The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The aim of these talks has been, and must continue to be, to show from all kinds of different aspects how people today and in the near future are moving into a period of civilization which will make special demands in different spheres of life. Speaking of processes deep down in the life of the spirit, I have sought to show what is happening today supersensibly, but all the same with powerful effect especially in the present time and which will influence the whole of human life, the whole of culture and the whole social sphere. We have been able to gather from these considerations that human soul nature will essentially become more inward.

When it is said that human soul nature will become more inward we must not fail to realize that this growing inwardness will, in many instances, go hand in hand with people becoming more superficial in their intellect, for instance with regard to the sciences. This will be due to the circumstances we have already considered and others which are still to be considered. It really has to be taken into account that, in reality, evolution is never as consistent as those who present the modern scientific theories of evolution would like it to be. Their ideas are not incorrect; yet ideas which are biased, even if correct, will often cause greater confusion than completely wrong ideas. They assume simple linear evolution from incomplete life-forms all the way to the human being. This is not how it is, however, for in the evolution of humanity and also of the world outside the human being, a more outward stream is always complemented by an inner one. Thus we are able to say: if a particular stream continues for some time in the outside world, an inner stream will run parallel to it (see Fig. 11a). This stream may be more material or materialistic on the outside, whilst inwardly it is more spiritual or spiritualistic. Then a more spiritualistic stream comes to the surface and the materialistic or material stream goes down into the hidden depths of human nature. And then the situation is reversed again: the more spiritual line goes inward and the material or materialistic one comes to the surface.

In the time immediately ahead of us, outer life will very much follow the course shown by the red line here (see Fig. 11a) where material events and material attitudes and considerations are concerned, and the depth of the human soul will be more spiritual. It may well be that people do not even want to know about this growing spiritual inwardness; but it will happen nevertheless.

If you really dwell on this in your soul, you will be able to give due consideration to two aspects which will be extraordinarily important for the future. Remember we said yesterday that in 1879 ahrimanic powers of a special kind descended from the heights of the spirit into the realm of human evolution, and specifically into the evolution of the human intellect and soul. These powers are here, they are living among us. They seek above all to take possession of our heads, of anything we think and inwardly feel. They are angelic Spirits, I said, who cannot continue their development in the spiritual world and want to use human heads to continue to develop in the immediate future. It is therefore particularly important that this line (blue line in Fig. 11a) of secret, hidden soul development is given due attention. As I have told you, many people probably do not want to give it conscious attention; they would far rather it stayed down below, so they need only concern themselves with material things. If it is not given attention, those ahrimanic powers will take hold of this very process of growing inwardness. This is one thing we must take into account. We must be ready to face the danger soon to come in the evolution of civilization, and stand guard in our most holy, inner human reality against the influences of ahrimanic powers.

Educational issues will be particularly significant in the immediate future. The inwardness of the human soul will be most significant during childhood and youth in the near future. Perhaps it is difficult to believe this today, but the time has long since come for us to say: the children and young people we see do not show their true nature in what we see on the outside. We see the red line here (see Fig. 11a), but beside it runs the blue one, a hidden inner life to which we must pay real attention. Teachers must pay attention to it, lest they surrender it to the ahrimanic powers. Education and training will have to change completely in many respects in the near future.

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Let us consider the origin of the principles in our present system of education and training. Certain things always lag behind in the cosmic order. ‘Enlightenment’, as it was called, was a special feature of the eighteenth century. People even wanted to establish a kind of rational religion based only on human reflection, on the starveling among the sciences, as I have said in my public lectures in Basle.¹ The way people feel they must behave towards growing children and young people in education and training has entirely come out of this stream of rationality: always do everything in such a way that the child can immediately understand; children should never experience anything deeper than they are able to understand.

It will have to be realized that this is the worst possible way of providing for the life of a human being, for it takes us to a truly disastrous extreme in human life. Just consider this: if we make every effort to give children only such things as are in accord with their level of understanding, things they can grasp, we do not give them anything for later life when they are supposed to have deeper understanding. Care is taken, so to speak, to ensure that for the whole of their lives they have nothing but the understanding of a child. This approach has already borne fruit, and the fruits are what you would expect! Much of the thinking in our present-day civilized world, where people consider themselves to be so wise and enlightened, remains at a childish level. No one in the newspaper world is, of course, going to admit that the thinking in their world is largely childish, but it is true nevertheless. Essentially this is connected with the fact that only the child's understanding is addressed. This then remains the same throughout life. Something quite different will have to be done: we must fill our souls, especially if we are educators, with the inner awareness, the consciousness, that a mysterious inwardness reigns in a child and we must present to the child's heart and mind much that will only be understood later on in life, not in childhood. Later in life they can then recall these things from memory and say to themselves: this is something you heard or learned on that occasion; now at last you are able to understand many of these things. Nothing will be better for the soundness of human life in the future than for individuals to recall things they were told in childhood, and then be able to understand them.

When people are able to live with themselves in such a way as to recall from memory the things they could not understand before, this will be the source for a healthy inner life. People will be spared the inner emptiness which enters into so many hearts and souls today, and causes them to end up in institutions. There, souls which have remained empty and barren inside because education has failed to give them anything that can be recalled later on in life may be offered something from outside.

Something else needs to be considered in this context. Because of the circumstances I have spoken of in recent times, people of our present age have lost awareness of the close connection between human beings and the universe. People today believe they are just hunks of meat walking on this earth or travelling in a railway carriage. They will not always admit this, of course, but this is in fact what they have in mind. It is not true, however. Human beings are closely bound up with the whole universe. And it is good to bring this clearly to mind again by considering the following.

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Consider the Earth. The Moon moves around it; let us say this is the orbit of the Moon (see Fig. 11b). The Earth is, of course, anything but the abstract mineral entity imagined by modern mineralogists, geologists and physicists. It is very much alive, and we can observe many forms of existence in connection with the Earth. For the moment, let us merely consider the currents which move around the Earth all the time. They move around it in all kinds of directions. They are etheric and spiritual by nature and have a real, substantial effect. Something is always present in these currents.

It is good to consider the source and origin of these currents. We shall be going into more detail as time goes on; for today I merely want to make some preliminary statements. If you read my Occult Science you will find that in very early times the Earth and the Sun were one. Our present-day Earth has been eliminated from the Sun. These currents are remnants from the life of the Sun; Sun life is still present in the Earth.

Yet the Moon, too, was one with the Earth in the past. And the Moon which orbits the Earth today also has currents within it. Those currents are remnants from a later time, from Moon evolution.

We thus have two kinds of currents and we may call them Sun currents and Moon currents. They take quite a different course, and they are a living reality. Let us assume a creature walking this Earth in a certain way has Sun currents passing through it; these pass through easily. Let us assume another creature is constructed in a different way, so that the Sun currents pass through it coming from one side and Moon currents from the other. Sun currents are not limited to specific places and actuality pass through everything; they can therefore pass through this creature in one direction. Thus there can be creatures on Earth who have only the Sun current passing through them in one direction, and there may be others who have the Sun current pass through them in one direction and the Moon current in another.

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Animals are creatures which can only have the Sun current going through them. Imagine a four-legged animal: as it walks, its backbone is essentially parallel to the Earth's surface. The Sun current, which has now become an Earth current, can continually pass through this backbone. This creature, then, is related to the Earth.

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It is different with human beings. In the living human body only the head has the position held by animals. Think of a line drawn from the back of the head to the forehead—it is the direction of the animal's backbone, and the same Sun current passes through the head. The human backbone, on the other hand, is lifted out of the currents which run parallel to the Earth, including the Sun current which has become Earth current. Being lifted out, human beings are in a position (this does, of course, depend a great deal on the geographical latitude and so on, but it is also what makes people different from each other) where under certain conditions the Moon current goes through them; not through the head, however, but through the backbone. The difference between animals and humans is tremendous. The cosmic current which passes through the animal backbone passes through the human head; the old Moon current, which does not relate to anything in the animal, passes through the human backbone. The human backbone even reflects its relationship to the Moon current in its composition, for human beings have approximately as many vertebrae as there are days in a month, between 28 and 31 vertebrae. The reason why the figure is only approximate will be considered at a later time. The whole life of the human backbone, and indeed of the human breast, is intimately bound up with the life of the Moon. Hidden beneath the life of the Sun, which relates to sleeping and waking and takes 24 hours, lies the rhythmical life of the Moon.

This is a basic reflection on the relationship between the human being and the whole universe. For just as the currents passing through the human backbone are part of the current which relates to the life of the Moon, so other currents in the human being relate to the other planets in our solar system. All these things are utterly real. In modern science they have been completely abandoned, and no one even ventures to consider these relationships. In consequence, scientists are not able to appreciate that the conscious human life which is outwardly apparent here on Earth goes hand in hand with an unconscious life which is connected with the human breast and arises from mysterious inner depths. This must be especially taken into account in times like those which lie ahead; it must be especially taken into account in the sphere of education, for otherwise the adversarial ahrimanic powers will take hold of the unconscious life. It would be utterly disastrous if people were to fail to note that part of their inner life, the part which is in the process of becoming more inward—the blue line in the diagram—is in danger of falling prey to the ahrimanic powers, unless it is taken up in full consciousness and deepened through the insights of a spiritual science in which courage is taken actually to say something about realities which outer science is unable to discover.

We must look at this in entirely concrete terms. Consider the way outer science is going. It is entering into all kinds of abstractions and, indeed, is most useful when it enters into all kinds of abstractions. People will need this science for their outer life; it must become part of human civilization. To use the outer scientific culture, such as it is now, in education will be particularly detrimental in the immediate future. To teach children abstract notions of nature and the laws of nature which people need to know will become an absurdity in the near future. On the other hand, it will be important—I can always only give examples—to consider the lives of animals in a loving way, with their special conditions of life described to give the children a real picture of how ants behave in their communities, how they live together, and so on. As you know, the beginnings of this are to be found in Brehm's Tierleben,² though they are not fully developed. Such symbolized stories of life in the animal world need to be more and more fully developed. Individual stories should be told in a truly thoughtful way, rather than dishing up elementary zoology to children in the dreadful way it is done now. We must tell them of the special things the lion does, and the fox, the ant, the ladybird, and so on. It is of no real consequence if the details which are told actually happen or not; what matters is that they are thoughtful and come from the heart. The kind of extract of natural history which is dinned into children today should only come in later years; children must first of all be able to take delight in stories which represent individual aspects in the lives of animals.

It will be particularly important to consider plant life in such a way that one has many stories to tell about the relationship of the rose to the violet, of shrubs to the weeds which grow around them, and long stories about the Spirits leaping above the flowers as one walks through a meadow, and the like. This is the botany children should be told. And they should be told of how certain green-coloured crystals which dwell in the earth behave towards colourless crystals, or a cubic crystal to an octahedral one. Instead of the abstract crystallography which is dished out to children who are still quite young, much to their detriment, we should have a symbolistic presentation of the life of the crystals down in the earth. Our views on everything which goes on in the depths of the earth can only be fruitful if we make them fruitful with the descriptions which are given in our anthroposophical literature. It will not be enough just to list items; these things must be the stimulus and give us ideas, so that we can tell many stories about the life shared by diamonds and sapphires, and so on. Think about it and you will know what I mean.

In a similar way it will be important not to dish up those horrible abstractions which are taught as history today, but again to bring life and liveliness into the course of human history and help the children to develop a feeling for what human hearts and minds experience in the course of human evolution. Conversations which did not actually take place in the physical world will have to be invented, a conversation between an ancient Greek and someone living in the fifth postAtlantean age, for example. To let those living human figures appear before the mind's eye of the children will be much more useful than all the historical abstractions presented to them today.

You can see where this is leading. The point is to fill the souls of children with living ideas so that the mysterious hidden undercurrent in them can be reached. Then you will see an inner life which is less arid and infertile and people who will be will also be less nervous later in life, because they will be able to recall stories which were told out of an insight into cosmic laws. They will also be familiar with the laws of nature and able to establish harmony between what was given to them in a living, vital form and the laws of nature. Their minds can only grow barren if they are given the abstract laws of nature. These are a few thoughts I wanted to put to you with special reference to the field of education.

It is, of course, much easier to get together in all kinds of associations today and proclaim over and over again “Education must be put on an individual basis”—and other abstract formulations of this kind. Of course, this is easier than to do what is now needed, which is that people interested in education should enter into the spirit of human and natural evolution and find imaginative tales which allow the life of the spirit to be concretely grasped in exactly the form it will take in the immediate future.

We will always, and in every field, need the stimulus of spiritual science. It alone will be able to let new life arise from the dying forms of the present life of mind and intellect—new life which can act as a stimulant in the way I have described, especially for the minds of children. Without the stimulus of spiritual science, one will be a dried-up school teacher who also dries up the children's minds. Worst of all, people will increasingly have the idea, especially with regard to educating the young, that the best we can do with everything we learn is to forget it again as quickly as possible. If a situation is created where in later life people do not want to miss any of the things they were given in their childhood, this will not merely be a pleasure but prove a wellspring, a true wellspring of human life. I would ask you to take this to heart.

Science itself also needs new stimulus. Yesterday I spoke of how difficult it is to bridge the gap between spiritual science in general and the special fields in which people are engaged in scientific life. Yet this will be absolutely one of the most essential things in future. You must have realized from some of the things said here and elsewhere that paucity and impoverishment of concepts and ideas have led to the conditions we have today.

I have said it in my public lecture in Basle and I have also repeated it here, that people who considered themselves competent believed when this war started that it would last no longer than four months. They thought they had studied the social and economic structure and they formed the idea on that basis. Their ideas of this kind did not relate to reality, and reality has proved them wrong. It is strange how little people are prepared to learn from events. Someone who had arrived at such an idea on the basis of their own scientific understanding surely ought to say to himself now: ‘The premises on which I based my conclusions were clearly quite inadequate.’ Surely, he must now be inclined to learn something. But he sleeps on, drawing further conclusions from those same premises, which have only changed a little under the pressure of experience, because he does not want to consider the inner connections. Of course, anyone who wishes to consider the inner connections in life will have to take this hurdle, which is such a problem, particularly to people who are involved in scientific issues. The last thing they want is to be bothered in the limited field in which they are active; they do not want to establish links with related fields.

This type of specialization was quite a good thing for a time. If it continues, and if our university students continue to be ruined by the bias which comes with specialization, the calamities which result when people's ideas are divorced from reality will get worse and worse. We will have people in municipal, rural and national representative bodies who simply have no real grasp of the issues they are supposed to regulate according to law, because their ideas are too limited to encompass reality. Reality is far richer than those ideas.

There can be no question, then, of being inclined to leave specialized areas as far as possible to ‘experts’, nor of using anthroposophy to satisfy subjective and egotistical needs. It has to be a matter of knowing how to unite these two opposites, and let one prove fruitful for the other.

Something we find again and again—you would also find it so if you were to focus your attention on these things—is that if you speak about special subject-areas to people who are sincerely devoted to anthroposophy, they do find the matter rather tedious. The request is always to speak about central issues—soul, immortality, God, and so on. This will, of course, satisfy their immediate egotistical religious needs, but it leaves no opportunity to give them what is needed more than anything for the near future, namely that people make themselves a real part of this real life. This is why we must take note when someone seeks to make a real connection between impulses to look at things on the basis of spiritual science and the specialist areas.

I have previously drawn attention here³ to the important book our friend Dr. Boos⁴ has written on the Collective Agreement.⁵ The book is now generally available and I should like to draw your attention to it, for it is a perfect example of building bridges between the general approach used in anthroposophy and a whole specialist field, the sphere of law. The point is that our friends will not, I hope, consider special investigations of this kind as something outside their sphere but rather give them their attention, for in the time which lies ahead life itself will have to be the subject for anthroposophical consideration. If you read the book carefully and work through it, you will find aspects of everyday life are taken up in a living way, and also in such a way that one can see two things coming into play here: first, impulses to consider life in a truly comprehensive way, impulses altogether attuned to cosmic laws, and then also great historical perspectives. You will also find it infinitely helpful to consider the difference between Romance contracts and agreements on the one hand and Germanic social cohesion on the other. The relationship of Romance to Germanic human nature presents itself in a very profound way in a particular specialist field. And it is important, especially with this specialist book by Dr. Roman Boos, to work one's way up to what really matters for the immediate future from the point of view of spiritual science -to bridge the gap between the life that presents itself to the senses and in which we establish our social conditions, and the life which streams in from the spiritual world and lets the Spirit pulse through our forms of existence.

I also recommend that you read the new issue of Wissen und Leben,⁶ which has an article by Dr. Boos on the key issues in Swiss national policies.⁷ You will find that current political issues can also be considered from a different point of view than that of everyday journalism—if you do not mind my saying so. Awareness of the relationship between different forms of culture, such as different forms of art, for instance, and political forms, is brought out most beautifully in this essay.

Having read Dr. Boos' article, which takes a serious look at Swiss national policies and is truly in the anthroposophical spirit, you may glance at the first essay in the journal, which is on the significance of the Reformation and was written by Adolf Keller.⁸ It is an essay in the old style, even if it is thought to be in a very new style. In one and the same issue you therefore have a justifiably truly modern work side by side with the most antiquated stuff. People who write such antiquated stuff do, of course, believe they are particularly clever and logical, with penetrating thoughts. The significance of the Reformation is discussed from different points of view in elevated terms which are nothing but empty and vapid abstractions.

Having read Adolf Keller's article, which is decent and well-meant and one of the best pieces of work in this field, one is tired out from being tossed hither and thither between what are again and again the same abstractions: the Reformation created freedom of initiative; freedom of initiative arose through the Reformation; when the Reformation was in progress, free initiative came to life. One is tossed hither and thither in the typical fashion of all abstractionists who know no better than to wallow in a few impoverished notions, having nothing to do with the real world. Here you have a typical instance of the abstract way of thinking which must be overcome, when people live with notions that have little real thought to them, yet are positively smacking their lips with pleasure because they imagine they are saying something really outstanding when they put it in a particularly abstract way.

A few days ago I was sent a treatise on profound theosophical matters which was, in fact, merely a treatise on the ‘something’; it only dealt with the ‘something’—the ‘unimproved something’ and the ‘improved something’, and how the improved takes hold of the unimproved, and how the ‘improved something’ takes precedence over the ‘unimproved something’. And so: conscious and unconscious ‘something’, improved and unimproved ‘something’—going one way and then the other, here again, there again; and in the final instance you have no more than this strange modern way of working in the abstract—though here applied to things of the spirit—which likes to see itself in the abstract and in reality is flight from reality and no longer has anything to do with any kind of reality. This does, of course, have quite specific consequences. People's limited ideas make them unable to wend their way through the river of life. Their ideas are too limited to encompass the reality of life. As a result one reads things like the following, for instance, which is on page 51 of Adolf Keller's essay:

Yet although this experience causes the deepest wellsprings of heart and mind to open up, it is still more than a mere upsurge of feeling. Divine and human elements are not mixed together in this. Conscience takes care this does not happen. It keeps the distance and maintains reverence. Man remains man and God remains God. The Reformation and mysticism have it in common that the relationship to God is established through a personal experience; what separates them is that the Reformation experience does not come in a seething and boiling of emotions in the depths of the soul, as in the case of mysticism, but from a troubled and morally elevated conscience. Anything which is a must, an absolute demand, holds the greatest power in the inner life. Man can only withstand this with divine help that is inwardly experienced.

Nothing but abstractions, and we are pushed hither and thither among them. Then follow the words: ‘This is the gospel, Jesus Christ.’

The gentleman has gone so far in his abstract thinking that he identifies the message of Jesus Christ with Jesus Christ himself. This is what one gets when abstraction is taken to its extreme. What follows is strange indeed. He has rejected mysticism. With his limited ideas he says that the Reformation had nothing to do with mysticism but that it creates healthy life. As if mysticism were not exactly such a living experience. But you see, his limited ideas cannot encompass reality. They are therefore used to say exactly the same about completely opposite things Thus he rejects the ‘seething and boiling’ as something which true adherents of the Reformation should not have, for if they did they would be mystics.
Adolf Keller goes on to say:

This help is not merely presented outwardly, historically or in the sacraments. It, too, can only grow strong if it is inwardly made one's own. It does not act from outside, magically, but only in so far as it may become part of our inner feelings and will, and can set the soul aglow.

Thus the Reformation must not be a ‘seething and boiling’ in the depths of the soul, yet this same Reformation can only be active in the soul if it is able to set the soul aglow, that is make it seethe and boil. You can study the whole essay like this, and nowhere does its poverty of spirit prove adequate for entering into reality. Yet writings like these are read with real passion today. People consider them most erudite. They fail to realize that they only have to read two or three lines more and they get all confused in their minds, for the same ideas have to be used for quite different things, and there is such a paucity of ideas.

If, on the other hand, you study Roman Boos' beautiful essay on the key issues in Swiss national policies—I do recommend it, for it will show you how connections can be made between political life and other forms of culture, and how our ideas can really come alive and the life of ideas be enriched, how you can find an exemplary study here concerning the future of Swiss politics—you can compare this with the vapid maunderings of Adolf Keller's essay in the same issue of the journal. By spending just a single small sum you can have the opportunity of getting old and new absolutely side by side and really see for yourselves.

Sometimes I really have to take account of current issues which are in complete opposition, for anthroposophy does not exist for self-indulgence at exalted levels but to make exactly the observations which take us truly into the present, into the intents and purposes of the present time.

• 1. Lectures given in Basle on 18 and 19 October 1917. See Note 8, lecture 10.
• 2. Alfred Edmund Brehm (1829–1884) wrote Illustriertes Tierleben (The illustrated lives of animals), with the second, 10-volume edition appearing in 1876–1879. Later editions were revised by other authors, and the narratives that gave the kind of picture of which Rudolf Steiner was speaking were gradually replaced with ‘strictly scientific’ texts. Many other natural histories have been based on Brehm's work.
• 3. In an addendum to a lecture given on 6 August 1916 (GA 170). The addendum has not so far been published in German or in English.
• 4. Dr Roman Boos (1889–1952), social scientist, writer and lecturer; represented anthroposophy and later Rudolf Steiner's idea of the Threefold Social Order; he was head of a social sciences association at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
• 5. Der Gesamtarbeitsvertrag nach Schweizerischem Recht, Munich and Leipzig 1916.
• 6. Wissen und Leben (translates as ‘Knowledge and life’), a fortnightly Swiss journal edited by Alb. Baur which appeared from 1907 to 1925. The issue concerned was dated 15 October 1917.
• 7. ‘Die Kermfragen der Schweizer-Politik’, later reprinted in Boos' Michael gegen Michel, Basle 1926, pp. 36–47.
• 8. Adolf Keller (b. 1872), Swiss Protestant theologian, professor in Geneva and Zurich.

What we basically have been able to foresee for a long time has quickly befallen the world through all sorts of events that have taken place recently. As a result, we have become witnesses of serious events, the full significance of which only a later time will truly be able to grasp. And much, I might say, even in outward form, of what underlies these serious events, is quite beyond our ken today. But for us, my dear friends, one word in particular is significant in these serious times, which I would like to express in the following way: For years we have tried to deepen our spiritual knowledge, we have tried to make the knowledge, feelings and perceptions of the spiritual worlds our own, and also everything that is connected with this knowledge, feeling and perception. But now we are actually faced with having to take a test, in a certain sense, to see if we are able to hold fast to the great ideals that are mapped out for us through the knowledge and feeling of the spiritual world, even under the impact of all the difficulties that are now happening. Where friends sit together in our branches, who are united for the most part by a common feeling, it is certainly easier to hold fast to what spiritual science should bring to humanity, but we must always and everywhere keep in mind the great ideals that are already expressed in our first principle. We are not a society that spreads within homogeneous masses of people; rather, we seek to spread the reconciling spirit throughout the whole earth. In this context, we are subject to a certain test, because it is truly difficult in the times in which we now live to fully develop the sense of objectivity in relation to the Highest, namely in relation to Justice.¹

Precisely for the reasons that will emerge from my words today, the inhabitants of Central Europe, and above all the German people, currently find it easier than others to be objectively just. But even here it is necessary not to abandon ourselves to mere immediate feelings, but as serious anthroposophists we must try to penetrate with understanding into the language that today must express justice in the spiritual sense.

Not because I want to present it as something personal, but because the matter is symptomatic for me, I want to mention the following: the first volume of my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” may be in the hands of some of you. The second volume was printed in the second half of July up to page 204. It ended in the middle of the lines. The passage was precisely what struck me as strange and symptomatic. I had to characterize the two French philosophers Boutroux and Bergson. I tried to do so as objectively as possible. Then I had to make the transition to Preuss, an unheeded, powerful thinker. After presenting French contemporary philosophy, I had to move on to what had been thought this side of the Rhine, in Germany. But the page was blank, because war broke out. I often had to look at the empty spaces of the thirteenth page.

And at that time, various voices came from across the Rhine. You are well aware of those voices. They spoke of German barbarism and the like, and hurled the most hateful accusations and slanders at us. One would say that it was distressing to experience what one was subjected to. Respected representatives of French intellectual life were stirring up hatred and passion among the people. And in this case, the personal can be seen as symptomatic: If in a book on the history of the development of philosophy one had to deal with French philosophy, and if one tried hard to do full justice to it, then it could truly fill one's soul with bitterness when, while trying with all one's might to immerse oneself with the greatest possible objectivity in the philosophy of the West, one had to experience that this philosophy, regardless of all the facts, cries out about the “barbaric nature beyond the Rhine”. It was all the more bitter because one of the worst attackers and haters of the German character was Maurice Maeterlinck.

It is strange: the first work by Maeterlinck to appear, and which already fully expresses his essence and his character, is based entirely on Novalis, is entirely drawn from Novalis, and Maurice Maeterlinck would be nothing without Novalis. All his later works arose entirely from this first foundation drawn from Novalis. This also sheds light on how our time understands justice. Today it is by no means sufficient to hear the voices that are spoken here and there under the influence of passion; rather, it is necessary that we visualize the facts. If one lets these speak, it leads to objectivity. And such objectivity is not the same as being indifferent to these relationships.

Great things are happening in our time, monstrous things. And a future time will need to refer to significant events of the past when speaking of the events of our time, in the sense of how we speak of repetitions. Not just one, many things come together to form a repetition, a composite repetition of significant historical events.

Just as in the heyday of Greco-Latin civilization the Romans had to fight the Punic Wars against Carthage, and just as the memorable Battle of Mylae decided the fate of the Romans, who had to flourishing Greco-Roman culture, against the submerging forces of the Carthaginian Empire, which was still strong on the outside, we find something like a repetition of certain events at the starting point of the present war. This may be said here today. A remarkable battle took place between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians had an enormous fleet, which made Rome, with its few ships, seem powerless. So the Romans came up with the unusual idea of building gangplanks that led from ship to ship and, to a certain extent, transformed the naval battle into a land battle, enabling the Romans to achieve a great victory on familiar ground. Just as something unprecedented happened at that time, something that few people could have imagined took place in Liège, which shows a certain relationship to the events described and which future times will speak of as a very first event. I mention these things only because I want to draw attention to the significance of the events within which we are standing in the present.

These are the very days when important decisions in the East and the West are on a knife edge. It is heartbreaking to consider what is facing each other, and especially in these days, when the decision, so to speak, stands before man's gaze as something uncertain, attention may be drawn to something else that is of tremendous importance to be remembered.

I may speak about these things as I will speak, because I am, so to speak, prepared by my karma. I was born in the realm of which it is said that it contributed so much to the war between nations; but growing up, I see that I was destined to be homeless even in childhood. I had no opportunity to experience the peculiar feelings of connection with my fellow countrymen and fellow people. Moreover, my childhood fell at a time when I myself became acquainted with hatred of Germans in Austria, when German-Austria was still under the impression of Prussia's victories, when even the Germans in Austria hated the Reich Germans. There was no opportunity to create a bias for Germany in me. This homelessness, given to me by my karma, entitles me to speak objectively, fully aware that it is precisely there that the anthroposophical attitude can speak through my words. It is not appropriate today to speak prophetic words. Therefore, he who says: where the victory may remain at last is doubtful, may go unheeded. But a victory, an important victory, which is also connected with a spiritual contemplation, which is indelible for all times to come, has already been won. What is this victory? It was won before the outbreak of the war. This victory can be characterized in the following way: Was not the center of Europe connected with the East for a long time? We are truly not speaking of the people who live in the east of Europe. We are well informed about this nation, and anyone who wants to learn the truth about the relationship of this nation to the development of nations should read the lecture cycle “The Mission of Individual National Souls in Connection with Germanic-Nordic Mythology”. The people in the East are different, and so is the triad that currently stands at the forefront of German intellectualism there: tsarism, Russian militarism, which has suffered a defeat, and the lying pan-Slavism. There were threads that went from the heart of Europe to this triad, even if not to its last leaf.

On July 31 of this year, the declaration of war severed and swept away this thread between Germany and Austria's leadership and Tsarist Russia. That was a great victory... [The following is unclear. The meaning seems to be something like that the events that took place at that time between the European center, the Western Powers and Russia, called for reflection on world history. Cf. also the footnote on page 13.]

Significant features of world history lie therein. One need not close one's eyes to the unnaturalness of the alliance between Europe's west and northwest and the east if one stands on anthroposophical ground of justice. Let us only try to continue to practice in these difficult times what we have learned through spiritual science itself and through some of what has been forced upon us.

When we were in dispute with Mrs. Besant, it was even an Indian scholar who said about the way Mrs. Besant shouted for tolerance, Mrs. Besant was doing it as if you were to call out to a person who has had his hand cut off and is defending himself: Be tolerant, otherwise you will start the fight! It shows a lack of thought not to realize that it is absurd to demand that the other person should let his hand be cut off without defending himself.

I have often had to hear it said in recent weeks that if Austria had not started the war with Serbia, it would have been “tolerant”. — Exactly the same case! You tell the one who is about to have his hand cut off: Be tolerant! - We have many ways of gaining objectivity from what is happening so painfully around us, but to do so we must be able to think properly. Learning to think is also one of the tasks of Theosophy. There is a cycle about the folk souls. But if we cannot understand it in the most sacred seriousness in these serious times, then all our previous work with this cycle would be a theoretical game. Only then will these things have become part of our flesh and blood when we know how to feel our way through them, where it is a matter of gaining clarity as is necessary now. In the penultimate lecture of the cycle, I tried to show that the various folk souls relate to one another in the same way as I tried to describe in the last picture of The Portal of Initiation in relation to the interplay of the three soul forces. The content of the speech, the words that each of the three personalities speaks there, must be spoken exactly as they are, since each of the personalities represents one of the three soul members of the human being.

In the penultimate lecture of the cycle on the soul of nations, you are pointed to how, if we take the nations of Italy and Spain, the third post-Atlantic age can be seen to resonate in our time: the character of the people is expressed as the sentient soul. In the case of France, it is the intellectual soul, in the case of England, the consciousness soul, and in the center of Europe, it is the I.

Do we not know that there can be struggles in our own soul, that the individual members can be in conflict with each other? Attention is drawn to this in the second drama, the “Testing of the Soul”. We can gain an insight into what is taking place in our time if we allow everything that is expressed there to take effect on us. And we must try to bring this image into such clarity in our soul that we know how to seek the I in the center of Europe. Thus, in the midst of these days of peace, we have, as it were, in the quiet spiritual work of that cycle, presented to our souls the foundations of something that now weighs heavily on the world. Basically, much of what is happening now will become clear to us if we consider everything that was expressed in the above-mentioned cycle. Only then will we attain the necessary objectivity.

It has happened in all wars that one side blames the other. For us, my dear friends, it is not appropriate to think like that; for us, it is appropriate to think differently. I will explain it with an example.

Imagine someone has grown old and then place yourself next to a child, fresh and full of strength. Would it be wise for the old man to resent the child and say: You child in your youthful power, it is your fault that I carry the infirmities of old age! It is no wiser, for example, to accuse the Germans of being responsible for the war. We must realize that what is happening is rooted in the karma of nations. In the life of nations, too, there is youth and old age; and just as in the life of an individual the freshness of childhood is not to blame for the fact that old age no longer has that freshness, so it is also foolish to make such accusations in the life of nations.

But we must not be blinded by all the talk; we must look at the facts, at the objective reality. The deeper foundations of current events still elude discussion today – apart from the fact that such a discussion would cause bad blood among some people – but I can draw attention to what is important in a different way.

As Anthroposophists, we know that Europe's I rests in the German spirit. - That is an objective occult fact. I would like to call upon a man who was not a Theosophist - he lived in the German spirit - to characterize what the attitude of the I had brought about. I know that this is not the attitude of a single person. It is the spirit of Herman Grimm, who in the spiritual sense still had Goethe's blood in his veins. He speaks the wonderful words: “The solidarity of the moral convictions of all men is today the church that unites us all. We seek more passionately than ever for a visible expression of this community. All truly serious aspirations of the masses have only this one goal. The separation of nations no longer exists here. We feel that the ethical world view knows no national distinction. We would all sacrifice ourselves for our fatherland; but we are far from longing for or bringing about the moment when this can be done through war. The assurance that peace is our most sacred wish is no lie. “Peace on earth and goodwill towards men” permeates us.

Take as an answer what anthroposophical teaching brings us. Our spiritual movement wants to bring about the possibility of satisfying such longing. And then there are more words from Herman Grimm: “People as a totality recognize themselves as subject to an invisible court enthroned in the clouds, before which not being allowed to exist they consider a misfortune and whose judicial proceedings they seek to adapt their inner disputes. With anxious endeavor they seek their right here. How hard the French are trying to present the war against Germany that they are planning as a moral imperative, demanding that other nations recognize it, even the Germans themselves!"

In response to this image, let us take what anthroposophy says about the realms of the hierarchies. It is touching to see how the human spirit, in its best and highest personalities, is full of the deepest longing for what spiritual science wants to bring, but passes it by, does not find it, and how then, with anxious endeavor, people seek their right here.

Then there is another remarkable fact. Herman Grimm says: “How the present-day French are endeavoring to present the war they have in mind against Germany as a moral duty, demanding recognition of it from other nations, yes, even from the Germans themselves!” That is all too well thought out. Is the effort to present this war as a moral imperative not noticeable today from what is coming towards us from the West?

And then there is a third saying by Herman Grimm that I would like to read to you. Again you will find how it is fulfilled in what our movement brings: “The inhabitants of our planet, all conceived as a unity, are filled with an understandable sensitivity that even the most primitive peoples sense and are wary of violating. People today recognize the right of individual self-determination in spiritual matters for each and every one. Even savage human creatures can be led to these thoughts.” But in saying this, Herman Grimm expresses nothing other than the very first principle of our society.

There you can see how our anthroposophy is an answer to the call that the German spirit sounded in the voices of the best of its spiritual life. The heart of Europe has a deep yearning for spirituality. This also sheds light on the fact that wherever Germans go, they adapt to the customs of the country, sacrificing their previous ways of life, not giving up their spiritual culture, but sacrificing their nationality.

All this, my dear friends, is on the one hand suitable for us to be fair, and yet not to close our eyes to what really needs to be considered.

There have also been surprises for the occultist in recent times; and I may say that during my course in Norrköping I was able or had to speak a word that was based on such a surprise. It is true: that these events would have to happen could be foreseen for years, and that they would have to happen this year according to fate. But at the beginning of July there was nothing more to say than that we would gather for the Munich cycle, and then, when we would part – so one could expect – we would face significant events. Then came the assassination in Sarajevo. Although I have often emphasized how different things are on the physical plane from the spiritual plane, and how often the opposite image appears, it was still a surprise to me when I was able to compare the individuality that went through this assassination before and after death. Something remarkable happened: this personality became a cosmic force. I mention this to draw attention to the fact that on the physical plane things are symbolic of the spiritual, and that, strictly speaking, all events on the physical plane can only be explained when seen through the spiritual plane. Some of you know that I once said: 'The horror was in the astral world, but could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear. I said: The horror hovered in the astral world, it could not descend to the physical plane because astral forces were gathered on the physical plane, forces of fear, which worked against it as a hindrance. — It was on July 20 that I knew that the forces of fear had now become forces of courage, of daring. An indescribably magnificent fact: the forces of fear became forces of courage. It was no longer inexplicable what took place on the physical plane as such a unique phenomenon: that enthusiasm. That is a fact that was unique to me, and as far as I know, was not known to any occultist before.

Now, you have all witnessed how this enthusiasm seized people in a few days, people who were truly peace-loving before, like a wave of courage washing over them.

Soon came the times when one heard with sadness the enormous sacrifices this war demands. And when I was in Berlin in the first days of September, deep pain moved my soul when I realized what blossoms of German souls had to be sacrificed in the field. I could not help brooding over this pain, and this gave rise to occult research, for which I had no merit. It is in pain that occult knowledge is bestowed upon the soul. The anxious question arose before my soul: if the flower of the leaders of the individual corps masses are carried off in particular, what will become of us then?

And there one could see how it was the fallen ones who, after death on the battlefield, helped those who had to fight after them. That was the result of clairvoyant research. When the dead help the living, it is a consolation in the midst of pain. My dear friends, spiritual science must reach into life at the moments when comfort seems impossible, when the right frame of mind cannot be found. Even there, spiritual knowledge can give the right frame of mind, it can still offer comfort. I know there will be souls in our community who will draw courage from such knowledge in the midst of sad events.

From the study of spiritual science, we know that spiritual beings are the guides and directors of the course of humanity. In the spiritual world, it is prescribed that one thing or another will happen by a certain point in time. Let us assume that it was destined for the people of the Earth to achieve a certain degree of love in order to fight egoism by the year 1950 or 1970. All spiritual science wants to produce this ability to love. It does so in a similar way to how wood produces warmth in a stove. It can be generated through the word; and within our current, attempts are being made to generate it through the great teachings of anthroposophy. But if the response of human souls to the word were insufficient, if things were to proceed too slowly, so that by the time prescribed the capacity for love and sacrifice had not been sufficiently developed, then another teacher must intervene.

In Dornach, it has been symbolically demonstrated. Actually, the intention was to have the building completed by the beginning of August. Nothing came of it; it was not predetermined by karma that the whole building should be completed by that time and should look down from its hill, towering above the area from the east and southeast, as a symbol of the spirit. But the columns with the domes rise up into the wide landscape as a spiritual observatory. In our building, the question of how to create a room with good acoustics will also be resolved. I was able to verify that the right acoustics have been found. The sound, as tested from a certain point, showed that the acoustics were the right ones for the building. But in these acoustics, our friends could not first hear the word of spiritual life. Instead, they first heard the echo of the thunder of guns from the south of Alsace. Instead of light from the spiritual world, vast masses of light from the searchlight of Fort Istein moved into the building and illuminated it. A peculiar symbolism! A symbolism that may perhaps be mentioned after all. Sometimes a different teacher is needed!

Was it not an enormous teacher? Does it not stand in violent opposition to materialism? Then think of all that took place in just one week! Think of the sum total of the fight against selfishness! Think of the sum total of the capacity for sacrifice, of human love that arose!

When I recently returned from Vienna, karma put a newspaper into my hand. It contained an account by an Austrian soldier who went to the field. He begins by describing how, during the journey to the theater of war, the soldiers are shown kindness from all sides, and at the end there is a passage – the warrior has in all likelihood never approached Theosophy – in which he says: “We who go into the field try to stand up for the just cause with all our courage and with all we have; but those who stay at home can also work.” Then come the big words, he says: “Those whom God hears, pray; those who cannot pray, gather all their thoughts and willpower into a fervent desire for victory...” and in this way he does his part! For many years we have spoken of the power of feeling. So now in a simple soldier lives what we have cultivated in years of work. No matter what the immediate result may be, one thing the event will produce is spirituality in the human soul, which would otherwise not have found it for a long time.

These events are great. They can only be compared with great events of the past, which cyclically overlap each other. Just as the struggle of the Romans against the Carthaginians, and the wars of the great migrations, were important and influential for the emerging culture of the peoples, so the struggle in the midst of which we stand is no less significant. And from some of the words I speak, one thing will be able to live in your hearts: that those who today shed their blood in the field, in battle, offer this blood as a sacrifice for something that must happen. It must happen for the good of humanity. And when we look at the great sacrifices, at the pain, one thing can fill us, if not with joy, then at least with great inner satisfaction: that holy blood flows, sanctified by the events; and those who shed it will become the most important members for future times. Much will become clear to us if we can bring ourselves to see in the flowing blood a hallowed sacrificial blood. If we imbue our souls with this truth, then the spirit will bear fruit in us. I may say it: what that simple soldier said can be fulfilled in the souls of our dear anthroposophical friends.

The thoughts that are cherished in the anthroposophical soul as convictions will resonate particularly strongly there; and this is necessary if the formula that we put at the beginning of our remarks is to have an effect. Among the fighters there are already those who serve in the right faith.

Spirits of your souls, watchers in action,
May your wings bring
Our souls' imploring love
To earthlings who trust in your protection,
So that, united with your power,
Our plea may help to radiate
The souls it lovingly seeks.

My dear friends! The purpose of my lecture today was to enable us to confront the meaning of what we have learned in our thoughts with current events, so that we can pass the test, so that we can look at events and circumstances with a just eye. Spirituality will also come through that great teacher who is now moving through Europe. But man is born to freedom. Much depends on those who are united with us in the spiritual movement. If the anthroposophical thoughts are now right in the time of trial in your souls, then that space, which is now filled with passions flowing in confusion, will be filled with brightly shining spiritual thoughts, with holy, genuine feelings. Such feelings will live on forever.

Many a night I pray that there may be many anthroposophists sending out such radiant, luminous thought-power; and if we can also find the right volition for it, we will have the opportunity to fulfill our place in true service of love. Let us be mindful of where we may bring love actively into the world. Our karma will bring it about, whether we are here or there, that this or that will be demanded of us, for which we are currently destined.

With tears in my eyes, I read a letter from a young Austrian to his mother, who on July 26 heard the words spoken in Dornach, and how what Anthroposophy can give in terms of attitude and strength lives in his heart, and lets him fulfill his duty where fate has placed him. And the same feelings and thoughts came to me from the letter of another young friend who had also attended that meeting in Dornach and then gone to the front. Such thoughts and feelings are what must live in souls today: where duty presents itself, we seek to fulfill it, exercise our judgment and be mindful where our love is required. Then one thing will be fulfilled in the future: When the peoples of Europe will no longer face each other in battle, the thoughts that we are sending out now will remain, they will be the strongest, they will represent an eternity. What we feel now will be a blessing when it is combined with the feeling that victory is inevitable: the victory of the spirit.

Remarkable words were spoken by a statesman in Germany this spring. Regarding our relationship with Russia, he said that Germany was on friendly terms with Petersburg, which was determined not to pay attention to pressurizing. And in July it was said about England that the relaxation was progressing, that the negotiations with England had not yet been concluded, but that they would be continued in this sense. Such was the language of a notable statesman in July. Read these words again now and try to realize how human judgment stands before the flood of events. But one thing can be illuminated from these words: we did not want the war! Oh, one would like – understand me correctly! – to be non-German, to put it grotesquely, so that these words would receive the attention they deserve, so that they could be given the emphasis they deserve.

But the human soul needs something lasting, not something that is spoken of today in terms that prove untenable tomorrow; it needs something that is the truth today and that is the truth tomorrow. It will only find such truth by connecting with the spirit. We can trust in the spirit's triumph. Those who connect with the spirit will find the right path to that wisdom that can only arise from the connection with the spirit. Just in the week before the outbreak of war, I had to read sentences in a newspaper like the following: Despite Liebknecht's reprimand, I believe that in political life one does not need to tell the truth unless it would come out or harm oneself. The saying is shaped by the materialism of our time, in which we would suffocate were it not for this war, and which our movement has taken upon itself to overcome. In contrast to the incredible nature of such a saying, our movement's first sentence is: “Wisdom lies only in truth.”

This shows how much we need the Spirit of Truth if we want to grasp things in their reality. For it is a matter of penetrating to that objectivity which can only be attained through the Spirit of Truth. Then it will be possible even today to recognize what a later time will recognize: that this war is a conspiracy against German intellectual life.

The saying that addresses the national spirit can help us to achieve such objectivity:

Spirit of my earthly home!
Unfold the light of your age
To the soul endowed with Christ,
So that striving, it may find
In the choir of the spheres of peace
You, resounding with the praise and power
Of the Christ-devoted human sense!

Much can come from this for our souls and for finding the right path if we vividly unite with this soul, which can come to us from such a saying. But then I know that something will happen, that an important link in what is to develop will be there, something that will live in the anthroposophical soul and that anthroposophy will bring into the world, that hopes will be met that I can express in summary with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware,
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

That, my dear friends, is what matters: we want to practice labor of love, to watch attentively for the demands of the day. And then we want to look into the circumstances without prejudice and clearly in order to achieve the kind of objectivity that is necessary today and that is so difficult for many to achieve. Perhaps those of our friends from outside the movement who hear these words can also help to clarify them.

If we can achieve such objectivity and such a willingness to work and love, then a strength can arise from such efforts that can be utilized by those spirits who send their work into the destinies of nations and who also stand by humanity to help and guide in these serious and difficult times.

• 1. Note from the editors: The transcription of this lecture cannot be considered completely reliable. There are indications of gaps in the written record of the spoken words, and even of errors. The reader is referred to the notes at the end of the volume.

So far we have attempted to see the human being in relation to the universe as regards form and as regards life. We found that human beings relate in different ways to the universe at the head end and at the limb end. All these things essentially hold true for the period of human evolution in which we are today, i.e. the post-Atlantean period, and it has to be understood that anything we are able to say about the phenomena of this world always applies only for specific periods, for the world is in a process of evolution and changes radically from one stage of evolution to the next.

We saw that human beings tear themselves away, as it were, from the relationship to the zodiac. Unlike the animal head, which lies within the zodiac, the human head has been lifted out of it, going through an angle of about 90 degrees. The head end of the human being is fully in a way of life that inclines towards inorganic, lifeless nature. Here life is more or less in decline; it is dying. Both form and life tear themselves away from their connection with the cosmos, and because of this enter into a kind of frozen state, the beginning of lifelessness.

Essentially we are the outcome of previous development in this area. Think of the individual aspect of the human being and the fact that the human head is the metamorphosis of the other person who lived on earth before, and you will recall that the head points to the past, whilst the limbs point to the future.

The head part of the human being also points to the cosmic expanses of the past in another way. As you know, the head is the principal bearer of the sense organs and these had their origin on ancient Saturn. The most highly developed senses—other senses developed on ancient sun and moon—go back to the earliest stages of cosmic earth evolution. Everything connected with the human head therefore points to the past and in some respects it would be right to say: The mineral world evolved in the course of earth existence, and the human head, being the oldest part, is more than any other part involved in this process of mineralization.

Tearing themselves away from the cosmos, human beings keep the form that is no longer connected with the cosmos during their life between birth and death, and they also keep the life that is dying and becoming mineralized. We may also say that if human beings had kept the animal form, that is, if their heads had maintained the orientation given by the zodiac and therefore the weightier life that is to be found in the animal head, they would be entirely the outcome of earlier times in their heads. The head would have something that would immediately make it apparent that it has arisen out of the whole past cosmic evolution. By tearing the head away from this, human beings are in a way destroying their cosmic past.

It is tremendously important that we consider the things that were presented yesterday and the day before and realize that in the development of the head human beings essentially destroy their cosmic past. In fact, they go beyond the actual mineralization process, entering into a process in which matter is finely dispersed to an extraordinary degree. Organic forms are of course also to be found in the head, and embedded in the organic element is a process in which matter is reduced to dust to a degree that actually goes beyond the mineral level. Fig. 18.

If we look at the human head in the right way we have to say it is the focus of a process in which matter as such is reduced to nothing and it is this which makes it the bearer of a distinct inner life. The generally accepted materialistic view is entirely wrong when it comes to the form of the human head. Thanks to the head being part of the organism, human beings have a life of thoughts and ideas. This becomes possible because the material life is reduced to dust in a strange process which you may be able to picture as follows.

Imagine—as I said, it is a picture, but it will give you some idea of the extremely subtle process involved—imagine, then, a painting, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, for example. For the painting to exist in this world, it is necessary for it to have physical substance. Imagine that the physical substance falls to dust, but a fine etheric tissue would remain. So now the Sistine Madonna has turned into dust, but everything that was painted by using physical paints, including the nuances of colour, continues to exist in etheric form and someone with etheric perception would be able to perceive the etheric form that remains.

That is what the thinking process is like, the process of forming ideas. When we become conscious of a thought or an idea, this is due to the fact that because the head has been taken out of the wholeness of the cosmos, as we have seen yesterday and the day before, matter loses all significance and human beings face the constant need to let their heads come alive again because they are always disintegrating, and dying in every detail. The etheric aspect of their heads lifts out of it in the process (Fig. 18, red line on the outside) and thoughts evolve. Matter turns to dust and falls away, as it were, and the etheric remains and that is how people become aware of their ideas.

You’ll remember me saying that in the senses we already have something of a physical apparatus. The eye is a physical apparatus, except that the human ether body is active in it. There it already is the way I am now also going to describe for the rest of the head, for nerve tissue. Please take careful note of what I am going to say now. In the senses, and especially in the senses connected with the head, a separate etheric principle is active in the process of perception. In the sphere of the senses, therefore, we have a kind of independent etheric process.

Take the eye. It is a physical apparatus, but the etheric is active in it. Independent etheric life is to be found in an organ that is all the time tending to disintegrate and is really a mechanical, if not sub-mechanical, object. This is the situation in the sphere of the senses.

In the sphere of the nerves, which is an inward continuation of the sphere of the senses, the situation is such that the ether body is more closely bound up with the physical substance, but the whole of our life of the nerves wants all the time to become life of the senses. Imagine, therefore, that you are seeing a coloured surface. The ether body moves independently in this process of sensory perception. If you now leave this process aside and give yourself up to the life of the nerves, the whole sphere of the nerves becomes sphere of the senses and you have a idea of the coloured surface in your mind. We may say that in so far as human beings are nerve human beings, they become entirely sphere of the senses in their mental images or ideas.

Now comes the reaction. The senses are geared towards the physical and are able to take things in continually. The organism of the nerves takes in what the senses present to it. It changes into sphere of the senses and in doing so it partly dies. It seeks to become all eye, or all ear, for instance. To prevent this happening, the vital principle, the principle of life, enters from the rest of the organism and pervades it and the human individual lets the idea go, as it were.

To sum up, we may say that towards the head end, human beings destroy their past. They thus become human beings with nerves and senses that hold images and they have a living experience of images that moves in the etheric realm. You see if we base ourselves on the spiritual science of anthroposophy it is perfectly possible to describe the life of ideas that arises in the conscious mind.

As human beings develop their head end with regard to form, they do so in a way that in the present age exposes them to the influence of forces that evolve in the cosmos when the sun is in the Fishes, the Ram, the Bull, and so on, but they lift their heads out of this, as far as the form is concerned. The result is that the head does not become an animal head but assumes what we may call the “human vertical”, whilst the animal remains within the zodiac.

With regard to life we are able to say that towards the head end, life evolves under the influence of the outer planets Saturn and Jupiter, as we saw yesterday. But human beings lift their life out of this, and thus the following happens: If those planets were never blocked out by the sun, the whole life of the nerves would increasingly become life of the senses. People would perceive with their eyes, or their ears, but this would continue on into the life of nerves. The life of the twelve senses would be in total, inorganic chaos in their life of nerves. Due to the fact that those outermost planets are blocked out, the life of nerves is torn out of the life of senses, and human beings are able to be conscious and act with deliberation in the life of ideas—entering into sensory function and leaving it again by deliberately suppressing ideas, and so on.

Thus an independent etheric principle is active in the senses during sensory perception and a reduced life of senses that is bound to the physical body is active in the nerve organism.

The whole has image quality because by going into the vertical human beings destroy the principle that would give them not image quality but the quality of physical substance. Animals remain within the zodiac and have only dream images and not the conscious images that human beings have. Dream images grow out of the vital principle of the organism; conscious images are lifted up into an etheric life that has become independent of the physical body. It is important to realize that human beings develop an independent etheric life towards the head end because they raise that part out of both the zodiac and the movements of the planets. Then the astral body and the I enter into the independent etheric life and are able to take part in the thought and idea activity of the ether body.

We thus see that the nature of the soul principle can be understood if we know that human thought life has soul quality, that is, it does not take part in material life.

We have seen how human beings develop with regard to both form and life at the other extreme. The day before yesterday we saw that human beings become active in the world through their limbs; going back to ancient Greek times we saw how they became hunters, animal breeders, tillers of the soil and traders who sailed the oceans. Human beings continue in these activities by withdrawing from the influence of the relevant images in the zodiac. Animals remain fully under the influence of Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes and therefore develop forms that relate to the earth. A study of the zodiac will show why animal limbs have developed in a particular way. Human beings develop their system of limbs in such a way that they relate it to the earth when those zodiacal images are beneath the earth, when the earth is at that point in the zodiac in the northern hemisphere for a time. This is also why the geography of the earth offers different living conditions. Human beings are however able to transfer something they have developed in one place to another. I am speaking of things that apply to earlier times; today the different human forms mingle on the globe and the study of geography will no longer give a real idea of the way human beings relate to the macrocosm.

Here, then, human beings tear themselves away from the line of the zodiac in a different way, entering into the “human vertical” in the opposite direction. They remain fully exposed to the constellations of the zodiac with regard to form and to the outer planets with regard to the head, but withdraw from both influences by standing on the earth and letting the earth cover up the other side. Saturn and Jupiter influence human beings by letting their light shine on the earth. Living in images in their heads, human beings also receive the images of those starry worlds, just as they receive images of the planetary movements by developing the principle of life towards the head end. Images from the cosmos, the macrocosm, are taken up into the life of images that human beings develop.

At the other end, images are taken up and thus the forms develop that I showed you the day before yesterday—the limbs, forms that are the opposite of those seen in the head. Human beings also develop activities that are beyond the influence of the macrocosm, that do not allow those influences to enter.

At the head end, therefore, human beings destroy their past. The opposite is the case at the limb end. If we stood on a transparent earth so that both zodiac and planetary movements could influence us from the other side as well, we would not be able to act freely and independently but only under the influence of the life of the planets and fixed stars. Freedom of action is only possible because the earth blocks out the life of the planets and fixed stars. Furthermore, if we were fully exposed to them, then in view of the special nature of the human life span, with repeated earth lives, the life of our limbs would grow wooden, it would harden in itself. We would be unable to let matter fall to dust, and our organic substance would become cornified (horn-like) before it matured. Human limbs would be cornified in a way that is utterly different from the hoofs of horses or cows—almost all the way up. We are protected from this horny development because as human beings we are lifted out of the zodiac.

The process which results from this is the opposite of the process of reducing to dust in the head, where the past is destroyed and matter turns to dust. Development of the limb end is such that matter is not allowed to reach full cosmic maturity. It is held back. We have fingers and toes because we do not allow our limbs to reach their full growth potential. If they did, we would not just have nails but our arms and legs would be completely stiffened and cornified. By holding our limbs back we are able to develop the will in them, and this provides the basis for future lives on earth. If we allowed the limb person to reach full maturity, life would consist of one life on earth only. We preserve the basis for our future by not letting the limb person grow to maturity.

Thus we have a complete contrast: When it goes in the direction of thought, our inner life becomes a life in images; when it goes in the direction of our limbs, life becomes material, it is flesh and organic matter—“young”, I’d say. It does not cornify and grow old and because of this it is possible for the flesh to fall away and the image of youth to go through death and into the next life on earth.

There (Fig. 19) the will is able to develop, and we may say that the “will-end” of the human being is organic development not taken to its conclusion. At the head end we were able to speak of image quality, and here we must speak of something else. Organic development not taken to its conclusion remains germinal, an embryo capable of further development. At the head end we have something like an oyster shell, pure matter that has been secreted out. At the limb end we have something that is embryonic.

Here (above) we can say we have living inner experience of a purely etheric principle—the image. Here (below) we live not in the image but in germinal life and we know ourselves to be bound up with matter, which is also why we are able to move our limbs. We do not have much physical movement in the head, except in so far as our senses are transformed into limbs, so that in the head, too, we are human beings with limbs. One thing is also always to be found in the other, that is a basic principle. In a sense our eyes are also hands, in so far as they are able to move. Nevertheless, the head is largely immobile, and the lobes of the brain and similar structures in particular are incapable of voluntary movement. Even the outside of the head does not show much mobility; it is quite rare even for people to be able to move certain ear muscles; if they can, it provides them with an excellent opportunity for showing off.

Life experienced in organic substance does not allow conscious awareness to arise and this makes it possible for us to develop the will. (Up) here, then, we destroy physical matter, and (down) here we retain, in embryo, the powers for our next life on earth when physical substance falls away from us at death.

Between the two lie the life of breathing and the life of circulation, as we called them yesterday. We also saw that with regard to form this area relates to the constellations of the zodiac that lie between the upper and the lower ones.

If we consider the present-day fixed stars to be Ram, Bull, Twins, Crab, Lion, Virgin, Scales, Scorpion, Archer, Goat, Water Carrier and Fishes, we need to relate these four (Fishes, Ram, Bull, Twins) to the head. Under their influence and in accord with the planetary movements that are above the earth, the head is given a dying life that offers experience of life in images, an inner life of ideas. The four opposite constellations—it would have been slightly different in ancient Greece—would be Virgin, Scales, Scorpion and Archer. The constellations that lie between the upper and lower ones would relate to the rhythmical aspect of the human being, just as in planetary life Mars and Mercury hold a middle position. Here, we may say, the human being swings to and fro between image and embryo. The life of breathing and of the blood illustrates this quite beautifully. We take in oxygen which gives life and is connected with the limb organism and with everything that is mobile in us. We combine the oxygen with carbon, a substance that initially has a stimulant effect on the life of the nerves and senses, bringing in an element of death, and is then cast out as a dying element. Here we have in physical, material terms the continuous contrast of extreme life in oxygen and extreme death in carbon: dying and enlivening, dying and enlivening. Life swings to and fro between these extremes.

At the level of soul life it is like this: we have inward experience of something that on the one hand is still purely etheric, like the life of thoughts; but the ether body takes hold of certain glandular structures and these glands secrete matter. At the physical level, therefore, the ether body acts on the glands. Glands do not make a connection with etheric life, the way muscles do—which are essentially part of the limb organism but secrete matter when etheric life takes hold of them. Etheric life and physical, material life therefore do not fuse completely, and we have a stage of transition. Matter is taken hold of but it also resists and is secreted out. If you study muscles and bones, the elements of the limb system, you find that matter is rigorously taken hold of by the human ether body, most of all in the bones. Nothing falls to dust and is dispersed, everything stays fresh and alive. In the head, none of the matter is taken hold of, but as the head develops, matter falls to dust. Unbound, etheric activity develops to become the life of thought. When the ether body takes hold of the glands, it unites with them but they resist. Muscle tolerates the ether body and take it into itself. Glands do not tolerate it; they immediately secrete matter and drive out the ether. At the soul level this is the life of feeling.

We can now get a real idea of the life of thought. Matter is not put to use, it only goes as far as the etheric, and conscious awareness lives in this etheric element. In the life of feeling, the ether body takes hold of glandular life, which does not tolerate it. Yet for the time that the ether body vanishes into glandular life, before secretion actually comes into effect, human beings are without their ether body, which has vanished into the glands. At that point they find themselves only in their I and astral body, and that is how it is when we feel.

idea—ether body, astral body, I
realm of feeling—astral body, I
life of will—I

If we take the ideas that come in the life of thought—the life of the physical body is cast off; human beings experience themselves in ether body, astral body and I. In the human head the I is active in the astral and the ether bodies and rejects the physical element; the I is thus able, with the aid of the astral body, to experience thoughts, thinking, in the ether body. In the realm of feeling human beings have the ether body taken away from them when it takes hold of glandular life; it is withdrawn from them until the gland has taken the secretory activity to its conclusion. The ether body is therefore in the physical body and human beings have only the astral body and I available for conscious inner life. Experience is at the level of feelings and dream-like in quality, because we enter into the physical body.

In their life of will, human beings enter completely into organic matter with the ether body. When we are awake, the ether body takes the astral body with it, and this enables us to move our limbs. The astral body is also taken into matter and is therefore withdrawn from us so that we have conscious awareness only of the I.

Thus we find that the inner life and the physical life are related at every level. Basing ourselves on the science of the spirit we merely need to have a clear picture of the way in which I, astral body and ether body are involved in the physical body and we perceive the difference between the inner life of thought, the inner life of feeling and the inner life of will. We find that the inner life of thought is in the dying part of the organism which has torn itself away from the upper part of the world of the fixed stars and the upper world of the planets, and become a life in images by reducing the past to dust. We find that in the middle, or rhythmical region we are able to share in life relating to the past and therefore also to the macrocosm, which has evolved out of the past; yet we also react to this because there is a continuous rhythmical element—on the one hand the rhythm of oxygen combining with carbon, and on the other that of glands being taken hold of and responding with secretion. When the macrocosmic life in us is taken hold of and takes hold, the microcosm, that is, the individual human being, reacts. We live in rhythm not only inside ourselves but with the world; we open up to the cosmos and take it back into ourselves. We are half-way individual beings and move rhythmically to and fro between macrocosm and microcosm, and this is where we are alive and active in our feelings. Here we can see exactly how the physical, material aspect of the organism interacts with the element of soul and spirit. In the life of the will, physical matter is most strongly taken hold of and this is where we are most of all mere microcosm, withdrawing entirely from macrocosmic activity in becoming active ourselves.

Living in the northern hemisphere, we withdraw from the other fixed stars and planets in our own way; people living in the southern hemisphere do the same in a similar way, and the whole does, of course, rotate. In our limbs we are therefore entirely microcosm between birth and death, in a world of our own which therefore is also able to take itself forward into a future. We are today developing the will as the youngest element in the inner life. This is still entirely dependent on the physical body for support; it allows only the I to find to itself, with the astral body and the ether body caught up in the physical body.

We shall never understand the inner life unless we are able to differentiate between I, astral body and ether body. Anyone who does not have a real, inner grasp of these will never be able to understand the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. What happens when people refuse to grasp this reality today?

What happens is that people who carry some authority stand there and tell people that it is not really possible to know anything about the inner life, though certain phenomena suggest that something exists that has soul quality, which they call “psychoid”. Giving an explanation of the way Descartes¹⁵ and Spinoza¹⁶ endeavoured to discover the nature of this interaction, they are unable to be anything but abstract—the body on one side, the soul on the other. It will never be possible to get at the truth in this way, because the relationship between soul and body is different in the life of thought, the life of feeling and the life of will. People will not get to the truth if they insist on making one big muddle of the whole inner life and talk of a “psychoid” element rather than giving real consideration to the way the I, astral body and ether body are related in real life. It is as if someone were to refuse to look at the real human being and talk about an “anthropoid” in order to avoid speaking of the anthropos¹⁷ That kind of science is anthropoid-sophy rather than anthroposophy; it is psychoidology.

If we give real consideration to the life of soul and spirit, we can give full detail of the “interactions” and so on, as people call them. There will be no need to cut out bits of the liver, or the brain, and present them neatly as abstract tissues, the way anatomists do. Instead we must know that the relationship of the human being to the cosmos is different at the head end and the limb end. At the head end we reduce it to dust, destroying the past. At the limb end we do not allow growth to reach its full potential but remain embryonic.

The worst thing is when people leave truth aside and speculate on the nature of the physical body as well as of soul and spirit. Using worn-out old words and making them into -oids, they fail to grasp the real truth. There are people nowadays who have no notion of how to get from a word to a concept. Someone called Arthur Drews¹⁸ has been giving lectures to non-conformist religious and monist congregations in Germany today, both of which live on the dregs of the materialistic science that goes back to the 1860s and 70s. He has studied Hartmann’s philosophy¹⁹—as a young man he would always dance attendance on him—but he really only took in the words, which roll about in his head like the balls in a pin-ball machine, and he has no idea of how to get from word to concept. And he uses these words from Hartmann’s philosophy, words that whizz around in his head as if in a pinball machine, to criticize anthroposophy!

Those are the fruits of education in our modern civilization, where people refuse to give serious consideration to the methods available for gaining real insight into the relationship between human being and cosmos. These enable us to describe the human form and human life on the basis of the cosmos and to understand that because human beings are specifically torn away from the cosmos they have dying life at one end, which enables them to develop an inner life of ideas based on images, and a life that remains embryonic at the other extreme, which allows the will element to develop.

These things sound incomprehensible to the people involved in the official science of today, and as a rule—not always but as a rule—we cannot expect them to gain access to them, for essentially they have lost all real understanding with their kaleidoscope of words. For anyone who knows the real situation, those lectures about psychoids are essentially no more than word kaleidoscopes; the things said about Descartes, Spinoza and so on, right up to Fechner,²⁰ have no inner connection and are kaleidoscopes of words. The scraps of words that whirl around in confusion can only gain inner meaning through insight into I, astral body, ether body, and so on. It seems a pity that one has to talk about the present time like this; but when it comes to the “intellectual life”, as it is called, we have to speak about the present age like this. The philosophers have no longer been able to get their bearings because decades ago their words have lost all meaning.

The latest thing is to appoint modern scientists as professors of philosophy. They are asked to hand down philosophy. It started with Mach,²¹ and today Driesch²² is one of the main representatives of the species. Scientists are being appointed as professors of philosophy because the philosophers no longer have anything meaningful to say, whilst scientists at least still have the faculty of external observation. What they say about philosophy is, of course, even more empty of meaning than the things said by philosophers, who at least still had the words. This really has been a strange development. We have seen philosophy, which still had meaningful content in the first half of the 19th century, evaporate completely in the wordy works of someone like Kuno Fischer,²³ for instance. But in his day the chairs of philosophy were still held by philosophers, even if their philosophy no longer had inner meaning.

It is absolutely necessary that we realize this clearly and that there are at least a few people in the world who see through all the glitter of those “psychoids” and know that we are deeply in decadence, particularly in the field of academics. You can’t know this strongly enough, and I think it will be good for you to enter deeply into the things I have tried to put before you in these three lectures.

We have seen that on the one hand man appeared to be connected with the universe in outer form and in the way of life, but that he has renounced the universe at the head end and at the limb end, so that we are only wholly given up to the rhythm of the universe in so far as we are rhythmical human beings; renounced in order to develop the life of thoughts as life in images, that is, independent of physical matter, at one end, and at the other end to develop the life of will by keeping matter at an embryonic level, not letting it assume the rigid form that the macrocosm is able to impose. The limb end is thus kept mobile and has the potential to evolve and progress from earth to existence on Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan.

Hold on to these things and you can see that the insight gained in anthroposophy really wants to take hold first of all of our sense of truth, secondly of our sense of aesthetics—when you study the human form as it arises out of the macrocosm—and thirdly also in the direction of what is good and of religious life. These three lectures are particularly able to show the profound justification of the statement that has been made so many times here, in courses and also on other occasions, that we must look for a synthesis, bringing together in harmony religion, art and science. This cannot be achieved unless we come to a genuine cosmology which clearly shows the reality of the human form and of human life.

Something else we need is a theory of independent activity in the inner life, a theory that shows us the true nature of man, who has torn himself away from the cosmos at either end. And we also need to know the qualities which human beings develop independently, relating to future worlds which will take the place of the earth within the macrocosm. This will lead to deeply religious inner responses and feelings.

If human civilization is to show true progress we need a cosmology that includes the human being and does not leave humanity aside the way our present-day cosmology does. We also need a theory of independent activity and we need ethics that are able to show that the potential for good which they hold is the seed for worlds. We need ethics that have reality, their values not abstract but having the power in them to come to realization. Cosmology, a theory of independent activity and ethics—these are the things humanity will need to be able to rise to something higher.

• 15. René, Descartes (1596–1650), French philosopher and mathematician.
• 16. Baruch Spinoza (1632–77), Dutch-Jewish philosopher and theologian.
• 17. Anthropos, Greek for “human being”.
• 18. Arthur Drews (1865–1935), a professor of philosophy who gave a number of lectures against anthroposophy in the autumn of 1921. See his Metaphysik und Anthroposophie, Berlin 1922, esp. the chapter on perception of the supersensible.
• 19. Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), German philosopher
• 20. Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801–87), German philosopher and psychologist.
• 21. Ernst Mach (1839–1916) Austrian physicist and philosopher.
• 22. Hans Driesch (1867–1914), German zoologist and philosopher.
• 23. Ernst Kuno Fischer (1824–1907), German philosopher who wrote a major history of modern philosophy, books on logic and metaphysics and on Kant, Descartes, Goethe, Lessing and Schiller.

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

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I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

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Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.

Looking back at the past several meetings of this conference, I feel it is necessary to digress a little from our planned program and tell you something about the practical aspects of Waldorf education. From what you have heard so far, you may have gathered that the key to this form of education, both in its curriculum and in its methods, is the understanding of the human constitution of body, soul, and spirit as it develops throughout life. In order to follow this principle, it was necessary to take a new look at education in general, with the result that the Waldorf school is, in many ways, run very differently from traditional schools.

The first point we had to consider was how to make the most of the available time for teaching, especially in regard to the development of the student’s soul life. The usual practice is to split up the available time into many separate lessons, but this method does not bring enough depth and focus to the various subjects. For example, suppose you want to bring something to your students that will have lasting value for them, something they can take into later life. I will use the example of a subject taught in almost every school: history. Imagine that you want to introduce the era of Queen Elizabeth I, including the main events and people usually described to children. A teacher could do this by talking about the facts of that historical period in history lessons, and it might take, say, half a year. But you can also do this in a different way. After methodical preparation at home, a teacher can cultivate within a fine feeling for the salient facts, which then become a kind of framework for this period. The teacher allows these to work upon the soul, thus enabling the students to remember them without much difficulty. All additional material will then fall into place more or less naturally. If one masters the subject in this way, we can say without exaggerating that, in only three to four lessons, it is quite possible to give students something that might otherwise take half a year, and even in greater depth so that the students retain a lasting impression of the subject.

If you do a detailed survey of all that children are supposed to learn in school today, you will agree with the method I just described. In our present state of civilization, what our children are supposed to learn by the age of fourteen is such an accumulation of material that it is really beyond their capacity to absorb it all. No school is truly successful in teaching this much, but this fact is usually ignored. People merely pretend that the present system works, and the curricula are set accordingly.

The aim of Waldorf education is to arrange all of the teaching so that within the shortest possible time the maximum amount of material can be presented to students by the simplest means possible. This helps children retain an overall view of their subjects—not so much intellectually, but very much in their feeling life.

It is obvious that such a method makes tremendous demands on teachers. I am convinced that, if teachers apply this method (which I would call a form of teaching based on “soul economy”), they will have to spend at least two or three hours of concentrated preparation for each half hour they teach. And they must be willing to do this if they want to avoid harming their students. Such preparation may not always be practical or possible, but if the teacher wants to succeed in carrying a comprehensive and living presentation of the subject into the classroom, such private preparation is fundamental. It does make great demands on teachers, but such obligations are intrinsic to this calling and must be accepted in the best way possible.

Before we could practice this basic educational principle in our newly established Waldorf school, it was necessary to create a suitable curriculum and a schedule. Today I would like to outline this curriculum and its application, but without going into details, since this will be our task during the coming days.

And so, having prepared themselves as just described, the teachers enter the school in the morning. The students arrive a little earlier in the summer, at eight o’clock, and a little later in the winter. When they assemble in their classrooms, the teachers bring them together by saying a morning verse in chorus with the whole class. This verse, which could also be sung, embraces both a general human and a religious element, and it unites the students in a mood of prayer. It may be followed by a genuine prayer. In our “free” Waldorf school, such details are left entirely up to each teacher.

Then begins our so-called main lesson, which lasts nearly two hours; in traditional schedules, these are often broken up into smaller periods. But the principle of soul economy in teaching makes it necessary to alter the conventional schedule. Thus, during the first two hours of the morning, students are taught the same subject in “block” periods, each lasting four to six weeks. It is left to the class teacher to introduce a short break during the main lesson, which is essential in the younger classes. In this way, subjects like geography or arithmetic are taught for four to six weeks at a time. After that, another main lesson subject is studied, again for a block period, rather than as shorter lessons given at regular intervals through the year.

Thus one introduces the various main lesson subjects according to the principles we agreed on, which include a carefully planned economy of the children’s soul life. At all costs, one must avoid too much stress on the mind and soul of the child. Children should never feel that lessons are too difficult; on the contrary, there should be a longing in the child to keep moving from one step to the next. Students should never experience an arbitrary break in a subject; one thing should always lead to another. During the four to six weeks of a main lesson block, the class teacher will always try to present the material as a complete chapter—an artistic whole—that children can take into later life. And it goes without saying that, toward the end of the school year before the approaching summer holidays, all the main lesson subjects taught during the year should be woven together into a short, artistic recapitulation.

Just as we provide children with clothing with enough room for their limbs to grow freely, as teachers we should respond to their inner needs by giving them material not just for their present stage but broad enough for further expansion. If we give children fixed and finished concepts, we do not allow for inner growth and maturing. Therefore all the concepts we introduce, all the feelings we invoke, and all will impulses we give must be treated with the same care and foresight we use to clothe our children. We should not expect them to remember abstract definitions for the rest of their lives. At the age of forty-five, your little finger will not be the same as it was when you were eight, and likewise, concepts introduced at the age of eight should not remain unchanged by the time students reach the age of forty-five. We must approach the child’s organism so that the various members can grow and expand. We must not clothe our material in fixed and stiff forms so that, when our students reach forty-five, they remember it exactly as it was presented in their eighth or ninth year. This, however, is possible only if we present our subject with what I call “soul economy.” During the remaining hours of the morning, the other lessons are taught, and here foreign languages play the most important part. They are introduced in grade one, when the children first enter the Waldorf school in their sixth and seventh year. Foreign languages are presented so that the children can really go into them, which means that, while teaching a language, the teacher tries to avoid using the children’s native language.

The foreign language teacher naturally has to take into account that the students are older than they were when they first learned their own language and will arrange the lessons accordingly. This is essential to keep in harmony with the student’s age and development. The children should be able to get into the language so that they do not inwardly translate from their native tongue into the foreign language whenever they want to say something. Jumping from one language to the other should be avoided at all costs. If, for example, you want to introduce a particular word such as table or window, you would not mention the corresponding word in the child’s native language but indicate the object while saying the word clearly. Thus children learn the new language directly before learning to translate words, which might not be desirable at all. We have found that, during the early stages, if we avoid the usual grammar and all that this entails, children find their way into a new language in a natural and living way. More details will be given when we speak about the various ages, but for now I wanted to give you a general picture of the practical arrangements in the Waldorf school.

Another very important subject for this stage is handwork, which includes several crafts. Because the Waldorf school is coeducational, boys and girls share these lessons, and it is indeed a heart-warming sight to see the young boys and girls busy together engaged in knitting, crocheting, and similar activities. Experience shows that, although boys have a different relationship to knitting than do girls, they enjoy it and benefit from such activity. Working together this way has certainly helped in the general development of all the students. In craft lessons that involve heavier physical work, girls also participate fully. This is the way manual skills are developed and nurtured in our school.

Another subject taught during morning sessions could be called “worldview.” Please understand that a Waldorf school—or any school that might spring from the anthroposophic movement—would never wish to teach anthroposophy as it exists today. I would consider this the worst thing we could do. Anthroposophy in its present form is a subject for adults and, as you can see from the color of their hair, often quite mature adults. Consequently, spiritual science is presented through literature and word of mouth in a form appropriate only to adults. I should consider the presentation to students of anything from my books Theosophy or How to Know Higher Worlds the worst possible use of this material; it simply must not happen. If we taught such material, which is totally unsuitable for schoolchildren (forgive a somewhat trivial expression used in German), we would make them want “to jump out of their skin.” Naturally, in class lessons they would have to submit to whatever the teacher brings, but inwardly they would experience such an urge. Anthroposophy as such is not to be taught in a Waldorf school. It’s important that spiritual science does not become mere theory or a worldview based on certain ideas; rather, it should become a way of life, involving the entire human being. Thus, when teachers who are anthroposophists enter school, they should have developed themselves so that they are multifaceted and skillful in the art of education. And it is this achievement that is important, not any desire to bring anthroposophy to your students.

Waldorf education is meant to be pragmatic. It is meant to be a place where anthroposophic knowledge is applied in a practical way. If you have made such a worldview your own and linked it to practical life, you will not become theoretical and alienated from life but a skilled and capable person. I do not mean to say that all members of the anthroposophic movement have actually reached these goals—far from it. I happen to know that there are still some men among our members who cannot even sew on a trouser button that fell off. And no one suffering from such a shortcoming could be considered a full human being. Above all, there are still members who do not fully accept the contention that you cannot be a real philosopher if you cannot apply your hands to anything—such as repairing your shoes—if the need arises. This may sound a bit exaggerated, but I hope you know what I am trying to say.

Those who must deal with theoretical work should place themselves within practical life even more firmly than those who happen to be tailors, cobblers, or engineers. In my opinion, imparting theoretical knowledge is acceptable only when the other person is well versed in the practical matters of life; otherwise, such ideas remain alien to life. By approaching the classroom through anthroposophic knowledge, teachers as artists should develop the ability to find the right solutions to the needs of the children. If teachers carry such an attitude into the classroom, together with the fruits of their endeavors, they will also be guided in particular situations by a sound pedagogical instinct. This, however, is seldom the case in the conventional education today.

Please do not mistake these remarks as criticism against any teachers. Those who belong to the teaching profession will be the first to experience the truth of what has been said. In their own limitations, they may well feel they are the victims of prevailing conditions. The mere fact that they themselves had to suffer the martyrdom of a high school education may be enough to prevent them from breaking through many great hindrances. The most important thing while teaching is the ability to meet constantly changing classroom situations that arise from the immediate responses of one’s students. But who in this wide world trains teachers to do that? Are they not trained to decide ahead of time what they will teach? This often gives me the impression that children are not considered at all during educational deliberations. Such an attitude is like turning students into papier-mâché masks as they enter school, so that teachers can deal with masks instead of real children.

As mentioned before, it is not our goal to teach ideology in the Waldorf school, though such a thought might easily occur to people when hearing that anthroposophists have established a new school. Our goal is to carry our understanding gained through spiritual science right into practical teaching.

This is why I was willing to hand over the responsibility for religion lessons to those who represent the various religions. Religion, after all, is at the very core of a person’s worldview. Consequently, in our Waldorf school, a Roman Catholic priest was asked to give Roman Catholic religion lessons to students of that denomination, and a Protestant minister teaches Protestant religion lessons. When this decision was made, we were not afraid that we would be unable to balance any outer influence brought into the school by these priests, influence that might not be in harmony with what we were trying to do. But then a somewhat unexpected situation arose. When our friend Emil Molt established the Waldorf school, most of our students were from the homes of workers at his factory. Among them were many children whose parents are atheists, and if they had been sent to another school, they would not have received religious instruction at all. As such things often happen when dealing with children and parents, gradually these children also wanted to receive some form of religion lessons. And this is how our free, non-denominational, religion lessons came about. These were given by our own teachers, just as the other religious lessons were given by ministers. The teachers were recognized by us as religious teachers in the Waldorf curriculum. Thus, anthroposophic religious lessons were introduced in our school. These lessons have come to mean a great deal to many of our students, especially the factory workers’ children.

However, all this brought specific problems in its wake, because anthroposophy is for adults. If, therefore, teachers want to bring the right material into anthroposophic religious lessons, they must recreate it fresh, and this is no easy task. It means reshaping and transforming anthroposophic material to make it suitable for the various age groups. In fact, this task of changing a modern philosophy to suit young people occupies us a great deal. It means working deeply on fundamental issues, such as how the use of certain symbols might affect students, or how one deals with the imponderables inherent in such a situation. We will speak more about this later on.

I am sure you can appreciate that one has to make all kinds of compromises in a school that tries to base its curriculum on the needs of growing children in the light of a spiritual scientific knowledge of the human being. Today it would be quite impossible to teach children according to abstract educational ideas, subsequently called the “principles of Waldorf education.” The result of such a misguided approach would be that our graduates would be unable to find their way into life. It is too easy to criticize life today. Most people meet unpleasant aspects of life every day and we are easily tempted to make clever suggestions about how to put the world in order. But it completely inappropriate to educate children so that, when they leave school to enter life, they can only criticize the senselessness of what they find. However imperfect life may be according to abstract reason, we must nevertheless be able to play our full part in it. Waldorf students—who have probably been treated more as individuals than is usually the case—have to be sent out into life; otherwise, having a Waldorf school makes no sense at all. Students must not become estranged from contemporary life to the extent that they can only criticize what they meet outside.

This I can only touch on here. From the very beginning, we had to make the most varied compromises, even in our curriculum and pedagogical goals. As soon as the school was founded, I sent a memorandum to the educational authorities and requested that our students be taught according to the principles of Waldorf education, from the sixth or seventh year until the completion of their ninth year, or the end of the third class, without any outside interference. I meant that the planning of the curriculum and the standards to be achieved, as well as the teaching methods, were to be left entirely in the hands of our teaching staff, the “college of teachers,” which would bear the ultimate responsibility for the running of the school.

In my letter to the authorities, I stated that, on completion of the third school year, our students would have reached the same standards of basic education as those achieved in other schools, and thus would be able to change schools without difficulty. This implies that a child with a broader educational background than the students in this new class will nevertheless be able to fit into any new surroundings, and that such a student will not have lost touch with life in general. For us, it is not only important that teachers know their students well, but that there is also a corresponding relationship between the entire body of teachers and all the students of the school, so that students will feel free to contact any teacher for guidance or advice. It is a real joy, every time one enters the Waldorf school, to see how friendly and trusting the students are, not only with their class teachers but with all the teachers, both in and out of class.

Similarly, I said that our teaching between the end of the ninth and twelfth years—from the end of class three to the end of class six—is intended to achieve standards comparable with those of other schools and that our students would be able to enter seventh grade in another school without falling behind. We do not wish to be fanatical and, therefore, we had to make compromises. Waldorf teachers must always be willing to cope with the practical problems of life. And if a student has to leave our school at the age of fourteen, there should be no problems when entering a high school or any other school leading to a university entrance examination. So we try to put into practice what has been described.

Now, having established our school through the age of fourteen, every year we are adding a new class, so that we will eventually be able to offer the full range of secondary education leading to higher education. This means that we have to plan our curriculum so that young people will be able to take their graduation exams. In Austria, this exam is called a “maturity exam,” in Germany Abitur, and other countries have other names. In any case, our students are given the possibility of entering other schools of higher education. There is still no possibility that we will open a vocational school or university. Whatever we might try to do in this way would always bear the stamp of a private initiative, and, because we should never want to hold official examinations, no government would grant us permission to issue certificates of education without test results. Thus, we are forced to compromise in our Waldorf plan, and we are perfectly willing to acknowledge this. What matters is that, despite all the compromises, a genuine Waldorf spirit lives in our teaching, and this as much as possible.

Because we wanted a complete junior school when we opened our Waldorf school, we had to receive some students from other schools, and this gave us plenty of opportunity to witness the fruits of the “strict discipline” that characterizes other schools. At this point, we have a little more than two years of “Waldorf discipline” behind us, which, to a large extent, consists of our trying to get rid of the ordinary sort of school discipline. For example, just a few weeks ago we laid the foundation stone for a larger school building; until now, we have had to make do with provisional classrooms. To my mind, it seemed right that all our children would take part in this stone-laying ceremony. And, as so often happens in life, things took a little longer than anticipated, and by the time we were just getting ready for the actual ceremony, our students were already in the building. First I had to meet teachers and several others, but the children were there already. The adults had to meet in our so-called staff room. What could we to do with all those children? The chair of the college of teachers simply said, “We’ll send them back to their classrooms. They have now reached a stage where we can leave them unattended without bad consequences. They won’t disturb us.”

So, despite the dubious “discipline” imported from other schools, and despite having rid ourselves of so-called school discipline, it was possible to send the students to their classrooms without any disturbance. Admittedly, this peace was somewhat ephemeral; overly sensitive ears might have been offended, but that did not matter. Children who disturb overly sensitive ears are usually not overly disciplined. At any rate, the effects of imponderables in the Waldorf school became apparent in the children’s good behavior under these unusual circumstances.

As you know, various kinds of punishments are administered in most schools, and we, too, had to find ways to deal with this problem. When we discussed the question of punishment in one of our teacher meetings, one of our teachers reported an interesting incident. He had tried to discover the effects of certain forms of punishment on his students. His students had experienced our kind of discipline for some time, and among them there were a few notorious rascals. These little good-fornothings (as such students are called in Germany) had done very poor work, and they were to be punished according to usual school discipline and given detention. They were told to stay after lessons to do their arithmetic properly. However, when this punishment was announced in class, the other students protested that they, too, wanted to stay and do extra arithmetic because it is so much fun. So you see, the concept of punishment had gone through a complete transformation; it had become something the whole class enjoyed. Such things rarely happen if teachers try to make them happen directly, but they become the natural consequences of the right approach.

I am well aware that the problem of school discipline occupies many minds today. I had the opportunity to closely observe the importance of the relationship between a teacher and his students, a relationship that is the natural outcome of the disposition of both teacher and students. One could go so far as to say that whether students profit from their lessons or how much they gain depends on whether the teacher evokes sympathy or antipathy in the students. It is absolutely open to discussion whether an easygoing teacher—one who does not even work according to proper educational principles—may be more effective than a teacher who, intent on following perfectly sound but abstract principles, is unable to practice them in the classroom. There are plenty of abstract principles around these days. I am not being sarcastic when I call them clever and ingenious; their merits can be argued. But even when slovenly and indolent teachers enter the classroom, if they nevertheless radiate warmth and affection for their students, they may give their students more for later life than would a highly principled teacher whose personality evokes antipathy. Although the students of a genial but untidy teacher are not likely to grow into models of orderliness, at least they will not suffer from “nervous” conditions later on in life. Nervousness can be the result of antipathy toward a teacher—even one using excellent educational methods—who is unable to establish the right kind of contact with the students.

Such points are open to discussion, and they should be discussed if we take the art of education seriously. I once had to participate in a case like this, and my decision may evoke strong disapproval among some people. During one of my visits to the Waldorf school, I was told of a boy in one of the classes who was causing great difficulties. He had committed all kinds of misdemeanors, and none of his teachers could deal with him. I asked for the boy to be sent to me, because first I wanted to find the root of the trouble. You will admit that in many other schools such a boy would have received corporal punishment or possibly something less drastic. I examined the boy carefully and concluded that he should be moved into the next class above. This was to be his punishment, and I have not heard any complaints since. His new class teacher confirmed that the boy has become a model student and that everything seems to be in order now. This, after all, is what really matters. The important thing is that one goes into the very soul and nature of such a child. The cause of the trouble was that there was no human contact between him and his teacher, and because he was intelligent enough to cope with the work of the next class (there was no comparable class in his case), the only right thing was to move him up. Had we put him down into the next lower class, we would have ruined that child.

If one bears in mind the well-being and inner development of a child, one finds the right way teaching. This is why it is good to look at specific and symptomatic cases. We have no intention of denying that, in many ways, the Waldorf school is built on compromise, but as far as it is humanly possible, we always try to educate from a real knowledge of the human being.

Let us return to the curriculum. The morning sessions are arranged as described. Because it is essential for our students to be able to move on to higher forms of education, we had to include other subjects such as Greek and Latin, which are also taught in morning lessons. In these ancient languages soul economy is of particular importance. The afternoon lessons are given over to more physical activities, such as gym and eurythmy, and to artistic work, which plays a very special part in a Waldorf school. I will give further details of this in the coming days. We try, as much as possible, to teach the more intellectual subjects in the morning, and only when the headwork is done are they given movement lessons, insofar as they have not let off steam already between morning lessons. However, after the movement lessons they are not taken back to the classroom to do more headwork. I have already said that this has a destructive effect on life, because while children are moving physically, suprasensory forces work through them subconsciously. And the head, having surrendered to physical movement, is no longer in a position to resume its work. It is therefore a mistake to think that, by sandwiching a gym lesson between other more intellectual lessons, we are providing a beneficial change. The homogeneous character of both morning and afternoon sessions has shown itself beneficial to the general development of the students. If we keep in mind the characteristic features of human nature, we will serve the human inclinations best.

I mentioned that we found it necessary to give some kind of anthroposophic religious lessons to our students. Soon afterward, arising from those lessons, we felt another need that led to the introduction of Sunday services for our students. This service has the quality of formal worship, in which the children participate with deep religious feelings. We have found that a ritual performed before the children’s eyes every Sunday morning has greatly deepened their religious experience.

The Sunday service had to be enlarged for the sake of the students who were about to leave our middle school. In Germany, it is customary for students of this age to be confirmed in a special ceremony that signifies the stage of maturity at which they are old enough to enter life. We have made arrangements for a similar ceremony that, as experience has shown, leaves a lasting impression on our students.

In any education based on knowledge of the human being, needs become apparent that may have gone unnoticed in more traditional forms of education. For instance, in Germany all students receive school reports at the end of each school year, because it is considered essential to give them something like this before they leave for summer holidays. In this case, too, we felt the need for innovation. I have to admit that I would find it extremely difficult to accept the usual form of school reports in a Waldorf school, simply because I could never appreciate the difference between “satisfactory” and “near-satisfactory,” or between “fair” and “fairly good,” and so on. These grades are then converted into numbers, so that in Germany some reports show the various subjects arranged in one column, and on the opposite side there is a column of figures, such as 4½, 3, 3–4, and so on. I have never been able to develop the necessary understanding for these somewhat occult relationships. So we decided to find other ways of writing our school reports.

When our students leave for holidays at the end of the school year, they do receive reports. They contain a kind of mirror image, or biography, of their progress during the year, which has been written by their class teachers. We have found again and again that our children accept these reports with inner approval. They can read about the impression they have created during the years, and they will feel that, although the description was written with sympathetic understanding, they do not tolerate any whitewashing of the less positive aspects of their work. These reports, which are received with deep inner satisfaction, end with a verse, composed especially for each child. This verse is a kind of guiding motive for the coming years. I believe our kind of reports have already proved themselves and will retain their value in the future, even though in some parts of Germany they have already been referred to as “ersatz” reports.

Students have responded to life in the Waldorf school in an entirely positive way. To show how much they like their school, I should like to repeat something I recently heard from one of our mothers, for such an example helps to illustrate more general symptoms. She said, “My boy was never an affectionate child. He never showed any tender feelings toward me as his mother. After his first year in the Waldorf school—while still quite young—his summer holidays began. When they were nearly over and I told him that soon he would be going to school again, he came and kissed me for the first time.” Such a small anecdote could be considered symptomatic of the effects of an education based on knowledge of the human being and practiced in a human and friendly atmosphere. Our school reports also help to contribute towards this atmosphere. As an introduction to life in the Waldorf school, I felt it necessary to digress a little from our planned program. Tomorrow we shall continue with a more detailed account of the child’s development after the change of teeth. Meanwhile, I wanted to include here a description of what by now has become the outer framework of practical life in the Waldorf school.

For quite a number of years now Education has been one of those branches of civilised, cultural activity which we foster within the Anthroposophical Movement, and, as will appear from these lectures, we may perhaps just in this sphere look back with a certain satisfaction on what we have been able to do. Our schools have existed only a few years, so I cannot speak of an achievement, but only of the beginning of something which, even outside the Anthroposophical Movement, has already made a certain impression on circles interested in the spiritual life of the cultural world of today. Looking back on our educational activity it gives me real joy, particularly here in Holland, where many years ago I had the opportunity of lecturing on subjects connected with anthroposophical spiritual science, to speak once more on this closely related theme.

Anthroposophical education and teaching is based on that knowledge of man which is only to be gained on the basis of spiritual science; it works out of a knowledge of the whole human being, body, soul and spirit. At first such a statement may be regarded as obvious. It will be said that of course the whole man must be taken into consideration when it is a question of educational practice, of education as an art; that neither should the spiritual be neglected in favour of the physical, nor the physical in favour of the spiritual. But it will very soon be seen how the matter stands when we become aware of the practical results which ensue when any branch of human activity is based on anthroposophical spiritual science. Here in Holland, in the Hague, a small school has been founded on the basis of an anthroposophical knowledge of man, a daughter school, if I may call it so, of our Waldorf School in Stuttgart. And I believe that whoever gets to know such a school, whether from merely hearing about the way it is run, or through a more intimate knowledge, will find in the actual way it deals with teaching and education, something arising from its anthroposophical foundation which differs essentially from the usual run of schools in our present civilisation. The reason for this is that wherever we look today we find a gulf between what people think, or devise theoretically, and what they actually carry out in practice. For in our present civilisation theory and practice have become two widely separated spheres. However paradoxical it may sound, the separation may be observed, perhaps most of all in the most practical of all occupations in life, in the business world, in the economic sphere. Here all sorts of things are learnt theoretically. For instance, people think out details of administration in economic affairs. They form intentions. But these intentions cannot be carried out in actual practice. However carefully they are thought out, they do not meet the actual conditions of life. I should like to express myself still more clearly, so that we may understand one another. For example, a man who wishes to set up a business concern thinks out some sort of business project. He thinks over all that is connected with this business and organises it according to his intentions.

His theories and abstract thoughts are then put into effect, but, when actually carried out, they everywhere come up against reality. Certainly things are done, thought-out ideas are even put into practice, but these thoughts do not fit into real life. In actual fact something is carried over into real life which does not correspond with what is real. Now a business that is conducted in this way can continue for some time and its inaugurator will consider himself to be a tremendously practical fellow. For whoever goes into business and from the outset has learnt absolutely nothing outside customary practice will consider himself a “practical” man.

Today we can hear how really practical people speak about such a theorist. He enters into business life and with a heavy hand introduces his thought-out ideas. If sufficient capital is available, he may even be able to carry on for a time, after a while, however, the concern collapses, or it may be absorbed into some more established business. Usually when this happens very little heed is paid to how much genuine, vital effort has been wasted, how many lives ruined, how many people injured or impaired in their way of life. It has come about solely because something has been thought out—thought out by a so-called “practical” man. In such a case however the person in question is not practical through his insight but by the use of his elbows. He has introduced something into reality without considering the conditions of reality.

Few people notice it, but this kind of thing has become rampant in the cultural life of today. At the present time the only sphere where such things are understood, where it is recognised that such a procedure does not work, is in the application of mechanical natural science to life. When the decision is made to build a bridge it is essential to make use of a knowledge of mechanics to ensure that the bridge will stand up to what is required of it; otherwise the first train that passes over it will be plunged into the water. Such things have already happened, and even at the present time we have seen the results of faulty mechanical construction. Speaking generally, however, this sphere is the only one in practical life in which it can be stated unequivocally that the conditions of reality have or have not been foreseen.

If we take the sphere of medicine we shall see at once that it is not so evident whether or not the conditions of reality have been taken into account. Here too the procedure is the same; something is thought out theoretically and then applied as a means of healing. Whether in this case there has been a cure, whether it was somebody's destiny to die, or whether perhaps he has been “cured to death,” this indeed is difficult to perceive. The bridge collapses when there are faults in its construction; but whether the sick person gets worse, whether he has been cured by the treatment, or has died of it, is not so easy to discover.

In the same way, in the sphere of education it is not always possible to see whether the growing child is being educated in accordance with his needs, or whether fanciful methods are being used which can certainly be worked out by experimental psychology. In this latter case the child is examined by external means and the following questions arise: what sort of memory has he, what are his intellectual capacities, his ability to form judgments and so on? Educational aims are frequently found in this way. But how are they carried into life? They sit firmly in the head, that is where they are. In his head the teacher knows that a child must be taught arithmetic like this, geography like that, and so it goes on. Now the intentions are to be put into practice. The teacher considers all he has learnt, and remembers that according to the precepts of scientific educational method he must set about things in such and such a way. He is now faced with putting his knowledge into practice, he remembers these theoretical principles and applies them quite externally. Whoever has the gift for observing such things can experience how sometimes teachers who have thoroughly mastered educational theories, who can recount admirably everything they had to know for their examination, or had to learn in practice class-teaching, nevertheless remain utterly removed from life when they come face to face with the children they have to teach. What has happened to such a teacher is what, daily and hourly, we are forced to observe with sorrowing heart, the fact that people pass one another by in life, that they have no sense for getting to know one another. This is a common state of affairs. It is the fundamental evil which underlies all social disturbances which are so widespread in the cultural life of today: the lack of paying heed to others, the lack of interest which every man should have for others. In everyday civilised life we must perforce accept such a state of affairs; it is the destiny of modern humanity at the present time. But the peak of such aloofness is reached when the teacher of the child or the educator of the youth stands at a distance from his pupil, quite separated from him, and employs in a completely external way methods obtained by external science. We can see that the laws of mechanics have been wrongly applied when a bridge collapses, but wrong educational methods are not so obvious. A clear proof of the fact that human beings today are only at home when it comes to a mechanical way of thinking, which can always determine whether things have been rightly or wrongly thought out, and which has produced the most brilliant triumphs in the life of modern civilisation—a proof of this is that humanity today has confidence only in mechanical thought. And if this mechanical thinking is carried into education, if, for instance, the child is asked to write down disconnected words and then repeat them quickly, so that a record can be made of his power of assimilation, if this is the procedure in education it is a sign that there is no longer any natural gift for approaching the child himself. We experiment with the child because we can no longer approach his heart and soul.

In saying all this it might seem as though one had the inclination or desire only to criticise and reprove in a superior sort of way. It is of course always easier to criticise than to build something up constructively. But as a matter of fact what I have said does not arise out of any such inclination or desire; it arises out of a direct observation of life. This direct observation of life must proceed from something which is usually completely excluded from knowledge today. What sort of person must one be today if one wishes to pursue some calling based on knowledge—for instance on the knowledge of man? One must be objective! This is to be heard all over the place today, in every hole and corner. Of course one must be objective, but the question is whether or not this objectivity is based on a lack of paying due heed to what is essential in any particular situation.

Now for the most part people have the idea that love is far more subjective than anything else in life, and that it would be utterly impossible for anyone who loves to be objective. For this reason when knowledge is spoken about today love is never mentioned seriously. True, it is deemed fitting, when a young man is applying himself to acquire knowledge, to exhort him to do so with love, but this mostly happens when the whole way in which knowledge is presented is not at all likely to develop love in anybody But the essence of love, the giving of oneself to the world and its phenomena, is in any case not regarded as knowledge. Nevertheless for real life love is the greatest power of knowledge. And without this love it is utterly impossible to attain to a knowledge of man which could form the basis of a true art of education. Let us try to picture this love, and see how it can work in the special sphere of an education founded on a knowledge of man drawn from spiritual science, from anthroposophy.

The child is entrusted to us to be educated, to be taught. If our thinking in regard to education is founded on anthroposophy we do not represent the child to ourselves as something we must help to develop so that he approaches nearer and nearer to some social human ideal, or whatever it may be. For this human ideal can be completely abstract. And today such a human ideal has already become something which can assume as many forms as there are political, social and other parties. Human ideals change according to whether one swears by liberalism, conservatism, or by some other programme, and so the child is led slowly in some particular direction in order to become what is held to be right for mankind. This is carried to extreme lengths in present-day Russia. Generally speaking, however, it is more or less how people think today, though perhaps somewhat less radically.

This is no starting point for the teacher who wants to educate and teach on the basis of anthroposophy. He does not make an “idol” of his opinions. For an abstract picture of man, towards which the child shall be led, is an idol, it is in no sense a reality. The only reality which could exist in this field would be at most if the teacher were to consider himself as an ideal and were to say that every child must become like him. Then one would at least have touched on some sort of reality, but the absurdity of saying such a thing would at once be obvious.

What we really have before us in this young child is a being who has not yet begun his physical existence, but has brought down his spirit and soul from pre-earthly worlds, and has plunged into a physical body bestowed on him by parents and ancestors. We look upon this child as he lies there before us in the first days of his life with indeterminate features and with unorganised, undirected movements. We follow day by day, week by week how the features grow more and more defined, and become the expression of what is working to the surface from the inner life of soul. We observe further how the whole life and movements of the child become more consequent and directed, how something of the nature of spirit and soul is working its way to the surface from the inmost depths of his being. Then, filled with holy awe and reverence, we ask: “What is it that is here working its way to the surface?” And so with heart and mind we are led back to the human being himself, when as soul and spirit he dwelt in the soul-spiritual pre-earthly world from which he has descended into the physical world, and we say: “Little child, now that you have entered through birth into earthly existence you are among human beings, but previously you were among spiritual, divine beings.” What once lived among spiritual-divine beings has descended in order to live among men. We see the divine made manifest in the child. We feel as though standing before an altar. There is however one difference. In religious communities it is customary for human beings to bring their sacrificial offerings to the altars, so that these offerings may ascend into the spiritual world; now we feel ourselves standing as it were before an altar turned the other way; now the gods allow their grace to stream down in the form of divine-spiritual beings, so that these beings, acting as messengers of the gods, may unfold what is essentially human on the altar of physical life. We behold in every child the unfolding of cosmic laws of a divine-spiritual nature; we see how God creates in the world. In its highest, most significant form this is revealed in the child. Hence every single child becomes for us a sacred riddle, for every single child embodies this great question—not, how is he to be educated so that he approaches some “idol” which has been thought out.—But, how shall we foster what the gods have sent down to us into the earthly world. We learn to know ourselves as helpers of the divine-spiritual world, and above all we learn to ask: What may be the result if we approach education with this attitude of mind?

Education in the true sense proceeds out of just such an attitude. What matters is that we should develop our education and teaching on the basis of such thoughts as these. Knowledge of man can only be won if love for mankind—in this case love for the child—becomes the mainspring of our work. If this is so, then the teacher's calling becomes a priestly calling, for then the educator becomes the steward of what it is the will of the gods to carry out with man.

Here again it might appear as though something obvious is being said in rather different words. But it is not so. As a matter of fact in today's unsocial world-order, which only wears an outer semblance of being social, the very opposite occurs. Educationists pursue an “idol” for mankind, not seeing themselves as nurturers of something they must first learn to know when actually face to face with the child.

An attitude of mind such as I have described cannot work in an abstract way, it must work spiritually, while always keeping the practical in view. Such an attitude however can never be acquired by accepting theories quite unrelated and alien to life, it can only be gained if one has a feeling, a sense for every expression of life, and can enter with love into all its manifestations.

Today there is a great deal of talk about educational reform. Since the war there has been talk of a revolution in education. We have experienced this. Every possible approach to a new education is thought out, and pretty well everybody is concerned in some way or other with how this reform is to be brought about. Either one approaches some institution about to be founded with one's proposals or at the very least one suggests this or that as one's idea of how education should take shape. And so it goes on. There is a great deal of talk about methods of education; but do you see what kind of impression all this makes when one surveys, quite without prejudice, what the various societies for the reform of education, down to the most radical, put forward today in their educational programmes? I do not know whether many people take into account what kind of impression is made when one is faced with so many programmes issuing from associations and societies for educational reform. One gets the impression: Good heavens, how clever people are today! For indeed everything which comes about like this is frightfully clever. I do not mean this ironically, but quite seriously. There has never been a time when there was so much cleverness as there is in our era.

There we have it, all set out. Paragraph 1. How shall we educate so that the forces of the child may be developed naturally? Paragraph 2 ... Paragraph 3 ... and so on. People today of any profession or occupation, and of any social class can sit down together and work out such programmes; everything we get in this way in paragraphs 1 to 30 will be delightfully clever, for today one knows just how to formulate everything theoretically. People have never been so skilful in formulating things as they are today. Then such a programme, a number of programmes can be submitted to a committee or to Parliament. This again is very clever. Now something may perhaps be deleted or added according to party opinion, and something extremely clever emerges, even if at times strongly coloured by “party.” Nothing can be done with it, however, for all this is quite beside the point.

Waldorf School education never started off with such a programme. I have no wish to boast, but naturally, had this been our purpose, we could also have produced some kind of programme no less clever than those of many an association for educational reform. The fact that we should have to reckon with reality might perhaps prove a hindrance and then the result would be more stupid. With us however there was never any question of a programme. From the outset we were never interested in principles of educational method which might later on be somehow incorporated in a legalised educational system. What did interest us was reality, absolute true reality. What was this reality? To begin with here were children, a number of child-individualities with varying characteristics. One had to learn what these were, one had to get to know what was inherent in these children, what they had brought down with them, what was expressed through their physical bodies. First and foremost then there were the children. And then there were teachers. You can stand up as strongly as you like for the principle that the child must be educated in accordance with his individuality—that stands in all the programmes of reform—but nothing whatever will come of it. For on the other hand, besides the children, there are a number of teachers, and the point is to know what these teachers can accomplish in relation to these children. The school must be run in such a way that one does not set up an abstract ideal, but allows the school to develop out of the teachers and out of the pupils. And these teachers and pupils are not present in an abstract kind of way, but are quite concrete, individual human beings. That is the gist of the matter. Then we are led by virtue of necessity to build up a true education based on a real knowledge of man. We cease to be theoretical and become practical in every detail.

Waldorf School education, the first manifestation of an education based on anthroposophy, is actually the practice of education as an art, and is therefore able to give only indications of what can be done in this or that case. We have no great interest in general theories, but so much the greater is our interest in impulses coming from anthroposophy which can give us a true knowledge of man, beginning, as here of course it must do, with the child. But today our crude observation completely ignores what is most characteristic in the progressive stages of life. I would say that some measure of inspiration must be drawn from spiritual science if today we are to develop a right sense for what should be brought to the child.

At the present time people know extraordinarily little about man and mankind. They imagine that our present state of existence is the same as it was in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and indeed as it has always been. They picture the ancient Greeks and the ancient Egyptians as being very similar to the man of today. And if we go back still further, according to the views of present-day natural science, history becomes enveloped in mist until those beings emerge which are half ape, half man. No interest is taken, however, in penetrating into the great differences which exist between the historical and pre-historical epochs of mankind.

Let us study the human being as he appears to us today, beginning with the child up to the change of teeth. We see quite clearly that his physical development runs parallel with his development of soul and spirit. Everything that manifests as soul and spirit has its exact counterpart in the physical—both appear together, both develop out of the child together. Then, when the child has come through the change of teeth, we see how the soul is already freeing itself from the body. On the one side we shall be able to follow a development of soul and spirit in the child, and on the other side his physical development. The two sides however are not as yet clearly separated. If we continue to follow the development further into the time between puberty and about the 21st year the separation becomes much more defined and then when we come to the 27th or 28th year—speaking now of present-day humanity—nothing more can be seen of the way in which the soul-spiritual is connected with the physical body. What a man does at this age can be perceived on the one hand in the soul-spiritual life and on the other hand in the physical life, but the two cannot be brought into any sort of connection. At the end of the twenties, man in his soul and spirit has separated himself completely from what is physical, and so it goes on up to the end of his life.

Yet it was not always so. One only believes it to have been so. Spiritual science, studied anthroposophically, shows us clearly and distinctly that what we see in the child today, at the present stage of human evolution—namely, that in his being of soul and spirit the child is completely dependent on his physical bodily nature and his physical bodily nature is completely dependent on his being of soul and spirit—this condition persisted right on into extreme old age—a fact that has simply not been noticed. If we go very far back into those times which gave rise to the conception of the patriarchs and ask ourselves what kind of a man such a patriarch really was, the answer must be somewhat as follows: Such a man, in growing old, changed in respect of his bodily nature, but right into extreme old age he continued to feel as only quite young people can feel today. Even in old age he felt his being of soul and spirit to be dependent on his physical body.

Today we no longer feel our physical body to be dependent upon what we think and feel. A dependence of this kind was however felt in the more ancient epochs of civilisation. But people also felt after a certain age of life that their bones became harder and their muscles contained certain foreign substances which brought about a sclerotic condition. They felt the waning of their life forces, but they also felt with this physical decline an increase of spiritual forces, actually brought about by the breaking up of the physical. “The soul is becoming free from the physical body.” So they said when this process of physical decline began. At the age of the patriarchs, when the body was already breaking up, the soul was most able to wrest itself free from the body, so that it was no longer within it. This is why people looked up to the patriarchs with such devotion and reverence, saying: “O, how will it be with me one day, when I am so old? For in old age one can know things, understand things, penetrate into the heart of things in a way that I cannot do now, because I am still building up my physical body.” At that time man could still look into a world order that was both physical and spiritual. This however was in a very remote past. Then came a time when man felt this interdependence of the physical and the soul-spiritual only until about the 50th year. The Greek age followed. What gives the Greek epoch its special value rests on the fact that the Greeks were still able to feel the harmony between the soul-spiritual and the physical-bodily. The Greek still felt this harmony until the 30th or 40th year. He still experienced in the circulation of the blood what brought the soul into a unity with the physical. The wonderful culture and art of the Greeks was founded on this unity, which transformed everything theoretical into art, and at the same time enfilled art with wisdom.

In those times the sculptor worked in such a way that he needed no model, for in his own organisation he was aware of the forces permeating the arm or the leg, giving them their form. This was learned, for instance, in the festival games; but today when such games are imitated they have no meaning whatever.

If however we have such a sense for the development of mankind then we know what has actually taken place in human evolution. We know too that today we only have a parallelism between the physical-bodily and the soul-spiritual until about the 27th or 28th year, to give a quite exact description. (Most people observe this parallelism only up to the age of puberty.) And so we know how the divine-spiritual springs up and grows out of the developing human being. Then we feel the necessary reverence for our task of developing what comes to meet us in the child, that is to say, of developing what is given to us and not developing those abstract ideas that have been thought out.

Thus our thoughts are directed to a knowledge of man based on what is individual in the soul. And if we have absorbed such universal, great historical aspects, we shall also be able to approach every educational task in an appropriate manner. Then quite another life will be brought into the class when the teacher enters it, for he will carry the world into it, the physical world and the world of soul and spirit. Then he will be surrounded by an atmosphere of reality, of a real and actual conception of the world, not one which is merely thought out and intellectual. Then he will be surrounded by a world imbued with feeling. Now if we consider what has just been put forward we shall realise a remarkable fact. We shall see that we are founding an education which, by degrees, will come to represent in many respects the very opposite of the characteristic impulse in education at the present time. All manner of humorists with some aptitude for caricature often choose the so-called “schoolmaster” as an object which can serve their purpose well and on whom they can let loose their derision. Well, if a schoolmaster is endowed with the necessary humour he can turn the tables on those who have caricatured him before the world. But the real point is something altogether different; for if the teacher, versed in present-day educational methods, carries these into school with him, and has therefore no means of learning to know the child, while nevertheless having to deal with the child, how can he be anything other than a stranger to the world? With the school system as it is today, he cannot become anything else; he is torn right out of the world. So we are faced with a truly remarkable situation. Teachers who are strangers to the world are expected to train human beings so that they may get on and prosper in the world.

Let us imagine however that the things about which we have been speaking today become an accepted point of view. Then the relation of the teacher to the children is such that in each individual child a whole world is revealed to him, and not only a human world, but a divine-spiritual world manifested on earth. In other words the teacher perceives as many aspects of the world as he has children in his charge. Through every child he looks into the wide world. His education becomes art. It is imbued with the consciousness that what is done has a direct effect on the evolution of the world. Teaching in the sense meant here leads the teacher, in his task of educating, of developing human beings, to a lofty conception of the world. Such a teacher is one who becomes able to play a leading part in the great questions that face civilisation. The pupil will never outgrow such a teacher, as is so often the case today. The following situation may arise in a school. Let us suppose that the teacher has to educate according to some idea, some picture of man which he can set before himself. Let us think that he might have 30 children in his class, and among these, led by destiny, were two, who in their inborn capacity, were far more gifted than the teacher himself. What would he want to do in such a case? He would want to form them in accordance with his educational ideal; nothing else would be possible. But how does this work out? Reality does not permit it, and the pupils then outgrow their teacher.

If on the other hand we educate in accordance with reality, if we foster all that manifests in the child as qualities of soul and spirit, we are in the same situation as the gardener is in relation to his plants. Do you think that the gardener knows all these secrets of the plants which he tends? O, these plants contain many, many more secrets than the gardener understands; but he can tend them, and perhaps succeed best in caring for those which he does not yet know. His knowledge rests on practical experience, he has “green fingers.” In the same way it is possible for a teacher who practises an art of education based on reality to stand as educator before children who have genius, even though he himself is certainly no genius. For he knows that he has not to lead his pupils towards some abstract ideal, but that in the child the Divine is working in man, is working right through his physical-bodily nature. If the teacher has this attitude of mind he can actually achieve what has just been said. He achieves it by an outpouring love which permeates his work as educator. It is his attitude of mind which is so essential.

With these words, offered as a kind of greeting, I wanted to give you today some idea of what is to be the content of this course of lectures. They will deal with the educational value of a knowledge of man and the cultural value of education.

To-day we shall begin to consider the inner activities of the soul which can gradually lead man to acquire conceptions, to acquire thoughts, about karma. These thoughts and conceptions are such that they can ultimately enable a man to perceive, in the light of karma, experiences which have a karmic cause.

Looking around our human environment, we really see in the physical world only what is caused by physical force in a physical way. And if we do see in the physical world something that is not caused by physical forces, we still become aware of it through external physical substances, through external physical objects of perception. Of course, when a man does something out of his own will, this is not caused by physical forces, by physical causes, for in many respects it comes out of the free will. But all that we perceive outwardly is exhausted in the physical phenomena of the world we thus observe. In the entire sphere of what we can thus observe, the karmic connection of an experience we ourselves pass through cannot reveal itself to us. For the whole picture of this karmic connection lies in the spiritual world, is really inscribed in what is the etheric world, in what underlies the etheric world as the astral world, or as the world of spiritual beings who inhabit this astral outer world. Nothing of all this is seen, as long as we merely direct our senses to the physical world.

All that we perceive in the physical world is perceived through our senses. These senses work without our having much to do with it. Our eyes receive impressions of light, of colour, of their own accord. We can at most—and even that is half involuntary—adjust our gaze to a certain direction; we can gaze at something or we can look away from it. Even in this there is still much of the unconscious, but at all events a fragment of consciousness. And, above all, that which the eye must do inwardly in order to see colour, the wonderfully wise, inner activity which is exercised whenever we see anything—this we could never achieve as human beings if we were supposed to achieve it consciously. That would be out of the question. All this must, to begin with, happen unconsciously, because it is much too wise for man to be able in any way to help in it.

To attain a correct point of view as regards the knowledge possessed by the human being, we must really fill our thoughts with all the wisdom-filled arrangements which exist in the world, and which are quite beyond the capacity of man. If a man thinks only of what he can achieve himself, then he really blocks all paths to knowledge. The path to knowledge really begins at the point where we realise, in all humility, all that we are incapable of doing, but which must nevertheless come to pass in cosmic existence. The eye, the ear—yes, and the other sense-organs—are, in reality, such profoundly wise instruments that men will have to study for a long time before they will be able even to have an inkling of understanding of them during earthly existence. This must be fully realised. Observation of the spiritual, however, cannot be unconscious in this sense. In earlier times of human evolution this was possible even for observation of the spiritual. There was an instinctive clairvoyance which has faded away in the course of the evolution of humanity.

From now onwards, man must consciously attain an attitude to the cosmos through which he will be able to see through into the spiritual. And we must see through into the spiritual if we are to recognise the karmic connections of any experience we may have.

Now it is necessary for the observation of karma that we at least begin by paying attention to what can happen within us to develop the faculty of observing karmic connections. We, on our part, must help a little in order to make these observations conscious. We must do more, for example, than we do for our eye in order to become conscious of colour.

My dear friends, what we must learn first of all is summed up in one word: to wait. We must be able to wait for the inner experiences.

About this “being able to wait”, I have already spoken. It was in the year 1889—I tell about this in the Story of my Life—that the inner spiritual construction of Goethe's “The Fairy Tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily” first came before my mind's eye. And it was then, for the first time, that the perception as it were of a greater, wider connection than appears in the Fairy Tale itself presented itself to me. But I also knew at that time: I cannot yet make of this connection what I shall some day be able to make of it. And so what the Fairy Tale revealed to me at that time simply remained lying in the soul.

Then, seven years later, in the year 1896, it welled up again, but still not in such a way that it could be properly shaped; and again, about 1903, seven years later. Even then, although it came with great definition and many connections it could not yet receive its right form. Seven years later again, when I conceived my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation—then only did the Fairy Tale reappear, transformed in such a way that it could be shaped and moulded plastically.

Such things, therefore, demand a real waiting, a time for ripening. We must bring our own experiences into relation with that which exists out there in the world. At a moment when only the seed of a plant is present, we obviously cannot have the plant. The seed must be brought into the right conditions for growth, and we must wait until the blossom, and finally the fruit, come out of the seed. And so it must be with the experiences through which we pass. We cannot take the line of being thrilled by an experience, simply because it happens to be there, and then forgetting it. The person who only wants his experiences when they are actually present will be doing little towards ultimate observation of the spiritual world. We must be able to wait. We must be able to let the experiences ripen within the soul.

Now the possibility exists for a comparatively quick ripening of insight into karmic connections if, for a considerable time, we endeavour patiently, and with inner activity, to picture in our consciousness, more and more clearly, an experience which would otherwise simply take its course externally, without being properly grasped, so that it fades away in the course of life. After all, this fading away is what really happens with the events of life. For what does a man do with events and experiences, as they approach him in the course of the day? He experiences them, but in reality only half observes them. You can realise how experiences are only half observed if you sit down one day in the afternoon or in the evening—and I advise you to do it—and ask yourself: ‘What did I actually experience this morning at half-past nine?’ And now try to call up such an experience in all details before your soul, recall it as if it were actually there, say at half-past seven in the evening—as if you were creating it spiritually before you. You will see how much you will find lacking, how much you failed to observe, and how difficult it is. If you take a pen or pencil to write it all down, you will soon begin to bite at the pen or the pencil, because you cannot hit upon the details—and, in time, you want to bite them out of the pencil!

Yes, but that is just the point, to take upon oneself the task of placing before the mind, in all precision, an experience one has had,—not at the moment when it is actually there, but afterwards. It must be placed before the soul as if one were going to paint it spiritually. If the experience were one in which somebody spoke, this must be made quite objectively real: the ring of the voice, the way in which the words were used, clumsily or cleverly—the picture must be made with strength and vigour. In short, we try to make a picture of what we have experienced. If we make a picture of such an experience of the day, then in the following night, the astral body, when it is outside the physical body and the etheric body, occupies itself with this picture. The astral body itself is, in reality, the bearer of the picture, and gives shape to it outside the body. The astral body takes the picture with it when it goes out on the first night. It shapes it there, outside the physical and etheric bodies.

That is the first stage (we will take these stages quite exactly): the sleeping astral body, when outside the physical and etheric bodies, shapes the picture of the experience. Where does it do this? In the external ether. It is now in the external etheric world; it does this in the external ether.

Now picture to yourself the human being: his physical and etheric bodies lie in bed, and the astral body is outside. We will leave aside the ego. There outside is the astral body, reshaping this picture that has been made. But the astral body does this in the external ether. In consequence of this the following happens—think of it: the astral body is there outside, shaping this picture. All this happens in the external ether which encrusts, as it were, with its own substance that which is formed as a picture within the astral body. So the external ether makes the etheric form (dotted (dark) outline) into a picture which is clearly and precisely visualised by the eye of spirit.

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In the morning you return into the physical and etheric bodies and bear into them what has been made substantial by the external ether. That is to say: the sleeping astral body shapes the picture of the experience outside the physical and etheric bodies. The external ether then impregnates the picture with its own substance. You can imagine that the picture becomes stronger thereby, and that now, when the astral body returns in the morning with this stronger substantiality, it can make an impression upon the etheric body in the human being. With forces that are derived from the external ether, the astral body now stamps an impression into the etheric body.

The second stage is therefore: The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body.

There we have the events of the first day and the first night. Now we come to the second day. On the second day, while you are busying yourself with all the little things of life in full waking consciousness, there, underneath the consciousness, in the unconscious, the picture is descending into the etheric body. And in the next night, when the etheric body is undisturbed, when the astral body has gone out again, the etheric body elaborates this picture.

Thus in the second night the picture is elaborated by the man's own etheric body. There we have the second stage:—The picture is impressed into the etheric body by the astral body; and in the next night the etheric body elaborates the picture. Thus we have: the second day and the second night.

Now if you do this, if you actually do not give up occupying yourself with the picture you formed on the preceding day—and you can continue to occupy yourself with it, for a reason which I shall immediately mention—if you do not disdain to do this, then you will find that you are living on further with the picture. What does this mean—to continue occupying yourself with it? If you really take pains to shape such a picture, vigorously, elaborating it plastically in characteristic, strong lines on the first day after you had the experience, then you have really exerted yourself spiritually. Such things cost spiritual exertion. I don't mean what I am going to say as a hint—present company is, of course, always excepted in these matters!—but after all, it must be said that the majority of men simply do not know what spiritual exertion is. Spiritual exertion, true spiritual exertion, comes about only by means of activity of soul. When you allow the world to work upon you, and let thoughts run their course without taking them in hand, then there is no spiritual exertion. We should not imagine, when something tires us, that we have exerted ourselves spiritually. Getting tired does not imply that there has been spiritual exertion. We can get tired, for instance, from reading. But if we have not ourselves been productive in some way during the reading, if we merely let the thoughts contained in the book act on us, then we are not exerting ourselves. On the contrary, a person who has really exerted himself spiritually, who has exerted himself out of the inner activity of his soul, may then take up a book, a very interesting one, and just “sleep off” his spiritual exertion in the best possible way, in the reading of it. Naturally, we can fall asleep over a book if we are tired. This getting tired is no sign at all of spiritual exertion.

A sign of spiritual exertion, however, is this: that one feels—the brain is used up. It is just as we may feel that a demand has been made on the muscle of the arm when lifting things. Ordinary thought makes no such strong claims upon the brain. The process continues, and you will even notice that when you try it for the first time, the second, the third, the tenth, you get a slight headache. It is not that you get tired or fall asleep; on the contrary, you cannot fall asleep; you get a slight headache from it. Only you must not regard this headache as something baleful; on the contrary, you must take it as actual proof of the fact that you have exerted your head.

Well, the process goes on ... it stays with you until you go to sleep. If you have really done this on the preceding day, then you will awake in the morning with the feeling: “There actually is something in me! I don't quite know what it is, but there is something in me, and it wants something from me. Yes, after all it is not a matter of indifference that I made this picture for myself yesterday. It really means something. This picture has changed. To-day it is giving me quite different feelings from those I had previously. The picture is making me have quite definite feelings.”

All this stays with you through the next day as the remaining inner experience of the picture which you made for yourself. And what you feel, and cannot get rid of through the whole of the day—this is a witness to the fact that the picture is now descending into the etheric body, as I have described to you, and that the etheric body is receiving it.

Now you will probably experience on waking after the next night—when you slip into your body after these two days—that you find this picture slightly changed, slightly transformed. You find it again ... precisely on waking the third day you find it again within you. It appears to you like a very real dream. But it has undergone a transformation. It will clothe itself in manifold pictures until it is other than it was. It will assume an appearance as if spiritual beings were now bringing you this experience. And you actually receive the impression: Yes, this experience which I had and which I subsequently formed into a picture, has actually been brought to me. If the experience happened to be with another human being, then we have the feeling after this has all happened, that actually we did not only experience it through that human being, but that it was really brought to us. Other forces, spiritual forces, have been at play. It was they who brought it to us.

The next day comes. This next day the picture is carried down from the etheric body into the physical body. The etheric body impresses this picture into the physical body, into the nerve-processes, into the blood-processes. On the third day the picture is impressed into the physical body. So the third stage is: The picture is stamped into the physical body by the etheric body.

And now comes the next night. You have been attending throughout the day to the ordinary little trifles of life, and underneath it all this important process is going on: the picture is being carried down into the physical body. All this goes on in the subconscious. When the following night comes, the picture is elaborated in the physical body. It is spiritualised in the physical body. First of all, throughout the day, the picture is brought down into the processes of the blood and nerves, but in the night it is spiritualised. Those who have vision see how this picture is now elaborated by the physical body, but it appears spiritually as an altogether changed picture. We can say: the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

1st Day and 1st Night:

When outside the physical and etheric bodies, the astral body shapes the picture of the experience. The outer ether impregnates the picture with its own substance.

2nd Day and 2nd Night:

The picture is stamped by the astral body into the etheric body. And the etheric body elaborates the picture during the next day.

3rd Day and 3rd Night:

The picture is stamped by the etheric body into the physical body. And the physical body elaborates the picture during the next night.

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Now this is something of which you must make an absolutely correct mental picture. The physical body actually works up this picture spiritually. It spiritualises the picture. So that when all this has really been gone through, it does happen—when the human being is asleep—that his physical body works up the whole picture, but not in such a way that it remains within the physical body. Out of the physical body there arises a transformation, a greatly magnified transformation of the picture. And when you get up in the morning, this picture stands there, and in truth you hover in it; it is like a kind of cloud in which you yourself are. With this picture you get up in the morning.

So this is the third day and the third night. With this picture, which is entirely transformed, you get out of bed on the fourth day. You rise from sleep, enveloped by this cloud. And if you have actually shaped the picture with the necessary strength on the first day, and if you have paid attention to what your feeling conveyed to you on the second day, you will notice now that your will is contained in the picture as it now is. The will is contained in it! But this will is unable to express itself; it is as though fettered. Put into somewhat radical terms, it is actually as if one had planned after the manner of an incredibly daring sprinter, who might resolve to make a display of a bravado race: I will run, now I am running to Ober-Dornach, I make a picture of it already, I've got it within me. It is my will ... But in the very moment when I want to start, when the will is strongest, somebody fetters me, so that I stand there quite rigidly. The whole will has unfolded, but I cannot carry out the will. Such, approximately, is the process.

When this experience of feeling yourself in a pillory develops—for it is a feeling of being in a pillory after the third night—when you again awake in it, feeling in a pillory as it were, with the will fettered through and through, then, if you can pay attention to it, you will find that the will begins to transform itself. This will becomes sight. In itself it can do nothing, but it leads to our seeing something. It becomes an eye of the soul. And the picture, with which one rose from sleep, becomes objective. What it shows is the event of the previous earth-life, or of some previous earth-life, which had been the cause of the experience that we shaped into a picture on the first day. By means of this transformation through feeling and through will, one gets the picture of the causal event of a preceding incarnation.

When we describe these things, they appear somewhat overpowering. This is not to be wondered at, for they are utterly unfamiliar to the human being of the present time. They were not so unknown to the men of earlier culture-epochs. Only, according to the opinion of modern men who are clever, those other men—in their whole way of living—were stupid! Nevertheless, those ‘stupid’ men of the earlier culture-epochs really had these experiences, only modern man darkens everything by his intellect, which makes him clever, but not exactly wise.

As I said, the thing seems somewhat tumultuous, when one relates it. But after all, one is obliged to use such words; for since the things are utterly unknown to-day, they would not appear so striking if they were worded more mildly. They must appear striking. But the whole experience, from beginning to end, throughout the three days, as I have described it to you, must take its course in inner intimacy, in rest and peace of mind. For so-called occult experiences—and these are such—do not take their course in such a way that they can be bragged about. When one begins to brag about them, they immediately stop. They must take their course in inner repose and quietude. And it is best when, for the time being, nobody at all notices anything of the consecutive experiences except the person who is having them.

Now you must not think that the thing succeeds immediately, from the outset. One always finds, of course, that people are pleased when such things are related. This is quite comprehensible ... and it is good. How much there is that one can learn to know! And then, with a tremendous diligence people start on it. They begin ... and it doesn't succeed. Then they become disheartened. Then, perhaps, they try it again, several times. Again it does not succeed. But, in effect, if one has tried it about 49 times, or, let us say, somebody else has tried it about 69 times, then the 50th or the 70th time it does succeed. For what really matters in all these things is the acquisition of a kind of habit of soul concerning them. To begin with, one must find one's way into these things, one must acquire habits of the soul. This is something that certainly ought to be carefully observed by the Anthroposophical Society which, since the Christmas Foundation, is intended to be a complete expression of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Really a very great deal has been given within the Anthroposophical Society. It is enough to make one giddy to see standing in a row all the Lecture-Courses that have been printed. But in spite of it, people come again and again, asking one thing or the other. In the majority of cases this is not at all necessary, for if everything that is contained in the Lecture-Courses is really worked upon, then most of the questions find their own answer in a much surer way. One must have patience, really have patience. Truly, there is a great deal in anthroposophical literature that can work in the soul. We must take to heart all that has to be accomplished, and the time will be well filled with all that has to be done. But, on the other hand, in regard to many of the things which people want to know, it must be pointed out that the Lecture-Courses exist, that they have been left lying there, and after they have been given many people trouble about them only inasmuch as they want a “new” Course; they just lay the old ones aside. These things are closely connected with what I have to say to-day.

One does not reach inner continuity in following up all that germinates and ripens in the soul, if there is a desire to hurry in this way, from the new to the new; the essential point is that things must mature within the soul. We must accustom ourselves to inner, active work of the soul, work in the spirit. This is what helps us to achieve such things as I have explained to you to-day; this alone will help us to have, after the third day, the inner attitude of soul in connection with some experience we may wish to see through in the light of karma.

This must always be the mode of procedure if we are to learn to know the spiritual. To begin with, we must say to ourselves: the first moment when we approach the spiritual in thought in some way, was the first beginning; it is quite impossible to have any kind of result immediately; we must be able to wait. Suppose I have an experience to-day that is karmically caused in a preceding incarnation. I will make a diagrammatic sketch. Here I am, here is my experience, the experience of to-day (right). This is caused by the quite differently-constituted personality in the same ego in a previous earth-life (left). There it is. It has long ceased to belong to my personality, but it is stamped into the etheric world, or into the astral world, which lies behind the etheric world. Now I have to go back, to retrace the way backwards.

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I told you that at first the thing appears as if some being were really bearing the experience towards me. This is so, on the second day. But after the third day it appears as if those who have brought it to me, those spiritual beings, withdraw, and I become aware of it as something of my own, which I myself, in a previous incarnation, laid down as cause. Because this is no longer within the present, because this is something I must behold in the past earth-life, I seem to be fettered. This state of being fettered ceases only when I have perceived the thing, when I have a picture of what was in the previous incarnation, and when I then look back to the event which I have not lost sight of through the three days. Then I become free, as I return, for now I can move about freely with the effect. As long as I am only within the cause, I cannot move about with the cause. Thus I go back into a previous incarnation, there become fettered as it were by the cause, and only when I now enter right into this present earth-life, is the thing resolved.

Now let us take an example: suppose somebody experiences at a certain time on a certain day that a friend says something to him that is not altogether pleasant—perhaps he had not expected it. This friend says to him something not altogether pleasant. He now ponders what he experiences in listening to what his friend says. He makes a vivid picture of what he has experienced, how he got a slight shock, and how he got vexed, perhaps he was also hurt, or the like. This is an inner working, and as such it must be brought into the picture. Now he lets the three days elapse. The second day he goes about and says to himself: ‘This picture which I made yesterday has had a strange effect upon me. The whole day long I have had within me something like an acid, as it were, something that comes from the picture and makes me feel inwardly out of sorts ...’ At the end of the whole process, after the third day, he says to himself: ‘I get up in the morning and now I have the definite feeling that the picture is fettering me.’ Then this event of the previous incarnation is made known to me. I see it before me. Then I pass over to the experience which is still quite fresh, which is still quite present. The fettering ceases, and I say to myself: ‘So this is how it was in the previous earth-life! This is what caused it; now there is the effect. With this effect I can live again ... now the thing is present again.’

This must be practised over and over again, for generally the thread is broken on the very first day, when we make the first effort. And then nothing comes.

It is particularly favourable to let things run parallel, so that we do not stop at one event, but bring a number of. events of the day into picture-form in this way. You will say: ‘Then I must live through the next day with the greatest variety of feelings.’ But this is quite possible. It is not at all harmful. Only try it; the things go quite well together. ‘And must I then be fettered so and so often after the third day?’ This does not matter either. Nothing of this matters. The things will adjust themselves in time. What belongs, from an earlier incarnation, to a later one, will find its way to it. But it will not succeed at once; it will not succeed at the first attempt; the thread breaks. We must have patience to try the thing over and over again. Then we feel something growing stronger within the soul. Then we feel that something awakens in the soul, and we say to ourselves: ‘Until now you were filled with blood. You have felt within you the pulsation of the blood and the breath. Now there is something within you besides the blood. You are filled with something.’

You can even have the feeling that you are filled with something of which you can say quite definitely that it is like a metal that has become aeriform. You actually feel something like metal, you feel it in you. It cannot be described differently; it really is so. You feel yourself permeated with metal, in your whole body. Just as one can say of certain waters, that they ‘taste metallic’, the whole body seems to ‘taste’ as if it were inwardly permeated by some delicate substance, which, in reality, is something spiritual.

You feel this when you come upon something which was, of course, always in you, but to which you only now begin to pay attention. Then, when you begin to feel this, you again take courage. For if the thread is always breaking and everything is as it was before—if you want to get hold of a karmic connection, but the thread is always breaking—you may easily lose courage. But when you detect within yourself this sense of being inwardly filled, then you get courage again. And you say to yourself: it will come right in time.

But, my dear friends, these things must be experienced in all quietude and calmness. Those who cannot experience them quietly but get excited and emotional, spread an inner mist over what really ought to happen, and nothing comes of it.

There are people to-day in the outside world who know of Anthroposophy only by hearsay. Perhaps they have read nothing at all of it, or only what opponents have written. It is really very funny now.—Many of the antagonistic writings spring out of the earth like mushrooms—they quote literature, but among the literature they quote there are none of my books at all, only the books of opponents! The authors admit that they have not really approached the original sources, that they know only the antagonistic literature. Such things exist to-day. And so there are people outside who say: “The Anthroposophists are mad.” As a matter of fact, what one can least of all afford to be in order to reach anything at all in the spiritual world is to be mad. One must not be mad in the very slightest degree if one hopes to come to anything in the spiritual world. Even the tiniest fragment of madness is a hindrance to reaching anything. This simply must be avoided. Even a slight fancifulness, slight capriciousness, must be avoided. For all this giving way to the moods of the day, the caprices of the day, forms obstacles and handicaps on the way to progress in the spiritual world. If one desires to progress in the field of Anthroposophy, there is nothing for it but to have an absolutely sane head and an absolutely sane heart. With doting sentimentality (Schwärmerei) which is already the beginning of madness, one can achieve nothing.

Things such as I have told you to-day, strange as they sound, must be experienced in the light of absolute clarity of mind, of absolute soundness of head and heart. Truly, there is nothing that can more surely save one from very slight daily madness, than Anthroposophy. All madness would [disappear] by means of Anthroposophy if people would only devote themselves to it with real intensity. If somebody were to set himself to go mad through Anthroposophy, this would certainly be an experiment with inadequate means!

I do not say this in order to make a joke, but because it must be an integral part of the mood and tenor of anthroposophical endeavour. This is the attitude that must be adopted towards the matter, as I have just explained to you, half in joke, if we want to approach it in the right way, with the right orientation. We must set out to be as sane as possible; then we approach it in the right spirit. This is the least we can strive for, and above all, strive for in respect to the little madnesses of life.

Once I was friends with a very clever professor of philosophy, now long since dead, who used to say on every occasion: “We all have some point or other on which we are a little mad!” He meant, all people are a little mad ... but he was a very clever man. I always believed there was something behind his words, that his assertion was not altogether without foundation! He did not become an Anthroposophist.

It will be well to insert some formalities now, so that we can then move on to some factual considerations.

I have already indicated that by putting oneself in the place of one or other of the three constituent parts of the social organism and trying to grasp the full meaning and essence of the matter, one can, as it were, find the right tone. This comes naturally if one has a true understanding of the matter.

Now I would like to present you with a few more ideas in this regard. But I would like to note in advance that, of course, when it comes to practical advice, things can always be a little different, that one can only talk about such things as examples, yes, that one can handle the matter in one way in one case and differently in another. But if I imagine what might be appropriate for your speaking effect in the coming weeks, I would first like to point out that a very specific inner attitude is of great importance for the speaker in every single case.

You see, the worst thing you could do would undoubtedly be to take a subject such as, let us say, “The great questions of the present time in relation to the threefold social order of the social organism, and, since you will be giving a number of speeches at various places during the week, would now repeatedly present this topic, so to speak, with a mastery of the individual formulations from memory. For intrinsic reasons, this is probably the worst method to choose for such a matter. You can only develop a responsible and well-founded manner of speaking if every speech you give is, so to speak, subjective and personal. It is therefore necessary, even if in the way I will describe in a moment, even if you give the same speech thirty times, or, let's assume the somewhat rare case, a hundred times in a row, to still feel it as something new each time and to always have the same great respect for the content of this speech, to let it come to mind again and again in its basic nuance - pay attention to what I am saying - to let it come to mind again and again before you give it, not so much in the individual structure and in the individual formulations, but in the basic nuances, to relive the thoughts in it again and again. How you can adjust to this depends on your relationship to the material. I knew actors and actresses of the highest caliber who assured me that they only really felt they had played a role well when they had played it about a hundred times. Now, of course, in a sense there is a kind of illusion in that; they also had it at the forty-ninth, fiftieth time, but only in relation to the previous times. In any case, however, there is a way to have the same respect for the content of the speech, no matter how often you give it. And basically, only giving the speech with the necessary freshness will keep you feeling as though you never get enough of the material in question, even if it is repeated almost entirely the same.

Anyone who feels that they are already bored by a speech they are supposed to give, or who is bored of giving the speech because they have given it so often with the same content, strikes me as someone who if he has eaten for a whole month and on the first of the next month says: I am now bored of eating, because it is just a repetition of eating from the previous thirty days; I don't want to do that again. Basically, the organism does the same thing every day in a monotonous way with regard to its most important functions, at most varying the order of the food a little. But in the same way, one can also nuance the thoughts of a lecture so that there is a change, just as there is a change in the food on consecutive days. But essentially, for the organism, it remains a monotonous being hungry – being satiated, being thirsty – drinking and so on, and basically it never gets boring.

Our intellect, our soul life in general, deviates from these in a certain way, in that it comes into decadence compared to the living growth of the natural as well as spiritual elementary forces; it deviates in that it wants to have everything only once, and then it just “has” it. In the process of progressing in soul development, one comes back again to what nature and the original spiritual elementary forces have: rhythm, the repetition of the same. And to this return to what is close to the original creative forces, closer than our decadent intellectual and soul life, to this return we must come when we work in the spiritual world, in the sphere of the spiritual. Religions have already taken this into consideration. They do not have new prayers said every morning and every evening, but always the same ones. And they assume that it is not boring, that it is really related to the whole psychological development of the human being, as eating and drinking is to the organic development of the human being. And we can prepare ourselves for our work in the spiritual, especially in a field such as oratory, so that, even if we repeat the same thing countless times, we always go through the content inwardly with the same interest before we present the matter. Only when we go through the content internally, even if it is only for a few minutes at a time, will we develop the right relationship to what we want to express. Only in this way will we develop the right sense of responsibility.

And we need this sense of responsibility when we are in a situation like the one you will be in over the next few weeks. You must be aware that with your speeches you are not just saying something to the people, but that we are at a world-historical moment, and that your speeches have a meaning for this world-historical moment. You must be very clear about the significance of what you are doing. You must say to yourself: I have something to teach people that, when it strikes them, will truly be the only means of bringing the world to ascent, while all around us are the forces of decline.

And if you are committed to this cause, then you will also appreciate in the right way what is asserting itself from all corners as the opposition to our cause and lurking everywhere on the sides of the paths you now want to enter. The opposition is ignored within our movement, even by most of our members. They do not like to concern themselves with it, and that is just a lack of interest in contemporary history. But out of an interest in contemporary history, we must talk and we must act. Only by acting on it can our words carry real weight. We must not take this opposition lightly. Sometimes, especially within our movement, it is almost enough to make us despair when we see how people within our movement remain quite apathetic in the face of the terrible accusations that are being made against anthroposophy, against threefolding, and now also against 'The Coming Day' and so on. In this respect, if one may say so, our opponents are quite different. Sometimes they are quite ruthless crooks. But they have tremendous zeal as the content of their crookedness. And they often, or even usually, find words out of a certain enthusiasm, an enthusiasm born of evil, or out of an enthusiasm born of incompetence that fights back because it cannot assert itself against what is being asserted. But in a sense there is drive in it; there is drive even in the ranting. You can't find the right words if you try too hard. But you can find the right words if you can find them from the overall mood towards the matter. This is what we have to focus on, both in writing and in speech. We must not shrink from allowing the strongest rebuffs to be experienced by those who assert themselves in such a shameless way against anthroposophy, against threefolding and so on. And we must be aware that in this way, basically, the positive also acquires its shade.

The factual also includes the things that we present to our opponents in the midst of our positive speeches, in which we take as little care as possible to defend ourselves. Because, you see, of course, one has to defend oneself sometimes, I have said it before, but what does a defense actually mean against such individuals as Max Dessoirs and the like? On the other hand, it means a lot to characterize what a disgrace it is for German educational and university life to have such people as lecturers. We must find the right words and word nuances to put this general cultural phenomenon in its proper light. And there it is good to describe things, I would say, in a certain colorful way. Then you have to try to find the inks and colors from your life experiences to describe it in color. There is a karma if you only pay attention to it in the right way. This karma already carries the nuances.

You see, in my “Soul Mysteries” I have mentioned the peculiar fact that Max Dessoir is one of those people to whom it is imposed by inner soul destiny to sometimes have to stop in the train of thought, to be unable to continue; that it can even happen to him during lectures that he is suddenly so filled with the full power of what he has to express that, he does not say so, his mind stands still, but it is something similar to his mind standing still. I emphasized this in my “Soul Mysteries”. A few weeks ago I received a letter from a friend who had just attended the lectures in Berlin by Dessoir during which it actually happened that Dessoir's mind stood still. The students called this peculiar university piece of furniture the “beautiful Max” because he had the habit - as this friend writes - of putting on a different colored waistcoat every week and presenting it. It's only an imitation, you see. Greater minds than Max Dessoir's had such a weakness. For example, it once happened with the great philosopher Kuno Fischer that a young student came to the barber who was vis-4-vis the university building in Heidelberg. And this barber was of course very interested in the university and its disciples. And so he also got into conversation with this keen fox, who was about to start college with Kuno Fischer. He told him that he wanted to go to Kuno Fischer. “Today he's writing something on the blackboard,” said the barber. “How do you know that?” asked the young student in astonishment. ‘He was here just now getting a haircut at the back; when he does that, he always writes something on the board; that's when he turns around.’ Well, ‘beautiful Max’ was in a situation one day where his thoughts suddenly escaped him. He started to go wild, of course in the appropriate weekly vest. There sat a man in front of him who had a newspaper in his hand. He lunged at the man and berated him terribly, saying it was his fault because he had read in the newspaper that his thoughts had escaped. After five minutes, he had his thoughts again. - This really happened and can be documented!

You can add nuances to such things. And you will very often find that you can apply some inks when you want to describe the peculiar education system in our present day, as it is rampant at universities. In addition to its harmful, annoying and destructive aspects, it also has its comical aspects. I myself knew, if I may mention it, a chemist; he was a professor of chemistry and technology of organic substances. He said every year once in his lecture: Yes, there are actually only three great chemists: one is Liebig, the second is a more recent one, Gorup-Besanez, and modesty forbids me to name the third.

Now, as I said, the point for us is not to place the main emphasis on the defense, which can of course be incorporated; rather, it is important to present the cultural phenomena as such in all their harmfulness. That we therefore prove ourselves powerful enough to pass judgment on so-called intellectual currents of the present. We can let this flow in everywhere in the positive presentation and will perhaps best get it into the souls that way. For if we want to get through, we must absolutely be able to create in the souls of our contemporaries a repugnance for certain contemporary phenomena. We must be able to plant a correct judgment about the terrible things that are actually rampant among us through the incompetence and especially through the mendacity that is among us. In order to do this in the right way, we must train ourselves to keep a sharp eye on people and not let them get away with anything. We must emphasize the symptoms, the characteristic features. In our time, and we shall always find it, there is a terrible mendacity, especially in the field of so-called science. And this mendacity, which actually becomes all the stronger the more we come from the natural science faculties, the philosophical faculties, to the medical, to certain other provinces, this mendacity, we must not fail to present it to our contemporaries again and again, characterizing it with individual examples. This is of great, of tremendous importance. For today one does not really have a strong sense of what such dishonesty actually means, how corrupting it is in the mind, when the person who is otherwise a scientist is at the same time consumed by a certain dishonesty in his work. And we will even achieve quite a lot in the long run, even if not immediately, if we succeed in making our contemporaries aware of the hypocrisy of our current educational system. But we will find the right oratorical nuance for this if we speak from the kind of attitude towards the matter that I have characterized.

Then, you see, when you are in the situation you will be in over the next few weeks, one thing seems important: that you are fully immersed in the material of what you want to present, that you are, so to speak, constantly struggling with the material, that one's preparation should be such that one can visualize the matter in one's mind in terms of intentions and thoughts, but not in terms of wording, because one must actually fight for the wording before the audience. Therefore, it is good not to prepare a lecture right down to the wording, but only up to certain key sentences. Depending on your subjective nature, you can write down key sentences. Not buzzwords! That is something that usually misleads you. But key sentences, so to speak, the topics of the individual paragraphs. So you write down, for example: “Economic life has its own laws; it turns everything into a commodity.” And then you discuss this, not taking it as a starting point, but as the topic of a paragraph, as something around which everything else crystallizes. You speak in reference to such a key sentence. Then you move on to the next key sentence.

You can only have the first five or six sentences of the lecture literally, but even then not literally in memory, but in mind. Having the rest literally is never good, because it impairs the inner living relationship in a very strong way. But it is necessary to have formulated the first five or six and the last five or six sentences fairly precisely. Because, as a rule, if the person addressing the audience is a human being and not a speaking machine, they will have stage fright for the first five to six sentences. It is the case precisely when they are human and not a speaking machine. This stage fright is a thoroughly good thing. It can take on the most diverse nuances. It can be that the inner liveliness is there through this stage fright during the first five or six sentences, if they are well formulated, but that this formulation gives us a certain inner relationship to it, whereas if we have not formulated the sentences, it can all too easily happen that nothing occurs to us and the like, doesn't it. For example, I knew an otherwise excellent man who usually read his lectures. But once, as if it were still before me, I remember it so well, he wanted to at least present the first sentences, the first sentence, from memory, but it did not occur to him. He had to read the first sentence, the first word, so accustomed was he to the manuscript. So it's good to live completely inside it, right up to the formulation, in the first five or six sentences.

With the last sentences, on the other hand, when you get to the end, if you are just a human being and not a speaking machine, you are under the impression of your whole lecture, and that's how a certain liveliness comes about at the end, and one would not be able to find the right wording in every case so as not to detract from the end if one had not prepared well, especially for the end, for the last five or six sentences.

So that for such “occasional speeches” in the best sense, as you have to give them, especially given the current situation, it is undoubtedly best for such speeches if you bring the first five to six sentences with you, then the key sentences, and again the last five to six sentences. But if I may give you a piece of advice, which I ask you not to take as if it must always be followed under all circumstances and you are obliged to carry out what I have just said with regard to the note that you take with you, then the advice would be: make a note on which you formulate the first five to six sentences, then the striking sentences, then the last sentences. Stick to it. And then – burn it! The next day or for the next lecture, do the same. And burn it again. Do this fifty times rather than allow yourself to keep the note through all fifty lectures.

This is an essential part of the inner vitalization of a person's relationship to his subject matter. One must have come to terms with the living element of the lecture one has given in a certain way, as one came to terms on February 14 with what one ate on the 13th. This is something that can certainly be considered a rule.

For you see, in certain fields of work it is a matter of finding our way back to the elementary conditions of life. Only in this way can we tear spiritual work out of the mildewed nature that is due to the fact that in abstract intellectual life there is something like: one wants to experience something only once; if one has already experienced something, it no longer exercises any sensation, and the like. It is absolutely the case that if one acquires the habit of what I have just characterized, one gradually comes to receive one's spiritual products from much deeper regions than from the highly questionable regions that are located highest in the human being in terms of spatial expansion. And it is tremendously important that precisely the most exalted spiritual things do not come from this main region. For this region is colorless, is sober, is actually such that, however paradoxical it may sound, it actually concerns no one but ourselves. What the intellect can gain in clarity actually concerns only the person who is the bearer of that intellect.

What we have to say to the world is based not on what we understand, but on what we feel and live through, through which we have suffered pain and suffering and happiness and overcoming. And, my dear friends, the content of what you have to say to the world in the coming weeks will be revealed to you anew each day as you go through it in your soul, as overcoming and suffering, and in a certain way, when you feel what is to be, as happiness too, as redemption. Above all, however, you will be able to feel a strong sense of responsibility. All this can be experienced every day. And that is a much better preparation than all the arrangements and everything that is given in some rhetoric. This living inner relationship to the matter is what really prepares us so that those imponderables develop that exist between us and our audience, no matter how large it is.

In general, it is precisely in this area that we have become abstract and theoretical people. I once listened to a lecture that Hermann Helmboltz gave at a large gathering. He took out his manuscript and read the entire lecture from the first to the last word. After this procedure with the audience was over, a theater director, who was a friend of mine, came up to me and said: What was the point of that? The lecture is already printed, it could easily be handed to each of the listeners. And if Helmholtz, who is so esteemed and honored, were to go around and shake each person's hand, it would be a much greater pleasure than having someone read to you for an hour what you can read yourself when it is printed.

We really must keep this in mind: that what is printed, and thus also everything that can be read, that which has already been written down, is something quite different from the spoken word. And even if it happens often enough – for reasons other than purely artistic ones and the like – that the spoken word is written down, that this Ahrimanic art is practised and that it is then read again, one must not deny that this whole procedure is basically nonsense in the higher sense. It must be practised, this nonsense, for certain reasons. But it remains nonsense. For those who take these things artistically, what is spoken is not something that can be printed or written at the same time. So I couldn't help but feel deeply when the director told me that it would have been wiser for Helmholtz to have shaken everyone's hand and distributed his lecture.

These are things that one must keep in mind, because they are basically rhetoric, while what is in the rhetoric is usually such that one cannot actually fulfill it. Because basically it is a thicket, threshed straw, with which one cannot actually do anything if one wants to be alive in one's cause.

Well, you see, these are formalities that can only contain advice, but which, I would not say, have been thought through, but which you could feel through. And if you feel through them, then you will be able to prepare yourself in the best possible way for your profession in the coming weeks. For from the feelings you develop in response to such advice, you will gain an insight into what you should actually do with the material you will be processing in the coming weeks. And what else can be said in this regard is something like the following:

In speeches such as the one you are about to give, even if the topics are chosen as I have indicated, it is nevertheless good to start at the beginning with something that belongs to the day, some current event that is symptomatic of the whole period. We live in a time in which such events actually occur daily. We need only follow contemporary history a little, and we will notice symptomatic events everywhere. We can then start from there. This immediately creates a common atmosphere between us and the listener. For the listener then knows the matter, we know it, and we create a kind of communication, which is of very special significance in lectures on contemporary history, or rather, in those that are to have an effect on the development of the time.

Or one can also relate a more remote symptom. It is often particularly suitable to concentrate attention in the right way if you tell something that seems to have no connection at all with the topic, but which has a much stronger inner connection, and the listener is initially touched by it in a somewhat paradoxical way, not knowing why you are telling it; and then you try to find the transition from something remote to what you actually want to develop.

Another piece of advice is that in certain cases it is extremely good to come back to the beginning at the end. The best way to achieve this is to formulate something at the beginning, which is either presented as a question, or not pedantically as a question, but in a question-like way. Then the lecture is the execution according to the question posed; and at the end one actually comes to the answer, so that the whole thing closes in a certain way. This often has a very, very good influence on the soul of the listener. He retains it more easily than usual.

In certain matters it may even be very good to have a kind of leitmotif, which one returns to after certain paragraphs, even if in a varied form. You will not have a good effect by always putting it in more or less the same words, but if you return to it in a varied form, you may well have a good effect.

Then we will also have to have a reforming effect on the audience through the form of our speech; I could also say “educational” if it did not offend people to use the word “educational”. You can also have a reforming effect through the formality of speech. You see, people today demand that you define as much as possible. Now we want to resist any defining. We always want to characterize. We want to characterize many things from two or more sides, in order to evoke the idea that every thing has different sides from which one can characterize it. We do not want to make this concession, nor any other concession in speech, but this is the least of them: giving people pedantic definitions. We must create the impression that what comes from the spiritual world, what comes from spiritual science, must, even in its form, present itself differently to our contemporaries than what arises from materialism. Whatever comes out of materialism will be materialistic, even if it is permeated, for example, by something apparently religious; it will speak in nouns, even if it is religiously colored. What comes out of the spirit cannot speak well in nouns. For the spirit does not work in a noun way. It is in constant motion. The spirit is entirely verbal. It dissolves nouns. It forms a subordinate clause rather than a noun. In this way it avoids treating the entities like pieces of wood, placing them next to each other like pieces of wood, or like pegs. This placing of things like pegs is materialistic. What is grasped in the spirit dissolves the nouns. And it is important that we make no concessions in this respect to our materialistically inclined present. However, in this case you will not come; the poet in the present more easily; not so much the one who has to speak, what you have to speak - however, if anything is immersed in the visionary or only in the imaginative, then the nouns can also occur. Because then the imaginations are forms. Every style has its own character for its particular field. But what is needed in a certain relationship to bring something new to one's fellow human beings as a teaching, as a view, will, if it comes from the spirit, not feel inwardly compelled to put one noun next to the other.

Then it would also be good for you, I would like to say, to really carry out something moral. When we started our anthroposophical movement, people were almost proud when they could say: I have presented theosophical or anthroposophical views here or there, without saying where they come from and without using the words theosophy or anthroposophy. This denial of the ground on which one actually stands, this not wanting to clearly profess one's commitment to something, has become a real nuisance, especially in anthroposophical circles. Well, I would like to say to you that those people who have been won over in this way, by avoiding speaking clearly and distinctly about the matter, are either not really won over at all or, if they are won over, are not worth anything. Only that which has been won in full truth and in absolute honesty has value for our cause. And if we make this our guiding principle, we may perhaps suffer failures here and there. But where we achieve success, it will be a good success. Under no circumstances should we avoid making people aware of the spiritual-scientific, anthroposophical background. Even if it acts like a red rag to a bull for a large number of people at first! The problem with such things is not the red cloth, but the bull.

These things are what must be part of the moral nuance of our zeal for the cause in the coming weeks. And we need zeal for the cause. We do not need to feel that we are martyrs for a cause. But we should have a sense of great responsibility. We should definitely have the feeling that we are speaking out of the development of the times, out of contemporary history. The more we have this, the better it is.

Perhaps today I may remind you again of what I have said many times before. Once I wanted to make clear to two Catholic priests how wrong they were with their particular demand, which they made after a lecture I gave. I had given a lecture in a southern German city, which is no longer a southern German city today, about the wisdom of Christianity. Two Catholic priests were also present. It was a long time ago, in the days when the order to fight anthroposophy intensely, as is the case today, had not yet been so intensively carried into the circles of Catholic clergy. And so these two priests were there. After the lecture they came to me. Now, it is not the case with Anthroposophy that one can talk objectively about a subject for a long time, even if a Catholic priest is listening. If he is not set from the outset to fight against everything that does not belong to the constitutionally soldered church, he will not notice that he can bring anything against it. What the Catholic Church has to say against it must come from areas other than the area of truth. So the priests came to me and said: Yes, we have nothing to say against the content of your lecture – at that time the slogan had not yet been issued from Rome – but the way you speak is not acceptable. Because we speak in such a way that all people understand, but you only speak to a certain circle that is prepared. I said that I always have the feeling that in outer life one does not become dishonest when addressing people as is usual in outer life; I say “Herr” to every court official, I say “Reverend” to every Catholic priest. So I said, “Reverend, it does not matter whether you or I think something is for all people. It is self-evident that you and I think subjectively in this way. That is not the point. The point is whether something is entrusted to us out of the impulses of the time, whether it is to be presented or not, regardless of our subjective state. And so I ask you now, assuming this good, subjective conscience, whether all people who want to know about the Christ still come to you in church today? If all people come to church to you, then you speak for all people. I ask you quite objectively: Do all people come to church to you? You couldn't say yes, it wasn't possible. Then I said: Well, you see, I speak to those who no longer come to church to you and who still want to hear something about the Christ. That is objective. We can believe subjectively, you and I, we speak for everyone. That is not the point. The point is that we acquire the sense of learning from the facts as they are, how we should do it. Of course, that did not occur to the two reverend gentlemen, of course, but it is right nonetheless.

So, these are the things that I wanted to tell you today, as a kind of formality. They are not rules, nor are they advice meant to be dogmatic. I myself said at the beginning of my reflections that they are meant more in the sense of examples. They can be varied in many ways. You may be obliged to follow different guidelines in a different situation. But I have considered what those personalities sitting in front of me might need to think about, especially in the situation you may find yourselves in over the next few weeks, and how you might approach your audience in the right way to address your audience in the right way, and above all to face the matter at hand in the right way, regardless of whether you achieve it or not, and to face the matter you have to represent in the right way. And that's when I came to have to tell you what I just said in a formal way.

Anthroposophical friends in Berne have already heard that the aim of the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum was to bring a new trend into the Anthroposophical Movement. The importance of becoming conscious of this new trend cannot be stressed too often, for the gist of the matter is this: before the Christmas Foundation Meeting—in practice at any rate, even if not invariably—the Anthroposophical Society was regarded as a sort of administrative centre for the content and the impulse of Anthroposophy. This, essentially, has been the position since the Anthroposophical Society made itself independent of the Theosophical Society.

You know that I myself had no place on the Society's Executive, but have so to say held a completely free position within the Society. And in this situation the Society's development has not proceeded as it certainly could have done. The fact is that Members have been too little alive to what might have developed on this basis. What happened was that from about the year 1919 onwards—after the War, during which the problem of leadership of the Society was a very difficult one—all kinds of efforts were made and undertakings set on foot within the Society. These undertakings were the outcome of ambitions among the Membership and proved to be detrimental to the real anthroposophical work—detrimental in the sense that they aroused very strong hostility from the outside world. Naturally, when such undertakings are set on foot in a Society resting upon occult foundations, one must, for esoteric reasons, let them be. For think of it—if from the beginning I had stood in the way of all these undertakings, most of those engaged in them would have been saying to-day that if only this or that had happened it would have led to favourable results. But there is no doubt at all that these things made the position of the Anthroposophical Movement in the world increasingly difficult.

I do not want to go into details but to take a more positive line: let me say only that the time had come to counteract by something positive the negative trend that had gradually appeared in the Society. Before the Christmas Foundation Meeting I often found it necessary to emphasise that a real foundation like the Anthroposophical Movement—which is in truth a spiritual stream guided and led from the super-sensible worlds by spiritual Powers and spiritual Forces which are reflected here in the physical worlds—should not be identified with the Anthroposophical Society, which is simply an administrative body for the cultivation—as far as it is capable of this—of the anthroposophical impulse.

But since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at the Goetheanum this has completely changed. And it was only because of this change that there was reason and purpose in my taking over the Presidency myself, in cooperation with an Executive which as a unified organism can work with great intensity for the Anthroposophical Movement. This means that the Anthroposophical Movement and the Anthroposophical Society are now one. Therefore what was not the position before the Christmas Foundation Meeting has changed fundamentally since that Meeting. Henceforward the Anthroposophical Society is to be identical with the Anthroposophical Movement as presented in the world. But it has thus become essential that the esoteric impulse flowing through the Anthroposophical Movement shall also find expression in the whole constitution of the Anthroposophical Society. Therefore since this Christmas Foundation Meeting in Dornach it must be recognised, unconditionally, that the establishment of the Dornach Executive is itself an esoteric matter, that a stream of true esotericism must flow through the Society, and that the institution of the Executive is to be regarded as an esoteric deed. This was the premise on which the Executive was formed.

Further, it must always be remembered that from now onwards the Anthroposophical Society will no longer exist merely as a body for the administration of Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy itself must be practised in everything that happens in the Anthroposophical Society. What is done must itself be anthroposophical. That, apparently, is what it is so difficult to realise. Nevertheless friends must gradually get it into their consciousness that this fundamental change has taken place.

As a first step, in the News Sheet appended to the Goetheanum Weekly, an effort has been made to introduce into the Society something that can provide unified substance for the membership, can further a unified flow of spiritual reality through the Movement. A unified trend of thought is made possible, particularly through the weekly ‘Leading Thoughts’ which should be a kind of basic seed for work in the Groups. It is really remarkable that so much misunderstanding still exists as to what the Anthroposophical Movement really is.

A short while ago I received a letter from a fairly recent Member of the Anthroposophical Society. This letter expatiated on the alleged incorporation of the Christian Community into the Anthroposophical Society. (The matter is of no importance here in Switzerland, but I mention it as an example.) At a certain point I had made it quite clear from the Goetheanum in Dornach how the relationship between this Christian Community and the Anthroposophical Society is to be thought of. I emphasised that I cannot in any way be regarded as the Founder of the Christian Community on the basis of the Anthroposophical Society, but that the Christian Community formed itself, through me, by the side of the Anthroposophical Society. At the time I used the expression “through me as a private individual.” The letter referred to seizes hold of this expression, “private individual,” after saying that a renewal of religion cannot come about through a human being but only from the higher spheres, for a renewal of religion can be achieved only by divine-spiritual Powers. That is quite right, but something has been overlooked ... and it is essential for this ‘something’ to be fully grasped in the Anthroposophical Society. What must be grasped is that the Anthroposophical Movement as such—in which moreover there also lies the source for a renewal of religion—certainly does not owe its origin to a human impulse alone but has been sent into the world under the influence of divine-spiritual Powers and by their impulse. Only when Anthroposophy itself is seen to be a spiritual reality which flows as an esoteric impulse through civilisation will it be possible to have the right point of view when some other body comes into being with its source in Anthroposophy ... and an objection like that contained in the letter cannot arise. The consciousness must be there that henceforward the Anthroposophical Society will be led from the Goetheanum on an esoteric basis.

Connected with this is the fact that a completely new trend will pervade the Anthroposophical Movement as it must now be conceived. Therefore you too, my dear friends, will notice how differently it has been possible to speak since that time. In the future it will amount to this: in all measures taken by the Anthroposophical Movement, which is now identical with the Anthroposophical Society, the responsibility is to the spiritual Powers themselves. But this must be correctly understood. It must be realised that the title “General Anthroposophical Society” may not be used in connection with any event or fixture organised without understanding having first been reached with the Dornach Executive; that anything inaugurated by Dornach may not be made further use of without corresponding agreement with the Executive. I am obliged to speak of this because it is constantly happening that lectures, for instance, are given under the alleged auspices of the General Anthroposophical Society without any application for permission having been made to Dornach. Matters which have an esoteric foundation, formulae and the like, are sometimes adopted without obtaining the agreement of the Dornach Executive ... and this is absolutely essential, for we have to do with realities, not with administrative measures or formalities. So for all these and similar matters, agreement must be sought from or a request made to the Dornach Executive. If agreement is not forthcoming, the arrangements in question will not be regarded as issuing from the Anthroposophical Movement. This would have in some way to be made plain.

Everything that savours of bureaucracy, all administrative formalities must in the future be eliminated from the Anthroposophical Society. Relationship within the Anthroposophical Society is a purely human relationship; everything is based upon the human reality. Perhaps I may mention here too that this is already indicated by the fact that every one of the 12,000 Membership Cards now being issued are personally signed by me. I was advised to have a rubber stamp made for the signature, but I shall not do so. It is only a minor point but there is, after all, a difference when I have let my eyes rest on the name of a Member; thereby the personal relationship—abstract though it be—has been made. Even if it is an external detail it should nevertheless be an indication that in future we shall endeavour to make relationships personal and human. Thus, for example, when it was recently asked in Prague whether the Bohemian Landesgesellschaft can become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, the decision had to be that this is not possible; individual human beings alone can become members of the Anthroposophical Society; they can then join together to form Groups. But they become Members as individuals and have the Membership Card as such. Legal entities—in other words, non-human entities—will have no such Card. Similarly the Statutes are not official regulations but a simple statement of what the esoteric Executive in Dornach wishes, out of its own initiative, to do for the Anthroposophical Movement. In future, all these things must be taken with the utmost seriousness. Only so will it be possible to bring into being in the Anthroposophical Society the attitude which, if it were absent, would make it impossible for me to take over the Presidency of the Society.

Through the Christmas Foundation, a new character and impulse is to enter into all our work. In the future, whatever is said will have a spiritual source—so that many things that have happened recently, can happen no longer. A great deal of the hostility, for instance, has arisen as a result of provocative actions in the Society. Naturally, all kinds of questionable elements play a part, but in the future we can no longer adopt towards the hostility the attitude we have adopted in the past. For the Lecture-Courses are available for everyone and can be obtained from the Anthroposophisch-Philosophischer Verlag. We shall not let them be advertised in the Book Trade; their release is not to be taken to mean that they will be handed over to the Book Trade, but they will be accessible to everyone. This fact in itself refutes the statement that the Anthroposophical Society is a secret society with secret literature. In the future, however, a very great deal will flow through the Anthroposophical Movement in respect of which no kind of relation with a hostile outside world will be possible. Much of what will be introduced into the teachings of the Anthroposophical Society in the future will be of such a nature that it will inevitably evoke hostility in the outside world; but we shall not worry about it because it is a matter of course.

And so I want to speak to you to-day in this spirit, to speak particularly of how different a light is shed upon the historical evolution of mankind when the study of karmic relationships in world-existence is pursued in real earnest.

At the very first gathering held in Berlin for the purpose of founding the German Section of the Theosophical Society, I chose for a lecture I proposed to give, the title: Practical Questions of Karma. I wanted to introduce then what I intend to achieve now, namely, the serious and earnest study of Karma.

In the German Section of the Theosophical Society at the time there were several old Members of the Society. They literally quaked at my intention to begin in such an esoteric way. And in actual fact the attitude and mood for it were not there. It was quite obvious how little the people were prepared in their souls for such things. It was impossible at that time to proceed with the theme ‘Practical Questions of Karma’ in the form that had been intended. Conditions made it necessary to speak in a much more exoteric way. But now, with more than two decades of preparatory work behind us, a beginning must be made with real esotericism. The Christmas Foundation Meeting, when the esoteric impulse came into the Society, has actually taken place, and so now a link can be made with that time when the intention was to introduce this esoteric trend into the Society.

What is the historical evolution of humanity, when we consider what is revealed by the fact of repeated earthly lives? When some personality appears as a leading figure in the evolution of humanity, we must say: This personality is the bearer of an Individuality of soul-and-spirit who was already present many times in earthly existence and who carries over into this earthly life the impulses from earlier incarnations. Only in the light of his earlier earthly lives can we really understand such a personality. From this we see at once how what was working in earlier epochs of world-history is carried over from those earlier epochs by human beings themselves. The civilisation of to-day has developed out of the human beings who belong to the present in the wider sense. But they, after all, are the same souls who were there in earlier epochs and assimilated what those earlier civilisations brought into being; they themselves have carried it over into the present. The same applies to epochs other than the present. Only when we can discover what has been carried over by human souls from one epoch into the other can we understand this onflowing stream of the impulses working in civilisation. But then we have history in the concrete, not in the abstract. People usually speak only about ideas working in world-history, about moral will or moral impulses in general which carry over the fruits of civilisation from one epoch into the others. But the bearers of these fruits of earlier civilisations are the human souls themselves, for they incarnate again and again. Moreover it is only in this way that an individual realises what he has himself become, how he has carried over that which forms the basis of his bodily destiny, his destiny in good and evil alike. When, as a first step, we ponder how history has been carried from one epoch into another by the human beings themselves in their repeated earthly lives, then, and only then are the secrets, the great enigmas of historical evolution, unveiled.

To-day I want to show by three examples how karma works through actual personalities. One of these examples leads us into the wide arena of history; the other two deal more with the reincarnations of particular individuals.

Our modern civilisation contains a great many elements that are really not altogether in keeping with Christianity, with true Christian evolution. Natural science is brought even into the elementary schools, with the result that it has an effect upon the thinking even of people who have no scientific knowledge. These impulses are really not Christian. Whence do they originate?

You all know that about six hundred years after the founding of Christianity, Arabism, inspired by Mohammed, began to spread abroad. In Arabism, Mohammed founded a body of doctrine which in a certain sense was at variance with Christianity. To what extent at variance? The concept of the three forms of the Godhead—Father, Son, Spirit—is of the very essence of Christianity. The origin of this lies away back in the ancient Mysteries in which a man was led through four preparatory stages and then through three higher stages. When he had reached the fifth stage, he came forth as a representative of the Christ; at the seventh and highest stage as a representative of the Father. I want only to make brief mention of this.

It is the Trinity that makes it possible for the impulse of freedom to have its place in the evolution of Christianity. We look upwards to the Father God, seeing in the Father God the spirituality implicit in all those forces of the Universe which go out from the Moon to Earth existence. All those forces which in Earth existence have to do with the impulses of physical germination—in man, therefore, with propagation—proceed from the Moon. It must, of course, always be remembered that the human process of reproduction has its spiritual side. From the pre-earthly existence of spirit-and-soul we come down to earthly existence, uniting with a physical body. But everything that is responsible for placing the human being, from birth onwards, into earthly life, is a creative act of the Father God, a creative act for the Earth through the Moon forces. Therefore inasmuch as throughout an earthly life man is subject to the working of the Moon forces, he is already predestined when he enters earthly existence to be exposed to impulses of a very definite kind. Hence, too, it is the essential characteristic of a Moon religion, a religion like that of the ancient Hebrews, in which the Father Principle is predominant, always to attach value in the human being only to what has been bestowed upon him through the forces of the Father God, through the Moon forces. When Christianity was founded, ancient Mystery-truths were still current in Christ's environment—truths deriving, for example, from specific phenomena of life in the earliest period of post-Atlantean evolution. Grotesque as they seem to-day, these phenomena were grounded in the very nature of man.

During the first epoch of post-Atlantean civilisation, the ancient Indian epoch, when a man had reached the age of thirty a radical change, a complete metamorphosis, took place in his earthly life. So radical was the change that, expressed in modern words, it would have been perfectly possible for a man who had passed his thirtieth year to meet a younger man whom he had known quite well, perhaps as a friend, but when this younger man greeted him the other would simply not understand what he was trying to do. ... When the older man had passed the age of thirty he had forgotten everything he had hitherto experienced on the Earth! And whatever impulse worked in him in the later years of his life was imparted to him by the Mysteries. This is how things were in the earliest period after the Atlantean catastrophe. If he wanted to know what his life had been before his thirtieth year, a man was obliged to enquire about it from the little community around him. At the age of thirty the soul was so completely transformed that the man was veritably a new being; he began a new existence, just as he had done at birth. In those days it was known that until the thirtieth year of life the forces of youth were at work: thereafter, it was the task of the Mysteries, with the very real impulses they contained, to see to it that a genuinely human existence should continue in the man's soul. And this the Mysteries were able to do because they were in possession of the secret of the Son.

Christ lived in an age when the secrets of the Son—I can do no more than touch upon them here—had been lost, were known only to small circles of men. But because of the experience undergone in His thirtieth year, Christ was able to reveal that He, as the last to do so, had received the Son-impulse directly from the Cosmos—in the way it must be received if after his thirtieth year a man is to be dependent upon the Sun forces just as hitherto he was dependent upon the Moon forces. Christ has enabled men to understand that the Son-principle within him is the Sun Being once awaited in the Mysteries but then as a Being not yet on the Earth. And so, just as in the ancient Mysteries men had gazed into the secrets of the Sun, it was made clear to them that their gaze must now turn to the Christ, realising that now the Sun Mystery had entered into man. In the first centuries of Christianity this wisdom was completely exterminated. Star-wisdom, cosmic wisdom, was exterminated and a materialistic conception of the Mystery of Golgotha gradually took shape; Christ was thought of as nothing more than a being who had dwelt in Jesus but men were unwilling to realise what had actually come to pass.

Those who were true knowers in the first Christian centuries were able to say: As well as the Father God there is God the Son, the Christ God. The Father God rules over whatever is predetermined in man because it is born with him and works in him as the forces of Nature. It is upon this principle that the Hebrew religion is based. But by the side of it, Christianity places the power of the Son which during the course of man's life draws into his soul as a creative force, making him free and enabling him to be reborn, realising that in his earthly life he can become something that was not predetermined by the Moon forces at birth.—Such was the essential impulse of Christianity in the first centuries of its existence.

Mohammedanism set its face against this impulse in its far-reaching decree: There is no God save the God proclaimed by Mohammed. It is a retrogression to the pre-Christian principle, but clothed in a new form—as was inevitable six hundred years after the founding of Christianity. The God of Nature, the Father God—not a God of freedom by whom men are led on to freedom—was proclaimed as the one and only God. Within Arabism, where Mohammedanism was making headway, this was favourable for a revival and renewal of the fruits of ancient cultures, and such a revival, with the exclusion of Christianity, did indeed take place in the Orient, on a magnificent scale. Together with the warlike campaigns of Arabism there spread from East towards the West—in Africa as it were enveloping Christianity—an impulse to revive ancient culture.

Over in Asia, Arabism was cultivated with great brilliance at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—at the time when Charles the Great was reigning in Europe. But whereas Charles the Great hardly progressed beyond the stage of being able to read and write, of developing the most primitive rudiments of culture, great and illustrious learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. It cannot, perhaps, be said that Haroun al Raschid in himself was an entirely good man, but he possessed a comprehensive, penetrating and ingenious mind—a universal mind in the best sense. He gathered at his Court all the sages who were the bearers of whatever knowledge was available at that time: poets, philosophers, doctors, theologians, architects—all these branches of learning flourished at the Court of Haroun al Rashid, brought thither by his genius.

At this Court there lived a most distinguished and significant personality, one who—in an incarnation earlier than the one at the Court of Haroun al Raschid—had been an Initiate in the true sense. You will ask: Does an Initiate, then, not remain an Initiate as he passes through his incarnations? It is possible for a man to have been a deep Initiate in an earlier epoch and then, in a new epoch, he must use the body and receive the education which this later epoch has to offer. In such a case the forces deriving from the earlier incarnation will have to be held in the subconsciousness and whatever is in keeping with the current civilisation will have to be developed. There are men who seem, outwardly, to be products of the particular civilisation in which they are living; but their manner of life enables one to perceive in them the existence of deeper impulses; in earlier times they were Initiates. Nor do they lose the fruits of Initiation; out of their subconsciousness they act in accordance with its principles. But they cannot do otherwise than adapt themselves to the conditions of the existing civilisation.

The personality of whom tradition says that he made magnificent provision for all the sciences at the Court of Haroun al Raschid was only one of the most eminent sages of his time, with a genius for organisation so outstanding that he was virtually the source of much that was achieved at the Court of Haroun al Raschid.

The spread of Arabism continued for many centuries, as we know from the wars waged by Europe in an attempt to keep it within bounds. But that was not the end of it: the souls who were once active in Arabism passed through the gate of death, developed onwards in the spiritual world and remained connected, in a sense, with their work. This was what happened in the case of the Individualities of Haroun al Raschid and of the wise Counsellor who lived at his Court.

To begin with, let us follow Haroun al Raschid. He passes through the gate of death and develops onwards in the spiritual world. In its external form, Arabism is repulsed; Christianity implants itself into Middle and Western Europe in the exoteric form it has gradually acquired. But although it is impossible to continue to be active in the old form of Mohammedanism, of Arabism, in Europe, it is very possible for the souls who once shared in this brilliant culture at the Court of Haroun al Raschid and there received the impulse for further achievements, to work on. And that is what they do.

We find that Haroun al Raschid himself reincarnates in the renowned personality of Francis Bacon, Lord Bacon—the distinguished Englishman whose influence has affected the whole of modern scientific thinking, and therewith much that is to be found in the minds of human beings to-day. Haroun al Raschid could not disseminate from London, from England, a form of culture strictly aligned with Arabism ... this soul was obliged to make use of the form of Arabism that was possible in the West. But the fundamental trend and tendency of what Bacon poured into European thinking is the old Arabism in the new form. And so Arabism lives in the scientific thinking of to-day, because Francis Bacon was the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid.

The sage who had lived at his Court also passed through the gate of death, but he took a different path. He could not come down into a stream of culture as materialistic as that into which Francis Bacon could enter; he had inevitably to remain within a more spiritual stream. And so it came about that in the epoch when the influence of Francis Bacon was also taking effect, another individuality was working—in this case in Middle Europe—one who in his life of soul encountered what had issued from the soul of the reborn Haroun al Raschid. We see the Bacon stream pouring out from England to Middle Europe, from West to East, bringing Arabism in the form it had acquired in its sweep across Spain and France. It is comprehensible, therefore, that the tenor and content of this soul should differ from the tenor and content of that other soul—who passed through the gate of death, during the period of existence in the spiritual world directed its gaze toward Eastern and Middle Europe, and was reborn in Middle Europe as Amos Comenius. He resuscitated what he had learned from oriental wisdom at the Court of Haroun al Raschid inasmuch as in the seventeenth century he was the one who with much forcefulness promulgated the thought that the evolution of mankind is pervaded by organised spirituality. It is often said, superficially, that Comenius believed in the Kingdom of a Thousand Years. That is a trivial way of putting it. The truth is that Comenius believed in definite epochs in the evolution of humanity; he believed that historical evolution is organised from the spiritual world. His aim was to show that spirituality surges and weaves through the whole of Nature; he wrote a “Pan-Sophia.” There is a deeply spiritual trend in what he achieved. He became an educational reformer. As is known, his aim in education was to achieve concrete perceptibility (Anschaulichkeit) but a thoroughly spiritual perceptibility, not as in materialism. I cannot deal with this in detail but can only indicate how Arabism in its Western form and in its Oriental form issued from what arose in Middle Europe from the meeting of the two spiritual impulses connected with Bacon and Comenius.

Many aspects of the civilisation of Middle Europe can become intelligible to us only when we see how Arabism—in the form in which it could now be re-cast—was actually brought over from Asia by individuals who had once lived at the Court of Haroun al Raschid. This shows us how human Individuality is an active factor in the evolution of history. And then, by studying examples as striking as these, we can learn from them how karma works through the incarnations. As I have said on various occasions, what we learn from this study can be applied to our own incarnation. But to begin with we must have concrete examples.

Let us now take an example in which this country will be particularly interested. Let us take the example of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the Swiss poet. The very personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, apart from his poetry, may well arouse interest. He is certainly a remarkable personality. When he was composing his poems which flow along in wonderful rhythms, one can perceive how at every moment the soul was prone to slip out of the body. In the wonderful forms of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's poems and of his prose-poems too, there is a quality belonging intrinsically to the soul. Many times in his earthly life he was destined to suffer from a clouding of consciousness when this separation of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body became too pronounced. There was only a loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the physical body—this is quite apparent when we study the poems or the personality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. We say to ourselves at once that this Individuality which in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation was only loosely connected with the physical body, must surely have passed through very remarkable experiences in earlier earthly lives.

Now investigation of earlier earthly lives is by no means always easy. Disillusionments and set-backs of every description have to be encountered in the course of such investigation. For this reason, what I say about reincarnations is most emphatically not for the purpose of satisfying cravings for sensation but always in order to shed deeper illumination upon the course of history.

As we follow the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, particularly in the light of this loose connection between the soul-and-spirit and the body, we are led back to a very early incarnation in the sixth century A.D. We are led to an Individuality who, to begin with, eludes the spiritual intuition with which these things are investigated. Spiritually we are thrust back from this Individuality who in his life in Italy was finding his way into Christianity in the form in which it was spreading at that time ... we can never get really near him. And then we seem to be thrown back again to the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, so that when in this investigation of an earlier incarnation we really seem to have got hold of the incarnation in the sixth century, we have to come back again to the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, without having properly understood the connection between these two incarnations. .. until at last the solution of the riddle dawns. We notice that in the mind of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer there is a thought that puzzles and misleads us—a thought which was also expressed in his story The Saint, dealing with Thomas Becket, the Chancellor-Archbishop of Canterbury in the twelfth century at the Court of Henry (II) of England.

It is not until we follow the connections of the thoughts and feelings working in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer while he was writing this narrative that we gain any real insight into how his mind was working. We are led as it were from a clouding of consciousness into clarity, then again a clouding, and so on. And finally we come to the conclusion that there must be some special significance in the thought that runs through Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's story; it must have deep roots. And then we hit upon the clue: this thought comes from an impulse in an earlier earthly life, the life when the Individuality of the later Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived at a minor Court in Italy and played an important part in the development of Christianity. In that life he had an unusual experience. Gradually we discover that this Individuality was sent with a Christian Mission from Italy to England and this Mission founded the Archbishopric of Canterbury. The Individuality who later became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was, on the one side, deeply affected by that form of art which has since died out but was prevalent in Italy in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and subsequently elaborated in the Italian mosaics. The Individuality of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer lived and worked in this environment and then, filled with the impulse of contemporary Christianity, accompanied the Mission to England. After having participated in the founding of the Archbishopric of Canterbury, this individual was murdered, in strange circumstances, by an Anglo-Saxon chieftain.

This happening lived on as an impulse in the soul. And when this soul was born as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the destiny of that earlier time was still alive in the subconscious ... the murder in England ... it has something to do with the Archbishopric of Canterbury! Just as a remembrance is often evoked by the sound of a word, so it was in this case ... “I once had something to do with Canterbury.” And the impulse becomes an urge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul to describe, not his own destiny, for that remains in the subconscious, but the similar destiny of Thomas Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England and at the same time Archbishop of Canterbury.

The strange infirmity of soul suffered by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer also causes experience of his own destiny to slip over into that of the other personality known to him from history.

During the period of the Thirty Years' War, when such chaotic conditions prevailed in Middle Europe, this Individuality had been incarnated as a woman. And all the chaos of those times profoundly affected the Individuality now incarnate in a female body. This woman married a rather uncouth, unpolished personality who fled from the conditions then prevailing in Germany to the region of Graubünden in Switzerland. And there this couple lived ... the woman deeply sensitive to the chaos of the impressions around her, the man more plebeian.

From the far-reaching events of that time the soul had absorbed all that struggles to come forth again in Jürg Jenatsch. The thoughts and emotions rise up again in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer from what he had experienced in those earlier circumstances. The difficulty is that the impressions welled up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's soul but that he felt compelled to transform them, because his life in the world was such that impulses were constantly rising up into his soul-and-spirit which then, in the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer-incarnation, were responsible for the very loose connection between his soul-and-spirit and his physical body.

This will indicate to you how impulses from olden times work over in a remarkable way into a man's thinking, feeling, perception and artistic achievements. The truth of such things will quite certainly never be discovered by speculation or intellectual thinking but only in genuine spiritual vision.

Personalities who attract one's attention in some earthly life are especially interesting from the point of view of their reincarnations. There is a personality who is greatly loved and held in high esteem, above all in this country, through whom we can discern how souls pass through their earthly lives. When we have real knowledge of these matters they turn out to be different from what one would naturally assume.

There is a soul ... I was able to find this soul for the first time occupying a kind of priestly office in ancient Mysteries. I say, a kind of priestly office, for although he was not a priest of the highest rank his position in the Mysteries enabled him to do a great deal for the education of souls. In that incarnation he was a noble character, full of goodness of heart which his connection with the Mysteries had developed in him. About a hundred years before the birth of Christ it was the destiny of this personality, in line with the customs of the times, to serve under a cruel slave-owner as the foreman or manager of a host of slaves whose work was hard and heavy and who could only be handled in the way that was the accepted practice in those days. This personality must not be misjudged or misunderstood. The conditions prevailing in ancient civilisations must be seen in a different light from those of to-day; we must understand above all what it meant for this fundamentally noble personality to have been incarnated a hundred years before the founding of Christianity as a kind of foreman-manager of a host of slaves. It was impossible for him always to act in accordance with his own impulses—that was his hard destiny. But at the same time he had established a definite relationship with the souls living in the hard-worked slaves. He obeyed the crueller personality of whom I have spoken (his ‘chief’ we should say to-day) but in such circumstances antipathies and sympathies are formed. ... And when the one who often with a bleeding heart had carried out the orders he received, passed through the gate of death, his soul encountered the souls who had felt, for him too, a certain hatred. This lived itself out in the life between death and rebirth and established connections of soul-and-spirit which then worked as impulses, preparing for the next earthly life.

In the nature of things, karmic connections are formed between all human beings who have to do with one another. It was also destiny that the Individuality of whom I am speaking, who was a kind of slave-overseer and connected karmically with the chief whose orders he was bound to obey, should have made himself guilty in a certain way—it was really innocence and guilt at the same time—of all the misery caused by the cruelty of his chief. He acquiesced in it, not out of any impulse of his own but impelled by the force majeure of customs and circumstances. Thus a karmic tie was established between the two. In the life between death and rebirth this took shape in such a way that the former slave-overseer was born again in the ninth century A.D. as a woman: she became the wife of the one who had been the cruel chief—and in this relationship lived through much that constituted the karmic adjustment of what I have described as a kind of ‘innocent guilt’ in connection with the cruelties that had been committed. But these experiences deepened the soul: much of what had been present in the ancient, priestly incarnation emerged once again, but overshadowed by great tragedy. Circumstances in the ninth century brought this wedded couple into connection with many human beings in whom there were living the souls, now reincarnated, of those who had been together with them as slaves. As a general rule, human souls are reborn during the same time-period. And again in this case there was a connection in the life on the Earth.

The souls who had once worked under the slave-overseer now lived together in spatial proximity as a fairly extensive community. The official servant of the community—but a servant of fairly high rank—was the individual who had once been the cruel slave-owner. He had dealings with all the inhabitants of the community and experienced from them nothing but trouble; he was not their governor but it was his duty to look after many of their affairs. The wife lived through all this at his side. We find, therefore, that a number of human beings are associated with these two personalities. But the karma that had bound the two together—the erstwhile slave-owner and his overseer—this karmic tie was thereby done with. The ancient priest-individuality was no longer bound to the other; but the tie with the other souls remained, precisely because in the incarnation about 100 B.C. he had been at least the instrument for much that had been their lot. As a woman, this Individuality brought only blessing to the community, for her deeds were performed with the greatest goodness and kindness, despite the infinitely tragic experiences she was obliged to undergo.

All these shared experiences, all that wove the threads of karma—it all went on working, and during the next period of life between death and rebirth (after the ninth century and on into the modern age) impulses took shape once again whereby these human beings were held together. And now, the souls who had once been the slaves and later on came together in a village community—these souls were born again, not in any kind of external community but at least during the same period of time. So that there was again the possibility of relationship with the Individuality—now reborn—who had been the slave-overseer a hundred years before the Christian era, and the woman in the ninth century A.D. For this Individuality was reborn as Pestalozzi. The souls who were also reborn more or less as contemporaries in order that karma might be fulfilled—these souls whose relationship to him was as I have described, became the pupils for whom Pestalozzi now performed deeds of untold blessing!

When one studies life and behind life as it presents itself perceives the working of souls from incarnation to incarnation ... certainly it is disturbing and astounding, for things are always different from what the intellect might conjecture. Yet life's content is immeasurably deepened when it is studied in this kind of context. I think, moreover, that a man himself has really gained something when he has studied such connections. If they are drawn forth—often with very great difficulty—from their spiritual backgrounds, and if one points, as I have only been able to do in sketchy outline to-day, to what is present in visible existence, one perceives how karma works through the course of human life. Verily, life acquires serious backgrounds when we pay attention to studies of this kind; and they can be understood if with unprejudiced minds we observe what then presents itself in the external world.

Anthroposophy does not exist in order to expound theories about repeated earthly lives or to give tabulated details of every kind, but to reveal, in all their concrete reality, the spiritual foundations of life. Men will look into the world with quite different eyes once the veils are lifted from these things. One day, if destiny permits, we shall have to speak of how they can play a part, too, in the actual deeds of men. Such knowledge will certainly show that concrete studies of karma are needed by our civilisation as an impetus and a deepening. I wanted to-day merely to lay before you these actual examples of karma. The personalities in question are well-known figures in history. Study them closely and you will find confirmation of much that I have said.

A basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed, this could seem very weird at first, because many people believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very deeply in reality.

However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature, these limitations of the scientific images do not at all appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere one-sidedness in natural sciences—if it is taken as a basis of the moral-social life—becomes injurious, causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters is that, in which we live during these years.

As peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge, the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate knowledge and penetrating reality.

Now we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the starting point from calling attention to the fact that the consideration of the human being has become relatively one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human being but into his whole nature.

Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control work salutarily on the social-moral life.

It could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not only considers how the human being is active in the wake day life but that one has also to regard the other side of life, the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.

Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious. However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate cognitive means because they want to refrain from anthroposophy.

What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.

I could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them. As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However, already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as bodily tools to the soul being.

The human being has to spend his life as it were,—as well as the single tone can never be music but only in the interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or harmony can originate—in such a way that life condition interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life. Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place fact.

One normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise that—if the human being withdraws from the wake day life if he falls asleep and dreams—that then in him that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in the present world period, has developed little of this everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate consideration cannot prove its nature at all.

Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a dream.

Spiritual science shows that it is true that something prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us which is associated with our future in such a way that it still encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death. The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past. One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the human being is not able to work really with that what works in the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences, certain memories give him from the past life.

All that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream is just something exceptionally significant, considered spiritual-scientifically.

However, the important is something else; it is that one is of the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake. Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious. However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual science searches as coherent, was always found by single outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of reality in us as the dream does.

In the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.

Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the course of the spiritual human development about the nature of the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.

Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one is not immediately aware of it.

Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise, what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.

However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that prevails what one can overview with the usual wake consciousness, but that in the human life—because dream and sleep also penetrate the wake day life—that prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the social, moral, political concepts and we discover that something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is even overslept.

This is the secret of the social life and of the historical life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.

Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science should bring back something to the human being that he has lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and their significance only in such a way as one often does today, one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that these natural sciences have originated in such a way because just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution because the human being was silly and childish for millennia, as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite different reason.

If one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist mental pictures interacted.

Even in our words “spirit” and “soul” are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts historically to a T. The human being has still grown together with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly from nature. The recent historical development means that the human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just, therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to which one got finally, but because the human being could get to a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.

If the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition. Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of the soul life.

The scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of self-reflection.

If one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific concepts have been developed so that the human being has no longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled materialism of natural sciences as something great.

One only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to the big, significant role that the scientific development has in the educational process of the human race. However, what appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake consciousness.

Not such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.

Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive means of natural sciences!

One needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the human being lives, also the sociological configuration of humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development, Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist, three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being develops what is militarily and politically strong from the social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the actually valuable class as the military one. In it the political higher life should develop. As the nervous life originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class should originate from the military. I do not keep characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.

However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level, and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have it.

While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in the history and the social life of humanity. That which humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures work catastrophically if they transition into actions.

The transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.

Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to believe that one can master the social, moral life with the scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?

Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science, which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality, there will be more and more people who realise that one has to turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of single people but because of deeper historical necessities.

We do not need to point to less significant personalities if we want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller (Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what is so often said that one can learn from history for the moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic events: history teaches this, history teaches that.

Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical lectures: “The community of European states seems to have changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I hope.”

This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words that should be prophetic in 1789!

How have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after, and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet was this historian, this genius Schiller?

Why is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one works in such a conception of history with mental pictures which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as well as they are in life, only dream.

History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the moral-social life.

I know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do not experience the historical development so that this experience works in concepts of the wake day life. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.

The art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to understand history with the creative imagination of the people. He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative cognition.—One has to take his starting point from that what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.

That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able to encompass history or the social-political life with the concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists, professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then you will cause the decline of the community with such parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this social-moral life.

Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only describe the decline of the old life with his concepts.—One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate from the dreaming consciousness.

In recent time, these things have become particularly important because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical, in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most consciously.

Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts, impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with Marxism.

Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal with either—or everywhere, but that concepts show one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts, so that he regards them as images of the real from different sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic viewpoint.

One realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself. Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through hard enough.

Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of modern socialism have become socially acceptable.

Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in truth?

To the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx (1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx described the impulses of the last three to four centuries. However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images, but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote his books about what had already become a corpse from which one should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program, lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now—skipping the scientific way of thinking—the social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible consciousness.

Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time can no longer venture to dream only to experience the social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.

One can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a “transition period.” However, it concerns what transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition transitions into the conscious cognition.

In the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the intermediate stage of natural sciences.

In the social it has to find the immediate transition from the instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the social life at this or that place. A time will come where one will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination. One would laugh if he put that as classic example.

As weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is penetrated by social love.

One can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will itself.

The social design of any community can only arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the beholding consciousness.

The legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one messes while one looks for all possible and impossible scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with Intuitive knowledge.

Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but human beings who should become able to put themselves powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the spirit of our time demands.

Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other in life.

One understands that the moral-social life, considered scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this. While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up, that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third. Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts. One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible knowledge.

What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a description of the social-political life in detail would be as if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws. If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the player.

Any child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human being.

However, such a life in the social-political can arise only from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in this direction even today!

In spiritual science one has started studying since many years what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are distributed geographically and historically, which impulses really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts available in the legal life for the first time.

However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a very interesting book in which he wants to show that the peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious, the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples. The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927) describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses. That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams. Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry and science.

This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided considerations show that one has already done the attempt to master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do this only with the beholding consciousness.

I could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.

If one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that the community must develop under the influence of vivid moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent, everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it the idea of freedom lives.

The highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can only prosper where the creation of the community originates from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into this moral-social life with another member of his being.

One may say that the great persons of the past already realised with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is, which embodies itself in history, he found strange words saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites.

How wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one did not understand the dream.—Goethe looks at the history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we have from history is not that “fable convenue” which you read in the history books and which we regard usually as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that which develops as the stream of humanity in the social-political development.

Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is that which the human being has as best from history, but that which can be associated with this dream of history, as a creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the present.

However, this truth can be complemented on the other side, while one points out that one cannot intervene with sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends them.

One needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause that the social-moral life can develop must arise from enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates if one can recognise by the connection of the single human being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by Inspiration, and by Intuition.

As Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life. However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.

In this direction, I wanted to give some indications and suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human life that we need in this catastrophic time.