The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The considerations we are currently undertaking concern matters that are treated as mysteries by many people who know something about them in one form or another. And for certain reasons, knowledge of these things is kept away from the world from many sides, because it is believed that the things in question are parts of a comprehensive knowledge of supersensible matters that should not yet be communicated to mankind. I do not consider this view to be correct with regard to certain things that are being discussed here. On the contrary, it seems to me necessary for humanity to make the courageous decision to enter into a real consideration of the supersensible worlds. And one cannot do that otherwise than by directly grasping what is specifically considered in relation to the question in question.

Today, I would like to deal with a preliminary question first. Yesterday we spoke about the stages a person goes through between death and a new birth. A very common objection to discussing these things, not on the part of the initiated, but on the part of the uninitiated, is that one simply says: Yes, why is it necessary to know something about these things? One could indeed wait until one passes through the gate of death, and then one will see what it is actually like in the spiritual world. It is something that is said very often. Now, the thing is that we can never answer such questions from a so-called absolute point of view when we talk about reality, but that we, from a spiritual-scientific point of view, must always answer them from the point of view of the time in which we live. We live in the fifth post-Atlantic period, which began in the 15th century of our calendar. It concluded the fourth post-Atlantic period, which, as we know, began in the 8th century BC and came to an end in the 15th century AD. There are seven such cultural periods. From this, however, it can be seen that we have passed the midpoint of the cultural development of the earth, which was in the fourth post-Atlantic period, and that we are simply entering – we are, after all, also in the fifth great earth period – the time when the earth is in a descending development.

The considerations we have been making in these days can already draw your attention to the fact that it is important to look at the descending development, at that which is, so to speak, not in evolution but in devolution, which is in retrogression. Our whole evolution on earth is in retrogression. Certain abilities and powers that were present in the previous period of ascending development cease to exist, and others have to take the place of these ceasing powers and abilities. This is particularly the case with certain inner psychic abilities of the human being. It can be said that until the fourth post-Atlantic period, until around the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, people still had the ability to have a certain connection with the supersensible world. We know that these abilities have disappeared in the most diverse ways. They no longer exist as elementary abilities; they have, so to speak, dwindled away. Not only has the life of man on earth changed between birth and death with regard to such abilities, but actually, and even more radically, has the life of man changed between death and a new birth. And it must be said that for this period of time, from death to a new birth, in the present cycle of mankind, which thus already belongs to the descending ones, it is so that men, when they go through the gate of death , they must have certain memories of what they have acquired here in the physical body if they want to find the right attitude and the right relationship to the events to which they are exposed between death and a new birth. It is one of the necessary prerequisites for a right life after death that people here before death acquire more and more certain ideas about life after death, because only when they remember these ideas, which they have acquired here, can they orient themselves in the time between death and a new birth. It is factually incorrect to claim that one can wait until death to have such ideas about the life between death and a new birth. If people continued to live in these prejudices, if they persistently refused to want to gain insights here already about life between death and a new birth, then this life, this life free of the body, would become a dark one for them, one in which they would be disoriented; they would not be able to penetrate their spiritual surroundings in the right way through everything that I described to you yesterday. Until almost the Mystery of Golgotha, it was the case that people brought abilities into their physical life here that originated in the spiritual world. That is why they had atavistic clairvoyance. This atavistic clairvoyance came from the fact that certain spiritual abilities extended from the pre-birth state into this life. That stopped. People no longer have abilities here in physical life that extend from the prenatal life. You know that. But the other thing must be done instead: people must acquire more and more ideas here on earth about the post-mortem life, the life after death, so that they can remember after death, so that they can carry something through the gates of death.

That is what I want to comment on in particular regarding this preliminary question. So the comfortable notion that one can wait until death to form such ideas does not apply if one considers in concrete terms at what point in time of the development of the earth we actually are. And this must always be borne in mind. For views that are absolutely valid, that apply at all times, do not exist; there are only views that can guide people for a certain period of time. This is what one must acquire in such an eminent sense through spiritual science.

And now I would like to discuss a few things that can bring our considerations to a preliminary conclusion. We started from the assumption that the present human being feels a gulf between what he calls ideals, be they moral or other ideals, which he also calls ideas, and what he feels to be his views on the purely natural order of the world. The concepts and views that man forms about the natural order of the world do not enable him to assume that what he carries in his heart as ideals has real power and can actually be realized like a natural force.

The essential thing to consider in this question is now the following: We now know how it is with the structure of the human being here on the physical earth. We also know how it is with the structure of the human being in the spiritual world between death and a new birth. Some time ago I raised a question which actually already comes before the human soul as a concrete question when the human being looks at life, but which is precisely a question to which one cannot say anything when one is faced with the gap just characterized between idealism and realism between idealism and realism, that is the question: How is it that in our world order some people die very young, as children or young people or in middle age, while others only die when they have grown old? What is the connection with the order of the world? Neither idealism on the one hand nor realism on the other, which cannot regard ideals as real powers, can shed any light on such questions, which are, however, questions of life. These questions can only be approached if one has something very definite in mind. And that is to realize that the present human being, as he will one day stand before us as an earthly human being, can cope relatively easily with space, but he does not cope in the same way with time. In this respect, the sum of all existing philosophical views does not really offer any significant insight, and the question of the nature of time has so far only been treated in the narrowest human circles. It is not that easy to speak about time and its essence in a way that is accessible to the general public, but perhaps I can succeed in giving you an idea of what I mean by bringing time into discussion in analogy to space. I will have to tax your patience a little, because the brief consideration I want to give to this subject seems to have a somewhat abstract character.

If you simply overlook a piece of the room, you know that what you overlook reveals itself to you in a perspective character. You have to take into account the perspective of the room when you overlook a piece of it. If you now bring the piece of room that you overlook and to which you instinctively ascribe a perspective character onto a surface, then you take the perspective into account. If you look down an avenue, you see the distant trees of the avenue as smaller and closer together. You can express this in perspective, and you can, in a sense, express in perspective on a surface what you see in space.

Now it is clear that what you see in space is juxtaposed in a flat surface. In space, it is not juxtaposed; there are two trees in front (see drawing on p. 164), and two trees are far away. But by bringing the visible space into the flat surface, you place what is behind one another next to one another. You have the instinctive ability to transpose what you have painted or drawn on a surface into three dimensions. That you have this ability is due to the fact that man, as he is now as an earthly man, has become relatively detached from space as such.

Man has not detached himself from time in the same way. And that is something tremendously important and significant, but something that unfortunately is hardly noticed, hardly noticed by science. Man believes that when he develops in time, he has time. But in reality he does not have real time. He does not have real time at all, but what you experience as time is actually, in relation to real time, something that can be called an image. Just as this image (see drawing) in the plane relates to space, so what the ordinary person calls time relates to real time. The ordinary person does not experience real time, but rather experiences an image of time. And that is very difficult to imagine.

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For example, it is extremely difficult for you to imagine that something that is effective today does not need to be present at the present moment in time, but is real at a much earlier point in time and is not real at the present moment in time. You can, so to speak, project that which is present in a very early period of time into your own time.

What I have just said has a very significant consequence. It has the consequence that everything we call nature has a completely different character than everything we have to regard as a certain part of the human being itself. For example, Ahriman also works in nature outside, or rather the Ahrimanic powers work; but the Ahrimanic powers never work in nature outside at the present time. If you look at nature as a whole, Ahriman is at work in nature, but he is working from a distant time. Ahriman works from the past. And whether you look at the mineral, the vegetable or the animal kingdom, you must never say that there is something in what is currently unfolding before your eyes in which Ahriman is active. And yet Ahriman is active in it; but from the past. If I were to describe the matter, I would have to say: Here is the line of development from the past into the future, and here you survey nature.

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Yes, now you have to imagine looking into it. What you see before you in the present contains no ahrimanic powers, but Ahriman works through nature from the past, from a particular past.

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And to you, Ahriman appears in nature, when you become aware of him there, in perspective. If you were to say: Ahriman is at work in the present — then you would be making the same mistake in relation to nature as if you were to say: When I survey a room, the distant trees stand beside the near trees (see drawing on page 164) because they can be placed in perspective within the space.

A fundamental requirement for a real view into the spiritual world is this: that one learns to see in perspective in time, that one learns to place every being at its correct point in time.

If I said yesterday that after death the I is, as it were, transferred from a fluid state into a kind of solid state, that is not all there is to it. Suppose you lived here on earth with your I from 1850 to 1920, and in 1920 you became aware of your I. I mean: you will become aware of it earlier, but now you look back, with the spirit self through the hierarchies you look back at your ego; there you see your ego always as it was from 1850 to 1920. The ego stays there, stays put. This means that your experiences do not go with you soon after your death, but you look back on them. You now look back from a temporally distant perspective and you see into the length of time, just as you see into the length of space here in the physical world. I can also express it this way: when you die, say, in 1920, you live with all that I described to you yesterday as the members of your being, but then you look back on the stretch of time in which you lived here on earth with your ego. And that stretch of time remains there, and you always see it as you continue to live in perspective, at the point in time where it was. And so you have to imagine that Ahriman is active outside in nature, but from an earlier point in time.

This is very important. It is something that is given very little consideration. If one wants to understand the world, if one wants to speak spiritually of time, then one must absolutely imagine time in a spatial way and must consider this connection of the spiritual substance with time. This is very important.

Now, what I said to you about the Ahrimanic powers, that they work from the past, is true for nature. But with human beings it is different. For the human being, while he lives here between birth and death, it is different precisely because everything that comes to an end in time becomes maya, deception, for him. While he lives here, the human being lives within the course of time itself, and by living through a certain number of years, he lives through the course of time. As time passes, he himself passes with time. That is not the case with space. When you walk down an avenue, the trees remain behind and you move forward, and you do not take the trees, which are left behind, and your impressions with you in such a way that you would have the impression that the tree image is moving with you when you take a step. You do that with the image of time. Here in the physical body you actually do this – because you yourself continue to develop in time – by allowing yourself to be deceived about time in relation to its perspective. You do not notice the perspective of time. And in particular, the subconscious mind does not notice it. The subconscious mind does not notice this living with time at all, and gives itself over to a complete deception with regard to the perspective of time. But this has a very definite consequence. It has the consequence that Ahrimanic powers can now work as present powers in what happens in man. Ahrimanic powers work in the life of the human soul as present powers. So that man stands in relation to nature in this way: when he looks out into nature, there is nothing Ahrimanic in the present. The Ahrimanic works in him as a presence, precisely as Maja, as deception. But the human being is given over to this deception about the things that I have explained to you, so that through the human being the Ahrimanic powers gain the possibility of creeping into the present, of walking into the present. We can say that the Ahrimanic forces – and the same applies to the Luciferic forces, albeit from a somewhat different point of view, which we will discuss in a moment – work in nature in such a way that they actually have nothing to do with the present, but extend their effects from prehistoric times. These Ahrimanic forces are currently at work in the human being.

What are the consequences? The consequence is that, in his deepest soul, man cannot feel related to nature in relation to the point just discussed. He looks at his being, or rather feels himself in his being, senses the nature-based being. Because ahrimanic powers are countervailing powers in him, and ahrimanic powers are past powers in nature, everything that is natural appears to him differently from that which develops within himself. Man does not unravel the difference he perceives between himself and nature in the right way. If he unraveled it in the right way, it would be as I have just explained. He would say: Outside in nature, Ahriman works from the past; in me, Ahriman works as a present power. But because of this, even if he does not know the difference, he behaves in the sense of this difference and perceives nature as spiritless. He does perceive that in the present the Ahrimanic powers are not directly active in nature, but he perceives nature as spiritless because he does not say to himself: Ahriman works from the past – instead, he only looks at present-day nature. Ahriman does not work in it.

But Ahriman, however strange it may sound, is the power that the general creation of the world uses to bring forth nature. When one speaks of the spirit of nature, when one speaks of the pure spirit of nature, one should actually speak of the ahrimanic spirit. There it is fully justified, the ahrimanic spirit. The beings of the normal hierarchies make use of the ahrimanic spirit to bring forth what extends around us as nature. The fact that we do not perceive nature in a spiritualized way is precisely because in the present life of nature the spirit is not contained, but works from the past. And that is the secret, I would say, of the world-creative powers, that they make use of a spirit that they have left at an earlier stage to work at a later stage, but let it work from the past.

When we speak of nature, we should not speak of matter, nor of forces; we should speak of ahrimanic entities. But then we would have to place these ahrimanic entities in the past. The result is a strange one: suppose some natural philosopher ponders, ponders what is behind the phenomena of nature. Well, he comes up with all sorts of theories and hypotheses about atomic connections and the like. But that is not the case. Behind what is spread out around us in a way that appeals to the senses, there is not actually what the natural philosophers usually assume, but behind all of this there is the sum of the Ahrimanic powers, but not as a presence. So if the natural philosopher is compelled to assume, let us say, that there are some atomic structures behind the chemical elements, then that is wrong; behind the chemical elements there are Ahrimanic powers. But if you could detach what you see from the chemical elements and look beyond, you would see nothing behind them in the present: it would be hollow where you look for atoms, and what is at work there comes from the past and works in this hollow space. That is how it is in reality. Hence the many unsuccessful theories about what the “thing in itself” is; for this “thing in itself” is not there at all in the present. Rather, where the “thing in itself” is sought, there is nothing; but the effect is there from the past. So that one could say that if Kart had sought his “thing in itself,” he would have had to say: Where I want to approach the 'thing in itself', there I cannot approach. — That is what he said. But he did not realize that in the beginning he would have found nothing there at all, and that if he had gone behind the veil of things, he would have had to go far back; then he would have found Ahrimanic powers.

In man himself it is different. It is precisely because man is vividly placed in time that it has been possible for the Ahrimanic powers to enter our world through the gateway of humanity and to work within man as such. And the consequence of the Ahrimanic powers working in man is that man detaches what he sees in the present from the spiritual, that man detaches his present existence from the spiritual. This is the consequence of our carrying the Ahrimanic powers within the Maja in us. So that one can say: Just as we view the world materially, detached from the spirit, as a mere natural order that believes it has reached its peak in the law of the conservation of energy and matter — which is an illusion — what we see as a natural order is merely brought about by the fact that we carry the Ahrimanic powers within us, and that they are not present as powers in nature outside us. Therefore, what we think about nature, in that we think of it merely materially, does not correspond to nature, but only to present nature. But this present nature is precisely an abstraction, because the past Ahriman always works in it.

Now, not only the Ahrimanic but also the Luciferic is at work in people. This Luciferic, however, has, so to speak, a different tendency in the universe than the Ahrimanic. Let us visualize the tendency of the Ahrimanic as we have now expressed it. The tendency of the Ahrimanic in us is to present the world in materialistic terms. That we conceive the world materialistically, that we think of a mere natural order, is the consequence of the fact that we carry Ahrimanic in us. That we carry ideals within us, which detach themselves from the general nature, according to which we want to orient ourselves in our mutual behavior, but which must appear to us only like dreams within the present world view, which are dreamed out when, according to the natural order, the earth has arrived at its final state , that is the consequence of the fact that the luciferic powers, which, like the ahrimanic ones, live in us, are constantly striving to tear the part of us that is accessible to them completely out of the natural order and to spiritualize it completely. The main tendency of the luciferic powers, insofar as they live in us, is to make us as spiritual as possible, to tear us away from all material life if possible. That is why they present us with ideals that are not natural powers, but that are powerless in the present natural order. And if, in the course of the future period of the earth, man were to fall entirely prey to the influence of Lucifer, so that he would believe that ideals are just imagined things towards which the mind can be directed, then this man would follow the luciferic powers. The material earth, to which we belong, would decay, scatter in the universe, would not fulfill its purpose, and the luciferic powers would lead man into another spiritual world to which he does not belong. To do this, they need the trick of making us believe in ideals that are actually mere dreams. Just as Ahriman, on the one hand, presents us with a world that is a mere natural order, so Lucifer, on the other hand, presents us with a world that consists purely of imagined ideals.

This is something very significant. And at present, I would say, a balance is only being struck in those areas that still lie in the human unconscious. But people must become more and more aware of this, otherwise they will not get out of this dilemma, they will not be able to build a bridge between idealism and realism, but this bridge is necessary.

What currently still creates a kind of balance is the following. When very young people die, for example children, these children – and the same applies to young people – have just looked into the world; they have not fully lived out their existence here on the physical plane. With a life unlived on the physical plane, they pass over into the other world, which is lived between death and a new birth, as I described yesterday. Because they have only lived part of their earthly life, they bring something of earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be brought across when one has grown old. You arrive differently in the spiritual world if you have grown old than if you die young. If you die young, you have lived your life in such a way that you still have a lot of strength in you from your prenatal life. As a child and as a young person, you have lived your physical life in such a way that you still have a lot of the strength in you that you had in the spiritual world before you were born. In this way, a close connection has been created between the spiritual part that one has brought with one and the physical part that one has experienced here. And through this close connection, one can take something that one acquires on earth with one into the spiritual world. Children or people who have died young take something from earthly life with them into the spiritual world that cannot be taken at all if one dies as an older person. That which is taken along is then over there in the spiritual world, and what is carried over by children and young people gives the spiritual world a certain heaviness that it would not otherwise have, the spiritual world in which people then live together, gives a certain heaviness to the spiritual world and prevents the luciferic powers from completely separating the spiritual world from the physical one.

So you see, we are looking at an enormous secret! When children and young people die, they take something with them from here, which the luciferic powers use to prevent us from completely detaching ourselves from earthly life. It is extremely important to realize this.

If you get older here on earth, you cannot thwart the luciferic powers in the way described, because after a certain age you no longer have that intimate connection between what you brought with you at birth and physical life on earth. When one has grown old, this inner connection is dissolved and just the opposite occurs. From a certain age onwards we instill our own nature in a certain way into the spiritual substance within the physical earth. We make the physical earth more spiritual than it would otherwise be. So from a certain age onwards we spiritualize the physical earth in a certain way, which cannot be perceived by the outer senses. We carry spiritual into the physical earth, as we carry physical up into the spiritual world when we die young; we squeeze out, so to speak, spiritual when we grow old, I cannot say it any other way. Growing old consists in the spiritual sense from a certain aspect of squeezing out spiritual here on earth. This in turn prevents the reckoning of Ahriman. As a result, Ahriman cannot, in the long run, have such an intense effect on people that the opinion that ideals do have a certain meaning could completely die out. But in today's time frame, we are already very, very close to people falling into the most terrible errors precisely with regard to what has been said. Even well-meaning people easily fall into such errors with regard to what has been said. And these errors will become ever greater and greater and, with increasing earth development, can become enormous.

To give you an example: a very ingenious philosopher, Robert Zimmermann, wrote an “Anthroposophy” in 1882. I have already mentioned this in a context. This “Anthroposophy” is not what we now call Anthroposophy, it is more or less a concept jungle. But that is because Robert Zimmermann was not able to see into the spiritual world, he was only a Herbartian philosopher. Now he has written this “Anthroposophy”. But it is precisely in this “Anthroposophy” that Robert Zimmermann deals with the question that I have placed at the top of our considerations these days from his point of view. On the one hand, he sees ideas: logical ideas, aesthetic ideas, ethical ideas; on the other hand, he sees the order of nature. And he cannot somehow find a bridge between the logical, the aesthetic, the ethical ideas and the order of nature, but he does stop at it: on the one hand, there is the order of nature, and on the other hand, there are the ideas. And the conclusion he comes to is extremely interesting, because it is actually typical of a person in the present day. He comes to the conclusion that it is forbidden to man once and for all to populate nature with ideas and to ascribe to ideas the power of nature. The two worlds can actually only be connected in the mind of man. So he says. And so he means at one point, where he summarizes almost everything he says and thinks: “The realization of ideas is neither a fact of the past nor a fact of the present, but a task whose fulfillment lies in the future and in the hands of man. The dream of a “golden age”, of which a sober rationalist like Kant as of that of “eternal peace, as an extreme positivist like Comte as the ‘état positif’, raved about, will be fulfilled when the entire world of ideas has become real and the entire reality is permeated by the ideas, that is to say, when that which Schiller called “the secret of the master's art,” the “consumption” of matter by form, becomes manifest, or, as Schleiermacher put it, “when ethics become physics and physics become ethics.”

Yes, but that can never be! It can only be that people realize ideas in their social order. But when the earth has reached its end, the whole dream of ideas will have been dreamt. Nothing else is possible according to such a philosophy. Therefore such a philosophy always remains abstract and must finally confess: “A philosophy which, like the one above, neither takes the theocentric point of view, inaccessible to human knowledge, as in theosophy, and regards the ‘dream of reason’ as a reality that has long since been created, nor, like anthropology, takes the anthropocentric but uncritical standpoint of common experience, in order to view from there a reality filled with ideas as a 'dream of reason', which thus simultaneously wants to be anthropocentric, that is, starting from human experience, and yet philosophical, that is, going beyond it, at the hand of logical thinking, is Arihroposophie.” “Anthroposophy” is therefore here the admission that one can never cross this chasm between unreal ideas and idea-less reality.

But in man himself there is a natural being, which thus belongs to the natural order, connected with a spiritual being that can absorb the spiritual. This is not denied by an anthroposophist like Robert Zimmermann. But man cannot be regarded by contemporary science either in such a way that the riddle would be solved through man, through this microcosm.

Let us now look back at something we have already mentioned during this stay. We have said that we actually have to divide the human being into three parts, not as conveniently as the skeleton, of course, as I have already explained. But I have also spoken about this in the final notes to my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Mysteries of the Soul). We can divide the human being into three parts: the head, the trunk and the extremities, with everything that belongs to the extremities belonging to the extremities, including everything sexual. If we divide the human being in this way and now apply what we already know: that the formation of the head, the shape of the head points to forces of the previous incarnation, the limb man points to the future incarnation and actually only the trunk belongs to the present. So, after what I have explained today, you will no longer find it very incomprehensible when I tell you: insofar as the human being carries his head, this head points back to the earlier incarnation, into the past. The forces of the past, Ahrimanic forces, are at work in the head, and what applies to Ahrimanic forces in general applies to the human head in particular. Everything that is actually formed in the human head does not actually belong to the present, but the forces of the previous incarnation have an effect on the head; and the creative powers make use of the ahrimanic powers to shape our head, to give our head its actual form. If the creative powers did not make use of the ahrimanic spirits to shape our heads, then we would all – forgive me, but it is so – wear a much softer head, but we would all have an animal head: one who is bullish in character would have a bull's head, another who is lamb-like in character would have a lamb's head, and so on. It is due to the influence of the Ahrimanic powers, which the creative forces use to shape us, that this animal head, which we would otherwise wear, does not really sit on us, as the Egyptians drew it on some of their figures; that we do not go around like these Egyptian figures, who have good reasons for this, because in the Egyptian mysteries, too, though from an atavistic point of view, things were taught that can be taught again now. We also do not go around like that, as in the Rosicrucian pictures, where every woman is painted with a lion's head and every man with an ox's head. That is the Rosicrucian painting of man. The Rosicrucians chose a more average animal and therefore gave the women the head of the animal that most resembles them, the lion, and the man the head of the animal that most resembles him, the ox, the bull. That is why in Rosicrucian figures you see man and woman placed side by side: the woman with the most beautiful lion's head, the man with a bull's head. But this is absolutely correct. That metamorphosis – to use a Goethean term – can take place, that our head, which tends towards the animalistic in its form, can be shaped so that it is a human head, comes from the influence of the Ahrimanic powers. If the deities did not make use of Ahriman to shape our bony heads, then we would walk around with animal heads.

But the divine powers also make use of the luciferic spirits. If they did not make use of these luciferic spirits, our limbless man would not be able to transform from the present to the next incarnation. The luciferic beings are necessary for this. And it is to the luciferic entities that we again owe the fact that, by dying, the form that the man of the extremities still has now is gradually transformed into the broader form that he is to have in the next incarnation. Then, in the middle of the path between death and a new birth, Ahriman must intervene to take on the other task: to reshape the head in the appropriate way. Just as we would go around with animal heads if we did not owe it to Ahriman that we get a human head, so our nature of the extremities would not metamorphose into the human until the next incarnation, but would pass over into the demonic. We lose our head, as we now have it, under all circumstances through death, not only as matter that unites with the earth, but also as form; in the next incarnation we carry over what will become the head from the extremity of man. But this would become a demonic being if we did not have the luciferic powers, who are connected with us, to thank for the fact that the transformation can take place from a demon, which is merely a spiritual soul, into the human form of the next incarnation.

Thus, Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers must participate in our becoming human, and the human cannot be understood without calling upon the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic for help. Humanity cannot be spared the task of truly understanding the activity of Ahriman and Lucifer in the future. The Bible quite rightly says that the Deity of whom it speaks at the beginning breathed the living spirit into man. But the living spirit works in the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the normally functioning divine entities, we are dealing only with the trunk of the human being. Insofar as we are dealing with the head man, we are dealing with an opponent of the powers of Yahweh, and thus also with an opponent of the Christ. And insofar as we are dealing with the man of the extremities, we are dealing with the Luciferic opponent.

Therefore, one will only understand the human being if one presents him under these three aspects. In our central group for our building, we therefore have this trinity: the representative of humanity, who is trained in such a way that the forces of breathing, of the trunk, of heart activity and so on are primarily active in him – this is the middle figure; then the figure in which everything main, head-related is active: Ahriman; and the figure in which everything extremity-related is active: Lucifer.

We must dissect the human being in this way if we want to understand the human being, because in the human being, the human being as such is united with Ahriman and Lucifer. At the same time, this is an indication that everything that is more or less connected with human thinking, which, after all, is bound to the head in relation to

its physical connection to the head — human thinking flows on the basis of perceptions as something external and obvious — that all this has an Ahrimanic character. Through the senses of the head we perceive nature primarily, and we build up an image of nature with the ahrimanic character just described, because we ourselves carry the ahrimanic in the formation, in the shaping of our head.

Ideals, on the other hand, have a great deal to do with love, with everything that belongs to the man of the extremities, inwardly, psychologically. I shall come back to this in the near future. That is why the Luciferic power has special access to ideals. Ahriman takes hold of us through our head, Lucifer through our extremities. Through our head Ahriman tempts us to conceive of nature without spirit; through our extremity man Lucifer tempts us to conceive of ideals without the power of nature.

But it is the task of the present human being, by surveying such things, to arrive at a correct overview. For you see, there is a certain boundary within us, precisely in our chest-humanity, in our trunk-humanity, whereby the forces of the head, which are Ahrimanic forces, are separated from the luciferic forces that belong to the extremity-humanity. If we were able to see ourselves completely by looking mystically into ourselves, then we would indeed comprehend the natural order through the head, but we would also see into ourselves through the natural order. And if the luciferic powers were to decide in us, then the luciferic powers would also enlighten us about the ahrimanic powers, and in this way we would come to a connection between the natural order and the spiritual order. But for a certain reason we cannot do this, and that is because we have a memory. What we absorb from nature in the way of ideas and concepts, of impressions, we store in our memory. And if here (see diagram on page 179) we have only schematically drawn the head human being, the trunk and torso human being, and the extremities human being, then in the trunk human being there is the septum, which leads to that which we take in through the head, in the natural order, coming back to us as memory material. As a result, we do not see down to the Luciferic, and thus we do not notice the Ahrimanic, as we do not see what is behind a mirror, but rather what is reflected. Here the natural order is reflected in what at the same time separates our Ahrimanic from our Luciferic, and what is the basis for the forming memory, for the forming power of recollection. If we could not remember the things we have experienced, if this partition were not there, if, looking into ourselves, we could see through ourselves, we would look down into ourselves as far as the Luciferic. Then we would also perceive the Ahrimanic.

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But now consider: what appears to us in this mirror is what we live through in the course of our lives, what we look back on after death, what becomes a solid ego from a fluid ego. This is what we look back on. That is what we live with. And Ahriman and Lucifer work with us, working with us in such a way that Ahriman brings us to wearing a human head, and Lucifer brings us to not becoming a demon, but to having the possibility of coming to a next incarnation.

I have perhaps tried your patience a little with things that are perhaps a little more difficult to understand, but I wanted to at least evoke a feeling for what actually creates the gap between idealism and realism. It arises from the fact that the Luciferic in us arouses idealism, which is powerless in nature, that the Ahrimanic in us evokes the mere natural order, which appears spiritless to us. Thus idealists, abstract idealists, are actually under the influence of Lucifer, while materialists are under the influence of Ahriman. It is necessary to engage with these things, not just to engage in so-called theosophy in a schematic way, but to engage with these more precise things. For it is necessary that man should become conscious of the fact that he must do something to remain united with the spirit for the rest of his development on earth. It is an uncomfortable truth, one might say, even a hated truth, truly a hated truth, for it contradicts so much that is pleasant to man, that is pleasant to him out of laziness. Nothing is more difficult for people today than when they are told: If you want to maintain your connection with the spirit in the future, you have to do something about it. Most people would like the Mystery of Golgotha to have dissolved into the ground, so that they have nothing to do with their own affairs, so that they can be redeemed from their sins through Christ and go to heaven without having to do anything. And that is why most theologians get so angry about anthroposophy, because the anthroposophical side can never admit that man has nothing to do to maintain his connection with the spirit, that this can also happen in the future of the development of the earth without any action on his part. The connection between the physical and the spiritual, between what the members of man are between birth and death, and what the members of man are between death and new birth, this connection is called into question by the future development of the earth, and it will only not come into disorder if men will really occupy themselves with the spiritual towards the future. Spiritual scientific evidence for this already exists today. This spiritual scientific evidence is highly, highly inconvenient truth, but it sheds light on important and significant matters.

I would like to say that the connection between the soul-spiritual and the physical-etheric in the human being of the counterweight has already become very loose, and it is necessary for the human being to be more and more alert to himself, so that nothing happens in the connection between his physical-etheric and soul-spiritual that could, so to speak, suck him dry, that could suck him dry soul-spiritually. For when such prejudices become more and more active, when one does not need to know anything about what happens after death in life, or when the gulf between so-called idealism and pure natural order becomes ever greater, then people are in danger of losing their soul more and more. Today, I might say, this loss is still held in check by the fact that when young people die, a certain heaviness is given to the spiritual world and Lucifer is thwarted, and when old people die, so much spirituality is poured into the physical world that Ahriman is thwarted. But one must not forget that as a result of people turning away from the spiritual realm, the Ahrimanic and Luciferic powers become more and more powerful, and that little by little, as the devolution of the earth goes on and on, this dam could no longer be fully effective.

That is what I would like to see emerging from our deliberations as a kind of bottom line, a feeling – and feelings are always the most important thing that can arise from spiritual scientific life – of the necessity of dealing with the spiritual from the present earth cycle onwards. I have emphasized this from the most diverse points of view, that it is necessary from the present point of view that people occupy themselves with the spiritual. And there will be no other way of dealing with spiritual matters in the future than by acquiring understanding and not resisting the process of really absorbing even the more difficult considerations such as we have been discussing in recent days and particularly today. People must come to understand the perspectivity of time. When this understanding of the perspectivity of time comes among people, then they will no longer say: Here is idealism, but it is only a mere dream that has no force of nature, and on the other side lies the natural order. Instead, people will come to recognize that what lives in us as ideals is the germ for the future, and that what is the natural order is the fruit of the past.

This sentence is a golden rule: every ideal is the germ of a future natural event; every natural event is the fruit of a past spiritual event. Only by this rule can one find the bridge between idealism and realism. But for this one thing is necessary: any ideal could never become the germ of a future natural event if this future natural event were prevented by the present natural event. We can put any hypothesis before our eyes. Let us assume the possibility that applies today, that through the so-called law of entropy, the evolution of the earth will one day pass into a kind of general warming, and that all other natural forces will cease, then within this final state, of course, all ideals would have died out. This final state follows quite well if one assumes that, according to pure causality, the present physical states will simply continue. If one thinks as present-day physics does, that such a final state will one day exist according to the law of conservation of energy and matter, then there is no room in this final state for an ideal to arise in it as a future natural event, because the future will simply be the consequence of the present natural event. But that is not how it is, that is not how it presents itself to the present study of nature, but it presents itself differently. All the substances and forces that exist today will no longer be there in the future. The law of conservation of matter and energy does not exist. Where we look for substance, we find nothing but the influence of something Ahrimanic that has passed away. And what surrounds us in the world of the senses will no longer be there in the future. And then, when nothing of what is physical now remains, when all this has been completely dissolved, the time will have come when the present ideals will join the natural process of what is now perishing.

This is how it is in the great universe. And for the individual human being, it is the case that he will be incarnated again in the next world incarnation when everything that he has grown into with the present incarnation has been partially overcome, when, that is, an environment can be created for him that is different from the present environment, when everything that is keeping him here on earth can be removed from the present environment. If all this has changed so that he can experience new things, then he will be incarnated again. The present ideals that can form in man will be nature, when all that is now nature will no longer be there, but something new will have emerged. But the new that arises is nothing other than the spiritual that has become nature.

Behind appearances and ideals we must seek that which forms the bridge over the abyss. But one must discover it. Today one can only discover it if one is not afraid to develop the concepts so powerfully that they themselves can penetrate reality. Therefore, the present time really has the necessity to engage very much in everything that can be experienced spiritually. But — let me add this as a postscript — it will be necessary for people to be able to develop ever greater and greater impartiality towards spiritual considerations. The day before yesterday, I ended by pointing out, as it might seem unnecessary to do for some people, but I do not like to do it, it is never unnecessary, a number of things that stand in the way of fruitful spiritual scientific work, including on the part of the Anthroposophical Society. Above all, what is needed here is real impartiality. Time and again, we see that the dissolving power that actually brought about materialism and destroyed the old spirituality is penetrating into human thinking, especially into the spiritual, into the willed spiritual. I have pointed out how materialistic some theosophical views are. Of course, it is not easy to find the right words when discussing spiritual-scientific matters, because our language today is no longer suitable for the spiritual, because we first have to search again for such a connection between language and the subject that is suitable for the spiritual. But it is necessary that the spiritual-scientific movement is not always corrupted by what is most harmful. One must characterize impartially what takes place in the spirit. Again and again I experience that I am asked: There is someone, there is someone who has spiritual experiences. — The meaning of the questions, which are often asked in this way, is that the actual question is: Is it now possible to surrender to what this or that person sees with blind faith in the truth? And if the answer is in the affirmative, then blind devotion arises; if it is in the negative, then the person in question is immediately denounced as a heretic and it is said: Well, that is atavistic clairvoyance, you don't give anything to that. — Yes, this either-or must be taken quite differently in this field. We must really face up to the statements about the spiritual with all our healthy reason. But if we want to become dogmatists, we cannot become spiritual scientists. If we want to either idolize or condemn, we cannot become spiritual scientists. There will also be infinitely valuable contributions to the characterization of the spiritual world from sides that one does not necessarily want to swear by.

On the other hand, there are times when people swear by some esoteric personality. Then it can be shown that this seer personality has at some point – well, maybe even once – retouched a little, or retouched a lot; then that personality is finished. Before, the same people swore by them, and now they have been undone.

Yes, you don't get ahead within humanity in this way. You don't get ahead within humanity with the either/or of deification or demonization, but only by facing things with your common sense. For example, it may also be the case that someone, of whom one even knows: Well, he does not disdain to tell a tall tale now and then – something quite true, important, essential comes out of the spiritual world.

We would not have the either/or that I am talking about if we wanted to introduce dogmatics, but if we wanted to place ourselves with common sense, precisely within this anthroposophical movement. That is one thing. The other is this: it is extremely difficult, because of the way things are often handled within our circle, to place the Anthroposophical Society in the cultural movement of the present day. This requires discernment on the part of those who are already members of this society. Once you are a member, you have a certain obligation to exercise this discernment. For we will go completely wrong with this Anthroposophical Society if we do not seek to connect with the general spiritual culture of the present, if we repeatedly and repeatedly fall back into the error of being sectarian. That will be the death of our movement if we become sectarian. Just consider that things like the ones we have discussed these days will not seem particularly strange to someone who is currently involved in science and cultural life, if he or she only acquires the necessary lack of prejudice. But in order to achieve something in this way, it is necessary to have the will to distinguish. With us it can easily happen that a question is asked in a stereotyped way when it is a matter of: should someone listen to anthroposophical lectures or should he be given a cycle? So the question is asked in a stereotyped way, without taking into account the level of education, the whole world position of the person concerned. But the stereotyped way is what is absolutely harmful to us. It is the schematic that makes it possible for a person like the one in Holland, around whom a whole bunch of nonsense has crystallized, to swim into the Anthroposophical Society and find protectors there, while people who are capable of judgment are often repelled by it.

To mention a specific example: some time ago, Mr. von Bernus appeared within the Anthroposophical Society with the clear aim — which one may find a little better, a little worse, as common sense may speak — of building a bridge between the general cultural life, the literary and scientific life of the present, and our anthroposophical life. Now, Mr. von Bernus, in his own way, has poetically reworked and brought out into the world a number of things, some of which are in my books and some of which are in cycles. He showed me himself: he has received a pile of letters, letters of criticism, because a truly contemporary attempt has been made here! One would not be surprised if someone who perhaps has a lot at stake could be repelled by such behavior as was perpetrated against him by the Anthroposophical Society in the past. Nevertheless, the journal he founded will be of tremendous service to the Anthroposophical Movement. He had, after all, managed to get the Anthroposophical Society represented in Munich in his art gallery. But everywhere one could see certain resistances to something that was as justified as possible! And if one looks at Bernus' experiences, they give a good picture of how the Anthroposophical Society should learn to be a real society.

In so far as the Dornach structure came into being, it is a society. But much else, in particular, is left undone, clearly showing that the Anthroposophical Society does not see itself as a society at all, but as a sum of individual sectarian little circles. But we must get beyond this stage of sectarianism. And we will not get beyond it unless some thought is given to the matter.

It is so difficult, and it is true that one does not like to say such things, but after all, many things are necessarily said to me because I am personally so closely involved with this anthroposophical movement. If the Anthroposophical Society should gradually develop more and more into a society with an expressed tendency to keep me completely quiet — which is what it is actually developing into and what it has always had as a tendency — then it is not a matter of personal vanity when I emphasize this. It makes me very uncomfortable that I have to emphasize it, but in the Anthroposophical Society there is a tendency to keep quiet about me, and there the personal is linked to the factual. Because of this – because everything that a society otherwise does is not being done – only the venomous words that the apostate members have created bubble to the surface.

Yes, these are things that I sometimes have to point out and that must not remain unspoken. I have raised them in the places where I have been able to speak recently, because I really believe that in these catastrophic times it is very important that anthroposophy is represented in the world in the right way. But it is so difficult to get people to reflect more deeply on how one should actually proceed in the anthroposophical field in order to make this Anthroposophical Society a real society. — Individuals have indeed made a start, but as a rule everything gets stuck in the starting blocks. Now, I think that perhaps, by drawing attention to the matter a second time, it will be given a little thought. I am not saying this for personal reasons, but because of certain necessities of the time, as you will indeed gather from what I have just said, from which you will be able to discern many seeds that can serve to help you understand our catastrophic times.

[Blackboard writing] September 2, 1918

Every ideal is a germ for a future natural event.

Every natural event is the fruit of past spiritual events.

This lecture is from the lecture series entitled, Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. It is lecture 5 of 19 lectures given by Rudolf Steiner at various cities throught Austria and Germany in the years 1908–1909.

The word “mission” is perhaps not quite the correct term for our examination of this extraordinary phenomenon at the end of the fifteenth century. Perhaps regarding connections to Savonarola's personality could urge us to say these links would be far more important than defining the mission of Savonarola. This other aspect could come to the fore as soon as members of our Anthroposophic world-view and world movement make themselves familiar with the being of Savonarola because out of his actions and characteristics various things can be learnt. In a being such as Savonarola's we may see the dawn of a new time and up to what point the development of Christianity had reached by the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. It is exactly clear what kind of activity was not effective. We can see what kind of activity was introduced into the development of mankind.

It is necessary to show how certain one-sided influences regarding the empowering and the presentation of Christianity became unsuitable. It didn't take long—with some single thorough strokes we would like to regard Savonarola's actions. Beside Savonarola we can place another figure, quite different in nature, of a Dominican monk. This monk of the monastery from which Savonarola's serious speeches were published, had painted the most wonderful, delicate paintings: Fra Angelico da Fiesole During this dawn of a new age it indicated how Christianity revealed itself in two gestures. This is the proof of how Christianity could be expressed through the soul at this time. This is one way, but the other way—and this is Savonarola's way—is how Christianity could be lived through during this time. One could, if one was such a person as Savonarola, with certain confidence, a strong will and a definite clear understanding, act as he did. Still comparatively young he believed that within such an Order, where the real rules of the Order should be fulfilled, a true life in Christianity could be experienced. If one still had what Savonarola had, the deepest moral courage of conviction, one could direct one's focus to everything happening in the world. One could compare Christianity with events happening in Rome, with the actual worldly life of the Pope, the Cardinals, or how it expressed itself in the wonderful creations of Michelangelo! One could observe how in all the catholic churches Mass was read according to the strictest Cult, giving people the feeling that they couldn't live without the Cult. One could also see that whoever came under the robe, the stole and chasuble, could in their civil lives honour a liberality but that this liberality which was striven for, seen in today's eyes, is by contrast mere children's games. One can take that which from a certain aspect had been striven for as a tendency, and see it become a reality up to the highest steps of the altar.

One could at that time connect the higher worlds in a glowing belief that was absolutely democratic: domination of the gods without any human rulers! This was the pull of Savonarola's heart. The Medici could be admired for all they had done for Italy and for all they had brought to Italy, but one could also, like Savonarola, see the great De Medici, of Lorenzo de Medici, as tyrants. Imagine being Lorenzo de Medici and considering allowing such a quarrelsome Dominican to preach as he wished. Lorenzo de Medici was a distinguished thinker. He could grasp various things, because things should be considered from both sides. He had drawn Savonarola to Florence but Savonarola went against the grain from the start in considering Lorenzo as his patron. When Savonarola became Prior of the monastery, he didn't even consider making the expected visit of thanks. When it was explained to him that Lorenzo had called him to Florence, he said: Do you believe that Lorenzo de Medici was the one who called Savonarola to Florence? No, it was God who called Savonarola to this monastery in Florence!

As a distinguished man Lorenzo donated something to the monastery and one can imagine Savonarola being calmed by what had been given to the monastery. However he gave all these gifts away and announced that the Dominicans were capable of regarding their vow of poverty and to gather no treasures.

Who were actually the enemies of Savonarola? All those who created the configuration and the reign on the physical plane. Nothing disconcerted Savonarola. He went straight ahead. He said: There is a Christendom. Its actual form is in fact unknown to people. The church disfigures it. It must disappear and be replaced by a new form which would reveal the true Christian spirit.—He continued preaching these proclamations. Initially his preaching was with great difficulty because he could only utter the words from his throat with great effort. However he became an orator whose following grew continuously, whose oratory talents increased ever more.

The ruling powers were initially liberal; they didn't want to oppose him. It was an Augustinian monk who felt obliged to deliver a speech which would annihilate Savonarola's power. His speech was delivered under the theme: “It doesn't befit us to know the day and hour when the divine Creator got involved with the world.” This Augustinian monk spoke in fiery words and one could say, being cognisant of the steams flooding Christian life, the entire declaration of belief of the Dominicans domain now opposed that of the Augustinians.—Savonarola prepared for battle and spoke about the same theme: “It befits us well to know things are not as they seem. It befits us to change them and know when the day and hour arrives.” The Florentine crowds cheered like they had cheered the Augustinian monk. He wasn't only considered a danger in Florence but also in Rome and in the whole of Italy. After the unbelievable agony of torture and falsified evidence he was condemned to be burnt at the stake.

Thus Savonarola lived while at the same time another Dominican monk painted a Christianity which hardly exists in the physical world. When we search for a specific word in our thoughts which was spoken by an extraordinary man regarding Savonarola, namely Jacob Burkhardt, the famous Renaissance historian, we can develop the opinion that life was so extensive in Italy that you stood directly before secularisation of the church, which meant the church turning into a worldly organisation, then we may conclude that Savonarola was the everlasting conscience of Christianity.

What caused the ineffectiveness of Savonarola despite his fiery entrance into Christianity? He is a historical figure. This was the cause: In this dawning of a new age and in this dusk of the church where Savonarola instilled his Christianity, something was introduced which worked against the external organisation of Christianity. This test proves it, not even such a figure as Savonarola could be produced again in Christianity. The spiritual-scientifically striving person should learn from this that there is something else necessary, something objective, which makes it possible for the deep springs of esoteric Christianity to be exhausted. Such an instrument can only be Anthroposophy. The figure of Savonarola is like a distant sign lit up in the future of what Anthroposophists should be learning, not through the means which one believed at the time, to re-discover Christianity, but with the means of anthroposophical spiritual science. As Anthroposophist one can learn much from this figure.

[ 1 ] During our last meeting here some time ago we spoke of the deeper currents of Christianity with particular reference to the Gospel of St. John and of the great images and ideas accessible to man when he reflects deeply upon this unique text. More than once it has been emphasized that the very depths of Christianity are illuminated by that Gospel and some of those who have heard lecture-courses on the same subject might feel inclined to ask: If the viewpoint reached through studying the Gospel of St. John may truly be called the most profound, can it be widened or enriched in any way by study of the other three Gospels of St. Luke, St. Matthew and St. Mark? Again, those who tend to be mentally lazy might ask: If the deepest depths of Christianity are to be found in the Gospel of St. John, is it still necessary to study Christianity as presented in the other Gospels, especially in the apparently less profound Gospel of St. Luke?

[ 2 ] Anyone who might put this question believing such an attitude to be worthy of consideration would be labouring under a complete misapprehension. The scope of Christianity itself is infinite and light can be shed upon it from the most diverse standpoints. Furthermore, as the present course of lectures will show, although the Gospel of St. John is a document of untold profundity, there are facts which can be learnt from the Gospel of St. Luke and not from that of St. John. The ideas which in the lectures on the Gospel of St. John we came to recognize as among the most profound in Christianity, do not by any means comprise all its depths. It is possible to penetrate these depths from another starting-point altogether, basing our studies on the Gospel of St. Luke viewed in the light of Anthroposophy.

[ 3 ] Let us once again recall facts in support of the statement that there is something to be gained from the Gospel of St. Luke even if the depths of the Gospel of St. John have been exhaustively studied. A fact revealed to the student of Anthroposophy by every line of the Gospel of St. John is that records such as the Gospels were composed by individuals who, as initiates and clairvoyants, possessed deeper insight than other men into the nature of existence. In everyday parlance the terms ‘initiate’ and ‘clairvoyant’ may be synonymous. But if our studies of Anthroposophy are to lead us into the deeper strata of spiritual life, we must distinguish between one who is an ‘initiate’ and one who is a ‘clairvoyant’, for they represent two distinct categories of human beings who have found their way into the spheres of super-sensible existence. There is a difference between an initiate and a clairvoyant, although an initiate may at the same time be a clairvoyant, and a clairvoyant an initiate of a certain grade. To distinguish with exactitude between these two categories of human beings you must recall the facts described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, remembering that strictly speaking there are three stages on the path leading beyond ordinary perception of the world.

[ 4 ] The first kind of knowledge accessible to man can be described by saying: he beholds the world through his senses and assimilates what he perceives by means of his intellect and the other faculties of his soul. Beyond this, there are three further stages of knowledge, of cognition: the first is the stage of Imagination, Imaginative Cognition, the second is the stage of Inspiration, and the third is the stage of Intuition—but the term ‘Intuition’ must be understood in its true sense.

[ 5 ] The faculty of Imaginative Cognition is possessed by one before whose eye of spirit all that lies behind the world of the senses is unfolded in mighty, cosmic pictures—but these pictures do not in the least resemble anything we call by this name in everyday life. Apart from the difference that the pictures revealed by Imaginative Cognition are independent of the laws of three-dimensional space, other characteristics make it impossible for them to be compared with anything in the world of the senses.

[ 6 ] An idea of the world of Imagination may be gained in the following way. Suppose someone were able to extract from a plant in front of him everything perceptible to the sense of sight as ‘colour’, so that this hovered freely in the air. If he were to do nothing more than draw out the colour from the plant, a lifeless colour-form would hover before him. But to the clairvoyant such a colour-form is anything but a lifeless picture, for when he extracts the colour from the objects, then, through the preparation he has undergone and the exercises he has practised, this colour-picture begins to be animated by spirit just as in the physical world it was filled by the living substance of the plant. He then has before him, not a lifeless colour-form but freely moving coloured light, glistening, sparkling, full of inner life; each colour is the expression of the particular nature of a spiritual being imperceptible in the world of the physical senses. That is to say, the colour in the physical plant becomes for the clairvoyant the expression of spiritual beings. [ 7 ] Now imagine a world filled with such colour-forms, reflected in manifold ways and in perpetual metamorphosis; your vision must not be confined to the colours, as it might be when confronting a painting of glimmering colour-reflections, but you must imagine it all as the expression of beings of soul-and-spirit, so that you can say to yourselves: ‘When a green colour-picture flashes up it expresses to me the fact that an intellectual being is behind it; or when a reddish colour-picture flashes up it is to me the expression of a being with a fiery, violent nature.’ Now imagine this whole sea of interweaving colours I might equally well say a sea of interplaying sensations of tone, taste, or smell, for all these are the expressions of beings of soul-and-spirit behind them—and you have what is called the ‘Imaginative’ world, the world of Imagination. It is nothing to which the word ‘imagination’ (fancy) in its ordinary sense could be applied; it is a real world, requiring a mode of comprehension different from that derived from the senses.

[ 8 ] Within this world of Imagination you encounter everything that is behind the sense-world and is imperceptible to the physical senses—for instance, the etheric and astral bodies. A man whose knowledge of the world is derived from this clairvoyant, Imaginative perception, becomes acquainted with the outward aspect of higher beings, just as you become acquainted with the outward, physical aspect of a man in the physical world who, let us say, passes in front of you in the street. You know more about him when there is an opportunity of talking with him. His words then give you an impression differing from the one he makes upon you when you look at him in the street. In the case of many a man whom you pass by (to mention this one example only) you cannot observe whether his soul is moved by inner joy or grief, sorrow or delight. But you can discover this if you converse with him. In the one case his outward aspect is conveyed to you through everything you can perceive without his assistance; in the other case he expresses his very self to you. The same applies to the beings of the super-sensible world. [ 9 ] A clairvoyant who comes to recognize these beings through Imaginative Cognition knows only their outward aspect. But he hears them give expression to their very selves when he rises from Imaginative Knowledge to Knowledge through Inspiration. He then has actual intercourse with these beings. They communicate to him from their inmost selves what and who they are. Inspiration is therefore a higher stage of knowledge than Imagination, and more is learnt about the beings of the world of soul-and-spirit at the stage of Inspiration than can be learnt through Imagination.

[ 10 ] A still higher stage of knowledge is that of Intuition—but the word must be taken in its spiritual-scientific sense, not in that of day-to-day parlance, when anything that occurs to one, however hazy and nebulous, may be called ‘intuition’. In our sense, Intuition is a form of knowledge thanks to which we not only listen spiritually to what the beings communicate to us, but we become one with the very beings themselves. This is a very lofty stage of spiritual knowledge for it requires, at the outset, that there shall be in the human being that quality of universal love which causes him to make no distinction between himself and the other beings in his spiritual environment, but to pour forth his very self into the environment; thus he no longer remains outside but lives within the beings with whom he has spiritual communion. Because this can take place only in a spiritual world, the expression ‘Intuition’, i.e. ‘to dwell in the God’ is entirely appropriate. Thus there are three stages of knowledge of the super-sensible worlds: Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

[ 11 ] It is possible, of course, to attain all these three stages of super-sensible knowledge, but it may also be that in some one incarnation the stage of Imagination only is reached. Then the spheres of the spiritual world attainable through Inspiration and Intuition remain hidden from the clairvoyant concerned. In our present age it is not usual for a person to be led to the higher stages of spiritual experience before having passed through the stage of Imagination; it is hardly possible for anyone to omit the stage of Imagination and be led at once to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition. But what would not be appropriate to-day, could happen and actually did happen in certain other periods of the evolution of man.

[ 12 ] There were times when Imagination on the one hand and Inspiration and Intuition on the other were apportioned to different individuals. In certain Mystery-centres there were men whose eyes of spirit were open in such a way that they were clairvoyant in the sphere of Imagination and that world of symbolical pictures was accessible to them. Because with this grade of clairvoyance, such men said: ‘For this incarnation I renounce the attainment of the higher stages of Inspiration and Intuition’, they made themselves capable of seeing clearly and with exactitude in the world of Imagination. They underwent much training in order to develop vision of that world. [ 13 ] But one thing was essential for them. Anyone who wants to confine his vision to the world of Imagination and gives up any attempt to advance to Inspiration and Intuition, lives in a world of uncertainty. This world of flowing Imaginations is, so to say, boundless, and if left to its own resources the soul floats hither and thither without being really aware of its direction or goal. In those times, therefore, and among peoples where certain human beings renounced the higher stages of knowledge, it was necessary for those whose clairvoyance had reached the stage of Imagination to attach themselves with utter devotion to leaders whose capacities of spiritual perception were open to Inspiration and Intuition. For Inspiration and Intuition alone can give such certainty in regard to the spiritual world that a man knows with full assurance: Thither leads the path—towards a definite goal! Without Inspiration it is not possible to say: There is the path; I must follow it in order to reach a goal! Whoever, therefore, cannot say this must entrust himself to the wise guidance of someone who says it to him. Hence in so many quarters it is constantly emphasized, and rightly so, that whoever rises, to begin with, to the stage of Imagination, must attach himself inwardly to a Guru—a leader who gives both direction and aim to his experiences. [ 14 ] It was also advisable in certain epochs—but this is no longer the case to-day—to allow other individuals to omit the stage of Imagination and to lead them at once to Inspiration or, if possible, to Intuition. Such men renounced the possibility of perceiving the Imaginative pictures of the spiritual world around them; they lent themselves only to such impressions from the spiritual world as issue from the inner life of the beings there. They listened with their ears of spirit to the utterances of the beings of the spiritual world. Suppose there is a screen between you and another man whom you do not see but only hear him speaking behind the screen. It is certainly possible to renounce pictorial vision of the spiritual world in order to be led more quickly to the stage of hearing the utterances of the spiritual beings. No matter whether a person sees the pictures of the world of Imagination or not—if he is able to apprehend with spiritual ears what the beings in the spiritual world communicate regarding themselves, we say of him that he is endowed with the power to hear the ‘inner word’—in contrast to the outer word used in the physical world between man and man.

We can thus conceive that there are people who, without beholding the world of Imaginations, are endowed with the power to apprehend the inner word and can hear and communicate the utterances of spiritual beings. [ 15 ] There were periods in the evolution of humanity when, within the Mysteries, these two forms of super-sensible cognition worked in co-operation. Each individual who had renounced the faculty of perception possessed by another, could develop greater clarity and definition in his own faculty and at certain periods this resulted in a truly wonderful co-operation within the Mysteries. There were clairvoyants who had specially trained themselves to see the world of Imaginative pictures, and there were others who, having passed over the world of Imagination, had trained themselves to receive the inner word into their souls through Inspiration. And so the one could communicate to the other the experiences made possible by his particular training. This was possible in times when some degree of confidence reigned between one man and another; to-day it is out of the question, simply because of the character of our age. Nowadays one man has not such strong belief in another that he would listen to his descriptions of the pictures of the world of Imagination and then, honestly believing those descriptions to be accurate, supplement them with what he himself knows through Inspiration. Nowadays, everyone wants to see it all himself—and that is natural in our age. Very few people would be satisfied with a one-sided development of Imagination such as was taken for granted in certain epochs. In our present time, therefore, it is necessary for a man to be led through the three stages of higher knowledge without omitting any one of them.

[ 16 ] At each stage of super-sensible knowledge we encounter the great mysteries connected with the Christ Event, about which all three forms of cognition—Imaginative, Inspirational, Intuitive—have infinitely much to say.

[ 17 ] If with this in mind we turn our attention to the four Gospels, we may say that the Gospel of St. John is written from the vantage-point of one who in the fullest sense was an Initiate, cognisant at the stage of Intuition of the mysteries of the super-sensible world, and who therefore describes the Christ Event as revealed by the vision of Intuition. But if close attention is paid to the distinctive characteristics of St. John's Gospel it will have to be admitted that the features standing out most clearly are presented from the standpoint of Inspiration and Intuition, while everything originating from the pictures of Imagination is shadowy and lacks definition. Thus if we disregard what was still revealed to him through Imagination, we may call the writer of St. John's Gospel the messenger of everything relating to the Christ Event that is vouchsafed to one endowed with the power of apprehending the inner word at the stage of Intuition. Hence he describes the mysteries of Christ's Kingdom as receiving their character through the inner Word, or Logos. Knowledge through Inspiration and Intuition is the source of the Gospel of St. John.

[ 18 ] It is different in the case of the other three Gospels, and not one of their writers expressed his message as clearly as did the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke. [ 19 ] In a short but remarkable preface it is said, in effect, that many others had previously attempted to collect and set forth the stories in circulation concerning the events in Palestine; but that for the sake of accuracy and order the writer of this Gospel is now undertaking to present the things which ... and now come significant words ... could be understood by those who from the beginning were ‘eye-witnesses and servants (ministers) of the Word’—that is the usual rendering. The aim of the writer of this Gospel is therefore to communicate what eye-witnesses—it would be better to say ‘seers’ (Selbstseher)—and servants of the Word had to say. In the sense of St. Luke's Gospel, ‘seers’ are men who through Imaginative Cognition can penetrate into the world of pictures and there behold the Christ Event; people specially trained to perceive these Imaginations are seers with accurate and clear vision at the same time as being ‘servants of the Word’—a significant phrase—and the writer of St. Luke's Gospel uses their communications as a foundation. He does not say ‘possessors’ of the Word, because such persons would have reached the stage of Inspiration in the fullest sense; he says ‘servants’ of the Word—people who could count less upon Inspirations than upon Imaginations in their own knowledge but for whom communications from the world of Inspiration were nevertheless available. The results of Inspirational Cognition were communicated to them and they could proclaim what their inspired teachers had made known to them. They were ‘servants’, not ‘possessors’ of the Word.

[ 20 ] Thus the Gospel of St. Luke is founded upon the communications of seers, themselves knowers of the world of Imagination; they are those who, having learnt to express their visions of that world through means made possible by their inspired teachers, had themselves become ‘servants of the Word’.

[ 21 ] Here again is an example of the exactitude of the Gospel records and of the need to understand the words in the strictly literal sense. In texts based upon spiritual knowledge, everything is exact to a degree often undreamed of by modern man.

[ 22 ] But we must now again remember—as always when such matters are considered from the anthroposophical standpoint—that, for spiritual science, the Gospels themselves are not original sources of knowledge in the actual sense. One who stands strictly on the ground of spiritual science will not necessarily take a statement to be the truth simply because it stands in the Gospels. The spiritual scientist does not draw his knowledge from written documents but from the yields of spiritual investigation. Communications made by beings of the spiritual world to the initiate and the clairvoyant in the present age—these are the sources of knowledge for spiritual science. And in a certain respect these sources are the same in our age as in the times just described to you. Hence in our age too, those who have insight into the world of Imagination may be called clairvoyants, but only those who can rise to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition can be called ‘Initiates’. In our present age the expressions ‘clairvoyant’ and ‘initiate’ are not necessarily synonymous.

[ 23 ] The content of the Gospel of St. John could be based only upon knowledge possessed by an Initiate capable of rising to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition. The contents of the other three Gospels could be based upon the communications of persons endowed with Imaginative clairvoyance but not yet able themselves to rise to the stages of Inspiration and Intuition. If therefore we adhere strictly to this distinction, St. John's Gospel is based upon Initiation, and the other three, especially that of St. Luke—according to what the writer himself says—upon Clairvoyance. Because this is the case, and because everything that is revealed to the vision of a highly trained clairvoyant is introduced, this Gospel gives us well-defined pictures of what is contained in the Gospel of St. John in faint impressions only. In order to make the difference even more obvious, let me say the following.

[ 24 ] Although it would hardly ever be the case to-day, let us suppose a man were initiated in such a way that the worlds of Inspiration and of Intuition were open to him but that he was not clairvoyant in the world of Imagination. Suppose such a man met another, perhaps not initiated but to whom the whole world of Imaginations was open. This man would be able to communicate a great deal to the first who might possibly only be able to explain it through Inspiration but could not himself see it, having no faculty of clairvoyance. There are many to-day who are clairvoyant without being initiates; the reverse is hardly ever the case. Nevertheless it might conceivably happen that someone who had been initiated, could not, although possessing the gift of clairvoyance, for some reason or other perceive the Imaginations in a particular instance. A clairvoyant would then be able to tell such a man a great deal as yet unknown to him.

[ 25 ] It must be strongly emphasized that Anthroposophy relies upon no other source than that of the Initiates, and that the texts of the Gospels are not the actual sources of its knowledge. The fount of anthroposophical knowledge is investigated to-day independently of any historical records. But then we turn to the records and compare the findings of spiritual-scientific research with them. What Anthroposophy can at all times discover about the Christ Event without the help of any documentary record is found again in the Gospel of St. John, presented in a most sublime way. Hence its supreme value, for it shows us that at the time when it was composed a man was living who wrote as one initiated into the spiritual world can write to-day. The same voice, as it were, that can be heard to-day, sounds across to us from the depths of the centuries.

[ 26 ] The same can be said of the other Gospels, including that of St. Luke. It is not the pictures delineated by the writer of the Gospel of St. Luke that are for us the source of knowledge of the higher worlds; the source for us lies in the results of ascent into the super-sensible world. When we speak of the Christ Event, a source for us is also that great tableau of pictures and Imaginations appearing when we direct our gaze to the beginning of our era. We compare what thus reveals itself with the pictures and Imaginations described in the Gospel of St. Luke; and this course of lectures will show how the Imaginative pictures accessible to man to-day compare with the descriptions given in that Gospel.

[ 27 ] The truth is that there is only one source for spiritual investigation when directed to the events of the past. This source does not lie in external records; no stones dug out of the earth, no documents preserved in archives, no treatises written by historians either with or without insight—none of these things is the source of spiritual science. What we are able to read in the imperishable Akashic Chronicle—that is the source of spiritual science. The possibility exists of knowing what has happened in the past without reference to external records. [ 28 ] Modern man has thus two ways of acquiring information about the past. He can take the documents and the historical records when he wants to learn something about outer events, or the religious scripts when he wants to learn something about the conditions of spiritual life. Or else he can ask: What have those men to say before whose spiritual vision lies that imperishable Chronicle known as the ‘Akashic Chronicle’—that mighty tableau in which there is registered whatever has at any time come to pass in the evolution of the world, of the earth and of humanity?

[ 29 ] Whoever raises his consciousness into the spiritual world learns gradually to read this chronicle. It is no ordinary script. Think of the course of events, just as they happened, presented to your spiritual vision; think, let us say, of the Emperor Augustus and all his deeds standing before you in a cloud-like picture. The picture stands there before the spiritual-scientific investigator and he can at any time evoke the experience anew. He requires no external evidence. He need only direct his gaze to a definite point in cosmic or human happenings and the events will present themselves to him in a spiritual picture. In this way the spiritual gaze can survey the ages of the past, and what is there perceived is recorded as the findings of spiritual investigation.

[ 30 ] What happened at the beginning of our era can be perceived by spiritual vision and compared, for example, with what is related in the Gospel of St. Luke. Then the spiritual investigator recognizes that at that time too there were seers able to behold the past; and moreover the accounts they give of happenings in their own times can be compared with what is revealed to-day by spiritual investigation of the Akashic Chronicle.

[ 31 ] Again and again it must be realized that we do not have recourse to outer records but to the actual findings of spiritual investigation and that we then try to rediscover these results in the outer records. The value of the records themselves is thereby enhanced and we can come to a decision about the truth of their contents on the strength of our own investigations. They lie before us as, even more faithful expression of the truth because we ourselves are able to recognize the truth. But a statement such as this must not be made without at the same time affirming that this ‘reading in the Akashic Chronicle’ is by no means as easy as observation of events in the physical world! With the help of an example I should like to give you an idea of certain difficulties that may arise.

[ 32 ] We know from elementary Anthroposophy that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. The moment we are no longer observing man on the physical plane but rise into the spiritual world, the difficulties begin. When we have a human being physically before us, we see a unity formed by physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. Whoever observes a human being during waking life has all this before him as unity, but if it is necessary for some reason to rise into the higher worlds in order to observe a human being, the difficulties at once begin. Suppose, for example, we wish to observe a human being in his totality while he is asleep during the night, and rise into the world of Imagination in order, let us say, to perceive his astral body—which is now outside the physical body. The human being is now divided into two. [ 33 ] What I am describing will seldom occur in this particular form, for observation of the human being is comparatively easy, but it will help to convey an idea of the difficulties in question.

Suppose someone goes into a room where a number of people are asleep. He sees their physical bodies lying there and, if he is clairvoyant, their etheric bodies too; at a higher stage of clairvoyance he sees their astral bodies. But in the astral world everything interpenetrates—including, of course, the astral bodies of human beings. Although it would not often happen to a trained clairvoyant, when looking at a number of sleeping people he might mistake which astral body belonged to some particular physical body below. As I said, it is an unlikely occurrence because this is one of the first stages of actual vision and because anyone who attains it is well trained in how to distinguish in such a case. But the difficulties become very considerable when spiritual beings—not human beings—are observed in the spiritual world. As a matter of fact the difficulties are already great if a human being is to be observed, not as he is at present, but in his totality, as he passes through incarnations. [ 34 ] Thus if you observe a human being now living and ask yourself: Where was his Ego in his previous incarnation? you have to go through the Devachanic world to reach his former incarnation. You must be able to establish which Ego has always belonged to the preceding incarnations of the person in question. You must hold together, in an intricate way, the continuous Ego and the various stages down on the Earth. Mistakes are very possible here and error can very easily occur when looking for an Ego in its earlier bodies. In the higher worlds, therefore, it is not easy to maintain the connection between everything belonging to a human personality and his former incarnations as inscribed in the Akashic Chronicle.

[ 35 ] Suppose someone has before him a man—let us call him John Smith—and as a clairvoyant or initiate he asks: ‘Who were the physical ancestors of this man?’—Let us assume that all external records have been lost and there is only the Akashic Chronicle upon which to rely. It would be a matter of having to discover from the Akashic Chronicle the physical ancestors of the man—the father, mother, grandfather, and so on, in order to see how the physical body evolved in the line of physical descent. But then there might be the further question: ‘What were the earlier incarnations of this man?’ To answer that question an entirely different path must be taken than when looking for the physical ancestors. It may be necessary to go back through long, long ages in order to arrive at the previous incarnations of the Ego.

Already you have two streams: the physical body as it stands before you is not a completely new creation, for it springs from the ancestors in the line of physical heredity; nor is the Ego a completely new creation, for it is linked with its previous incarnations. [ 36 ] The same holds good for the intermediate members, the etheric and astral bodies. Most of you know that the etheric body is not a completely new creation but that it too may have taken a path leading through the most diverse forms. The etheric body of Zarathustra reappeared in Moses. It was the same etheric body. If we were to seek out the physical ancestors of Moses this would give us one line; if we were to seek out the ancestors of the etheric body of Moses we should get another, quite different line; here we should come to the etheric body of Zarathustra and to other etheric bodies. [ 37 ] Just as we have to trace quite different lines for the physical body and the etheric body, the same applies to the astral body. Each separate member of the human being might lead to very diverse streams. Thus the etheric body may be the etheric re-embodiment of an etheric body that belonged to a different individuality altogether—not by any means the same in which the Ego was formerly incarnated. And the same can be said of the astral body.

[ 38 ] When we rise into the higher worlds in order to investigate the several members of a human being, the individual streams all take different directions, and in following them we come to very intricate processes in the spiritual world. Whoever wishes to understand a human being from the vantage-point of spiritual investigation, must describe him not merely as a descendant of his ancestors, not merely as having derived his etheric body or his astral body from this or that being, but he must describe the paths taken by all these four members until they unite in the present individual. This cannot be done all at once. For instance, we may trace the path followed by the etheric body and reach important conclusions. Someone else may trace the path of the astral body. The one may lay more stress on the etheric body, the other on the astral body, and frame his descriptions accordingly. To those who do not notice everything said about an individual by men who are clairvoyant, it will make no difference whether one says this and another that; it will seem to them that the same entity is being described. In their eyes the one who describes the physical personality only and the other who describes the etheric body are both speaking of the same being—John Smith.

[ 39 ] All this can give you an idea of the complexity of circumstances and conditions encountered when it is a question of describing the nature of any phenomenon in the world—whether a human or any other being—from the standpoint of clairvoyant research or Initiation-knowledge. I was obliged to say the foregoing because it will help you to understand that only the most extensive investigation in the Akashic Chronicle can present any being in full clarity to the eyes of spirit.

[ 40 ] The Being who stands before us as the Gospel of St. John describes Him—no matter whether we speak of Him as Jesus of Nazareth before the Baptism by John or as Christ after the Baptism—that Being stands before us with an Ego, an astral body, an etheric body and physical body. To give a full description according to the Akashic Chronicle of the Being who was Christ Jesus, we must trace the paths traversed by the four members of His nature in the course of the evolution of humanity. Only then can we rightly understand Him. It is here a question of grasping the meaning of the information regarding the Christ Event given by modern spiritual-scientific investigation, for light must be shed on apparent contradictions in the four Gospels.

[ 41 ] I have often pointed out why purely materialistic research cannot recognize the supreme value and profundity of the Gospel of St. John: it is because those who carry out this research cannot understand that a higher Initiate sees differently, more deeply, than the others. Those who have doubts about the Gospel of St. John attempt to establish a kind of conformity between the three synoptic Gospels. But conformity will be difficult to establish and sustain if it is based only upon the external, material happenings. What will be of particular importance in tomorrow's lecture, namely the life of Jesus of Nazareth before the Baptism by John, is described by two Evangelists, by the writers of the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke, and external, materialistic observation will find differences there that are in no way less than those which must be assumed to exist between the Gospel of St. John and the other three Gospels.

Let us take the facts: The writer of the Gospel of St. Matthew relates how the birth of the Creator of Christianity was announced beforehand, how the birth took place, how Magi, having seen the ‘star’, came from the East, being led by the star to the place where the Redeemer was born; he describes how Herod's attention was aroused and how, in order to escape the massacre of the babes in Bethlehem, the parents of the Redeemer fled with the child to Egypt; when Herod was dead it was made known to Joseph, the father of Jesus, that they might return, but for fear of Herod's successor they went to Nazareth instead of returning to Bethlehem.

To-day I will leave aside the Baptist's proclamation, but I want to draw attention to the fact that if we compare the Gospels of St. Luke and St. Matthew we find the annunciation of Jesus of Nazareth described quite differently; the one Gospel relates that it was made to Mary, the other that it was made to Joseph. From the Gospel of St. Luke we learn that the parents of Jesus of Nazareth lived at that place and went to Bethlehem on the occasion of the enrolling. While they were there, Jesus was born. Then came the circumcision, after eight days—nothing is said about a flight into Egypt—and a short time afterwards the child was presented in the temple; the customary offering having been made, the parents returned with the child to Nazareth. A remarkable incident is then described—how on the occasion of a visit with his parents to Jerusalem the twelve-year-old Jesus remained behind in the temple, how his parents sought and found him there among those who expounded the scriptures, how among the learned doctors of the Law he gave evidence of profound knowledge of the scriptures. Then it is related how the parents took the child home with them again, how he grew up ... and we hear nothing particular about him from that time until the Baptism by John.

[ 42 ] Here we have two accounts of Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ descended into him. Whoever wishes to reconcile the accounts must consider how, according to the ordinary materialistic view, he can reconcile the story in the Gospel of St. Matthew that directly after the birth of Jesus his parents, Joseph and Mary, fled with the child into Egypt and subsequently returned, with the other story of the presentation in the temple narrated by St. Luke.

[ 43 ] In these lectures we shall find that what seems a complete contradiction to the ordinary mind will be revealed as truth in the light of spiritual investigation. Both accounts are true!—although presented as accounts of events in the physical world they are in apparent contradiction. Precisely the three synoptic Gospels of St. Matthew, St. Mark and St. Luke ought to compel people to adopt a spiritual conception of events in the history of humanity. For it is surely obvious that nothing is attained by ignoring apparent contradictions in such records or by speaking of ‘fiction’ when realities prove too great an obstacle.

[ 44 ] We shall have opportunity here to speak of things of which there was no occasion to speak in detail when we were studying the Gospel of St. John namely, the events that took place before the Baptism by John and the descent of the Christ into the three bodies of Jesus of Nazareth. Many riddles of vital significance concerning the essence of Christianity will find their solution when—as the outcome of research into the Akashic Chronicle—we hear of the being and nature of Jesus of Nazareth before the Christ took possession of his three bodies.

[ 45 ] Tomorrow we shall begin by considering the nature and the life of Jesus of Nazareth as revealed in the Akashic Chronicle, and then ask ourselves: How does the knowledge of Jesus of Nazareth compare with what is described in the Gospel of St. Luke as imparted by those who at that time were ‘seers’ or ‘servants’ of the Word, of the Logos?

Yesterday I tried to point out to you ideas which should really be clear to people who are truly striving for progress in the present day. In particular, I tried to point out ideas that are suitable for bringing real new life into the cultivation of intellectual life and especially into the cultivation of the educational and school system. And among the hindrances that stand in the way of real clear-sightedness in this field, we have found above all the modern tendency to use empty phrases and meaningless words. For as soon as a thought is expressed in words, the words lead to action, for action follows. For there is an abyss between the word and the deed. This is always the case because the word lacks the thought. And our spiritual science, which, since it has existed as such, has wanted to serve the real spiritual and thus also the social progress of the present, has always endeavored to infuse new spirit into words that have gradually become mere phrases, that have become empty of content.

In view of what has just been said, it is necessary for you to grasp something quite correctly. We speak of many forces in the universe, which we then designate with certain names, that is, with certain words. It goes without saying that something new should be consciously expressed in such words. But for this to happen, it is necessary to slowly develop this newness. Our spiritual science movement has existed for a long time. What was to be laid down in it has been laid down in a series of books and in a series of lecture cycles. These books and cycles are intended to fill us with such a spirit that we can think our way into certain words in which we then have to express what is actually the content of the whole anthroposophical world view. It is essential that we do this. And for that we must fully realize: if we do not make an effort to evoke an understanding of this spiritual content through one or the other way, then the words we use for our spiritual content must, of course, sound like an empty phrase to the outside world. This must be particularly well observed today because we have to put ourselves in a position to properly influence the spiritual and the teaching and educational spheres. If the teaching and education system continues to develop as it has done so far, it will put the social life of humanity in a terrible position. Then, precisely because of this teaching and education system, the anti-social spirit will take root ever more deeply in our modern humanity to an extreme degree. There is also external evidence for this, which, I might say, can be found at every turn in the street, but which, strangely enough, only leads people to stop halfway. I would like to point out a very telling example in this regard, which could, however, be multiplied a hundredfold or a thousandfold.

As early as the last decade of the last century, Theobald Ziegler, a philosopher teaching in Strasbourg, gave lectures in Hamburg on general education. These lectures have been republished time and again, and they contain much of what should actually be of particular concern to today's humanity, that is, to those who actually reflect on such things, on education, from today's point of view. I will single out one question, the question of the state's supervision of schools. Theobald Ziegler discusses how the difficulty in this area of school supervision arose from the fact that this school supervision was still entirely in the hands of the clergy relatively recently, and that the teaching profession struggled with the help of the state to wrest this school supervision from the clergy. As a result, the teaching profession also turned to the all-protective state and found that it is better for the state to protect us than for the clergy to do so. And people like Theobald Ziegler, who deal with such questions from the point of view of our current higher education, say the following to themselves. I will read his words to you: “If, however, the sovereignty of the state over the school is both right and duty,” - that is, right and duty at the same time - “then we must not close our eyes to the dangers of this nationalization of education, as they have often emerged in the field of higher education in particular. The spirit of bureaucracy weighs heavily on schools as well. Above all, it hinders the freedom of movement that is so necessary, as it would be granted to the municipalities and school institutions according to the various local needs, but also according to other differences that may exist in the teaching staff; it works towards an intellectual uniformity that is very detrimental to our education; this already suffers enough from templates and uniformity. The formalistic lawyer at the head of most German school administrations also hinders pedagogical progress; because he himself is sterile – never has a director of legal studies had a pedagogical idea that would have made a mark in the field under his supervision! It is important to resist this bureaucratic school regime and to demand far-reaching freedom for the schools of larger and more intelligent communities, which are often superior to the state in their understanding of socio-political demands and usually also ahead of it in their realization.

A man of this kind sees all this. Yet he introduces this sentence with the words: “But the supremacy of the state over the school is both a right and a duty.” Now, should not the thought arise in some souls: how little courage such people have to draw the consequences from what they actually understand. The question must arise in our minds: How is it actually that when a plight of the worst kind is recognized, people only come to the conclusion: But we have to leave it, we have to let the state have this supervision of the school; it has a right to do so and it has a duty to do so? This question should at least be raised today by some courageous souls. For our university professors recognize the evil, but they do not want to cure it. This question should be raised. And if it is raised, it cannot be answered at first. Look for answers to this question – you cannot say that the good will is not there. Why can't it be answered at first? Yes, because there is only one answer. However paradoxical it may still sound today, there is only one answer to this question in the present: our education, our entire spiritual life will never again acquire a cultural physiognomy if it is not imbued with a world view that belongs in our present time, but which is born out of the modern, not the traditional human being. Spiritual science has sought such a world view and is still seeking it. It is therefore called upon above all to provide the answer to this question. There is an inner connection here, and all social striving in the present time will not get beyond this connection. But it is up to us to make this connection clear and distinct and intensely present to our souls.

It is truly not for any agitational reasons, such as wanting to stand up for one's own, but it is the realization that out of necessity, it is to be brought into this present time what this present time particularly needs for a renewal of spiritual life. But spiritual science can only be brought into the present in a truly liberated spiritual life. This spiritual science itself brings to light truths that are unfamiliar to today's humanity. And when these truths are clothed in the words that today's humanity is accustomed to, then this humanity becomes furious. For it is indeed a characteristic manifestation that today's humanity rages over everything that has some kind of spiritual-scientific background. It is not aware of the reasons for its rage, but it becomes all the more furious the more it clings to the old. It simply becomes furious when it feels instinctively: There is something underlying that we just do not want to have, there is something spiritual-scientific underlying. That was also the case with the Appeal. People do not admit to themselves that they are angry, but say: It is incomprehensible to us. But the fact is that they are angry because something is coming from a side that they would actually like to perhorteszieren. We should not deceive ourselves about this fact either, for this spiritual science must one day, in all seriousness and with all its strength, bring truths to light that today's humanity simply does not like, but without which the further development of today's humanity cannot happen. That is why we are rushing into decadence, because humanity rejects what it actually needs for progress from the old habits of thinking.

I would like to start today's reflection with two truths. To do so, I would like to return to something I said yesterday. You know that we summarize certain forces that play a role in world evolution and also have an influence on human beings as, on the one hand, Luciferic forces and, on the other, Ahrimanic forces. With such words, it takes years to grasp what lies within them, otherwise they remain mere phrases. But once one has grasped their content, then in these words one has something one must have, just as the electrician has two impulses in his positive and negative electricity, which he must have in order to be able to speak of the things.

The aim is to take the scientific spirit that prevails in inorganic natural science and carry it up into the life of the spirit, but not in the sense of becoming a monist in the popular sense. Rather, it is about actually metamorphosing the way of thinking that prevails there for the higher branches of the life of the spirit, and expressing it in these higher branches. If someone were to speak of positive and negative soul forces in relation to the soul and spiritual life, they would lapse into the most extreme abstraction. Yet the very same way of thinking that correctly speaks of positive and negative in an inorganic field speaks of Luciferic and Ahrimanic in the soul-spiritual field. We can also define what Luciferic and Ahrimanic are in the abstract. We can say: the human being as we actually see him, as we ourselves are, is a state of equilibrium; he is actually always only something that is a balance between two poles, between the Luciferic pole and the Ahrimanic pole. Everything in us tends on the one hand towards the fantastic, the enthusiastic, the one-sided, and, if it degenerates, towards the illusory. That is the one extreme towards which we tend. If we did not carry this Luciferic extreme within us, we would never be able to become artists. It can never be a matter of our saying, in a false ascetic way: Let us flee the Luciferic! But then we flee everything in us that gives us artistic impulses. But if we want to be human beings who can fulfill their tasks here on earth in the fullest sense of the word, we must bring this Luciferic element into balance with what is at the other pole in us. This other pole is the ossified, the intellectual, the sober. Physiologically speaking, the Ahrimanic in us is everything that develops the forces in us that make us bony people; the skeleton characterizes the Ahriman. The Luciferic in us is everything that develops the forces that organize us towards muscles and blood. Between these two poles, between the life of blood and the life of bone, we are stuck as human beings and, if we are fully human, we must strive for a state of equilibrium between the life of blood and the life of bone, between what the blood always wants to push us towards, which is the illusory, and what the human being of bone always wants to push us towards, which is the sober, dry, philistine. We are in between, and man is never truly at rest, but inwardly moved between these two extremes, and he can only be understood if he is inwardly moved between these two extremes.

Consider that we human beings actually have the task of experiencing within ourselves what the balance beam experiences when it constantly sways and only has a state of equilibrium between left and right, swaying back and forth. Thus, as human beings, we must really sway between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. The Ahrimanic element is always present in thought that is based only on the external sense world. This abstract thought, which is based only on the sense world, tends to represent an Ahrimanic element in us. And the will, which draws on the experiences of our body and rises in the egoistic impulses of our body, constantly tends towards Luciferic character.

Thus the soul is also interwoven with the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic. My task in Dornach was to place the main group, which represents the representative of humanity between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, in the context of the School of Spiritual Science. The attempt has been made to depict the figure of Christ in this central figure of the representative of humanity, who stands in the middle. This Christ-figure is surrounded by two Luciferic figures, that is, two such figures that would emerge if only the blood-muscular were to develop in man. And below, the figure is subjected to two Ahrimanic figures, that is, two such figures that would arise if only those forces were to develop in man that strive towards ossification. Thus, the Christ is related above to everything that leads to illusion, and below to what leads to the sober, pedantic, philistine. — I do not have any examples of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic figures here, but I do have a few replicas of the central figure, which I would like you to see here afterwards. In woodcarving, an attempt has been made to express in material form what I have only briefly touched on in abstract terms. But I would ask you to consider these things not as symbols but from an artistic point of view, which must be the opposite of anything abstractly symbolic.

Yesterday I presented you with something that may not be entirely clear to you; but I would ask you to accept it simply as a result of spiritual science. I have often pointed out the underlying fact. Yesterday I said that our physiological science is based on a terrible fallacy, namely, that there are two kinds of nerves, motor and sensitive, whereas in truth everything is sensitive and there is no difference between motor and sensitive nerves. The so-called motor nerves are only there so that we can perceive our movements internally, that is, so that we are sensitive to what we ourselves do as human beings. Just as the human being perceives color through the sensitive optic nerve, so he perceives his own leg movement through the “motor” nerves, which are not there to set the leg in motion, but to perceive that the movement of the leg is being carried out. The wrong interpretation has even led present-day science into a fatal error with regard to the tabes phenomena. While it is precisely these tabes phenomena that fully prove what I have just briefly discussed and already presented yesterday.

But what deeper fact is actually at the root of this? One always goes wrong if one simply puts forward the judgment: something is wrong, something is incorrect. For the incorrect thing, which has a particular essential meaning, is real. On the one hand, there is the physiological school of thought that there are motory and sensitive nerves, and on the other hand, it exists in numerous minds, which are by no means always stupid, but only biased in the world view of the present. Where does the whole thing come from? One must not only gain the opinion of something being wrong, but one must also investigate the underlying facts to find out why such an inaccuracy could arise. Only spiritual science can provide a real answer.

Nowadays, when a physiologist arrives at his science, he is, if you will excuse the harsh word, not really a human being. Through the particular development of this science in modern times, he has lost his sense of equilibrium. He does not describe the equilibrium between the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic, but has slid down into Ahrimanism. He is actually possessed by the Ahrimanic and describes with an Ahrimanic attitude. And because one always fails to see the state one is in, one sees the other instead. If one has an Ahrimanic attitude and describes something in the human being, one describes the Luciferic. In fact, today's physiology, which prattles on about the difference between the motor and sensitive nerves, has come about because Ahriman describes Lucifer in man, and what comes about under this description is actually the nature of Lucifer, who is now so constituted that in a certain respect one can speak of him — but then they are spiritual, on a different plane — of sensitive and motor elements. It is extraordinarily interesting to see how, under the influence of present-day world views, man has slipped from a certain state of equilibrium, which he had in Greek, into the Ahrimanic. And one describes the progress of our culture correctly if one describes it as I did some time ago in 'The Reich', if one identifies it with an increase of the Ahrimanic. The interesting thing is that in relation to all these things, a state of equilibrium was reached in Greek culture for a short period of time, and that today we are actually inciting all the damage to which I have to draw attention with regard to the Greek element in us by seeing Greek, which was in a state of equilibrium, through our Ahrimanic spectacles. I am not opposed to Greek as such, but to Greek interpreted in an Ahrimanic way. So we have rushed down into the Ahrimanic, and today we have the impulse within us to describe, view and also do everything actually from Ahrimanic motives.

Before the Greek period, things were different. There was an ancient science, and in Egyptian culture one can still study it externally. Today people do not understand this science at all, because it is the opposite of what is called science today. Today we have descended into the Ahrimanic. Those who developed towards Greek culture and reached their decadence in Egyptian culture were still in the Luciferic above. They were at the other extreme. They had a physiology in which Lucifer describes Ahriman, while we have a physiology in which Ahriman describes Lucifer.

It is not enough to understand these things theoretically; one must realize that when one is immersed in social life – for a certain social life is always around man – then these things become real. For the social structure is, after all, man's creation. Everything that is in man goes into the social structure, and we have things in our social structure that we do not pay attention to, but that must be paid attention to today, otherwise we will not get out of certain damages of our time. Not only do we carry within us the two poles of the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, between which we are to maintain balance, but we also carry the Luciferic and the Ahrimanic into the states of the soul. I have repeatedly spoken about this from the most diverse points of view, and again and again I have drawn attention to the false asceticism that says: I will hold myself back from Lucifer and Ahriman so that I may become a good person. But the moment you put money into your pocket, you are in the objectified Ahrimanic in its most extreme consequence. For everything that permeates the social order from the monetary side is Ahrimanic, and the rule of money is an Ahrimanic rule. And everything that we have brought into the outer structure of life, into the social structure, in terms of Luciferianism – yes, don't be too much affected by a shock – everything that we bring into the structure of life from the side of Lucifer, that is all what office and dignity is. By taking up an office in the outer structure of life, we are drawing ourselves to Lucifer. It is no different. The privy councillor belongs to Lucifer, and the money he has in his purse belongs to Ahriman.

This is a fact – not something to laugh about! This is a fact, a very real, indeed the most real truth for our time. And the real aspiration of our time is to find our way back into balance within these things, the balance that we have lost historically by rushing into the Ahrimanic. If we go back to the time before the Greeks, when, I might say, equilibrium was attained for a moment in the world, we find that under the domination of the spiritual there was only ossification, covered over with theology and militarism. (Theology and militarism actually belong together; there is an inner affinity between them.) Under the domination of the theological and the military, Lucifer in particular came into his own. Then Greek culture attained a state of equilibrium for world development, which, however, every human being should actually strive for. And then begins the descent on the sloping plane into the Ahrimanic, beginning with the uninspired Romanism, and then encountering that mighty wave that comes from the north as Germanic culture, but which is once again drowned out. And we are caught up in this drowning out and today we have to save ourselves from this drowning out. For what the physiologists, the more theoretical scientists, have done by letting Ahriman represent Lucifer, that wants to be realized more and more outwardly. Man is on the way to absorbing more and more of the Ahrimanic, and what the physiologists have only talked about — for the description we have of man in the physiological textbooks today is not a description of man, but a description of Lucifer. Many people would like to do what the physiologists only talk about, not out of ill will, but because they do not yet know where the real path must lead. The moment we were to satisfy the socialist demand and reduce the social organism to a mere economic body, we would be Ahrimanizing the whole social order. A purely Ahrimanic programme would demand only the so-called economic foundation, on which the spiritual superstructure would then arise by itself. It is so grotesque when the extreme Left says what was really possible to say: We fully agree with Steiner's criticism of capitalism; we agree with the threefold social organism, but we must vigorously fight Steiner, because we want nothing but the class struggle, and the threefold social organism must arise by itself.

There you have an example of eminently Ahrimanic striving and will, which wants nothing to do with the state of equilibrium and rushes headlong into an Ahrimanic culture. That is today's difficulty. Yesterday I pointed this out from a different angle. If you go with those people who stand on the right — you will not do this, of course, if you are reasonable — then you will preserve the remnants of an old luciferic culture; go with the people of the left, then you expose yourself to the danger of collaborating in a world structure that is purely ahrimanic. The bourgeoisie has indeed succeeded in handing over such a culture to the proletariat that this proletariat regards bourgeois thinking as an ideal – the ideal of a purely Ahrimanic state on earth, where everything is bureaucratized, where, at the thought of a change, for example in the field of education, even naive souls like Theobald Ziegler shrink back. And in the Ahrimanic economic state, you can be sure, it will look bad for spiritual life! The proletarian impulse is forward, but humanity will only escape disaster if it is spiritualized, if it is permeated by that which makes half-reality into whole reality. That is the task. But this other reality can only be the spiritual one, and that makes people angry. This anger must be withstood. True venom is already being spat; but this venom against the spirit breaks out of the real powers of anger, which today hide everywhere, treacherously, as the ahrimanic powers in our world order.

Truly, it is not without reason and not without reference to the great problem that is now emerging that anthroposophists were offered the opportunity to see the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic as the two poles of humanity, and to see more deeply the problem that is emerging today as a social one than it can be seen without spiritual science. Particularly in the sphere of reform, of revolutionizing spiritual life, the social problem can only be seen in the light of spiritual science, because only there does it appear in the right sense. And this imposes a certain obligation on anthroposophists to look at how culture has always swung back and forth in a kind of pendulum swing. If we go back to old oriental social structures, we find the pendulum swinging in the direction of theology on the one hand, and in the direction of militarism on the other. We carry theology and militarism in the oriental sense as our heritage, and today is the time when we must see these things clearly. Later, another took the place of theology and militarism. For just as theology and militarism are related, namely, they vibrate in a Luciferic and Ahrimanic way, so are related: metaphysics in the medieval scholastic sense, also as it has the Kantians, even if half-rejecting it, and the jurisprudence that rests entirely in the metaphysical spirit, as Roman jurisprudence does. This is again connected with the civil service. Just as theology is connected with militarism, so jurisprudence is connected with metaphysics, with officialdom and the good bourgeoisie, while theology and militarism are connected with the aristocracy. These things, theology as the Luciferic on the one hand, militarism, which lives out itself aristocratically, on the other hand as the Ahrimanic, oscillated in the pre-Greek period. We carry the heritage within us. Jurisprudence and the metaphysics that stands above it developed in Romanism. They had the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie, which was brought into the world by Romanism, as their followers. Anyone who sees the transition between Greek and Roman culture can grasp with their hands how the real spiritual entities of Greek culture became metaphysical in Roman culture. Compare the Greek gods in their liveliness as imaginations with the abstract concept of a Jupiter, a Juno or a Minerva in Romanism: everything has become abstract, a shadowy concept. And so the state institutions of Greek life are also alive, working from person to person, even if they are no longer suitable for our time. In Romanism the whole State is cast as a concept in a system of juridical concepts. These juridical concepts educated the newer bourgeoisie, and now we have entered, for a long time already, the realm of world views that have emerged from the theological-juridical-metaphysical sphere; now we have entering the sphere of so-called positivism, which only recognizes the real as perceived by the senses and has the proletariat as its companion phenomenon, with all that is good and all that is wrong with the proletariat today.

But with that, we have also arrived at the lowest point, and we have to go up again, otherwise we will fall into the abyss. When people were theologically minded, they could descend, descend to the legal-metaphysical sphere. If we do not begin to ascend again today, we will sink into the abyss. This means that now, when we have arrived at the extreme end of materialism and are just about to make materialism practical, we must grasp the spiritual with all our energy, which alone can restore the materialistic attitude. That is the fundamental duty of our time. But that is also what makes the work so difficult. For it is not the striving that has been brought out of human class or status prejudices, or that which has been brought out of party phenomena, but the striving that has been brought out of world-historical development itself, that people are not yet willing to approach, because basically it affects people at a time when they are most badly fragmented in terms of selfishness and when they feel most comfortable being as unspiritual as possible.

The whole thing is connected with a real, physiological-physical development of the human being. I have often pointed out this physiological-physical development of the human being. Do you think we still have the same bodies as the Greeks? Our bodies are different. The human physique also undergoes metamorphoses. The Greeks, in their equilibrium, had a keen observation for such things. We must appropriate them from the depths of our soul, from our spiritual striving. Anyone who looks at Greek sculpture finds a wonderful trinity expressed in it. This is not observed enough. Compare the head of Hermes with that of Zeus or Athena in its entire physiognomy. And compare the head of a satyr with the head of Hermes on the one hand, with the head of Athena or Hera on the other. Then you will discover the remarkable fact that the Greeks sensed something by introducing these differences into their sculpture. The distances between the ears and the position of the nose are things that speak clearly. Anyone who really studies a head of Hermes knows, or at least can know, that the Greeks wanted to represent in the head of Hermes the humanity from which the Greeks felt they had grown, the past humanity that still had abilities and powers that came more from the animal world. The Greeks themselves wanted to represent themselves in the Zeus type, which for them was the only beautiful type. Compare the position of the ears and the nose of a head of Hermes with those of a head of Zeus: the special way in which the Greeks saw themselves, formally, artistically – and the whole Greek world view was basically an artistic one – they wanted to express this in the three types of their sculpture.

These things have been lost to a great extent by modern humanity. They must be re-conquered, re-acquired. But what the Greeks were able to achieve from their unconsciously assumed state of equilibrium, we must achieve consciously, by consciously gaining the point of view that enables us to say something like: You physiologists, you are describing Lucifer from the point of view of Ahriman. And why do we do it today? Because the physical body has changed since Greek times. We are more thoroughly rooted in the physical plane than the ancient Greeks, who had a presentiment of this and wonderfully expressed such great intuitions in their mythology. The Greek foresaw us modern people. But he foresaw us as Prometheus, chained to the rocks of the bone system, chained to the Ahrimanic. He foresaw us imaginatively. And that which wants to rush into the Ahrimanic will chain us ever more strongly to the rocks of ossification.

We must free ourselves by grasping the spiritual and loosening the fetters of Prometheus. We can only do this if we seriously reflect on ourselves. The Orient can never do this to us, because it is itself too Luciferian; the Occident can never do this to us, because it is too Ahrimanic for itself. That is the task we must set ourselves. And if we set it ourselves, then we have given Central European culture a real goal, a goal similar to that which lived in the forces of Greece, which poured out into the forms of Greek art, into the artistic creation of Greek dramas, into the thoughts of Plato pointing to heaven. But we must seek these things for ourselves. We must not be imitators of Greek culture. We will best understand Greek culture if we grasp it in its uniqueness and if we learn from it to grasp the tasks of our time.

We must look without illusions at the social structure of the present, we must look at how money has become a commodity out of Ahrimanic thinking. For the value of our money has the pure character of a commodity, the value of silver or gold. And people should reflect on how something that functions as a “commodity money” does not correspond to any original human need, but is something for which the need must first be created in the greed of people. To put it trivially: we cannot eat or drink gold and silver. That is the Ahrimanic, in which the present-day human being is placed, and from which our economic life must be freed by having only the production, circulation and consumption of goods in it. And money must become nothing more than a large bookkeeping entry, the respective instruction for the goods. What is issued as a banknote is merely the commodity written on the credit side, which one has given in return for it. One has a credit balance in society until one has exchanged the other commodity for it. Money must lose its Ahrimanic character.

And so, on the other side, on the side of spiritual life, there is the terrible Luciferian aspect that the spiritual person is pushed into offices, that the human side of the person perishes in office and dignity. Because every office puts on a Luciferian uniform. Anyone who can see through these things in reality will see especially when he sees tenured teachers and professors walking along, poor people who are stuck in Luciferic clothing and who have to fight as human beings against their Luciferic clothes. This fight demands in the present that man be de-Luciferized in the spiritual realm, that he be given back to humanity as a whole. This can only be achieved in a liberated spiritual life. The issues run deeper than is usually admitted. They run so deep that they impose certain obligations on anyone who penetrates into their depths. These obligations must not be misunderstood in their true form. We are called upon, in the middle of Europe, to find our way out of misfortune, misery and need, from matter to spirit. For decades, in narrower circles of Western peoples, the Anglo-American peoples, it was always pointed out that a world conflagration would and must arise, and that Eastern Europe would take on a shape from this world conflagration, so that socialist experiments would have to be carried out within this Eastern Europe, experiments which we in the West and in the English-speaking areas would never want to carry out ourselves. This had become a tradition, and it can be traced back to the 1980s, that the opposing but generous Anglo-American policy foresaw what this Central European policy of nullity was unfortunately blind and deaf to: that a world conflagration would come, and that Eastern Europe would be ripe for socialist experiments.

It must never be allowed to happen that the Western nations are left alone to carry out socialist experiments in Central and Eastern Europe. But this can only be avoided if we take up our task and set a goal for Central European intellectual life. That is our task. Let us not look at it in a small-minded way! We have had to experience time and again that anthroposophical intentions have been translated into selfish pettiness due to a certain lack of courage in the face of the big picture. Those who professed anthroposophy were only too willing to seek their own way, saying – to take just one example – that orthodox medicine was on the wrong track, so they took all kinds of devious routes in order to avoid being cured in the way that orthodox medicine does, and to be cured differently. You are familiar with these things. Devious routes were sought for this or that. But they always failed when it came to presenting the matter in public. It is not a matter of reaching those who are branded as “quacks” in public by secret routes, but of incorporating into the public structure, into the social structure, those who can then rightly practice medicine out of the spirit. Let us summon up the real courage! Let us not say in our little room: we do not want to be cured by the doctor who has been stamped at the university, but we will go to the one who cures without public law, because we do not dare to represent our attitude before the whole of public and demand that such a medicine should not be there, which we do not consider to be the right one. Today it is no longer possible to take the back roads. Today, public life is pulsating with what must come: a courageous forward thrust that only needs to be shown the right paths. My dear friends, this is what we must now keep in mind again and again: that anthroposophy was not intended for the selfishness of individual sectarians, but as a cultural impulse for the present time. Those who have misunderstood Anthroposophy are those who believe that they are serving it by shutting themselves away in the back room and doing something sectarian. Of course, the things that are to have a public effect must first be known, and for my part they must first be done in the back room; but it must not remain there. What lies within the anthroposophical impulse belongs to the world, not to any sect. And anyone who applies anthroposophical ideas in a sectarian way sins against anthroposophy itself. Therefore, now that the great question of the times, the social question, has arisen, anthroposophy must put its trust in this social question. That is its task. And it must, as it were, pass over all sectarian tendencies, which unfortunately have become so prevalent in the Anthroposophical Society itself. In this respect, we will have to look within ourselves in order to elevate all sectarian tendencies in our soul to cultural tendencies. For it is only from this field of spiritual science, from the tendency to make spiritual life alive in our materialistic time, that a real transformation of spiritual life, of the school and teaching system, can come about.

Everything is of course needed within a cultural council. But without a real soul, which should come from a new world view, this cultural council can only gradually — however well it is applied now — become cultural rubbish. We must bear in mind that today the paths are very, very much divided, and that it takes courage to choose, but that if we are to avoid disaster for the development of humanity, we must choose. Of course we cannot turn the whole world anthroposophical overnight, bless it with a new world view. But if we work ourselves, we must remain aware that we have truly not attained anthroposophy in order to now either hide it in an Ahrimanic or a Luciferic way, but to seek the state of equilibrium between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic so that we can counter the rush into the Ahrimanic with what this equilibrium brings forth, which today's humanity so urgently needs.

Bearing in mind what we sought to study yesterday, let us consider how matters actually stand in regard to what we call man's Saturn evolution.

If we remember the course of yesterday's lecture,¹ we know that there is concealed within us, within our human being, something that was first implanted in us during the Saturn period, namely, the first rudiments of our physical bodily nature. What we have acquired from the ancient Saturn evolution can be met with nowhere today in the external world. In primeval ages the Saturn evolution arose and again passed away; it possessed characteristics, forces, which seek in vain if we look around us today. For even if we look out to the stars in cosmic space we do not at first find what prevailed within the old Saturn evolution.

After this ancient Saturn evolution had died away, there came as you know, the Sun evolution and then the Moon evolution and today we are living in the Earth evolution. Three evolutionary periods have gone by. And all that formed their peculiar characteristics has passed away with them and is no more to be found in our field of vision. We can only find the characteristics of the Saturn evolution among the hidden occult activities which pulsate through the world. We can still, as it were, uncover the forces which at that time worked upon our physical body.

If you recollect what was shown in my book Outline of Occult Science you are aware that there was an active co-operation at that time between the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Personality. This co-operation still exists today though it cannot be discerned externally. We find it if we look into what we call our personal karma. Please note, my dear friends, that our personal karma is woven in such a way that what befalls us in successive earth lives is connected as cause and effect. The forces active in our personal stream of destiny cannot be investigated by the official Natural Scientist. He will find nothing among the forces disclosed in the field of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Physiology etc., which calls forth the connection of cause and effect that comes to expression in our personal karma. The laws prevailing there are withdrawn from physical observation as well as from the historical observation pursued today by the so-called cultural-scientist of a materialistic colouring. The modern investigation of historical evolution, the history which is written nowadays of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, up to our own time, contains laws which have nothing to do with the forces active in our karma. Thus the historian, the modern materialistic scientist studying civilization does not discover the laws dependent on man's personal karma.

History is looked upon as a continuous stream and no one considers to what extent historical evolution depends on the fact that human souls, for instance, who were personalities in ancient Roman times are present again today. The fact that they participate in current events and that the way in which they do so flows out of their personal karma finds no place in modern materialistically coloured history.

If we seek therefore for forces having something of the nature-forces of old Saturn we have to go to the law of our personal karma. Only when we learn to read what is in the surrounding cosmos and not merely to observe it, do we gain an insight into how the laws of ancient Saturn are still in a certain way active.

If we turn our attention to the ordering and out-streaming of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac as a cosmic script, and consider what radiating forces pour into human life from Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., we are then thinking in the sense of forces which were Saturn forces. And if we try to bring personal karma into connection with the constellations which relate to the zodiacal signs, we are then living approximately in the sphere of that world-conception which must be employed for the laws of the ancient Saturn epoch.

Thus nothing visible has remained, nothing that may be perceived, and yet there is still remaining an invisible element which may be interpreted out of the signs of the cosmos. Anyone who thought that Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., made his destiny would be living under the same delusion as a man who had been sentenced by a certain legal passage and then conceived a special hatred of this paragraph in the law and believed that it had sent him to gaol. Just as little as a legal paragraph printed on the white page can sentence a man, can Aries, Taurus, or Gemini, bring about destiny. Yet one can read from the star-script the connection between the cosmos and human destiny. And thus we can say that what follows from the star script is a remainder of the ancient Saturn evolution, is indeed the ancient Saturn evolution become entirely spiritual, but leaving its signs behind in the star-script of the cosmos.

When we proceed from the Old Saturn evolution to the Moon evolution we must be clear that at first there is nothing so directly (I said; at first, so directly) in our surrounding field of vision; external nature contains in the first place in the main no forces which resemble those of the Old Moon evolution. These forces of the Old Moon have also drawn back into concealment, but they have not yet become spiritual to the same degree as the Old Saturn laws. The Saturn laws have become so spiritual that we can only investigate them in the laws of our personal destiny, that is to say, quite outside space and time. When we observe human life as a whole we still find today these ancient Saturn laws, still find what cannot be seen when we confront a man in the physical world.

We have said that in meeting man in the physical world, we have the physical body as coming from the Old Saturn evolution, the etheric from the Old Sun evolution; the astral body from the Old Moon, and the Ego. And when we look at man externally and observe his form it is solely this embodiment of the ego which is not a relic from other periods of evolution. It is the laws of Earth which prevail and are active when the ego fashions man for itself and embodies itself. The laws of the Moon evolution, the laws of the astral body have already withdrawn and are no longer outwardly active. Now if we encounter a man we shall say: “You, O Man, as you confront me as material man are an embodiment of the Ego. But deep in the background of your being lies your invisible personal destiny.” How this invisible human destiny is determined comes under the rule of ancient Saturn laws. There we are already appealing to something entirely spiritual when, from the earthly laws of the embodiment of the Ego, we look towards the ancient Saturn laws. If, however, we look from what stands before us in the human being towards what still prevails in him from the Old Moon laws we find something not so spiritual. But this too has withdrawn from the external activity of the world, this too is not directly under the active forces of Earth-existence.

Where then must we seek for what has remained behind from the ancient Moon activity? We must we seek it protected and embedded, veiled from Earthly existence. For it is active in the period before man enters Earth existence through his physical birth, it is active before the external physical ray of light can penetrate his eye, it is active before he can first draw breath. It is active from the conception to birth, active in the embryonic life. I beg you expressly to notice, however, it is not active in that which develops from the ovum to the external physical human being; in what grows from the ovum, becoming greater and greater through continuous division, the forces of the Earth are working. But it is active in what exists only in the mother and dies away during the embryonic development, in what is lost with the birth and perishes. In all that envelops the earthly human being and cares for its nourishment before it is born, in all that ensheaths the growing human being and then falls away from it—in that rule the ancient Moon laws. And with this we have something that goes beyond the single human life, that forms a connection between the individual man and his ancestors and is included in the concept of heredity.

Thus we see something that existed during the Old Moon evolution still playing an active part, though not in the external world. In the outer world it acts only, so to say, as a dying away in human development, as something that is overcome as soon as the human being draws the first active breath for earthly life.

If one would study the laws of the Old Moon existence—or at any rate a part of them—purely physiologically and not clairvoyantly, the only way to do so today would be to study the laws at work in the sheaths surrounding the human embryo before it draws the first breath, enfolding it and nourishing it. What is there enclosed in the mother's body, what can only thrive during earthly evolution within the protecting sheath of the maternal body was the whole nature during the Old Moon evolution; it filled the whole field of vision.

Thus there die not only beings in so far as they have a sheath-nature, but whole types of natural laws, and exist in succeeding ages solely as last remains. Now you will have to ask the question: How does it stand with what is derived from the Sun?

Let us look at yesterday's diagram. We have seen that through all complications that appear here, we have to do with the complete human being, with his physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego,—etheric body, astral body, ego,—astral body, ego, and with the ego itself.

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All that is above the dividing line is really the hidden part of human nature. If we wish to study the laws underlying the foundation of the physical body we must look to super-sensible laws determining man's destiny. If we look towards that which rules in the astral body and finds its embodiment in the physical body, we have something that is not so spiritual, so super-sensible, but something that melts from the sense-perceptible into the super-sensible. For the part that falls away from the human embryo becomes so to say more and more atomistic. The nearer the human being approaches birth the more it dissolves materially and becomes increasingly spiritual. For that which is attached to the human being as astral body and etheric body has originated through the spiritualising of those parts of the embryonic sheaths which fall away.

The question could now arise: how does it stand with regard to the Sun part? Can we find the Sun portion somewhere in the world? This too withdraws from sense perception. Whereas what we call karma, personal destiny, or, one might say, the Saturn part of man, lies in lofty spiritual regions, we have seen that we need not ascend so high in the case of the Moon part, for we found it still ensheathed in the sensible. Nor in the case of the Sun part need we ascend so high as for the Saturn part. One can still apprehend it but it is not easily recognised.

I should like to give you an example of something where you can still recognise the Sun-part that is active, although attention can only be directed to it in a veiled way. Those of you who have acquainted yourselves with the new edition of my book, Riddles of Philosophy in Outline will have found that four periods in the development of Philosophy are distinguished. I have called the first period “The World-conceptions of the Greek Thinkers”. This lasted from 800 B.C.—in round numbers—or 600 B.C. to the birth of Christ, i.e. into the age of the origin of Christianity. A second period lasted from the rise of Christianity to about 800 – 900 A.D. up to the time of John Scotus Erigena. Then came a third period which I have called “the World-conception of the Middle Ages”, and which lasted from 800, 900 A.D. to 1600 A.D. And then there is the forth period up to our own time; we are just in this period. Eight-hundred year periods have been assigned to the history of philosophy, presented in such a way as was possible in a book meant for a public still quite unacquainted with Spiritual Science.

The intention was to give everything that could stimulate the mind and let the spiritual structure of these periods work upon one. The characteristic of the first period consists in the fact that a transition is found from a very remarkable ancient thinking to what one can call the life of thought in ancient Greece. Our age has not made much progress in the understanding of such differences, the difference, for instance, between the thought life of our own time and that of ancient Greece. Our clumsy thinking believes that thought lived in an ancient Greek head just as it lives today in the head of modern man. Thought lived in Socrates, Plato, even in Aristotle quite differently from how it lives in present-day mankind; this present thought-life first awoke in the 7th, 6th century B.C. Before that there was no actual life of thought. As my book sets out, one can speak of a beginning, of a birth of thought-life in this age of ancient Greece.

People have conceived that most curious ideas about the great philosophical figures of Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, etc. It has been pointed out, for instance, that Thales believed that the world originated out of water, Anaxagoras out of air, Heraclitus from fire. I have shown how these ancient philosophers formed their philosophies from the human temperament. They were not based on speculation, but Thales established water as the original ground of things because he was of a watery temperament; Heraclitus founded the fire-philosophy because he was of a fiery temperament and so on. You find that shown in detail in my book.

Then comes the actual thought-life. And in the epoch described here the thought-life is still essentially different from that of modern times. The Greek thinker does not draw up thoughts from the depths of his soul, but thought is revealed to him just as external sound or colour is revealed to modern man. The Greek perceives the thought; he perceives it from outside and when we speak of Greek philosophy we must not speak of such a mode of thinking as is normal today, but of thought-perception. Thus in the first period we are concerned with thought-perception. Plato and Aristotle did not think in the way the modern philosopher thinks, they thought as today we see, perceive. They looked out into the world, as it were, and perceived the thoughts which they expound to us in their philosophies just as much as one perceives a symphony. They are thought-perceivers. The world reveals to them a thought-work; that is the essential character of the Greek thinker. And this perception of the thought-work of the world was brought to the highest pitch of perfection by the Greek thinker.

If the philosophers of today believe that they understand what Plato and Aristotle perceived as a universal symphony of thoughts, that is only due to a childish stage of the modern philosopher. The modern philosophers have a long way to go before they can fully grasp what Aristotle represents as Entelechy, what he gives as the members of the human soul nature—Aesthetikon, Orektikon, Kinetikon etc. The inner activity of thinking, where one draws the thoughts out of oneself, where one must make subjective efforts in order to think, did not as yet exist in Greece. It is completely foolish to believe that Plato thought he perceived thoughts. To believe that Aristotle already thought in the modern sense, is nonsense ... he perceived thoughts.

Modern man can hardly imagine what that is, for he makes no concepts of actual evolution. He gets slight goose-flesh if one tells him that Plato and Aristotle did not think at all in the modern sense, and yet it is a fact. In order that thinking in the modern sense might take root in the modern human soul, an impulse had to come that seized its inmost part, an impulse that has nothing to do with the thought-symphony in the surrounding world but which grips man's inmost being. This impulse came from Christ and hence this period of philosophy lasts up to the time of Christ.

In the second period we are concerned with a thinking that is still not man's own individual thought, but is stimulated by the impulse coming from the external world. If you go through all the systems of thought of the philosophers of the second period up to the time of Scotus Erigena you will find everywhere how the Christ-Impulse rules in them. It is what has flowed out of Christ himself, one might say, that gives man the first stimulus to create thoughts from within outwards. This gave the stamp, the physiognomy of the patristic philosophy of the Church Fathers, the philosophy of Augustine and others up to Scotus Erigena. We can therefore say that we no longer have thought-perception, but thought-inspiration stimulated by the spirit.

It was different again in the third period when the inner impulse proceeding from Christianity began to be seized by men themselves. In this third period man begins to be conscious that it is he who thinks. Plato and Aristotle did not think, but they could as little doubt that thought has a fully objective validity as a man seeing green on a tree can doubt that it has a fully objective validity.

In the second period it was the intense belief in the Christ Impulse that gave certainty to the awakening thought. But then began the period when the human soul began to say: “Yes, it is actually you yourself who thinks, the thoughts rise up out of you.” The Christ-Impulse gradually faded and man became aware that the thoughts arose out of himself. It began to occur to him that perhaps he framed thoughts that had nothing at all to do with what is outside. Was it possible that the objective external world had nothing to do with his thoughts?

Think of the great difference between this and the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle: Plato and Aristotle perceived thoughts and therefore they could not doubt that the thoughts were outside. Now, in the third period men became aware: ‘One creates thoughts oneself ... well, then, what have thoughts to do with objective existence outside?’ And so the need arose to give certainty to thinking,—to prove thinking as was said. Only in this period could it occur to Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, to create validity for the idea of God;—for one did not see thoughts as perception. In the former Greek thinking that would have been a complete nonsense, because at that time thoughts were perceived. How can one doubt that God exists when thoughts of the Godhead are as clearly to be seen outside as the greenness of the tree? Doubt first began in the third period when men became aware that they themselves produced the thoughts. The need arose to establish the connection of that which one thinks with that which is outside. In essentials this is the epoch of scholasticism—the becoming aware of the subjectivity of thinking.

When you consider the whole thought-structure of Thomas Aquinas it stands entirely under the aegis of this epoch. The consciousness is present throughout; concepts are created within, concepts are linked together in the same way as the laws of subjectivity. Thus a support must be found for the idea that what is created inwardly also exists outside. There is still at first an appeal to traditional dogmatism, but there is no longer the same attachment to the Christ-Impulse as in the second period of philosophical development.

Then comes the fourth evolutionary period; the independent rule of thought from the external thought-perception, the independent creation of thought from within: free creation of thought, that free creation that comes to light so magnificently in the thought-structures of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Decartes, and their successors, Leibniz etc. If we follow up these edifices of thought we observe that they are produced entirely out of the inner being. And everywhere we find that these thinkers had an intense desire to prove that what they created in themselves had also real validity externally. Spinoza creates a wonderful ideal-edifice. But the question arises: Now is that all merely created within, in the human spirit, or has it a significance in the world outside? Giordano Bruno, and Leibniz create the monad which is supposed to be a reality. How does something thought out by man as monad exist at the same time as a reality in the outer world? All the questions which have arisen since the 16th, 17th century are concerned with the endeavour to bring free thought-creation into harmony with external world existence. Man feels isolated, abandoned by the world in his free thought creation. We are still standing in the midst of this.

But now what is this whole diagram?

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If we go back to the perception of thoughts which prevailed in the time of the old Greek philosophers then we must say: Philosophic thought in ancient Greece—in spite of the fact that it was the age of the intellectual or mind-soul in ancient Greece—was still a perceptive thinking, was still deeply influenced by the sentient soul, in fact by the sentient, the astral, body. It still clung to the external. The thinking of Thales, of the first philosopher was still influenced by the etheric body. They created their Water—Air—Fire—Philosophies out of their temperament, and the temperament lives in the etheric body. One can therefore say that the philosophy of the sentient body goes into the philosophy of the etheric body. Then we come into the Christian period. The Christ- Impulse penetrates into the sentient soul. Philosophy is experienced inwardly but in connection with what one can feel and believe; the influences of the sentient soul are present. In the third period, that of scholasticism, the intellectual or mind-soul is the essential element of philosophical development. Now the development of philosophy follows a different course from that of human evolution in general. And for the first time since the 16th century we now have philosophy coinciding with the general evolution of mankind, for we have the free thoughts ruling in the consciousness soul.—Consciousness soul! The magnificent example of how free thought prevails from the abstraction of existence up to the highest spirituality, how a thought-organism, leaving aside the world entirely, rules purely in itself, that is the philosophy of Hegel—the thought that lives solely in the consciousness.

If you follow this scheme it is actually the part that I could not show in my book for the public, though it lies in it. And if you read the descriptions given of the separate epochs you will, if you are proper Anthroposophists, very clearly connect them with what I have written here (see diagram). There is thus a development corresponding to that of man himself: from the etheric body to the sentient body, to the sentient soul, to the intellectual soul, to the consciousness soul. We follow a path like the path of man's evolution, but differently regulated. It is not the path of human evolution, it is different. Beings are evolving and they make use of human forces in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul etc. Through man and his works pass other beings with other laws than those of human development.

You see—these are activities of the Sun-laws!

Here we need not ascend to such super-sensible regions as when we investigate human destiny. It is in the philosophical development of mankind that we have an example of what remains from the Sun-laws.

We had yesterday to write here Angeloi as corresponding to the etheric body (see diagram).

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Such Angeloi evolve. And while men believe that they themselves philosophise, Sun-laws work in them—inasmuch as men bear within them what the Sun-evolution laid down in their physical and etheric bodies. And the laws of the Sun-existence, working from epoch to epoch, cause philosophy to become precisely what it is. Because they are Sun-laws, the Christ, the Being of the Sun, could also enter them during the second period. Preparation is made in the first period and then the Christ, the Sun-Being, becomes active in the second period.

You see how everything is linked together. But inasmuch as the Christ, the Sun-Being, enters in, he comes into connection with an evolution which is not the human evolution, not man's earthly evolution, but actually Sun-evolution within Earth existence.

Sun-evolution within Earth existence! Just think what we have actually reached in these reflections. We are considering the course of philosophical development, philosophical thought since the time of ancient Greece, and when we consider how this has evolved from philosopher to philosopher we say to ourselves: there are active within not earthly laws, but Sun laws! The laws which at that time held sway between the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels come to light again on earth in the philosophical search for wisdom. Read in the book Occult Science how the Spirits of Wisdom enter during the Sun-evolution. Now during earthly evolution they enter again not into what is new but into what has remained from the Sun-evolution. And man develops his philosophy not knowing that in this development the Spirits of Wisdom are pulsing through his soul. The Old Sun existence lives in the evolution of philosophy; it really and truly lives within something that has stayed behind, something that is connected with the Old Sun-evolution.

Human beings, passing from generation to generation, evolve as external personalities in earthly evolution. But an evolution of philosophy goes through it from Thales up to our present time; the Sun-evolution lies within it. This gives opportunity for beings who have stayed behind to make use of the forces of philosophical evolution in order to carry on their ancient Sun existence; beings who remained behind during the Sun-evolution, who neglected at that time to go through the development that one can pass through in one's etheric body, sentient body, and sentient soul—in cooperation with Spirits of Wisdom and Archangeloi. These Spirits that missed their evolution during the Sun time can use man's philosophical evolution in order to be parasites within human evolution. They are Ahrimanic spirits!

Ahrimanic spirits yield to the enticement of creeping parasitically into what men strive for in philosophy and so of furthering their own existence. Men can thus evolve philosophically but at the same time they are exposed to Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean spirits.

You know that Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful spirits as long as one is not aware of them, as long as they work in secret. As long as they do not emerge and let men face them eye to eye spiritually Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful in one or another way. Let us suppose that a philosopher appears who develops thought of such a nature that one can grasp it in merely earth existence. He develops thoughts that can live through the instrument of earthly reasoning. That is Hegelian thought! It is pure thought, but only such as can be grasped with the instrument of the physical body and this as we know ends at death.

Hegel has achieved thought that is the deepest which can be thought in earthly life—but which must lose its configuration with death. Hegel's tragedy lies in the fact that he did not realise he grasped the spirit in logic, in nature, in soul-life, but only the spirit that exists in the form of thought and does not accompany us when we go through death. To have put this clearly before his mind he would have had to say: If I could believe that what goes through thought, that is to say what I think about abstract being by means of logic, thoughts of nature, thoughts of the soul and up to philosophy—if I could believe that this leads me behind the scenes of existence than I should be deceived by Mephistopheles!

This was realised by another: Goethe realised it and represented it in his Faust as the conflict of the thinker with Mephistopheles, with Ahriman. And in this fourth period of the evolution of philosophy we see how Ahriman presses into the Sun-evolution and how one has to face him consciously, really recognising and comprehending his nature.

Hence today we are also standing at a turning point of the philosophical thought of the outer world. In order to avoid falling prey to the allurements of Ahriman and becoming mephistophelean wisdom, philosophy must get behind this wisdom, must understand what it is, must flow into the stream of Spiritual Science.

Read the two chapters preceding the last one in the second volume of my Riddles of Philosophy. You will see that I tried to present the world concepts prevailing in the world, the philosophical concepts of the world, in order then in a concluding chapter to add A brief view of an Anthroposophy. There you will see how philosophy today in the free emancipated life of thought represents something which, to be sure, rises into the consciousness soul, but how this life, through the consciousness soul, must lay hold of what comes from Spirit itself, philosophically at first, otherwise philosophy must fall into decadence and die.

Thus you see at least one example of the working of the Sun-evolution in human earthly life. I said that one could encounter these sun-laws if one studied the course of philosophical evolution, though one does not always recognise that it is sun-law which is active in it. This must be recognised by Spiritual Science. Just reflect that in reality a Being is evolving which little by little acquires the same members as man himself.

If one were to go still farther back into ancient times one would find that not alone the etheric, but the physical body too gave rise to the forming of world concepts. It is difficult to give clear characteristics of the age that goes back beyond the 12th – 14th centuries B.C.; it lies before Homer, before historical times. But then something was evolving which is not man as man lives upon the earth.

Something lives in history which passes through the etheric body, the sentient body etc., a real, actual Being. I said in my book that in the Grecian era thought was born. But in modern times it comes to actual self-consciousness in the consciousness soul: thought is an independent active Being. This could not of course be said in an exoteric book intended for the public. The anthroposophist will find it however if he reads the book and notes what was the prevailing trend of its presentation. It is not brought into it, but results of itself out of the very subject matter.

You see from this that very many impulses of transformation as regards the spiritual life are coming forward in our time. For here we see something evolving that is like a human being except that it has a longer duration of life than an individual man. The individual man lives on the physical plane: for seven years he develops the physical body, for seven years the etheric body, for seven years the sentient body etc. The Being which evolves as philosophy (we call it by the abstract name ‘philosophy’) lives for 700 years in the etheric body, 700 – 800 years in the sentient body (the time is only approximate), 700 – 800 years in the sentient soul, 700 – 800 years in the intellectual or mind-soul and again 700 – 800 years in the consciousness soul. A Being evolves upwards of whom we can say: if we look at the very first beginnings of Grecian philosophy this Being has then just reached the stage of development which corresponds in mankind to puberty; as Being it is like man when he has reached the 14th – 16th year. Then it lives upwards to the time when a human being experiences the events between the 14th and 21st year; that is the age of Greek philosophy, Greek thought. Then comes the next 7 years, what man experiences from the age of 21 to 28; the Christ Impulse enters the development of philosophy. Then comes the period from Scotus Erigena up to the new age. This Being develops in the following 700 – 800 years what man develops between the ages of 28 and 35 years. And now we are living in the development of what man experiences in his consciousness soul: we are experiencing the consciousness soul of philosophy, of philosophical thought.

Philosophy has actually come to the forties, only it is a Being that has much longer duration of life. One year in a man's life corresponds to a hundred years in the life of the Being of philosophy. So we see a Being passing through history for whom a century is a year; evolving in accordance with Sun-laws though one is not aware of it.

And then only there lies further back another Being still more super-sensible than the Being that evolves as humanity except that a year is as long as a century. This Being that stands behind evolves in such a way that its external expression is our personal destiny, how we bear this through still longer periods, from incarnation to incarnation. Here stand the Spirits regulating our outer destiny and their life is of still longer duration than the life of those for whom we must say that a century corresponds to a year.

So you see, it is as if we look there into differing ranges of Beings, and how, if we wished, we might even write the biography of a Being who stands spiritually as much higher than man as a 100 years is longer than a year.

An attempt has been made to write the biography of a such a Being as had its puberty at the time of Thales and Anaxagoras, and has now reached the stage of its self-consciousness and since the 16th century has entered, so to say, into its ‘forties’. The biography of this Being has furnished a ‘History of Philosophy’.³

From this you see, however, how Spiritual Science gives vitality to what is otherwise abstract, and really animates it. What dry wood for instance, is the usual ‘History of Philosophy’! And what it can become when one knows that it is the biography of a Being which is interwoven in our existence, but evolves by Sun-laws instead of Earth-laws!

It was my wish to add these thoughts to what we have been considering lately about the life-forces which arise in us when we look at Spiritual Science not as a theory but seek it in the guidance to living. And it is just through Spiritual Science that we find the living. What is so unalive, so dry, and withered as the history of philosophy comes to meet us out of the mist as though we looked up to it as a Goddess who descends from divine cloud-heights, whom we see young in ancient times, whom we see grow even if with the slowness where a century corresponds to a year of human life. Yet all this becomes living—the sun rises for us like the Sun within Earth existence itself. For just as the sun rises on the physical plane, so do we see the ancient Sun still radiate into the earthly world in a Being that has a longer lifetime than man. As we follow man's development on the physical plane from birth to death so we follow the development of philosophy by seeing a Being within it. When in this way we look at what Anthroposophy can be to us we reach the point of seeing in it not only a guide to knowledge but a guide to living Beings who surround us even though we are unaware of them.

Yes, my dear friends, something of this was only felt by Christian Morgenstern. And by feeling this, feeling it in the deepest part of his soul, our friend Christian Morgenstern could put into writing a beautiful sentiment, a true anthroposophical sentiment which shows how a soul can express itself which in its inmost being knows itself to be one with our Anthroposophy—not merely as with something giving us various facts of knowledge—but as something that gives us life. In the wonderful poem Lucifer by Christian Morgenstern we have a wonderful example of this. The feeling of this poem lives entirely in the inspiration of which ones feels a breath when, as we have tried to show today, one finds the transition from the presentation of the idea in Anthroposophy to the grasping of living beings.

Lucifer

“I'll keep my light from light of your excluded,
I want you not, your light shall be precluded,
Until my light's my own and separated.

So do I bring the Evil to expression
As Spirit of negation, self-possession,
Yet is new world by ranks of mine created.

By off'ing to un-erring Beings resistance,
A race of err-ant gods has found existence
Who act on their—and not your—discretion.

Who have not walked in Truth from the beginning
Who only reach the Truth through suffering, sinning,
Who only read the truth through sin's transgression.”

Luzifer

“Ich will mein Licht vor eurem Licht verschliessen,
ich will euch nicht, ihr sollt mich nicht geniessen,
bevor ich nicht ein Eigenlicht geworden.

So bring ich wohl das Bose zur Erscheinung
Als Geist der Sonderheit und der Verneinung,
Doch neue Welt erschafft mein Geisterorden.

Aus Widerspruch zum unbeirrten Wesen,
Aus Irr-tum soll ein Gotterstamm genesen,
Der sich aus sich—und nicht aus euch—entscheidet

Der nicht vom Anbeginn in Warheit wandelt,
Der sich die Wahrheit leidend erst erhandelt,
Der sich dies Wahrheit handelnd erst erleidet.”

Christian Morgenstern

If the feeling in this poem leads you to reflect how alive something can becomes that is understood theoretically in Anthroposophy, so that, as it were, one can grasp the Beings who approach us out of the dark abyss of existence, if you take this poem, stimulated by feelings I wished to arouse through today's lecture, then you will see that this figure of Lucifer is really perceived, fashioned in a wonderful way. It is a model example of how what is brought to us by Anthroposophy can become alive and grip our whole soul.

• 1. “The Ego perceived externally as Speech and Song, as creative fantasy, as inner experience.” Dornach, 9th Jan. 1915 (Z69)
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy

In the first two lectures I dealt with the general principles by means of which the knowledge of healing can be made fruitful through anthroposophical research, and to-day I would like to enlarge upon this by giving certain details—such details as will at the same time show that in so far as Anthroposophy works into practical life, it will lead also to a ‘handling,’ if I may use the expression, of life as a whole which will be in accordance with reality.

In the previous lectures I spoke of the way in which Anthroposophy must necessarily regard the constitution of the physical body which we know by means of our senses, but the substance of which is continually being thrown off and newly constructed during the course of life. Within this physical body lives the so-called ether, or life body, which contains the forces of growth and of nourishment and which man possesses in common with the plants. We must also recognise that man is the bearer of sentient life—that life which inwardly reflects the outer world. This is the astral body. (As I said before, we need not take exception to the terminology but simply accept it in the sense in which it is here explained.) Man has this astral body in common with the animal kingdom, but he excels all other kingdoms of Nature in the surrounding world inasmuch as he possesses the Ego-organisation.

If we merely speak of these constituent parts of the human being in a general way, we shall never come to the point of being able to estimate them at their true value. If, however, we perceive the real significance of these four members of our being, then we have no longer a mere philosophically conceived classification, or a mere division of phenomena before us, and we realise that such a conception really adds something to our comprehension of the being of man. We need only consider a daily event of human life—the interchange of waking and sleeping—and we shall at once understand the significance of this threefold constitution.

Every day we observe the human being passing from that condition wherein he has an inner impulse to move his limbs and when he takes in the impressions of the outer world so that he may work them over within himself, into that other condition where he lies motionless in sleep and his consciousness (if it does not rise to the point of dream) sinks down into an inner, indefinite darkness. If we refuse to admit that the functions of willing, feeling and thinking are annihilated in sleep and simply appear again when he wakes, we must ask ourselves: What is the relation of waking man to sleeping man?

During sleep, the astral body and Ego-organisation have separated from the physical body and the ether body. As soon as we have realised that the astral body and Ego-organisation—the soul-and-spirit—separate from man's physical organisation during sleep, we come to something else, namely, that this radical extraction during sleep can also occur in a lesser degree—partially—during the waking state. Certain conditions call forth a certain tendency to sleep but do not bring about total sleep—I mean conditions of faintness, unconsciousness and the like. These are conditions in which the human being commences to sleep but does not achieve it completely; he hovers as it were, between sleeping and waking.

In order to understand such conditions, we must be able to look into the nature of the human being. We must remind ourselves of what was said in the last lecture when the results of anthroposophical research were explained. I said that it is possible to divide the whole organisation of man into three systems: (1) the nerves-and-senses; (2) the rhythmic system (which includes all rhythmical processes); (3) metabolic-limb system. I also said that the metabolic-limb system is the polar antithesis of the system of nerves-and-senses, while the rhythmic system is the mediator between the two: Each of these three systems is permeated by the four members of man's being—physical body, ether body, astral body and Ego-organisation. Now the constitution of man is very complicated. It cannot be said that in sleep the astral body and Ego-organisation pass entirely out of the physical and etheric bodies. It can so happen that the organism of nerves-and-senses is only partially forsaken by the higher principles. Then, because the system of nerves-and-senses has its main seat in the head, the head is constrained to develop something which gives an inclination towards sleep. Yet the man is not really asleep, for his metabolic-limb system and his rhythmic system still contain the astral body and Ego-organisation. These have only left the head. Hence there arises a state of dullness, or faintness, while the rest of the organism functions as in waking life. What I have here described does not necessarily arise from within; it can occur when something is applied from without—for instance if a certain quantity of lead is administered or lead combined with some other substance. Comatose states or vertigo, which are caused by the separation of the astral body and Ego-organisation from the head, can be brought about by the administration of certain quantities of lead. We see, therefore, that this substance, this lead, when it is taken inwardly, drives the astral body and Ego out of the head. Here we look deeply into the human organisation in its relation to the surrounding world; we see in this way that it can become dependent upon what is taken in by way of substance.

But now let us suppose that a person exhibits the opposite condition—that his astral body and Ego cling too firmly to his head, work too strongly upon it. This becomes clear to us when we examine how the head-organisation works upon the whole man, when we study how the organism builds itself up. We see all the hard parts forming themselves—the bony structures; we see the other softer parts, the muscles and so on. If we study man's whole development from childhood onwards, we find that that part of the organism which shows us, first by its outer shape how it inclines towards ossification, and has its essential nature in its bony consistency—namely the head—we find that the head throws out, during the course of its development, precisely those forces which work formatively in respect of the whole skeleton and which therefore tend to harden and stiffen the human being. We gradually come to know what tasks the Ego-organisation and astral body perform when they permeate the head; they work in such a way that the forces which harden man inwardly, which cause the hard parts of his being to separate from the more fluid organisation, stream out from his head. Now if the astral body and the Ego-organisation work too strongly in the head, the hardening forces stream out too vigorously and the result is what we see in the ageing organisation, when a tendency to bone-formation is present. This tendency manifests as arteriosclerosis, where chalky deposits are present in the arteries. In sclerosis the stiffening, hardening principle, which otherwise works into the bones works into the whole organism. We have therefore an excessively strong working of the Ego-organisation and the astral body; they impress themselves too deeply into the organism.

At this point the conception of the astral body begins to be a very real factor. For, if we administer lead to the organism in its normal condition, we drive the astral body and Ego out of the head. But if these principles are too closely bound to the head and we give a proper dose of lead, we are acting rightly because then we loosen the astral forces and the Ego to some extent from the head and thus we can combat sclerosis.

Here we see how external influences can work upon this connection of the different members of man's being. If we administer lead to the healthy organism, we can bring it to the point of illness; comatose conditions or faintness are caused because the astral body and the Ego are separated from it, giving rise to a condition which in the ordinary course of events is only there in sleep. If, however, the astral body and the Ego are too closely united with the head, the human being is over-wakeful and the effect of this continued over-wakefulness is an inward hardening. The ultimate consequence will be sclerosis and in this case the right thing to do is to drive the astral body and the Ego slightly out of the head. Thus we begin to understand the inner working of the remedy directly we take the different members of man's being into account.

Now let us turn to the metabolic-limb system. When we are sound asleep, our astral body and Ego have separated from this system. But we can drive them out of this system without driving them out of the head; just as we drive them out of the head by means of lead and cause comatose conditions, etc., so by giving a certain dosage of silver or some combination of silver, we can drive the astral body and Ego out of the metabolic-limb system. We then get corresponding manifestations in the digestion—solidifying of the excreta and other disturbances of the digestive tract.

But suppose the astral body and Ego are working too actively in the digestive organs. Now the astral body and Ego stimulate the digestive functions precisely in the metabolic-limb system. If they work too strongly, penetrate too deeply, then there is excessive digestive activity. There is a tendency to diarrhoea and other kindred symptoms which are the result of too rapid and superficial digestion.

Now this is connected with something else, namely that in this condition the metabolic-limb system comes too much to the fore. In the human organism everything works together. If the metabolic-limb system predominates, it also works too strongly—works moreover not only on the rhythmic organisation but also on the head-organisation, principally, however, on the former; for the digestive organisation continues on into the rhythmic system. The products of digestion are transformed in the blood. The rhythm of the blood is dependent upon what enters it by way of material substances. If, then, there is excessive activity on the part of the astral body and Ego, symptoms of fever and a rise of temperature will occur. Now if we know that the astral body and the Ego-organisation are driven out of the metabolic-limb system by the administration of a certain dosage of silver, we know further that if the astral organism and the Ego-organisation are too deeply embedded in the metabolic-limb system, we can raise them out of the latter by giving a remedy consisting of silver or silver combined with some other substance.

This shows us how we can master these connections within the being of man. Spiritual Science therefore makes researches into the whole of Nature. In the last lecture I attempted to show, in principle, how this can be done in respect of the plants. To-day I have explained how it can be done in respect of two mineral substances, lead and silver. We gain an insight into the relation between the human organism and its surroundings by directing our attention to the manner in which these different substances in the outer world affect the different members of the constitution of man.

We will now take an example which shows that it is possible, out of an inner insight into the nature of the activity of the human organisation, to pass from the realm of pathology to an understanding of therapy.

We have a certain remedy continually present within us. The being of man requires healing all the time. The natural inclination is always for the Ego-organisation and the astral body to press too strongly into the physical body and the etheric body. Man would prefer to look out into the world, not clearly, but always more or less dully; he would prefer to be always at rest. As a matter of fact, he suffers from a constant illness: the ‘desire to rest.’ He must be cured of this, for he is only well if his organism is constantly being cured. For the purpose of this cure, he has iron in the blood.

Iron is a metal which works on the organism in such a way that the astral body and Ego are prevented from being too strongly bound to the physical and etheric bodies. There is really a continual healing going on within man, an ‘iron-cure.’ The moment the human organism contains too little iron, there is a longing for rest, a feeling of slackness. Directly there is too much iron, an involuntary over-activity and restlessness sets in. Iron regulates the connection between physical body and ether body on the one hand, and the astral body and Ego-organisation on the other. Therefore if there is any disturbance of this connection it may be said that an increase or a decrease of the iron-content in the organism will restore the right relation.

Now let us observe a certain kind of illness that is not of particular importance in medicine. We can quite well understand why not. It is, to begin with, apparently so intricate that its cause is not easy to discover. And so every possible kind of remedy is given for this illness, to which, as I have said, medicine gives little heed although it is very unpleasant for the sufferer—I mean migraine.

In the head-organisation we observe, first of all, the continuations of the sense-nerves which are most wonderfully intertwined and interwoven. The nerves, as they continue on into the centre of the brain from the senses, form a marvellous structure. It represents the highest point of perfection in respect of the physical organisation, for there the Ego of man impresses the most intense form of its activity upon the physical body. The way in which the nerves pass inwards from the senses and are linked together, bringing about something like an inner articulation within the organism, places the human organism at a much higher level than the animal. And it is possible, just because the Ego-organisation must take hold at this point in order to control this marvellous structure, that it may occasionally fail and then that part of the physical organisation gets left to itself. It may happen that the Ego-organisation is not powerful enough to permeate this so-called ‘white matter’ of the brain or to organise it thoroughly.

Now the white matter of the brain is surrounded by the grey matter—a substance which is far less delicately organised but which is indeed regarded by ordinary physiology as being the more important of the two. This it is not, for the reason that it is connected much more with nutrition. We have a far more mobile activity in respect of nutrition—of inner accumulation of substance—in the grey brain-matter, than in the white matter which lies in the middle and which in a much greater degree is a foundation for the Spiritual.

Now everything in the human organism belongs together, for every member works upon every other. Directly, therefore, that the Ego begins to withdraw to some extent from the central—the white brain-substance—the grey matter becomes disordered. The astral body and the ether body can no longer take proper hold of the grey matter; and so the whole of the interior of the head gets out of order. The Ego-organisation withdraws from the central brain, the astral organisation withdraws more from the periphery of the brain; and the whole organisation of the head is dislocated. The central brain begins to be less serviceable for the forming of concepts, more akin to the grey matter, developing a kind of digestive process which it ought not to do; the grey matter begins to unfold an excessively strong digestive process. And then foreign bodies are absorbed; a strong excretory process permeates the brain. All this reacts upon the finer breathing processes, principally, however, upon the rhythmic processes of the blood-circulation. Thus we get, not perhaps a very deeply penetrating, but still a very significant disorder arising in the human organism and the question is:

How are we to restore the Ego-organisation to the system of nerves-and-senses? How are we to drive the Ego back again to the place it has left—into the central part of the brain?

This we can do if we administer a substance of which I spoke in the earlier lectures, namely, silicic acid. If, however, we were to give only silicic acid, we should, it is true, send back the Ego into the central nerves-and-senses system in the head, but we should leave the surrounding part, i.e., the grey matter of the brain, untouched. Thus we must at the same time so regulate the digestive process of the grey matter that it no longer ‘overflows,’ that it incorporates itself rhythmically into the whole organisation of the human being. Therefore we must simultaneously administer iron—which is there in order to regulate these connections—so that the rhythmic organisation shall be placed once more in its right relation to the system lying at the basis of spiritual activity.

At the same time, however, there will be irregularities in the ‘digestive’ processes in the larger brain. In the organism, nothing takes place in one system of organs without influencing others. Therefore in this case, slight and delicate disorders will arise in the digestive system as a whole. Once more, if we study the connections between outer substances and the human organism, we find that sulphur and combinations of sulphur work in such a way that starting from the digestive system they bring about a regularising of the whole process of digestion.

We have now three standpoints from which migraine can be considered: (1) regulation of the digestion, the disorder of which is evident in the irregular digestive process of the brain; (2) regulation of the nervous and sensory activity of the Ego by means of silicic acid; (3) regulation of the disordered rhythm of the circulatory system by the administration of iron. In this way we are able to survey the whole process. As I have said, migraine is an ailment somewhat despised by ordinary medicine but it is by no means so complicated as it appears when we really penetrate into the nature of the human organism. Indeed we discover that the organism itself calls upon us to administer a preparation of silicic acid, sulphur and iron—combined in a certain way. We then obtain a remedy for migraine (Biodoron) which, however, also has the effect of regulating the influence of the Ego-organisation, causing it to take hold of the organism and to work upon everything of the nature of disturbed rhythm in the blood-circulation and also upon all that is taking place as the out-streaming digestive process in the organism.

Migraine is only a symptom of the fact that the ether body, astral body and Ego are not working properly in the physical body. Therefore our remedy for migraine is peculiarly adapted to restore the co-operation of these three higher principles with the physical. When these members are not working properly together, our remedy—which is not a mere ‘cure for headache’—can help a patient under all circumstances. It is a remedy for migraine just because it attacks the most radical symptoms; and it is especially by speaking of this remedy that I can make clear to you the anthroposophical principles of therapy, the essential nature of illness and how to prepare a medicament.

Before such remedies can be prepared we must understand the relationship that exists between the human organism and the surrounding world. But for this it is necessary to approach the study of the nature of this relationship in all seriousness. In the last lecture, in indicating how we arrive at plant-remedies, I mentioned Equisetum arvense as an example. We can say of every plant that it works in such and such a way on this or that organ. But as we study these things we must be quite clear that a plant—growing here or there in Nature—is not at all the same in Spring as it is in Autumn. In Spring we have a sprouting and growing plant before us—a plant that contains the physical and ethereal forces just as man contains them. If, then, we administer a substance from this plant to the organism we shall be able to produce an especially strong effect upon the physical body and ether body. If, however, we leave the plant growing all through the Summer and pluck it when Autumn is drawing near, then we have a plant which is on the point of drying up and shriveling.

Now let us look again at the human organism. Throughout the development of the physical body there is a budding and sprouting caused by the working of the ether body. The astral body and the Ego-organisation cause disintegration. All the time in the physical body there is a budding and sprouting life, caused by the ether body. If this process alone were to take place in the human being, he would never be able to unfold self-consciousness; for the more the growth-forces are stimulated, the more this budding and sprouting takes place, the more we lack self-possession. When the astral organism and Ego-organisation separate from the other two members in sleep, we are unconscious. The forces which build man up, which cause growth and give rise to the process of nutrition do not bring him to the point where he can feel and think. On the contrary, to be able to feel and think something in the organism must be destroyed. This is the work of the astral body and the Ego-organisation. They bring about a continual Autumn in man. The physical organisation and ether body bring about a continual Spring—a budding and sprouting life—but no self-consciousness, nothing of the nature of soul and spirit. The astral body and the Ego-organisation destroy; they cause the physical body to dry up and harden. But this has to be. The physical body has continually to oscillate between integration and disintegration. Outside in Nature we find the forces alternating between Spring and Autumn. In man too, there is rhythm; while he is asleep, it is wholly Spring for him—the physical and etheric bodies bud and blossom; when he is awake the forces of the physical and etheric bodies are thrust back, hemmed in, and conscious self-possession sets in—Autumn and Winter are there.

By this we can see how superficial it is to base our judgments merely on outer analogies. External observation might well result in describing the waking life of man as ‘Spring’ and ‘Summer’ and in speaking of sleep as analogous to Winter. But in reality this is not correct. When we fall asleep, the astral body and the Ego pass out and the physical-etheric part of our being begins to bud and blossom; the forces of the ether body are very active. It is a condition of Spring and Summer. If we could look back upon our physical and etheric bodies and observe what is going on when the astral body and Ego have forsaken them, we should be able to describe this budding and sprouting, and the moment of waking would seem to be like the approach of Autumn. But this, of course, requires the faculty of spiritual perception. It cannot be seen with physical eyes.

Now let us imagine that we are looking for plant-remedies. Gentians gathered in the Spring will have a healing influence on certain forms of dyspepsia. If we gather the plant in the Spring and then prepare it as a medicament, we shall be able to work upon disturbed forces of nutrition.

The roots of the gentian should be boiled and given in order to regulate the forces of nutrition. But if we give gentian roots that have been dug up in the Autumn when the plant as a whole is decaying, when its forces will resemble the functions performed by the astral body, we shall not effect any cure; on the contrary, we shall rather increase the irregularity in the digestive process. It is not enough simply to know that any particular plant is a remedy for this or that ailment; we must also know when the plant must be gathered if it is to act as a remedy.

We must therefore observe the whole being and becoming of Nature if we are to apply effective plant-remedies and develop a rational therapy. We must also know in making up our preparations that it is not the same to gather the plants in the Autumn as to gather and administer them in the Spring. When we are preparing medicaments we must also learn to know what it means if we pick gentian, for instance, in the first weeks of the month of May; for what man bears within him during the course of twenty-four hours, namely Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, is spread in Nature over a period of 365 days. The process which is enacted in the human being in a period of 24 hours, needs 365 days in Nature.

By this you will see what is involved when we speak of applying anthroposophical principles to therapy. At the present time we have a very serviceable science of healing, and as I have said again and again, what Anthroposophy has to give in respect of an art of Healing must certainly not come into opposition with what is given by the recognised Medicine of to-day. Anthroposophical medicine will stand firmly on the foundations of modern medical science in so far as these foundations are justified. But something more has to be added, namely spiritual insight into the being of man.

Consider once more what I have said in these lectures about the system of nerves-and-senses being permeated by all four members—by the physical body, ether body, astral body and Ego. The metabolic-limb system is also permeated by all four members. But each system is permeated by the other members in a different way. In the metabolic-limb system, the Ego-organisation functions in the activity of will. Everything that causes man and his whole organism to move is contained in the metabolic-limb system; everything that leaves him at rest and fills him with inner experiences, concepts, thoughts and feelings, is contained in the system of nerves-and-senses. An essential difference is shown here. In the system of nerves-and-senses, the physical body and etheric body are of far greater importance than the Ego and astral organisations, while in the metabolic-limb system it is these higher members that are essential. Therefore if the Ego and astral body work too strongly in the nerves and senses, something will arise which this latter system then drives into the other members of the being of man.

Over-emphasis of the Ego and astral organisations within the nerves and senses drives this latter system somehow or other into the metabolic-limb system. There are various ways in which this may take place; the result is what may—in a very general sense—be described as ‘swellings.’ We learn to understand the nature of these swellings when we realise that because of excessive activity of the Ego or the astral body, the system of nerves-and-senses is driven into the rest of the organism.

And now consider the opposite condition: the Ego and astral body withdraw from the metabolic-limb system; the physical and etheric organisations become too strong—they radiate into the system of nerves-and-senses and flood it with those processes which properly belong to the metabolic-limb system: the result is an inflammatory condition. Now we can understand that swellings and conditions of inflammation present a certain polaric contrast to one another. If, then, we know how to drive back the system of nerves-and-senses when it is beginning to be active somewhere in the metabolic-limb system, we shall arrive at a possible means of healing.

Now, one instance where the system of nerves-and-senses is working with terrible consequences in some region of the metabolic-limb system, is carcinoma. Here there is evidence that the system of nerves-and-senses has entered into the metabolic-limb organisation and is making itself effective there. In my second lecture I spoke of a tendency to the formation of a sense-organ which can arise at the wrong place, within the metabolic-limb system. The ear, when it is formed in the right place, is normal; but if a tendency to ear-formation or a tendency to form any other sense-organ—even in the very slightest degree—occurs in the wrong place, then we have to do with carcinomatous growth. We must work against this tendency of the human organism, but a very deep understanding of the whole of the evolution of the world and man is necessary here.

If you study anthroposophical literature, you will find that it gives quite different teaching in regard to cosmology from that given by materialistic science. You will find it stated that the creation of our Earth was preceded by another creation when man did not as yet exist in his present form, but was, in certain respects, still spiritually higher than the animal kingdom. The senses of man, as we know them, did not exist. They only arose in their perfected state during Earth-evolution. As tendencies, of course, they were there long before, but in their final form, as they now are, penetrated by the Ego-organisation, they did not come into being until the Earth was formed. The human Ego ‘shot,’ as it were, into eyes, ears and the other senses during this period. Hence if the Ego-organisation becomes too active, a sense does not only form in the organism in a normal way but there is too great a general tendency to create senses. This results in carcinoma. What, then, must we do in order to discover a remedy for this disease? We must go back to earlier conditions of Earth development and search for something that is a last remnant, a heritage, from earlier periods of evolution. We find such a remnant in plants that are parasitic—such as viscum: forms that grow as the mistletoe grows upon trees—forms that have not come to the point of being able to root themselves in the Earth as such but must feed upon what is living. Why must they do this? Because they have, as a matter of fact, evolved before our Earth assumed its solid, mineral form. We have in mistletoe to-day something that could not become a pure Earth-form; it had to take root upon a plant of another character—because the mineral kingdom was the latest of the kingdoms to evolve upon the Earth. In the substance of mistletoe we have something which, if it is prepared in the proper way, will have a beneficial effect upon carcinoma and work in the direction of driving the misplaced formation of a sense-organ out of the human organism.

If we penetrate into Nature, it is possible to fight against those things which, appearing in the form of some illness, have fallen away from their normal evolution. Man is too much ‘Earth’ when he develops cancer; he brings forth the Earth-forces too strongly within his being. We must combat these exaggerated Earth-forces with something that is the result of a state of evolution when the mineral kingdom and the present Earth were not yet in existence. Therefore, working on the basis of anthroposophical research, we make a special preparation from viscum.

I have now put certain brief details before you. I could add a great deal more, for we have already worked out and produced a number of remedies. Let me, for example, mention the following. If the metabolic system radiates into the extreme periphery of the senses-organisation, a certain form of illness is produced—so-called hay-fever. And here we have the opposite of what I described just now. When the system of nerves-and-senses slips downwards so to speak into the metabolic-limb system, this gives rise to swellings. On the other hand, if the metabolic-limb system enters into the region of nerves and senses, we get such manifestations as are present, for example, in hay-fever. In this case it is a question of paralysing those centrifugal processes where the metabolic-limb system is induced too strongly towards the periphery of the organism, by giving something which will stem back the etheric forces. We try to do this with a preparation (Gencydo) made from fruits which are covered with rind; the forces connected with this rind-formation have the effect of driving back the etheric forces in the metabolism. The excessively active centrifugal forces which give rise to hay-fever are combated by strong centripetal forces. Both the pathological and therapeutical processes can be quite clearly perceived. And indeed we find that the best results are obtained with our remedies precisely in those cases that are the most resistent to treatment at the present time. Instances of the treatment of hay-fever show that excellent results have been obtained.

And so I could give you many details to show that the insight into the nature of man which is gained by anthroposophical research builds the bridge between pathology and therapy. For how, in the last resort, do the Ego and astral organisms work? They destroy. And because of this destructive process we are beings of soul and spirit. When something is being disintegrated, a purely poisonous activity is taking place and that destroys the organs. If an organ becomes rampant or hypertrophied, we must disintegrate it. The disintegrative activity belongs to the astral body and Ego. Poisons in an external form—they may be either metallic or vegetable poisons—are, in their effect upon the human organism related to the astral body and Ego. We must realise to what extent a poisonous process is taking place in the human organism inasmuch as the Ego and astral body are at work. There is a correspondence between the budding and sprouting forces of the plants—which we eat without harm—and the physical and etheric forces in the human being; and we must learn to recognise the correspondence between the activity of the Ego and the astral body upon the human organism and the working of the forces and substances of those plants which we cannot eat because they are harmful but which, because they resemble the normally destructive processes in man, can work as remedies.

Thus we learn to divide the whole of Nature, firstly into those forms of life which resemble our physical and etheric bodies and which we eat for the purposes of growth and development; and secondly into the destructive elements, i.e., the poisonous forces which resemble the working of the astral body and Ego-organisation. If we understand the four members of man's being in this sense, we shall regard the polarity between the nutritious substances and the poisonous substances quite differently. The study of illness will then be a continuation of the study of Nature. By an insight into both health and disease—a spiritual insight—our whole conception of Nature will be immeasurably enriched. But there is one condition attached to such study. In our present age, people prefer to embark upon some particular study when the object in question is quite still. They like to bring this object as far as possible into a state of complete rest so that the longest possible time can be spent in observing it. Anthroposophy, on the contrary, prefers that whatever is being studied should be as far as possible in a state of movement; everything must be mobile and living, observed in the presence of spirit, for only so do we draw near to life and reality. To this we must add something else, and that is the courage to heal. This courage is just as necessary as the actual knowledge of how to heal; it is not nebulous or fantastic optimism but a feeling of certainty which makes us feel in any case of illness: ‘I have insight into this and I will try to cure it.’ Great things result from this. But if we are to gain this certainty, it is above all necessary to have the courage to win through to an understanding of the being of man and of Nature. Naturally, therefore, the kind of remedies that we obtain can only come from a living contact with medicine.

Close to the Goetheanum, where we are striving for anthroposophical knowledge which shall satisfy the souls of men, there is a centre which is devoted to healing—near to the Mystery-centre, a therapeutical centre, because a comprehensive knowledge of the relation between the human being and the world must include not only an understanding of the healing processes but also of the processes of disease. A profound insight into the Cosmos is only possible when we are able to survey not only the tendencies which lead to sickness but equally those which lead to health.

If the forces connected with growth in the organism were not continually being repressed, man's being of soul and spirit could never function. The very manifestations which in the normal condition of mankind turn to illness, to retrogression of development, must indeed exist in order that he may become a thinking being. If man could not be ill, he could not be a spiritual being. If the functions of thinking, feeling and willing manifest in an abnormal form, man falls ill. The liver and kidneys must carry out the very same processes that give rise to thinking, to feeling and to willing; but these processes lead to disease when they arise in exaggerated form. The fact that man can be ill makes it also possible for him to be a being who can think, feel and will.

Anthroposophical science can enrich the science of healing with spiritual knowledge as I have shown; but it can also do so because it fills the doctor with devotion and readiness for self-sacrifice. Anthroposophy not only deepens our thinking, our intellectuality, but also our feeling—indeed our whole nature. The answer to the question: What can the Art of Healing gain through Spiritual Science? is this: the doctor, as a healer, can become wholly man; not merely one who thinks about a case of illness with his head but who has inner realisation of the state of illness, knowing that to heal is a noble mission. The doctor will only find the right place for his profession in the social order when he perceives that illness is the shadow side of spiritual development. In order to understand the shadow he must also gaze upon the light—upon the nature and the being of the spiritual processes themselves. If the doctor learns thus to behold spiritual processes to behold the light that is working in the being of man, he will be able to judge of the shadow. Wherever there is light, there must be shadow; wherever there is spiritual development there must be manifestations of illness as its shadow-forms. Only he can master them who can truly gaze upon the light.

This, then, is what Anthroposophy can give to the doctor and to the art of healing.

Let us now continue to try to elaborate on the things we have discussed in recent times. I told you more or less in general terms how the spiritual and soul life of man actually relates to the sensory and physical life. Now today I will elaborate on this further. I have already pointed out to you that if you want to know something about these things, you cannot say: Yes, the intellect that I have once and for all must decide everything, and what it cannot decide does not exist. One must always bear in mind that one has also undergone a development in ordinary life. Just imagine what it would be like if we had remained at the level of a three-year-old child! We would look at the world quite differently. A three-year-old child sees the world quite differently than an adult. The three-year-old child can be taught all kinds of things. After all, in terms of life, he is still asleep. The three-year-old child cannot even speak properly; he can be taught language. In any case, the three-year-old child is modest and not snooty. It is willing to be taught. It would probably not be so modest if it were not half asleep and said: Why should one learn? We already know everything! But today's man says: We already know everything; and since we cannot understand the spiritual soul with our minds, there is no such thing as a spiritual soul.

Now, if I were to say as a three-year-old child: I don't want to learn anything more; if I say: Dad, Mom, and a few other things, like apples and so on, that's enough – that would be a child's point of view. But once you have acquired the common sense of an ordinary person, you can really develop something within yourself. And if you now further develop the ordinary powers of cognition that you have, then it comes about that you undergo just such a leap, I would say, as the one from a small child to an adult human being. All this depends, of course, on gaining insight and on incorporating it into the whole process of human development. Today, people cannot help but be snobbish in this regard and say: I already know everything, and what I don't know is none of my business. Today, people cannot help but say this because they have been educated from elementary school on to ascribe everything to reason, and to say of the other: Well, yes, one can believe in that, but one cannot recognize it.

You see, you just have to be very clear about the fact that there really is such an awakening from ordinary everyday life to real knowledge, just as there is an awakening from sleeping and dreaming to ordinary life. You just have to realize that you can only really know something about the world when you see through what is happening from a higher point of view, just as you have to see through the dream from a waking point of view. One only realizes that a dream is not reality, that a dream is something that depends on waking life, when one can wake up. I told you the other day that if one could never wake up, one would consider what one dreams to be the only reality.

But now let us see what a dream actually is. You see, gentlemen, people have thought an awful lot about dreams. But actually, everything that is said about dreams is basically just drivel. It really is drivel, because people can say: well, if the brain just vibrates a little, then the person is dreaming. Yes, but why does the brain only vibrate a little? — Well, what is said about dreams is actually a kind of proof. But if you are clear about the fact that the human being not only has this physical body, which you can see and touch in life, but that he also has the other aspects of his nature that I have drawn to your attention, that the human being also has an etheric body, an astral body and an ego, and if you then say to yourself: this very ego and this astral body are outside the physical body and the etheric body when you are asleep, then you can first of all explain to yourself why a person does not walk when they are asleep. They do not walk because the ego is not inside the physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a small child does not walk. Because the ego has not yet awakened in a small child. So you can explain to yourself why a person walks: he walks because the I slips into his physical body. You can also explain to yourself why a person does not think when asleep. He does not think because the astral body is not within his physical body.

Doesn't that show you that you have to distinguish, so to speak, between the physical body and the etheric body, which are in bed, and the I and the astral body, which are outside during sleep.

Now imagine what it is like when you wake up or fall asleep. When you fall asleep, it is the case that the I and the astral body are just going out. So there is also a state where they are half inside, half on their way out. Only later does the state come when the I and the astral body are completely outside. So there is also such a state where they are still half inside and already half outside. That is when you dream.

Otherwise, you only believe that you are dreaming during the night. Actually, you only dream when you are falling asleep and when you are waking up. And what do you dream about then? Yes, you see, gentlemen, people believe that you dream because you use your brain when you are awake – so today's scholars say – but when you are asleep you only use your spinal cord. That's what people think.

But these people are not able to observe at all! Take a real dream, for example. Take the dream of a fire. You dream of a whole fire; you dream of all kinds of things. And you wake up – someone yells outside: “Fire!” In reality, you perceived nothing else – you didn't know anything about fire and so on – so you heard this “Feurio!” half and half because your ear was open. Because you are accustomed to it, you associate this with fire, but it is half and half obscure. And what you dream about fire can be something completely different than what you see. For example, you may dream that the fire is coming from a volcanic eruption. You may dream something completely different. And when you dream about something that happened many years ago, you will know how confused the dream is. Perhaps as a small boy you had a small quarrel with someone. Now, years later, you dream about this quarrel. But you dream about it as if you had been beaten to death, or as if you had beaten the other person to death. The dream confuses everything. And you can perceive this confusion everywhere in the dream.

Now, when we dream while falling asleep, the story remains confused. When we dream while waking up, it corrects itself because we really see what is there. We dreamt that someone is murdering us. He puts a ball in our mouth; afterwards he comes and works on us with some instrument – we wake up and unfortunately have a corner of the bedspread in our mouth.

You see, the dream takes a small cause, adds a lot to it and confuses the story. For example, if the air is bad in the room where you sleep, you will experience what is known as the Alpdrücken. But you do not say to yourself in the dream: “The air is bad there, I can't get a good night's sleep there,” but you get the impression that an evil spirit is sitting on your chest and pressing down on you. You all know the legend of the Trut. This is based on the fact that one has got bad air into the lungs. The nightmare is based on this.

What, then, is dreaming based on?

Well, gentlemen, now let us take the waking dream. It is the case that the ego and the astral body are just slipping in and are not yet completely inside. These are the dreams of which we know the most. When you are completely inside your physical body, you look out of your eyes. But when you are not completely inside, you do not look out of your eyes. You have to imagine that when you enter your physical body, you turn around, as it were, and look out of your eyes. But if you are still half outside, you pass through your eyes, slipping through your eyes, and you see everything indistinctly. You then attach all kinds of confused fantasies to them. But when we enter our body during the night's sleep, we have nothing but these confused fantasies. And how do we sort them out? We can't sort them out. Only our body sorts them out for us. Otherwise, we would see the fire-breathing volcano Vesuvius every time we heard the word 'Feu' (fire) outside. Our eyes are so wonderfully constructed that we can only see the right thing through them. That is to say, we would only devote ourselves to all kinds of fantastic things throughout our lives if we were our body for the whole of life. It is the body that makes it possible for us to see life properly.

So you see, when we look at ourselves outside of our body, we are actually inside our ego and our soul; we are fantasists who have all kinds of confused ideas in our minds, and all we need to do is realign ourselves in our body every morning when we wake up. It is thanks to our body that we see things in order. Actually, we are fantasists in our earthly lives. The dream shows us how we really are in our earthly lives.

If you then come to really understand things, in the sense that you have awakened in a certain way with regard to your knowledge, you see even more clearly: in his life on earth, man is what he dreams. He is actually a fantasist, and he must always allow the body to correct him. And when he is completely asleep, he is actually quite unconscious. He cannot perceive anything of the world at all. Only when he has a piece of his body does he perceive the world fantastically.

But just when you know that, you say to yourself: What is the dream then actually? What does the dream actually show us? The dream shows us that we actually know nothing about our body; because if we knew something, we could also see properly what is outside. We could recreate the eyes in our thoughts and in our spirit. But we cannot do that; we are dependent on our body giving us the power of the eyes. So the dream shows us how little we know about our body.

But now you remember that I said the other day that we have to make this body ourselves. Inheritance is nothing. What is present when a person begins his existence on earth is, as I have explained to you, matter ground down to dust. First the soul-spiritual must enter into it. Man must first build up all his matter himself. When he understands the dream, he knows that he cannot do that. And when one comes to understand the dream, one learns something else.

Think about how difficult it is to put yourself back in the first years of your childhood. Suddenly you remember an event that you know your mother didn't tell you about, but that you saw for yourself. For one person it falls in the third year, for another in the fourth year, and so on. Yes, gentlemen, before that you were really asleep, really asleep. But when you look at a three-year-old child who can actually still sleep properly – because you don't remember it, just as you don't remember ordinary sleep – when you look at this three-year-old child in relation to life, you can do something that you can't do later.

I have already told you that the brain continues to develop until the permanent teeth have come through, until the seventh year. Look at the brain of a child who has just been born and the brain of a seven-year-old child. Something has happened to this seven-year-old child, something has worked on this brain. The brain itself cannot do anything. The brain is like a dynamo. A dynamo develops magnetism, and the whole factory movement depends on it. But the electric current must flow through it, otherwise the dynamo stands still. The brain stands still if the current of soul-life does not flow through it. In childhood the current of soul-life flows through the brain with much greater power, for the child works out the whole brain until the second change of teeth, and most of all in the very earliest years of life. That is why I told you that Jean Paul, who was a very clever man, said: A person learns much more in his first three years than in his three years at university. It is much more artful than what one ever has to work on externally later.

We say to ourselves: Yes, we had that; we have lost that. Just when we became conscious, we lost this inner soul work. We no longer have that. And the one who comes to this realization notices that he can do it less and less. When you later gain the gift of looking back on life, it makes you feel quite dizzy about what has happened. Because when you were a fourteen-year-old boy, you might still have been able to do some of the things you did in abundance when you were a three-year-old child or even just when you were born. You could do the most when you were a three-year-old child; at fourteen you could do a lot less of it. When you turn thirty, you can still digest enough, but you can no longer work out anything. When you turn fifty or sixty, you have become a real donkey when it comes to the work of working out the human body. You only realize how big an ass you become in the course of your life! It is necessary to realize that you lose some of your wisdom during the twenty to thirty years of your lifetime. If you go through the period of thirty to forty years, you lose a lot more. And afterwards, you are already a terrible donkey in relation to everything you have to process internally.

But when you start to realize this, when you acquire the ability to look back on your life, you are actually filled with respect for what a clever being you were as a very young child. You were once terribly ugly; but you can change everything if you were an ugly fellow. At fifteen, you can no longer make yourself beautiful. As a small child, you can do just that. All small children can do that.

So it is important to realize what kind of donkey you have become in the course of your life. That is an important side of life. You don't become immodest, but a terribly modest person. You realize when you see it correctly: when you were a little child, you actually sat on the donkey and drove the donkey yourself. Now that you have become an old man, you have turned into a donkey yourself. — You see, you have to put it so drastically, otherwise nothing comes of it.

In this way you also arrive at the meaning of the dream. You will have experienced it yourself; in a dream you can even think that you are the Emperor of China or something else. There are many other dreams. You can dream anything. But what does the dream show us? You just have to follow the dream to see how it changes in the course of your life.

Infant dreams are quite wonderful. Infant dreams still show you that the child still has the powers within itself to shape its body. They are truly cosmic. The child dreams of what it has experienced before descending to earth, because these powers are still within it. It needs them to develop its brain. When you have this wonderfully designed brain, which is located in the upper skull (see drawing on page 152), then it has the eye, but here are the nerves that are needed to see. All this must be worked out in detail. It must be worked out in detail. Yes, gentlemen, you cannot work that out with earthly knowledge. With earthly knowledge you can work out machines here and there; but with earthly knowledge you cannot work out the brain. In the dreams of small children you can still see exactly: in their dreams they work out how their brain functions. Later on, dreams also become very strange if a person does not lead an orderly life; they become increasingly disorderly. And the fact that the dream is confused actually stems from the fact that one knows so little about one's physical body because one is not inside it.

So that is the reason why we know so little about our physical body: because we have lost, transformed into foolishness, what we have received as wisdom when we descended into earthly life. When you wake up and say to yourself, “Well, if you believe everything you've dreamt now – that you're the emperor of China – then of course you're an ass.” But we ourselves can't do anything other than develop ass-like behavior because we don't have the body. Not being inside, we can't help but be confused by the dream. We have completely lost the ability that we had as small children to build up our body properly. It has to come to us from outside. When we wake up, it comes to us from outside. But when we come back down to earth, it doesn't come to us from outside. Then we encounter destroyed matter in the egg from outside. We have to build it up piece by piece.

Yes, gentlemen, we have to learn all this between two earth lives. Between two earth lives we have to learn what the dreaming human being cannot do. You see, there are enemies and opponents of anthroposophy who say: Oh, they are just people who want to dream; they make all kinds of fantastic things up about the world. Yes, but anthroposophy consists precisely in the fact that we no longer rely on dreams, because dreams show that we cannot do what we can do when we enter into earthly life, when we enter with this dark, unconscious knowledge that we have as a small child. There we are clear about the fact that we have acquired this in a world that is not the world on earth, because in the world on earth we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual self. However beautiful this world is, we can only educate ourselves to become fantasists with regard to our actual selves. We have to acquire our relationship to our body, our whole relationship to our body, in another world.

Now I want to tell you that the one who sees through the whole thing and thus also sees how becoming an ass advances further and further knows: it is easy to lose this knowledge. Well, it is not much different than when someone takes an exam. When someone takes an exam, it often takes two years to pass it. But they forget it quickly, terribly quickly. This is also the case with the knowledge we need to build our body: we can forget it quickly. Only here the “quick” is somewhat different than with an exam or a test. The “quick” is our whole life on earth. When we have died, we have forgotten approximately what we brought down into physical life at our birth. Our lifetime is approximately the forgetting time.

Now imagine that one of you has an experience of which he is aware: you are growing up as a child; you first remember something that happened, let's say, when I was four years old. Suppose he has already turned sixty and he remembers an event from when he was just four years old. Now it took him fifty-six years after those four years to forget, to forget inwardly. For fifty-six years, the forgetting became stronger and stronger. For fifty-six years, he became more and more of an ass. So how much more time did he need to forget what he still had until the age of four? Well, it took him so much more time than 4 in 56 contains: he needed fourteen times his first childhood to forget. When he reaches the age of sixty, it takes him fourteen times as long again to regain in the spiritual world what he has forgotten there. So he needs 60 times 14 years, 840 years. Then, in the spiritual world, he has acquired the ability to have something similar to what the small child had in its first four years, in order to build up. That means that after 840 years he can come to earth again.

You can only calculate this with full responsibility, as I have written it on the board for you now, if you are really clear about it, if you can examine what lies in dreams, how dreams distance you more and more from the spiritual world.

And you see, if someone walks around and at a certain time cannot enter his physical body at all, then he is a medium. If someone enters his physical body at the right time and uses it again, well, then he is a normal person. But if a person goes around in this state all the time, without the ego having entered the physical body – you can even walk around as a sleepwalker; you can even speak as a sleepwalker, or when you are lying in bed – then you need not be surprised; because if you, let us say, throw a ball, and everything is flat, it will roll on by itself. So under certain circumstances, when a person is not quite healthy, when everything goes easily for him, when his body is not quite firm, the activity that is otherwise conscious can still have an effect. But then the person is an automaton. A sleepwalker is not a human being, but an automaton. And one who speaks from sleep does not speak humanly either. Just try it: when someone speaks from sleep, you can hear the most stupid things, because he becomes an automaton and his ego and soul are not in his body.

But if this is only half the case, if a person is only half an automaton – the inward movement happens from behind, so that the person moves in from the back of the brain to the front – if a person only moves in halfway, then he can close his eyes, and then, because the optic nerves are at the back (on the right), he perceives something, but it is fantastic. And then he can also talk you into all kinds of fantasies, because, right, he doesn't see, but he gets images there. The sense of hearing is located there (center). And the sense of language is located there (left). He can talk you into anything there. The mediums speak from there, but they are not in the world. Therefore, nothing that the mediums say can be trusted, because they are half inside their physical body. Nothing at all is to be given to it. What the media say is just what man in his - I must use the expression again and again - in his donkey-like behavior perceives.

Yes, gentlemen, but I have also heard of mediums who say really wonderful things. That is also true, the mediums also say wonderful things; but that is no wonder at all. Because, you see, when, for example, a strong earthquake strikes somewhere, the animals are the first to leave; the people stay and are destroyed by the earthquake. Animals are prophetic from the very beginning because the intellect is everywhere; they have not yet choked the intellect into themselves. So the medium is something that descends to the animal. It can do wonderful things, it can even say verses that are more beautiful than Goethe's verses — well, because it descends to the animal intellect.

For someone who is to attain knowledge in the anthroposophical way, the opposite is the case. He must not only enter halfway, as in his dreams, but he must know everything as the other person knows it, and in addition, what one can know when one wakes up a second time. When one wakes up a second time, one gets an idea of what it is like. You say to yourself: Yes, if you have spent a little time getting to know people during your life on earth, it will help you after death. Then it will be easier for you after death to get to know the human body again. But what you have to get to know between death and a new birth is the inside of the human body. And here you must be clear about one thing: getting to know the world is a lot of work. Students sweat profusely when they have to get to know the external world, when they have to learn to calculate how the stars revolve and so on; when they have to learn to calculate what the Earth looked like when there were no present-day crabs and so on. There is a lot to learn. But, gentlemen, what has to be learned on earth about what lies outside of man is nothing compared to what has to be learned within man.

Now you will say: Yes, but you do learn inwardly from the human being when the human being is dead; you learn everything from the human being. You cut up the human being and you learn from the corpse what the human being looks like internally. — But there is a big difference. With all the knowledge you gain from the corpse, you can never create a living human being. Of course, in order to create a living human being, conception is necessary. But at the moment of conception, the human being who has only just learned in the spiritual world between death and a new birth is also involved. One can only acquire knowledge on earth about that which is dead. One cannot acquire knowledge about that which is alive, or even about that which feels and thinks.

And I would not have dared to write these figures down for you if it had not been for the higher knowledge that one can see how man during his life on earth moves further and further away from the spiritual world. When he grows old, he has gone furthest away. When he is still a child – let us assume that he dies at the age of sixteen – yes, then it is different when he remembers back to the age of four. He may die at the age of sixteen, remembering back twelve years, that is three times four, and if he has reached the age of sixteen, he actually only needs forty-eight years to reappear. It is true that you can do that in the calculation!

But now we come across something very strange, gentlemen. This is this: you know, since ancient times, the patriarchal age has always been counted as about 72 years. When a person has reached the age of 72, the years beyond that are actually considered a gift. Isn't that right, that is the patriarchal age, 72 years. Now let us assume that such a patriarch was an excellent person, as there were some in ancient times. We, who are so inattentive today, remember very little from our childhood. But these people remembered things from the age of three or two. And then they had 70 years to forget their childhood wisdom, their extrasensory wisdom. That includes 35 times 2. So they go through a period in the spiritual world when they are 72 years old, remembering much further back than they can now, which is 35 times 72 years, or over 2000 years.

You see, gentlemen, if you observe the sun in spring, it rises in the constellation of Pisces. Once upon a time, it rose in the constellation of Aries. The calendar still shows Aries as the point of sunrise. But that is not correct. The sun rose in the constellation of Aries until the 15th century. Then it was correctly stated that the sun rises in the constellation of Aries. And since then, astronomers have become lazy and they continue to do so, even though the sun no longer rises in the constellation of Aries, but in the constellation of Pisces.

Let's assume that the constellation of Pisces has a certain size. There are twelve such constellations. When the sun rises next year, as I said, it will be somewhere in the constellation of Pisces on March 21. And when you observe it next year, it will have moved a little further, no longer coming up in the same place, and last year it was a little further back, also not coming up in the same place as this year. The sun takes a certain amount of time to pass through the constellation. At first it was at the very beginning of Pisces, and later, in the future, it will be at the end of Pisces. Then it will have advanced so far that it will no longer come out at Pisces, but at Aquarius. So now it passes through the constellation of Pisces, then later through the constellation of Aquarius, and even later through the constellation of Capricorn, and so on. For the sun to pass through such a constellation takes about as long as it takes a person, on average, when they have become very old, to come back.

This means a great deal that the sun advances once from one constellation to another. I have explained in my “Occult Science” that this is connected with the way the sun behaves when man returns. And we may therefore assume that knowledge shows us that when a person dies now, he receives what he has to learn to rebuild his body from the effects of Pisces. And then he comes again when he can no longer learn from Pisces, but must learn from Aquarius. And then he comes again when he must learn from Capricorn. Then again from Sagittarius. And then again he comes when he must learn from Scorpio. And then again, when he has to learn from Libra; then Virgo, then Leo, then Cancer, then Gemini, then Taurus, then Aries. Then he comes back to the beginning. But of course he has learned a lot by then. He has gone around once in 25,815 years and has gone through about twelve earth lives, eleven to twelve earth lives. Someone might say: Yes, you are telling us that a person always learns what he needs on earth from a different constellation, a constellation that looks quite different. If you look up at the constellation of Pisces, it looks quite different from Aquarius or Capricorn and so on.

Yes, but, gentlemen, imagine you were there, say, 800, 1000, 1500, 2000 years ago. It was quite different on Earth then. You would have led a completely different life. Perhaps you would have been some small, contented farmer, fattening up a paunch and becoming a very contented fellow. Now you are in the industrial labor movement. That is what you learned from the fish. Back then, when you would have fattened up your tummy and been a contented farmer, you would have learned that from the ram. So man learns what he goes through on earth precisely from the constellations.

You see, now we are getting to the point where we can say that people gradually come around. So if you had been there in 825 AD, for example, in the 9th century, you would have been that little farmer with the big belly; now you have returned under the influence of Pisces. But if you go around, you will arrive at Pisces again after 25,815 years. But now you have learned so much that you no longer need to become what you were before, but you are now at a much higher level as a human being. You have to realize that after 25,815 years, when we want to go back to Earth, we will no longer have to go down to Earth like that, because we have learned everything in a corresponding constellation.

And you see, this is where what I have already pointed out to you comes into consideration. Those who have learned geology in a very scholarly way today tell you: 25 million years ago, it was like this on Earth. Now, how do people come to the conclusion that 25 million years ago the Earth was a hot liquid body? I have also spoken to you about similar things, but not about such long periods of time. How do people come to this conclusion?

They examine Niagara Falls, for example. The waterfall rushes down. Now they take the stone over which it has rolled and calculate how much of it is washed away in a year, and then they calculate how much of the stone has been washed away in a year, when the water was not yet bottled but was still present as vapor. And from that they get these 25 million years.

It's just like when I examine a person's heart. Today is April 9. Let's examine the heart today, then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit; then again in a month, it will have changed a little bit again. And from these small changes, we calculate and come up with what the heart was like 300 years ago. But it hadn't existed yet. The calculation is correct. That is often the case with scientific calculations: the calculation is correct, but the things were not yet there. And so it is with what the earth looked like 25 million years ago. The calculation is exactly right, but the earth was not yet there. And so one then also calculates what the earth will be like after 25 million years. One just calculates in the other direction. But the earth will no longer exist then. Just as with the heart, which gets a little worse and worse every day, you can calculate what it will be like in 300 years, except that you will no longer be there as a physical person in 300 years. The calculations are quite correct. That is precisely the dazzling, the deceptive thing, that the calculations are terribly correct; but the human being does not last as long as the calculations indicate. When you reappear after 25,815 years, the Earth will have disintegrated in the meantime, and you will have had to find your way into the Earth in your successive lives anyway. The Earth is no longer there; you are freed from the Earth. You have ascended to a higher life.

And so, if you really get to the bottom of it, you can scientifically penetrate the time when old legends still tell that man goes through a series of earthly lives, but then no longer needs to return to earth. Then he must have learned so much that he can now endure it without a physical body. But then man must gradually have come to no longer have such crazy dreams as today, and must no longer have distanced himself so far from the spiritual world.

But you have come up with a very important result, gentlemen. You have to say to yourself: those people who resist becoming acquainted with the spiritual world do not want to let knowledge approach humanity. They want man to remain an ass on earth and not be able to return. Because he has already acquired something about man on earth, and something living at that, not just knowledge attached to dead matter, he is increasingly able to see through consciously after death what he has to go through.

Then, when a person, as certain dark forces want, because he must become a donkey on earth, should also remain a donkey, then these dark forces tempt him to lose his spiritual existence altogether. They persuade him to believe in eternal bliss. But just as they persuade him to believe in bliss, they take away from him what is allotted to him. That is how one has to talk; it is something terrible!

Therefore, anthroposophy must show man how he really is according to knowledge, so that he may gradually become able to enter the spiritual world again. You see, that is it, that anthroposophy is already a great human task and has a great social significance. Because all understanding will indeed go away. And because the intellect only wants to remain within, because human wisdom serves up what comes from the corpse, that is actually how it came about – not from something else – that humanity lives in such darkness and has no idea what to do. For example, in order to get out of the eternal congress image and so on, in order to get to something again, you have to really wake people up. But people hate to wake up. Because, when people sit down at meeting tables, it is not just about sitting down together, but about talking about something sensible; whereas people today are such that they do not even admit that they first have to wake up, have to make something of their minds flexible, so that they can also get a feeling for the social question again. Therefore, everything else is basically just a sticking plaster. But what is necessary is that people really come to an understanding of their inner being already on this earth, that they are prepared for what they have to do in the spiritual world. That is already so.

It does not occur to anthroposophy to convert individuals. Individuals cannot achieve anything, but many people can; and anthroposophy only wants to help many people acquire the right knowledge. Then it will be possible to bring about better times on this earth.

I wanted to tell you this too, gentlemen. Now I have to go to Zurich, St. Gallen and Winterthur. When I come back, I will continue with these lectures. Perhaps you can think of some questions you would like to ask.

Good morning, gentlemen! Does anyone have any further questions?

A question is asked regarding cataracts. The questioner says that he was in hospital in Basel in 1916 because of an inflammation of the iris, and that he received injections into the head. Now he would like to ask whether these injections could have had a harmful effect.

Dr. Steiner: Have you noticed anything in yourself? Of course, it is out of the question that these injections could have caused a disease. These so-called flies, these phenomena you speak of, do not have to indicate any kind of serious illness, but come from something else. The injections have the peculiarity that they sometimes weaken the nearby muscles a little, and then you can no longer move the muscle as freely; the eye becomes a little stiff. When you focus on something, it doesn't come into focus properly, and that's where these 'gnats and flies' come from. So this often comes from a slight weakness in the adjustment, I would say. Why did you have the iris injections?

Questioner: It was thought to be the vitreous humor.

Dr. Steiner: It is always better to fight such things with other means, as long as possible, through inner means. Some things cannot be fought through inner means; then one tries to inject. But you don't need to worry about that. It's not necessary.

Is there perhaps another question we can answer?

Questioner: I would like to come back to the turning. I and also my colleagues noticed that when we talk about the heart, there is some ambiguity. I thought about how Doctor once drew for us how the Earth is connected to the moon and the fluid - I don't know if I'm expressing myself correctly =, the sun is around it. The heart is on the left side of the body. I would now like to ask whether the heart is actually connected to the whole world mechanism?

Dr. Steiner: Here we have to recall various things that we have already discussed. I once said: In science today, people have completely wrong ideas about the heart. They think the heart is a kind of pump, and that the heart pumps blood all over the body. So they think: the heart contracts. When the heart contracts, it becomes smaller, holding less blood in itself. This pushes the blood through the veins, it is pushed into the body, and because the heart is elastic, it is thought to expand again. This brings the blood back again. — So today we attribute to the heart that it behaves like a pump, that it pumps blood throughout the body.

You see, that is a completely wrong view. It is a view that stems from the materialistic age, which attributes everything to the mechanical, when one thinks that the heart should be a real mechanical pumping device that pumps blood throughout the body. In doing so, no consideration is given to how all of life takes place in a living being. I would like to draw your attention to one thing in this regard.

There is a very small, lowly animal that actually consists only of a kind of tube. If I wanted to draw this animal, I would have to draw it something like this (see drawing): There would be a skin. Such a tube is the animal. Inside it is hollow, and there it is simply like a small harbor, a small cup. It still has little cilia, tiny hairs, with which it can move. This little animal lives in the water. It is called Hydra because it lives in the water. This little animal, Hydra, has the peculiarity that, when compared to higher animals or to humans, it is nothing more than a mere stomach. And this tube actually does nothing other than absorb all kinds of granules, that is, all kinds of food, that come near it and then digests them inside. So the little animal lives in the water; all kinds of nutrients swim in the water. The animal swims around, swims up to the nutrients, absorbs these nutrients, just like our stomach does; it also absorbs. Of course, this little animal does not have a pharynx or a mouth that prepares the nutrients. The Hydra simply absorbs these nutrients and digests them. The strange thing, however, is that it has the excretory organ, the anus, in the mouth at the same time. It also secretes through the mouth again immediately. So, everything is together in this little animal.

Now it is natural: if something wants to be a living being, especially an animal, it must not only eat – it must eat – but it must also breathe. And this little animal breathes with the outside of its skin. There are tiny holes all over it. These holes are found wherever there is organic matter, living matter. And it draws in the air it needs from the water through these holes. So you can say that this little animal, the Hydra, has an inside, a cavity with which it eats. On the outside, it has its respiratory organs. So the animal draws in the air, and the air also enters in the middle into this hollow space. The animal can eat and breathe. It is always busy with this. The animal swims around everywhere in the water, eats and breathes in the air from the water, which is also contained in the water.

What will the materialistic person say? He will say: Well, this little animal simply consists of this skin. This skin, which has grown inside in such a way that it is a nutritional apparatus on the inside, and on the outside it is a respiratory apparatus. — That is what the materialist says. But we cannot say so, because we must consider that to be a highly superficial view and must say: No, this little animal also has an etheric body, in which it is enclosed, and also an astral body, in which it is also enclosed. It still has that, these are the invisible limbs,

Now, gentlemen, can you prove by any means that the animal is also something invisible besides the visible? The materialist says: I take care of the visible, I do not take care of the invisible. The visible, that shows me a kind of stomach inside, on the outside it is a kind of lung, and I am satisfied with that.

Now you can do something special with this animal. Not true, gentlemen, we don't wear gloves, but we still remember what it looks like. If you have a glove, you can turn it inside out. So imagine that the glove is brown on the outside for my sake and has a gray lining on the inside. If you now turn it around so that the gray is on the outside and the brown is on the inside, you have turned it over correctly; now the inside is on the outside and the outside is on the inside. You can cut off a finger and do the same with the individual finger. Then, when you cut off the finger and turn it around, you have something like this hydra. The hydra looks like a single finger. And the strange thing is: just as you can turn this fingerling around so that the inside is outside and the outside is inside, you can also turn this Hydra around. You can do that, you can really turn it around. And then what I have drawn here (in the drawing, $. 53) in red is on the outside and what I have drawn in blue-violet is now on the inside. But the hollow space is now also outside, and what used to be outside is now inside. And the strange thing about it is that now the Hydra suddenly starts swimming around again. It doesn't mind at all. It swims around in the water again, eating and breathing. She now eats the granules in this newly formed cavity and breathes through what used to be the stomach wall. So it doesn't bother Hydra at all. It doesn't harm her at all. She starts to eat with what she used to breathe with, and to breathe with what she used to eat with.

Yes, gentlemen, if it were the case that it had only grown like this, and there was only a stomach inside and respiratory organs on the outside, the Hydra could do nothing but breathe in from the inside and start eating from the outside. But it doesn't do that. Instead, when it is turned around, it turns its stomach into lungs and its lungs into a stomach. Yes, now I would like to know how that would happen if there were nothing but a stomach and lungs! If you have a tool, a glove or whatever it is, you can turn it around if it is something external. If it is something internal, you cannot just turn it around, of course. So what is left of the etheric and astral body, the invisible, remains. And because that is there, the body of the hydra can simply be turned around. So you see: if you just look with a clear eye at what is actually going on in nature, you will immediately find out that the materialistic view must be absolutely wrong. So that one can say: That which actually eats and breathes is something invisible. And because the body of the Hydra is not constructed like ours, it does not have bones and muscles, but everything is one and the same substance, that is why the Hydra can use this one substance for everything.

It is not true that we cannot turn our stomachs inside out because it is so specially formed, because we do not consist of the same material as the Hydra, but our materials are different. But inside our stomach must also breathe, and the air that we have in it, it draws in from the outside as well. So our stomach is already a kind of Hydra.

From all these things, to which much more could be added, it is clear that even in the smallest animal we can prove that there is something invisible that underlies this animal.

Now, gentlemen, from this you can see that when we speak of what actually moves our whole being, we come to the conclusion that it is something invisible. If you take the external movement when we walk, you will not come to the conclusion that it is your big toe that takes the step, but you will say: I walk, it is my will that causes me to walk. When the organs move within – and it is not only the heart that moves, for example, the intestines are constantly moving; the intestines move in waves, otherwise the chyme could not be digested; so within the human being everything is in motion, there are constant movements within. So when the organs move within, these movements are not caused by the material part within us, but they are caused by that which is invisible within us. So we have to say: the heart is not a pump, but the heart is moved by our astral body. - So we have an astral body, and it moves the heart, or rather because our real self is also in the astral body, we also move our heart with our self, and we move it in a very special way.

If you look at the heart, as Mr. Burle quite rightly said, it is located on the left side of a normal person, not as strongly as one usually thinks, but it is located on the left side. And then the large veins come out of the heart here. The large artery and the other veins actually come out of the heart.

Now it is like this: when I breathe in, for example, I nourish myself with oxygen, so to speak. When I breathe out, I breathe out carbon dioxide. When I have breathed out the carbon dioxide, I immediately feel an oxygen hunger. I want to breathe in again. Yes, that has nothing to do with my heart at first, but with my whole body. My whole body gets the oxygen hunger. When it gets oxygen hunger, it drives all its blood to move, because the blood must have oxygen. Through its astral body, the body sends the blood to where it can get the oxygen.

Or suppose I am walking or working. Then the food burns up in me. I have already explained this to you. As a result, the blood becomes poor in nourishment. When one is working, the blood always becomes poor in nourishment. Now, what does the blood want? The blood wants to get nourishment again. The blood, as it were, seizes the nourishment that the stomach and intestines have absorbed. All of this, this hunger for air and food, sets the blood in motion. It is the blood that moves first, and the blood carries the heart with it. So it is not the heart that pumps the blood through the body, but the blood moves through the hunger for air and food, and this moves the heart. So we have to say that it is our invisible self that moves the heart.

Now, gentlemen, when you hear this, you may raise a question. You see, with our anthroposophy, it is always the case that our opponents think they are making the objections. But you know the objections long before. You make them yourself beforehand. That is why I always draw your attention to the objections. You may object: Yes, what use is our heart if it does not pump blood through the body? If the blood moves, we might not need the heart, which is supposed to be carried along.

Yes, you see, that is what people say who have no real understanding of the human body as a whole. There is a big difference between the human head and the rest of the human being. I have told you something about this difference before. Suppose you are walking or working. Yes, the head is not involved in that. The head sits with the rest of the body, like you sit in a carriage. You sit very still. The carriage has to move its wheels, the horses have to pull. But our hands and feet have to work, and the head sits inside as the one that does not work, right? Otherwise, we would somehow have to have ropes on our ears and use them to set the wheels on the machines in motion. We don't do that. The head doesn't work. Imagine if you could attach ropes to your hair – most people today could no longer do this because they are bald. That would be very bad for you. The head does not actually work, it sits quietly on the rest of our organism. But why is that? Yes, you see, the head is something completely different from the rest of the human being. The rest of the human being is a movement apparatus. The head is only to that extent a movement apparatus, as it participates in the movements and so forth; the movements work up into our head. But the head is not that which itself makes the movements.

The head has sensory organs on the outside. That is where it perceives what is outside. But the head also perceives what is going on inside, only unconsciously in most people. If I want to look outside so that I know what is going on outside, I need my eyes. If I want to look inside, at the blood circulation, I need my heart. The heart is not just there to pump blood through the body, but is a sensory organ that perceives everything, like the whole head. We would know nothing about our blood circulation – of course, with our upper floors we know nothing about it either, but there must be knowledge in the head – if the head did not perceive our whole blood circulation through the heart.

I have already told you how the liver is a perception organ. The lower movements, for example, are perceived by the liver. But the heart perceives all the movements of the whole person. This sets the heart in motion. Through the movements caused by the hunger for breathing and the hunger for food, the heart is set in motion. And from the movements of the heart, one can tell whether something in the body is in order or in disorder.

Now, imagine that someone has drunk an awful lot of alcohol on a particular evening and is, as they say, thoroughly drunk. This disrupts the entire blood circulation. The next day, the head notices through the heart: the entire blood circulation is out of order. The result is a hangover, a familiar headache. Yes, why is there a buzzing in the head? You see, when it's a nice day and I look around with my eyes, I have a nice impression. If it's awful weather out there, I have a bad impression. Yes, gentlemen, when everything is moving properly in the blood, the head has a good impression, everything is in order in the head. But when there is a storm in the blood – that is what happens when someone has been drunk in the evening – then the head has a stormy impression through the heart, everything is mixed up.

So we only understand what the heart is when we know that the heart is actually the inner sense organ through which the head perceives everything that is going on in the body.

If we look around us in the world, it turns out that the human being stands in relation to the whole world through his invisible part, through that which I have called his astral body. The most important stars in relation to which the human being stands are the sun and the moon. Now, the human head is mainly in relation to the sun, but the rest of the human being is actually in relation to the moon. And one can say that it is, of course, an awful superstition to think that something can be done with the current phases of the moon. But there is a rhythm in the human being that is also expressed in the blood and is similar to the lunar rhythm. Man orients himself to the whole world. And so it is also the case that the movement of the blood does not depend on food alone. When a person is completely healthy – after all, in a sense he is a free being – then in a sense he makes himself independent of the external forces of nature, and in a sense he also makes himself independent of the whole world. But the moment a person begins to feel a little ill, he becomes dependent on the whole world.

Let us suppose that someone is ill and you can tell from their pulse. There is a huge difference for the person who can perceive it between the pulse in the morning and the pulse in the evening. You can tell a lot from the difference between the morning pulse and the evening pulse. But for certain sick people, there is also a big difference between the pulse at the full moon and the pulse at the new moon. Human beings are dependent. Even if they can make themselves independent when they are healthy, a certain dependency remains, and this is particularly evident when they are ill. So we have to say: in terms of what makes an impression on our hearts, we are already related to the movement of the heavenly bodies, namely the moon. We are related to the movement of the moon. — In this respect, a great deal of observation still needs to be done.

I told you earlier that in a normal person, the heart is slightly shifted to the left. But just as there are left-handed people and most people are right-handed, doing everything with their right hand, there are also, curiously enough, right-handed people. There are people who do not have their heart on the left, but on the right side. Most of the time this is not noticed at all, because the difference is, of course, an internal one. If someone is left-handed, you notice it very quickly, but if their heart is shifted a little to the right instead of to the left, you don't notice it so quickly. But it would be interesting to examine precisely such people, who have their heart on the right side, to see how they are somewhat different in life than those who have their heart on the left side. A person whose heart is on the right side, that is, shifted to the right, is someone who actually always has to do certain things at a certain time of year or at a certain time of day. The right-heart person is much more dependent on the external environment than the left-heart person. And if the heart has only moved a little bit to the right – after all, it is not in the same place for everyone, but a little bit different for each person – if it is still on the left, but has moved a little bit to the right, then he immediately has the desire to align himself more with his surroundings. He immediately wants to do something special in spring, let's say, and something special in autumn. Of course, you can't always do that and then ruin yourself. People have no idea how they can ruin themselves.

For example, in the case of children who have their hearts a little to the right, you have to proceed differently at school – it doesn't need to be noticed – than with those children who have their hearts in the right place. When a person's heart is to the right, they are then led to make much more use of their astral body.

You see, gentlemen, that is the story: if someone works at a machine for a long time, you can say that in general the work becomes mechanical. It becomes more unpleasant because you yourself become a piece of the machine, but if you work at a machine for a long time, you do the movements and so on mechanically. Imagine that you are quite normally a real left-handed person. The father was also a left-handed person, the grandfather too, the great-grandfather too. It has slowly crept in. And when you are born as a son, you naturally make the same movement internally that your father and grandfather and great-grandfather have already made. It's as easy as if you've been working on a machine for a long time.

If you are a right-hearted person, the position of your heart is not inherited from your father. As a rule, the father is not also a right-hearted person. That is not inherited. In that case, you have to start things over and over again from your astral body, so to speak. You don't have the whole inheritance in you. And the consequence of this is that such a person, who is a right-hearted person, has to apply much more inner strength to keep the whole blood circulation in order. And that is why such a right-hearted person is much more concerned with the external.

The following is even possible. Suppose you are not a right-heart person at all, but a perfectly normal left-heart person. But if you become a ballet dancer – it happens to men too, but even more so to women – then ballet dancing also affects the heart. Now, ballet dancing is also very materialistic. But in ancient times, when people were encouraged to dance, for example in ancient Greece, the fact that they then incorporated movements that imitated the stars even pushed the heart a little to the right during their lifetime. Even today, dance still has a strong effect on the heart of a dancer, even though it has become materialistic, because it moves the heart a little to the right. And if one paid more attention to these things, one would see, when one dissects the human being after death, how the heart has stretched certain vessels apart. The fact that the person in question was a dancer is why the heart has been pushed a little to the right - you can still see that after death.

This answers the question that Mr. Burle asked. It is answered by seeing that when man is more devoted to his astral body, he actually does not want to follow his usual blood circulation, but he wants to control it even more, and in doing so he indulges in movements that are more like the movements outside the earth, towards the moon. Can you understand that? (Answer: Yes!)

So what you asked today, that it is very easy to see that a person has a certain longing to do this, is precisely because man's whole heart movement is controlled by the invisible part, that he then, I might say, slips a little over to the invisible and that he then actually directs himself according to the external and not merely according to the inner blood movement, which is directed towards breathing and nourishment. All these things can be explained if one really understands the human being.

And now I would like to tell you something that is still a little bit related to what we discussed last time. Last time we saw: there inside the eye, there is this small lens (it is drawn). If a person has normal vision, then this small lens is transparent. If a person gets cataracts, then the lens becomes opaque. Salts are deposited. So we can say: In a healthy person, here in the eye – if that is the front of the eye – is the lens; it is transparent. In a person who is seriously ill, we have the lens in which salts have been deposited, making it opaque. Because the lens is transparent, the human being's astral body can see the world through the transparent lens. He sees everything in the world.

When you get used to very, very intense thinking through things like the ones I have described in the booklet: “How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds”, there comes a moment when you can do something very special. But getting used to very intense thinking is not something people today want to do easily. Because people today do not withdraw completely into their own thinking, because they say: everything must be given to us from the outside; we must explore the secrets of the world from the outside. Of course, it is also uncomfortable, because you have to be very careful with this thinking. If you think very vividly, you have to be terribly careful, of course. But there comes a moment in life when you can do something very special.

Not that I can lift a chair with my hand, everyone understands that because it happens all the time. But I can also leave my hand alone, not use it for what it usually does. What the lens of the eye does is not so much in the power of people. If you have an impression from the outside, well, then you look through your lens of the eye towards this impression. If you have no impression, then the lens of the eye remains still.

But, gentlemen, just imagine someone who has really made an effort to think very hard. He is completely absorbed in his inner thoughts. He is not looking outwards, he is leaving his eye lens alone, just as you leave your hand alone when you are not using it. Yes, then the whole starry sky is reflected at the point where you would otherwise have the transparent lens with which you would otherwise see. That is, I would like to say, the downright wonderful thing about this method, which you develop in the way I have described in 'How to Know Higher Worlds', is that you learn to use the individual organs not only for the earth, but also for the other world. When salts have naturally deposited, the lens becomes thick and automatically opaque. When one reflects deeply, it remains transparent, but the person does not see through the lens, he does not look outwards. And from there it begins to illuminate the whole world from the lens. But then one sees the spiritual. And you see the whole starry sky in its true, inner meaning. This small place in man, where the lens is located, can teach you about everything you dare to say about stars and so on. You see, it is actually so wonderful with man that at the smallest point is the seat of knowledge that is tremendous.

Those who are very healthy – of course, one does not need to wish this for any human being – even have this whole story easier, they do not have to exert themselves so much with their thinking. They only need to concentrate very little to be able to see inwardly when they have forgotten how to see outwardly. But this is what must always be emphasized when speaking of such higher knowledge: when speaking of such higher knowledge, it is always so obvious that one can, of course, exert oneself too much, and then, instead of higher knowledge, something can occur, such as, let us say, the disturbance of the lens. The lens can then become somewhat opaque due to this strong inner concentration, even if one does not become strong-minded, but something opaque. Therefore, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds,” everything is described in such a way that a person can achieve what is discussed there, but without becoming ill as a result. No exercise should be described in such a way that it can make one ill. But this lens is the place in the human being that can actually reveal the entire spiritual world to us at the very back of the eye. And so we can say: you can see outwardly when everything is transparent in the eye. You can see inwardly when something is deliberately made opaque.

Yes, gentlemen, this is something that can make it clear to you how knowledge of spiritual worlds actually arises. Knowledge of spiritual worlds arises precisely from the fact that one first finds in one's head the individual points that are not needed for ordinary activity, because they are at rest. Through the lens, one first gets to know the outer world. But one can train the whole body so that all possible uses of the senses are suspended for a moment. If, for example, one does not use the heart – blood circulation can continue, but one switches off the heart as a sense organ – then one begins to perceive the whole blood circulation. But then one does not just perceive the blood circulation. When you make your heart so that you can see through your body to the blood circulation, when you do not feel your heart inwardly and do not feel the pulse beat, but see through it, as you learn through the lens to see out into the world with your head, when you learn to see through yourself, then, gentlemen, you see not only the blood circulation, but you see the whole movement of the moon, everything that the moon does, and you see how the moon relates to the sun. And then you see the relationship of the heart to the sun and moon.

You see, in the old days, all this was easier for people. They were not yet schooled to learn only from the outside world. They did not want to see everything in front of them. If you had taken a Greek, a person who had lived twenty-seven or twenty-eight hundred years ago, to the movies, he would not have watched the movie for long because he would have fainted. at the moment when the old Greek would have looked at it, inside him, but not just in one limb, but in the whole person, what you get when a limb falls asleep, when something presses on it. Not a real sleep would have come to the person, but this falling asleep of the whole person would have arisen if you had sat the old Greek in a cinema. He would have fainted from it, of course. The ancient Greek would not have been able to watch it at all, because at that moment his head would have received such a disturbance in the whole blood system through the heart that his whole body, not just individual limbs, would have fallen asleep, and the head would no longer have been able to control anything. He would have fainted. Man has become quite different from what he was in ancient times. Today, modern culture has caused such a disorderly blood circulation that people no longer faint in cinemas.

If you have really studied spiritual science a little bit and then go to the movies, you have to pull yourself together very hard, otherwise you can still faint today. But it's not true, we are all human, and one takes on the characteristics of the other. And it is the case that people no longer have the blood circulation system of ancient times, like the ancient man. That is why the ancients could see more clearly into the circulatory system and could speak more easily of the sun and the moon than we can. We are cut off from it and must first reconnect to it through exercises. We must first properly restore the organs so that we can see.

You see, the ancient Greeks could still understand when older people told them something about how things actually are on earth. We must not believe that everything handed down from ancient times is always superstition; it is just that in many cases later generations have transformed it to such an extent that it has become superstition. It is indeed strange how things that are quite reasonable at first simply become superstitions later on. When people no longer know how things should actually be done, then these things become superstitions. For example, the ancient Jews did not eat pork. Yes, they knew that, because of their race and the area in which they lived, pork made them weak. Then it later became superstition. The things that later become superstition always go back to earlier reasonable things. So we don't have to believe that what was previously available as old knowledge is always nonsense, but you can't always rely on the old because the old things have been falsified many times. That is why you have to research everything anew.

That is why it is so nonsensical when people say of anthroposophy that it merely collects together what already existed. Nothing is collected together, but everything is newly investigated! And to those of you, gentlemen, who say: In Anthroposophy they only collect all kinds of old Gnostic stuff — just ask them where they can prove that the story of the eye lens is found as I told you last time and today, where you can find it in any book. You cannot find it because the story has been completely forgotten. Therefore, you can answer anyone who says that the things have been collected together: You are lying because you do not even know what is said there – that the whole view of the heart and so on is renewed.

It is the case that everything is originally explored here and then comes to the whole person. And from such simple things as the fact that a person moves while dancing and turning, which I touched on last time and today, prompted by Herm Burle's question, one can see a lot. It can be understood.

But, gentlemen, then something else will come out, which is what humanity fears most. Because, you see, once anthroposophy gets through – today you can't do anything; if you want to do something practically, all hell breaks loose; even if you just say things, the opposition arises immediately, as you are well aware – but once anthroposophy gets so far that it penetrates into our schools, that it asserts things everywhere, something else will come. Then people will know which movements are right for their health and their entire metabolic development and which are wrong. Then the time will come when work will be organized around the human being. Today, work is organized around machines. Today, people have to move in a way that those who discovered the machine find appropriate. Later, people will realize that what comes from the machines is not the main thing; the human being is the main thing. Therefore, there must only be such machines that are designed for man. This will only be possible once anthroposophy has been fully accepted. Then it will be possible to say: everything mechanical must be geared to man.

But something is needed for this. First, one must understand that the heart is not a machine, but is directed towards the human being. Then one will also be able to find the basis for the outer machine that shapes it in such a way that it is directed towards the human being. But a science that has made itself so comfortable that it describes the heart as if the human being had only a pump in his blood circulation makes no conscience of making the machine so that the human being must adapt to it. Our whole false social situation is connected with this false view in science. And therefore one must understand that only a correct thinking about man must come first; only then can a correct social life begin. As long as one believes that the heart is a pump, one will not be able to adjust correctly in the outer life either. Only then, when one knows that the invisible man is higher than his heart, it is he who moves his heart, then one will also adjust the machines according to man. We must begin to realize this.

Today people make it much too comfortable for themselves. They make it much too comfortable for themselves. What is most international today? The football game! I explained it to you the other day. But what is spiritual is always pushed together into small circles and so on. It fragments. Right, in Norway you can hear: Long live him! or you hear a German song sung when footballers (from Germany) are up. But otherwise people separate.

What must be grasped is the spirit, but in such a way that it is grasped in the particular. Not that one speaks in general terms of spirit, spirit, but it must be grasped in the particular.

We will continue the discussion next Saturday.

Yesterday, when we were discussing the threefold order of the social organism from morning till night, the latest issue of the journal Das Reich arrived, in the middle of our deliberations. Under the general title of “Knowledge and Opinion” it contains material that I have never read before and that I have never seen before. These statements, however, stimulated a whole series of thoughts in me, thoughts, however, that are often stimulated in me anyway.

It is in Lower Austria, in a place from which, if you look south, you have a particularly beautiful view of the mountains in the evening glow, the Lower Austrian Schneeberg, the Wechsel, those mountains that form the northern edge of Styria, a small, very inconspicuous house. Above the entrance door was written: “In God's blessing all is included”. I myself was in this cottage only once during my youth. But there lived a man who was outwardly very inconspicuous. When you came into his cottage, it was full of medicinal herbs everywhere. He was a herbalist. And these herbs he packed in a knapsack on a certain day of the week, and with this knapsack on his back he then traveled the same route to Vienna that I also had to take to school back then, and we always traveled together, then walked a bit together through the road that leads from the South Station to the city center, “auf der Wieden” in Vienna. This man was, so to speak, the embodiment of the spirit that prevailed in the area, in everything he said, but how he, as that spirit, had survived from the first half of the nineteenth century, which was not that long ago at the time. This man actually spoke a language that sounded quite different from the language of other people. When he spoke of the tree leaves, when he spoke of the trees themselves, but especially when he spoke of the wonderful essence of his medicinal herbs, one realized how this man's soul was connected with all that made up the spirit of nature in that particular area, but also what formed the spirit of nature in the wider area. This man was a sage in his own way, through his own inner being, and from this inner being spoke much more than the inner being of a human being often reveals. This man, Felix was his first name, had a spiritual bond between his soul and nature, he also spoke a lot from all kinds of reading. For in addition to the medicinal herbs that, so to speak, stuffed his little house, he had a whole library of all kinds of meaningful works, but which were basically all related in their basic nature, in their basic character to that which was the basic character, the basic trait of his own soul. The man was a poor fellow. For one earned very little, extremely little, from the trade in medicinal herbs, which one laboriously gathered in the mountains. But this man had an extraordinarily contented face and was extraordinarily wise inside. He often spoke of the German mystic Ennemoser, who was his favorite reading, and who indeed contains much in his writings of what had passed through the German mind, but precisely through the German mind in the great times when the thought impulses of Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe and those who stood in the background were still alive. For behind these minds there stood the spiritual world, which they allowed to flow over into what they revealed to the world in their writings. But what was printed in the issue of “Reich” that came to me yesterday from the estate of Ennemoser was completely unknown to me until yesterday. It contains the final section of Joseph Ennemoser's “Horoscope of World History” - I note in addition: Ennemoser died in 1854 and this is the first of his works to be published from his estate. I would like to read a little from this work by Ennemoser to introduce today's discussion:

”...The winter that covers the German regions with snow and ice may last a long time before the real spring comes, but it will come, the seed of freedom has been sown and it will grow, the law of nature will not be repealed by either cunning or military power. Just as the idea of Christianity was implanted in the rough trunk of the Germanic nation and absorbed into its life, so will this vigorous trunk unfold green branches into fresh flowers; just as the body of the church in the German architectural style is already complete in its outlines, wherein the finished dogma of faith , the towers that are still missing almost everywhere will also rise to the sky with the incense of true devotion, and the ever-spiritual life and the organization of personal relationships with the divine will only mature into self-aware understanding, the symbolic framework must first be absorbed into the living movement of purpose , the heaviness of the church must be lightened, the stability of the dogma of separateness must be guided into the current of the universally human; just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science, and art a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material!

Is it not a utopian dream and will Germany be even remotely able to fulfill such a requirement? Germany will fulfill its calling, or perish most ignominiously and with it European culture. The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and west, a storm can break out! The trunk of old politics stands on rotten roots, the calculations of diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you pick figs from thistles, grapes from thorns? True life of freedom sprouts only on the green branches of justice and from the warm spring of charity! Or can this unnatural state persist and the disharmony that has spread to all limbs return to the old order of withered bodies?

Evening will come, the first time has passed, but Germany's end has not yet come; so far it has had childish attempts, there will come a second time when it will discard the 'childish' and have 'manly' attempts. The time of a nation is only at an end when it no longer has questions and does not care about life's higher goods, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the issues of the time! The German has lost nothing but his resilience, his mind is clear, his courage firm, and who doubts the strength of his arm? Everywhere, living spirits are at work, not as imitators, but as originals. The true hunger of the Germans is the yearning for a higher freedom of the mind; the thirst and desire for the light of truth and justice are the main driving forces to set the vigorous hands to work, all of which are still unfinished, to strive for a goal that is still far from humanity. Or should the stream flow back to the sources of its origin? Are nations to become the family fiefdoms of princes again, or is it a matter of state and national rights? There is a higher law in nature and history that no nation can escape, none can go beyond its goal, but neither can any disturb the order of the whole and fall short of it, as its abilities and the spirit of language drive it to! And will not reaction guide the wheel back onto the old track? Fools, who delight only in the dreams of their youth! You can extinguish the fire that erupts in many directions, but you cannot extinguish the inner embers once they have been ignited; reaction itself becomes the means to freedom, pressure brings accelerated movement, the hatred of the parties has a stronger effect than love on the events of the future; perhaps only some kind of spark is needed, and the suppressed intellectual power of the whole nation breaks out in bright flames of enthusiasm. “Nescit vox missa reverti,“ the spirits of life slumber under a thin cover; no free action can be taken back by the spirit; foreign spirits, moods and earthly powers act alone or together on the human will, driving it with irresistible power to acts that, according to divine order, lead to the unification of opposites, to the reconciliation of parties and to the final fulfillment of the calling!”

These are the sentences of a man who died in 1854. I also had to think when I visited dear Felix in his little house one time, that I also visited the home of the schoolmaster's widow, the widow of the schoolmaster who had died several years ago, but I visited her for reasons that the Lower Austrian schoolmaster was also a highly interesting personality. The widow still had a wealth of literature that he had collected in his library. Everything that German scholarship had collected and written down about the German language, myths and legends, in order to sink it into the forces of the German people, could be found there. The lonely schoolmaster had never had the opportunity to go public until after his death; only after his death did someone dig up some of his estate. But I still have not seen those long diaries that that lonely schoolmaster kept, in which pearls of wisdom were written. I don't know what happened to those diaries. On the one hand, this lonely schoolmaster worked among his children; but on the other hand, when he left the schoolroom, he immersed himself—like many such people from the old days of German development—in what lived on in this way as the substance of the German essence. When one then went away from them and traveled to Vienna, one could see how the ancient and the most recent times merge. We live in these most recent times, and it is up to us to understand them a little, to understand them in order to find in them the possibility, as far as it is up to us, to participate in the great tasks that this time poses for humanity.

It is truly not an external matter that all these thoughts, in connection with the experiences of which I have given you a hint, passed through my soul yesterday, just after our meeting, because yesterday, too, was basically a piece of what is falling into our time, right out of the great questions that we must have. For the man said: “The time of a people is only at an end when it no longer has any questions and is no longer concerned about the higher goods of life, or when it is incapable of engaging in the solution of the questions of the time.” Yesterday, many things passed us by that could inspire the thought: How many are there still who have real questions about the time, who still care about the higher goods of life? Did we not experience it yesterday that when our Mr. Ranzenberger appeared in a good-natured way with something that could have touched the heart, he had to disappear? As in the Symbolum, one could encounter the treatment that what is anthroposophically intended experiences in the present. He was not allowed to finish speaking. Nor was the next speaker allowed to finish, who had no questions, who really had no questions, who is living out that senile youth that has no questions and which makes one fear for the future when one knows that only that which that has the strength and substance of the spirit behind it, that can only flourish in the present time if it still has questions and is concerned about the higher goods of humanity, that does not reel off abstract phrases about content-free ideals of youth and thinks itself great with them.

These things are worthy of attention. They are just as worthy of attention as when revolutionary phrases and philistinism are combined. For revolutionary phrases and radicalism are a mask for philistinism, for pedantry, for banality, which we have also encountered enough of, especially in recent times. It is necessary in our time not to speak, not even to speak in short sentences, of those things that mean compromise, but to speak in a clearly conceivable way – for one distinction should be written in the hearts of people of the present: the distinction between content and lack of content – that that which can be developed from here is the strongest opponent of lack of content. For, through the impulse of the threefold social organism, together with friends who have devoted themselves to this idea and sensed its substantiality, we have tried to bring into the world that which is backed by spiritual insight. But on the other hand, it must also be emphasized that the spiritual reality must not be confused with the phrase of the time, no matter how beautiful that phrase may be. The same sentences can be said today: one time they are empty phrases, the other time they are spiritual content. The latter must be present as reality; it is not yet present just because the words sound the same. But everything that is mere phrase, even if it ultimately seems to succeed, has no substance of reality. And it is the task of those united in the anthroposophical movement to recognize this difference between spiritual reality and insubstantial, meaningless phrase. It is not enough that people today say that humanity must show courage again, must straighten up again, must glow with new spiritual forces, and that spiritual life must break away from economic and state life and establish an autonomy of the spirit. We must distinguish whether there is any substance behind such things or whether they are mere empty phrases, born of the spirit of empty phrases of our time. No matter how beautiful they may sound, what matters is whether there is any spiritual reality behind them or whether they are just empty phrases.

I have often said here that it is not without reason that what we call anthroposophy has emerged in our time, what we call anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. For decades we have tried to cultivate it in preparation for this serious 'time. But we must also understand it as such: as a preparation for this serious time. This time has very special characteristics. Outwardly, this time bears the mark of materialism, and the sister of materialism is empty talk. The more humanity clings to outward material things, the more that which it says about the outer world becomes empty talk. Empty talk and materialism belong together. Today we can only rise above empty talk by deepening our spiritual life. We can only rise above materialism by deepening our spiritual life. For, however strange it may sound, this age of materialism and empty phrases is the time when the spirit, with its content from the spiritual world, most strongly wants to communicate with humanity. The world lives in contradictions. Never before has man been as close to the spiritual world as he is today, although outwardly he is mired in materialism. Never before have people been so close to the spiritual world, but they do not realize it, they misunderstand it. And it is particularly strange when one is repeatedly told that one can only believe what anthroposophy brings, or that one must accept it on authority. However, there is nothing for which authority is less necessary, nothing for which it is less appropriate than for anthroposophy. For it speaks of that which today wants to enter into every human being, which wants to enter through the senses but is not allowed in by the materialistic attitude of the time. And this anthroposophy speaks of that which today wants to arise from within every human nature, but which people do not let up from the lower body through the heart to the head, and of which they naturally do not notice anything.

Not only do people today want to be approached by sensual external impressions, but these sensual external impressions want to flow in through the human senses in such a way that they become imaginations in the human being. Today, people are inwardly predisposed to develop imaginations, pictorial representations of the world. But he hates it, does not want it; he says: That is poetry, fantasy. He does not realize that science can give him many good things, but never the truth about man, and that he would experience the truth if he could come to his imaginations. And what lives in man's inner being reveals itself continually, only that man does not notice it as inspiration. Never before have people been so tormented by inspirations as they are today. For they notice that something from within them wants to rise to their hearts and minds; but they perceive it only as nervousness because they do not want to let it rise, or they anesthetize themselves with something else against these revelations of the spirit.

We have often spoken here of the fact that, in addition to his physical body, which can be seen with eyes and grasped with hands, man also has his etheric body. They also know that the etheric body can only be recognized by those who devote themselves to real imaginations. But today there is a way to truly grasp the human etheric body. This way consists in taking art in the Goethean sense seriously. Throughout his life, Goethe was convinced that truth comes to life in the artistic perception of reality, that art is a “manifestation of secret natural laws that could never be expressed without it.” But our school system is dripping a poison dew on everything that science should imbue with a productive artistic spirit. Our scientific humanity believes that it is getting closer to the truth by eradicating everything from its content that is imbued with the artistic spirit. In doing so, it is getting further and further from the real truth, not closer to it, and besides, the real truth is gradually being squeezed out of all the individual sciences that we have to hand down to young people. The only truth is what Richard Wahle says – in the sense in which I have expounded it – that in what is called science today, only ideas of a ghostly world live. Take everything that can be known through natural science: it gives man no conception of reality. Nature itself, with its true essential being, does not live in the conceptions of today's natural science, and the other sciences have formed themselves after natural science. What lives in these conceptions is not nature, it is a ghost of nature. The world spirit has taken its revenge on present-day people who no longer want to believe in a spiritual world, so that present-day humanity has fallen into the terrible superstition of taking the spectre of science as real science. Today, those who believe in ghosts are precisely those who call themselves monists, scientifically educated. And how could these ghosts of the world become reality?

This could happen if one seriously develops the artistic sense in oneself, as Goethe wanted to educate it in his nation, if one could absorb what comes to life in a productive capacity for contemplation – Goethe called it “contemplative judgment” – if one could dissolve the specter of contemplating nature into the productive, creative power of the spirit. In the middle of the last century, this creative power of the mind was treated in German intellectual life as the fantasy of the wild man who comes to this fantasy in my fairy tale in the one mystery drama. Thus we live with our ideas today as people in a ghostly world, we are superstitious without knowing it, we mock the superstition of others and are three times more entangled in this superstition than those we mock as superstitious people.

The etheric body of the human being is not built according to what we know as natural laws, but according to artistic laws. No one can grasp it, either in themselves or in others, unless they have an artistic spirit within them. And it is the lack of artistic spirit in the present that is so devastating, so destructive, so devastatingly interfering with the worldviews of the present. And in addition to his etheric body, we know that the human being also carries the astral body within him. This astral body is of particular importance in the present.

My dear friends, I know of no more poignant event for world development than the fact that the most important decisions regarding this world catastrophe were taken on a Saturday, on August 1, 1914 in Berlin, in the late afternoon, even into the night. For those who understand the basic laws of human life from the point of view of anthroposophy, many things are obvious, but for these others stand and mock at the superstition of others, but they are three times as superstitious as those they mock. For these people do not want to know anything about the deeper laws that prevail in the life of the world. They believe that gravity rules, that atomic forces rule. But they do not know that world history is ruled by deep-seated laws, of which the outer phenomena are only symptomatic expressions, that from epoch to epoch people have to enter ever different spheres and live in ever different ways. And so we have arrived in the present time because we, of all times in the development of mankind, are closest to the spiritual world, we just do not realize it yet. We have arrived at the point where we have to take into account man's relationship to the spiritual world. Oh, earlier people did not need to take this into account; their poor brains were still agile enough to receive the spiritual revelations they needed. But in the course of time these revelations have become empty shadows and phrases. And what is called Christianity today is often nothing more than a collection of empty shadows and meaningless phrases, not filled with the spirit. But mankind hates the real spirit; it repeatedly succumbs to its tendency towards complacency, in that which has been called Christianity for centuries and millennia, and which Christ repeatedly and repeatedly repels. It is always said: If you go among today's workers and talk to them about Christianity, they don't want to hear it. I can only say: I believe that. For just as you speak today, so you have spoken and thought for centuries and millennia, and now you want to heal the people to whom you have spoken in this way with the same thing that has brought about the misery of the time and of which you have proven that it has no hope.

Today, man is compelled to take his relationship with the spiritual world seriously, to feel that he really does not only live in the physical world, but also in a spiritual world. And until we take this attitude seriously, rivers of blood will still have to flow over poor Europe. For men hate the truth, and the hatred very often changes into fear; therefore, the people of the present are afraid of the truth. Today it is so that we cannot come to the truth at all when we make our decisions. I am going to tell you something extremely paradoxical, but I am only saying it because it is necessary that these things be said in our very serious times, because today man needs real self-knowledge, not empty self-knowledge. Man today is close to the spiritual world. When he is in his physical body, he is separated from the spiritual world; there he sees through his physical eyes, hears through his physical ears, and feels with his physical sense of touch. From falling asleep to waking up, however, he is in the spiritual world, where he lives the life that remains largely unconscious to him today, and that plays into his daily life with its impulses. But for the modern man it is so that he cannot come to fruitful decisions if he wants to make these decisions in the time from morning to evening, but he must have lived them prophetically the night before. It was not like that in the past, when people, through the different nature of their brains, still had spiritual revelations. Today, the human brain has dried up, even in youth it speaks in a senile way. For man must know: when he wakes in the morning, he has already prepared as an inner prophet what he must decide upon during the day. Only that is of real fruitfulness, what he has ready when he wakes in the morning. Everything else will lead more and more to need and misery for those who live in the superstition that one must come to one's decisions during the day, when one is in the physical body. Man should take this into account. For we live today in a time when he should make his relationship with the spiritual world real. That is why it is so distressing that the decisions leading up to the events that marked the beginning of the world catastrophe for Germany were not prepared by the corresponding personalities through what they could have experienced in the preceding night, but were made under the immediate impressions of Saturday, out of the mind of the day, until late into the evening.

I often said to friends when this war broke out: we will not be able to talk about this war in the same way as about the other wars that have taken place in history. We can talk about these other wars by collecting documents from the archives and then judging the facts. On the other hand, we will not be able to talk about this war and its origins in the same way. For at the time when this tempest broke out, all hell was let loose and the gates were sought by the confused human beings. And it will be possible to prove that of the forty to fifty people who were involved in the events that led to the war in July 1914, a large number did not have full use of their consciousness when they made those fateful decisions during the day. But that is the time when consciousness is silent during the day, and when people are not asleep, that is when the demons hostile to humanity intrude into human consciousness. We are therefore dealing with the playing into the world catastrophe of spiritual causes, and anyone who sees through the laws of the world can recognize how, through the fact that the most important decisions are only made on the basis of the events of the day, disaster occurs. Thus one will find less and less the possibility of getting out of the distress and misery if people do not strive to make their relationship with the spiritual world real, that is, to take their relationship with the spiritual world seriously in the facts that take place within. What use is it if you are a mystic, no matter how good, if you sit down half the day or sometimes the whole day and immerse yourself inwardly, trying all kinds of things to evoke an inner sense of comfort and pleasure What use is it if the spirit does not come to life in you, whereby you create living relationships between yourself and the real spiritual world and its laws, which are then expressed in the destinies in which we humans are involved?

All that is expressed in these words was one of the reasons why reading Ennemoser's words had inspired particular thoughts in me. For it was in the middle of German intellectual life between East and West. Ennemoser himself uses these words: “The wind blows from the east and the west.” He thus points first to a special relationship to the Orient and Occident, which I recently pointed out in a public lecture. He points this out as a man of the old Germanic times and shows that in the old days the German spirit was still connected to the world spirit, and that the German spirit was actually called upon to understand the great world connections a little. Oh yes, it goes to the heart when you read such a sentence in our time, written more than half a century ago: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish most ignominiously, and with it European culture.” “ One feels that others in the past have thought the same thoughts that have been expressed here and in other places to you and other people. Because basically much of it was a paraphrase of the words: Germany will either fulfill its destiny or perish, and with it European culture. — This Germany must have questions again, it must regain a connection with the higher goods of life. For this question hangs over us: can we still have questions of deeper significance? Can we still concern ourselves with life's higher goods? The question is one of being or not being. If we concern ourselves with higher goods and can still pose questions to the spiritual world, then we will find a way, starting from Central Europe, to prevent the downfall of world culture. If, on the other hand, we continue along the path of a senile youth and a philistine phrase that masquerades as revolutionary, then we will descend into barbarism. If people in Germany know how to spiritualize, then they are a blessing for the world; if they do not know how, then they are a curse for the world. Today the situation is such that the way that will lead to the salvation of mankind in the future runs between right and left like the sharp edge of a razor, and that anyone who wants to recognize things in their reality cannot love comfort and choose comfortable paths.

Remember that I have been telling our friends for a long time that he certainly counted, clearly counted, on generous historical impulses, but in a sense that was only beneficial in those places where he lived out the nationalistic impulses in such a way that their bearers saw them as universal human impulses. The Anglo-American world has its initiates, its people who appreciate intellectual power. Here you could preach and preach about intellectual power, and those three times superstitious people thought you were superstitious yourself. That is why the three times superstitious people have become the victims of the Anglo-American West, which saw through things. In the 1880s, or perhaps even earlier – I am only familiar with the period up to that time – this Anglo-American West spoke to the public about what it considered appropriate for the intellectual and spiritual state of that public. But he spoke from the lodges of his initiation in such a way that he said: The world war will come - that was a spiritual-scientific dogma among the English-speaking population - and its only goal can be that socialist experiments are being carried out in the east of Europe that we do not want and cannot want in the west. I am not telling you a fairy tale, but what was said in the 1880s by English-speaking people who were connected to those who knew about these things. But here these things were not taken for what they are, namely as explorations of a real reality. And so one was overtaken by what the others knew, who therefore could never draw the short straw, precisely for the reason that they knew. And in these mysterious lodges themselves, what kind of people were there? There were people who had their ramifications into all those areas that were important to work on. One has only to study what has been going on at various points, for example, on the Balkan peninsula, for decades, and try to see the connection. In the lectures I gave in various places during the war, I pointed out many symptoms in this regard. Everything was geared to the socialist experiments in the East coming through the world war and flooding Central Europe. In the lodges of the initiates, these people said: We in the West are preparing everything so that in the future, using all the means that can be gained from the spiritual world – but can be gained in an unlawful way – we will get such people for the exaltation of national honor, who can become their rulers, individual people on a plutocratic basis.

This was prepared by the West. The Ahrimanic spirits were involved in this, and it is in this world that those personalities are to be sought who can wait, who prepare their actions not by years but by decades, if these are the actions of great politics. In these English-speaking areas, there is not the militaristic discipline that is known in Central Europe, but rather a spiritual discipline, but to the highest degree. It is so strong that it can turn men like Asguith and Grey, who are basically innocent hares, into its puppets, into its marionettes. Grey is truly not a guilty person, but what a fellow minister said about him a long time ago is true: he is a person who always makes a concentrated impression because he has never had any thoughts of his own. But such people are chosen if you want the right puppets for the world theater. Things were well initiated and well prepared.

But today it is the case that man must not only take into account that which connects him to the spiritual world, which is so close to him, but he must also know that great cosmic laws are at work in the evolution of the world, in which humanity is enmeshed with its destiny, and that these can also be experienced through a spiritual science. One must only be able to finally break away from that stupidity which today is called history; for this history of today is stupidity. It believes that what follows is always determined by what has gone before.

But such a view is just as if you had a sea in front of you and said of it: Waves are washed up on the shore; each one is caused by the one before; the fifth comes from the fourth, the fourth from the third, the third from the second, the second from the first. But the truth is that forces are at work beneath the surface of the water, causing the individual waves to arise. In the same way that someone today looks at the sea, people today also look at history, and they are still proud to write pragmatic or causal history and to present these spectres to people, who in turn react to them superstitiously and take this stupidity of causal history as reality. But anyone who knows how things really are, how forces work from below, how every single event is driven to the surface, must say to himself: Unless this stupidity, which we call history today, is removed from people's minds and views, no salvation can come into human development and evolution. These are the serious thoughts that should fill the mind of anyone today who is really serious about what is happening today as a result of the fire signs.

Oh, it could be painfully soul-stirring when one tried to bring humanity to its senses on specific issues. In the 1880s, for example, I had to think: Oh, we have a physics that exerts its devastating effects on the whole world view with its absurd atomic theory, and that believes in the spectre of the external world of which I spoke earlier. How can one, I thought, teach this world again that it is a spectre? And I said to myself: If you make the world aware that what reaches us as color and light is not only quantity, as physics today with its atomistic stupidity believes, but also quality in the Goethean sense, then you could bring people from one corner to self-awareness in this regard. And I wanted to make people understand that Goethe's Theory of Colors is not dilettantism, but reality in the face of today's atomistic physical foolishness. But the time for that had not yet come. The German mind was still bowing to the English Newtonian theory of colors, which is just as suited to the Anglo-American mind as Goethe's theory of colors is to the German mind. If we had found the opportunity to take up what we needed, who knows what might have come of it! But we should not have tried to find it by taking the easy way out; instead, we should have taken the path of taking the spirit seriously. And then: Goethe's theory of metamorphosis was already a theory of the connection between humans and the rest of the living world. This theory of metamorphosis should have been developed further. But what happened? People did talk about it, but those who spoke had no idea of the real circumstances: what was said was mere empty phrases. People did not distinguish the phrases from what had substance, and so they adopted Anglo-American Darwinism instead of Goethe's metamorphosis theory.

These are the individual facts in a specific area, by which one can see what we have sinned against the individual facts, and what should be done, for example, with such individual facts. Today is a serious time, and it is necessary that we reflect on the great impulses of the Central European spirit, which gave the signature to the period from the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. If we can summon up the forces that were at work in that time, then there may be hope that we will again see questions arise and that we will again find goals and access to the spiritual forces of the world. For what Ennemoser wrote more than half a century ago is as true for our time as it is for his: “The decision is approaching, time is pressing, the wind is blowing from the east and the west, a storm can break out!” Today you can feel it. “The trunk of the old policy stands on rotten roots, the calculations of the diplomats would like to be destroyed, their art has become a distorted art that no one understands. Can you get figs from thistles, grapes from thorns?” And I ask: Can you make revolutions with philistines who act radically? Can the spirit be emancipated and left to its own devices with senile youth? We need true spiritual substance, not that which merely behaves in a radically phrase-filled manner. We need truly enthusiastic youth for everything that young people can be enthusiastic about, but not a youth that spouts senile phrases and has programs for everything and confuses these phrases and programs with spiritual content. One would like to see a ray of spiritual power penetrating into their hearts, so that it might prepare people to distinguish between thoughtless phrase and substantial content. But when substantial content comes to people, they say they do not understand it, it is not quite clear to them. And when the attitude lives in something: you have to form your sentences in a way that befits the truth - and it is not always convenient for it to fit into every cheap phrase - then people say: you write convoluted sentences. How often have I said: Those who take the truth seriously must write some sentences in such a way that they deal with the next sentence while formulating one, and that they place what is said in one sentence in its proper light with the next. If we take this seriously, we will develop the kind of attitude that enables us to understand anthroposophy in its deepest inner sense. Above all, we will develop the ability to distinguish, to really distinguish. Are people today really able to distinguish between things that are, for example, dawning and things that are setting? They are not. And it is here, in this power of discernment, that the big questions we have to ask ourselves must arise. We must ask ourselves what Goethe wanted for natural science. Was Goethe's theory of colours a morning light to recognize the essence of colour more deeply than physics can, or do we want to turn it into an evening glow that testifies that the sun of Goethean culture has already set? Was Goethe's theory of metamorphosis a morning light, or do we want to turn it into a Darwinian law that makes the sun of Goethean culture set? These things must be thought through and felt through today. Without this, it cannot continue.

Take the experiences of the last few weeks: you can become hopeful and hopeless at the same time. We have begun to work here in the spirit of the threefold social order. We began in such a way that we took no account of a certain stratum of humanity. We spoke to the humanity that makes up the broad masses, and we had found that no one can deny our understanding of the souls of the broad masses. During the war I once spoke a word of warning: We were condemned during the war to have healthy roots of the people, and that out of these roots of the people individualities developed, which were the German greats; but what the middle class was, that was what could fill one with doubt, that was what so easily wanted to take the easy way out in relation to truth and education. And so it came about that in our movement for threefolding, what had emerged from the roots of the people was brought into a rather alarming view: the party leaders. And the party leaders, who no longer belong to the people, are now presenting the people with a choice: either to remain reasonable and listen to what is truly based on spiritual foundations, but what can be understood in a reasonable way by human understanding, like everything that is based on spiritual foundations, can be understood by the mind, if one only wants to, or to follow the leaders and to lead Europe little by little to the fate of the ten to twelve million people who were killed during the war catastrophe, and the so-and-so many millions who were crippled, and to bring ten to twelve more millions to death or to starve them. This choice has been made today. And anyone who cannot grasp this idea cannot raise their thoughts to the level of strength necessary for the seriousness of the times.

A few weeks ago, we tackled what - it may not be aptly described as the cultural council. For three weeks we have been fiddling with the matter, and it has not been resolved. The matter had to be presented in the way it was presented, because it was also necessary to appeal to what remained of healthy instincts in the general wilderness. What was said from this point of view need not be national-chauvinistic, nor need it have the hostile point against another people. The English themselves know very well that as individual Englishmen they are something different than as a people. The man, who I have often quoted, who is one of the finest art critics, once said a beautiful word, in which he said something like the following: Oh, that's where we make history. There you examine how events actually developed and resulted and how peoples get into wars. But all that has been written is only there to praise the one that we need, according to our subjective point of view, and to condemn or defame the other. And it is true that when nations wage war, they wage war everywhere like savages and do not ask why. lerman Grimm says that the moment people wage war, they become savages. When people become a state, a nation, they do not become higher, but lower. This is the great misfortune of our time, that the state or the sense of belonging to a nation is valued higher than the individual human being. But people today are so enmeshed in the esteem of communities rather than of the individual that they feel quite comfortable being dehumanized, being a state template. It is naturally difficult to create something that can truly emancipate intellectual life. But in our time, humanity is closer to the spirit than one might think, despite its materialism. Inspiration and imagination rule in us. But because of our lack of productive imagination, we transform our imagination into all kinds of ghostly images about the world's interrelations, with which we defame the real world's interrelations. If you tell someone: Europe hangs together in such and such a way – as I did a few years before the outbreak of this war in the lecture cycle in Kristiania; if you look at the world in such a way that you judge it with inner psychology, with inner vision, then the dreamers regard it as a superstition, and if you set about putting it into practice, then these same people consider it utopian or ideological. But what matters is that we see clearly in these matters today. In their sense, the members of the Anglo-American world have seen clearly, and we have seen dimly. —- And inspirations also change, turning into wild animalistic emotions that want to live it up in blood. Look at the blood that is flowing today, look when people are lined up against the wall and shot: these are the inspirations that want to come to people with the good will of the spiritual world, which is hated by people and which therefore transforms into wild animal instincts. Because if a person does not want to allow what wants to come to him from the spiritual world as inspiration, then it transforms into wild emotions, into animalistic drives.

This should be borne in mind by those who have been involved with anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for decades. They should bear in mind that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is not just about collecting knowledge. Whether you ultimately know something about the astral body and etheric body and I, purely conceptually, or whether you copy out a cookbook and just juxtapose what is in the cookbook in your mind, it makes no difference; one is no more valuable than the other. Anthroposophically oriented spiritual science must pass over into the human soul as knowledge, but one must not confuse this knowledge with the dull, muffled mystical feeling. Ennemoser has already said this very rightly in this essay, for he says: “Just as freedom should move within the laws of justice, so religion must become an enlightened truth with the light of science.” But people today do not want to illuminate religious feeling with anthroposophical science; they want to have an abstract divinity in the mystical feeling. And above all, they do not want art to become a cultivator of spiritual beauty in natural material.

But this is what anthroposophy must aim to achieve: it must not only impart knowledge; admittedly, knowledge, but knowledge that can become inner enlightenment, that spurs on our power of discrimination. If it can do that, then much will be served in Central Europe. For we must be able to look to the west and to the east with a gaze that sees and recognizes the world. We in the west must be able to distinguish between what rises hostile to us and what is hostile only in the declining. Here too I recall from my boyhood, when I was in the area where the Styrian mountains are, how every week, twice, I had before me in the train that Count Chambord, who lived in Frohsdorf Castle, on whose face lay the most ancient catholicity, the most ancient ultramontane Jesuit education and at the same time that which was the reflection of the French “L'Etat c'est moi”. That was still truth. Everything else is no longer truth. No matter how much France may develop her power today, she is in decline, just as the Anglo-American element is in the ascendant. But these things must be properly assessed. We must see through them so that we can fertilize ourselves with the laws of spiritual life, so that we can transform thoughts into will and find the courage to really place ourselves in the present, which demands so much seriousness and so much significance from us. We must always renew the attempts and make these attempts again and again to knock on the door of our contemporaries: Do you want a free spiritual life, do you want a soil in which a free spiritual life can develop? For these attempts must always be made. If we want to let some truth and wisdom flow into humanity, then we must put it to the test, whether people want to accept it or not; it can very well impair the matter that people do not want to accept it. Therefore, I ask you not to lie down on a lazy bed by saying to yourself, according to Ennemoser's sentence: “Germany will fulfill its destiny or perish in the most disgraceful way, and with it European culture. “ These words are not to be understood in this way; rather, you must say to yourselves that Germany will fulfill her calling if there are people who have enough strength to revive the German spirit in themselves, unchauvinistically, unnationally, as a part of the world spirit, in whose sense we have to work between East and West. And if the world rejects what can come from Central Europe, then the time should have come for us, those who for decades have committed themselves to anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, not only with our heads but also with our hearts and with all our willingness to make sacrifices, to remember and say: We are here! And that we are here to cultivate the spirit should not be a lie of the soul, but should unfold as a truth of the soul! And when others are ready to accept the call for truth, as it can come from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, then, when this understanding occurs, what was intended as the Anthroposophical Society could become what it was intended for. Today, the call for the emancipation of spiritual life goes out to all people of good will. But those people who have laid claim to it from the standpoint of the spirit should be honest about it and say: If the others leave the path of the spirit, if they do not have the courage to do so, then we will take it upon ourselves. We have the courage to do so. We do not want the spirit to be an empty phrase for us; we want it to pulsate as reality in our blood; we want to say what has to be done for the spirit.