The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Above all, I thank Dr. Zeylmans and all of you for giving me the opportunity to express some thoughts here about the – if I may say so – medical consequences of the anthroposophical method of research. Of course, it will only be possible to give a few brief hints in the two short hours, and given the deviation of the point of view that I will have to choose from the one in use today, it will also be particularly difficult in the two short hours to get beyond the fact that much of what needs to be said, from today's point of view – from the point of view that one is used to – may seem quite paradoxical, perhaps more than paradoxical. But those present will know how, in the course of the historical development of mankind, we have learned to rethink many things; and so, at least to begin with, there will also be a certain tolerance for the fact that a point of view that arises out of genuine, conscientious research must appear paradoxical.

But the first thing I would like to say in the way of an introduction is that the medical consequences of the anthroposophical research method are not about opposing anything that would have to be absolutely “new” to what today's conscientious medicine, built on the natural science that has become customary for centuries, has to say. The research method I am talking about does not want to overthrow, but rather the opposite: by looking at the various things that have emerged from natural science for medicine in recent times from conscientious sensory-empirical methods, it has to take on board the fact that modern medicine points everywhere to an area that is still difficult for it to enter, for the reason that, yes, because the research methods are basically so conscientious has arisen, that modern medicine refers everywhere to an area that is still difficult for it to enter, for the reason that, yes, because the research methods are basically so conscientious, so exact, so exact in relation to the sensory-empirical methods that we are all familiar with. But precisely because of what natural science has become great, because of what has enabled it to provide such a meaningful basis for medicine, precisely because of this, certain paths to knowledge of the human being and thus to healing have been made impossible. And so allow me to start today by mentioning some principles and then to go into the peculiarity of some of our remedies, which are typical, which are characteristic, tomorrow.

We did not choose this path from the outset, saying to ourselves: Anthroposophy must know everything, so it must also have something to say about medicine. That is the agitator's method. But we, on truly anthroposophical ground, want to take the standpoint of genuine scientific knowledge, at least in our fundamentals. And so it has come about that this medical movement has arisen within the overall anthroposophical movement, because doctors, especially doctors in Germany, but basically doctors in all countries, have found that current science and medicine raise questions that cannot be answered with the methods in use today, at least not from diagnosis, from pathology, to rational therapy. Then these doctors came and asked whether anthroposophy, with its special kind of knowledge of the human being, might have something to say about medicine, about a knowledge of the human being that can go somewhat deeper into the human being than one is able to do with the methods currently in use. And so, I would say, the challenge, especially from those medical doctors who were dissatisfied or who had fallen into a certain skepticism as a result of their studies and practice, led to the development of what I will be talking to you about today and tomorrow. From the outset, we did not take the view that we could now introduce all kinds of amateurish ideas into a conscientiously conducted field of research that had been put into practice. And when the founding of Kommender Tag in Stuttgart and Futurum in Switzerland suggested that the field of medicine should now also be cultivated, it came about that I said: Certainly, what Anthroposophy has to give can throw light on the preparation of remedies, but one should not simply start from preparing remedies, but everything that is done in this direction should be in the strictest connection with medicine, with real practice. And so our institutes came into being, which are indeed institutes for preparing remedies using the methods I will talk about; but these institutes are connected to clinical institutions, and in the course of time I will often refer to that clinical institute which has now become exemplary in the first place: that of Dr. Wegman in Arlesheim, which is directly connected with the Goetheanum, our anthroposophical university in Switzerland. There it is indeed possible, through constant contact with the sick, to enter into a living connection with regard to therapy, which, through the anthroposophical method of research, is to be cultivated as the great question of our time.

But we have not yet been satisfied with that either. We have affiliated actual research institutes to these institutes. And we have affiliated a biological institute and physical institutes, but I will not speak of them for the time being, as they are still in the early stages of their work. At the Biological Research Institute – which I want to mention so that you can see that we want to work with the same exactitude that is otherwise required – we have already recorded two findings. Please don't take it as silly vanity of mine when I express my conviction – oh no, it's important to honestly express what one can be convinced of based on the available results – when I say: Despite some individual methodological objections that one could still make, these two results are such that they can point the way to how we can strive for the same exactitude that is otherwise striven for today in the scientific basis of medicine.

The first work to come out of our research institute is a work on the function of the spleen, and since I can only give you two lectures, only suggestions, you will forgive me if I can only point out some of them. In the course of anthroposophical research work, the function of the spleen has become particularly interesting to me, and I will have to speak about what can be called the spiritual scientific method. Through these methods, it has become clear to me how special the spleen function is in the human organism as a whole, which, as you know, is a kind of crux for anthropology. The human being - I can only hint at this now - carries within him the most diverse processes, including those that require rhythm. These processes include not only breathing and blood circulation, but also rhythms of a larger scale, for example, the rhythm of digestion. Now, the rhythm of digestion is something that is demanded by human nature itself, but which, in the way it is demanded by it, can never be maintained. According to the demands of his organism, man should actually eat and drink with an enormous rhythmic regularity. He cannot do this, because even if he organized the times for his meals with great pedantry, this would not yet result in the rhythmicity demanded by the organism actually being able to be maintained. For one day one eats this, the next day something else, and one would have to proceed with an almost immeasurable knowledge of the details if one were to do all this. Breathing and blood circulation have it easier, but the rhythm of digestion is, because we are dependent on our contact with the outside world, something that cannot really be met. Now the functions of the spleen are designed to compensate for and correct those irregularities that necessarily occur in the digestive rhythm, by combining these spleen functions with the entire digestive function in the broadest sense. That is what I realized at the time. Now, at our Biological Research Institute, through methods that are as exact as the clinical methods of today, even if some objections can be raised with regard to the details, this has been fully empirically confirmed by the work on spleen function. It is a work that one would like to believe, if it had been done in an ordinary clinic, would have made a great impression in the field of medical thinking. That this has not happened – and this is not a case of silly vanity, I assure you – and that this work, carried out with such enormous dedication by Dr. Kolisko, is still relatively unknown today, is solely due to the fact that it was created on anthroposophical ground.

The second work is such that a scientific-medical “belief” has been made to the extent that it can become an exact science.

It is historically understandable that, given the tremendous successes that have emerged in the last few centuries, at least in the natural sciences, in the 19th century, humanity was, so to speak, hypnotized by what sensual-physical observation and exact experimentation could yield. But as far as knowledge of the human being is concerned, and even in terms of ordinary physical knowledge of the human being, it is not possible to go so far with these research methods that an inner understanding of the nature of the human organization emerges. And this is simply because, on the one hand, great and tremendous progress is being made in our knowledge of the human physical organization, but, on the other hand, precisely because of the exact and fruitful nature of these research methods, a whole part of the human being, which is just as real as the physical human being, is simply being excluded. The greatness of scientific research can also be seen from the fact that it has thrown out of our knowledge of man with tremendous energy that which is the spiritual-soul man, who - as we shall see - must be understood in the medical sense no less as a reality in practice than the physical man. To do this, it is necessary for me to first tell you a few basic principles about the anthroposophical research method in general, especially insofar as it leads to knowledge of the human being.

The fact is that today, in all our research, we simply stop at how we have become in our soul constitution, which also includes our cognitive ability, through what culture has already brought up as our school education, as education within the conventional sciences. That is where we stop. We do not say to ourselves: as a two- or three-year-old child, we still look quite unlike our soul mood and constitution in later life. We develop; we become quite different in the course of, say, fifteen years of our human youth. In our eighteenth or nineteenth year, we have abilities that we do not have as a two- or three-year-old child, let alone earlier; these develop from within us. Why should it not be possible to raise the question: Is it not possible for an adult to remain relatively capable of development? Is it possible to arbitrarily, so to speak, complete this development of the soul life? Of course, at first it is a question of inner trial. But anyone who tries, who really tries to go beyond what is today considered the norm of human soul development, to attain other soul abilities, can do it, will succeed! More details about this can be found in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds”, “Occult Science: An Outline” and others. In principle, I will only hint at this, that we are able to develop further what we otherwise have as thinking, what we know from its application not only in ordinary life but also in current science when we experiment and interpret observations. When this is said, people usually start saying: Yes, now he is coming up with a “mystical development.” But if you want to contemptuously point to the mystical development — if you want to use the word — that I am talking about here, then you should also contemptuously point to mathematics and geometry. The essence of mathematics and geometry is this: that one moves in full deliberation from one position to another, that there is absolutely nothing of the subconscious, in which suggestive can play a role. This deliberation, this full awareness, must follow us everywhere in the object, in mathematics and geometry. The same thing that we do inwardly with the object, when we proceed exactly, can be applied to the development of our own soul. Not in that mystical conspiracy, with which one often speaks about mysticism, but in full clarity, the soul can be further developed in relation to its ability to think, but not by brooding within itself, but by proceeding from quite definite, clearly comprehended ideas and from there — just as it happens in mathematics for the object — now taking in nothing but that by which one can pass with full composure from one content of consciousness to another. If this is applied as a truly inwardly exact method of developing the soul for a sufficiently long time — it takes longer for some, shorter for others — then one does indeed gradually come to grasp thinking, not as it is otherwise passive, but in its activity; so that one, while otherwise passively following with one's thoughts what one can observe, comes to experience an inner activity.

This inner activity of thinking gives the first real insight into what is supersensible in man, the first stage. I would like to say: if one approaches man from the outside – and one can chart the whole blood dynamics – then in the blood dynamics one has, so to speak, a picture of man, of a part of man, seen from the outside. But by proceeding as I have indicated with regard to thinking, one comes to experience oneself inwardly filled with a second human being, with the human being who is independent of the physical organism.

Anyone who thinks that something suggestive is occurring is ignoring the fact that the methods I am referring to here are absolutely exact methods, in which everything is experienced in full composure; so that one can arrive at precisely what might be even the slightest suggestion in the depths of the soul and reject it. The path one follows with this method is exactly the opposite of that which can introduce anything suggestive or autosuggestive into consciousness. But one comes to the following:

If one observes the gradual development of the child with the precise observation that one acquires through such a development of thought, then a significant difference arises between the whole constitution of the child up to about the change of teeth, up to the seventh or eighth year, and after that. The difference that exists between the earlier and later stages is such that one must first acquire the ability to pay attention to it. Otherwise one overlooks it, does not pay attention to it, but one must start precisely there, I would say, with the courage to approach the human being and such observations really as precisely as one has otherwise become accustomed to in physics in the course of more recent research. In physics we speak of latent warmth and of warmth that actually occurs. We speak of the fact that through some process a state of warmth that would otherwise remain latent in some substance, that is, within the substance, can come out. Whatever external physical science has arrived at, we must also arrive at. We must be able to have the courage to do this, the courage with regard to the development of the human soul, for example. And if one has this courage to do research, the following emerges: one sees — one only has to understand how to focus one's attention on it — how, in the case of a child who has changed teeth, inner soul forces arise that were not there before. Not even education has progressed so far as to be able to say anything about this, because it is not observed precisely, because the curves do not rise steeply and fall deeply, but because it is a matter of subtleties and these subtleties must be observed with a different, spiritual eye; that is why little attention is paid to them today. But for those who acquire the ability to conduct spiritual research, it turns out that everything we call the ability to remember, for example, is radically changed when the teeth change. The ability to remember is one that, with a certain elementary power, still allows the organism to shoot out what the child presents in their memory. That special kind of memory experience, where one goes back and has the feeling that one is going back to the experience, that only occurs with the change of teeth.

So countless things in the mental experience only occur with the change of teeth. They are then there; they did not reveal themselves before in the child's nature. Where were they? They were in the child's nature, just as latent warmth is in a substance; and those organic processes that have only their external symptom in the change of teeth have brought out what was previously in the organism and working on it, just as some physical process brings out the latent warmth from a substance. Today, psychology speaks of psychophysical parallelism and the like; it cannot come to the conclusion that there may be a connection between what we have in psychology today: the soul, thought of in a completely abstract way, and what comes to light anatomically and physiologically, because the two things are such that, if you look at them in such an abstract way, you cannot find a bridge from one to the other.

But the human being is, after all, a developing being. If we look at what is present in the soul after the change of teeth, what has emerged in the soul, we can say: the same forces that now confront us as the metamorphosed thinking in the soul were previously organic forces, acting as forces for the growth of organs in the child; so that here we have an empirical relationship between the life of soul and the life of body, which one must seek only at the right time in human development.

If we now carry out the mental exercises I have mentioned, we come once more to something similar in this thinking, something that is as strong and active as the thinking still in the organism. That is the second person that one discovers in oneself: it is on a higher level than the ordinary, merely passive thinking, but what we have as a second, etheric body - I ask you not to be offended by the term - thoroughly organized. So it is not a matter of the anthroposophical research method that one now speaks of an imagined etheric body, but that one can in fact - I can only give hints here - empirically show how what one finds through the special methods of knowledge is really active in human nature; because when we look at a child, what we later find in thought is at work. If I want to understand the forces of growth in the child, if I want to know how there is something particularly vitalizing in it, then I have to do it in what I call imaginative knowledge, because that makes it an inner content of consciousness. If, for example, the forces that are growth forces in the child later pass over into the life of the soul, but then work passively, and if there are healing powers in these growth forces, then I can only explore these healing powers if I now, in turn, come to look at and inwardly experience what the vitalizing forces are, using the actual spiritual scientific method. This makes it possible to see in these things not mere fantasy but something that is active in the human organism, and thus to make outer anthropology a real anthroposophy through inner empiricism.

And just as one finds this second human being through a special training of thinking, so, if one goes further, within these two humans, the physical and the etheric, a third can still be found. But do not be put off – because terminology is needed everywhere – if I call it the astral human being, anthroposophy already indicates the reasons for this. I will only hint at the constitution of man himself.

When one has come so far as to really experience this second, etheric man inwardly independent of the physical man, then one has a content of consciousness. With reference to this, I can say: One feels almost as secure in it as one feels in one's physical body in normal waking consciousness. One already feels this second man. Therefore, the next step, which must follow, is much more difficult inner work: to find out what I have described as the etheric human being. Because you only get the rest by gaining the strength to sucker out this etheric human being. This must now be done very consciously, so that you, as it were, drive out again after driving in. Generally speaking, the preliminary exercise for this is not easy. Ideas that have stuck with you for a long time, that were so present that they occupied your entire consciousness – but again in full consciousness, so that there is nothing suggestive about them – are difficult to switch off, because they work in consciousness with much stronger force than ideas that are fleetingly established in everyday life and from ordinary observation. But once one has practiced freeing one's consciousness in general, in a more conscious way, from whatever may be present in it, then one can also learn to use suggestion to make this figment of one's own imagination disappear and to create an empty consciousness. This consciousness is then exactly in the state in which man would be if, after entering the ordinary dreamless sleep, he were suddenly to perceive around him a different world, if he were to wake up not in the body but outside the body, and also not in the physical world but in a spiritual world.

This awakening can be brought about by doing what I have just described: after first energizing the consciousness in the strongest possible way, so that it acquires an etheric content, one then empties it again, has the empty consciousness, the mere awakening, without any of the content one otherwise has in life or in science. To produce empty consciousness – you know how difficult that is in ordinary life, because when you let the sensations of the senses disappear in ordinary life, the person simply falls asleep. But in this way, as I have described it, you come to the empty consciousness that merely watches, but it does not remain so for long. Then the spiritual world enters, above all a third human being, a person who is actually now only an inner function, only inner mobility and activity. The second, etheric human being, is the vitalizing one, the third, astral human being, is mobility, activity.

Then there is a fourth human being that makes it possible for us to be human in the fullest sense of the word. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to elaborate on this in the course of the lectures; for now I will only hint that this is the actual I-human being, because what I have described so far is also possessed by the animal: physical body, etheric body and astral body. But the human being also has the possibility of experiencing this combination of his limbs within himself, not in the abstract but in the concrete. If the human being not only produces empty consciousness, thereby grasping the spiritual world, but if he now goes further and energizes the experience of the spiritual world even more, then he comes up to the full conception of the I.

In this way, one can form a picture of what gradually becomes the content of the human being through anthroposophically exact methods. This content of the human being is now truly there. Just as warmth, which was first latent and then brought up and became real warmth, manifests itself in its physical effects, so that which is etheric body, astral body and I definitely manifests itself in the human being. And we only understand the human being if we can truly consider this interaction of the four members of his being.

Let us look at a single aspect. Let us look at a single aspect so that we can form an idea of how these things can interact, for example the kidneys and kidney function in humans. In every single aspect of the human being, the four aspects of human nature interact to a greater or lesser extent. When we study kidney function, what we can observe in the corpse or otherwise is only the sum of physical effects. However, this sum of physical effects is energized by what I initially called the etheric body, that is, by that part of the etheric body that contains the vital functions for the kidney in particular. But this is again permeated by the astral body, and it is only in the interaction of these members of human nature that we can inwardly comprehend the human being, whether in the case of a single organ or a system of organs. Now let us take the case of detecting some kind of irregularity in kidney function. I need only refer to this in general terms, since you are a professional in this field. And anyone who sees through the whole thing as I have indicated will see that in some way the physical kidney function and the etheric kidney function oppose the astral kidney function. So that is a typical case. One can come to the conclusion that the physical and etheric kidney organization offer resistance to the astral kidney function — which one only gets a view of when one has established empty consciousness. But now it is like this: when a living organ, the kidney, offers resistance through its physical and etheric organization to the astral, then, because otherwise the organ would atrophy, the astral organization must intervene more thoroughly more energetically; and therefore, in special cases, of course (I always relate to specific cases), we have a particular concentration of the part of the astral organization that corresponds to the kidney on the kidney activity. In other words, the astral kidney function becomes much stronger in itself than it is allowed to be called upon to be according to the whole constitution of the human being; so that the one who sees through the kidney function in this way has the picture: Here the astral body is performing work in the kidneys that it withdraws from the totality of the human being in which it must be active; it develops a process in the kidneys that should not actually be there. Due to the particular abnormal developmental aspects in the physical and etheric kidneys, the astral kidneys are overburdened.

Now it is a matter of pushing the diagnosis to this point. It is known that the astral part of the kidney now has something to do that it does not actually have to do in the normal functioning of the organism; it performs something that it should not actually perform, but which the kidney, as it is in its diseased, pathological state, or as the etheric kidney, now demands of this astral part. This leads to the first part, to the very first link in a view of the nature of the patient. The disease processes should actually be the greatest mystery for the thinking person, because they are, after all, natural processes. But the normal processes are also natural processes. How do these abnormal processes, these disease processes, come to be in the midst of the normal processes? As long as one regards the human being only as an equally valuable tissue of physical substances and functions, one does not actually arrive at a possible distinction between what is physiological and what is pathological; but one does arrive at it when one knows that the kidney can undergo a metamorphosis in which it develops physical processes that the normal kidney does not develop because in the normal kidney there is a right harmony between the physical, etheric and astral kidneys. This is what one first sees.

The question now is: how can this disease process, which must simply be explained in terms of an excessive demand on precisely a supersensible part of human nature, possibly be eliminated? How can we get the astral person to function normally again?

In these discussions, I always want to look at something very specific and individual. I do not want to talk about a severe kidney disease, because the principle of the matter can also become clear to us in the case of a mild kidney disease. But just so that I can indicate how to deal with such a kidney, I would like to start from a very specific example.

What we know is, first of all, that we must now free the astral body from its work on the kidney, which is deformed in the broadest sense. There is a process going on there that the human astral body should not be doing; we have to get it out of the abnormally running process of the kidney.

If we now gain the kind of knowledge that first looks at the human being and then at the world, the following emerges with the method I have described. We turn our gaze from the human being to the outer nature. We come to study the special nature of Equisetum arvense. If we study this horsetail, not so much emphasizing the individual substances it consists of, but rather looking at the process that lives in it, then we come to the following: Today it is common, because materialistic thinking has taken hold of everything, that we state for everything organic: it consists of so much protein, fat and carbohydrates and so on. We look everywhere for what the external chemistry can indicate as the individual components of a substance, and in this way we arrive at the elements, as they were called; but that is not what is of primary importance in what I have in mind here. What interests us most about equisetum is that when we analyze it, that is, when we break down its functions, we find that silicic acid is the main constituent among the substances that remain. It must therefore be present in such a strong way that it predominates, still exerting its silicic acid function in equisetum. In analyzing, we do not recognize the substance as such, but we do recognize what significance the substance has. And that must also be recognized.

Equisetum is a plant; in it we do not find an astral body, but we do find a physical body and an etheric body. We study Equisetum arvense and find that silicic acid plays a particularly important role. Of course, there are other plants that contain silicic acid. We also find that certain sulphuric acid salts play a role and finally we find that the most important constituents that still assert their nature, their essence, in Equisetum, are silicic acid — but not the “material”, but the silicic acid function — and the sulphur function. And now we find something very remarkable. If we are able to see through the special kind of connection with the spiritually developed powers, what is around the sulfuric acid salts in connection with the silicic acid, SiO2, we find that there is there is a process, a functional connection that we can now transpose into the human organism, either orally or – in the case of other processes we do not have to choose the oral route – through a bath or by injection. The significance of these individual methods will be discussed later. But if we introduce the equisetum into the human organism in a certain way – but it is better not to use equisetum as such now, and that is the basis of the essential way we prepare our remedies, because although the effects are there, visually, they are not as permanent – if we now study the functional relationship between silica and sulfur and then try to imitate it in the preparation, we have the opportunity, by implementing what can be studied in the case of Equisetum in the more or less inorganic preparation, to develop stronger effects on the human organism than those achieved by using the mere plant as a tea or the like. This is particularly important for the production of our remedies.

If I now introduce into the human organism the functional relationship between sulphur and silicic acid in the right way, then simply through the special quality of this functional relationship the following happens: the process that the human astral body has to carry out while the disease is present is now taken from the kidney. If I introduce into the kidney the functioning of sulphur and silicic acid in Equisetum arvense, I relieve the human astral body of what would otherwise have to be done by the deformed kidney (deformed in the widest sense); I let the disease process, so to speak, be done by something that I have introduced into the body.

This is the beginning of every healing process. You have to know the disease process. You first have to have a rational pathology, you have to know the disease process and you have to research where in nature something can be found that can exactly reproduce this disease process. For one must not believe that one can always fight the disease process everywhere in a disease, but one must actually catch it. What the disease process is, must be caught by something that is known in its dynamics, as here with Equisetum sulfur and silicic acid. Then one gets out that which, as in this case of kidney disease, used to function as the astral body. And by getting this out, one must also ensure that the person is strengthened internally through diet and so on, so that they can apply all their inner strength more energetically than usual. That is, one must devote some energy to the entire astral body. Then one gets the astral body, which has now been released in its entirety in this way and in the corresponding case, to extinguish the disease by means of the healthy part of the astral body, if one first has the excessive activity of the astral body take over from an external function.

This is how one arrives at a rational concept of healing. As a rule, this healing always consists in intercepting the disease process by means of an inserted process from outside and then, by energizing, inducing what is already in the person to overcome the disease process, while one cannot do this as long as — as in this case — the astral body has to turn its activity one-sidedly towards the kidney, which is different from how it should be. What I have just described is the case, or can be the case, with all those disease processes that are based on organ irregularities that - as I would like to call it - have a centrifugal effect, an inward centrifugal effect. The kidney is a secretory organ that first secretes inwards, even if the excretion goes outwards, it secretes inwards. And if you take my point of view, pathological processes must be understood in such a way that the cure consists in inducing a centrifugal process in the kidneys by introducing Equisetum arvense, a process that radiates out from the kidneys.

There are other processes that show us the polar opposite of what I have just mentioned. And here I do not wish to mention a serious illness, but rather, to discuss the principle, something that, although it only attracts more or less distant attention compared to the actual deeper illnesses of the human being, is, above all, extremely unpleasant for the patient: that is hay fever, hay fever catarrh. If we want to combat this, we must bear in mind that we are dealing with a very serious constitutional disorder. Ultimately, however, it can be traced back to a weakening of the astral body with its powers, this third, internally mobile human being, which occurs peripherally in the human being. We can trace hay fever back to early childhood, where we have general illnesses that we usually do not pay much attention to, which then specialize into what occurs later in life as hay fever. And if we know that this hay fever is based on the astral body weakening in relation to certain functions, not reaching the physical body and etheric body, then it must be our primary concern to energize this astral body inwardly, to lead it back to its proper functions, so that when we have to deal with more outward-directed centrifugal effects in the pathological, we now counteract them with something else. In the example of kidney disease, we have, as it were, intercepted the disease; we have considered the astral body in such a way that, when it is freed from its abnormal work, we only need to energize it, to strengthen it; then, when we relieve it of what it had to do with the diseased kidney, it will already be working in the direction of health. This is not the case with processes such as hay fever. In such cases we must not try to stop the disease process; instead, we must set in motion a process that is the exact opposite of the disease process. It has been found that we can stimulate the astral body to perform a function that it can no longer perform because it no longer has access to the physical and etheric bodies. This can be done by using certain fruit juices that which have skins, and which actually show centripetal effects within the fruit, and when we prepare the corresponding preparation from these fruit juices, as an ointment for milder cases and as an injection for more severe cases. We drive it back to the physical body and ether body, and in this respect, we can indeed show some very nice successes. Dr. Wegman has injected numerous patients with our hay fever remedy and has had the most wonderful successes in this area. It is entirely possible, from this way of thinking, to bring about a meeting between the astral body, which has become sluggish, and to energize it, so that one can see in this process, which one causes with the injection – these processes then have a certain affinity to particular organs; so if we use a particular fruit juice, it has a particular affinity to particular organs; one then one has to find out the particular points and know the currents in which the affinities express themselves – one can see how those physical functions that occur through that which has become sluggish and inert in the astral body, which would not occur if they were held by the astral body, how these functions really cease to occur when we now intercept the astral body itself. Before, we intercepted the disease process; now we intercept the process in the particular area on which we want to act. Thus, with regard to the preparations we use, we have to distinguish between processes that work more centrifugally, as I described in the case of the kidney process, and healing processes that work more centripetally, as for example in the case of the hay fever remedy.

When you consider these things, you might think at first that they are imaginary. Most people in the present day also believe that they are imagined. That is why I attach great importance to the fact that we not only produce such remedies, but that our institutes work in line with this medical way of thinking. Now, when examining these remedies, one is in a different situation than when trying out remedies in a purely empirical way. In the latter case, one is mainly dependent on statistics, which tell us: if the number of cases in which a remedy has helped is very large in relation to those in which it has not helped, then statistics will help us. But if we start from a method such as I have described, we see to a certain extent from our understanding of the disease process what must occur in a particular healing process. Pathology and therapy become one! Because the thing is this: if I recognize through diagnosis what is going on in the diseased kidney, then it is the same process, only on a different level, that I have to apply in therapy: I have to intercept the process; I have to introduce something into the human organism through the combination of sulfur and silicic acid so that I myself produce what presents itself to me as a pathological process. I heal by developing a therapy that is an imitation of the disease process at a different level, and that must be carried out by the astral body. For example, if I introduce the function of equisetum into the human organism, I leave it in the etheric body, and I relieve the astral body of its work on the diseased kidney.

In this way what is otherwise juxtaposed and can only be found together by pure empiricism – pathology and therapy, is transformed into an absolute unity. If we recognize the nature of the disease process in this way, we must find in the outer nature how, for example, a particular kidney process is imitated in Equisetum arvense; or if we recognize that the bile secretion process in the liver is really its inner nature in certain forms of the disease, we find this form of disease of the gall secretion process, for example, in Cichorium intybus, then we are able, through the way in which the function proceeds in Cichorium intybus, to relieve the astral body of the liver in the gall secretion process of what it would otherwise have to do. We thus advance in healing in such a way that pathology itself is actually nothing other than therapy. This is how therapy becomes a truly rational science. — If, for example, we are familiar with the wonderful connection that exists between iron and certain mucilaginous plant components and salts of Anisum vulgare, we can see how there is something functional in this aniseed, particularly in the seeds of Anisum [Pimpinella anisum], which is one with certain hyperinflammatory blood disease processes. We can relieve the blood of these disease processes by using a preparation that is modeled on the connection between certain plant mucilages and the iron in aniseed. In this way, we not only free the astral body, but, when it comes to blood diseases, the ego organization is also involved.

In this way, we come to turn our gaze to the whole of nature. What is beautiful nature outside is actually nothing but an imitation of disease processes. In the human being, these are disease processes on the inside, while outside it is the wonderfully beautiful nature. But one must understand the connection and know how to bring disease functions into the human being from the wide field of natural processes and thereby relieve the supersensible members of human nature of disease processes. Now one no longer has to rely on statistics! For if one recognizes such a connection by inner insight, and observes how the effects must occur, then it is the same as in a physical experiment carried out correctly in an exact scientific way. There one does not proceed according to statistics either, but one knows, for example from Mariotte-Gay-Lussac's law, that this is an exactly executed experiment which, if it is carried out exactly, is also conclusive. With human beings it is not as simple as with a physical experiment, but it is actually the same if one can see through the process of the illness and say: this or that must work, and then see step by step how it works. What is necessary – and this is precisely what is available to such a high degree in the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute of Dr. Wegman in Arlesheim – is that one really banishes all medical skepticism; because that is actually what continually puts the strongest obstacles in one's way. What Dr. Wegman has is the courage to heal. The courage to heal is part of everything! Then you also come to see the disease process and start to counter it, so to speak, intercepting it. But then it becomes particularly important to see how it all actually happens, if you don't want to be sloppy; but to follow the healing process step by step. And then you also know where something is not in order; then you have to go back and investigate where you have overlooked something. But if you then have the courage to heal in every single case and actually do not presuppose anything else, do not want anything other than healing, than courageously healing the disease processes, then you have that, from which you can feel most strongest stimulus, as a scientific basis for medicine that does not merely want to work out rational therapy from an exact pathology as a consequence, but which already has the healing process in the diagnosis. Then one cannot speak about the disease process other than that one already has the therapy at the same time as the diagnosis. One then describes the kidney disease in such a way that the description is very similar to what happens in Equisetum arvense: one transfers what one sees in the kidney to an external natural process; so that one describes in such a way in the diagnosis that the diagnosis contains the healing process.

You hear repeatedly if one talks about anthroposophy that it originates from the fantastic inspirations of single personalities. Many people at least judge that way who fancy themselves as capable. However, one has to say from the start that this anthroposophic spiritual knowledge wants to cover a research field that contains the most important interests of the human life generally. Hence, isolated attempts were done repeatedly at all times to cultivate this field. But one must say that these were mostly only light flashes in our time which were cast on this field by this or that outstanding personality who contemplated the human spiritual life. These light flashes with which one always has the sensation that they come from quite different origins of the human being than the knowledge that refers to the outside sense perception.

Unsurprisingly, an unaware cognitive instinct makes the human beings illuminate this field by such light flashes repeatedly, because on this field there are the most important soul riddles which the human being has to face over and over again with his feeling, thinking and willing. The human being has to feel: if he does not take a position to these questions, it has an effect on his soul that you can compare with a kind of bodily illness. The soul life becomes banal; it feels exposed to all kinds of “addictions”—I would like to say—if the doubts, the uncertainties emerge concerning these questions. However, in our times the human beings were less eager to satisfy their desire for knowledge, which arises from such impulses, with spiritual food. Who did not know the fashion of those who could afford it to visit the most different sanitariums where, actually, for many people nothing was extinguished but that desire for knowledge of which one liked, actually, to be unaware in the usual life. What the human beings searched in sanitariums and similar institutions, were, strictly speaking, only suggestions with which they did not want to be present, so to speak, with their souls and which should meet those mysterious desires about which I have just spoken and which one does not want to satisfy spiritually.

A picture repeatedly emerges to me if I have to contemplate such questions. When I was—to visit somebody—in a sanitarium just at a time when the different guests were passing and when I found out for myself after the conversation and the sight of single patients that that who mostly needed recovery of his nervous system was the doctor in charge. The others needed much less recovery of their nervous systems than the doctor in charge needed.

On this field, single persons who dealt more intensely with questions of the spiritual life have cast single light flashes that arose to them from the depths of their souls. Besides, one thing always became known that would run like a red thread also today through the considerations of this evening. The fact that in the human being, as he walks on earth today, another human being sleeps and rests who is not perceived due to the conditions of the usual life because he sleeps quieter in the usual human being than dream images exist in him which emerge and disappear.

However, one thing always struck just spirited persons when they found out for themselves how this second human being rests in the usual human being: they could not conceive this sleeping human being without bringing him together with death in any way. More or less instinctively, the one or the other personality recognised that just as the phenomena of the outer sense perceptible physical life are associated with the laws of existence, of growth, of birth and so on, this second human being sleeping in the first is associated intimately with death, with fading. You notice that it is a great, important moment for persons of knowledge if they have to think the higher human being in the usual human being associated with the forces of death.

Such a personality is the philosopher and psychologist Karl Fortlage (1806-1881). I want to take an important statement as starting point that he did in a course of eight psychological lectures in 1869. In these lectures, you can find the following, quite important place:

 “If we call ourselves living beings and attribute a quality to ourselves which we have in common with animals and plants, we inevitably understand by the living state something that never leaves us and always continues in sleep and in the wake state in us. This is the vegetative life of nourishing our organism, an unaware life, a sleeping life; it is outbalanced in the breaks of waking by the life of consumption. The brain makes an exception here because this life of nourishing, this sleeping life, is outbalanced in the breaks of the waking by the life of consumption. In these breaks the brain is exposed to prevailing consumption and gets consequently into a state which would bring about the absolute weakening of the body or death, if it extended to the other organs.”

After Fortlage has come to this strange statement, he continues this consideration with the following, profound words: “Consciousness is a little and partial death, death is a big and complete consciousness, an awakening of the whole being in its innermost depths.”

You realise that such a light flash, emerging from the depths of the soul, illuminates the coherence of death and consciousness what accompanies us during our wake life always and makes up, actually, the human being. Fortlage gets to an idea of the relationship of death and consciousness, realising that that which seizes all human beings at once at the moment of death works in microcosm if we unfold our consciousness during the wake life. Every conscious act is in microcosm the same as death is on a large scale. So that—as to Fortlage—the real death if it occurs is the emergence of an enclosing consciousness, which puts the human being into a supersensible world, while he is put into the physical world if his soul needs the physical body between birth and death.

Fortlage wrote many volumes on psychology. However, such light flashes appear only now and again in his writings. The remaining contents of his writings even deal with that which one finds so normally today in psychology: the association and course of mental pictures, the emergence of desires and so on, briefly, with all those questions on which one ventures solely in psychology and which are far away from that what, actually, interests the whole human being in psychology, which are far away from the main questions of freedom and immortality.

The considerations of this evening deal with the question of immortality while in some weeks here I hold a talk about freedom from the same viewpoint.

Even if Fortlage is concerned with the subordinate questions in his vast psychological research, and in such a way that this kind of activity cannot lead to the highest questions, at least, such light flashes are found with him. However, one reproved him for it. Eduard von Hartmann reproved Fortlage sharply that he would have left the path of science introducing such a coherence into the strict science as that of consciousness and death.

Well, one may say, not only Fortlage but also many personalities produced in single light flashes something of knowledge that refers to this characterised second human being sleeping in the sense-perceptible human being. However, these were isolated light flashes.

Anthroposophy has the task now to systemise, to make methodical that what has come up instinctively in single light flashes like manifestations of higher knowledge from the depths of the human soul, so that that which originates from it can place itself as a fully valid science beside the modern natural sciences. However, it is necessary that that who wants to form an opinion about anthroposophy casts off some prejudices that easily result from certain advantages of modern science.

I had to say, the human being whom spiritual science considers is something sleeping in the normally waking human being. From it, however, it is explicable that everything that refers to this second human being is generally drowned as it were at first in our consciousness by the sensory experience and the needs of our personal life. If in this usual life now and again such light flashes appear, they disappear faster than a dream does. No miracle, hence, that most people once say to themselves after the absolutely entitled judgement of our time: indeed, what emerges there from the soul and will manifest of this low sounding sleeping human being, this does—if it appears with those who call themselves spiritual researchers—the impression of something dreamish, fantastic. Our time does not want to get involved with such phantasms. It has rapidly finished its judgement: nonsense, this is something that has arisen from the imagination of single ones.

However, something else could be right. How would it be if it were right that one could get such weak images as they exist in dream of that what lives in the human being beyond birth and death what is the everlasting of the human nature compared with the transient? If this held true, one would have to renounce either any knowledge of the everlasting in the human being if one did not want to recourse to images of imagination or dream life, or one would have to bring the logical discipline into this world that usually seems to be fantastic, the sense of methodical research that one applies to the sense-perceptible world. One has to raise the images with certain soul forces, so that they do not only scurry like dreams, but also become as distinct and impressive as the images of the usual consciousness are.

Is anyone able to do this? Today it is difficult to bring home to a human being that one is able to do it even in scientific sense because today one regards natural sciences as the only science that has a strictly reasonable methodology. If one distinguishes other sciences, one accepts them, actually, only as far as they are founded methodically after the pattern of natural sciences. One has to say for certain fields: what natural sciences have brought up in modern times as mental pictures, showed that it must be that way if they want to control the area which is assigned to them. However, one must also say that one cannot approach the everlasting life of the human being with these mental pictures.

These images cannot be appropriate to the same extent to solve the riddles of nature and the riddles of the human soul. To the latter one has to add something else. Which means must be applied to make the soul so strong that it can bring up the mental pictures which rest sleeping below in our consciousness and can apply the strict discipline and methodology of thinking to them, about which I have spoken in particular in my book How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?. As in former talks, I want again to emphasise some viewpoints of these writings. One gets no idea of the approach of the spiritual researcher what he has to do, actually, to behold into the spiritual world with his soul if one does not realise what one can experience as a whole human being with the suitable desire for knowledge at certain limiting points of knowledge to which just the modern natural sciences lead.

Modern natural sciences give that who dedicates himself to them not only explanations, which nobody admires more than the spiritual researcher does, of the outer physical course, of various things which have an impact on the practical life, but natural sciences give that who dedicates himself from certain viewpoints an inner education of the soul life. More than one was able in former stadia of scientific cognition, today one is prepared to spiritual research cognitively, actually, just by natural sciences. One should not be restricted by that what natural sciences have to say about the outside world in their own field.

One should rather be able to soar an inner discipline of the soul life by the way one does research in nature. The mental pictures that natural sciences deliver can explain the outer nature only; after their contents, they have nothing to say about the spiritual life. But while one applies them devotedly, they educate that human being by the way who is able to take care of that what goes forward in him, of certain inner living conditions which bring along him to receive a concept, an inner experience of that soul life beyond the body.

I know very well that this concept—living with his soul beyond the body—is for many people the summit of nonsense today. However, this never minds. Everybody can convince himself that the inner experience gives him the certain insight of the life beyond the body if he goes through such soul exercises as I have indicated them in my writings or as I want to pronounce them, in principle, here.

One can experience especially important things if one just arrives at that boundary area of cognitive life to which natural sciences lead so often. You know, many people speak of the big boundary questions of cognition. One speaks of the fact that the human soul comes to a border if it wants to know about whether the world is infinite or limited spatially or temporally, if the soul wants to know whether it is subject to an irresistible constraint in all its actions or whether it is free.

Indeed, these are the highest boundary questions. Du Bois-Reymond put such boundary questions in his famous speech about the limits of the knowledge of nature, about the seven world riddles. You can experience the deepest impression if you feel out of the pain of a person longing for knowledge how such a person stands at such a boundary place.

I could bring in many examples. Such an example is contained in the writings of the famous aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). If one reads his writings, one has often to stop with that what he experiences at such boundary places of cognition. He wrote a nice treatise on a book that the philosopher Johannes Volkelt (1846-1930) had written about the dream fantasies.

In this treatise that reproached Vischer that he had mixed with the spiritists, Vischer states such a place where he shows what he had experienced at the boundary places of cognition. He said, it is most certain that the human soul cannot be in the body; however, it is also most certain that it is not beyond the body. Here we have such a boundary question, which is paradoxical, because it has an entire contradiction in itself, as those are which one meets just always then when one delves devotedly in strict natural sciences, in life generally. The soul cannot be in the body; however, it can also not be beyond the body!—Why does one get to such contradiction?

At such border places where such contradictions appear, the scientific cognition is not at all helpful and it is most annoying if one believes that it helps something. Then, however, most people are soon ready with their judgement. They simply say in such a case, well, up to here just the human knowledge reaches; we are not able to get further.—However, it is not that way. Because Vischer had the prejudice, he experienced the contradiction only. However, he did not experience what one can do to get further with his soul at such border places. Here the usual cognition must stop and a particular experience of the soul has to begin. Here you must be able to forget as it were what the images of the usual life are because they lead you just to this border place only. You must be able to experience this here. Here you must be able to struggle with that what faces you if you let yourself in for such a contradiction. One should experience such contradictions with the whole soul. Then something new faces the soul like from spiritual depths that it cannot experience without this experience of such contradictions.

One has formed mental pictures of how, for example, lower animals that still have no senses develop senses in contact with the outside world. An inner life existed; it is confronted with the outer world, adapts itself to the outer world, and experiences the impulses of the outer world. While before the life pulsates in the organism and then everywhere stumbles against the sensory outside, it develops, we say, a sense of touch. First, it is a kind of internal tunnelling, then bumping against the borders of the externally spatial. Nevertheless, the being learns in the contact with the outside world to adapt itself; it forms a kind of picture of the outside world by the sense of touch; by the collisions with the border, this sense of touch develops.

One can compare to this image of that what develops the outer senses in the lower organisms what the soul experiences if it gets to such border places of cognition. There the soul really experiences in such a way, as if you bump against anything in the darkness that you have outside at first. Then that differentiates itself, which you experience there in such contradictory mental pictures that one forms at boundary places of knowledge. As the sense of touch arises as a physical sense from the undifferentiated cells, a spiritual existence arises from the mental, while the soul bumps against the border of the spiritual world. You really bump against the spiritual world. However, you also adapt yourself to it. You experience the significant that you have the soul first as it were as an undeveloped soul organism, which the outside spiritual world faces, then however, this soul develops spiritual senses of touch and spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in the further process to perceive that with which it is confronted at first.

I gladly believe that today those people who feel the urge to experience something of the spiritual world would prefer if one could teach the ability of perceiving the spiritual world while one imposes them mystically or as the case may be. Some people believe this. Nevertheless, it is not that way. What opens the spiritual world to us is inner soul work. This inner soul work really leads to that which I have indicated. The human being who changes his soul into an organised soul knows that his soul gets free from the body, when pushing against the spiritual and perceives the spirit. Getting free from the body is a result of inner perception. Since also that which I have explained just now appears repeatedly with persons of knowledge.

It is strange, how the course develops which I have described spiritual-scientifically with those who have worked through the longings for knowledge.

Let me bring in an example of Vischer once again, the example of a quotation by him by which he shows how he felt placed repeatedly at those boundary places of cognition where one cannot help perceiving contradictions, but contradictions that cannot be solved while you solve them logically, but while you settle down into them and develop your spiritual organs.

In particular, the following contradiction appeared to Vischer over and over again: the brain should be the organ of the soul, should produce mental pictures as it were; but if one becomes engrossed in the being of the mental pictures, one cannot regard them as cerebral products. This is such a boundary place of cognition; Vischer says referring to it:

“No mind, where no nerve centre, where no brain, the opponents say.”—Vischer himself does not say it—“No nerve centre, no brain, we say if it were not prepared from below on countless levels. It is simple to jibe at a spirit rumbling about in granite and lime—it is not more difficult than if we ask mockingly how the proteins in the brain soar ideas. The human knowledge cannot measure the level differences. It will remain a secret how it appears and happens that nature behind which the spirit still must slumber is such perfect counterblow of the spirit that we get bumps from it. It is a diremption of such apparent totality that with Hegel's alterity and exasperation, as witty as the formula may be, nothing is said; the asperity of the imaginary partition is simply covered. One finds the right recognition of the cutting edge and the thrust of this counterblow with Fichte, but no explanation of it.”

This portrayal is very strange. Friedrich Theodor Vischer feels facing a limit of knowledge; he describes his experience. How has he to describe it?

He gets to the expression: “we get bumps from it.” He gets to the expression: “cutting edge and thrust of the counterblow.”—One sees the soul that wants to differentiate to develop internal spiritual organs by which it can experience the supersensible outside world, in which it lives.

For a long time in the history of humanity, it was an obstacle to soar spiritual organs in the right way because one believed only the human thinking that takes the sense impressions as starting point could solve certain questions, just the questions of God, freedom and immortality.

Well, thinking is important, because strictly speaking a big part of those exercises that one must do to attain spiritual organs consists of a higher development of thinking than the thinking is which one uses in natural sciences. However, if you only abandon yourself to the usual thinking, that originates from the usual human being not from that second human being sleeping in you. This thinking does not lead into the spiritual world; this thinking can only realise that it is in the spiritual world. However, no unbiased person concedes that thoughts are something that lives in the sensory world; however, these thoughts contain nothing but impressions of the sensory world if they are taken from the usual human nature. People with deeper inner life have always felt like in flashes of inspiration where to the human thinking leads if it is left to itself, emancipated from the outer sense perception.

You can find—if you have experience of the spiritual-scientific literature—such light flashes with numerous personalities which sometimes are, however, darkness flashes. With them, one has to stop and observe to which cliffs the human cognitive life leads if this life is sincere and honest to itself and does not fool itself with all kinds of prejudices, and does not apply all kinds of methods taken from other, verified fields to the soul life itself. Again an example of many:

A man who really struggled with knowledge problems and riddles is Gideon Spicker (1840-1912) who taught philosophy at the University of Münster until few years. Gideon Spicker took the education for the spiritual as starting point. The deepest knowledge questions arose to him from theology. Some years ago, he wrote two nice booklets: From the Cloister to the Academic Lectureship. Destinies of a Former Capuchin (1908) and In the Turning Point of the Christian World Period. A Philosophical Confession of a Former Capuchin (1910); in the one he describes his life, in the other his knowledge desire.

At a place, one has to pause particularly where this former Capuchin, who then became a professor, expresses himself about the experience that he had with thinking that he had emancipated from the sensory experience. However, he did not have the courage to go into spiritual science; he did not develop the power of thoughts so far that it wakes the spiritual organs, so that he faced a spiritual world, felt with his soul being in the realm of the supersensible. Because he was at such a border place where he experienced something with the thinking, he expressed himself as follows:

“To which philosophy one confesses, whether to a dogmatic or skeptical, to an empiric or transcendental, a critical or eclectic one: all without exception take an unproven and unprovable proposition as starting point, namely the necessity of thinking. No investigation gets to this necessity, as deeply as it may prospect one day. It must be absolutely accepted and can be founded by nothing”—he means the necessity of thinking—“every attempt to prove its correctness always requires it. Beneath it a bottomless abyss yawns, a nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light. We do not know, where from it comes, neither where to it leads. Whether a merciful God or a bad demon put it in the reason, both are uncertain.”

However, no human being speaks this way who has learnt a little bit only, has maybe learnt very much, and puts up all kinds of philosophy from the learnt concepts. Thus a human being speaks who has worked through what the knowledge researcher can go through if he submerges with his soul forces only deeply enough into that undergrounds of inner experience into which one can submerge where one is confronted with the cliffs, the partitions which one only penetrates if the spiritual organs really awake if they become consciousness.

In my life, I became acquainted with a number of such persons like Gideon Spicker, and I have tried to reflect such characters in the picture of Strader in my mystery dramas. However, I had to experience with it that just those who are often called followers of anthroposophy misunderstood me to the greatest extent. While the persons whom these dramas show are taken out of the real, comprehensive life, from that life that should just show the necessity and the validity of spiritual science from the other areas of modern existence, weird persons believed, I would write such roles that are tailor-made for those who should represent them, whereas I was just a far cry from this.

I could show with a comparison what such a person experiences who does not get to the knowledge of spirit but to the insight of the necessity of thinking. Someone who gets to the knowledge of spirit knows that if one not only wants to consider the thinking but experiences it, he does not experience, indeed, that beyond the thinking that Gideon Spicker describes, the bottomless abyss, the nightmarish darkness illuminated by no beam of light, but he experiences the spiritual world beyond this thinking that bears the sense-perceptible reality. He experiences with his soul in this supersensible area. He also experiences that there is no uncertainty whether a merciful God or a bad demon has been put in the reason, but he experiences and observes the spiritual that penetrates the reason, as the sense perceptible world penetrates the sensory observation.

However, one must say that the thinking—if it is left to itself if it is only thought, and is not experienced—that such a development of the soul life can be compared—you forgive for the somewhat odd comparison—with a hungry organism. If one believes to be able to recognise something of the highest questions by mere thinking—God, freedom, immortality—, then one resembles a person who does not want to still his hunger with food from the outside, but lets the hunger develop. As little as you can develop a hungry organism, so that it balances out its needs in itself, just as little you can attain any spiritual content of the soul and any solution of the questions of God, freedom, immortality if you abandon yourself only to the thinking. As you starve on and on unless you eat, you cannot attain the spiritual development if you think only on and on.

The older philosophical metaphysics wanted this. As hard as it is, it is true: this outdated metaphysics that is something new, however, to some people is nothing but a science that suffers from mental malnutrition.

However, it is not enough that you gain this knowledge only to understand the inner experience correctly. As you have to understand that mere thinking leads to mental malnutrition if this thinking does not brace itself up for inner experience, you have also to understand that much knowledge of the outer sense-perceptible reality and its processing by the intellect, by methodical research do not lead to any knowledge of the soul.

You will convince yourselves if you take common textbooks of psychology that one normally starts speaking about the nervous system. What one says, otherwise, about the human organism is borrowed from physiology, from natural sciences.

Now I have to stress repeatedly not to be misunderstood that spiritual science is a far cry from misjudging what natural sciences have reached concerning the secrets of the nervous life, the secrets of the human organism. I do not want to discount its value. Nevertheless, the value is in another area than in that of the soul knowledge. You may abandon yourself to the mere thinking, then you starve; but abandoning yourself to the outer observation for the knowledge of the soul life only resembles the supply of all kinds of stuff that is indigestible. If you fill your stomachs with stones or the like, the human organism cannot make anything from this indigestible stuff.

Thus you cannot suppose, if you take the scientific results simply in such a way as they are and do not process them mentally, that you receive any enlightenment of the spiritual world, of the life of the soul in the supersensible realm. In our times, people abandoned themselves to the most different mental pictures that should explain how actually the soul relates to the body. Not only that there the oddest fairy tales are bustling about in that what one often calls science. One wants to eradicate fairy tales and superstition from the outer life, in science they often flourish, one only notes it in science just as little as one noted it in the outer life of former times. That fairy tale also belongs to it that the nerves are telegraph wires to the soul that pass on the outer sensory impressions, then again other nerves are there which direct the will impulses to the periphery. About this fairy tale, one would not like to talk at all, because what is meant with this comparison is far away from reality and arises only from an unnoticed scientific superstition.

However, I would like to emphasise two mental pictures that are also widespread today with those who contemplate the relationship of the body and the soul.

Some people believe that they have to regard the body or the nervous system as a kind of tool of the soul, as if the soul is a being that uses the body like a tool. The others who cannot realise how a mental-spiritual being should find a working point to work on something material like the body got even to the weird mental picture of the mental-bodily parallelism. There the processes of the body should proceed for themselves. Without the soul working on the body like a cause or the body reacting on the soul, the soul life should proceed in parallel with the bodily processes. One current always accompanies the other, but the one does not work on the other. Wundt (Wilhelm W., 1832-1920), Ebbinghaus (Herman E., 1850-1909), Paulsen (Friedrich, 1846-1908) and many others dedicate themselves to this weird parallelism theory.

All these theories suffer from the fact that they do not realise what the coherence of the soul with the body is based on. This coherence can be expressed neither by the fact that one says, the body is the tool of the soul, nor that one says, the soul processes proceed in parallel with the bodily phenomena.

However, I am able to bring only forward that what I can say that encompasses a wide field as a result and observation of anthroposophy. Everybody can find the other reasons in my various writings. Nevertheless, I would like to show the essentials briefly today.

If one wants to express the relationship of soul and body correctly, one has to say, as far as one considers the human being, everything bodily of the human being turns out to be for a real observation neither as tool nor as a process running alongside but as a creation of the soul in microcosm and on a large scale.

It is nothing bodily at the human being that is no creation of the soul. However, one has to cast off some prejudices and to take up new concepts from spiritual science if one wants to envisage this far-reaching idea that everything bodily is a creation of the soul.

Already in microcosm, this is in such a way if we form any mental picture if a feeling emerges in us. Yes, only because one has not learnt to observe spiritually and bodily, one believes that there something exterior works on a finished body; the exterior effect spreads to the finished body through the eye or ear, then the effect continues inwardly. Have an unbiased look at the suitable theories. You will find everywhere that they are not at all based on real observations but on prejudices. Since what really goes forward if we perceive if we hear anything, is already carried out, actually, for the most part when we become aware of it, and is strictly speaking always a developmental process in the body. A beam of light hits us and causes something. It is in the same world in which our body is. In our body, something goes forward. What goes forward in it is of the same kind, only in microcosm, as it is if on a large-scale forces form our organism on a large scale. As the forces of growth and other forces form our organism, something is formed in us if a beam of light hits us if a tone hits us and so on. That which is formed there as something subtle in us is reflected in the soul that is not in the body but always in the supersensible realm. We become aware of the reflection. The process, however, which must take place there for the wake consciousness must be a destructive process, a little death.

We cannot completely convince ourselves of the consciousness, of the soul being with the help of the usual consciousness processes, and with bodily-spiritual observation. Nevertheless, if we come on what also accompanies our usual awake life, on the forming of memories, we come already nearer to that which I have just said. Someone who is able to observe what goes forward in the human being knows: what makes a mental picture aware to us does not lead straight away to memories. No, something has always to run alongside, another process has to take place. If you have sense for observation, look at a pupil who studies hard ever so much; what he must perform as auxiliary exercises, so that that which he takes up also goes over into his memory. For a subconscious accompanying process must proceed always. That which we know does not remain to us, but that which goes alongside the consciousness in the subconsciousness. However, that which happens there in our organism by this side flow of the consciousness is still very similar to the growth processes of childhood.

The origin of mental pictures is a growth process in microcosm. Usually we grow like with tremendous power in proportion to the small growth process that takes place in us, unnoticed in the usual life if memory forms. Under the surface of the current of the conscious mental pictures, events happen which carry the memories; and this is very like the growth processes. Do you ask why one can well train the memory just in your youth? Because you still have fresh growth forces in yourselves, because they have not yet withered. However, I can always give such single proofs only; you can prove what I have said with many single observations.

Our usual imagining, feeling and willing intervenes already in such a way that it is reflected not only and makes aware what happens; but in such a way as concerning the memory an undercurrent is there for our conscious life, there is also an upper current. As one does not note the undercurrent—one notes it at most if the pupil studies hard and does movements and knocks its head to support this undercurrent—, one does not note the upper current all the more. However, this upper current belongs above all to that second human being who sleeps there in the usual human being, while we think, feel, and will in our usual life.

Just as the current of memory proceeds beneath the consciousness, something purely mental proceeds above the consciousness, something that does not intervene at all anyhow in the body. Because this conscious soul life has such hyper-experience, I would like to say, the forces of growth are not sufficient for this conscious soul life, for the entire soul life at all. The forces that lead the human being to birth are not sufficient. These forces could only evoke that in the human being that we perceive with the sleeping organism.

At the moment when the consciousness intervenes with its upper currents in the organism, those forces which also destroy this organism finally at death must intervene in the organism. These forces are destructive forces, so that the forces of growth must balance out them in sleep. Only then, one understands the supersensible life of the soul if one knows how far the purely organic reaches subsensibly.

I do not like speaking about personal experiences; what I tell, however, is associated substantially with that which I generally have to bring forward. I confess that I intensely pursued the problems about which I speak today and in my writings since for more than thirty years on all ways that may arise. These ways have to lead the soul into the area of spiritual life and in the coherence of this spiritual-mental life with the bodily life. I have found that—if you go about your work scientifically in the sense of our time honestly and sincerely—you really can obtain many fertile things, while you discipline yourself scientifically. On this way then you just find those questions for whose solution the usual natural sciences do not suffice. Yes, just from scientific thinking one gets other observation results about what is in natural sciences, actually.

The question of the nature of the nervous system was one of the biggest ones to me for decades, which the scientific psychologists, the psychological scientists regard as the organ of the soul who imagine that in the nerves an inner activity takes place, which is similar to other organ activities. Well, such activities also proceed in the nerves, but they do just not serve the forming of mental pictures, of feelings and will impulses. They serve the nutrition of the nerves, the production of the nervous substance if it has been consumed. They just do not serve the soul life; however, they must be there, so that the soul life can take place. I use a comparison that I have used here already once.

If you consider the nervous system as something that must be there for the soul life, you just have something, as if you say, the ground must be there, so that I do not fall into the depth if I want to go. However, if I go and the ground is soft, I leave behind tracks. Then someone will completely err who checks the ground and searches the forces in it, which my footprints have produced from inside. As little as these forces produce tracks from inside, any inner forces of the brain and nervous system produce the tracks that originate from imagining, feeling, and willing. There the mental works which prevails in the supersensible area.

Before one does not realise this and experiences it as real observation, one can generally come to no understanding of the true nature of the soul. That which is on the bottom of the soul life in the nervous life is not the organic processes of the nervous system—they lead to another direction—, this is that which I would like to specify now. I have brought in the preceding personal remark, so that you realise that I do not frivolously pronounce something such substantial that it is hard gained what I say about the nervous life: while organic forces go into the nervous ramifications, the human being goes over from life to death. In the nervous ramifications, the human being dies perpetually, if he uses these nervous ramifications for thinking, feeling, or willing.

The organic life does not continue as the growth conditions do, but it dies away, while ramifying in the nerves. While it dies away, it prepares the ground for the spiritual development, for the purely supersensible mental. As I remove the air with a pump from a container, produce vacuum, and then the air completely flows again into the container by itself, in the same way mental life flows in the dead part of the nervous system perpetually if the organism sends the partial death into it.

Hence, the partial death is the basis of consciousness. If one recognises that the human being does not need to pour his organic forces into his body to make this body the place of the soul, but that the human being needs to kill his organic experience to withdraw this organic life constantly from the places to which the nerves give the opportunity, you notice how the supersensible soul life can develop in the sensory body, however, after it has created this sensory body first. Since the same soul, which thinks, feels and wills in the time from conception to death, exists also before. The spiritual world is not anywhere in a cloud-cuckoo-land, it is there where the sense-perceptible world is also; it penetrates it. Where sensory effects are, they originate from supersensible, spiritual effects. This same soul lives in the supersensible world that has formed the body and has changed it into the apparatus reflecting the processes to it of which you can become aware. Before it came to conception, it lived in the supersensible world, and in this life on earth, it is connected with the supersensible world. This soul exists already since centuries, before it enters the sense-perceptible existence at conception. As in the life between birth and death this soul has created the body as its image and unfolds its life with this image of the body, the life of the soul unfolds the forces that develop the forces of heredity from the supersensible world.

It is correct that that which we pass on originates in the successive generations. However, our soul works already on them. We insert the forces in our ancestors by the effects of our soul that we receive then as inherited. Thus, we develop our whole organism from the spiritual world as we form something with the memory in microcosm; and only the base, the opportunity of it is given by the sensory heredity. The body is completely a creation of the mental-spiritual. As well as the single experience between birth and death is based on a creation of the spiritual, the entire human body is also based on the spiritual-mental. However, there are incorporated not only the forces of growth in this developmental current but also the forces that appear finally in the total sum as death which is only the outside of immortality.

Since while the mental-spiritual puts the body in the world, is reflected with it, it experiences its own life in the supersensible area. However, at the same time it destroys the body because the upper current mentioned just now develops. As every consciousness is based on a partial death, the complete death is nothing but the withdrawal of the soul from the body that is the beginning of a different experience of the soul. We know: as we develop memories between birth and death, we developed the inner human being in the supersensible current who goes through births and deaths who is everlasting.

What I have indicated as soul experience is not anything that the spiritual researcher produces, it is the characterised second human being whom one only oversleeps, otherwise, but is always in the human being. Spiritual research is nothing but making people aware of that what is perpetual and eternal in the human being, so that he can go through death. If you are able to move with your mental in the spiritual in the intimated way as you move with your senses in the physical-sensory, then you know that you live as a human being also in a spiritual world as one lives with the senses in a physical world. As one distinguishes the mineral, plant and animal realms in the physical world, one distinguishes realms in the spiritual world, which are full of beings that become more and more spiritual the higher you ascend to which the human being belongs with his soul, as he belongs with his body to the physical realms. Briefly, the soul consciously enters in the spiritual world.

I would like to call this worldview Goetheanism after its origins, as well as I would call the building in Dornach Goetheanum that is dedicated to this worldview. Since not on some daydreams but on the healthy condition on which the Goethean worldview is based that is also based what I mean as anthroposophy. Goethe differed in his view of the physical things just by such conditions from that what originated later as natural sciences. However, Goethe developed such scientific concepts that these concepts may sit heavily in the soul's stomach like stones, but can be transformed, so that you reach the mental realm with these scientific concepts. Goethe himself did not yet found spiritual science; he did not get around to doing this. Nevertheless, he developed his theory of metamorphosis so that you only need to develop the internal experience from the principles further, then you also attain knowledge of the mental-spiritual experience.

Whereto does the common psychology, actually, come? A very significant philosopher of the present, Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who died recently, had a rich knowledge life behind himself. He was a fighter in this area; last, he found asylum during this war in Zurich. He attempted to cope with thinking, feeling, and willing his whole life through, beside his other profound researches in the psychological field. These three concepts play a particular role in psychology. Franz Brentano did not advance further than to a classification, did not advance where one can grasp the mental itself only as something living. If one clusters imagining, feeling, willing so simply mechanically, one has three classes. To grasp the mental as something living, one has to grasp the mental, now, however, the spiritual-mental, in such a way as Goethe tried to grasp the outer physical things with his theory of metamorphosis, as Goethe imagined the green leaves of the stalk transformed into the petals, even into the fruit organs. As he attempted to explain all organs by a transformation into each other, one must not only leave thinking, feeling, and willing side by side, but also gain the living transition of them.

There I can bring in the research results again which matured in myself for a long time. Our will is not only put so externally beside the feeling and the imagining, but the feeling has simply originated as a metamorphosis of the will in such a way as the petal forms from the stalk leaf; and imagining develops from feeling. At the end the anthroposophist gets to the result that the will is basically a young being which if it becomes older changes into feeling, and if it becomes even older into thinking, into mental pictures. In the imagining the same is always mysteriously contained which is also inside feeling and willing. However, we do not experience how mental pictures arise from feeling.

However, if the soul has developed its spiritual organs, it experiences a mysterious feeling in all its mental pictures, but not a feeling which is bound to our body, but which leads us on the detour of the mental picture into the vastnesses of the spiritual world. You experience—if you are not led by the feeling into your bodily, but are led into the vastnesses of the spiritual world—that supersensible in which we are between death and a new birth. Then you experience the supersensible world with higher knowledge than the usual mental pictures are, with spiritual-mental knowledge.

However, most people would like to experience this supersensible world after the methods of the sensory world. They are not contented to experience it only in pictures, in Imaginations. They would like to experience it with the senses. However, as the body has to die to become pure spirit, one has to cast off the sensory knowledge that combines with the material. Knowledge has to become Imagination, so that in the Imaginative experience which is as subtle as imagination, but not so arbitrary, the sensory-material is cast off, and a picture of that reality is already attained between birth and death that the human being experiences after death.

Hence, nobody can hope to recognise the supersensible who would like to hear voices or to get other material effects like the spiritists do, while because of a weird self-deception these want to tackle, actually, the supersensible and put something sense-perceptible to themselves. With that subtle spiritual experience, which must happen if one wants to experience the imperishable human being, just many people are not content today. Only this supersensible experience can lead us to the real knowledge of the soul being in the supersensible field that leads us to a true view of the relationship of the body to the soul and that of the soul to the body.

As the feeling changes into imagining, the willing does it too. As one can find a feeling mysteriously in every mental picture, one also discovers a will impulse, which does not lead us to the movements of the limbs, to sensory actions, but leads us from imagining into the supersensible world.

If one discovers the young soul being of willing in the old-grown soul being of imagining, one discovers in this willing which is experienced purely spiritually those forces which work from the preceding life on earth on this life on earth. Then the repeated lives on earth and the intermediate lives in the purely supersensible world become real observation; then the human being gets to the real supersensible knowledge.

One could think that the supersensible knowledge is there only to satisfy the human need of knowledge. Let me quite briefly, at the end, only indicate with few words that this does not hold true. One could believe that only the human need of knowledge is satisfied, but this has its deep practical significance. Indeed, one is concerned with progress in the evolution of humanity. The Copernican worldview, the modern natural sciences came only, after humanity had gone through other levels before. Thus, the anthroposophical spiritual science only originates if the urge to recognise the supersensible is strong enough in the human beings. Many people who know that there is a supersensible world still believe that today the human beings are not ripe to develop those free cognitive forces to wake the sleeping human being. The opposite is the case! Today the human being thirsts for supersensible knowledge. He numbs himself only as I have said at the beginning of this talk.

This cannot go on this way for other reasons, too. One can recognise nature without ascending to laws that make the soul life explicable. You can even say that you can recognise nature the better, the more you keep away from any mental-spiritual while developing physical laws. The physical laws will be the more suited for their field, the less one confuses them with laws that refer only to the mental-spiritual. One has already to say this. However, as soon as it concerns the complete understanding of human life, so that our understanding can intervene in the development of this human life, as soon as it concerns the social and political living together, as soon as it concerns generally finding a right relation from human being to human being, something else is necessary. Then the thoughts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences are not sufficient.

Unfortunately, humanity has got used very much to thinking life after such thought forms after which one imagines natural processes. Thus people also have instinctively familiarised themselves with the social life, with the political living together in such a way and also to form it as the spirit forms which only is just used to thinking physical laws. More and more this has developed that way during the last four centuries. As it is correct if natural sciences exclude the spirit from their field, it is insufficient for the human living together, for everything that is connected with society, with sociology to develop thought forms that originate only from natural sciences. One does not become ready with how the human beings have to live together all over the world if one wants to develop this living together after political, after social ideals that are produced after the pattern of scientific principles.

One example of many: when this tragic war broke out, one could hear from many sides, just from the people who called themselves experts of the laws of human living together: this war can last no longer than at most four to five months.—In full seriousness, these persons said this from their scientifically developed thinking, which also exists with that who is not a physical scientist. Just the greatest experts spoke this way. How sadly has reality disproved these mental pictures! Nobody who figures spiritual-scientifically out the world can dedicate himself to such mistakes because he knows which difference exists between escapist mental pictures and realistic ones.

What fulfils our souls as spiritual science brings us together with reality; it puts us into the full reality. A social science, which really copes with this living together of human beings around the whole world which should not bring in instincts, impulses to the human beings which discharge as the today's dreadful, catastrophic events discharge—such a social science can arise only from the conditions which spiritual science gives. Since it deals not with a part of life but with the whole life; hence, it only can generate mental pictures and concepts that cope with reality.

If people do not force themselves to build up their social thinking based on spiritual science, humanity will not come out of the calamities that discharge today so frightfully. I can appreciate what goes out from the people who one calls pacifists or similarly. However, such things cannot be decided by mere orders, cannot be decided by the fact that one decrees: this and that must be.

One can absolutely agree with that which must be. However, if one only produces the orders, only the laws of the usual thinking, it is in such a way, as if one says to a stove: dear stove, it is your duty to heat the room; hence, heat the room.—It will not heat the room, without putting wood into it and making a fire.

Just as little all the usual ideas of peacekeeping et cetera are sufficient. It concerns that one not only says, human beings, love each other, but that one puts heating material into the human souls. However, these are concepts that arise from the living conception of spiritual life.

Since the soul does not only belong to the material, it belongs to the spiritual life. One does often not understand even today, what it means that this human soul belongs to the supersensible area. One usually thinks that one is with the laws which one develops today already in the supersensible area. One does not do this.

Just in the fields of serious science one often starts realising already that it is also significant to check for human experience not only that which scientific prejudice has sketched out in the last decades but also that there other concepts, other ideas are necessary.

Did we not experience the strange play in the last time that one of the most loyal disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), the famous physiologist, wrote a book in which he says farewell to the whole outwardness of Darwin's theory which wants to explain the evolution only with a sum of contingencies, of coincidences, which does not want that forces intervene in this evolution that one cannot recognise with mere outer observation. Thus, one experienced the strange case that Oscar Hertwig wrote a significant book in the last time: The Origin of Organisms — a Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance (1916). In this book in which serious science itself attempts to come out from the only material, to ascend to the spiritual, Oscar Hertwig closes his explanations with the following considerations:

“The interpretation of Darwin's theory which is so ambiguous with its indefiniteness also permitted a versatile use in other fields of the economic, social, and political life. From it everybody could get desired answers, like from a Delphi oracle, concerning its practical applications on social, political, hygienic, medical, and other fields and refers as affirmation of his assertions to the Darwinian biology with its immutable physical principles. However, if now these putative principles are no real ones”—Oscar Hertwig believes to have proved that—, “should there not be social dangers with its versatile practical application on other fields? Nevertheless, do not believe that the human society can use phrases like the relentless struggle for existence, the selection of the fittest, the natural perfection etc. transferring them to the most different fields without being deeper influenced in the whole direction of its ideation. One could easily prove this assertion with many phenomena of modern times. Just therefore the decision of truth and error of Darwinism is beyond the scope of biological science.”

There you recognise how a naturalist realises: what the human beings think and what of their thoughts changes over into their impulses, that prepares and develops what then in the outer reality comes into being; the spiritual is also the creator of the material in the social field.

If the material appears in such figure as today, one has to search other reasons in the spiritual than someone searches them who goes forward with his concepts of the social only after the pattern of natural sciences. Spiritual science that is based on occultism will work different on the social life; it will not speak only of a relentless struggle for existence, but it will figure out what positions itself as something spiritual in that which appears in nature only as struggle for existence. It considers not only the existence after the outside, but after that which the spirit has poured into it; it will not only judge the course of evolution by its functionality but also by that which has been put as something ethical in the course of purposefulness. It will not only speak of perfection by natural selection but of the creative spirit that flows into the developmental current and creates the natural selection as well as the soul creates its body. It will search the bases of the social laws above all in the supersensible.

There we can already realise that spiritual science is not something that satisfies mere knowledge, but something that is intimately associated with the practical need, with the whole course of life. The future will demand those bases of thinking just for the practical life that can originate only from spiritual science.

Why are the human beings reluctant even today to accept spiritual science? Just from that which I have said now one can get an answer. We were mainly concerned this evening how spiritual science pursues the riddle of immortality. However, death separates us from immortality. We have realised that just in the course of life we have to recognise the perpetual intervention of death. In ancient times, one always said, someone who enters into the spiritual world must experience death symbolically.

It is maybe a radical diction, but it is true. Between our world of the senses and the intellect that analyzes the sensory observations and the world of immortality is no world of growth but of death. One has to envisage death; one has to look at the destructive forces that counteract the forces that just natural sciences regard as the forces of growth.

This produces something similar in the area of knowledge, as it is the fear of death in the outer life. One can already speak of the fact that people do not have the courage to penetrate that area through which one must go if one wants to enter into the supersensible. The human beings shrink from it. They do not know it. They deceive themselves with all kinds of theories and prejudices of limits of knowledge, with any only material significance of life. They rather deceive themselves than that they pass that gate courageously through which one can come only from the sensory to the extrasensory world. However, the gate is that by which one must recognise the nature of death. Since it is true: the human being will find adequate harmony of his soul only if he can absorb the secrets of immortality.

Nevertheless, to the fruit of knowledge that can be enjoyed as immortality one gets only if one ploughs over the ground of death. However, one must not be afraid of it. As the human being overcomes the deadly fear of knowledge in the area of cognition, a science of the immortal, of the supersensible will originate. Tomorrow I speak about the fact that this science of the supersensible disturbs nobody's religious confession. I hope that I do not engage your attention tomorrow as long as today; but I was not able to shorten this basic talk.

The great advances in natural science in recent centuries, but especially in recent decades, are rightly admired, as I have repeatedly mentioned in the lectures on spiritual science given here. And it is only right that the modern man, in order to get to know the present point of human development, likes to put himself in the mindset and the way of thinking from which these results, this progress of natural science, have been achieved. But by putting himself in this way of thinking, the modern man's thinking, his whole mind, takes on certain forms. And without detracting from our admiration for the progress of natural science, it must be said that in recent times this very immersion in the scientific way of thinking has, in many people, produced a kind of inability to be attentive to what knowledge of the nature of the human soul, of the human spirit itself, gives, what knowledge it gives about the most important, most incisive riddles of human existence.

If one follows the course of spiritual history from the points of view just mentioned, one not only gets a general idea of the inability just described. If we look in detail at what has been attempted in recent times with regard to the study of the soul, we immediately get the impression that minds that have been trained by the scientific way of thinking often pass by the points where the knowledge of the soul, the knowledge of the most important questions of existence, should open up. As an example today, I will mention the ideas of a thinker of recent times, whom I have often referred to here and who can indeed be considered one of those who have endeavored to go beyond the merely external, sensual existence and point to something that lives in the spiritual behind the sensual. I would like to start with certain thoughts that Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious, wrote down at the beginning of his psychology, his theory of the soul. He expresses how it is actually impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul, and how the difficulty of a psychology lies precisely in the fact that it is almost impossible to observe the phenomena of the soul. Let us allow Hartmann's thoughts to arise in this direction before our soul. He says:

“Psychology seeks to establish what is given; to do so, it must above all observe it. But observing one's own psychic phenomena is a peculiar matter, since it inevitably disturbs and changes what it focuses on to a lesser or greater degree. Anyone who wants to observe their own delicate feelings will, by focusing their attention on them, alter these feelings quite considerably.”

Hartmann therefore believes that you cannot observe the soul, because if you want to observe feelings, you have to observe the soul; but when you want to direct your attention to a tender feeling, it disappears into the soul; the soul withdraws, as it were, from the observation of the human being.

“Yes, even,” he says, “they can slip away from him underhand. A slight physical pain is intensified by observation.”

So he means: pain is a mental experience; but how can we observe it? How can we find out what is there when pain lives in the soul in such a way that when we start observing it, it becomes stronger. So it changes. By observing, we change what we want to observe. Or:

“Reciting the most familiar memorized material can falter or become confused in its sequence if the observation is trying to determine the course of this sequence.”

He means: It is a mental phenomenon when we recite something that we have memorized. But if we want to start observing what is actually happening while we are reciting, it does not work. So we cannot observe this mental phenomenon of reciting. Or he says:

"Strong feelings or even emotions, such as fear and anger, make it impossible to observe one's own psychological phenomena. Often, observation falsifies the result by introducing into what is given only that which it expects to find. It seems almost impossible to objectify one's psychic experiences of the present moment in such a way that one makes them the object of simultaneous observation; either the experience does not allow the simultaneous observation to arise, or the observation falsifies and displaces the experience.

We see here a personality that, as it were, recoils from the observation of the soul under the influence of thinking. If I want to grasp the soul, then I change the soul precisely through this soul activity of grasping. And that is why observation is actually not possible at all – so Hartmann thinks.

Now this is indeed an extraordinarily interesting example of the wrong track that this research in particular can take due to a certain inability. After all, what would we actually gain if we could truly observe, say, a tender feeling? A tender feeling would remain in the soul exactly what it is. By observing this tender feeling, we would experience nothing other than what this tender feeling is. Nothing about the soul; nothing at all about the soul. And it is the same with the other examples Hartmann cites. For it depends on the fact that what we should actually call soul never shows itself in what the moment offers. Rather, the soul can only truly appear to us when we are experiencing the changes of the individual soul experiences. If we wanted to observe what is present in the soul in a moment, we would be like the person who goes out into the fields at a certain time of year and sees the brown soil of the fields, spread out widely, and says to himself: this brown soil of the fields is what is actually spread out there. After a certain time, he goes out again. Now there are green shoots everywhere. If he is observing rationally, will he not say: Yes, then the brown soil that I saw recently did not show me everything that is actually there. Only by observing the changes that have taken place at different points in time can I understand what it actually is: that it is not just soil that has been spread, but that this soil has contained so many seeds that have sprouted and are sprouting.

Thus, the soul presents itself only when we become attentive: a delicate feeling is extinguished when I direct a strong thought of observation towards it. This interaction of the delicate feeling and the strong thought that observes it is the first manifestation of the workings and essence of the soul. So Eduard von Hartmann regrets not being able to observe that which changes, while he should be observing change. If he were to start from a point of view that allows him to look deeper into the life of the soul and into the connection between the life of the soul and the physical life than he is able to, then he would say the following about memorization, for example. He would recognize that memorizing is based on the fact that something of the soul has become engrained in the bodily process as a result of me having activated it many times, so that when I recite what I have memorized, the body automatically carries out what has to happen so that what I have memorized comes out again, so to speak without the soul having to be present. The person who is able to observe soul experiences knows that through memorization the soul element moves deeper into the bodily organization, so that there is more activity in the bodily realm than when we form present thoughts through direct contemplation that we have not memorized. When we form thoughts directly, I would say that we are working at a higher level in the soul than when we recite what we have memorized, where we bring forth more or less automatically what the soul has engraved in the body. But then, when we automatically run what we have buried from the soul into the body, we disturb this automatism when we intervene with a directly present thought that arises at a higher level, namely in the soul. It is when we enter with our thoughts from the soul into the automatism of the body, which takes place when reciting a piece of memorized material, just as if we were to insert a stick into a machine and disturb its operation.

When we grasp such things, which Hartmann regrets, we will immediately see how the various modes of activity of the soul and also of the body interact in man.

And Eduard von Hartmann says: “Observation often distorts the soul.” Well, in the course of the last few decades, popular science has basically more or less abandoned actual observation of the soul, at least methodical observation of the soul. But certain flashes of light have emerged. And such flashes of light have been had precisely by those who are not really recognized by regular school philosophers. Nietzsche, for example, had many such flashes of insight. In a certain, increasingly morbid and ingenious grasp of the soul's life, Nietzsche recognized how what takes place on the surface of it differs greatly from what takes place in the depths of human life. One need only read something like Nietzsche's arguments about the ascetic ideal to which some people devote themselves, and one will see what is actually meant here. How is the ascetic ideal often described? Well, you describe it in such a way that you have in mind what the person who devotes himself to asceticism in the usual sense imagines: how the person trains himself more and more to want nothing himself, to switch off his will and, precisely as a result, to become more and more spineless and selfless. From pursuing this train of thought, what is called the ascetic ideal is then formed. Nietzsche asks: What is actually behind this ascetic ideal in the soul? And he finds: The one who lives according to an ascetic ideal wants power, an increase of power. If he were to develop his ordinary soul life as it is, he would have less power – as he perceives it – than he wants. Therefore, he trains his will, seemingly to reduce it. But in the depths of the soul, it is precisely by diminishing the will that he wants to achieve great power, great effects. The will to power is behind the ideal of lack of will, of selflessness. So says Nietzsche. And there is indeed a flash of insight here, which should certainly be taken into account when judging, especially when it comes to self-knowledge of the human being.

Let us take a more obvious example than the one Nietzsche discussed in Asceticism. A person once wrote to me and often said: “I devote myself to a certain scientific direction; actually, I don't have the slightest sympathy for this scientific direction, but I consider it a mission, a duty, to work in this direction because humanity needs it in the present. I would actually rather do anything than what I am doing. I was not embarrassed to keep telling the man in question that, according to how he appeared to me, this was a superficial view of his soul about himself. Deep in the subconscious, in those layers of the soul's life of which he knows nothing, there lives in him a greed to carry out precisely that which he said he actually dislikes, that he only accepts as a mission. And in truth, I said, the whole thing seems to me that he regards this as a mission for the reason that he wants to develop these things out of the most selfish motives. So one can see, without going deeper into the soul life, that the superficial soul life almost falsifies the subconscious. But in this falsification lies a remarkable activity of the soul.

It was precisely from such trains of thought, as I have cited them, and from a failure to pursue such trains of thought further, as I have followed them up, that Eduard von Hartmann reached his hypothesis of the unconscious. He says: From what takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing, from what one has there as consciousness, one can actually gain no view of the real soul. But because one has only this, one must altogether renounce any view of the real soul-life and can only put forward a hypothesis. — Therefore Hartmann puts forward the hypothesis: Behind thinking, feeling and willing lies the unconscious, which can never be reached. And from this unconscious arise thoughts, feelings and impulses of the will. But what is down there in the unconscious can only be the subject of thoughts that have a greater or lesser degree of probability, but which are only hypotheses. It must be said that anyone who thinks in this way simply blocks their own access to the life of the soul, to that which is beyond the ordinary life of the soul. For Hartmann correctly recognized that everything that enters into ordinary consciousness is nothing more than a mere image. And it is precisely one of Hartmann's merits that he emphasized time and again in the most eminent sense: What falls into ordinary consciousness arises from the fact that the soul, as it were, receives its own content mirrored from the body, so that we only have mirror images in what we experience in thinking, feeling and willing. And to talk about the fact that these mirror images of consciousness contain a reality is quite similar to the assertion that the images we perceive from a mirror are reality. Hartmann emphasized this again and again. We will come back to this point today. But Hartmann, and with him countless thinkers, countless people in general in the last decades and the immediate present, they blocked their own possibility of penetrating into the soul because, I would say, they had an indescribable fear of the path that can penetrate into the soul. This fear remains in the subconscious; in ordinary consciousness it protrudes in such a way that one conjures up numerous reasons that tell one: one cannot go beyond certain limits of knowledge.

For anyone who really wants to penetrate into the life of the soul needs not to stop at ordinary consciousness, but to move on to what I have called “visionary consciousness” in the lectures I have given here, a consciousness that is, to a certain extent, higher than ordinary consciousness. I have chosen the following comparison: During sleep, man lives in images. The images of the dream that arises from sleep become conscious to a certain degree. I said in previous lectures: the essential thing is that in these images that he experiences in his dreams, man is not able to relate his will to the things around him. At the moment of waking up, when a person enters from dream consciousness into waking consciousness, what remains of the images and perceptions is basically the same as it is in the dream; only now the person enters into a relationship with their surroundings through their will, and they integrate what otherwise only exists as images in their dream into their sensory environment. Just as a person wakes up from dream consciousness into ordinary waking consciousness, so too can he bring himself, through certain soul activities, to wake up from ordinary waking consciousness to a “visionary consciousness,” whereby he does not integrate himself into the ordinary world of the senses, but with his soul powers into the spiritual world. This intuitive consciousness is the only way by which man can penetrate into the beyond of soul phenomena.

I might say that the most enlightened minds of the present believe that one would be committing a sin against knowledge if one were to speak of a human being's ascent to such an intuitive consciousness. And for many of the philosophical minds of the present day in particular, this intuitive consciousness is simply condemned by the fact that such a person says: Yes, it is just like clairvoyance! — Now the thing is that — in order to tie in with something — it is perhaps best characterized by characterizing the tremendous progress that has taken place in man's attitude to reality from Kant to Goethe. In doing so, one does indeed commit a sin against the spirit of many a philosopher. But this sin must be committed at some time. Kantianism is, after all, what began to erect barriers to human knowledge within the development of the continental spirit. The “thing in itself” is to be presented as something absolutely otherworldly, which human knowledge cannot approach. That is what Kantianism wants, and that is what many people in the 19th century wanted with Kantianism, right up to the present day and including the 20th century. In a few short sentences, Goethe has put forward something tremendously significant against this principle of Kantianism. And if one really wants to evaluate German intellectual life, one could consider Goethe's short essay “On the Power of Judging by Intuition”, which is usually printed in the natural scientific writings of Goethe, as one of the greatest achievements of modern philosophy, for the simple reason that what is alive in this short essay is the starting point for a tremendous development of human intellectual life. In this essay, “On the Power of Judgement,” Goethe says something like this: Yes, Kant excludes the human being from the thing in itself and only allows the categorical imperative to enter into the soul, commanding him what he should do. But if, in the moral sphere, one should rise to thoughts about freedom and immortality, why should it be closed to man to raise himself directly in knowledge to that world in which immortality and freedom themselves are rooted? — Goethe calls such a power of judgment, which transports itself into such a world, the contemplative power of judgment. Now, in his contemplation of natural phenomena, Goethe continually exercised this power of judgment. And in the way he observed plant and animal forms, he set a magnificent example of the use of this power of judgment. Kant saw this power of judgment as something demonic, which one should leave alone, which one should pass by. He called the use of this power of contemplative judgment “the adventure of reason.” Goethe countered: “Why should one, after making the effort I have, to recognize how the spirit lives and moves in natural phenomena, why should one not bravely face this adventure of reason?”

This is, of course, only the beginning, but it is the beginning of a development that proceeds as I have characterized it in these lectures. Today, too, I would like to point out that in my writings, in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”, in “The Occult Science in Outline”, in my last book, “The Riddle of Man”, you will find information and hints about what the soul has to undertake in order to find within itself, as it were, the strength to awaken from ordinary waking consciousness to observing consciousness in the same way that one awakens from dream consciousness to ordinary waking consciousness. Just as the soul must exert itself by virtue of the natural forces given to it in order to awaken from the dream-life, in which man is passively surrendered to the succession of images, into the waking consciousness, so can it, by taking itself in hand and applying to itself all that I have described in the book “How to Know Higher Worlds.” She can strengthen herself to awaken within a world that is now just as different in comparison to the ordinary waking consciousness as the ordinary sense world of the waking consciousness is different from what one experiences in the mere world of images in a dream. Out of the ordinary waking consciousness and into a world of intuitive consciousness: this is the path that the most outstanding thinkers of modern times have avoided so much. And we have the peculiar phenomenon that precisely the most enlightened minds have remained with Kant and have not found the way from Kant to Goethe, in order to advance vividly into the realm of the seeing consciousness, which is only the development at a different level of what Goethe meant by contemplative judgment.

But then, when the human being rises to such an awakening in the seeing consciousness, then he first reaches what I have already characterized in my lectures as imaginative knowledge, which is not called “imaginative” because it represents only something imagined, but because one lives in images; but in images that are not taken from the sensual outer world, but from a more powerful, more intense reality than the outer sensual reality. When a person develops the strength within themselves to reach this imaginative knowledge, it means that they truly live in what I have called in earlier lectures the ethereal in the sense of spiritual science. Through ordinary waking consciousness, we become aware of the external sense world. In imaginative consciousness, we enter into a completely different world, in which, so to speak, other things live and move than in the ordinary sense world.

Now it is certainly difficult for those who have no idea of this seeing consciousness to form an idea of it. And it will probably be the same for some of my honored listeners who have told me in recent times that these lectures are difficult to understand. They are not difficult with regard to what is communicated, but they are difficult for the reason that they speak of something that is not there for ordinary consciousness.

They speak of the results of perception that are based on the research of the seeing consciousness. But one can also gain an approximate idea in the ordinary consciousness of that which is actually the very first of the seeing consciousness. Imagine yourself — and basically anyone can do this — in a very vivid morning dream from which you wake up, and try to remember such a dream in which you have tried, I would even say, to really live in the dream, more or less subconsciously trying to really live in it. Then you will have experienced that what you feel as thoughts, as if they were banished to your body, and of which you have to say to yourself, “I feel my thoughts as though they were thought by me,” you will have to think about that, so to speak, spread out over the images of the dream as they flood in. You cannot distinguish yourself from what is flooding in the images of the dream, as you can distinguish yourself in sensual consciousness, so that you can say, “I stand here and I think about the things that are out there.” You do not perceive something outside and think about it, but you have the direct experience: in what is flooding up and down, the forces live that otherwise live in my thinking. It is as if you yourself were immersed in the surging life, so that the surging, the form of the surging, everything that is there is formed like weaving, living thought forces: objective life and weaving of thought forces. This, what can only be imagined in the dream life, I would like to say, can be perceived very distinctly in the seeing consciousness as a first impression. There really the possibility ceases to think: There outside are the objects and there inside in my head I think about the objects. No, there one feels embedded in something, what one would like to call a surging substantial sea, in which one is a wave. And that, what thought power is, is not only in one, that is outside, that drives this surging and surging, that goes outward, inward. That is to say, one sometimes feels connected to it, sometimes in such a way that the power of thought flows outside without one.

What one achieves – whereby, in a sense, a substantial element is connected with what otherwise only lives in us as thought – that is what should really be called ether. For the ether is nothing other than a finer substantiality, but one that is so permeated everywhere that thought is at work in it, that in reality thoughts outside fill the ether itself. Only in this way, through the development of consciousness, does one arrive at what should really be called ether. But then one also arrives at a more intimate relationship between one's own soul and the environment. In sensory observation, one can never enter into such an intimate relationship with one's surroundings as in this experience of the observing consciousness, which now really has no boundaries between inside and outside, but flows in and out - into and out of one's own soul life - that which is ether filled with thoughts and thoughts of the soul.

But only when one has entered into this intuitive consciousness can there be a higher self-knowledge. And here I now touch on something that again belongs to the significant results of spiritual research; but it will also be transferred to scientific research, insofar as it will find confirmation of this, as it will find confirmation of those results of spiritual research that I have presented in previous lectures. Man is a complex being, even if we look at him only externally and physically. If Goethe's approach had already been fruitful earlier, if it had not been overgrown by the 19th-century materialism hostile to spirit and soul, Goethe's theory of metamorphosis would also have been applied to man himself. Goethe made a very beautiful distinction between the green leaf and the colored petal of a flower, which are the same thing, only at different levels of existence, one being only a transformation product, a metamorphosis of the other. If we start not from a merely theoretical reception, but from the intuition that lived in Goethe, in that he applied the idea of metamorphosis in the simplest way, to the plant, and now applies this metamorphic applies this view of metamorphosis to man in all the complexity of his being, one comes to recognize that man, by having a head and a remaining organism, is a very remarkable creature.

When we observe the human being as he develops from an early age, from early childhood onwards, we encounter many things that are full of meaning and that are still not sufficiently appreciated by science today. Let us just emphasize the fact that in early childhood the part of the human being that develops most physically is the head. The head grows throughout life in such a way that it increases fourfold, while the rest of the organism grows twentyfold from its childhood state. Consider, then, how different the pace of growth is for the head and for the rest of the organism. This is due to the fact that the head and the rest of the organism are two different metamorphoses of one and the same, but in a very peculiar way. The head appears in man, as he begins his physical life, immediately in a certain perfection; the rest of the organism, on the other hand, appears with the greatest conceivable imperfection, and must first develop slowly to the degree of perfection that it is to achieve in physical life. Thus the head and the rest of the organism undergo quite different periods of development. I have already mentioned how spiritual science shows the origin of this. The human head points back to a long preceding spiritual development. When we enter our physical existence through conception and birth, we come from a spiritual world as soul-spiritual beings. What we go through during our spiritual development in the spiritual world contains a sum of forces that initially express themselves primarily in the head; therefore, what appears in the head as something so perfect and needing little further perfection points to a development that the person has already undergone.

The rest of the organism is, as it were, the same at an initial stage. It is in the process of developing the powers which, if they could reach full development, would tend to make the whole of the rest of the organism what the head is physically. However paradoxical it may sound, that is how it is. The head shows that it is a transformed remaining organism; the remaining organism shows that it is a head that has not yet become. In a sense, just as the green leaf is a petal that has not yet become a flower, and the colored petal is a transformed leaf. And that which the human being develops through his remaining organism, that is incorporated into the soul. And when a person passes through the gate of death, it enters into a spiritual world, undergoes a development between death and a new birth, and in a later life becomes one of the powers that then develop in the head, just as the head of the present has developed out of the organism of an earlier life on earth.

Now you may ask: How can such a thing be known? Something like this can be known as soon as a person enters into intuitive consciousness. For then something really occurs that compels one to see the human being as this duality: the head human being and the human being of the rest of the organism. And the head is, so to speak, a tool of the etheric world, as I have just described it, and the rest of the organism is also a tool of this etheric world.

The human being not only has his physical organism as a kind of section of the whole physical world, but he also has, held together by the physical organism, an etheric organism within him that can only be perceived if one ascends to imaginative knowledge, as I have described. But then, when what is ethereal really becomes vivid, then one encounters the great difference between what underlies the etheric body of the human being and the head and what underlies the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And just as the head and the rest of the organism have very different growth rates, so that which lives and is active in the etheric body of the head and that which lives in the etheric body of the rest of the organism has very different inner developments of strength, which evoke different inner imaginations. And when one enters the imaginative world at all, then the imagination of the etheric body of the head interacts with the imagination of the etheric body of the rest of the organism. And this living interaction in the human etheric organism is the content of a higher self-knowledge. The fact that the human being comes to truly recognize himself in this way also enables him to evaluate certain soul experiences in the right way. If what I have stated were not as I have described it, the human being would never be able to have what is called a memory. The human being would be able to form ideas from sensory impressions, but these would always pass by. The fact that a person can remember something that he has once experienced is based on the fact that the etheric body of the head, in interaction with the etheric body of the rest of the organism, causes that which takes effect in the etheric body of the head to bring about changes in the etheric body of the rest of the organism that are permanent and that work their way up into the physical organism. Every time something takes hold in the soul and bodily life of a person that belongs to memory, a change first occurs in the etheric organism that can be imagined through imaginative knowledge; but this change continues into the physical organism. And through this alone we have the possibility of again bringing up certain thoughts, that what is sent from the ether organism of the head into the other ether organism is imprinted in the physical body. Only by the fact that something has made impressions in our physical body are we able to retain it in our memory. But what happens in the physical organism in the manner described, can only be observed by the seeing consciousness. This can only be observed if the observing consciousness continues the exercises that are characterized in the books mentioned, if the observing consciousness rises from mere imaginative knowledge to what I have called “inspired knowledge”. Through imaginative knowledge we enter into a world of surging ether, which is animated by thoughts that permeate it. If we continue the exercises, we will gain more strength in our soul life than is necessary for this imaginative knowledge, and then we will not only perceive a surging thought life in the ether, but we will also perceive beings within this surging thought life, real spirit beings, which do not reveal themselves in any physical body, but which only reveal themselves in the spiritual. But by coming to the real perception of a spiritual world, we also come to the possibility of achieving what can be called: to look at the actual human being as well as at things from the outside, to really face oneself, not just to feel what I have now called one's own thought life in the surging ether, in one's own ether organism, but to perceive oneself among other spirit beings as a spirit being in the spiritual world. When this happens, something occurs that is difficult to even characterize, but that can be understood with some good will.

When you imagine something and hold the image in your mind, and later you recall this image, you say you are remembering. But as I have just explained, this is based on something that is happening in the physical organism. It is just that we cannot follow it with our ordinary consciousness. But if we ascend into the consciousness of vision, then we come, as it were, to see what happens behind the memory, what happens in man in the time that elapses from the moment when he conceived a thought that has now disappeared as it were, and lives only down in the physical organism until it is brought up again. All that lives beyond the thought that is remembered is not perceived if one cannot lift oneself out of oneself through the seeing consciousness and, as it were, look at oneself from the other side. So that one not only sees a thought going down and sensing it coming back up, but perceiving everything that happens in between while the thought is going down and coming back up. This is only possible for the inspired consciousness; it is possible for the beholder who has made it possible for himself not only to look outward while living in the physical body, but to look even within the body of man himself while living in the spirit. Thus man reaches, on the one hand, a beyond of the soul, which assures him that he lives in the spirit. But man also reaches the beyond of the soul, which works in what lives unconsciously from the disappearance of a thought until the reappearance of the same, what lives down there as what Eduard von Hartmann calls the “unconscious”, and which he believes can never be reached by consciousness. It cannot be reached by ordinary consciousness because the thought is reflected in the organism beforehand; but if one gets behind this reflection, if one goes beyond oneself and lives in the observing consciousness, then one experiences what really happens in a person between the moment of conceiving the thought and the moment of remembering it. And this we will now hold fast, what man can perceive, as it were, beyond that stream through the seeing consciousness, which is usually limited to him by memory. For we see well: there we enter through the seeing consciousness into a beyond of the soul.

Let us keep this thought in mind and look at many other endeavors that have emerged in the scientific age from the same point of view.

Not only does the scientific world view, I might say, take such erroneous paths to the soul life as I have characterized it, but in a certain respect it also takes erroneous paths when it wants to explore what lies beyond the senses. In this respect, scientific research is indeed in a strange position at present when it forms a world view. It has actually come to the conclusion that everything that lives in consciousness is only an image of reality. It starts from an incorrect idea; but this incorrect idea, despite its incorrectness, gives a certain insight that is correct, namely that everything that lives in consciousness is an image. Scientific research starts from the idea that out there is a reality of vibrating, thoughtless ether atoms, completely without spirit or soul. We have found the ether to be a surging, thought-filled life; the scientific world view starts from the thoughtless, soulless ether. These vibrations impress our senses, effects arise in us, conjuring up the colorful, resounding world for us, while outside everything is dark and silent. Now, however, thinking, on which this world view is based, wants to get behind these images. What does it do? What it does there can be compared to someone -— well, let's say a child - looking into a mirror. Mirror images come towards him, his own and the images of his surroundings. And now the child wants to know what actually underlies these mirror images. What does it do? Yes, what is actually underlying them is behind the mirror, it says; so it will either want to look behind the mirror. But there it sees something quite different from what it was actually looking for. Or it may well smash the mirror to see what is behind the glass. The same is true of the scientific view of the world. It has the whole carpet of sense phenomena before it, and it wants to know what actually lives behind the sense phenomena. It goes so far as to approach the substance, the matter. Now it wants to know what is out there, apart from the senses. But that is merely as if it wanted to smash the carpet, which is like a mirror. She would not find what she was looking for behind it. And if someone were to say: “I have red through the eye, and behind it are certain vibrations in the ether,” he is talking just like someone who believes that the origin of what shines in the mirror is behind the mirror. Just as when you stand before a mirror you see the image of yourself in the mirror, and you are together with what is in the surroundings, and with what also reflects itself of yourself, so you are together in the soul with what is behind the sense phenomena. If I want to know why other things are reflected with me, I cannot look behind the mirror, but I have to look at those who are to my left and right, who are of the same nature as I am, who are also reflected. If I want to explore what is out there behind the sensory phenomena, I must explore that in which I myself am involved; not by breaking the mirror, but by exploring that in which I myself am involved.

Indeed, ingenious and wonderful trains of thought have been developed over the airwaves in relation to natural science. But all these trains of thought have led to nothing, to the realization that the path of physical research leads only to the same thing that is seen in the sense perception, only that because some things are too fine or too fast to be perceived by the senses. One comes to no ether. This is clear today after the beautiful research with the pumped tubes, the vacuum tubes, where one thought one had the ether in one's hands; for today one knows that nothing else comes about through these experiments than radiant matter, not what can be called ether. I would even say that ether research in particular is undergoing the greatest revolution today. For one will never arrive at anything other than that which reflects, by way of physical research. If one wants to get further, then one must consider that which reflects with a community — but one can only do that with the seeing consciousness. And that is what lives in the ether that is truly inspired by thought. Therefore, when one asks about the beyond of the senses, one finds only one answer through the seeing consciousness. For when one recognizes the surging thought-inspired ether within oneself through imaginative knowledge, then one also comes to seek it behind the red, behind the sound, behind all external sensory perception; no longer the dead ether of today's physical conception, which is just fading away, but the living, thought-inspired ether. Behind what the senses perceive, lives the same thing that is found in us when we penetrate down into that which lives in us between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. We do not reach the beyond of the senses by the methods of modern physics, but by finding what is beyond the senses in our own being, by learning to recognize: the same process works in our own being between the grasping of a thought and the reminiscence of a thought, which lives outside and which penetrates my eye when I perceive red. Behind this red is the same thing that is in me between the grasping of a thought and the remembering of a thought. The beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul leads into the spiritual.

I had to lead you through a deducted train of thought today because I wanted to say something in the context of these lectures about the perspective that must arise from spiritual science. I wanted to show how true self-knowledge leads to the beyond of the soul, but also how, when one steps into the beyond of the soul, one also stands in the beyond of the senses, and how one thereby finds the way into the spiritual world through the observing consciousness. And once we enter this spiritual world, the intuitive consciousness discovers that which also plays a role in our soul life and which I have described in the previous lectures as that which, as our destiny, rises and falls in our experiences. In this way, the life of fate is linked to the moral life, to what happens in destiny. When we first know that behind the experience of the senses there is not a spiritless reality, but a reality inspired by the spirit, then our moral life will have just as much place in this spiritual world, which lies beyond the soul and beyond the senses, as the material world, which we perceive all around us, has in this outer world.

Spiritual science today, when it develops these things, is still seen as something paradoxical; the things I have described are, so to speak, considered foolishness; and yet they can be considered just as much as facts, simply by looking at them as if one wanted to describe an external event. But this approach of spiritual science is only digging in one epistemic tunnel from one side; from the other side, natural science digs into the mountain. If the two strive in the right direction, they will meet in the middle. And I would like to say: in a kind of negative way, those who cultivate natural science do come to meet those who cultivate the humanities; for remarkable things have come about among natural scientists in recent times. Those who think they are firmly grounded in natural science research because they know what has been discovered up to twenty years ago do not yet know much about what natural scientists actually do. But if you look more closely, you will make some very strange discoveries in the course of scientific thinking. For this very reason, I have today cited Eduard von Hartmann as a thinker who at least points to a beyond the senses and a beyond the soul. He just does not admit that it is possible for the observing consciousness to penetrate beyond the senses and the beyond of the soul. Therefore he says, dipping it into a general sauce of knowledge - knowledge sauce, one says nowadays! -: What lies beyond the senses and beyond the soul is the unconscious. He now puts forward quite questionable hypotheses about it. But these are only truths of thought. Thought does not reach into these worlds. Only the seeing consciousness reaches into them, as I have described. But at least Hartmann does advance to at least a presentiment of the fact that in the beyond of the senses and in the beyond of the soul there is something spiritual, even if he did not bring it to consciousness. When he published his Philosophy of the Unconscious in 1868, he offered a critique of the already then rampant materialistic interpretation of Darwinism. “Materialistic Darwinism” — not what Darwin found in the way of individual facts, that is not under discussion here — believes that it can explain how the more perfect arise from imperfect, simplest living creatures by leaving out everything of a spiritual nature, as they say, through mere selection, through mere struggle for existence. Due to the fact that the perfect ones develop by chance and overcome those that remain imperfect by chance, the perfect ones gradually prevail; this is how something like a developmental series from the imperfect to the perfect arises. As early as 1868, Hartmann explained that such a play of purely external natural necessities, which can also be called chance, is not sufficient to explain the development of organisms, but that certain forces must be at work, even if unconsciously, when a living being develops from imperfection to perfection. In short, he sought a spiritual element in evolution, that spiritual element that can really be found beyond the senses and beyond the soul, he hypothetically assumed. He assumed it only hypothetically, because at that time one had not yet penetrated to the stage of direct intuitive consciousness.

When the “Philosophy of the Unconscious” was published, which criticized Darwin's theory of chance in a sharp-witted way, a large number of scientifically minded people came forward to oppose this “dilettante thinker” Eduard von Hartmann. A dilettante philosopher who doesn't understand anything of what Darwinism has brought, and who speaks so glibly from his own intellectual standpoint! And among those who criticized Hartmann at the time was Oscar Schmid, a professor in Jena. Haeckel himself was also among them. Haeckel himself and numerous of his students were now highly astonished that among the many writings that, in their opinion, brilliantly refuted Eduard von Hartmann, who talked such amateurish nonsense, there was also a writing by an anonymous author – by a man who did not name himself. And Haeckel said: He should come forward! And others also said: He should come forward and we would accept him as one of our own! It is so wonderful that a scientific paper has now been published in this way against the nonsense of the “philosophy of the unconscious”! — And a second edition of this paper “The Unconscious in the Light of Darwinism” was published. And the author called himself – it was Eduard von Hartmann! You see, there were reasons why people no longer declaimed: He calls himself us and we consider him one of us. They now kept quiet about him. That was a fundamental lesson that had to be taught to those who believe that the one who talks about the spirit does so because he does not understand their science. It became quite quiet now. But something else was noticed: in 1916 a very interesting work was published that can be said to stand at the pinnacle of the field it discusses. This work is called: 'The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance'. And this work - well, who wrote it? Well, it is by the often mentioned most brilliant Haeckel student, by Oscar Hertwig, the Berlin professor of biology. We are witnessing the strange spectacle that the next generation of Haeckel's students, the generation of students of which he himself was most proud, is already writing books to refute the Darwinian theory of chance, which at the time when they turned against Hartmann was precisely the one prevailing in the Haeckel circle. And what does Hertwig do, whom I myself knew as one of the most loyal Haeckel students with his brother Richard? He adopts what can be called a “materialistic interpretation of the Darwinian theory” and refutes it piece by piece, quoting Eduard von Hartmann at several points. Hartmann now reappears in Oscar Hertwig's writing “The Becoming of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance” and is honored again. In the past, when he was not known, people said: He calls himself unconscious, and we consider him one of us. And now we are beginning to come back to what Hartmann still put into the unconscious. Now we are beginning to recognize the spiritual in what is there sensually.

However, this book “The Development of Organisms. A Refutation of Darwin's Theory of Chance by Oscar Hertwig” is indeed strange. For while all earlier materialistic interpretations of Darwinism boiled down to saying: We have perfect organisms, we have imperfect organisms; the perfect ones have developed from the imperfect ones through their external natural forces, Hertwig comes back to to the fact that in the perfect organism, if one goes back microscopically to the first germ, one can prove that Nägeli's view is correct, that in the first germ the perfect organism is already distinguished from the imperfect organism. For there is already something quite different in the perfect organism than in the imperfect one, which one believes the perfect one has developed from. Microscopic research has gone to a limit, but it has achieved nothing more than to come across a mirror, and has not progressed further than the limit of the sensory world. The consequence will be that many people who stand on the standpoint of the natural-scientific world view will not merely state, as Hertwig does: the materialistic interpretation of Darwinism is impossible. Rather, they will acknowledge: If we want to arrive at anything that explains the sense world and lies behind it, then we cannot stop at ordinary consciousness; we cannot get out of the sense world, not even with as many telescopes as we want. We can only get out of the sense world if we arm ourselves with the seeing consciousness.

But in general, even philosophers have not yet gone very far in arming themselves with the soul to the point where they would recognize that the seeing consciousness can sprout forth from this ordinary consciousness, just as the waking consciousness sprouts forth from the dream. Today philosophers are even less qualified to penetrate to these things. I have often said that I only act in opposition to those whom I basically respect very much. Therefore, I may say: It is only because of this inability to think in a way that is in accordance with the spirit and reality, that one would strive for this seeing consciousness, that people are considered great philosophers today who, basically, their whole thinking and meditating only swim around in what surges up and down in this ordinary consciousness, without even feeling the need to get beyond mere talk of surging ideas. And so it has also come about that someone who revels in the surface of the surging and swaying ideas, as Eucken did, for example, can be regarded as a great philosopher today. It is just one of the things that one has to characterize by saying that this clinging to ordinary consciousness has also taken away from man the sharpness of thought that allows him to see that there are not such limits to knowledge as Kant states, but such limits that one must reckon with in order to transcend them through the seeing consciousness. That is why those who declaim about all kinds of spiritual worlds, but who, within the ordinary consciousness, come to nothing but what Eduard von Hartmann long ago recognized as mere ordinary consciousness operating in images, are regarded as great philosophers today.

And so much could be shown in the present day that would draw attention to the fact that, I would say, the admirable scientific way of looking at things has led us away from the paths that lead to the soul. For some, however, it has been quite the opposite. There are people in the present who sense what I have said today. For example, there is a personality in the present who senses that what lives in the soul between birth and death in the form of thinking, feeling and willing is only something that is conditioned by the body, while the eternal comes from the comes out of the spiritual world, enters into existence through birth, transforms itself in the body so that it works in the body, and then leaves again through death, and that what works in the body is not the true soul. The personality that I mean recognizes this. But it says that in what lives in ordinary consciousness, we only have images. This personality calls it “events”. Behind these lie the primal factors that are experienced in the seeing consciousness as beyond the soul and beyond the senses. But the personality that I mean does not want to go into this seeing consciousness. And so it stands before the occurrences, again, I would like to say, smashing a thick mirror over and over again, and saying: Behind it the primal factors must be. But it rages. And by raging against the mirror surface and not wanting to come to the seeing consciousness, it believes that all philosophy has only raged. With Fichte one can see (I have spoken about this in my book “Vom Menschenrätsel” (The Riddle of Man)) that he did not rave, but that he pointed to the seeing consciousness in an important point. The personality I am referring to now, which does recognize the image-nature of ordinary consciousness, says: “He who cannot laugh (at Fichte) cannot philosophize either.” And as this personality lets all philosophers from Plato and Heraclitus to the present day pass before it in their interrelations, it calls these philosophies “The Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. And there is an interesting sentence on page 132: “We have no more philosophy than an animal, and only the frantic attempt to arrive at a philosophy and the final surrender to not-knowing distinguish us from the animal.”

That is the judgment of one personality about all philosophy, about all attempts to penetrate into the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses! This is truly a raging man who, in his rage, believes that others are raging. Therefore, because he speaks so beautifully about philosophy, he is currently a university professor of philosophy! Philosophy is currently being taught in such a way as to express itself in such a phenomenon.

I know very well that for some people what I am saying seems bitter. I can fully understand that. I can understand all the bitterness and also all the paradoxes. But it must be pointed out once and for all that in the present time there is the necessity to emerge from what is enclosed in the mere sense world and to submerge into what leads beyond the soul, beyond the senses. For it is not the world that sets up limits to our knowledge. What sets up the limits of knowledge is man himself.

Sometimes one can make very interesting discoveries, such as what the human being is like when he does not even want to look at what, as a seeing consciousness, leads to the very essence of the soul. I have just given a sample of a philosophical view of a university professor Richard Wahle, who wrote the “Tragicomedy of Wisdom”. I could mention another: the famous Jodl. The man would certainly - he is no longer alive - regard everything that has been said here today, and that is said here at all, as the most complete madness. But he does speak about the soul in the following way: “The soul does not have states or capacities, such as thinking, imagining, joy, hatred, and so on, but these states in their totality are the soul.” Very ingenious! And the whole of Jodl's philosophy is permeated by this ingenuity. Only this definition of the soul is no more valuable than if someone were to say: It is not the table that has corners and edges and a surface, but corners and edges and a surface are the table.

And that is the quality of most of the thoughts that now live in that tangle of mere thought-webs, which are, however, only a product of the body because they do not want to penetrate to the observing consciousness, where one first discovers the soul. Today, however, one will still find that such a view takes many revenge. I have called the world-view represented in these lectures Anthroposophy. This is in reference to the “Anthroposophy” of Robert Zimmermann, who was also a university professor, but who was equally opposed to Anthroposophy. For what would Robert Zimmermann have said about the Anthroposophy that is presented here? Well, he would say what he has already said about Schelling: the philosopher must remain within that which can be attained through thought. He must not appeal to something that requires a special training of the soul! One can speak in this way, then one is just practicing an anthroposophy like Robert Zimmermann did. You will find a thicket of thoughts in it; it will not interest you, because not a word is said about all the questions of the soul and the spirit. Of what I have discussed in these lectures, what is connected with the beyond of the soul and the beyond of the senses, what is connected with the question of the immortality of the human soul, with the question of fate — none of this is contained in that anthroposophy. For the whole of the thinking of this last century has, on the one hand, admittedly produced the great advances of natural science, which cannot be sufficiently admired, but on the other hand, it has also produced the attitude of mind towards knowledge that the youthful Renan, when he left college, expressed as his conviction when he had been led astray in his religious ideas by the insights of the modern scientific way of thinking. At that time he said: “The man of the present day is aware that he will never know anything about his highest causes or his destiny.” That is ultimately the confession of many today, except that because the confession has been around for so long, very many have become numb to it and do not feel how such a confession eats away at the soul when it is new. This confession has blocked the paths to the beyond of the soul and to the beyond of the senses that are characteristic of today. Ernest Renan, after all, was someone who felt how it is possible to live with such a blockage. And so, as an old man, he made a strange statement:

The non-recognition of the observing consciousness does not lead to the knowledge of the origin and essence of man, just as the breaking of a mirror does not lead to the knowledge of those beings who are reflected in it. Renan felt this. He felt that where earlier times sought the spiritual origin of man, his world view posits a nothing. His mind protested against this by him declaring in old age that he would rather know that there is a hell than believe that nothingness is real. As long as only the mind protests in this way, as long as humanity will not get beyond the limitations of the world view that has so far blocked the paths to the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul. Only when humanity declares its willingness to develop such strong thinking and imagining that the soul can strengthen itself for what is, in the seeing consciousness, a living continuation of what Goethe suggested in his concept of the contemplating power of judgment, and which Kant regards as an adventure of reason, only when humanity decides to to advance to this realization of thoughts, to the whole soul world, in order to penetrate into spiritual reality with the seeing consciousness, then not only a mere protest of the mind, but a protest of knowledge will arise against the powers of compulsion of that so-called monism, which wants to split man off from a knowledge of his actual being. And I think that today we can already feel the inner nerve that lives in the spiritual-scientific debates in such a way that we are living at the starting point of those upheavals in human soul life that lead out of the realization of the already admired natural scientific world view into the beyond of the senses and the beyond of the soul, into the actual place of origin of the human being, into the spirit.

And thus man will again be able to link that which lives in his destiny, in his moral existence, to the origin of the world, just as he can link that which lives in the outer necessity of nature. And in this way man will ascend to a truly unified and also truly satisfying view of nature and soul, because as spirit he speaks to spirit.

The First World War was entering into its fourth year when Rudolf Steiner gave these lectures in Dornach near Basle in Switzerland. Within sound of the battle front and sight of the flashes of cannon Eire at night, people from different countries, including the combatant nations, were working together in Dornach to build the First Goetheanum. These lectures clearly show the Spirit of the movement which was to be given a home in that building.

1917 was also the year of the Russian Revolution. The configuration which the world was to have for the next seventy years or more was beginning to emerge. Steiner, and others who were working with him, had made tremendous efforts to present his ideas of a threefold social order to leading politicians in Germany and Austria, in the hope that their realization would bring positive developments for the future. These efforts failed.

Having worked and lectured in Dornach in January of that year, Steiner went to continue his work in Germany, returning to Dornach on 28 September to resume his lecturing activity with the first of the lectures in this volume on 29 September. This was also the time when he worked with Edith Maryon on the large sculpture showing the Representative of Man between the Opposing Powers. At the same time he was working on the further development of eurythmy, on productions of Parts 1 and 2 of Faust at the Goetheanum, and from November on the ceiling painting in the building's small dorre.

1917 was also the year when Steiner formulated the idea of the threefold nature of the human organism which is fundamental to anthroposophy.

The lectures in this volume give insight into the factors which had brought the catastrophe of war on humanity, factors which evidently are still in Operation today, three-quarters of a century later. We are shown a way ahead and encouraged, whoever and wherever we may be, to take up the challenge which continues to face humanity. Steiner had stern words to say on occasion, and his obedience to the need for truthfulness shines through everything he had to say. In several of the lectures, he spoke of the desperate need for a new approach to education, going into the subject in some detail. Two years later, in response to The Driving Forces Behind Europe's requests made to him, he was to initiate Waldorf education, which has since become a world-wide movement.

Anna Meuss

Moritz Benedikt, the criminal anthropologist and well-known physiologist, found that the posterior cerebral lobe of criminals is relatively small, as in higher apes; he established atavism in this case. In this way, crime is attributed entirely to the physical constitution. Even the soul life is controlled quite mechanically by modern school psychology, the speed of absorption of sensory impressions, strength of memory and so on. The human being is treated like a machine. This has been happening increasingly for 50 years. Even social life should be shaped in this way, as it is through the sentence [...]: Act so that your motive can become the norm for all people. It's like saying, “Wear a skirt that fits all people.” It is Kant's categorical imperative. But even if one achieves excellence in the natural sciences, it does not follow that one could (transfer their results) to the moral field. So it is with Oscar Hertwig, who so brilliantly refuted Darwinism; in the social field, he has not only produced inadequate but also harmful results.

Spiritual knowledge is necessary to gain insight into the possibility and essence of human freedom; knowledge of what man's true nature is leads to love of the human being and is the only basis for true morality and social life of the future, based on brotherhood. Generalized morality, as we have it now, leads to the opposite of what is desired, as current events prove; moral preaching is like telling the stove: get warm without heating.

Thinking, feeling and willing find their correlate in the nervous system, in breathing and rhythm, for example in the blood circulation for digestion or metabolism, for reproduction. The nervous system is degenerative, leads to death, just as thinking in waking consciousness always destroys something. It must merge with imagination if it is to become viable. Volition, the metabolism, leads to life, to being born, when it is connected with intuition. The essence of intuition is love. Feeling in the middle then maintains the balance so that the pendulum does not swing in one direction or the other.

New religions no longer arise since the synthesis in the Christianity of all religions. Anthroposophy should not be confused with all kinds of obscurantism, but is common knowledge and should become more and more so, even if it is currently being rejected. From it will be born a realistic, benevolent socialism, in which all is salvation. Because people today are asleep, it has been possible for a few people to bring about these catastrophic events.

Allow me today to make a few suggestions, perhaps in a somewhat aphoristic form, about the interrelationship between body, soul and spirit in humans and then, based on this, to make a few comments about the relationship of humans to birth and death and to the universe in general. It goes without saying that all of this can only be hinted at. But those of the honored audience who have heard some or all of this year's winter lectures will find much of what can only be presented in aphorisms today more or less substantiated in the previous reflections, which, after all, dealt in detail with important questions of the life of the mind and soul. Especially during this winter and last winter, I often allowed myself to make the observation that spiritual science, as it is intended in the considerations presented in these lectures, is not something that wants to enter the spiritual cultural development of humanity today as if by the arbitrariness of an individual, but that it is deeply rooted in the spiritual life as it has gradually developed over time to our days. So that one can say: Especially when one looks through the nineteenth century, in many places there is a kind of approach to such a spiritual science. But due to very understandable circumstances, it has been brought about that in the course of the nineteenth century, and especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, the extraordinarily successful and, in its successes, by the spiritual science absolutely not to be doubted by spiritual science, has occupied the minds, and that as a result the beginnings of an actual spiritual-scientific world view have been more subdued than might otherwise have been the case.

In particular, it seems to me that Goethe's world view contains the most significant first steps towards a spiritual science and that basically, if Goethe's world view is really penetrated, one cannot doubt that in this Goethean view of the world there really is something like a germ from which spiritual science can develop. Certainly, in the course of the nineteenth century, people believed that they understood Goethe very deeply. They also honestly tried. But what is present in him as the most significant seeds of a spiritual-scientific view of the world can only be gained if one not only tries to turn one's soul's gaze directly to what Goethe himself , but when one tries to put oneself completely into the way he thought, how he looked at things, when one, so to speak, not only wants to be his observer, but his successor. It is well known, and I have also pointed this out several times in these lectures, how Goethe raised himself to a meaningful view of nature, let us say first in his observation of the metamorphosis of plants. What did he want to achieve with this metamorphosis of plants? Well, he wanted to show, first of all, that the plant being that expresses itself in roots, leaves, petals and fruit consists of individual members, but in such a way that these individual members arise from each other, are transformations of each other. He wanted to gain a comprehensive view of the plant being, for example, by trying to show that What we see as a colored petal is, from a certain point of view, essentially the same as the green leaf of the plant, only a metamorphosed, transformed leaf. And the fine organs that we find in the blossom, which we recognize as stamens, and so on, are in turn transformed petals, right up to the fruit. For Goethe, everything in the plant comes into being through the leaf transforming itself backwards and forwards, as it were. For him, the whole plant becomes a leaf, but a leaf that takes on different forms. In this way, spiritual contemplation in Goethe's sense, I would like to say, the intense focus on the individual part of the plant, rises to a whole of the plant, but to a whole that is spiritual, and that he now calls the type of the plant. It is remarkable that during his journey in Italy, Goethe believed that he was able to awaken more and more thoroughly in his mind what cannot be perceived with the outer senses in the plant, but what lives in the plant sensually - Goethe calls it a sensual-supersensible form - and what is expressed in different forms as a leaf, as a flower petal, as a stamen and so on. He also calls this type, which is sensual and supersensory, the idea of the plant. And I have already spoken here in earlier times about what was said after a botanical lecture given by the Jena professor Batsch, between Schiller and Goethe, who had both listened to the lecture. Schiller had found that it was all very nice and good, but that it did not form a whole, that it all crumbled away into mere details, that there was no overview. Goethe took a sheet of paper and sketched an ideal plant in front of Schiller's eyes, a plant that cannot be found anywhere in the physical world, but which he believed he could grasp as a sensual and supersensual form and that lives in every plant, so that every plant is only a particular manifestation of this, as he said, primal plant. So Goethe drew something that can never be found here or there with the naked eye. Schiller, who was not yet completely at home with such things at the beginning of the 1790s, could not find his way at all in what Goethe wanted with this primal plant. He said, “Yes, that's an idea, it's not a view; you can't see it anywhere!” Goethe became annoyed at this objection and said, “If what I have drawn here is an idea, then I perceive my ideas with my eyes!” Now, that was certainly a somewhat extreme way of expressing it, a slight exaggeration. But Goethe felt that he had not merely recorded an abstract idea, but something that arose in his soul with such inner necessity as arises for the eye in the individual plant life when the eye focuses on the individual plant. This life, with the sensual and the supersensual, as he called it, was a reality for Goethe; it was a reality for him.

Now Goethe pursued such observations with zeal and real effort. Those who have studied Goethe's endeavors know that he made all possible observations with real scientific effort, together with the Jena professors, especially with Loder. Goethe pursued the endeavors with zeal in order to arrive at something that could justify a similar approach for the whole realm of living beings. And it is well known – one need only read Goethe's scientific writings – how he then tried to find out for the human and animal forms as well how the various organs are basically only transformations of a basic form of the organ. And as I said, you can read about it in Goethe's scientific writings, how he, as it were, through a flash of inspiration, but one that was prepared for by his careful anatomical studies, found a happily burst animal skull on his second Italian journey and how the bones of the head, in their shell-like form, are only transformed and how their original form is that which we find superimposed on each other in the spine as vertebrae. One such vertebra, of which there are 30 to 33 stacked on top of each other, is transformed in a corresponding way, so to speak, puffed up by its inner driving forces – forgive the trivial expression – and internally shaped to match certain parts of the cranium, so that for Goethe the cranium is a transformed vertebra.

I am well aware of how this Goethean way of looking at things has been transformed by modern views. That is not what matters now, but the way of thinking, not the details. Now, one can assume that perhaps at the very moment when it dawned on him that the cranial bones are transformed vertebral bones, something is at work and driving in the vertebral bone, which, while remaining hidden in the vertebral bone, remained hidden in the vertebra, rises up, —- the idea occurred to him that the entire human brain is also transformed nervous substance, a transformed nerve link, just as such nerve links are now organized in the spinal cord. This means that not only the outer covering of the spinal cord and the skull present themselves as transformation forms of each other, but that the brain shows itself at a higher level as a transformation of what is found inside the spinal cord bone column as nerve organs, ganglia, if you will call them, superimposed on each other. This thought suggested itself at the time when Goethe had formulated the other thought with what he considered absolute certainty. But he did not elaborate on this thought, so that it cannot be found in his writings for the time being.

Perhaps I may mention that I have been intensively involved with Goethe's scientific studies for more than thirty years now and that it was clear to me from the beginning that the last thought must have been added to the first one by Goethe. But of course it would be something special if one could prove that Goethe really conceived this thought in connection with the first one. And when I was allowed to work in the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar from 1890 to 1897, it was natural for me to pursue such things. And already in the early 1890s, in about 1891, I was able to open a notebook that Goethe kept during the same period in which he made his discovery about the whirling nature of the skull bones. And in this notebook, written in Goethe's distinctive pencil letters, we find the following entry: “The brain itself is only a large main ganglion. The organization of the brain is repeated in every ganglion, so that each ganglion can be seen as a small subordinate brain.”

Thus the brain, the whole brain, is only that which we find in every link of the nervous system, at a different stage of development! Today I would like to draw your attention not so much to this fact as such, but to how Goethe's mind must have been predisposed in order to recognize such things and to assert such connections in what surrounds us sensually and physically in the animal, plant and human organization. What was Goethe actually striving for? Well, we saw it. He strove to find a sense-supersensible to what mere sensory observation can give, something that can only be grasped in the spirit, but which is just as much a reality as what can be seen with the eyes. So that Goethe came to the extreme saying: “Then I see my idea with my eyes!” Of course, he could only mean the eyes of the soul, because you cannot see ideas with your outer eyes.

In order to show how what Goethe thought about external connections contains the germ of what spiritual science has to say today, I now have to take a leap, so to speak. But this leap will appear natural to anyone who tries to gradually penetrate the spirit of Goethe's way of looking at things. If one wants to make progress in this way of looking at things, which Goethe, out of what I would call his instinctive genius, initially applied to the outer form of life, it is necessary for the human soul to undergo those inner developments that I have been talking about for years and particularly again this winter. As I mentioned last time, mentioned last time, you will find a brief indication of it in a few pages in the essay I wrote for the recently published journal 'Das Reich', which summarizes some of the material that you will find described in detail in my books 'Occult Science', 'Theosophy' or 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. I would like to say: that which makes the soul capable of looking at the world through the instrument of the physical organism must be elevated through special soul exercises, which I cannot describe again today, but which I have often described here. Through these inner exercises, through these inner soul-searchings, the soul must be enabled to see the soul-spiritual as such, to perceive it as such. To make that which appears more instinctively in Goethe the subject of conscious observation is the ascent from one spiritual science to another.

Now I have described — and as I said, you can read about it in the writings and essays mentioned — how the soul, through certain inner soul activities that it undertakes with itself, really brings about experiences that are of a completely different nature than the experiences one has in ordinary life through the instrument of the body; how the soul, by giving itself inner impulses that it would otherwise not give itself in outer life, can truly detach an inner element from the physical, just as - to repeat what was said the day before yesterday - oxygen is detached from hydrogen in the well-known chemical experiment. Through such soul exercises, the soul comes to experience itself purely in the soul element, to contemplate the soul aspect separate from the bodily. Since one cannot prove everything again and again, I would just like to point out that today I will present this only as the result of previous lectures, but that I have said a great deal about this detachment of the soul from the body.

When the human being comes to perceive the soul and spiritual as such, detached from the physical, the physical becomes something different and the soul-spiritual also something different. Just as there is no longer water, but oxygen and hydrogen, when you decompose the water in a chemical experiment, so the physical becomes another, the spiritual becomes another, of course only before the inner contemplation. But then, when the soul is fertilized by such real, now inner spirit-soul contemplations, then one gradually comes to look at the outer world quite differently than before. For this outer world is, after all, permeated by the spiritual everywhere. And then, I would say, the whole of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis becomes much more intense, much more saturated. He who, through the instrument of the outer body, first looks only at the outer sense world and its course, sees only that which is expressed in material existence. He can sense that the spirit reveals itself through material existence. But the spirit itself, how it rules and weaves in the material, can only be seen when the soul forces I spoke of in the earlier lectures are developed. But then the organs that one sees with physical eyes in humans and other living beings also appear in a completely different light. And then what is contained in Goethe's natural science is greatly expanded. Then, only by a straightforward continuation of what is contained in Goethe's ideas, one learns to recognize how the whole human head comes to us as the expression of what the human being actually is in the world from within. This whole human head appears to us as a complicated transformation product of something else. We know – this can be best understood by looking at the skeleton – that the human being visibly consists of two parts: the head and the rest of the organism, which is connected to the head in the skeleton only by small connecting links. So that we can really divide the human being into the head part and the rest of the physical organism when we look at it purely from an external, bodily point of view. And now, if, as I said, one fertilizes one's views through inner vision, one comes to the conclusion that the whole head is a complex transformation of the rest of the organism. On another level of development, the rest of the organism is, in a corresponding way, something similar to the head, just as the vertebra of the spinal column is something similar to the skull. The entire human head is transformed from the rest of the human organism. And one clearly gets the idea that this human head is, so to speak, like the rest of the organism, which has furthered the formative forces within it. The rest of the organism has remained at a certain stage; the laws of formation are held at a certain stage. In the head they have been further developed, further processed into form, further poured out into sculpture, I would say. The whole human head – the rest of the human being transformed, taken externally, bodily!

I would have to speak at length if I were to go into the details in this regard. But if one were to be able to hold an anatomical-physiological course here for weeks and go into the individual organs found in the head and in the other human organism, one would be able to prove in the strictest scientific sense, down to the last detail, how the basic idea, which I can only hint at now, can be absolutely proven. But now, in order to approach, as it were, an understanding of the whole, complete human being, one must consider the whole significance of what has been recognized, the whole, complete significance. In the human being as he stands before us, we have, in fact, two things before us: we have his head before us at a very different stage of development and formation than the rest of the organism, and we have the rest of the organism before us, of which we can say: In it lie formative forces that are only fixed at an earlier stage; if they were developed, they could become the head. Likewise, we can say: if the head had not fully developed its formative forces today, but had left them at an earlier stage, it would not have become the head, but would have presented itself in an external form as the rest of the organism.

We gain further insight into these conditions when we now consider the soul of man. And this soul of man can only be considered if one really rises from ordinary human knowledge to what I meant earlier and can only hint at today, with higher knowledge, with inner, supersensible vision. As you know, there is also a so-called psychology, a science of the soul. And especially in our time, this science of the soul wants to arise through exactly the same approach that is used in external natural science. People who still had something of the earlier approach to the soul in them and yet wanted to take full account of the entirely justified demands of modern natural science, tried to understand the soul life of the human being as it unfolds. Franz Brentano is a truly significant psychologist who still had something of an older science of the soul, which now seems to have been overcome, in him and wanted to take full account of modern science. However, in his “Psychology”, which was published in 1874, he could not rise to anything other than to classify what lives in the soul. This soul life is usually divided into thinking, feeling and willing. Brentano divides it somewhat differently. Franz Brentano is just such an observer of the soul who cannot rise to spiritual insight, but who wants to apply the way of looking at things, which one otherwise has only for external nature, for sensory perception, to the life of the soul. He only comes to a classification. Even in outer nature, Goethe does not seek to arrive at a mere classification, at what is called a system, but he seeks to arrive at a metamorphosis, he tries to present the transformation, and thereby, as it were, to follow that which lives supernaturally in its various transformations of form and to have an overall unity in the whole. Brentano, the psychologist, also breaks down the life of the soul and again cannot cope with the individual phenomena of the soul. It must truly be said that it is a hard nut to crack when one looks at the psychology of the present day, as it has developed in the nineteenth century in particular, with the eye of a psychologist of the soul who is trained in the way I have often described here. There you find this inability to get anywhere other than mere classifications: thinking, feeling and willing.

That which Goethe wants to have illuminated through all material, that which lives, this transformation and transmutation, this life, now not in an immobile contemplation that places thing beside thing and divides, but in a mobile, in a living, this life in such a contemplation must be applied in particular to the life of the soul if one really wants to grasp the life of the soul. You cannot just look at thinking, feeling and willing. That is quite impossible, one can only come to the division into thinking, feeling and willing. But when one examines soul life with the sharpened gaze of spiritual research for thinking, feeling and willing, then one finds in it a much more intense kind of metamorphosis, transformation than in what shines through the outer form of living nature. One grasps, so to speak, the transformation itself.

Can we recognize the essence of a thought if we grasp it only as a thought? No, we cannot! This is shown by spiritual insight. The thought transforms itself in the soul itself into feeling, and feeling in turn into will. And one must be able to grasp the metamorphosis of thinking, feeling and willing in one's inner mobility, then one grasps the soul. This can only be done by separating the soul from the physical body. And then one notices in direct inner experience what happens when we have a thought and compare it with a feeling, and compare feelings again with the will. We come to look inwardly at every thought that arises from the transformation of feeling. Every thought is a transformed feeling, and if we want to look at it inwardly, we must always perceive in the thought the incomplete, but half-dying of feeling. The life of thought is a dead emotional life. In thought lives, I might say, the rest of the emotional life. The life of feeling is transformed, but in such a way that the life of feeling passes, as it were, from a living state, of which one can be inwardly aware, into a more dead state.

When you say it like that, it sounds abstract. But when you experience it inwardly through soul-vision, when you really experience everything that makes your feelings turn into thoughts, for example when you have felt something vividly in the present and later you visualize this feeling only through a memory and then follows the path of how the feeling became a thought, then one experiences something so intensely inwardly, as one experiences, for example, 'when one sees a family member pass from life to death with an original, healthy family feeling. In the inner life of the soul, this very soul life, if one wants to recognize it, is permeated with intense inner liveliness, with intense inner participation. And no one should believe that the ascent from the external observation of nature to what is called the observation of the soul life is only something abstract or only that which is often addressed as confused mysticism, which mostly consists only of building a world view out of a dark feeling; but true soul science arises from the inner experience of the metamorphosis of soul facts,

But thought, too, can be awakened again into feeling, and it can transform itself into will. When, as has been indicated here several times, one watches how a thought seizes us as an ideal and then throbs through us, permeating the soul with enthusiasm until it becomes will, then one experiences, I might say, a birth, when one has raised the experience in question to the level of soul observation. This inner soul experience is what results from the exercises described, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. But through this, as you can see, an inner soul life is opened up that lies behind the ordinary soul life. The ordinary soul life proceeds in thinking, feeling and willing separately. But this soul life, which I have just described, lies behind the thinking, feeling and willing that is usually turned towards the outer sense world. It is not something that the spiritual researcher creates; it is something that he experiences only within the ordinary thinking, feeling and willing, something that he merely comes upon. He creates it no more than someone who comes in from outside and sees the table here now creates the table, although he creates its image by entering and looking at the table. In the same way, the spiritual researcher creates an image of the soul life that lies behind the ordinary soul life; but this soul life is present in every human soul. It lies, if one may say so, below the threshold of ordinary consciousness, which is turned towards the outer world or towards sensory perception in general.

I would like to say that there are also approaches to finding this soul life. Such approaches are to be found precisely in the development of thought in the nineteenth century. Because there is a yearning in all human beings for knowledge of the soul, such approaches have even gripped people in the broadest circles. We have one of these approaches in the concept, which Eduard von Hartmann did not exactly develop but did work with, in the concept of unconscious soul life. He did, after all, derive all conscious mental life from unconscious mental life. But the situation is somewhat skewed when it comes to Hartmann's unconscious, because it is only characterized in negative terms. If one says: What underlies the conscious is an unconscious, then one is saying no more than: everything that is outside of this table is a non-table, is a table. Now, if I describe everything that sits and stands here as non-table, as untable, I have not yet said anything special. It cannot be described in any other way than negatively if one stops at the level of conscious mental life with the realization. And that is what Eduard von Hartmann wants. One must inwardly fertilize the soul life, as has often been described here, and this ordinary soul life must descend to the other, so that the subconscious, unconscious soul life is grasped by an expanded consciousness, by a consciousness different from the ordinary consciousness that is turned towards the world of the senses.

You see, a soul life is grasped through spiritual insight. This soul life, which is grasped and appears directly in spiritual insight, what is it if not that which works inwardly in man and of which one must imagine that the outer body is somehow its expression, its revelation? But just as we have our ordinary conscious soul life, so its advantage lies precisely in the fact that this conscious soul life does not directly affect the body. Just imagine if the conscious soul life did affect the body - yes, it is really not an exaggeration when I present the following. Let us assume that we see the hand of a stranger and want to grasp its form. If this form did not appear to us as a mere idea, but permeated us, becoming truly alive within us, then our hand would have to metamorphose and become like the other person's hand. We would have to be able to absorb it completely, to make alive within us that which we can only visualize in abstract terms. And if we were to stand face to face with a whole, full human being who made such a strong impression on us that the impression was not just present in an abstract idea, we ourselves would have to take on the form of that person. Thus that which functions as ordinary conscious soul-life would not fulfill its task in the world at all if it were not so completely separated from our bodily life that it does not interfere with the bodily life and allow it to develop independently.

But we need only go back in human development to see at least a hint of what we can call – as I pointed out the day before yesterday – the shaping from within of the forms of the human organism. When we look at people, especially in their very earliest childhood, we see how what is within them is vividly shaped into what they later develop. We see how the spiritual enters into the bodily form. Of course, there are many objections to the assertion that I am now making. However, as I said, it is not possible to cover all the bases in a single lecture. These objections can be easily overcome if one can only talk about them in detail. So we see a vivid manifestation of what is inside a person, in the person's youth, in childhood, and in pathological conditions. We see how the soul and spirit intervene vividly in physical development. The ordinary soul life — one might say, thank God — cannot intervene in physical development; it would not fulfill its task. But read this excellent chapter in Schleich's new book: “On the Switching Mechanism of Thoughts”, this beautiful, I would say epoch-making chapter: “Hysteria - a Metaphysical Problem”, then you will see how it is referred to how, in fact, the soul-spiritual, what is grasped in thoughts, affects the plastic formation of the body in pathological states. We are healthy precisely because it is not so in the normal state. I will cite only the most primitive example from this book. The examples have always been known to anyone who deals with such things; but through the way in which they are introduced in this book, something epoch-making has indeed happened. The one example: a doctor enters a lady's room, in which a fan is humming. She says – she is hysterical, it is a pathological condition with which he is dealing –: There is a big bee! At first, the doctor wants to disabuse her of the idea that it is a big bee; after all, it is only a fan. Then she says: If it were to sting me! At first the doctor also wants to make it clear to her that that would not be so bad either. But at that moment the eye swells up into a lump the size of a chicken's egg.

This is how we see the effect of the mere thought. And as I said, thank God our ordinary thoughts are not such thoughts. And that is precisely why they are the right thoughts for ordinary life, that they cannot. They do not take this plasticizing form, they do not go down into the organism. For that, pathological conditions must arise; but then we see how thought can take hold of material life. Schleich quite rightly calls this an 'incarnation of thought'. But one must not think that one can remain within the ordinary life of the soul when speaking of such things. The ordinary thoughts that a person has are there for the purpose of understanding the world and as a basis for action. If a person is in good health, these thoughts certainly do not intervene in the ordinary life of the soul in a plasticizing way. But in a normal way, if you look at it spiritually, you find that what forms the human being, from childhood on, what shapes the forms, is now based on the same principle in a healthy way, just as the spiritual and soul life, which is still unconscious and remains unconscious as such, remains plastically formative. And it is precisely in this that man's further experience consists, namely, that what first enters the organism, what first takes hold of the organism, later separates itself from the organism, exists spiritually and soulfully on its own, and is experienced precisely as spiritual and soul-like. This is what the further development of man as an individuality consists of.

I have presented certain trains of thought to you; but these trains of thought are not really invented, not logically combined in any way, but they are lifted out of the soul's vision. And as I said, it is not a game of analogies, but it arises from the observation of the soul from the developed soul-spiritual knowledge that the same thing that can later intervene as a plastic principle in pathological conditions intervenes in the normal way in childhood life. The thoughts that I have thus suggested lead further, not by logical spinning, but by continuing the soul-spiritual view of the world. From the contemplation of bodily life, the thought was suggested: the human body, apart from the head, contains the same formative forces as the head, only at a less advanced stage; the head contains the same formative forces as the rest of the body, but at a far more advanced stage. These thoughts combine with each other in the inner vision. This more intimate acquaintance with the life of nature is attained by becoming acquainted with the spiritual and soul life in nature as well. In the higher vision, one must still clarify the following through the more intimate acquaintance with the subconscious spiritual life, as I have just described it. And one can do this through this more intimate acquaintance. Certain thoughts, I might say, only surmised by philosophers, become inwardly completely clear through the kind of knowledge meant here. Again and again, philosophers chew over and over - I do not mean this in a disparaging way - to gain some kind of concept of substance, of matter. In his Ignorabimus speech, D'Bois-Reymond presented in such a brilliant way all that can prove that what matter actually is, or, as he says, where matter haunts in space, cannot be grasped through knowledge. —- Matter basically always remains something unrecognized for ordinary knowledge; it remains outside of ordinary knowledge. Through spiritual knowledge one really comes to realize that matter itself cannot be perceived and that matter cannot enter into our inner being, just as little as the brass of a signet, which I imprint in the sealing wax, can enter into the substance of the sealing wax, although everything that is to enter, let us say the name Müller, passes from the signet to the sealing wax. What is externally material cannot be brought into the interior. But that which is to be brought in comes in in a similar way to the name Miller coming into the sealing wax. That which is in us cannot penetrate outwards to where matter is in space. Ordinary knowledge cannot grasp matter. Matter is simply imperceptible. I would have to talk at great length again if I wanted to explain in detail — which can be done — that matter cannot possibly be perceived as such. Matter can only ever be hypothetically added to the perceptions.

What is the actual basis for this? It is based on the fact that we do not perceive anything material at all. If only matter were spread out and we ourselves consisted of matter in the ordinary sense, we would be unable to perceive anything. Matter is not perceptible! How does matter become perceptible? Matter becomes perceptible because, in addition to matter (you don't have to force this 'in addition to'), there is still ether, etheric essence, in the world around us. When I speak of etheric essence, I must of course refer to what I have often said here, that the concept of ether as it is meant here does not correspond to any concept of ether as postulated by physics, although it can of course overlap with it in many ways. But finally, what kind of ether concept does modern physics have? This modern physics, which is actually on a wonderful path with those who research with all the tools of modern natural science, who make every effort to develop and increasingly develop the scientific way of thinking and attitude? From individual physicists, who must be taken very seriously indeed, in a completely different sense than the amateurish talk of a monistic worldview, we already have the sentence: If you want to have any idea at all about ether, then you can only do so by not imagining any material properties in the ether; ether must be imagined in such a way that all material properties are kept away from it. And now we are experiencing the marvelous fact that two opposing views of things are colliding. In the midst of these turbulent times, we are experiencing the clash of two worldviews with regard to the external, physical world, a fact of unspeakably great significance for anyone who is able to judge such a thing in its full gravity. We are now also experiencing the fact that what physicists have never really tackled in the right way, namely gravity, is being investigated. And there we experience it – I can only hint at these things in a purely historical way – that on the one hand the more materialistic view asserts itself and, as it were, tries to gain insight into the ether from ideas about the material, that is, from purely material properties. And on the other hand, we have a wonderful method of investigating gravity, which, as has already been said, seeks to strip away the material and dematerialize the natural in order to understand gravity. In short, if we want to understand the direction in which real science is heading today, we cannot rely in any trivial way on the talk of the so-called monistic world view, but we have to go into this true and serious scientific endeavor, which is permeated by truly impressive methodological discipline which, in attempting to go from matter up to the ether, strives more and more to achieve what I just meant by individual physicists even saying: the ether can only be imagined if it is no longer imagined with material properties.

In spiritual science, the ether now reveals itself through inner vision and through inner knowledge, just as one otherwise comes to know the external, the sensual existence. This is only possible through the first stage of spiritual vision. You can read about it in my book 'How to Know Higher Worlds'. There, as the first step in spiritual insight, I use the term, please do not misunderstand me, imaginative knowledge. But that is just a term. What is meant is the kind of knowledge — I have often presented this in the last lectures here as well — in which the human being does not simply accept the perceptions, but has to build the perceptions himself. Just as one builds up externally what one also has in reality when one notes it down, so imaginative knowledge will inwardly express what one experiences spiritually. But through this knowledge one does indeed arrive at a conception of ether that cannot be conveyed by external material representations. And then one arrives at the fact that ether is spread out in the world and forms the possibility that things, figuratively speaking, turn their surface towards us so that they can be perceived, and that ether is within us, meeting the outer ether. Ether from within, ether from without meet, and in this way that which flows towards us ethereally from things, that which ethereally rises from us in the organism, is encompassed. This encompasses itself inwardly, and only through this does that which we call perception arise. What makes it so difficult to understand sensory perception is precisely the lack of knowledge of the facts just described.

Take the human eye! This human eye gives images of our surroundings precisely because the material processes from outside continue within the eye, so to speak. What happens in our inner eye is, without our consciousness being present, only a continuation of the laws of light that exist outside in the world. And when the outer ether continues into our eye and is grasped by the inner ether, this is how this perception of light arises. What I am about to say is a direct continuation of what is written in Goethe's beautiful and significant chapter on physical colors and their perception.

Thus we ascend from external matter to the ether, and in so doing we come closer to what lives within us. For that is the other thing now. Matter rises to the ether; we have ether within us; the inner ether enters into interaction with the outer ether. That is the one process. And now let us look at it from the other side. We have seen that when we have our soul life, the conscious soul life, which in a healthy state must not interfere with matter but which nevertheless contains the possibility of formative forces, this conscious soul life leads us down into a subconscious soul life. And this subconscious soul life has, I would say, a completely different power than the conscious soul life. The conscious soul life is the abstract soul life, the soul life that does not hurt us. I would like to give just one example of this: in the conscious soul life we can say a lie calmly, it does not hurt us. But if the lie arises in the subconscious, it hurts; that is, it has the power to develop into reality. It is only in our subconscious mental life that we have a mental life that is capable of forming itself, a mental life that is no longer separate from matter, but can now intervene in matter, although initially it can only intervene in the matter that is available to it. This subconscious mental life can now in turn intervene in what is in us as ether. And in that which is behind matter as ether, and in that which is below our consciousness as subconscious soul life, there arises an interaction that lies below our consciousness and above matter. This takes place in our subconscious. If you follow this train of thought, you can now easily explain the morbid states of mind as well. There is not enough time to go into them. I have often used the term subconscious here, which may even rightly appear dreadful at first to some people, and which really challenges one to make bad or good jokes about it. But the term should not be important. If we take a comprehensive view of the whole human being, he consists, of course, of matter, just as the other external things consist of matter, of the etheric being that he has within and that enters into relationship with the external ether, and of the subconscious soul life, which can now intervene in the ether in a formative way. And that which arises in the interaction between the subconscious soul life, which we discover in the spirit-sight, into which we dive in the spirit-sight, and the weaving, surging ether, that is precisely the imagination, the first step of spiritual vision.

And then, when through knowledge a person has struggled through to that which is not consciously experienced in him, but which is still inner life, then he also experiences how this inner life proves to be related to that which now lives in the external, but is not matter, cannot be imagined as material at all - even according to today's physics - how this becomes one in him.

We can grasp even more closely what I have often characterized in these lectures as the inner human being in the human being. The conscious soul life goes down to a subconscious soul life, and this subconscious soul life is now more powerful than this conscious one and organizes itself together with the etheric life. In this way we actually have that which is present in the human soul life. And when a person awakens this soul life within himself through the exercises described in the repeatedly mentioned books and essays, only then does he really perceive what can be called the spiritual world, just as he perceives the outer sensual world with his physical organism. In the thorough organization of his etheric body lies the possibility of perceiving and knowing a spiritual world, and of knowing that he himself comes from this spiritual world.

And now the thought broadens and is combined with the other thought, which was gained from Goethe's world view. For once one has grasped the inner human being, one can now begin to ask oneself: Yes, what about these two parts of the human nature, the head and the rest of the body, which are at different levels of development? Here we come to the fact that what can be imagined spiritually and soul-wise must be brought into quite different relationships with the head than with the rest of the organism. When one grasps the spiritual man in clairvoyance – but not in the way it is meant in spiritualism or in trivial superstition, but really in the sense that is always characterized here – the spiritual man who underlies the outer man, also the man who has ordinary consciousness — for that is nothing directly soul-like, but only something that lies below it — if one can grasp this person, one sees this inner person in a completely different connection with the main part of the person and with what the rest of the person's body is. And what we find is this: When we examine the head, we find in the head a plastic formation, a shaping, such that the soul-spiritual has flowed completely into the form, the soul-spiritual is completely shaped in the form and has even shaped itself in this form in such a way that it still retains some of its formative powers. And these retained formative forces are those that we can then develop as our thoughts. But what is developed in our thoughts only abstractly out of the head lies in the form in which it can only be achieved subconsciously, at the basis of the formation of our head. And in a completely different way, the spiritual-soul substance underlies the rest of the human organism. These formative forces do not penetrate so deeply into the rest of the human organism; there they retain a certain independence; there the soul-spiritual lives much more strongly alongside the physical body. If I may speak figuratively, imaginatively and figuratively – please allow me this tautology – I would therefore like to say: When the seer has the human head before him, he has a spiritual-soul form, but in addition, only extremely sparsely, a spiritual form. If he has the other human organism before him, he has the bodily form, but the spiritual is richly developed, only it has not yet become as organized in the material as it is in the head. In the head the spiritual has flowed into matter much more than in the rest of the organism. The human head is much more material than the rest of the organism. The rest of the organism is such that the spiritual has not yet flowed very much into the material and still has greater independence.

Now the spiritual insight of which I have spoken comes to a real understanding of the essential meaning of what I have just expressed. What forces of development are there in the human head that have reached a point that lies much, much further ahead in development than what can be observed in the rest of the organism? If one learns to look at what underlies the head, one learns to transfer the spiritual vision to the human head, then one oneself comes to experience soulfully what has been processed in the human head. When one experiences inwardly in soul what formative forces are at work in the human head — today I can only hint at these things in aphorisms — then one finds that what is processed there expands directly into a spiritual world, that one must really think of the formative forces as coming from the spiritual world, even if this passes through the human hereditary currents. Here again we have a beautiful point of contact between modern natural science and spiritual science. There are such points of contact everywhere. Today there are natural scientists who, through their natural research, also admit that such cosmic formative forces are at work in what builds up in the human being while he is developing in the mother's body. So we have something in the human head that is formed from the cosmos. In the human head there is an immediate imprint of the cosmos when one looks at the soul.

If we now ascend further to the spiritual, to the way I have described it to you, we come back further. We gain the following knowledge of the head: at birth, actually soon after conception, this human head is so constituted that its formative forces pass entirely into the material, leaving only a little of the soul behind, living out their full potential in the material. But these formative forces lead back to a time before conception. They lead up into the spiritual world, so that what arises from the cosmos in the formation of the head, the human being has essentially experienced in the spiritual world before he was conceived or born. And when we go from the soul to the spiritual, we will then, within this spirit, recognize in the formation of the head what comes from an earlier life on earth. It is precisely by observing the human head in a spiritual-scientific context that one passes directly from the present earth life into the earlier earth life. And this is supplemented by the other thought, when one now observes what is present in the rest of the organism, apart from the head. In this remaining organism, the soul-spiritual life is still separate, the whole human life, as it is led from birth to death in dealing with the outside world, in relation to other people, to the things of this world, to nature and all the spiritual conditions in which we live, to all social conditions; this is expressed in what is spiritual about us, in the rest of the organism, summarized in the human heart. This is not just a picture, but a real spiritual-physiological fact. But because this human organism has taken on its fixed form at birth, it can initially only remain spiritual-soul-like. However, it is present as formative forces, it remains present as formative forces, and it goes through death as formative forces. If we follow what is in the human organism, apart from the head, then we find that the spiritual view points us to what lies after death. And if we look at the human being spiritually, we find that this is transformed into the next earthly life.

And further: Concrete observation teaches us that the head, as it is now shaping itself with its inner formative powers, is the result of our physical life in a previous earthly existence, apart from the head. Our head has truly been transformed from an earlier life on earth, and our present organism, apart from the head, with all its experiences, retains the formative forces in a spiritual-soul way, and when it departs with death, it gives them to the spiritual world, and they develop so that they can participate in the formation of our head in the next life on earth. And we arrive at the great, significant law: in what our head is inwardly formed — mind you, inwardly formed — we have the result of the formation of what the rest of the organism, apart from the head, was predisposed to in a previous life on earth; and in what struggles and forces in the rest of our organism, we have what goes into the formation of the head in the next life on earth. Once this knowledge is acquired, it will be possible to draw a strict scientific distinction between what lies within the line of inheritance and what does not lie within the line of inheritance. In this field, natural science still has, I might say, very significant doors to open if it wants to meet what spiritual science has to say about the spiritual and soul life.

I would like to draw attention to just one point. Of course, natural science today rightly attributes certain characteristics that we have to the principle of inheritance; we have them from our father and mother, grandfather, grandmother and so on. But we should not think that the natural scientist is saying something when he comes and says: Yes, the spiritual scientist attributes inner formative forces to earlier earthly lives; we learn all this from inheritance! The spiritual researcher does not deny that which can be scientifically explained from heredity, which may lie in the physical line of reproduction, as the spiritual researcher is generally on the ground of natural science. But, as I said, natural science must first open up certain doors and follow certain guidelines. Just think about the following: as I pointed out the day before yesterday, a person reaches sexual maturity at a certain age and is then able to produce offspring. At that point, he has all the abilities within him to pass on to the next generation what he has in the way of physical-bodily formative forces. He must have it in himself. No new abilities can arise later. What a person acquires later in the way of abilities, which he in turn partially incorporates, as he previously incorporated the ability to reproduce, does not pass into the reproductive current, but these abilities work and have an effect in the person in such a way that they form the germ for that which goes through the gate of death, between death and new birth through the spiritual world and in a next life on earth, it is embodied anew in the way I have described. There is then a transition, and one can say - as grotesque as it may still sound today - the formation of the head, but, as I said, the head is formed from within. The formation of the head contains forces that we must seek as the spiritual and soul element accompanying the body, which exists independently of the head, in an earlier life on earth. But what we now have in addition to our head, before the spiritual and soul has completely poured into the physical, that prepares the configuration and shape of the head in a next earthly life. This is certainly still a paradoxical assertion today, and yet, it is how a comprehensive doctrine of metamorphosis for the whole person is built, a doctrine of metamorphosis that encompasses spirit, soul and body and shows how the reality within the human being goes through birth and death and how this reality in the human being is related to the universe. What is it that directly belongs to our earthly life? What directly belongs to our earthly life as an individual human being living between birth and death? Our head! What we usually find to be the most spiritual on the outside is most closely related to the earth. What is less related to the earth also passes into other than earthly worlds in the time between death and a new birth. And when, after the person has passed through the gateway of death, the spiritual has gained the strength to transform itself into the formation of the head, then it has attained its goal.

As you can see, spiritual science speaks in a very concrete way about what belongs to the eternal part of man. And in a very concrete way it can indicate how the human being is embedded in the whole universe. It can point out how that which is in the human head is so occupied by the forces of the earth that the whole spiritual and soul life has poured itself into the head, and how that which exists outside the head is only preparing to be joined to it in the next life on earth. We see how one earthly life follows another, in order to link up to eternity like chain links. When man – not now in an external, abstract description, but inwardly – grasps what can be experienced as the inner man, when the subconscious, the ethereal takes hold and the inner man becomes active, then the soul is seized and it can be understood beyond birth and death in connection with the universe. And when man has awakened this in himself, then a spiritual world also becomes visible before this inner man, a concrete spiritual world, as before the physical eyes, which develop out of transformed matter, the physical world becomes visible. The spiritual and soul worlds present themselves in a definite, concrete way. And just as we become acquainted with concrete physical things and beings through our bodily organization in the physical world around us, so we become acquainted with a spiritual world in concrete individual forms through the higher man, through the man who lives spiritually and soulfully in man. But the spiritual-soul in man must be grasped in a living way, otherwise it remains a mere inkling that can only be found in a conceptual construction. One can only come to the spirit, to the soul, by descending from the ordinary consciousness to the subconscious and really developing a new consciousness for the subconscious and thereby forming a higher human being in the human being with what otherwise pervades matter as ether. This is possible through experience, through real inner experience on the paths described in my book “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds”. If one does not attain this spiritual level, then one remains within that which of the soul-spiritual asserts itself in the physical organism. One basically remains in that which is present in man between birth and death, and then one comes to that unclear mysticism, which unfortunately is confused by many with true, but now brightly clear mysticism, which is attained in the way I have just described, through the experience of the inner concrete spiritual-soul man. And because confused, hazy mysticism is confused with that which becomes bright and clear within, that is why spiritual scientific striving is still so often misunderstood today. The nebulous inner self, felt only through the detour of the body, does not really expand into a cosmic self, but becomes blurred in a general sense of the world. It is difficult to express this. That unclear, blurred mysticism is only what the soul can experience with the help of the bodily instrument. The soul must first be released from the body, then the soul-spiritual is truly experienced. And the spiritual must be seen, but not with the same powers of cognition with which the conceptual-legal, natural-legal in the sensual world is seen; because that is seen with the help of the bodily instrument, that does not even go through the gate of death with us. Natural laws are only meaningful between birth and death – not for nature itself, but for us. But when a person awakens the inner man and the spiritual world is around him, then he beholds a concrete spiritual world in which spiritual beings are as physical beings are in the physical world. And then it does not come to what otherwise a yes also quite commendable, but just limited metaphysics comes: in all possible ways one comes from a mere inkling of the spirit, which one veils with concepts, to pantheism, this foggy construct that sees an All-spirit everywhere, just as if one did not want to see individual plants and animals everywhere, but an All-nature. Whether one sees will everywhere, as Schopenhauer did, or finds a panpsychism by philosophical means, all these “pane” come about only because the soul-spiritual works only with the tool of the human head. And basically, mere philosophical idealism, which I have repeatedly tried to describe truly in all its magnitude this winter, could not lead to anything other than a conceptual understanding of the world; for the real spiritual world is only attained in the way I have indicated. But precisely when one works out this concrete view — and today I could only work it out aphoristically — what I have said can really be fully reconciled with the scientific world view, and does not offend any religious feeling. You will soon be able to read about this in my little work 'The Task of Spiritual Science', which will be published in the next few weeks. All that I have described so far only enables man to understand the world around him in all its phenomena. The spiritual world is present in the outer world in its effects, but these effects can only be fully understood when one grasps the spiritual foundations of these effects. Only when we have grasped the soul-forming forces that underlie the world, the spiritual forces of action, can we gain insight into what the world actually is.

Goethe first wanted to see the weaving and surging of the spirit, which had remained unconscious to him, in the reflection of the external material, and he could only perceive this in the living material through his metamorphosis. If the way of thinking that Goethe had is extended to body, soul and spirit, a true science of body, soul and spirit will really appear. Then such a science will also be possible, as I indicated the day before yesterday for understanding the individual national souls and for the historical development of humanity in general as it unfolds on earth.

One can say: there has always been a longing to achieve such a spiritual science. Today we call it anthroposophy, that is, I will try to justify this name for you. Anthroposophy because anthropology looks at the human being as one would if one only used the external organs of the human being. Anthroposophy arises when one lets the inner, awakened human being focus on what it means to be human. In earlier lectures I quoted a saying of Troxler from 1835, from which it can be seen how such an anthroposophy has been longed for. For in the time when Goethe's world view was more or less unconsciously at work in the better souls everywhere, there was already a longing and hope for such an anthroposophy. And as proof of this, let me quote a saying that Immanuel Hermann Fichte — whom I also mentioned in one of the last lectures — made in 1860; it should prove to you that what is being sought here today as spiritual science is something longed for and hoped for in the spiritual movement of the nineteenth century, even if it was somewhat subdued for the reason given. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great philosopher, says in his “Anthropology” at the end, 1860: “But anthropology already ends in the result, justified from the most diverse sides, that man, according to the true nature of his being, as in the very source of his consciousness, belongs to a supersensible world. In contrast, sense consciousness and the phenomenal world arising from its vantage point, with the entire human sensory life, have no other significance than to be the place in which the supersensible life of the spirit is carried out, in that the spirit, through its own act of free consciousness, introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, is truly nothing arbitrarily invented, but something longed for and hoped for by the best minds of the nineteenth century. And I am convinced that it is based on a real penetration into the spirit of Goethe's world view. When, a few years ago, the question arose as to the name of the society within which this spiritual research, which is meant here, would be cultivated, I would have liked to have named this society the “Goethe Society” if the name had not already been given to another Goethe Society. It was named the Anthroposophical Society; but for good reasons, because you see: what appears today as spiritual science is long awaited and long hoped for, and it is that which today, I might say, is brought to the surface from subconscious depths of the soul, only the fulfillment of those hopes that were truly not present in the worst minds.

And such hopes were present in yet another way, in a remarkable way and, I might say, arising from the Goethean worldview, in a spirit that lived so completely with his soul in the Goethean worldview – in Herman Grimm. Here, something wonderful comes to light. Herman Grimm is, after all, a historian, especially an art historian. He tried, really out of Goethe's spirit — I am not saying now how he was able to grasp it, but how he was able to assimilate it and spiritualize it — to present the developmental process of historical phenomena in the sense of such a Goethean world view. What is he coming to? At one point in an essay he wrote about Macauley, Herman Grimm tried to understand how one can understand historical development and the place of the individual human being in history. He tried to form a concept about it: What is the place of the human being in the development of history? He still shrank back, because when he wrote the essay – it was at the beginning of the seventies – the time was not yet ripe to describe spiritual science in such a way as one can describe it today – even if it is still often regarded as fantasy or something worse. He does not attempt to ascend to spiritual science, but to form a thought, which he says he initially wants to just let be a fantasy, a thought through which he can imagine: how does the individual human being initially stand in the universe from an historical point of view?

Grimm then utters the following words: “It is conceivable that the spirit of a human being, released from the bonds of the body, might hover above the earth like a mere mirror of what is happening.” — He formally apologizes at the time because no spiritual science could be present: “I am not stating an article of faith here, it is just a fantasy. Let us assume that for some people immortality takes this form” — we have it, the fantasy, immortality takes this form for spiritual science! — ”that they float above the earth, unhampered by what previously blinded them, and reveal to them all the destinies of the earth and of man before the birth of the planet...” Herman Grimm had to imagine life in the spiritual world between death and a new birth at least hypothetically, in order to really imagine and think about the way in which man is embedded in history. And so he said: Now, how can we understand the individual human being? - “Now, suddenly, let us dream on” - one must dream, of course, but the dream becomes truth! “If this spirit, which so freely surveyed things, were forced to join the body of a mortal man again.” That is to say, in order to be able to imagine history and man's place in history, Herman Grimm necessarily had to think of repeated lives on earth. Only in this way could he imagine history.

This is how deeper spirits looked at history and the historical becoming and the inner standing of man. But as I said, such things flowed, I would say, under the prevailing stream of the more materialistic development of the world view in modern times and will probably be carried to the surface by our time, because our time already senses that the spirit and the soul must be recognized again. Indeed, this is felt most acutely when one tries to understand the historical development of humanity. And today it is obvious to seek to understand the historical development of humanity because we are at such a significant stage of this historical development. When one looks at such a view of history, for which Herman Grimm had to imagine repeated lives on earth, and then looks at another historical conception, one becomes very aware of how far mere adherence to the material can go, especially when one wants to understand historical development.

In this context, I have a spirit in mind, of whom I will present a few sentences to you at the end, because he is, of course, quite far removed from any understanding of the spiritual, of the soul. And yet a certain mind wants to explain historical development, for example why religions arose in different forms, why there was initially polytheism, then monotheism arose, and within monotheism Christianity arose, and within Christianity Protestantism arose again. Yes, that there is something spiritual and soulful at work inside, of course he cannot rise to that. But from what can be observed externally, albeit only in a rough way, when one looks at the outside world, including the outside world of history, only through the instruments of the body, he now tries to make clear how the history of religions has developed. He says – the words are not particularly important to the idea presented, but I will read them in the introduction: “As long as consolidation progresses, the organism that will prevail will be the living one that functions best at the given moment, and this tendency is just as evident in abstract thought as in trade and war.” So if you want to understand how a later state arises from an earlier one, then, in his opinion, you can see how the later state became more favorable than the earlier one.

And he applies this to religions: “The development of religions provides the most striking proof of this principle. Monotheism is cheaper than polytheism.” That is to say, people gradually strove to get more for less in the spiritual realm. So they advance from polytheism to monotheism, which is cheaper! It does not need such a widespread cult as polytheism! So: “Monotheism is cheaper than polytheism.” Consequently, the two great monotheistic religions were able to survive in Cairo and Constantinople, the two commercial centers of the first Middle Ages, while the Roman cult perished, along with the Greek and Egyptian and the various Persian religions.

So we have the later monotheistic religions because they are cheaper! They have only one God, so they need a simpler cult, are cheaper! Then he continues: “In the same sense, Protestantism is cheaper than Catholicism.” If you only look at the exterior, you cannot deny it, the Protestant church does not have as much decoration, has not developed as much worship, is cheaper.

“That is why Holland and England – I am not saying this! – adopted Protestantism when they snatched trade with the Orient from Italy and Spain.” Because the Dutch and the English wanted to have it cheaper, they adopted Protestantism!

“Atheism, finally, is cheaper than any religion, and it is a fact that all modern commercial centers tend towards skepticism, that the modern state itself seeks to reduce the costs of worship to a minimum.” Here we have cost as a principle of the progress of religions! However, this is again an example of the approach that I took the day before yesterday: that one can see how, from the different cultures, the endeavor is either to think more spiritually and psychologically about the course of human development, or more in terms of what can only be achieved through external observation.

The author is Brooks Adams, an American, and Roosevelt wrote the preface to this book! I will add nothing more to these thoughts, they show, as it were, the asymptote to which a purely external world view must lead. Of course, what is grasped as spiritual-soul will often appear to a purely external view of the world like mere dreaming. Dreaming — yes, people today would even forgive one for dreaming from a materialistic point of view. I am convinced that if someone, in a dream, could invent a machine that he then constructs in external reality, people would believe in this dream. All that is needed is the power to recognize in its reality that which is found only within the soul and spirit.

That this spiritual power belongs to the developmental and educational principles of the world-view development that has found expression in German spiritual life is precisely what I have tried to explain in the various lectures during this difficult time of trial. And when one has gained an insight into what spiritual science will and must be for the future of humanity, and sees how, ever since there has been a German development, the educational principles of this German development have been, shall we say, dreaming towards this spiritual science, then that also gives a firmness and certainty to stand still within the spiritual life of one's own nation and to have no need to vilify other spiritual lives and to utter such words of hatred as we heard only the day before yesterday, in order to gain inner strength, so to speak, inner justification in rejecting what is alien. German spiritual life can gain inner justification and inner strength by considering what lies within itself.

And so, at the conclusion of this lecture, let me express, as something that can take root in the soul as a feeling, the comparison of what spiritual science wills with what often lives as germs precisely in German cultural life. The way in which the soul and spirit are anchored in German cultural life gives us the inner certainty that Germanness cannot be overcome, because it is destined for greatness in the evolution of the world and of humanity, according to what it contains as germs within itself. We can say today: England possesses one quarter of the total dry land area, Russia one seventh, France one thirteenth, the German element barely one thirtieth of the land! Thus, those who expand over a quarter, plus a seventh, plus a thirteenth of the dry land, are opposed to those who have barely spread over a thirtieth of the dry land. And so those who have spread out over this one-thirtieth and who today consciously stand on this one-thirtieth in relation to what stands on a quarter, plus three-sevenths, plus three-tenths must imbue themselves with what can be experienced from the grasp of the innermost being. There is no doubt that inner necessities can be experienced: those who stand on a thirteenth plus a seventh plus a quarter in relation to those who stand only on a thirtieth, they must not overcome the latter, as they often say today in their fanatical ideal of hatred. For that which lives on this one thirtieth seems, by its inner nature and essence, to be destined for that which, within the earthly context, can still be called a long, long time and, for the human imagination, a temporal eternity. This German essence carries within itself the certainty of its continued existence. And from this certainty emerges what can be summarized in a few words: they will not overcome it, because if the world is to have meaning, they must not overcome it!

It has often been said that when Spiritual Science will spread, it should play its part as a true force of life. And this assertion may be strengthened by the most varied considerations of life's relations. By the very fact that we become more and more acquainted with the characteristics of that invisible world which is the foundation of the visible world, do perceptions, concepts take hold of our soul which in their turn become impulses toward quite definite actions, toward a quite definite attitude in life. Of special importance will be the attitude which may be initiated in regard to the so-called dead, concerning those who during our life span go through the time between death and a new birth. Just as man here in the physical body is, through his soul and body, related in the most varied ways with the physical world, and the spiritual nature underlying it, so does he also stand between death and a new birth in the most varied relations to the facts, happenings, and beings of the supersensible world. And just as human beings have an occupation, an activity, in the physical world between birth and death, so they also have activities, occupations, if you please, between death and a new birth. What we may learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead more and more to what is called the removal of the abyss which, especially in our materialistic age, opens up between those living on earth and the dead. Between the living and the so-called dead, an increasing mutual intercourse will be established.

Let us today call attention to details in this intercourse between the living and the dead, as well as to the occupations and ways of living of the souls who live between death and a new birth. Those who die before others with whom they had relations here on earth must naturally often look back from the spiritual world on the beings they loved, or who have otherwise remained in the life on earth. Now, the question is whether such souls existing between death and a new birth can perceive human beings living here between birth and death. If we have developed the faculties which enable us to penetrate into the life between death and a new birth, we have quite special, one might say, deeply moving experiences. For instance, one may find souls of the dead who sometimes say the following in the language which is possible between the departed souls and the seer, and which can only be understood by the latter who is able to look from our world into the world of the dead. In the following way, for instance, a soul was able to make itself known to the seer after death (it was a soul embodied in its last incarnation in a male body): “All my thoughts and memories go back to that person who was my faithful wife when I was below in the life on earth; she was, so to speak, the sunshine of my life. When, my business completed, I came home in the evening, my soul was refreshed by what she was able to be for me, by what then came into my soul from hers. A true spiritual bread of life she was for me, and longing for her has stayed with me. My spiritual eye is directed toward the earth and I cannot find her, she is not there. From all I have learned, I know that this soul must be on earth as she was before in a physical body, but for me she is as though extinguished, as though she were not there.”

This deeply moving experience one may often have with reference to souls who think back about those left behind and who feel as though fettered, so that they cannot get through, cannot look down on these earthly souls. They are fettered, not by their own essential being, but rather by the other soul left behind. And if one investigates the reason why the soul from the beyond cannot perceive the soul remaining on earth, then one learns that the soul who has remained on earth has not, on account of the existing circumstances of our age, been able to be inspired by, to be imbued with, any thoughts which might become visible, be perceptible, to a soul having gone through the portals of death. We might make another comparison. Souls who have gone through the portals of death and long for the sight of those remaining in physical bodies, such souls have a dim idea of the existence of others on the physical plane, but are unable to manifest themselves to them. Just as one who is dumb is unable to call attention to himself by means of language, therefore is inaudible to others, so does the entire soul remain mute to the disembodied soul who longs for it; it is in its spiritual nature inaudible to the one who has already passed the portals of death.

There is a great difference between one soul and another here on earth, depending on whether these souls have one content or another. Let us consider a soul who lives here in the physical body and from the time of awaking to the time of going to sleep is only concerned with thoughts taken from the material world; such a soul, filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world, cannot be perceived at all from the other world. No trace of such a soul can be found. A soul that is filled with spiritual ideas, as for instance those which Spiritual Science gives, and which is aglow with and irradiated by spiritual ideas—such a soul is perceptible from the beyond. Therefore, souls who have remained behind, however good they may be as human beings, are without reality and imperceptible to the world beyond if they are immersed in materialism. These are deeply shocking, terrible impressions for the seer who certainly has attained serenity. But these experiences, possible with reference to the world beyond, especially in our era, are numerous. In our era it is just as though every contact were cut off between souls who here are often so closely linked. This is frequently the case when a soul has gone through the portals of death; while it can always be found that the souls who live beyond, who have gone through the portals of death and look down on human beings harbouring spiritual thoughts, even though only now and then, and letting them permeate their soul, can then perceive these, so that these earthly souls remain real souls for them. Even more significant: what is touched upon here can become of practical import. The spiritual thoughts which souls harbour here can not only be perceived, they can be understood by the souls beyond. And in this way something can be brought about which may become of great importance for the intercourse between souls here and souls beyond, namely, that which may be called “Reading to the Dead.” And such “Reading to the Dead” is often extraordinarily important.

Here, too, the seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom, now have a strong longing for spiritual wisdom and wish to hear about it after having passed through the portals of death. Then, if the souls that have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person and, at the same time, bring to mind an anthroposophical train of thought or open an anthroposophical book and in thought, not aloud, read to the dead whose spiritual image stands before them, the dead will become aware of it. It is in the anthroposophical movement that we have had, in this regard, the most excellent results, when still living anthroposophists read of their departed relatives. One can often see how these dead long to hear what penetrates to them from here. One thing is of especial importance during the time immediately after death in order that one may enter into a relationship with a soul. It is not possible without further ado to enter into relation with any supersensible being. There is often much deception, much illusion in this respect, it is not as easy as it seems. It is a grave error to think that a human being need only to die in order, so to speak, to come into contact with the whole spiritual world. On one occasion I met a man who was otherwise not really very smart, but who, nevertheless, talked incessantly about Kant, Schopenhauer, and so forth who even gave lectures on Kant and Schopenhauer. This man, when I lectured about the nature of immortality, answered me in a rather smug way. He said: “Here on earth we cannot know anything about immortality, since we do not experience it until we die.” One might say that, with his present equipment, he will not differ in his soul very much after death from what he is now. It is deep prejudice that believes the souls become quite wise as soon as they have passed through the portals of death. On the contrary, we cannot after death establish so easily connections with human beings, if we have not already established them before death. Connections that have been already established here are effective for a long time. It does not occur readily that a soul be instructed immediately by souls in the beyond, because it cannot have a connection with them. But the departed human being has connections with people on the earth, and they can bring him the food for which he is starving, they can bring him spiritual wisdom by reading to him and thus bring about immensely meritorious effects. The dead would not be helped if we read them external, materialistic science, perhaps chemistry or physics; that is a language they do not understand because these sciences are of value only for life on earth. But what is said about the spiritual worlds in the language of anthroposophy remains comprehensible to the dead. During the time immediately following death, one thing, however, has to be considered; during that period the souls retain an understanding for things communicated in the languages they usually spoke here on earth. Only after a time do the dead become independent of language; then one may read to them in any language and they will understand the thought content. During the time immediately following death, the departed is also more connected with the language he has last spoken, if he has exclusively spoken only one language. We should really consider the fact that during the time immediately following death we have to send our thoughts to the dead,—we must send our thoughts to them—in the language they were accustomed to. Here we have come to a point in our considerations which can teach us how the abyss may be bridged over by the fact that anthroposophy flows into our spiritual life in this world and in the other world, in the world in which we live between death and a new birth. While materialism only allows us to bring into life an intercourse between souls confined to their earthly existence, anthroposophy will open the way for a free communication, an intercourse between the souls on earth and the souls dwelling beyond in the other world. The dead will live with us. And truly, what we may call the passing through the portals of death will often after a time be felt merely as a change in the form of existence. And the entire change in the life of spirit and of soul, which will take place when such things have become common knowledge, is going to be of great significance.

We have just dealt with an example of the effect of the living on the dead. We may also form a conception of the way the dead in their turn affect the living. Several times I have ventured to mention—please excuse the personal reference—that in the past I had to instruct many children. I had to instruct several children in a family where only the mother was living; their father was dead and I felt it to be my task—this must be the task of any educator—to discover the potentialities and talents of these children in order as educator to guide and instruct them. Regarding these children of whom I am speaking, something remained incomprehensible; no matter what was tried they showed a certain behaviour that was not a consequence of their inherent qualities or of their surroundings. One could not quite manage them. In such cases one must call on everything for help; and spiritual research resulted in the following: the father had died, and in consequence of special circumstances, which had occurred among the relatives, he was not in accord with the way in which the children were being treated by the relatives nor with the things which happened within the intimate family circle—and, because of special circumstances, his influence had an effect on the children. And it was not until the moment I could take into consideration that there was something special which neither derived from potentialities nor from surroundings, but which came out of the supersensible world from the departed father who directed his forces into the souls of his children—it was not until then that I could be guided by it. Now I had to take into consideration what the father really wanted. And the very moment I investigated the will of the father who had passed through the portals of death, and considered him as a real person, like the other persons in physical existence who had their joint effect on the children—it was then that I succeeded in my task.

This is a case in which it was clearly shown that spiritual knowledge can tell us, indicate to us, the effect of the forces from the supersensible, spiritual world on this physical world. But in order to perceive such a thing one needs the right moment. One must try, for instance, to develop a kind of force which makes it possible to perceive, as it were, the raying in of the supersensible force—in this case that of the father—into the souls of the children. This is oftentimes difficult. It might be easy, for instance, to try to recognize how the dead father wants to implant this or that thought into the children's souls. But that often proves incorrect and, especially, it cannot always be repeated. It may then prove to be a good device to procure a picture giving the father's form, the way he looked at the last; if a distinct picture of his handwriting is held in memory and is kept there before the mind's eye, and we thus prepare ourselves for the kind of instruction meant here by concentrating on handwriting or picture, then we take into our own work the views, the intentions, the aims of the dead person. The time will come when we are going to take into account what the dead want for those left behind. Today we can only take into account the will of those who are on the physical plane. There will be a mutual, one might say a free intercourse between the living and the dead. We shall learn to investigate what the dead want for the physical plane. Just imagine the great upheaval, one might also say of the external factors of physical life, when the dead shall play a part and through the living have an effect on the physical plane. Spiritual Science, if it is rightly understood, and it always must be rightly understood, will not be a mere theory. Spiritual Science will become more and more an elixir of life which pervades all existence, transforming it the more it spreads. And it will surely accomplish this, for its effect will not be that of an abstract ideal which is preached, or which is “sold” by societies. It will, slowly but surely, take hold of the souls on earth and transform them.

There will be an enrichment of our conceptions in many other respects. In our existence our life with the dead shall change because we shall understand what the dead are doing. Many things now remain quite incomprehensible regarding the relations between the world here on earth, the physical plane, and the world which we experience between death and a new birth; for much that happens here in the physical world remains incomprehensible. And since all that happens here corresponds to what happens beyond, the relation of the world and humanity to the supersensible world remains incomprehensible. But if anthroposophy is rightly understood, comprehension will increasingly take the place of non-comprehension in this realm.

Now a relationship will be established which may show what strangely devious ways are taken by the beings who, so to speak, carry out the further development of world wisdom. Strangely devious ways are taken by these beings, but nevertheless, if we follow them, they show themselves full of wisdom in every respect. Let us consider various conditions. Let us first consider souls whom the eye of the seer may perceive in their occupation between death and a new birth. There we see—and again that is for the seer something deeply affecting—we see many souls who are condemned for a certain time between death and a new birth to be the slaves of the spirits who send sickness and death into physical life. Thus we see there souls between death and a new birth who are under the dominion of beings whom we call the Ahrimanic spirits, or the spirits of hindrance, of those who work at death in life, and of those who bring obstacles into life. And a hard lot it is which the seer observes, in some souls, when they have to submit in this manner to the slave yoke. If one traces back such souls to the life they led before they passed the portals of death, one finds that the souls who for a certain time after death must serve the spirits of resistance have prepared this for themselves by self-indulgence during life. And the slaves of the spirits of sickness and death have prepared this fate for themselves by having been unscrupulous before death. So there we see a certain relation of the souls of men to the evil spirits of sickness and death, and to the evil spirits of resistance. But now let us take a further look at the following, let us look at the souls who here on earth are subjected to that which such souls must do. Let us look at the souls who perish here on earth in the flower of their youth without reaching the death of old age. Let us look upon the souls who here on earth are subjected to sickness, who are pursued by misfortune, as obstacle upon obstacle arises before them. What does the seer observe when he considers souls who die early or are pursued by misfortune and then pass into the spiritual world? What does the seer notice about such souls? One may have strange experiences concerning human destinies on earth. We shall point to at least one example, to one of the very moving destinies on earth, and which may certainly happen.

A child (a little girl) is born; the mother dies at the birth of the child; the child is orphaned at birth with regard to the mother. The father, on the day the child is born, learns that his whole fortune which was tied up in a ship on the high seas is lost; he learns that the ship has been wrecked; because of this he becomes melancholic; he, too, dies, leaving the child completely orphaned. The little girl is adopted by a wealthy woman; she is very fond of the child and wills her large fortune to her. The woman dies while the child is still comparatively young. The will is probated and a technical error is found—the child does not get a penny of what was willed to her. For the second time she is cast out into the world penniless and must hire out as a servant, must do menial work. She meets a man who falls in love with her, but they cannot be united on account of the prejudices governing the community: they belong to different denominations. But the man loves her so very much that he promises to adopt her faith as soon as his father, already very old, dies. He goes abroad; there he learns that his father has fallen ill. His father dies; he adopts the girl's faith, and as he hurries to her side, she falls ill and dies. When he returns, she is dead. He feels the deepest pain and will not be satisfied until the grave is opened so that he can see her once more. And from the position of the corpse, it can be seen that the girl was buried alive. This is a legend—Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, has retold it in his writings—it is a legend which is not reality, but it might occur in innumerable instances. We see that a human soul does not merely perish in the flower of her youth but we see her pursued by misfortune from the beginning of life in a certain way. In the working out of such conditions those souls cooperate who, on account of unscrupulousness, become the servants of the evil spirits of sickness, death and misfortune. Thus such unscrupulous souls must be active in the preparation of such hard fates; here is a relationship! To the seer this is especially evident in such happenings as, for instance, the catastrophe of the Titanic, by investigating the effect of the souls who for lack of conscience have become the servants of these spirits of sickness and misfortune. Karma must be carried out, these things are necessary; but it is an evil fate which engulfs the souls who, after death, are bowed down under such a yoke of slavery.

But let us ask further: What about the souls who here on earth suffer such a fate, who perish in the flower of their youth, who are destroyed early by epidemics? What about these souls, when they pass through the portal of death into the spiritual world before their time? We learn the fate of these souls when with the eye of the seer we penetrate, so to speak, into the occupation of the spirits who give a forward impulse to the evolution of the earth, or to all evolution. These beings of the Higher Hierarchies have certain forces, certain powers to further development; but they are in a certain way limited with regard to these forces and powers. Thus the following becomes manifest:

The completely materialistic souls, those who lose all sense of the supersensible world, are in fact already in this our era threatened by a kind of blight, a kind of cutting off from progressive development. And in a certain way already in our era the danger exists that a large portion of humanity may not be able to keep up with evolution, because they are, so to speak, bound to the earth by the heaviness of their own souls, being completely materialistic souls, so that they are not taken along for the next incarnation. But this danger is to be deflected according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies. The truth is that the hour of decision for the souls who, having cut themselves off completely, are not carried along with the evolution, that the hour of decision does not come until the sixth period—actually, not until the Venus evolution. Souls must not fall prey to the downward pull of gravity to such an extent that they are compelled to remain behind. It is actually according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies that this must not happen. But these beings of the Higher Hierarchies are in a certain way limited in their forces and capabilities. Nothing is unlimited, even among the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. And if it were only a question of the forces of these Higher Hierarchies, then completely materialistic souls, through themselves, would have to be already cut off in a certain way from progressive evolution. The beings of the Higher Hierarchies really cannot alone by themselves save these souls—so an expedient is used. Namely, the souls that die here an early death have, as souls, a possibility before them. Let us say they die through some catastrophe; for instance, they are run over by an express train—then indeed the bodily sheath is taken from such a soul; it is now free from its body, denuded of its body, but it still contains the forces which might be active in the body here on earth. By going into the spiritual world such souls carry up very special forces, which in fact still might have been effective here on earth, but which have been prematurely diverted. Forces, especially applicable in helping, are carried up by those who die early. And the beings of the Higher Hierarchies use these forces to save the souls whom they could not have saved by their own power.

Souls that are materialistically inclined are thus led away to better times and saved, since their strength is only sufficient for the regular course of mankind's evolution. Salvation is achieved by the fact that these beings of the Higher Hierarchies experience an increase of strength by such unused forces coming from the earth, which have still unused energy. These forces accrue to the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Thus the souls who perish early help their fellowmen who otherwise would be submerged in the morass of materialism. Here we have what those souls must do who depart early. Strange interdependence, is it not, in the complicated ways of world wisdom! Thus the world wisdom permits, on one side, the sentencing of human souls for lack of conscience to cooperate in bringing sickness and early death into the world. The souls who suffer it are used by good beings of the Higher Hierarchies to help other men. In this manner happenings that seem evil outwardly in maya are often transformed into good, but in complicated ways. The ways of wisdom which are taken in the world are very complicated. It is only gradually that one learns to find one's way in these paths of wisdom. One might say: There, up above, the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies sit in council. Because men must be free, they are given the possibility of plunging into materialism, into evil. The Hierarchies give them so much freedom that these human souls, so to speak, escape them, these souls who could not, by their own strength, carry on up to a certain point of time. They need souls who develop on earth forces which retain their inner potential through the premature separation from the body when these souls have to return to the spiritual world in consequence of accident and an early death. This early death is brought about by the services of human souls who, in pursuance of their freedom, have fallen into unscrupulousness. A wonderful cyclic path is opened up here, we may say, a cyclic path of world wisdom. We should not believe at all that the so-called simple things are the universal ones. The world has become complicated. It really was a significant word of Nietzsche which was revealed to him as though by inspiration, when he said: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.” Those people are completely in error who think that everything may be grasped by the day-wisdom of the intellect. For the higher spiritual light is not that which shines into the wisdom of the day, but that which shines into the darkness. We must seek this light in order to find our way in the darkness in which, nevertheless, the world wisdom is at work.

If we accept such concepts, ideas and thoughts, my dear friends, then it may come about that we contemplate the world with other eyes than before. And it will become more and more necessary that we learn to contemplate the world with new eyes; for humanity has lost many things since ancient times. What it is we lost may be understood if we consider the following:

Still in the third post-Atlantean period there were intermediate states between sleeping and waking, in which souls looked up into the world of the stars and saw not merely physical stars, as is the case today, but the spiritual beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the directing and leading forces of stellar destiny and stellar movement were observed by them. And what existed as old stellar maps from immemorial times when all kinds of drawings were made of group souls, looking like animals without being animals, all this is not born out of fantasy, but is spiritually perceived. The souls perceived this in the realm of the spirit. They were able to carry this spiritual element through the portals of death. The soul has now lost this vision of the supersensible world. Today when the souls are born, they confront the physical world with the bodily sense organs and see nothing but the external physical world. They no longer can see that which surrounds the external physical world as the world of spirit and of soul, the world of the Higher Hierarchies, and so forth. But what is the nature of the souls who appear in the bodies of today? All the souls of persons sitting here were incarnated in former times, and the great majority were incarnated in Egypto-Chaldaic bodies and through those bodies they looked out into the world in which they also had spiritual perception. This spiritual experience they took into themselves, it exists in them today. Not in all the souls; but the souls who today no longer see anything but physical facts, they once lived in contemplation of the spiritual world, they lived a completely perceptive life of the spiritual world. How do these souls live now? They live exactly as though they had totally forgotten this spiritual world. They have forgotten the spiritual perceptions they once absorbed. But what we have forgotten is merely forgotten for our present consciousness; it still lives in the deepest recesses of our souls. Thus the peculiar situation exists: the souls living today have around them, consciously, nothing but a physical sense image of the world; but in their inner being the perceptions which once they received as true spiritual vision are still living unconsciously in the depths of their souls. Of these perceptions the souls know nothing; they only show peculiar conceptions which burrow in the depths of the soul, but which do not rise into consciousness; these conceptions have a paralyzing, deadening effect. And thus something actually arises in the human beings of today which exists in them as a deadening element.

If as a seer one contemplates the human being of today as he is anatomically constructed, one finds in this human being, especially in the nervous system, certain currents, certain forces which are forces of death and which stem from conceptions that were alive in former incarnations. These spiritual conceptions which he has now forgotten have a consuming quality. This would show itself more and more, the farther man advances toward the future, if there were not something present which counteracts it. What could this be? Nothing but bringing up into consciousness that which was forgotten. One must remind the souls of that which they have forgotten. That is what Spiritual Science does, fundamentally it does nothing but remind the souls of the conceptions they have absorbed. Spiritual Science lifts these conceptions into consciousness. In this way it gives again to men the possibility of enlivening what would otherwise be like a dead impulse in life.

Now note these two things which you received in the course of today's consideration. On the one hand the seer perceives human souls who have passed through the portal of death, who long for the souls left behind, whom they cannot perceive, because in these souls there exist only materialistic images of the world, though they may perhaps belong to quite good men. For the seer, though he may have achieved calmness of soul, it is deeply moving to perceive these starving souls. On the other hand, the seer looks into a future of humanity which will contain more and more dead matter, if it does not revivify the conceptions which it once received and which will kill it, if they are not raised into consciousness. The seer would have to look into a future when people, through all kinds of hereditary traits would show signs of old age much earlier than is the case today. Just as one may see today examples of infantile old age, even senility, so people would then show, soon after being born, wrinkles and other indications of old age, if through lack of spiritual knowledge forces did not appear which are memories of conceptions once received in a natural way. In order to provide the dying human race with a life-giving elixir, in order to give the dead the possibilities of coming into contact with the relatives they have left behind on earth—in order to accomplish this, the seer, conscious of this fact, searches for a language which is not only understood here on earth by the souls incarnated in a physical body, but which is spoken in common by the souls living here between birth and death and those souls living beyond between death and a new birth—a language common to the living and the dead.

And truly, it is not that one feels mere sympathy for what is a Spiritual Science—a theoretical sympathy as for other things—truly, this is not what should prompt us; but he who really understands, he who looks into the world, feels that this Spiritual Science has a world-mission. He says to himself: the necessity exists to find the common language, to find the elixir of life which keeps men from becoming arid regarding the various conceptions we mentioned. That is the mission of Spiritual Science for the spiritual worlds themselves. One feels this mission as a high and sacred duty, as something very serious and significant. And we must not merely find pleasure in the ideas which Spiritual Science can give us for our theoretical satisfaction, but we must feel the spiritual power which it must derive from the necessities of the development of humanity and of the world. Then we shall have the right feeling for the reason, for the existence of Spiritual Science, why it has to be implanted into the spiritual life of humanity. It is this feeling which we must actually achieve and we must be permeated by it. This feeling has a highly curative power, it is one which brings to the human soul a real harmony of its forces. This is a fact. The more we allow our souls to be permeated with that which belongs to the world of supersensible truths, the more our feelings will become inwardly able to direct us in our lives, the more essential will these feelings become. The man who is merely pleased with Spiritual Science, who embraces it out of curiosity, or for some similar reason, that man will perhaps make a very bad use of it in his life. But he who is permeated by the feeling we characterized above, by that sacred feeling that comes to us because we know that Spiritual Science must exist out of inner necessity, he will take his place in life with the right attitude toward this Science. He will be able to find his way through Spiritual Science, at least inwardly, even in the most difficult situations; he will perhaps find it especially when outwardly the greatest difficulties arise. For Spiritual Science is an affair of the future, it has entered into the world today because it must serve mankind in the most comprehensive sense, in the most comprehensive manner. But the result of this is that those who in a way have a fear of the spiritual worlds in the depths of their souls manifest this fear in their consciousness as hatred.

Many human feelings are related to each other; ambition and vanity, for instance, are related to fear. And in a complicated manner all kinds of feelings are related to each other. Why is man ambitious, vain? What does it mean to be ambitious, vain? To be ambitious, vain, means wanting to be valued in the opinion of one's environment, and to take pleasure in the value one gains in the opinion of one's environment, to take intense pleasure in that opinion. Why does one want that? One may want it for a number of reasons. But today is the time when men, if we look into the depths of their souls, reveal themselves as particular cowards. Some of them who appear to be quite robust in their outward consciousness are cowards in the depths of their soul. And they seek all kinds of narcotics when they have such fear of the supersensible worlds. That is, because some people are afraid of losing their foothold when they gain access to the spiritual worlds, fear overcomes them; but they want to stifle this fear, sometimes because they are afraid of the earnest and solemn strength which they must use in order to enter into the spiritual worlds. We have seen many a man who believed he could be in the spiritual world at the end of four weeks, but there are—oh, the most terrible of terrors—hindrances: it proves impossible for this man to become in this incarnation, on the basis of spiritual knowledge, that which he would like so much to be—a famous man. Many a man then loses his joy, that is what he is afraid of, and he wants to stifle this fear; and so he creates against this Spiritual Science an antipathy permeated by hatred and vanity.

This mood will spread farther and farther in the present, for the inwardly cowardly, outwardly vain souls will become more and more prevalent in the world. And it may well come to pass that much more hatred, many more attacks will be launched against Spiritual Science than has been the case so far. Thus, there is certainly sufficient reason to see quite clearly, to feel quite clearly in all these things; in spite of the characterized feelings, we should have harmony, even though outwardly it may often seem that everything may go awry. To see clearly and distinctly, that will be necessary if one wants to stand firm on the ground of spiritual knowledge. For in our times those who most intensely believe they are qualified to criticize often do not know at all what they are talking about. There are people who, let us say, begin to write articles about Spiritual Science, who criticize terribly the “fantasies” of the spiritual researcher. Then, in the second half of the article there appears all kind of information about the author, which is entirely false, which is not true. A wild fantasy governs these descriptions. No one who ascends to the supersensible worlds could think up such fantasies as the person who in the first part of his article has criticized the “fantastic” Spiritual Science. Thus things are turned around in the human soul. Those who think they can tell the truth very clearly and who are gifted with a certain impure imagination about the facts of the physical plane partially stupefy themselves by holding forth against that which is supersensibly perceived. Thus humanity seeks oblivion not merely by means of alcohol, but by all kinds of other means. In many things we must see clearly, and the spiritual conception of life will give us the guidance to clear seeing. The most varied narcotics are sought and also found, and they are found for the reason that demonic beings are increasingly active in the hidden depths of the souls of men. These demonic beings will certainly be released by degrees against that which is to fructify humanity from the spiritual side.

This is something, my dear friends, which I wanted to paint before your souls just at this time as a kind of picture of the future, because it is well that we remind ourselves in our time of the way we shall have to take a firm and secure stand on the ground of this Spiritual Science by creating the right feelings toward it and its mission, if we really recognize this Science and its mission. From this ground we can tranquilly watch in our innermost being the development into the future, even though perhaps we may be brought outwardly more and more into disharmony, even though we may more and more be put in the wrong.

In a series of lectures the fact has now been brought home to us that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited view.

In order to describe this spiritual essence we were obliged in the last lecture to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of the reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the ‘true’—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the elements of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the movement of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:--Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? In this lecture we shall follow the same system as in the last. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with the inner experience of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn, Sun and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experience than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in the astral body. There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in the advance of that world of ideas which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, must come from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole sequence in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from astonishment at something. This wonder, this astonishment, from which every form of learning must proceed, belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which first arises from wonder, in that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We should be able actually to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles: Any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through any kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge created by the atmosphere of vital power, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of is satisfaction.

But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, astonishment at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and astonishment. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: ‘In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may fill me.’ So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner ‘wondering’ is our perception of the quality of an outer ‘wonder’ to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That however depends on himself, or at least it need only do so. And he should not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as ‘a wonder’ unless he can in a certain way make claim to explain it because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a ‘wonder’, when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experience a man may have on the physical plane to disprove, what must at first be described as a ‘miracle’, anything connected with the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this fundamental basis of all knowledge is already established in him. He demands that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that astonishment or marvel, upon which is based all the ancient Greek philosophy, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between this idea and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have said that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, and their sacrifices being rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principle factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most vital points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Entities even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed through to the Higher Entities but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon was caused by their feeling within them what they had wished to send up to the Higher Entities as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the Higher Entities, remained behind within the Beings themselves—thereby was developed in certain Beings—in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we sacrifice in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the Higher Entities resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was; the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a pain, which gives birth to Longing, just as was the case with the Beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearances on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Entities of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: ‘Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now lam shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!’ The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice is as a longing after the Higher Beings, into such a condition that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the Higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the substance of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as a relation is established between these beings and the Higher Entities which conveyed the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Entities united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun [Editor's Note: The Sun was once a planet]—and that the Sun refused to accept it and threw it back; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their Being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Entities; this makes it first possible for them, hi place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the Higher Entities. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the Higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the Higher Entities in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those Higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If a planet were able to pour all its contents into the Sun and these were not rejected, the essence of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those it would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun had thrown it back: an estrangement of what we must call the contents of the sacrifice takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: ‘The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great Cosmic purpose.’ Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the ‘displacement’—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the Cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal Cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted from the outset. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this alien stamp is imprinted from the beginning. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feeling, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent from the beginning:—that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from Resignation, from Renunciation—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution; to that which comes into existence through the renunciation by the Higher Entities of Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the attribute of the inner contents of certain Beings, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in a concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at a corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death, was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any Cosmic substance or Cosmic Being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If (1) fire represents the purest sacrifice—and where-ever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if (2) behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if (3) we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, (4) which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which was severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid was formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of the relation of death to the earth; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: ‘In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death!’ All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya. That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement presents itself to occult science from yet another side, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would he just the same as saying that our fingernails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which s complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we/cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we trim it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we put them to death it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the finger-nail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, and that is an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organ towards the Sun; and in Autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore it its natural colour even if we dye it.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that ‘death’. In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man, is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the ‘Christ-Being’ it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their beings in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call ‘death.’ Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything about death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the realities of the higher worlds play their part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: ‘This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for that’; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, ‘this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds’. Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for an ample multitude of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure of the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event on of man gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in the 20th century. From now on these capacities will gradually spread, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, may be able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth--know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death--is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding first in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane? On the physical plane so that we can stand by it, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that ‘no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!’ This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane, has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be ‘proved’. Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as these produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there I Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove, the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it took place leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books, as is set forth in Christianity as a Mystical Fact. They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the constellations, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical happenings; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event will happen on the earth; by the position of the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves; no matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess. Anthroposophy cannot be contradicted. In the lecture I gave here, entitled: ‘How can Theosophy be established?’ I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: ‘I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls’; off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: ‘This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls’. The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for ‘reality’ may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to the realities and in doing so we have shewn that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the results of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true essence of the earth or solid matter is death, like the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this has occurred death itself has entered the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Thus the fact has now been brought home to us in a series of lectures that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited grasp of the world.

In order to describe this spiritual element we were obliged in the course of the last lectures to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the “true”—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the element of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the rippling of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:—Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? To-day we shall follow the same system as in the last lectures. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with inner experiences of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the Earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experiences than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in what we call the “astral body.” There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in meeting that picture-world which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, proceeds from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole process in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from amazement at something. This wonder, this amazement, from which every form of learning must proceed belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which has raised itself above wonder, that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We really ought to be able to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles; any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through some kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge that is created by the atmosphere of the life element in knowledge, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of its satisfaction. But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, amazement at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and amazement. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: “In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may pass over into me.” So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner “wondering” is our perception of the quality of an outer “wonder” to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That, however, depends on himself; or at least it need only do so. And he would not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as “a wonder” unless he were in a certain way to demand that it should disclose itself to him because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a “wonder,” when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experiences one may have of men on the physical plane to deduce something—which in the first place is described as a “miracle,” concerning the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this starting point of all knowledge is already established for him. He demands, in fact, that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that amazement or marvel, upon which is based all philosophy in the sense of ancient Greece, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between these ideas and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have shown that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, but that their sacrifices were rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principal factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most important points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Beings even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed up to the higher Beings but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon consisted in their feeling within themselves what they had wished to send up to the higher Beings as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed, that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the higher Beings, remained behind within the Beings themselves—and that thereby was developed in certain Beings, in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we experience in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the higher Beings resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was: the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a sorrow, a pain which gives birth to longing, just as was the case with the beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearance on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Beings of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: “Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now I am shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!” The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice glows as a longing for the higher Beings, into such positions that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the Beings of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as in the position of these Beings to the higher Beings a relation is established between them which conveys the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Beings united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun, and that the Sun refused to accept it; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Beings; this makes it first possible for them, in place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the higher Beings. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the higher Beings in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If the whole substance of a planet could flow into the Sun and it were not rejected, the Beings of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those they would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun throws them back: an estrangement of what we must call the “contents of the sacrifice” takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: “The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great cosmic purpose.” Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the “displacement”—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this estrangement from its origin is imprinted. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feelings, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent: that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from the resignation, the renunciation of what has been rejected by the higher Beings—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution—to Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the nature of essential contents, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at the corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical human body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any cosmic substance or cosmic being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If fire represents the purest sacrifice—and wherever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which has been severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid is formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the spiritual process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of death, that is, of the earthly; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world, may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya, or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: “In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death! All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya, That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality, presents itself to occult science.

We can approach what I want to say from yet another side. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would be just the same as saying that our finger-nails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which as complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we cut it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death; for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we bring them to their “death” it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the fingernail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organs towards the Sun; and in autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore its colour by natural means.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that “death.” In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the “Christ-Being it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their true being in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call “death.” Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything of death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the reality of the higher worlds plays its part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: “This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for it there”; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, “this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds.” Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for a sufficiently great number of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure on the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event of man's gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in our twentieth century. From now on these capacities will gradually arise, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, maybe able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth—know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death—is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane On the physical plane, so that we can recognise it as real, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that “no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!” This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be “proved.” Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as those produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there! Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it went by leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books (as is set forth in Christianity as Mystical Fact). They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the star-constellation, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical event; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event can happen on the earth; through the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves. No matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess, that does not disprove Anthroposophy. In the lecture I gave entitled: “How can Theosophy be established?” I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: “I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls;” off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: “This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls.” The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for “reality” may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to reality and in doing so we have shown that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the result of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true nature of the Earth or solid matter is death, the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this severing has entered, death itself enters the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

These lectures will perhaps have given you some idea of what a complicated being man is and from how many sides we must consider him if we would come near to his real nature. I want now to point to one more fact of evolution, and it is one that may be classed among the most significant of all the results we can arrive at when, with the help of clairvoyant research, we study the whole course of man's evolution—looking back over the period from very ancient times until to-day, and looking forward to what shall come for the race of man in the future. I have, in the course of these lectures, drawn your attention to a perception that man can acquire when he educates his faculty for knowledge in the way we described; when, that is to say, his soul in its efforts after knowledge enters into the moods we characterised as wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled harmony with the events of the world, and lastly, devotion and surrender to the whole world process. You will remember I explained how if the soul enters upon these moods or conditions, man's faculty of knowledge can gradually rise to a perception of two converse processes that are everywhere around him. Man learns to distinguish in his environment between what is becoming and what is dying away. He says to himself at every turn: Here I have to do with a process of becoming, something that will reach perfection only in the future, and here again, on the other hand, I encounter a gradual dying away, a gradual disappearing. We perceive the things of the world as existing in a region where everything is either coming into being or passing away. And I pointed out in particular how the human larynx is really an organ of the future, how it is called to be in the future something entirely different from what it is to-day. To-day it merely communicates to the outer world by means of the spoken word our inner moods and conditions, whereas in the future it will communicate what we ourselves are in our entirety; that is to say, it will serve for the procreation of the whole human being. It will be the reproductive organ of the future. A time will come when the larynx will not merely help man to express by means of the word what is in his heart and mind, but man will use the larynx to place his own self before the world; that is to say, the propagation of man will be intimately connected with the organ of the larynx.

Now in this complicated microcosm, in this complicated “little world” which we call “man,” for every such organ that is only as yet a seed and will later on in the future attain a higher degree of perfection, there is another corresponding organ which is gradually dwindling, gradually dying away. And the corresponding organ for the larynx is the organ of hearing. In proportion as the hearing apparatus little by little disappears, in proportion as it grows ever less and less, will the larynx grow more and more perfect and become more and more important. We can only estimate the greatness of this fact when we look back, with the help of the Akashic Records, into a far distant past of mankind and then from what our research reveals are in a position to form some conception of what the ear was once like. Great new vistas are opened up for a knowledge of the nature of man when we trace back the human ear to its original form. For in its present state this hearing apparatus of ours is no more than a shadow of what it once was. To-day it hears only tones of the physical plane, or words that express themselves in tones on the physical plane. But that is only a last remnant of what used to flow into man through the hearing; for through this hearing apparatus once flowed into man the mighty movements of the whole universe. And as to-day we hear earthly music with our ear, so in ancient times did world music, the music of the spheres, flow into man. And as to-day we men clothe words in tones, so in times past did the divine Word of the Worlds clothe itself in the music of the spheres—that Word of the Worlds of which the Gospel of St. John tells, the Logos, the divine Word. Into what we may call man's hearing in the old sense of the word, there flowed from the spiritual world a heavenly music, the music of the spheres, just as now into our hearing flows the human word and the earthly music, and within the music of the spheres was what the divine Spirits spoke. And as to-day man compels the air into forms with his word and his singing and his tone, so did the divine words and the divine music bring forth forms.

And now let us consider that most wonderful of all the forms created by Divine music. We may approach it in the following way. When to-day you give utterance to a word or even only to a vowel, let us say the sound “A”—then through this sound the possibility arises of creating a form in the air. It was in like manner that form entered into the world out of the cosmic Word, and the most precious of all these forms is man himself; man himself was created in his original state by being spoken out of the divine Word. “The Gods spake!” As to-day the air comes into forms through the word of man, so did our world come into its form through the Word of the Gods. And man is the most excellent of these forms. The organ of hearing was, of course, then infinitely more complicated than it is now. It is to-day quite shrunk and shriveled. To-day it is an external organ, penetrating only a limited distance into the brain, but once it extended inwards over the whole human being. And everywhere throughout man's being moved the paths of sound which spoke man into the world, as the utterance of the Word of God. Thus was man created—spiritually—through the organ of hearing, and in the future, when he has ascended again, he will have an ear that is quite small and rudimentary. The meaning and purpose of the ear will have completely gone. The ear is in a descending evolution; to compensate for this, however, the larynx, which is to-day only like a seed, will have developed to greater and greater beauty and perfection. And in its perfection it will speak out what man can bring forth for the world as the reproduction of his being, even as the Gods have spoken Man into the world as Their creation. So is the world process in a sense reversed. When we consider the whole human being as he stands before us we have to see in him the product of a descending evolution, and when we take an organ like the ear we find it has already reached a densification of the bony matter in the small bones of the ear, it is, as it were, in the last stage of descending evolution. The sense as such is disappearing. Man, however, is developing on into the world of spirituality, and his ascending organs are the bridges that carry him over into spirituality. Such is the relationship between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit. The world of the senses makes itself known to us in descending organs, and the world of the spirit in ascending organs.

And it is the same everywhere. In the whole world as it presents itself to our view we can follow in some way this becoming and dying. And it is important that we should learn to apply the idea to the other things in the world. It will teach us a great deal. Thus in the mineral world, for example, we can also find something that is in an ascending evolution, something that is to-day only at the seed stage. It is quicksilver. Quicksilver is a metal that will undergo transformations in the future but transformations that will lead to greater perfection. Quicksilver as metal has not yet pulverised all the forces that every substance possesses in the spiritual before it becomes substance at all. Powers that belong essentially to the nature of quicksilver still remain in the spiritual, and these it will in the future be able to bring forth and place into the world. It will assume new forms. Thus quicksilver corresponds in the world of the minerals to the human larynx, and also in a sense to the organ that is attached to the larynx—the lung. Other metals—copper, for example—are in a kind of descending evolution. Copper will, in the future, show itself as a metal that has no more inner spiritual forces to place out into the world, and that is consequently more and more obliged merely to split up and crumble to cosmic dust.

I have here set before you a few examples of connections which will in future increasingly become an object of study. Men will study more and more the relationships between the processes of becoming and of passing away in the several kingdoms of nature, and will learn to find—not through experiments and tests but through an Imaginative knowledge—relationships between particular metal substances and particular organs in the human body. And as a result substances whose effects are already partially known from external experience will, through Imagination, be able to be known in all their healing power, in all their reproductive and restorative power over the human body. All kinds of relationships and connections will be discovered between the several things and beings of the world.

Thus, man will come to recognise that the virtues which lie in the seed of a plant are differently connected with man than the virtues contained in the root. All that we find in the root of a plant corresponds in a manner to the human brain and to the nervous system belonging to the brain. [see Summary] It goes so far that in actual fact the eating of what is to be found in plant roots has a certain correspondence with the processes that take place in the brain and nervous system. So that if a man wants his brain and nervous system to be influenced from the physical side in its task as physical instrument for the life of the spirit, he receives with his nourishment the forces that live in the roots of plants. In a sense we may say that he lets think in him what he thus receives in food, he lets it do spiritual work in him, whilst if he is less inclined to eat of the root nature of plants it will be rather he himself who uses his brain and nervous system. You will see from this that if a person consumes a quantity of root food he is liable to become dependent in respect of his experiences as soul and spirit; because something objective and external works through him, his brain and nervous system surrender their own independence. And so if he wants it to be more himself who works in him, then he must diminish his consumption of roots. I am not, my dear friends, giving suggestions for any particular diet, I am merely informing you about facts of nature. And I warn you expressly not to set out to follow what I have said without further knowledge. Not every person is so far advanced as to be able to dispense with receiving the power of thought from something outside himself; and it may very easily happen that a man who is not ripe to leave it to his own soul-life to provide him with the power of thinking and feeling—it can easily happen that if such a man avoids eating roots he will fall into a sleepy condition, because his soul and spirit are not yet strong enough to evolve in themselves out of the spiritual those forces which are otherwise evolved in man quite objectively, and independently of his soul and spirit. The question of diet is always an individual question and depends entirely upon the whole manner and condition of the development of the person in question.

Again, what lives in the leaves of plants has a similar connection with the lungs of man, with all that belongs to the system of the lungs. Here we may find an indication of how a balance can be created, for example, in a person whose breathing system, owing to inherited tendencies or to some other condition, works too powerfully. It would be well in such a case to recommend the person not to eat much of what comes from the leaves of plants. There may be another person whose breathing system requires strengthening, and then we shall do well to advise him to eat freely of such food as comes from leaves. These things have their close connection also with the healing forces that are in the world in the several kingdoms of nature, for those parts of the individual plants which have a definite relationship to man's organs contain forces of healing for those regions of man's organism. Thus, roots contain great forces of healing for the nervous system, and leaves for the lung system.

The flowers of plants contain many healing forces for the kidney system, and seeds in a particular way for the heart, but only when the heart sets itself too strongly in opposition to the circulation of the blood. If the heart yields too easily to the circulation, then it is rather to the forces that are in the fruits, i.e. in the ripened seeds, that we must turn. These are some of the indications that result when we take into consideration that the moment we pass from man to surrounding nature all that presents itself to our senses in the world of nature is actually only the surface.

• Roots—Brain.
• Leaves—Lungs.
• Flowers—Kidneys.
• Seeds—Heart.
• Fruits—Blood system.

In the plants, what belongs to the world of the senses is only on the surface. Behind what reveals itself to sight and taste and smell are the soul-and-spirit forces of the plant. But these soul-and-spirit forces are not present in such a way that we could speak of each single plant as ensouled, in the same way that each single human being is ensouled. That is not the case. Whoever were to imagine it would be giving himself up to the same delusion as a man who thought that a single hair or the tip of the ear, or, let us say, a nose or a tooth, were ensouled. The whole human being is ensouled in his totality, and we only learn to look into the soul nature of man when we pass from the parts to the whole. And we must do the same in the case of every living thing. We must take care to observe it spiritually and see whether it is a part or in some sense a whole. All the various plants of the earth are by no means a whole for themselves; they are parts, they are members of a whole. And as a matter of fact we are only speaking of a reality when we speak of that to which the several plants belong, as parts belong to a whole. In the case of man we can see at once to what his teeth, his ears, his fingers belong; physically they belong to the whole organism. In the case of the plants we do not see with the eye that to which the single plant belongs, we cannot perceive it with a physical organ at all, for the moment we reach the whole we come into the realm of the spirit. The truth about the soul nature of the plant world is that it has the plants for its individual organs. There are, as a matter of fact, for our whole earth only a few beings who are, so to say, collected together in the earth and have as their single parts the plants, just as man has the hairs on his body.

We can, if we wish, refer to these beings as the group souls of the plants. We can say, when we go beyond what our senses can behold of the plant, that we come to the group souls of the plants, which are related to the single plant as a whole to a part. Altogether there are seven group souls—plant souls—belonging to the earth, and having in a way the centre of their being in the centre of the earth. So that it is not enough to conceive of the earth as this physical ball, but we have to think of it as penetrated by seven spheres varying in size and all having in the earth's centre their own spiritual centre. And then these spiritual beings impel the plants out of the earth. The root grows towards the centre of the earth, because what it really wants is to reach the centre of the earth, and it is only prevented from pushing right through by all the rest of the earth matter which stands in its way. Every plant root strives to penetrate to the centre of the earth, where is the centre of the spiritual being to which the plant belongs.

You see how extraordinarily important is the principle we laid down—to go always to the whole in the case of every being or creature, to see first whether it is a part or a whole. There are scientists in our days who look upon the plants as ensouled, but they look upon the individual plant in this way. That is no cleverer than if we were to call a tooth a man; both stand at the same mental level. Many people are ready to think, when they hear views like this put forward, that they are quite theosophical, just because the plants are regarded as having soul; but really all such talk on the part of science has no value at all for the future, the books are so much waste paper. To look for individual souls in the separate plants is to say: I will extract a tooth from a human being and look in it for a human soul. The plant soul is not to be found in the single plant but has its most important point in the centre of the earth, whither the root tends, for the root is that force in the plant which strives ever towards the most spiritual part of plant existence.

When we are considering a theme such as this we shall find, my dear friends, that we come across statements made from the standpoint of the present-day view of nature which can bring us near to the gateway of truth, but only to the same degree as Mephistopheles can bring Faust into the realm of the Mothers—namely, just to the outermost door and no further. For as little as Mephistopheles can go down with Faust into the realm of the Mothers, so little can present-day natural science enter into the spiritual. But as in a certain sense Mephistopheles gives the key, so does natural science. Natural science gives the key, but it does not want to enter itself, even as Mephistopheles does not want to enter himself into the realm of the Mothers. It is true in a sense that natural science gives us clues which, if we have acquired the mode of knowledge described in these lectures, can often bring our knowledge to the gateway of truth.

Natural science to-day, following the impulse of Darwin, has drawn—from observation of the world of the senses alone—an important conclusion; natural science speaks of the principle of the so-called “struggle for existence.” Who is not ready to see this struggle for existence all around him as long as he takes cognizance only of what the external world of the senses affords? Why, we meet with it at every turn. Think of the innumerable eggs laid by the creatures of the sea, how many are destroyed and perish, and how few actually grow up and become new creatures. There you have, apparently, a fearful struggle for existence. One could well begin to lament over it if one listened only to the world of the senses, and say: of the millions and billions of eggs so many, so very many, go under in the struggle for existence and so few survive. But this is only one side of a thought, my dear friends. Take hold now of the same thought at another end! In order to bring your thinking on in a certain direction, let me ask you to grasp the same thought at another point. You can also lament in a similar way over the struggle for existence in another connection. You can cast your eyes over a field of corn where so-and-so many ears are standing, each holding so-and-so many grains of corn, and you can ask the question: How many of these grains of corn are lost in some way or other and never fulfil their true purpose; and how few of them are planted again in the earth that they may become new plants of the same kind as the old ones? We can thus look over a field of corn that is promising a rich and plenteous harvest and say to ourselves: How much of all that sprouting life will perish without having attained its goal! Only a very few grains will be buried in the earth for new plants of the same kind to arise. Here again we have an instance, only in a rather different sphere from that of the sea-creatures, where also only a very few come to fulfilment.

But now let me ask you what would become of the human beings, who must eat something, if every single grain of corn were buried again in the earth? Let us suppose that it were possible—theoretically we can suppose anything—for such an abundant growth to take place that every single grain of corn could come up again; but we must also think of what would happen to the beings who have to find their nourishment from corn. Here we come to a strange pass; a belief that might appear justified when we look at the world of the senses is shaken. When we look at a field of corn in respect of its own physical existence we might seem quite justified in concluding that every single grain should grow into a whole plant. And yet the standpoint is perhaps false. Perhaps in the whole connection of things in the world we are not thinking correctly when we ascribe to each single grain of corn this aim and object, namely to grow into a whole plant. Perhaps there is nothing to justify us in saying that the grains of corn which serve other beings for food have somehow failed in their cosmic aim. Perhaps there is nothing that compels us to say that the eggs of the creatures of the sea have failed in their aim when they have not grown into fishes. It is in reality no more than human prejudice to suppose that every single seed ought to become again the same being. For we can only measure the tasks of the individual beings when we turn our eyes to the whole. And all the eggs that perish by the million in the sea every year, and do not grow into fish, provide food for other beings who are only not yet accessible to man's vision. And in very truth those spiritual substances which struggle their way through to existence and become the countless eggs of the sea that are apparently lost—they do not lament that they have missed their goal; for their goal is to be nourishment for other beings, to be received up into the very being of these other beings. Man stands outside with his intellect and imagines that only that has meaning which strives towards the goal which he, through his senses, is bound to see as the ultimate goal. But if we look at nature without prejudice and with an open mind we shall see in every single stage of every single being a certain perfection and fulfilment, and such perfection does not rest only in that which the being will eventually become, but is contained already in what it is.

These are some of the thoughts, acquired in occultism, which must take root in your heart and minds. And if you now turn away from the external world and look into your own soul you will observe that you have there in your soul a rich store of thoughts. Thoughts are perpetually streaming into your soul, perpetually lighting up within it; and only a very few of these thoughts are clearly grasped, only a very few become a conscious part of the human soul. When you go for a walk in the town, reflect how much enters your soul by way of your senses, and yet how little you observe in such a way that it becomes a permanent part of your soul-life. You are continually receiving impressions, and the sum of all the impressions you receive is related to the portion of them which becomes a permanent conscious possession of your soul as the great mass of fish spawn in the sea that is brought into being year by year is related to the proportion of it that actually grows into fish. You, as well, have to be forever going through this same process in your own soul, the process of bringing, over a vast region, only a very small quantity to fulfilment. And when man begins to lift the veil a little and gain some vision of the great flood of pictures of fantasy and of thought out of which he emerges when he emerges from sleep—the dream affords for many persons a last trace of the immeasurably rich life man leads in sleep—then he can come to realise that there is meaning in the fact that he receives so many impressions that do not come to clear consciousness. For the impressions that actually come to clear consciousness are lost to the inner work of man, they cannot work upon the system of the sense organs, nor the system of the glandular organs, nor the system of digestion, neither can they work upon the systems of nerves, muscles and bones. That which becomes conscious in the soul, and which present-day man carries in him as his conscious inner soul-content, has no more power to work upon the organism; its characteristic is that it is torn loose from the mother earth of the whole human being and thus comes into his consciousness. All the rest of the soul-content—which bears the same relation to these conscious thoughts and ideas as the many eggs do to the few that become fish—all the countless impressions that come into our soul from without and do not come into consciousness, work upon the whole human being.

Everything in his environment works continually upon man in his totality. The dream can sometimes teach you how far what lives on in your soul as conscious idea, how very far that is from being all that enters your soul; many other impressions are entering your soul all the time. You have only to give attention to such things and you will find they occur constantly in life. You dream of some situation. Perhaps you dream you are standing opposite a man who is talking with another man. You are standing there and making a third. In your dream you have a clear and exact picture of the countenance of the man opposite you. You say to yourself: “How do I come to have such a dream? It gives the impression of being concerned with people I know in physical life, it seems to relate itself to physical life. But where does it come from? I have never heard or seen this person.” And now you pursue it further; and when you examine carefully you find that a few days ago you were opposite this person in a railway carriage, only the whole experience passed by you without your consciousness being awakened. In spite of that, however, it entered deeply into your life. It is only owing to inexactitude of observation that people as a rule know nothing about these things.

The conceptions that dreams bring before us in this way are by no means the most important of the impressions that work upon the soul. The most important are quite other impressions. Think for a moment, my dear friends, how the process I described to you yesterday has been continually happening all the time in the evolution of humanity. By means of his bony system man has been continually producing Imaginations, by means of his muscular system he has been sending into the world Inspirations, and by means of his nervous system Intuitions. All these are now there in the world. The outstreamings that are evil, each man must himself receive back again and carry away through his destiny. But the rest builds up and takes form and is perpetually there in man's environment. In very deed all the Imaginations and Inspirations and Intuitions that man has given out into the earth world, even only since the Atlantean catastrophe, are present and are part of our environment. The good things man has given out—these the individual men do not need to take back again in the course of their Karma; but what they have sent out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth all through the centuries of the successive epochs is actually present for the men who are now living on earth, just as much as the air is present for physical man. As man breathes physical air, as the air from his environment enters right inside him, so do the Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions that have been developed penetrate into man, and man partakes of them with his soul and spirit. And now it is important that man should develop a real relation to all this in his environment, that he should not meet what he has himself imparted to the earth in earlier epochs of its existence as if it were strange to him, as if he were unconnected with it. He can, however, only become connected with this spiritual content he has given to the earth when he gradually acquires the power to receive it into his soul.

How can this come about? When we come to make a deep study of the spiritual meaning of earth evolution we discover that in the time when post-Atlantean man had still something left of ancient clairvoyance, Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were communicated in great abundance to the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. That was a time when spiritual substance was given forth in large measure. Since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and especially from the present day onwards, we gradually send out less and less; what falls rather to us is to receive the old substance, for it is something with which we are intimately connected; we have the task to take up again into ourselves what has been sent out. That means it is required of man to replace an earlier spiritual outbreathing by a spiritual inbreathing. Man must grow ever more sensitive and receptive to the spiritual that is in the world. In ancient times that was not so necessary, for men of those olden times were able to put forth from them spiritual substance, they had, so to speak, a reserve store. But this reserve of spiritual substance has been so deeply drawn upon since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch that in future man will, in a sense, only be able to send out what he has first absorbed, what he has first inbreathed. In order that man may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new task in earth existence—to this end is Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science there in the world. When a man feels drawn to Anthroposophy it is not just that it takes his fancy as one among many other things in the world that take his fancy. He is drawn to Anthroposophy because it is intimately and deeply bound up with the whole of earth evolution, intimately bound up with the task that lies immediately before man to-day in evolution, namely to develop understanding for the spiritual all around him. For from the present time onwards it will be the case that those who do not develop understanding for the spirit behind the senses, for the world of the spirit behind the world of the senses, will be like men whose breathing system is so injured that they cannot take in air and they suffer from difficulty in breathing. To-day we still have left in our ideas a certain inheritance from primeval human wisdom, and we feed upon these old ideas. If, however, we are able to observe the evolution of mankind in modern times with the eye of the spirit we shall perceive that while discoveries abound in the field of the material and external, in the spiritual a kind of exhaustion shows itself, a strange poverty of spiritual content. New ideas, new concepts, arise less and less among mankind. It is only those who do not know of ancient concepts and who are always rediscovering the old for themselves—that is to say, their whole life long remain in a sense immature—who can imagine that it is possible for ideas to develop and mature in these days. No, the world of abstract ideas, the world of intellectual ideas is exhausted. There are no more new ideas springing up. The time of Thales marks the rise of intellectual ideas for Western thought. And now we stand at a kind of end; and philosophy as such, philosophy as a science of ideas, is at an end. Ideas and thoughts belong only to the physical plane, and man must learn to lift himself up to what lies beyond ideas and thought, that is, beyond the world of the physical plane. To begin with he will lift himself up to Imaginations. Imaginations will again become for him something real and actual. That will bring about a new fructification of the spiritual in mankind. That is why, my dear friends, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science gives Imaginations of great and mighty world processes. Note how different from everything else of its kind is the description given of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Compare it with the abstract concepts of natural science. Everything in Spiritual Science has to be given in pictures, it has to be presented in such a way that it is not directly realisable in the external world of the senses. We say of Old Saturn that it had a condition of warmth, of warmth alone. That is sheer nonsense for the present-day world of the senses; for the world of the senses knows nothing of warmth substance as such. But what is nonsense for the world of the senses is truth for the world of the spirit, and the next step required of man in the near future is to live his way into the world of the spirit. Those who will not resolve to breathe the air of the spirit—and Spiritual Science has come into the world to make the soul of man susceptible to the air of the spirit—those who do not want to make themselves responsive to Spiritual Science will actually approach a condition of spiritual shortness of breath and spiritual exhaustion. One can already see many persons approaching this condition, and it leads on to a spiritual wasting and decline, to an actual “consumption” of the spirit.

Such would be the lot of men on earth if they wanted to stop short at the world of the senses. They would go into a spiritual decline. In the future development of civilisation there will be men full of sensitiveness for the spiritual, full of heart for all that Spiritual Science will give, and for the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as it springs up spontaneously in the souls of men. So will it be for a part of humanity: they will have understanding and devotion for this world of the spirit. And it will be these men who will fulfil the task that is set before the earth in the near future. Others perhaps will be content with the world of the senses, not wanting to go beyond it, not wanting to go beyond that shadow picture which the conceptions of philosophy and of natural science afford. Such people are moving in the direction of spiritual shortness of breath, spiritual consumption, spiritual sickness and disease. They will become dried up in earth existence and not attain the goal that has been set for earth evolution. Evolution goes on, however, in such a way that each one is compelled to ask himself the question: Which way will you choose? In the future men will stand, as it were, on two paths, to the right and to the left. On one path will be those for whom the world of the senses alone is true, and on the other will be those for whom the world of the spiritual is the truth.

And since the senses, such as the ear, for example, will disappear, since at the end of the earth all the senses that belong to the earth will have completely disappeared, we can form some idea of what that consumption and wasting away will be like. If we abandon ourselves to the world of the senses we abandon ourselves to something which abandons man in the future of earth evolution. If we press through to the world of the spirit we develop ourselves in the direction of something that wills to come nearer and nearer to man in the future of earth evolution. If we want to express it in a symbol we may say that it is possible for man to stand there at the end of the earth evolution and to speak as Faust did when he had been blinded physically—(for man will be not only blinded to the world around him but deaf to it in addition, he will stand there blind and deaf and deprived of taste and smell)—he will be able to say with Faust: “But in my inmost spirit all is light—yes, and all is glorious ringing tones and words of men!” Thus will the man be able to speak who has turned to the world of the spirit. But the other, the man who wanted to remain at the world of the senses would be like a Faust who, after he was blinded, would be compelled to say: “Blind hast thou become without, and within shines no light of the spirit, darkness alone receives thee.”

Man has to choose between these two Faust natures in his relation to the future of the earth. For the first Faust would be one who had turned to the world of the spirit, whilst the second would be one who had turned to the world of the senses and had thereby become closely united with something of which man must feel that it is unsubstantial and unreal, and moreover that it robs him of his own reality and being. Thus does that appear which we set out to discover and bring from occult heights—thus does it appear, my dear friends, in its relation to the immediate daily life of man. I think I need not spend words in pointing out what moral principles and will impulses for present-day humanity can proceed from a real understanding of occult science.¹ For out of a rightly understood wisdom will a rightly understood goodness and virtue be born in the human heart. Let us strive after a real understanding of world evolution, let us seek after wisdom—and we shall find without fail that the child of wisdom will be love.

• 1. Printed by C. F. Hodgson & Son, Ltd., 2 Newton St., London, W.C.2.