The Rudolf Steiner Archive

It is fair to warn the reader that this is not an easy book. Should he be broaching the territory, without any previous knowledge of Rudolf Steiner's work and techniques, simply as one option in his search for a convincing critique of the prevalent materialism (or, as it is more commonly called, reductionism), he might do better to begin with one or both of two other books by the same author, The Origins of Natural Science and The Boundaries of Natural Science. There is little doubt that dissatisfaction with reductionism is gradually becoming more widespread (compare the tiny minority that was touched by it in the Victorian age); and it is perhaps significant that another change in the current world-view appears to be accompanying it. I mean an increasingly wide acceptance of the notion that human consciousness itself is in process of evolution; that there has not merely been a ‘progress’ from one set of ideas (largely erroneous) about the nature of the world and humanity towards a more ‘advanced’ one, but that the very structure of consciousness, the whole relation between man and nature, has been changing through the millennia.

Nowhere is this perspective, and the revised cosmology it entails, more explicit than in the literary legacy of Rudolf Steiner, and nowhere is its importance more earnestly stressed. The title of the present work already contains the difference between evolution of consciousness and history of ideas. History is the record of a conscious process, and the term is often extended to signify the process itself. Evolution is a process occurring at a pre-conscious stage, and up to the present this has applied also to the evolution of consciousness. Thus, the karma of materialism is not the same as the history of materialism. Karma is the name of a process operating at an unconscious level in the development of a human individuality, a process normally observable only in its effects; and the Karma of materialism is such a process operating in the development of materialism. So underneath the history of materialism (which would amount to a history of ideas, culminating in reductionism) Steiner reveals an unconscious process extending both before and after that history. Reductionism as theory manifests first in natural science, but the change of consciousness underlying it began much earlier, and it continues now irrespective of theory and affects the whole life of humanity. These lectures were delivered in the year 1917, when the catalogue of global disasters, which Steiner saw as the Karma of materialism, was still not long past its dawn; and it is with the effects of materialism in the social and political life, of humanity, both national and international, that they mainly concern themselves.

Just as in Boundaries of Natural Science Rudolf Steiner argues the necessity of penetrating this hitherto unconscious realm for the future health of science itself, so here he argues its necessity in order to cope with social and political problems that are growing more and more intractable as they are less and less understood. Penetrating it with what? With strengthened and energetic thinking. Notwithstanding his admiration for the achievements of natural science, disciplined as it is by its constant relation to observable fact, he accuses it of one disastrous oversight. While it has devised and continues to devise ever more elaborate and more precise tools for investigation, it has left unexamined and unimproved the first and most essential, the most ubiquitously applied, of all its tools. It has never tried to examine the nature of thinking itself; the point at which unconscious process blossoms into, or rather “sets” as, conscious thought. In the Boundaries course Steiner describes a method by which scientists could embark on such an examination. Here he is more concerned with the effects that have stemmed from their failure to do so at the time of the scientific revolution and after it. This involves reverting to that period in history and to the period preceding it. It is no use just saying: yes, there has been an evolution of consciousness, and it has resulted in materialism. It is no use simply chronicling effects; the process itself must be penetrated, and penetrated in detail; and if this entails reference to the thought processes of such historical figures as Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther, so be it.

The first step however is to delineate the process itself, as far as possible, and this he does in Lecture III by way of a careful treatment, both synchronic and diachronic, of the relation between intellect, perception and breathing. The lecture should be read carefully, for it is there that he lays the foundation for the doctrine which he will go on to inculcate. Namely, that the unconscious is not just ‘spirit’ (still less of course the Freudian psycho-physical jumble); nor is it simply an inferred and unknowable 'world of spirit'; it is a world of active spiritual beings, whose particular aims and influences are not wholly, and will become less and less, beyond the reach of human knowledge.

Or perhaps it would be truer to say the doctrine which he will go on to assume. That is one of the reasons why it is a difficult book, not simply because such an immaterial cosmology is repugnant to the contemporary mind-set: for repugnant it certainly is, except to a level of open-mindedness that is deplorably rare. Open-mindedness at a somewhat lower level is not so infrequent. There are many minds in our time acutely aware of the apparent impotence of the human spirit to deal with the complex and apparently insoluble problems that increasingly threaten its continued existence, and which go so far as to proclaim that a new kind of consciousness seems to be demanded of us. What is wanted, these uneasy people say, is altogether new ideas, a new kind of thinking. But they usually forget that the new is by definition unfamiliar; so that, when they are confronted with a picture of the universe that is not just a rearrangement of the old picture, but is really new and therefore wholly unfamiliar, they are offended or contemptuous. It becomes clear, Steiner repeats with emphasis and with examples to drive it home, that what they really wanted was something that looks new but is in fact old enough to feel quite comfortable. Confronted by anything beyond that they refuse even to examine the evidence for it. Exclamation marks are a sufficient refutation.

For many readers there will be the added difficulty of what they will feel as its author's tendency to plunge in medias res. Quite early in the book they will be confronted by references to named spiritual beings to whom they have not been introduced, notably certain of the spiritual hierarchies, who have been differently named in different traditions, but for whom Steiner uses the nomenclature found with their earliest recorded appearance in the extant literature of the West, that is the work of ‘pseudo-Dionysius’; and, over and above these, to the 'adversary' figures of Lucifer and Ahriman, especially the latter. If the reader is wise, he will reflect that, where knowledge of the immaterial itself is at issue, and not simply knowledge of its material effects, it is the same as with all knowledge. Neither things nor beings can be spoken of without being identified, or identified without being named: It remains true that some previous acquaintance with the literature of Steiner's anthroposophy will greatly reduce this difficulty, and will prevent the names being merely names. Nor is there much doubt that most of his original audience enjoyed such an acquaintance.

Some acquaintance then with the literature of anthroposophy is desirable in a reader of this book. But I would not say it is indispensable. There is another way of acquainting oneself with unfamiliar terminology besides starting with a set of definitions. Indeed definitions, though useful in forestalling error, may even hinder close acquaintance with the actuality of what is defined, inasmuch as they tend to substitute abstraction for experience. The other way of twigging the meanings of unfamiliar words is to plunge into contexts wherein they occur more than once, and sometimes perhaps by way of casual reference, and thus gradually to approach nearer and nearer to them by experiencing their use in those contexts. Incidentally if this way were not a way that is wide open to us, we should never have learned to speak or to understand anything at all.

I believe therefore that readers will not be lacking who will by-pass any initial stumbling-blocks as they enter into the substance of the book and become more and more impressed by its whole tone, by the authority born of wide learning, long reflection and exceptional insight and by the profound sense of responsibility, alike to the truth and to humanity, that breathe through its wide-ranging paragraphs.

Owen Barfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today we will lead on from the lecture of the day before yesterday to certain matters which can promote a deep personal understanding of Anthroposophical life. If we survey our life and make real efforts to get to the roots of its happenings, very much can be gained. We shall recognise the justice of many things in our destiny and realise that we have deserved them. Suppose someone has been superficial and thoughtless in the present incarnation and is subsequently struck by a blow of fate. It may not be possible, externally, to connect the blow of fate directly with the thoughtlessness, but a feeling arises, nevertheless, that there is justice in it. Then again, looking back on our life, we find blows of fate which we can only attribute to chance, for there seems no explanation for them whatever. These two categories of experience are to be discovered as we survey our life.

Now it is important to make a clear distinction between apparent chance and obvious necessity. When a man reviews his life with reference to these two kinds of happenings, he will fail to reach any higher stage of development unless he endeavours to have a very clear perception of everything that seems to him to be due to chance. We must try, above all, to have a clear perception of those things we have not wished for, which go right against the grain. It is possible to induce a certain attitude of soul and to say to ourselves: How would it be if I were to take those things which I have not desired, which are disagreeable to me, and imagine that I myself actually really wanted them? In other words we imagine with all intensity that we ourselves willed our particular circumstances.

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

And now let us consider the question of the successive incarnations of the human being. What is it that reincarnates? How can we discover the answer to this question?

There are three fundamental and distinct categories of experiences in the life of the soul Firstly our mental pictures, our ideas, our thoughts. In forming a mental picture our attitude may well be one of complete neutrality; we need not love or hate what we picture inwardly, neither need we feel sympathy or antipathy towards it. Secondly there are the moods and shades of feelings which arise alongside the ideas or the thoughts; the cause of these moods in the life of feeling is that we like or love one thing, dislike or abhor another, and so forth. The third kind of experience in the life of the soul are the impulses of the will. There are, of course, transitional stages, but speaking generally these are the three categories. Moreover it is fundamentally characteristic of a healthy life of soul to be able to keep these three kinds of experiences separate and distinct from one another. Our life of thought and mental presentation arises because we receive stimuli from outside. Nobody will find it difficult to realise that the life of thought is the most closely bound up with the present incarnation. This, after all, is obvious when we bear in mind that speech is the instrument whereby we express our thoughts; and speech, or language, must, in the nature of things, differ in every incarnation. We no more bring language with us at the beginning of a new incarnation than we bring thoughts and ideas. The language as well as the thoughts must be acquired afresh in each incarnation. Hebbel⁵¹ once wrote something very remarkable in his diary. The idea occurred to him that a scene in which the reincarnated Plato was being soundly chastised by the teacher for his lack of understanding of Plato would produce a very striking effect in a play! A man does not carry over his thought and mental life from one incarnation to another, and he takes practically nothing of it with him into his postmortem existence. After death we evolve no thoughts or mental pictures but have direct perceptions, just as our physical eyes have perceptions of colour. After death the world of concepts is seen as a kind of net stretching across existence. But our feelings, our moods of heart and feeling these we retain after death, and we also bring their forces with us as qualities and tendencies of soul into a new earthly life. For example, even if a child's life of thought is undeveloped, we shall be able to notice quite definite tendencies in his life of feeling. And because our impulses of will are linked with feelings we also take them with us into our life after death. If, for instance, a man succumbs to a mistaken idea, the effect upon his life of feeling is not the same as if he devotes himself to the truth. For a long time after death we suffer from the consequences of false mental presentations and ideas. Our attention must therefore turn to the qualities and moods of feeling and the impulses of will when we ask ourselves what actually passes on from one incarnation to another.

Suppose something painful happened to us ten or twenty years ago. In thought today we may be able to remember it quite distinctly and in detail. But the actual pain we felt at the time has all but faded away; we cannot re-experience the stirrings of feelings and impulses of will by which it was accompanied. Think for a moment of Bismarck⁵² and the overwhelming difficulties we know he had to face when he took his decision to go to war in 1866; think of what tumultuous feelings, what teeming impulses of will were working in Bismarck at that time! But even when writing his memoirs, would Bismarck have been conscious of these emotions and resolves with anything like the same intensity? Of course not! Man's memory between birth and death is composed of thoughts and mental pictures. It may be, of course, that even after ten or twenty years a feeling of pain comes over us at the recollection of some sorrowful event, but generally speaking the pain will have greatly diminished after this lapse of time; in thought, however, we can remember the very details of the event. If we now picture to ourselves that we actually willed certain painful events, that in reality we welcomed things which in our youth we may have hated, the very difficulty of this exercise rouses the soul and thus has an effect upon the life of feeling. Suppose, for example, a stone once crashed down upon us. We now try with all intensity to picture that we ourselves willed it so. Through such mental pictures—that we ourselves have willed the chance events in our life—we arouse, in the life of feeling, memory of our earlier incarnations. In this way we begin to realise that we are rooted in the spiritual world, we begin to understand our destiny. We have brought with us, from our previous incarnation, the will for the chance events of this life.

To devote ourselves in meditation to such thoughts and elaborate them, is of the highest importance. Between death and a new birth too, much transpires, for this period is infinitely rich in experiences—purely spiritual experiences, of course. We therefore bring with us qualities of feeling and impulses of will from the period between death and a new birth, that is to say, from the spiritual world. Upon this rests a certain occurrence of very great importance in the modern age, but one of which little notice is taken. The occurrence is to be found in the lives of many people today, but it is usually passed by unnoticed. It is, however, the task of Anthroposophy to point to such an occurrence and its significance. Let me make it clear by an example.

Suppose a man has occasion to go somewhere or other and his path takes him in the wake of another human being, a child perhaps. Suddenly the man catches sight of a yawning chasm at the edge of the path along which the child is walking. A few steps further and the child will inevitably fall over the edge into the chasm. He runs to save the child, runs and runs, entirely forgetting about the chasm. Then he suddenly hears a voice calling out to him from somewhere: ‘Stand still!’ He halts as though nailed to the spot. At that moment the child catches hold of a tree and also stops, so that no harm befalls. If no voice had called at that moment the man would inevitably have fallen into the chasm. He wonders where the voice came from. He finds no single soul who could have called, but he realises that he would quite certainly have lost his life if he had not heard this voice; yet, however closely he investigates he cannot find that the warning came from any physical voice.

Through close self-observation many human beings living at the present time would be able to recognise a similar experience in their lives. But far too little attention is paid to such things. An experience of this kind may pass by without leaving a trace—then the impression fades away and no importance is attached to the experience. But suppose a man has been attentive and realises that it was not without significance. The thought may then occur to him: At that point in your life you were facing a crisis, a karmic crisis; your life should really have ended at that moment, for you had forfeited it. You were saved by something akin to chance, and since then a second life has as it were been grafted onto the first; this second life is to be regarded as a gift bestowed upon you and you must act accordingly. When such an experience makes a man feel that his life from that time onwards has been bestowed upon him as a gift, this means that he can be accounted a follower of Christian Rosenkreutz. For this is how Christian Rosenkreutz calls the souls whom he has chosen. A man who can recall such an occurrence—and everyone sitting here can discover something of the kind in their lives if they observe closely enough—has the right to say to himself: Christian Rosenkreutz has given me a sign from the spiritual world that I belong to his stream. Christian Rosenkreutz has added such an experience to my karma. This is the way in which Christian Rosenkreutz chooses his pupils; this is how he gathers his community. A man who is conscious of this experience knows with certainty that a path has been pointed out to him which he must follow, trying to discover how he can dedicate himself to the service of rosicrucianism. If there are some people who have not yet recognised the sign, they will do so later on; for he to whom the sign has once been given will never again be free from it.

Such an experience comes to a man because during the period between his last death and his present birth he was in contact with Christian Rosenkreutz in the spiritual world. It was then that Christian Rosenkreutz chose us, imparting an impulse of will which leads us now to such experiences. This is the way in which spiritual connections are established. Materialistic thought will naturally regard all these things as hallucinations, just as it regards the experience of Paul at Damascus as having been an hallucination. The logical conclusion to be drawn from this is that the whole of Christianity is based upon an hallucination, therefore upon error. For theologians are perfectly well aware that the event at Damascus is the foundation stone of the whole of subsequent Christianity. And if this foundation stone itself is nothing but an illusion, then, if thought is consistent, everything built upon it must obviously be fallacy.

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

One of the consequences of materialism is that human beings become prematurely old. Thirty years ago, for example, children looked quite different; there are children today of ten or twelve years of age who give the impression almost of senility. Human beings have become so precocious, especially the grown-ups. They maintain that lies such as that of babies being brought by the stork should not be told to children, that children should be enlightened on such matters. But this enlightenment itself is really a lie. Those who come after us will know that the souls of our children hover down as bird-like spirit forms from the higher worlds. To have an imaginative conception of many things still beyond our comprehension is of very great importance. As regards the fact in question it might be possible to find a better imaginative picture than the story of the stork. What matters is that spiritual forces operate between the child and his parents or teachers, a kind of secret magnetism must be there. We must ourselves believe in any imaginative picture we give to the children. If it is a question of explaining death to them, we must point to another happening in nature. We can say: ‘See how the butterfly flies out of the chrysalis. The same thing happens to the human soul after death’ But we must ourselves believe that the world is arranged in such a way that the forces in the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis present us with an image of the soul going forth from the body. The world-spirit has inscribed such a picture in nature to draw our attention to the process. It is tremendously important to be always capable of learning, of remaining young, independently of our physical body. And that is the great task of theosophy that has become Anthroposophy: to bring to the world the rejuvenation which it needs. We must get beyond the banal and the purely material. To recognise soul and spirit as powers operating in life—this must be the aim of the work in our groups. We must be permeated more and more with the knowledge that the soul can gain mastery over the external world.

• 51. Hebbel ... diary: ‘After his soul journey Plato is now possibly being caned at school for—not understanding Plato.’ Hebbel's diaries Nr. 1335.
• 52. Bismarck: ‘Gedanken und Erinnerungen’ (Thoughts and Memories), 1898, 2 volumes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

London,
February 1962.

Owen Barfield

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are things going in twelfth-grade mathematics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr. Steiner: They can do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher asks about gardening class for the upper grades.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A teacher makes a comment.

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

In the last lecture we tried to present a retrospect not only of the content of our studies during the past year, but also of the true meaning—the inner spirit of these studies. In doing so we showed that the spirit which fills our souls when considering the Christ-problem from all possible sides must permeate our whole movement, all our spiritual efforts. We realise that we have been able to grasp one subject from so many different aspects because, in striving after knowledge, we have ever cultivated true modesty with regard to this knowledge. We should like for a moment to speak somewhat more exactly about humility in respect of knowledge.

I have often said that we can only arrive at a true conception of any object when this is viewed from different aspects, that only when these different views are placed side by side is a true picture of the object obtained. Even in ordinary observation we must go all round an object in order to form a comprehensive conception of it. If anyone said that it was possible to grasp an object at a single glance, from one point of view in the spiritual world, he would be much mistaken. Many human errors spring from failing to recognise this. In the accounts given by us of the Event of Palestine great care has been taken that thoroughness in this respect should not be relaxed. We have four accounts of this event, the accounts of the four Evangelists. Those who do not know that in spiritual life an object, being, or event, must be observed from different sides (for people approach such things without much thought) see nothing more in this fact than the possibility of apparent contradictions between the Evangelists. We have repeatedly pointed out that the accounts of the four Evangelists have to be regarded as giving four different aspects of the one mighty Event of Christ, and that they must he compared one with another as we compare four pictures of the same object taken from different sides. If we proceed carefully in this way as we have already tried to do in respect of the Gospels of Matthew, of John, and Luke, and as we hope later to do in respect of the Gospel of Mark, it is seen that the four accounts of the event of Palestine agree in the most perfect way. Thus, in the very fact that there are four Gospels, a great lesson is given showing the necessity of a many sided view if the truth is to be reached.

I have often spoken of the possibility of there being different opinions held by different individuals concerning truth. You will recall how at our general meeting last year I supplemented what is generally called “Theosophy” by another view which I described as the “Anthroposophical view,” and explained how this was related to Theosophy. I showed that there is an ordinary science built on facts and the intelligent comprehensions of facts as revealed to the senses, this when it deals with mankind is called “Anthropology.” It contains everything that can be discovered and investigated by means of the senses. It therefore studies the human organisms as revealed by the instruments and methods of natural science. It studies, for instance, the relics of an earlier humanity, the utensils and instruments of civilisations that have remained hidden within the earth, and seeks from these to form some idea of how the human race has developed. It studies further those stages of development found in savage or uncivilised peoples; and from the conclusions arrived at traces the stages civilised peoples have passed through in former ages. In this way Anthropology forms its conceptions of what man has experienced up to the present stage of development. Much more could be said regarding the nature of Anthropology. I have compared it with a man who learns of a country by walking about on the level, observing the features of the land, its towns, forests, fields, etc., and describing these as seen from this stand-point.

Now mankind can be observed from a different standpoint—theosophical. All Theosophy begins by defining man, by speaking of his being or nature. If you study my “Outline of Occult Science” you will see that everything is summed up and reaches its climax in the description of the being of man himself. If Anthropology can be compared with a man who gathers facts and tries to understand them by walking about on the level, Theosophy can be compared with the observer who climbs a mountain in order to observe the surrounding country from its summit. Much that is spread out on the plain will then fade and only certain features remain. So it is with spiritual observation, with Theosophy. The point of view it takes regarding spiritual matters is a higher one. It follows that many things seen from this standpoint, and many of the ordinary human activities met with in daily life fade away, just as villages and towns vanish when seen from a mountain top.

What I have just said may perhaps not seem very obvious to a beginner in Theosophy. For what such a beginner first learns concerning the nature of man, concerning the different principles of his being, physical body, etheric body, astral body, etc., he tries to understand and form a conception of, but at first he is far from the greater difficulties which face him when he advances further in the acquisition of Theosophical truths. The further one advances the more one realises how infinitely difficult it is to find a connection between what has been gained above, on the spiritual mountain top of Theosophy, and what emerges in daily life as characteristic human feelings, ideas, etc.

We might ask:—Why do Theosophical truths seem obvious and right to many in spite of their not being able to prove what is told them from the spiritual mountain tops, or by what they have themselves seen? This is because the human soul is really designed for truth, not for untruth; it is so organised that it feels it natural when anything true is said. There is a feeling for truth in man; and he should realise the infinite value of this feeling. This is especially the case in our day, for the very reason that the spiritual heights from which the necessary truth can alone be seen are so infinitely high. If people had first to climb these heights they would have to travel a long way in spiritual experience, and those unable to do so would know nothing of the value of these truths for human life. But every soul, are these truths are imparted, can realise them and make them its own.

What is the position of a soul that receives these truths compared with one able to discover them for itself? This can he shown by a quite trivial example, but however trivial it means more than at first appears. Everyone can pull on a boot, but not everyone can make a boot; for this a bootmaker is necessary. What a man receives through the boot does not depend on whether he can himself make it or not, but on whether he makes use of it in the right way. This can be compared exactly with the spiritual truths given to us by spiritual science. We are summoned to make use of them, even though we are not able to discover them for ourselves. And when through our own natural sense of truth we accept and make use of them, they serve us for the directing of our whole lives; through them we know that we are not confined to life between birth and death, that we bear within us a spiritual man, that we pass through repeated earthly lives, and so on. We can make use of these truths. They serve us. Just as a boot protects us from cold, so these truths shield us from spiritual cold, from spiritual poverty. For it is a fact that we are chilled and impoverished spiritually when we only think and feel those things that have reference to the external world of the senses. We must allow that the truths presented to us by those who can bring them down from a higher standpoint can be of service to all, though there may perhaps be only a few who can travel the spiritual path described in recent lectures.

Now every glance into the ordinary world around us—and which when it deals with man is also the concern of Anthropology—shows us how this world is itself the revealer of a world lying behind it, a world that can be seen from the spiritually higher standpoint of Theosophy. Thus even the world of the senses can reveal another world to us when we pass on to its interpretation, when we not only receive the facts it presents to us with our understanding, but begin to interpret these facts. If we cannot see as far over the fields of the sense world as Theosophy can, yet we can stand on the mountain side where the various objects are not absolutely indistinct and some prospect is possible. This standpoint in respect to spiritual things we have called Anthroposophy, and in doing so have shown that there are three ways of considering man—the anthropological, the anthroposophical, and the theosophical.

We hope this year, in connection with the General Assembly, to give lectures on “Psychosophy,” these are important in other ways from those given on “Anthroposophy”; I will then show how the human soul can interpret things for itself from its own impressions and experiences, and can participate in spiritual life in a similar way as in Anthroposophy. And in a future course of lectures on “Pnematosophy” I will bring these lectures to a conclusion so that those dealing with Anthroposophy and with Psychosophy will flow again into Theosophy. All this is for the purpose of evoking in you a sense of the manifold nature of truth. The experiences of one who seeks earnestly for truth is this:—The further he goes the humbler he becomes, and also the more cautious in translating the truths gained at a higher level into words suited to ordinary life. Although, as was stated in the last lecture, these truths are really only valuable when so translated, it must be realised that the task of recalling and translating what has been seen is one of the most difficult in the work of spiritual science. To make what is seen on spiritual heights so clear to the understanding, that sound logic and a healthy sense of truth can accept and understand them presents the very greatest difficulties.

I must lay stress again and again on the fact that in the activities of our group we are especially concerned with the creation of this feeling for, and understanding of, truth. We do not concern ourselves only with the comprehension of what is communicated to us from the spiritual world, it is far more important that we should experience it sympathetically through feeling, and by this means acquire those qualities that should he possessed by all who strive earnestly in the theosophical sense.

Looking at the world that surrounds us we acknowledge that on every side it presents to us the external expressions of an inner spiritual world. For us to-day this is a worn out saying. Just as the human countenance expresses what is passing in a man's soul, so the changing face of the external world can be likened to the play of expressions on the countenance of a living, spiritual world behind the sense world; and we first understand physical events aright when we see in them the expressions of a spiritual world. If a man has not yet been able to reach those heights whence spiritual vision is possible by following his own path of knowledge, he has at least the physical world before him, and can ask himself:—Is not confirmation given me through the evidences of my own senses of what is imparted to me as the result of spiritual vision?

This search for evidence is always possible, but it must be carried out not lightheartedly but with precision.—If you have followed different lectures given by me on spiritual science and have read my “Outline of Occult Science” you will realise that at one period of the earth's development the earth was united with the sun, that these formed one globe; the earth only separated from the sun later. If you remember all you have heard or read you must allow that the animal and plant forms found on the earth to-day are the further development of those that existed at the time when the earth and sun were one. But just as the animal forms of to-day are suited to the present conditions of the earth, so the animal forms of that far off time must have been suited to the planetary body which was then both sun and earth. It follows from this that the animal forms that have remained over from these times have not only remained over, but are the continuation of creatures that existed formerly. There are, for example, animals that still have no eyes, for eyes only have meaning when there is light, such light as streams to earth from the sun when it is outside. Thus among the various creatures of the animal kingdom we find those that have formed eyes after the sun separated from the earth, and also those that are relics of the time when the earth was still united with the sun—that is animals without eyes. Such animals would naturally belong to the lowest types, and so they do. We find it stated in popular books that the possession of eyes began at a certain stage of development. This bears out what spiritual science tells us.

We are able in this way to picture the world around us, in which we ourselves are placed, as the facial expression of the living, weaving life of the spirit. If we merely, considered the physical world, without it revealing to us how it points to a spiritual world, we would never feel the urge, the longing to develop towards that world. Some day a longing for what is spiritual will be aroused in us by the surrounding world itself, some day the spirit must stream down from the spiritual realms as though a door or window that has opened into our everyday world. When will this take place? When does spiritual illumination stream directly into us? It takes place—and you have heard this in many lectures from me and others—when we are in the position to experience our ego.

The moment we experience our ego, we experience something which is directly related to the spiritual world. But what we experience is at the same time in-finitely feeble; it is but a single point amid all the phenomena of nature, the single point which we express by the little word “I.” This word certainly describes something that was originally spiritual, but a spirituality that has dwindled to a single point. All the same what does this shrunken spiritual spark teach us? We cannot learn more of the spiritual world through the experience of our own ego than this ego-point contains, unless we progress to interpretation. But this point possesses what is still more important, namely, through it we are told how we are to know, when we seek to know the spiritual world.

What is the difference between the experiences of the ego and all other experiences? The difference is that we are ourselves within the ego-experiences. All other experiences approach us from outside; we are not ourselves within them. Someone might say here:—“But my thoughts, my will and desires, my preceptions, do these not live within me?” A man can convince himself, through very slight awareness of self, how little he is able to accomplish in respect of dwelling within his will. We imagine that the will can he recognised as that which urges us, as if we were not ourselves within it, but as if in our actions we were compelled by someone or something. This is the case also as regards our perceptions, and as regards the greater part of what people think in daily life. We are not really within these. How little we are within our thoughts in ordinary life is seen when we carefully investigate how much ordinary thought is dependent on education, and on what we have acquired at one time or another, and on surrounding conditions. This is why the ordinary content of human thinking; feeling and will varies so much in different nations and at different epochs. One thing only is the same.—One thing exists everywhere among men, and must be the same in every nation in all parts of the earth and in every human association—this is the experiencing of the single point, the ego.

We may now ask:—What does the experiencing of the ego-point mean? This is not such a simple matter as you might suppose. One might easily think, for example, that one experiences the ego itself. But this is not the case at all. Man does not really experience his ego. What then does he experience? He really experiences a concept of the ego, a percept of it. If the experiencing of the ego was clearly understood by us, it would present something that reached to infinity, that spread out on all sides. If the ego were unable to confront itself, to see itself as an image is seen in a mirror—though this image is only experienced for a moment—man could not experience his own ego, he could form no conception of it. This is man's first experience of the ego, it has to suffice him, for it is precisely this conception that differs from all other conceptions. It differs from them in this, that other conceptions resemble their original, they cannot differ from their original; but when the ego forms a conception of itself it is concerned with itself alone, and the conception is but what remains behind of the ego-experience. It is like a checking or blocking of it, as if we would check it in order to turn it back on itself, and in this checking the ego is confronted by the reflected image of itself which resembles the original. This is what occurs at the experiencing of the ego.

We can therefore say:—We recognise the ego in the conception of it (Ich-vorstellung). But this ego conception differs considerably from all other conceptions, from all other experiences. It differs from them profoundly. For all other conceptions and all other experiences we require something of the nature of an organ. This is clearly seen in respect of sense-perception. In order to have the conception colour we require eyes and so on; it is clear to anyone that in the ordinary perception of the senses an organ is necessary. You might think that no organ was required to perceive what is intimate to your own inner Being, but even in this you can convince yourselves by simple means that organs are necessary. This is dealt with more particularly in my book “Anthroposophy”; here opportunity is given to approach by theosophical methods what there is stated in a manner more suited to the generality. Let us suppose the following—at some period of your lives you grasp a thought or idea. You understand the idea that comes to you. By what means do you understand it? Only through other ideas that you have previously accepted. You realise this because you observe that one man comprehends a new idea that comes to him in one way, another in another way. This is because one man has within him a greater, another a smaller sum of ideas which he has assimilated. The material of old ideas is within us and confronts the new as the eye confronts the light. Out of our own old ideas a kind of “idea-organ” is constructed, and what we have not constructed of this in our present incarnation must be sought in some former one. There it was built up, and we are able to confront the new ideas that come to us with an “organ of ideas.” We require an organ for all the experiences that come to us from the outer world, especially if these are of a spiritual nature. We never stand spiritually naked as it were before what comes to us from the outer world; but are ever dependant on what we have become. Only in a single case do we confront the outer world directly, namely, when we attain ego perception (Ich-wahrnehmung). The ego is present, even when we sleep, but perception of it must always be aroused anew, it must be roused anew each morning when we wake. Even supposing We journeyed in the night to Mars, where our surroundings would be quite different from what they are on earth, yet ego-perception would remain the same! This latter under all conditions take place in the same way because no external organ is required for it—not even an “organ of ideas.” What confronts us here is a direct conception (Vorstellung) of the ego; a conception or perception (Wahrnehmung) certainly, but in its true form. Everything else comes before as a picture seen in a mirror, and is restricted by the form of the mirror. Ego-perceptions come before us absolutely in their true form.

Put in another way one might say:—When realising things with the ego, we are ourselves within them; they cannot possibly be outside of us. We now ask our-selves:—How do individual ego-conceptions or ego-perceptions differ from all other perceptions by the ego? They are distinguished by the direct impression they make on the ego, no other perceptions make this direct impression. But we receive pictures of all that surrounds us; and these in a certain sense can be compared with ego-perceptions. Everything is changed by the ego into an inner experience. The outer world must become our conception if it is to have any meaning or value for us. We form true pictures of the surrounding world, which then continue to live in the ego no matter through which of the sense-organs they have come to us. We smell a substance when we pass it by, and though we do not come in direct contact with it we bear an image of it within us. In the same way we bear within us the image of colours we have seen, and retain pictures of them. The ego preserves such experiences. But if we wish to describe the characteristic feature of these images we must say—it is that they come to us from outside. All the pictures we have been able to unite with our ego, so long as we are in the world of the senses, are the relics of impressions we have received by means of the senses.

One thing the sense-world cannot give us—Ego-perception! This arises in us spontaneously. Thus in ego-perception we have a picture that rises of itself, however closely it may be confined to one point.

Think now of other pictures being added to these, pictures that do not rise through stimulation of the senses, but that rise freely in the ego (as ego-conceptions do), and are therefore formed in the same manner as the ego-conception. These arise in what we call the “Astral world.” There are picture-concepts which arise in the ego without our having received any impression from the outer world.

How do these inner experiences differ from those other pictures we received from the sense-world? We receive pictures of the sense-world by having come in contact with that world; these then become inner impressions, but impressions which have been stimulated from outside.

What are those experiences of the ego which are not directly stimulated by the outer world? We have these in our feelings, our wishes, impulses, instincts and the like. These are not stimulated by the outer world. Even if we do not stand within our feelings, wishes and impulses etc., by means of the senses as already described, yet we must allow an element does enter into our inner feelings, impulses, and desires. In what way do these differ from the sense-pictures we bear within us as a result of what our senses have perceived? You can feel this difference. Pictures received through the senses quietly rest within us, and we try to retain faithful reproductions of them once we have realised our connection with the outer world. But our impulses, desires and instincts are active in us, they represent a force. Though the outer world has no part in the rise of astral pictures, yet the fact of their appearing denotes a certain force. For what is not set going (getrieben) is not there, it cannot arise.

In sense-pictures the “initial force” is the impression received from the outer world. In astral-pictures this force is what lies at the root of desires, impulses, feelings, etc. Only, in life as it is to-day, man is shielded from developing a force in his feelings and desires sufficiently strong to evoke pictures—pictures that would be experienced in the same way as those of the “I” itself.

The most marked feature of the human soul to-day is this powerlessness of its instincts and desires to attain to forming pictures of what the ego places before it. When the ego is confronted with the strong forces of the outer world it is moved to form pictures. When it lives within itself, it has, in the normal man, but one opportunity of perceiving an emerging picture; that is when this picture is the picture of the “I” itself.

Instincts and desires do not work with sufficient strength to form pictures similar to this single ego-experience. If they did they would have to acquire a quality which every external sense-perception has. This quality is of great moment. All sense-perceptions do not grant us the pleasure of doing as we wish. If, for instance, someone lives in a room where there is an unpleasant smell, he cannot dispel it through his impulses and desires. He cannot change the colour of a flower from yellow to red, because he prefers red, merely through his wish to do so. It is characteristic of the sense-world that it remains entirely independent of us. Our wishes and impulses affect it in no way. They are directed altogether to our personal life. What then must happen to them in order that they may he so greatly enhanced that we can experience through them a world of pictures (Bilddasein)? They must become like the external world, which in its construction and in the pictures it calls forth in us does not follow our wishes, but con-strains us to form pictures of the sense-world in accordance with the world around us. If the pictures a man receives of the astral world are to shape themselves aright, he must become as detached from himself, from his own personal sympathies and antipathies, as he is from the presentations of the outer world which come to him through his senses. What he wishes or does not wish must not carry weight with him in any way.

I mentioned in the last lectures that this demand can be formulated as follows—“One must not be egoistic.” This endeavour should not be undertaken lightly, for it is by no means easy to be unegoistic.

There is another fact I would like you to notice. The great difference between the interest we feel in what comes to us from outside compared with what meets us from within. The interest a man takes in his inner life is infinitely greater than in anything the outer world brings him. We certainly know that for many people the outer world when it has been changed into pictures does occasionally have an effect on our subjective feelings; we know people frequently “reckon something to be the blue of heaven,” that they are even not lying but believe what they say. Sympathy and antipathy always enter into such things, people deceive themselves as to what actually comes from outside, allowing it to be changed later into pictures. But these are exceptional cases; for little progress would be made if men allowed themselves to be deceived in daily life. Something in that case would be out of harmony with external life. This would not help them, truth has to be acknowledged as regards the external world; reality is the corrective. It is the same with ordinary sense impressions; external reality is here a good regulator. But when we begin to have inner experiences reality is apt to fail us. It is not then so easy to permit outer reality to make the necessary corrections, and we permit ourselves to he ruled by sympathy and antipathy.

The thing of greatest importance when we begin to approach the spiritual world is that we learn to regard ourselves absolutely with the same indifference with which we regard the outer world.

These truths were formulated in a very strict way in the ancient Pythagorean schools, as were also the truths regarding a most important part of man's knowledge, that concerning immortality. How few there are to-day who take any interest in the question of immortality! The ordinary things of life are what men long for in the life beyond birth and death. But this is a personal interest, a personal longing. The breaking of a tumbler is a matter of small interest to you, but if you had a personal interest in the continued existence of the tumbler, even though broken, the same interest as you have in the immortality of the human soul, you may be sure most people would believe also in the immortality of the tumbler.

Therefore in the schools of Pythagoras teaching concerning immortality was formulated as follows:—

“Only that man is ripe for understanding the truth concerning immortality, who could also endure it if the opposite were true; if he could bear that the question regarding immortality was answered with a ‘no.’ If a man is himself to bring down (selber ausmachen will) anything from the spiritual world regarding immortality," so said the Pythagoreans, "he must not long for immortality; for while there is longing, what he says regarding it is not objective. Opinions regarding the life beyond birth and death if they are to have any value can only come from those who could lie down peacefully in the grave even if there was no immortality.” This was taught in the olden times in the Pythagorean schools when the teacher wished to make his pupils realise how difficult it was to be sufficiently ripe to accept any truth. To be ripe enough to receive a truth and to state it from oneself requires a very special preparation, and must consist in the person being entirely without interest in the said truth. Now, it might well be said regarding immortality:—“It is quite impossible that there should be many people who are not interested in this, there cannot be many such.” People not interested in immortality are those who are told of it and of the eternal nature of human existence, and in spite of this remain uninterested. To accept and make use of the statement concerning reincarnation and human immortality so as to have something for life, can be done by anyone who also accepts the truth without any self-conviction. The fact that one is not sufficiently ripe to accept a truth is no reason for rejecting it. On the contrary, it is being ripe for what life requires of us, when we accept a truth and devote our life to its service. What is the necessary counterpart to the acceptance of truths? One may accept truths calmly even when one is not ripe. But the necessary counter-part to the acceptance of them is—that in the same measure as we long for truth that we may have peace, contentment, and security in life, in the same measure we make ourselves ripe for these truths, such truths as can only be perfected in the spiritual world. An important precept for spiritual life can be drawn from this—that we should accept everything, making what use we can of it in life, but should be as distrustful as possible regarding our presentments of truths, more especially of our own astral experience. This establishes the fact that we must specially guard against those astral experiences that come when we reach the point where we are bound to feel interest, namely, when our own life is under consideration.

Let us suppose that someone through his astral experiences has become ripe enough to carry out some-thing he destined to do next day, to experience next day. It is a personal experience. He guards himself from investigating the record of his personal life; for here he is bound to be interested. People might for instance ask lightly:—“Why does the clairvoyant not investigate the precise moment of his own death?” He does not do so because this can never be without interest to him, and he must hold himself aloof from anything connected with his own personality. Only what is in no way, connected with his own person may be investigated in the spiritual world. Nothing whatever of objective value is transmitted where the investigator is personally interested. He must be willing to confine himself to what is of objective value only, he must never speak of anything that concerns himself in his investigation, or in the impressions he receives from the higher world. When matters arise that concern himself he must be very certain that these are not introduced through his own interest in them. It is exceedingly difficult to investigate anything where the investigator's own interests are concerned.

Thus at the beginning of all endeavours to enter the spiritual world the following rule must be laid to heart:—Nothing that affects oneself must be sought for or considered valuable. The personality must be absolutely excluded. I may add that the “exclusion of everything personal” is exceedingly difficult, for frequently one thinks one has done so, yet is mistaken! For this reason most of the astral pictures seen by one or another are nothing more than a kind of reflection of their own wishes and desires. So long as we are strong enough in our spiritual self to say:—“You must distrust your own spiritual experiences,” these do little harm. But the moment the strength to do so fails and a man declares his experiences to be of value to his life he begins to be unbalanced. It is just as though a person wishing to enter a room finds no door and runs his head against the wall. So the investigator must keep ever before him the maxim:—Be very careful to test your own spiritual experiences. This carefulness consists in setting no more value on such experiences than on any piece of imparted knowledge or enlightenment. We must not apply such knowledge to our own personal life, but merely allow it to enlighten us. It is well if we feel in regard to such experiences:—“You are only being given enlightenment!” For in that case we are in a position as soon as some contradictory idea enters, to correct it.

What I have said to-day is but a part of the many things we shall be considering during the coming winter, and can serve as an introduction to lectures on the life of the human soul, entitled "Psychosophy," which are to follow at a later date.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “Spirits” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word ‘Spirit’ to-day. Even in saying “Spiritual”; and indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use this word with very little application to spiritual things, on one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did the postman know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance was compelled to remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing; who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It will be incorrect to speak of ‘Sin’ or ‘wrong-doing’ as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions. Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice our feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can well be included in the hidden depths of Soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our Soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: ‘He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,’ if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own Soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: ‘readiness to bestow,’ ‘readiness to give’, even to giving oneself, so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a Soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although our Soul-life is fitted into our earth-body, an upper layer exists over this hidden Soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the Soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the Soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited to convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later Soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant in the depths below the superficial waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he would simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had however been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the Soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the Soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths one which governs every Soul and occasionally emerges in, its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted; perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as ‘home-sickness’. If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term ‘home-sickness,’ expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be more accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will towards an inclination which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable wish.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our Soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to exercise this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own Soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will, passes in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to highest Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of Soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had been forced to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to others all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this into themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called ego-nature which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their own Ego-nature, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a Being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other Being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to made sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer Him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the Soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of Soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But between the boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, and that which is an attribute of noble character in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world, there are many intermediate states—what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new Beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those Beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate--for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new Beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our Soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a ‘movement’ takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only one particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only accrue when it presents invariably the same aspect to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of Movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we know it up to the present, something else must follow. We know that in the whole Cosmic multiplicity in the upward course of development during this evolution, besides the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called ‘Bestowing Virtue,’ which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and Spirituality behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as ‘thoughts’ but as ideas. We can best picture these to ourselves by the ideas that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic ideas that succeeding one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a Being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other Beings. But when this is thus guided into a relation with the other Beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory idea of the other Beings, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the ‘arising’ of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human Beings our selves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing. We can in a certain fashion realise, if we do not regard these conditions of suffering as earthly that they could not possibly be so, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its Soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these Beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these Beings would have been empty-Souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the Beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for that has stretched over to the earth-stage of our nature. And this is so imbedded in the subsoil of our Soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have a Soul-life which can play its part. And when it does so, what does the Soul-life say? If we bear in mind the Cosmic subject of this subconscious Soul-life, we can say that what we can thus trace back to the subsoil of the soul is a bursting-forth within that which we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has moved across from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we really have an explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If we just grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, we obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human Soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should a picture remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly afresh in the background—and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. When these have been there for some little time the longing pushes up again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to the Soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: that if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something else, something that is able to redeem it by something other than mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we can the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the ‘Planet of Redemption,’ just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence may be called the ‘Planet of Longing’; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the Soul-life, is longing, which is the ocean-bed of our Soul. This strives continually to ascend to one who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very best he is capable of feeling. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have become acquainted with all that can satisfy the ordinary superficial individual consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which in its individuality can never be satisfied, but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality rather than with the individuality. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the mind of to-day be brought into touch with application to the study of universal Being living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the Soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the Soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his Soul, above all, when the unconscious Soul-forces akin to longings, burn up ardently as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great Soul. If only something could have flowed into his Soul, drowning, silencing the longing for ideas while he yearned for an end to this search for ideas—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the Spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing Soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—‘Who would desire to be happy in this world! I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we shun each other for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! There must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our Souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, He is only not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!’—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies Anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life 100 years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the planet of redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the Soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his ‘Penthesilea’; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her Soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called ‘her’ Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Katchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the Soul where dwells the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can trace the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Katchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been dryly called the forces of our planet's attractions? Yet only 100 years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done to-day. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his Soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness cannot be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our Souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the Soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows bygone men have so long desired—we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also theosophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

In our survey of the world we have now carried a difficult aspect of it far enough to discover to some extent the spiritual behind the phenomena of the external sense-world. Concerning such phenomena, at first outwardly revealing little of the fact that the spiritual in its own peculiar form stands behind them, as we experience this spiritual in our own soul-life—concerning such phenomena we have recognised that nevertheless spiritual qualities and properties do stand behind them. For example, in ordinary life we recognise the properties of heat or fire, and we have learnt to see in these the expression of sacrifice. In what meets us as air and at any rate, to our ideas, seems to reveal so little of its spiritual nature, we have recognised the bestowing virtue of certain Spiritual Beings. And we have learnt to perceive in water what might be called resignation. It may just be mentioned here, that in earlier conceptions of the world there was naturally a greater sense of the spiritual behind the outer material element, and the fact that specially volatile substances have been designated “spirit” may be looked upon as proving this, for we make a peculiar use of the word “spirit” to-day. Indeed in the outer world it may often occur that people use the word “spiritual” with very little application to spiritual things. On one occasion (as some here present are aware) a letter was addressed to a spiritualist union at Munich, and so little did one know what a spiritualistic circle was, that the letter was delivered to the Central Committee of Wine and Spirit merchants!

But to-day, when we wish to study that significant transition in the evolution of the Earth planet which took place in the passing from ancient Sun to ancient Moon, we must bear in mind a different kind of development of the spiritual. We must now start from that point which we reached in the last lecture, when we came to the subject of “renunciation.” This, as we have seen, consisted essentially in the refusal of Beings of exalted Spiritual rank to accept the sacrifice, which as we were told, consisted for the most part of will or will-substance. If we represent this to our minds in such a way that we picture certain Beings desirous of offering the substance of their will in sacrifice which through the renunciation of yet higher Beings was rejected, it will be easy to rise to the conception that this substance must remain with the Beings desirous of sacrificing, who were prevented from doing so. Thus we are introduced to Beings in the Cosmic scheme ready to contribute with fervour what dwells within them—but who are not able to do this, are obliged to retain this substance within them. The Beings whose sacrifice was rejected were unable to establish a particular connection with still higher Beings, which might have been established had their offering been accepted. What we must understand by this is symbolically expressed in the world's history by the figure of Cain confronting Abel, though there the contrast is more sharply emphasised. Cain too wished to offer sacrifice to his God. But it was not pleasing unto God and He would not accept it. The sacrifice offered by Abel was accepted. What we must bear in mind in this story is the inner experience which came to Cain through the rejection of his sacrifice.

If we wish to raise ourselves to the height necessary for the comprehension of what is now under consideration, we must clearly realise that in speaking of the regions referred to, both conceptions and ideas slip into use regarding them which only have meaning in our ordinary life. It would be incorrect to speak of “sin” or “wrong-doing” as coming into being by the rejection of the sacrifice. Guilt or atonement as we know it in our ordinary life, could not as yet be spoken of in those regions.

Rather must we think of these Beings in such a way, that on the part of those Higher Ones who rejected the proffered sacrifice, there is renunciation or resignation. In the mood of soul described in the last lecture there is nothing of guilt or omission; on the contrary, it contains all the greatness and significance to be found in resignation. None the less the fact remains that in those other Beings who wished to contribute their sacrifice there arose a feeling, though very faint, which was the beginning of an opposition to those who rejected it. So that when at a much later epoch, the story of Cain is brought to our notice this feeling is represented in an accentuated form. Hence we do not find in those Beings who continued to evolve from the Sun and to pass over to the Moon, the same disposition of mind as in Cain; in them the mood is different in degree. We only really become acquainted with this if we look into our own souls as we did in the last lecture, trying to find its counterpart there, and thus get a hint of that feeling which was developed in the Individualities whose sacrificial gifts were rejected.

Coming nearer and nearer to the earthly life of man, we find this mood in ourselves—everyone knows it—as uncertainty and at the same time as torment in the domain which can be included in the hidden depths of soul-life. This feeling with which we are all acquainted holds sway in the secret depth of our soul-life, and sometimes pushes its way up to the surface; and then perhaps its torment is least. We often go about with these feelings without being aware of them in our superficial consciousness; yet there they are within us. We might recall the words of the poet: “He alone who longing knows, knows what I suffer,” if we wish to convey an idea of the tormenting nature of this mood with which is connected a certain degree of pain. The longing to be found in the souls of men, is what is here meant.

In order to transport ourselves into what went on spiritually in the evolutionary phases of ancient Saturn and Sun, it was necessary to raise our vision to peculiar states of the soul which only appear, so to speak, when the human soul begins to aspire and prepares for higher striving. We saw this when we tried to understand the nature of sacrifice by referring to our own soul-life, when we tried to comprehend the nature of the wisdom man can acquire, which we saw trickling in, and which has its origin in what may be called: “readiness to bestow,” “readiness to give,” even to giving oneself; so to speak. When we come on to the more earthly conditions which have evolved out of the earlier ones, we encounter a soul-mood resembling in many respects what a man may even yet experience at the present day. But we must quite clearly realise, that although the whole of our soul-life is inserted into our earth-body, an upper layer lies over the hidden soul-life in the depths. Who could fail to know that there is such a hidden life of the soul? Life itself amply teaches us this.

Now in order to make clear to ourselves something of this hidden life of the soul, let us take the case of a child who in his seventh or eighth year, or at some other age may have experienced some injustice, to which children are particularly sensitive. He perhaps may have been blamed for something which he really had not done, but it suited the convenience of those around him to throw the blame on the child, so as to have an end of the matter. Now children are very specially sensitive to unjust accusation; but as life now is, although such an experience may have bitten deeply into the childish life, the later soul-life put another layer of existence over it, and as far as everyday life is concerned the, child forgot it. And indeed it may very well never crop up again. But suppose that in his fifteenth or sixteenth year this boy should experience fresh injustice, perhaps at school; then that which has lain dormant below in the surging waves of his soul, begins to stir. The boy need not know that a memory of what he had formerly endured is rising to the surface, he may have different concepts and ideas on the subject. But if his earlier experience had not occurred he might simply have gone home, perhaps grumbled and complained, and shed a few tears, and that would have been the end of the matter. The first injustice had, however, been experienced, and although, as I make a point of saying, the boy need have no recollection of it, yet it works! It becomes active beneath the surface of the soul-life just as there may be movements beneath the surface of a calm and glassy sea, and what might have ended in a few grumblings and tears now becomes the suicide of a schoolboy! Thus do the hidden depths of the soul-life play their part on the surface. The most important of all the forces ruling below in these depths, one which governs every soul and occasionally emerges in its original form, is—longing. We also know the names by which this force is known to the outer world, but they are only metaphoric and indefinite, for they express very complicated connections and thus do not enter a man's consciousness at all.

Take as an example a phenomenon with which we are all well acquainted: perhaps a man who lives in great cities is less affected by it, but he will have seen it in others:—I refer to what is known as “home-sickness.” If you investigate into the true nature of home-sickness you will find it differs fundamentally in every one. Sometimes it takes one form and sometimes another. One person may long for the homely stories of the family circle; he does not know that he is longing for home, he only feels an undefined craving, an undefined want. Another longs for his mountain, or for the river on whose banks he used to play, watching the movement of the rippling water. He is seldom aware of what it is that is working within him. All these diverse characteristics we include in the term “home-sickness,” expressing something that may be active in a thousand forms, and would be most accurately defined as a kind of longing. And what is this longing? We have just said that it is a kind of willing, and whenever we investigate this longing, we find that it is of this nature. What kind of willing? It is a will which in its immediate form cannot be satisfied; for were it satisfied, the longing would cease. What we described as longing is an unattainable desire of the will.

So must we define the frame of mind of those Beings whose sacrifice was rejected, it was somewhat of this nature. What we may discover in the depths of our soul-life is a heritage coming to us from those primeval times of which we are now speaking. Just as we have inherited other things from that ancient stage of evolution, so do we inherit all kinds of longings, all kinds of repressed wishes impossible to fulfil. It is in this way we must also conjecture that through the rejection of the sacrifice during the phase of evolution there came into existence beings whom we may designate as: Beings with wishes which are repressed. Now because they were obliged to suffer this repression they were in a very special position. And as we can hardly rise into these conditions by means of thought, we must once again turn to certain conditions in our own soul, if we wish to feel, to sense the reflection of them.

A being able to sacrifice its own will passes, in a certain sense, into the being of the other. We can feel this even in our human life, we live and move in one for whom we sacrifice ourselves, we feel glad and satisfied when in that person's presence. And as we are now speaking of the sacrifice offered to higher Beings, to more widely-extending, universal Beings, by others who found their greatest bliss in gazing up at them, what remains behind as repressed longings and wishes can never create the same inner disposition of soul as would have been theirs if they had been allowed to complete their sacrifice. For if they had been able to do this what they offered would have passed over into the other Beings. We might, by way of example suggest, that if the earth and the other planets could have made sacrifice to the Sun—they would be with the Sun. But if they were not allowed to do this, if they had to withhold what they were preparing to offer up, they would then have been driven back into themselves. If we can understand what has just been said in these few words, we observe that at this stage something new enters the universe. It must be clearly understood that it is impossible to express this in any other way than by saying that the Beings who were ready to offer to another all that dwelt within them, were compelled on the rejection of their sacrifice, to draw all this unto themselves. Do you not guess what now flashed up—that this was what is called egoity which comes out in every form? It is thus that we must look upon what lives on in the Beings as a heritage—which later on was poured into evolution, so to speak. We see egoism flashing up in the weakest form, as longing, but we can also see it slipping into the evolution of the Cosmos. Thus we see how Beings devoted to themselves, to their egoity, would in a certain respect have been condemned to a one-sided development, to living only in themselves, if something else had not occurred.

Let us picture a being, permitted to make sacrifice; such a one lives in the other being, and does so for all time. One not allowed to make sacrifice can only live within itself. It is thereby shut off from what it would have experienced in another, in this case a higher Being. Thus from the outset it is condemned and exiled by evolution to a one-sided existence, were it not that something here enters evolution to redress the balance. This is the arrival on the scene of new Beings who prevent the one-sidedness. Just as on Saturn there were the Spirits of Will, and on ancient Sun Spirits of Wisdom, so, on ancient Moon the Spirits of Movement make their appearance; we must not, however, think of movement in space, but movement rather more like the nature of thought. Every one knows the expression “thought-vibrations,” though this only refers to the fluidic movement of our own thought; yet this expression may serve, if we want to acquire a more comprehensive conception of movement, to show us that we think of something more than the mere movement from one place to another, for that is only one of the many forms of movement. If a number of persons devote themselves to a higher Being who is expressive of all that is within them, and who accepts all the sacrifices they offer him, these people live in that Being as a plurality in unity, and find full satisfaction in so doing. But if their sacrifices are rejected, the plurality is driven back upon itself and is never satisfied. Then came the Spirits of Movement and in a sense they guide the Beings who would have simply been driven back upon themselves and bring them into relation with all other Beings. The Spirits of Movement should not be thought of as merely bringing about changes of place; they are Beings able to bring forth something whereby one Being is constantly brought into new relation with others.

We can form an idea of what was attained in the Cosmos at this stage if we once more reflect upon a corresponding disposition of the soul. Who does not know the longing when a condition of soul approaches in which a man is at a standstill, when he can experience no change! Who does not know the torment of it, how it drives a man into a state of mind which becomes unendurable, and which in a merely superficial person takes the form of boredom? But of this boredom which is as a rule only ascribed to a shallow-pated person, there are all manner of in-between stages up to that which is an attribute of noble characters in whom dwells what is generated by their own natures as longing and cannot be satisfied in this world. And what better method is there of quieting longing than by change? This is proved by the fact that persons who suffer from it incessantly seek to form relationships to new beings. The torment of longing can often be overcome by changing the conditions to ever new beings.

Thus we see that while the earth was passing through her Moon-phase, the Spirits of Movement brought into the lives of those beings who were filled with longing and would otherwise have been desolate—for boredom is also a kind of desolation—the change which is brought about by movement, a constantly renewed relation to ever new beings and new conditions. Movement in space, movement from one place to another, is but one form of the more comprehensive movement which has just been mentioned. When in the morning we have a definite train of thought in our soul, not necessarily to be kept to ourselves, but passed on to others—a “movement” takes place. We can then overcome one-sidedness of longing by means of variety, by change and the movement of the things experienced. In outer space there is only a particular form of change. In this connection let us imagine a planet in relation to a Sun: if it always occupied the same position to the Sun, if it never moved, it would be subject to that one-sidedness, which can only result when it presents invariably the same side to the Sun. Then the Spirits of Movement turn the planet round so as to bring about a change in its conditions. Change of place is but one of the many forms of change. And the Spirits of Movement, by bringing change of place into the Cosmos, merely introduce one specific part of movement in general.

But as the Spirits of Movement introduce change and movement into the Universe as we have learnt to know up to the present, something else must follow. We know that during this evolution, in the whole Cosmic multiplicity that evolves upwards as the Spirits of Movement, of Personality, of Wisdom, and of Will—there is also what we have called “Bestowing Virtue,” which is radiated forth as Wisdom, and is the spiritual element behind air and gas. This then combines with the Will now transformed into longing, and within these Beings it becomes what is known to man hardly yet as “thoughts” but as “picture.” We can best realise this in the picture that a man has when he dreams; the fluidic pictures that succeed one another in a dream may evoke a conception of what takes place in a being in whom the volition of longing dwells, and is guided by the Spirits of Movement into relation with other beings. But when it is thus guided into a relation with the other beings, it cannot completely surrender itself—the egotism within it prevents that; but it is able to take in the transitory picture of the other being, which lives in him like a dream-picture. This is the origin of what we call the “arising” of pictures of the other world. At this phase of development we see the arising of the picture-consciousness. And as we human beings ourselves passed through this phase of evolution without then possessing our present earthly ego-consciousness, we must think of ourselves at that time without that which we can now acquire through our ego, but living and weaving in the universe, while within us lived something which we can compare with the present feelings of longing.

We could in a certain fashion imagine, if we do not remember such conditions of suffering as we know on earth, that they could not possibly exist, by reflecting on the following:—Sorrow and suffering—naturally in its soul-form, came at that time into our being and that of other entities connected with our evolution; through the activity of the Spirits of Movement the inner nature which would otherwise have been barren and empty, suffering the tortures of longing, was filled with the balm which flowed into these beings in the form of picture-consciousness, otherwise these beings would have been empty-souled, empty of everything not to be called longing. But the balm of the pictures was slowly poured in, filling the desolate void with variety, and thus the beings were led away from exile and condemnation. If we take what is here said seriously, it gives us both the spiritual basis of what developed during the Moon-phase of our Earth, and of what we now have in the deep subsoil of our consciousness, for it has been covered over by the earth-stage of our nature. And it is so embedded in the subsoil of our soul, that, as the disturbance beneath the surface of the sea drives up the waves, it can influence us, without our being aware of the cause of what enters our consciousness. Beneath the surface of our ordinary ego-consciousness we have such a soul-life as can play up into it. And when it does so, what does the soul-life say? If we bear in mind the cosmic subsoil of this subconscious soul-life, we can say that what we can sense arising from the depths of the soul is a bursting-forth within what we have acquired through our earth-phase, of what has come over from the Moon-phase of evolution. If we clearly grasp what it is that has come into our nature here on the Earth, we have a true explanation of what has been spiritually brought over from the ancient Moon into our Earth-existence.

If you grasp the fact that it was necessary, as has just been described, that pictures should continually arise to assuage the feeling of desolation, you obtain a conception which is of very great importance and weight: that of the longing human soul, in all its yearning emptiness. By the constant succession of pictures, arising one after the other, the yearning is satisfied and brought into harmony; but should the pictures remain any length of time the old longing begins to glimmer faintly up from the depths and the Spirits of Movement call up new pictures. And when these have been there for a little time the longing arises again, demanding fresh ones. Now with respect to a soul-life such as this the momentous sentence must be pronounced: if this longing can only be satisfied by a continual flow of pictures following one after the other, there would be no end to the infinite flow. The only thing that can supervene on this is what must come if the endless flow of pictures is to be replaced by something that is able to redeem it otherwise than by mere pictures—namely, by realities! In other words, the planetary embodiment of our earth through which we have passed, when pictures were brought to us by the activity of the Spirits of Movement, must be replaced by that planetary phase of the earth's embodiment which we call the phase of redemption. We shall see presently that the earth is to be called the “Planet of Redemption,” just as her last embodiment—that of the Moon-existence—may be called the “Planet of Longing”; longing capable of satisfaction yet flowing on endlessly. And while we live in the consciousness belonging to this earth, in which as we know redemption comes to us through the Mystery of Golgotha—there arises continually within us from the subsoil of our soul, a never-ceasing craving for redemption. It is as though, on the surface, we had the waves of our ordinary consciousness—while below, in the depths of the ocean of the soul-life, lives longing, which is the ocean-bed of our soul. This strives continually to ascend to the One who accomplishes the sacrifice, the Universal Being, Who is able to satisfy the longing once and for all time—not in a never-ceasing succession of pictures.

The earth-man already feels moods such as these, and they are the very very best for him to feel. The citizens of earth of our time who feel this longing—which belongs to this particular age of ours—are those who enter our own movement of Spiritual Science. In external life people have learnt to know all the separate things that can satisfy the ordinary superficial consciousness; but from the subconsciousness pushes up that which can never be satisfied in details but yearns for the central basis of life. This basis can only be provided by a universal science which occupies itself with the totality of life rather than with details. That which rises from the subconsciousness must in the sense of to-day be brought into touch with the study of the universal existence living in the world; otherwise that which ascends from the subsoil of the soul will be further longing for something which can never be attained. In this sense anthroposophy is a response to those longings which dwell in the depths of the soul. As everything that happens in the world has had a prelude, we need not wonder at a man who at the present day longs through spiritual science for satisfaction for the powers of his soul, above all, when the unconscious soul-forces akin to longings, would consume themselves as longing. Suppose that he, through living in an earlier age, in which this spiritual wisdom had not been given, had been unable to have it, and had come to long for it, to have a persistent longing for it, unable to grasp the meaning of life, just because he was an eminently great soul. If only something could have flowed into his soul, drowning, silencing the longing for pictures while he yearned for an end to this search for pictures—the greater the yearning, the more intense the search. And is it not like a voice expressing itself to us, the utterance of a spirit living at a time when it could not yet have the spiritual wisdom which, like balsam, is shed forth into the longing soul, when we hear Heinrich Von Kleist writing to a friend. In the following words we seem to hear him say:—“Who would desire to be happy in this world!” I could almost say, shame on you if you wished to be. Would it not be short-sighted, noble man, to strive for anything here below, where all ends in death! We meet here, three Springs long we love, and then we flee apart for an eternity. And what is worth striving for, if love be not? Oh! there must be something more than love, happiness, fame, and so on; something of which our souls do not even dream. It can be no evil spirit at the head of the world, it is merely not understood. Do not we smile too when children cry? Just think of the endless continuity! Myriads of ages, each having its own life, and to each a manifested existence like this world of ours! What is the name of the little star we see in the sky when the night is clear and we gaze at Sirius? All this immense firmament but a speck of dust compared with infinity! Tell me, is this nothing but a dream? At night when we are reposing between our linen sheets, we have a wider aspect, richer in intuition than thoughts can grasp or words describe. Come, let us do something good, and die in doing it! One of the million deaths we have already died, and shall yet die. It is as though we pass from one room to another. Lo! The world to me appears enclosed in a nest of boxes, the smallest exactly like the biggest!”—(From a letter written by Heinrich Von Kleist, in 1806.)

The longing expressed in these words was felt by a man who could not then find anything able to satisfy it—such as a modern thinker may find if he studies anthroposophy in the right way. The writer of these words took his own life a hundred years ago, shooting first his friend, Henriette Vogel and then himself, and now he rests on the banks of Lake Vann in that lonely grave which for a century has closed over his remains.

In speaking of the frame of mind which best illustrates what we are endeavouring to grasp, when we speak of the combined action of the sacrifice of will held back in longing, of the satisfaction of this longing, which could only come through the Spirits of Motion, and the urge towards its ultimate satisfaction, only to come on the Planet of Redemption—a singular Karmic link has caused us to speak here, in accordance with our ordinary programme, on the very day which reminds us of how a great mind expressed this undefined longing in the grandest of words, and finally poured it forth in the most tragic act in which longing could be embodied. How can we fail to recognise that this man's spirit in its entirety as he stands before us, is an actual living embodiment of that which dwells in the depths of the soul, which we must trace back to something other than the life of earth if we wish to recognise it? Has not Heinrich Von Kleist described in the most significant manner what may live within a man (a description of which you will find at the very beginning of The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Mankind), as something transcending him and driving him, and which he will only understand later on if he does not snap the threads of his life before! Think of his “Penthesilea”; how much more there is in her than she can span with her earthly consciousness! We should not be able to describe her at all, did we not take for granted that her soul was immeasurably further advanced than the narrow little soul (although it was a great one) which she could span with her earthly consciousness. Hence a situation must arise which artistically introduces the whole process of the Drama. Indeed, it was necessary to prevent the whole transaction—which Kleist introduces with Achilles—from being grasped with the higher consciousness; otherwise the whole tragedy could not be perceived. Hence Achilles is called “her” Achilles. What lies in the higher consciousness must be plunged into the non-conscious. Again, what part does this subconsciousness play in Kätchen Von Heilbronn, especially in the remarkable relation between her and Wetter Von Strahl, which plays no part in the higher consciousness, but in the deeper strata of the soul where dwell the forces of which man knows nothing, which pass from one to another. When we have this before us we can feel the spiritual nature of the world's forces of gravity and attraction. For instance, in the scene where Kätchen stands before her admirers, do we not feel what lives in the subconsciousness, and how it is related to what is outside in the world which has been drily called the planet's force of attraction? Yet only one hundred years ago a truly penetrating and striving mind was not able to find his way into that subconsciousness. But it must be done today. And the tragedy of a Prince of Homburg strikes us in a very different way now. I should like to know how an abstract thinker, one who accounts for everything by reason alone, could account for a figure such as the Prince of Homburg, who carried out all his great deeds in a kind of dream-state, even those leading finally to victory. Kleist indicates very clearly that he could not possibly gain the victory by means of his higher consciousness, for as far as that was concerned he was not a particularly great man, for he whines and whimpers over everything he has to do. Only when by a special effort of the will, he brings up what dwells in the depths of his soul, does he play the man.

What still belongs to a man as heritage of the old Moon consciousness must not be brought to the surface by abstract science, but by that science which has many sides, and can lay hold in a delicate and subtle way of spiritual contours: that is, Spiritual Science. The greatest unites itself with the mediocre and the ordinary.

Thus we see that Anthroposophy shows that the conditions we are experiencing in our souls to-day are connected with the Cosmos, with the Universe. We see also, however, how that which we experience in the soul to-day can alone provide us with an understanding of the spiritual foundation of things. We see, too, that our era had to come to satisfy what was yearned for in the age preceding our own, when men longed for what cannot be given until our age. We feel a kind of veneration for such men, who could not find their bearings as regards what they longed for in their hearts, and what the world could not give them. When we recollect that all human life is linked together, and that the man of to-day can devote his life to those spiritual movements which—as their destiny shows—bygone men have so long desired we cannot but feel a veneration for them. So, on the centenary of the tragic death of one who was consumed by that longing, we may in a sense point to Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science as being the redemption of mankind from that longing. This day may serve to remind us how tragically and stormily that which Anthroposophy is able to give us, has been desired and longed for. This is a thought that we may well take hold of, which perhaps is also anthroposophical, on the centenary of the death of one of the greatest German poets.

with Dr. Steiner [Dr. Rittelmeyer is a new addition] in the chair.

Dr. Kolisko reads the circular letter [the new draft of the Appeal].

Adolf Arenson is not in favor of the whole story going out into the world in print, but only to be presented to the assembly of delegates.

Dr. Schwebsch asks Dr. Rittelmeyer what impression he has gained from the matter that has been read out.

Dr. Rittelmeyer: I had the impression that the Society was being set on fire. Discussions like the one on Monday are impossible. This afternoon I was present. [Dr. Steiner did not attend this meeting.] On the whole, I would like to see a warmer tone adopted, so that the positive things that the Society wants and can do are convincingly expressed. The tone that is struck should bear witness to the fact that each individual is brought to carry out his function. Great slogans must come from Stuttgart. Each of the speakers should see that something great is happening through it. Care should also be taken to ensure that the anthroposophical spiritual material is properly conveyed. Efforts should be made to ensure that the right kind of polemic and apologetics are provided.

Dr. Steiner: Our opponents must not be given the opportunity to gain the negative impression from us.

Many speakers speak: Dr. Hahn, Dr. Schwebsch, Alexander Strakosch.

Dr. Rittelmeyer: What is at stake is that we come to self-reflection in the face of the tremendous hour of destiny. Would it not be right to make a positive suggestion that a number of us, quite on our own, without regard to the programs that have been presented so far, would reflect on the deepest essence of the anthroposophical impulse and put it on paper. Then it could either be used as it is, or the most suitable thing, with which everyone can best identify, would be sent out.

Dr. Husemann supports this proposal.

Dr. Steiner: I would have found it understandable if Dr. Husemann had made such a proposal three weeks ago today. It is understandable that Dr. Rittelmeyer is making it. But that Dr. Husemann, at this psychological moment, expects us to do something for a society around which – as Dr. Rittelmeyer rightly said – a fire has been set, which I have always emphasized, too – when Dr. Husemann expects us to do something like that, then I can only say that I cannot understand his whole view and sympathy. The psychological moment has not come to sit down again and brood over nothing for as long as possible. There has been enough time since the many weeks when we always spent the time driving back and forth between Dornach and here to learn about the things that have been discussed here. Dr. Husemann, you must not think that you can be offered anything!

Dr. Hahn will speak about this.

Dr. Steiner: The best must be expressed in the appeal. Mr. Arenson says that this version will immediately be in the hands of the enemies. I consider the belief that this will do no harm to be the greatest naivety. One must be clear about the fact that one cannot sleep through the whole process of the Anthroposophical Society. You have to realize that whatever version is published, tomorrow it will be in the hands of the enemies. So you have to realize that you are publishing a version that can fall into anyone's hands. This version must not begin with the sentence: 'The hour of destiny has come for society'. If you send out the matter in this version, then those who started the fire will have the very best foundation. I was pleased that this was said today in the middle of the discussion. I have emphasized it myself again and again. It's just that no one ever listens to what I say. Everyone must admit that you could have known this. Everything here is done as if there were no opposition. You can only want to send out such an appeal if you are completely cut off from the real facts of the situation. We had this appeal almost word for word yesterday. That is why I asked for it to be discussed today. The result of the discussion is that the same appeal appears again.

Adolf Arenson and Mr. Baumann will speak about this.

Dr. Steiner: On page 2, the sentence: “This order was not recorded by Mr. Uehli. Such omissions were openly admitted.” Page 3: “Since Dr. Steiner insisted at all meetings that one should press ahead until the real damage was known...” Page 4, for example, the impossible sentence: “do better from now on and expose mistakes unreservedly...”, “Don't let the question of personalities come to the fore...”.

If you write down a sentence like this, for example, you will see that a large number of people who are pushing for a reorganization say, “These people don't even understand the very basics. They make suggestions to downplay the question of personalities.” The question of personalities is exactly what matters! Out there, it's about people, not about the central committee.

Only today I was told how bad blood it made when the pedagogical course met here and the invitations had to be obtained. The matter was told to me in this way – it serves only to characterize the “Stuttgart System”, it may even be possible to correct it -: The matter was that this youth league, which had organized the course, was supposed to invite the central committee; a conversation is said to have taken place between the invitees and Dr. Unger, in which Dr. Unger is said to have said that it was not important to him to be invited personally, but that the central committee had to be invited. The young people invited the three gentlemen personally and individually; but they had not invited the central committee.

If you throw these sentences into the fire that exists within the Society, people will say: They don't have the slightest talent for doing what matters. — By saying this, you are conjuring up an impossible intensification of this fateful hour.

The whole of what follows as a portrayal of the coming day is a single point of attack. For example, that I should also give my advice to those who work for threefolding outside the movement. People will laugh at that. As if I had assumed that I should give advice to the whole world! The relationship to religious renewal is also presented quite wrongly here. —- “The leading personalities are fully aware of the omissions and wrong methods. That these methods have been particularly emphasized by Stuttgart...” When such sentences appear in an appeal, then above all the people who would now like to have the Society as you know it – above all the outside opponents – will say: So that's all; they not only wash dirty linen in their own house, but what this Society is doing is hanging out its dirty linen for the whole world to see.

I have tried so hard to point out what would lead to the matter being brought before the world in a plausible way. This has not been taken into account. Of course, the damage also had to be mentioned. But the damage was only mentioned in order to get to the positive things.

Several people present speak.

Dr. Steiner: The matter is so obvious. One must look at the things I have mentioned that belong to the positive part of the call. One could say: It is a fact that since 1919 the prominent personalities we have in society have moved here to Stuttgart. This should have led to a powerful impulse for the movement emanating from here. Instead, these foundations have been established. A Waldorf school has been set up. The Waldorf teachers feel that they can ignore what is going on around them, because they have the school.

I said: We can't go on like this. This is something that plays into the hands of our opponents. Has anyone ever paid attention to what I said? It was like that every time. I was very glad when Dr. Rittelmeyer gave his speech. He emphasized that this “alliance of non-anthroposophical experts on anthroposophy” is bringing up certain things from the past. This is a very important clue that can now be put to extremely good use. Was it necessary that we did not take the defense of the anthroposophical cause itself into our own hands years ago? That we did not repeatedly point out specific defamations in an appropriate manner? I myself do not get around to it because other things are more necessary. It was not necessary to continually supply new material to the opponents, but to also take the defense of the Society into our own hands. Now they are making an appeal accusing the Society. (Note from Dr. Heyer: “The ‘Federation of Non-Anthroposophical Connoisseurs of Anthroposophy’ presents facts that we should make use of in order to point out the specific slanders with a single blow —— defense of the Anthroposophical Society —— The appeal must state that we now want to do what was not done earlier.”)

Mr. Fink: The individuals should withdraw and work something out.

Mr. Stockmeyer supports the motion that the individuals should withdraw, that each person should draft the appeal and that they should then meet again.

Dr. Steiner: I would like to briefly outline what Dr. Rittelmeyer said. Firstly, that fires have been set everywhere around the Anthroposophical Society; secondly, that impossible discussions have taken place here in the branch twice in a row; thirdly, that he wishes there to be a warmer tone overall; further, that the positive should be strongly emphasized; that certain strong slogans should be issued; that the sectarian spirit must recede; that the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge be imparted in a careful, not distorted way as by the opponents of the world; that he had listened to the offensive in the discussions and that the story of the cloud secret [...] then came out; that above all he misses correct mediators of the anthroposophical spiritual knowledge.

Dr. Steiner (to Dr. Röschl): Why can't one reveal that one is familiar with the writing [of the league of non-anthroposophical experts on anthroposophy]? [It says:] “It is a fight to the death.” Should we openly document that we do not care about our opponents?

Dr. Noll: Dr. Goesch characterizes himself as an epileptic. Two absences. These

people are going to be led around by an epileptic.

Dr. Steiner (to Dr. Noll): Do it! You are a doctor, aren't you! The weekly journal Anthroposophie is waiting for material for its next issue. Anthroposophie is as boring as it can possibly be because no one provides any material, and those who know the material provide nothing.

A motion has been made that we adjourn.

The meeting is interrupted and the participants write their proposals. After two hours the meeting continues.

Continuation (night session, starting at 10:30 p.m.)

Dr. Steiner: Then we can begin.

A large number of the participants read out their proposals or talk about the difficulties of society: Dr. Noll, Mr. Apel, Dr. Heyer, Dr. Röschl,

Dr. Stein, Mr. Stockmeyer, Mr. Maier, Mr. Wolffhügel, Mr. Strakosch, Dr. von Heydebrand.

Dr. Steiner: Twelve calls! I request suggestions as to the form in which we want to negotiate.

Dr. Rittelmeyer: It seems to me that the calls are mostly full of empty phrases. There is far too little concrete discussion based on the situation. Seriousness is mentioned, but it is not given enough consideration.

I imagine it could be worded something like this – I have written it down: “We have become aware that society in its present form is not the right vehicle for spiritual values. It has become too entrenched, too selfish and self-indulgent. There has been a lack of cohesion of forces. So it has come about that precisely the yearning that awakens in youth has not found the right place in society where it can be satisfied. The universal need for spiritual knowledge has not found the right organ. The present situation calls on us to be mindful of our duty. An opposition has awakened that has already given us all kinds of tests. We must become fully aware of the high spiritual good that has been entrusted to us in this hour of world history. We bear the responsibility for ensuring that this spiritual good is conveyed in the right way. New, elastic, free forms must be found for what has been entrusted to us. Everywhere it is a matter of leading the spirit in full freedom and purest clarity to the depths where the solution of the problems shines forth. If we become aware of the tasks, then we may hope that a solution can be found.

Paul Baumann: Dr. Rittelmeyer should be asked to write the appeal.

Jose del Monte is opposed to a single person making the appeal. He should come about through the combined efforts of everyone.

Dr. Unger: Dr. Rittelmeyer should be involved.

Dr. Stein: Dr. Rittelmeyer should choose those with whom he believes he can do it.

Dr. Rittelmeyer: I am actually only in a position to make the material I have written available to you. I need at least until tomorrow morning so that I can present it. I don't want everything that was in the other individual calls to be lost.

Dr. Steiner: We are back to square one. The situation has become tragic. Isn't it true, just consider this: yesterday I asked you to summarize the individual institutions. But let's refrain from doing so at this moment. What preceded the discussions that have begun about the reorganization of society? This was preceded by a polemic against the improper behavior of anthroposophists towards the “Movement for Religious Renewal”. Then a small committee was formed that is historically connected with this defense against what was overgrowing the society. A committee of seven was formed to take charge of the reorganization. And now the representatives of the Anthroposophical Society themselves are transferring the reorganization of the Society to the leader of the religious renewal! That is the fact that you have now organized. Just consider that the person who made the request was also the leader of the committee of seven.

If you believe that we will make progress in this way, that the steps we are taking will have any significance, then the situation of society is quite tragic. Because just admit what it means to hand over a reorganization plan with nothing but negative criticism. Yesterday I myself suggested calling Dr. Rittelmeyer. I have only given all this as a description of the situation we find ourselves in.

Marie Steiner: Now the Anthroposophical Society is buried, and the gravestone can be placed on it.

Dr. Unger (jumps up): If no one else offers to do it, then I will undertake to make the appeal alone. I repeat the offer to make this appeal. It could be ready by tomorrow morning.

Dr. Steiner: Just consider what the deeper meaning of all these weeks of discussions is. It is this: when something happens in the Society, the will of people must also stand behind it. It is not enough to express thoughts and then have others say that they agree with them. It just so happens that the people who have held the leadership of the Society externally in recent years have moved to Stuttgart. Today we have reached a point where it is no longer possible to merely have the appearance of leadership, but where leadership must be taken up with real power. No matter how many thoughts I would say, it would be of no use to you. After all that has happened, it is of no use to hand down thoughts with which one then declares one's agreement. If society had been left with the standpoint of 1918, there would have been no “Kommende Tag” and no Waldorf School. Now that all this is in place, it is a matter of actually taking control of it. To do this, the will must be connected with the thoughts of those who want to lead, otherwise there is no will and no power. You have to muster the strength to do something. This strength must be able to turn into something positive. You have to have something in yourself. And, isn't it true, if an attempt is made to put something like this forward here, it ultimately leads to suggestions like the one just made. Until yesterday, the whole of society had not thought of inviting Dr. Rittelmeyer. The whole of society, which has been discussing here for weeks what to do, is now calling on Dr. Rittelmeyer to write the appeal. It must not be understood as if the whole Anthroposophical Society agrees with this.

Adolf Arenson: I felt a sense of relief when Dr. von Heydebrand spoke earlier.

Dr. Steiner: We could have said that we ourselves did not want anything and transferred the whole thing to Dr. Rittelmeyer. It is better to say everything as it is. There is no other way than to say: the old board stays, and then we wait to see what the others say, who have been shaken up in this way. That is the conclusion: the old board stays, since no result has been reached; we will wait to see what the company says about it tomorrow. But what was the whole campaign for? Why was all this staged?

Dr. Stein: They wanted to perform a feat.

Dr. Steiner: We started by saying that the old board had become a laughing stock, and we end up with the result that the old board has to stay because of the lack of results.

Dr. Blämel: Could Dr. Steiner, as the occult leader, not designate those who have the ability to lead the Society out of chaos?

Adolf Arenson: The task now is to write the appeal. Emil Leinbas: The old central committee can no longer function.

Dr. Steiner: The point is that the Anthroposophical Society should want something in its leaders; this may even differ from what I myself consider desirable. What the Society wants in its leaders must emerge. This is quite independent of the accident in Dornach. It arose from the task I gave Mr. Uehli on December 10. I asked Mr. Uehli to meet with other members of the central committee, reinforced by leading personalities here in Stuttgart, to make proposals about the opinions that exist in the central committee and in the committee regarding the further continuation of the Society. Nothing came of this. Because when I arrived here, a committee of seven members, actually under the leadership of Mr. Uehli, met me. This committee really behaved as if it had the philosopher's stone in relation to reorganization; and its criticism culminated in the fact that the old board was a laughing stock. Since then, negotiations have been ongoing. I also presented the other part of the alternative: that otherwise I would be forced to turn to each individual member of the Anthroposophical Society myself in order to somehow put the Society itself in order. Now, as I said, instead of the Central Board carrying out the task, a committee has confronted me here, and the actions of this committee have now led to this result, which has just been characterized. Either the leadership of the Society declares: We give up the possibility of continuing the leadership —— or it must express what it wants. But it must offer some kind of guarantee that the Society has a will and is not just grumbling. There must be a real will.

Now, the negotiations have been carried this far for the reason that I must, of course, offer the utmost chance that the Anthroposophical Society can continue to act as a society. You have to look at things as they are. We cannot undo what has happened. What does it mean to go back to the situation in 1918? I will mention just two things. One would be to close the Waldorf School; the other would be to pay out all the sums that have been paid in for shares. We must be clear about the consequences of everything. It is easy to make speeches, but we in the Society have institutions that must continue to function. Therefore it is not an easy matter when I have to address each individual member. You can't close the Waldorf School! You can't buy back the shares! But these are the real foundations for such an action. If I were now forced to do so, it would mean that nothing would remain of the old Anthroposophical Society but these real institutions. The “Kommende Tag” must be treated in such a way that it does not lose its reputation; the Waldorf School must continue to exist. But the Anthroposophical Society must dissolve, and I turn to the members to create something new.

Therefore, the last chance must be seized. When the Anthroposophical Society was constituted, I expressly stipulated that I would not be a member. You have only to discuss whether you want to resign your leadership or continue to lead. Please bear in mind that I have never been involved in the administration of the Anthroposophical Society. Things must be taken as they are. You cannot act as you have done, out of your emotions, and say that the old Central Board is a laughing stock. Do you think it is easy to face people and say that we have once again sat through a night without results? Oh, we already know what the sparrows are saying on the rooftops: “Let's get rid of all your leadership!”

Marie Steiner: The will is directed towards dismissing Dr. Unger. But there is no pure will for the reorganization of the Anthroposophical Society and for the cause itself.

Dr. Steiner: One also has the right to dismiss someone; but one must know whom one then puts in his place. Just imagine: it would rightly be laughed out of court if, after three weeks of negotiations, the decision were taken to adjourn the meeting. And that after twelve appeals have been made! After two hours, twelve people had decided to take action, after otherwise just waiting for someone else to do something. I can only say: the simple fact that twelve calls have emerged after two hours testifies to the lack of interest in a matter that one has represented with an unparalleled zeal. What could have been achieved if the same intentions that have been developed in the last two hours had been present earlier!

It is not surprising that nothing of any significance has been said. The way people think about a matter that is serious in the deepest sense is what has characterized the “Stuttgart system” to this hour. I do not want to reorganize the Anthroposophical Society. I have to turn to those who have turned to Anthroposophy. You are deciding the fate of the Anthroposophical Society! We cannot go on telling people: “Be so good as to wait!”

Adolf Arenson talks about the reorganization. He gives a summary of the points on which he intends to negotiate with the Friends: What is it that is still missing? He sees only the need to call the Friends together to make the weak points strong.

Dr. Steiner: We must not just give programs. If we want to issue a declaration of will, we must say something in it. The words must express a direction of will. Dr. Rittelmeyer's suggestion was good, but the tragic situation is that the others think that without what Dr. Rittelmeyer called “strong slogans,” they could no longer save society at all; everyone else should adhere to these slogans. What do you think? The people you call here as delegates want to find leadership here. The situation must be created in which the people say: Now the people of Stuttgart are confronting us in such a way that we want to follow them. In Stuttgart, people must know what needs to be done. The others are waiting to hear what is being done here in Stuttgart. Otherwise we will end up in pure negation.

Youth is not the most important thing. What do you think will happen if you don't come up with slogans today? Tomorrow, young people will say: “They don't know anything; now we have to do it!” Young people don't know anything either; they only think they know something, but they don't know anything. They are passing judgment on society with what they want or don't want now. This must be taken into account. You can't just say: Well, let's call a meeting of delegates; they'll then tell us what we should want.

The following spoke: Adolf Arenson, Miss Dr. Röschl and Dr. Schwebsch.

Dr. Steiner: The committee that was formed yesterday met today.¹ A spokesperson presented the first draft. This is the committee's appeal. Then, aren't they, the other appeals that have also been put forward are from Dr. Unger, Dr. Heyer and so on. These are personal appeals, just like the others. These two things must be considered absolutely separately.²

The fact of the matter is that yesterday this committee had Dr. Kolisko's draft as something finished. We parted: firstly, with the appointment of the committee; secondly, with the request to this committee to convert the draft into a positive one. Furthermore, the draft, with all that it contains, cannot of course be signed by the provisional central committee. So the starting point for today's appeal was, secondly, that its negative points should be converted into positive ones. The mistake, then, is not that any positive points have been newly added, but that only the old negative points have remained. I expected the negations to be transformed into positives. Substantially, it is important that the twelve appeals suffer from an excess of phraseology; they do not have enough substance. Those who make the appeal do not act independently enough.

Dr. Stein once said: We should not let the life's work of Dr. Steiner be taken away from us. — The appeal has now made the following impression: The points that I myself gave were heard, but they appeared in the appeal without any inner connection. The point is to make such a thing one's own. That is why I repeated these things again. What you have written in there does not have enough affinity with the personalities. That is what it comes down to.

José del Monte speaks.

Dr. Steiner: Dr. Rittelmeyer began his speech by saying that he had reported in detail to the committee on what he had said. I am just surprised that there is nothing about this in the committee's appeal, nor about what was decided yesterday: to transform negation into a positive.

I cannot formulate the points that should ultimately be the positive ones. (Note from Dr. Heyer: “It would be detrimental if I were to state the positive points.”) This must be done by those who have been given the task of working in the direction indicated.

Now, as a result of all the misery yesterday, we have come to form a committee that is roughly the same as the one I had imagined the old board could have formed. I imagined that the old board would have formed this committee from the synthesis of positive activities in the anthroposophical cause. It is composed of all the necessary antecedents. This committee has the opportunity to represent the shades of the old, and through its two members, Mr. von Grone and Wolfgang Wachsmuth, who are young, it has the opportunity to be accepted by young people. So this morning, because we had to give the young people some information, I said: ³ I am just curious to know whether the old people among the young will accept the young people among the old. So I asked if the old among the young would accept the young among the old. I was told that it would only depend on how they would approach us. — The new committee has the opportunity to exist as something old; and at the same time it has the opportunity to be accepted by the youth.

Things must arise out of the real facts. Furthermore, as already mentioned, the committee is composed in such a way that it is a synthesis of those positive activities that are decisive in the anthroposophical movement. This committee is given out of the nature of the matter itself. But if we don't achieve anything, then the society must abdicate.

If only the committee acts in the right way. Dr. Kolisko belongs to the young among the old; he is already called the “second soulless dialectician”; Dr. Kolisko belongs to the young among the old. Because this committee has two prominent, still completely undiscovered personalities among its members, it only needs to reveal itself in the right way in one or the other direction. A committee must be such that it can work in a wide variety of directions. The committee could not be better composed. I cannot understand why it should not work.

Just consider: before I left last week, we had heard the most serious accusations against each other. Before I left, I asked the Provisional Committee to prepare the matter so that we could discuss it the following Monday. I had in mind what had been read here. The question was whether another Monday meeting should be held here. At least the call could have been made. What happened on Monday? This Monday meeting was a mere repetition of the meeting that had taken place before I went to Dornach. The same thing happened again. Of course, small variations occur; time alone makes them because the earlier process is no longer remembered exactly. When I complained that there was an exact repetition, I was told that it was with other bases. I was also told that negotiations had to be conducted with the people. Now we were at the point where there had been a straightforward repetition and it had to be made clear once again that such an appeal had to be made. We can continue the matter like this. From yesterday to today it is a straightforward repetition, with the exception of what the pause for thought has produced.

We had a memorable vote yesterday.⁴ I had a vote on who had read Mr. von Grone's essay. I had a vote on who had not read it: that was the vast majority. When I go to the Waldorf School, the magazines lie there for many days. Lack of interest begins with only taking care of one's own narrow field. Here one is no longer an anthroposophist by degrees; one is really no longer an anthroposophist. It takes three weeks before one comes to the decision to reflect on anthroposophy.

What Dr. Rittelmeyer said this evening follows from all of this. If you had been present at the small committee meetings, you would not be able to deny that all these points have already been raised; most of them in even greater detail. No one has taken care of this. They could have drawn on the things that have been discussed here for weeks. As long as we do not make an effort to draw from reality and do not get tirades out of a book, we will get nowhere. The reader senses whether there is anything real in the appeal. The spirit must enter in, which engages with the facts with good will. And it is this spirit that is being opposed.

Now I don't know whether we will see another copy tomorrow night. If we don't make every effort, then we will end up with a revolution in full swing in society. At least we should be clear about that, that Mr. Leinhas would also have to stay if we stay and only

Friday morning. But then the time would have to be used for work.

Adolf Arenson: I object to the fact that it is said that this group made that suggestion.

Dr. Steiner: Anyone who did not make the proposal can object. The fact remains that this proposal was made this evening by this group. You can now be appalled that this fact has come to light. Such a group should at least agree on the most fundamental things, so that it does not reduce itself to absurdity.

So tomorrow the whole group.

• 1. Without Rudolf Steiner. There are no minutes of this.
• 2. Of the numerous drafts that were made for the appeal, nothing is available.
• 3. No protocol.
• 4. It was not possible to determine in which district the vote took place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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