The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Clairvoyance, which is the basis of the modern science of initiation, has always existed. In the past ages it was something that rose up within the human being like an elemental force, and on the path of initiation those who had gone through fewer stages were essentially dependent for their progress upon the authority of those who had gone through more stages than they. But to meet the needs of the human soul of today we cannot build on authority; to do so would be to contradict the stage it has now reached.

In our age the methods are entirely built, as in external science, upon the continuous and full control of the individuality and personality; in the soul life there must be control in every stage and in every step taken by the new candidate for initiation. Hence in speaking of exact clairvoyance in connection with the modern science of initiation we use the word ‘exact’ as it is used in the term “exact” science. Yesterday I spoke of the insight we gain into the cosmos and into the working of all things through the modern science of initiation. That insight is by no means something which, when we study it, lives in the soul merely as a theory or an abstract conception; it is something which becomes a living, spiritual force which penetrates us fully in all our powers and faculties when we allow it to work upon us. Thus the anthroposophical spiritual movement has been made effective in many spheres of life and particularly in that of the artistic life. Through the help and self-sacrifice of its friends and members in many countries the movement has been able to build the Goetheanum, its headquarters at Dornach, near Basle, Switzerland,¹ as an independent school of anthroposophical science. And in all its forms this building expresses that same deep spiritual reality which finds utterance through the spoken and the written word for the ideas and thoughts of the science.

Had any other spiritual movement in our time required to build a headquarters it would have commissioned an architect to design it on Antique, Renaissance or Gothic lines, or in one of the prevailing styles. This the Anthroposophical Movement, by reason of its inner nature, could not do. The architectural forms of the Goetheanum are drawn from the same source out of which the ideas of the super-sensible spring, as they are proclaimed through the world. Everything that is found in Dornach, be it sculpture or painting, is carried by a new style out of which Anthroposophy is born in this modern age. Whoever visits this School for Spiritual Science will find that on the one hand the anthroposophical world view is proclaimed from the rostrum in words and on the other hand the forms of the building and the paintings express in an artistic way what is expressed by the word. That which can work from the stage should only be another form of revelation than that what can be effected through the word. Anthroposophy should come out of the deepest foundations of humanity, of which theoretical Anthroposophy is only one branch, education and the arts are the others. In this way anthroposophical life becomes a factor in the most varied fields of human existence. The Waldorf School, which has been founded in Stuttgart, is not in any sense a school where children are taught a particular anthroposophical conception of the world. It is one where the teachers themselves, not so much in what they teach as in how they do so and in the whole way in which they exercise the art of education—are permeated in their faculties with that which anthroposophy can give them. Reference could be made to other directions in which the modern science of initiation is proving itself of use in every branch of human life and activity. Moreover it operates upon and vitalizes the religious needs of civilized humanity, and as these needs are deeply connected with an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha it is with that subject that I propose to deal now.

Let me begin by connecting what I have to say with what was said yesterday about the path of spiritual development for modern times leading to imagination, inspiration and intuition. I showed how by imagination and concentration, by means of certain exercises, the student can develop his thought-power until it becomes something which may be called imaginative in the real sense of the word, and in such a way that thought becomes not what it ordinarily is—abstract, cold, and in outline sketchy if compared with the intense vitality of sense impressions—but imaginative, pictorial, vivid and full of life, and in these characteristics no way inferior to impressions of the senses. The man who has attained to imaginative thinking, has something as full of life as when in normal daily existence he yields to the impressions of the world of colour or of sound.

But between the students of the new science of Initiation who attain to this imaginative thought, and those who abandon themselves to uncontrolled vision and hallucination, there is an important difference. The man who is subject to visions and hallucinations is not aware that the pictures which arise before him are subjective; on the other hand, he who has imaginative thought is fully aware that what he has before him is not an external reality but is something subjective having its origin in his own inner life. He knows the subjective nature of that imaginative picture-world. He knows too, that when through ‘imaginative thought’ he comes to perceive what was called yesterday his ‘time organism’—the formative force body that works within the physical body as its sculpturer and architect—he is perceiving the first spiritual super-sensible thing that he can experience, and something that essentially belongs to his own inner being.

Then there comes the second stage on that path of development when he becomes so strong that he is not only able to concentrate the full forces of his soul at will upon the concepts, and then upon the imaginative pictures he has before him in imaginative thought, but can divert that picture world away from his consciousness while maintaining it in a fully wakeful condition. He is now ready for the real imaginations to pour into him from the external world spiritually, speaking through the outside spiritual universe, i.e., the objective imaginations as against the subjective picture-world that he had before. Here is attained the stage I have described as inspirational knowledge. He perceives his own spiritual being as it exists independently of his physical bodily organism, and as it existed in the worlds of soul and spirit before he entered into this physical life through conception and birth. He has before him a picture of his prenatal existence in the spiritual world and of the spiritual realities of the whole universe, and comes in contact through conscious knowledge with the spiritual reality of man and of the universe. Thus, through this imaginative, inspirational knowledge, he discovers what he was before he descended into this physical incarnation in a physical body for this life. He discovers also that when he came down from the spiritual worlds he carried with him into this physical life the power of thought which he here possesses in his ordinary consciousness. What is this power of thought? It is that which he already had in his life in the spiritual worlds before birth, but ordinary consciousness only shows it in a pale and abstract outline.

He then comes to recognize something that may be thus described: he gazes upon the picture at the gate of death, and the moment of death, and sees that the physical body is no longer held together and built up in its whole forces by the force of an indwelling human soul but is given over to the forces of the earth as they work in the external mineral world; he sees how, through decay or the process of burning, the human physical body is given up to those mineral forces and assimilated with the earth. He sees by comparison how, in effect, what is carried into the earthly life through birth is something (speaking now in the sense of the soul) that dies into the physical body just as the latter dies into the earth at death. What he had in his power of thought in the ordinary consciousness was something that was vital and full of spiritual life in the spiritual worlds before conception and birth, but was then killed in the physical body so that it appeared in ordinary consciousness as the power of deadened thought.

Because of this fact knowledge of today is so unsatisfactory for man, as he comprehends, in a certain sense, only lifeless nature. It is an illusion when he thinks that through scientific experiments he can reach anything else. Certainly there will be progress beyond representing only lifeless nature; they will be able to create organic substances. But it will not be understood by the deadened thinking, even when they have been created in the laboratories. With this kind of thinking, which is the corpse of the soul which is spiritually dead, only death can be understood.

In what then does the process consist that was described as the development of the soul to imaginative, inspirational and intuitional knowledge? It is in effect this, that we call to life within ourselves what was killed in our power of thought. When we develop the living, imaginative, plastic thought, and inspirational and intuitional cognition, we call to life our power of thought, which was dead.

We have now reached the point where we should be able to understand human evolution and history. Modern scientific history usually skims over the surface of external events, without regarding the metamorphoses that go on within the soul of man from age to age. We may ask why is it that in this age humanity has had to pass through a period when thought was abstract and of a deadened quality. The answer is that the full, living, spiritual thought, by its very vitality and fullness of life, exercises a kind of compulsion on the human soul. It is by passing through this dead and abstract thought that humanity has been able to achieve freedom, and for the evolution and development of freedom this stage was a necessary one.

After man has attained to Imagination and Inspiration, he has to say to himself: Something has happened to me, which causes me anxiety. I mention this as an unusual fact, for the strange thing happens, that the man of today when he has risen to Imagination and Inspiration, experiences real anxiety. This stems from the fact that today, when he becomes clairvoyant, man has to say to himself: I have become too strongly egotistical through my development. Anxiety arises in the heart and mind (Gemüt), for man has the feeling that his ego works too strongly. In ancient initiation, before the Mystery of Golgotha, the candidate went through the opposite experience: As he attained to initiation he found that in a sense he was becoming less ego-conscious, that he was pouring himself out into the universe and becoming less in possession of himself. His ego-consciousness was rather weakened than strengthened.

The turning point between these two characteristics of initiation is the Mystery of Golgotha. The first human being to pass through initiation, and to experience this deeply disquieting feeling when the ego becomes too strong, was St. Paul at Damascus. The passage in the New Testament (Acts 9) is so well known as to need no further reference here. It was on that occasion that he gained insight into the necessity for weakening the power of his ego; he realized that the initiate of the new age stood in need of a force to weaken the intensity of the ego-life, and as a result of his experience he pronounced the words which were to give the keynote to the whole development of humanity through initiation as from the moment of the Mystery of Golgotha. These words, which resounded forth into the future and pointed out the direction to be taken by the succeeding period of evolution, were ‘Not I, but Christ in me.’ When we look upon the place of Golgotha, and receive into ourselves the forces of the Christ Who descended to earth from the spiritual worlds and Who since the Mystery has permeated the earth, we are enabled to diminish the forces of the ego and to pass through initiation in the right way.

The abstract thinking of which I spoke in the first part of this lecture, where the power of thought is deadened and becomes like a soul-corpse living in the physical body, has prevailed only in the more recent times of human evolution. It began, gradually, some three or four centuries after the Mystery of Golgotha. In the more ancient people, man brought with him into his physical life out of the spiritual worlds more of the full life of thought which is now dead abstract thought. This may be confirmed by studying, without bias, the evolution of humanity and the records and experiences of man, whether initiate or non-initiate, in ancient times. Much is said today about so-called Animism, the poetic fancy of simple and primitive peoples, in an endeavour to explain the experiences of the past ages as recorded and handed down in tradition. But by facing up to realities we see that it was not in a kind of poetic fancy that ancient man described the woods and forests, lakes and mountains, springs, brooks, clouds and thunder and lightning, and everything physical in the world of Nature in a spiritual way. He saw and described not only the physical things that we see, but the spiritual beings that inhabited every flower and mineral, every spring and wood. That description was not, as in the modern conception of Animism, something created out of poetic fancy, but a direct experience of the living, spiritual power which man brought with him into physical life. It was as though, in a spiritual sense, he sent out feelers which felt and touched and realized, giving him experiences of the spiritual beings which inhabit everything in external nature. It is only since the third or fourth century after Christianity that gradually developed in humanity dead thinking, that dead consciousness which today can only see the mineral world. Ancient man experienced in himself something that was living; he was able to experience and to know the spiritual beings in the world and to recognize them as the same thing that had lived within him before he entered into the physical life. His experience was a very practical one, explaining his pre-natal existence in spiritual worlds, and he felt that something was born with him into this physical life and lived within him; he did not feel that this thought proceeded from the organism of his physical body, for he knew it was a living thing he had brought with him from the spiritual world before his birth.

Now we can quite well realize how the course of human evolution would have continued along the line that has been described, and how the thinking power of man would have become more and more dead. We can imagine evolution continuing in a straight downward line, and that is what would have happened if the Cross had not been raised upon Golgotha. Looking at the picture of death we see that had it not been for the Mystery of Golgotha the physical body of man would die, that his soul-life would die with his physical body. We can say out of our consciousness of this abstract, deadened thought, that our soul-life, i.e., our life of thought, partakes of death. And this is what humanity would have had to experience gradually more and more but for the Cross on Golgotha; no longer would there have been the living thought, but the soul-life would have slowly expired in universal death.

This is how we can regard the Mystery of Golgotha by means of the modern science of initiation, just as it is possible for those who are rooted in Christianity to regard the Mystery through the simple study of the Gospel records. This fresh aspect of the Mystery is the starting point for a new evolution and an upward one. He who goes through the experiences and training of the modern path of initiation, and who attains to inspirational and intuitive cognition, is able to attain to the point where a spiritual world is revealed, of which the Mystery of Golgotha is shown as the great solace in world existence. He also realizes that he has attained freedom, but as the price of that freedom he finds this deep and troubling experience, as he passes through the way of initiation to ‘imagination’ and ‘inspiration’, that his ego has been strengthened and intensified, and is now too strong. That is one pole of his experience. The other pole is that in spite of the strengthened ego he has gained from evolution he cannot save himself or mankind from the universal death of the soul-life. But when he looks out, from his spiritual experience in inspirational and intuitive cognition, upon the picture of the Cross on Golgotha, he sees that through the passing of that Divine Being, the CHRIST—first through the physical body of a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and then through the gate of death—mankind can be redeemed from universal death. On the one hand man has strengthened the ego-consciousness, but this cannot save him from universal death; and on the other hand he sees redemption from that death in the picture of the Cross on Golgotha and of the dying and the risen Christ. Through this conscious spiritual knowledge he is able to understand from out of what experience the wonderful writers of the Gospels wrote. He sees that until the third or fourth century after Golgotha something still remained of that living thought in humanity, something of that spiritual world which man brought into his physical life, and that it was this which enabled isolated human beings in the first three or four centuries to understand the Mystery of Golgotha; even as the modern initiate can understand it by means of the new science of initiation when he goes through that path and through the exercises which have been described.

From the knowledge contained in the Gnosis—which resembles in some respects modern anthroposophical science—we find that in the first few centuries there was a certain understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, and that unless that understanding had still existed in isolated human beings the Gospels never could have been written. They were written out of the last relics of the old pre-Christian science of initiation. Hence we see why St. Paul out of his experience was able to say, “Were it not for the risen Christ then all our faith and all our life of soul would have been in vain, would have remained dead'. Then we understand that the Divine Being, the God, descended to the earth and went through the gate of Death, and lives in and with the earth since the Mystery of Golgotha, and, as was not the case before, the forces of Christ are working especially in the evolution of humanity upon the earth. We know that He passed through and conquered death, that He rose again through conquering the death of the soul forces and redeemed the soul from death. And so are we able to enter our thinking life again, to enliven what has become dead in the soul-life by looking up from the deeply moving and troubling experience of our too much strengthened ego to the picture of the Mystery of Golgotha.

It is thus that anthroposophy can show the path, not away from Christ, but to Him. I shall now give an outline of what anthroposophical cognition tells us of the evolution of mankind in its approach to the Mystery of Golgotha.

In primeval times, when man's thinking was still alive and filled with spiritual vitality, he saw the spiritual alongside the physical being when he looked out upon the physical phenomena of the world of Nature. The spiritual thought he experienced in a somewhat dreamlike, instinctive consciousness, and he knew that his spiritual origin was in the spiritual worlds. From out of the great masses of men who thus knew instinctively of the spiritual world there arose individuals who gave themselves up to science, to the path of knowledge, just as in our time individuals become scientists and learned men. In that time when in the forces of all human souls there was still a connection with the spiritual world, there arose men of science and learning, initiates, who also by exercises and by training the soul (though different in character from those described for the modern science of development) attained to a kind of imagination, inspiration and intuition.

Intuition is the third stage of spiritual development, Here the initiate perceives not only pictures of the spiritual world, but enters into and communes with the spiritual beings themselves. In the spiritual worlds the initiates held a mighty and majestic communion with beings who descended from the divine spiritual worlds; they raised themselves to this inter-course. The most ancient and primeval teachers of humanity were spiritual beings who taught, not through the external senses and not by walking in physical bodies among men and teaching through the physical ear, but through the spiritual consciousness of the ancients. Now what was it primarily that these spiritual beings, the sublime teachers, taught mankind through these ancients? It was the mysteries of ‘unbornness’ of the human soul. They taught in clear knowledge that which was already known or felt instinctively by the masses of mankind, namely, how the life of man is connected in the spiritual worlds before birth. From these ancients, divine spiritual teachers, humanity learnt to know the destinies of the human soul through its connection with the life before birth. We can see how in ancient times death and resurrection were represented merely in pictorial form in the cults and ceremonies. The cults represented the death and the resurrection of gods, of divine beings, prophetically and in a picture that was not at that time a real and practical experience of the mysteries of death. For man had not then the same tragic experience of death as he has today; he still had within him the living life he had brought from the spiritual worlds into his physical life. Death to him did not mean that tragedy which it was to mean later when the soul-life had been drawn into the physical body and become like a corpse. In those ancient cults where death and resurrection of the Divine Being were represented as in a picture it was more like a pictorial prophecy of what was to come—the Mystery of Golgotha. The men who witnessed these cults and ceremonies were already able to say in dim prophecy that the god passes through death and conquers it, and that because the god conquers death so can the divine in the human soul. Nevertheless the pre-Christian mysteries and understandings and teachings of humanity by the divine spiritual beings was a teaching principally of the mysteries of birth not of death. And that is a deeply significant fact in the evolution of humanity.

The first initiates of the Christian era, looking upon the Mystery of Golgotha, recognized that the old initiation and the old teaching of the mysteries did not penetrate into the knowledge of death. They realized however that this knowledge was revealed in the Mystery of Golgotha. Then there was understood and was revealed what can only be described by saying literally that in the Mystery of Golgotha something happened which concerned the destinies of the gods themselves. It may be put in this way: looking down upon the earth, the divine spiritual beings could see that through a destiny that was beyond the power of the gods, the earth and humanity and all that was connected with humanity were being given up to death. But who was it that had no experience of death? The gods, the divine spiritual beings, those from whom the ancient primeval teachers of humanity descended to commune with the initiates when they had raised themselves to a consciousness of the spiritual. And they, the gods, did not partake in that death through which all earthly human beings were destined to pass. Therefore it was decided between the gods, not only as a matter concerning mankind but as one concerning the gods themselves, that a god should pass through the mystery of death on earth in a human body. That is the great mystery that we must understand about the Mystery of Golgotha. It not only concerns man but also the gods.

So it is that when we come to view the Mystery through the modern science of initiation our aspect or outlook is super-sensible. Anthroposophy leads to an understanding of this. Not only the initiate of today but every man may receive a stimulating impulse, encouragement and understanding from the modern science of initiation. We, all of us, may attain to an intensified and strengthened power of knowledge, and having done so may recognize that the Mystery of Golgotha which took place within earth-existence, was at the same time a cosmic and an earthly event. Then are we able to say, ‘It is not I, but Christ in me Who makes me live again in the spiritual life of the soul.’

Anthroposophy does not lead to irreligion but to a religious life in the fullest sense of the term; we are deepened and penetrated with new spiritual forces. Through spiritual-scientific cognition of the Mystery of Golgotha man overcomes all doubts which are contained so strongly in today's religious life. External science has given us freedom, but with it has come doubt. It is the task of Anthroposophy to sweep away these doubts that have come in the train of external science and which were a necessary stage in the development of humanity, and because Anthroposophy is a spiritual science it is able to do so. It can instill into the heart and soul of man a religious sense for everything in the world and in mankind, and above all it can give an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha in a form that can be received, not only by those who adhere to the older Christian tradition, but by all men on the earth.

Anthroposophy did not come to found sects or new religions. It came to call to life again what is the religion of humanity, the synthesis of all religions, the religion that is already there—Christianity. Not only is it able to call Christianity into fresh life, but for those who have been bereft of Christianity by modern science and the doubts arising from it, it is able to bring about, in the fullest sense, a resurrection of the religious life. Amongst all the other life-giving forces, Anthroposophy is able at this present time to enliven us and to bring about the resurrection of religious experience for all mankind.

• 1. Refers to the first Goetheanum, destroyed by fire on December 31, 1922. Rebuilt as the present Goetheanum. (Ed.)

At the present time, opposition to what I will call anthroposophical knowledge of the Spirit comes mainly from two sides. I alluded briefly in the lecture yesterday to the antagonism of natural scientific thinking which maintains that supersensible knowledge is beyond the reach of human faculties. From this side, therefore, Anthroposophy is regarded as unworthy of any serious consideration.

We shall be more concerned to-day with opposition of a different character. It comes from people who feel that Anthroposophy deprives them and their fellow-believers of their inward connection with Christ. In their own way, such people are usually very devout Christians and it is from their very piety that the antagonism is born. They feel that man's relation to Christ should be the outcome of simple, naive devotion of the heart and soul and that this is disturbed and confused when intellectual knowledge is brought to bear upon the Christ Being. The one desire of such people is that the strivings of simple human hearts shall be left undisturbed by any attempt to speak of Christ in terms of intellectual understanding.

Due-respect must, of course, be paid to such feelings. Nevertheless, in their attitude to Anthroposophy these people are entirely in error. If they realised the truth, they would find that Anthroposophy helps them to tread the Path to Christ; they would find that all the longings which draw them to Christ in simplicity and devoutness of heart are inwardly strengthened by what Anthroposophy has to say concerning Him.

I should like to illustrate this from different points of view.—We will think; to begin with, of the character of the religions life, of the religious consciousness of men in different epochs of human evolution on the Earth.

Let us go back to ancient times.—You will see later that this historical survey is not superfluous but will actually clear away many misunderstandings prevail and at the present time. Evidence and knowledge concerning these very ancient epochs cannot be obtained from historical documents but only through the methods of Spiritual Science of which I spoke yesterday through the development of those faculties of inner perception described yesterday as the means whereby the supersensible nature of man and his supersensible destiny are revealed. We find that in these olden tithes, men were instructed by these who were disciples of the Mysteries. External documents have practically no information to give about the ancient Mysteries, far such indications as still exist are of very much later date and tell us nothing of what the Mysteries really were.

The Mysteries were centres of spiritual life and culture in which religion and science were a unity. Sheer veneration, superhuman in its intensity, went out from the pupils to their great Teachers, or Gurus in these Mysteries. And when other men desired to satisfy their inner longings for religion, they turned to those who were the pupils of these Teachers, receiving from them the knowledge of the universe and its laws which the disciples of the Mysteries had acquired through deep devotion. In order to throw light upon what, in the present age too, can be true piety and true veneration of Christ, I should like to speak briefly about the attitude and relation of a pupil in olden times to his Guru or Teacher in the Mysteries.

We find, first of all, that these Teachers were regarded by their pupils as being divinely inspired. When they spoke with the fire of inspiration that had been kindled in them in the Mysteries and through the sacred rites, their pupils felt that the words were not uttered by men but that the Divine Powers of the universe were speaking out of human lips.

This was not a symbolic conception but an actual experience in the pupils of the ancient Mysteries. And you can imagine the depth and intensity of veneration in such a pupil when he knew that a Divine Being, a God—not a human being—was speaking to him through the lips of his Teacher. Strange as it seems to us to-day, the following was the typical attitude of the pupils of the ancient Mystery-teachings.—They held the view: In still earlier epochs of the evolution of mankind, in the initial stages of this evolution, Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves descended—in the spiritual sense, of course—to the Earth. These Divine-Spiritual Beings did not incarnate in bodies of flesh but by way of spiritual knowledge entered into communion with those who were the first Gurus, the first Teachers in the Mysteries; and the primary instruction concerning what must be taught to men in order that they may enter into real connection with the spiritual world, came from these Divine-Spiritual Beings themselves. Thus, it was held that the teachings once transmitted to men by the Gods themselves had - passed down the generations to the disciples of the Mysteries in every epoch.

You will say this amounts to an assertion that the origin of human wisdom lies in supersensible worlds. But here we come to a domain that is still wrapped in complete obscurity. Think, for example, of the explanation usually given of the origin of speech. There are people who believe, in accordance with the Darwinian theory, that human speech has evolved from the sounds uttered by animals. But there are and have been men—above all it was so up to a comparatively recent past—who attribute a divine origin to human speech.

I shall not enlarge upon this particular point for it would lead too far to-day. It is enough to say that what gave rise to these feelings of deep reverence in the disciples of the Gurus was the conviction that the teachings received from their lips had once been imparted to mankind by the Gods themselves.

What was the aim and goal of this kind of discipleship? Discipleship itself consisted in this: the pupil gave himself up to his Guru in utter veneration and devotion; the Guru was the link connecting him with the spiritual worlds; this Teacher was regarded as the one and only channel for the Divine. The pupil felt that whatever qualities he himself possessed, whatever powers he unfolded were due to his Teacher; he felt that he owed everything to his Teacher. From the Teacher he received instruction—primarily concerning the direction of his thoughts. His thoughts must not be concerned with the material world of sense but through the power implanted in his soul by the Guru, using what were then legitimate methods of suggestion, the heart and soul, of the pupil were directed entirely to the Supersensible. In acts of ordinary sense-observation, thoughts strike as it were against the external objects ... when we think about a table or a tree, our thought strikes against the table or the tree ... But under the influence of the Guru the pupil's thoughts became translucent, so that he saw nothing that is in the physical world but with the vision of thought he gazed into those supersensible worlds I described to you yesterday in terms of ,modern Initiation-science, It was essential, too, for the pupil to experience the reality of these supersensible worlds, and to this end instruction was given him concerning speech. When we speak in ordinary life, we share with others, thoughts that are either of our own shaping or have been conveyed to us in some way; in short what flows into our speech has its origin in the physical world. The Guru imparted to his pupil certain mantric utterances, words half-declaimed, half-spoken, the purpose of which was to educate him to pay attention not so much to the meaning of the words but rather to experience the currents of the Divine Cosmos itself in the flowing sentences. The mantram itself was uttered in such a way that the divine realities in the world and in the human being might pour through the words; the actual meaning of the words of the mantram was of no importance. Thus, by making his thoughts translucent, the pupil was to become capable of beholding the Divine. When declaiming the mantrams, he was not to heed! the meaning of the words, but the divine power streaming through them was to flow over into the acts performed in the sacred rites. The pupil's will was to be directed to the Divine through the rites and ceremonial. Even to-day you can find an indication of this in the Buddha posture. The position in which the limbs are held is quite unsuitable for earthly activities; indeed, the human being is lifted away from the earthly world and, I together with the acts he is performing inwardly is led upwards to the Divine.

What was the aim of such procedure? The soul of the pupil, directed in this threefold way to the Divine, was to become capable of turning evil, sin and human transgression in the direction of .those supersensible worlds described to you yesterday, I told you that with modern Initiation-science, too, man can penetrate into the worlds in which he lives as a being of soul-and-spirit before entering earthly-existence; he descends from these worlds in order to unite with a body provided by the father and mother, and when he has passed through the gate of death, returns thither to prepare for another life on Earth. The aim of these godlike Teachers in the ancient Mysteries was not only to turn the gaze of the pupil towards the supersensible worlds but to kindle in him a force of thinking akin to prayer, a force born of the divine power flowing in the mantric utterances, a force of deepest veneration while performing the sacred rites. Imbued with this power the pupil was then able to turn the tide of sinfulness on the Earth towards the supersensible worlds. These pupils in turn imparted to other human beings what they themselves had been taught in the Mysteries and thus the content of civilisation in those ancient times took shape.

Now upon what basic assumption did these teachings rest? The basic assumption was that the world in which man lives here on Earth does not, like the Divine world, encompass his whole being. In those olden times the Guru taught his pupil: This world in which you are living between birth and death comprises the other kingdoms of nature, but not the deeper being of man. And apart altogether from the conception that human activities between birth and death were fraught with sin, the pupil was taught to realise None of my experiences here in the world between birth and death, none of the deeds I perform are an expression of my full manhood, for that belongs to supersensible worlds.

Every pupil in those ancient times knew with complete certainty in certain moments of life that before descending to the Earth he had lived in a supersensible world and would return thither after death. This clarity of insight was due to a primitive, dreamlike clairvoyance which he need not acquire by effort since it was a natural faculty in all human beings. Thus, the pupil knew: When my actions and life are concerned only with what exists here, on the physical Earth, my full manhood is not in operation. I must guide the forces within me to those spiritual worlds where they truly belong.

The aim of the ancient Mysteries was that by the ceremonial rites and the divine power flowing through the sounds of the mantrams, the forces which man on the Earth cannot turn to good account in his actions should be led upwards and away from the earthly world to the super-earthly, supersensible worlds—for it is there and there alone that man lives in the fullness of his being.

The Gurus brought home to their pupils that when the human being has passed through the gate of death he knows that his actions and achievements on Earth fall short of what his full manhood demands; he knows that compensation must be made in the spiritual world for actions which on the Earth are full of imperfection and fraught with unwisdom.

Knowledge of the supersensible worlds includes the realisation that what remains imperfect on the Earth can be raised nearer to perfection in the supersensible worlds.

But as we shall see, conditions in the days of the ancient Mysteries were quite different and this difference must be recognised and understood to-day. The pupils in those olden days learned from their Teachers that when man has passed through the gate of death and has lived for a certain time in the supersensible world, a sublime. Spiritual Being comes before him, a sublime Being Whose outer expression is the Sun and its forms of manifestation. Hence the sages of the ancient Mysteries spoke of the Divine Sun Being. Just as we say that the soul of a man expresses itself in his physiognomy and play of countenance, so did the men of old conceive the Sun with its movement and forms of manifestation to be the physiognomic expression, the revelation of the sublime Sun Being Who was hidden from their sight on Earth but Who came before them after their death, helping to make more perfect their shortcomings and imperfect achievements in earthly life. “In deepest piety of heart, put your trust in the sublime Sun Being Whom you cannot find on the Earth, Who will be found only in the spiritual worlds ... put your trust in the mighty Sun Being in order that after your death He may help you to take the right path through the spiritual world.” ... In such manner did the Gurus of ancient times speak of the Being by Whom all the imperfections of men are made good.

When the time of the Mystery of Golgotha was approaching, this ancient wisdom had already fallen into decay; little of it remained, save traditions and vestiges here and there. But Initiates-in the old sense of the word still existed—men who clung with the same devotion and pious faith to the Divine Father God by whom in days of yore the Divine Messengers, the Teachers of the first Gurus, had been sent down to Earth. These Initiates were well aware of the deep consolation that had been given to the pupils of the ancient Mysteries when they were told: After death you will find the sublime Sun Being—He Who helps you to transmute and make perfect all shortcoming of earthly life, Who takes away from you the bitter realisation that you have fallen away from the Divine World-Order. Those who were Initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, however, knew that this same sublime Sun Being had come down to the Earth, had taken Manhood upon Himself in Jesus of Nazareth and since the death on Golgotha must be sought no longer in the supersensible worlds but among men on the Earth. This was how the Initiates spoke at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha and on in to the third century of our era. To those who were willing to listen, they were able to say The Being from Whom true healing comes and for Whom you are longing, was within the reach of men in days of yore. Through a Divine Deed this Being came down to the Earth, into a human body and has lived since then as a supersensible reality within the evolution of mankind. And whereas the pupils in olden times had been obliged to go to the Mysteries and there be stimulated by the sacred rites to lift their gaze to the supersensible world, men of later time must learn on the Earth itself to make direct connection with the Christ Being Who descended to the Earth and became Man as other men.

Such was the mood and attitude kindled among men by those who were contemporaries of the Mystery of Golgotha and also by many who were Initiates in the first three centuries of Christendom. Historical records have little help to offer because all real evidence of the teaching was exterminated. But supersensible perception as it was described to you yesterday leads to the knowledge that in the first three Christian centuries, this was the attitude and feeling prevailing in men who were willing to listen to the Initiates still living in those times ... And then this truly Christian feeling died away and must in our time be called to life again.

The veneration of the pupil for his Guru in olden days had been a means whereby men had learned to look upwards to the Divine. The Teacher or Guru was regarded as the channel by which the Divine streamed down to the Earth and as the one who, in turn, guided into the spiritual world the feelings of devotion and reverence in the human heart. These feelings and experiences passed along the stream of heredity from generation to generation and were guided by those who became the first Teachers of Christianity no longer to a Guru in the old sense but to the Christ Who had descended from spiritual worlds and in Jesus of Nazareth had taken Manhood upon Himself. Few people to-day realise the deep inwardness and intensity of devotion which characterised these early Teachers of Christianity.

This feeling of reverence and devotion continued through the centuries, directed now to the Being of Whom Christianity proclaimed that He had passed through the Death on Golgotha in order that henceforward mankind might find Him on Earth.

The goal and aim of the modern Initiation-science of which I spoke to you yesterday is to approach this Christ Mystery, this Mystery of Golgotha, with true understanding.

Medieval Christianity was, it is true pervaded by piety and religious devotion that were really like a continuation of the veneration paid to the Gurus of old, but the dreamlike clairvoyance once possessed by human beings had faded away. Apart altogether from historical records, anthroposophical Spiritual Science is able to investigate the life of man as it was in those far distant ages of the past. At certain moments in their lives it was possible for human beings to pass into a state of dreamlike clairvoyance in which they became aware of the world from which they themselves had descended to their earthly existence. But this knowledge that the soul belongs to Eternity had gradually been lost. Under the influence of this knowledge men would never have been able to unfold consciousness of human freedom. Consciousness of freedom—which is an integral part of full manhood—was destined to arise in man when the time was ripe. The epoch when this feeling of freedom dawned was that of the Middle Ages; but by that time the old consciousness which could never have experienced the reality of freedom, was fading away. For when man looked upwards to his existence as a being of soul among other beings of soul in pre-earthly life, he was aware only of dependence, he had no feeling of freedom. The ancient clairvoyant vision of the spiritual world grew dim and in this twilight condition of consciousness humanity unfolded that feeling of freedom which in our modern civilisation has reached a certain climax. But in this condition the gaze of mankind could not penetrate into those supersensible worlds whence Christ had descended into Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore, true Christian worship rested, to begin with, upon tradition; men relied upon historical tradition and upon the power that had come down through the generations from the veneration once paid to the Gurus. The deep reverence for the Divine that had once lived in men could be directed, now, to the Being Who had passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this twilight condition of consciousness, men were gradually evolving a science of physical nature such as ancient times had never possessed and in consequence of this, even the faintest inkling that a spiritual world is accessible to human cognition, even that faded away.

The supersensible knowledge of which I. spoke yesterday is an actual extension of knowledge of the world of nature. And all the faculties developed by a man through meditation and concentration in such a way. that he penetrates into the spiritual world as a knower—all these faculties are immeasurably strengthened when, as one belonging to the modern age, he does not content himself with what natural science has to say about the external world but wrestles inwardly with it, assimilating these exact, scientific thoughts but endeavouring, then, to unite them with the innermost forces of his own being. A certain attunement or attitude of soul then arises—to begin with, it is not easy to define. But if this attitude becomes the keynote of meditation and concentration in the sphere of thought and in the sphere of will, then the soul is led upwards into the spiritual worlds and understanding of supersensible reality is attained. We learn to look away from the Earth of which natural science teaches us, into a supersensible world which belongs to the Earth and must be recognised as an integral part of the Earth—above all when it is a matter of understanding man and man's life on Earth.

Questions of far-reaching import then arise in one who is struggling to acquire anthroposophical knowledge. And as he seeks to find answers, he is led towards an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. Having raised his consciousness away from the Earth, having unfolded a faculty of perception outside the physical body and of action through the power of ideal magic, such a man is able to behold the Spiritual. With consciousness that has become independent of the body, he is able to penetrate into a spiritual world with knowledge and with power of will.

If a man who is equipped with this inner understanding of the spiritual world turns his attention again to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha as an Event on the Earth, his thought—unlike that of many modern theologians—will not be concerned only with the man Jesus of Nazareth. His conception of what came to pass in the Mystery of Golgotha is no longer materialistic because he has acquired the power of supersensible vision and sees the man Jesus of Nazareth as the bearer of the Divine Christ—the Divine-Spiritual Christ Being. Because the Divine-Spiritual is a direct reality to this modern “Theosophia,” it can recognise in the man Jesus of Nazareth the Christ Who is a Spiritual Being and must always be conceived as such. With the knowledge and understanding of the Super-Earthly he has acquired, a man is then led to Christ, beholding in Him the super-earthly, Divine Principle, the God-Man.

Through an understanding of the realities of the spiritual world, modern Anthroposophy leads the way to Christ—leads to Him after due preparation. In order to make this quite clear I want to speak of erroneous and true ways by which a man of the present age may approach the spiritual world ... There were men in days long since gone by whose inspiration proceeded directly from the Mysteries; then the spiritual consciousness of humanity grew dim but even with this darkened consciousness men still gazed into certain spheres of pre-earthly existence and strove to let a spiritual power stream from their sacred rites. But the successors of those godly, pious men of old have become, in the modern age, people who endeavour by extremely questionable means to contact the spiritual world. The godly men of earlier times confined themselves to the realm of the soul, turning their eyes of soul to the supersensible worlds; this mood of holiness and of piety persisted in the feelings of those devotees of Christianity of whom I spoke at the beginning of the lecture and who desire to cling to their naive, simple piety. Such an attitude is naive to-day because in his natural consciousness the human being no longer has any vision of supersensible existence. This naive piety no longer leads men upwards into the supersensible worlds, for their consciousness remains in the earthly, physical body. It is characteristic of this naive piety that it clings to the feelings, to the sentient experiences, coming to the soul when it sinks into itself, into its own human nature. This will, it is true, lead a man to the realisation that the physical body consists not only of flesh and blood, but that the Spiritual too, is present—the Spiritual which truly pious men would fain send upwards to the Divine. But those who are misguided successors of the pupils of the old Gurus endeavour through mediumistic practises to kindle this spiritual force.

What kind of person is a medium? A medium is one who lets the Spiritual speak out of the physical body, write by means of the physical hands or manifest in some other way. The very fact that mediums speak or write while their ordinary consciousness is dimmed, indicates that the human body is not wholly physical, that a spiritual force issues from it, but of a mechanical, inferior kind. A medium desires not only to experience the Spiritual in the body but strives to bring the Spiritual to physical manifestation. And the spiritual force that is present. in the body does indeed become articulate when the medium speaks or writes. The peculiarity about mediumistic people is that they become extremely talkative, they love to talk and to write at tremendous length ... but all these manifestations of the Spiritual through the body contain a great deal that ordinary logic will regard as highly questionable. These mediums are themselves the proof that it is not right for modern man to fall back upon ancient methods of establishing connection with the Divine-Spiritual but that he must seek in an altogether different way.

This different way of approach to the spiritual world is that of anthroposophical Spiritual Science and I will speak of one particular aspect. If a man takes natural science in earnest, regarding its results as truly great achievements of modern civilisation, then in his efforts to draw near to the spiritual worlds he will, to begin with, find it extraordinarily difficult to speak of the Spiritual at all, to entertain thoughts concerning it, let alone to indulge in any kind of automatic writing. When through meditation and concentration a man becomes aware of the Spirit within him, he will prefer to keep silent—to begin with, at any rate. Whereas a medium becomes talkative and lets the Spiritual become articulate through his own organs of speech, when supersensible knowledge of the Spirit begins to dawn in one who is a conscientious, scientifically trained thinker, he would rather keep silent about the subtle and delicate experiences of which his soul becomes aware. He even prefers to forbid thoughts from intruding because thoughts have been associated with earthly, physical things. He prefers not to let thoughts stream into his soul because he has an inner fear lest half-consciously he may apply to spiritual realities, thoughts that are connected with outer, physical things; he is afraid that when thoughts are applied to spiritual reality, this spiritual reality will not merely slip away but that it will be profaned, distorted. Least of all will he take to writing—for he knows that in days of yore, when worship of the God became potent, spiritual deed in the sacred rites, men did not resort to writing—which is a bodily act. Writing first became a custom when the human intellect and reasoning faculty were directed to the material world of sense and to one who has any knowledge of the Divine-Spiritual it is an activity which goes very much against the grain. And so when a man begins to become aware of the reality of the Divine-Spiritual, of the supersensible world, he stills his thoughts; he is literally silent as far as speaking is concerned; and he abstains from writing about matters pertaining to the Divine.

I said before, my dear friends, that it is permissible for me to speak of these things because they are the results of my own experience along a path of development which had led on from natural science to a comprehension and actual perception of the spiritual worlds and of the Mystery of Golgotha as spiritual reality. But you will realise that the Mystery of Golgotha presents difficulties to everyone who tries to approach it in the light of anthroposophical Spiritual Science. The Mystery of Golgotha as it reveals itself in the course of human history must be conceived in all its stupendous majesty and glory as an historical fact. Within the man Jesus of Nazareth, a God passed through death on Golgotha and we must learn to contemplate in a picture from which every element of sense-life is absent, this, the greatest of all Events in history. But it is exceedingly difficult to wrestle through in thought to this sense-free comprehension of the Mystery of Golgotha, to present it in words or write of it.

What comes to us along this path is inner reverence and awe as we contemplate the great Mystery enacted on Golgotha. This reverence pours through the soul of one who in the way I have described, has silenced his thoughts and words, who feels the deepest awe when the power of the Spirit within him draws him to the Mystery of Golgotha. Feelings of profound reverence and awe pour through the soul of such a man ... it is as though he dares not approach so stupendous a Mystery. Thus the path of anthroposophical Spiritual Science leads not only to knowledge ... although to begin with it is knowledge which directs our gaze into yonder supersensible worlds. But this knowledge streams into the life of feeling, becomes holy awe; it becomes a power that lays hold of the human soul far more deeply than any other power, more deeply even than the veneration paid to the Guru by his pupils in olden times. And this feeling grows, first and foremost, into a longing and a yearning to understand Christ Jesus on Golgotha. What, to begin with, was supersensible vision in the life of soul is transformed through inner metamorphosis into feeling. This feeling seeks the God-Man on Golgotha and can find Him through the vision of the Spiritual already acquired. Man also learns to understand Jesus of Nazareth, realising that, in him, Christ may be seen as a reality within earthly existence. And so anthroposophical Spiritual Science brings knowledge of the Spiritual Christ Being but at the same time the deep and true reverence for the Divine which arises from this knowledge of the Supersensible.

When a man first becomes aware of the power of supersensible knowledge he prefers to be silent in his thoughts and words, not in any way to use his bodily faculties as an instrument for voicing his experiences. Nevertheless, having reached a transitional stage, when he resolves to speak of his inner life, he experiences something which justifies him in speaking of the spiritual nature of Christ Jesus. At this transitional stage he makes the resolve to give the Spiritual definite form in his thoughts, to speak and to write about the Spiritual. And the experience that now comes to him is that he feels as it were lifted out of his physical body whenever he is speaking or thinking about the Spiritual. The physical body is an essential instrument in ordinary thinking and speaking, but now, at this higher stage, a man is aware of being removed in a certain way from his physical body. Whereas a medium feels himself entirely within the physical body and even deadens his consciousness in order to remain within the physical while allowing the Spiritual to manifest through the body, a man who has attained real knowledge of the Supersensible lifts himself out of his physical body in an enhanced and more delicate state of consciousness. Because he is experiencing the reality of the spiritual world, he finds it exceedingly difficult to take hold of the physical world; his faculty of speech and the natural flow of his thinking elude him; he cannot find the way to his limbs or his physical body. He must now undergo the experience of trying to find his bearings in this physical world once again and therewith the thoughts and the language in which to express the realities of the supersensible world of which he has become aware. But having had this experience, a man feels as though he must enter life anew, as though he must pass through a second, self-engendered birth. He learns to know the inner depths of human nature for he has entered into these depths a second time in order to create an instrument for thinking and speaking of spiritual reality. Penetrating thus into his organism with supersensible knowledge, a man realises that there too he will find Christ inasmuch as Christ passed through the Mystery of Golgotha. He now has some understanding not only of the Christ Who once came down to the Earth and passed through death, but if he has really fathomed the depths of his own being, there too, he experiences Christ Who died in order that His Power might flow into all mankind.

This is the experience that comes, with far greater assurance now, to a man possessed of supersensible knowledge. And he can clothe the knowledge of Christ thus acquired in words which contain profound truth: “Not I but Christ in me.” For he knows: On Golgotha, Christ died; through His death Christ entered into the human forces of birth and has lived since His death in the very being of man. The modern Initiate therefore knows the truth of these words of St. Paul, knows that he will find Christ within himself if he does but succeed in fathoming the depths of his own manhood.

In order to make men Christians in the real sense, the Initiate need not demand that they should all have reached his own level. Equipped with this understanding and knowledge of Christ, he can also discover new paths for simple-hearted piety. Men of simple piety can indeed find Christ, only their path to-day cannot be quite the same as that which led in days of yore to the adoration outpoured at the feet of the Guru. The piety that befits the modern age must be an inward piety, for man is no longer called upon to send up into a supersensible world, his feelings of reverence for the Divine; he must penetrate within his own being in order there to find Christ Who since the Mystery of Golgotha has been on the Earth as the Living Christ.

Anthroposophical Spiritual Science can say to a man of simple piety: “If you do but penetrate deeply enough into your own being, you will find Christ; this is no illusion because by his Death on Golgotha Christ did indeed descend into these depths of your innermost self.” One who is schooled in Spiritual Science knows that in speaking thus to a man of simple piety, he is saying what is true; he knows that he is not playing upon the emotions of the other but pointing to a goal within his reach. It is perfectly possible for simple, godly men to tread the path which leads, in the modern age too, to supersensible knowledge.

Whereas in earlier times, reverence and veneration for the Guru made the thoughts of the pupil translucent, enabled divine power to resound in the mantrams and the rites to become potent deed, a man who desires to find the true path to Christ in our modern age must, above all else, inwardly deepen his soul. He must learn to look within himself in order that he may find and become aware of inner reality when he turns his gaze away from the world of sense. And within him too, he will find the power that carries him through the gate of death, inasmuch as here, on the Earth, knowledge of this power has come to him through devotion to Christ and to the Mystery of Golgotha.

The Guru of olden times said to his pupils and through them to all human beings: When you pass through the gate of death you will find the sublime Sun Being Who makes good the imperfections of Earth-existence. The teacher of modern times says: If here on the Earth, with inner reverence and deep devotion of heart you establish connection with Christ Who has descended, and with the Mystery of Golgotha, you will be inwardly filled with a power that does not die with you, but bears you through death and will work together with you towards the fulfilment of what cannot be wholly fulfilled on Earth while you are living in a physical body. What in olden times was wrought by the sublime Sun Being will be wrought, now, by Christ's power within your own being from which the body has been cast off at death. Christ's power will work in human imperfections on Earth and men will be drawn together in the social life through their recognition of Him. For the power that streams from Christ, the power upon which anthroposophical Spiritual Science is able to shed the light of understanding, can enter into the actions and the will of men and thereby flow into their social life.

There is much talk to-day of social reform and social progress. Who will be the great Reformer of the social life when men's actions are performed in the name of Christ Jesus and the world becomes truly Christian? Who will be the mighty Reformer, having the power to establish peace amid social strife on Earth? The Christ—He and He alone can bring peace, when men lead a social life hallowed by acts of consecration, when as they look up to Christ they do not say “I,” but rather: When two or three, or many, are gathered together in the name of Christ, then He is in the midst of us Activity in the sphere of social life then becomes a veritable hallowing, a continuation of the sacred acts of cult and rite in olden times. Christ Himself in very truth will be the great social Reformer, since He works to-day as a living reality within the being of man.

The social life must be permeated with the Christ Impulse ... Men of simple piety long to find Christ's power within the soul so that what they do in the social life may be done in Christ's name. These men of simple piety can still be sure of their ground when a modern Initiate says to them: The power you can find through your simple piety of soul when you meditate upon your own being and upon the Christ Who lives within you—this power streamed from the Death on Golgotha, from Christ Himself. It works as the Christ Impulse in the deeds you perform in social life, because Christ is present among men as a Living Reality when they find the way to Him. They are led to Him through that deep inner love which links human hearts together and brings a supersensible element into feeling, just as the light that is kindled within a man's being brings a supersensible element into knowledge.

And so men of simple piety need say no longer that their path is disturbed by the knowledge imparted by anthroposophical Spiritual Science. If natural science were to continue along purely external paths, this simple piety would in the course of time die out altogether; but if natural science itself can lead on to knowledge of the Supersensible and thereby to knowledge of the Christ as a supersensible Being, then all truly pious men will be able to find that for which they long: assurance in their life of soul, certainty that their deeds and actions are in harmony with the Christ Impulse. That for which pious and godly men yearn can be imbued through anthroposophical Spiritual Science with all the certainty of knowledge. This Spiritual Science has therefore the right to insist that it does not disturb the path of simple godliness or lead men away from Christ. Seeking as it does to lead the way to the spiritual world by working with and not against modern science, Anthroposophy has this message to give: Mankind must not go forward into the future without Christ but with him—with Christ as a Being Who is known and recognised, Whose reality is felt and Whose Impulse men resolve to make effective in the world.

[ 1 ] An objection is often raised against anthroposophy that is just as comprehensible to the soul attitude of the personality from which it comes as it is unjustified to the spirit from which anthroposophical research is undertaken. This objection seems to me to be entirely insignificant because its refutation is near at hand for anyone who follows with true understanding the presentations made from the anthroposophical point of view. Only because it arises ever anew do I say something about it here, as I have already done also in the sixth edition of Theosophy, 1914, at the end.

In order to raise this objection, the demand is made that the results of spiritual observation which anthroposophy is presenting be “proven” in the sense of purely natural-scientific methods of experimentation. One imagines, for example, that several people who assert that they can arrive at such results are confronted by a number of other people in a properly ordered experiment, and the “spiritual researchers” would then say what they have “seen” about the subjects in front of them. Their statements would then have to agree, or at least be similar in a sufficiently high percentage. It is comprehensible that someone who only knows anthroposophy without having understood it will raise this demand again and again, for its fulfillment would spare him the trouble of working his own way through to the correct path of proof which consists in the attainment of one's own vision, which is possible for everyone. Anyone who has really understood anthroposophy, however, also sees that an experiment set up in the way just described to gain the results of truly spiritual vision is about as appropriate as stopping the hands on a clock in order to tell time. For, in order to bring about the conditions under which something spiritual can be seen, paths must be taken that arise from circumstances of the soul life itself. Outer arrangements like those leading to a natural-scientific experiment are not formed out of such soul circumstances. These circumstances must be such, for example, that the will impulse leading to vision issue exclusively and entirely from the primal, individual, inner impulse of the person who is to see. And that there is nothing in the way of artificial outer measures flowing into and shaping this inner impulse.

It is actually surprising that the fact is so little considered that everyone, after all, through one's own appropriate soul attitude, can directly create for oneself the proofs for the truth of anthroposophy; that therefore these “proofs” are accessible to everyone. As little as one wants to admit this to oneself, the fact is that the reasons for requiring “outer proofs” lie, after all, only in the fact that outer proofs would be attainable in a more comfortable way than upon the difficult, uncomfortable, but truly spiritual-scientific path.

[ 2 ] What Brentano wanted, when he endeavored again and again to be able to work in a psychological laboratory, lies in an entirely different direction than this demand for comfortable experimental proofs for anthroposophical truths. His longing to have such a laboratory at his disposal often appears in his writings. The circumstances denying him this affected his life tragically. Precisely through his approach to psychological questions he would have accomplished great things with such a laboratory. If one wishes, in fact, to establish the best foundation for anthropological-psychological findings, extending to the “borderland of knowledge” where anthropology and anthroposophy must meet, this can best be accomplished through a psychological laboratory such as Brentano envisaged. In order to demonstrate the facts of a “seeming consciousness” no experimental methods would need to be sought in such a laboratory; but through those experimental methods that are sought, it would become clear how the being of man is predisposed to this vision, and how seeing consciousness is demanded by ordinary consciousness. Anyone who stands upon the anthroposophical viewpoint longs as Brentano did to be able to work in a genuine psychological laboratory—which is impossible because of the prejudices still holding sway today against anthroposophy.

It is often said, and rightly so, that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will only attract the attention of the right people when it is able to engage with philosophical matters. Until it does so, it will make an amateurish impression on philosophers, and until then people will also say that the followers of this spiritual science are only followers of it because they lack a thorough philosophical education.

It would be quite hopeless to wait until a sufficiently large number of people with a philosophical education would realize that spiritual science is something that lifts even the most philosophical person far above mere philosophy. But since we cannot afford to wait for the spiritual-scientific movement, and must give spiritual science to the public as this public is capable of receiving and grasping it, even without the individual members of this public having received any particular philosophical training, if we is generally compelled to do so, it must be strictly emphasized that in the field of anthroposophy there is nothing that cannot be discussed in the strictest sense with what is necessary and right in the field of philosophy. And even if I am not in a position to give philosophical considerations due to the general direction of the theosophical movement, I would still like to use this short hour to draw the attention of those who have studied philosophical matters to some philosophical points of view. And I ask you to take this as something that falls completely outside the scope of the other anthroposophical considerations, as something that is purely a single philosophical consideration. You may find some of the things that need to be discussed difficult. But don't worry if you have to sit through a short hour of difficult and not-so-heartfelt reflections here. In any case, you can be sure that it will be extremely useful for you to establish the foundations of spiritual-scientific truths. You will find again and again, when you take in real philosophical thinking, that this philosophical way of thinking will not only greatly facilitate your understanding of spiritual science in general, but also of what is called “esoteric development”. So today's purely philosophical reflection is to be quite out of the ordinary.

You should not regard philosophy as something absolute. Philosophy is something that has only emerged in the course of human development, and we can easily state the hour of its birth, for this is more or less correctly stated in every history of philosophy. In recent times, some have objected to the fact that every history of philosophy begins with Thales, that is, with the first appearance of philosophy in Greece; and it has been thought that philosophy could be traced back beyond that time. This is not correct. What can justifiably be called “philosophy” actually begins with Greek philosophy. Oriental wisdom and knowledge are not what should properly be called “philosophy”. If we disregard the great philosophical intuitions, as they appear in a different way in Heraclitus, Thales, and later in Socrates, and go straight to philosophy as it presents itself to us in a closed world-building, in a closed structure of thought, then Pythagoras is not the first philosopher. For Pythagoras is, in a certain respect, still an intuitive seer who, although he often expresses what he has to say in philosophical forms, is not a philosophical system in the true sense of the word, any more than the Platonic system is. A philosophical system in the true sense of the word is only the great system - as a philosophical system - that Aristotle built up in the 4th century BC. We must first orient ourselves on these things.

If Aristotle is called the first philosopher and Plato is still regarded as a half-seer, it is because Aristotle is the first who has to draw solely from the source of philosophy, namely from the source of thinking in concepts. Of course, all this had been prepared for a long time; it was not as if he had to create all the concepts himself; his predecessors had done considerable preparatory work for him in this regard. But in truth, Aristotle is the first to give precisely that which, for example, was the subject of the mysteries, not in the old seer form, but in the conceptual form. And so, anyone who wants to orient themselves in philosophy will have to go back to Aristotle. In him, he will find all the concepts that have been gained from other sources of knowledge in earlier times, but he will find them processed and worked up into a conceptual system. Above all, it is in Aristotle that we must seek the starting point of a - let us call it 'science' - a science that did not exist in this form within the development of mankind and could not have come into being. Anyone who can follow the development of humanity in this way, with the means of spiritual science, knows that before Aristotle – of course this is all to be understood with the famous Gran Salz – an Aristotelian logic was not conceivable in this way, because only Aristotle created a corresponding thinking technique, a logic. As long as higher wisdom was imparted directly in the mysteries, there was no need for logic. In a certain way, Aristotle is also the unrivaled master of logic. Despite all the efforts of the 19th century, logic has basically not made much progress in all essential points beyond what Aristotle has already given.

It would take us too far afield today to point out the reasons why philosophy could only enter into humanity at this time, in the time of Aristotle. Through anthroposophy, it will gradually become clear to many why a very specific age was necessary for the foundation of philosophy.

We then see how Aristotle is the leading philosopher for a long time and, with brief interruptions - which seem more like interruptions to today's people than they really were - remains so until today. All those who are active in other fields, let us say in Gnosticism, Platonism, or in the church teachings of early Christianity, they processed the Aristotelian arts of thought. And in a wonderful way, what Aristotle gave to humanity as the formal element of thinking also spread in the West, where what the Church had to say was more or less clothed in the forms that Aristotle had given in his thinking technique. Even though in the first centuries of the spread of Christianity, Aristotle's philosophy was still disseminated in the West in a very deficient form, this is essentially because the writings of Aristotle were not available in the original language. But people thought in terms of the thinking technique developed by Aristotle.

In a different way, Aristotle found acceptance in the East, only to come to the West again via the Arabs. Thus Aristotle found his way into the West in two ways: firstly through the Christian current and secondly through the current that gradually flowed into the culture of the West through the Arabs.

It was during this period that there was a great interest in Aristotle's thinking, which represents the actual high point in medieval philosophy, namely the first form of what is called “scholasticism”, specifically “early scholasticism”. Scholasticism essentially existed to be a philosophy of Christianity. It was compelled for two reasons to take up Aristotle: firstly, out of the old traditions, because one was accustomed to knowing Aristotle in the first place; even the Platonists and Neoplatonists were more Platonists in content; in their thought technique, they were often Aristotelian. But there was another reason why scholasticism had to rely on Aristotle, namely because scholasticism was compelled to take a stand against the influence of Arabism and thus against Oriental mysticism, so that in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries we find scholasticism philosophically justifying Christianity in the face of the Arab world of ideas. The Arab scholars came with their wonderfully honed Aristotelian knowledge and tried to attack Christianity from a variety of positions. If one wanted to defend Christianity, one had to show that the Arabs were using the instruments they were using in an incorrect way. The point was that the Arabs gave themselves the appearance that only they alone had the correct way of thinking of Aristotle and therefore directed their attacks against Christianity from this correct way of thinking of Aristotle. In the interpretation of the Arabs, it appeared as if anyone who stood on the ground of Aristotle must necessarily be an opponent of Christianity.

The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas arose in the face of this endeavor. His aim was to show that if one understands Aristotle correctly, one can use Aristotelian thought to justify Christianity. Thus, on the one hand, there was the tradition of proceeding in Aristotelian thought technique, on the other hand, the necessity to handle this very technique of Aristotle in the right way against the onslaught of Arabism, which was expressed in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.

Thus we find a peculiar synthesis of Aristotelian thought in what constitutes the essence of scholastic philosophy in its early days, a philosophy that was much maligned but is little understood today. Very soon, then, the time came when scholastic philosophy was no longer understood. And then all kinds of scholastic aberrations occurred, for example the one that is usually referred to as the school of thought called “nominalism”, while early scholasticism was “realism”. It is due to this nominalism that scholasticism soon outlived itself and fell into disrepute and obscurity. In a sense, nominalism is the father of all modern skepticism.

It is a strange tangle of philosophical currents that we see emerging in our more recent times, all of which basically flow against scholasticism. We still see some minds that stand firmly and firmly in the Aristotelian technique of thought, but which are no longer completely protected against the onslaught of modernity. Nicholas of Cusa is one of them.

But then we see how the last thing that can be saved from this philosophical-methodical basis is to save Cartesius. And on the other hand, we see how all the good elements of Arabism - that kind of philosophy that combined more Western-Oriental vision with Aristotelianism - have intertwined with that technique of thought that we call “Kabbalistic”. Among the representatives of this trend is Spinoza, who cannot be understood otherwise than by linking him, on the one hand, to Western Orientalism and, on the other, to Kabbalism. All other talk about Spinoza is talk in which one has no solid ground under one's feet.

But then “empiricism” spread with a vengeance, especially under the aegis of Locke and Hume. And then we see how philosophy finds itself increasingly confronted with purely external material research - natural science - and how it gradually retreats before this kind of research. We then see how philosophy becomes entangled in a web from which it can hardly extricate itself. This is an important point where the philosophy of modern times gets caught, namely with Kant! And we see in the post-Kantian period how great philosophers appear, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, who appear like a kind of meteor, but who are least understood by their own people. And we see how a brief, strange wrangling over ideas takes place in order to escape from the net in which Kantianism has caught the philosophers, how impossible it is for philosophy to escape from it, and how German thought in particular suffers from Kantianism in its most diverse variations, and how even all the beautiful and great attempts that are made suffer from Kantianism. Thus we see a deficiency appear in all of modern philosophy that has two sources: One is evident in the fact that at our philosophy chairs, which believe they have more or less freed themselves from Kantianism, people are still floundering in Kant's snares; the other is evident in the fact that philosophy suffers from a certain impossibility of asserting its position, which it should defend as philosophy, against the very short-sighted natural science.

Not until our philosophy has freed itself from the nets of Kantianism and from all that causes philosophy to stop in the face of the onslaught of natural science, not until our better-intentioned elements recognize how they can get over these two obstacles that stand in their way, can any salvation on the philosophical field be expected. Therefore, the philosophical field, especially within Germany, presents a truly sad picture, and it is highly distressing to see, for example, how psychology is gradually receding, how, for example, people who are actually incapable of doing anything other than processing elementary things a little in a philosophical way, but who do not get beyond certain trivialities, have a huge reputation, like Wundt, for example. On the other hand, it must be seen that minds such as Fechner's - who could be stimulating if people had an appreciation for it - are regarded by those who are pure dilettantes as a new Messiah. This was bound to happen and is not meant as criticism.

I would now like to start from a concept that is so closely related to the web in which philosophy has become entangled since Kant, which is the fundamental evil of the philosophical mind, an evil that can be characterized by the words: “philosophy has fallen prey to subjectivism!”

If we want to understand Kant, we must first understand him historically. Kant's view is actually born entirely out of the developmental history of human thought. Those who know Kant better are aware that the Kant of the 1750s and 1760s was completely absorbed in what was the most common philosophy in Germany at the time, which was called the Enlightenment philosophy of Wolf. In its external form, it was often a jumble of empty phrases, but its spirit was partly still borrowed from the old Leibnizianism. But let us concern ourselves here with a brief characterization of Wolffianism. We can say that for Wolffianism, the world view is divided into two truths: firstly, that of external observation and what man can gain from it; secondly, that which man can gain through pure thinking: 'a priori'. Thus there was also a physics - an astronomy, a cosmology - that was gained from the consideration of facts, and a rational physics - a rational astronomy - that was gained by pure thinking. Wolff was aware that human thinking, without taking any experience into account, could construct knowledge about the nature of the world purely rationally, out of itself. This was knowledge from pure reason, “a priori”, while “a posteriori” was knowledge that was gained from the senses, from mere understanding, from experience. Likewise, for Wolff there were two psychologies, one in which the soul observed itself, and the other, the rational psychology. And in the same way, Wolff distinguished between a natural theology based on revelation, on what has come down to us as revealed truth and is present as the supersensible in religious creeds; from this he distinguished rational theology, which could be derived from pure reason - a priori - and which, for example, draws the proofs of the existence of God from pure reason.

Thus, all knowledge of the time was divided into that which was derived from pure reason and that which was derived from pure experience. Those who stood on this ground studied at all universities at that time. Kant was also one of them, even though he went beyond them, as can be seen from one of his writings entitled: “On the Concept of Introducing the Negative into the World”. Then he became acquainted with the English skeptic Hume and thus became familiar with that form of skepticism that has a shattering effect on all rational knowledge, especially on the view of universal apriority, the law of causality. Hume says: There is nothing that can be gained by any a priori form of thinking. It is simply a habit of man to think that every fact is to be understood as the effect of a cause. And so the whole rational structure is something that one has become accustomed to. For Kant, who found something plausible in Hume, the ground was thus removed for Wolffian rationalism, so that he said to himself that only knowledge from experience is possible.

Kant then found himself in a very strange situation. His whole feeling and perception resisted the assumption that there was actually nothing absolutely certain. If you were to go along with Hume completely, you would have to say: Yes, we have seen that the sun rises in the morning and warms the stones, and we have concluded from all the cases that the sun rose in the morning and warmed the stones that there is a certain causal connection in this; but there is no necessity at all that this conclusion is an absolute truth. That is Hume's view. Kant did not want to abandon the absolute truth. It was also clear to him that no a priori statement is possible without experience. He therefore turned this last sentence around and said: Certainly, it is true that man cannot arrive at anything without experience; but does knowledge really come from experience? No, said Kant, there are mathematical judgments that are quite independent of experience. If mathematical judgments were derived from experience, we could only say that they have proved true so far, but we do not know whether they are correct. Kant added: The fact that we can make judgments like mathematical ones depends on the organization of the subject at the moment we make these judgments; we cannot think differently than the laws of mathematics are, therefore all experience must conform to the realm of mathematical lawfulness. So we have a world around us that we create according to the categories of our thinking and our experiences. We begin with experience, but this has only to do with our organization. We spread out the network of our organization, capture the material of experience according to the categories of perception and understanding of our subjective organization, and basically see a world picture that we have spun according to its form. [Gap in the postscript.]

Since Kant, philosophy has become ensnared in this subjectivism – except to a certain extent in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel – in this subjectivism, which states that man has something to do with things only insofar as they make an impression on him. More and more has been attributed to Kantianism. Even Schopenhauer, who in his “World as Will and Representation” really goes beyond Kant, but also others to a much greater extent, have only understood this Kantianism to mean that the “thing in itself” is completely inaccessible to human knowledge, whereas everything that occurs in man - from the first sensory impression to the processing of impressions as knowledge - is merely an effect on the subject.

You see that man is then basically cut off from everything objective, only wrapped up in his subjectivity. “Our world is not a world of things, only a world of ideas,” says Schopenhauer. The thing is something that lies beyond the subject. The moment we know something, what we have before us is already our idea. The thing lies beyond the subject, in the trans-subjective. The world is my idea and I only move within my ideas. That is the net in which philosophy has caught itself and you can find it spread over the whole thinking of the nineteenth century. And this thinking could not lead to anything else in the field of psychology either, except to understand that which is given to us as something subjective. This is even noticeable in the individual sciences. Consider the teachings of Helmholtz. Helmholtz says: That which is given to us is no longer just an image, but only a sign of the real image; man must never claim that what he perceives has a similarity to reality.

The whole development of subjectivism in the nineteenth century is an example of how people can lose their impartiality once they are wrapped up in a thought. Eduard von Hartmann's “Transcendental Realism” is an example of this. It was impossible to talk to Eduard von Hartmann about the fact that perhaps the world could not just be “my imagination”. He had become so wrapped up in this theory that it was hardly possible to discuss an epistemological question with him objectively. He could not get beyond this definition “the world is my imagination”.

Anyone who is fair will not deny that this subjectivism, which lies in the sentence “the world is my imagination”, has something tremendously seductive about it. If you look at it from the subject's point of view, you will say that if we want to recognize something, we must always be active. From the first sensation to the last generation of the point in our field of vision that means “red”, we must be active. If it were not for the way our eyes are organized, “red” could never appear in our eyes. So that when you survey the field of experience, you have the activity of the subject in the experiences, and that therefore everything within your knowledge, viewed from the subject, is produced by yourself. This is in a certain way very significant, that man must be active, down to the last detail, if he wants to recognize. The subjectivity of the human being touches on the “thing in itself”; wherever it touches, it experiences an affection; you only ever experience a modification of your own powers. So you spin yourself in; you do not go beyond the surface of the “thing in itself”. All you could achieve is to say: My own activity always pushes against the surface of the 'thing in itself', and everywhere I feel only my own activity.

I would like to give you an image. This image is one that none of the subjectively oriented philosophers has really thought through. For if they did, they would find in this image the possibility of getting out of subjectivity.

You have a sheet of paper, drip liquid sealing wax on it and now press a seal into the sealing wax. Now I ask you: What has happened here? On the seal there should be a name, let us say “Miller”. When you have pressed it, what is in the seal is absolutely identical to what is in the sealing wax. If you go through all the sealing wax, you will not find the slightest atom that has come from the seal into the sealing wax. The two touch each other, and then the name “Miller” appears. Imagine that the sealing wax were a cognizant being and would say, “I am sealing wax through and through; that is my property, to be sealing wax. Out there, the seal is a ‘thing in itself’; not the slightest part of this ‘thing in itself’ can get into me.” The substance of the brass remains completely outside; and yet, if you remove the seal, the name “Müller”, on which it depends, is absolutely correct for the sealing wax. But you cannot say that the sealing wax has produced the name “Müller”. The name “Müller” would never have come about if there had not been a touch.

If only sealing wax could talk and say, “This imprint is only subjective!” – That is basically what all Kantians conclude; only they do so in such convoluted thoughts that the simple person can no longer recognize the error in such something simple.

Now, however, the seal impression completely matches the name engraved in the seal, which is what matters here, apart from the mirror image, which is not considered here. Therefore, the impression and imprint can be considered identical, at least with regard to the essential, the name “Müller”. It is exactly the same with the impressions we receive from the outside world: they are identical with the way in which things exist outside, that is to say, in relation to the essential in both.

Now, the sealing-wax could still say: “I do not get to know brass after all.” But that would mean that what contains the name “Miller” would also be recognized in terms of its material nature. But that is not the point. You have to distinguish between refuting Kantianism – if we follow this example to its conclusion, Kantianism is absolutely refuted – and completely transcending subjectivism. And that raises the question of whether we can now also find the other thing, which is neither in the nature of the sealing wax nor in that of the brass, which is above both and will be a synthesis between objectivism and subjectivism? For merely refuting Kantianism is not enough.

If we want to answer this question, we have to delve a little deeper into the problems. The fact that recent philosophy has not been able to make any headway in this area is due to the fact that it has lost touch with a real technique of thinking. Our question now is this: Is there anything in man that can be experienced that is not subjective? Or does only that live in man that cannot go beyond subjectivity?

If humanity had been able to follow the straight path from Aristotle, it would never have been entangled in the web of Kantianism. The straight path – without the break in the Middle Ages – would have led to the realization that there is a supersubjective reality above the subjective. Mankind did not progress in a straight line from Aristotle, but rather took a detour, and this deviation already began in the later scholasticism due to the emergence of nominalism. It then rolled further and further down this wrong path until it finally found itself entangled in a formal net with Kant. To get out of this impasse, we have to go back to Aristotle and ask ourselves: Is there nothing that goes beyond the merely subjective, that is, so to speak, subjective-objective?

Let us consider how Aristotle treats cognition. He distinguishes between cognition through the “sense” and cognition through the “mind”. Cognition through the sense is directed towards the individual sensual thing, cognition through the mind is directed towards making a distinction between “matter” and “form”. And Aristotle understands “form” to mean a great deal. Mankind would first have to be made aware of Aristotle's concept of form in the right way. An old friend of mine in Vienna always made this clear to his students using one example. Matter is basically not the essence of a thing, but the essence of a thing for our minds is the “form”.

If we want to make this distinction correctly in the sense of Aristotle, then we must say: All wolves are based on the species from which they “sprang”, which transformed matter into wolves. And the human soul represents the wolves in the concept, so that the generic concept in the human soul is for Aristotle what is represented in the soul, what the species is. How man recognizes the genus in the generic concept depends entirely on him, but not the reality of the genus.

Thus we have a union between what is only in the soul, the concept, and what is in the realm of the trans-subjective or the genus. This is absolute realism, without falling into the error of Plato, who subjectivized the species and regarded them as a kind of trans-subjective powers. He grasps the concept of the species again as the essence in itself, whereas the concept is only the expression of the soul for the transcendental reality “species”.

From here we then come to the task of early scholasticism, which of course had the very special task of justifying Christianity. Here, however, we will only deal with the epistemological basis of early scholasticism in a few words. It is initially based entirely on the fact that man knows nothing but his ideas. It is true that we know through ideas, but what we imagine is not “the idea” but the object of the idea. The “representation” is an impression in the subject, and need not be more. Now it is important that you understand the relationship between subject and object in the early scholastic sense. Everything that is recognized depends entirely on the form of the human mind. Nothing can enter or leave the soul that does not come from the organization of that soul itself. But that which originally underlies the work of the soul comes about through the soul's contact with the object. And it is the subject's contact with the object that makes the idea possible. This is why early scholasticism said that man does not present his ideas, but that his ideas represent the thing to him. If you want to grasp the content of the idea, you have to look for the content of the idea in the thing.

However, this example shows that in order to absorb the scholastic concepts, one needs a keen mind and a fine distinction, which are usually lacking in those who simply condemn scholasticism. You have to get involved with such sentences: “I present” or “My ideas represent a content, and that comes from the object”. Modern man wants to get straight down to the nitty-gritty with all the concepts, as they arise for him out of trivial life. That is why the scholastics all appear to him to be school foxes. In a sense, they are, because they have just seen to it that man first learned something: a discipline of thinking technique. The thinking technique of the scholastics is one of the strictest that has ever occurred in humanity.

Thus, in all that man cognizes, we have a web of concepts that the soul acquires from the objects. There is a fine scholastic definition: in everything that man has in his soul in this way, in the representations and concepts, the object represented by the same exists in the manner of the soul. “In the cognized, the objective exists in the manner of the soul.” Down to the last detail, everything is the work of the soul. The soul has indeed represented everything in its own way within itself, but at the same time the object is connected with it.

Now the question is this: How do we get out of subjectivism today? By taking the straight path from Aristotle, we would have got beyond subjectivism. But for profound reasons, this straight path could not be followed. The early days of Christianity could not immediately produce the highest form of knowledge through thinking. In the first centuries, something else lived in the souls, which prevented scholasticism from [gap in the transcription] rising above subjectivity.

We can easily understand how to get beyond subjectivism if, in the manner of the scholastics, we understand the difference between concept and representation. What is this difference? It is easiest to understand this using a circle as an example. We can gain the representation of a circle by taking a boat out to sea to a point where we see the vault of heaven on the horizon all around us. There we have gained the idea of the circle. We can also gain the idea of the circle if we tie a stone to a thread and swing it around. Or, even cruder, we can get this idea from a wagon wheel. There you have the circle everywhere in the life of ideas. Now there is another way to get the circle, the way in which you get the circle through purely inner construction, by saying: the circle is a curved line in which every point is the same distance from a center. - You have constructed this concept yourself, but in doing so you have not described yourself.

You can gain the idea through experience, you can get the concept through inner construction. The idea still has to do with subject and object. At the moment when a person constructs internally, the subject and object are irrelevant to what he has constructed internally. Whether you really construct a circle is absolutely irrelevant to the nature of the circle. The nature of the circle, insofar as we come to it through internal construction, is beyond subject and object.

Now, however, modern man does not have much that he can construct in this way. Goethe tried to create such [inner constructions for higher areas of natural existence as well. In doing so, he came up with his “archetypes”, his “archetypal phenomena”].

In such an inner construction, the subject rises above itself, it goes beyond subjectivity. To return to the image - the sealing wax, as it were, into the matter of the seal.

Only in such pure, sensuality-free thinking does the subject merge with its object. This high level could not be attained immediately. Man had to pass through an intermediate stage first. Up to a certain point in time man worked directly out of the spiritual world; he did not think for himself, but received everything from the Mysteries. Thought only arose at a certain time. Therefore, logic was only developed at a certain time. The possibility of developing pure, sensuality-free thinking was only attained at a certain stage of development. This type was already attained, potentially, in the nineteenth century in minds such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. And we have to develop it further in the more intimate areas through spiritual science. Spiritual research is to be re-founded on pure, sensuality-free thinking, as it has been lived and expressed, for example, in the Rosicrucian schools. In earlier times of human development, people were initiated into the deeper secrets of existence by initiates. Now they must train themselves to gradually work out these things for themselves. In the meantime, it was important to maintain the connection with the divine world. In order for Christianity to mature calmly, the knowledge of the supersensible had to be withdrawn from human research for a certain period of time. People should learn to believe, even without knowing. Therefore, for a time, Christianity relied on mere belief. People were to let the idea mature quietly. Hence we have the coexistence of faith and knowledge in scholasticism. In scholasticism, the concept only wants to provide a firm support for what, with regard to supersensible objects, should be left for a certain period to what has been imparted to it through revelation. This is the standpoint of scholasticism: to keep the things of revelation aloof from criticism until man's thinking has matured. The foster-father who gave thinking its technique was Aristotle. But this thinking should first be trained on firm points of support in outer reality.

Today it is a matter of understanding the spirit of scholasticism in contrast to what dogma is. This spirit can only be recognized in the fact that what was beyond the power of judgment remained the subject of supersensible revelation, while the consequence of rational knowledge was that man himself should arrive at productive concepts, at that which is imperishable in them, through the world of sensual experience. This method of constructing concepts was to remain - and it is precisely this method that modern philosophy has completely lost. Nominalism has conquered modern philosophy by saying: the concepts that are formed according to the nature of the soul are mere names. The connection with the real had been completely lost because the instrument of those who no longer properly understood scholasticism had become blunt. Early scholasticism wanted to sharpen thinking on the thread of experience [for the supersensible-real]. But then came others who clung to the documents of experience, whereas reason was only to be trained on them. And then came the current that said: Forever must the supersensible be withdrawn from all human rational knowledge! - And according to Luther's saying, reason is “the stone-blind, the deaf, the mad fool”.

Here we see the starting point of that great conflict between what could be known and what could be believed; and Kantianism arose from this one-sided, nominalistic school of thought only in a mysterious way. For basically, all Kant wanted was to show that Reason, when left to its own devices, is nothing but a “stone-blind, deaf, and crazy fool.” When reason presumes to transgress the boundaries it itself has laid down in [...] [... gap in the transcription], then it is the “blind fool.” In the one-sided development of [nominalistic] thinking, we see the web in which Kantianism has spun itself maturing. Knowledge is tied to external experience, which is now even prescribed the limits. And faith [gap in the postscript].

It is a task that only anthroposophically oriented spiritual science will be able to accomplish: to get philosophy back on the right track.

If we look at the spiritual life in our age, we cannot but see – if we are sufficiently unprejudiced – that the whole and the great in this age have lost more and more of their soul, especially since the second half of the 19th century. Soul is missing from our contemporary civilization; and if the individual wants to awaken his soul to inner life, then it becomes necessary for him to do so not through experiencing the great traits of our civilization, but in solitude.

We have generally lost the ability to truly follow the basic impulses of our present life with an alert mind. There have been phenomena for external observation, which began in the 19th century, that should have called for a powerful attention to what is happening in spiritual life. But such phenomena have passed more or less without a trace. Indeed, it can be said that such phenomena have not even been formulated in modern times in such a way that their formulation could have made a sufficiently deep, awakening impression on modern humanity.

I would like to begin today's reflection with an observation that, on the basis of its externality, may be received by one person with a certain smile, by another historically registered as one of the many world-view aberrations with a neutral meaning, and by a third combated with some anger. Above all, however, I would like to try to simply formulate the facts as I see them.

In the last two decades of the 19th century, it often became an important question for me as to who was actually the cleverest person of the age. Of course, such things can only be understood in a relative sense. So please don't construe the things I will say in connection with this question too literally, of course; but with the necessary grain of salt with which one takes such things, I ask you to consider the matter as something that I may present as a characteristic of our age.

Our age is the age of intellectualism. Intellect has reached very special heights. And so one must ask oneself: What does the intellect of man actually depend on during earthly existence? Certainly, the powers of the intellect, the active part of the intellect, depends on the soul of the human being – and we will have to consider this soul later – depends on what the human being unconsciously carries within him for earthly consciousness in the form of an etheric organism, a body of formative forces, an astral body and the I organization.

But in the present period of the earth's development, the human being is simply not yet so far advanced that he can really bring the activity of the intellect, as it lives in these three links of human nature, to existence. If the human being did not have his physical body, the intellect would have to remain silent during his earthly existence. It would be like the way a person walking into a wall feels: when walking straight ahead and not even paying attention to his arms and hands, he sees nothing of himself, but if the wall he is walking into is a mirror, then he sees himself. Just as a person who does not see himself, so would the intellect of man be: he would not perceive himself if he did not have the physical body that reflects his activity, that throws back his activity. Thus man owes the greatness of his intellect in the present age to the reflection of his inner soul activity through the physical body. But while man will never mistake his mirror image for himself, this is precisely what happens with intellect. Man ultimately mistakes as intellect that which lives only in the physical web as the mirror image of the intellect. He surrenders himself to the mirror image. But then the mirror image will rule in him.

In a sense, man surrenders himself completely to his physical body with his intellect. If man succeeds in truly surrendering himself completely to the physical body with his intellect, then this intellect becomes highly perfected. When we allow our inner being to be active, then we still occasionally grope our way through all kinds of feelings and urges that we have, through prejudices, through sympathies and antipathies, then we grope our way into the intellect. There we make it imperfect. But if we become completely dry, sober, cold natures, if, to speak in the Hamerling sense, we combine the male soullessness of the billionaire with the female soullessness of the mermaid, as Hamerling has portrayed such a union in his “Homunculus,” and thereby acquire the ability to think as we must think in accordance with our physical bodies, then a relative perfection of our intellectuality is precisely possible in this age. Then we learn to think in such a way that, in a sense, the intellect moves itself within us, that the intellect becomes, in a certain sense, an automaton, playing at a relatively highest perfection.

I said this to myself back then in the last two decades of the 19th century and asked myself: Who is the cleverest person in contemporary civilization in this sense, that he has brought the intellect to a relatively highest perfection? Well, you may smile, but I really couldn't come up with anything other than that the cleverest person in contemporary civilization is Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious. It is by no means some kind of daring paradox, but something that emerged for me from a perhaps not entirely soulless consideration of the last two decades of the 19th century.

You can imagine that one has great respect for the person whom one considered the most intelligent person of the age. That is why I also dedicated what I wanted to express in terms of epistemology in my booklet “Truth and Science” to Eduard von Hartmann. So I am not speaking out of disrespect, I speak out of deep respect. The preconditions for Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy are, after all, that Eduard von Hartmann was actually trained as an officer. He made it to the rank of first lieutenant, but then contracted a knee injury and subsequently transformed the intellectuality that was actually intended for modern militarism into philosophy. It is interesting that this is precisely how what I can only formulate as follows came about: Eduard von Hartmann was the cleverest man of the last third of the 19th century.

He therefore also saw clearly what one can clearly see with the understanding of the last third of the 19th century. He saw through human consciousness, as it is bound to the earth, but bound to the physical human body. Being clever, he did not deny the spirit. But he transferred it into the sphere of the unconscious, into that which can never carry a body, which can never come into intimate contact with the physical, and which, therefore, since it is always extra-physical, that is, spiritual, can only be unconscious.

Conscious – Eduard von Hartmann told himself – one can only be in the body. But if the body is not the only thing, if there is a spirit, then the spirit cannot be conscious, only unconscious. When a person passes through the gate of death, Hartmann says, we cannot expect him to penetrate into a different consciousness, because beyond this earthly consciousness there is only the unconscious. The person enters the sphere of the unconscious spirit. The unconscious spirit is everywhere except where the person's consciousness is.

Eduard von Hartmann's philosophy is therefore a philosophy of the spirit, but a philosophy of the unconscious spirit. So that there is no consciousness except in the human body, that there is spirit everywhere, but spirit that knows nothing of itself or the world and nothing of itself.

Is it not absolutely clear that this unconscious spirit can never penetrate into anything outside of itself except through the physical human body? That is clear from the outset. But something very significant is said with this. It is said that this intellect, which thus elevates itself to the status of the unconscious, lacks love.

I am not saying that Eduard von Hartmann lacked love, but his intellect, which was precisely its significance, lacked all love. It is not possible for the loveless intellect to build the bridge anywhere. Therefore, it remains only in itself, but as a result, it cannot gain consciousness. He remains in the sphere of unconsciousness. One could also say that he remains in the sphere of unkindness.

This already indicates that this is also the sphere of soullessness, because where love cannot occur, soulfulness gradually fades away altogether. And so, I would say, we have to feel the atmosphere of unkindness from the whole and great civilization of the second half of the 19th century, on whose shoulders our civilization stands.

It is now highly remarkable where Eduard von Hartmann has led this indulgence of the unconscious mind, combined with unkindness.

He looked at this world of earthly life that gives man consciousness. But if we could not live as earth people in our body, if we could not submerge ourselves in our body with every waking and connect ourselves completely with our body, what would we face?

When we awaken as earth humans, the I and the astral body, which were secreted during sleep, return to the physical body and the etheric body. There the I and the astral body connect very intimately with the etheric body and physical body, and this I and the astral body become one with the etheric body and the physical body.

And as long as we are awake as an earthly human being, we must speak of an intimate unity of the spiritual-soul and the physical-bodily. But if we separate the spiritual-soul from the physical-bodily, as Eduard von Hartmann does intellectually, then the following reality would correspond to it: a reality that would occur when we, on waking up, enter our physical and etheric bodies, but do not merge with them, but only dwell in them. According to Eduard von Hartmann, the unconscious mind dwells in the body and thereby becomes conscious in physical life on earth. So it thinks something that, if it were to occur in reality, would be as if, when we wake up, we would indeed enter our physical and etheric bodies, but would not merge with them – but would live inside them, looking around as we look around in a house, seeing everything inside – so we would be separate inside. But what would happen then?

Now, if we, with our spiritual and mental selves, were not merged with our physical body but lived separately from it, then that would mean an unspeakable, unbearable pain for our soul; because every pain arises from the organ not functioning properly, from the organ becoming diseased, from us being expelled from a part of our physical body. If we were to be expelled altogether, if we were to be, if I may express it this way, 'extra' to our physical body, we would have to experience an unutterable pain. Every morning when we wake up, this pain threatens us, so to speak. We overcome it by immersing ourselves in our physical and etheric bodies and connecting with them.

Now, Eduard von Hartmann was certainly no initiate; he was merely an intellectual, the best intellectual of the second half of the 19th century. He merely grasped in thought what I have now painted before you as a reality. He presented the world as if we did not connect with our I and our astral body with the physical and etheric bodies. He imagined the relationship of the human being to his body as I have just described it in reality.

This led him to the following conclusion: He came to the conclusion of a complete pessimism. Of course, pessimism would be experienced if we were separated from our physical body when we woke up. Eduard von Hartmann conceived it. And what does he propose as the result of his thinking? The world is the worst conceivable. The world contains the greatest amount of evil and pain, and the real cultural development of humanity can only consist in gradually extinguishing, destroying the world. And at the end of “The Philosophy of the Unconscious” an ideal does indeed emerge.

Eduard von Hartmann lived in the age of ever-increasing technological development, when more and more machines were being used to perform this or that task. Anyone who takes a look at what is possible with machines is fascinated by the possibilities that lie within them. If you expand the possibilities that can arise for the world as the perfection of the mechanical, it has a tremendous suggestive power.

Eduard von Hartmann has surrendered himself to this suggestion. And he thinks that humanity – which, precisely because it has come to intellect, must gradually become more and more intelligent – must also increasingly realize that the right thing for this world is to destroy it; that humanity will one day will come to a machine through which one can drill down to the center of the earth and then set the machine in motion to hurl this whole worst earth into the vastness of the cosmos with everything that lives on it.

One can only say that the foundations for such a way of thinking are actually present in all others, who may not be as clever as Eduard von Hartmann, but are also very clever, but they have not had the courage to think the final consequences in this sense. And one can say that if one is really able to grasp what the intellect can achieve, detached from the rest of the world, then, with this one-sided development of the intellect, this ideal, as presented by Eduard von Hartmann, even appears, in a certain sense, necessary.

I said that one did not really come to formulate certain phenomena of the time that were there after all. But one should really aspire to a formulation that is as concise as possible by the philosopher of the unconscious, who presented this perspective to humanity in 1869. And in this, Eduard von Hartmann was actually also really cleverer than the others, because he did, after all, accomplish that deed, which I have often related, after he presented this ideal to people. In the same book in which he presents this ideal, he speaks of the spirit, albeit the unconscious spirit, but he speaks of the spirit. It was a terrible sin, because science had come so far that one was not allowed to speak scientifically of the spirit, even in the harmless way of leaving it entirely unconscious.

And so the other clever people saw this “philosophy of the unconscious,” which made itself very noticeable in literature, as dilettantism. Then Eduard von Hartmann played a trick on them. A refutation of the “philosophy of the unconscious” by an unknown author appeared. And in it, this spirit philosophy was thoroughly refuted. The writing was called “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent”. In this anonymous writing, the ghost of Hartmann's other clever minds was so strong – yes, I must say now, the ghost, because I am not allowed to say spirit in this case – that the most important natural scientists of that time, Oskar Schmidt, Ernst Haeckel and a host of others, wrote the most laudatory reviews of this anonymous book and said: “There's someone who has thoroughly dealt with this dilettante Eduard von Hartmann! It's a shame that he's not known, this anonymous. He should tell us his name and we would consider him one of our own.

It is understandable that after such a blow to the trumpet, the anonymous's writing was soon discontinued and a second edition was needed. It appeared: “The Unconscious from the Point of View of Physiology and the Theory of Descent, second edition, by Eduard von Hartmann”.

So, as you can see, Eduard von Hartmann also proved that he was already the cleverest, because firstly he could be as clever as he was, and then also as clever as the others, his opponents.

If yesterday I had to say that psychoanalysis is amateurism squared, then one would actually have to say that because soul qualities always multiply: the cleverness of Eduard von Hartmann was cleverness squared, multiplied by itself.

We should not pass by such a phenomenon of the age in such a deep sleep, as we do. We should formulate it and bring it to mind, then we would really have the absurdities of the age before us. And why was Eduard von Hartmann so clever? He was so clever because he really looked at everything that one was allowed to take note of in his time with a penetrating gaze. He became, so to speak, the naturalist of philosophy. It is, of course, rather like saying: the flour of soup. But he became the naturalist of philosophy.

Now it is a matter of realizing quite empirically, precisely in the face of such an occurrence, where one must go if one does not want to fall into these abysses. If one wants to find one's way out of the confusion that this civilization brings, one must look at what the human being really carries within.

But if we now move from the physical body of the human being and gradually move more into the spiritual, we approach the soul, as we discussed again yesterday, the etheric body or formative forces.

Eduard von

Hartmann knew nothing of such an etheric or formative body, in accordance with what could be known in his time. He did not ascend from the consideration of what is externally natural-physical to the next thing that borders on the physical, to the etheric or formative body.

We know that when a person falls asleep, his I and his astral body separate from the physical body and from the etheric body. The etheric body remains in the physical body. If a person merely applies earthly consciousness, he can never really know what the nature of his etheric body is. For when he is awake, he enters with his astral body and his ego into the etheric body. Then he is inside. Then he experiences what he himself has brought into it with his ego and his astral body. A being of a much higher organization would have to plunge into this etheric body during human sleep, while the I and the astral body are outside. Such a being, which could really objectively see how it actually relates to this etheric body, would find what the human being actually leaves behind with the physical body when he falls asleep, his etheric body. If one were to determine what it is that the human being leaves behind, one would find that this etheric body or formative forces body is truly the epitome of all wisdom in an earthly and in a much higher sense.

It cannot be denied for true knowledge: When we have left our physical and etheric bodies at night, the two that we have left behind are much cleverer together than we are when we are inside. For we are, in our I and our astral body, children of the development of the earth and the moon. The ether body, however, goes back to the development of the sun, and the physical body goes back to the development of Saturn. These are at a much higher level of perfection. Today, we in our I and in our astral body cannot measure up to what has accumulated over time from the solar developmental epoch here in our ether body as wisdom. One could say: this ether body is concentrated wisdom. But when we humans bring our wisdom into this etheric body with our astral body and with our ego, then we need a counterforce, just as we need the counterforce of the mirror if we want to see our reflection. We need the physical body as a counterforce. Just as we could not stand if we did not have physical ground, so we could not live in our etheric body without the etheric body bordering on the physical body and bumping into the physical body everywhere, having an abutment on the physical body. The etheric body with its inner life would be like a human being floating freely in the air without a base. In our ordinary earthly existence, we have only a soul life, which lives in the etheric body but needs the physical body as a support.

With this soul condition, we can only get close to the mineral world. We can only see through the inanimate. If we want to get close to the plant world, we need the ability to use the etheric body without the physical body.

How can we do that? How can we use our etheric body without our physical body? We can do this if we increasingly transform ourselves, through inner exercises, from people who live primarily through their physical body in the element of heaviness to people who live through the light in the element of lightness, who through the light no longer feel their connection with the earth, but with the vastness of the cosmos; when looking at the stars, the sun and moon, the vastness of the universe, gradually becomes as familiar to us as looking at the plants that cover the meadows. When we are mere earthly children, we look down at the plants that cover the meadows. We take pleasure in them, but do not understand them, because we are earth-bound human beings. But if we can learn to stand in the expanse of the universe, in the meadow of heaven, studded with stars — not on the floor but on the ceiling — and feel can feel a kinship with it, as we otherwise do with the soil of the earth, then we begin, by transforming our earthly consciousness into a cosmic consciousness, to use our etheric body in the same way as we otherwise use our physical body. Only then will we be able to penetrate to the plant world with our understanding. For plants are not produced from the earth upwards, but are drawn out of the earth through the heavens.

You see, Goethe was filled with this longing when he developed his Metamorphosis of Plants. And there is much that he said that is as if he felt he was such a person, inclined towards the sun rather than the earth, who felt how the sun draws the power of plant growth out of the earth even at the root , how the sun, with its powers, gradually develops the leaf in connection with the effect of the air, and how the sun finally, in the flower and in the formation of fruit, gradually cooks that which it has sucked out of the earth.

Just read this wonderful little book by Goethe, published in 1790: “Attempt to explain the metamorphosis of plants”, and you will find the beginnings of such a representation everywhere. Goethe longed to penetrate the plant world. But he repeatedly stumbled over the difficulty of really developing the ethereal vision instead of the physical vision. This is what was already present as an impulse in Goethe, and what the person who really draws on Goethe must further develop. This person does not want to take the dead Goethe, but the Goethe who continues to live and work.

For by realizing that the human soul can do something like this, if only it really becomes aware of its etheric body, it is able to feel its heavenly origin, its independence from the earth, its being on earth. The human soul can say to itself: You are of cosmic origin; you are on earth through the physical human body, but you are of cosmic origin. And when you can take joy in the plant world here, then that which rejoices in you is a son of heaven, who delights in what the heavens in turn draw out of the earth in the plant world. Man seizes himself soulfully from the earth by thus truly grasping his etheric or formative body in reality.

When one does this, that is, when one comes so far - and what can bring one to it is real love for the plant world - to live in the etheric body as one otherwise lives in the physical body, then not only one's own ether body is raised into consciousness, but in the same way as the physical nature is raised through our senses into our consciousness through our physical body, so the etheric world is placed into our consciousness through the etheric body.

And what do we feel when we look out, as it were, through our etheric body into the etheric world, just as we look out with our physical body into the physical world? We see there what is spread out before our physical eye, the real past from which this physical world has emerged. There we see in spirit the images of what was, so that the present can be.

Therefore, from the earliest times of humanity, the first initiation given to man was the initiation of the cosmos. In the oldest schools of humanity, people worked towards this initiation of the cosmos. The teachers of the first mysteries were the initiators for reading in the ether of the cosmos, which can also be called reading in chaos, in the Akasha Chronicle, reading the Akasha, reading that which has passed and has conjured the present before our eyes. And it was basically the first level of initiation that humanity has achieved in its existence on Earth, this initiation through the cosmos.

A second one that can be achieved is this: when we awaken, we let the astral body and the ego sink down into the physical body and etheric body. We animate the etheric and physical body, we connect with them. But we can only grasp as much of the infinite wisdom of the etheric body as we carry into it. But it constantly stimulates us. If we have a good idea somehow, then it is the etheric body that, because it is intimately connected with the ether of the cosmos, stimulates us to have the idea. Everything that a person develops in the way of ideas and ingenuity when they are awake comes from the etheric body and thus indirectly from the cosmos. The genius speaks with the cosmos by stimulating the astral body through the etheric body.

But the person who does not see this through lives in it, and his soul consists in that he sinks the astral body and the I into the physical body and the etheric body in the waking state.

When we make the stars our home, just as we do the meadows, we have the opportunity to experience the etheric, in that we make the world's widths the upper ground of our being. The human being always experiences it, only in his knowledge he does not penetrate there without initiation; but in reality every human being experiences it. If we look for a counterfoil for our astral body, this counterfoil is always there. It is only that spiritual science draws attention to what is present in every human being.

Suppose you could not see the physical floor, but you could stand on it, you would stand on it. If someone, who had only discovered through science that the floor was there, were to tell you about it, you would still stand on the floor. So the one who has mastered spiritual science can tell you that you are rising to the upper ground, to the starry heavens; but you are really rising all the same. And so the human being stands in another world with his astral body, in the world of living spirit beings, which we have enumerated as the world of the higher hierarchies.

Just as we, when we place ourselves in the physical world, have this physical world as our real one, just as there are minerals, plants and animals in this physical world and the soil is what the human being ultimately outgrows in the evolution of humanity, so the human being is in the world of the beings of the higher hierarchies with his astral body. When he lives in this world, he has the corresponding counterfoil for his astral body. But he always carries within himself that which he can only get to know through spiritual science. And he carries it within himself as the faculty of feeling.

Everything we make our own in the world through our feelings, through this most intimate life of the soul, exists in the undulations and weavings of the spirits of the higher hierarchies in our own astral body. When we become conscious of our feeling, this consciousness of feeling is what the human being has at first, but in this feeling the weaving and working of the spirits of the higher hierarchies lives through the human being. We cannot truly grasp the soul if we do not feel this soul immersed in the spiritual worlds of the higher hierarchies. And just as the past is revealed to us for the sensory present through etheric vision, when what has been developed in the first earthly mysteries as the initiation of the cosmos is recreated in a modern way, so too can the soul be so deepened that it attains an awareness of what is actually taking place in the astral body.

To do this, we need to lovingly immerse ourselves in what has been lived as a connection with the spiritual worlds in the great mysteries. If we allow the cosmos to teach us, under the guidance of the wisdom of initiation, we will arrive at the reality of the first level of the soul. If we can penetrate into what actually took place in the mysteries, we can, so to speak, not only read in the Akasha Chronicle the past of the stars, the past of the animals, the past of the physical human being, we can read what has lived in the souls of the great mystery teachers, we can truly awaken in us something like what I have tried to present in the way can be presented to the modern human being in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact'. If we can bring to life what the mystery teachers developed through their contact with the spiritual beings themselves, then we come close to that initiation which in later times on earth was added to the cosmic initiation and which I would like to call the initiation of the wise.

Thus one can speak of two levels of initiation: initiation through the cosmos and initiation through the wise. What the wise had taught as cosmic knowledge formed the content of cosmic initiation. Looking into the souls of those who preceded man in the life of the soul leads to the second level of soul being. Man can begin with all this in his outer historicity. When we grasp with inner aliveness what still shines through from ancient times – let us say in the wonderful Vedanta wisdom and other wisdom of older times – then in turn our own inner aliveness is grasped, and we are brought close to the initiation of the cosmos. And when one delves into such things with heartfelt love, as I presented them in my book 'Christianity as Mystical Fact', where an attempt has been made to present the old mysteries in their content in connection with the mystery of Golgotha, then one comes close to initiation by the wise.

And then, for the present, it is necessary to look honestly into one's own inner being and to get to know this inner being, one's own spirit, which then illuminates the soul from within. But I will speak in more detail about this, as the third stage of the initiation necessary today, next time. It is the initiation of self-knowledge.

But when spiritual science speaks of the soul today, it must speak from the spirit of these three stages of initiation: initiation through the cosmos, initiation through the sages, initiation through self-knowledge. In this way one measures the various boundaries of the soul's life. It is not possible to take even the first steps on this path without love. And I had to tell you that precisely the intellect of the present day, when it emerges at the highest level, forgets love, loses love. But in this way something very special takes place.

To really lovingly engage with what can be described as the physical body, the etheric body, the astral body and the I,

can be done by hearing something of the voice of the genius that rules our time, if one has the good will to listen to the voice of the genius of our time. But can the man of the present day take what is said when one speaks of “the genius of our age” with the deep seriousness it deserves? When we speak of the genius of our age, does it not remain an abstract concept for most people? Think how far removed people are from grasping a truly spiritual force that is active, weaving and living in our time when we speak of the genius of our time.

But it may be said that even if people deny the spirit, they will not be rid of the spirit. The spirit is inextricably linked to humanity. Only when people renounce the genius of an age does the demon of that age approach them. And when the intellect had progressed so far at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century that it followed only the mechanism of the physical body, even became automatic, mechanical, and thus reached its highest level, so that it became as clever as it and as clever as the others are, when this intellect advanced to the point where the mechanical and material aspects of the intellect called into existence, the intellect behaved as a person behaves when they reject genius. 'Then the demon of the age takes hold of him. The intellect had separated itself from the soul. The intellect became mechanical, soulless, and in this state it founded a philosophy. It had no love, could not love wisdom. Its philosophy could only become the intellectual image of earthly demonology, that demonology that conceives the ideal of a machine that is drilled into the center of the earth and blows the earth out into the universe.

That is what the demon of the age has told the intellect of the age. The demon of the age will often make itself heard if one does not want to recognize the soul. Then it will appear to this intellect as man would really experience it if, waking up, he were to submerge into his physical and etheric bodies and did not unite with them, but remained inwardly separate from them. For this intellect is alien to the human being; it emancipates itself from the human being. The intellect that is connected to the human being struggles out of earthly consciousness and up to other states of consciousness. For the intellect that only binds itself to the earth, but then separates itself, and therefore has only the reflection of the intellect, all other states of consciousness become the infinite sea of the unconscious. The human soul ceases to become aware of its heavenly origin, to become aware of its independence from earthly life.

But the soul-life of man consists in this, that man in his nature vibrates between the bodily and the spiritual. It is in this vibration between the bodily and the spiritual that the soul-life exists. If man honestly believes only in the body, and because he cannot leave the spirit alone, it only becomes unconscious, then the denial of the soul-life occurs.

While Hartmann conceived the destruction of the earth in such a demonic way, as only a person could conceive it who would sleep in the physical body, but then would become clairvoyant in the physical body - while Hartmann came to an intellectual formulation of earthly suffering, a person who was a friend of his who had exchanged many letters with him, writhing in real pain on his sickbed, in whom it had come about that many organs of his spiritual soul had not let him into the physical, who was experiencing earthly suffering, not inventing it, could only treat the soullessness of his age in a satirical way. That is Robert Hamerling, who wrote his “Homunculus” in the 1880s, when the perspective of the soullessness of the age dawned on him: the human being who only strives outwardly, who only ever accumulates more and more outwardly, and who finally becomes a billionaire – this terrible perspective of the soulless age was before Hamerling's soul's eye. And the soulless billionaire, the homunculus, who is born not through the agency of the soul but only in a mechanical way, through mechanical procreation, Hamerling has married to the soulless elemental spirit, to the mermaid, to the Lorelei.

Thus Robert Hamerling saw the prospect of the soulless age before the eye of the soul in the striving of man, who works purely materially, for spiritless intellectuality, which is certainly present in nature spirits, but which, in man, evokes all the forces of destruction, up to the demonic destructive urge to blow up the whole earth into space. Robert Hamerling could only treat this problem of the soulless age in a satirical way.

But soul must be given to the newer civilization and culture again. This soul can only be given when the earthly experiences of man are illuminated by the light of a knowledge of the spirit.

And so that which has been presented in a truly terrible, one might say chilling, way to the cleverest man of our age and which, writhing in pain, has satirically presented itself as a perspective by the one who felt the cleverness of the age most tragically, must be transformed for people through spiritual knowledge into the perspective of the soul, towards which we must strive as a second perspective.

Yesterday we spoke about the physical perspective. Today we want to speak about the perspective of the soul, and tomorrow we want to speak about the spiritual perspective.

As terrestrial beings, human beings initially experience three alternating states of consciousness: the waking state from the moment we wake until we fall asleep; the opposite state, which is the sleeping state, where the soul, as it were, descends into spiritual darkness and has no experiences around it; and between the two, the dream state, of which we are aware of how our waking experiences play into it, but on the other hand, how the connections of waking are changed by certain extraordinarily significant and interesting inner forces, how, to mention just a few examples, something long past appears as something immediately present; how something that passed by the consciousness in complete carelessness, that one perhaps did not pay special attention to in ordinary waking life, moves into the dream consciousness and so on. Things that otherwise do not belong together are brought together by the dream.

But at the same time, it is a very characteristic feature of the dream state that the dream content, everything that is perceived in the dream, is of a strong pictorial quality, that even when the word sounds into the dream, it is the pictorial quality of the word that plays into it, the tone of the word, the modulation of the sounds, all of which are resolved into pictorial quality, even if it is only audible pictorial quality that is heard by the soul.

Now, dreams contain an extraordinary amount of material that can occupy the human soul at its deepest level. But one does not gain insight into the actual spiritual existence if one is unable to form valid ideas about the relationship between these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping.

Today, we would like to characterize these three states of consciousness with the help of spiritual science, as far as possible. First, the state of consciousness during waking life.

A person can become aware that he can lead this waking life by beginning to make use of his body, the organs of his body, but also of his thinking, which is bound to the body, when he wakes up. And even if one has no knowledge of the fact that the I and the astral body submerge into the physical and etheric bodies when one wakes up, one must still feel how, albeit quickly, but distinctly perceptibly, at least distinctly perceptibly, one acquires power over one's limbs, power over one's organs and power to unfold one's inner thinking.

All this can teach people how the waking life of the day is bound to the physical body. And by looking at the etheric or formative body from the point of view of spiritual science, we must also say that this waking life of the day is bound to the etheric or formative body just as it is to the physical body. We must delve into these two aspects of our human nature, we must make use of their organization in order to lead an active daily life.

Now one can succumb to the most diverse illusions about this waking day life if one does not begin to illuminate it from the point of view of spiritual science. We need say little about the sense life; for what could be clearer than that man makes use of his sense organs precisely in the waking day life and that these sense organs convey to him what is around him as a manifestation of the external physical world. One has only to observe the nature of the sense organs to see how, through the relationships of the eye, the ear, and the other senses to the environment, what the human being calls his waking daytime experiences as a revelation of the sensory world comes about.

What now makes it necessary to proceed to a more exact observation is thinking, imagining. Let us be quite clear about the fact that man, with his imaginations, has initially only given an internalization of his sensory life.

If man looks honestly within himself, he will say to himself: Through the senses I receive impressions, in thinking I continue these impressions inwardly. And if we then examine our thoughts, we will find that these thoughts are shadowy images of what the senses convey to us. In a sense, the human being's thinking is directed entirely outwards. Thinking is now the activity of the etheric or formative body, so that we can also say: by thinking as a sentient being on earth, the human being's etheric or formative body is directed outwards. But in this way we have really only considered one side of the etheric or formative body. And if we consider what we have in ordinary waking consciousness, our thoughts about the outer world, it is as if we could only physically observe a person from behind under certain circumstances. Imagine that you had only ever seen a number of people from behind. You would form ideas about them that you might not dare express to them. You would be curious, inquisitive, as to what the people in question look like from the front, and you would be convinced from the outset that the front belongs to the back of a person, that this is the other side, the more expressive side for the physical human being on earth.

So it is when we become aware of the thinking of the external world: we see, as it were, the back side of thinking. It is the other way around because the direction of the currents of the senses always goes from front to back in the human being. Even where it appears to be otherwise, it must be thought of this way: What is represented physically as the front side is for thinking the back side. And basically we have to put ourselves in a position to view human thinking from the other side, where it is not turned towards the impressions of the outer senses, where it shows us its hidden inner side.

But then we come upon something very strange. Then thinking does not present itself to us as it appears when we carry images of the sensory external world in our consciousness. Then, viewed from this other side, our thinking, which after all constitutes the forces of the etheric or formative body, is transformed into forces that build our physical organism, into forces that create our physical organism.

When we grow, when our organs are built up from the germinal state, when our organs are plastically formed, it is the other side of thinking that actively intervenes from the etheric or formative body and organizes us. What works and lives in us as we grow, as we process the food in us, what formative forces are present in us at all, that is the other side of thinking. Ordinary thinking only gives rise to shadowy thoughts in us; it is the reverse side of thinking. But what first gives form to our thinking apparatus, what our brain and our entire nervous system develop, is the creative power of thinking, and this is at the same time the creative power of the formative forces or etheric body. That is the other side.

It does not take much clairvoyant power to see how this creative power of thinking works in man as a force of growth, as a formative force. One needs only, I might say, to turn inward to become aware that thinking is not just a shadowy reflection of the outside world, but an inner activity. One needs only, so to speak, to turn back from being turned to the outside world to what one does inwardly, what one thinks, then one becomes aware of this activity of thinking.

In this grasping of the activity of thinking, we now grasp first of all what human freedom is, and the understanding of freedom is one with the grasping of this activity of thinking. Therefore, by grasping the activity of thinking in this way, one also grasps the morality that permeates and interweaves the human being.

In my Philosophy of Freedom, I wanted to make comprehensible this grasping of thinking as an active element, this grasping of pure thinking as opposed to thinking filled with external sense images, this inward jerk, and to make comprehensible how the human being can inwardly grasp this activity of thinking, and how, through this inward turning, he can grasp morality as something that can arise in pure thinking, and how, through this, he can also truly attain the consciousness of freedom.

So that we can say: Let us turn human thinking, which initially shows us in its first aspect shadowy images of the sensual outside world, let us turn it around before us, then it becomes the plastic creative power of the human being himself, then it becomes the inner activity, then it becomes the carrier of freedom, that in which, as it were, what moral impulses are in the human being can be intercepted.

In this way, we advance from the physical body into the etheric body in a spiritual way. We can therefore say: the first step up into the spiritual world is the actual experience of the feeling of freedom.

And now let us look at dream consciousness. Dreams may be chaotic, they may be dreams of terror and fear, they may be sweet dreams, but they always weave and live in images that they conjure up before the soul. Let us disregard the content of the dream, but let us look at the drama of the dream, and we see how the soul, so to speak, weaves and lives waking up or falling asleep in these dream images.

Yes, a certain power of the soul expresses itself in this way. One may argue about the extent to which these images are right or wrong, but the fact that these images can be formed must indicate to us that there is a power in the soul that forms these images. The dream image is placed before this soul itself by an inner power of the soul. There is an inward weaving power of the soul in the formation of dreams.

Look at the moment of waking up. You must feel how, emerging from the darkness of sleep, this inner weaving power is present. But it submerges into the physical and etheric bodies. You would dream away if this power did not submerge. It is the power of the astral body. The astral body, which is incapable of becoming aware of itself when it is outside the physical and etheric bodies, begins to feel itself, to sense its own power, by awakening, by feeling the resistance of the physical and etheric bodies when it enters them. It appears chaotic in dreams, but it is the soul's own power that has been alive from the moment of falling asleep until waking up and that is now submerging. Yes, the dream-forming power pours into the physical and etheric bodies. It descends into the blood circulation, it descends into the muscle tension and relaxation. The dream-forming power also enters into the etheric body. Thereby this dream-forming power is strengthened. By itself it is weak and powerless. The dream images flit about aimlessly when the dream-forming power is alone. But when the dream-forming power engages with the physical and etheric bodies, making use of the organs of the physical and etheric bodies, it becomes strong.

What does it do as it becomes strong? Well, it develops memory in the human being. Remembrance and memory are nothing other than the dream-forming power embodied in the physical and etheric bodies. The dream enters into the physical body and is thus integrated into the order of the physical world. It then forms the content of memory, which is no longer chaotic but integrated into the physical world.

We could not remember anything if we did not bring the power of dreams with us into our physical body when we wake up; for in the physical body, the power of dreaming becomes the power of remembering, of memory.

And when you sit quietly, turned away from the external world of the senses, and let your memories play, your memories that surface, calm, bless, your memories that stir the imagination – when you let them run their course, it is the dream power, strengthened by the physical and etheric body, that dream-power which, when the astral body kept it outside the physical and etheric bodies, was immersed in the spirit of the world and experienced the secrets of things in the spirit of the world.

If you were to perceive the same power that forms the power of memory in your waking state asleep, you would not have the chaotic images of the dream, which only form in the moment of immersion in the physical and etheric bodies, but you would experience yourself immersed in the external world, freed from the physical and etheric bodies, sleeping in a majestic world of images.

This world of images would be the cosmic counter-image of what ascends and descends in your memories in lonely contemplation. Your memory life is the microcosmic counter-image of that macrocosmic, gigantic, majestic weaving and billowing of images that our dream power undergoes when the astral body has submerged, instead into the physical and etheric bodies, into the things and processes of the outer cosmos.

And when we speak of the spiritual content of our soul and find that this spiritual content of our soul undulates in what is transformed from external impressions and lives in our memories, in the content of our memory, which, appropriated by our own inner being, basically constitutes everything blissful and tragic, joyous and sorrowful of our soul life, when we consider all that lives in our soul as spiritual content in our memory, then we must realize that we owe it to the fact that we can immerse the dream-forming submerge the dream-forming power, which is actually akin to the cosmos, into our inner being, so that what lives in the formative forces out there in the cosmos, what creates and works outside, is present in our inner being as the memory power that spiritualizes us and spiritualizes our soul.

Thus, in the power of remembrance, we feel related to all the creative and working forces of the cosmos. And we may say: when I look out and see how the images of plants unfold in spring, when I look into the forest and see how the trees develop from their germs over the years and decades, when I look up and see how clouds change under the influence of the more external formative forces, when I look out and see how mountains form and eroded away in the world, I look up at all these formative forces that work their way up to the stars: I have something akin to all this in my own soul, I have the powers of remembrance in my soul, and these are the microcosmic image of what weaves and works out there in the world in the metamorphoses of things.

And now let us consider the I, which, even in a sleeping state, leaves the physical and etheric bodies and connects with the things and processes of the cosmos outside. We then become aware of how we, as human beings, are able to immerse ourselves in things with our actual being, even if this remains unconscious in our experience of the world. However, the self itself emerges from the deep sleep, emerges into the physical and etheric body. And here it is only spiritual scientific initiation that can pursue this. While for memory, the slipping of the power of dreaming into the physical body still provides a point of reference for ordinary observation, with imagination, as it can be developed in the sense of my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, one must now also learn to observe how, from falling asleep to waking up, the things and processes of the cosmos, how the I, which remains from falling asleep to waking up, submerges into the physical and etheric body, how now also that which is so powerless for the present human development on earth that the human being is immersed in sleep as in darkness, in the darkness of his soul , and when it submerges into the physical and etheric bodies, it now also strengthens itself in the physical and etheric bodies, as it takes hold of the pathways of the physical and etheric bodies and seizes the innermost power of the blood, through the innermost power of the blood.

And this too has its manifestation in the waking consciousness of the day. The I, immersing itself in the physical and etheric bodies, then expresses itself. The I is that which works and weaves in the human being as the free one; it can express itself, it cannot express itself. But when it expresses itself, what is its most characteristic expression in the human being? It is the power of love appearing in the human being.

We would never have the ability to merge with love in another being or another process, to merge with this other process, so to speak, if the I did not also leave us every night in real terms in order to immerse itself in the things and processes of the cosmos outside. There it submerges itself in reality. By slipping into us in our fully awakened consciousness, it gives us the inner strength to love through the abilities it has acquired outside. This is what emerges as the threefold power of the soul at its deepest core: freedom, memory life, love power.

Freedom, the inner primal form of the etheric or formative body. The power of memory, the inwardly occurring dream-forming power of the astral body. Love, the inwardly occurring power of love that leads the human being to devotion to the outer world.

Through the fact that the human soul can partake of this threefold power, it permeates itself with spiritual life. For this threefold permeation with the sense of freedom, with the power of remembrance, through which we hold together past and present, through the power of love, through which we are able to give our own inner being to the outer world and become one with the outer world, through the holding of these three powers of the soul, this our soul becomes spiritualized.

To grasp this with the right soul nuance means to grasp what it means that man carries the spirit in his soul. And anyone who does not understand this threefold inner spiritualization of the soul does not understand how the soul of man harbors the spirit.

This then extends to life. If we are able to establish a living inner connection between memory and love - the memory that prevails in us through the astral body, love through the I - then in certain cases a wonderful thing can be achieved.

In this way, these things are grasped directly in life. We preserve the memory of a beloved dead person beyond death. We carry his image in our soul, that is, we add to the sensual impressions we received from him during our lifetime that which remains with us when his sensual existence has been withdrawn from us. We continue life with the dead in our memory with all the strength and intensity of our soul, continuing it in such a way that we no longer have the support of external sensory impressions, and we try to bring these memories to such a vibrancy that it may seem to us as if the dead person is there in the immediate present. We remain aware that we carry this in our memory, but we then connect this power, which is strengthened by our astral body, with the power that we have through our ego, with the power of love. We preserve the intense love for the dead person beyond the grave. We enable ourselves to connect the power of love with the image, which no longer receives sensual stimulation, in the same way that we could otherwise develop the power of love under sensual stimulation.

In this way, it is possible to strengthen what the astral body and the ego would otherwise only express when they make use of the organs of the physical body. Particularly when we preserve the memory of the dead, which can no longer be stimulated in us by the physical body and the etheric body, when we can keep this memory so active and alive that we can connect it with an intense love, then this is a way to awaken inwardly to a certain degree of astral body and I, and precisely in the memory that we are able to preserve for the dead lies one of the first steps to freeing the I and the astral body from the physical body. to a certain degree of the astral body and the I, and it is precisely in the memory that we are able to preserve for the dead person that one of the first steps towards freeing the I and the astral body from the physical and etheric body during the waking state lies.

If people could understand what it means to keep the memory alive, to look at the image that remains of the dead person as one would look at it alive, then they would experience the liberation of the astral body and the ego in this way, which leads across the threshold that lies between the physical and the spiritual world. This experience contains the following insight: We first have the memory, vividly, as if the dead person were still there; we know that through our waking consciousness we connect the image of the dead person with love, which we otherwise only had when we received sensual impressions from him. We bring all this to life within us. The jolt occurs when we are able to develop the necessary inner strength. The jolt occurs, we cross the threshold into the spiritual world. The dead person can be there in his reality.

This is one of the ways for a person to enter the spiritual world. It is connected with something that can only be revered, something that can even be recognized in reverence and with a certain inner serious attitude.

If you allow all the seriousness to take effect on your soul that can be associated with such ideas, as I have just presented to you for the case of crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, if you visualize this seriousness, then at the same time you have an idea of all the seriousness that must be associated with entering the spiritual world at all. Life must, as it were, have shown us by our own will its deep seriousness if we truly want to enter the spiritual world, yes, if we really seriously want to understand the spiritual world.

This is what the science of initiation has always sought to infuse into external civilization. But this is also what our so externalized time needs again.

For it is a remarkable phenomenon that to man today dogmatic science is worth more than reality. In every moral act man can be conscious of his freedom. And just as we experience red or white, so we actually experience freedom as human beings. But we deny it. We deny it under the authority of contemporary science. Why? Because contemporary science only wants to look at the mechanical, wherever the earlier is the cause of the later. And there this science dictates dogmatically: everything must have its cause. It dogmatically dictates causality, and because causality must be right, because one wants to swear by causality dogmatically, therefore one numbs oneself to the feeling of freedom. Reality is plunged into night in order to maintain the dogma, in this case the dogma of external science, which exercises such strong authority.

Science abolishes life. For if life were to become aware of itself in man, this life would immediately grasp freedom in the activity of thinking. And so purely external science, based on causality, has become the great killer of the sense of life in man. One must be aware of this.

Can we hope that if man inwardly abolishes the experience of freedom, he can then go further to the spiritual form, to the spiritual form of memory? Can one hope that man, just as he otherwise lets the red of the red rose be revealed, will thus let memory be that which, in him, reveals the 'power of dreaming' that is weaving and working in the universe? Can one hope that man can gain conviction for the second step if he kills the sense of freedom on the first step through the so-called dogma of causality? In so doing, man fails to look into the spirituality of his own soul. Thus he does not penetrate down to the point where he realizes that, in addition to the ability to live asleep outside among things, he acquires the ability in the spiritual I to love through his spirit. The last reason for love lies in the spirit-imbued I, which submerges into the human physical and etheric organism. And to recognize the spirituality of love means, in a certain case, to recognize the spirit at all. He who recognizes love also recognizes the spirit. But in order to recognize love he must penetrate to the inner spiritual experience of love. It is precisely in this respect that our civilization has taken the most false course.

Memory is a weaving and living within the soul, and there the differences are not so clearly and deeply apparent. Only mystic spirits, Swedenborg, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, feel, as they immerse themselves in their memories, the weaving and living of the spiritual-eternal in this memory, speak of the igniting spark that flashes up in man when he becomes aware in remembrance that in this remembrance the same thing lives inwardly microcosmically that works and weaves outwardly in the creative, forming powers that lie dream-like at the basis of all world existence. There the things are not so clear.

But they become clear when we go to the third stage, when we see how our civilization has misunderstood the original spiritual nature and weaving of love. Everything that is spiritual naturally has its outer sensual form, for the spirit submerges into the physical. It embodies itself in the physical. If it then forgets itself and becomes aware only of the physical, it believes that what is stirred by the spirit is merely stirred by the physical. Our time lives in this delusion. It does not know love. It only fantasizes about love, yes, lies about love. In reality, it only knows eroticism when thinking about love. I do not want to say that the lonely do not experience love, because man in his unconscious feeling, in his unconscious will, denies the spirit much less than in his thinking - but when contemporary civilization thinks about love, then it only speaks the word love, then it actually speaks of eroticism. And one can truly say: if you go through contemporary literature, everywhere, for example, where love is written in German, the word eroticism should actually be used. For that is all that thinking immersed in materialism knows of love. It is the denial of the spirit that turns the power of love into the power of eroticism. In many areas, not only has the genius of love been replaced by its lower servant, eroticism, but in many places the opposite image, the demon of love, has now also emerged. But the demon of love arises when that which otherwise works in man as willed by God is claimed by human thinking, is torn away from spirituality by intellectuality.

So the descending path is: one recognizes the genius of love, one has spiritualized love. One recognizes the lower servant, eroticism. But one falls into the demon of love. And the demon of love has its genius in the interpretation, not in the real form, but in the interpretation of sexuality by today's civilization. How today, when one wants to approach love, not only is there talk of eroticism, but only of sexuality!

It can be said that much of what is aimed at today as so-called sex education is already included in this way in which civilization talks about sexuality. The demonology of love lives in this present-day intellectualized discourse on sexuality. Just as, on another level, the genius that an age is meant to follow appears in its demon, because the demon enters where the genius is denied, so it is in this area, where the spiritual is meant to appear in its most intimate form, in the form of love. Our age often prays to the demon of love instead of to the genius of love, and confuses that which is the spirituality of love with the demonology of love in sexuality.

Of course, the most complete misunderstandings can arise in this area. For that which lives originally in sexuality is permeated by spiritual love. But humanity can fall away from this spiritualization of love. And it falls back most easily in this intellectualistic age. For when intellect takes on the form of which I spoke yesterday, then the spiritual element of love is forgotten, only its external form is taken into account.

It is within man's power, I would say, to deny his own nature. He denies it when he sinks from the genius of love to the demon of sexuality — although I do understand the way people feel about these things, as it is mostly present in the present.

If we bear this in mind, we will have to admit that anthroposophy can guide us, not just intellectually, but also in our innermost soul and spiritual life, and help us to rediscover the spirit within the soul. For we can become intimate with anthroposophy. And we will become intimate with it if we understand how to take it in its reality.

Today, in some external way, it has been suggested that one should develop a picture or something similar of anthroposophy. Yes, is it not there in its reality? Do we still need a picture? But what we need is to become intimate with anthroposophy through our own inner honesty. Then it penetrates into the innermost fabric of our soul life and soul being. We should not try to form an image in an external way. But inwardly we should become intimate with this living being, which, as Anthroposophy, should, I would say, go everywhere between our ranks when we are united as people who understand such things.

If we really live with Anthroposophy as a real entity that walks among us in a higher sense, if we are real human beings, if we become intimate with this Anthroposophy, then we will be impelled to experience in real terms what humanity so urgently needs to experience in our time: not just an image for the soul's eye, but a love for the essence of anthroposophy in our hearts. That is what we need, and that is what will most be able to be an impulse of our time.

In this way, I have tried to add the spiritual perspective to the physical and soul perspectives of anthroposophy. The spiritual perspective is not an external pursuit of the spirit; on the contrary, the spiritual perspective is the experience of anthroposophy in the deepest, most intimate part of the human soul and heart. And this deep, intimate experience of anthroposophy in the human soul and in the human heart is the meditation that leads us to an encounter, to a real encounter with anthroposophy.

This is an attempt to present the three perspectives that anthroposophy can open up: the physical, the soul and the spiritual.

The beginning of anthroposophy is to be made with a consideration of the human senses. Through the senses, the human being enters into a relationship with an external world. When speaking of the senses, two things should be considered. First, one should disregard how the human being enters into another world, namely the spiritual world, through a different path, as described above. And then one should initially disregard whether there is anything spiritual behind what the senses observe. When speaking of the senses, one should approach the spiritual in such a way that one waits to see to what extent the hint of the spiritual arises naturally from the observation of the senses. The spiritual must not be rejected nor presupposed; its manifestation must be awaited.

It is not the objects of sensory observation, but the senses themselves, as human organs, that are considered here. On the basis of what his senses convey to him, man forms ideas about an external world. This is how knowledge of this external world comes about. In relation to knowledge, one can speak of truth and error. Does error now arise in the realm of the senses, or only where judgment, memory, etc. are used to form ideas about the statements of the senses? We have a right to speak of illusions. If, through some irregularity in the ear or the eye, a sound or a light appears differently than it would with the normal formation of the organs concerned, then, for example, there is an illusion. Does this mean that Goethe was wrong when he said, “You may trust your senses implicitly; they will not let you see anything false if your intellect keeps you alert”? Goethe's statement proves to be immediately justified when we consider the following. An error that is caused by reason or memory is different from a sensory deception. The latter can be corrected by common sense. If, through an error of the eye, a tree standing before him appears to someone as a human being, he will only fall into error if he does not correct the eye defect and sees in the pretended human being an enemy against whom he defends himself. It is not so with an error of the intellect, for there it is this intellect itself that errs, and which therefore cannot at the same time correct its own mistakes. The illusions of the senses only become real errors through the mind. This distinction is not pedantry, but a necessity.

Many people are accustomed to listing five types of sensory perception when speaking of sensory perception: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching (or feeling). But we cannot stop here, because there are other ways in which a person enters into a relationship with the outside world that differ from those of hearing or seeing, for example. Even anthropological science currently speaks of senses other than those included in the above list. It is not necessary here to go into the list given by anthropology. It should only be noted that here lies one of the very gratifying points where science, based on mere sensory-physical facts, is pushed by its own observations to views that partly coincide with what the spiritual researcher must establish. Such points of contact will arise more and more in the course of time; and if goodwill prevails on both sides, a time will soon come when natural science and spiritual research will be mutually accepted.

In anthroposophical terms, everything that causes a person to recognize the existence of an object, being or process in such a way that it is justified to place this existence in the physical world can be called a human sense that leads man to recognize the existence of an object, being or process in such a way that he is justified in placing this existence in the physical world.

Seen in this light, the most indeterminate and general sense appears to be that which can be called the sense of life. Man only really notices the existence of this sense when something is perceived through it that breaks through the order in the body. Man feels weariness and fatigue in himself. He does not hear the fatigue, the weariness; he does not smell it; but he perceives it in the same sense as he perceives a smell, a sound. This kind of perception, which relates to one's own corporeality, is ascribed to the sense of life. It is basically always present in an alert person, even if it only becomes quite noticeable when there is a disturbance. Through it, the person perceives themselves as a corporeal self filling the space.

This sense is different from the one by which a person perceives a movement they have performed, for example. You move a leg, and you perceive this movement. The sense by which this happens is called the sense of self-motion. The difference between this sense and the first arises when you consider that through the sense of life you only perceive something that is present in the inner body without you doing anything about it. The sense of one's own movement perceives such things that require activity or mobility.

The third sense arises when one notices how the human being is able to maintain a certain position in relation to above and below, right and left, etc. It can be called the sense of equilibrium or the sense of static. Its peculiarity arises from the fact that one must have a perception of one's position if one is to maintain oneself in it as a conscious being. If the sense of equilibrium does not function, then dizziness will overtake the person; he will fall over. An unconscious object is maintained in its position without being aware of it. Such an object cannot be affected by dizziness. When speaking of this sense, anthropology points to a small organ in the human ear. There are three semicircular canals in the so-called labyrinth of the ear. If these are injured, dizziness occurs.

If you survey the peculiarities of the three senses listed, you will find that humans perceive something through each of them that relates to their own physical existence. Through the sense of life, he acquires general sensations about his corporeality; through the sense of self-movement, he perceives changes in this corporeality of his; through the sense of equilibrium, he perceives his relationship to the spatial outside world. However, he receives this perception in such a way that it reveals itself to him as a state of his own corporeality, as his own sensation of position. — Through these three senses, the human being acquires the sensation of his own corporeality as a whole, which is the basis for his self-awareness as a physical being. One can say that through the senses of life, of self-movement and of balance, the soul opens its gates to one's own corporeality and senses this as the physical external world that is closest to it.

With the following senses, the human being encounters the external world that does not belong to him in this way. The first sense to be considered here is that through which man comes into closest contact with what is called matter. Only gaseous or airy bodies allow close contact with the material. And this is conveyed through the sense of smell. Without a substance being divided into the finest particles and thus spreading like air, it cannot be perceived by the sense of smell.

The next stage of sensory perception is that by which not only the substance as such, but also the effects (deeds) of the substance are perceived. This happens through the sense of taste. This sense can only perceive a watery body, or one that is dissolved in the fluid of the mouth in order to be tasted. Through the sense of taste, man penetrates one degree deeper into the external materiality than through the sense of smell. With the latter, it is the substance itself that approaches the person and manifests itself in its own way; with the sense of taste, what is felt is the effect of the substance on the person. This difference can best be felt by considering how, in the sense of smell, the gaseous nature of the substance must be ready to approach the person so that he can perceive it as it is; in the sense of taste, the person, through his own liquid, dissolves the substance, thus making a change with it, in order to penetrate into those peculiarities of that substance which it does not reveal to him by itself. The sense of smell is suited to perceive the outer side of material things; the sense of taste penetrates more into the inner side of material things. And this inner aspect of material things man must first induce to reveal itself by changing the outer aspect.

Man penetrates even deeper into the inner aspect of the physical external world through the next sense. It is sight. Whether man sees a body as red or blue reveals more about the inner aspect of this body than is contained in the effect conveyed by the sense of taste. It depends on the nature of a body whether it behaves towards the colorless sunlight in such a way that it appears red or blue under its influence. Color manifests itself as the surface of a body. But one can say how the body reveals itself on its surface; this is an appearance of its inner essence through the medium of light.

The sense of warmth penetrates even deeper, as it were, below the surface of the bodies. If you feel a piece of ice or a warm object, you are aware that cold or warmth is something that does not just appear on the surface like color, but that permeates the body completely. You will notice how the sequence of senses characterized here is such that with each successive one, the human being delves deeper into the interior of the bodies of the external world.

A further advance in this immersion is given with the sense of hearing. It leads to the interior of the bodies to a far greater degree than the sense of warmth. Sound causes the interior of the bodies to tremble. It is more than a mere image when one speaks of the soul of a body being revealed through sound. Through the warmth that a body carries within itself, one experiences something of its difference from its surroundings; through sound, the intrinsic nature, the individuality of the body emerges and communicates itself to perception.

If, as is appropriate, one speaks of meaning where knowledge comes about without the participation of understanding, memory, etc., then one must recognize other senses than those listed. If we apply this distinction, it is easy to see that in everyday life the word “sense” is often used in a non-literal way. For example, when we speak of a sense of imitation, a sense of concealment, etc. In what appears as imitation, concealment, etc., the intellect and judgment are already involved. Here we are not dealing with mere sensory activity.

But the situation is quite different when we perceive in language what is revealed by the sound. It is certainly self-evident that a complicated act of judgment is involved in the perception of something spoken, that comprehensive soul processes come into play that cannot be described by the word “sense”. But there is also something simple and direct in this area that represents a sensation before all judgment, just as a color or a degree of warmth is. A sound is not felt only in terms of its pitch, but something much more inward is grasped with it than the tone itself. If we say that the soul of a body lives in the tone, we may also say that in the sound this soul-life reveals itself in such a way that it is released and freed from the physical, and enters into manifestation with a certain independence. Because the sensation of sound precedes judgment, the child learns to sense the sound-meanings of words before it can use judgment. It is through speech that the child learns to judge. It is entirely justified to speak of a special sense of sound or sense of language. The reason that recognizing this sense is difficult is because the most diverse exercise of judgment usually occurs in addition to the direct sensation of what is revealed in the sound. But a careful examination of oneself shows that all hearing of what is given in sounds is based on an equally direct, judgment-free relationship to the being from which the sound emanates, as is the case when a color impression is perceived. It is easier to grasp this fact if we visualize how a sound of pain allows us to directly experience the pain of a being, without any kind of reflection or the like interfering with our perception. It is important to consider that the audible sound is not the only thing through which such inwardness is revealed to a person, as is the case with the sound of speech. Gesture, facial expression, and physiognomy ultimately lead to something simple and direct, which must be counted as much a part of the meaning of speech as the content of the audible sound.

To an even greater degree, the sensory character is hidden in the next sense to be characterized. When we understand a person who communicates through speech, gestures, etc., it is true that judgment, memory, etc. play a predominant role in this understanding. But here too, right self-contemplation leads us to recognize that there is a direct grasping and understanding that can precede all thinking and judging. The best way to develop a feeling for this fact is to realize how one can understand something even before one has developed the ability to judge it. There is, in fact, a very direct perception of that which reveals itself in the concept, so that one must speak of a sense of concept. What a person can experience as a concept in his own soul, he can also receive as a revelation from another being. Through the perception of the concept, one delves even deeper into the inner being of another person than through the perception of sounds. It is not possible to delve even further into another person than to the sensation of what lives in him as a concept. The sense of concept appears as that which penetrates into the innermost being of an external being. With the concept that lives in another person, the human being perceives what lives in him or her in a soul-like way. The sensory character of what is usually called the sense of touch does not appear in the same way as with the ten senses mentioned. This sense conveys external pressure, resistance, hardness, softness. One must visualize the essence of what is meant by “pressure”. The process is by no means a simple one. In reality, we do not perceive the pressing body directly, but rather the fact that it causes us to recoil at this or that point on the skin, or that we have to make a greater or lesser effort to make an impression on the body. There is a remarkable difference between this perception and that of, for example, a degree of warmth that is revealed on a body. Even if it is absolutely true that a cold bath will appear in a different state of warmth to a person who is hot from exercise than to a person who is freezing, that is, that in the perception of warmth, the subjective state is also perceived, it remains true that essentially the nature of the external object is revealed in the warmth. This results in a direct relationship between the feeling person and the object. It is not the same as saying to oneself that one must exert oneself more or less to make an impression on a body or to overcome the resistance it offers through its hardness or softness. What one says to oneself is the reproduction of an experience that one has within oneself in the body. And even if the fact is hidden, it is still true that in such a perception the judgment plays along, as it were secretly: “I find strong resistance, therefore the body is hard.” Just as it is true that, for example, in the sense of language, perception can be a completely direct one without any judgment, it is also true that, in the sense of touch, there is always an underlying judgment, however hidden. What is directly sensed by the sense of touch can always be found within the realms of the first three senses listed here. A body that presses on me, for example, causes a shift in the position of my body, which is sensed by the sense of life, or the sense of self-movement, or the sense of balance.

It is necessary to clearly define the differences between the individual sensory areas. With each sense, the relationship that a person has with an external object is different than with the other senses. Through the sense of life, the sense of self-movement, and the sense of balance, a person is immersed in his or her own physicality and perceives him or herself as a being of the external world. Through the sense of smell, the sense of taste, and the sense of sight, the physical reveals itself insofar as it manifests itself outwardly. Through the sense of warmth, it reveals inwardness, but still in an external way. With the help of the sense of hearing, the sense of speech, the sense of thought, the human being perceives an alien inwardness that is external to him. If one pays attention to these differences between the sensory areas, then one will not be tempted to speak too much in general terms about what a sense, sensory perception, etc. is. Rather, one will pay attention to the particular relationship through which the human being enters into the external world through each sense. It does not say much to characterize sensory perception, for example, as an impression that is directly caused by a stimulus of the sensory nerve in the soul. Through such definitions, it is all too easy to lose the characteristic of each individual sense in blurred generalizations. But it is important to note that the impression we experience from the warmth of a body is quite different in nature from that caused by a light impression. If we do not take this into account, we are easily led, for example, to place far too much value on judgments such as: “Man perceives the external world through the senses and forms ideas and concepts on the basis of sensory perceptions.” Here sense perception is simply set against conceptual thought. Such a judgment obscures the necessary free view of the fact that, for example, the sensation of smell is very far removed from the conceptual experience, but that the sense of hearing as a sense perception already approximates to what is present within the soul as such an experience.

The basis for the further life of the soul is given in the sensory perceptions. Based on the sensations of the first three senses, as well as those of smells, tastes, colors, sounds, etc., the ideas arise from the interaction of the human being with the outside world, through which what is given from the outside is reflected in the soul. The judgments arise through which the human being orients himself within this outside world. Experiences of sympathy or antipathy arise, in which the emotional life is formed; desires, longings and will develop. If one wants to have a characteristic for this inner life of the human soul, one must focus one's attention on how it is held together and, as it were, permeated by what one calls one's own “I”. A sensory perception becomes a soul experience when it is taken up from the realm of the senses into the realm of the “I”. One can gain a justified idea of this fact by making the following simple consideration. For example, one perceives the warmth of a certain object. As long as one touches the object, there is an interrelationship between the “I” and the external world. In this interrelationship, the idea of the temperature of the object in question is formed in the “I”. When you remove your hand from the object, the idea remains in the “I”. This idea now forms something essential within the soul life. It should not be neglected to note that the idea is that which detaches itself from the sensory experience and lives on in the soul. Within certain limits, a person can now call the experiences that he has with the help of the senses, and which then continue in the soul, his world.

But anyone who now reflects on how this world enters his realm will be forced to assume a different existence for this world. For how can this world only be an experience of the soul; how can man know anything about it? Only through having senses. Before the world can present itself to man as a sensory perception, these senses themselves must first be born out of it. For man the world would be soundless if he had no sense of hearing, and cold if he had no sense of warmth. But just as this is true, so is the other: in a world in which there were no sounds, no sense of hearing could arise; in a cold world no sense of warmth could develop. One need only think of how eyes do not develop in beings that live in the dark; or how, in beings that have developed eyes under the influence of light, these eyes atrophy when their bearers exchange their stay in the light for one in the dark. One need only think this through with complete clarity to realize that the world given to man through his senses, and on which he builds his soul life, must be based on another world, which makes this sensory world possible only by allowing the senses to arise out of itself. And this world cannot fall within the realm of the sensory, since it must precede it entirely.

Thus, contemplation is opened up to a world that lies beyond the sensory world, which cannot itself be perceived by the senses, but from which the sensory world arises as if from an ocean of existence that lies beyond it. The sense of warmth perceives warmth; behind it lies something that has formed the sense of warmth. The eye perceives through light; behind it lies something that forms the eye. One must distinguish between a world as it is given to man through the senses and one that underlies it. Is it impossible to say anything about this latter world through mere reflection? We can say something if we consider the following. Through the interrelationship between man and the external world, as mediated by sense perception, the world of perception, feeling and desire arises within man. In the same way, one can think about the relationship between the assumed other world and man. Through them, the organs of sensory perception arise in him. In everything that can be experienced in the sensory world, the human being is there with his “I”, in which the soul world is built up on the basis of sensory experiences. The construction of the sensory organs, which necessarily precedes all sensory perception, must take place in a realm of reality into which no sensory perception can penetrate. (There is hardly any need to consider the objection that might briefly occur to someone that a person could observe the structure of the sense organs in another being. After all, what he can perceive there, he perceives through the senses. One can indeed observe how a hammer is made without using a hammer; but one cannot observe with the senses how a sense organ is formed without using one.)

It is entirely justified to speak of the sense organs as having to be built from a world that is itself supersensible. And the essence of sense perceptions as described here provides food for thought for saying more about this world. Since the sense organs ultimately appear to be the result of the activity of this world, it can be said that this activity is a manifold one. It acts on man from as many sides as there are sense organs. The currents of this world pour into the wells that lie in the sense organs, so that man can draw from these wells for his soul life. And because that which is drawn from these wells ultimately comes together in the 'I', it must, although it comes from different sides, originally flow from a single source. In the 'I', the various sensory perceptions come together in unity. In this unity, they present themselves as belonging together. What strikes the soul in sensory perception is such that the inner life of the ego can be detached from it. From this it can be seen that behind the sensory world, in a supersensible one, there are as many sources of activity as there are sensory organs. These sources of activity reveal themselves through their effect, which consists in the structure of the sensory organs.

The range of these sources of activity thus includes a number of these sources that is equal to the number of sense organs. And one can say that the outermost limits of this range may be assumed to be the “I” on the one hand and the “sense of touch” on the other, although the sense of touch, like the “I”, may not be counted as part of the actual sensory life. What once belonged to the “I” has detached itself from sensory perception, and so, because it is a completely inner experience, can no longer be counted among the latter. But it belongs to the essential nature of every sensory perception that it can become an “I” experience. To do so, every sense organ must be predisposed from the supersensible world to provide something that can become an “I” experience. And the sense of touch, in a sense, provides experiences of the opposite kind. What it reveals about an object presents itself as something that lies entirely outside of the human being. Thus, the human being as a whole must be constructed out of the supersensible world in such a way that, on the basis of tactile experiences, he confronts a world outside of himself.

If we survey the life of the human soul as it develops out of sense experiences, the sense organs appear as fixed points, as if in a circumference; and the “I” appears as the movable element, which, by passing through this circumference in various ways, gains the experiences of the soul. The whole structure of the human organism, insofar as it is expressed in the sense organs, points to its causes in the supersensible world. There are as many sense areas as there are such causes; and within the realm of these causes, there is a unified supersensible principle, which becomes apparent in the organization towards the unity of the I.

A further consideration shows that the supersensible activity revealed in the structure of the sense organs works in different ways. In the three spheres of the sense of life, the sense of self-movement and the sense of equilibrium, the activity starts from within the human body and manifests itself within the limits of the skin. This kind of activity is also present in the senses of smell, taste, sight, warmth and hearing; but it is joined by another, which must be said to proceed from the outside inward. The organ of hearing, for example, is a member of the human organism. Within this organism, the forces must be at work that shape this organ in accordance with the nature of the body as a whole. From the outside, however, the hidden supersensible forces in the world of sound must come together, forming this organ in such a way that it is receptive to sound. In the case of the five sense organs mentioned, an encounter of forces is thus indicated on the surface of the human body, as it were: forces act in the direction from the inside of the body outwards and shape the individual sense organs according to the nature of the whole organism; the forces that meet them come from the outside inwards and shape the organs in such a way that they adapt to the various manifestations of the external world. In the case of the senses of life, self-movement and equilibrium, only one of these two directions, the one striving from the inside outwards, is present. It further follows that in the case of the senses of speech and of concepts, the direction from the inside outwards does not apply, and that these senses are built into the human being from the outside in. For these senses, therefore, the supersensible activity as characterized reveals itself in such a way that it already approaches the inner life of the soul in terms of its formation. Insofar as we must also see the 'I' predisposed in the above-characterized way in the supersensible forces that build up the senses, we can say that in the 'I' these forces betray their own nature most of all. Only that this essential nature is, as it were, concentrated in a point in the 'I'. If we observe the 'I', we find in it a nature that is spread out in the most abundant profusion in a supersensible world and reveals itself out of this only in its effects, in the building of the senses. In this respect, too, the sense of touch presents itself as the opposite of the 'I'. In the sense of touch, that part of the supersensible world (or, if you will, the extra-sensible world) is revealed that cannot become an inner experience of the human being, but is accessed through corresponding inner experiences.

Anthropology describes the sense organs as sensory phenomena. It is consistent with the above findings that it does not yet designate special organs for the senses of life, self-movement and balance. The forces acting from the inside out shape the human being as a general sense organism that experiences and maintains itself. The organs of these three sense areas spread out, as it were, in the general physicality. It is only with the sense of balance that anthropology points to the three semicircular canals as a hint of a special sensory organ, because it is with this sense that the human being enters into an elementary relationship with the outside world, namely with the spatial directions. For the five intermediate senses there are separate organs, which readily show that the abilities characterized, from outside inward and from inside outward, interact in a variety of ways in their formation. (Even if there are still some doubts for anthropology regarding the external sense organ for warmth, these doubts will be resolved as science advances.) External organs for the sense of sound and the sense of conception cannot be described in the same way as for the other senses because these organs are already located where physical life internalizes itself in the soul. But the organ of touch will present itself to science more and more clearly as what it must be in the sense of the above considerations. It must work in such a way that the human being withdraws into himself in the touched objects, so to speak, shutting himself off from the areas of this sense in inner bodily experiences. We must therefore recognize in the structures spread over the entire surface of the body, which are regarded as organs of touch, something that essentially has to do with the body's surface withdrawing from the external world that is touched. The organs of touch are therefore actually formative for the interior of the human body; they give the body the form through which it withdraws from the external world that touches it from all sides. (In those places where the organs of touch show a greater sensitivity, the human being relates to the outside world differently than in those places of lesser sensitivity. He pushes himself more or less, as it were, against the outside world in one case or the other. From this it can be seen that the shape of the body is, in a certain respect, a result of the nature of the organs of touch at the various points on the surface of the body.)

Another aspect now becomes part of the sensory life of the human being. Here too we can distinguish a number of areas. First of all, there is the process by which the inner life of the body is sustained from the outside: breathing. In this process, the life of the body touches the outer world; it confronts the outer world, as it were, in a form in which it cannot continue to exist, in order to receive from it the strength to continue. These words express approximately what is revealed to man in the breathing process, without going into the results of sensory science. The latter belong to anthropology. But what is characterized here is experienced by man directly in life, in his desire for air, in the observation of the inhibition of life when there is a lack of air, etc. A further process in this area is that which can be described as warming. For the maintenance of bodily life, man depends on the development of a quite definite degree of warmth within his body, which does not depend on the processes that determine the warmth of his surroundings, but on those that take place within him, and which maintain the intrinsic warmth within definite limits, however the external warmth may be constituted. A third process of this kind is nutrition. Through it, the life of the body enters into a relationship with the external world in such a way that the substances consumed by it are replaced. A fourth process must be added to nutrition if it is to take place. In the mouth, the food consumed must interact with the saliva secreted by the body; similarly, such a process takes place during the further digestive process. This can be described as the fourth process in this area: secretion. Physical self-observation now shows that this process is followed by another. In the secretion that aids digestion, what is secreted is merely able to transform the food in such a way that it can be absorbed into the body. But man must also secrete that which can enter into this bodily life. He must transform the nutrients in such a way that they can serve to build up his body. This is based on a process that goes beyond what is given in the secretion just characterized. This process shall be called the process of preservation. Another process arises when we turn our attention to human growth. This goes beyond mere maintenance. In addition to the maintenance process, which would leave the body as it is at a particular point in time, there is another process that can be described as a growth process. The growth process and the maintenance process reach their conclusion when the finished body presents itself to the human being in a very specific form. This shaping of the human being from the inside out into a very specific form is called production. Reproduction then presents itself as a repetition of this production. That which belongs to one's own body is brought forth in such a way that it remains united with the human being; in reproduction, the brought forth comes out. Since here, for the time being, we are only speaking of the human being as a self-contained physical individuality, the process of reproduction is not taken into account.

The processes that are referred to here as aspiration, warming, nutrition, secretion, maintenance process, growth process and production are now followed by inner experiences for humans in a similar way to how inner experiences follow the processes of sensory perception in the ego. Emotional experiences follow breathing, warming and nourishment. These experiences are less noticed in their middle states, but they immediately stand out when this state is disturbed in one direction or the other. If breathing cannot take place in the appropriate way, anxiety and the like occur. A disturbance of the warmth state manifests itself in the feeling of frost or heating. Disturbance of nutrition manifests itself in hunger and thirst. It can be said that breathing, warmth and nutrition are linked to inner experiences, which reveal themselves as a kind of well-being, comfort, etc. These experiences are always there; they underlie what manifests itself as malaise, discomfort, hunger, etc. when there is a disturbance. Real introspection now shows that such emotional experiences are also related to secretion, the process of preservation, the process of growth and the process of creation. Think of how states of fear and anxiety manifest themselves in excessive perspiration; and you will be able to admit that secretion of this kind, within certain limits, is connected with a feeling that manifests itself in a general sense of comfort, just as one can see that all secretion is accompanied by an emotional state that escapes the attention of consciousness as long as it is normal. And further, self-reflection shows that such emotional experiences are also connected with the processes of preservation, growth and production. One can feel, for example, that the feeling of strength of youth is the expression of what inner experiences follow growth.

These inner emotional experiences are now something that stands in a similar way in the human being to the processes of breathing, warming, growing, etc., as the inner experiences that follow sensory perceptions stand in the “I” to the processes of these perceptions. It is therefore possible to speak of the fact that, for example, breathing is connected with an experience in the human being in a similar way to how hearing is connected with the experience that is designated as sound. The only difference is that the degree of clarity with which external sense perceptions are inwardly relived is much greater than that which is accorded to the inner experiences characterized here. Hidden beneath or within the 'ego-person' is another person who is built up out of inner experiences, just as the ego-person is built up out of the results of external sense perceptions. But this human being who lies beneath the 'I-human' is only really noticed in life when he announces himself to the 'I-human' in the disturbances of his experiences. But just as little as one may throw together the process of sensory perception with the process in the ego that is linked to it, so little may one do so, for example, in relation to the breathing process and the inner experiences (of an emotional nature) that combine with this process. It would be easy to be tempted to completely misunderstand the nature of these inner experiences and to say that there is no essential difference between them and those that develop under the influence of sense perceptions. It must be admitted that the difference between the two types of inner experiences, for example, between the sense of life and the inner emotional experience during the breathing or warming process, is not particularly clear. But it can easily be determined by more exact observation, if one bears the following in mind. It belongs to a sense experience that a judgment can only be attached to it through the “I”. Everything that a person accomplishes under the influence of a judgment must, if it relates to sense perceptions, be such that the judgment is made within the “I”. For example, one perceives a flower and passes judgment on it: this flower is beautiful. What is now evoked by the processes of breathing, warming, nourishment, etc., as inner experiences, points, without the intervention of the “I”, to something similar to judgment. In the experience of hunger there is an immediate indication of something corresponding to hunger and connected with it in the same way that, after making a judgment in response to a sense perception, the human being connects with that sense perception. Just as the activity of the 'I' connects with the sense perception when making a judgment, so with hunger something external is connected without the 'I' establishing this connection. This union may therefore be called an instinctive manifestation. And this applies to all inner experiences that are connected with breathing, nourishment and growth processes. We must therefore distinguish between the instinctive inner experiences of breathing comfort and warmth and well-being, and the corresponding perceptions of the meaning of life. The wave of instinct must, as it were, first beat against the 'I-human being' in order to reach the realm of the meaning of life. The structure of the inner experiences that take place through the processes described behind the 'I-human being' are now to be ascribed to the 'astral human being'. Again, the name 'astral human being' should initially be associated with nothing other than what is described here. Just as the “I-person” draws his experiences from the “sense world” through the sense organs, so the “astral person” draws his from the world that is given to him through the processes of breathing, growing, etc. For the time being, let this world be called the “world of life”.

In order for a “life world” to exist, the organs of life must be built out of a world that lies beyond all life in a similar way to the forces for building the sense organs lying beyond the world of sense perceptions. This world reveals itself again in its effects, in the structure of the organs of life. The individual areas of the life processes: breathing, warming, nourishment, etc., can be interpreted as references to just as many areas of this world. One can now see that the areas of the life processes are less strictly separated from each other than the areas of sensory perception. The sense of taste, for example, is strictly separated from the sense of sight, whereas the areas of life processes are closer; they merge more. Breathing leads to warming, which in turn leads to nutrition. - Anthropology therefore shows essentially separate sensory organs for sensory perception; for the life processes, it shows organs that flow into one another. Thus the lungs, the most exquisite respiratory organ, are connected with the organs of blood circulation, which serve for warming; these in turn flow together with the digestive organs, which correspond to nutrition, etc. — This is an indication that the corresponding areas of the world in which their constructive forces lie also relate to each other in a different way than the forces for building the sense organs. The latter must, as it were, be more mobile in relation to one another than the organs of sense. The experiences of the sense of taste, for example, can only meet with those of the sense of hearing in the common 'I' to which they belong. The feeling of growth, on the other hand, meets with itself through that which is revealed in the breathing process. The feeling of the power of growth is revealed in the ease of breathing, in warming, etc., through increased inner life. Each feeling-like experience of this kind can coincide with another of the same kind. The areas of sensory perception could be depicted as a kind of circumference, with the individual areas resting on it while the “I” moves across them. The life processes can be depicted in a different way. They can all be imagined as being mobile and capable of moving across each other.

Now, however, there are also clear relationships between the sense perceptions and the life processes. Take the breathing process and relate it to the auditory perception. In both cases, the corresponding bodily organ is directed towards the outside world. This is an indication that in the outer world that which has a relationship to both the one and the other organ reveals itself. It is only that, for instance, two things reveal themselves in the air; in relation to one, the respiratory organ is formed and places it at the service of the body; in relation to the other, the structure of the organ of hearing is related. It may be recognized that the forces that shape the organ of hearing must, so to speak, be more original than those that form the respiratory organ. For in the developed human body, everything is interdependent. A human organ of hearing can only unfold from the inside out if the respiratory system is predisposed in just the way it is. From out of the organism, the respiratory system grows towards the outer world, as does the organ of hearing. Now the respiratory organ serves only the inner life of the body; the organ of hearing, however, must be adapted to the outer world - to the realm of sound. In the outgrowth of the respiratory organ from the body, therefore, only the nature of the body itself needs to be taken into account; the organ of hearing must outgrow itself in such a way that it is appropriate for the outer world of sound. No other organ needs to lie in front of the respiratory organ; it grows in accordance with the inner formative forces. The organ of hearing, however, must grow towards an already existing structure. Its adaptation to the outer world must precede its emergence from the inner life of the body. This shows that the forces that form the organ of hearing as a sensory tool belong to a world that is the more original or higher than the other, in which lie the forces that reveal themselves as such, which form both the organ of hearing and the organ of respiration from the body. A similar thing can be shown for other sensory perceptions and life processes. One's attention is drawn to the sense of taste. The secretions can be related to it in a similar way to the respiratory process to the sense of hearing. The saliva of the mouth contains what the food dissolves and thus makes it possible to taste. A similar reflection to the one just made can show that the forces from which the secretory organs are formed are the less original ones compared to those through which the sense of taste arises.

In the light of such considerations, one can therefore assume a higher supersensible entity in man, whose powers reveal themselves in the structure of the human sense organs. Likewise, there is another whose effects reveal themselves in the structure of the human organs of life. The latter world is felt by the 'astral man' as his instinctive inner experiences; the former manifests itself to the 'I-man' as a sensory reality (sensual world). However, neither the first world through the senses nor the second can come directly to manifestation in the astral man.

It has been said that the supersensible world reveals itself in the “I”, as it were shrunk to a point, in its own nature; in the same sense, it can be recognized that the second of the worlds mentioned shows itself in the emotional experiences of the “astral man”, which can be described as life instincts. In these experiences something is expressed with which the other instinctive experiences of the “astral man” merge into one and are an image of a supersensible world in the sense that the “I-man” is an image of such a world.

The “I-person” and the “astral person” represent two human parts that express themselves in inner processes. In order to make the “I-person” possible, the forces of a supersensible world build up the sense organs. In so far as the human body is the carrier of the sense organs, it shows itself to be built out of a supersensible world. Let us now call this carrier of the sense organs the physical human body. The 'I-human' permeates it in order to live with its help in the sense world. We must therefore see in the physical human body an entity that is built out of forces that are related in their nature to the 'I' itself. Within the sense world, the physical human body can only reveal itself in its sensory manifestation. According to its inner reality, it is a being of a supersensible nature. — In order to make the “astral human being” possible, another world, which is added to the characterized supersensible world as a “life world”, builds the organs of life. The forces of this world have proved to be akin to those of the experiences that the “astral human being” has in the instincts of life. What builds up the physical human being reveals itself in the sense world in the sense described above. The forces that build the organs of life can only reveal themselves in the physical world in the processes of life. This is because they generate the organs of life, and only through such organs can a life process manifest itself. The organs of life themselves are not organs of perception. Therefore, not only the forces that build up the organs of life remain imperceptible to the senses, but the manifestation of these forces in the human being cannot become manifest to the senses either, but can only be an intuitive, instinctive experience. This revelation will now be called the 'etheric human body'. (The word 'etheric' should be understood to mean only what is meant here, and in no way what bears the name 'ether' in physics.) Just as the physical human body relates to the 'I-human', so the 'etheric human body' relates to the 'astral human'. The physical body is, in its essence, such that it provides the I with sense experiences; the “etheric body” can only be experienced directly by the “astral human being” in terms of feeling. The relationship between the I and the physical human body is the same as that between the “astral human being” and the “etheric human body”. Thus the organs of life presuppose forces to which they adapt themselves, in that they shape sense organs, such as the organ of hearing, out of the body in the sense of experiences to which they themselves do not serve; and the sense organs in turn presuppose the organs of life in that they are maintained by their processes.

Thus we can distinguish: 1. A supersensible world in which lie the forces for building up the sense organs. 2. A supersensible world in which lie the forces for building up the organs of life. The former presupposes the latter; therefore the former can be called the higher spiritual world and the latter the lower spiritual world. 3. A world in which the astral human being is related to the life processes in such a way that these reveal themselves in him as life instincts. This presupposes the life processes, and thus the second world. It may be called the astral world. 4. A world in which sense experiences reveal themselves to the human being through the sense organs. This, however, is the physical-sensual world.

The physical human body is formed from the higher spiritual world, in so far as it is the carrier of the sense organs. The etheric human body is formed from the lower spiritual world, in so far as it builds up the life organs. In the astral world, the astral human being enters into a relationship with the processes of life, in so far as these reveal themselves in the life instincts. In the physical world, the human ego enters into a relationship with the sense experiences (sound, tone, warmth, light, etc.) that present themselves as the external world, insofar as these reveal themselves as the sense world.

In the previous section, the “astral man” was only considered in terms of how his emotional experiences reflect the processes of the life organs. But these experiences are not the only ones that are peculiar to him. In addition to these experiences, there is, first of all, the ability to move in humans. The human being does not move his body only in response to impulses that arise from life processes. The impulses for movement are located in the inner life, insofar as this is independent of life processes. But self-reflection shows that these impulses do not always have to be triggered by the impulses of the “I-human”; they arise as instinctive experiences and thus belong to the same realm as the instinctive experiences that combine with the life processes, that is, the “astral human”. Furthermore, those experiences of the “astral man” that can be described as instinctive desires also present themselves as such experiences. Desires arise on the basis of sensory perceptions. But in relation to them, self-contemplation shows the following. Sensory perception first leads to a judgment when it is taken up by the “I-person”. This judgment then acts on the “astral person” when it leads to a desire. The experience forms in the “I-person”: the sensually perceived is valuable; interest awakens for it. If this interest is now to become a desire, the judgment must be seized by an impulse of the “astral man”. And desires are also formed on the basis of experiences that are connected with life processes. However, the emotional experiences described above are not yet desires. The experience of hunger is not yet a desire. It only points to the life process in a judgmental way. The desire is an independent experience that the “astral man” adds to the feeling of hunger. In addition, there are desires that are rooted in the “astral man” without being stimulated by life processes or by external perceptions. Certain drives belong to the realm from which such desires arise. — A third kind of independent experience of the “astral human” arises when we consider how something else interposes itself between the process of sense perception and the experience of the “I-human”. It is the “image” that arises in the alternation between sense experience and “I” on the basis of the former. The sense experience is transitory; it lasts only as long as the sense organ is directed towards the object. The “picture” remains; but this “picture” is not yet something that belongs to the judgment, to the I-activity itself. For one can only judge on the basis of the “picture”. The picture contains an experience of the “astral man”, not of the “I-man”. One can also call the “image” the sensation if one does not apply this word to the sense experience itself but to its content. In this sense, sensations are the third kind of independent experiences of the “astral human being”. Just as one speaks of sense organs for the physical human being and of life organs for the etheric human being, so too can one speak of impulses of movement, longings and sensations for the astral human being. The organs for these experiences cannot come from the astral human being itself, because the latter must first have them before it can have the experiences. The organs must be formed out of a world lying outside the astral man. But because the astral man has such experiences in feeling, desire and movement, the impulses of which are rooted in himself, and because he is, so to speak, an observer of what must unfold in himself, the forces that form the corresponding organs can only come from the same sphere as the whole astral man. We must therefore presuppose a world that, although it lies outside the “astral man”, is nevertheless of the same essence as it. The nature of this world can also be revealed here from that experience of the “astral man” which is the innermost. The “sensations” or “image sensations” can be recognized as such in the sense mentioned above. In the desires and impulses of movement, on the other hand, there is something that points beyond the inner experience. The desires and impulses of movement must also be stimulated from a world that is similar to his world of “images”, in the construction of which he is involved as an “astral human being”. We can now distinguish between the “astral human being” as he experiences himself inwardly in “images”, desires and impulses of movement, and the “astral human being” who is the revelation of a world lying outside the impulse of movement and desire. This “astral man” is to be distinguished from the first “astral body” of man. It can be perceived by the senses just as little as the “etheric body,” because it does not produce organs for physical perception, but only for sensation, desire and movement impulse. It is clear that the impulse of movement and desire cannot be perceived by the senses; but this must also be admitted for the intuitive perception, in so far as it is of the same nature as the forces that build up the “astral body”. For the image that arises through a sensory experience also detaches itself from this experience and remains as the content of the “astral man”. But the forces that form the organs of the “astral man” must be conceived as a detached “image”, not as a sensory experience. However, as long as this “image” is imagined as if its content had come from a sensory experience, it cannot illustrate the forces from which the “astral body” is formed. This is because a sensory organ is necessary for the emergence of such an image. It must be thought of an image of this kind, but not of such origin. A fantasy image is of this kind. As long as a fantasy image comes from the mere personal arbitrariness of the “I-human”, it cannot, by its very nature, be considered for the characterization of the world mentioned. It must arise out of a reality that lies outside of the “I-human” and also outside of the “astral human”. Taking into account all that has been said, one can form an idea of what the “astral body” must be like. According to the indications that have emerged, it is an imagistic body rooted in reality, which from within itself kindles the forces of desire and movement.

In the areas corresponding to sensory experiences, something was given that could be visualized as a perimeter along which the individual forces were distributed, which manifest themselves in the sense organs as their effects. In the regions corresponding to the life processes, the picture could be chosen so that the individual corresponding forces run over each other. One must say “run over each other”; for the individual processes do not interpenetrate. Respiration, for example, comes close to the process of maintenance because the latter must continually rebuild the organ of respiration. But the respiratory process itself is not changed by the influence of the process of conservation. The two processes – breathing and the process of conservation – thus work past each other. This is different for the processes of movement, desire and “image sensation”. These three processes work in the following way. Image sensations are effectively generated in desires; desires live on in the impulses of movement. It is therefore justified to say that when an image sensation meets desire, the former permeates the latter, and the content of the image sensation lives on in the desire. Likewise, the desire lives on in the movement - together with the image sensation. Thus the forces of the world out of which the astral body is formed can be visualized in such a way that one thinks of them as three force-structures: that structure which corresponds to the image-sensations acts on that which pours out the longings, and in the structure for the movements the effects of the first two structures then live on.

It will now be easy to see that the world from which the “astral body” originates, is the same as that characterized in the previous chapter as the “astral world”. For the life processes must first be transformed into life instincts in order to be impulses in the “astral man”. Life instincts, pictorial sensations, desires and impulses for movement thus belong to the “astral man” insofar as he already presupposes the lower spiritual world and himself has his origin in the “astral world”.