present day mankind must look at clearly; dualism has developed in the last centuries between nature observation and the moral world of ideas. On the one side we have the observation of nature which only works with the necessity, as I've often pointed out, to being strictly exact and wanting to link everything to definite connections and causalities. This kind of nature observation creates a worldly structure, builds hypotheses about the beginning and the end of the earth.

Here you stand before what the human being experiences in religious and moral ideas. This is completely torn away from what lives in the observation of nature. This is why people strive so hard to justify the moral-religious content through mere faith. The moral-religious content has been elevated to a system whose content must stand for itself which to some extent should not be allowed to be ruined by anything else, like how outer nature is described, what a person may feel, how the one influences the other. Our present day nature observation, as it exists in its newest phase, where optics and electrodynamics merge, draws by necessity the imagination of the death of warmth to itself. Then the earth with all its people and animals will die and then no human soul will develop despite all its moral ideals. This earth's demise is ensured by the Law of Conservation of Matter, of the Conservation of Energy: through this Law of the Conservation Of Energy the result is the death of the earth, the death of all human souls just like materialists consider the death of the soul as connected to the death of the human body. Only when we are absolutely clear in our mind that what lives in us as morality, what permeates us as religious ideas, form a seed within us, a seed containing a reality, just as the seed of a plant unfolds into a plant the following year, only then can we know that the start of this seed is for a future natural existence and that the earth with everything it contains, visible, audible, perceptible to our senses, does not depend on the law of conservation of energy but that it dies, falls away from all human souls who then carry the moral ideals through as new natural events, into the Jupiter-, Venus-, and Vulcan existence; only when we are clear that Heaven and Earth will perish but My word, the Logos, which develops in the human soul, will not perish—when we are clear, literally clear about these words, only then can we speak of moral and religious content of our human souls. Otherwise it is dishonest. Otherwise we put to a certain extent morality in the world and adhere to another certainty than the natural certainty. If we are clear in our minds that the words of Christ are true, that a cosmos originates from morality, wrested free from the death shroud when this cosmos disintegrates, then we have a world view which indicates morality and naturalness in its metamorphosis.

This is essentially what must penetrate present day humanity because with the schooling of natural thinking developed over the last decades, it is impossible to also accomplish the most essential social concepts which we need. Something must live in the social concepts which recognise morality at the same time in its cosmic implications. The human being must once again learn that he or she is a cosmic being. Earlier the social affairs which needed to be organized on the earth round was not understood; before it had been acknowledged that human beings are connected with cosmic intentions, with cosmic entities.

This is what is felt by people in our age who experience the whole tragedy in their souls, who have come from the abyss between the natural scientific notion and the moral view which we have. Probably only a few slightly sense the implications of this abyss, but it must be crossed over—to say this literally: “Heaven and Earth will perish but my Word will not perish.” This means, what sprouts in the human soul will enfold, just as the earth will perish.

One can't be an avid supporter of the Law of Conservation of Energy and believe at the same time that the moral world indicates eternity. Only to the degree with which courage is found to establish and view the world through the view of nature, will a way be found out of this chaos of the present. This way out can only be found when human beings decide, once again, but now fully conscious, to revert back to that wisdom which once was experienced in the old mysteries in an instinctive way. If humanity makes the decision to consciously penetrate the spiritual world it is an objective possibility, my dear friends. Since the end of the 19th Century a wave from the spiritual world wants to enter our physical world. I could say, it storms in, it is there. Mankind only needs to open their hearts and their senses, and human hearts and human souls will be spoken to. The spiritual world has good intentions, but humanity is still resisting. What was experienced in the second decades of the 20th Century in such a terribly way, ultimately is the bracing of humanity against the inward thrusting wave from the spiritual world. However one could say, it is at its worst, just where scientific minds turn against the streaming in from the spiritual worlds. One should not however, once materialistic and intellectual thinking habits have been withdrawn, now introduce some sort of form which would rule, which could be acquired from the spiritual world.

In relation to this the intellectual-materialistic wave it had its peak, its impact in the second half of the 19th Century. Obviously materialism prepared this long in advance. I have repeatedly referred to its actual worldly historic beginning: what lived in Hellenism as materialism was only a prelude, somewhat in Democritus and in change. Its world historical importance only gradually developed from the 15th Century. It developed slowly, certainly, but it still, when the actual dogmatic tradition was relinquished, I might say, allowed a feeling for a spiritual world's existence within the physical, that the spiritual world can be grasped but not registered through mere intellectual gestures.

Today some who do not see the essence of it, point out with a certain nostalgia to not that far back in time, positivism and materialistic thoughts actually shamed the human being who was regarded as completely inhuman. After that, basically only in the second half of the 19th Century they came to view humankind as completely inhuman, wiping out the specifically human. Thus they avenged themselves by claiming that the human being had thoroughly educated itself in a relatively total abstract way of thinking, as it appeared in the renewed version of the Theory of Relativity. As a result it is always interesting and one should take responsibility for it, that there are still singular minds who refer back to the time when even materialistically orientated minds considered that anything pertaining to people should be dealt with through the mind.

Certainly, a thoroughly intellectual and positivistic mind was Auguste Comte but he wasn't alive in the end of the 19th Century when people were completely excluded from human observation even though, where intellectualism and materialism only became external nature's concepts—but only the outer nature concept, where a human being no longer considered his own humanity in relation to it, that even his own human qualities were thought of as being in the images of nature. Thus it is interesting if we can read what the English thinker Frederick Harrison, briefly wrote about Auguste Comte. He said: I'm thinking about a concise remark by Auguste Comte which he made more than sixty years ago. Auguste Comte, the positivist, the intellectualist who was still somewhat touched by the spirituality of olden times, already saw that in the future the human being will be completely omitted. Despite his positivism, despite his intellectualism it displeased him to what he referred to and what he had been creating, which only came about in the last third of the 19th Century so he hadn't seen it: our modern doctors, said Comte, appear to be essentially animal doctors. He meant, so Harrison continues, that they often, more particularly with women, are treated like horses or cows.

Comte stressed that an illness should be observed from more than one side, that it contains a spiritual element and occasionally even a prominent kind of spiritual element, thus the human doctor should just as much be a philosopher of the soul as an anatomist is to the body. He claimed that true medication would have two sides. From this basis—Harrison adds—he would reject Freudian one sidedness. Harrison continues—how this Comtian point of view has developed further and how people have gradually degenerated to the point of view where people are treated like horses and cows and how this has gradually made human doctors into animal doctors. Everything is relative—this is already contained in the kernel of the theory of relativity. The main teaching of Auguste Comte had a better basis and a more thorough philosophical depth and life than Einstein, he said.—It is always refreshing when one can still today hear such a statement, because we live in the age where the scientific mind opposes everything which comes from a spiritual side, namely what wants to transport the mind in human life, in human action and particularly in important areas such a medical activities.

If we ask ourselves: what is it then, which makes materialism and intellectualism so attractive for today's science? Look for yourself how things are taking place. Consider how our education is set up to hardly involve the teachers in the child's whole organization. The teacher is far too comfortable, and has personally been raised far too comfortably to really delve into the intricacies of child development, like I have depicted today again. Such things would rather not be bothered with—because what would be required? It would call for not shying away from every transition in daily life while living a delusion, to a life which is quite different, where our knowledge becomes reality.

This transformation of people, this otherness, this change pertaining to knowledge is shied away from today; people do not want it. People want to comfortably rise to higher truths which can only be the highest abstractions because to reach abstraction can be done with a certain comfort. This way no inner changes are needed in order to reach it. However, to come to a real life content, how it forms the basis of our outer sensory content, can't be attained when at least concepts aren't changed which have no significance for ordinary sense life, whose meaning one can only penetrate with a power coming from within and working outward. People are put into life which also stretches into the supersensible world, and in our age it relies on this supersensible world being elucidated in a healthy way. When I said yesterday that the materialistic-intellectual point of view doesn't just include a few scientifically educated people, even with a scientific education, but that they are popular beliefs in the simplest people still connected to ancient beliefs, then it must be said: it is urgent and necessary that whatever flows into our overall life in popular form should also contain information of the spiritual world.

Presently overall characteristic attributes can be found everywhere where the effort is made to introduce Anthroposophical spiritual science into areas of life. In medicine, in religion, the social life, everywhere the introduction of anything non-sectarian should be made: Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, which comes to the fore with the same scientific earnest with which it had been introduced since the middle of the 15 Century as scientific, is to be fully recognized.

When a child has grown up and has had the luck to have undergone some higher learning, what becomes apparent today? These young people, doctors, theologians, philologists, lawyers, will not become anything else; they will not be converted but stay as they are and only accept abstractions applicable to their science. If an attempt is made to offer them some knowledge of the world then they immediately withdraw particularly into this comfortable life of abstraction in which they desire to continue living—but which is leading towards chaos. Thus we can observe an interesting symptom arising which I want to single out. On occasion where the Nurnberg main preacher Geyer held seemingly many lectures at various places, it can be noticed: here people suspect, mainly scientific people suspect that an attempt is being made to introduce Anthroposophically orientated spiritual science into their lives. This the people don't want. Even well minded people don't want it. They sense that here they must re-adjust their views in relation to their entire scientific orientation, here they must think quite differently about their own basic beliefs. As a result when something appears which challenges their own basic beliefs, they revert to their comfortable abstract criticism. So we discover already at the start of the Geyer lectures a quote by the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen, but also a person who should be able to greet with inner satisfaction and joy anything available in this area where spiritual science can fruitfully bring clarification into the psychological areas and is fruitfully elucidated.

Spiritual science goes along a healthy path while the psychiatrist follows it in a morbid way. Psychiatry can only become healthy if it is enlightened in all areas, in all its details if it is based in the healthy manner of anthroposophical spiritual science. Through this the psychiatrist should rise up, letting his psychiatry be permeated by spiritual science; because this psychiatry has basically become nothing other than psycho-pathology. This is a terrible thing at the present—this psychiatry. What does the psychiatrist do? He doesn't sense how the rays of light which can come to him through anthroposophical spiritual science can clarify psychiatry. Instead, he positions spiritual science as he does psychiatry at present that means, he uses the same measure for both. Even if he means well by doing so it becomes something extraordinarily interesting because we can compare it to looking at our faces in a garden mirror ball—if you have a pretty face you will still see the beauty, but it is broken up in squares. Naturally spiritual science will thus appear checkered if it is opposed in full force even by someone with good intentions. It is always interesting to read a bit of what Dr Kolb, the principal medical psychiatrist, always meaning well, has to say:

“The famous Anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner I see ...” excuse me, I must read this—“a genial but extraordinarily imbalanced personality with some understandable striking traits according to psychiatric knowledge. The principal preacher Geyer from Nurnberg appears to base his teachings on Steiner. I have twice heard a public lecture like this from many highly respected clergy. The lecture as a piece of art, was charming. I would consider it an atrocity to pick this blue flower of poetry, which was served so gracefully, and the blue haze”—the blue appears to be less critical than the haze—“in which he brings us closer to Steiner's painted age clouded by critical colour. Now as psychiatrist I must say: the `clairvoyance' of Steiner is nothing other than ordinary thinking which is influenced by a kind of self-hypnosis when a genial and what I would like to accept as...”—after this it becomes quite different!—“an ethically high-standing personality with glowing scientific and general education, highly informed about the present religious-philosophic teachings, as Steiner is, to some extent see into your brain and offer the content of the brain as `Anthroposophy,' yet amongst a multitude of fantastic traits much which is good, noble and morally high standing, perhaps isolated valuable scientific thoughts can be found.”

Now I ask you, just listen to this: ordinary thinking, influenced by Anthroposophy, sees into the brain and what is seen in the brain, is presented as Anthroposophy! Please, take this genial quote from this psychiatrist: therefore everything perceived by looking into the brain is also a bit influenced by auto suggestions!

“When however his teaching up to now are thrown to be people from the pulpit, then fewer genial people, without previous training, will preach about the marvelling products of his `clairvoyance.'”

They have actually done quite well, these untrained people! It is in fact as if this psychiatrist, whose anthroposophical thoughts are influenced by auto-hypnosis which he sees in the brain, actually lives completely outside the actual world.

“As occultism is similar to communism with a fatal attraction on the mentally weak, on immature youth, the prematurely old aged, on dreamers, on hysterics, above all on psychopaths, the insecure, the sick liars and swindlers, so we will experience that demoralized through war, death and misery and worry about the future we have become susceptible for the rise of `Prophets' similar to those historical deeds of the Munster Anabaptists we read with horror. The Catholic church is greatly merited by rejecting Steiner with complete lucidity and sharpness.” This `lucidity and sharpness' you read near a living person here!—“and I would like as Protestant to ask every single spiritual Protestant heartily, to test the danger of the demise of our church into a dreary and dangerous sect before it becomes a dangerous temptation of ideally orientated Christians with pathological traits strongly recommending Steiner's teachings.”

This lesson was received by the principal preacher Geyer from the topmost Medicinal Council psychiatrist Dr Gustav Kolb, director of the mental hospital and nursing institution in Erlangen.

You see how the state of mind of a person is constituted who has completely accepted the thinking habits of the modern scientific spirit. Please, just consider for a bit, just for my sake meditate over what appears when a person, instead of directing his gaze to the outer world, directs himself through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition and brings sharply into focus what is in my `occult science,' letting this gaze turn inward and depict the human brain, as if influenced by auto hypnosis. Isn't it true that what the psychiatrist is describing is madness! This depiction actually rises from a psychiatric base! Yet one must say that such a man as Gustav Kolb is well meaning and discovers that the blue haze should not be dissected by other critical colours; because he finds it barbaric to oppose the blue flower introduced by the priest Geyer. So from the one side he is even benevolent but he is really a typical representative of modern science.

This is the situation which can definitely be hoped for and expected from by modern science towards anthroposophically orientated science. Therefore it must always be mentioned that active, spiritual science orientated collaborators are needed, in every shop, found on every corner, who are revealed in this way and then drawn into the right light in which they are moved when there is a reference to, first of all, present day science being unable to be different from what it is, and secondly: brain instead of Anthroposophy.

Really, we must free ourselves from preconceived ideas in order to make it possible today, to convince the occasional person permeated by these modern scientific habits, to change. The joy several of our short minded followers often have that the occasional person can be converted, is a misplaced joy. It is concerned with unprejudiced humanity being penetrated by what anthroposophic spiritual science offers and then grimly facing the characteristics of modern science where it turns into nonsense, even when well meant. We are confronted today with immense seriousness. Therefore it must ever and again be stressed that at least among us many who sense this earnestness must rise instead of merely sitting and listening for a bit with the pleasure of hearing anthroposophic truths, but should rather want to permeate anthroposophic orientated spiritual science into every part of active life and also have the courage and energy to step forward where it is needed. I draw your attention repeatedly to what opposes spiritual science, with all the possible grotesque, ridiculous, deceitful and good-natured impotent forms it assumes. The battle which is fought against this, is even more sparse. It has to be done for the salvation of the further evolution of humanity. Healing must come through the modern spirit of science—as you know, where it is entitled, it is also appreciated by spiritual science—because it wants to set itself up in those areas of which it understands nothing, making it sick.