The Rudolf Steiner Archive

This lecture, the 9th of 12 lectures published under is: A Living Knowledge of Nature, the Fall of the Intellect into Sin, the Spiritual Resurrection.

You have seen from these lectures that I feel duty bound to speak at this time about a consciousness that must be attained if we are to accomplish one of the tasks of the Anthroposophical Society. And to begin with today, let me point to the fact that this consciousness can only be acquired if the whole task of culture and civilization is really understood today from the spiritual-scientific point of view. I have taken the most varied opportunities to try, from this point of view, to characterize what is meant by the fall of man, to which all religions refer. The religions speak of this fall of man as lying at the starting point of the historical development of mankind; and in various ways through the years we have seen how this fall of man—which I do not need to characterize in more detail today—is an expression of something that once occurred in the course of human evolution: man's becoming independent of the divine spiritual powers that guided him.

We know in fact that the consciousness of this independence first arose as the consciousness soul appeared in human evolution in the first half of the fifteenth century. We have spoken again and again in recent lectures about this point in time. But basically the whole human evolution depicted in myths and history is a kind of preparation for this significant moment of growing awareness of our freedom and independence.

This moment is a preparation for the fact that earthly humanity is meant to acquire a decision-making ability that is independent of the divine spiritual powers. And so the religions point to a cosmic-earthly event that replaces the soul-spiritual instincts—which alone were determinative in what humanity did in very early times—with just this kind of human decision making. As I said, we do not want to speak in more detail about this now, but the religions did see the matter in this way: With respect to his moral impulses the human being has placed himself in a certain opposition to his guiding spiritual powers, to the Yahweh or Jehovah powers, let us say, speaking in Old Testament terms. If we look at this interpretation, therefore, we can present the matter as though, from a definite point in his evolution, man no longer felt that divine spiritual powers were active in him and that now he himself was active.

Consequently, with respect to his overall moral view of himself, man felt that he was sinful and that he would have been incapable of falling into sin if he had remained in his old state, in a state of instinctive guidance by divine spiritual powers. Whereas he would then have remained sinless, incapable of sinning, like a mere creature of nature, he now became capable of sinning through this independence from the divine spiritual powers. And then there arose in humanity this consciousness of sin: As a human being I am sinless only when I find my way back again to the divine spiritual powers. What I myself decide for myself is sinful per se, and I can attain a sinless state only by finding my way back again: to the divine spiritual powers.

This consciousness of sin then arose most strongly in the Middle Ages. And then human intellectuality, which previously had not yet been a separate faculty, began to develop. And so, in a certain way, what man developed as his intellect, as an intellectual content, also became infected—in a certain sense rightly—with this consciousness of sin. It is only that one did not say to oneself that the intellect, arising in human evolution since the third or fourth century A.D., was also now infected by the consciousness of sin. In the Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages, there evolved, to begin with, an ‘unobserved’ consciousness of sin in the intellect.

This Scholastic wisdom of the Middle Ages said to itself: No matter how effectively one may develop the intellect as a human being, one can still only grasp outer physical nature with it. Through mere intellect one can at best prove that divine spiritual powers exist; but one can know nothing of these divine spiritual powers; one can only have faith in these divine spiritual powers. One can have faith in what they themselves have revealed either through the Old or the New Testament.

So the human being, who earlier had felt himself to be sinful in his moral life—‘sinful’ meaning separated from the divine spiritual powers—this human being, who had always felt morally sinful, now in his Scholastic wisdom felt himself to be intellectually sinful, as it were. He attributed to himself an intellectual ability that was effective only in the physical, sense-perceptible world. He said to himself: As a human being I am too base to be able to ascent through my own power into those regions of knowledge where I can also grasp the spirit.

We do not notice how connected this intellectual fall of man is to his general moral fall. But what plays into our view of human intellectuality is the direct continuation of his moral fall.

When the Scholastic wisdom passes over then into the modern scientific view of the world, the connection with the old moral fall of man is completely forgotten. And, as I have often emphasized, the strong connection actually present between modern natural-scientific concepts and the old Scholasticism is in fact denied altogether. In modern natural science one states that man has limits to his knowledge, that he must be content to extend his view of things only out upon the sense-perceptible physical world. A Dubois-Reymond, for example, and others state that the human being has limits to what he can investigate, has limits to his whole thinking, in fact.

But that is a direct continuation of Scholasticism. The only difference is that Scholasticism believed that because the human intellect is limited, one must raise oneself to something different from the intellect—to revelation, in fact—when one wants to know something about the spiritual world.

The modern natural-scientific view takes half, not the whole; it lets revelation stay where it is, but then places itself completely upon a standpoint that is possible only if one presupposes revelation. This standpoint is that the human ability to know is too base to ascend into the divine spiritual worlds.

But at the time of Scholasticism, especially at the high point of Scholasticism in the middle of the Middle Ages, the same attitude of soul was not present as that of today. One assumed then that when the human being used his intellect he could gain knowledge of the sense-perceptible world; and he sensed that he still experienced something of a flowing together of himself with the sense-perceptible world when he employed his intellect. And one believed then that if one wanted to know something about the spiritual one must ascend to revelation, which in fact could no longer be understood, i.e., could no longer be grasped intellectually. But the fact remained unnoticed—and this is where we must direct our attention!—that spirituality flowed into the concepts that the Schoolmen, set up about the sense world. The concepts of the Schoolmen were not as unspiritual as ours are today. The Schoolmen still approached the human being with the concepts that they formed for themselves about nature, so that the human being was not yet completely excluded from knowledge. For, at least in the Realist stream, the Schoolmen totally believed that thoughts are given us from outside, that they are not fabricated from within. Today we believe that thoughts are not given from outside but are fabricated from within. Through this fact we have gradually arrived at a point in our evolution where we have dropped everything that does not relate to the outer sense world.

And, you see, the Darwinian theory of evolution is the final consequence of this dropping of everything unrelated to the outer sense world. Goethe made a beginning for a real evolutionary teaching that extended as far as man. When you take up his writing in this direction, you will see that he only stumbled when he tried to take up the human being. He wrote excellent botanical studies. He wrote many correct things about animals. But something always went wrong when he tried to take up the human being. The intellect that is trained only upon the sense world is not adequate to the study of man. Precisely Goethe shows this to a high degree. Even Goethe can say nothing about the human being. His teaching on metamorphosis does not extend as far as the human being. You know how, within the anthroposophical world view, we have had to broaden this teaching on metamorphosis, entirely in a Goethean sense, but going much further.

What has modern intellectualism actually achieved in natural science? It has only come as far as grasping the evolution of animals up to the apes, and then added on the human being without being able inwardly to encompass him. The closer people came to the higher animals, so to speak, the less able their concepts became to grasp anything. And it is absolutely untrue to say, for example, that they even understand the higher animals. They only believe that they understand them.

And so our understanding of the human being gradually dropped completely out of our understanding of the world, because understanding dropped out of our concepts. Our concepts became less and less spiritual, and the unspiritual concepts that regard the human being as the mere endpoint of the animal kingdom represent the content of all our thinking today. These concepts are already instilled into our children in the early grades, and our inability to look at the essential being of man thus becomes part of the general culture.

Now you know that I once attempted to grasp the whole matter of knowledge at another point. This was when I wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and its prelude Truth and Science although the first references are present already in my The Science of Knowing: Outline of an Epistemology Implicit in the Goethean World View written in the 1880's. I tried to turn the matter in a completely different direction. I tried to show what the modern person can raise himself to, when—not in a traditional sense, but out of free inner activity—he attains pure thinking, when he, attains this pure, willed thinking which is something positive and real, when this thinking works in him. And in The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I sought, in fact, to find our moral impulses in this purified thinking.

So that our evolution proceeded formerly in such a way that we more and more viewed man as being too base to act morally, and we extended this baseness also into our intellectuality.

Expressing this graphically, one could say: The human being developed in such a way that what he knew about himself became less and less substantial. It grew thinner and thinner (light color). But below the surface, something continued to develop (red) that lives, not in abstract thinking, but in real thinking.

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Now, at the end of the 19th century, we had arrived at the point of no longer noticing at all what I have drawn here in red; and through what I have drawn here in a light color, we no longer believed ourselves connected with anything of a divine spiritual nature. Man's consciousness of sin had torn him out of the divine spiritual element; the historical forces that were emerging could not take him back. But with The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I wanted to say: Just look for once into the depths of the human soul and you will find that something has remained with us: pure thinking, namely, the real, energetic thinking that originates from man himself, that is no longer mere thinking, that is filled with experience, filled with feeling, and that ultimately expresses itself in the will. I wanted to say that this thinking can become the impulse for moral action. And for this reason I spoke of the moral intuition which is the ultimate outcome of what otherwise is only moral imagination. But what is actually intended by The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity can become really alive only if we can reverse the path that we took as we split ourselves off more and more from the divine spiritual content of the world, split ourselves off all the way down to intellectuality. When we again find the spirituality in nature, then we will also find the human being again.

I therefore once expressed in a lecture that I held many years ago in Mannheim that mankind, in fact, in its present development, is on the point of reversing the fall of man. What I said was hardly noticed, but consisted in the following: The fall of man was understood to be a moral fall, which ultimately influenced the intellect also. The intellect felt itself to be at the limits of its knowledge. And it is basically one and the same thing—only in a somewhat different form—if the old theology speaks of sin or if Dubois-Reymond speaks of the limits of our ability to know nature. I indicated how one must grasp the spiritual—which, to be sure, has been filtered down into pure thinking—and how, from there, one can reverse the fall of man. I showed how, through spiritualizing the intellect, one can work one's way back up to the divine spiritual.

Whereas in earlier ages one pointed to the moral fall of man and thought about the development of mankind in terms of this moral fall of man, we today must think about an ideal of mankind: about the rectifying of the fall of man along a path of the spiritualization of our knowing activity, along a path of knowing the spiritual content of the world again. Through the moral fall of man, the human being distanced himself from the gods. Through the path of knowledge he must find again the pathway of the gods. Man must turn his descent into an ascent. Out of the purely grasped spirit of his own being, man must understand, with inner energy and power, the goal, the ideal, of again taking the fall of man seriously. For, the fall of man should be taken seriously. It extends right into what natural science says today. We must find the courage to add to the fall of man, through the power of our knowing activity, a raising of man out of sin. We must find the courage to work out a way to raise ourselves out of sin, using what can come to us through a real and genuine spiritual-scientific knowledge of modern times.

One could say, therefore: If we look back into the development of mankind, we see that human consciousness posits a fall of man at the beginning of the historical development of mankind on earth. But the fall must be made right again at some point: It must be opposed by a raising of man. And this raising of man can only go forth out of the age of the consciousness soul. In our day, therefore, the historic moment has arrived when the highest ideal of mankind must be the spiritual raising of ourselves out of sin. Without this, the development of mankind can proceed no further.

That is what I once discussed in that lecture in Mannheim. I said that, in modern times, especially in natural-scientific views, an intellectual fall of man has occurred, in addition to the moral fall of man. And this intellectual fall is the great historical sign that a spiritual raising of man must begin.

But what does this spiritual raising of man mean? It means nothing other, in fact, than really understanding Christ. Those who still understood something about him, who had not—like modern theology—lost Christ completely, said of Christ that he came to earth, that he incarnated into an earthly body as a being of a higher kind. They took up what was proclaimed about Christ in written traditions. They spoke, in fact, about the mystery of Golgotha.

Today the time has come when Christ must be understood. But we resist this understanding of Christ, and the form this resistance takes is extraordinarily characteristic. You see, if even a spark of what Christ really is still lived in those who say that they understand Christ, what would happen? They would have to be clear about the fact that Christ, as a heavenly being, descended to earth; he therefore did not speak to man in an earthly language, but in a heavenly one. We must therefore make an effort to understand him. We must make an effort to speak a cosmic, extraterrestrial language. That means that we must not limit our knowledge merely to the earth, for, the earth was in fact a new land for Christ. We must extend our knowledge out into the cosmos. We must learn to understand the elements. We must learn to understand the movements of the planets. We must learn to understand the star constellations, and their influence on what happens on earth. Then we draw near to the language that Christ spoke.

That is something, however, that coincides with our spiritual raising of man. For why was man reduced to understanding only what lives on earth? Because he was conscious of sin, in fact, because he considered himself too base to be able to grasp the world in its extraterrestrial spirituality. And that is actually why people speak as though man can know nothing except the earthly. I characterized this yesterday by saying: We understand a fish only in a bowl, and a bird only in a cage. Certainly there is no consciousness present in our civilized natural science that the human being can raise himself above this purely earthly knowledge; for, this science mocks any effort to go beyond the earthly. If one even begins to speak about the stars, the terrible mockery sets in right away, as a matter of course, from the natural-scientific side.

If we want to hear correct statements about the relation of man to the animals, we must already turn our eye to the extraterrestrial world, for only the plants are still explainable in earthly terms; the animals are not. Therefore I had to say earlier that we do not even understand the apes correctly, that we can no longer explain the animals. If one wants to understand the animals, one must take recourse to the extraterrestrial, for the animals are ruled by forces that are extraterrestrial. I showed you this yesterday with respect to the fish. I told you how moon and sun forces work into the water and shape him out of the water, if I may put it so. And in the same way, the bird out of the air. As soon as one turns to the elements, one also meets the extraterrestrial. The whole animal world is explainable in terms of the extraterrestrial. And even more so the human being. But when one begins to speak of the extraterrestrial, then the mockery sets in at once.

The courage to speak again about the extraterrestrial must grow within a truly spiritual-scientific view; for, to be a spiritual scientist today is actually more a matter of courage than of intellectuality. Basically it is a moral issue, because what must be opposed is something moral: the moral fall of man, in fact.

And so we must say that we must in fact first learn the language of Christ, the language ton ouranon, the language of the heavens, in Greek terms. We must relearn this language in order to make sense out of what Christ wanted to do on earth.

Whereas up till now one has spoken about Christianity and described the history of Christianity, the point now is to understand Christ, to understand him as an extraterrestrial being. And that is identical with what we can call the ideal of raising ourselves from sin.

Now, to be sure, there is something very problematical about formulating this ideal, for you know in fact that the consciousness of sin once made people humble. But in modern times they are hardly ever humble. Often those who think themselves the most humble are the most proud of all. The greatest pride today is evident in those who strive for a so-called ‘simplicity’ in life. They set themselves above everything that is sought by the humble soul that lifts itself inwardly to real, spiritual truths, and they say: Everything must be sought in utter simplicity. Such naive natures—and they also regard themselves as naive natures—are often the most proud of all today. But nevertheless, during the time of real consciousness of sin there once were humble people; humility was still regarded as something that mattered in human affairs. And so, without justification, pride has arisen. Why? Yes, I can answer that in the same words I used here recently. Why has pride arisen? It has arisen because one has not heard the words “Huckle, get up!” [From the Oberufer Christmas plays.] One simply fell asleep. Whereas earlier one felt oneself, with full intensity and wakefulness, to be a sinner, one now fell into a gentle sleep and only dreamed still of a consciousness of sin. Formerly one was awake in one's consciousness of sin; one said to oneself: Man is sinful if he does not undertake actions that will again bring him onto the path to the divine spiritual powers. One was awake then. One may have different views about this today, but the fact is that one was awake in one's acknowledgment of sinfulness. But then one dozed off, and the dreams arrived, and. the dreams murmured: Causality rules in the world; one event always causes the following one. And so finally we pursue what we see in the starry heavens as attraction and repulsion of the heavenly bodies; we take this all the way down into the molecule; and then we imagine a kind of little cosmos of molecules and atoms.

And the dreaming went further. And then the dream concluded by saying: We can know nothing except what outer sense experience gives us. And it was labeled ‘supernaturalism’ if anyone went beyond sense experiences. But where supernaturalism begins, science ends.

And then, at gatherings of natural scientists, these dreams were delivered in croaking tirades like Dubois-Reymond's Limits of Knowledge. And then, when the dream's last notes were sounded—a dream does not always resound so agreeably; sometimes it is a real nightmare—when the dream concluded with “Where supernaturalism begins, science ends,” then not only the speaker but the whole natural-scientific public sank down from the dream into blessed sleep. One no longer needed any inner impulse for active inner knowledge. One could console oneself by accepting that there are limits, in fact, to what we can know about nature, and that we cannot transcend these limits. The time had arrived when one could now say: “Huckle, get up! The sky is cracking!” But our modern civilization replies: “Let it crack! It's old enough to have cracked before!” Yes, this is how things really are. We have arrived at a total sleepiness, in our knowing activity.

But into this sleepiness there must sound what is now being declared by spiritual-scientific anthroposophical knowledge. To begin with, there must arise in knowledge the realization that man is in a position to set up the ideal within himself that we can raise ourselves from sin. And that in turn is connected with the fact that along with a possible waking up, pride—which up till now has only been present, to be sure, in a dreamlike way—will grow more than ever. And (I say this of course without making any insinuations) it has sometimes been the case that in anthroposophical circles the raising of man has not yet come to full fruition. Sometimes, in fact, this pride has reached—I will not say a respectable—a quite unrespectable size. For, it simply lies in human nature for pride to flourish rather than the positive side.

And so, along with the recognition that the raising of man is a necessity, we must also see that we now need to take up into ourselves in full consciousness the training in humility which we once exercised. And we can do that. For, when pride arises out of knowledge, that is always a sign that something in one's knowledge is indeed terribly wrong. For when knowledge is truly present, it makes one humble in a completely natural way. It is out of pride that one sets up a program of reform today, when in some social movement, let's say, or in the woman's movement one knows ahead of time what is possible, right, necessary, and best, and then sets up a program, point by point. One knows everything about the matter. One does not think of oneself at all as proud when each person declares himself to know it all. But in true knowledge, one remains pretty humble, for one knows that true knowledge is acquired only in the course of time, to use a trivial expression.

If one lives in knowledge, one knows, with what difficulty—sometimes over decades—one has attained the simplest truths. There, quite inwardly through the matter itself, one does not become proud. But nevertheless, because a full consciousness is being demanded precisely of the Anthroposophical Society for humanity's great ideal today of raising ourselves from sin, watchfulness—not Hucklism, but watchfulness—must also be awakened against any pride that might arise.

We need today a strong inclination to truly grasp the essential being of knowledge so that, by virtue of a few anthroposophical catchwords like ‘physical body,’ ‘etheric body,’ ‘reincarnation,’ et cetera, we do not immediately become paragons of pride. This watchfulness with respect to ordinary pride must really be cultivated as a new moral content. This must be taken up into our meditation. For if the raising of man is actually to occur, then the experiences we have with the physical world must lead us over into the spiritual world. For, these experiences must lead us to offer ourselves devotedly, with the innermost powers of our soul. They must not lead us, however, to dictate program truths. Above all, they must penetrate into a feeling of responsibility for every single word that one utters about the spiritual world. Then the striving must reign to truly carry up into the realm of spiritual knowledge the truthfulness that, to begin with, one acquired for oneself in dealing with external, sense-perceptible facts. Whoever has not accustomed himself to remaining with the facts in the physical sense world and to basing himself upon them also does not accustom himself to truthfulness when speaking about the spirit. For in the spiritual world, one can no longer accustom oneself to truthfulness; one must bring it with one.

But you see, on the one hand today, due to the state of consciousness in our civilization, facts are hardly taken into account, and, on the other hand, science simply suppresses those facts that lead onto the right path. Let us take just one out of many such facts: There are insects that are themselves vegetarian when fully grown. They eat no meat, not even other insects. When the mother insect is ready to lay her fertilized eggs, she lays them into the body of another insect, that is then filled with the eggs that the insect mother has inserted into it. The eggs are now in a separate insect. Now the eggs do not hatch out into mature adults, but as little worms. But at first they are in the other insect. These little worms, that will only later metamorphose into adult insects, are not vegetarian. They could not be vegetarian. They must devour the flesh of the other insect. Only when they emerge and transform themselves are they able to do without the flesh of other insects. Picture that: the insect mother is herself a vegetarian. She knows nothing in her consciousness about eating meat, but she lays her eggs for the next generation into another insect. And furthermore; if these insects were now, for example, to eat away the stomach of the host insect, they would soon have nothing more to eat, because the host insect would die. If they ate away any vital organ, the insect could not live. So what do these insects do when they hatch out? They avoid all the vital organs and eat only what the host insect can do without and still live. Then, when these little insects mature, they crawl out, become vegetarian, and proceed to do what their mother did.

Yes, one must acknowledge that intelligence holds sway in nature. And if you really study nature, you can find this intelligence holding sway everywhere. And you will then think more humbly about your own intelligence, for first of all, it is not as great as the intelligence ruling in nature, and secondly, it is only like a little bit of water that one has drawn from a lake and put into a water jug. The human being, in fact, is just such a water jug, that has drawn intelligence from nature. Intelligence is everywhere in nature; everything, everywhere is wisdom. A person who ascribes intelligence exclusively to himself is about as clever as someone who declares: You're saying that there is water out there in the lake or in the brook? Nonsense! There is no water in them. Only in my jug is there any water. The jug created the water.

So, the human being thinks that he creates intelligence, whereas he only draws intelligence from the universal sea of intelligence.

It is necessary, therefore, to truly keep our eye on the facts of nature. But facts are left out when the Darwinian theory is promoted, when today's materialistic views are being formulated; for, the facts contradict the modern materialistic view at every point. Therefore one suppresses these facts. One recounts them, to be sure, but actually aside from science, anecdotally. Therefore they do not gain the validity in our general education that they must have. And so one not only does not truly present the facts that one has, but adds a further dishonesty by leaving out the decisive facts, i.e., by suppressing them.

But if the raising of man is to be accomplished, then we must educate ourselves in truthfulness in the sense world first of all and then carry this education, this habitude, with us into the spiritual world. Then we will also be able to be truthful in the spiritual world. Otherwise we will tell people the most unbelievable stories about the spiritual world. If we are accustomed in the physical world to being imprecise, untrue, and inexact, then we will recount nothing but untruths about the spiritual world.

. You see, if one grasps in this way the ideal whose reality can become conscious to the Anthroposophical Society, and if what arises from this consciousness becomes a force in our Society, then, even in people who wish us the worst, the opinion that the Anthroposophical Society could be a sect will disappear. Now of course our opponents will say all kinds of things that are untrue. But as long as we are giving cause for what they say, it cannot be a matter of indifference to us whether their statements are true or not.

Now, through its very nature, the Anthroposophical Society has thoroughly worked its way out of the sectarianism in which it certainly was caught up at first, especially while it was still connected to the Theosophical Society. It is only that many members to this day have not noticed this fact and love sectarianism. And so it has come about that even older anthroposophical members who were beside themselves when the Anthroposophical Society was transformed from a sectarian one into one that was conscious of its world task, even those who were beside themselves have quite recently gone aside again. The Movement for Religious Renewal, when it follows its essential nature, may be ever so far removed from sectarianism. But this Movement for Religious Renewal has given even a number of older anthroposophists cause to say to themselves: Yes, the sectarian element is being eradicated more and more from the Anthroposophical Society. But we can cultivate it again here! And so precisely through anthroposophists, the Movement for Religious Renewal is being turned into the crassest sectarianism, which truly does not need to be the case.

One can see how, therefore, if the Anthroposophical Society wants to become a reality, we must positively develop the courage to raise ourselves again into the spiritual world. Then art and religion will flourish in the Anthroposophical Society. Although for now even our artistic forms have been taken from us [through the burning of the Goetheanum building on the night of December 31, 1922], these forms live on, in fact, in the being of the anthroposophical movement itself and must continually be found again, and ever again.

In the same way, a true religious deepening lives in those who find their way back into the spiritual world, who take seriously the raising of man. But what we must eradicate in ourselves is the inclination to sectarianism, for this inclination is always egotistical. It always wants to avoid the trouble of penetrating into the reality of the spirit and wants to settle for a mystical reveling that basically is an egotistical voluptuousness. And all the talk about the Anthroposophical Society becoming much too intellectual is actually based on the fact that those who say this want, indeed, to avoid the thoroughgoing experience of a spiritual content, and would much rather enjoy the egotistical voluptuousness of soulful reveling in a mystical, nebulous indefiniteness. Selflessness is necessary for true anthroposophy. It is mere egotism of soul when this true anthroposophy is opposed by anthroposophical members themselves who then all the more drive anthroposophy into something sectarian that is only meant, in fact, to satisfy a voluptuousness of soul that is egotistical through and through.

You see those are the things, with respect to our tasks, to which we should turn our attention. By doing so, we lose nothing of the warmth, the artistic sense, or the religious inwardness of our anthroposophical striving. But that will be avoided which must be avoided: the inclination to sectarianism. And this inclination to sectarianism, even though it often arrived in a roundabout way through pure cliquishness, has brought so much into the Society that splits it apart. But cliquishness also arose in the anthroposophical movement only because of its kinship—a distant one to be sure—with the sectarian inclination. We must return to the cultivation of a certain world consciousness so that only our opponents, who mean to tell untruths, can still call the Anthroposophical Society a sect. We must arrive at the point of being able to strictly banish the sectarian character trait from the anthroposophical movement. But we should banish it in such a way that when something arises like the Movement for Religious Renewal, which is not meant to be sectarian, it is not gripped right away by sectarianism just because one can more easily give it a sectarian direction than one can the Anthroposophical Society itself.

Those are the things that we must think about keenly today. From the innermost being of anthroposophy, we must understand the extent to which anthroposophy can give us, not a sectarian consciousness, but rather a world consciousness. Therefore I had to speak these days precisely about the more intimate tasks of the Anthroposophical Society.

My dear Friends! Circumstances have worked out in such a way that numerous friends found it possible to come to today's class and shall probably also be present for further sessions, friends who were not present at previous sessions of the class, and it is not possible, therefore, simply to proceed in the way that was indicated when we met the last time. Also, the repetition of the class lessons need prove to be no hardship for those members of this esoteric school who have participated in earlier sessions, for the content of this esoteric school is of such a nature that it should again and again be brought before the soul. This is on point for those for whom today's session is a repetition, as the repetition, just because it is a repetition, also signifies a continuation.

For all those, however, who are here today for the first time, it signifies something else. It signifies an acquaintance with the beginning of the esoteric path.

It is true that even those who are far advanced along the esoteric path find special fruitfulness for their further striving in returning again and again to the beginnings. Returning in this way to the beginning is at the same time always an entering upon a new and further step. This is the way we wish to look upon these lessons which are now to be given. So, for the sake of those members who are here today for the first time, the nature and significance of this school shall be set forth once again in an introductory manner.

When the impulse for the Christmas Conference manifested itself here in this hall through the spiritual laying of the Foundation Stone of the Anthroposophical Society on Christmas Day, it was then indeed the fact, as I said yesterday, that an esoteric impulse was from then on to flow through the entire Anthroposophical Society, an esoteric impulse which could indeed already be observed in everything that has been undertaken since Christmas in the Anthroposophical Society. The kernel of this esoteric activity of the Anthroposophical Society must henceforth be the esoteric school, specifically the esoteric school which, arising out of the whole character of Anthroposophy, now has to replace what was previously attempted as the so-called Independent College of Spiritual Science, which one cannot claim to have been successful.

This failure took place at a time when I did not yet personally have the responsibility for the conduct of the Anthroposophical Society and also did not have the task of permitting those who wished to try something to go ahead and try it. This kind of thing should not occur again in the future. It was in accordance with the nature of what formed itself out of the Christmas impulse, an impulse with which I was united, that the Free School of Spiritual Science, with its various sections, should constitute the esoteric kernel of all that was once again intended to become effective as esoteric activity within the Anthroposophical Society.

An esoteric school, however, is not founded in the earthly realm. An esoteric school is only truly present when it is the earthly reflection of what is founded in the supersensible worlds. It has frequently been discussed in Anthroposophical meetings of that in the rulership within the hierarchy of archangels, who have wielded authority over human spiritual life in sequence, it was the Archangel Michael who took on this guidance of spiritual life in the last third of the nineteenth century. It has also been pointed out that Michael's guidance has a very special importance in spiritual life, within the spiritual development of human life on earth.

It is certainly so in human evolution that life in this evolution is guided by seven successive archangels, by seven archangels who together constitute the substance of the rulership of the planetary system to which sun, earth and moon also belong. The impulse radiating out from each of these archangels extends over a period of three to four hundred years. Taking our start from the archangel under whose impulse the spiritual life of mankind stands at the present time, taking our start from Michael, we presently have the archangel who has the spiritual force of the sun within him in everything which he does, in everything that he nurtures.

He was preceded three to four hundred years back, reckoning back three to four hundred years from the last third of the nineteenth century, Michael’s rulership was preceded by the rulership of the archangel Gabriel, who predominantly bears Moon forces in his impulses.

Preceding still further back, we come to those centuries where there was a kind of revolt, especially among those who were the main carriers of civilization, a revolt during medieval times against spiritual activity and spiritual beings. This was due to the rulership of Samael, who bears Mars forces in his impulses.

Going even further back, we come to that epoch in which a medically oriented alchemy flowed deeply into spiritual life under the rulership of the Archangel Raphael, who bears Mercury forces in his impulses.

Retracing our steps still further, we come ever nearer to the time of the Mystery of Golgotha, although not quite reaching it, and we find the rulership of Zachariel,¹ who bears Jupiter forces in his impulses, and then the rulership of Anael,² who bears Venus forces in his impulses, at a time quite close to the Mystery of Golgotha. Then we come to the time in which the radiance of the Mystery of Golgotha confronted a profound spiritual darkness pervasive on the earth under the rulership of Oriphiel,³ who bears Saturn forces in his impulses.

Then we return again to the former rulership of Michael, in which a concurrence of world-wide, cosmopolitan impulses took place in Alexandrianism, in Aristotelianism, which up to that time had been brought to mankind through the Greek mysteries and spiritual ways and beings of the Greeks. By means of Alexander this was carried over into Asia and North Africa, so that the life of spirit that had arisen in a small territory streamed out over the whole of the civilized world at that time. For it is precisely this which characterizes a Michael Age, that what has flowered at an earlier time in a single locality radiates out in cosmopolitan fashion over the other parts of humanity.

So, one always returns, when one has completed a cycle of all the various archangels, to the same archangel. We could go yet further back through another sequence of Gabriel, Samael, Raphael, Zachariel, Anael, and Oriphiel, and we would arrive once more at a Michael age. And we will find that after the Michael age which now streams down upon us, there will again follow an era of Oriphiel.

And so, my dear friends, we should be aware that Michael impulses live in characteristic fashion in all that is to take place at the present time as spiritual activity and spiritual substance. But this is a more important Michael epoch than were the preceding ones. I merely wish to draw your attention to this fact.

What is essential in this regard is that when at Christmas the Anthroposophical Society was placed in the service of esoteric spiritual life, this esoteric school, the esoteric kernel of the Society, could only come into existence if it were founded by that spiritual power to whom is entrusted the responsibility for the guidance of the present epoch of mankind's history. We live in this esoteric school as in an esoteric school founded by Michael, the spirit of our time. We live in an esoteric school that has been rightly founded, for this school is the Michael school of the present time.

So, my dear friends, you only conceive what is spoken in this school properly if you are conscious that what is spoken here is entirely what the Michael stream itself wishes to bring to mankind. Michael-Words are all the words spoken in this school. Michael-Will is everything which is willed in this school. Michael-Pupils are you all, when you take your places rightly within this school. Only when this consciousness lives within you is it possible for you to take part in the right way in this school, to participate in this school with the right mood and attitude of heart and mind, to know and feel that you are not merely members of what steps forth in the world as an earth institution, but what steps forth as a heavenly institution.

Furthermore, it is understood that each person who becomes a member of this school is beholden, is pledged⁴ to nurture the school. It is a unique aspect of the Christmas Foundation impulse of the Anthroposophical Society that a character of complete openness has impressed itself on this Society. As a result, nothing further is required of one who becomes a member of the Anthroposophical Society than that he receives from the Society what flows within the spiritual movement of anthroposophy. One undertakes no further obligations when one becomes an adherent of anthroposophy. The obligation to be a decent human being is, of course, understood.

It is another matter when one seeks to enter this school. In this case, in regard to all that emerges out of the whole spiritual spirit, out of the occult spirit of this school a member of this school will take on a nurturing-pledge⁵ to be a worthy representative of Anthroposophical enterprises before the entire world, with all of one’s thinking, feeling, and willing. One can be a member of this school in no other way.

The decision whether or not one is a worthy member of this school rests solely in the hands of the leadership of the school. The leadership of the school must take seriously, however, the specific duties which it takes on. The leadership of this school is accountable only to the spiritual powers, to the Michael power itself, for the various things that it does. The leadership, however, must take seriously the point that whoever belongs to the school must be a worthy representative of the concerns of Anthroposophy before the world. This entails that the leadership of the school must insist that membership be taken up seriously in the utmost sense. The leadership must therefore make clear to whomever cannot meet this seriousness, that that person’s membership cannot continue.

That this will be taken seriously, my dear friends, you may see from the fact that in the short time this school has existed, in twenty cases already, it has been necessary to exclude members for a period of time. Strict rules of this kind will have to be maintained. One may not play around with genuine esoteric matters, for they must be handled with utmost earnestness. In this manner straightforwardly through this school earnestness can stream into the movement of Anthroposophy, which is absolutely necessary for it to flourish in true spirituality.

These are the introductory words which I had to convey to you.

If you, I am speaking now to those who are present here for the first time, if you receive the words which are spoken as genuine messages from the spiritual world, as genuine Michael words, then you will take your places here in the only way that is right for you to do so.

Let us first bring before our souls those words which sound forth to man when he looks out with unprejudiced perception upon all that surrounds him in the world, in the world above, in the world around him, and in the world below. We may look out to the silent world of the minerals, to the sprouting, springing realm of the plant kingdom, to the mobile realm of the animals, to the pensive realm of the human being on earth, we might turn our glance out to the mountains, to the seas, to the rivers, to the bubbling springs, we might gaze up to the moving clouds, to thunder and lightning, we might gaze up to the shining sun, to the glimmering moon, to the twinkling stars. From all around, when a person opens his heart, when he is able to hear with soulful ears, there sounds forth confronting him the admonition, which also rests within the words which I have now to utter:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

And when we allow the sense and spirit of these words to work upon us, we feel the longing to seek those wellsprings from which our actual human nature flows. To understand these words completely means to seek out in earnest longing the path which leads to those waters from which flows the beingness of the human soul, to seek the origin of human life.

This will come to you, my dear brothers and sisters, in accordance with the disposition of your karma. But the first step will be a contemplative understanding of the esoteric path. This esoteric path will be portrayed in Michael words here in this school. The path will be portrayed in such a way that each human being can walk it, that no one is obliged to follow it, but rather that it can initially be understood, for this understanding is itself the first step. Therefore, there will flow forth in mantric words what Michael has to say to humanity at the present time. These mantric words are at the same time words for meditation.

Once again, the effect of these words in meditation will depend on the karma of each individual soul. The first thing is to acquire an understanding that just from the spoken mantric words a longing for human self-awareness springs forth, directing the mind to the wellsprings of human existence-awareness. O Man, know yourself! Yes, this longing must grow inwardly. We must seek for the wellspring that lives in the human soul, which is our intrinsically human existence.

We must first look out upon the world as given around us. We must look out and into all that is present for us in small things and into what is grandiose. We observe the silent stone, the earthworm, we observe whatever grows and creeps and lives around us in the realms of nature. We gaze out to the mighty twinkling, glistening stars. We hear the rolling thunder. If a person becomes an ascetic, he does not have the perspective to fathom the riddles of the intrinsic nature of a human being, nor when one despises what lives as a worm in the earth, what twinkles in the vault of the heavens, nor when one despises outward sense appearance and seeks for an abstract, vague, inwardly chaotic path, but rather, only when one develops a direct deep feeling for all that creeps, lives, and endures in the tiniest worm, when one develops a feeling for the majesty of what shines down upon us from the stars, when one can feel beauty, truth, purity, sublimity, extraordinary greatness, and majesty in all that enters through our senses and becomes perception. When one can stand upright as an observant human being and can hear from plants, stones, animals, stars, clouds, seas, springs, and mountains, when one can hear and grasp majesty and greatness and truth and beauty and radiance from everything surrounding him, then a person says to himself with full depth and intensity, “Certainly great, powerful, majestic, and magnificent is all that crawls, as do the worm on the earth, that sparkles and shines above, as the stars do in the heavens, but your being, O Man, is not among them.” You are not in all that of which your senses initially bear witness.

Then one turns one's questioning, riddle-laden glance toward the far distances. From this point forward the esoteric path will be described in imaginations. One turns one's glance toward the far distances. Something in the nature of a path comes into view, a path that leads to a black, night-bedecked wall, which reveals itself as the beginning of profound darkness. We stand there, surrounded by the majesty of sense existence, marveling at the majesty and splendor and radiance of sense existence. Not finding there our own being, our gaze is directed toward the boundary of sensory appearance. But there looms black, night-bedecked darkness. In our heart, however, something says to us, “Not here, where sunlight gleams back to us from all that grows and moves and lives, but rather over there, where night-bedecked darkness confronts us, there are the wellsprings of intrinsic human existence. From there must come the answer to the question, “O Man (O Mensch), know yourself!”

So we go cautiously to confront the black darkness and become aware of the first being whom we come up against, who stands there where the black night-bedecked darkness begins. Like a previously unnoticed cloud formation, it draws itself together, becomes humanoid, not weighed down with gravity, yet with human likeness. With earnest, deeply earnest gaze it meets our questioning glance. This is the Guardian of the Threshold. Between the sun-filled, light-reflecting surroundings of man and that night-bedecked darkness, there is an abyss, a deep, yawning abyss. At the abyss the Guardian of the Threshold confronts us. We designate him just so for a reason, as follows.

Of course, every night in sleep the human being’s “I” and astral body is certainly in that world which now appears to imaginative cognition as black, night-bedecked darkness. One is unaware, as one’s soul senses are not yet opened, one is unaware of living and moving in the midst of spiritual beings and spiritual conditions from falling asleep until awakening. If one were to experience awareness without further preparation what may be experienced there, one would be utterly crushed. The Guardian of the Threshold protects us, which is why he is called the Guardian of the Threshold. He protects us from crossing the abyss unprepared. We must obey his admonitions if we wish to follow the esoteric path. He wraps the human being in darkness every night. He guards the threshold, so that the human being, falling asleep, shall not pass over unprepared into the spiritual, occult world.

There he stands, when we have sufficiently taken this to heart, when we have immersed our soul in it. There he stands, directing his admonition to us, that everything in our physical surrounding is beautiful, but that our own being is not to be found in all this beauty, that we must seek beyond the yawning abyss of existence in the region of night-bedecked, black darkness, that we must wait until it grows dark here in the sunlit, light-gleaming realm of sense-perceptible brightness, until it becomes bright for us there, where for the present there is only black darkness.

It is this that the Guardian, with earnest words, puts before our souls. We are still standing a certain distance before him. We gaze out and take in his admonishing word, which resounds from the distance.

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness;
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are and were and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit;
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,

This is the first admonition of the Guardian of the Threshold, that first admonition which says to us that beautiful and great and sublime as our sense-world surroundings are, this world gleaming with light illuminated by the sun is for the being of man just a sort of darkness, that we must search there where the darkness is, that this darkness becomes light for us, so that the nature of a human being may be confronted and illuminated for us out of this darkness, so that out of this darkness the human riddle may be resolved. Then the Guardian of the Threshold continues.

And from darknesses clarifies itself
(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),
The bringer of spirit-premonitions to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.
And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,
Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word:
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

[The mantra was written on the blackboard; heading and last line was underlined.]

Where on grounds of earth, color upon color,
Life stirring reveals itself,
Where out of stuff of earth, form on form,
All without life takes shape,
Where feeling creatures, strong in will,
Delight in the warm glow of their existence,
Where you yourself, O Man, derive
Bodily existence from earth and air and light:

There you enter your own being’s
Deep, night-bedecked, cold inner darkness;
You’d ask within the dark expanse
Never, who you are and were and will become.
For your true existence the day dims
To the night of the soul, to darkness of spirit;
And you turn yourself, soul-searching,
Unto the light, that from darknesses strengthens,
And from darknesses clarifies itself

The continuation of this sentence follows after a few lines, but first we have a clause in parentheses:⁶

(Revealing you in counterpart,
Yet also portraying you as parable,
Earnest spirit-word in ethereal realm,
Audible to your heart, forcefully effective),

This concludes the parenthesis. Now we continue the sentence. “And from darknesses clarifies itself.,

The bringer of spirit-premonitions,

(the Guardian of the Threshold himself)

to you,
He who alone can illuminate your way;
Before him spread the sensory fields,
Behind him yawns the deep abyss.
And from his fields spirit dark,
Hard by the yawning chasm of existence,

Rings forth the ancient might of his creator-word:
See, I am the only door to inner knowing.

Then it is the Guardian himself, who after having conveyed this first admonition, sense light as darkness, darkness as light, now directs our attention to those feelings and senses that can now begin to rise with primeval power out of our soul. He, the Guardian, gives expression to them, as he allows his glance to grow yet more earnest, more earnest yet, as he stretches his arm and his hand toward us in admonishment, in warning, and utters these further words:

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,

We feel ourselves drawn into making a few steps toward the Guardian; we approach nearer to the yawning abyss of existence.

From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:
There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
Through world forming powers,
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

It is different whether initially the word sounds forth to us from sensory beings, if we understand correctly, “O Man, know yourself,” or whether it now sounds forth at the fearful abyss of being out of the mouth of the Guardian of the Threshold himself. One and the same word, yet two different ways of being taken hold of by it! All of these words are mantric, are there to be meditated, are the sort of words that stimulate capacities in the soul to draw nearer to the spiritual world, if they are able to inflame the soul. [The mantra was written on the blackboard. The heading and the last line were underlined.]

The Guardian at the Abyss

From the wide expanse of the beings of space
Who in the light experience existence,
From the onward tread of the course of time
Which in creating finds itself expressed,
From the depths of the feeling heart,
Where in one's self the world is born anew:
There sounds in speech filled with soul,
There shines in thoughts filled with spirit,
The from godly healing forces
Through world forming powers,
Welling working word of existence-awareness:
O Man, know yourself!

While the Guardian speaks these words, we have approached the yawning abyss of being. It goes deep down. There is no hope that we can cross over the abyss with the feet given to us on earth. We need to be freed from the weight of earthly, we need the wings of the spirit to cross over the abyss. Just there however, just as he has beckoned us to the edge of the abyss of being, the Guardian makes us aware that at this time of our inner self, before it has been refined and purified, of how it actually is in the present, of how we are entirely given over to hate toward the spiritual world, to mockery of the spiritual world, to lack of courage and to fear of the spiritual world. Just there the Guardian makes us aware of this self of ours that wills there, that feels there, that thinks there in its threefold configuration as willing, feeling and thinking, of how this self of ours is actually constituted today, is formed by the age in which we live. This we must first come to recognize before we can become aware of our god-implanted true self in true, genuine self-awareness.

As the three beasts, one after another, are drawn out of the abyss, they appear to us as seen by the eternal godlike healing powers, the will of a person, the feeling of a person, the thinking of a person. As one after the other, willing, feeling, and thinking in their true form emerge out of the abyss, the Guardian speaks in clarification. We stand fast at the abyss. The Guardian speaks. The beasts rise. The Guardian:

Yet you must beware the abyss;
Lest your beasts within devour
You, if in heedless haste you pass me by;
They are in you throughout this age of man,
As foes of knowing placed within.

Behold⁷ the first beast, the crooked back,
The bone-locked head, the withered body,
Dull blunt blue is its skin;
Your fear of spirit-creator-being
Produced this monstrous foe in your willing;
Your courage of knowing alone overwhelms it.

Behold the second beast, it bares its teeth,
Contorts its face, and lies in scornful mockery,
Yellow with grayish cast is its body;
Your hatred of spirit-revelation
Produced this weakling in your feeling;
In your fire of knowing it must be tamed.

Behold the third beast, with split mouth,
Glazed eye, and slouching attitude,
Dirty red its form appears to you;
Your doubt in spirit-light-dominion
Produced this spectral form in your thinking;
The work of knowing must weaken it.

Only when you subdue the three,
Will wings of your soul grow,
To soar across the deep abyss
That severs you from fields of knowing,
For which your yearning heart,
Healing-seeking, would hallow itself.

I will write these mantric verses on the blackboard next time.

Having learned this from the mouth of the Guardian one returns in memory to the beginning. There stands once more before the soul what all beings say, that are in our surroundings, if we understand them rightly, what all beings said to man in the most distant past, what all beings say to man in the present day, what all beings will say to the human being of the future:

O Man, know yourself!
So sounds the word of worlds.
You hear it soul-forcefully,
You feel it spirit-powerfully.

Who speaks so world-mightily?
Who speaks so heart-inwardly?

Does it work streaming through space
Into your sense’s self-experiencing?
Does it sound weaving through time
Into your life's evolving stream?

Are you the one, who yourself
In sensing space, in experiencing time
Creates the word, feeling yourself
Estranged in space’s soul-emptiness,
As you lose the power of thinking
In time’s destroying stream?

These are the words of the Michael School. When they come to be spoken, the spirit of Michael waves and weaves through the room in which they come to be spoken. And his sign is the very sign, that in his presence may confirm his presence. [The Michael sign was drawn on the blackboard.]

Then Michael leads us into the true Rosicrucian School that would reveal the secrets of man's own true being in the past, in the present, and in the future through the Father God, the Son God and the Spirit God. And then, impressing the seal on the words “rosae et crucis” the words may be spoken

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus

accompanied by the signs of Michael's seal, which are, for the first words, “Ex Deo Nascimur” [The lower seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], for the second words, “In Christo Morimur” [The middle seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], and for the third words, “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus” [The upper seal gesture was drawn on the blackboard.], whereby, as we speak the words “Ex Deo Nascimur,” confirming them through the seal and signs of Michael, we feel, “I honor the Father” [Overlying the drawn lower seal gesture was written the words:]

I honor the Father

As we speak “In Christo Morimur” we feel with this sign, “I love the Son.” [Overlying the drawn middle seal gesture is written the words:]

I love the Son

As we speak “Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus” we feel with this sign, “I unite with the Spirit.” [Overlying the upper seal gesture is written the words:]

I unite with the Spirit.

That is the meaning of the signs. Michael's presence becomes confirmed by his seal and signs. [The Michael sign was made. Then the gestures of the three seal signs were made, and at the same time the words were spoken:]

Ex Deo Nascimur
In Christo Morimur
Per Spiritum Sanctum Reviviscimus.

Only those who are authorized members of this School may possess the mantric words which have come to be written on the blackboard, that is, those who have received the blue membership card. No one else may possess these words. Of course, anyone prevented from attending one or other of the Lessons may also receive them, as well as those who live too far away to attend. So long as they are members of the school, they may receive them from others who are also in this school.

In each case, however, permission must be sought before the mantras are passed on. Not the one who wants to receive the mantras but the one who wants to pass them on must ask either Frau Dr. Wegman or myself for permission. This is not merely an administrative matter. Every time a mantra is passed on permission must first be sought either from Frau Dr. Wegman or from me. The mantras may not be sent through the post, but only handed on personally.

• 1. Whom Steiner also referred to as Uriel
• 2. Also known elsewhere as Haniel
• 3. Also known elsewhere as Cassiel
• 4. Pflichten: Pfleger is cognate with pledgers, those who are pledged to care for others, to guardian, to nurse, and more than just to nourish, but to nurture. Pfleger are care-givers or nurturers. Pflichten as a verb is to care for, to nurture.
• 5. Verpflichtung
• 6. Zwischensatz
• 7. schau is a combination of behold and show (with which it is cognate) and is active and willful.

It is a little difficult to continue what has been given in the last lectures, because so many friends who have not taken part in these studies are here to-day. On the other hand it is hardly possible to make a new beginning, for many things contained in the previous lectures have still to be completed. Friends who have just arrived will have to realise that if some of our thoughts to-day prove somewhat difficult to understand, it is because they are connected—inwardly, though not outwardly—with preceding lectures. At Easter we shall have a self-contained course, but to-day I must continue what has gone before. We did not expect so many friends at this date, although needless to say we are extremely glad that they have come.

In recent lectures we have been speaking of definite karmic relationships—not with the object of finding anything sensational in the successive earthly lives we have studied, but in order to arrive step by step at a really concrete understanding of the connections of destiny in human life.

I have described successive earthly lives of certain historic figures, in order to call forth an idea of how one earthly life works on into the next—and that is not an easy matter.

Again and again it must be emphasised that a new trend has come into the Anthroposophical Movement since the Christmas Foundation Meeting at Dornach. Of this I should now like to say a few introductory words.—You know, my dear friends, that since the year 1918 there have been all manner of undertakings within the Anthroposophical Society. Their origin is clear. When the Anthroposophical Society was founded, this question was really being asked, out of a deep occult impulse: Would the Anthroposophical Society continue to evolve by virtue of the inner strength which (in its members) it had acquired until then? There was only one way to make the test. Until then, I, as General Secretary, had had the leadership of the German Section, which was the form in which the Anthroposophical Movement had existed within the Theosophical Society. The only way now was for me no longer to take in hand the leadership of the Anthroposophical Society but to watch and see how this Society would evolve through its own inherent strength.

You see, my dear friends, that is something quite different from what the position would have been if already at that time (as at our Christmas Foundation Meeting) I had said that I would undertake the leadership of the Society. For the Anthroposophical Society, if led by me, must naturally be an altogether different thing than if led by someone else. Moreover, for certain deep reasons, the Society might have been led all the better if I myself had not had the administrative leadership. Many things might have been done if human hearts had spoken—things which in fact remained undone, or which were even done from outside, often enough under resistance from the anthroposophists.

During the War, of course, we had little opportunity to unfold our forces in all directions. So it came about that after the year 1918, the prevailing state of affairs was taken advantage of by those from many quarters who wanted to do this or that. If I had said at the time, “No, these things shall not be done”, then of course we should hear it said to-day: “If this or that had only been allowed, we should now have numbers of flourishing undertakings.”

For this very reason it was the custom at all times for the leaders of occult movements to let those who wanted to do something try it out and see what became of it, so that convictions might be called forth by the facts themselves. For that is the only way to call forth conviction. And so it had to be in our case too.

The upshot of it all has been that since the year 1918, opposition to our Movement has grown rife, and has brought about the present state of affairs, when it is impossible for me, for instance, to give public lectures in Germany.

At the present moment these facts must in no way be concealed from the Anthroposophical Movement. We must face them with all clarity. As long as we work with unclear situations we shall make no progress.

As you know, all manner of experiments were made in the hope of being ‘truly scientific’—shall we say? Quite naturally so, in view of the characters of those concerned! Scientists who also partake in our Society naturally like to be scientific. But that is the very thing that annoys our opponents. When we say to them, “As scientists we can prove this or that truth”, they come forward with all their so-called scientific claims, and then of course they become furious. We should be under no illusions on this point. Nothing has annoyed our opponents more than the fact that our members have tried to speak on the same subjects as they themselves do, and in the same manner, only—as these our members often used to say—“letting a little Anthroposophy flow into it.” It was precisely this which called forth our opponents in such overwhelming numbers.

Again, we offend most strongly against the life-conditions of Anthroposophy if we give ourselves up to the illusion that we can win over the adherents of various religious communities by saying the same or similar things as they, only once more “letting Anthroposophy flow into it.”

But now, since the Christmas Foundation Meeting, an entirely new element must come into all that is being done in the field of Anthroposophy. Those of you who have observed the way Anthroposophy is now being presented here, or the way it was presented at Prague and again at Stuttgart, will have observed that impulses are now at work which call forth something altogether new, even where our opponents are concerned. If we try to be ‘scientific’ in the ordinary sense of the word—as, unfortunately, many of our members have tried to be—then we are presuming, so to speak, that it is possible to enter into discussion with them. But now take the lectures that have been given here, or the lectures at Prague, or the single lectures at Stuttgart—can you believe for a single moment that there can be any question of entering into discussion with our opponents on these matters? It goes without saying: we can enter into no discussion with our opponents when we speak of these things. How, for example, should we discuss with any representative of the civilisation of to-day the statement, for example, that the soul of Muavija appeared again in the soul of Woodrow Wilson?¹

Thus in the whole Anthroposophical Movement there is now a prevailing quality which can tend to nothing else than this.—We must take it at last in real earnest that there can be no question of entering into discussion or argument with our opponents. For if we do so, it will in any case lead nowhere. Thus we must realise that, with regard to our opponents, it can only be a question of refuting calumnies, untruths and lies. We must not give up ourselves to the illusion that these things can be discussed. They must expand by their own inherent power; they cannot be decided by any dialectic.

Through the whole tenor of the Anthroposophical Movement as it has been since Christmas last, this will perhaps be realised increasingly, even by our members. Henceforth the Anthroposophical Movement will take this attitude: It will no longer pay heed to anything other than what the spiritual world itself requires of it.

It is from this standpoint that I have placed before you various thoughts on karma. Those of you who were here, or who heard my last lecture at Stuttgart, will remember that I tried to show how the individualities who lived in the 8th and 9th centuries A.D. at the Court of Haroun al Raschid in Asia, having continued to evolve after death in different directions, played certain definite parts in their new incarnations. At the time of the Thirty Years' War (and a short time before) we have on the one hand the individuality of Haroun al Raschid, reincarnated in the Englishman, Bacon of Verulam. And a great organiser at the Court of Haroun al Raschid, who had lived at the Court—not indeed as an Initiate, but as the reincarnation of an Initiate—this individuality we found again as Amos Comenius, whose field of action was rather in Middle Europe. From these two streams, much in the spiritual part of modern civilisation flowed together. In the spiritual and intellectual aspect of modern civilisation, the Near East—as it was in the time immediately after Mohammed—lived again, on the one hand through the reincarnated Haroun al Raschid, Bacon of Verulam; and on the other hand through Amos Comenius, who had been his counsellor.

In the present lecture I wish to emphasise the following fact:—The evolution of man does not merely take place when he is here on earth, but also when he is between death and a new birth. Bacon as well as Amos Comenius, having fastened Arabism—so to speak from two different sides—on to the civilisation of Europe, died again and passed into the life between death and a new birth. And there they were together with many souls who came down to earth after their time. Bacon and Amos Comenius, having died in the 17th century, lived on in the spiritual world. Other souls, who came down to earth in the 19th century, were in the spiritual world together with the souls of Bacon and Amos Comenius from the 17th to the 19th. On the one hand there were souls who gathered mainly around the soul of Bacon—Bacon whose work became so dominant. Then there were the souls who gathered around Amos Comenius. And though this is rather a pictorial way of speaking, we must not forget that there are ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’—albeit under quite different conditions—even in the spiritual world which men pass through between death and a new birth. Such individualities as Bacon or Amos Comenius worked not only through what they brought about on earth—through their writings, for example, or through the traditions of them which lived on on earth. No, these leading spirits were also working through the souls whom they sent down, or the souls with whom they were together and who were then sent down; they worked by causing certain tendencies to germinate in these souls in the spiritual world. Thus among the men of the 19th century we find souls who had become dependent already in their evolution in the pre-earthly life on one or other of these two spirits—the discarnate Amos Comenius, and the discarnate Bacon.

As I said, I want to lead you more and more into the concrete way in which karma works. Therefore I will now draw your attention to two personalities of the 19th century whose names will be known to most of you. One of them was especially influenced in his pre-earthly life by Bacon, and the other by Amos Comenius.

If we observe Bacon as he stood in earthly civilisation—in his earthly life as Lord Chancellor in England—if we observe him there, we find that his working was such that an Initiate stood behind him. The whole Bacon-Shakespeare controversy, as it is outwardly pursued by the historians of literature, is appallingly barren. All manner of arguments are brought forward which are supposed to show that Shakespeare the actor did not really write his dramas, but that they were written by Bacon the philosopher and Lord Chancellor, and so on ...

All these things—working with external methods, seeking out similarities in the way of thought in Shakespeare's dramas and Bacon's philosophic works—all these are barren superficialities. They do not get at the real truth. For the truth is that at the time when Bacon, Shakespeare, Jacob Boehme, and a fourth were working on the earth, there was one Initiate who really spoke through all four. Hence their kinship, for in reality it all goes back to one and the same source. Of course, these people who dispute and argue do not argue about the Initiate who stood behind, especially as this Initiate—like many a modern Initiate—is described to us in history as a rather intolerable fellow. But he was not merely so. No doubt he was so sometimes in his external actions, but he was not merely so. He was an individuality from whom immense forces proceeded, and to whom were really due Bacon's philosophic works as well as Shakespeare's dramas and the works of Jacob Boehme, and also the works of the Jesuit, Jacob Balde.

If we bear this in mind, then we must see in Bacon, in the philosophic realm, the instigator of an immense and far-reaching stream of the time.

It is most interesting to observe what could become of a soul who lived throughout the two centuries, in the life beyond the earth, under the influence of the dead Bacon. We must turn our attention to the way in which Bacon himself lived after his death. For our studies of human history it will in fact be more and more important to observe the human beings who have lived on earth not only until the moment of their death but in their working beyond death, where they work on and on upon those souls who are afterwards to descend to earth. This applies especially to those who have themselves been responsible for great spiritual achievements.

No doubt these things may be somewhat shocking for men of the present time. So for instance I remember—if I may make this digression—I remember on one occasion I was standing at the entrance to the railway station in a small German University town with a well-known doctor who went in a great deal for occultism. Around us stood many other people. Presently he warmed up to his subject and out of his enthusiasm said to me in a loud voice, so that many of those who were around could hear him: “I will make you a present of the biography of Robert Blum; but that is a biography which begins only after his death.” Spoken loudly as it was, one could well observe the shock it gave to those who were standing around us! One cannot say without more ado to the people of to-day, “I will make you a present of the biography of a man, but it begins only after his death.”

For the rest—apart from this two-volumed biography of Robert Blum, which begins not with his birth but with his death—little has yet been done in the way of relating the biographies of men after their death. Biographies generally begin at birth and end at death; there are not yet many works that begin with a man's death.

Yet, for the real happenings of the world, what a man does after his death is immensely important, notably when he passes on the results of what he did on earth—translated into the spiritual—to the souls who come down after him. We cannot understand the age which succeeds a given age if we do not observe this side of life.

Now I was specially interested in observing those individualities who surrounded Bacon after his death. Among them were individualities who were subsequently born as natural scientists. But there were also others who were born as historians; and if we observe the influence of the dead Lord Bacon on these souls, we see how the materialism which he founded upon earth—the mere researching into the world of sense (for, as you know, everything else was for him an ‘idol’)—translated into the spiritual, reverts into a kind of radicalism. And so indeed, in the very midst of the spiritual world, these souls received impulses which worked on in such a way that after their birth, having descended to the earth, they would attach no value to anything that was not a concrete fact visible to the senses.

I will now speak in a somewhat popular form, but I beg you not to take my words too literally, for if you do so it will of course be only too easy to say: ‘How grotesque!’ Among these souls there were also some who, by their former tendencies—derived from former earthly lives—were destined to become historians. And among them was one who was the greatest. (I am still speaking of the pre-earthly lives of all these souls). One among them was the greatest. Under the influence of Lord Bacon's impulses, all these souls said to themselves, in effect: It is no longer permissible to write history as it was written in former times, to write it with Ideas, investigating the inner connections. Only the actual facts must now be the object of our research.

Now I ask you, what does this mean? Are not the intentions of men the most important thing in history?—and they are not outwardly real! These souls, however, no longer permitted themselves to think in this way; and least of all did the soul who afterwards appeared again as one of the greatest historians of the 19th century—Leopold von Ranke. Leopold von Ranke was a pre-earthly disciple of Lord Bacon.

Study the earthly career of Leopold von Ranke as a historian. What is his principle? Ranke's principle as a historian is this: nothing must be written in history save what is to be read of in the archives. We must compile all history from the archives—from the actual transactions of the diplomats.

If you read Ranke you will find it so. He is a German and a Protestant, but with his sense of reality this has no effect on him. He works objectively—that is to say, with the objectivity of the archives. So he writes his History of the Popes—the best that has ever been written from the pure standpoint of archives. When we read Ranke we are irritated, nay dreadfully so. It is a barren prospect to imagine the old gentleman—quick and alert as he was until a ripe old age—sitting forever in the archives and merely piecing together the diplomatic transactions. That is no real history. It is history which reckons only with the facts of the sense-world—that is to say, for the historian, with the archives.

And so indeed, precisely by taking into account the life beyond the earth we have the possibility to understand why Ranke became what he was.

But now we can also look across to Amos Comenius, and observe how he worked on the pre-earthly willing of souls who afterwards descended to the earth. For just as Leopold von Ranke became the greatest disciple of Bacon—of Bacon after his death—so did Schlosser become the greatest disciple of Comenius after his death.

Read Schlosser's History; observe the prevailing tone, the fundamental note he strikes. On every page there speaks the moralist—the moralist who would fain seize the human heart and soul—whose object is to speak right into the heart. Often he scarcely succeeds, for he is still rather a pedant. He speaks, in effect, like a pedant speaking to the heart. Nevertheless, being a pre-earthly disciple of Amos Comenius, he has absorbed something of the quality that was in Comenius himself, who was so characteristic by virtue of the peculiar quality of his spirit. For after all, Comenius too came over from Mohammedanism. Though he was very different from the spirits who gathered around Lord Bacon, nevertheless Comenius too, in his incarnation as Comenius, concentrated on the real, outer world. Everywhere he demanded visibility, objectivity, in education. There must always be an underlying picture. He demands vision—object lessons, as it were; he too lays stress on the sense-perceptible, though in quite another way. For Amos Comenius was also one of those who at the time of the Thirty Years' War believed most enthusiastically in the coming of the so-called Millennium. In his Pansophia he wrote down great and world-embracing ideas. He wanted to work for human education by a great impulsive power. This too worked on Schlosser. It is there in Schlosser.

I mention these two figures—Ranke and Schlosser—in order to show you how we can understand what appears as the spiritually productive power in man only if we also take into account his life beyond the earth. Only then do we understand it—just as we have also learnt to understand many things by taking into account repeated lives on earth. For in the thoughts which I have recently placed before you, we have observed this marvellous working across from one incarnation to another. As I said, I give these examples in order that we may then consider how a man can think about his own karma. Before we can dwell on the way in which good and evil—or illnesses or the like—work over from one incarnation to another, we must first learn to perceive how that which afterwards emerges in the spiritual and intellectual life of civilisation also works across from one incarnation to another.

Now my dear friends, I must admit that for me one of the most interesting personalities in modern spiritual life, with regard to his karma, was Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Anyone who observes him closely will see that his most beautiful works depend on a peculiar fact, namely this: Again and again, in his whole human constitution, there was a kind of tendency for the Ego and astral body to flee from the physical and the etheric bodies.

Morbid conditions appear in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, bordering very nearly on dementia. But these morbid conditions only express in a rather more extreme form what was always present in him in a nascent state. His soul-and-spirit tends to go out—holds to the physical and etheric only by a very loose thread. And in this condition—the soul-and-spirit holding to the physical and etheric by a very loose thread only—the most beautiful of his works originate; I mean the most beautiful of his longer works and of his shorter poems too. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's most beautiful poems may even be said to have originated half out of the body. There was a peculiar relationship between the four members of his nature. Truly there is a great difference between such a personality and an average man of the present time. With an average man of this materialistic age we generally find a very firm and robust connection of the soul-and-spirit with the physical and etheric. The soul-and-spirit is deeply immersed in the physical and etheric—‘sits tight’, as it were. But in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer it was not so. He had a very tender relation of the soul-and-spirit to the physical and etheric. To describe his psyche is really one of the most interesting tasks one can undertake when studying the developments of modern spiritual life. Many things that emerge in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer appear almost like a dim, cloudy recollection—a recollection which has however grown beautiful in growing dim. When Conrad Ferdinand Meyer writes we always have the feeling: He is remembering something, though not quite exactly. He changes it—but changes it into something beautiful and form-perfected. We can observe this wonderfully, piece by piece, in certain of his works.

Now it is characteristic of the inner karma of a human being when there is such a definite relationship of the four members of his nature—physical body, etheric body, astral body and Ego. And in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's case, when we trace back this peculiarly intimate connection, we are led, first of all, to the time of the Thirty Years' War. This was the first thing clear to me in his case: there is something of a former earthly life at the time of the Thirty Years' War. And then there is a still earlier life on earth going back into the pre-Carlovingian age, going back quite evidently into the early history of Italy.

When we endeavour to trace Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's karma, the peculiar, intangible fluidity of his being (which none the less expresses itself in such perfection of form)—the peculiar, intangible fluidity of his life somehow communicates itself to our investigation, until at length we feel: We are getting into confusion. I have no other alternative but to describe these things just as they happened in the investigation.

We go back into the time of the 6th century in Italy. There we have the feeling: We are getting into an extraordinarily insecure element. We are driven back again and again, and only gradually we observe that this is not due to ourselves but to the object of our research. There is really in the soul—in the individuality—of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer something that brings us into confusion as we try to investigate him. We are driven to return again and again into his present incarnation or into the one immediately before it. Again and again we must ‘pull ourselves up’ and go back again.

The following was the result.—You must remember, all that has lived in a human soul in former incarnations becomes manifest in the most varied forms—in likenesses which are often quite imperceptible to outer observation. This you will have seen from other instances of reincarnation given here.

So at length we come to an incarnation in Italy in the early Christian centuries—at the end of the first half of the first millennium A.D. Here we come to a halt. We find a soul living in Italy, to a large extent at Ravenna, at the Roman Court. But now we come into confusion. For we must ask ourselves: What was living in that soul? The moment we ask ourselves this question (in order to call forth the further occult investigation), the whole thing is extinguished once again.

We become aware of the experiences which this soul underwent while living at the Court at Ravenna—at the Roman Court. We enter into these experiences and we think we have them, and then again they are extinguished—blotted out from us; and we are driven back again to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer as he lived on earth in the immediate past. At length we perceive that in this later life he obliterates from our vision the content of his soul in the former life. Only after long trouble do we perceive at length how the matter really stands. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer—or rather the individuality who lived in him—was living at that time in a certain relationship to one of the Popes who sent him, among others, to England on a Roman Catholic, Christian Mission.

The individuality who afterwards became Conrad Ferdinand Meyer had first absorbed all that wonderful sense of form which it was possible to absorb in Italy at that time. The Mosaic art of Italy bears witness to it; also the old Italian painting, the greater part, nay practically the whole of which has been destroyed. This art did not continue.

And then he went on a Roman Catholic Christian Mission to the Anglo-Saxons. One of his companions founded the Bishopric of Canterbury. What afterwards took place at Canterbury began essentially with this foundation. The individuality, however, who after-wards appeared as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, was only there as a witness, so to speak. Nevertheless, he was a very active person, and he called forth the ill-will of an Anglo-Saxon chieftain, at whose investigation he was eventually murdered. That is what we find to begin with.

But while he lived in England there was something in the soul of this Conrad Ferdinand Meyer which robbed him of real joy in life. His soul was deeply rooted in the Italian art of his time—or, if we will call it so, in the Italian spiritual life. He gained no happiness in the execution of his missionary work in England. Yet he devoted himself to it with great intensity—so much so that his assassination was a reaction to it.

This constant unhappiness—being repelled from something which he was none the less doing with all force and devotion out of another impulse in his heart—worked on in such a way that when he passed through his next earthly life there ensued a cosmic clouding-over of his memory. The inner impulse was there but it no longer coincided with any clear concept.

And so it came about that in his subsequent incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, an undefined impulse was at work in him, to this effect: ‘I was once working in England. It is connected somehow with Canterbury. I was murdered owing to my connection with Canterbury.’

So indeed the outer life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation takes its course. He studies outer history, he studies Canterbury, studies what happened in Canterbury, in connection with the history of England. He comes across Thomas à Becket, Chancellor of King Henry II in the 12th century. He learns of the strange destiny of Thomas à Becket, who from being the all-powerful Chancellor of Henry II, was murdered virtually at his instigation. And so in this present incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, his own half-forgotten destiny appears to him in Thomas à Becket. It comes before him, half-forgotten in his subconsciousness, for I am speaking of course, of the subconscious life which comes to the surface in this way. So he describes his own fate in a far distant time. But he describes it in the story of what actually happened in the 12th century between King Henry II and Thomas à Becket of Canterbury, whose fate he recounts in his poetic work Der Heilige (The Saint). So indeed it is—only all this takes place in the subconscious life which embraces successive incarnations. It is as though within a single earthly life a man had experienced something in his early youth in connection with a certain place. He has forgotten it. He experienced it maybe in the second or third year of his life. It does not emerge, but some other similar destiny emerges. The very same place is named, and as a result he has a peculiar sympathy for this other person's destiny. He feels it differently from one who has no ‘association of ideas’ with the same place.

Just as this may happen within one earthly life, so it took place in the concrete instance I am now giving you. There was the work in Canterbury, the murder of a person connected with Canterbury (for Thomas à Becket was Archbishop of Canterbury), the murder of Thomas à Becket at the instigation of the King of England. All of these schemes work in together. In the descriptions in his poem he is describing his own destiny.

But now the thing goes on—and this is most interesting in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's case. He was born as a woman about the time of the Thirty Years' War—a lively woman, full of spiritual interest in life, a woman who witnessed many an adventure. She married a man who first took part in all the confused events of the Thirty Years' War, but then grew weary of them and emigrated to Switzerland, to Graubünden (Canton Grisons), where he lived a somewhat philistine existence. But his wife was deeply affected and impressed by all that took place in the Graubünden country under the prevailing conditions of the Thirty Years' War.

This too is eclipsed, as though with another layer. For it is so with this individuality: That which is living in him is easily forgotten in the cosmic sense, and yet he calls it forth again in a transmuted form, where it becomes more glorious and more intense. For out of what this woman observed and experienced in that incarnation there arises the wonderful characterisation of Jürg Jenatsch, the man of Graubünden, in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's historic novel. Observing Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in this incarnation, we have indeed no explanation of his peculiarity if we cannot enter into his karma. I must say—speaking with a grain of salt—that I envy the people who ‘understand’ him so light-heartedly. Before I knew his reincarnations, all that I understood was that I did not understand him. This wonderful inner perfection of form, this inner joy in form, this purity of form, all the strength and power that lives in Jürg Jenatsch, and the wonderful personal and living quality in The Saint,—a good deal of superficiality is needed to imagine that one understands all this. Observe his beautiful forms—there is something of clear line in them, almost severe; they are painted and yet not painted. Here live the mosaics of Ravenna. And in The Saint there lives a history which was undergone once upon a time by this individuality himself; but a mist of the soul has spread over it, and out of the mist it emerges in another form.

And again one needs to know: All that is living in his romance of Graubünden, Jürg Jenatsch, was absorbed by the heart and mind of a woman; while in the momentum, the driving power that lives in this romance there lives again the swashbuckler of the Thirty Years' War. The man was pretty much of a philistine, as I said, but he was a swashbuckler. And so, all that comes over from former experiences on earth comes to life again in a peculiar form in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. Only now do we begin to understand him. Now we say to ourselves: In olden times of human evolution, men were not ashamed to speak of Spirits from beyond descending to the earth, or of earthly human beings finding their way upward and working on from spiritual worlds. All this must come again, otherwise man will not get beyond his present outlook of the earthworm. For all that the natural-scientific conception of the world contains, it is the world-outlook of the earth-worm. Men live on earth as though only the earth concerned them, as though it were not true that the whole Cosmos works upon all earthly things and lives again in man. As though it were not true that earlier epochs of history live on, inasmuch as we ourselves carry into later times what we absorbed in former times.

We do not understand karma by talking theoretic concepts about successive earthly incarnations. To understand karma is to feel in our hearts all that we can feel when we see what existed ages ago flowing into the later epochs in the souls of men themselves. When we begin to see how karma works, human life gains quite a new content. We feel ourselves quite differently in human life.

Such a spirit as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer feels his former earthly lives like an undertone—an undertone that sounds from far away. We understand what appears in him only when we develop an understanding for this undertone. The progress of mankind in spiritual life will depend on its ability to regard life in this way, to observe in all detail what flows across from former epochs of the world's evolution into later epochs through the human beings themselves. Then we shall cease, in the childish way of psycho-analysts, to explain the peculiarities of souls by speaking of ‘hidden underlying regions’ and the like. After all, one can ascribe anything one likes to what is ‘hidden’. We shall look for the real causes. In some respects, no doubt, the psycho-analysts do quite good work. But these pursuits remind us of the story of how someone heard that in the year 1749 a son was born to a certain patrician. Afterwards this son emerged as a very gifted man. To this day we can point to the actual birth-place in Frankfurt of the man who afterwards came forth as Wolfgang Goethe. ‘Let us make excavations in the earth and see by dint of what strange emanations his talents came about’. Sometimes the psycho-analysts seem to me just like that. They dig into the earth-realm of the soul, into the hidden regions which they themselves first invent by their hypotheses, whereas in reality one ought to look into the preceding lives on earth and lives between death and a new birth. Then if we do so, a true understanding of human souls is opened out to us. Truly the souls of men are far too rich in content to enable us to understand their content out of a single life alone.

• 1. See Vol. I, lecture X.

I should like during these few days to say something rather especially for the friends who have come here to attend the Easter Course,¹ and who have not heard much of what has connections. Those who were present at the lectures before Easter may find some repetitions but the circumstances make this inevitable.

I have been laying particular emphasis on the fact that study of the historical development of the life of mankind must lead on to study of the human being himself. All our endeavours aim in the direction of placing man at the centre of our study of the world. Two ends are attained thereby. Firstly, it is only in this way that the world can be studied as it truly is. For all that man sees spread around him in nature is only a part—gives as it were one picture of the world only: and to limit study of the world to this realm of nature is like studying a plant without looking beyond root, green leaf and stem, and ignoring flower and fruit. This kind of study can never reveal the whole plant. Imagine a creature that is always born at a particular time of the year, lives out its life during a period when the plant grows as far as the green leaves and no further, dies before the plant is in blossom and appears again only when roots and green leaves are there.—Such a creature would never have knowledge of the whole plant; it would regard the plant as something that has roots and leaves only.

The materialistic mind of to-day has got itself into a similar position as regards its approach to the world. It considers only the broad foundations of life, not what blossoms forth from the totality of earthly evolution and earthly existence—namely, man himself. The real way of approach must be to study nature in her full extent, but in such a way as all the time to realise that she must needs create man out of herself. We shall then see man as the microcosm he truly is, as the concentration of all that is to be found outspread in the far spaces of the cosmos.

As soon, however, as we study history from this point of view, we are no longer able to regard the human being as a resultant of the forces of history, as a single, self-contained being. We must take account of the fact that he passes through different earthly lives: one such life occurs at an earlier time and another at a later. This very fact places man at the centre of our studies, but now in his whole being, as an individuality. This is the one end that is attained when we look in this way at nature and at history.

The other is this.—The very fact of placing man at the centre of study, makes for humility. Lack of humility is due to nothing else than lack of knowledge. A penetrating, comprehensive knowledge of man in his connection with the events of the world and of history will certainly not lead to excessive self-esteem; far rather it will lead the human being to look at himself objectively. It is precisely when a man does not know himself that there rise up in him those feelings which have their source in the unknown regions of his being. Instinctive, emotional impulses make themselves felt. And it is these instinctive, emotional impulses, rooted as they are in the subconscious, that make for arrogance and pride. On the other hand, when consciousness penetrates farther and farther into those regions where man comes to know himself and to recognise how in the sequence of historical events he belongs to the whole wide universe—then, simply by virtue of an inner law, humility will unfold in him. The recognition of his place in universal existence invariably calls forth humility, never arrogance. All genuine study pursued in Anthroposophy has its ethical side, carries with it an ethical impulse.

Unlike modern materialism, Anthroposophy will not lead to a conception of life in which ethics and morality are a mere adjunct; ethics and morality emerge, as if inwardly impelled, from all genuine anthroposophical study.

I want now to show you by concrete examples, how the fruits of earlier epochs of history are carried over into later epochs through human beings themselves. A certain very striking example now to be given, is associated with Switzerland.

Our gaze falls upon a man who lived about a hundred years before the founding of Christianity.—I am relating to you what can be discovered through spiritual scientific investigation.—At this period in history we find a personality who is a kind of slave overseer in southern Europe.

We must not associate with a slave overseer of those times the feelings that the word immediately calls up in us now. Slavery was the general custom in days of antiquity, and at the time of which I am speaking it was essentially mild in form; the overseers were usually educated men. Indeed the teachers of important personages might well be slaves, who were often versed in the literary and scientific culture of the time. So you see, we must acquire sounder ideas about slavery—needless to say, without defending it in the least degree—when we are considering this aspect of the life of antiquity.

We find, then, a personality whose calling it is to be in charge of a number of slaves and to apportion their tasks. He is an extraordinarily lovable man, gentle and kind-hearted and when he is able to have his own way he does everything to make life easier for the slaves. In authority over him, however, is a rough, somewhat brutal personality. This man is, as we should say nowadays, his superior officer. And this superior officer is responsible for many things that arouse resentment and animosity in the slaves. When the personality of whom I am speaking—the slave overseer—passes through the gate of death, he is surrounded in the time between death and a new birth by all the souls who were thus united with him on earth, the souls of the slaves who had been in his charge. But as an individuality he is very strongly connected with the one who was his superior officer. The fact that he, as the slave overseer, was obliged to obey this superior officer—for in accordance with the prevailing customs of the time he always did obey him, though often very unwillingly—this fact established a strong karmic tie between them. But a deep karmic tie was also established by the relationship that had existed in the physical world between the overseer and the slaves, for in many respects he had been their teacher as well.

We must thus picture a further life unfolding between death and rebirth among all these individualities of whom I have spoken.

Afterwards, somewhere about the 9th century A.D., the individuality of the slave overseer is born again, in Central Europe, but now as a woman, and moreover, because of the prevailing karmic connection, as the wife of the former superior officer who reincarnated as a man. The two of them live together in a marital relationship that makes karmic compensation for the tie that had been established away back in the first century before the founding of Christianity, when they had lived as subordinate and superior officers respectively. The superior officer is now, in the 9th century A.D., in a commune in Central Europe where the inhabitants live on very intimate terms with one another; he holds some kind of official position in the commune, but he is everyone's servant and comes in for plenty of knocks and abuse.

Investigating the whole matter further, we find that the members of this rather extensive commune are the slaves who once had their tasks allotted to them in the way I told you. The superior officer has now become as it were the servant of them all, and has to experience the karmic fulfilment of many things which, through the instrumentality of the overseer, his brutality inflicted upon these people.

The wife of this man (she is the reincarnated overseer), suffers with a kind of silent resignation under all the impressions made by the ever-discontented superior officer in his new incarnation, and one can follow in detail how karmic destiny is here being fulfilled.

But we see, too, that this karma is by no means completely adjusted. A part only is adjusted, namely the karmic relationship between the slave overseer and his superior officer. This has been lived out and is essentially finished in the medieval incarnation in the 9th century; for the wife has paid off what her soul had experienced owing to the brutality of the man who had once been the superior officer and is now her husband.

This woman, the reincarnation of the former slave overseer, is born again, and what happens now is that the greater number of the souls who had once been slaves and had then come together again in the large commune—souls in whose destiny this individuality had twice played a part—came again as the children whose education this same individuality in his new incarnation has deeply at heart. For in this incarnation he comes as Pestalozzi. And we see how Pestalozzi's infinite humanitarianism, his enthusiasm for education in the 18th century, is the karmic fulfilment in relation to human beings with whom he had already twice been connected—the karmic fulfilment of the experiences and the sufferings of earlier incarnations.

What comes to view in single personalities can be clear and objectively intelligible to us only when we are able to see the present earthly life against the background of earlier earthly lives.

Traits that go back not merely to the previous incarnation, but often to the one before that, and even earlier, sometimes show themselves in a man. We see how what has been planted, as it were, in the single incarnations, works its way through with a certain inner, spiritual necessity, inasmuch as the human being lives not only through earthly lives but also through lives between death and a new birth.

In this connection, the study of a life of which I spoke to those of you who were in Dornach before Easter, is particularly striking and interesting—the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer.

Conrad Ferdinand Meyer presents a very special enigma to those who study the inner aspect of his life and at the same time greatly admire him as a poet. There is such wonderful harmony of form and style in his poems that we cannot help saying: what lives in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer always hovers a little above the earthly—in respect of the style and also in respect of the whole way of thinking and feeling. And if we steep ourselves in his writings we shall perceive how he is immersed in an element of spirit-and-soul that is always on the point of breaking away from the physical body. Study the nobler poems, also the prose-poems, of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and you will say to yourselves: There is evidence of a perpetual urge to get right away from connection with the physical body. As you know, in his incarnation as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, it was his lot to fall into pathological states, when the soul-and-spirit separated from the physical body to a high degree, so much so that insanity ensued, or at any rate conditions resembling insanity. And the strange thing is that his most beautiful works were produced during periods when the soul-and-spirit had loosened from the physical body.

Now when we try to investigate the karmic connections running through the life of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, we are driven into a kind of confusion. We cannot immediately find our bearings. We are led, first, to the 6th century A.D., and then again we are thrown back into the 19th, into the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation. The very circumstances we are observing, mislead us. I want you to realise the extraordinary difficulty of a genuine search for knowledge in this domain. If you are satisfied with phantasy, then it is naturally easy, for you can make things fit in as you like. For one who is not satisfied with phantasy but carries his investigation to the point where he can rely upon the faculties of his own soul not to play him false—for him it is no easy matter, especially when he is investigating these things in connection with an individuality as complex as that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. In investigating karmic connections through a number of earthly lives it is no great help to look at the particularly outstanding characteristics. What strikes you most forcibly in a man, what you see at once when you meet him or learn of him in history—these characteristics are, for the most part, the outcome of his earthly environment. A man as he confronts us is a product of his earthly environment to a far greater extent than is generally believed. He takes in through education what is present in his earthly environment. It is the more intangible, more intimate traits of a man which taken quite concretely, lead back through the life between death and a new birth into former earthly lives.

In these investigations it may be more important to observe a man's gestures or some habitual mannerism than to consider what he has achieved perhaps as a figure of renown. The mannerisms of a person, or the way he will invariably answer you—not so much what he answers but how he answers—whether, for example, his first tendency is always to be negative and only when he has no other alternative, to agree, or whether again in quite a good-humoured way he is rather boastful ... these are the kind of traits that are important and if we pay special attention to them they become the centre of our observations and disclose a great deal. One observes, for instance, how a man stretches out his hand to take hold of things; one makes an objective picture of it and then works upon it in the manner of an artist; and at length one finds that it is no longer the mere gesture that one is contemplating, but around the gesture the figure of another human being takes shape.

The following may happen.—There are men who have a habit, let us say, of making a certain movement of the arms. I have known men who simply could not begin to do anything without first folding their arms. If one visualises such a gesture quite objectively, but with inner, artistic feeling, so that it stands before one as a plastic, pliable form, then one's attention is directed away from the man who is actually making the gesture. But the gesture does not remain as it is; it grows into another figure which is an indication, at least, of something in the previous incarnation or in the one before that. It may well be that the gesture is now used in connection with something that was not present at all in the previous incarnation—let us say it is a gesture used in picking up a book, or some similar action. Nevertheless, it is for gestures and habits of this kind that we must have an eye if we are to keep on the right track.

Now in the case of an individuality like Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, the point of significance is that while he is creating his poems there is always a tendency to a loosening of the soul-and-spirit from the physical body. There we have a starting-point but at the same time a point where we may easily go astray.

We are led, as I told you, to the 6th century A.D. We have the feeling: that is where he belongs. And moreover we find a personality who lived in Italy, who experienced a very varied destiny in that incarnation in Italy, who indeed lived a kind of double existence. On the one side he was devoted with the greatest enthusiasm to an art that has almost disappeared in this later age, but was then in its prime; it is only in the remaining examples of mosaics that we are still able to glimpse this highly developed art. And the individuality to whom we are first impelled, lived in this milieu of art in Italy at the end of the 5th and the beginning of the 6th century A.D.—That is what presents itself, to begin with.

But now this whole picture is obscured, and again we are thrown back to Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. The darkness that obscures vision of the man of the 6th century now overshadows the picture of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in the 19th; and we are compelled to look very closely into what Conrad Ferdinand Meyer does in the 19th century.

Our attention is then drawn to the fact that his tale Der Heilige (The Saint), deals with Thomas à Becket, the Chancellor of Henry II of England. We feel that here is something of peculiar importance. And we also have the feeling that the impression received from the earlier incarnation has driven us up against this particular deed of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. But now again we are driven back into the 6th century, and can find there no explanation of this. And so we are thrown to and fro between the two incarnations, the problematic one in the 6th century and the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation—until it dawns upon us that the story of Thomas à Becket as told in history, came up in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's mind owing to a certain similarity with an experience he had himself undergone in the 6th century, when he went to England from Italy as a member of a Catholic mission sent by Pope Gregory. There we have the second aspect of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in his previous incarnation. On the one side he was an enthusiastic devotee of the art that subsequently took the form of mosaic.—Hence his talent for form, in all its aspects. On the other side, however, he was an impassioned advocate of Catholicism, and for this reason accompanied the mission. The members of this mission founded Canterbury, where the bishopric was then established.

The individuality who afterwards lived in the 19th century as Conrad Ferdinand Meyer was murdered by an Anglo-Saxon courtier, in circumstances that are extraordinarily interesting. There was something of legal subtlety and craftiness, albeit still in the rough, about the events connected at that time with the murder.

You know very well, my dear friends, how even in ordinary life the sound of something remains with you. You may once have heard a name without paying any particular attention to it ... but later on a whole association of ideas is called up in your mind when this name is mentioned. In a similar way, through the peculiar circumstances of this man's connection with what later became the archbishopric of Canterbury—the town of Canterbury, as I said, was founded by the mission of which he was a member—these experiences lived on, lived on, actually, in the sound of the name Canterbury. In the Conrad Ferdinand Meyer incarnation the sound of this name—Canterbury—came to life again, and by association of ideas his attention was called to Thomas à Becket, (the Lord Chancellor of Canterbury under Henry Plantagenet) who was treacherously murdered. At first, Thomas à Becket was a favourite of Henry II, but was afterwards murdered, virtually through the instigation of the King, because he would not agree to certain measures.

These two destinies, alike in some respects and unlike in others, brought it about that Conrad Ferdinand Meyer transposed, as it were, into quite different figures taken from history, what he had himself experienced in an earlier incarnation in the 6th century—experienced in his own body, far from what was at that time his native land. Just think how interesting this is! Once we have grasped it, we are no longer driven hither and thither between the two incarnations. And then, because again in the 19th century, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer has a kind of double nature, we see how his soul-and-spirit easily separates from the physical. Because he has this double nature, the place of his own, actual experiences is taken by another experience in some respects similar to it ... just as pictures often change in the play of human imagination. In a man's ordinary imagination during an earthly life, the picture changes in such a way that imagination weaves in freedom; in the course of many earthly lives it may be that some historical event which is connected with the person in question as a picture only, takes the place of the actual event.

Now this individuality whose experience in an earlier life worked on through two lives between death and rebirth and then came to expression in the story Thomas à Becket, the Saint,—this individuality had had another intermediate earthly life as a woman at the time of the Thirty Years' War. We have only to envisage the chaos prevailing all over Central Europe during the Thirty Years' War and it will not be difficult to understand the feelings and emotions of an impressionable, sensitive woman living in the midst of the chaos as the wife of a pedantic, narrow-minded man. Wearying of life in the country that was afterwards Germany, he emigrated to Graubünden in Switzerland, where he left the care of house and home to his wife, while he spent his time sullenly loafing about. His wife, however, had opportunity to observe many, many things. The wider historical perspective, no less than the curious local conditions at Graubünden, worked upon her; the experiences she underwent, experiences that were always coloured by her life with the bourgeois, commonplace husband, again sank down into the foundations of the individuality, and lived on through the life between death and a new birth. And the experiences of the wife at the time of the Thirty Years' War are imaginatively transformed in Conrad Ferdinand Meyer's tale, Jürg Jenatsch.

Thus in the soul of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer we have something that has gathered together out of the details of former incarnations. As a man of letters, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer seems to be an individuality complete in itself, for he is an artist with very definite and fixed characteristics. But in point of fact it is this that actually causes confusion, because one's attention is immediately directed away from these very definite characteristics to the elusive, double nature of the man.

Those who have eyes only for Conrad Ferdinand Meyer the poet, the famous author of all these works, will never come to know anything of his earlier lives. We have to look through the poet to the man; and then, in the background of the picture, there appear the figures of the earlier incarnations.

Paradoxical as it will seem to the modern mind, the only way in which human life can be understood in its deeper aspect is to centre our study of the course of world-events around observation of man himself in history. And man cannot be taken as belonging to one age of time only, as living in one earthly life only. In considering man, we must realise how the individuality passes from one earthly life to another, and how in the interval between death and a new birth he works upon and transforms that which has taken its course more in the subconscious realm of earthly life but for all that is connected with the actual shaping of the destiny. For the shaping of destiny takes place, not in the clear consciousness of the intellect, but in what weaves in the subconscious.

Let me now give you another example of how things work over in history through human individualities themselves.

In the first century A.D., about a hundred years after the founding of Christianity, we have an exceedingly significant Roman writer in the person of Tacitus. In all his work, and very particularly in his ‘Germania’, Tacitus proves himself a master of a concise, clear-cut style; he arrays the facts of history and geographical details in wonderfully rounded sentences with a genuinely epigrammatic ring. We may also remember how he, a man of wide culture, who knew everything considered worth knowing at that time—a hundred years after the founding of Christianity—makes no more than a passing allusion to Christ, mentioning Him as someone whom the Jews crucified but saying that this was of no great importance. Yet in point of fact, Tacitus is one of the greatest Romans.

Tacitus had a friend, the personality known in history as Pliny the Younger, himself the author of a number of letters and an ardent admirer of Tacitus.

To begin with, let us consider Pliny the Younger. He passes through the gate of death, through the life between death and a new birth, and is born again in the 11th century as a Countess of Tuscany in Italy, who is married to a Prince of Central Europe. The Prince has been robbed of his lands by Henry the Black of the Frankish-Salic dynasty and wants to secure for himself an estate in Italy. This Countess Beatrix owns the Castle of Canossa where, later on, Henry IV, the successor of Henry III the Black, was forced to make his famous penance to Pope Gregory.

Now this Countess Beatrix is an extraordinarily alert and active personality, taking keen interest in all the conditions and circumstances of the time. Indeed she cannot help being interested, for Henry III who had driven her husband, Gottfried, out of Alsace into Italy before his marriage to her, continued his persecution. Henry is a man of ruthless energy, who overthrows the Princes and Chieftains in his neighbourhood one after the other, does whatever he has a mind to do, and is not content when he has persecuted someone once, but does it a second time, when the victim has established himself somewhere else.—As I said, he was a man of ruthless vigour, a ‘great’ man in the medieval style of greatness. And when Gottfried had established himself in Tuscany, Henry was not content with having driven him out but proceeded to take the Countess back with him to Germany.

All these happenings gave the Countess an opportunity of forming a penetrating view of conditions in Italy, as well as of those in Germany. In her we have a person who is strongly representative of the time in which she lives, a woman of keen observation, vitality and energy, combined with largeness of heart and breadth of vision.

When, later on, Henry IV was forced to go on his journey of penance to Canossa, Beatrix's daughter Mathilde had become the owner of the Castle. Mathilde was on excellent terms with her mother whose qualities she had inherited, and was, in fact, the more gifted of the two. They were splendid women who because of all that had happened under Henry III and Henry IV, took a profound interest in the history of the times.

Investigation of these personalities leads to this remarkable result: the Countess Beatrix is the reincarnated Pliny the Younger, and her daughter Mathilde is the reincarnated Tacitus. Thus Tacitus, a writer of history in olden times, is now an observer of history on a wide scale—(when a woman has greatness in her she is often wonderfully gifted as an observer)—and not only an observer but a direct participant in historical events. For Mathilde is actually the owner of Canossa, the scene of issues that were immensely decisive in the Middle Ages. We find the former Tacitus now as an observer of history.

A deep intimacy develops between these two—mother and daughter—and their former work in the field of authorship enables them to grasp historical events with great perspicacity; subconsciously and instinctively they become closely linked with the world-process, as it takes its course in nature as well as in history.

And now, still later on, the following takes place.—Pliny the Younger, who in the Middle Ages was the Countess Beatrix, is born again in the 19th century, in a milieu of romanticism. He absorbs this romanticism—one cannot exactly say with enthusiasm, but with aesthetic pleasure. He has on the one hand this love for the romantic, and on the other—due to his family connections—a rather academic style; he finds his way into an academic style of writing. It is not, however, in line with his character. He is always wanting to get out of it, always wanting to discard this style.

This personality (the reincarnated Pliny the Younger and the Countess Beatrix) happens on one occasion brought about by destiny, to be visiting a friend, and takes up a book lying on the table, an English book. He is fascinated by its style and at once feels: The style I have had up till now and that I owe to my family relationships, does not really belong to me. This is my style, this is the style I need. It is wonderful; I must acquire it at all costs.

As a writer he becomes an imitator of this style—I mean, of course, an artistic imitator in the best sense, not a pedantic one—an imitator of this style in the artistic, aesthetic sense of the word. And do you know, the book he opened at that moment, reading it right through as quickly as he possibly could and then afterwards reading everything he could find of the author's writings—this book was Emerson's Representative Men. And the person in question adopted its style, immediately translated two essays from it, conceived a deep veneration for the author, and was never content until he was able to meet him in real life.

This man, who really only now found himself, who for the first time found the style that belonged to him in his admiration for the other—this reincarnation of Pliny the Younger and of the Countess Beatrix, is none other than Herman Grimm. And in Emerson we have to do with the reincarnated Tacitus, the reincarnated Countess Mathilde.

When we observe Herman Grimm's admiration for Emerson, when we remember the way in which Herman Grimm encounters Emerson, we can find again the relationship of Pliny the Younger to Tacitus. In every sentence that Herman Grimm writes after this time, we can see the old relationship between Pliny the Younger and Tacitus emerging. And we see the admiration that Pliny the Younger had for Tacitus, nay more, the complete accord and understanding between them, coming out again in the admiration with which Herman Grimm looks up to Emerson.

And now for the first time we shall grasp wherein the essential greatness of Emerson's style consists, we shall perceive that what Tacitus displayed in his own way, Emerson again displays in his own special way. How does Emerson work? Those who visited Emerson discovered his way of working. There he was in a room; around him were several chairs, several tables. Books lay open everywhere and Emerson walked about among them. He would often read a sentence, imbibe it thoroughly and from it form his own magnificent, free-moving, epigrammatic sentences. That was how he worked. There you have an exact picture of Tacitus in life! Tacitus travels, takes hold of life everywhere; Emerson observes life in books. It all lives again!

And then there is this unconquerable desire in Herman Grimm to meet Emerson. Destiny leads him to Representative Men and he sees at once: this is how I must write, this is my true style. As I said, he had already acquired an academic style of writing from his uncle Jacob Grimm and his father Wilhelm Grimm, and he then abandons it. He is impelled by destiny to adopt a completely different style.

In Herman Grimm's writings we see how wide were his historical interests. He has an inner relationship of soul with Germany, combined with a deep interest in Italy. All this comes out in his writings.

These are things that go to show how the affairs of destiny work themselves out. And how is one led to perceive such things? One must first have an impression and then everything crystallizes around it. Thus we had first to envisage the picture of Herman Grimm opening Emerson's Representative Men. Now Herman Grimm used to read in a peculiar manner. He read a passage and then immediately drew back from what he had read: it was a gesture as though he were swallowing what he had read, sentence by sentence. And it was this inner gesture of swallowing sentence by sentence that made it possible to trace Herman Grimm to his earlier incarnation. In the case of Emerson it was the walking to and fro in front of the open books, as well as the rather stiff, half-Roman carriage of the man, as Herman Grimm saw him when they first met in Italy—it was these impressions that led one back from Emerson to Tacitus. Plasticity of vision is needed to follow up things of this kind.

My dear friends, I have given you here another example which should indicate how our study of history needs to be deepened. This deepening must really be evident among us as one of the fruits of the new impulse that should take effect in the Anthroposophical Society through the Christmas Foundation Meeting. We must in future go bravely and boldly forward to the study of far-reaching spiritual connections; we must have courage to reach a vantage-point for observation of these great spiritual connections. For this we shall need, above all, deep earnestness. Our life in Anthroposophy must be filled with earnestness.

And this earnestness will grow in the Anthroposophical Society if those who really want to do something in the Society give more and more thought to the contents of the News Sheet that is sent out every week into all circles of Anthroposophists as a supplement to the weekly periodical, Das Goetheanum. A picture is given there of how one may shape the life in the Groups in the sense and meaning of the Christmas Meeting, of what should be done in the members' meetings, how the teaching should be given and studied. The News Sheet is also intended to give a picture of what is happening among us. Its title is: ‘What is going on in the Anthroposophical Society’, and its aim is to bring into the whole Society a unity of thought, to spread a common atmosphere of thought over the thousands of Anthroposophists everywhere. When we live in such an atmosphere, when we understand what it means for all our thinking to be stimulated and directed by the ‘Leading Thoughts’, and when we understand how the Goetheanum will thus be placed in the centre as a concrete reality through the initiative of the esoteric Vorstand—I have emphasised again and again that we now have to do with a Vorstand which conceives its task to be the inauguration of an esoteric impulse—when we understand this truly, then that which has now to flow through the Anthroposophical Movement will be carried forward in the right way. For Anthroposophical Movement and Anthroposophical Society must become one. The Anthroposophical Society must make the whole cause of Anthroposophy its own.

And it is true to say that if once this ‘thinking in common’ is an active reality, then it can also become the bearer of comprehensive, far-reaching spiritual knowledge. A power will come to life in the Anthroposophical Society that really ought to be in it, for the recent developments of civilisation need to be given a tremendous turn if they are not to lead to a complete decline.

What is said concerning successive earthly lives of this or that individual may at first seem paradoxical, but if you look more closely, if you look into the progress made by the human beings of whom we have spoken in this connection, you will see that what is said is founded on reality; you will see that we are able to look into the weaving life of gods and men when with the eye of spirit we try in this way to apprehend the spiritual forces.

This, my dear friends, is what I would lay upon your hearts and souls. If you take with you this feeling, then this Easter Meeting will be like a revitalising of the Christmas Meeting; for if the Christmas Meeting is to work as it should, then all that has developed out of it must be the means of revitalising it, of bringing it to new life just as if it were present with us.

May many things grow out of the Christmas Meeting, in constant renewal! May many things grow out of it through the activity of courageous souls, souls who are fearless representatives of Anthroposophy. If our meetings result in strengthening courage in the souls of Anthroposophists, then there will grow what is needed in the Society as the body for the Anthroposophical soul: a courageous presentation to the world of the revelations of the Spirit vouchsafed in the age of Light that has now dawned after the end of Kali-Yuga; for these revelations are necessary for the further evolution of man. If we live in the consciousness of this we shall be inspired to work courageously. May this courage be strengthened by every meeting we hold. It can be so if we are able to take in all earnestness things that seem paradoxical and foolish to those who set the tone of thought in our day. But after all, it has often happened that the dominant tone of thought in one period was soon afterwards replaced by the very thing that was formerly suppressed. May a recognition of the true nature of history, and of how it is bound up with the onward flow of the lives of men, give courage for anthroposophical activity—the courage that is essential for the further progress of human civilisation.

• 1. Easter as a Chapter in the Mystery-Wisdom of Man. (on-line as: The Easter Festival in Relation to the Mysteries) Dornach, 19th–22nd April, 1924.

Well, gentlemen, if you still have something on your minds today or want to ask something, I ask that you do so.

Question: One of the wonderful things about being human is having a conscience. When you have done something, you think about it. And even if you no longer think about things that have happened, you still know that you have a conscience. It would be interesting to ask whether conscience can be killed in such a way that you can forget it. The way humanity is today, one would actually have to assume that conscience has been killed in a large part of humanity.

Dr. Steiner: You see, gentlemen, that is actually a big question, but it is related to what we have just said in the previous lectures. I have tried to explain to you in turn how the human being, who consists of matter, also contains an etheric body – that is, a body of a completely different nature that cannot be perceived or seen with the ordinary senses – then an astral body and an ego organization, we could also say: an ego body. The human being has these four parts.

Now we have to imagine what a person actually becomes when they die. As I have often told you, when a person sleeps, the physical body and the etheric body remain in bed. The astral body and the I go out and are then no longer in the physical body and etheric body. But when a person dies, then, of what the person has, the physical body is discarded. It is then a truly physical body; the other three parts, the etheric body, the astral body and the ego, then go out. I told you that the etheric body remains connected to the ego and the astral body for a few more days. Then it also separates, as I have described to you, and then the person lives in what is his ego and his astral body. As he now lives on and on, he lives in the spiritual world that we are actually exploring through spiritual science in this life on earth. So that we can say: Now we know something of a spiritual world here on earth; then we will be inside.

But after some time we come back down to earth. We pass through a spiritual world, just as we pass from birth to death in earthly life, and then come back down again. We take on the physical body given to us by our parents and so on. That is where we come down from the spiritual world. So before we came here to earth, we were spiritual beings, let us say. We have descended from the spiritual world. You see, gentlemen, that is an extraordinarily important fact for man to know that he comes down from the spiritual world with his ego and with his astral body. Otherwise it cannot be explained at all how it is that man, when he grows up, somehow speaks of the spirit. If he had never been inside the spiritual world, he would not speak of the spirit at all.

You know that once upon a time people on earth did not talk as much as certain people do today about life after death, but people talked a lot about life before they came down to earth. In ancient times, people talked much more about what happened to a person before he took on flesh and blood than about what happened afterwards. In ancient times it was much more important for people to remember that they were souls before they became human beings on earth. Now, I have spoken even less about the development of humanity on earth, but today we will talk a little about this development of human beings on earth.

If we go back in time about eight to ten thousand years, we would find a rather desolate life here in Europe. There is still a rather desolate life in Europe. In contrast, about eight thousand years before our present time, there was an extraordinarily developed life in Asia. In Asia, we have (it is drawn) here a country, it is called India. There is the island of Ceylon, up above would be the mighty river, the Ganges, up there is a mountain range, the Himalayas. In this India, which is in Asia, and also a little above it, lived people who, as I said, had a very highly developed spiritual life eight thousand years ago. Today I call them Indians. At that time the word Indian did not yet exist. But today we call it India, and that is why I use this expression. If you went back and asked these people, 'What do you call yourselves?' they would say, 'We are the sons of the gods!' because they described the land where they were before they were on earth. There they themselves were still gods, because men in those days, when they were spiritual, called themselves gods. They would also have said in answer to the question, what do you become when you fall asleep: When we are awake we are men, when we fall asleep we are gods. Being gods only meant being different from when we are awake, being more spiritual.

These people had a particularly high culture, and for them it was not so important to talk about life after death, but about life before one was born, about this life among the gods, as they said.

You see, there are no external records of these people. But of course these people lived on – you know, there are still Indians today – and in much later times they wrote great poetic works that are called the Vedas. Veda is the singular, Vedas the plural. Veda actually means “word”. They said to themselves: the word is a spiritual gift, and what people wrote in their Vedas was what they still knew from the other world. In those older times they knew much more, but what can still be studied externally through books today is what is in the Vedas. That was written much later. But in what is written in the Vedas, which was written down much later, you can see that these people still knew firmly: Before man descended to earth, he was in a spiritual world.

Now, if we go back about six thousand years to our time, we already have a less highly developed culture here. Culture is declining in India. What scholars today still describe as ancient Indian culture has already declined from its original height. But a culture is developing in the north (it is being drawn) – that is Arabia, of course – but in the north, up there, a culture is developing in the place that later became Persia. That is why I called it the ancient Persian culture. A completely different culture is developing there. It is quite remarkable. You see, if you go back to these ancient Indians, who lived two thousand years before these people, then you find everywhere among these ancient Indians that they actually value the earthly world very little. They always think that they came into the earthly world from the spiritual world. They knew this very well. They did not value the earthly world at all; they valued the spiritual world. They said they felt like outcasts, and what was on earth was not particularly important to them. And here, six thousand years before our time, in the land now called Persia, there came for the first time a certain appreciation of the earth. Earthly life was respected. This earthly life was respected to such an extent that people said to themselves: Yes, light is very, very precious, but the earth is also very precious with its darkness. And so the view gradually developed that the earth is just as precious and that it fights with heaven. And this battle between heaven and earth was developed over two or three thousand years as a concept that had particular significance for these people.

Then, if we go back about three or four thousand years, we come to a land where Arabia extends into Africa, where the Nile flows: Egypt. The Egyptians and also those who were actually sitting over there in Asia, more towards the west, and more towards Europe, they received the Earth even more willingly. And so, if we go back three or four thousand years, we find that these Egyptians, who were the third type of people, so to speak – Indians, Persians, Egyptians – these people built these huge pyramids. But what they did above all was this: they harnessed the Nile. They canalized the Nile, which every year floods the land with its fertile soil, so that these floods could benefit them in all directions. To do this, they developed what is known as geometry. They needed it. Geometry and the art of surveying were now being developed. People grew to like the Earth more and more. And you see, to the same extent that people grew to like the Earth, they became less aware that they had come from a spiritual world. I would say that they forgot more and more about it because they grew to like the Earth more and more, and to the same extent it became more important to them to say to themselves: 'We live after death'.

Of course, we have seen that life after death is assured to man, but people in the past, before the Egyptians came, did not think about immortality at all. Why? Because it was a matter of course for them. When they knew that they came from a spiritual world and had only accepted the physical body, then they had no doubt at all that they would arrive in a spiritual world after death. But in Egypt, where people thought less about their stay in the spiritual realm before their life on earth, the Egyptians were very afraid of dying. This huge fear of dying is actually not much older than three or four thousand years. The Indians and the Persians had no fear of death. So one can actually prove that the Egyptians had this terrible fear of dying. Because, you see, if they had not had this terrible fear of dying, then today these Englishmen and the others could not go to Egypt and then exhibit the mummies in their museums! Because in those days people were embalmed with all kinds of ointments and other substances. They placed and preserved them in the coffin as they looked during their lifetime. People were embalmed and made into mummies because it was thought that if the body is kept together, the soul will remain present for as long as the body has on earth. The body was preserved so that the soul would not suffer any harm. You see, that is the fear of dying. So with all their might, the Egyptians wanted to achieve immortality through earthly matter. But these Egyptians still knew an extraordinary amount, which was later completely lost.

And the next people that particularly stand out to us are in the north of Egypt, in Greece, in present-day Greece. But ancient Greece was very different. You see, the Greeks had almost completely forgotten about life before birth. Only a few people in particularly high schools, which were called mysteries, still knew about it. But on the whole, in Greek civilization, the spiritual life before birth had already been completely forgotten, and the Greeks loved earthly life most of all. And that is why a philosopher emerged in Greece, his name was Aristotle, in the 4th century BC. You see, now we are getting close to the Christian era. Aristotle was the first to put forward a view that had not existed before. He put forward the view that not only is the body of a person born when a child is born, but also the soul of a person is born. So in Greece, the view first emerged that the soul of a person is born with the body, but that it is then immortal, so it goes through death and lives on in the spiritual world. Only Aristotle then put forward a peculiar view. Aristotle had actually forgotten everything that was wisdom in ancient times, and he then put forward the view: the soul is born at the same time as the body. But when a person dies, the soul remains in such a way that it has only had this one earthly life behind it. It must then look back forever only on what the one earthly life is.

Imagine what a terrible view that is! So if someone on earth has done something bad, they will never be able to make amends for it, but will always have to look back and see the image of what they have done wrong. This is Aristotle's view.

Then Christianity came. In the very first centuries, Christianity was understood a little. But when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and Christianity took root in Rome, it was no longer understood there. It was not understood.

Now there were always councils within Christianity. The high dignitaries of the church came together and determined what the great flock of believers should believe. The view was formed that there are shepherds and sheep, and the shepherds then determined at the councils what the sheep should believe. At the eighth of these councils, it was now determined by the shepherds for the sheep that it was heretical to believe that man had lived in the spiritual world before his birth. So the old views of Aristotle became Christian church dogma! And as a result, humanity was virtually forced to know nothing, not even to think about the fact that man came down from the spiritual world with a soul. They were forbidden.

When materialists say today: The soul is born with the body and is nothing but physical – then that is nothing more than what people have learned from the church. That is precisely why people today believe that they go beyond the church when they are materialists. No, people would never have become materialists if the church had not abolished the knowledge of the spirit. For at this eighth general, ecumenical council in Constantinople, the spirit was abolished by the church, and that remained so throughout the Middle Ages. Only now, through spiritual science, do we have to realize again that the human being was also there as a soul before he was on earth. That is the important thing, that is the most important thing.

Anyone who follows the development of humanity on Earth clearly sees that originally the knowledge existed that people, before descending to Earth, are in a spiritual existence. This was only gradually forgotten and later even abolished by a council decision.

Now we must only realize what this means. Imagine, people who lived up to the Egyptians, so in ancient millennia, they knew: Before you walked around on this earth, you were in the spiritual world. Yes, they did not just bring down from the spiritual world some kind of general, vague knowledge, but they brought down from the spiritual world the awareness that they had lived with other beings. And from that they also brought down their moral impulses. What I should do on earth, I see from the way these earthly things are, these old people said; what else should I do, I just need to remember what was before birth. They brought down their moral impulses from the spiritual world. You see, if you asked people in those ancient times: What is good? What is evil? — then they said: Good is that which the beings among whom I was before I was on earth want; evil is that which they do not want. But each individual said that to himself. Now, gentlemen, that has been forgotten.

In Greece, there was now something very strange. In Greece, they have forgotten so far that there is a life before birth, that Aristotle said: The soul is born with the physical body. - So people had no idea that they had already lived before birth. But they sensed something in themselves from this life. Whether you know something or not, that has no influence on reality. I can always say: there is no table behind me, I don't see any table [hitting the table on my way back], but the table is still there, even if I don't see it. Life before birth remained, and people felt it within themselves. And that is what they started to call conscience in Greece. In Greece, the word conscience first appeared around the 5th century BC. Before that, the word conscience did not exist. So the word conscience comes from the fact that people forgot about prenatal life, pre-earthly life, and what they still felt of it within themselves, they gave a word to it. And since that time it has remained so. People feel prenatal life in themselves, but they say: Well, that's just the way it is; it arises down there somewhere and then it shoots up - but they don't pay any further attention to it.

You see, that was good for the church. Because what could happen now from the church? Yes, gentlemen, in the past, when everyone knew that they had lived as a soul before they descended to earth, people said: What we know of our previous life, of our life before birth, is moral. - Now the Greeks only felt conscience. And then later came the church, which now administered conscience. Isn't that right, it took over and said: You don't know what you should do. The sheep don't know, the shepherds do! And it made rules and administered conscience.

You see, it was necessary that the spirit was abolished at a council, because then what was left of the human spirit as conscience could be administered. And then the church said: No, nothing existed in man before he was on earth. The soul is born with the body. Anyone who does not believe this is of the devil. But we, as the church, we know what it is like in the spiritual world and what man has to do on earth. — That is how the church took possession of conscience.

This can still be proven in detail. Because, you see, that still played a role well into the 19th century, sometimes in a quite dreadful way. For example, in the 1830s and 1840s in Prague there was a man named Smetana. This person was the son of a Catholic church servant, who was of course a devout Catholic. He had the feeling that one has to believe what the church prescribes; one knows from the spiritual world what the church prescribes. Now he had a son. The people at that time were somewhat ambitious and sent their children to grammar school. But in the grammar schools that were in Prague in the last century, you didn't actually learn very much. Basically, you learned very little. So young Smetana was educated at grammar school. And that was just the way it was: the one who was supposed to learn anything at all then became a priest. So young Smetana also became a priest. In those days in Prague, and also in the rest of Austria, priests were employed as teachers in the higher schools as well. And so it happened that when he himself had to teach, he read somewhat different books than those prescribed for him by the church as a priest. Yes, through this he gradually came to doubt, namely about a dogma. He said to himself: What is it actually so terrible that a person should be born, spend his life on earth, then go through death and now, if he was a bad guy, should only look at it forever - the church even painted that with the necessary pictures - what he did as a bad guy on earth and should never have the opportunity to improve!

Now, you see, this man, Smetana, lived in a religious house. But when he became a teacher, it became a little too cramped for him in the religious house; so he moved into a secular apartment and read more and more – there were no anthroposophical books available at the time – the books of Hegel, Schelling and so on, which at least gave something, a beginning of something reasonable. In this way he became more and more doubtful about the so-called eternity of punishment in hell, because according to Aristotle, a bad person goes through death and must live eternally in his wickedness. But the doctrine of the eternity of the punishment of hell arose from this, and was then established by the church in the form of a council. This doctrine is, of course, not a Christian one, but is that of Aristotle. It is not true at all that the doctrine of the punishment of hell is a Christian doctrine; it is from Aristotle. But that was not clear to people.

But this Smetana realized it. So he started teaching something that was not quite in line with the teachings of the Church. It was in 1848 that he taught something that was not quite right. At first he received a terrible warning, a huge letter written in Latin, in which he was told that he should now return repentant to the fold of the church, because he had caused enormous offence to the shepherds by teaching the sheep something that was not prescribed by the shepherds. He replied to this first letter, written in Latin, saying that he thought it hypocritical to say anything other than what one is convinced of. Then a second letter in Latin arrived, which admonished him even more seriously. And when he no longer answered this, because it would have been useless, it was announced one day in all the churches in Prague that a very important celebration was to take place because one of the lost sheep, who had even become a shepherd, had to be excluded from the church.

Among those who had to distribute the notices everywhere that this important celebration was to take place was the church servant, old Smetana, the father. He had remained a devout Catholic. You can now imagine what it means that the whole of Prague has been summoned to condemn Smetana's son, to condemn him to be forever excluded from the church and so on, and that his father had to carry the leaflets himself! Yes, the church was never as full in Prague as it was on that day. All the churches in Prague were full to bursting. And from all the pulpits it was proclaimed that the apostate Smetana was being excommunicated.

The consequence of this was – of course, the germ of consumption lay in the Smetana family – that first the sister died of grief, then the old father died of grief, and after that Smetana himself died of grief, of suffering, after a short time. But that was not the point, was it, but the point was that Smetana no longer proclaimed the story of the eternity of hellish punishment, as he understood it.

This is all connected with the development of the idea of conscience in humanity. For that which man retains of his pre-earthly life lives in him and speaks in him as conscience. And from the standpoint of conscience one can say: Conscience cannot come from the material substance of the earth. For just imagine, let us say, someone has a terrible craving. There have been cases of this. Then it is the substances in his body, the substances of the earth, that push and nudge him to have this craving. Then conscience tells him: But you must fight these cravings. Yes, gentlemen, that would be just as if conscience also came from the body as if someone were to walk backwards and forwards at the same time. It is nonsense to say that conscience comes from the body. Conscience is connected with what we bring down from the spiritual world from our pre-earthly life when we descend to earth. But as I have explained it to you, the awareness that conscience comes from the spiritual world has been lost for earthly people, and for people like Smetana, whom I told you about earlier, it only dawned on him again in the 19th century through this terrible thing of hellfire. Conscience belongs to the person themselves. A person carries their conscience within them. What use would all the conscience in the world be to you if you were to pass through death and then realize for all eternity what a bad fellow you were? You couldn't help yourself. Having a conscience wouldn't mean a thing!

So that one can say: If that is the human being (he is drawn), then conscience lives in the human being. Conscience is that which he has brought with him into earthly life from the spiritual world. Conscience says within him: You should not have done that, and you should not have done that. The earthly person says: I will do that, I desire that. Conscience speaks differently because it comes from the eternal human being. And then, when the human being has discarded the physical body, only then does he realize: You yourself are what has always spoken in your conscience. You just didn't notice that during the time of earthly life. Now you have gone through death. Now you have become your own conscience. Your conscience is now your body. Before, you had no conscience. Now you have your conscience, with which you continue to live after death.

But to the conscience one must also ascribe a will. You see, all the things I have told you have come true. The Greeks had forgotten the pre-earthly life. The church had raised to dogma that one may not believe that there is a pre-earthly life. The conscience has been completely misunderstood. All this had been fulfilled. And now, of course, there have also been great scholars. But these great scholars in the Middle Ages were, of course, under the impression that there can be no such thing as a pre-earthly life. The church forbids believing it.

In this conflict stood, for example, a man like Thomas Aquinas, who lived from 1225 to 1274. As a Catholic priest, he had to comply with what the Catholic Church prescribed. But he was a great thinker. And with regard to what I have told you today, he had to say: When a person dies, he only has the contemplation of his earthly life, always and forever, never otherwise. He contemplates that. So what does Thomas Aquinas do? Thomas Aquinas attributes only reason to man for all eternity, but no will. Man must contemplate this after death, but he can no longer change it. Thomas Aquinas was one of the greatest Aristotelians of the Middle Ages precisely because he said: If a person has done something bad on earth, he must look at it forever; if a person has done something good, he looks at the good forever. - So only the knowledge, not the will, was attributed to the soul.

That is not true. It is true that after death you see what you were in terms of good and evil, but that you retain the will, the full strength of your soul, to change that. So, of course, when you look at your life, you see how it was, then you live in the spiritual world and see what should have been different. Then the urge comes by itself to go back down to make the necessary improvements. Of course, mistakes will be made again, but then the following lives will always follow, and the person will achieve the goal of complete human development.

What Thomas Aquinas was still obliged to do in the Middle Ages, to believe only in knowledge and not in the will, still afflicted people in the 19th century as much as it did Smetana. It is to be attributed to this that other people came along in the 19th century who were furious about knowledge. This all originated in the dogma of the punishment of hell; only people did not see through it. Schopenhauer, for example, was filled with rage at the realization and now attributed everything to the will. Yes, but if you now ascribe everything to the will again, then this will is too stupid and foolish. Therefore, Schopenhauer attributed the whole creation of the world and everything to the foolish will. And those people who have thought about it have experienced terrible inner conflicts, just as Smetana experienced in Prague. There have been many such cases; this is just an excellent example of which the difficulties have been written down. There have been many such people.

And so we must be clear about this: Man has his conscience as an inheritance from his pre-earthly life. It is the spirit that speaks in conscience. That which we already were before we were man on earth has entered the flesh and speaks in conscience. And when we have laid aside the body, then the soul will continue to speak in conscience after death, but not unconsciously, but having a will and having to make amends, having to be active.

You see, that is the difference between anthroposophy and everything that is contained in Christian dogmatics today, for example. In Christian dogmatics, this inner power of the human soul, which can create, is not known. Rather, the human being dies and can only look at what he has created in one earthly life, because in that one earthly life the soul is born with the body. So if you want to present it schematically, you have to say: If this is a human being's one life on earth (upper drawing, circle), it also begins with the soul, and when the person now dies – there is birth, there is death – then his soul life expands into all eternity. I don't want to go to the second board with my drawing anymore, because that is too expensive, I would even have to have a third one! Only knowledge, only the intellect, is destined to do nothing but contemplate the evil of earthly life for all eternity, because the intellect is born with the physicality of earthly life. The first materialist was actually the one who established this dogma, was actually Aristotle.

Now, anthroposophy finds that there is not only one earthly life, but also successive earthly lives. A person always has something left over from the previous life, which he does not know exactly, but which is within him: that is conscience. Now he lays down the body, in his conscience he lives on. There (lower drawing, red left) is now basically only conscience until the next birth. Now (middle circle) there is conscience again in the form of a voice that speaks; now (red right) it lives in the outside world, is there again. And the human being is actually the one who always creates his new lives on earth. Of course, this is something that particularly annoys the doctrine that does not want to grant anything to the human being at all, that wants to look at everything as if the human being were a creature. He is not a mere creature, but there are creative powers in him. And that is precisely the difference between anthroposophy and the other views: anthroposophy's research brings out that these creative powers are in man, man is also creative. He is not only created, but he is creative. And one of the most creative things in him is precisely his conscience, because that is what remains for us as a sacred inheritance from our pre-earthly life and what we carry out again when we pass through death.

This is precisely what modern science still has from the Church, and it is precisely on this point that one should really see very clearly. Because the thing went like this: From over there in Rome, only that which was logical on one side and materialistic on the other came. Then the modern peoples adopted that. But in the German language, sometimes a remnant of the old has remained in a completely different way, only you don't recognize it again. That is very strange. In this you can see how man is connected with the great events.

If you look at these countries up in Asia today – Siberia – they are actually areas that are very sparsely populated, but they were once heavily populated. The rivers were much, much mightier then. Siberia is a land that has gradually dried up and risen, and people then moved west, across to Europe. This is due to the elevation of Siberia. And in this way, many ideas that were present in Asia came to Europe by a different route, and these ideas live on in European languages. Therefore, one must say: The further west one goes, the less this notion of conscience is present. But the very word conscience shows that the people who formed the word conscience had a feeling that there is something in man. And what does the word conscience actually mean? We have just said what it means: It is the inheritance from what is pre-earthly life, what remains in humanity. But what does the word conscience mean? When you look at life on earth and say to yourself: the events that will happen in two or three years are uncertain, but that a person has a spirit within them that was there before their earthly existence and that remains after their earthly existence, that is certain. And the word conscience is also connected with certainty, and it is the most certain thing there can be. So that in the word conscience is already indicated that which is eternal in man. It is very significant that conscience contains something different than, for example, 'conscience' or something similar in Western languages. Conscience is that which is 'known together' on earth: con-science – that which is accumulated from earthly knowledge. But that which lives in man as conscience and is designated by the word conscience is the most certain thing there can be, something that is not vague but completely certain. And it is absolutely certain that man on earth not only believes in life after death – an opinion held by Aristotle and the church faithful – but also develops a will to shape it better and better, to shape the earth better and better again and again out of the spirit, that therefore the will also lives after death, as does knowledge. With Thomas Aquinas, only knowledge had life. Now we must realize that the will has life. You see, gentlemen, it is indeed so: one does not need to belittle someone who centuries ago in his time was a great 249

great scholar, such as Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century, because he taught in his time what was taught in his time. But it is quite another thing if Thomas Aquinas taught what could only be taught in the 13th century than if, as is currently happening in Paris, a Thomas Society is founded to teach the same teach the same as was taught in those days, just as Leo XIII. commanded for all priests and scholars of the Catholic Church in the 19th century to say only what Thomas Aquinas taught in the 13th century. Today, Thomas would not say that either! And these two things confront each other in the world, something like the Thomas Society in Paris, which wants to lead people back again, and anthroposophy, which teaches the present, that which a present human being is. And above all, when you look at something like conscience, it is important that it leads you to the eternal in man. But the eternal cannot be properly understood if one does not also look at the pre-earthly life, if one only looks at that which actually arose only since the Egyptian period as the post-earthly life, as the so-called immortality.

You see, gentlemen, it was only three or four millennia ago that people began to talk about being immortal, that they do not die with the soul as the body dies. But before that, people said that they were not born as a soul either, as the body is born. They had a word meaning that we would have to call 'unborn' today. That was one side. And immortality is the other side. Not even the languages today have a different word than immortality! The word unbornness must arise again. Then one will say: Conscience is that in man which is not born and does not die. Only then will one be able to truly appreciate conscience. For conscience has meaning for man only when one can truly appreciate it.

Well, then, on Saturday at nine o'clock, gentlemen.

By devoting oneself to spiritual life, it is necessary to become aware of why we, as human beings in today's world, by grasping our task as human beings in today's world, have the longing and the urge to cultivate spiritual life. This is because, since the last period of the last century, people can relate to the higher worlds in a completely different way than was the case in earlier centuries. This is something that is basically far too little taken into account: that the development of humanity from epoch to epoch always produces new impulses.

Whereas it was relatively difficult in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries to gain an understanding of the spiritual world and spiritual life from within the human soul, it will become more and more a natural need of the human soul in the coming times to seek spiritual understanding. For since the last third of the 19th century, the gates to the spiritual world have, in a sense, opened so that spiritual knowledge flows from the spiritual world for everyone who wants to receive it. In this sense, we are in a completely new epoch of human development. Those who today are drawn to anthroposophy and the anthroposophical movement as if by instinct feel what is written in the signs of the times. Fifty years ago, it would have been completely impossible to gather together to discuss the spiritual secrets of existence, because the waves of spiritual understanding had not yet begun to flow down to humanity. And we must understand that what we strive for and want must become more and more general. To do that, we must also look at the symptoms that characterize the overall development of humanity today. Today, only a few people are interested in spiritual life and have the urge to gain knowledge of the spiritual world. The masses still vigorously reject any spiritual knowledge. Now we must know how to delve into all that has led to such a state of affairs in our human development. Among the ideas that best show what has emerged as a symptom of the present era, perhaps the idea of freedom is the most important, for it is the idea that can best illustrate the evolution of the last few centuries.

It is only natural that a person out in the world today who is not seeking spiritual knowledge but who wants to be informed about the laws of the world and the human soul life, takes refuge in official science, which in turn is dominated by natural science. How do people come to know about the world? They turn to people who have learned to gain a scientific understanding of the world and who may have then also laid down in popular scientific writings how one should think about the human soul, about nature and freedom and so on. How would someone like that come to a different idea than by asking such people?

Now, in the nineteenth century, official science, in its desire to become a world view, underwent a very strange but symptomatic development. But people do not notice such very strange symptoms at all. If you ask a great scientist whether there is such a thing as an idea of freedom, he will answer: It does not exist in the sense in which the old worldviews understood this idea, because today we know that when a person, for example, consumes a certain substance, that substance immediately affects his brain, and then he can no longer properly control his brain. You see that man is dependent on his brain, so how can he be free? Or they say: In rational psychology, we show that a person who is afflicted with a mental illness and cannot speak or remember speech sounds shows abnormalities in his brain. How can you talk about freedom when man is dependent on his brain? This is what ordinary psychiatry says. For ordinary, trivial thinking, all these reasons carry a great deal of weight. Such things sound very plausible and gradually take hold in people's thinking. Unless a spiritual worldview sets minds straight again, people will fall prey to a worldview that completely denies the idea of freedom.

In this respect, science has come a long way. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, people were always looking for purpose in nature. They wondered: why does the bull have horns, why do apples grow on apple trees? — A wise world guidance, they said, has done that. It gave the bull horns to be able to push with, and it has apples grow so that man can eat them and so on. Enlightened minds of the 18th and 19th centuries have scoffed at these utilitarian reasons. They have said, ironically: Why did the world's existence cause this or that tree to grow? — Because man wants to drink wine and needs cork stoppers for his wine bottles!

Such objections to the careless way in which nature was thought of as man are entirely justified. With a person, you can always ask: what purpose does he pursue with what he does? — Now, nature had been humanized or anthropomorphized, an anthropomorphic worldview had been created that asked about goals in nature just as one can ask about a person's goal. It was perfectly legitimate for the nineteenth century to oppose this anthropomorphism, which saw nothing in nature itself, but only introduced human beings into nature. The spirits of the nineteenth century wanted to look at nature directly, to ask it themselves. They did not want to fantasize human purposes into nature. This striving was entirely justified, because the old way of looking at things transferred human soul life into nature. And it is justified to say that one wants to look at nature as it is, apart from man. It was said: We want to throw out of nature everything that belongs to man. This then led in the 19th century to an image of nature in which there was no longer anything of man in it. This gave rise to a materialistic natural science. Human concepts were pushed out of nature. In a sense, it was a correct reaction against the old doctrine of utility or teleology.

Thus a materialistic natural science arose on the premise that nothing of man can be found in this natural science. At the time, this was a perfectly justified demand. But in the second half of the 19th century, it became clear that we must also consider the human being as a natural product, we must also consider the human being as nature. This second demand, to consider the human being according to the material conditions of nature, changed everything, because the human being had been thrown out of nature. It was quite clear that man could no longer be found in this science of nature, which had been so arranged. This developed in the course of the 19th century. It was then that everything belonging to the human soul was distilled out of natural science, which can be compared to saying: I have a bottle, there is water in it. But I want an empty bottle, so I pour the water out of the bottle. And then one is surprised that there is no more water in the bottle. With the bottle, everyone immediately notices that the bottle is then empty. With science, people did not realize the folly of wanting to understand man from nature emptied of man. I am convinced that a materialistic assembly would only laugh at these simple considerations, because they are not aware of this capital mistake. Among these misconceptions, the idea of freedom, immortality and the like suffered the most. For anyone who looks at the matter as it has just been described finds it quite natural that no information about these concepts can be obtained from science.

Now it is a matter of the fact that it is indeed necessary, especially for a spiritual world view, to come to the realization that although man in his corporeality belongs to external nature and its laws, he carries something within him as a soul that can only be found by spiritual means. In other words: If we want to recognize the human being in his very own essence, then we must not look at that in man which is his outer shell between birth and death, but we must look at that which, going from incarnation to incarnation, is his actual, true essence. And it will be the task of anthroposophy to direct people's attention to those processes of the inner life that prove that there is such an eternal core of being within the human being, independent of the outer physical body.

If we first consider the human being in such a way that we admit that the actual human essence not only lives between birth and death, but is also that which places the human being in the physical world and which remains after death, then one will recognize the necessity of guiding human knowledge and cognition up to the regions where the human being, through its knowledge, participates in that higher world to which it belongs through its soul-spiritual nature. But in the moment when man enters with his knowledge into the higher worlds, he comes together with spiritual beings of the higher worlds just as he does here in the physical world with the beings of the three natural kingdoms.

Now, the most unjustified view is that which Pascal, the famous Christian researcher, once expressed and in which Maeterlinck, for example, today quite rightly agrees with him, saying that Pascal wanted that once and for all. - Pascal says: We actually have nothing from earthly existence but that it hides eternity, infinity, from us. It must be said that this belief is very widespread. Wherever one goes, one finds a justified longing for the spiritual, the eternal, which is expressed in such a way that one says: after all, earthly existence is quite unsatisfying. Only in the contemplation of the eternal can man really find satisfaction. But when one really penetrates into the eternal worlds, then something else is added to Pascal's saying. When one penetrates into eternity, one experiences that it by no means conceals earthly existence, but rather shows that everything there is designed to lead back to earthly existence.

The most peculiar objections are sometimes raised against the doctrine of re-embodiment. A lady, to whom I explained the necessity of re-embodiment with all its reasons, said to me: I do not want to come back to earth, I do not like life enough. — I tried to make her understand that her feelings had nothing to do with the matter. She listened to me and then left. From the nearest railway station she sent me a postcard on which was written: I don't want to be born again! One can laugh at such an attitude. One finds it often. One does not consider that the attitude is not important, not important what one says here on earth within this life. One just does not know that it can be quite insignificant whether one wants to return or not. They do not realize that in the time between death and the new birth they carry all the forces in their soul that long for re-embodiment, that want to return. These forces are indeed present. There everything is geared to the fact that the forces one develops there can only be satisfied when one enters earthly life again. One senses that the soul has remained imperfect, that it has not developed certain qualities in its last life on earth. Here on earth it may be unimportant whether one is perfect or imperfect, but not in the life between death and a new birth. There are irresistible forces to transform imperfection into perfection. One realizes that in many cases this can only be achieved through suffering and pain, and one knows that in order to achieve perfection, one must undergo the sufferings and joys of an earthly life. And so one enters a new incarnation with all one's might.

I have mentioned this because from such a matter one can see very clearly that our world view must become all-encompassing, that one must not draw conclusions from life between birth and death, as it presents itself to our desires and interests, about the desires and interests that one has between death and a new birth. Man only learns to think in a thorough, energetic way when he trains himself in this way to be all-round through the spiritual world view, when he learns to recognize that every thing must be considered from different sides. Even the practice of life forces man to do so in ordinary life. If one says: fire is beneficial – he is right. But if one says: Fire is very harmful, because it burns towns and villages, then that is also true. The absolute statement: Fire is good, or: Fire is evil, does not apply. With regard to fire, practical life already teaches us to recognize these two sides. But if the same is demanded for beings of the higher worlds, for example, Lucifer and Ahriman, then one does not readily accept it, but one asks: Is Lucifer a good or an evil being? Is Ahriman a good or an evil being? People want to have definitions that give them an answer to such questions, and they consider an answer to be highly unsatisfactory that says: Lucifer and Ahriman can be both good and evil. This is not demanded of fire. Here, practical life helps us to transform an incorrect judgment into a correct one.

Among the many things that are now circulating in Germany, for example, to attack us, is the fact that it was recently said: He — that is, Dr. Steiner — presents things in his public lectures as they present themselves to his view, but he avoids giving specific concepts or judgments. My dear friends, in a Greek school of philosophy, they once wanted to have a very definite concept of what a human being is. After much discussion, they agreed to say that to define the concept of a human being, a human being is a being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day someone brought a plucked cockerel and said: So this is a human being, because it has two legs and no feathers. According to the definition, this must therefore be a human being! — It just so happens that when you look more closely, 'certain concepts' can be very unrealistic. Therefore, the spiritual world view will accustom people to characterizing things in a comprehensive way. Natural science has also produced a good deal of one-sided thinking, and even those who, with their spirit, would like to rise above natural scientific thinking often show - with all good will - a certain admirable naivety. In this field, one must really develop the will bit by bit to achieve full clarity.

Just as I tried to show yesterday how people who may be regarded as thorough natural scientists and whose names should not be vilified are unable to judge in the field of spiritual scientific research, so one should not, without being unjust, be immediately amazed by an idea that may be put forward with good intentions but is not sound. There is, for example, the natural scientist William Crookes. He has achieved many significant things for scientific research, but at the same time he was someone who wholeheartedly committed himself to research into immortality. He wanted to gain certainty about immortality using the usual scientific methods, and he achieved wonderful results in his mediumistic research. Now he once expressed an idea in such a way that one can also appropriate this idea, go along with it to a certain point. When someone claims that we see colors depends on the nature of our eyes, that we hear sounds, we owe to our ears, and if we had other sensory organs, the world around us would be quite different – that is quite right. When William Crookes says, “Why do you then deny the existence of a supersensible world, which is not there for you only because you have such organs that are not suited to perceive it?” — so that is also correct. He expresses this fully justified idea more precisely by assuming that he says: We perceive colors, we hear sounds, but we only see effects of electricity and magnetism. They are forces of nature, the essence of which man does not know, even if he applies them in practical life. This is found everywhere, that it is said to be natural forces, the essence of which man has not fathomed. — Admitted! In reality, it means nothing more than: Man has his eyes for colors, his ears for sounds, and so on; in the case of magnetism, man sees that the magnet attracts the iron, but he does not see magnetism itself, that which magnetism actually is. With electricity, he perceives light and heat effects, but not electricity itself. Now William Crookes says: What would the world be like for beings that could perceive electricity and magnetism directly with special sensory organs, but not light, colors, sounds, and so on? If we could not perceive light, a crystal would be opaque to us, as would glass, and there would be no point in putting windows in. They would only prevent us from having contact with the outside world. If, on the other hand, we had organs for electric current, we would see a telegraph wire as a line of light running through the dark space; we would perceive flowing, luminous electricity there. If we had an organ for magnetism, we would perceive magnets in such a way that magnetic forces would radiate in all directions, and so on. William Crookes now says: It is not unlikely that there are such beings whose organs are attuned to vibrations that our organs leave untouched. Such beings live in a completely different world from us. And he then considers what this world would look like. In this world, glass and crystal are dark bodies; metals, because they conduct electricity, are somewhat lighter, interspersed with dark parts. A telegraph wire would be a long, narrow hole in a body of impenetrable solidity. A working dynamo would resemble a conflagration, and a magnet would even fulfill the dream of medieval mystics of an eternal lamp that never goes out.

William Crookes has dealt with this beautifully, and in this way one can already give an idea of how nonsensical it is to claim that this sensual-physical world is the only one, that there is no other world than just ours, and that there cannot be beings other than human beings. All true! But there is something else that can be said about this idea – and this is where the other side of the matter begins, which concerns the true spiritual researcher. Let us suppose that we ask the question: What would it be like if, instead of eyes, man really had these organs to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, if this idea, which a person naively puts forward, were realized in us humans, what would it be like? Then we human beings would find our way around in the realm of electricity and magnetism just as directly as we now find our way around in the realm of light and sound. But that would have a consequence. If man had an organ for the direct perception of electricity and magnetism, then, at the same time as this organ, which would then be an organ of knowledge for him, he would have the power and the authority to kill or make sick every other human being. This ability would be conferred directly by such an organ.

This is what spiritual science has to say about William Crookes' idea, because spiritual science knows that the human being is permeated by such forces, which have a kinship here on earth with magnetic and electrical forces. Now the question takes on a completely different meaning; now the touch of naivety in the simple posing of such an idea becomes really apparent. While a person who has no higher vision posits the idea of looking into the electrical and magnetic forces, for the spiritual researcher what has just been said follows immediately from it. When we realize this, we first come to realize that we must not remain on the surface if we really want to delve into and understand the wisdom that underlies the order of the world. For this insight of the spiritual researcher shows us that it is very good for man that he does not have the electrical and magnetic organs, that he cannot harm his fellow human beings with them. In this way, his lower instincts and desires cannot be satisfied in such a way as to be fatal for him and the world. Man has a world around him that allows him, through a slow and gradual education, to conquer these lower forces and then ascend to the higher forces.

That is the whole purpose of evolution on earth: that man, passing through many earth-lives, in manifold undulating movements, gradually heads towards perfection, but in such a way that he learns to put his lower powers, instincts and longings at the service of higher ideas and motives. He would not be able to do this if, at the time when he was only developing morality in the course of his evolution on earth, he had been given organs that allowed him to perceive electricity and magnetism directly, because then the temptation would have been too strong to kill people he did not like for whatever reason, and to leave only those people on earth who were right for him.

Thus we see that only the spiritual world view actually gives us the opportunity to look at existence from all sides and to penetrate deeper into it. When a person really becomes a spiritual researcher, as could only be briefly characterized in yesterday's public lecture, he really enters the spiritual world and then becomes aware that the higher hierarchies are around him there, as the three kingdoms of nature are around him here. There we learn to recognize certain entities, which we call the luciferic and ahrimanic beings. What then are the luciferic beings? They are those that belong to beings who, during their previous incarnation on earth, in the old lunar age, remained behind in their development, thus did not enter into the full hardening of earthly existence, into which the human being has entered, but remained at a stage that lies before the materialization of the human being. As a result, they and their powers have remained more spiritual than the human being is. In their development they could only reach a stage that is more spiritual than the stage in which man undergoes his earthly embodiments. By permeating human nature with their powers, they have caused human nature to contain more spirituality than it should actually have. If these Luciferic forces had not been present, man would have had in his astral body, in the lower unconscious forces as compared with the conscious ego forces, a personal spiritualization in the form of the Luciferic forces, but not such forces as he now has. Through the Luciferic influence man's lower nature has become more spiritual than it would otherwise have been. Man would have received everything he should have received on earth from the progressive powers, but he would not be as spiritual as he is today. He would have escaped the Luciferic impact.

But man would also lack something else. Without this influence, man could not have had freedom, because if this influence of Lucifer had not come, he would have carried out all his actions in such a way that, when he had to do this or that, he could only have looked to the motives that would have come to him from the spiritual world in the form of ideas. Whatever man would accomplish on earth, he would accomplish in such a way that he would see the idea underlying it like a picture showing him what had to happen, without him having to form this idea. It would be like an inspiration from the higher worlds, and this would affect him in such a way that he could not possibly resist it. He would naturally follow the will of the gods.

But now the Luciferic influence was there. Through it, man has come into the position of not simply allowing the motives for an act to flow to him, but he must first prepare these motives himself through his own work from the depths of his soul. He must educate himself to moral ideas, and man would not be able to educate himself to moral ideas if the Luciferic influence had not come. For through this a more spiritual element has entered into our astral nature. Thus it is not only the idea of morality that works in our consciousness of self — for the idea of morality would work in such a way that it would not occur to any human being to do evil, since the idea of good for an action would be directly presented to his spiritual eye by divine spiritual beings — but the instincts and passions also work with it. This idea would not be able to arise in the consciousness of the ego at all if its astral nature, individually shaped by the influence of Lucifer, did not confront it. This influence of Lucifer has brought about that in our nature, out of the unconscious and towards consciousness, purification must take place, that we must work our way up to conscious moral ideas and motives in the struggle with ourselves, and then follow these ideas of our own accord. Thus it is Lucifer who enables us to follow moral ideas after we have first worked them out for ourselves.

Now we can say: So there is a power that arises from within us when we work towards moral ideas. Where is this power in man, if man is not moral by nature but must educate himself to be so; where is the power that works in the soul from out of the unconscious to present moral ideas to man? Where is it in us that we can bring it out of ourselves? If man becomes a spiritual researcher, if he is able to look into the spiritual world, then he also discovers where the power that generates moral ideas is to be found. It is constantly at work in the unconscious forces; it is in man, but in the ordinary world it is used for something quite different. When we act in the ordinary world before we have set ourselves moral goals, we act under the influence of our urges, desires and instincts. But we can only act when we put our body into action. Here we are constantly working with unconscious forces, for unless one has studied spiritual science, who knows what forces are at work when one bends an arm, puts one foot in front of the other, and so on? Without spiritual science, one does not know what forces are at work in man. No one knows how his movements, how everything that works so that he can be an active person in the physical world, how that comes about and what force is at work. This is only noticed by the spiritual researcher when he comes to so-called imaginative knowledge. First, one makes images that work by drawing stronger forces from the soul than are otherwise used in ordinary life. Where does this power come from that unleashes the images of imaginative experience in the soul? It comes from the place where the forces that make us active human beings in the world are at work, that make us move our hands and feet. Because this is the case, you can only access your imagination if you are able to remain still, if you can bring the movements of your body to a standstill, if you can control it. Then you notice how this power, which otherwise moves the muscles, flows up into the soul and mind and forms the imaginative images. So you are actually rearranging the forces. So down there in the depths of the body is something of our very own nature, of which we feel nothing in ordinary life. By switching off the physical, the spirit, which otherwise comes to expression in our actions, penetrates up into the soul and fills it with what it would otherwise have to use for the physical. The spiritual researcher knows that he must withdraw from the body what the body would otherwise consume. For imaginative knowledge, therefore, the bodily must be eliminated. In ordinary life, we do think, we do form ego-conscious images, but the just-discussed power flows down into our organs in our organism in waking consciousness, becomes effective there and is not used at all, as a rule, to become spiritually visible in the soul.

If we are not spiritual researchers, we have no control over this power; we have to leave it down there in the subconscious, but it does something, this power. It works on our moral ideas. When it flows up consciously, one educates oneself by means of this power to imaginative knowledge; if it is not consciously used for that, it serves man in his actions in the world. But man is not always in action, in activity; then this power, which sits below, is unconsciously released, and it then also works on the realization of moral ideas. So the same power that moves the limbs, that spiritually permeates the body so that man can grasp, walk, and so on, that power sometimes releases itself in the human 'body and produces moral ideals. If you can admire a moral thinker somewhere, who alone develops lofty ideals, you see in these ideals the release of the same forces that play in his hand movements and so on. So, to develop moral ideals, man must, so to speak, first come to rest.

But one can also develop moral ideals and then not follow them, because the forces we use to develop moral ideas, we also use to move and they can be used for one and for the other. Developing moral ideals does not yet mean being moral. Only following them means acting morally. The moral ideals then emerge like memories. As long as you still have to educate yourself to them, you have to use the same strength to generate them that you will need later to follow them. We carry them as memories within us as our moral norms. Therefore, man must be educated in morality so that these memories arise within him as his moral norms and he can follow them.

Who is it then that works in us to conjure up these moral ideals from our nature? That is Lucifer. He urges us to produce our moral ideas, our free morality, out of ourselves. Man owes it to Lucifer that he must produce his moral freedom out of himself. There is no freedom in nature. Freedom is only found by carrying out and realizing that which permeates the human being spiritually and soulfully. By penetrating the lower desires of the human being, Lucifer not only became the seducer of the human being, but at the same time the creator of human freedom. Through Lucifer's impulse, man was made free.

So when we study the innermost nature of our physical body in the way that science studies nature, and follow the laws of logic, we come to this origin of human freedom. If someone were to say today: I don't believe in magnetism, I only see an iron and that cannot possibly attract another iron, that's fantasy —, then this refutes life practice. But in the realm of soul and spirit, people do behave in such a way as to deny the forces that are present. Luciferic forces are inherent in freedom. Without these luciferic forces, we could not be free beings; we could never develop ethical impulses from the depths of our souls and act upon them. We will only understand freedom when we understand that the physical-sensual nature of man is permeated by a spiritual-soul nature, which is already expressed in the hand movement, but which can be released consciously in the imaginations of the spiritual researcher, unconsciously in the presentation of moral motives. When we look within, we also get to know the good side of Lucifer, and one can no longer say: Lucifer is an evil being – for he is also the bringer of human freedom.

Now, however, man also transforms other forces in his soul into bodily functions, for example, when speaking, when the speech organ is set in motion by the brain. In this case, we are not in action with the whole body, but by setting the organization of the physical body in motion from the spiritual-soul, we perform an inner activity. When we speak, spiritual-soul forces intervene in the so-called Broca's organ, which is located in the third cerebral convolution, and then in the larynx. If we withdraw this power, which acts on the Broca's organ, from speaking, as it were, if we become aware of it without using it to speak, then we have grasped it in its spiritual-soul aspect. Let us suppose, for example, that you meditate in such a way that you place yourself in the forces of your soul, which would otherwise be expressed in speech, without speaking, you remain silent. When one thus arrests the soul-life in its inner being, before it intervenes in the bodily, one has grasped a power in oneself that leads to so-called inspiration, to spiritual hearing. The occult saying about so-called “silent knowledge” is based on this. What is meant is a kind of silence in which one inwardly applies the forces that would otherwise flow into the larynx. These forces penetrate into the soul and make it inwardly active. In this way one enters into the world of inspiration.

This world of inspiration is basically a world that is separate from the world of mere imagination when the spiritual researcher enters it. It is a world through which other beings of the spiritual worlds express themselves to us. In our present cycle of time, it is the case that, as if by a law of nature, such forces are unconsciously coming more and more to expression in man as well, which otherwise only live out in the organs of the physical body and their inner activities.

When the power that a person would otherwise use to speak is released in him as if by natural necessity, this power enables him to perceive a spiritual reality, which corresponds to inspiration. This is different from perceiving images in imaginative knowledge with the eye of a true seer. This power, which is active in our moral ideas, enables us to recognize the good side of the Luciferic beings. When we can perceive with this power, which is otherwise used to speak, then we enter into the sphere for which, without all religious prejudice, the Gospel of John gives us the right understanding by saying: “In the beginning was the Word.” This “Word” is heard when one can so subdue one's own word, one's own corporeality, that the power which otherwise speaks through the larynx can be held back before the larynx, and thus be set free.

So what was the obstacle that prevented people from perceiving the word of the world from the very beginning? It was that they had to learn to speak! But in the process of further development, language will indeed become something very strange. Language has changed a great deal in the course of human development. If we go back to the original stages of language, people were still directly connected with language. Even today, in the country, we find that man lives and moves much more in it, is more closely knit to it. He still feels, when uttering a word, that there lies in it something like an image of what he sees around him. The further human evolution advances, the more abstract the word becomes; it becomes only a sign of what it is meant to express. Language becomes more and more inorganic,

increasingly arabesque-like, ever more alien to the human being. Why is this so? In this alienation of language from the inner meaning of words, those forces that were formerly used to develop language are laid bare. This in turn is connected with the fact that spiritual perception of the Christ-being will soon come, precisely because man's power to form speech is being released. In ancient times speech was closely connected with the human organism, now it is beginning to emancipate itself from it. Thus the power to form speech is being released and will be used for the perception of the World Word, the spiritual Christ.

Thus we have considered two sides of human nature; how man, on the one hand, uses the luciferic power in the free creation of moral ideals, and how, on the other hand, through the release of the speech-forming power – through something, therefore, that he shares with all mankind, since these powers are released within all mankind – he attains the power to perceive the Christ spiritually. We can penetrate to the Christ impulse because we are members of the whole human race. To the same extent that language becomes more and more abstract and the power of speech emancipates itself from the organism in human nature, man prepares himself to truly perceive the spiritual Christ. This is the other side of human evolution. While man has inwardly become freer through the influence of Lucifer, in that the latter gave him the possibility of forming his moral ideas, he will, as through an external force, acquire for himself the ability to connect with the Christ. The Christ will approach man in such a way that He will pour out His nature as the epitome of moral ideas over the whole evolution of mankind. When the Christ-being thus becomes known to all mankind, the Christ-entity will have in itself something of the nature of moral motives. And here we touch on something that shows how anthroposophy can rise to a level where the highest sense of truth can unite with the noblest moral motives. In my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom', which was completed twenty years ago, I tried to show that real freedom is present in the human soul when a person follows the moral motives that he has raised to consciousness. What is the nature of these moral motives? They do not force; we follow them without compulsion. No motive is moral that forces. Motives that we follow out of compulsion are brought to us from the outside world. Moral motives can be recognized by the fact that we cannot follow them either. We must let their value penetrate us in a free way. Man only professes the ethical-moral motives in a truly moral way when he goes to them, when they do not impose themselves on him. That is the characteristic of moral motives. The Christ, when humanity recognizes Him in spirit, will have this in common with ethical motives: that one can also deny Him, that He forces no one to acknowledge Him. The old gods still worked on other powers of the human soul. They still touched man where he had not yet raised himself to consciousness. But the Christ will consciously appear to man in his spirituality to the extent that man has freed himself in consciousness and will have risen to him. He will be there for all who want to recognize him, without forcing anyone to acknowledge him. He will appear before humanity in such a way that people can follow Him freely. Just as a moral motive does not force a person, but leaves him free to follow this motive or not, so it will also be with the Christ-Being: a person must be fully aware of the value of this Christ-Being if he wants to follow it. In the future, the recognition of the Christ-being will be at the same time a free deed of the soul for every single human being. This will be the infinitely significant fact that we may struggle to a truth that does not force us to recognize it, but that we only recognize when we see its full value.

Thus, the idea that anthroposophy gives us of Christianity — which will only come into its true form — will indeed bring a truth to people that is, in the most eminent sense, a free truth at the same time. The following, given in pictorial form, can be added to this, which can then be further understood through meditation. The same word has been used twice in the development of humanity: Once at the temptation in Paradise, when Lucifer said to man: “You will be like the gods; your eyes shall be opened.” This is the pictorial expression for the Luciferic impulse. With it, Lucifer poured spirituality into the lower nature of man and in return gave man the possibility of attaining inner freedom through moral motives. And a second time it was said, now by the Christ: Are you not gods? The same Word! From this it is evident that it is not only the content of a word that is important, but the essence that a word expresses, the way in which a word is spoken. There we see the necessary connection between the act of Lucifer and the act of the Christ, also expressed in a figurative way, as the religious documents tend to do.

Lucifer is the bringer of personal freedom for the individual human being; Christ is the bearer of freedom for the whole human race, for all humanity on earth. That is the significance of anthroposophy: it teaches us that the recognition of the Christ-being will take place in such a way that it is up to the individual to recognize the Christ or not, just as it is up to the individual not to be moral.

The Christ should be a free truth for the human soul. All other truths, which belong to all mankind, constrain us. But there are still truths in the bosom of the world that are connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, the recognition of which must be free acts of the human being and which ennoble and refine this human being by being recognized by the human being of his or her own free will. Thus does free truth, free concrete truth, reach so deeply into the developing nature of man on earth. It shows us how truth, won in freedom, belongs to the fundamental laws of human evolution.

It has been shown to us how freedom could only come into human development through the influence of Lucifer, and that man first had to rise to the truth with the help of this Luciferic impulse. In this way, humanity was still compelled to the truth; one could only recognize the truth through compulsion. But man can see this as an ideal for the future, that he can develop in such a way towards freedom and recognize truths in a free way, as set out here. Much could be said about anthroposophy, but it would be difficult to find anything more intimately connected with our need for freedom than the above statement about free truth. It must speak in the most profound and noble way to what lies at the core of our human destiny.

We can only truly grasp what it means to be human on earth when we realize what stands before us as a conscious ideal: the ideal of freedom and truth, of truth that will create an outer body for itself in freedom.

It was necessary to speak to you about such ideas of freedom at the very moment when we have won our own liberation as an Anthroposophical Society from fetters that had become impossible for us, in order to use these ideas to give a feeling-based indication of the way one should think in a society that makes such ideals the goal of its togetherness.

Now I would like to say to you in the warmest way – as all friends who have come together with our Swedish friends here from out of town will feel with me – how deeply satisfying it is, and even more deeply satisfying at the end of our event, that here in this country, what has been presented here has met with such a deep, fundamental understanding, that such a fundamental understanding has developed here for what we want with the founding of the Anthroposophical Society. And truly, not to fight against anything, but to serve in the right way our freely conceived anthroposophical ideal, may this be chosen as a farewell word. May the society that you have founded among yourselves contribute much more work and achievement to what we were able to discuss today in our lecture on the freedom of the soul in the light of spiritual scientific knowledge. May that which is already there, waiting and hoping, flow down from the spiritual worlds through this work, and may it surely come true for us humans when our work is done, which will be so tremendously significant for the development of humanity's spiritual striving. May this be the work of this branch in particular! With these words, I would like to have said my farewell to you.

What I am going to say today is intended to deal with primary and secondary education, and to deal with it in such a way that what is of essential value can be useful for the present time, the grave times, in which we are now living. I believe you will have seen for yourselves that what could be given only as outline in my book The Threefold Commonwealth has many deep contributing factors—indeed very many, if we take into consideration all that arises from the new shaping of the world. So that actually in everything that must be said on this subject, preeminently where fresh activity has to be aroused, only guiding lines can be given to begin with instead of anything of an exhaustive nature.

When we look at the times in which we are living—and we need to do so for we have to understand them—it must constantly strike us what a gulf there is between what must be called a declining culture and a culture that may be described as chaotic, but all the same on the up-grade. I expressly draw attention to the fact that today I am wanting to deal with a special aspect of my subject, and therefore ask you to take it in connection with the lectures as a whole, once they are brought to completion.

I should like to start by drawing your attention to something that is clearly noticeable, namely, how the culture based on bourgeois social contract is in rapid decline, whereas we are witnessing the dawn of another culture based on what is largely not understood and represented by the proletariat. If all this is to be understood—it can be felt without being understood but will then lack clarity—we must grasp it in its symptoms. Symptoms are always a matter of detail; I ask you to remember this in what I am saying today. I shall naturally be forced by the subject itself to take details out of their context, but I shall take pains so to shape this symptomatology that it will not be able to work in the way of agitators or demagogues, but will really be shaped by the relevant circumstances. We may meet with much misunderstanding in this direction today, but that we shall have to risk.

Now in the course of years I have often asked you to bear in mind that, on the ground of the world-outlook represented here, it is perfectly possible to be a real upholder and defender of the modern natural scientific approach to the world. You know how frequently I have referred to all that can be said in defense of this approach! At the same time, however, I have never failed to point out what a fearful counterpart it has. Quite recently I reminded you that this can be seen at once when anyone, as a result of what we call here the symptomatic method of study, points to some particularly telling example and goes to work quite empirically. Now in another connection I have had to sing the praises of a recent remarkable work by the outstanding biologist Oskar Hertwig, Das werden der Organismen—Eine Wiederlegung der Darwinischen Zufallstheorie. Then, to avoid misunderstanding after the publication of a second book of his, I have had to remark how this man has followed up a really great book on natural science with a quite inferior work on social conditions. This is a fact fraught with meaning for the present time. It shows that even on the excellent foundation of the natural scientific approach to the world, what is pre-eminently necessary for an understanding of the present times cannot arise, namely, knowledge of the social impulses existing in our age. I want today to give you another example to bring home to you with greater emphasis how, on the one hand, bourgeois culture is on the decline and can be saved only in a certain way; how, on the other hand, there exists something that is on the ascent, something that must be carefully tended with understanding and judgment if it is to be a sarting point for the culture of the future.

Now I have before me a book that is a symptomatic and typical product of the declining bourgeoisie. It appeared immediately after the world war with the somewhat pretentious title The Light Bearer. This light bearer is admirably adapted to spread darkness over everything which today is most necessary for social culture and its spiritual foundation. A remarkable community of people have foregathered, who in separate articles have written remarkable things about a so-called rebuilding of the social organism. Naturally I can quote only certain passages from this rather voluminous work. To begin with we have a scientist named Jakob von Uexkull, really a good typical scientist who—and this is the important point—has not only a certain knowledge of natural science, is not merely well versed in it, but in his research work is recognised as an accomplished scientist of the day. He feels impelled, however, like others bred in the scientific tradition, to treat us to his views upon organising the world socially. He has learnt about the 'cell-state' as the organism is often called in scientific circles. He has certainly learnt to develop his mind, with which he then observes the social life. I want to refer you just to a few instances from which you may be able to see how this man, not from his knowledge of natural science but as a result of his scientific method of thinking—really quite correct but wholly absurd for practical life—how he now looks at the structure of modern society: he turns to the social organism, to the natural scientific organism, the organism as it is in nature, and finds that "the harmony in a natural organism can at times be disturbed by processes of disease"—and referring to the social organism goes on to say:

“All harmony can be disturbed through disease. We call the most terrible disease of the human body cancer. Its characteristic is the unrestrained activity of the protoplasm which, without considering the preservation of the organs, goes on producing more and more protoplasmic cells. These press upon the bodily structure; they cannot, however, fulfil any function themselves for they are lacking in structure.

“We recognise the same disease in the human community at large when the people's motto: liberty, equality, fraternity, replaces the motto of the state: compulsion, diversity, subordination.”

Now here you have a typical scientific thinker. He looks upon it as a cancerous disease when the impulse towards liberty, equality and fraternity arises out of the people. In place of freedom he wants to put compulsion, in place of equality, diversity, in place of fraternity, subordination. This is what from the 'cell-state' he has learnt to adopt as his method of viewing things, and which he then applies to the social organism. The rest of what he puts forward too is not without significance when considered from the symptomalogical point of view. He goes so far as to find something in the social organism that corresponds in the natural organism to the circulation of the blood, not at all in the way I have described it in various lectures, but as he himself pictures it. He goes to the length of looking upon gold as blood circulating in the social organism and says: “Gold possesses the faculty of circulating independently of commodities, finally reaching the collecting centres represented by the great banks (Gold heart)”. Thus this scientist seeks a heart for his social organism and finds it in the collecting centres of the great banks, “which can exercise an overwhelming influence on the movements of both gold and commodities”.

Now I particularly stress that I have no intention of making fun of anything here. I want just to let you see how a man, who from this point of view has the courage to think things out to their logical conclusion, is actually obliged to think. If today many people deceive themselves about our having during the last three or four centuries brought evolution to the point of making this kind of thinking quite intelligible, then it is evident that these people are asleep in their souls, that they give themselves up to cultural narcotics which prevent their looking with wide awake souls at what is concealed in bourgeois culture. For this reason I have shown you a symptom that sheds light on this light bearer, sheds light on the elements of present-day culture, in so far as, out of the scientific method of thinking, this culture understands the social life. In a further examnple I want to show you how different a result we experience from what we meet within the spiritual sphere.

Among those belonging to the society just mentioned there is a man with a more spiritual bent, by name Friedrich Niebergall. Now this Friedrich Niebergall is quoted because his attitude towards certain things we consider of value is most sympathetic. But I should like to say here that what matters is the nature of the sympathetic attitude with which from such a side certain matters are approached. If we know this, and if we are not mere egoists but understand the great social impulses, perhaps we do not value this sympathetic attitude very highly; and it would be good if in these matters we were not to give ourselves up to illusion. We know, some of us at least could know, that what we carry on here and call spiritual science, or anthroposophy, we have for some time considered to be the true spiritual foundation of what today is on the ascent. Here, it is true, extremes meet; and I have always been forced to experience how some of those very people who participate in our anthroposophical endeavors turn to other movements they feel to be closely akin, but which differ from our endeavors in that they belong to the worst phenomena of the bourgeois decline, whereas spiritual science has from the first been strongly opposed to all that is behind this. So we find confused together in a certain Johannes Müller, who has no power of discriminating the different streams—like Niebergall for example—we find in this Johannes Müller a phenomenon showing just the characteristics of our decadent culture; and on the other hand (you know I do not say these things out of mere foolishness) you find mention of my name. It is true that all kinds of elegant things, most elegant things, are said about what I try to accomplish. You must, however, realise how in all that is put forward in anthroposophy my every effort is directed towards taxing man's understanding and fighting in a pronounced way against anything in the way of nebulous mysticism or so-called mystic theosophy. This could be done only by approaching the highest spheres of knowledge with clear insight, lucid ideas, which will be striven for when through natural science we have learnt, not the natural scientific outlook of today, but true thinking. After the gentleman in question has declared how fine much of anthroposophy is, he adds: “Round this basis of practical truth there then springs forth a confused medley of alleged knowledge concerning the life of the soul, of mankind and of the cosmos—as once was the case in the all-embracing gnostic systems offered out of the secret wisdom of the East to an age seeking in like manner inner depths and peace of soul.” It is not possible to say anything less to the point than this. For the fact that the author describes this as confused nonsense, a confused medley, rests solely on his lacking the will to adopt the mathematical method of our spiritual science. This is generally the case with those wishing to gain conceptions from a knowledge that is on the decline. The result of disciplining inner experience by mathematical method appears to this author therefore to be a confused medley. But this conf used medley that brings into the matter mathematical clarity, perhaps indeed mathematical dryness, is what is essential, for it preserves what is meant to be pursued here from all fantastic mysticism, all nebulous theosophy. Without this so-called confused medley there can be no real foundation for the future life of spirit. It is true that by reason of our social conditions there had to be a struggle to make it possible for spiritual science to be carried on in the very modest dimensions it has reached today. We had to struggle with what very often appears as a result of most people—who now have time, and nothing but time, for the affairs of spiritual science—still having those old habits of thinking and perceiving which are on the decline. Hence, we have to struggle so hard against what easily spreads in a circle such as ours, namely, sectarianism, which naturally is the very opposite of what is meant to be cultivated here, and against every kind of personal wrangling which, it goes without saying, leads to the systematic slandering that has flourished so exuberantly on the soil of this movement.

Now whoever studies the life of spirit today from symptoms such as these will soon come to the point of saying: What is particularly needed in the sphere of spiritual endeavour is a return to original sources. The clamor for a new form of social life is always heard at a time when people harbor the most widespread anti-social impulses and anti-social instincts. These anti-social impulses and instincts are particularly evident in people's private intercourse. They are to be seen in what men give or do not give—to each other. They are to be seen in the characteristic way people ignore the thoughts of others, talk others down, and finally pass them by. In our day the instinctive capacity really to understand the people we meet is extraordinarily rare. The following also is a disappearing phenomenon—the possibility of people nowadays being convinced of anything unconnected with their social status, education or birth. Today people have the most beautiful thoughts, but it is very difficult for them to be enthusiastic about anything. In thought they pass by all that is best, and this is a deeply rooted characteristic of our age. As consequence of this fact—you know that recently I have talked of logic based on fact as being important for the present time in contrast to mere logic of thought—as consequence of this a longing exists in men today to have recourse to authority and the pronouncements of feeling rather than by their own inner activity to work through to things. Those today who talk a great deal about freedom from authority are the very people who, at heart, believe in it most firmly and long to submit themselves to it. Thus we see, only it is generally unnoticed because most people are asleep, a rather questionable tendency among those who, without finding any way out of it, are involved in this cultural decline, namely the tendency to sink back into the bosom of the old Catholic Church. Were people to realise what lies in this tendency to return to the Catholic Church they would be much astonished. Under the present conditions, if this tendency were to increase, at no very distant date we should have to witness a mighty swing over to the bosom of the Catholic Church by masses of the people. Whoever is able to observe the special features of our present culture knows that this is threatening us.

Now whence does all this arise? Here I must draw your attention to an essential phenomenon of our present social life. The special feature of what in the last few centuries has increased to ever wider dimensions, and will increase further in those lands which will preserve their civilisations throughout the present chaos—this special feature is the technical coloring of the culture, the particular technical shade taken on by the culture of recent times. Were I to speak exhaustively on this subject, I should have to point in detail to all that now is referred to just in passing; and one day I shall do so. This technical culture has indeed one quite definite quality; this culture in its nature is through and through altruistic. In other words there is only one favourable way for technical accomplishments to be wide­spread, namely, when the men actively engaged in them in contrast to egoism, develop altruism. Technical culture makes it increasingly necessary—and those who are able to observe these things see the necessity on every fresh advance of technical culture—for work organised on a technical basis to be entirely free from egoism. In contrast to this there has developed at the same time what has had its origin in capitalism, which must not necessarily be linked to technical culture or remain so linked. Capitalism, when it is private capitalism, cannot work other than egoistically, for its very being consists in egoistic activity. Thus in recent times two streams meet in diametrical opposition to one another: modern technical life which calls upon men to be free from egoism, and, coming from the past, private capitalism, which can prosper only by the assertion of egoistic impulse. This is what has made its way into our present situation, and the only means of extricating ourselves is to have a life of spirit which has the courage to break away from the old traditions.

Now today there are many people concerned with the problems of future primary and secondary education, school education, and of professional training for human beings. Especially when we are studying the question of primary and secondary education we must say to these people: Well and good, but with the best will in the world, can you interest people at large in primary and secondary education if you do nothing to change present conditions of education and matters of the spirit? Have you the material for the work? What actually are you able to do? With your principles—perhaps socialistic in a good sense—you may be able to found schools for a great mass of the people and to found institutions for their higher education. You may organise everything of this kind to which your good will impels you. But have you the material really to organise for the benefit of the people what you want with good will to extend to them? You tell us that you found libraries, theatres, concert halls, exhibitions, lecture courses, and polytechnics. But the question must arise: What books do you have in your libraries? What kind of science is dealt with in your lectures? You place on your library shelves those very books which belong to the bourgeois culture that is on the decline; you hand over the scientific education in the polytechnics to men who are products of that bourgeois culture. You give the nature of education new forms, but into these new forms you cast what you have absorbed of the old. For instance you say: For a long time we have been trying to give primary and secondary education a democratic form; up to now the various states have been against this for they want to educate men to be good civil servants.—True you are opposed to this education of good civil servants; you allow the people to be educated by them, however, for up to now you have nothing else in mind but these civil servants whose books are on the shelves of your libraries, whose scientific method of thinking you propagate by means of your lectures and whose habits of thinking permeate your colleges.—You see from this that in these serious times the matter must be taken far more profoundly than it generally is today.

Now let us just look at certain details to have at least something clear before us. We will begin with what we may call primary and secondary education. Under this heading I include everything that can be given to the human being when he has outgrown the education to be acquired in his family, when to this must be added the education and instruction obtained at school. Those who know the nature of man are clear that school education should never be a factor in the evolution of the human being until approximately the change of teeth has taken place. This is just as much a scientific law as any other. Were people to be guided by the real nature of human beings instead of by mere dummies, they would make it a regulation that school instruction should not begin till after the change of teeth. But the important question is the principles upon which this school instruction of children is to be based. Here we must have in mind that whoever is able to bring his thoughts and efforts into harmony with the ascending cultural evolution can really do nothing today bµt recognise, as inherent in the principles holding good in school education and instruction, what lies in the nature of the human being himself. Knowledge of human nature from the change of teeth until puberty must underlie any principles in what we call primary and secondary education. From this, and from a great deal of the same nature, you will realise that, if we take this as our basis, the result will be the same education for everyone; for obviously the laws which hold good in human evolution between approximately the seventh and fifteenth years are the same for all human beings. The only question we need answer concerning education and instruction is: To what point have we to bring human beings by the time they reach their fifteenth year? This alone may be called thinking in terms of primary and secondary education. At the same time this alone is thinking in a modern way about the nature of instruction. The consequence of this today will be that we shall no longer ignore the necessity of making an absolute break w1th the old school system, that we shall have in all earnest to set to work on organising what, during the years specified, is to be given to children in accordance with the evolution of the growing human being. Then a certain basis will have to be created—something that , when social goodwill exists , will not be a nebulous idea for the future but something practical which can be immediately acted upon. The basis for this will have to be created in the first place by a complete change in the whole nature of examination and instruction of the teacher himself. When today the teacher is examined, this is often done merely to verify whether he knows something that, if he is at all clever and doesn't know it, he can read up in a text book. In the examination of teachers this can be entirely omitted, but with it will go the greater part of such examinations in their present form. In those that will take their place the object will be to discover whether the man, who has to do with the education and instruction of the developing human being, can establish with him a personally active and profitable relation; whether he is able to penetrate with his whole mentality—to use a word much in fashion—into the soul of the growing human being, into his very nature. Then the teacher will not just teach reading, arithmetic or drawing; he will be fit to become a real moulder of the developing human being.

Thereupon, from all future examinations, which will take a very different form from their present one, it will be easy to discover if the school staff are really creative in this sense. For this means that the teacher will know: I must help this pupil in some particular way if he is to learn to think; another in another way if he is to unfold his world of feeling.—For the world of feeling is intimately bound up with the world of memory, a thing few people know today, most modern professors .being the worst possible psychologists . The teacher must know what to give to his pupil if the will is to unfold in such a way that the seeds, sown between his seventh and fifteenth years, may bring about the strengthening of the will for the whole of his life. The cultivation of will is brought about when everything that has to do with practical physical exercises and artistic pursuits is adapted to the developing being. Whoever is a teacher of those who are in process of development will concentrate all his effort on enabling the human being to become man. In this way he will discover how to utilise all that is conventionally called human culture—speaking, reading and writing. All this can best be utilised in the years between seven and fifteen for the development of thinking. However strange it may seem, thinking is the most external thing in man, and it must be developed on wha tever establishes us in the social organism. Consider how the human being on coming into the world through birth lacks any propensity towards reading and writing and how these belong to his life as a member of a community. Thus, for the development of thinking we must, comparatively early, have good instruction in languages, naturally not in what was spoken formerly but in languages as used today by the civilised peoples with whom we have contact. This efficient teaching in languages would naturally not consist in teaching the grammatical anomalies as is done today in the grammar school; it must be started in the lowest classes and continued. It will be important too that teaching should be given in a conscious way to unfold the feeling and the memory bound up with it. Whereas everything relating to arithmetic and geography—of which children can absorb an extraordinary amount when it is given them rightly—stands between what has to do with thinking and what has to do with feeling, everything taken into the memory has more to do with pure feeling, for instance, the history that is taught, the myths and legends that are told. I can only touch on these things.

But it is also necessary in these first years to give particular attention to the cultivation of will. Here it is a matter of physical exercises and artistic training. Something entirely new will be needed for this in these early years. A beginning has been made in what we call eurythmy. Today we witness a great deal of physical culture that is decadent and belongs to the past; it pleases many people. In its place we shall put something that so far we have had occasion to show only to the employees of the Waldorf—Astoria factory through the sympathetic help of our good Herr Molt; we shall put what—if it is given to the growing human being instead of the present gymnastics—promotes culture in both body and soul. It can so develop the will that the effect remains throughout life, whereas cultivation of the will by any other means causes a weakening of it when vicissitudes and various experiences are met with in the course of life. In this sphere particularly, however, we shall have to go to work with common sense. In the way instruction is given, combinations will have to be made little dreamt of today; for instance drawing will go hand-in-hand with geography. It would be of the greatest importance for the growing pupil to have really intelligent lessons in drawing; during these lessons he would be led to draw the globe from various sides, to draw the mountains and rivers of the earth in their relation to one another, then to turn to astronomy and to draw the planetary system. It goes without saying that this would have to be introduced at the right age, not for the seven-year-olds but certainly before they reached fifteen, perhaps from the twelfth year onwards, when if done in the right way, it would work on growing youth very beneficially.

What in a didactic and pedagogical way I have just now been discussing concerning primary and secondary education will, in accordance with the logic of facts, have a quite definite consequence, namely that nothing will play a part in teaching that is not in one form or another retained for the whole of life. Today, as a rule, only what is included among the faculties plays its part rightly—what is done by learning to read is concentrated in the faculty of reading, what is done in learning to count is concentrated in the faculty of arithmetic. But just think how it is when we come to things having rather to do with feeling and memory. In this sphere children today learn a great deal only to forget it, only to be without it for the rest of life. In future, stress must be laid on this—that everything given to a child will remain with him for life.

We should then come to the question: What is to be done with the human being when having finished with the primary and secondary school he goes out into life? Here it is important that everything unsound in the old life of spirit should be overcome, that at least where education is concerned the terrible cleft made by class distinction should be abolished.

Now the Greeks, even the Romans, were able to devise for themselves an education that had its roots in their life, that was bound up with their way of life. In our time we have nothing which binds us in our most important years with our quite different mode off living. Many people, however, who later take up positions of authority, learn today what was learnt by the Greeks and Romans, and thus become divorced from life today; added to which this is spiritually the most uneconomical thing possible. Besides, we are today at a point in human evolution—if people only knew it—when it is quite unnecessary for preserving our relation to antiquity that we should be brought up in their ideas. What people in general need of the old has for a long time been incorporated in our culture, in such a way that we can absorb it without years of training in an atmosphere foreign to us. What we should imbibe of Greek and Roman culture can be improved upon, and this has also been the case; but that is a matter for scholars and has nothing to do with general social education. What is to be imbibed from antiquity for our general social education, however, has been brought to such a stage through the work of great minds in the past, and is so much in our midst, that if we rightly absorb what is there for us we have no need to learn Greek and Latin to deepen our knowledge of antiquity; it is not in the least essential and is no help at all for the important things in life. I recall how, to avoid misunderstandings, I found it necessary to say that, though Herr Wilamowitz is most certainly a Greek scholar of outstanding merit, he has nevertheless translated the Greek plays in a way that is really atrocious; but, of course, these translations have been acclaimed by both the press and scholars. Today we must learn to let people participate in life; and if we organise education so that people are able to participate in life, at the same time setting to work on education economically, you will find that we are really able to help human beings to a living culture. This, too, will enable anyone with a bent towards handicraft to take advantage of the education for life that begins about the fourteenth year. A possibility must be created for those who early show a bent towards handicraft or craftsman ship to be able to participate in what leads to a conception of life. In future, pupils who have not reached their twenty-first year should never be offered any knowledge that is the result of scientific research and comes from scientific specialisation. In our day, only what has been thoroughly worked out ought to have a place in instruction; then we can go to work in an out-and-out economic way. We must, however, have a clear concept of what is meant by economy in didactic and pedagogical matters. Above all we should not be lazy if we want to work in a way that is economic from the pedagogical point of view. I have often drawn your attention to something personally experienced by me. A boy of ten who was rather undeveloped was once given over into my charge, and through pedagogical economy I was enabled to let him absorb in two years what he had lacked up to his eleventh year, when he was still incapable of anything at all. This was possible only by taking into account both his bodily and his soul nature in such a way that instruction could proceed in the most economical way conceivable. This was often done by my spending three hours myself in preparation, so as in a half-hour or even in a quarter to give to the boy instruction that would otherwise have taken hours—this being necessary for his physical condition. If this is considered from the social point of view, people might say that I was obliged in this instance to give all the care to a single boy that might have been given to three others who would not have had to be treated in this way. But imagine we had a social educational system that was reasonable, it would then be possible for a whole collection of such pupils to be dealt with, for it makes no difference in this case whether we have to deal with one or fourteen boys. I should not complain about the number of pupils in the school, but this lack of complaint is connected with the principle of economy in instruction. It must be realised, however, that up to his fourteenth year the pupil has no judgment; and if judgment is asked of him this has a destructive effect on the brain. The modern calculating machine which gives judgment the place of memorising and calculating is a gross educational error; it destroys the human brain, makes it decadent. Human judgment can be cultivated only from and after the fourteenth year when those things requiring judgment must be introduced into the curriculum. Then all that is related, for example, to the grasping of reality through logic can be begun. When in future the carpenter or mechanic sits side-by-side in school or college with anyone studying to be a teacher, the result will certainly be a specialisation but at the same time one education for all; but included in this one education will be everything necessary for life. If this were not included matters would become socially worse than they are at present. All instruction must give knowledge that is necessary for life. During the ages from fifteen to twenty everything to do with agriculture, trade, industry, commerce will have to be learnt. No one should go through these years without acquiring some idea of what takes place in farming, commerce and industry. These subjects will be given a place as branches of knowledge infinitely more necessary than much of the rubbish which constitutes the present curriculum during these years. Then too during these years all those subjects will be introduced which I would call world affairs, historical and geographical subjects, everything concerned with nature knowledge—but all this in relation to the human being, so that man will learn to know man from his knowledge of the world as a whole.

Now among human beings who receive instruction of this kind will be those who, driven by social conditions to become workers in a spiritual sense, can be educated in every possible sphere at schools specially organised for such students. The institutions where people today are given professional training are run with a terrible lack of economy. I know that many people will not admit it but there is this lack of economy; above all validity is ascribed to the most curious conceptions belonging to the world-outlook that is on the decline. Even in my time I have experienced this—people have begun to press where it is a question in the universities of historical and literary subjects, for fewer lectures and more "seminars"; today we still hear it said that lectures should be given as little space as possible on the programme but seminars encouraged. One knows these seminars. Faithful followers of a university tutor gather together and learn strictly in accordance with the ideas of this tutor to work scientifically. They do their work under his coaching and the results of the coaching are forever visible. It is altogether another matter if a man, in the years when he should be learning a profession, goes of his own free will to a course of intelligent lectures, and then has the opportunity of embarking upon his own free exposition—though certainly this would be connected with what the lectures contained. Practical application can certainly be included in the programme but this exaggerated emphasis on seminars must be stopped. That is just an undesirable product of the second half of the nineteenth century, when the emphasis was on the drilling of human beings rather than on leaving them to develop freely.

Now when we are discussing this stage in education it must be said that a certain educational groundwork ought to be the same for everyone, whether he is destined to be a doctor, a lawyer or a teacher; that is one aspect of the matter; in addition to this, everyone must receive what contributes to the general culture of man, whether he is to become a doctor, a machine maker, architect, chemist or engineer; he must be given the opportunity of receiving general culture, whether he is to work with his hands or his head. Today little thought is given to this, though certainly in some places of higher education many things are better than they were. When I was at the Technical College in Vienna a Professor was giving lectures on general history. Each term he started to give his general history; after three or perhaps five lectures he ceased—there was no longer anyone there. Then, at this college, there was a Professor of history of literature . Thus there were the means to receive what was universally human besides specialised subjects. To these lectures on the history of literature, which included exercises in rhetoric and instruction on how to lecture, like those given, for example, by hand—to these lectures I always had to drag someone else, for they were held only if there was an audience of two. They could be kept going, therefore, only by a second being dragged in, and this was someone different practically every time. Except for this, the only attempt to provide students with the information they needed about conditions in life was by lectures on constitutional law or statistics. As I said, these things have improved; what has not improved is the driving force that should exist in our whole social life. This will improve, however, when there is a possibility for all that constitutes the universally human not to be made intelligible only to those with a definite professional view but intelligible from a universally human aspect. I have often been surprised how distorted my lectures on anthroposophy have been by my audience; for if they had taken them in a positive way they could have said: we won't bother about the anthroposophy in these lectures, but what is said about natural science, which receives great praise when coming from the ordinary natural philosopher—that is enough for us. For as you all know these lectures are always interspersed with general information about nature. But there are many people who are not interested in taking things from a positive angle, preferring to distort what they have no wish to accept. What they refused to accept, by the very way in which the thoughts were formed, by the whole mode of treatment, as well as the necessary interspersing of natural science, could be taken as contributing to universal human knowledge, which the manual worker could receive just as well as the scholar, and which was also generally intelligible as natural science. Just consider other endeavors towards a world-outlook. Do you imagine that in monistic gatherings, for instance, people can understand anything if they have not a scientific background? No, and if they have not, they merely gossip. What here we pursue as anthroposophy is something that can change all knowledge of nature, and even of history, so that everyone will be able to understand them. Just think how intelligible to everyone what I have shown to be a great leap historically in the middle of the fifteenth century can be. That, I think, is intelligible to everyone. But it is the groundwork without which there can be no understanding at all of the whole social movement in our time. This social movement is not understood because people do not know how mankind has developed since the middle of the fifteenth century. When these things are mentioned people come forward and declare: Nature does not make leaps, so you are wrong to assume there was such a thing in the fifteenth century. This foolish proposition that nature never makes a leap is always being harped upon. Nature continually makes leaps; it is a leap from the green leaf of a plant to the sepal which has a different form—another leap from sepal to petal. It is so too in the evolution of man's life. Whoever does not teach the history that rests on senseless conventional untruth, but on what has really happened, knows that in the fifteenth century men became different in the finer element of their constitution from what they were before, and that what is brought about today is the development of what they have grasped in the centre of their being. If there is a desire to understand the present social movement, laws of this kind in historical evolution will have to be recognised. You have only to call to mind the way in which matters here are dealt with and you will say: To understand all this no special knowledge is necessary; there is no need to be a man of culture; everyone can understand it. This indeed will be what is demanded in the future—that no philosophies or world-conceptions should be propagated which can be understood only by reason of a form of education belonging to a certain class. Take up any philosophical work today, for example, by Eucken or Paulsen, or anyone else you want information about, take up one of those dreadful works on psychology by university professors—you will soon drop it again; for those who are not specially trained in the particular subject do not understand the language used. This is something that can be set right only by universal education, when the whole nature of education and instruction will be absolutely changed in the way I have tried to indicate today.

You see, therefore, that in this sphere too we can say: here we have a big settling-up—not a small one. What is necessary is the development of social impulses or, rather, social intincts, through instruction, through education, so that people do not pass by one another. Then they will understand each other so that a practical living relation is develcped—for nowadays the teacher passes his pupil by, the pupil passes his teacher. This can happen only if we run our pen through what is old—which can be done. The facts of the case do not prevent this; it all goes back to human prejudice. People cannot believe that things can be done in a new way; they are terrified that their life of spirit may lose what was of value in the old way. You have no idea how anxious they are on this score. Naturally they are unable to take all this in; for instance they cannot see all the possibilities created by having an instruction that is economical. I have often told you that provided this is done at the right age it is possible from the beginning of geometry—the straight line and the angle—up to what used to be called the pons a sinorum, the Pythagorean theorem. And on my attempting this you should have seen the joy of the youngsters when, after three or four hours work, the theorem of Pythagoras dawned upon them. Only think what a lot of rubbish has to be gone through today before young people arrive at this theorem. What matters is the enormous amount of mental work wasted, which has its effects in later life; it sends its rays into the whole of life, right into its most practical spheres. Today it is necessary for people to come to a decision in these matters—fundamentally to re-organise their way of thinking. Otherwise—well, otherwise we simply sink deeper into decline and never find the path upwards.

Since it has been requested that I speak about the therapeutic principles that have grown out of the anthroposophical world view on one of our evenings, I am very happy to comply with this request, but it is difficult to speak briefly about this subject in particular. It is difficult because the subject is an extremely broad one and it is hardly possible to give a proper idea of the essentials in a very short lecture, which can only be aphoristic. On the other hand, certain considerations that have to be made are somewhat remote from general human consciousness. Nevertheless, I will try to explain the things that are important as generally as possible this evening.

The fact that there is also a medical current within the anthroposophical movement certainly does not stem from the fact that we as anthroposophists want to be everywhere and want to poke our noses into everything. That is certainly not the case. But as the Anthroposophical movement sought to make its way in the world, physicians also joined the movement, physicians who were seriously striving, and a large, relatively large number of such physicians had come to a more or less clear awareness of how shaky the views of today's officially accepted medicine actually are, and how the foundations for the actual understanding of disease processes and their healing are often lacking.

Official science lacks these foundations because what today claims validity, scientific validity, actually only wants to rely on the natural science that is generally used today. And this natural science, in turn, only believes it is walking securely with what it can determine in a mechanical, physical or chemical way in external nature. And it then applies what it finds through physics and chemistry about external natural processes to where it wants to come to an understanding of the human being. But even if a kind of concentration, microcosmic concentration of all world processes, is contained in the human being, the external physical and chemical processes in the human organism itself are never present in the form in which they take place outside in nature. Man takes up into himself the substances of the earth, which are not merely passive substances, but which are actually always imbued with natural processes and phenomena. A substance only appears on the surface to be something that is at rest. In reality, everything in the substance is alive and in motion. And so man also takes up into his organism these processes, this weaving and living, as they take place chemically and physically in nature, but he transforms it immediately in his organism, he makes it into something else in his organism.

What becomes of the natural processes in the human organism can only be understood by truly and truly observing human beings. But today's natural science, by wanting to rely solely on the physical and chemical, actually excludes from its field of study what actually takes place in the human being as human, and also, for example, in the physical body of the human being as human. For nothing takes place in the physical body that is not at the same time influenced by etheric, astral or ego processes. But because natural science completely disregards these ego processes, these astral processes, this etheric life and weaving, it does not actually get anywhere near the human being. Therefore, this natural science cannot really look into the human interior in such a way that it can clearly see how the external chemical and physical processes in the human being then continue to work, how they continue to work in the healthy person, and how they continue to work in the sick person.

But how can one judge the effect of a remedy in the right way if one cannot understand how some natural thing that we introduce into the organism, or with which we treat the organism, continues to work in the human organism.

And so we can say that the greatest conceivable progress in the medical field in modern times has actually only been made in the field of surgery, where it is a matter of external, one might say mechanical, handling.

On the other hand, in the field of actual therapy – not in my opinion, but precisely in the opinion of those doctors who have become aware of all this – there is great confusion because one cannot see the connection between any natural thing and its effect on the disease if one actually excludes the human being from scientific observation due to one's particular view of natural science.

Now, since anthroposophy is based precisely on getting to know the human being in his innermost being, both insofar as he is a supersensible being and insofar as he is a sensual being, knowledge can also be gained from anthroposophy about treating people with these or those natural remedies in the event of illness.

In fact, we are already faced with a certain limit to our knowledge in medicine if we only ask about the actual nature of the disease. What is the disease? Based on today's scientific knowledge, this question: What is the disease? — cannot be answered at all. Because, according to these scientific views, what is the sum of all the processes that take place in a healthy person? From the head, from the outermost end of the head to the last end of the toes on the foot, these are the natural processes. But what then are the processes that take place in the liver, kidneys, head, heart, wherever, during an illness? They are natural processes. Everything that is a healthy process is a natural process; everything that is a disease process is also a natural process. Why is it that, under the one kind of process, the human being is healthy and under the other kind of process, he is sick?

The point is that one does not speak in generalities, speaking so nebulously: Well, the healthy natural processes are normal, the unhealthy natural processes are not normal. — There really comes “in due time”, when one knows nothing, “a word”!

The problem is that if you only apply general natural science, as is common today, you approach the human being in such a way that you prefer not to approach the living human being at all, but rather the corpse. You take some piece of the organism here or there and imagine what healthy or diseased natural processes are taking place within it. And so you don't really care whether you take tissue from the head or the liver or the big toe or something like that. Everything can be traced back to the cell. Histology, the study of tissue, has actually become the most highly developed of all human studies. Well, if you go into the smallest parts and omit all the interrelationships of forces, then, just as all cows are grey in the dark, all organs in the human being are the same. But then you get a nocturnal “grey cow science”, not a real science that deals with the specificity of the individual organs in the human being.

What must serve as the basis for this, I only dared to express a few years ago, although it has occupied me for more than thirty to thirty-five years now. But one usually only imagines that spiritual science comes to its results so easily. One need only look into the spiritual world and one would discover everything, whereas it is more difficult when one has to work in laboratories, in physics cabinets or in a clinic; there one must make an effort — at least that is what one thinks. In spiritual science, one only has to look into the world of the spirit and one can discover everything. But it is not like that. Especially conscientious spiritual research requires more effort and, above all, more responsibility than working in a laboratory or at a clinic or an observatory. And so it is that although the first conception of what I now want to briefly indicate in principle was before me about thirty-five years ago, I was only able to express it a few years ago, after everything had been processed and, above all, verified in the context of the entire official natural science of the present day. And it was precisely under the influence of these principles about the structure of the human being that the therapeutic current within our anthroposophical movement came into being.

We must not forget that, even when we have a person before us in their physical form, we must distinguish three distinct limbs. These three different limbs can be named in a variety of ways. However, the best way to approach them is to characterize them by saying that the human being has, as the one system of their physical being, the nerve-sense system, which is mainly localized in the head.

The human being has a second system, the rhythmic system; this includes breathing and blood circulation. But it also includes, for example, the rhythmic activities of digestion and so on. This is the second system of the human being.

And the third system of the human being is the connection between the movement system, the limb system and the actual metabolic system. This connection will be immediately clear to you when you consider that it is precisely through the movement of the limbs that the metabolism is promoted, and that actually the limbs are always connected with the metabolic organs in a very organic way. Anatomy will also show you this immediately. Just see how the legs continue inwardly into the metabolic organs and how the arms also continue inwardly. So that we can distinguish three systems in the human being: the nerve-sense system, localized mainly in the head; the rhythmic system, localized mainly in the chest, around the heart; and the metabolic-limb system, localized mainly in the limbs and the attached metabolic organs.

But we must not imagine this human anatomy in the way that a professor once did in an attempt to discredit the anthroposophical movement. He did not try to penetrate what was actually meant by this structure, but he tried to blacken this structure of the human being and said: These anthroposophists claim that the human being consists of three systems, the head, the trunk - chest and stomach - and the limbs. Yes, of course, you can immediately ridicule a thing in this way.

For it is not the case that the nervous-sensory system is only in the head. It is mainly in the head, but it then extends over the whole organism, so that the human being has spread his head organization over the whole organism. Similarly, the rhythmic system extends up and down over the whole organism. Man is thus, again, a rhythmic system in space, and also a metabolic-limb system. When you move your eyes, the eyes are limbs. These systems are not juxtaposed in space, but are structured into one another. They are interlocking, and one must become accustomed to precise thinking if one wants to properly assess this structure of the human being.

Now the two systems, the first and the third, the nervous sense system and the limb metabolism system, are actually polar opposites. What the one produces, the other destroys; what the other destroys, the one produces. So they work in completely opposite ways. And the middle system, the rhythmic system, establishes the relationship between the two. There is a kind of oscillation between the two, so that a harmony can always take place between the destruction of one system and the building of the other. If we consider the metabolic system, for example, the metabolic system naturally works with its greatest intensity in the human abdomen. But what is going on in the human abdomen must evoke a polar opposite activity in the human head, in the nerve-sense system, if the human being is to be healthy.

Now, if you imagine that this intense activity, which is actually the activity of the human digestive system, extends to the nerve-sense system due to its intensity being too strong and too great, so that the activity which should actually be in the metabolic system, encroaches on the nerve-sense system, then you have two, albeit natural processes, for my sake, but you can immediately see how the one natural process becomes abnormal. It just belongs in the metabolic system, and it breaks through, as it were, into the nerve-sense system.

This is how the various forms of a disease arise that is treated by medicine today as a somewhat neglected disease, but, I would say, by a large part of humanity as a less neglected disease, because these various forms of the disease are known everywhere. This is how what is known as the various forms of migraine arises. And in order to understand migraine in its various forms, one must grasp this process, which, in its intensity, as it is there, is supposed to take place in the metabolic system and which breaks through into the nervous sense system, so that the nerves and the senses themselves are treated in such a way that the metabolism shoots into them instead of remaining in its actual place.

The reverse can take place. The process that is supposed to be most intense in the nerve-sense system, which is quite contrary to the metabolic process, can in turn break through in a certain way after the metabolic system. So that in the metabolic system, instead of there being only a very subordinate nerve-sense process, an intensified nerve-sense process takes place, so that, as it were, what belongs to the head breaks through and occurs in the abdomen, head activity thus occurs in the abdomen. When this happens, the dangerous disease of abdominal typhus arises in the person.

Thus, by thoroughly understanding this threefold human being, we can see how the process of illness develops out of the healthy process in the human organism. If our head, with its nervous-sense system, were not organized as it is, we could never have typhoid fever. If our abdomen were not organized as it is, we could never have migraine. But the activity of the head should remain in the head, and the activity of the abdomen in the abdomen. If they break through, then these types of disease arise.

And as with these two particularly characteristic forms of disease, one can point to other forms of disease that always arise from a certain activity that belongs to a certain organ system asserting itself in a different place, in a different organ system.

If you proceed only anatomically, you see how the smallest parts are arranged in the organism's tissue. But you do not see this effect of polar opposite activity. You can only study the nerve cell to see that it is organized in the opposite way to, say, the liver cell. If you can see the whole organism in such a way that it appears to you in its threefold structure, then you also notice how the nerve cell is a cell that constantly wants to dissolve, that constantly wants to be broken down if it is to be healthy, and how a liver cell is something that constantly wants to be built up if it is to be healthy. These are polar activities. They interact in the right way when they are properly distributed in the organism, and they interact in the wrong way when they penetrate each other.

The rhythmic system is in the middle and always wants to create a balance between the opposing polar activities of the nervous-sensory system and the metabolic-limb system.

I would now like to select a specific example to give you a sense of how – I can of course only discuss it in aphorisms – we can find the relationship between the healing agent taken from nature and its forces and the forces of illness and health at work within the human being.

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Let us turn our attention to a very specific ore found in nature, the so-called antimony ore. Antimony has an extraordinarily interesting property when you look at it externally. It forms in nature in such a way that, so to speak, skewers arise, rod-shaped, spear-like structures that lie next to each other, so that one finds the antimony ore in nature in such a way that, if I draw it schematically, one could draw it something like this. It grows almost like a mineral moss or a mineral lichen. You can see that, to a certain extent, this mineral wants to arrange itself in thread-like form. It can be seen even more clearly how this mineral, this ore, wants to arrange itself in thread-like form when it is subjected to a certain physical-chemical process. Then it becomes even more fibrillar. It arranges itself in very thin fibers. But what is particularly significant is what happens when this antimony is subjected to a certain kind of combustion process. You get a white smoke that can attach itself to walls and then become shiny, mirror-like.* This is called antimony mirror. It is not very well respected today, but it was used a great deal in ancient medicine, precisely because of the ancient knowledge from which I have repeatedly spoken to you in the morning lectures. This antimony mirror, that is, what develops only from the combustion process and can be deposited on walls, making them shiny as glass, is something extraordinarily important.

Another property is added to all this. I will just emphasize this: If you subject antimony to certain electrolytic processes and bring it to the so-called electrolytic cathode, you only need to exert a small influence on the cathode after you have brought the antimony and subjected it to the electrolytic process, and you get a small antimony explosion. In short, this antimony has the most interesting properties imaginable.

If we introduce a certain moderate dosage of antimony into the human organism, we can study the various processes to see how the same forces that behave as I have described in antimony actually do experience their continuation in the human organism, and how they take on all kinds of forms of force and all kinds of forms of action there.

These forms of activity – I cannot, of course, go into the details and evidence here, I just want to briefly sketch out the inner connections – these processes that occur in the human organism are particularly strong, for example, wherever blood coagulates. So they strengthen and promote blood clotting. But if we now examine the human organism using methods that also belong to the threefold structure of the human organism, which gradually allow us to look into the human being and recognize how the individual systems in the various organs behave, if we look into the human organism in this way, we find that what lives in antimony does not merely live outside in the mineral antimony, but that it is actually a context of forces that lives in the human organism itself, that is always present in the human organism, in a healthy organism, and that it also takes on forms in the sick human organism, as I have explained to you now.

This antimony process, I would like to say, which is present in the human organism itself, is polar opposite to another process. It is opposed to the process that occurs wherever the plastically active forces, for example the cell-forming forces, the cell-rounding forces, occur, where that which actually forms the cell substance of the human organism occurs. I would like to call these forces, because they are preferably contained in the protein substance, for example, the albuminizing forces. And so we have in the human organism the forces that we find outside in nature, in antimony in particular, when we subject the antimony to combustion, for example, and bring it up to the antimony level. The forces that work outside in the antimony, we also have them working in the human organism. But we also have the opposite forces at work, the albuminizing forces, which bring the antimony forces to a standstill, remove them.

These two systems of forces, the albumino- and antimonio-metallizing forces, now counteract each other in such a way that they must be in a certain equilibrium in the human organism. It must now be recognized that, for example, the process which I described to you earlier in principle and which underlies abdominal typhus, is essentially due to the fact that the equilibrium between these two systems of forces is disturbed.

In order to gain a true insight into the human organism, we need to be able to draw on what I have just discussed from a wide range of perspectives – albeit non-medical – in these morning lectures during this course.

We have seen how the human being not only has this physical body, but also an etheric or formative forces body, an astral body, an ego organization. And just yesterday I was able to explain to you how the physical body and the formative forces body, on the one hand, and the I and the astral body, on the other, are intimately connected, but how the astral body and the formative forces body or ether body are more loosely connected, because they separate every night.

This connection, which consists of the interplay of the forces of the astral body and the etheric body, is now radically disturbed in abdominal typhus. In the case of abdominal typhus, the astral body becomes weak and is unable to work intensively into the physical body because it works for itself, causing a preponderance that effectively pushes down the nerve-sense organization, which is mainly subject to the astral body. Instead of being transformed into the metabolic organization, it remains as such, as astral activity. The astral body works for itself. It does not properly work into the ether body. This is how the symptoms of the disease arise, which give the symptoms of typhoid fever.

Now, what occurs in antimony is that the antimony, so to speak, denies its mineral nature, becomes crystallized in a bourgeois way, that even the antimony mirror, where it is deposited, appears like snow flowers on a window, thus also showing the inner crystallization power as in nature, this crystallization power This crystallization power, which becomes active in antimony, works when we process it in the appropriate way as a medicine and introduce it into the organism, so that it supports this organism, so that it can push its astral body with its forces in the right way into the etheric body, and bring these bodies back into the right relationship.

With the remedy made from antimony in the appropriate way, we support the process that is opposed to the typhoid process. And in this way, with the antimony remedy in particular – to which, depending on whether the disease takes this or that course, other substances must be added, which in turn have a similar relationship to the human organism – one can fight the disease with this remedy, to which other substances are added, disease by stimulating and supporting the processes in the organism, so that it develops its own, I might say antimonizing power, which then tends to bring about the right rhythm in the interaction of the etheric body and the astral body.

Thus, anthroposophical observation leads us to see the relationship between what works outside in nature, in natural things, as I have shown you with the example of antimony, and what works inside the human organism. You can follow these albuminous forces, which have a plastic, rounding effect, and the forces that work along lines, right into the germ cell.

For those who have really acquired knowledge in this field – however unpleasant it is for them to say so, because they know that they will arouse the hatred and antipathy of the corresponding people – and who can see into the workings of the human organism, the otherwise truly most wonderful microscopic examinations of the ovum, of the germ cell, seem extraordinarily amateurish. They observe the ovum as such on the outside, the development of the so-called centrosomes – you can read about this in any embryology book – without knowing how these albuminizing forces, which also control the whole organism, work in opposition, polar opposition to the antimonizing forces. The rounding of the ovum as such is caused by the albumino-coagulating force; the centrosomes after fertilization are caused by the antimonio-coagulating processes.

But this happens in the whole human body. And by preparing the remedy in the right way and knowing, through the diagnosis, where the human organism needs support, we supply the human organism with the forces it needs to counteract a disease process.

By introducing anthroposophical perspectives into medicine, we are actually achieving the goal of considering the real and correct relationship between the macrocosm, the whole world, and the human being. And just as I have pointed out antimony to you – I would of course have to say a lot about antimony if I wanted to discuss it scientifically in detail now, but I just want to hint at the principles – and the processes that it can bring forth, that it has within it when it is treated in one way or another, I could now for example, I could also show you the whole behavior within nature and its processes, let us say for that which is called quartz as a mineral, silicic acid, silicea, which is mixed with granite as one of its components, which crystallizes transparently in its deposits and is so hard that it can no longer be scratched with a knife, and is precisely a component of granite. If this substance is treated in a certain way, when it is administered to the organism – in the right dosage, of course, which must be determined by diagnosis – it acquires the property of supporting whatever is to take effect in the nerve-sense system, whatever the organism is to muster in the nerve-sense system as the inherent forces of this nerve-sense system. So that one can say: what the senses are actually supposed to do, one supports when one administers this remedy, which is prepared from silicon, from quartz, to the person in the right way. One must then, depending on the secondary symptoms, add other substances, but in the main it is about the effect of what lies in the silicic acid formation process. When this silicic acid formation process is introduced into the human organism, it supports an activity in the nerve-sense system that is too weak. It then has the right strength. Now, when this nerve-sense activity becomes too weak, the digestive activity breaks through to the head. Migraine-like conditions arise. If we now support the sense activity, the nerve sense activity in the right way with a remedy that has been produced in the right way from silicic acid, from quartz, Silicea, then the nerve sense system in the migraine patient becomes so strong that it can in turn push back the broken-through digestive process.

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I am, of course, presenting these things to you somewhat crudely, but you will see what is important from this. It is essential to really understand the healthy and sick human organism, not only in terms of its cellular composition, but also in terms of the forces that act in the same sense or in a polar or rhythmic way in this human organism, in order to then seek out that which can combat this or that pathological process in the human organism when it is at work in nature.

Thus, for example, we can find how the process contained in phosphorus is a process in the external nature that, when introduced into the human organism, has a supportive effect on a certain kind of internal inability of the human organism: namely, when the human organism, in relation to certain forces that should always be at work within it when it is healthy, becomes incapable of allowing these forces to work in the right way, when it has too little strength to allow certain forces to work within it that are actually a kind of organic combustion process that is always present when substances are transformed in the human organism. Organic combustion processes occur with every movement, with everything that a person does, even with those things that are done internally. Now, the human organism can become too weak to regulate these organic combustion processes in the right way. They must be inhibited in a certain way. If they are not inhibited enough, they develop in a vehement way. The organic combustion processes actually always have an immeasurable, unlimited intensity by themselves, otherwise there would immediately be too much fatigue here or there, or one would not be able to get any further than a moving person. These organic combustion processes actually have, I want to say, unlimited intensity, and the organism must continually have the possibility to inhibit them.

If these inhibiting forces are absent, either in an organ system or in the whole organism, if the organism has become too weak to inhibit its organic combustion processes in the right way, then tuberculosis arises in its most diverse forms. I would say that it is only through this organic powerlessness, through this inability to inhibit the combustion processes, that the suitable breeding ground for the bacilli is created; these can then be found on this breeding ground.

Nothing should be said here against the bacillus theory. The bacillus theory is very useful. From the different way in which the bacilli appear here or there, one naturally recognizes various things; for diagnosis, an extraordinary amount can be recognized from it. It is not my intention to speak out against official medicine, but rather to continue it where it reaches certain limits. And it can be continued by applying the aspects of anthroposophy to it.

If phosphorus is now added to the organism, these abilities to inhibit the organic combustion processes are supported. However, it must be taken into account that this inhibition can originate from a wide variety of organ systems. If, for example, it originates from the system that works primarily in the bones, then the phosphorus effect in the human organism must be supported by specializing it, so to speak, specifically for the bone side. This is done by combining the phosphorus remedy with calcium or calcium salt in some way that is revealed by a more precise study of the matter. If the patient has tuberculosis of the small intestine, some copper compounds will be added to the phosphorus in the correct dosage. If the patient has pulmonary tuberculosis, iron, for example, will be added to the phosphorus. But then, because pulmonary tuberculosis is an extremely complicated disease, other admixtures may also be considered under certain circumstances. So you can see that the possibility of a real therapy is based on how the chemical and physical processes in the human organism continue, how they continue to work inside.

Official medicine often starts from the view that just as the antimony forces work out there in antimony, so they also work in the human organism. That is not the case. We must be clear about how these processes continue to work in the human organism. And that can be seen in particular if we apply the actually anthroposophical insights to the experiments at issue.

As we saw with antimony and its powers, antimony establishes the rhythm between the astral body and the etheric body or formative forces body. In the case of the forces at work in silicic acid, quartz, and quartz, in the silicea, can be seen to be particularly suitable for establishing the correct relationship between the ego and the astral body when it is disturbed, in order to have a healing effect on the nervous and sensory system. While it is the case with lime – especially with the lime used from the lime secretions of animals – that you get remedies that establish the right relationship between the formative forces body and the physical body.

So one can say: The correct view of the human being leads one to use lime or similar substances, namely substances secreted by the animal organism, such as oyster shells, to restore the right relationship when it is disturbed, which always manifests itself in physical processes, in disease processes. To restore the right relationship between the etheric body and the physical body. In the preparation of remedies, one must reflect on this in the case of such chalky or similar secretions.

If one is dealing with an arrhythmic interaction between the formative body and the astral body, one must pay attention to such things as are present, for example, in antimony, but also in numerous other metals, but especially in the components that of the plants, that is to say, they are particularly strong in the leaves and in the trunk, while those forces that correspond to the phosphorus process are preferably contained in the flower organs of the plants, and those processes that correspond to the silica process are contained in the root organs of the plants. So that one can also find the relationship between the forces that are in the different parts of the plants. The root forces have a definite affinity and relationship to the human head and nervous-sense system. The leaf and stem organs have a special relationship to the rhythmic system and the flower organs have a special relationship to the abdominal, metabolic system. Therefore, if one often wants to help the digestive, metabolic system in a simple way, it is often enough simply by choosing certain flower organs to make into tea, after having diagnosed in the right way. In this way one helps the digestive organs. While one must extract the salts of the roots through a special extraction process if one wants to obtain a remedy that acts particularly on the nerve-sense process, on the head organs, for example.

And so, on the one hand, you have to understand nature and, on the other hand, the human organism. Then you can really find the remedies in nature in such a way that you can see how the two things are connected, that you don't just have to try clinically: “How does it work?” and then, you see, you make a series of cases and you note that ninety or seventy per cent of them show some favorable result, and that you were mistaken in forty cases. Then you treat the matter statistically and according to whether the statistics favor this or that, you regard it as a remedy or not as a remedy.

I can only deal with these things briefly and aphoristically in order to show you how, without falling into amateurism or medical sectarianism, a strictly scientific approach can be taken to deal with disease processes using remedies that come from human observation.

Just as important as recognizing the right natural substance and natural process to be processed into a remedy is the particular way in which it is used.

Precisely because one can act either on the nerve-sense system, in order to bring about recovery in the indicated manner from it in the right way, or on the rhythmic system, or on the metabolic-limb system, precisely because one must act on these individual systems, it is important, it is essential to also know how the method of treatment is to be administered. Because almost every remedy can be used in three different ways. Either it is introduced into the human being through the mouth into the stomach and so on, so in the way the human being takes in the remedy, one counts on the human being's metabolism, on the metabolic system and on how the metabolic system then affects the other systems. Therefore, there are remedies that are used in this way in particular: they are introduced to the human being through the mouth and stomach and so on.

But then there are also remedies that, in the most eminent sense, have to be used in such a way that they already affect the rhythmic system through the way they are used. In this respect, antimony is particularly suited to finding the right treatment method for this point. This is where injections and injection methods come in. And the remedy that is inoculated into the blood, or is otherwise injected, is the one that is counted on to have an effect on the rhythmic process of the human being.

For those remedies used in baths and ointments, or even where it is a matter of treating the human organism externally and mechanically, for example in massage processes or similar, where the aim is to apply the remedy or the healing process to the person in a more external way, it is assumed that the healing method will act on the nerve-sense system.

And so, in turn, one can work through any other system in a variety of ways to achieve the healing process. Let us assume we have Silicea, a quartz. It makes a difference whether we have a remedy that we prepare and that is to be taken orally, or whether it is injected. If we assume that it is taken orally, we want to introduce the quartz processes through the digestive system by way of how it is processed in the digestive system and the digestive system in turn sends forces into the nerve-sense system. But if we expect that they should be sent more into the nervous-sense system, by inserting them into the blood organism, the respiratory rhythm, whereby in turn healing can take place indirectly through this rhythm, if we thus intend this, then we inject.

If we intend to bring any aromatic-ethereal substance, such as that contained in a plant blossom, to bear through the digestive organ, we make a tea that we introduce into the stomach through the mouth. If we want to work by bringing the essential oil, which has an aromatic effect on the nerve-sense system, directly into effect or through the nerve-sense system on the rhythmic process, then we make some kind of bath out of the juices of these flowers, by adding the juice of these flowers to the water and preparing a bath out of it. There we act on the nerve-sense system.

And so you see how the healing effect also depends on the way the individual substances are treated in relation to the human being.

In order to achieve something in this way, our clinical-therapeutic institutes with their corresponding laboratories and other enterprises have been founded by physicians who have joined our anthroposophical movement, so that on the one hand remedies and healing methods can be tried out, and on the other hand the remedies can be produced. We have such clinical and chemical-pharmaceutical institutes in Arlesheim near Dornach and in Stuttgart.

In particular, the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim should be mentioned, which is under the excellent leadership of Dr. Wegman, who has a particularly beneficial effect on this institute because she has what I would call the courage to heal. For it is precisely when one looks into the complexity of the natural processes from which the healing processes are to be drawn, on the one hand, and into the tremendous complexity of the health and disease processes in the human being, on the other, when one is confronted with this immense field – and one is always confronted with this immense field, even if one only has a certain number of patients – then healing requires courage.

An International Pharmaceutical Laboratory is affiliated to this Arlesheim Institute, where the remedies are produced. Today they can be used all over the world, if only the right ways and means are sought. The laboratory produces the means; people just have to find the means and ways to the laboratory, that is the point. People have to find the right means and ways to get to the remedies. The work is not done in an amateurish way, nor is today's science denied; rather, today's science is only continued.

Once this knowledge has taken root in the broadest circles, we can be truly unconcerned about the success of such a movement as the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Arlesheim. But it is difficult to really bring to bear in the world a therapy based on a full understanding of the human being, with its remedies, in the face of today's purely materialistic direction. Here one would actually have to count on the insight of every person who cares about the health of their fellow human beings.

Now, by first pointing out what can be achieved through natural remedies and their appropriate use, it is of course not ruled out what can be achieved by taking a more spiritual-soul approach to healing. In this area, particularly fruitful observations are made. If we now look at the hygienic-therapeutic aspect, which must always be included in a proper education, we see how the way we affect children's souls and spirits through teaching – when I give educational lectures, I discuss these things – can have the most diverse healing and pathogenic effects, perhaps not immediately, but over the course of the life process. I will mention just one. For example, the teacher can proceed in the right way with regard to the child's memory by not expecting too much or too little of him. If he proceeds wrongly, if he demands too much of the memory in the eighth, ninth, tenth, or eleventh year of life, if he does not have the right pedagogical tact in this direction, then what the soul must accomplish in an excessive memory activity, in an artificially cultivated memory activity, will later in life express itself as all kinds of physical illnesses. A connection can be demonstrated between diabetes and incorrect memory methods in teaching. While, on the other hand, the disruption of memory in another way can certainly affect the child in an unfavorable way.

I can only mention this in principle, because time is already so very advanced. But from this one can see how not only health and illness are affected by natural remedies, but how the soul itself works in a very special way for health and illness.

And from there, we can also find our way to those methods where we try to bring about healing processes through purely spiritual-soul influences from person to person, which I cannot describe in detail today, of course, due to the limited time. But it is very easy to fall prey to amateurism in this area. One can, for example, entertain the belief that so-called mental illnesses are most easily cured by spiritual influences. Mental illnesses are characterized by the fact that it is actually almost impossible to reach the patient on a soul-spiritual level. That is precisely the case with so-called mental illnesses: the soul closes itself off to external influences. But one will always find that especially in the so-called mental illnesses, which actually go by their name wrongly, physical disease processes are present somewhere hidden. Before dabbling in mental illnesses, one should actually correctly diagnose the physical source of the disease, which is sometimes very hidden, and then one will be able to work charitably by healing the physical organism.

In the case of physical illnesses, it will be much more a matter of helping through all kinds of spiritual and psychological influences, which are usually applied in a very amateurish way today – I don't want to go into that now. In this respect, much blessing can be bestowed in this regard, in many ways the external process, which is to be brought about by remedies and the like, can be supported.

I can only hint at this. The methods based on anthroposophy certainly do not exclude therapeutic influences of soul and spirit, but include them. We prove this by the fact that at the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim-Dornach, in addition to physical healing methods, you can find so-called eurythmy therapy.

This eurythmy therapy consists of transforming what you see here as artistic eurythmy in the moving human being, in the human being in his or her structure, but moving in space, transforming the vocalizing in such a way that the person moves in healthy movements, but ones that are derived from eurythmy, that one applies the vocalizing movements in such a way that one supports precisely the forces that I mentioned earlier as the albuminizing forces in the person. While the consonantizing forces support the antimonisizing forces in many ways.

In this way, consonant and vowel eurythmy therapy can work together to restore the balance between these two types of forces. And it can be seen, especially when things are done properly, not in a dilettantish way, how other healing processes, especially chronic illnesses, can be greatly supported by this eurythmy therapy.

This eurythmy therapy is actually based on the fact that spiritual and mental processes are evoked by what a person performs with the limbs of his body. If we know which movements arise spontaneously in a healthy human organism, then we can also find the corresponding movements that have a healing effect when we work back from the limbs, from human movement, to the processes of the internal organs.

At the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim, for example, it is possible to seek out this eurythmy therapy and see how it can be a special branch within the whole healing process, which can be found on anthroposophical ground, based on real human knowledge.

It would, of course, be going too far to go into details in this area in particular. The principle is actually given in what I have presented.

So it has just happened that we have had to develop this therapeutic current within the anthroposophical movement in the most diverse ways because, so to speak, medical experts have approached us. It has arisen out of the conditions of our time. It has been demanded, so to speak, by present-day civilization. Anthroposophy has basically only given the answers to questions that were put to it.

Today I have only been able to give you an aphoristic account of the principles; more is not possible in this already all too long time. And if I wanted to explain just a few things so that it would be, I would like to say, in its entirety, then I would have to do something similar to what I rejected the day before yesterday in the eurythmic lecture; I would have to invite you to stay overnight and listen to me until tomorrow morning, when we would then come together for tomorrow's morning lecture. This is something that can make people ill, and surely no one who wants to talk about healing can make people ill in this way! So it is better to send them home to a good night's sleep with a shorter presentation.

Since I was asked to speak about the therapeutic principles which have developed out of the anthroposophical view of the world, I will gladly meet this request. However, it is difficult to be brief, especially about this kind of subject matter which is so extraordinarily extensive. In one brief lecture, which can only be aphoristic, one can hardly develop correct ideas of what is important. In addition, certain deliberations must be undertaken in such an attempt which are quite removed from what people generally think about. Nevertheless, this evening I will attempt to present the relevant issues in as generally comprehensive a manner as possible.

The fact that within our anthroposophical movement there is also a medical-therapeutic endeavor is certainly not based upon our desire as anthroposophists to participate in everything and to stick our noses, so to speak, into everything. That is absolutely not the case; but as the anthroposophical movement sought to make its way through the world, physicians too found their way to this movement. They are seriously striving physicians; and a relatively large number of such physicians had come to a more or less clear awareness of how uncertain, how vacillating the views of contemporary, official medicine actually are, of how in many cases the foundations for the actual comprehension of processes of illness and healing are lacking. These foundations are lacking in official medicine because today the claims for scientific validity are actually based exclusively upon generally accepted natural science. This natural science in turn believes itself to be moving with certainty only with what it can determine in a mechanical, physical or chemical manner from outer nature. It then applies the discoveries made through physics and chemistry about outer natural processes in order to come to an understanding of the human being. But even if there is a kind of concentration, a microcosmic concentration of all world processes within the human being, nevertheless, the outer physical and chemical processes never proceed within the human organism in the same form in which they proceed outside in nature. Man takes the substances of the earth into himself, substances which are not merely passive, but which are actually always permeated by nature processes. A substance only appears outwardly as if it were resting within itself. In reality, everything lives and weaves in the substance. Thus man also takes into his organism these processes, this living and weaving activity, proceeding chemically and physically in nature; but he transforms it immediately in his organism—he makes it into something different.

This something different, which develops out of the nature processes in the human organism, can only be understood if one attains a comprehensive observation of the human being based on reality. But contemporary natural science actually excludes from its realm what proceeds in the human being as intrinsically human. Even, for example, what proceeds as intrinsically human in the physical body is attributed exclusively to physical and chemical processes; for in the physical body of man nothing takes place which is not at the same time subject to the influences of etheric processes, of astral processes, of ego processes. But as natural science totally ignores these ego processes, these astral processes, this etheric living and weaving, it actually does not at all approach the human being. Therefore this natural science can not really look into the inner activities of the human being in order to comprehend how the outer chemical and physical processes continue to work in him: how they continue to work when he is healthy, and how they continue to work when he is diseased.

How shall it then be possible to properly judge the effects of medicaments, of a remedy, if one has not acquired an understanding for how some substance of nature which we introduce into the human organism, or with which we treat the human organism, continues to work in that organism.

It could indeed be said that the greatest progress imaginable in medicine in more recent times has actually only been made in the area of surgery where one is dealing with external mechanical manipulations, as it were. In contrast, in the area of actual therapy, there reigns great confusion—(this is not my judgment, but the judgment of those physicians who have become conscious of all this). The reason for this confusion is that the connection between any object of nature and its effect upon illness cannot be understood if, by virtue of a specific point of view which one has about natural science, one actually excludes the human being from scientific considerations.

Since anthroposophy strives to know the human being comprehensively—insofar as he is a super-sensible as well as a material being—it is also possible that anthroposophy can yield knowledge concerning the treatment of illnesses with various natural substances.

Fundamentally speaking, we are already confronting today a kind of boundary in medicine if we ask only for the actual nature of illness. What is illness? This question cannot be answered out of contemporary scientific knowledge. For, what, according to these natural scientific views, are all the processes which proceed in the healthy human being? From the head to the tip of the toes these are processes of nature. But then what are the processes which take place during illness in the liver, kidney, head, heart, wherever? What kind of processes are these? These are also natural processes! All healthy processes are processes of nature; all processes of illness are also processes of nature. Why then is the human being healthy with one sort of natural process and ill with the other sort of natural process?

It is not a matter of speaking in vague generalities: well, yes the healthy processes of nature are normal, but the sick processes of nature are not. One can get the impression that, if one doesn't know anything, there arises “at the proper time,” a word, a label for our ignorance.

What is actually going on when customary natural science is applied in approaching the human being? The predominant practice is not to look at the living being, but at the corpse; here and there a piece of the organism is sampled and then various abstractions are made about what kind of healthy or sick natural processes proceeded within it. Thus it actually doesn't matter whether one takes some kind of tissue out of the head, out of the liver, out of the big toe, or the like. Everything is finally reduced to the cell. Gradually histology, the study of tissues and cells, has actually become the most highly developed teaching of the human being. Of course, if one goes into the smallest parts and ignores all other forces, all other relationships, then, as at night all cows are grey, all organs are the same. The result is a benighted “grey cow science,” not a true science which acquaints itself with the uniqueness of the separate organs in man.

What must provide the basis there I actually dared to express only a few years ago. Although it is generally imagined that it is easy for spiritual science to come to its results, this matter has occupied me for more than thirty years. It is thought that one only needs to look into the spiritual world to find out everything, while it is difficult if one has to work in laboratories or in a clinic—there one must really struggle. In spiritual science it is only a matter of looking into the world of the spirit and then one finds out everything. It really isn't that simple. Thorough and responsible spiritual investigation demands more effort and above all more responsibility than the manipulations in the laboratory or in the clinic or observatories. And so it is that the first conception of what I will now briefly indicate in principle stood before me approximately thirty-five years ago. I was only able to speak about it a few years ago after everything was worked through and, above all, verified completely on the findings of the entire contemporary official natural science. It was under the influence of these principles of the membering of the human being that what I just told you about developed—this medical-therapeutic endeavor within our anthroposophical movement.

Even if we confront the human being as a solely physical being, we must definitely distinguish three members which differ one from another. These three different members can be labeled in the most varied ways, but we can best approach them if we characterize them by saying that one system of the physical being is the nerve-sense system which is primarily localized in the head. The second system is the rhythmic system, which encompasses respiration, blood circulation, the rhythmic activities of the digestive system, and so forth. The third system is represented in the interconnection between the movement system, the system of the limbs, and the actual metabolic system, This interconnection becomes immediately evident to you if you think of the fact that the metabolism is enhanced especially through the movement of the limbs and that inwardly the limbs are organically connected with the metabolic organs. That is directly evident also in anatomy. Just look at how the legs are continued inwardly into the metabolic organs and, similarly, how the arms are continued inwardly. Thus we can now distinguish the nerve-sense system, located primarily in the head; the rhythmic system, located primarily in the chest; and the metabolic limb system, located primarily in the limbs and the attached metabolic organs.

This membering, however, may not be done as a professor once did who wanted to ridicule the anthroposophical movement. He did not attempt to penetrate into what is actually meant with this membering. He said: these anthroposophists maintain that man consists of three systems: a head, a rump consisting of chest and abdomen, and limbs. Of course, in this manner it is easy to ridicule the matter.

What matters is not that the nerve-sense system is only in the head. It is primarily in the head, but it extends over the entire organism. The head organization spreads out through the entire organism. Similarly, the rhythmic system extends upwards and downwards through the entire organism. Spatially speaking the human being is entirely metabolic-limb system. If you move the eyes, the eyes are limbs. So these systems are not spatially next to one another; instead they interpenetrate one another. They totally interpenetrate and one must accustom oneself a little to an exact thinking if one wants to evaluate this membering of the human being in the right way.

Now both these systems, the first and the third, the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system, are placed polarically opposite each other. What the one creates destroys the other. What destroys the other is created by the one. They thus work in completely opposite ways. And the middle system, the rhythmic system, establishes the connection between the two. There is a kind of vacillation, oscillation, between them, so that a harmony can always exist between the destruction of the one system and the construction of the other system. If, for example, we look at the metabolic system, we recognize that it naturally works with its greatest intensity in the lower body of the human being; but that which goes on within the human abdomen, or the lower body, must call forth the polar opposite activity in the head, in the nerve-sense system, when the person is healthy.

Imagine now that the activity actually inherent in the human digestive system intensifies so much that it extends right up to the nerve-sense system, so that the activity which should actually remain in the metabolic-limb system reaches over to the nerve-sense system. Then you have a natural process, so to speak, but you can see immediately how that natural process becomes an abnormal one. It should remain in the metabolic system, but breaks through, so to speak, upwards into the nerve-sense system.

That results then in the various forms of the illness treated by medicine today as insignificant, but not treated in that way by a large part of humanity because these various forms of illness are known everywhere. What develops is known as the various forms of migraine. In order to understand migraine in its various forms we must comprehend this process which ought only to take place in the metabolic system but which breaks through to the nerve-sense system so that the nerves and senses are so affected that the metabolism shoots into them instead of remaining in its own place.

The reverse can also take place. The process which ought to be most intensive in the nerve-sense system, and which is completely opposite to the metabolic process, can in a certain sense also break through to the metabolic system. Consequently an enhanced nerve-sense process takes place in the metabolic system where normally a merely subordinated nerve-sense process should be active. Thus what belongs to the head, as it were, breaks through into the lower body. If this happens then the dangerous illness develops which is known as typhoid fever.¹

Thus we can see how a fundamental understanding of this three-fold human being makes it possible for us to understand how a process of illness develops out of a healthy process. If our head, with its nerve-sense system, were not organized as it is, then we could never have typhoid fever. If our lower body were not organized as it is, we could never have migraine. The head activity should remain in the head, the lower body activity in the lower body. If they break through then such forms of illness develop.

And just as we can point to two especially characteristic forms of illness, so can we point to other forms of illness which always develop when an activity which belongs to one organ system asserts itself in another place, in another organ system.

If one proceeds only anatomically one merely observes the status of the smallest parts in the tissues of the organism. But one does not see the working of polar opposite activities. When studying the nerve cell you can only study that its organization is opposite to that of the liver cell, for example. If, however, you were able to look into the totality of the organism in such a way that it appears to you in its three-foldness, then you will also notice how the nerve cell is a cell which continually tends to dissolve, which continually tends to be broken down if it is healthy: and how a liver cell is something which continually tends to be built up if it is healthy. Those are polar activities. They work in the right way upon one another if they are appropriately distributed in the organism; they work incorrectly within one another if they penetrate into one another.

The rhythmic system is in the middle and always strives to create the balance between the two opposed polar activities of the nerve-sense system and the metabolic-limb system.

I would now like to select a special example to let you have insight into how one can find the relationship of a remedy which has been taken from nature with its forces to the health-giving and illness-generating forces active within man.

Let us direct our gaze to an ore which can be found in nature, so-called antimony. As soon as we look at it externally we see that it has an extraordinarily interesting property. Its form in nature is such that certain rods develop—stem-like, lance-like structures which lie next to one another—so that if we were to draw the ore schematically we could draw the following:

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It grows almost like a mineral moss or a mineral lichen. One can see that this mineral wants to order itself into threads. One can see this even more clearly if we subject it to a certain physical-chemical process. Then the thread-like crystals become even thinner. It orders itself into clusters of very fine threads. Especially important, however, is what occurs when this antimony is subjected to a certain kind of combustion process. You get a white smoke which can then condense on the walls and becomes mirror-like. That is called the antimony mirror. It is hardly respected at all today but in older medicine it was widely used. This antimony mirror, which first arises out of the combustion process and condenses on the walls so that it shines like a mirror is something exceptionally important.

In addition there is another property. I will emphasize only this: if antimony is subjected to certain electrolytic processes and it is brought to the so-called electrolytic cathode, then it is only necessary (after the antimony was subjected to the electrolytic process on the cathode), to exert a slight action on it and a small antimony explosion will occur. In brief, this antimony has the most interesting properties.

If antimony is introduced into the human organism in a moderate dose one can study various processes which show how in fact the same forces which behave as I have just described experience a kind of continuation in the human organism and how they take on all kinds of forms of forces and effects within it.

I can naturally not explain all the details and proofs to you: I only want to briefly sketch for you what is inherent in these forms of activity. These processes which arise in the human organism occur especially strongly wherever blood coagulates. Therefore they strengthen or enhance the coagulation of blood. However, if we use those methods of study which are consistent with an understanding of the threefold human organism, we are permitted to gradually look into the human being and gain knowledge of how the separate systems behave in the different organs. If we look into the human organism in this way, we find that what lives in antimony lives not only outside in the mineral antimony, but also is active as a force-system in the human organism. This force system is always present in the healthy human organism. In the sick human organism it takes on forms of the kind which I have just explained to you.

This antimony process existing in the human organism is opposed in a polar way to another process. It is opposed to that process which arises where the plastically active forces, for example, the cell-forming forces occur. These are the forces which round out the cells, which form the cellular substance of the human organism. I would like to call these forces, because they are primarily contained in protein substance, the albuminizing forces. Thus we have in the human organism the forces which we find outside in human nature in antimony if we subject antimony, for example, to combustion, and bring about an antimony mirror. In addition we also have the opposing forces active, the albuminizing forces, which immobilize, which take away the antimonizing forces.

These two force systems, albuminizing and antimonizing, work against one another in such a way that they must be in a certain state of equilibrium in the human organism. One must now recognize that the process which I have described to you before in principle, and which lies at the basis of abdominal typhus, is essentially based on a disturbance of the balance between these two force systems.

In order to look properly into the human organism one must be able to take recourse to that which I have described to you from the most varied—although not medical—points of view in these morning lectures.

In them we have seen how man has not merely his physical body, but also an etheric body—a body of formative forces, an astral and an ego organization. And just yesterday I was able to explain to you how there is an intimate connection on the one hand between the physical body and the formative force body, and on the other, between the ego and the astral body. There is a looser connection between the astral body and the formative force body, for they separate every night.

This interconnection, which consists of a working into one another of the forces of the astral and etheric bodies, is radically disturbed in typhoid fever. In this illness the astral body becomes weak and is unable to work with a corresponding intensity into the physical body because it works for itself thereby bringing about that excess which presses downward, so to speak, the nerve-sense organization, which is primarily subject to the astral body. Instead of transforming itself into metabolic activity, it remains active as astral activity. The astral body works for itself. It does not work properly into the etheric body. The consequences are the symptoms of illness which give us the symptomatology of typhus.

Now that which occurs as antimony is active in such a way that antimony denies its mineral nature. It gets crystalline threads, so that even the antimony mirror, wherever it deposits, appears like ice-flowers in the window, thereby showing the inner force of crystallization as in nature. This force of crystallization, which becomes active in antimony, if it is properly incorporated into a remedy and introduced into the organism, works in such a way that it supports this organism enabling it to insert its astral body with its forces into the etheric body in the right way, so that it can bring these bodies again into the right connection.

With antimony prepared in a proper way into a remedy we support that process which opposes the typhus process. And just with this antimony remedy, to which other substances are added, one can battle against the illness by stimulating and supporting processes in the organism so that it unfolds its own, I would like to say, antimonizing force which has as its goal to call forth the proper rhythm in the working together of astral body and etheric body. Other substances must be mixed in to establish a proper connection to the organism depending on whether an illness takes one or another course.

Thus an anthroposophical consideration leads to the recognition of a relationship between what is active in the objects of nature, as I have shown you with the example of antimony, and that which is active within the human organism. You will be able to follow up this albuminizing, this plastically rounding force, and the other force which works linearly right into the germ cell.

Whoever has truly gained knowledge in this field—however uncomfortable it may be for him to say so, because he knows he will call forth hate and antipathy in certain people—and who thus looks into the operation of the human organism will consider the otherwise amazing and wonderful microscopic studies about the germ cell, exceptionally dilettantish. There people look externally at the egg cell, observe the development of the so-called centrosomes—you can read about that in any textbook about embryology,—without knowing how these albuminizing forces, which also rule throughout the entire human organism, are opposed, polarically opposed, to the antimonizing forces. The rounding of the egg cell as such is brought about by the albuminizing forces; the centrosomes, after fertilization, are called forth by the antimonizing forces.

That, however, goes on in the entire human body; and by preparing remedies in the right way, and knowing through the diagnosis where one must support the human organism, one introduces into this organism the forces which can work against a process of illness.

By bringing anthroposophical points of view into medicine a connection is established between the macrocosm and the human being. Naturally I would have to say much more about antimony if I wanted to scientifically explain it in detail, but I only want to point out general principles here. In addition I wanted to tell you about the processes which antimony is able to bring forth out of itself, which it has in itself, depending on how one treats it.

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I could also show you now, as an example, the entire behavior within nature and its processes for that which we call quartz, or silicic acid. It is one of the constituents of granite. It is transparently crystalline and so hard that you can't score it with a knife at all. If we treat this substance in the proper way and administer it to the human organism—in the proper doses that are determined from the diagnosis—then it gains the characteristic of being able to support that which is to be active in the nerve-sense system, which the organism through the nerve-sense system is to bring forth as the intrinsic forces of this system. So what, by rights, the senses actually should do is supported by the remedy, which is prepared in the right way from quartz, or silica and administered in the proper doses. It is necessary then, depending upon the accompanying symptoms, to add still other substances, but here it is primarily a matter of the effect of that which lies in the silicic acid formation process. Thus if one brings this silicic acid formation process into the human organism, then a weak activity in the nerve-sense system is supported so that it then works with the proper strength. Now if this nerve-sense activity becomes too weak, then the digestive activity is able to penetrate through to the head and the migraine-like symptoms develop.

If one then supports the nerve-sense activity in the right way with a remedy which is produced in the proper manner out of silicic acid, the nerve-sense system becomes so strong in the person suffering from migraine that it can again press back the digestive process which broke through.

Naturally I am characterizing these matters somewhat crudely, but you will see what is significant here. What matters is to really be able to see through the healthy or ill human organism, not merely in accordance with its cellular composition but according the forces active in it, whether they work co-operatively, rhythmically or in opposition. Then one can look in nature for what in the human organism can fight against this or that process of illness.

Thus one can find, for example, how the process which is contained in phosphorus is in outer nature a process which, if introduced into the human organism, works in a supportive way upon a certain kind of inner disability of the human organism; namely, when the human organism becomes incapable of allowing to act in the right way certain forces, which should always work in the healthy organism. This is when a person has too little strength and cannot let certain forces be active within him which are a kind of organic combustion process which is always present in the transformation of substances in the human organism. This takes place in every movement, in all that man does, and also in what is active within organic combustion processes. Now the human organism can become too weak to regulate these organic combustion processes in the proper way, for they must be inhibited in a certain manner. If they are insufficiently inhibited, they develop an excessive activity. The organic combustion processes in themselves actually always have an immeasurable, unlimited intensity. If that were not so, an excessive fatigue would arise immediately, or one would be unable to keep moving. However, the organism must also continuously have the possibility of inhibiting the boundless intensity of the organic combustion processes.

If now these inhibiting forces are neither in an organ system nor in the entire organism, if the organism has become too weak to inhibit its organic combustion processes in the proper way, then there develops something which manifests itself as tuberculosis in the most various forms. The suitable nutrient soil for the bacilli is created through this organic loss of strength, through the inability of the organism to inhibit the combustion processes.

Nothing will here be said against the bacterial theory which to a certain extent is very useful. In the various ways by which bacilli arise here or there one can naturally find out many things; for purposes of diagnoses one can generally get a lot of information. In no way do I want to say anything against official medicine, except that it needs to be augmented and developed further when it arrives at certain boundaries—and it can be developed further when the points of view of anthroposophy can be applied to it.

If phosphorus is then introduced into the human organism, then these capacities of containing the organic combustion process are supported. But one must see to it that this containment can emanate from the various organ systems. Let us begin by looking at the system which primarily works in the bones. There the activity of phosphorus in the human organism must be supported in that one directs it towards the bones. That can happen when one combines the remedy phosphorus—in a way which becomes clear through a more exacting study of the matter—with calcium or a calcium salt. When dealing with tuberculosis of the small intestine one will mix some kind of copper compounds in the right dosage with the phosphorus. When dealing with a pulmonary tuberculosis, one will add iron to the phosphorus. But still other additions come under consideration since pulmonary tuberculosis is an exceedingly complicated disease. Thus you see that the possibility of a true therapy is based on how the chemical and physical processes continue to work on in the human organism.

Official medicine often starts out from the opinion that the working of the antimony forces outside in nature is the same as it is in the human organism, but that is not the case. One must be clear about how these processes work on in the human organism, and this can be seen if one applies actual anthroposophical insights to the experiments which must be done.

We have seen how antimony establishes the rhythm between the astral body and the etheric body. Now we can see how the forces which are active in quartz are especially suitable to reestablishing the proper relationship, when it has been disturbed, between the ego and the astral body, in order thereby to work in a healing way upon the nerve-sense system. We can also see how calcium—especially that calcium which is obtained from the calcium excretions of animals—provides remedies which establish the proper relationship between the body of formative forces, the etheric body and the physical body.

Thus one can say that a correct view of the human being leads to the use of calcium or something similar, namely, what is secreted from the animal organism,—oyster shells, for example—in order to establish the proper relationship between the etheric body and the physical body, which, if out of balance, always expresses itself in physical processes of illness. That is what one must reflect upon when preparing remedies from such calcareous or similar excretions.

When dealing with an arhythmic working together of the body of formative forces and the astral body, one must look for what is present in antimony, and also in numerous other metals. If one wants to use remedies prepared from plants, one must also look especially into those constituents which are contained in the middle parts of the plants, those which are particularly present in the leaves and stem, whereas those forces which correspond to the phosphorus process are contained primarily in the blossom organs of the plants. Those processes which correspond to the silicic acid process are contained in the root organs of the plant. Thus one finds relationships between the forces which are in the various parts of the plant and the human organism. The root forces have a definite relationship and connection to the human head and to the nerve-sense system; the leaves and the stem organs have a specific connection to the rhythmic system; the blossom organs have a special connection to the metabolic system.

If one therefore wants to give assistance in a simple way to the digestive, metabolic system, that can often successfully be done—after having made the diagnosis in the correct way—by choosing certain blossoms of which one makes a tea. In this way one can assist the digestive organs. If one wants to gain a remedy which works especially upon the nerve-sense processes, upon the head organization, one would have to extract the salts from the roots by a special extraction process.

Thus it is necessary to penetrate into nature on the one hand and into the human organism on the other. Then it is possible to really find the remedies in nature so that one can see how the two are connected. Otherwise one does things by trial and error in order to find out how something works only to discover that it is not valid, or to write up a number of cases where 90% or 70% showed a favorable result, but 40% were unsuccessful. Then the matter is statistically treated, and depending on what result the statistics yielded, a determination is made whether or not a particular remedy should be used.

Because of the brief time available I can only speak about these matters aphoristically in order to indicate how in fact, without succumbing to dilettantism or medical sectarianism, one can proceed strictly in accordance with science in approaching illness processes through remedies which come out of a full perception of man.

Just as the correct knowledge of natural substances and natural processes is important in order to create a remedy, so it is equally important to know the specific manner of application of the remedy.

One can either work upon the nerve-sense system in bringing about, in the right manner, the process of healing, or one can work on the rhythmic system, or on the metabolic-limb system. In order to work on these different systems it is essential to know how the method of treatment must be initiated, for almost every remedy can be used in three different ways. To begin with it can be taken orally. This makes it possible for a person to take up the remedy through the metabolic system, which then in turn works upon the other systems. Some remedies are meant to be used in just this way.

There are also, however, remedies which can be used in a way which allows them to work directly on the rhythmic system. (In this connection antimony will provide a good example for finding the proper method of treatment.) This is where administration by injection must be introduced. Injecting the remedy intravenously or sub-cutaneously is the mode of administration which can best work upon the rhythmic processes in man.

In those remedies used in ointments, or in baths, or even wherever there is a question of treating the human organism in an external, mechanical way, for example in massage, then one can count upon this method of treatment as working primarily upon the nerve-sense system.

One can thus work through every organ system in the most varied ways in an effort at working towards a healing process. Let us assume we have silica, or quartz. It makes quite a difference whether we prepare this remedy to be taken by mouth or to be injected. If we count upon the fact that it will be taken by mouth then we will be preparing it to work through the digestive system, and the digestive system in turn can send forces into the nerve-sense system. We are then introducing the quartz processes by detour through the digestive system. If, however, we see that more quartz processes need to be transmitted to the nerve-sense system by introducing them via the rhythmic system, via the blood and breath, then we inject the remedy and thereby attempt to heal by way of the rhythmic system.

If we want to work therapeutically by way of the digestive organs with aromatic ether substances contained in the blossom of the plant, then we will prepare a tea and introduce it into the gastro-intestinal tract by having the patient drink it. If we want to bring etheric oils which, through their aromatic properties, work directly upon the nerve-sense system—or working first upon the nerve-sense system and then into the rhythmic system—then we could make some kind of bath to which we add the juices of the blossoms. In this manner we work upon the nerve-sense system.

Thus we see how the healing effect of the different substances brought into a relationship to man depends on the various methods of application and treatment. This will become transparently clear if anthroposophical knowledge is more and more applied to bringing about a connection between nature processes and the human being. It can then become evident through anthroposophy which remedies one needs to apply and how one needs to apply them.

In this way something can be brought about in the laboratories within our clinical-therapeutic institutes and other endeavors in which physicians are involved making it possible that on the one hand, remedies and therapeutic methods can be tried out, and on the other hand, the remedies themselves can be prepared. We have such clinical institutes as well as chemical-pharmaceutical laboratories in Arlesheim, near Dornach, as well as in Stuttgart.

I must point here especially to the Clinical-Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim (now the Ita Wegman Klinik) which is under the exceptional direction of Frau Dr. Ita Wegman, who unfolds an activity full of blessing for that institute because she has that which I would like to call “the courage to heal.” It is evident that this courage to heal is necessary, especially if you look on the one hand into the complexity of natural processes out of which healing processes must be drawn forth, and on the other hand into the immense complexity of processes of illness and health in man.—If a physician confronts this vast field even if he only has a certain number of patients, then she or he is required to have courage in order to heal.

Attached to this Arlesheim Institute is the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory (now the Weleda) in which remedies are produced. They can be used today in the entire world. The pharmacy produces the remedies and it is up to others to find the ways and means to make use of them. That is the essential point. People must find the right ways and means to arrive at the right remedies without being dilettantes. Then contemporary science will not be negated; rather, it will be taken further, extended.

If this knowledge becomes widely known, the success of such an endeavor as the International Pharmaceutical Laboratory in Arlesheim will not be a problem. But it is difficult in the face of the prevalent, purely materialistic direction of medicine to bring into the world effective therapeutics which are based upon a full knowledge of man. To bring about a change one would have to count upon the insight of every person who has a heartfelt interest in the health of his fellow man.

In pointing to that which can be achieved through natural remedies and their appropriate application, I certainly do not want to exclude what can be achieved by more soul-spiritual processes of healing. In this realm one can make especially fruitful observations. If we now carry hygienic-therapeutic considerations—as always must be the case in a proper pedagogy—into the school, one can see how the manner in which one works upon the children in a soul-spiritual manner in instruction can have an effect on the health and illness of a person—if not immediately, then certainly in the course of life. When I give pedagogical lectures I naturally speak about these matters in greater detail. I will mention only one example: the teacher can proceed properly in relation to the memory of the child only if he expects neither too much nor too little. If he proceeds improperly, if he places too many demands on the memory in the eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh years of life, then he does not have the proper pedagogical tact. What the soul must go through in an excessive activity of memory, or artificially nurtured activity of memory, will live itself out later in life as all kinds of physical illnesses. It is possible to establish a connection between diabetes and erroneous methods in education in relationship to memory. So too can the use of memory in education to the opposite extreme also have unfavorable effects upon a child.

I can mention this only in principle, but one can see from it not only how the natural remedies work in health and illness, but also how the special manner in which the soul itself works can be significant to health and illness.

Starting from there one can also find one's way to those methods whereby we attempt, through purely soul-spiritual influences, from person to person,—which I naturally cannot describe in detail any more today—to bring about processes leading to healing. Especially in this realm, however, it is very easy to get into dilettantism. One can, for example, harbor the belief that the so-called mental illnesses can be most easily healed through spiritual influences (for example by discussion). However, mental illnesses especially distinguish themselves by the fact that one can hardly approach the ill person with rational discussion. As a matter of fact it is just that impossibility of rational exchange which closes off the soul against outer influences in the so-called mentally ill. But one will find over and again that especially in so-called mental illness—which actually has been, as such, incorrectly named—physical processes of illness are present in a hidden way somewhere. Before one wants to meddle in a dilettantish way with mental illness, one ought actually, with the proper diagnosis, to determine which physical organ is involved in the illness. Only then will one be working beneficially through a corresponding healing of the physical organism.

One can help physical illnesses much sooner through all kinds of soul-spiritual (mental-psychological) influences, This is being done today but generally in a dilettantish way. I will not go into that now, Especially in physical illness much benefit will come in this way and the outer process which is brought about through remedies and the like will be supported in different ways.

I can only indicate this, Those methods which are based on the foundation of anthroposophy certainly do not exclude therapeutic soul-spiritual influences; rather, they include them. You have evidence of this in the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim-Dornach. Besides the physical-therapeutic methods you also find curative eurythmy.

This curative eurythmy consists in taking what you have seen here as artistic eurythmy and transforming it into health-giving movements for the person moving them, The vowel aspect is transformed so that the person makes healthy movements which are drawn out of eurythmy and are applied specifically in support of those forces which earlier I have called the albuminizing forces in man, while the consonant forces in many ways support the antimonizing forces, Thus it is possible through the working together of consonant and vowel eurythmy to bring about a balance between these two kinds of forces, And it can show there, if things are done properly, not in a dilettantish manner, how other healing processes, also in chronic illnesses, can be immensely supported through this curative eurythmy.

This curative eurythmy is actually based upon the fact that soul-spiritual processes are awakened through that which man does with his limbs. If one knows which movements want to come directly forth out of the healthy human organism, then one can also find the corresponding movements which will work in a healing way if one works back from the limbs, i.e. from the human movement, upon the processes of the inner organs.

In the Clinical Therapeutic Institute in Arlesheim the possibility exists to look at this curative eurythmy and to see how it, as a therapy, can be a specialized branch within the entire therapeutic process, a therapy which can be discovered out of true anthroposophical knowledge of man. It would naturally be going too far to discuss details in this area. The principles are actually given in what I have presented to you.

Thus it has happened that in the most varied ways we have had to develop this therapeutic endeavor within the anthroposophical movement because those involved in therapy have approached us. It has been a demand arising from the condition of the times. It was so-to-speak demanded by contemporary civilization. Anthroposophy has only given the answers to questions which were posed to it.

I really could only present the principles aphoristically to you today. More has not been possible during the available time. If I wanted to present matters in their totality, then I would have to do what I refused to do two days ago during the lecture on eurythmy. I would have to invite you to stay here through the night and listen to me till tomorrow morning, until the morning lecture. But that is something that would make you sick, and it would certainly be inappropriate for someone who wants to speak about bringing health to make people sick in this way. Therefore I must send you home for a healthy sleep following this sketchy presentation.

• 1. A febrile illness of prolonged duration which is marked by hectic fever, delirium, enlargement of the spleen, abdominal pain, and a variety of systemic manifestations such as headache, diarrhea, skin lesions, and more.

Continuing our study of the evolution of European Cultures in the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, we come to the culture for which I found the following design when I was working out the forms for the columns in our Building. It includes a drop-like motif above (a). The justification for this design can be felt when one studies the Middle-European culture of the Post-Atlantean epoch. I say Middle-European expressly. The reason for this will emerge from the subject-matter itself.

In this Middle-European culture the most varied national elements have for centuries been gathered together, making it impossible to speak of a “national” culture in the same sense as in the case of the cultures of the Southern and Western peoples of Europe.

In considering this Middle-European culture we must bear in mind at the outset that at the present time it is to all appearances composed of the people of two State-organisations. Remember, please, that in these lectures I am not speaking specifically of States but of cultures, and am saying here that the Middle-European culture is composed of two State-organisations—the German Empire and Austria.

In the case of Austria we see immediately that it would be absurd to speak of a national State, for in Austria there is an agglomeration of national cultures of the most varied kinds. This has been brought about by history, and Austrian life really consists in the interplay of these national cultures.

History is also responsible for the fact that the culture of the German Empire appears today in a certain unified form. Let us enquire, to begin with, only into the culture of the German population of Germany, and that of the German population of Austria, which has indeed many connections with that of Germany, geographically too, but on the other hand is geographically separated from it by great mountains. We will think first of the German element in a general sense.

If we ask: What is German?—this question cannot be asked in the same sense as the question: What is French? What is English? What is Italian? This cannot be done, because a member of the German people—if this expression can be used at all—never knows in any particular period under what definition he stands. What he would necessarily express if he were to say: “I am a German”, would quickly change, and in a comparatively short space of time; from age to age he would nave continually to be moairying the concept of “German nationality” (Deutschtum).

It is highly significant that when during Germany's period of distress Johann Gottlieb Fichte gave his famous “Addresses to the German Nation”, in two of these Addresses he struggled to find a concept to express “German-hood” (Deutschheit). It was a struggle to find a concept to express “German-hood”, just as one struggles to find concepts for something one confronts quite objectively—not subjectively, as a people usually confronts the concept of nationality.

There lies in the striving of an inhabitant of Middle Europe a trait that must be described as an “aspiration to become something”, and not as an “aspiration to be something”. To “become” something, not to “be” something—so that in Middle Europe a an who understands his own nature would have to rebel against being classified under some particular concept. He wants to become what he is. What he is to become hovers before him as an ideal. Therefore Goethe's “Faust” characterises the innermost aspiration of Middle Europe in these words:

“Whoe'er aspires unweariedly
Is not beyond redeeming.”

or again:

“He only earns his freedom and existence,
Who daily conquers them anew.”

It is being in a state of becoming, being that is never stationary, perpetually aspirins towerds something, beholding in the far distance what it desires to become.

And so it can be said that the work that is so essentially characteristic of the Middle-European nature was necessarily an outcome of human aspiration. This work is Goethe's “Faust”, which in spite of its many perfections has countless imperfections; it is not a work of art finished and complete in itself. “Faust” could be written again in a later epoch and written quite differently, but even so it would still be an expression of the nature of the man of Middle Europe.

If we ponder deeply upon this we shall get the picture of the upward striving Ego in Middle-European humanity serpent-entwined.

Serpent-entwined! This means, striving with the wisdom that is undetermined, the wisdom that is forming? in process of becoming never living in any certainty of complete fulfilment. Such is the situation of the man of Middle Europe.

And then there is Faust's ascent into the spiritual world at the end of Part II. Through Goethe, Faust becomes a Messenger of the gods—if I may put it so. There can be no more graphic expression of this than the “caduceus”—the staff of Mercury.

But in still another way this German element can best be described by saying that its members are “messengers”. The messenger of the Spirit was Mercury. It is only necessary to consider what has happened, and we shall find that to be a bearer of the message of culture lies in the deep foundations of the character of the German people.

By way of illustration I will quote particular instances connected with Austrian culture. In examining the remarkable, very complicated structure of the Austrian State, we can recognise three filaments of the population. There were once—they have now for the moot part disappeared or are in process of disappearing—the inhabitants of northern Hungary in the Zipser district, certain inhabitants of Siebenbürgen and certain inhabitants of the lower Theiss district, the Banat. Who were these peoples? Thy were peoples who in earlier centuries: migrated from regions more to the West and had brought with them from there their German thinking and their German language. One of these filaments settled south of the Carpathians in northern Hungary. In my youth they were called the “Zipser Germans”. Today they are largely merged in the Magyars, They have entirely surrendered their folk-nature, but it has not entirely disappeared: it lives on in many impulses that are present among the Magyars, but also in the achievements of the industrious people of northern Hungary. They have not clamoured for any especial recognition from ths surrounding people, for they have made no real effort to avoid surrendering their German element to the general nature of their environment.

The inhabitants of Siebenbürgen are Saxons; they are of Rhenish descent. I myself came across them in the year 1887 when I gave a lecture in Hermannstadt. Today they are on the point of being absorbed into the Magyars, like the Zipser Germans. The folk-substance lives on but no claim is made for stress to be laid upon their own national element.

In the southern Theiss region (Banat) the people are pure Swabians who have migraterd. The inhabitants of Württemberg are called Swabians. The seine happened to them as to the people of the Zipser region; they were messengers, in the truest sense, of the element that is now dissipating under the influence of a quite different language. And if one is more closely acquainted with the situation, one knows how necessary it was that these people should be merged in a common Middle-European element, in order that this element might itself thrive.

The same thing could be demonstrated in numbers of other cases. Anyone who wants really to understand and not merely to judge according to stereotyped concepts, will find that such things disclose an overcoming, a suppressing of the nationalistic principle. Everything in Middle Europe is adapted to lift man out of the nationalistic principle and to promote the expression of his own nature as man.

Hence it would be ridiculous to call Faust a German figure, although he could have originated nowhere except in Middle Europe, and in the truest sense the play is to be numbered among the works most truly representative of Middle-European culture.

If these matters are really to be understood, we must bear in mind the many intertwinings that take place in the evolutionary process and disclose themselves when we think, for example, of what was said yesterday: that in French culture there has been a revival of ancient Greek culture. In a certain respect, of course, ancient Greek culture also lives in German art, especially in German poetry and dramatic art. Does not the Greek Iphigenia live again in Goethe's Iphigenia? Did not Goethe write an “Achilleid”, or at any rate a part?

One must always go to the very root of these matters. The Greek element does indeed live in Middle-European culture; but the essential point is how ancient Greek culture, born as it was out of the Intellectual Soul, lives again in the elements of the Intellectual South in French culture. The Greek element does not live in the thinking of the individual Frenchman, in his individuality, but in the way in which the folk-soul takes expression. In the individual Frenchman, indeed, it lives perhaps less consciously than, for example, in its reappearance in Goethe or in Schiller, but it is at work in French culture.

The whole inner impulse of ancient Greek culture lights up in French culture. One can of course refer to some such thing as Voltaire wrote in a letter of the year 1768, where he says: “I have always believed, I still believe and shall continue to believe, that as far as tragedy and comedy are concerned, Athens is surpassed in every respect by Paris. I boldly declare that all Greek tragedies are like the works of tyros compared with the glorious scenes of Corneille and the consummate art of Racine's tragedies.” This sentiment can be compared with what Schiller once wrote to Goethe, saying, in effect: “As you were not born a Greek or an Italian, but in this northern clime, you have had to let an ideal Greece come to birth within you.”—But for all that, one must not suppose that Hellenism appeared in Middle Europe in a form as adequate as that in which it appeared in French culture. In Goethe's “Iphigenia” the yearning for Greek culture can be perceived. Goethe believed that he had acquired a new understanding for art after experiencing it in Italy, yet his “Iphigenia” has something about it that is quite different from anything in a Greek work of art. The essence of the matter is the artistic form in which things are presented. A very great deal could be said on this subject, but in these lectures I am trying merely to give indications. The revival of the Intellectual or Mind soul culture in the French people is shown in their way of living, their modus vivendi.

When we study Voltaire's assessment of the evolutionary history of humanity, he seems to us entirely Greek. Here and there, of course, people have indulged in fantastic notions about ancient Greek culture. but if one known the kind of thing a Greek might have said and then reads a little poem by Voltaire, one can feel what is meant by speaking of the revival of Greek culture. The gist of this little poem is as follows: Full of beauties and of errors, the old Homer has my profoundest respect; he, like every one of his heroes, is garrulous, overdone—yet for all that, sublime.

A Greek, of course, could never have expressed himself about Homer in this way, but about other things, certainly. It is quite typically Greek.

Looking for an expression to use instead of the word “nationality” in the case of Middle-European culture, we find, even from geographical considerations, the words: “Striving after individuality”. And within this striving after individuality we include not the German only, for Middle Europe must be taken to embrace a number of other peoples as well, in all of whom this striving is present in a most marked degree. This striving after individuality is to be found in the Czechs, the Ruthenians, the Slovaks, the Magyars, in spite of all their external differences; and finally it is to be found at the other pole of German culture, in the Poles. In them, the element of individuality is developed to the extreme. Hence the intensely individualistic world-outlook of really great Poles: Tovianski, Slovacki, Mickiewitz. Hence, too, the very essence of Polish philosophy, which emanates entirely from the individual as such. (Whether this philosophy is attractive or the reverse, according to taste, is not the point at all; these things must be looked at objectively.) As for the Polish attitude to religion, the fact that in a given case the one concerned happens to be a Pole can always be ignored. And it is the same in this whole agglomeration of peoples which constitutes Middle European culture; one trait is common to them all a striving after individuality.

Polish Meseianism is only the other pole of this striving; it takes the form more of a philosophical ideal, but it is the same in essence as what comes to expreesion in Goethe's “Faust” as the character of the striving personality, of the single individual.

The following design expresses what is at work in Middle Europe. What comes from above is indicated in this upper, twofold motif; it must be two-fold, because on the one side there is the idealism that is present in Middle Europe and on the other, the sense for the practical. The important thing in the design is not the relative size of the forms but the fact that the one (a) is at the side of the motif and the other (b) arches above the motif. The latter (b) represents what expresses itself in the peculiar, not very strong, kind of tie which the population of Middle Europe has with the soil, in one case more, in another case less marked.

The form at (a) indicates the trait that expresses itself in the thought element of Middle Europe, with its inclination towards philosophical speculation. There was a suggestion of these two motifs, although what they really indicate was but little understood, in a characterisation of the Germans once in in a foreign nation, to this effect: The Germans can till the soil and they can sail in the clouds—(this did not refer to ballooning, but to flights of mind)—but they will never be able to navigate the seas.

This is a strange utterance when one thinks of the German Hanseatic League, but it was actually made. It does, after all, point to two capacities with which the spiritual worlds have endowed the Germans—and these are at the same time Middle-European capacities.

The Ego is that principle in the human soul which has first and foremost to come to terms with itself; consequently there will be a seething and a swirling in this Ego-element. Whatever foreign wars the Germans have waged and will wage, the really characteristic wars are those which Germans have waged against Germans, in order to bring about inner clarification. If one follows the course of the wars fought out inside Germany, one has a faithful picture of what goes on within the enclosed Ego of man himself.

I have pointed out—the thought is to be found in many of my lectures—that the Ego could never have become conscious of itself if it were not kindled anew every morning by the outer world. The Ego wakens into consciousness through being kindled by the outer world; if this did not happen the Ego would be there, certainly, but it would never become a centre of consciousness. Every guiding-line given by Spiritual Science concerning the being of man is confirmed by the external facts.

The configuration assumed by the Middle-European States does not really originate from these States themselves but has been determined from outside. I will speak of Austria first. When I was young, numbers of people there were constantly saying that this agglomeration of peoples which constituted Austria must soon dissolve, that it was ready for dissolution. Those who understood something about world-evolution did not hold this view, because they knew that Austria was not held together from within but from outside. This can be demonstrated in all details by history.

If one were to speak quite objectively of the latest configuration of Middle Europe, of the German Empire; one would have to say: The German has always talked of the ideal of the one united German Empire. But perhaps it would still not be there if the French had not declared war in 1870 and so forced on apace the founding of the German Reich. It was really consolidated frcm outside rather in the way the Ego is kindled each morning by the outside world. Otherwise it might still be a goal to be striven for, an ideal existing, perhaps, only in the minds of the people.

All these things must be weighed quite objectively, particularly by those who adhere to the principles of Spiritual Science. Only so can one survey, calmly and dispassionately, what is taking place in the fifth Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. I can give guiding-lines only, for the subject could obviously not be exhausted in fifty lectures. And every lecture would present further proof of the truth of what can only very briefly be indicated here.

So we may say that the spiritual scientist can acquire a picture of European culture in which he perceives the interworking of Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego. And through this knowledge a lofty ideal can stand before us that of being able to play our part in bringing it about that in place of the present chaos, harmony shall arise in the individual human soul.

This is possible, but only possible if every single individual presses on toward objectivity. The individual man stands at a higher level than the nation. in our time these things are obscured in many ways. It is necessary to say these things, once at any rate. It is my spiritual duty to say them, and only because it is my spiritual duty do I say them at the present time.

We are living in an age when perception of what constitutes the harmony between the soul-members represented by the several peoples, and also of everything that is taking place around us, seems to be more clouded than ever before. In so saying I do not lay the main stress upon what is happening on the battlefields—for that must be judged in the light of other necessities—but upon the judgments now current among the peoples. They all seem to be at utter variance with what ought to be.

I have already spoken here about a symptomatic experience I have had in connection with my last book (“Die Rätsel der Philosopnie”). I had written up to page 206, and then the war broke out. What follows after this point—the brief outline of Anthroposophy—was written actually during the war. I tried to give an objective picture of the philosophy

of Boutroux and of Bergson. I do not believe that anyone could fail to realise the complete objectivity of what I said, even though only a brief space could ba allotted to the subject. It was necessary to call attention to the fact that Bergeon's philosophy is not original and in a certain way is lightly formulated. From pages 199-204, the views of Boutroux and Bergson were set forth without comment, and then on page 204, I said: “Out of easily formulated, easily attainable thoughts, Bergson presents an idea of evolution which, as the outcome of very profound thinking, W. H. Preuss had already presented in his book “Geist und Stoff” (“Spirit and Matter”) in 1882. Then, on pages 205-69 the philosophy of the lonely thinker Preuss is dealt with. It would naturally have been Bergeon's duty to make himself conversant with the ideas of Preuse. I say expressly, it would have been his duty to know something about the philosophy of Preues, for a philosopher ought to be aware of the ideas of his contemporaries if he proposes to write. Please bear in mind that I said, it would have been his duty to know this philosophy—for I may very possibly be accused of having said that Bergson intentionally kept silent about Preuss. I said no such thing and the passage quoted above stands there for all the world to see.

Now suppose that everything the different peoples have said about each other during these last weeks had not been said—in that case the above reference to Bergson would have been considered an objective statement. But now it will in all probability not be so regarded. Naturally, I shall not at any other time be able to speak differently about this matter. Those who stand on the ground of Spiritual Seience must remain objective. At the present time, things that ought to be clearly perceived are clouded over; but when a sufficiently large number of people have taken Spiritual Science to their hearts and are really steeped in it there will emerge out of this obscurity the ideal arising from the truths of Spiritual Science.

What we know of these truths—it is only a question of being steeped in them deeply enough—enables us to develop the right feeling for them. Let those who want to feel the true relationship between the different cultures, read what is contained in the forms of our columns and architraves, let them contemplate the curves and forme, and they will understand the spiritual relationships between the several nations. Not a single motif is accidental. When you look at a motif, when you see how it passes over from the third pillar to the fifth, you have there an expression of the relationship between the peoples corresponding to the two columns. From these architraves you can envisage the inner configuration of the soul-life of the peoples.

You enter the Building by the West door, and as you move towards the East you can feel what makes man truly man, in that he gathers into his soul what is good and admirable in each of the particular cultures—and then, as we hope, it will all sound together in harmony in the second, smaller part of the Building under the small cupola. Those who open their hearts to the Building will find the way out of tie prevailing obscurity; those who do not, will be swept along in it.

As we go towards the East, this next motif links on to the last (see pages 1 and 11). It is evident that this new form has arisen out of the foregoing Staff of Mercury! whereas in the latter the serpent-motif spreads horjzonally into the world, here the main motif points upwards and forks downwards, receiving what comes from above like a blossum opening downwards.

In this, which is the Jupiter motif as the former was the Mercury motif, the East of Europe is expressed. With its tapering slenderness this motif suggests folded hands stretching upwards to what comes from above, and gliding by their side that with which earthly man has to connect himself as it comes down from above like a flower.

It is not at all easy for the European to understand this motif and what lies behind it, because it is connected much more with the future than with the present. On account of the character of modern language it is extremely difficult to find words to characterise what lies behind this motif. For once spoken, the words would immediately have to signify something different, if they were to be really expressive. One cannot speak of the Russian element in the same way as one can speak of the English, French and Italian elements. We have already seen that we cannot speak of a “national” element in the case of Middle-European culture in the same sense as in the case of the cultures of Western Europe; still less can we speak of the Russian element in this sense. For does Russia present a picture similar to that presented by the English, French or Italian peoples? Most, certainly it does not! There is something in the Russian nature that is like a transformation of Western Europe, but a transformation into something totally different.

In the West of Europe we see national cultures whose fundamental character can be discerned by deepening our knowledge of the culture actually existing there. In the German nature we find a state of incompleteness, a striving after something that is not present, but is there as an ideal only. But this striving after the ideal lives in the blood, in the astral body and the etheric body of the man of Middle Europe. Looking over to the East we see a magnificently finished philosophy of religion, a culture that is eminently a religious culture. But can it be called “Russian”? It would be absurd to call it Russian, even though the Russians themselves do so, for it is the culture that came over to them from ancient Byzantium; it is a continuation of what originated there.

Naturally, what lives in the Sentient Soul comes from the Sentient Soul; what lives in the Intellectual Soul comes from the Intellectual Soul; what lives in the Consciousness Soul comes from the Consciousness Soul; and what lives in the Ego, even though it is in flow, in a perpetual state of becoming, proceeds from the Ego. But what comes from the Spirit Self is something that descends out of the Spirit into the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul.

The Spirit Self comes down from above towards Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego. This Spirit Self must announce itself through the fact that something foreign hovers down, as it were, upon the national culture. So we see that, fundamentally, everything it has hitherto experienced as its culture is foreign to tbe Russian soul, and has been foreign over since the time when the Greco-Byzantine culture was received, up to the external institutions that were imported from outside by Peter the Great. So we see bow through the Spirit Self there daecends the force which strives down to the soul-forces; but the Spirit Self will be able to give effect to its true force, its true character, only in the future. The Russian soul has, however, to make preparation for the reception of the Spirit Self.

Quite obviously what has reached the Russian soul from foreign elements is not the Spirit Self that will come in the future. But just as the Byzantine influence, Eastern Christianity, Western culture, have descended upon Russian souls, so, one day, the Spirit Self will descend. At the present time there is nothing more than preparation for it, nothing more than an inclination towards receiving it.

Examples can be given to illustrate everything for which Spiritual Science gives guiding-lines. Here is an example lying close at hand.—I have often spoken of the greatness of the philosopher Solovieff. His greatness was first revealed to me through spiritual observation, for I know that he is even greater, has effected even greater things, since his death in 1900 than he had effected before his death.

But let us consider the facts; you can convince yourselves from Solovieff's own writings. Many of them have been translated. There are the translations by Nina Hoffmann, by Keuchel, and now the excellent translation by Frau von Vacano, “Die geistigen Grundlagen des Lebens”.

If a man of Middle Europe steeps himself in the works of Solovieff, he can have a remarkable experience—especially since the latest translation has become available. It is extraordinarily interesting. One who is really conversant with Western and Middle-European philosophy will ask himself at first: Is there anything new in Solovieff? If we compare Solovieff with Western philosophy, we shall find not a single new thought as far as the actual text is concerned; there is nothing, absolutely nothing, not even in a turn of phrase, that could not equally well have been written in the West. And yet there is something altogether different.

But if you search for this difference in the philosophy itself, in what has been written, reading it as you read an ordinary book, you will not discover what is different. For what is different is something that is not contained in the sentences themselves. It is not in them, and yet it is there. What is contained within and behind the sentences will eventually be found by the sensitive soul, despite the conviction, after reading the book, that it contains nothing that differs from West European philosophy. What is contained in Solovieff's works is a certain nuance of feeling which may seem to the man of Middle Europe like a sultry atmosphere. Sometimes one feels as though one were in an oven, particularly when great and far-reaching questions are involved. If you follow a sentence closely, you will discover that nothing of exactly the same kind emerges as it does in the case of a West European philosopher. There is a certain tone of feeling which resounds as if it were unending expectant; this tone of feeling has a mystical character; certainly, it is still a sultry mysticism which may even contain an element of danger for the man of Western Europe if he allows himself to be affected by it.

But if one knows what lies in the substrata of the human soul—and it is necessary to know this—and really gets to the root of this element of sultriness, then it is certainly not dangerous. I believe that unless anyone has knowledge of the undertones of the life of soul, the essence of the difference in Solovieff's works will escape him and he will simply be convinced that he is reading a philosopher belonging to Western Europe. It is a very strange phenomenon, a phenomenon which clearly shows that what must come out of the East has not yet been uttered, above all has not yet been put into words.

We can recognise the characteristic traits of the European cultures from another angle by considering, for example, the following.—Something of the very essence of French culture, the Intellectual Soul culture, is contained in a certain saying of Voltaire. It will certainly be discerned by anyone who is able to perceive realities from symptoms. The saying, “If God did not exist, he would have to be invented”, is rightly attributed to Voltaire. This presupposes—otherwise the utterance would have no sense that God would have to be believed in; for he would hardly be invented for amusement.

Such a saying could be formulated only by a mind working entirely out of the Intellectual Soul, the Mind Soul, and having confidence in what arises from it—even in the matter of invention; for this belongs to the sphere of the Intellectual Soul.

Now let us take a Russian: Bakunin. He formulated the saying differently—and that is very remarkable. He says, “If God existed, he would have to be abolished.” He discovers that he cannot tolerate the existence of God if he is to claim validity for his own soul.—And another saying of Bakunin is very characteristic: “God is—and man is a slave”—the one alternative. The other is: “Man is free—therefore there is no God.” He cannot conceive a way out of the circle and decides to choose between the two alternatives. He chooses the second: “Man is free—therefore there is no God.”

This is a picture of the contrast between culture in Western and in Eastern Europe. West-European culture can still reconcile the idea of the free man with the idea of God. But in East-European culture there may be no God who coerces me, otherwise I am not free, I am a slave.

One feels the whole cleft between Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul, Consciousness Soul and Ego on the one side and the Spirit Self, which is present now, as it were, in counterpart, and is only preparing, its true being. We feel the whole cleft in what confronts us from the East, and we feel the lack of kinship of the East with the West when we perceive what effect representative personalities of the East make upon West-European culture. Who in the West, if he is not already a student of East-European culture, could understand what the Devil says to Ivan Karamazov? Who could reallyunderstand what Gorki calls “gruesome, yet veritable truth”?—“Yes, well, what is the truth? Man is the truth! What does it mean—Man? You are not it, nor am I it, and they are not it.—No! But you, I, they, old Luke, Napoleon, Mahomet all of us together are it! That is something quite tremendous! That is something wherein all beginnings are lodged, and all endings.—All in man, all for man. Man alone exists; all else is the work of his hands and of his brain. Man! Simply colossal! The very sound is exalted! MM—A—N! One should respect man! Not take pity on him—not degrade him by pitying him—but respect him!”

And how does one who has been an actor speak about his relationship to the public? And how the convict?—“I have always despised those people who are too much concerned with satiety. Man himself is the main thing! Man stands at a higher level than the satisfied stomach!”

It will be very difficult for the West to understand such things, for they give expression to the mystical suffering of the East; they let the cleft be felt between what is yet to come in the East and what lives in the West and in Middle Europe.

This immense cleft indicates to us that what is there in the East today is not the real East at all. I should have a great deal to say on the subject but can only indicate these things. This East is something of which the East itself still knows little, something concerning which it only dimly senses what it will become in the future

We understand well that it must be difficult for this East of the future to find, the bridge leading to its own true nature, to find itself, for we are confronted by no less a phenomenon than that the East still lives in feeling, still in something that is unutterable; it is seeking for a form of utterance. It seeks it in the East, seeks it in the West. The East was greatly enriched by what the Byzantine element brought to it but when the East gives expression to this, it no longer belongs to the East's own being; it is foreign to the East's own being.

But one thing leads above all clefts, namely, what we know as the true Science of the Spirit. And if what is now going on in West and Middle Europe can show us that without Spiritual Science the further course of evolution must lead ad absurdum, the East shows us that progress is utterly impossible unless understanding is reached through Spiritual Science.

Through Spiritual Science men will find and understand one another—in such a way that not only will their theoretical problems be answered, but the sufferings of culture will also be healed.

Even more than elsewhere there will be opportunity for the East to feel the events of today as a hard testing. For what must needs be felt there in particular strength will be in complete opposition to every impulse, in the East that willed this war. And still more than in the West and still more than in Central Europe does it hold good for the East, that self-identification with the active motives of this war is a denial of its own true being. Everything in the East that has led to this war will have to disappear if the sun of salvation is to rise over the East.

Our Building should become part of our very hearts, my dear friends, for it expresses everything that I try to say about it in sketchy words. More deeply than by any words you can understand what I have now said when you have a right feeling for the Building, when you feel that everything is contained there—in every curve, in every motif.

Our Building should be something that can be called “A Dome of Mutual Understanding among European Humanity”, So it is perhaps in a particular sense—I must say this, for it is my duty to say it—also a contribution towards what is to be found in the preface to my book “Theosophy”, namely, that Spiritual Science is something that our age rejects in the intellect and on the other side longs for in the soul, and of which it is in dire need.

When we contemplate the events of today we can say that Anthroposophy is something from which European humanity in the present epoch is as remote as it ought to be near, is something that it should long for with every fibre of its being. For if Spiritual Science penetrates our hearts in a way that could at the moment only be indicated in interpreting the forms of the columns and architraves, then the souls of European humanity will stand in the right relationship to each other.

If Anthroposophy—and for our immediate present this is still more important—if Anthroposophy fulfils its task in the human soul in having a clarifying effect in the thoughts of men, bringing real clarity into them, permeating and rectifying them, then a very great deal will have been achieved for the immediate future. For as well as the fact that men's hearts are not rightly related to each other in our materialistic age, the karma of which we are experiencing, men's thought, too have gone astray. Men do not want to understand each other; but not only that; they have perhaps never lied about each other to such a colossal extent as they do in our time! That is still worse than what is happening out there on the battlefields, because its effect lasts longer and because it works up even into the spiritual worlds. But at bottom it is sheer slovenliness of thought that has brought us to the pass we have already reached. Therefore Anthroposophy is today the most urgent of all necessities in the evolution of humanity!

Already one can ask the question: Are people today still capable of thinking? And further: Do not people feel that they must first have knowledge of the actual facts about which they want to think and speak?

I raise these two questions today because, as I have said, it is my duty to do so. What is at work in Middle Europe was called “Bernhardism” by the American ex-President Roosevelt. I will not discuss what the ex-President has said but will point to something that is not usually noticed. Fundamentally, this book which I have in my hand and is the one alluded to by Roosevelt, is a very serious book: “Germany and the Next War”, by Friedrich Bernhardi, written in 1912. The author was one who knew a great deal about this impending war from an external, exoteric, point of view, and for this reason the book is extraordinarily instructive. But what kind of thinking do we find in a book that in its own way is honest and sincere? Here is a chapter entitled: “The Right to make War”. Naturally, if one talks of a right to make a war, one must take a standpoint determined by a community of people, not by individuals; in other words, one speaks out of the consciousness of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits. Here is a passage which from the standpoint of the author is well meant, full of good intention. The attempt is made to explain that as long as there are separate nations, these nations have a right to make war on each other. The passage continues: “The individual can perform no nobler moral action than to sacrifice his own existence to the cause which he serves, or even to the conception of the value of ideals to personal morality... Similarly, nations and States can achieve no loftier consummation than to stake their whole power on upholding their independence, their honour, and their reputation.”

The first part of the passage is correct, but the thought behind it as a whole is absurd; States cannot adopt a selfless standpoint, because with them totally different conditions prevail. We must be clear in our minds about this. Imagine yourselves in the shoes of an Austrian statesman after the events which culminated in the assassination of a Serb at Serajevo.—Can one speak there in the sense of the foregoing passage? Most certainly not! A statesman is obliged to act as the egoism of the State demands. And so quite correct utterances are made today while the thought behind them is utterly false. This is only one example. The spiritual-scientific attitude here will he illuminating in the truest sense of the word, if only there are a sufficient number of people to represent it. These are not trivial matters; they are matters of vast significance. For they have all combined into what has now led to this terrible outbreak of war. I say this, becausel I know it. I say it because at the same time I can truly say—so far as anything of this nature can be said in the sense in which an occultist means it—that I have suffered and am still suffering enough from the events of these last weeks. I have gone through enough shattering experiences beginning with the Serajevo assassination and including much else. Never before have I myself seen anything as astounding, nor have I heard from occultists of anything as astounding, as what followed upon the assassination at Serajevo. A soul was there lifted into the spiritual worlds who produced an effect entirely differerst from that produced by any other soul; this soul became, as it were, a cosmic soul, forming a cosmic centre of force around which all the prevailing elements of fear gathered, All the existing elements of fear gravitated towards this soul—and lo! in the spiritual world exactly the opposite effect was produced than had been produced in the physical world. In the physical world, fear held back the war; in the spiritual world it was an element that hastened on the war, hastened it rapidly. To have such experiences for the first time is one of the most shattering moments that can occur in occult observation. If at some time or other, what has happened in the last eight or ten weeks is objectively surveyed, it will be possible, even by following the outer events, to recognise something that is like a mirror-image of what was happening in the spiritual.

It is the task of Anthroposophy, today more than ever, to learn objectivity from the evente of the time—true objectivity, which is so remote from the attitude prevailing today. I tried to bring out this point by asking two questions: “Are people today still capable of thinking?” and “Do people try, do they accustom themselves to look for the real facts when they want to think or speak?” Do they really do this?

Wherever we look—when men and whole nations are lying about each other on such a colossal scale—everywhere it is evident that the feeling of duty to put facts to the test, to go into the real facts, is lacking, even in high places.

This duty to test facts must be deeply engraved in the hearts of anthroposophists. We must learn to realise that among people who are to be taken. seriously, things must no longer happen as they are happening today, so universally.

As anthroposophists we must realise that these things need to be kept firmly in minds for otherwise we shall not emerge from this chaos in cultural life. With strict earnestness we must adhere to our basic principle: “Wisdom is only in the Truth”. Our whole Building is an interpretation of this principle. We must learn to read our Building—that is the important thing. When it is rightly read, an attitude of earnestness, of conscientiousness, of longing for truth, will grow in our hearts in connection with cultural and spiritaal life.

If our friends permeate themselves with the conviction that the truth rests upon the foundation of the facts of evolution, then their activities will bring blessing everywhere, no matter to which nation they belong. But if they themselves adopt a one-sidedly nationalistic standpoint, they will certainly not be able to do what is right in the anthroposophical sense.

The reason why Blavatsky's Theosophy went astray was that from the outset the interests of one portion of humanity—not the English, but the Indian—were placed above the interests of mankind as a whole. And it is true in the deepest sense that only that leads to genuine occult truth which at all times places the interests of humanity as a whole above those of a portion of humanity—but does so earnestly, with the most earnest, deepest feelings. Occult truth is clouded over the very moment the interests of one part of humanity are made to override the interests of the whole. Difficult as this may be at a time like our own, nevertheless it must be striven for by those who in the true sense of the word call themselves anthroposophists.