The Rudolf Steiner Archive

IN the Building that is to be a home for Spiritual Science, full account must be taken of the evolutionary conditions and necessities of mankind as a whole. And unless this demand is fulfilled, the aim of such a Building will not be achieved. In an undertaking like this we have a deep responsibility to the laws of the spiritual life, the spiritual Powers and the conditions of human evolution of which we have a certain knowledge; and above all we must be mindful of the judgment which future times will pass upon us. In the present cycle of human evolution, this responsibility is altogether different from what it was in times gone by.

Great and mighty creations of art and of culture through the ages have many things to tell us. In a beautiful and impressive lecture this morning, [Lecture by Dr. Ernst Wagner: “Works of Art as Records of the Evolution of Humanity.”] you heard how the creations of art and of culture help us to understand the inner constitution and attitude of the human soul in earlier times.

Now there is a certain reason why the responsibility of those who shared in the creation of ancient works of art, was made easier than it is for us to-day. In ancient times, human beings had at their disposal means of help which are no longer available in our epoch. The Gods let their forces stream into the unconscious or subconscious life of the soul; and in a certain sense it is an illusion to believe that in the brains or souls of the men who built the Pyramids of Egypt, the Temples of Greece and other great monuments, human thoughts alone were responsible for the impulses and aims expressed in the forms, the colours and so on. For in those times the Gods themselves were working through the hands, the heads and the hearts of men.

The Fourth Post-Atlantean epoch already lies in the far past and our age is the first period of time in which the Gods put man's own free, spiritual activity to the test. True, the Gods do not refuse their help, but they vouchsafe it only when by the strength of aspiration developed in the soul through a number of incarnations, men make themselves worthy to receive the forces streaming to them from above. What we ourselves have to create is essentially new — in the sense that we must work with forces differing altogether from those in operation in bygone times. We have to create out of the free activity of our own human souls. The hallmark of our age is consciousness — it is the epoch of the Consciousness Soul, the Spiritual Soul. And if the future is to receive from us such works of culture and of art as. we have received from the past, we must create out of full and clear consciousness, free from any influence arising from the subconscious life. That is why we must open our minds and hearts to thoughts which shed light upon the task ahead of us. Only if we know upon what laws and fundamental spiritual impulses our work must be grounded, only if what we do is in line and harmony with the evolutionary forces operating in mankind as a whole — only then will achievement be within our reach ... And now let us turn to certain fundamental ideas which can make our work fruitful — for what we have to create must be basically, and in its very essence, new.

In a certain sense our intention is to build a Temple which is also to be a place of teaching — as were the ancient Temples of the Mysteries. Buildings erected to enshrine what men have held most sacred have always been known as Temples. You have already heard how the life of the human soul in the different epochs came to expression in the temple-buildings. When with insight and warmth of soul we study these buildings, differences are at once apparent. A very striking example is afforded by the forms of temples belonging to the Second Post-Atlantean epoch of culture. Outwardly, at any rate, very little is left of these temples of the ancient Persian epoch, and their original form can only be dimly pictured or reconstructed from the Akasha Chronicle. Something reminiscent of their forms did indeed find its way into the later temples of the third epoch, into Babylonian-Assyrian architecture and above all into the temples of Asia Minor, but only to the extent that the structure of these later buildings was influenced by the conditions obtaining in that region of the Earth.

What was the most striking and significant feature of this early Art of Building?

Documentary records have little information to give on the subject. But if, assuming that investigation of the Akasha Chronicle itself is not possible, we study the buildings of a later epoch, gleaning from them some idea of what the earlier temples in that part of the world may have been, it will dawn upon us that in these very ancient temples, everything depended upon the facade, upon the impression made by the frontage of the temple upon those who approached its portals. A man who made his way through this facade into the interior of the temple, would have felt: “The facade spoke to me in a secret, mysterious language. In the interior of the temple I find everything that was striving to express itself in the façade.” He would have felt this no matter whether he came as a layman or as one who had to some extent been initiated.

If we now turn from these temples — the character of which can only be dimly surmised by those unable to read the Akasha Chronicle — if we now turn to the temples, the pyramids or other sacred monuments of Egypt, we find something altogether different. Sphinxes and symbolic figures of mystery and grandeur stand before us as we approach an ancient Egyptian Temple; even the obelisks are enigmas. The Sphinx and the Pyramids are riddles — so much so that the German philosopher Hegel spoke of this Art as the “Art of the Riddle.” The upward-rising form of the pyramid in which there is scarcely an aperture, seems to enshrine a mystery; from outside at any rate, a façade is indicated only in the form of a riddle presented to us. In the interior, as well as information on manifold secrets contained in the ancient mystery-scripts or what later took their place, we find indications in the innermost sanctuary, of how the hearts and souls of men were led to the God who dwelt in deep concealment within the temple. The building enshrines the most sacred Mystery — the Mystery of the God. The pyramids, too, are shrines around the holiest secret of humanity, namely. Initiation. These buildings shut themselves off from the outer world, together with the Mystery they contain.

Passing now to the temples of Greece, we find that they retain the basic principle of many Egyptian temples in that we have to think of the Greek Temple as the dwelling place of the Divine-Spiritual; but the outer structure itself indicates a further stage. In its wonderful expression of dynamic power, of inner forces weaving in the forms, it is whole and complete, intrinsically perfect — an Infinitude in itself. The Greek God dwells within the temple. In this building, with its columns which in themselves reveal their function as ‘bearers’ capable of supporting what lies upon them, the God is enshrined in something that is whole and perfect in itself; an infinitude is here embodied, within Earth-existence. This is expressed in the whole form and in every detail of the building.

The idea of the temple as an expression of all that is most precious to man, is embodied in the Christian Temple or Church. Such buildings, erected originally over a grave, indeed over the Grave of the Redeemer, culminate in the spire which tapers upwards to the heights. Here we have before us the expression of an altogether new impulse, whereby Christian architecture is distinguished from that of Greece. The Greek Temple is, in itself, one complete, dynamic whole. The Church of Christendom is quite different. I once said that by its very nature, a temple dedicated to Pallas Athene, to Apollo or to Zeus needs no human being near it or inside it; it stands there in its own self-contained, solitary majesty as the dwelling-place of the God. The Greek Temple is an infinitude in itself in that it is the dwelling-place of the God. And it is really the case that the farther away human beings are from the temple itself, the truer is the effect it makes upon us. Paradoxical as it may seem, this is the conception underlying the Greek Temple. The Church of Christendom is quite different. The call of a Christian church goes out to the hearts and minds of the Faithful; and every one of the forms in the space we enter tells us that it is there to receive the community, the thoughts and aspirations of the congregation. There could hardly have been a truer instinct than that which coined the word Dom for the Temple of Christianity, for Dom expresses a gathering-together, a togetherness of human beings. (Dom is akin to tum, as in Volkstum).

We cannot fail to realise that a Gothic building, with its characteristic forms, is trying to express something that is never as separate and complete in itself as a Greek Temple. Every Gothic form seems to reach out beyond its own boundaries, to express the aspirations and searchings of those within the walls; there is everywhere a kind of urge to break through the enclosing walls and mingle with the universe. The Gothic arch arose, of course, from a deep feeling for the dynamic element; but there is something in all Gothic forms which seems to lead out and beyond; they strive as it were to make themselves permeable. One of the reasons why a Gothic building makes its wonderful impression is that the multi-coloured windows provide such a mysterious and yet such a natural link between the interior space and the all-pervading light. Could there be any sight in the world more radiant and glorious than that of the light weaving through the coloured windows of a Gothic cathedral among the tiny specks of dust? Could any enclosed space make a more majestic impression than this — where even the enclosing walls seem to lead out beyond, where the interior space itself reaches out to the mysteries of infinite space?

From this rapid survey of a lengthy period in the development of temple-architecture, we cannot have failed to realise that its progress is based upon underlying law. But for all that, we still confront a kind of Sphinx. What is really at the root of it? Why has it developed in just this way? Can any explanation be given of those remarkable frontages and facades covered with strange figures of winged animals and winged wheels, of the curious pillars and columns to be found in the region of Asia Minor as the last surviving fragments of the first stage of temple-architecture? These frontages tell us something very remarkable ... exactly the same, in reality, as the experience which arises within the temple itself. Can there be any greater enigma than the forms which are to be seen on fragments preserved in modern museums? What principle underlies it all?

There is an explanation, but it can only be found through insight into the thoughts and aims of those who participated in the building of these temples. This, of course, is a matter in which the help of occultism is indispensable. What is a Temple of Asia Minor, in reality? Does its prototype or model exist anywhere in the world?

The following will indicate what this prototype is, and throw light upon the whole subject. Imagine a human being lying on the ground, in the act of raising his body and his countenance upright. He raises his body upwards from the ground in order that it may come within the sphere of the downstreaming spiritual forces and be united with them. This image will give you an inkling of the inspiration from which the architectural forms of the early temples of Asia Minor were born. All the pillars, capitals and remarkable forms of such temples are a symbolic expression of what we may feel at the sight of a human being raising himself upright — with the movements of his hands, his features, the look on his face, and so on. If with the eyes of the Spirit we are able to look behind this countenance into the inner man, into the microcosm that is an image of the macrocosm, we should find, inasmuch as the countenance expresses the inner man, that the countenance and the inner man are related in just the same way as the facade or frontage of a temple of Asia Minor was related to its interior. A human being in the act of raising himself upright — that is what the early temple of Asia Minor expresses, not as a copy, but as the underlying motif and all that this motif suggests. The spiritual picture given by Anthroposophy of the physical nature of man helps us to realise the sense in which such a temple was an expression of the microcosm, of man. Understanding of the aspiring human being, therefore, sheds light on the fundamental character of that early Art of Building. Man as a physical being has his spiritual counterpart in those remarkable temples of which only fragments and debris have survived. This could be pointed out in every detail, down to the winged wheels and the original forms of all such designs. The Temple Is — Man! rings to us across the ages like a clarion call.

And now let us turn to the temples of Egypt and of Greece. Man can be described not only as a physical being, but also as a being of soul. When we approach man on Earth as a being of soul, all that we perceive in his eyes, his countenance, his gestures, is, to begin with, a riddle as great in every respect as that presented by the Egyptian Temple. It is within man that we find the holy of holies — accessible only to those who can find the way from the outer to the inner. And there, in the innermost sanctuary, a human soul is concealed, just as the God and the secrets of the Mysteries were concealed in the Temples and Pyramids of Egypt.

But the soul is not so deeply concealed in man as to be unable to find expression in his whole bearing and appearance. When the soul truly permeates the body, the body can become the outward expression and manifestation of the soul. The human body is then revealed to us as a work of artistic perfection, permeated by soul, an infinitude complete in itself. And now look for something in the visible world that is as whole and perfect in itself as the physical body of man permeated by soul. In respect of dynamic perfection you will find nothing except the Greek Temple which, in its self-contained perfection, is at the same time the dwelling-place and the expression of the God. And in the sense that man, as microcosm, is soul within a body, so is the temple of Egypt and of Greece, in reality, MAN!

The human being raising himself upright — that is the prototype of the oriental temple. The human being standing on the soil of the Earth, concealing a mysterious world within himself but able to let the forces of this inner world stream perpetually through his being, directing his gaze horizontally forward — that is the Greek Temple. Again the annals of world-history tell us: The Temple is — MAN!

We come now to our own epoch. Its origin is to be found in the fruits of the ancient Hebrew culture and of Christianity, of the Mystery of Golgotha, although, to begin with, the new impulse had to find its way through architectural forms handed down from Egypt and from Greece. But the urge is to break through these forms, to break through their boundaries in such a way that they lead out beyond all enclosed space to the weaving life of the universe. The seeds of whatever comes to pass in the future have been laid down in the past. The temple of the future is foreshadowed, mysteriously, in the past. And as I am speaking of something that is a perpetual riddle in the evolution of humanity, I can hardly do otherwise than speak of the riddle itself in rather enigmatical words.

Constant reference is made to Solomon's Temple. We know that this temple was meant to be an expression of the spiritual realities of human evolution. We hear much of this Temple of Solomon. But a question that leads nowhere — and here lies the enigma — is often put to men living on the physical Earth. It is asked: Has anyone actually seen King Solomon's Temple? Is there anyone who ever saw it, in all its truth and glory? Here indeed there is a riddle! Herodotus traveled in Egypt and the region of Asia Minor only a few centuries after the Temple of Solomon must already have been in existence. From the descriptions of his travels — and they mention matters of far less importance — we know that he must have passed within a few miles of Solomon's Temple, but he did not set eyes upon it. People had not seen this temple! The enigma of it all is that here I have to speak of something that certainly existed — and yet had not been seen. But so it is ... In Nature, too, there is something that may be present and yet not be seen. The comparison is not perfect, however, and to press it any further would lead wide of the mark. Plants are contained within their seeds, but human eyes do not see the plants within the seeds. This comparison, as I say, must not be pressed any further; for anyone who attempted to base an explanation of Solomon's Temple upon it would be speaking quite falsely. In the way I have expressed it, however, the comparison is correct — the comparison between the seed of a plant and the Temple of Solomon.

What is the aim of Solomon's Temple? Its aim is the same as that of the Temple of the Future. The physical human being can be described by Anthroposophy; the human being as the temple of the soul can be described by Psychosophy; and as Spirit, the human being can be described by Pneumatosophy. Can we not then picture man spiritually in the following way: — We envisage a human being lying on the ground and raising himself upright; then we picture him standing before us as a self-contained whole, a self-grounded, independent infinitude, with eyes gazing straight forward; and then we picture a man whose gaze is directed to the heights, who raises his soul to the Spirit and receives the Spirit! To say that the Spirit is spiritual is tautology, but for all that it underlines what is here meant, namely, that the Spirit is the super-sensible reality. Art, however, can work only in the realm of sense, can create forms only in the world of sense. In other words: The spirit that is received into the soul must be able to pour into form. Just as the human being raising himself upright and then the human being consolidated in himself were the prototypes of the ancient temples, so the prototype of the temple of the future must be the human soul into which the Spirit has been received. The mission of our age is to initiate an Art of Building which shall be able to speak with all clarity to the men of future times: The Temple is — Man — the Man who receives the Spirit into his soul! But this Art of Building will differ from all its predecessors. We now come back to what was said at the beginning of the lecture.

With our physical eyes we can actually see a man who is in the act of raising himself upright. But man as a being pervaded by soul must be inwardly felt, inwardly perceived. And this was indeed the case — as you heard this morning when the lecturer so graphically said that the sight of a Greek Temple “makes us feel the very marrow of our bones.” Truly, the Greek Temple lives in us because we are that Temple, in so far as we are each of us a microcosm permeated by soul. The quickening of the soul by the Spirit is an invisible, super-sensible fact ... and yet it must become perceptible in the world of sense if it is to be expressed in Art. No epoch except our own and the epochs to come could give birth to this form of Art. It is for us to make the beginning, although it can be no more than a beginning, an attempt ... rather like the temple which having been once whole and perfect in itself, strove in the Church of Christendom to break through its own walls and make connection with the weaving life of the universe.

What have we to build?

We have to build something that will be the completion of this striving. With the powers that Spiritual Science can awaken in us, we must try to create an interior which in the effects produced by its colours, forms and other features, is a place set apart — and yet, at the same time, is not shut off, inasmuch as wherever we look a challenge seems to come to our eyes and our hearts to penetrate through the walls, so that in the seclusion as it were of a sanctuary, we are at the same time one with the weaving life of the Divine. The temple that belongs truly to the future will have walls — and yet no walls; its interior will have renounced every trace of egoism that may be associated with an enclosed space, and all its colours and forms will give expression to a selfless striving to receive the inpouring forces of the universe.

At the opening of our building in Stuttgart* I tried to indicate what can be achieved in this direction by colours, to what extent colours can be the link with the Spirits of the surrounding world, with the all-pervading spiritual atmosphere. And now let us ask: Where does the super-sensible being of man become externally manifest? When does an indication reach us of the super-sensible reality within physical man? Only when man speaks, when his inner life of soul pours into the word; when the word is the embodiment of wisdom and prayer which — without any element of sentimentality — enshrines world-mysteries and entrusts them to man's keeping. The word that becomes flesh within the human being is the Spirit, the spirituality which is expressing itself in the physical human being. And we shall either create the building we ought to create ... or we shall fail, in which case the task will have to be left to those who come after us. But we shall succeed if, for the first time, we give the interior the most perfect form that is possible to-day — quite apart from the outside appearance of the building. The exterior may or may not be prosaic ... that does not fundamentally matter. The outside appearance is there for the secular world — with which the interior is not concerned. It is the interior that is of importance. And what will this interior be?

* See the lecture: “Die okkulte Gesichtspunkte des Stuttgarter Baues.” Stuttgart, October, 1911.

At every turn our eyes will light upon something that seems to say to us: This interior, with its language of colours and forms, in its whole living reality, is an expression of the deepest spirituality that man can entrust to the sphere of his bodily nature. The mystery of Man as revealed to wisdom and to prayer, and the forms which surround the space, will be one in such a building. And the words sent forth into this space will set their own range and boundaries, so that as they strike upon the walls they will find something to which they are so attuned that what has issued from the human being will resound back into the interior. The dynamic power of the word will go forth from the centre to the periphery and the interior space itself will then re-echo the proclamation and message of the Spirit. This interior will set and maintain its own boundaries and at the same time open itself freely to the spiritual infinitudes.

Such a building could not have existed hitherto, for Spiritual Science alone is capable of creating it. And if Spiritual Science does not do this in our day, future epochs will demand it of us. Just as the Temple of Western Asia, the Temple of Egypt, the Temple of Greece, the Church or Cathedral of Christendom have arisen in the course of the evolution of humanity, so must the place of the Mysteries of Spiritual Science — secluded from the material affairs of the world and open to the spiritual world — be born from the Spirit of man as the work of art of the future.

Nothing that is already in existence can prefigure the ideal structure that ought, one day, to stand before us. Everything, in a certain sense, must be absolutely and in essence new. Naturally, it will arise in a form as yet imperfect, but at least it will be a beginning, leading to higher and higher stages of perfection in the same domain.

How can men of the modern age become mature enough to understand the nature of such a building?

No true art can arise unless it is born from the whole Spirit of an epoch in human evolution. During the second year of my studies at the Technical High School in Vienna, Ferstel, the architect of the Votivkirche there, said something in his Presidential Address which often comes back to me. On the one side his words seemed to me at the time to strike a discordant note, but on the other, to be absolutely characteristic of the times. Ferstel made the strange statement: “Styles of architecture cannot just be found, cannot be invented.” To these words there should really be added: “Styles of architecture are born from the intrinsic character of the peoples.” Up to now, our age has shown no aptitude, as did the men of old, for finding styles of architecture and of building and then placing them before the world. Styles of architecture are “found,” but in the real sense only when they are born from the spirit of an epoch. How can we to-day reach some understanding of the Spirit of our age by which alone the true architecture of the future can be found? ... I shall try now to approach the subject from quite a different angle and point of view.

During the course of our work, I have come across artists in many different domains who feel a kind of fear, a kind of dread of spiritual knowledge, because Spiritual Science tries to open up a certain understanding of works of art and the impulses out of which they were created. It is quite true that efforts are made to interpret sagas, legends, and works of art, too, in the light of Spiritual Science, to explain the impulses underlying them. But so often it happens — and it is very understandable — that an artist recoils from such interpretations because, especially when he is really creative, he feels: ‘When I try to formulate in concepts or ideas something that I feel to be a living work of art, or at least a fertile intuition, I lose all power of originality, I lose everything I want to express — the content as well as the form.’ ... I assure you that little has been said to me through the course of the years with which I have greater sympathy. For if one is at all sensitive to these things, it is only too easy to understand the repulsion that an artist must feel when he finds one of his own works or a work he loves, being analysed and ‘explained.’ That a work of art should be taken in hand by the intellect is a really dreadful thought for the artist who is present, somewhere, in all of us. We seem to be aware of an almost deathlike smell when we have an edition of Goethe's Faust before us ... and there, at the bottom of the pages are the analytical notes of some scholar who may even be writing them as a philosopher, not merely as a philologist! How ought we to regard these things? I will try to make the point clear to you, very briefly, by means of an example.

I have before me the latest edition of the legend of “The Seven Wise Masters,” published this year by Diederichs. It is an old legend of which many different versions exist. Fragments of it are to be found practically all over Europe. It is a remarkable story, beautiful and artistically composed. I am, of course, speaking here of the art of epic poetry, but the same kind of treatment might also be applied to architectural art. I cannot take you through all that is contained, sometimes in rather unpolished phraseology, in this legend of the Seven Wise Masters, but I will give you a skeleton outline of it.

A series of episodes graphically narrated in connection with one main theme, have the following superscription: “Here begins the Book which tells of Pontianus the Emperor, his wife the Empress and his son, the young Prince Diocletian, how the Emperor desired to hang his son on the gallows, and how he is saved by words spoken each day by Seven Wise Masters.”

An Emperor has a wife and by her a son, Diocletian. She dies, and the Emperor takes a second wife. His son Diocletian is his lawful heir; by the second wife he has no son. The time comes for the education of Diocletian. It is announced that this will be entrusted to the most eminent and wisest men in the land, and Seven Wise Masters then come forward to undertake it. The Emperor's second wife longs to have a son of her own in order that her stepson may not succeed his father; but her wish is not fulfilled and she then proceeds to poison the mind of the Emperor against his son; finally she resolves to get rid of the son at all costs. For seven years Diocletian receives instruction from the Seven Wise Masters, amassing a wide range of knowledge — sevenfold knowledge. But in a certain respect he has outgrown the wisdom that the Seven Wise Masters had been able to impart to him. He has, for instance, himself discovered a certain star in the heavens and it is thereby intimated to him that when he returns to his father, he must remain dumb for seven consecutive days, must utter no single word and appear to be a simpleton. But knowing too, that the Empress is intent upon his death, he asks the Seven Wise Masters to save him. And now the following happens, seven times in succession, The son comes home, but the Empress tells the Emperor a story with the object of persuading him to let his son be hanged. The Emperor gives his assent, for the story has convinced and deeply moved him. The son is led out to the gallows in the presence of the Emperor and on the way they come upon the first of the Seven Wise Masters. When the Emperor holds him responsible for his son's stupidity, he — the first of the Masters — asks leave to tell the Emperor a story, and receives permission. “Very well,” says the Wise Man, “but first you must allow your son to come home, for it is my wish that he shall listen to us before he is hanged.” The Emperor acquiesces and when they have returned to their home, the first of the Seven Wise Masters tells his story. This story makes, such an impression upon the Emperor that he allows his son to go free. But the next day the Empress tells the Emperor another story, and again the son is condemned to death. As he is being led to the gallows, the second of the Seven Wise Masters comes forward, begging leave to tell the Emperor a story before the hanging takes place. Again the upshot is that Diocletian still lives. The same happenings repeat themselves seven times over, until the eighth day has come and Diocletian is able to speak. This is the story of how the Emperor's son comes to be saved.

The whole tale and its climax are graphically told. And now, think of it: We take the book and absorb ourselves in it; the graphic, if at times rather crude pictures, cannot fail to delight us; we are carried away by a really masterly portrayal of souls. But such a story immediately makes people call out for an ‘explanation.’ Would it always have been so? No indeed! It is only so in our own age, the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch, when the intellect predominates everything. In the days when this story was actually written, nobody would have been asked to ‘explain’ it. But the verdict nowadays is that explanation is necessary ... and so one makes up one's mind to give it. And after all, it is not difficult. The Emperor's first wife has given him a son who is destined to receive teaching from Seven Wise Masters and whose soul has descended from times when men were still endowed with natural powers of clairvoyance. The soul has lost this clairvoyance but the human ‘I’ has remained — and can be instructed by the Seven Wise Masters, who are presented to us in many different forms. As I once said, we have essentially the same theme in the seven daughters of Jethro, the priest of Midian, who came to Moses by the well belonging to their father; he, eventually, became the father-in-law of Moses. In the Middle Ages, too, there are the seven Liberal Arts. The second wife of the Emperor who has no consciousness of the Divine, represents the human soul as it is to-day, when it has lost consciousness of the Divine and is therefore also unable to ‘have a son.’ Diocletian, the son, is instructed in secret by the Seven Wise Masters and must finally be freed by means of the powers he has acquired from these Seven. And so we could continue, giving an absolutely correct interpretation which would certainly be useful to our contemporaries. But what of our artistic sense? I do not know whether what I now have to say will find an echo or not! When we read and absorb such a book and then try to be clever, explaining it quite correctly, in the way demanded by the modern age, we cannot help feeling that we have wronged it, fundamentally wronged it. There is no getting away from the fact that a skeleton of abstract concepts has been substituted for the work of art in all its living reality — whether the explanation is true or false, illuminating or the reverse.

The greatest work of art of all is the world itself — Macrocosm or Microcosm! In olden times the secrets of the world were expressed in pictures, or symbols. We, in our day, bring the intellect, and Spiritual Science too, to bear upon the ancient wisdom which has been the seed of the culture of the Fifth Post-Atlantean epoch. We do this in order to ‘explain’ the secrets of the world. In comparison with the living reality this is just as abstract and barren as a commentary in comparison with the work of art itself. Although Spiritual Science is necessary, although the times demand it, nevertheless in a certain respect we must feel it to be a skeleton in comparison with the living realities of existence. It is indeed so. When Theosophy keeps only our intellects busy, when with our intellects we draw up tables and coin all kinds of technical expressions, Theosophy is nothing but a skeleton — above all when it is speaking of the living human being. It begins to be a little more bearable when we are able to picture, for instance, the conditions of existence on Saturn, Sun and Moon, the earlier epochs of Earth-evolution or the work of the several Hierarchies. But to say that the human being consists of physical body, ether-body, astral body and Ego — or Manas and Kama-Manas ... this is really dreadful, and it is even more dreadful to have charts and tables of these things. Thinking of the human being in all his majesty, I can scarcely imagine anything more horrible than to be surrounded in a great hall by a number of living people and to have on the blackboard beside one a chart of the seven principles of man! But so, alas, it must be ... and there is no getting away from it. It is not, perhaps, actually necessary to inflict these things upon our eyes — they are anything but pleasing to look at — but we must have them before the eyes of the soul! That is part of the mission of our age. And whatever may be said against these things from the point of view of art, they are, after all, part and parcel of the times in which we live.

But how can we get beyond this? In a certain respect we have to be arid and prosaic Theosophists; we have to strip the world bare of its secrets and drag glorious works of art into the desert of abstract concepts, reiterating all the time that we are “Theosophists!” How can we get out of this dilemma?

There is only one way. We must feel that Theosophy is for us a Cross and a Sacrifice, that in a sense it takes away from us practically all the living substance of world-secrets in the possession of mankind hitherto. And no degree of intensity is too great for words in which I want to bring home to you that for everything that truly lives, in the course of the evolution of mankind and of the Divine World too, Theosophy must, to begin with, be a field of corpses.

But if we realise that pain and suffering are inseparable from Theosophy, in that it brings knowledge of what is greatest and most sublime in the world, if we feel that we have in us one of the divine impulses of its mission — then Theosophy is a corpse which rises out of the grave and celebrates its resurrection. Nobody will rejoice to find the world being stripped of its mysteries; but on the other hand nobody will feel and know the creative power inherent in the mysteries of the world as truly as those who realise that the source of their own creative power flows from Christ, Who having carried the Cross to the ‘Place of Skulls,’ passed through death. This is the Cross in the sphere of knowledge which Theosophy carries in order to experience death and then, from within the grave, to see a new world of life arising. A man who quickens and transforms his very soul — in a way that the intellect can never do — a man who suffers a kind of death in Theosophy, will feel in his own life a source of those impulses in Art which can turn into reality what I have outlined before you to-day.

True spiritual perception is part and parcel of the aim before us — and we believe that the Johannesbau-Verein will help to make this aim understood in the world. I hardly think any other words are needed in order to bring home to you that this Building can be for Anthroposophists one of those things which the heart feels to be a vital necessity in the stream of world-events. For when it comes to the question of whether Anthroposophy will find a wider response in the world to-day, so much more depends upon deed than upon any answer expressed in words or thoughts; very much depends, too, upon everyone contributing, as far as he can, to the aim which has found such splendid understanding on the part of the Johannesbau-Verein and may thus be able to take its real place in the evolution of mankind.

During his earthly existence, the human being alternates in the states of consciousness, which we have already considered from many points of view during these days, between the states of complete waking, sleeping and dreaming. And I have just tried to explain the full significance of dreaming during the short lecture cycle at the delegates' meeting. Today, let us first ask ourselves the question: Is it part of the essential nature of man as an earthly being to live in these three states of consciousness?

We must be clear about the fact that within earthly existence, only man lives in these three states of consciousness. The animal lives in a fundamentally different cycle. The animal does not have the deep dreamless sleep that man has for the longest time between falling asleep and waking up. On the other hand, the animal does not have the complete wakefulness that man has between waking up and falling asleep. The animal waking state is actually somewhat similar to human dreaming. Only the conscious experiences of higher animals are more definite, more saturated, I might say, than the fleeting human dreams. But on the other hand, the animal is never unconscious to the same high degree as man is in deep sleep.

The animal therefore does not differ to the same extent from its surroundings as does man. The animal does not have an external world and an internal world in the way that man has them. If we translate into human language, the animal actually reckons, what lives as a dull consciousness in the higher animals, with its entire inner being to the outside world.

When an animal sees a plant, it does not initially have the feeling that there is a plant outside and that it is a closed being inside, but rather a strong inner experience of the plant, an immediate sympathy or antipathy. In a sense, the animal feels within itself what the plant expresses. That in our present age people are so little able to observe what does not reveal itself in a very crude way, this circumstance alone it is, which prevents them from simply seeing from the behavior, from the behavior of the animal, that it is as I have said.

Only man has this sharp, clear distinction between his inner world and the outer world. Why does man acknowledge an outer world? How does man come to speak of an inner world and an outer world at all? He comes to it through the fact that he is always outside his physical and etheric bodies with his I and with his astral body in the state of sleep, that he, so to speak, leaves his physical and etheric bodies to themselves in sleep and is with those things that are the outer world. During our state of sleep, we share the fate of external things. Just as tables and benches, trees and clouds are outside our physical and etheric bodies when we are awake, and we therefore call them the external world, so our own astral body and our own ego belong to the external world during sleep. And when we belong to the external world with our ego and our astral body during sleep, something happens.

To understand what is happening, let us first consider what actually happens when we face the world in a normal waking state. The objects around us are external to us. And gradually, human scientific thinking has come to recognize only that which can be measured, weighed and counted as certain for these physical things of the outside world. The content of our physical science is, after all, determined by weight, by measure, by number.

We calculate with the calculation operations that once applied to earthly things, we weigh the things, we measure them. And what we determine by weight, measure and number, that is actually given by the physical. We would not describe a body as physical if we could not somehow prove its reality with the scales. But that which, for example, colors are, that which sounds are, that which even sensations of warmth and cold are, that which is the actual sensory perceptions, that weaves so over the heavy, measurable, countable things. When we want to define any physical thing, what constitutes its actual physical essence is precisely what can be weighed and counted, and what the physicist actually only wants to deal with. Regarding color, sound and so on, he says: Yes, something is happening out there that also has to do with weighing or counting. — He himself says of the color phenomena: There are vibrations out there that make an impression on people, and people describe this impression as color when the eye determines it, as sound when the ear determines it, and so on. - Actually, one could say: the physicist today does not know what to do with all these things - sound, color, warmth and cold. He regards them simply as properties of what can be determined with the scales, with the measuring stick or by calculation. In a sense, colors adhere to the physical, sound breaks away from the physical, and warmth or cold undulate out of the physical. We say: that which has a weight, that asked for the blush, or it:st red.

When a person is in the state between falling asleep and waking up, it is different with the I and with the astral body. In this state, things are not there at all in terms of measure, number and weight. According to earthly measure, number and weight, things are not there. When we are asleep, we do not have things around us that can be weighed, strange as it may seem, nor do we have things around us that can be counted or measured directly. You could not apply a yardstick as I and as an astral body in a state of sleep. But what is there, if I may express it in this way, are the free-floating, free-weaving sensations. Only that in his present state of development, man does not have the ability to perceive the free-floating blush, the waves of the free-weaving sound, and so on.

If you want to draw a schematic picture of the matter, you could do it like this. [Here he begins to draw on the board] You could say: Here on earth we have tangible solid things, and the red, the yellow, that is, what the senses perceive in the physical world, adheres to these tangible solid things, so to speak. When we are asleep, yellow is a free-floating being, red is a free-floating being, not attached to such conditions of heaviness, but freely weaving and floating. It is the same with sound: it is not the bell that sounds, but the sound that weaves.

And it is true that when we walk around in our physical world and see something, we pick it up; only then it is a thing, otherwise it could also be an optical illusion. Weight must be added. That is why one is so inclined to regard something that appears in the physical without it being perceived as heavy, such as the colors of the rainbow, as an optical illusion. If you open a physics book today, you will find that it explains that what you see is an optical illusion. What is actually real is the raindrop. And so you draw lines into it that actually mean nothing at all for what is there, but which you imagine through space; you then call them rays. But the rays are not there at all. Then one says: the eye projects that outwards. This projection is something that is used in physics today in a very strange way. So I take up the idea: we see a red object. To convince ourselves that it is not an optical illusion, we pick it up and it is heavy: this is how we verify its reality.

The one who now becomes aware in the I and in the astral body outside the physical and etheric body also finally comes to the conclusion that something like this is already there in this free-floating and free-weaving colored, sounding; but it is different. In a freely floating colored shape, there is a tendency to move out into the vastness of the world; it has an opposite gravity. These things on earth want to go down to the center of the earth [drawing, downward arrows], while those [upward arrows] want to go out freely into space.

And there is also something similar to a measure. You see it when you have, let's say, a small reddish cloud [plate 4], and this small reddish cloud is surrounded by a mighty yellow structure. Then you measure, but not with the scale, but qualitatively you measure with the red, with the stronger shining the weaker shining yellow. And just as the measuring rod tells you: that is five meters, so here the red tells you: if I were to spread out, I would enter the yellow five times. I have to expand, I have to become more powerful, then I will also become yellow. — So the measurements are made here.

It is even more difficult to explain counting here, because in earthly counting we usually only count peas or apples that lie next to each other indifferently. And we always have the feeling that when we make two out of one, the one is actually quite indifferent to the fact that there is another two next to it. In human life it is already different; there it is sometimes the case that one is dependent on the two. But that also goes into the spiritual. But in actual physical mathematics, the units are always indifferent to what is associated with them. That is not the case here.

If there is a one of a certain kind somewhere, it requires any, say, three or five others, depending on the case [drawing, red dots and rings]. This always has an inner relationship to the others, there the number is a reality. And when consciousness begins to perceive what it is like to be out there with the ego and the astral body, then one also comes to determine something like measure, number and weight, but in an opposite way.

And then, when seeing and hearing out there are no longer a mere swimming and groping of red and yellow and sounds, but when one begins to perceive things in such an orderly way in there too, then the perception of the spiritual entities that actualize and realize themselves in these free-floating sensory perceptions begins. Then we enter into the positive spiritual world, into the life and activity of spiritual beings. Just as we enter into the life and activity of earthly things here on earth by determining them with the scales, with the measuring rod, with our calculations, so we enter into the comprehension of spiritual entities by acquiring the merely qualitative, opposite heaviness, that is, by wanting to expand with ease in space, measuring color by color and so on. These spiritual essences now also permeate everything that is outside in the realms of nature.

With the waking consciousness, the human being sees only the outer side of minerals, plants, and animals. But in what lives as spiritual in all these beings of the nature kingdoms, there the human being is when he sleeps. And when he then goes back into himself when he wakes up, then his I and his astral body retain, so to speak, the inclination, the affinity to external things and cause the person to recognize an external world. If the human being had an organization that was not designed for sleep, he would not recognize an external world. Of course it is not a matter of someone suffering from insomnia. For I am not saying that a person does not sleep, but that a person does not have an organization that is designed for sleeping. It is a matter of being attuned to something. That is why a person who suffers from insomnia becomes ill, because it is not suited to his nature. But that is just how things are: precisely because man dwells in sleep with what is in the outer world, with what he then calls his outer world when awake, he also comes to an outer world, to a view of the outer world.

This relationship of man to sleep gives the earthly concept of truth. How? Well, we call it truth when we can correctly recreate an external event within us, when we can correctly experience an external event within us. But for this we need the mechanism of sleep. We would have no concept of truth at all if we did not have the mechanism of sleep. So that we can say: we owe truth to the state of sleep. In order to devote ourselves to the truth of things, we must also spend a certain amount of time with them in our existence. Things only tell us about themselves when we are with them in our souls during sleep.

The dream state is different. As I explained to you in the short series during the delegates' meeting, the dream is related to memory, to the inner life of the soul, to that which lives primarily in memory. When the dream is a free-floating world of sound and color, we are still half outside of our body. When we completely submerge, the same forces that we unfold in the dream, weaving and living, become forces of memory. In this way we no longer differ from the outer world. Our inner life coincides with the outer world, we live so intensely in the outer world with our sympathies and antipathies that we do not perceive things as sympathetic or antipathetic, but the sympathies and antipathies themselves show themselves pictorially.

If we did not have the ability to dream and the continuation of this dream power within us, we would have no beauty. The fact that we have any predispositions for beauty at all is based on our ability to dream. For the prosaic existence, we have to say: we owe it to the power of dreaming that we have memory; for the artistic existence of man, we owe beauty to the power of dreaming. So: 'the state of dreaming is connected with beauty'. The way we perceive beauty and create beauty is very similar to the weaving force of dreaming.

We behave similarly when experiencing beauty and when creating beauty – only with the application of our physical body – as we behave outside of our physical body, or half-connected to our physical body, when dreaming. There is only a small gap between dreaming and living in beauty. And only because in today's materialistic time people are so coarse that they do not notice this gap, there is so little awareness of the full significance of beauty. In order to experience this free floating and weaving, one must necessarily devote oneself to it in dreams. Whereas when one surrenders to freedom, to the inner exercise of will, and thus lives after the jolt, one no longer has the sensation that it is the same as dreaming, because it is just the same, only with the application of the powers of the physical body.

People today will think long and hard about what was meant in older times when one said “chaos” [the word “chaos” is written on the blackboard]. There are many different definitions of chaos. In reality, chaos can only be characterized by saying: When a person enters a state of consciousness in which the experience of heaviness, of earthly measure, just ceases, and things begin to feel half light, but do not yet want to reach out into the world , but still maintain themselves horizontally, in balance, when the fixed boundaries dissolve, when the floating indeterminacy of the world is still seen with the physical body, but already with the soul-constitution of dreaming, then one sees chaos. And the dream is merely the shadowy approach of chaos to man.

In Greece, people still had the feeling that you can't really make the physical world beautiful. The physical world is just a necessity of nature, it is what it is. You can only make that beautiful which is chaotic. If you transform chaos into cosmos, then beauty arises. That is why chaos and cosmos are interchangeable terms. You cannot create the cosmos – which actually means the beautiful world – from earthly things, but only from chaos, by shaping chaos. And what you do with earthly things is merely an imitation in the substance of the shaped chaos.

This is the case with all artistic endeavors. In Greece, where mystery cults still had a certain influence, people still had a very vivid idea of this relationship between chaos and the cosmos.

But if you travel around in all these worlds - in the world in which man is unconscious when he is in a state of sleep, in the world in which man is half-conscious when he is in a state of dreaming - if you travel around everywhere: you will not find goodness. These beings that are in there have been predestined with wisdom from the very beginning of their lives. In them, you find ruling, weaving wisdom; in them, you find beauty. But there is no point in our, as terrestrial human beings, trying to get to know these entities and speak of goodness in them. We can only speak of goodness when there is a difference between the inner and outer world, so that the good of the spiritual world can or cannot follow.

Just as the sleeping state is truth, the dreaming state is beauty, so the waking state is goodness, assigned to the good [it is written on the board]. |

Sleeping state: truth
Dreaming state: beauty
Waking state: goodness

But that does not contradict what I have said in recent days, that when one leaves the earthly and comes out into the cosmos, one is led to drop even earthly concepts in order to speak of the moral order of the world. For the moral order of the world is just as predetermined, just as necessarily predetermined in the spiritual as causality is here on earth. It is just that there it is spiritual: the predetermination, the being-determined-in-oneself. So there is no contradiction.

But we must be clear about human nature: if we want to have the idea of truth, then we must turn to the state of sleep; if we want to have the idea of beauty, then we must turn to the state of dreaming; if we want to have the idea of kindness, then we must turn to the state of waking.

Thus, when a person is awake, he is not destined for his physical and etheric organism according to truth, but rather destined for goodness. So we must come to the idea of goodness all the more.

Now I ask you: What does contemporary science strive for when it wants to explain the human being? It does not want to ascend by explaining to the awake person the path from truth through beauty to goodness; it wants to explain everything according to an external causal necessity, which only corresponds to the idea of truth. One does not come to that which lives and weaves in man in an awakened state, but only to that which the sleeping person is at most. Therefore, if you read anthropological works today and do so with an awakened eye, awake to the soul peculiarities and forces of the world, then you get the following impression. You say to yourself: That is all very nice, what we are told by today's science about man. But what is this human being like, of whom science tells us? He is constantly lying in bed. He cannot walk. He cannot move. Movement, for example, is not explained at all. He is constantly lying in bed.

The human being that science explains can only be explained as a person lying in bed. There is no other way. Science only explains the sleeping human being. If you want to get him moving, you have to do it mechanically. That is why it is also a scientific mechanism. You have to introduce a machine into this sleeping human being that will get this lump up and moving when it is time to get up and put it back into bed in the evening.

This science, however, tells us nothing about the human being who walks around in the world, who lives and breathes, who is awake. For what sets him in motion is contained in the idea of kindness, not in the idea of truth, which we gain from external things. This is something that is given very little consideration. When a modern physiologist or anatomist describes the human being, one has the feeling that one would like to say: Wake up, wake up, you are asleep, you are asleep! — People get used to this state of sleep under the influence of this world view. And what I have always had to characterize: that people actually oversleep everything, that is because they are obsessed with science. Today, because the popular magazines report on everything everywhere, even the uneducated are obsessed with science. There have never been so many obsessed people as there are today, obsessed with science. It is quite peculiar how one has to speak when describing the real conditions of the present day. One has to use completely different tones than those that are currently in use.

And so it is when a human being is placed in an environment by the materialists. When materialism was at its height, people wrote books such as one that sounded in a certain chapter, which states: Man is actually nothing in himself. He is the result of the oxygen in the air, he is the result of the degree of cold or heat under which he is. He is actually - so ends this materialistic description - a result of every draft of air.

If you go along with such a description and imagine the person to be what the materialistic scientist describes, then it is in fact a highly neurasthenic person. The materialists have never described any other people. If they did not realize that they were actually describing people asleep, when they wanted to move on but had fallen out of step, they never described people as anything other than highly neurasthenic individuals who, due to their neurasthenia, are bound to die the very next day and who cannot live at all. For this epoch of science has never grasped the living human being.

There lie the great tasks which must lead men out of the conditions of the present back to such conditions under which the further life of world history is possible. What is needed is an advance in spirituality. The other pole must be found to what has been attained. What exactly has been attained in the course of the 19th century, which was glorious for the materialistic world view? What has been achieved?

In a wonderful way – it can be said quite sincerely and honestly – it has been possible to determine the external world in terms of measurement, number and weight as an earthly world. In this respect, the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century have achieved something magnificent and tremendous. But the sensations, the colors, the sounds, they are all fluttering around in the indefinite. Physicists have completely stopped talking about colors and sounds; they talk about air vibrations and ether vibrations, which are neither colors nor sounds. Air vibrations are not sounds, but at most the medium through which sounds propagate. And there is no grasp of what the sensory qualities are. We must first come to that again. Actually, today we see only what can be determined by means of scales, measures, calculations. The rest has eluded us.

And if the theory of relativity also introduces the magnificent disorder described to you yesterday into what can be measured, weighed, counted, then everything becomes fragmented, everything diverges. But after all, this theory of relativity itself fails at certain limits. Not with regard to concepts – one does not escape the theory of relativity with earthly concepts; I have already discussed this elsewhere – but with reality one always escapes the concepts of relativity. For that which can be measured, counted, weighed enters into quite definite relationships with regard to measure, number and weight in the outer, sensory reality.

Once upon a time in Stuttgart, a physicist or a group of physicists took umbrage at the way the theory of relativity was treated by anthroposophists. Then, in a discussion, he demonstrated a simple experiment that it is actually immaterial whether I hold the matchbox and stroke the match: it will burn; or whether I hold the match and stroke the matchbox: it will also burn. It is relative.

Certainly, here it is still relative. And in relation to everything that is related to a Newtonian space, or to an Euclidean space, it is all relative. But as soon as that reality comes into consideration, which appears as heaviness, as weight, then it is no longer as easy as Einstein imagined, because then real conditions arise. Here one must really speak in paradoxes again. Relativity can be asserted if one confuses the whole of reality with mathematics and geometry and mechanics. But if one enters into the true reality, then that no longer works. After all, it is not just relative whether one eats the roast veal or whether the roast veal eats one! You can travel back and forth with the matchbox, but you have to eat the roast veal, you can't let the roast veal eat you. There are things that set limits to these relativity concepts. These things are such that if they are now told outwardly, one will say: There is not the slightest understanding for this serious theory. But the logic is already as I say it: it is no different, I cannot do it differently.

So it is a matter of seeing how, by taking into account weight – that is, what actually makes physical bodies – how, in reality, I might say, colors, sounds and so on cannot be accommodated anywhere. But with this tendency, something extraordinarily important is lost. Namely, the artistic element is lost. As we become more and more and more and more physical, the artistic element leaves us. No one today will find any trace of art in what the physics books describe. There is nothing left of art, everything must come out. It is indeed dreadful to study a physics book today if you still have any sense of beauty. Because everything that beauty is woven from, color and sound, is outlawed, and only recognized when it adheres to the heavy things, precisely because of that, art is no longer important to people. Today it is no longer important to anyone. And the more physical people become, the less artistic they become! Just think about it: we have a great physics. There is truly no need to rebuke opponents who say, in the field of anthroposophy, that we have great physics. But physics thrives on the denial of the artistic. It thrives on the denial of the artistic in each individual, because it has arrived at a way of treating the world in which the artist no longer cares about the physicist.

I don't think, for example, that the musician today attaches much importance to studying the physical theories of acoustics. It's too boring for him, he doesn't care. The painter also doesn't like to study the terrible color theory that is contained in physics. He usually turns, if he cares about colors at all, to Goethe's color theory. But that is wrong, according to physicists. Physicists turn a blind eye and say: Well, it's not so important whether the painter has a correct or a false theory of colors. It just so happens that under today's physical world view, art must perish. Now we have to ask ourselves the question: Why was there art in older times?

If we go back to very ancient times, to the times when people still had an original clairvoyance, it was the case that people did not notice so much of measure, number and weight in earthly things. They did not care so much about measure, number and weight, they were more devoted to the colors, the sounds of earthly things.

Just think that chemistry has only been calculating with weight since Lavoisier; that is a little more than a hundred years! Weight was only applied to a world view at the end of the 18th century. The consciousness that everything must be determined according to earthly measure, number and weight was simply not present in the older humanity. One was devoted to the color carpet of the world, the weaving and undulation of sound; one was devoted not to the vibrations of the air, but to the undulations and weaving of sound. One lived in it, even by living in the physical world.

But what possibilities did one have by living in this sensual perception free of heaviness? It gave one the possibility, for example, when one approached a person, not to see the person at all as one sees him today, but one looked at the person as a result of the whole universe. Man was more a confluence of the cosmos. He was more of a microcosm than what stands within his skin on this small patch of earth, where man stands. Man was thought of more as an image of the world. The colors flowed together from all sides, giving man his colors. The harmony of the world was there, resonating through man, giving man his form.

And humanity today can hardly understand the way in which the ancient mystery teachers spoke to their students. Because if someone today wants to explain the human heart, they take an embryo and see how the blood vessels expand, and how a tube initially forms and then the heart gradually takes shape. No, the ancient mystery teachers didn't talk to their students like that! That wouldn't have seemed much more important to them than knitting a sock, because after all, the process looks very similar. On the contrary, they emphasized something else as being tremendously important. They said: The human heart is a result of the gold that lives everywhere in the light and that streams in from the universe and actually forms the human heart. They had the ideas: The light weaves through the universe, and the light carries the gold [see drawing]. The gold is everywhere in the light, the gold weaves and lives in the light. And when a person is in their earthly life, then their heart – you know, after seven years it changes – is not built from the cucumbers and lettuce and roast veal that a person has eaten in the meantime, but these old teachers knew: it is built from the gold of the light. And the cucumbers and the salad are only the stimulus for the heart to build itself up out of the light-woven gold of the whole universe.

Yes, people spoke differently, and one must become aware of this contrast, for one must learn again to speak in this way, only on a different level of consciousness. For example, what once existed in the field of painting, which then disappeared, where one still painted from the universe because one did not yet have the gravity, that has left its last trace - let us say, for example, with Cimabue and especially with the icon painting of the Russians. The icon is still painted from the external world, from the macrocosm; in a sense, it is a section of the macrocosm. But then one arrived at a dead end. One could not go further because this view simply no longer exists for humanity. If one had wanted to paint the icon with an inner part, not just out of tradition and prayer, then one should have known how to treat gold. The treatment of gold in the picture was one of the greatest secrets of ancient painting. To bring out what is human in the background of gold, that was ancient painting.

There is an enormous gulf between Cimabue and Giotto. For Giotto had already begun to do what Raphael would later take to a particularly high level. Cimabue still had tradition, but Giotto was already becoming a naturalist. He realized that tradition was no longer coming to life in the soul. Now you have to take the physical human being; now you no longer have the universe. You can no longer paint out of gold, you have to paint out of the flesh.

This has finally come to the point that, after all, painting has passed over to what it had in many ways in the 19th century. The icons, they have no heaviness at all, the icons have “shone in” from the world; they have no heaviness. You just can't paint them anymore today, but if you painted them in their original form, they would have no weight at all.

Giotto was the first to paint things in such a way that they had weight. From this it became that everything that is painted also has weight in the picture, and one then paints it from the outside; so that the colors relate to what is painted, as the physicist explains that the color arises on the surface through some special wave vibration. Art, in the end, also reckoned with weight. Giotto began it in an aesthetic-artistic way, and Raphael then brought it to the highest level.

So that one can say: The universe has departed from man, and the heavy man became that which one could only see. And because the feelings of the old days were still there, the flesh became as little heavy as possible, but it became heavy. And so the Madonna was created as the opposite of the icon: the icon, which has no weight, the Madonna, which has weight, even if she is beautiful. Beauty has been preserved. But icons cannot be painted at all, because man does not experience them. And it is an untruth when people today believe that they experience icons. That is why the icon culture was immersed in a certain sentimental untruth. This is a dead end in art, it becomes schematic, it becomes traditional.

Raphael's painting, painting that is actually based on what Giotto did with Cimabue, this painting can only remain art as long as the old splendor of beauty still shines on it. To a certain extent, it was the sunny Renaissance painters who still felt something of the gold weaving in the light and at least gave their pictures the radiance with which the gold weaving in the light made them shine from the outside.

But that came to an end. And that is how naturalism came about. And so today, in terms of art, humanity is caught between two stools on the ground, between the icon and the Madonna, and is dependent on discovering what pure weaving color and pure weaving sound is, with their opposite weight, opposite to measurability, to weighable countability. We must learn to paint from color. Even if we approach this today tentatively and poorly, it is our task to paint from color, to experience color itself, detached from the heaviness of experiencing color itself. In these things, one must be able to proceed consciously, also artistically consciously.

And if you look at what has been achieved in the simple attempts at our programs, you will see that, even if it is only a beginning, a start has been made to free colors from heaviness, to experience color as an element in itself, to make colors speak. If we succeed, then, in contrast to the unartistic physical world view that allows all art to evaporate, an art is created from the free elements of color and sound that is free from heaviness.

Yes, we are also sitting between two chairs, between the icon and the Madonna, but we have to get up. Physical science will not help us here. I have told you: one must always remain lying down if one applies only physical science to the human being. But now we must get up! For that we really need spiritual science. This contains the element of life that carries us from heaviness to the weightless color, to the reality of color, from the very bondage in musical naturalism to the free musical art and so on.

In all areas, we see how it is about a rousing, about an awakening of humanity. That is it, that we should take up this impulse to awaken, to look out, to see what is and what is not, and everywhere the challenges lie to move forward. That is why I really had to conclude with just such reflections, as I have brought to you, both at the delegates' meeting and now in these days, before this summer break, which is due to the English trip. These things are already getting to the nerve of our time. And it is necessary that one lets the other shine into our movement, as I have tried to hint at.

I have described how the modern philosopher has come to admit: What does this intellectualism lead to? Building a giant machine that you place in the center of the earth to blast the earth out into all the spaces of the universe! He admitted that this is the case. The others do not admit it to themselves!

And so I have tried in the most diverse places – for example, when I showed you yesterday how the concepts that were still there thirty or forty years ago are now being dissolved by the theory of relativity, simply melting away like snow in the sun – I have tried to show you how everywhere you look there are calls to really strive towards anthroposophy. For, as the philosopher Eduard von Hartmann says: If the world is as we have to imagine it – that is, as he imagines it in the 19th century – then we must actually, because we cannot endure it in it, blow it up into space, and it is only a matter of our being so far that we can carry it out. We must long for the time when we can blast the world into all the expanses of the universe. Before that happens, relativists will have ensured that people no longer have any concepts! Space, time, movement dissolve, then one can already fall into such despair that under certain conditions one already sees the greatest satisfaction in this blasting out into the whole universe. But you just have to familiarize yourself with what lies as certain impulses in our time.

That is what has caused the last lectures to be held in the way they have been: where external culture shines into our ranks. They were also an invitation to open our eyes. And I tried to shape these lectures in such a way that they show what it means: the Anthroposophical Society should make every effort to get out of sectarianism, to get beyond sectarianism.

My dear friends, I am sorry to have to say goodbye to you for a few weeks with these words, but I would like you to use this time to reflect on how to get out of this sectarianism! Otherwise, the situation will arise that the Anthroposophical Society will get more and more into sectarianism. And there are strong tendencies not to throw off the sectarianism, but to sail right into the sectarian nature.

How it is possible to avoid sectarianism is something that must occupy our feelings. And I wanted to touch on this point very briefly because it is extremely necessary to do so. I wanted to draw attention to the fact that, in these last lectures, I have tried to speak in such a way that, so to speak, we look out into the world everywhere, that there is no spinning into a sect, but a life in the world with open eyes, with a practical mind, an inner connection with the world. This is entirely compatible with the utmost immersion in the spiritual. That is why I told you that today a person must even know that there may be an Indian today, Rãmanãthan, who looks at European culture and says to the Europeans: Let yourselves be taught about the Jesus of India, because you understand nothing about Jesus Christ. We only understood the matter when we started reading the New Testament.

If we allow ourselves to become ensnared in such sectarianism, as there were strong tendencies towards during the delegates' meeting, then we will not achieve the great task of anthroposophy in the present, and this must be achieved, because 'it is a human task.

Having said this, I would like to take leave of you for a few weeks and we will announce the next events in due course. In the next few weeks, lectures and eurythmy performances will take place at various locations in England.

So we want to prepare ourselves for a summer break in such a way that during this summer break we let our hearts be particularly alert to the right feeling of how we should feel so that the development of humanity can continue in the right way.

From the events that are taking place, especially in the present, you will indeed see that today all talk about social affairs is without the right foundation if one does not take into account international relations. That is why I have chosen the path that has already been revealed by yesterday's and today's discussions for these considerations. I would like to start with a brief presentation of certain international conditions, and then, with this foundation, move on to our actual task.

The above remarks will have led you to ask: How should one think in order to arrive at a possible solution to the great questions of world history today and in the near future, how should one think in relation to the West on the one hand and the East on the other?

You can easily see that today everything is, so to speak, unified in the thinking of people. Isn't it true that a person who wants to judge world affairs today thinks in a certain way about a particular issue. He says: In the West, we face the prospect of being confronted for decades to come with efforts to enslave Central Europe. They will force Central Europe into forced labor. And one can only escape what is looming if one, so to speak, takes the orientation, and one means roughly the same orientation that the West is giving us in Central Europe, if one now takes this orientation to the East, that is, establishes economic relations with the East and, so to speak, seeks outlets in the East for what is now being produced in Germany. Since we have become accustomed to looking at everything only from an economic point of view, we now extend this scheme to the East.

This is actually spoken with the exclusion of any realistic consideration. And that is why I wanted to say beforehand how the East and the West are involved in our entire modern civilized life, so that a way might be created for gaining a judgment on this side. The question is: Is it promising on the part of the leading economic people, who integrate themselves into that configuration, which, under the influence of the only blessed economic life, is to take on that which is still called the “German Reich”, is it promising that economic relations to the East, economic relations as such, are now being established directly?

Anyone who looks at the matter in the abstract, according to today's thinking, will say yes! But anyone who considers what the whole intellectual, political and economic life of the 19th century and of the last era in general teaches us will probably come to a different conclusion. For just take the real facts that are at hand: we have ample opportunity to see how devotedly and how gladly the European East absorbs the intellectual life of Central Europe when we look at the circumstances that have unfolded in the 19th century until about its last decades. For if you look into the intellectual life of Russia and ask yourself: how did it actually come about? you will see that in this whole Russian intellectual life two things live.

Firstly, the real Russian intellectual life, in all that has come to us and been absorbed by Central Europe out of a certain sensationalism that arose in the last decades of the 19th century – the reflexes of good Central European thinking live towards us through and through. German thinkers and everything associated with German thought were received in Russia with great willingness, more so than in Germany itself. In fact, in the first half of the 19th century, German personalities were specifically called upon to establish Russian education. Everywhere you can see how the specific thoughts and intentions for institutions in Russia arose under the influence of Central Europe, and specifically of German personalities, and how they came about in the same way as the legendary Rurik rulers, of whom one always hears the words: the Russians have this and that and all sorts of things, but no order; that is why they turn to the three brothers and say that they should give them order. This was more or less the situation throughout the 19th century with regard to everything that was available as intellectual sources of life in relation to Central Europe. Wherever something was needed to take in concrete ideas, people turned to Central Europe or Western Europe. But the reaction to the two areas was quite different. Central European life was absorbed into Russian life with a certain matter-of-factness, without much ado, and it continues to live on. Intellectual life, which was more Western European, was absorbed in such a way that much ado was made about it, that it took on a certain sensational coloration, that it settled in with a certain pomp, with a certain decorative element. This is something that must be taken into account. Take the most important Russian philosopher, Soloviev. Such a philosopher has a completely different significance within Russian life than a philosopher within Central European life. All the thoughts in him are Central European, Hegelian, Kantian or Goethean, and so on. We find only the reflections of our own life everywhere when we devote ourselves to these philosophers in terms of their concrete thoughts. One can even say: What concrete thoughts are present in Wolstoj are Central European or Western European – but with all the differences that I have just discussed. The same applies even to Dostoyevsky, despite his stubbornness in Russian-national chauvinism. All this is one side.

But you can see that I would like to say, with a certain unanimity, that rejection occurs in Russia when Russia is touched by the economic machinations of Central Europe at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Just think of the adoption of certain trade treaty provisions and the like. And think of how the Russian element behaved – apart from the shouting – how the Russian element behaved as a people in its rejection of what asserted itself there as a purely economic invasion or as an economic display of power.

All this should be a guide. All this should show that it would be playing with fire if one were to attempt today to establish a relationship with the East through trade or other economic relations. What is important and what we must achieve despite the great difficulties involved in dealing with the Bolshevik element is, above all, to bring into Russia the spiritual element, insofar as it emanates from productive intellectual life. Everything that emanates from productive intellectual life extends to views and feelings that affect intellectual life itself or state life or economic life. All this will be quite well received by the Russian element.

For the second element to the first, which actually consists only in the adoption of concrete, specifically German thoughts, the second element in Russian intellectual life, that is, how should one put it, an undifferentiated, vague one – this is not meant in any kind of inflammatory way, but again, a terminology – a vague sauce of sentiment and feeling. And that is precisely what can be observed, for example, in the case of a philosopher who is typical of the Russian element, such as Soloviev: his thoughts are quintessentially German. But they appear in a completely different form in Soloviev than they do, for example, in German thinkers. Even Goethe's spirit appears in a completely different form in Soloviev. It is poured over and into it, a certain emotional and sentimental sauce that gives the whole a certain nuance. But this nuance is also the only thing that distinguishes this life. And this nuance is something passive, something receptive. And that is dependent on absorbing Central European intellectual life.

In this interaction between Central European intellectual life and the Russian folk element, something magnificent can develop fruitfully for the future. But one must have a sense of how creative such interaction is. It must take place in the purely spiritual element. It must take place in a certain element that is based on the relationship between human and human. We must win this relationship with the East. And when this is understood, then it will automatically lead to what can be called a self-evident economic community, which arises out of spiritual life. It must not be assumed, otherwise it will be rejected. Anything that economists could do to the East will certainly not help us if it is not built on the basis of what I have just discussed. It is an eminently socially important question that this be faced.

The other thing for us to consider is our relationship with the West. You see, lecturing the West about our Central European intellectual life is an impossibility. And this impossibility should be taken into account, quite apart from the fact that it is extremely difficult just to convey in translation what we in Central Europe think, what we in Central Europe feel, what the East also feels. The whole way of looking at things, when it comes to purely spiritual matters, is thoroughly different between the Central European area on the one hand and the West and America on the other. People were amazed that Wilson understood so little about Europe when he came to Paris. They would have been less amazed if they had looked at a thick book that Wilson had already written in the 1890s, called “The State”. The book was actually written entirely in the style of European scholarship. But just look at what has become of this European scholarship! If you had considered the antecedents that were available, you would not have been surprised that Wilson could not understand anything about Europe. He could not. For insofar as thinking as such comes into consideration, it is in vain to evoke any kind of direct impression. On the other hand, it would be quite significant if one were to imagine the matter in such a way that one says, yes, if one wants to negotiate with the West from nation to nation, for example, one will get nowhere. But if you exclude statesmen and scholars from the negotiations, scholars in all fields and statesmen even more so, if you send no statesmen to the West but only economists, then the Westerners will understand these economists and something beneficial will come of it. Only in the field of economic life will one understand something in direct negotiations in the West. But that does not mean that one should limit oneself in one's dealings with the West only to what is economic life. Oh no, there is no need for that. It is, for example, highly interesting to look at some concert halls, large concert halls, in Western countries and the names of famous composers that are written on them: Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and so on – as a rule, only German names are found. So you can be sure: if you only want to make an impression in Western Europe based on Central European thought, you won't get very far with either the Romance or the Anglo-Saxon element. That doesn't mean that you can't talk to people about what is being thought in Central Europe. Of course one can. But one must speak in a different way from the way one speaks in Central Europe, where the life of ideas and of thinking is primarily taken into account. Take a larger example: even more than what is usually handed down in our Dornach building today, the Western European, and perhaps the American, understands the Dornach building itself, that which emerges from the matter as fact.

Of course, in speaking, one can shape the matter in such a way that one lets the factual emerge from the matter. That was how it was before the war – it may be emphasized again, without being immodest – to the extent that in May 1914 I was able to give a lecture in German in Paris that had to be translated word for word; but I was able to give it in German. And this lecture, I am only stating the fact, had a greater success than any lecture of mine ever had within Germany. We were that far along. But it is necessary to frame what is said in a very specific way, so that it is presented to the people in a way that I would call more façade-like, artistic, and that results in an external effect. To a great extent, it is about the how.

And so it is not unrealistic at all to say: We will make a big impression on the West if we understand our task correctly in this way, if, for example, we really get beyond what we do not and never will succeed at, because we will always lag behind the West, if we get beyond imitating the West. You see, it doesn't matter whether we imitate the West's machines – we don't make them as precisely as the West – or whether we copy false teeth, we don't make them as elegantly as the West, it doesn't matter! If we merely imitate, we will not get along with the West. For it does not need what we produce in the process. But if we grasp what we can do and what the West cannot do, if, for example, we were to permeate technology with art and artistic perception, if we were to truly arrive at what has long been present within our Anthroposophical Society, but which we have not been able to implement due to a lack of personalities who , if we were to artistically shape the locomotive, for example, if we were to artistically shape the station into which it enters, if we were to impress upon what can be grasped of us what is in us, then Westerners will take it, then they will also understand it. And then they will also associate with us. But we must have an idea of how this association should be. Each of us can only do this in his own field, but it must be done. And we must begin by recognizing how the impulse of threefolding arises out of very real conditions.

We need to have a spiritual life that is such that it can have more of an effect on the East in the way just characterized; it can only be a productive spiritual life. With that, we would already outdo all the Zunatshchikis and the others. For in the long run, they would not be able to enslave the Russian people, the Russian soul. Once we have this productive spiritual life, it will happen that it will have an impact on the East. We just have to get the strength to bring this spiritual life into its own. We have to defeat all the vermin that are coming up and want to trample this spiritual life underfoot.

The hostility towards spiritual life has come to such a pitch that I recently had to read out a passage in Dornach that said that now that the spiritual spark has ignited enough in the clash with spiritual science, the real spark must finally take hold of this Dornach building.

So the opposition is taking on the most brutal forms. The point is that it is a necessity: to bring this productive spiritual life, this very concrete, productive spiritual life, to bear regardless of what people sneer at and what they do. For we know that This productive spiritual life that can arise in Central Europe can bring about that great brotherhood that can expand to the East and unite the East with Central Europe, while all brutal economic machinations would only create more and more abysses between Central Europe and the East. It is extremely important to see through such things and to make such things popular. It is particularly important for the very reason that if you can win an audience for such things, then, by getting used to thinking in such ways, people will also come to a completely different way of thinking on other social issues.

But this must be done on a broader basis than has been the case so far. To do this, it is necessary that we now work with all our might to ensure that the things we do are not always a lost cause in a certain sense. For this must indeed be emphasized, my dear friends: today there is plenty of material in our threefolding newspaper, but basically it is still in a state of decay because it is only literature for the time being. It is therefore necessary to keep working on it. But that is an impossibility. What is proposed here and there must actually be processed on a broad basis, by many people. But we must see these things clearly.

We must be quite clear about the fact that we need a free and productive intellectual life and that we must cultivate it in order to be able to enter into a possible relationship with the East.

And in the same way, we must have an economic life in which the state does not interfere, in which the intellectual life does not interfere, in which only economists are active in order to negotiate with the West. These negotiations must be conducted by the economists alone. Only in this way will something come of it. It can be done, and it should be done as long as it is not otherwise possible: to also negotiate with the West from state to state. But nothing beneficial will come of it. Something will only come of it when the statesmen disappear from the economic negotiations on our side, no matter what they shout over there. Let the statesmen negotiate over there! There the statesmen are involved in economic life. But on our side, when the economists become statesmen, they lose their economic perspective; then they become men who think entirely in terms of the state.

What is important is to see through the real necessities of life. We must therefore have a threefold structure of the social organism for the very reason that we can send economists who are uninfluenced by the machinations of the state and intellectual life to the West. And we need a free spiritual life so that we can enter into a possible relationship with the East. Thus international circumstances themselves absolutely demand this of us.

How this is to be realized in detail, each of us must work out for himself. What is given here is only a guide. But it is a guide based on real conditions. And what has been said several times must be taken seriously in the deepest sense. It is not true that today's practitioners really understand anything about practical life. They understand nothing at all about truly practical life – precisely because they are practitioners! Because the practitioners today are in fact the strongest theorists, because they completely immerse themselves in individual thought patterns and theorize in practice. That is precisely what must be thoroughly understood in the deepest sense of the word. And we must base our so-called “agitation” on this: that we work from the real conditions.

You see, above all we must be clear about the fact that modern economic life as such makes this threefold social order necessary: and that is because this economic life today is chaotically mixed up from the impulses of the East, the impulses of the West and the impulses of the middle. And that is how it is: Economic life basically consists of three elements: what nature provides, in the sense that I discussed in the previous lesson; then what human labor creates; and what is achieved through capital. Capital, human labor and what nature provides and what is then continued through production, that is what figures in economic life.

But you see, just as it is with the human three-part organism, that it consists of three parts, but in each of its parts the three-part structure is repeated, so it is also with the social organism. We certainly have an organ in the head that is primarily a nerve-sense organ; but the head is also nourished, it is traversed in a certain way by nutritional organs. Likewise, in what is merely a metabolic organism, in the metabolism, serving the metabolism, we again have something of the nerve-sense organism, the nervus sympathicus. It is the same with regard to the threefold nature of the social organism. The whole is again contained in each of the three parts. But today it is contained in an unorganized way. It is so interwoven that it destroys life, that it does not build up life.

First of all, nature is interwoven, and production is, of course, only a continuation of nature. And to the extent that nature is interwoven, our economic life is still interwoven with a way of feeling that is completely oriental, that is completely from the East. Orientals will not understand how one could somehow include human labor in economic life. And even if we go back to our earlier economic conditions, which were still permeated by oriental conditions, one will never find human labor included in economic life.

It is also impossible for human labor to play a role in economic life. Because, you see, you can add apples and apples together. You can get something out of it mathematically. You can also add apples and pears together as fruits. You will get something out of it mathematically. But I don't know how you would mathematically add apples and glasses, for example, to a common sum. Now, what is contained in a good, in a commodity, is fundamentally different from what, as human labor, has “oozed into the commodity,” as one would say in a Marxist expression. This is nothing more than foolishness, but it has become popular to say that “human labor has oozed into the commodity.” To make human labor and what is in the commodity, the product, into something communal is just as much nonsense as if you wanted to make apples and spectacles into something communal. But modern political economy has done just that. So economic life has achieved the feat of, so to speak, eating spectacles and using apples as weapons for the eyes.

You don't notice it in human life, but you do notice it in the subordinate kingdoms of nature. It sounds paradoxical to say such a thing, but in reality it is done all the time. And in the economic sphere, where wages are the main thing and the wages contain something that should be paid for and is included in the price of the goods, just as it comes from nature, you have in fact added apples and glasses. It is an impossibility. It is inconceivable.

When the three spheres of the social organism, spiritual life, political and legal life, and economic life, were still regulated according to the old conditions, the latter in the oriental manner, when people, without really thinking about it much, but only out of abundance – I said in the previous hour: a little higher than the animal, which also only takes what nature offers – in older times, even in our regions, goods and labor were not added together at all. Labor was regulated in a different way: one was a landowner, a noble landowner, one inherited this social position from one's ancestors. If you didn't have such blood in your veins, you were a serf, a bondsman, a slave. That is, people were in a legal relationship to each other. Whether you had to work or whether you could tend to your belly and watch from the balcony as the others worked was not determined by price or money, but was based on legal relationships. Work was regulated on completely different grounds than the movement of goods. These regulations were completely separate, stemming from old conditions that we can no longer use now. There were two things: goods and human labor in the Orient. It was always thought that the legal working conditions would be established on different grounds than the circulation of goods. Those resulted from these old legal relationships, certainly. But labor was not paid somehow, rather the person was put in a position and then worked, and what he worked on circulated. But human labor did not “flow” into the product.

So you can see that the state-legal aspect is inherent in everything that is produced economically, because labor is involved in it. When we speak of the purely economic in economic life, we must speak of goods, of commodities. Insofar as we speak of developed economic life, of economic life that is based on the division of labor, we must already add a state-legal element, so that the regulation of labor is a state-legal one. It thus spills over into the other link of the social organism. And capital – yes, capital is essentially part of economic life in that it supports economic life spiritually. Capital is what creates the economic centers, what creates the businesses. It is the spiritual element in economic life. It is just that under modern materialism, this spiritual life in economic life has taken on a materialistic character. But the spiritual element is nevertheless in economic life. The capitalist element is the spiritual element in economic life.

This leads us to seek the threefold social order in the economic life itself. That is to say, starting from the actual economic life, in which the production, circulation and consumption of goods take place, what flows into economic life as work is to be brought into connection with the life of rights or the state; and capital, which is the actual spiritual element, is to be brought into connection with spiritual life. This is specifically stated in the “Key Points”, where it is said that the transfer of capital and the circulation of capital must be related to spiritual life in a certain way. That is it: we learn to distinguish these three areas within economic life itself.

But we shall only get a correct picture of what actually exists if, on the one hand, we know that we have to regulate something that Orientals have carelessly ignored: the relationship between human economic life and nature. For the Oriental, this was a matter of course. We have to regulate it. For Westerners, as I explained earlier, the whole of intellectual life has been absorbed into economic life. Even Spencer thinks economically when he claims to think scientifically. Everything is included in economic life. Intellectual life is economic. That is why capitalism as such is materialistic. Capital must be there, as is also stated in the “Key Points”, but the process of capitalizing the spiritual will meet with the strongest resistance in the West, where capitalism, as it is now, corresponds precisely to the Western way of thinking, where everything spiritual is brought into the material. Therefore, basically everything that is now being forced on the middle world by the West, about which so many unjustified words are being said, is basically nothing more than the effect of Western capitalism, which has only taken on large dimensions. So that, while the western states are just capitalized, one believes that one is dealing with the mere state structure. This is not the case. The statesmen are basically economists too, just as the scholars are economists. And so we will have to keep these two things separate, which, on the one hand, we have to think through in our economic life, while the Orient is not accustomed to thinking it through – and which, on the other hand, has to be spiritualized in relation to capitalism, while it does not occur to the West to spiritualize the matter at all. That is the task of the Central European regions. That is why something emerged in these Central European regions that should now be clearly and sharply recognized.

Again and again we meet people – here in Stuttgart and in Switzerland, and our other friends have had similar experiences – who say: Yes, if you agree with the division into a free spiritual life and a free economic life, but then there is nothing left for the state! In fact, the way state life is today, how it has absorbed spiritual life on the one hand, which does not belong in it, and how it absorbs more and more of economic life on the other, the actual state life withers away. The actual life of the state, namely that which should take place between human beings and between all mature human beings, is no longer there at all. That is why people like Stammler can only stammer in such a way that they say: the life of the state consists in giving form to economic life. But that is precisely the essential point: that state life will only come into being, that is, it will embrace everything that takes place between mature human beings purely by virtue of the fact that they are human beings. This includes the whole area of labor regulation, for example, which will only come into being in the right way when the other two areas have been separated out. Only then will it be possible to develop a truly democratic state life. It is not surprising that we do not yet have a proper concept of this state life, because today we do not yet have a proper concept of an independent democracy, because we only think in the abstract and then start defining democracy. You can always define, can't you? Definitions always remind you of the old Greek example, which I have often cited, where someone defined man in a very correct definition: he is a living being that walks on two legs and has no feathers. The next day, the person who had said this was brought a plucked goose and told: “So this is a man, because he walks on two legs and has no feathers.” You can do anything with definitions. But we are not dealing with definitions, but with the discovery of realities.

Take the concept of democracy as it exists today and as it is basically of Western origin - how did it come about? You can follow the development of England. If you follow it through the older English rule, you will find that there is a striving out of bondage. But all this has a religious character. And it takes on a very religious character, especially under Cromwell. From the theocratic-puritanical element, from freedom of faith, something develops that is then detached from theocracy, from faith, and becomes the democratic-political element of freedom. This is what is called the democratic feeling in the West. This is detached from the religiously independent feeling. This is how one arrives at the real concept of democracy. And there will only be a real concept of democracy when there is an organization between the spiritual and the economic organization that is now based on the relationship between human beings and the equality of all mature human beings. Only then will it become clear what the state relationship is.

But you see, it is characteristic that basically the ideas really did arise in Central Europe, without anyone having already come up with this threefold order, that the ideas arose: Yes, how should the state actually come into being? It is extremely interesting how, in the first half of the 19th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was even able to become a Prussian minister – that is a remarkable thing – wrote the beautiful essay 'An Attempt to Define the Limits of the Effectiveness of the State', based on certain Schillerian and Goethean concepts. He really wrestled with the possibilities of state building, of real state building. He tried to tease out of the social conditions everything that could be state, political, and legal. Wilhelm von Humboldt certainly did not succeed in an impeccable way, but that is not the point. Such things should have been developed further. And until we get around to creating the real thing for what is state-like, while “the bunglers” always bungle that state life is only the shaping of economic life, we will not get ahead. These things must necessarily be brought before a large audience today, on a large scale and as quickly as possible. For only by introducing healthy thoughts into our contemporary world and spreading these thoughts as quickly as possible can we make progress.

For the opposing forces are strong. They sneer and assert their will to destroy from all corners. And we should have no illusions about the strength of will on that side. Because if the undertaking we are now embarking on is to have any real meaning, then we have to say to ourselves: we have tried to gain a social impulse from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. Not true, what is anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that has time, that can go slowly, that can also take into account what people can tolerate. Cliques may also form. Because these cliques are only in the physical world; the spiritual movement transcends them. What is really at the core of the pure anthroposophical movement as a life force has a significance, a content in the spiritual world. It does not matter so much whether cliques form, whether there are sectarian traits within them, and so on. These are things that must be combated in our present-day serious times, piece by piece, in the details. But it is not as bad as if the right thing does not happen in the area where the practical, that which is directly called to action, is taken out of the anthroposophical movement, as it is, I would like to say, on our social wing of the anthroposophical movement. There is no time to wait. We cannot set up threefold social order federations that organize themselves in such a way that they are only a reflection of the old anthroposophical branches. We have to be aware that what we work out tomorrow, no matter how good it is, can be worse than what we work out badly today. It is therefore essential that we work hard in the present, in the moment, and that every day it can become too late. And indeed, events show us how things can become too late week after week. That is why this action, which we are now facing, has been initiated and why so much emphasis is placed on it, because it is necessary for things to happen quickly. Europe has no time to lose.

What is needed is to bring about a change in our thinking, to think in such a way that reality plays a role in this thinking. Humanity has been educated in such a way that, basically, an unrealistic way of thinking has also become the norm in practical life. It is an unrealistic way of thinking when people today come forward and say, for example, that one should cultivate the right, one should somehow advance in social life from an ethical point of view. These things are very nice, of course, but they are very abstract. The spiritual has value only when it directly intervenes in material life, when it is really able to carry and conquer the material. Otherwise it has no value. We must not allow ourselves to be captivated by such tirades, as presented to the world today by people like Foerster, for example. These are fine words, but they do not penetrate into material life because those who present them do not understand material life themselves, but believe that today's material world can somehow be advanced by preaching.

And that is the mistake the bourgeoisie has made: they have withdrawn more and more with regard to their spiritual life in an area of luxury. Six days a week they sit in the office. In the cash book at the front, you can read “With God!”. But then it doesn't go very much with God on the following pages; there the “With God!” is very abstract. But then, after working the whole week in the familiar way, on Sunday you go and listen to a sermon about eternal bliss that fills the soul with spiritual delight, and the like. That is, making the spiritual life a luxury and de-spiritualizing the material life! In this respect, the bourgeoisie has come a long way. It has pushed this further and further, so that finally the whole intellectual life has really become ideology.

On the other hand, it is no wonder when the proletariat comes and declares theoretically: Intellectual life is an ideology – and when it now tries to transform the entire economic life by merely considering the mode of production. The two belong together. Really, things are such today that ultimately the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat consists only in how long the one is at the bottom and the other at the top, and vice versa. It is only one struggle. The aim of getting to the bottom of the matter is not to come up with a fruitful way of shaping life. This can only be done if one has a far-reaching impulse that encompasses the human being as such.

But then, if one recognizes this, one must either come to grips with the threefold order or be able to put something better in its place. Everything else that arises today does not take the human being as such into account at all. Therefore, it is necessary that in the very near future, our movement be saved, as it were, from what our opponents have in mind. They plan to make our movement impossible through machinations. And these machinations are indeed very sophisticated. Just consider the sophistication that now lies in the campaign of the “Berliner Tageblatt”. The Berliner Tageblatt has an article fabricated for it in which all kinds of nonsense 'occultists' are mentioned, and in the middle of it stands Anthroposophy, which has nothing to do with it. But people spare themselves the trouble of dealing with Anthroposophy by simply categorizing it as nonsense. Of course, the nonsense that is in there is something that everyone can understand, so there is no need to bother with anthroposophy. It is indeed being spread internationally; you come across it everywhere, in English newspapers, everywhere. But that is only one thing. In the near future – it has already begun, but it will continue – a war of extermination will begin against what our movement is. Therefore, it is necessary today to reflect on what needs to be done. And if something drastic does not happen on a broad basis, then, my dear friends, we would have to say to ourselves: We do have a concept of what could happen in social life based on anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, but we do not have the strength to carry it through. In fact, when one sees the consistency with which the opposing side works, sometimes a consistency born of wickedness, one says: It is necessary that we realize, a will must be mustered! They have bad will, why should the same forces not be mustered in the good? Why should it not be possible to say with justification: there was the intention of bringing through something beneficial for humanity; but the opponents, they were different people, they have a consistent will, they also go to the point of realizing this will!

My dear friends, if we do not stand on this ground of going to the point of realizing our will, then it is self-evident that we will not be able to achieve anything for the present moment. In a certain respect, the question in our movement is now one of either/or. That is why this action was initiated. I ask you to bear this in mind. I ask you to take it into your will before we go further in the formation of what we need for this will.

Let's imagine that we are in the world into which the Apocalypticer wants to translate men during the next earthly period. He describes his visions of the breaking in of spiritual worlds and of how they will take possession of earthly human beings. He precedes this by three stages which we must become familiar with; three stages,—in a certain sense each of these represents something which must fall before mankind will become worthy and capable of obtaining the spiritual world in a pure form for their working, thinking and feeling.

The first stage is the fall of Babylon; we will call it this to begin with. The second stage is the fall of the beast and his companion the false prophet who spreads the teaching of the beast. The third stage is the fall of the divine counter powers which are usually called Satan. These three stages become quite objective and real in connection with the spiritual perception of future human evolution.

A great deal concerning human evolution will be decided in our century, and one has good reason to direct the eye of one's soul upon these three falls'. For they will break in upon us in a certain form; they will occur after the first appearance of Christ on earth in his etheric body, which is really his second appearance upon earth. And mankind will have to prepare itself and make itself strong enough in order to go through this threefold fall of the adversaries of the Christ impulse without endangering their soul development. We shouldn't forget how precise the Apocalypticer really is, for each time such a fall occurs he lets an angel come down from the spiritual worlds, and we notice something which can give someone who hasn't acquired a spiritual conception of the world a rather strange feeling. He lets the angel who comes down rejoice about the great suffering and terrible things which accompany this terrible fall, and it will be necessary for us to understand this rejoicing. But before we do that let's take a look at the three stages of the fall of the powers who oppose the Christ.

First comes what is called the fall of Babylon. Here we can place the sum of all the errors which men and mankind can fall into through their human nature before our souls. Everything which tends to drag human beings down below the spiritual level at which they really belong is included in what the Apocalypticer calls the Babylonian temptation.

Man is really only a human being—although of course he has to acquire this humanness first, and he can't just have it at every moment in his evolution—man is only truly human if there is a complete harmony between the material and spiritual principles in him, that is, if the material doesn't play up into emotions which are not controlled by the spiritual. This is the important thing and we must understand it quite well, for even the Apocalypticer could not speak the way he does if he assumed that passions, desires and everything which comes from the will sphere was quite unjustified right from the beginning. To say that this is unjustified—this ascetic striving in a false sense—also arises from the sphere of passions and desires, for someone who doesn't feel strong enough to permeate his passions from the spiritual side in such a way, that he places them in the service of good world evolution is indulgencing his weak emotions. He wants the good evolution, but he wants to impoverish it in this way and he wants to indulge his weakness. For the Apocalypticer it's not a question of tearing out emotions or of tearing out passions and desires, it's a question of their not remaining uncontrolled by the spiritual world.

Babylon is the city in which a falling away from spirituality through passions held sway in an almost stereotyped way at a certain period in its mystery development, and everything which represents emotions in human life, which remain out of control on a smaller or larger scale is summarized by this city. Here we should translate the strong, coarse expressions which were used at that time (they weren't coarse then) into our language. The people in ancient times didn't form abstract concepts, they always referred to concrete things, always pointed to something characteristic and looked at concrete things. And so the Apocalypticer speaks of Babylon. Why of Babylon?

Really deep mysteries existed in Babylon or in the mystery centers of Babylon in which one could be initiated into the secrets of the super-earthly cosmos, far out into star worlds, and in which one could learn about starry secrets concerning the star worlds and their spiritual content. The earliest priests in ancient Babylon used human powers of clairvoyance and dreams in a way which we would call mediumistic today; this was the case in ancient Babylon. A wonderful, ancient Babylonian teaching developed in this somewhat mediumistic way. However, as one can also see today, mediums—even though they are suited for spiritual mediations, and they are often used in this way, although the process must be controlled by discerning initiates—have very questionable moral characteristics. Mediums become morally degenerate, and because there is a certain discrepancy between what they reveal and what they are, they can eventually no longer distinguish between truth and lies. Here one gets into a region where morality and immorality are no longer distinct.

You must understand how mediums get into this condition. Someone is a medium if his ego and astral body are pulled out of his physical and etheric bodies by an external force, and this was also what happened at the time of the Babylonian priests. However, another power sits in this ego and astral body as soon as they have been pulled out of the medium's physical and etheric body. Depending on whether the initiate who brings this about has good or bad intentions and belongs to the left or the right, this can be a good power or an evil one. Excellent things came to light in this way in ancient Babylonian times, but the problem was with what occurred when the medium returned to his physical body. You see, one cannot get by in the spiritual world with the logic and discrimination between lies and truth which one has in the physical world. It is a complete error to think that one can use the concepts of lies and truth which one rightly uses in the physical world, in the spiritual world. There is nothing there which one could distinguish in such a way. Some of the beings there are good and others are evil. One has to know them through themselves, and in fact, they tell one the kind of being they are. Even the evil ones are truthful in their own way. Of course this is difficult to understand, just as it is difficult to understand what happens in the spiritual world as soon as one enters it. For instance, here in the physical world we say that a straight line is the shortest path between two points. However, in the spiritual world it is the longest distance between two points and every other one is shorter. So that we cannot apply anything which we have to use in the physical world to the spiritual world.

Hence a true initiate must have the right attitude of soul for the spiritual world, but he must also feel fully responsible for the fact that the moment he returns to the physical world he has to work with physical concepts. A medium cannot do this because he doesn't leave his body consciously. When he comes back again his ego and astral body fill the physical and etheric bodies with a line of thought which is no doubt appropriate for the spiritual world, but it corrupts all moral feelings in the physical world. Hence mediums become corrupted, and the corruption with respect to truth and lies then' extends to other forms of corruption. Hence the fact is that Babylon went through this development from the greatest revelations of spiritual worlds to a terrible corruption; first with respect to the principle of spiritual revelation, and then also with respect to human life in general, so that the previous corruption in the spiritual sphere extended to the latter. This spiritual corruption is very powerful; so that someone becomes more immoral if he becomes corrupt after he has gone into spiritual realms than he did before with his ordinary human tendencies. This is why Babylon was considered to be a representative of moral corruption.

The expressions for corruption which we find here are ones which were in common use. The whole of humanity over the entire earth imitated the Babylonians and thereby became a kind of city of Babylon. And this is what the Apocalypticer means. The city of Babylon is to be found among mankind on earth; it exists wherever human beings have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation. It is this human attitude which must fall before that fin—al condition of which the Apocalypticer speaks can come. And if we investigate what is active in the Babylonian corruption, we find that the Ahrimanic principle is active in it everywhere. Ahriman is sitting in men, and he is a power who stands close to them in the whole world, as it were. He is in our emotions, which thereby degenerate. The Ahrimanic and Luciferic principles are opposite poles. The Ahrimanic element is present in what falls here, as for instance when Babylon falls, and it is opposed to the Luciferic element. What kind of an image must the Apocalypticer use when he sees this? The image of jubilating Luciferic, angelic sentiments. We must be aware of this.

It's a big mistake to look upon the worst world conceptions as the best ones, as for instance the idea about the evil principle being down below and the good principle being in everything which comes to meet it from above. This is not the actual state of affairs. The Ahrimanic principle is down below and one has the Luciferic principle above where the angels are rejoicing about the falls. The rejoicing one hears is the voice of Lucifer which accompanies the diving angels, for the actual Christ principle is the balance between the two.

One can only understand something like what the Apocalypticer is presenting if one understands this threefoldedness in the world's makeup in the right way. For anyone with ordinary human feelings it is completely incomprehensible why pure and good spirits would begin to scream for joy when the misery which is described here befalls other beings. This is of course immediately comprehensible if one sees it as the jubilant cries of those who were basically opposed to the creation of the world in which man experiences his spiritual development. They want to keep his whole evolution on a very different spiritual level. They didn't want that connection or marriage of the spirit with matter which took place in earthly existence. So that when what is grasped by Ahriman is eliminated from earthly existence, what they're really feeling in their souls is: we now have the satisfaction that one part of earth-existence will no longer be continued; it is falling during earth evolution he world view which speaks out of the images which the Apocalypticer describes for each fall is wonderfully honest in this respect.

Now the first one, the fall of Babylon, is all the errors men can fall into when they are also influenced by the initiation principle, it is human perversions. When Babylon falls the remaining human aberrations will be eliminated from further world evolution, at a point in time which we will discuss later. To begin with we will place coming events before our soul in a qualitative way.

The second thing is where man is no longer just involved by himself. The beings who fall with Babylon are men; it is human aberration. However, in the case of the fall of the beast and the false prophet who supports the teaching of the beast, what falls is something spiritual and superhuman, and not something human.

Something which is outside of the human kingdom falls, namely, the beast who breaks in upon human communities, and the one who proclaims the teaching of this beast. Hence one is dealing with something which can take possession of' human beings where something superhuman is working directly in men with an evil impulse, and it's not a matter of a weak nature working, as in the case of a medium. We can add the following to make the Imagination even clearer. All those who will participate in the fall of Babylon will have become degenerate through the fact that they tried to do things which their organization couldn't stand; their organization became weak with respect to these things, and therefore they became corrupt. In the fall of Babylon man's organization acts out of weakness. In the fall of the beast and the false prophet it's not as if a medium became corrupt because he got weak, but it's as if the spirit which overpowers the ego and astral body of the medium during hypnosis would then go into his physical and etheric body and make use of the physical body in order to wreak havoc on earth through the human being.

This is exactly the idea which we encounter here in the Apocalypticer. He wants to say that a time will come when we will see human beings walking around on earth who couldn't stand what really, lay in the Christian annunciation who took the Christ into their souls, but who didn't get to the level of the Christ with their etheric and physical bodies, and therefore became corrupt and devoted to other spirits; but they didn't devote themselves to them with full consciousness, so that they became corrupt. These are the first ones, who are included in the fall of Babylon.

The other ones walk around like men, but their fate is that their human ego is not in them, so that one can no longer speak of them as human beings, for they are possessed by the beast and the false prophet. This will come after the fall of Babylon. There will be people walking around on earth who will be demons, for Ahrimanic powers will act in them directly.

Many of the preliminary conditions for all of these things already exist today; one could say that all of this is already present in a germinal form. After all we already have the terrible case where Ahriman appeared amongst us as an author, perhaps not through a human being entirely, but at least through the temporary weakness of a human being. Nietzsche was a wonderful and brilliant writer, but the Nietzsche individuality was not in him when he wrote the AntiChrist and Ecce Homo. I know this individuality in Nietzsche, and I even described it in my autobiography; but Ahriman becomes a direct author here, and Ahriman is a much more brilliant writer than Nietzsche.

Ahrimanic powers will intervene more and more and Ahrimanic spirits will also use human bodies for other things. A time will come when Christians will have to ask themselves seriously when they meet this or that human being: Is that really a human being or is it a very loose mantle for Ahrimanic spirits? In the future one will have to make this distinction in addition to the other ones one has to make today. This will be the second fall, and the beast and his herald will take possession of human bodies. Thereby these demons will have fallen. So first we have the fall of corrupt human beings and then the fall of certain corrupt spirits, who are close to men. These spirits take a tumble in the second fall.

Then we have the third fall, which is the fall of Satan in the Apocalypse. Here we have a very high being who does a different kind of work than the one which can be done on earth. The beast and the false prophet are powers who lead mankind astray; they want to steer men in the wrong direction in a moral and intellectual respect. However, the power which is meant in the fall of Satan wants something quite different. It wants to throw the whole earth off its course, and not just mankind. Seen from a human, earthly standpoint, this power is a terrible adversary of the Godhead.

One can only ask the following in a hypothetical way, and one can't look at it from the viewpoint of human or earthly evolution, if one doesn't want to commit an intellectual or spiritual sin. If one looks at it from other viewpoints, how does this satanic power in the universe compare with other spirits?

Now Michael has a different standpoint than human beings do, and it's no wonder that his opinion about Satan is quite different from that of men. Human beings tend to be rather abstract, and they think that Satan is an evil power. But he is also a great power from the viewpoints which are important for the earth, a great power that has gone astray. And archangel Michael does not have the rank of Satan, who is at the level of a principality or an archai; Michael is only an archangel. Satan is a very terrifying power from Michael's standpoint and not a despicable one, because he thinks that this power who belongs to the Archai is higher than he is. Except that Michael holds views which are in line with earth evolution.

With respect to everything which is connected with the orbits of the planets, Michael decided a long time ago to travel in the orbits which are prescribed by the sun's existence. Satan is a power who is continually lurking around in our cosmos. There is something sinister about this lurking of Satan. One can perceive this at the moments when one sees a comet shooting through our cosmos, with its different orbit (drawing).

If one draws it according to Copernicus which is not quite correct, although it doesn't make much difference here one has sun, Mercury, Venus, earth, Mars; those are the inner planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—one can see that such comets have very irregular orbits with respect to these regular orbits. The view that these comets describe long ellipses is nonsense, but we don't have to go into that now. But in any case, the segments of the cometary orbits which lie within our planetary system do not agree with the planetary orbits at all.

And so this Satan lies in wait in order to catch every comet that comes along, and to use its momental inertia so that—when he has collected enough comets—he can throw the planets out of their orbits, and the earth with them. This situation exists in the universe; Satanic powers are continually lying in wait so that they can transform the entire planetary system. Thereby this planetary system would be taken away from the divine, spiritual powers in whose footsteps men should be walking, and it would be taken into quite different directions of world evolution. This intention is a terrible mistake from Michael's point of view, but an intention about which Michael would have to say: I couldn't even do it, for it would be impossible for a being who is in the archangel class to do something like that. Only beings who are in the archai class might have enough forces to carry out something along these lines. Michael—who decided to move in the sun's orbit a long time ago, and who therefore (in the sense of the Ptolemaic system) has become what is known in occultism as an archangel of the rotation of time for the planets and has decided to remain entirely within the orbital periods.

The angels had to decide to remain in these scheduled orbits at some point. In a certain epoch of Atlantean evolution the gods descended into the mystery centers, and one could really perceive that the hosts of archangels which include Oriphiel, Anael, Zachariel and so on, resolved to move within the prescribed planetary orbits. So this came about at a certain time.

However, the mighty hosts which are led by Satan have not made this decision up to the present time and they're still trying to use every cometary orbit in order to give a different configuration to the entire planetary system. Here one is dealing with an adversary of Christ who not only wants to corrupt individual human beings, and who doesn't just want to corrupt groups of human beings like the beast and the false prophet, but we have to do with Satan and his hosts and with direct attacks upon the earth's connection with the planetary system, as it were. This will have to be the third fall. In both of these last two falls we again have the rejoicing of the Luciferic kind of spiritual beings.

One must foresee these things. For the first stage, the Babylonian stage, will have straying human beings who have drawn an aberration into themselves through their physical constitution, so that there is no hope that anything particularly good will become of these walking human bodies over which the ego and astral body have entirely lost control. These bodies must be given up for lost although perhaps not the ego and astral body which belong to them. The former will then go on as such along the karmic paths of humanity. At a particular point in time we see certain men walking around in their bodies, who are men who have succumbed to the Babylonian temptation and whose bodies and what is in them fall out of evolution: the fall of Babylon.

The second thing is that human beings will walk around—one will be able to see this—of whom one will have to say that Ahrimanic power's, are living in them. Here Ahriman is acting directly; this is the beast; the fall of the beast and of the false prophet of the beast, who is a superhuman being and not a man.

The third thing is that one will notice that something about the laws of nature is becoming unexplainable. This will be the greatest and most important experience that people will be able to have, when they notice that something is becoming unexplainable about natural laws and that phenomena are not taking place in accordance with the laws of nature. It will often happen that one will have something which is not merely an erroneous calculation, but is calculated correctly, let's say that a planet should be in a certain place, but it doesn't get there.

Satan will make some first successful attempts to bring disorder into the planetary system. Mankind will have to develop a very strong spirituality in order to counteract this. For the disorder that can be brought about in this way will and can only be harmonized through the strong spirituality of human beings. These are the things which we can foresee today if we place future stages of human and earth evolution before our soul. This is what we see again when the Apocalypticer speaks to us. You should try to feel your way into this coincidence with what can really be gained from Anthroposophy or can gradually be disclosed through Anthroposophy.

For one will be able to speak of comets and one can already speak about them today to the effect that Satan is lying in wait for them in the cosmos, and that he wants to use their orbits to replace cosmos with chaos. For if you take what can be gained through Anthroposophic understanding into yourself and you can discover it again in the Apocalypse, there is something important about this rediscovery. A kind of soul encounter with the Apocalypse and therewith the Apocalypticer himself is present in this; that is important,—thereby with the Apocalypticer himself. For this will be very important, that the priest who is living into the future should increasingly get the longing to meet the Apocalypticer who looked into the future in this way after the Mystery of Golgotha,—the Apocalypticer at any time, regardless of whether he is living on earth or not.

For priests must get the feeling that the help that can come from John, the creator of the Apocalypse, to the one who wants to work in a Christian way that this help is an extremely important one, and one that one needs. However, we will only really be able to accompany John the Apocalypticer if we approach the Apocalypse with the attitude of soul that I described. Then John becomes our ally, and after all he is closely connected with Christ Jesus, he was initiated by Christ Jesus himself, he is an initiate of Christ Jesus. Therefore, he is an important ally. It is tremendously important to come to the Christ through him.

It is really true that a real understanding of the Apocalypse leads deep down into the region where one has the greatest imaginable prospects of meeting John and then the Christ himself. There is a deep truth connected with this and a truth which one can hope will have a very deep aftereffect upon your thinking and feeling, for it is a real priests' truth, that is, a truth which draws a priest into the spiritual realm in a legitimate way. We will continue with this tomorrow.

Dear friends,

If we are going to consider the mutual concerns of priest and physician, we should look first at certain phenomena in human life that easily slide over into the pathological field. These phenomena require a physician's understanding, since they reach into profound depths, even into the esoteric realm of religious life. We have to realize that all branches of human knowledge must be liberated from a certain coarse attitude that has come into them in this materialistic epoch. We need only recall how certain phenomena that had been grouped together for some time under the heading “genius and insanity” have recently been given a crass interpretation by Lombroso¹ and his school and also by others. I am not pointing to the research itself—that has its uses—but rather to their way of looking at things, to what they brought out as “criminal anthropology,” from studying the skulls of criminals. The opinions they voiced were not only coarse but extraordinarily commonplace. Obviously the philistines all got together and decided what the normal type of human being is. And it was as near as could possibly be to a philistine! And whatever deviated from this type was pathological, genius on one side, insanity on the other; each in its own way was pathological. Since it is quite obvious to anyone with insight that every pathological characteristic also expresses itself bodily, it is also obvious that symptoms can be found in bodily characteristics pointing in one or the other direction. It is a matter of regarding the symptoms in the proper way. Even an earlobe can under certain conditions clearly reveal some psychological peculiarity, because such psychological peculiarities are connected with the karma that works over from earlier incarnations.

The forces that build the physical organism in the first seven years of human life are the same forces by which we think later. So it is important to consider certain phenomena, not in the customary manner but in a really appropriate way. We will not be regarding them as pathological (although they will lead us into aspects of pathology) but rather will be using them to obtain a view of human life itself.

Let us for a moment review the picture of a human being that Anthroposophy gives us. The human being stands before us in a physical body, which has a long evolution behind it, three preparatory stages before it became an earthly body—as is described in my book An Outline of Esoteric Science.² This earthly body needs to be understood much more than it is by today's anatomy and physiology. For the human physical body as it is today is a true image of the etheric body, which is in its third stage of development, and of the astral body, which is in its second stage, and even to a certain degree of the ego organization that humans first received on earth, which therefore is in its first stage of development. All of this is stamped like the stamp of a seal upon the physical body—which makes the physical body extraordinarily complicated. Only its purely mineral and physical nature can be understood with the methods of knowledge that are brought to it today. What the etheric body impresses upon it is not to be reached at all by those methods. It has to be observed with the eye of a sculptor so that one obtains pictorial images of cosmic forces, images that can then be recognized again in the form of the entire human being and in the forms of the single organs.

The physical human being is also an image of the breathing and blood circulation. But the entire dynamic activity that works and weaves through the blood circulation and breathing system can only be understood if one thinks of it in musical forms. For instance, there is a musical character to the formative forces that were poured into the skeletal system and then became active in a finer capacity in the breathing and circulation. We can perceive in eurythmy how the octave goes out from the shoulder blade and proceeds along the bones of the arm. This bone formation of the arm cannot be understood from a mechanical view of dynamics, but only from musical insight. We find the interval of the prime extending from the shoulder blade to the bone of the upper arm, the humerus, the interval of the second in the humerus, the third from the elbow to the wrist. We find two bones there because there are two thirds in music, a larger and a smaller. And so on. In short, if we want to find the impression of the astral body upon the physical body, upon the breathing and blood circulation, we are obliged to bring a musical understanding to it.

Still more difficult to understand is the ego organization. For this one needs to grasp the meaning of the first verse of the Gospel of St. John: “In the beginning was the Word.” “The Word” is meant there to be understood in a concrete sense, not abstractly, as commentators of the Gospels usually present it. If this is applied concretely to the real human being, it provides an explanation of how the ego organization penetrates the human physical body. You can see that we ought to add much more to our studies if they are to lead to a true understanding of the human being. However, I am convinced that a tremendous amount of material could be eliminated not only from medical courses but from theological courses too. If one would only assemble the really essential material, the number of years medical students, for instance, must spend in their course would not be lengthened but shortened. Naturally it is thought in materialistic fashion today that if there's something new to be included, you must tack another half-year onto the course!

Out of the knowledge that Anthroposophy gives us, we can say that the human being stands before us in physical, etheric and astral bodies, and an ego organization. In waking life these four members of the human organization are in close connection. In sleep the physical body and etheric body are together on one side, and the ego organization and astral body on the other side. With knowledge of this fact we are then able to say that the greatest variety of irregularities can appear in the connection of ego organization and astral body with etheric body and physical body. For instance, we can have: physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego organization. (Plate I, 1) Then, in the waking state, the so-called normal relation prevails among these four members of the human organization.

But it can also happen that the physical body and etheric body are in some kind of normal connection and that the astral body sits within them comparatively normally, but that the ego organization is somehow not properly sitting within the astral body. (Plate I, 2) Then we have an irregularity that in the first place confronts us in the waking condition. Such people are unable to come with their ego organization properly into their astral body; therefore their feeling life is very much disturbed. They can even form quite lively thoughts. For thoughts depend, in the main, upon a normal connection of the astral body with the other bodies. But whether the sense impressions will be grasped appropriately by the thoughts depends upon whether the ego organization is united with the other parts in a normal fashion. If not, the sense impressions become dim. And in the same measure that the sense impressions fade, the thoughts become livelier. Sense impressions can appear almost ghostly, not clear as we normally have them. The soul-life of such people is flowing away; their sense impressions have something misty about them, they seem to be continually vanishing. At the same time their thoughts have a lively quality and tend to become more intense, more colored, almost as if they were sense impressions themselves.

When such people sleep, their ego organization is not properly within the astral body, so that now they have extraordinarily strong experiences, in fine detail, of the external world around them. They have experiences, with their ego and astral body both outside their physical and etheric bodies, of that part of the world in which they live—for instance, the finer details of the plants or an orchard around their house. Not what they see during the day, but the delicate flavor of the apples, and so forth. That is really what they experience. And in addition, pale thoughts that are after-effects in the astral body from their waking life.

You see, it is difficult if you have such a person before you. And you may encounter such people in all variations in the most manifold circumstances of life. You may meet them in your vocation as physician or as priest—or the whole congregation may encounter them. You can find them in endless variety, for instance, in a town. Today the physician who finds such a person in an early stage of life makes the diagnosis: psychopathological impairment. To modern physicians that person is a psychopathological impairment case who is at the borderline between health and illness; whose nervous system, for instance, can be considered to be on a pathological level. Priests, if they are well-schooled (let us say a Benedictine or Jesuit or Barnabite or the like; ordinary parish priests are sometimes not so well-schooled), will know from their esoteric background that the things such a person tells them can, if properly interpreted, give genuine revelations from the spiritual world, just as one can have from a really insane person. But the insane person is not able to interpret them; only someone who comprehends the whole situation can do so. Thus you can encounter such a person if you are a physician, and we will see how to regard this person medically from an anthroposophical point of view. Thus you can also encounter such a person if you are a priest—and even the entire congregation can have such an encounter.

But now perhaps the person develops further; then something quite special appears. The physical and etheric bodies still have their normal connection. But now there begins to be a stronger pull of the ego organization, drawing the astral body to itself, so that the ego organization and astral body are now more closely bound together. And neither of them enters properly into the physical and etheric bodies. (Plate I, 3) Then the following can take place: the person becomes unable to control the physical and etheric bodies properly from the astral body and ego. The person is unable to push the astral body and ego organization properly into the external senses, and therefore, every now and then, becomes “senseless.” Sense impressions in general fade away and the person falls into a kind of dizzy dream state. But then in the most varied way moral impulses can appear with special strength. The person can be confused and also extremely argumentative if the rest of the organism is as just described.

Now physicians find in such a case that physical and biochemical changes have taken place in the sense organs and the nerve substance. They will find, although they may take slight notice of them, great abnormalities in the ductless glands and their hormone secretion, in the adrenal glands, and the glands that are hidden in the neck as small glands within the thyroid gland. In such a case there are changes particularly in the pituitary gland and the pineal gland. These are more generally recognized than are the changes in the nervous system and in the general area of the senses.

And now the priest comes in contact with such a person. The person confesses to experiencing an especially strong feeling of sin, stronger than people normally have. The priest can learn very much from such individuals, and Catholic priests do. They learn what an extreme consciousness of sin can be like, something that is so weakly developed in most human beings. Also in such a person the love of one's neighbor can become tremendously intense, so much so that the person can get into great trouble because of it, which will then be confessed to the priest.

The situation can develop still further. The physical body can remain comparatively isolated because the etheric body—from time to time or even permanently—does not entirely penetrate it, so that now the astral and etheric bodies and the ego organization are closely united with one another and the physical organism is separate from them. (Plate II) To use the current materialistic terms (which we are going to outgrow as the present course of study progresses), such people are in most cases said to be severely mentally retarded individuals. They are unable from their soul-spiritual individuality to control their physical limbs in any direction, not even in the direction of their own will. Such people pull their physical organism along, as it were, after themselves. A person who is in this condition in early childhood, from birth, is also diagnosed as mentally retarded. In the present stage of earth evolution, when all three members—ego organization, astral organization, and etheric body—are separated from the physical, and the lone physical body is dragged along after them, the person cannot perceive, cannot be active, cannot be illumined by the ego organization, astral body, and etheric body. So experiences are dim and the person goes about in a physical body as if it were anesthetized. This is extreme mental retardation, and one has to think how at this stage one can bring the other bodies down into the physical organism. Here it can be a matter of educational measures, but also to a great extent of external therapeutic measures.

But now the priest can be quite amazed at what such a person will confess. Priests may consider themselves very clever, but even thoroughly educated priests—there really are such men in Catholicism; one must not underestimate it—they pay attention if a so-called sick person comes to them and says, “The things you pronounce from the pulpit aren't worth much. They don't add up to anything, they don't reach up to the dwelling place of God, they don't have any worth except external worth. One must really rest in God with one's whole being.” That's the kind of thing such people say. In every other area of their life they behave in such a way that one must consider them to be extremely retarded, but in conversation with their priest they come out with such speeches. They claim to know inner religious life more intimately than someone who speaks of it professionally; they feel contempt for the professional. They call their experience “rest in God.” And you can see that the priest must find ways and means to relate to what such a person—one can say patient, or one can use other terms—to what such a human being is experiencing within.

One has to have a sensitive understanding for the fact that pathological conditions can be found in all spheres of life, for the fact that some people may be quite unable at the present time to find their way in the physical-sense world, quite unable to be the sort of human being that external life now requires all of us to be. We are all necessarily to a certain degree philistines as regards external life. But such people as I am describing are not in condition to travel along our philistine paths; they have to travel other ways. Priests must be able to feel what they can give such a person, how to connect what they can give out of themselves with what that other human being is experiencing. Very often such a person is simply called “one of the queer ones.” This demands an understanding of the subtle transition from illness to spirituality.

Our study can go further. Think what happens when a person goes through this entire sequence in the course of life. At some period the person is in a condition (Plate I, 2) where only the ego organization has loosened itself from the other members of the organism. In a later period the person advances to a condition where neither ego nor astral enter the physical or etheric bodies. Still later, (Plate I, 3) the person enters a condition where the physical body separates from the other bodies. (Plate II) The person only goes through this sequence if the first condition, perhaps in childhood, which is still normal, already shows a tendency to lose the balance of the four members of the organism. If the physician comes upon such a person destined to go through all these four stages—the first very slightly abnormal, the others as I have pictured them—the physician will find there is tremendous instability and something must be done about it. Usually nothing can be done. Sometimes the physician prescribes intensive treatment; it accomplishes nothing. Perhaps later the physician is again in contact with this person and finds that the first unstable condition has advanced to the next, as I described it with the sense impressions becoming vague and the thoughts highly colored. Eventually the physician finds the excessively strong consciousness of sin; naturally a physician does not want to take any notice of that, for now the symptoms are beginning to play over into the soul realm. Usually it is at this time that the person finally gets in touch with a priest, particularly when the fourth stage becomes apparent.

Individuals who go through these stages—it is connected with their karma, their repeated earth lives—have purely out of their deep intuition developed a wonderful terminology for all this. Especially if they have gone through the stages in sequence, with the first stage almost normal, they are able to speak in a wonderful way about what they experience. They say, for instance, when they are still quite young, if the labile condition starts between seventeen and nineteen years: human beings must know themselves. And they demand complete knowledge of themselves. Now with their ego organization separated, they come of their own initiative to an active meditative life. Very often they call this “active prayer,” “active meditation,” and they are grateful when some well-schooled priest gives them instruction about prayer. Then they are entirely absorbed in prayer, and they are experiencing in it what they now begin to describe by a wonderful terminology. They look back at their first stage and call what they perceive “the first dwelling place of God,” because their ego has not entirely penetrated the other members of their organism, so to a certain extent they are seeing themselves from within, not merely from without. This perception from within increases; it becomes, as it were, a larger space: “the first dwelling place of God.”

What next appears, what I have described from another point of view, is richer; it is more inwardly detailed. They see much more from within: “the second dwelling place of God.” When the third stage is reached, the inner vision is extraordinarily beautiful, and such a person says, “I see the third dwelling place of God; it is tremendously magnificent, with spiritual beings moving within it.” This is inner vision, a powerful, glorious vision of a world woven by spirit: “the third dwelling place of God,” or “the House of God.” There are variations in the words used. When they reach the fourth stage, they no longer want advice about active meditation, for usually they have reached the view that everything will be given them through grace and they must wait. They talk about passive prayer, passive meditation, that they must not pray out of their own initiative, for it will come to them if God wants to give it to them. Here the priest must have a fine instinct for recognizing when this stage passes over into the next. For now these people speak of “rest-prayer,” during which they do nothing at all; they let God hold sway in them. That is how they experience “the fourth dwelling place of God.”

Sometimes from the descriptions they give at this stage, from what—if we speak medically—such “patients” say, priests can really learn a tremendous amount of esoteric theology. If they are good interpreters, the theological detail becomes clear to them—if they listen very carefully to what such “patients” tell them, to what they know. Much of what is taught in theology, particularly Catholic pastoral theology, is founded on what various enlightened, trained confessors have heard from certain penitents who have undergone this sequence of development.

At this point ordinary conceptions of health and illness cease to have any meaning. If such a man is hidden away in an office, or if such a woman becomes an housewife who must spend her days in the kitchen or something similar in bourgeois everyday life, these people become really insane, and behave outwardly in such a way that they can only be regarded as insane. If a priest notices at the right moment how things are developing and arranges for them to live in appropriate surroundings, they can develop the four stages in proper order. Through such patients, the enlightened confessor is able to look into the spiritual world in a modern way but similarly to the Greek priests, who learned about the spiritual world from the Pythians, who imparted all kinds of revelations concerning the spiritual world through earthly smoke and vapor.³ What sense would there be today in writing a thesis on the pathological aspect of the Greek Pythians? It could certainly be done and it would even be correct, but it would have no meaning in a higher sense. For as a matter of fact, very much of what flowed in a magnificent way from Greek theology into the entire cultural life of Greece originated in the revelations of the Pythians. As a rule, the Pythians were individuals who had come either to this third stage or even to the fourth stage.

But we can think of a personality in a later epoch who went through these stages under the wise direction of her confessors, so that she could devote herself undisturbed to her inner visions. Something very wonderful developed for her, which indeed also remained to a certain degree pathological. Her life was not just a concern of the physician or of the priest but a concern of the entire Church. The Church pronounced her a saint after her death. This was St. Teresa.⁴ This was approximately her path.

You see, one must examine such things as this if one wants to discover what will give medicine and theology a real insight into human nature. One must be prepared to go far beyond the usual category of ideas, for they lose their value. Otherwise one can no longer differentiate between a saint and a fool, between a madman and a genius, and can no longer distinguish any of the others except a normal dyed-in-the-wool average citizen.

This is a view of the human being that must first be met with understanding; then it can really lead to fundamental esoteric knowledge. But it can also be tremendously enlightening in regard to psychological abnormalities as well as to physical abnormalities and physical illnesses. Certain conditions are necessary for these stages to appear. There has to be a certain consistency of the person's ego so that it does not completely penetrate the organism. Also there must be a certain consistency of the astral body: if it is not fine, as it was in St. Teresa, if it is coarse, the result will be different. With St. Teresa, because of the delicacy of her ego organization and astral body, certain physical organs in the lower body had been formed with the same fragile quality.

But it can happen that the ego organization and astral body are quite coarse and yet they have the same characteristic as above. Such an individual can be comparatively normal and show only the physical correlation: then it is only a physical illness. One could say, on the one hand there can be a St. Teresa constitution with its visions and poetic beauty, and on the other hand its physical counterimage in diseased abdominal organs, which in the course of this second person's life is not reflected in the ego and astral organization.

All these things must be spoken about and examined. For those who hold responsibility as physicians or priests are confronted by these things, and they must be equal to the challenge. Theological activity only begins to be effective if theologians are prepared to cope with such phenomena. And physicians only begin to be healers if they also are prepared to deal with such symptoms.

• 1 . Cesare Lombroso (1836–1909), Italian anthropologist. Wrote Genius and Insanity (1864) and The Criminal: Anthropological, Medical and Legal Aspects (1876).
• 2 . Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Esoteric Science (Hudson, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1985).
• 3 . Pythians: priestesses of Apollo who delivered the oracles at Delphi.
• 4 . Teresa of Avila (1515–1582), Carmelite nun. Reformed the Carmelite Order in association with John of the Cross. Canonized by the Catholic Church.

The last two lectures concentrated on artistic feeling and creation. I wished to call attention to the fact that anthroposophical contemplation leads to a particular manner of beholding the world, which must lead, in turn, to an inner vitalization of the arts, present and future. At the end of yesterday's lecture I stressed the fact that, by gaining a direct relation to the spiritual, a person can acquire the forces necessary for the creation, out of his innermost core, of true art. It has always been so. For true art stands beside real knowledge on the one hand, and on the other, genuine religious life. Through knowledge and religion man draws closer to the spiritual element in thought, feeling and will. Indeed, it is his inward experience of knowledge and religion, during an earth life, that brings about a sense of the validity of all that I discussed during the last two lectures. Looking at the physical surroundings akin to his physical body, he comes to realize that physicality is not the whole of his humanness. In all artistic and religious ages he has recognized this truth, saying to himself: Though I stand within earth existence, it contradicts that part of my human nature which was imaged forth from worlds quite different from the one in which I live between birth and death.

Let us consider this feeling I have just described in respect to cognition. Through thinking man strives to solve the riddles of existence. Modern man is very proud of the naturalistic knowledge which, for three or four centuries, now, while marvelous relationships in nature were traced out, has been accumulating. But, precisely in regard to these relationships, present-day natural science must say to itself on reflection, with all intensity: What can be learned through the physical senses leads to a door which locks out world mysteries and cosmic riddles. And we know from anthroposophical contemplation that, to pass this door, to enter the realms where we may perceive what lies behind the outer world, we must overcome certain inner dangers. If a human being is to tread the path leading through this door, he must first attain, in his thoughts, feelings and will, a certain inner steadiness. That is why entering this door is called passing the Guardian of the Threshold. If real knowledge of the spiritual-divine foundation of the world is to be acquired, attention must be called not only to the dangers mentioned, but also to the fact that no person penetrates this door in the state of consciousness brought about between birth and death by merely natural conditions.

Here we should consider the tremendous seriousness of cognition. Also the abyss lying between the purely naturalistic world and the world we must seek if we would enter our true home and discover what bears a relationship to our inmost being. For in the merely naturalistic world we feel ourselves strangers in regard to this inmost being. On entering physical existence at birth, inevitably we carry with us our eternal-divine being; but if its source is to be recognized, we must first become aware of the abyss lying between earth life and the regions of cognition which we must enter in order to know our own being.

An understanding of cognition highlights, on the one hand, the gravity of the search for a true relationship with the spiritual world; on the other, it helps us to recognize that, if earthly existence were immediately satisfactory, if what modern naturalism dreams to be the case were so, namely, that man is merely the highest pinnacle of natural phenomena, there would exist no religious human beings. For in such circumstances man would have to be satisfied with earthly existence.

Religion aims at something entirely different. It presents a reality which reconciles man to earthly existence, or consoles him beyond earthly existence, or perhaps awakens him to the full meaning of earthly existence by making him aware that he is more than anything which earthly existence implies.

Thus the anthroposophical world-conception is capable of giving a strong impetus to cognition as well as to religious experience. In the case of cognition it stresses the fact that one must travel a road of purification before passing the gate to the spiritual world. On the other hand, it stresses the truth that religious life leads far beyond the facts observable by a person with only ordinary earthly consciousness. For Anthroposophy recognizes that the Mystery of Golgotha, the earth-life of Christ Jesus, though placed among historical events comprehensible to the senses, can be comprehended in its fulness only supersensibly.

Fortunately the abyss on the edge of which man lives, the abyss opening out before him in religion and cognition, can be bridged. But not by contemporary religion, nor yet by a cognition, a science, derived wholly from the earth.

It is here that art enters. It forms a bridge across the abyss. That is why art must realize that its task is to carry the spiritual-divine life into the earthly; to fashion the latter in such a way that its forms, colors, words, tones, act as a revelation of the world beyond. Whether art takes on an idealistic or realistic coloring is of no importance. What it needs is a relationship to the truly, not merely thought-out, spiritual. No artist could create in his medium if there were not alive in him impulses springing from the spiritual world. This fact points to the seriousness of art, standing alongside the seriousness of cognition and religious experience. It cannot be denied that our materialistically oriented civilization diverts us, in many ways, from the gravity of art. But any devoted study of true artistic creation reveals it as an earnest of man's struggle to harmonize the spiritual-divine with the physical-earthly.

This became evident at that moment of world-evolution when human beings were faced in all seriousness with the great question of art; became evident in the grand style during the time of Goethe and Schiller. A glance at their struggles will corroborate this statement. Much that is pertinent, here, has already been quoted in past years, in other connections. Today—to provide a basis for discussion—I shall cite only a few instances.

During the eighteenth century there emerged a guiding idea which Goethe and Schiller themselves accepted: namely, the differentiation between romantic and classical art. Espousing classicism, Goethe tried to become its nurturer by familiarizing himself with the secrets of great Greek art. His Italian journey was fulfilment of his longing. In Germany, that northern land, he felt no possibility of reconciling, artistically, the divine-spiritual hovering, before his soul and the physical-sensory standing before his senses. Greek art, so abundant in Italy, and now deeply perceived, taught him the harmonization he lacked when he left Weimar for Italy. The impression he makes in describing his experience is—I must coin a paradoxical expression—at once heroic and touching.

In art Goethe was a classicist in the sense (if we use words which satisfactorily express his own idea) that he directed his gaze primarily toward the external, the sensory-real. But he was too profound a spirit not to feel a discrepancy between the sensory and that which derives from other realms, home of his soul. Sense-evidence should be purified, elevated through shaping, through an appropriate treatment. Thus Goethe the artist distilled from natural forms and human actions an element which, although presented imperfectly in the sensory-physical, could be brought to clarity without infidelity to the physical. In other words, he let the divine-spiritual shine through purified sensory forms. Always it was his earnest endeavor not to take up the spiritual lightly in his writings, not to express the divine-spiritual offhandedly. For he was convinced that romanticism can make only a facile, all-too-easy introduction of the spiritual into the physical; not deal with it comprehensively and effectively.

Never was it his intention to say: The gods live; I resort to symbolism to prove my conviction that the gods live. He did not feel thus. On the contrary, he felt somewhat as follows: I see the stones, I behold the plants, I observe the animals, I perceive the actions of human beings. To me all these creations have fallen away from the divine-spiritual. Nevertheless, though their earthly forms and colors show a desertion from the divine-spiritual, I must, by my treatment, lift them to a level where they can reflect, out of their own natures, that same divine-spiritual. I need not become unfaithful to nature—this Goethe felt—just purify seceded nature by artistic fashioning; then it will express the divine-spiritual. This was Goethe's conception of classicism; of the main impulse of Greek art, of all true art.

Schiller was unable to go along with this viewpoint. Because his gaze was directed idealistically into the spiritual world, he used physical things as indicators only. Thus he was the dayspring of post-Goethean romantic poetry. It is extraordinarily interesting to watch the reversal of method. For romantic poetry, as opposite pole to the classicism striven for by Goethe, despaired, as it were, of elevating the earthly-sensory to the divine; being satisfied to use it only as a more or less successful way of pointing to the divine-spiritual.

Let us look at the classicism of Goethe, composer of these beautiful lines:

Who possesses science and art
Possesses religion as well:
Who possesses the first two not,
O grant him religion.
(“Wer Wissenschaft and Kunst besitzt,
Hat auch Religion;
Wer jene beiden nicht besitzt,
Der habe Religion.”)

Goethe, permeated by a conviction that every artist harbors the religious impulse, Goethe, to whom the trivially religious was repulsive because there lived in him a deep religious impulse, took the greatest pains to purify artistically the sensory-physical-earthly form to a point where it became an image of the divine-spiritual. Let us look at his careful way of working. He took up what was robustly earthly without feeling any necessity of changing it greatly to give it artistic form.

Consider, in this respect, his Goetz von Berlichingen. He treated the biography of this man objectively and with respect while dramatizing it, as demonstrated by the title of the first version: Geschichte Gott friedens von Berlichingen mit der eisernen Hand, dramatisiert (History of Gottfried of Berlichingen of the Iron Hand, Dramatized). In other words, by changing only slightly the purely physical, he led it over into the dramatic; wishing, as artist, to part with the earth as little as possible; presenting it as a manifestation of the spiritual-divine world order.

Take another instance. Let us see how he approached his Iphigenie, his Tasso. He conceived these dramas, shaped their subject matter, poetically. But what happened then? He did not dare to give them their final form. In the situation in which he found himself, he, Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt and studied in Leipzig and Strassburg before going to Weimar, he, the Weimar-Frankfurt Goethe, did riot dare to finish these dramas. He had to go to Italy and walk in the light of Greek art to elevate the sensory-physical-earthly to a level where it could image forth the spiritual. Imagine the battle Goethe went through in order to bridge the abyss between the sensory-physical-earthly and divine-spiritual. It was like an illness when he left Weimar under cover of night, saying nothing to anybody, to flee to an environment in which he could master and elevate and spiritualize, as never in the north, the forms he worked with. His psychology is deeply moving. As I said before, it has about it something that might be called heroic-touching.

Let us go further. It is characteristic of Goethe—the paradox may strike you as peculiar—that he never finished anything. He began Faust in one great fling, but only the philistine Eckermann could induce him, in his old age, to bring this drama to a conclusion, and then it was only just barely possible for the author. For Goethe to bring his Faust to artistic form was a tremendous struggle which required the help of somebody else. Then take Wilhelm Meister. After its inception, he did not wish to finish. It was Schiller who persuaded him to do so. And if we scrutinize the matter, we might say: if only Schiller had not done so. For what Goethe then produced was not on the same level as his first sketch which would have remained a fragment. Take the second part: episodes are assembled. The writing is not all of a piece; it is not a uniform work of art. Now observe how—as in Pandora—Goethe strove to rise to the pinnacle of artistic creation by drawing his figures from the Greek world which he loved so much. Pandora remained a fragment, he could not complete it; the project was too vast for him to round it out. The serious, difficult task of the artist weighed upon his soul, and when he tried to idealize human life, to present it in the glory of the divine-spiritual, he could complete only the first part of the trilogy, the first drama: Die Natuerliche Tochter.

Thus in every possible way Goethe shows his predilection for the classical; always endeavoring, in his works, to purify the earthly physical to the point where it could spread abroad the radiance of the divine-spiritual. He struggled and strove, but the task was such that, apprehended deeply enough, it surpassed human forces, even Goethe's. We must say, therefore, that precisely in such a personality the arts with their grave world-mission appear in their full grandeur and power. What appeared, later, in romanticism is all the more characteristic when considered in the light of Goethe.

Last Thursday was the hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of Ludwig Tieck, who was born on May 31, 1773, and died on April 28, 1853. Tieck—unfortunately little known today—was in a certain respect a loyal pupil of Goethe. He grew out of romanticism, out of what at the University of Jena during the nineties of the eighteenth century was regarded as as the modern Goethe problem. In his youth he had experienced the publication of Werther and of the first part of Faust. At Jena, together with Novalis, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, he struggled to solve the riddles of the world. In his immediate environment Ludwig Tieck felt the breath of Goethe's striving toward the classical, and in him we can see how spiritual life was still active at the end of the eighteenth, and during the first half of the nineteenth, century. With Schlegel, Tieck introduced Shakespeare into Germany; and as a personality he illustrates how Goethe's tremendous efforts were reflected in certain of his prominent contemporaries. Tieck felt the grandeur and dignity of art as a mighty cultural ideal. He looked about; he did not gather his life experiences in a narrowly circumscribed spot. After sitting at the feet of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel at the University of Jena, he journeyed through Italy and France. Then, after becoming acquainted with the world and philosophy, he strove, in a true Goethean manner, artistically to bridge the abyss between earthly and heavenly existence.

Of course he could not compete with Goethe's power and impetus. But let us look at one of Tieck's works: Franz Sternbald's Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald's Journeys), written in the form of Wilhelm Meister. What are these Sternbald journeys? They are journeys of the human soul into the realm of art. The question pressing heavily upon Sternbald is this: How can I raise sense-reality to the radiance of the spiritual? At the same time Tieck—whose hundred-and-fiftieth birthday we ought to be celebrating—felt the seriousness which streams down upon art from the region of cognition and that of religious life. Great is the light which falls, from there, upon Ludwig Tieck's artistic creations. A novel which he wrote comparatively early in life bears the title William Lovell; and this character is under Tieck's own impression (received while sitting at the feet of Schelling and Fichte in Jena) of the extreme seriousness of the search for knowledge. Imagine the effect of such teachings upon a spirit as receptive as Tieck's. (Differently, though not less magnificently, they influenced Novalis.) In his younger years Tieck had passed through the rationalistic “free spirit” training of Berlin's supreme philistine Nikolai. It was therefore an experience of the very greatest importance when he saw how in Fichte and Schelling the human soul relinquished, as it were, all connection with outer physical reality and, solely through its own power, endeavored to find a path through the door to the spiritual world. In William Lovell Tieck depicts a human being who, entirely out of the forces of his own soul, subjectively, seeks access to the spirit. Unable to find in the physical-sensory the divine for which Goethe constantly strove through his classical art, William Lovell seeks it nevertheless, relying entirely on his own forces, and thereby becoming confused, perplexed in regard to the world and his own personality. Thus William Lovell loses his hold on life through something sublime, that is, through the philosophy of Fichte and Schelling. In a peculiar way the book points out the dangers of cognition, through which, of necessity, men must pass. Tieck shows us how the cognitionally-serious can infuse the artistically-serious.

In his later years Ludwig Tieck created the poetic work: Der Aufruhr in den Cevennen (The Uprising in the Cevennes). What is his subject matter? Demonic powers which approach man, nature spirits which lay hold of him, possess him, drive him into religious fanaticism, and cause him to lose his way through the world. Oh, this Ludwig Tieck certainly felt what it means, on the one hand, to be dependent solely upon one's own personality and, on the other, to fall prey to elementals, gods of the elements. Hence overtones of gripping power in Tieck's works; for example in his Dichterleben (Life of the Poet) in which he describes how Shakespeare, as a thoroughly poetic nature, enters the world, how the world puts obstacles in his path, and how he stumbles into pitfalls. In Dichterleben Tieck discusses a poet's birth and all that earthly life gives him on a purely naturalistic basis. In Tod des Dichters (Death of the Poet) which deals with the last days of the Portuguese poet Camoens, he describes a poet's departure from life, his path to the gate of death. It is deeply moving how Tieck describes, out of the seriousness of the Goethe age, the beginning and end of an artist's life. What was great in Tieck was not his own personality, but rather his reflection of Goethe's spirit. Most characteristic, therefore, is his treatment of those “really practical people” who want to stand solidly on the earth without spiritual impulse in artistic presentation. Oh, there exists no more striking satire on novels about knights and robber barons than Tieck's Blaubart (Bluebeard). And, again, no more striking satire on the mawkishly emotional trying to be artistic than Tieck's Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss-in-Boots). The woeful excess of sentiment which mutters of the divine-spiritual (a sentimentality illustrated by the affected Ifliand and babbling Kotzebue) he sends packing.

Ludwig Tieck reveals how the Goetheanism of the first half of the nineteenth century was mirrored in a receptive personality; how something like a memory of the great ancient periods played into the modern age; periods in which mankind, looking up to the divine-spiritual, strove to create, in the arts, memorials of the divine-spiritual. Such a personality represents the transition from an age still spiritually vital, at least in memory, to an age blinded by a brilliant natural-scientific world-conception and less brilliant life-practice; an age which will never find the spirit without the impetus which comes from direct spiritual perception, which is to say, from imagination, inspiration and intuition, as striven for by Anthroposophy.

Look, from this point of view, at the tremendous seriousness ensouling these writers. Not only Goethe but many others despaired of finding their way into the spiritual world through contemporary cultural life. Goethe did not rest until, in Italy, he had acquired an understanding of the way the Greeks penetrated the secrets of existence through their works of art. I have often quoted Goethe's statement: “It seems to me that, in creating their works of art, the Greeks proceeded according to nature's own laws, which I am now tracing.” Clearly, he believed that in their art the Greeks received from the gods something which enabled them to create higher works of nature, images of divine-spiritual existence. The followers of Goethe, still under his direct influence, felt compelled to return to ancient times, at least to ancient Greece, to attain to the spirit.

Herman Grimm, who in many ways still felt Goethe's living breath (I mentioned this in my last article in Das Goetheanum), said repeatedly that the ancient Romans resembled modern human beings; though they wore the toga, walked like moderns; whereas the ancient Greeks all seemed to have had the blood of the gods flowing through their veins. A beautiful, artistically felt statement! Indeed, it was only after the fifteenth century (I have often mentioned this) that man entered into materialism. It was necessary. We must not berate what the modern age brought. Had things stayed as they were, man would have remained deterministically dependent upon the divine spiritual world. If he was ever to become free, his passage into a purely material civilization was an historical necessity. In the book The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have described modern man's attitude in this respect. But the evening glow of the ancient spiritual life was still lighting up the sky in Goethe's time, indeed, right up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Therefore his longing for Italy, his hope of finding there, through an echo from ancient Greece, something unattainable in his own civilization: the spirit. Goethe could not live without having seen Rome and a culture which, however antiquated, still enshrined the spiritual in the sensory-physical.

He was preceded in this mood by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a kind of personification of that evening-glow of ancient spiritual life. Goethe's appreciation of Winckelmann comes out in his marvelously beautiful book on this man and his century: a glorious presentation of the strivings of a personality longing for the spirit. Through this book one senses what Goethe felt vividly: that Winckelmann went to the south, to Rome, to find in ancient spirituality the spirit he missed in the present and restore it. Winckelmann was intoxicated by his search for spirituality: Goethe could feel that. And his book is superb precisely because he was permeated with that same longing. In Rome both men sensed, at last, something of the breath of ancient spirituality. There Winckelmann traced the mysteries of art to remnants of Greek artistic impulses and absorbed them into his soul; there Goethe repeated the experience. Thus it was in Rome that Goethe rewrote Iphigenie. He had fled with his northern Iphigenie to Rome in order to rewrite it and give it the only form he could consider classical. Here he succeeded. Which cannot be said of the works written after he returned home.

In all this we see Goethe the artist's profoundly serious struggle for spirituality. Only after he had discovered in Raphael's colors and Michelangelo's forms the results of what he considered genuine artistic experience could his own search come to fruition. Thus he represents the evening glow of a spirituality lost and no longer valid for modern man.

Permit me, now, to make a personal remark. There was a certain moment when I felt deeply what Winckelmann said when he traveled south to discover the secrets of art, and how Goethe followed in his footsteps. At the same moment I could not but feel strongly that the time of our surrender to the evening glow had passed; we must now search with all our might for a new unfolding of spiritual life, must give up seeking for what is past. All this I experienced at the destiny-allotted moment when, years ago, I had to deliver some anthroposophical lectures about the evolution of world and man in the very rooms where Winckelmann lived during his Roman sojourn; the very rooms where he conceived his thoughts about Italian and Greek art, and enunciated the comprehensive ideas which filled Goethe with the enthusiasm expressed in his book on Winckelmann. Here in Winckelmann's quarters the conviction permeated me that something new must be stated on the path to spiritual life. A strange connection of destiny.

With this personal remark I conclude today's observations.

This lecture is the eighth of nineteen lectures in the volume Answers to Universal Questions and Life Questions through Anthroposophy. This lecture is also known as The Categories of Hegel.¹

The lecture today will be put into such a form, that through particular remarks connected with the elucidations you will be able to see where the bridge is to be made between Anthroposophy and Philosophy, and how certain philosophical concepts and knowledge can be of importance in the practice of spiritual science. Something is to be stated at the outset that will be useful to us in bringing the philosophical edifice altogether into a right relation to spiritual science. As a preparation, you have heard the logic lectures during the General Meeting (22 Oct. 1908, on the 4^th Dimension; 25 Oct. 1908, on Fichte, Schelling, Hegel). There we recognized thinking as the capacity, to place oneself over against the world in a technique of concepts. We characterized it in a certain way, when we wanted to obtain a concept from pure formal logic. We can only really speak of thinking, when it takes its course in concepts, and we strictly distinguished between perception, representation and concept. If such distinctions are said to be difficult, it must be borne in mind, that in spiritual science it is obligatory that one engage in strict soul exercises, which will increase to sharp and energetic conceptual contours.

We have learnt to know the concept itself as something, which is constructed wholly within our spirit, and this construction is a true one. All psychological disquisitions, which see in the concept only a shadow, arising through abstraction, of that which we have in the representation, remain stationary half way. The concept has not arisen thus, but in inward construction.

In order to get a picture of the place of the concept and the conceptual system, let us just represent to ourselves, what relation this world of concepts takes on the one side to sensible perception, and on the other side to the higher reality, which comes to us through super-sensible observation. The whole network of concepts that a man possess, beginning from the concept of number etc. to the concepts that Goethe constructed, but which in our western culture remain wholly in inception, you may represent as a tablet (Tafel), forming the boundary between the super-sensible and sensible worlds. Between these two spheres the world of concepts forms the boundary. If the observer of sense things were to direct only his eye or other perceptive organs to the outer world, he would merely experience representations. That was shown in the representation of the circle, which remains to us from the perception of the horizon on the ocean. If the human being on the other hand constructs the picture merely in the spirit, the pictures of all the points which are equal in distance from a point within, then in antithesis to the representation of the circle he possess the concept of the circle. Thus we could construct other concepts than mathematical ones, and could finally rise to real knowledge of the Goethean morphology, whose concepts have come into existence just as inwardly as the concept of the circle and so on. When we accordingly imagine the network of all the concepts which man can form, then one can approach the sensible reality with these concepts, and then one finds, that the sensible world agrees with one's concepts. What one has constructed as circles coincides with the circle that is given to him in the perception, through journeying out on the ocean. In this way in all true conceptual thinking we relate ourselves to the reality. The concept is decidedly not gained through observation—that is a conception which is very wide-spread today—the concept is plainly something wherein a man takes no account of the external reality. Now through this we established the place of the network of concepts in regard to the external sensible reality.

Now we must ask: how is it with the position of the network of concepts in regard to super-sensible reality? When he, who through the methods of clairvoyance discloses the super-sensible reality, now approaches this reality with his concepts, he will thus find the network of concepts coincides just as much with the super-sensible world. From the other side the super-sensible reality throws its rays as it were on the network of concepts, as on the one side does the sensible reality.

Now whence comes this network of concepts itself? Here that can only be asserted as fact, for the answer to this question can only result as the consequence of the logical path which we shall yet be able to take together. Today I will only give you a picture of this network of concepts, in order to show whence the network, which a man weaves within him, takes it origin. That is best made clear by a shadow picture. The shadow-picture of the hand would never arise if the hand were not there. The shadow-picture resembles its prototype, but it has one peculiarity! it is nothing! Through the fact that in the place of light the non-light comes, through the obliteration (obscuring??) of the light the shadow-picture comes into being.² The concepts arise in exactly the same way, through the fact that behind our thinking soul there stands the super-sensible reality.

The concepts also are really only an obliteration of the super-sensible reality, and because they resemble the spiritual world, as the shadow-pictures do the prototypes, for this reason the human being can form an inkling of the super-sensible worlds. When the perception of the super-sensible makes concept with the sensible, then these shadow-pictures arise. In the conceptual shadow-pictures you have the super-sensible reality just as little as in the shadow-picture of the hand you have the hand itself. Accordingly we have recognized here that the concepts are the boundary between the two realities, but originate from the super-sensible reality.

Now we ask ourselves: how can a man arrive at concepts, when he has no experience in super-sensible worlds? If he had only the sense-reality, he could only have representations. But it is not requisite to ascend into super-sensible reality in order to form concepts. The seer can perhaps arrive more easily at a complete conceptual world, because he has of course learnt to know the forces, which form the concepts. You will find the spiritual-scientific explanation of what is here said in my Theosophy. A man arrives at his concepts because he causes them to stream down upon him in that form (formlich). Now how is it possible for a man to arrive at a network of concepts filled with content? The majority of people have only arrived at pure concepts in mathematics. Most men, of course, believe that concepts arrive through abstractions. Naturally that is not at all the origin of concepts. Even thinking men are in general quite unclear as to this. When I tried to make clear the self-constructiveness of the concept in The Philosophy of Freedom I had the opportunity of experiencing something very curious. You find elucidated there, in adverse connection with Herbert Spencer, that to start from outer experience is a thoroughly unsatisfactory mode of forming the concept. (p. 55, 1932 ed.)

The concept cannot be gained from observation. That arises from the fact, that the growing human being only slowly and gradually forms the concepts conforming to the objects which surround him. The concepts are added to the observation.

A much read philosopher of the present day (Herbert Spencer) describes the spiritual process, which we carry out in connection with the observation as follows: when in walking through the fields on a September day, we hear a rustling a few steps in front of us, and at the side of the ditch from which it seems to come, we see the grass in movement, we shall probably go straight to the spot in order to learn what has produced the noise and the movement. At our approach a partridge flutters into the ditch, and therewith our curiosity is satisfied: we have what we call an explanation of the phenomenon. This explanation, be it remarked, amounts to the following: since in life we have so often experienced, that a disturbance of the quiet situation of small bodies accompanies the movement of other bodies situated between them, and as we have for this reason generalized the connections between such disturbances and such movements, we regard this special disturbance as explained as soon as we find that it is an example of this very connection! On closer inspection, the matter shows itself to be wholly different from the description given here. When I hear a noise, I first seek the concept for this observation. This concept only points one to something beyond the noise. One who does not reflect further, hears just the noise and is satisfied with that. But my reflection makes it clear to me, that I have to regard the noise as an effect. Thus it is only when I combine the concept of the effect with the perception of the noise, that I am led to go beyond the single observation and to seek for its cause. The concept of the effect calls up that of the cause, and then I seek for the object which causes it, and which I find in the form of the partridge. But these concepts, cause and effect, can never be gained through mere observation, however many cases it should embrace. The observation calls forth the thinking, and it is only this that shows me the way to link the single experience to another.

If one demands of a ‘strictly objective science’ that it should take its content from observation alone, one must demand at the same time that it should renounce all thinking. For thinking, according to its nature, transcends what is observed ...

If one would follow Spencer's line of thought, one would arrive at this, that concepts only arise through the crystallizing of the special observations out of the general.³ So long as I relate myself in regard to the noise, as Spencer describes it, I can never come to cognition at all.

Something is still requisite. A prominent philosopher of the present day, to whom I dedicated a copy of my book, wrote in the margin at the place just quoted: “the hare certainly does not do that”, and sent me the book back. But here we are of course not intending to write a philosophy of the hare. Our soul must be in a condition in which it is able to gain the network of the concepts when it is not in the position to get it from perception. The methods, even when they are the scientific methods, which one employs to form representations about the world through outer experience, all these methods cannot aid us to construct the real network of concepts in the human soul. But there must be a method, which is independent of external experience as well as clairvoyant experience, for the human soul ought in truth, as we presuppose, to be able to form concepts before it mounts up to the super-sensible. Accordingly a man has to proceed from one concept to another then he remains within the network of the concepts itself. That that takes place in the soul, makes it requisite that we presuppose a method having nothing to do with external observation or with clairvoyant experience. This movement in pure concepts one now calls, in the sense of the great philosopher Hegel, the “dialectic method”. That is the true dialectic method, where the human being lives only in concepts, and is as it were in a condition to cause one concept to germinate out of another. The man then lives in a sphere, where he takes no account of the sensible world and of that which stands behind it the super-sensible world.

We have pointed out what the soul does inasmuch as it continues mobile in the network of concepts. It begins to spin concept to concept in the sense of the dialectic method. It leads man from concept to concept. Granted that we have to begin somewhere, then we pass on from concept to concept. This must give as a result the sum of all concepts. They would constitute the sum of all concepts, which in the world-all are adapted below to the sense world and upwards to the super-sensible world as well. In the widest sense of the word one terms all these self-mobile concepts, adapted to the two worlds, “the Categories”. Whence it follows that at bottom of the whole human network of concepts is composed of the categories alone. With the same justice one might say: all concepts are categories, as one might say: all categories are concepts. One has, in truth, habitually called the weightiest, the radical concepts, the nodal points of the concepts, Categories. These more important concepts, following Aristotle, are called categories. But in the strict sense one can use the words ‘concept’ and ‘category’ interchangeably, so that we are justified in calling the sum of our self-mobile, self-producing concepts ‘theory of categories’. And Hegel's work—is really a system of categories.⁴ Hegel himself, of course, says this very thing: if one establishes the network of concepts in the whole ambit, one then has in it the ideas of the divine being before the creation of the world. Since we find the concepts in the world, they must have been originally established there. If we trace the concepts back, we discover the divine ideas, the categorical content of the world.

Today I cannot go into the historical development of the system of categories, but only show how in the main Hegel, the great master of categorical theory, has developed the system of concepts. Hegel is today perhaps the least understood philosopher. And when anything is ever said about him, it is worth but little. Wherefore people are still apt to say today, as they always said in his lifetime: he wants to develop the whole world in concepts. Even the Leipzig philosopher Krug understood him as though he wanted to construct the rose out of spiritual perceptions, as though one ought to develop it from concepts. Whereupon he received the answer, that it is not quite evident why the writing pen itself of the Leipzig philosopher should (not) be constructed of pure concepts.⁵

It is of extraordinary importance for Anthroposophists to make their way into these pure concepts. It is at the same time an important and strongly effective means of training the soul, and a means of overcoming a certain indolence and slovenliness of soul. These are effectively banished by Hegel's ‘Dialectic’. One has, you know, this unequivocal feeling of the slovenliness of the concepts in the perusal of modern books, when one has trained oneself in Hegel's system of concepts. True enough, one must have a starting point, one must begin with something; naturally, this must be the simplest concept, it must have the most diffused (geringsten) content, and the greatest ambit; that is the concept of “SEIN” (being: in existence, entity, mere subsistence). This is the concept that is applicable in the whole circumference of the world. Nothing is expressed about the kind of existence, when we speak of existence in the absolute sense. Hegel starts from the concept of SEIN. But how does one get out beyond this concept? However, in order not to remain at a standstill we must of course have a possibility of causing concept to germinate out of concept. This essential clue which we have not got we find in the very dialectical method itself, when it becomes clear that every concept contains in itself something still more than the concept itself, as, to be sure, the root contains the whole plant in itself which will yet grow out of it. It is so with the concept as well. If we look at the root with outer eyes we certainly do not see what impels the plant out of the root. In the same way there is something incorporated in the concept SEIN, which can cause the germination of a concept, and this, in truth, is the concept NICHT-SEIN (non-being, non-existence), the contrary of the first concept. The NICHTS is incorporated in the SEIN, so that here we have one concept germinate out of the other. If we would form a representation of the concept of NICHTS, that is quite as difficult as it is important. Many people, even philosophers, will say it is altogether impossible to form a concept of the NICHTS. But that is just the important thing for Anthroposophists. A time is coming when much will depend upon the fact that the concept of the NICHTS is grasped in the appropriate way. Spiritual science suffers from the fact that the concept of the NICHTS can not be grasped purely. From the Theosophy has become a theory of emanations.

Imagine yourself confronting the external reality and contemplating the world from a point of view which depends only on yourself. You contemplate, for example two men, one large and one small. You imagine something about them, a concept, which would never be conceived [about them] then unless you had met them both, the small and the large man. It is all one what you think about them, but the concept would never have been formed unless you had encountered them. You can find nothing in the primary causes, which could lead to the concept. It has emerged through the pure constellation, through the reference of things to each other. But now this concept, which has come out of the NICHTS, becomes a factor that continues active in you. The NICHTS becomes accordingly a positively real factor in the phenomena of the world, and you can never lay hold of this world phenomenon unless you have seized the NICHTS in this real significance. You would even understand the concept of Nirvana better if you had a clear concept of the NICHTS.

Now connect the two concepts “SEIN and “NICHTS” with one another; then you come to the WERDEN (becoming); a fuller concept, which prospectively contains the other two. WERDEN is a continuous transition from NICHT SEIN to SEIN. In the concept WERDEN you have [a] play [between] the two concepts SEIN & NICHTS. Starting then from the concept of WERDEN you arrive at the concept of DASEIN (existent there); it is that which next (das nachste) unites itself to the WERDEN; the stiffening of the WERDEN is the DASEIN (existential state), a condensed WERDEN. A WERDEN must precede DASEIN.

Now what [do] we get when we have developed four such concepts within us and gained them in this way? We get much from them. In the concept of WERDEN then, we are thinking of nothing else than of what we have learned as content of the concept. We must forthwith exclude everything that does not belong to the concepts. Only SEIN AND NICHTSEIN belong thereto. Wherefore a strictly trained thinker is so hard to understand. When a concept is spoken of, one ought really just as little to think in connection with [it] of something diverse from it as in the case of the concept ‘triangle’. Dialectic is a splendid schooling for thinking.

Already we have four sequent categories: SEIN, NICHTSEIN, WERDEN, DASEIN. We could then go on and cause every possible thing to germinate out of DASEIN, and we would obtain a rich DASEIN from this one line. But we can also go otherwise to work. SEIN can also be developed on the other side; this is very fruitful. The pure idea (Gedanke) of the SEIN (existence) is projected into reality in thinking.⁶ At the moment when we grasp the concept SEIN we must designate it as WESEN (Nature, essence, being, i.e. existent but not outwardly. Tr.)

The WESEN is SEIN retained within itself, the through and through self-penetrating SEIN. That will become evident upon reflection on the essential (wesentliche) and the inessential (unwesentliche) element in a thing. The WESEN is the SEIN at work within, the SEIN wholly devoting itself to the work, it is the WESEN-being. We speak of the WESEN of man when we associate his higher members with the lower and contemplate the concept of the WESEN as the concept attaching itself directly to the SEIN. From the concept of WESEN we gain the concept of ERSCHEINUNG (appearance or phenomenon), the self-manifestation outwardly, the contrary of WESEN, which has the WESEN within it; it is, namely, that which emerges. WESEN and ERSCHEINUNG are in a lie relation as SEIN to NICHTS. If we again connect WESEN and ERSCHEINUNG with each other, we get the ERSCHEINUNG that once more itself contains the WESEN. We distinguish between the outer appearance and the inner essence. But when inner WESEN overflows into ERSCHEINUNG, so that the appearance itself contains the WESEN, then we are speaking of WIRKLICHKEIT (Reality). No man trained in dialectics will express the concept REALITY otherwise than by thinking therein of APPEARANCE penetrated by WESEN. Reality is the fusion of the two concepts.

All speaking about the world must be permeated by those concepts which receive their contours through the inner texture (Gefuge), the organic edifice (Bau) of the whole world of concepts. We can still go on, ascend of even richer concepts. We could say: Wesen is the Sein which is in itself, which in itself has come to itself, which can manifest itself. If now this Sein not only manifests itself, but furthermore still extends its lines (Linien) to the environment, and is thus capable of expressing something yet different we arrive at the concept of BEGRIFF (concept) itself. We have our Wesen in us; it works (arbeitet) in us. But when we cause the concept to work in us then we have something in us that points outwards which embraces the outer world.⁷ Accordingly we can ascend from Wesen, Erscheinung, and Wirklichleit to BEGRIFF. We now have the concept in us, and we have seen in formal logic how the concept works in the conclusion. There the concept remains within itself. But now the concept can go out. Then we are speaking of a concept which gives back the nature (Natur) of the things. We there come to true OBJECTIVITY. In the contrast to the subjectively working concept, we come here to objectivity. As appearance (ERSCHEINUNG) relates itself to the WESEN, so objectivity to the concept. And one has only rightly apprehended the concept of objectivity when it has taken place in this way. If we now connect BEGRIFF—concept—and OBJECTIVITY, we come to the IDEE, the idea, which is at one and the same time objective appearance and contains the subjective within itself.

In this way the concepts grow on all sides out of the primary stem-concept, out of the SEIN. Thus there arises the transparent diamond-crystal world of concepts, with which only we should again approach the sense world. Then is exhibited how the sensible and super-sensible world coincide with the concept-dialectic, and the human being comes to that concordance of the concepts with the reality, in which really rightful cognition consists.

• 1. At the beginning the source document the following is written: “Aristotle's Categories or Classes or Conditions or States: 1. Substance,2. Quality,3. Quantity,4. Relation,5. Action,6. Passion,7. Time,8. Place,9. Situation,10. Habit”
• 2. In the source document ‘obscuring’ is placed above ‘obliteration’ as it indicate a correction, but the latter is not crossed out.
• 3. In the source document the sentence reads “…crystallising out of the special…”, ‘out’ appears to be crossed out, but this is not absolutely clear.
• 4. In the source document ‘theory’ is placed over ‘system’ so as to suggest ‘system of categories’ could also be ‘theory of categories’, also above “Hegel's work”, and under “sum of our self-mobile” is the sentence (hand-written): “the logic derived from Logos, which of course is also a concept”.
• 5. In the source document ‘not’ is inserted as a hand-written correction, but with a ‘?’ after it, so as to indicate that the corrector is not sure about this correction.
• 6. In the source document ‘projected’ (hard to read) is an alteration from ‘protracted’.
• 7. In the source document “… it works (arbeitet) in us. But when we cause the concept to work in us …” is inserted (hand-written) as a correction.

My task in these lectures will be to give you a picture of the theosophical conception of the world based upon the so-called Rosicrucian method. Please do not misunderstand this statement by expecting an historical account of Rosicrucianism. The expression “Rosicrucian method” is intended only to imply that theosophy will be presented in accordance with the method always adopted in the Mystery Schools of Europe since the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and called Rosicrucian training.

You know that theosophy is the truth that was imparted to mankind in ancient times in order that there might be formed in hearts everywhere a basic fount of human knowledge. But the further back we go into the past, the greater was the secrecy in which this knowledge was held. What was the reason for such secrecy? In the course of these lectures I shall return to the question why this universal wisdom was communicated in secret schools and centers to individuals who were destined not only to learn but to undertake training that transformed their souls to such an extent that they developed clairvoyance and insight into higher worlds. Such individuals were then sent out as emissaries, charged with guiding and leading others. But progress consists in the fact that more and more human beings become capable, through their power of judgment and intellect, of grasping this wisdom. Hence it has become necessary for what was formerly kept secret gradually to be made publicly known.

In the course of the nineteenth century, as the result of external conditions that we shall come to know, it became necessary to allow a great deal, indeed, a very considerable amount, of knowledge of occult science to make its way into the open for the sake of the well-being and progress of humanity. In the nineteenth century the Guardians of this knowledge said to themselves that in earlier times the communications of spiritual teaching made to human beings in the religions or by other means, were able to satisfy their needs in regard to eternal truths. But the needs of humanity change. So these Guardians of the primeval wisdom were obliged to realize that in the future there would be an increasing number of human beings whose souls could no longer be satisfied by the old forms of communicating spiritual truth.

Such people can find satisfaction in anthroposophy. This new form of communication springs from observation of a need of humanity in the modern age. The Guardians of the secret knowledge were naturally aware that such conditions were inevitable in the future, but not until a certain point of time was it necessary to make actual preparation for the influx of this wisdom into humanity and to emphasize that these secrets must also be grasped by the general intelligence prevailing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This was realized in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There were few at that time who were aware of this starting point of preparation in Europe. The first Rosicrucians were those who gathered around a significant individuality known as Christian Rosenkreutz. It was he, Christian Rosenkreutz, who could affirm with the most convincing clarity, “From the Mysteries we have received a treasure-store of knowledge and wisdom of the super-sensible. If we adhere to this, we may hope in the future, too, to succeed in doing what was done in the past, namely, to send out individuals trained in our schools to instruct others when they have learnt and discerned the secrets of the primeval wisdom.”

This old method of promulgating the primeval wisdom was to continue, but preparation was to be made for something else as well. He, Christian Rosenkreutz, spoke as follows. He said, “A far greater number of human beings who long for the primeval wisdom will come to us and we could communicate it to them in the form in which we now possess it. But its acceptance demands belief in and recognition of our authority in a high degree—an attitude that will progressively disappear from mankind. The more men's power of judgment increases, the less will be their belief in those who teach them. Belief and trust were preconditions for the earlier form of communication.”

At the present time one would have to say, “People will come who wish to test for themselves what is communicated to them. They will insist that they wish to apply to what is told them the same logical intellect that is used for observation of the material world. They admit that something in addition to this intellect is necessary for investigation of the spiritual world, but for all that they insist upon testing things by means of this intellect.” Hence, at the beginning of our epoch it was necessary to clothe the primeval wisdom in new forms. The work of the Rosicrucians was to give expression to the primeval wisdom in a form enabling it to be acceptable to the modern mind and the modern soul.

What is theosophy when presented according to the Rosicrucian method? Theosophy in itself is always and everywhere the same. A Rosicrucian theosophist today is a theosophist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the forms it takes, its wisdom is adapted exactly to what human beings desire and need to understand. What is the specific characteristic of our time? The course of the evolution of humanity was such that men were obliged to become ever more familiar with outer, physical reality. Look back into olden times, for example into the ancient Egyptian culture, and you will realize with what simple measures and forces men worked, erected their buildings, satisfied their personal needs. Then think of our modern life with all its ingenious gadgets for physical comfort. What tremendous spiritual force and mental activity are expended on the physical needs of daily life! This, of course, was necessary, because the specific task of the Western world was so to shape external culture and gain such control of outer nature that the physical plane came truly under the control of the human spirit. A world such as our own needs measures different from those current in antiquity to be capable of imbibing the wisdom guarded in the secret schools.

On the other hand, when we compare the knowledge possessed by the Chaldeans and their grasp of spiritual realities with our present knowledge, the Chaldeans admittedly tower heavens high above us. Today we admire a Copernicus, a Galileo and what is recorded by external science, but this is all child's play compared with the wisdom of the ancient Chaldeans. To the modern researcher the planet Mars, for example, is an objective body whose course and movement can be measured. But the Chaldeans knew as well what forces and entities are connected with Mars, what divine will governs all this, what connection there is between these forces and man. The mystery and sway wielded by these spiritual forces were known to the Chaldeans. That is why the modern researcher is so powerless in face of the inner character of this ancient Chaldean culture. External means for its investigation are at his disposal but there are no longer any inner means. Theosophists and Rosicrucians, however, have the spiritual, esoteric possibilities for penetrating into the spirit of that ancient culture.

The great scientific authorities, of whom we read that they excavate clay cylinders and fragments covered with inscriptions of the ancient Babylonian wisdom, stand before these objects like three-year-old children facing some electrical apparatus. The researcher does not know what to make of what he excavates from such ancient sites, so penetrating, so unbounded was the spiritual knowledge current in that era. But to produce by means of the intellect and the external devices of our civilization what we justifiably admire today as evidence of the great progress made during recent centuries—this was first possible for modern science. Such an era, however, needs a different kind of thinking and perception in order to understand the spiritual. At this point, perhaps, a warning may be given. People speak so much today about higher or lower degrees of evolution, arguing about whether Buddha or Christ is the greater. But that is not the essential. Whether the Assyrian wisdom or our own is the higher is not important. We are living in the present, materialistically-minded age and the inflow of spiritual knowledge into our culture is needed in order that mankind's longing for such knowledge may be satisfied. It is the Rosicrucian wisdom that gives this knowledge to modern man in the form suitable for him. What is being said here may possibly seem rather daring, but please accept it now for what it is and later on it will become clear. As a matter of fact, Rosicrucian wisdom has been more greatly misunderstood than anything else in the world.

As time went on, the great individuality who was Christian Rosenkreutz foresaw what demands of understanding would be made by rationalistic thought and he realized that already in that period it had become necessary to promulgate all spiritual knowledge in the form demanded by the modern age. We must realize that for the Rosicrucians it was much more difficult than for any similar movement of an earlier period, because their initial activity in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries took place at the time when materialism was approaching apace. All modern achievements such as steam engines, telegraphy and so on were bound to place human beings firmly on the physical plane. The Rosicrucians were obliged to work for an era when men's thinking would be guided by mathematical principles. They were obliged to make their preparations with this in view and hence were entirely misunderstood. For this reason one cannot be informed truly about Rosicrucianism by what is said about it in public. Nothing of what was cultivated in true Rosicrucianism is to be found in literature. The deepest spiritual truths cultivated by the Rosicrucians were interpreted in such a mistaken way as to suggest that spiritual phenomena can be produced in alchemists' cellars with the help of retorts and so forth! This conception of alchemy gave rise to the materialistic caricature of Rosicrucianism that is presented in literature today. The task of the Rosicrucians was to formulate a science by means of which they would be able to let their wisdom flow gradually into the world.

From all this you will realize that when we present theosophy to people today it must be Rosicrucian theosophy. By using an older terminology we could win over a certain number of people, but they would necessarily be individuals who are connected with every fiber of their being with the modern world and its culture. There are egoists who withdraw from the tasks of the present age. We, however, wish to take modern life and its forms of expression seriously. We must accept our epoch as it actually is but endeavor to influence it spiritually. This is the conception that Rosicrucian theosophy must have of its task.

In the course of this Congress there will have been opportunity for you to realize what a fruitful effect theosophy can have, for example, in the sphere of medicine. Suppose medicine continues to develop along materialistic lines. If you could see forty years ahead you would be horrified by the brutality of the procedures to be adopted by medicine, by the forms of death with which medical science will set out to cure human beings. How does medical science today investigate the effects of its remedies? By means of the human material it finds in the hospitals and elsewhere; therefore, by outer observation. But spiritual wisdom, by its very nature, penetrates into the inner relationships of the spiritual, knows what in the physical world corresponds to the spiritual. A completely new creation of all medical science will proceed from what is called Rosicrucianism. But that is only one domain.

Compare the complicated conditions of our existence today with those of the ancient Chaldeans. Think what an amount of intellectual energy and what complicated cooperative measures are essential to enable a check issued in New York to be cashed in Tokyo. An era of this character, which has spread such culture over the globe, needs methods of spiritual activity different from those of earlier epochs. Occultists are aware of this. Modern thinking is simply unable to cope with and master the chaos of outer conditions and tasks in which man is becoming so deeply involved. Thinking itself will become rigid. Today we are living in an age of transition but thinking will soon no longer be sufficiently fluid and flexible to grapple with and transform the complicated conditions of life.

Why do we promulgate theosophy? In order to achieve practical effects. Theosophical thoughts make thinking more elastic, more flexible, enable a more rapid survey of far-reaching circumstances. Rosicrucianism has therefore to fertilize every domain of life. To realize the practical effect of theosophy you may turn to my essay, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. It is impossible for you to under-stand its content without Rosicrucian theosophy, which must not remain theory but become a helping hand in practical life. This element is simply not present in the earlier forms of theosophy. The role of Rosicrucian theosophy or occultism is to satisfy the spiritual longings of men and to enable spirit to flow into the daily round of their duties. Rosicrucian theosophy is not there for the salon or for the hermit, but for the whole of human culture.

Wisdom is always and forever one. But just as the individual man lives and evolves to further and further stages, so too does humanity as a whole. For this reason the forms of the wisdom revealed to men must change in order to be in keeping with the course of their evolution. The great teachers of humanity are working among us today, as always. We, too, who are present here as souls, were incarnated in earlier times, have lived through all the periods of evolution, the Greco-Latin, the Egypto-Chaldean and epochs still further back in time, in order to benefit from constantly new achievements and acquire constantly new knowledge. Think of a soul in an Egyptian incarnation, surrounded by the gigantic pyramids and mysterious sphinxes. What a different effect all this had upon the soul from what surrounds it today! For as long as the earth has something new to display—and the earth is forever making progress—for so long does the soul undergo constantly new experiences.

The soul does not incarnate on the earth in order to please the gods, but in order to learn! The face of the earth was quite different when the soul incarnated for the first time and will again be different when the final incarnation is reached. We return to this earth when, and not until, there is something new to be learned here. That is why the interval between two incarnations is lengthy. Only think how greatly Northern Europe, merely as landscape, differed from what it is today at the time when Christ was on the earth. We do not come to the earth twice without being able to learn something new. Everything in the world is in process of evolution, but evolution means the elaboration and later manifestation of the new.

Not only men but all beings evolve. We have to seek the way to beings who are at stages of evolution higher than that reached by man, although in this life he comes into relation with them in many ways. These beings are also subject to the law of evolution and just as our souls were different thousands of years ago, so, too, in earlier epochs, were the beings now revealing themselves. They also are perpetually learning. When we are speaking of one of the higher beings who has descended to our world in order to reveal to us with the resources of the spirit the mysteries of the higher worlds, we must affirm that that is a sublime art that must be mastered. Even a god has to master it.

Human beings of today must be addressed differently from those who were living ten thousand years ago. The higher beings, like men, undergo evolution, and what I have said during this Congress about the event of Damascus indicates how they evolve. A man with spiritual vision sees not only the outer environment but also everything that belongs to the spiritual aura of the earth. Just as human beings are surrounded by an aura, so, too, are the cosmic bodies. A clairvoyant is eventually able to perceive the aura of a cosmic body. What a clairvoyant would have seen in the earth's aura two thousand years ago would be quite different from what would have been seen a thousand years ago and different again from what would be seen by one who has developed clairvoyance today. Just as the picture of outer nature changes, so, too, does the picture of the spiritual world into which vision penetrates.

I shall now refer to an event of which I shall speak again later on, namely, the event of the burning thorn bush and the proclamation from Sinai. What happened to Moses at that time? His clairvoyant power had developed to a certain stage and he beheld the super-sensible reality in the physical phenomenon. An individual who was not clairvoyant would simple have seen a happening in nature. Moses, however, beheld in the burning thorn bush the Being who proclaimed Himself as “I AM the I AM.” He knew that this Being was there in very truth, that the fire was not only outer fire but harbored a spiritual reality. A Being belonging intimately to the whole further evolution of humanity, who announced His name as the “I AM the I AM,” had revealed Himself to Moses. What was it that was now known to all the pupils of Moses? In the Mystery Schools of that era they had learned that the same Being who had revealed Himself on Sinai would one day come down to the earth, live in a human body, and speak for three years in a man, Christ Jesus. This was known to the initiates. It was also known to Saul, who later became Paul. But he said to himself, “This Being exists in very truth and will come down to the earth. But I cannot conceive that the Being who revealed Himself in the burning thorn bush as Jehovah could suffer the shameful death on the Cross.” What was it that eventually convinced Saul? The event of Damascus! At the moment when he became clairvoyant and the earth's aura was visible to him, when in that aura he beheld the Christ, the living Christ, who revealed Himself as the same Being who had died on the Cross, at that moment Saul became Paul.

But that vision could not previously have been possible. Earlier than two thousand years ago Christ was not yet present in the earth's aura but He was still visibly present in the sun. Zarathustra beheld the sun surrounded by an aura he called Ahura Mazdao, the great Aura of Ormuzd. But this Being had descended, had first revealed Himself to Moses in the burning thorn bush and had then lived on earth as a man in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. Hence Christ could say of Himself, “I am the Light of the World.” Before then, nobody could have spoken these words, because the Light of the World had not previously been present in any being.

We will study these themes until they are fully understood. Today, however, it will merely be indicated that it was not possible for the Christ Being always to reveal Himself as He did, for example, in the case of Paul. The Christ Being had first to muster the necessary power, to develop it to the point where this revelation was possible. Earlier than two thousand years ago this could not have taken place. Each soul, in each incarnation, makes progress. This is what has happened in the case of leading individualities. We must realize that Christ has not always been the same and in His distinctive ways of working we must recognize how He, too, advances from one evolutionary stage to another. It gives rise to an overwhelming feeling of exultation when a man is made aware that just as in the case of his own soul and its incarnations and progress, the spiritual beings also reach higher and higher stages and become more and more powerful. This realization gives one a living feeling of evolution. It is an essential part of Rosicrucian esotericism to show how a being such as Christ has worked both in the past and at the present time, in Moses and in Paul, and to see from this how even a Being of such sublime eminence makes progress. This gives a rise to an intimate concept of evolution.

Now let us think of a child. He is born, sees the light of the world—this is the usual expression—and in the very first years of life changes particularly quickly. Compared with the later epochs of life it is then that the course of evolution is the most rapid. Materialistic science itself could make many relevant discoveries here. When the brain is examined, which is possible by external means, it can be observed how on the top of a child's head at the place that remains soft for a considerable time, the skull bones do not close immediately and the brain itself takes shape only gradually. The function of articulation is to pro-duce an instrument for a power of which the child will only later be capable, namely, the power to think, to correlate his perceptions. A clairvoyant sees how during the very first weeks and months after birth the child is surrounded by intensely active, powerful forces belonging to the etheric body, the second member of man's constitution. We know that in an adult human being of today the dimension of this etheric body is practically the same as that of the physical body, but in a young child it still extends far beyond the physical body, especially around the head. The activity of the forces, which to a clairvoyant seems to be like a play of light, is particularly strong here. It is wonderful to see how certain forces surge up from the body below and then stream from the nape of the neck in all directions, wherever hair appears; the forces radiate in a living play of light to become an astral-etheric radiance in the child's etheric body, a radiance that fades away in the course of time. In this radiance lie the forces that create the connective tissues in the brain. The brain is formed out of spiritual substance after the child has been born. Forty to fifty streams of forces can be seen working together. The body of light is composed of these streams. A wonderful spectacle is presented by a child during the first weeks of life. This body of light gradually presses into and is then within the child's brain. To begin with, the etheric body was outside the child, surrounding the head, and was entirely primitive. This was surrounded by a body of light from which the etheric body gathered forces, and now it penetrates gradually into the child's head and remains there as the complicated etheric organism.

What is so wonderful about the process of evolution is that everything physical is produced from the spiritual, formed by the spiritual, which we then receive into ourselves. The psyche has itself fashioned the dwelling place in which it subsequently resides. So we see that what takes place in the microcosm, the little world, in the brain of a human child, also takes place in the macrocosm, the great world. Now think of an outstandingly advanced individuality, such as Jesus of Nazareth, in whose body Christ lived as soul for three years. Just as in a child the etheric body itself prepares the physical brain into which it subsequently passes, so, too, had Christ previously prepared the abode in which He was to dwell. He had to accomplish this by His own activity. To begin with He was only outwardly connected with the earth, which could not yet have received Him. The most highly evolved souls had, however, worked at the earth in such a way that the Christ was able to draw nearer and nearer, and He Himself had participated in this work. Who, then, had so transformed the body of Jesus of Nazareth and finally brought it to the stage where it was able to receive the Christ? The Christ Himself had done this! To begin with He had worked upon the body from outside and was subsequently able Himself to pass into the human being concerned.

What takes place in the microcosm also takes place in the macrocosm, and it is because the beings above us also develop that evolution is possible. It was only because Christ could reveal Himself supersensibly that He became the planetary Spirit of the Earth. The microcosmic invariably tallies with the macrocosmic.

I have not been able today to present even the first chapter of Rosicricianism to you. All I have done is to indicate how a man of the present age should learn to think and perceive. The true meaning of the mandate, “Know thyself!” lies in our following in this way the evolution of the cosmos. Where is our self? Certainly not in us alone! To think that would be egoistic. The self is formed out of, born out of the whole universe and our own ascent leads us finally to merge in the whole cosmos. The aim of self-knowledge is to give man his place in the great world in order to reveal to him there the true meaning of the word, self-knowledge.

The hour is so late, that I shall make this lecture a short one, and leave over till tomorrow the main substance of what I have to say in these three lectures. To-morrow the Eurhythmies are put earlier, so that it will be possible to have a longer lecture.

I pointed out yesterday that in order to master the conditions of our present declining civilisation, one needs to differentiate,—so to differentiate between the various groups of peoples massed together over the face of the earth, that one's attention is actually directed to what is living and working in each of the separate groups, in particular among the Anglo-American peoples, among the peoples of what is properly Europe, and among the peoples of the East. And we have seen that the aptitude for founding a cosmogony suited to the new age is to be found pre-eminently among the Anglo- American peoples,—the faculty for developing the idea of freedom, amongst the peoples of Europe, whilst that for developing the impulse of altruism, the religious impulse with all that it connotes by way of human brotherhood, is to be found amongst the population of the East. There is no other way in which a new civilisation can be founded than by making it possible hereafter for man, all the world over, to work together in real co-operation. But, my dear friends, in order that this may be possible, in order that any such real co-operation may be possible, several things are necessary. It Is necessary to recognise, dispassionately and as a matter of fact, how much our present civilisation lacks, and how strong the forces of decline in this present civilisation are. When one considers the forces present in our civilisation, one cannot say: “It is altogether bad;” that is not the way to look at it; in the first place, it would be an unhistoric point of view; in the second place, it could lead to nothing positive. The impulses that reside in our civilisation were, in some age, and in some place, justified. But everything that in the historic course of mankind's evolution leads to ruin, leads to ruin for the very reason that something which has a rightful title in one age and one place has been passed on to another age and another place, and because men, from various Ahrimanic and Luciferic motives, cling to whatever they have grown accustomed to, and are not ready to join in with that actual forward movement which the whole cosmic order requires.

Our age prides itself on being a scientific one. And, at bottom, it is from this, its scientific character, that the great social errors and perversions of the age proceed. That is why it is so imperative that the light should shine in upon our whole life of thought and action, inasmuch as the activities of modern times are entirely dependent on the modern system of thought. We noticed yesterday, in the general survey into which we were led, how the collective civilisation of the earth was made up of a scientific civilisation, a political civilisation tending towards freedom, and of an altruistic economic civilisation that really is derived from the altruistic religious element.

People nowadays,—as I said before, yesterday,—when they consider the forces actually at work in our social structure, remain on the surface of things; they are not willing to penetrate deeper. The lectures in our class-rooms teach what professes to pass for economic wisdom, drawn from the natural science methods of the present day; but what lives in men, and what stirs the minds and the being of men,—that is regarded as a sort of unappetising stew. No attention is paid to what are really its true features.

Let us turn first to the civilisation of Europe. What is the pre-eminent trait of this European civilisation? If one follows up this trait of European civilisation, one finds that one has to go a long way back in order to understand it. One has to form a clear idea of how, out of the ancient primal impulses of the original Celtic population, which still really lies at the base of our European life and being, there gradually grew up, by admixture with the various later strata of peoples, our present European population, with all its religious, political, economic and scientific tendencies. In Europe, in contradistinction to America on the West and Asia on the East,—in Europe a certain intellectual strain was always predominant. Romanism—all that I Indicated yesterday as the specifically Roman element—could never have so got the upper hand, unless intellectualism had been a radical feature of European civilisation. Now there are two things peculiar to intellectualism. In the first place, it never can rouse Itself to make a clean sweep of the religious impulses within it. Religious impulses always acquire an abstract character under the influence of intellectualism. Nor can intellectualism ever really find the energy for grappling with questions of practical economics. The experiments now being carried out in Russia will hereafter show how incapable European intellectualism is of introducing order into the world of economics, of industry. What Leninism is shaping is nothing hut unadulterated intellectualism. It is all reasoned out; an order of society built up by thought alone. And they are attempting the experiment of propping up this brain spun communal system upon the actual conditions prevailing amongst men. Time will show—and very terribly—how impossible it is to prop up a piece of intellectual reasoning upon a human social edifice.

But these things are what people to-day refuse as yet to recognise in all their full force. There is unquestionably among the population of Europe this alarming trait, this sleepiness, this inability to throw the whole man into the stream so needed to permeate the social life of Europe. But the thing that above all others must be recognised is the source from which our European civilisation is fed,—whence this European civilisation is, at bottom, derived. Of itself, of its own proper nature, European civilisation has only produced a form of culture that is intellectual, a thought-culture. Prosaicness and aridity of thought dominate our science and our social institutions.

For many, many years, we have suffered from this intellectualism in the parliaments of Europe. If people could but feel how the parliaments of Europe have been pervaded by the intellectualist, utilitarian attitude, by this element that can never soar above the ground, that lacks the energy for any religious impulse, that lacks the energy for any sort of economic impulse! As for our religious life, just think how we came by it. The whole history of the introduction and spread of this religious life in Europe goes to show that Europe, within herself, had no religious impulses. Just think, how flat and dull the world was, how interminably flat and dull—prosaic to the excess at the time of the expansion of the Roman Empire. Yet that was only the beginning of it. Just conceive what Europe would have become if Roman civilisation in all its flat prosaicness had gone on without the impulse that came over from the Asiatic East, and which was religious, Christian,—what it would have been without the Christian impulse, which sprang from the p lap of the East, which could only spring from the lap of the East, never from that of Europe. The religious impulse was taken over as a wave of culture, of civilisation, from the East. The first and the only thing Europe did was to cram this religious impulse, that came over from the East, with the concepts of Roman law, thread this Eastern impulse through and through with bald, abstract, intellectualist, legal forms.

But this religious impulse from the East was, at bottom, alien to the life of Europe, and remained alien to it. It never completely amalgamated with the being of Europe. And Protestantism acted in a most remarkable way as what I might call a test-tube, in which they separated out. It is «just like watching two substances separating out from one another in a test-tube, to watch how European civilisation reacted with respect to its religious element. In the seventh, in the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth centuries a kind of experiment was being made to combine religious feeling and sentiment with scientific and economic thought into one homogeneous substance; and then, actually, just as two substances react in a test-tube and separate out, so these two separated out,—the cold intellectualist thought and the religious impulse fell apart and deposited Protestantism, Lutheranism. Science on the one side, one truth; on the other side the rival truth, Faith. And the two shall mix no further. If anyone tries to saturate the substance of Faith with the substance of Thought, or to warm the substance of Thought with the substance of Faith, the experiment is regarded as downright sacrilege. And then, as the climax of all that was cold and dreary, came the Konigsberg-Kant-school with its Critique of Pure Reason alongside its Critique of Applied Reason—Ethics alongside Science,—making a most terrible gulf between what in man's nature must be felt and lived as a single whole. These are the conditions under which European civilisation still exists. And these are the conditions under which European civilisation will be brought ever nearer and nearer to its downfall. It was as an alien element from the East that Europe adopted the religious impulse, and it has never combined organically with the rest of her spiritual and physical life. So much with regard to the spiritual life of Europe.

You see, my dear friends, the progress of modern civilisation has had Its praises sung long enough. They have gone on singing its praises until millions of human beings in this civilised world have been done to death, and three times as many maimed for life. It has been blessed in unctuous phrases from the pulpits of the churches, till untold blood has been shed. Every lecturer's desk has sounded the praises of this progress, until this progress has ended in its own annihilation. There can be no cure before we look these things straight in the face. And to-day, people of the Lenin type and others come and beat their brains over socialist systems and economic systems, and fancy that with these concepts which have long since proved inadequate to direct European civilisation, they can now, without any new concepts, without any revolution of thought, effect a reform in our economic system, in our system of society.

I think I have here, once before, spoken of the beautiful concepts that our learned professors arrive at when they are dealing with these subjects. But it is so beautiful that I must really come back to it once more. There is a well-known political economist called Brentano, Lujo Brentano. Not long ago an article appeared by him, entitled: “The Business Director (Der Unternehmer).” In it Brentano tries to construct the concept of the Business Director the Capitalist Director. He enumerates the various distinctive marks of the capitalist director. The third of these distinctive marks, as given by Lujo Brentano, is this: That he expends the means of production at his private venture, at his own risk, in the service of mankind. Mark of the capitalist director! Then that excellent Brentano goes on to examine the function of the Worker, of the ordinary Labourer, in social life; and now, see what he says: That the labour-power, the physical labour-power of the labourer is the labourer's means of production; he expends it at his own venture and risk in the service of the community. Therefore, the labourer is a Business Director (Untemahmer); there is absolutely no difference between a labourer and a business director; they are both one and the same thing! You see, what they nowadays call scientific thought has by now got into such a muddle that when people are constructing concepts, they are no longer able to distinguish between two opposite poles. It is not quite so obvious here, perhaps, as in another case of a Professor of Philosophy at Berne, one of whose specialities was that he wrote such an awful lot of books, and had to write them so awfully fast, that he had not time to consider exactly what it was he was writing. However, he lectured on philosophy at the Berne University. And in one of the books by this Professor of Philosophy at Berne, this statement occurs:—A civilisation can only he evolved in the temperate zone; for at the North Pole it cannot be evolved, there it would be frozen up; nor could it be evolved at the South Pole, for there the opposite would occur, it would be burnt up! That is actually the fact. A regular Professor of Philosophy did once write in a book that it is cold at the North Pole and hot at the South Pole, because he was writing so fast that he had no time to consider what he was writing.

Well, that excellent Brentano's blunders in political economy are not quite so readily perceived; but at bottom they proceed from just the same surface view of things, from which so much in Europe has proceeded. People take for granted what already exists, and starting from this, proceed to build up their whole system of concepts just on what exists already. That is what they learn from natural science, from the natural science methods. This is how the science institutes do it; and in our day,—the age when people set no store by authority and take nothing on faith, (of course not!)—that is what they obediently copy. For nowadays, if a man is an Authority, that is sufficient reason for what he says being true,—not a reason for turning to his truth because one sees it to be true, but because he is an Authority. And people regard economic facts, too, in this way. They regard economic facts as being all exactly on a par with one another. Whereas, as a matter of fact, they are made up of mixed elements, each of which requires individual consideration.

The current of religious impulse had come from the East into European civilisation; and for the economic structure of Europe something again different was needed. The approach of the Fifth post-Atlantean age was also the time for the irruption of those events which set their stamp upon the whole civilisation of the new age and gave to it its special physiognomy. The discovery of America, the finding of a sea-route round the Cape of Good Hope to India, to the East-Indies,—this set its stamp on the civilisation of the new age. It is impossible to study the whole economic evolution of Europe by Itself alone. It is absurd to believe that from the study of existing economic facts one can thereby arrive at the economic laws that sway the common life of Europe. In order to arrive at these laws, one must bear constantly in mind that Europe was able to shift any amount off on to America. The whole social structure of Europe has only grown up owing to the fact that there was an unfailing supply of virgin soil in America, and that everything flung off from Europe passed Westwards into this virgin soil. Just as she had drawn her religions impulse from the East, so she sent forth an economic impulse towards the West. And the whole system of industrial economy peculiar to Europe was conditioned by this Westward outflowing, just as her spiritual life was developed under the inflow of the religious impulse from the East. European life, the whole course of the rise of European civilisation, has gone on through the centuries until now, under the Influence of these two currents. Here, in the middle, was European civilisation; here from the East came the religious impulse pouring in; here, in a westward stream, the economic impulse, pouring out.—Inflow of the religious impulse from the East, outflow of the economic impulse towards the West. Now this, you see, towards the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries reached a sold, of crisis. There came a gradual stoppage. Things no longer went on the same as they had been going for four centuries. And to-day we are still lining in this stoppage and are affected by it. The religious impulse came in as an alien and brought forth our spiritual life. And our economic life came about under a process of being continually drawn off and weakened. If America had not been there, and if our industrial economy had been obliged to grow up solely according to its own principles,—had it not been able continually to fling off what it could not assimilate,—then it could never have developed at all in Europe. Now there is a stoppage; and accordingly, an outlet must be found within. It Is from within that the way must be found to lead off into the right channel what no longer can go on externally in space. It must be done by bringing about the threefold social order. What has been mixed together in inorganic confusion must be combined into an actual organism. There is not one reason, there is every conceivable reason for the adoption of the threefold social order,—scientific reasons, economic reasons, historic reasons. And only he can fully appreciate the claims of the threefold social order, who is in a position to survey all these various grounds on which it rests.

That is a thing that one would so like to tell the people of the present day; for people of the present day suffer under a poverty of concepts that has grown positively alarming. This poverty of concepts is really such that anyone who has got any feeling for ideas finds to-day that quite a small number of ideas dominate our spiritual life, and they meet him at every turn. If anyone is hunting for ideas, this is what he finds; he takes up a work on Physics; it contains a certain limited number of ideas. Next, he studies, say, a work on Geology; there he finds fresh facts, but precisely the same ideas. Then he studies a biological work; there he finds fresh facts, but the same ideas. He reads a book on Psychology, dealing with the life of the soul. There he finds more facts, which really only consist of words, for they only know the soul really as a collection of words. When they talk of the will, there is a word there; but of the actual will itself they know nothing. When they talk of Thought they know nothing of real thinking; for people still only think in words. Nor do they know anything of feeling. The whole field of Psychology is to-day just a game of words, in which words are shaken up together in every conceivable kind of way. Just as the bits in a kaleidoscope combine into all sorts of different patterns, so it is with our concepts. They are jumbled up together into various sciences; but the total number of ideas is quite a small one, and keeps meeting one again and again. These ideas are forcibly fitted on to the facts. And people have no desire to find the concepts that fit the facts, to examine into the ideas that fit the facts. People simply do not notice things.

In a certain town in Central Europe, not long ago, there was a conference of Radical Socialists. These Radical Socialists were engaged in planning out a form of society suitable for adoption in Europe. The form of society as there planned by them was almost identical with what you can read in a collection of articles that appeared in the “Basler Vorwärts” of this week,—a series of articles in the Basel “Vorwärts,” putting forward in outline a scheme of society almost identical with what was thought out some time back in a Mid-European town. And what is the special feature of this scheme of society as planned out there? People think it very clever, of course. They think that it cannot be improved on.

But it is what it is, solely for the reason that it was drawn up by men who, as a matter of fact, had never really had anything to do with industrial and economic life, who had never acquired any practical acquaintance with the real sources and mainsprings of industrial and economic life. It was a scheme invented by men who have taken an active part in the political life of recent years. Well, you know what taking an active part in the political life of recent years means,—one was either elector or elected; one was elected either -in the first ballot, or in the second ballot. Say that one did not succeed in getting elected in the first ballot. Well, one had raised those huge sums of money, of course, subscriptions had been collected, and the huge sum raised, in order that one might have enough voters to get elected. The money was all spent; one had vented a terrible lot of abuse on the rival candidate the fellow was a fool, a knave and a cheat, If nothing worse. And came the second ballot. So far, no one had got an absolute majority, and now it was a question of electing one of those who had had proportional majorities. Now there was a change in the proceedings. Now, one-third of the election money was returned by one's opponent,—the same who was a fool, knave, cheat, etc. One accepted the returned money, and all of a sudden one's speeches took a different tone; there is nothing for it, one said, but to elect the man (the man who before was a knave, fool, cheat, etc),—he will have to be elected. After all, one had got back a third of the election money, and, inspired by this return of a third of the election money, one was gradually converted into his active supporter. For, after all, one of the two must be elected; the other man had no chance; all that could be done was to save a third of the election expenses.

So they had taken an active part in political life. So, too, no doubt, they had had a voice in the political administrations, but they had no notion, not the remotest, vaguest notion, of industrial and economic life. They simply took the political ideas they had acquired,—ideas that had, of course, become much corrupted, but still they were political ideas of a sort,—and they tried now •; to fit them on to industrial and economic life. And accordingly, if these ideas were put into effect, one would get an industrial and economic life organised on purely political lines. Industrial economic organisation has already become confounded with political organisation,—so impossible has it become for people to keep apart things that have become so welded, so wedged together. But the time has come when it is urgently necessary to carry into many, many places an insight into what really exists. And that is a thing for which people to-day show no zeal.

There is nothing to be expected from the influence of a civilisation which never contemplates external reality,—which wants to bind external reality to a couple of hard and fast concepts; nor need one hope with this little set of concepts to draw near to that true reality which is the business of anthroposophical science to discover. For it is this true reality that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy has to seek and find. Therefore, the spiritual science of Anthroposophy must not be taken after the pattern of what people were often pleased to call “religious persuasions.”

That, you see was what one suffered from so terribly in the course of the old Theosophic movement. What more was the old Theosophic movement than just that people wanted a sort of select religion? It consisted in no new impulse proceeding from the civilisation of Europe itself. It consisted merely in emotions, which were to be had out of the old religious element just as well. Only people had grown tired of these old religious concepts and ideas and feelings, and so had taken up something else. But the same atmosphere pervaded it as pervaded the old persuasion. They wanted to feel good, with an evangelical sort of goodness if they had been evangelicals, or with a catholic kind of goodness if they had been Catholics; but they did not at bottom want the thing really needed, namely, an actual new religious impulse along with other impulses, because the life of the European peoples has grown up habituated to an alien religious impulse, that of Asia. That is the point. And until those things are organically interwoven that were inorganically intermixed,—till then, European civilisation will not rise again. It cannot be taken too seriously; it must pervade everything that is going to live in science, in economic, in religion, in political life.

We will speak more of this, then, tomorrow. To-morrow the eurhythmic performance takes place here at 5 o'clock. Then, after the necessary interval, that is, I take It, about half past seven tomorrow, there will be the lecture.

You will have observed from our various studies that a connection exists, even though an inner connection, between a principal being inhabiting a planetary body at a certain period and this celestial body itself. One can consider this link between the human being and all that belongs to the whole earth from most varied aspects. We will study the subject today from a single aspect and thence again form ideas about the actual being of man.

We know, of course, that man goes through his earthly life in successive incarnations, and that these bring him into a more intimate relation with the actual planet Earth than the periods which lie between death and a new birth. The periods that man lives through between death and a new birth represent for him more of a spiritual existence; at such times, he is more withdrawn from the Earth itself than in the time between birth and death.

To be more withdrawn from the Earth or to be more closely connected with it, means, however, from time to time to stand in a certain relationship to other beings. For what we call the regions of the world outwardly perceptible to the senses is, after all, only the expression for certain connections between spiritual beings. Though our Earth may look to physical sight what the geologists imagine, may seem to be only a mineral mass surrounded by a sheath of air, yet in the last resort that is only the outer semblance. What actually appears as this mineral mass is nevertheless the bodily nature of certain spiritual beings. And again what we behold beyond the Earth, shining down as the world of stars, that too as we see it is only the outer sense expression for a certain association of Spiritual Beings, of Hierarchies. It is by virtue of the solid Earth, the firm ground upon which we live between birth and death, this physical external earth, it is through this that in the main we develop our life between birth and death. Through all that shines down to us from cosmic space, that sparkles to us as the star-world and that seems to concern us so little, with this we have a greater connection between death and a new birth. It is more than a picture, it is a reality of deepest significance if one says: Man descends from star- worlds to physical birth that he may pass through his existence between birth and death. We must not think, however, that the appearance of the universe which we have here on earth when we talk of the star-world is the same as what meets our spiritual vision in the period between death and a new birth. That which appears externally to man living upon earth as the star-world is then displayed in its inner being, its spirit-nature. There we have to do with the inner nature of what is outer nature for our earthly existence here. In fact we must say to ourselves: Whether we look down to the earth or up to the cosmos, what meets our sense-perception is always but a kind of illusory picture, and we only reach the truth if we go back to the Beings who underlie this semblance with the different grades of cosmic self-consciousness.

Thus it is semblance, illusion, whether one looks upwards or down: the truth, the essentiality, lies behind the semblance. That illusion meets us above end beneath is connected with the fact that our life between birth and death, on the one hand, and between death and a new birth, on the other hand, is always threatened with the possibility of leaving the path of full humanity. Here on earth between birth and death we can become too closely related to the earth, can unfold an urge to find too great an affinity with the earthly powers. And likewise between death and a new birth we can develop an urge to become too closely allied to the cosmic powers outside the earth. For here on earth we stand too near the external symbolic expression, to what is clothed in physical materiality, we stand here, as it were, estranged from the inner spirituality. When we evolve between death and a new birth we stand fully within the spirituality, we live with it, and again we are threatened with the possibility of being swallowed up, of being dissolved in it. Whereas here on earth we are exposed to the threat of growing hardened in physical existence, between death and a new birth we are exposed to the possibility of drowning in spiritual existence.

These two possibilities are due to the fact that besides those powers that are meant when speaking of the normal orders of the Hierarchies, other beings are also in existence. Just as the elemental beings are to be found in the three kingdoms of nature, just as man exists, as the nearer hierarchies exist of whom a genuine spiritual science says that they are there “according to their cosmic time,” so there exist other beings, who, as it were, unfold their nature at the wrong time. They are the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings of whom we have often spoken. You will have already realised that the Luciferic beings are essentially those who as they now present themselves should have lived in an earlier cosmic epoch. On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings as they now present themselves should live in a later cosmic epoch. Retarded cosmic beings are the Luciferic beings, premature cosmic beings are the Ahrimanic beings. The Luciferic beings disdained to take part with others in the age that was appointed to them; they are retarded, because they scorned to take full part in evolution. When they manifest themselves today, therefore, they are revealed as having stayed behind at earlier stages of existence.

The Ahrimanic beings cannot, so to say, wait till a later age in cosmic evolution to develop the qualities implanted in them. They want to forestall the time. And so they harden in their present existence and reveal themselves to us now in the form they should reach only in a later development of cosmic life.

When we look out into cosmic space and behold the totality of the stars—what is this sight? Why do we have this view? We have this special sight, the appearance of the Milky Way, the appearance of the rest of the star-strewn heavens, because it is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world. All that surrounds us shining and radiating is the manifestation of the Luciferic nature of the world, it appears as it does because it has remained behind at an earlier stage of its existence. And when we walk over the solid ground of the earth it is hard and solid because conglomerated within it are the Ahrimanic beings, beings which should only possess at a later time of their evolution the stage that they now provide for themselves artificially.

Thus it is possible that if we surrender ourselves to the sense world by gazing at the aspect of the sky, we make ourselves more and more Luciferic. When in the life between birth and death we have this inclination to gaze upon the heaven, this means nothing actually immediate and direct; it means a sort of instinct that has remained in us from the time before birth or conception when we were in the spiritual world and lived with the stars. We have entered then into too close a relationship with the cosmic worlds and we have retained this inclination—though indeed to surrender oneself to gazing at the physical star-world is not a particularly noticeable tendency of mankind. We develop this tendency when through our karma—which we always draw to us between birth and death—we have too deeply slept away the time between death and a new birth, when we have developed too little inclination to live there in full consciousness.

If we immerse ourselves in the earthly life, on the other hand, that is directly developed here between birth and death. That is the actual Ahrimanic possibility in man's life. The Luciferic possibility is connected with what we acquire through our relationship to the illusory spirit-world; the Ahrimanic relationship which we form is due to our developing too great an inclination between birth and death towards the surrounding physical external world.

If we grow too strongly into a connection with the earth, so strongly that we never turn our thoughts to the super-sensible that lies beyond the merely terrestrial, then the Ahrimanic affinity appears in us.

Now all this has a deeper significance for the whole development of man's being. If between death and a new birth we are swallowed up, as it were, in the spiritual world and then later do not find the right balance between the spiritual and the material world, evolving with too strong an affinity to the extra-earthly, we can gradually come to an earth existence—can come even in the next incarnation to an existence in which we cannot grow old. Such things are now, in this age, reaching a critical point. That is the one possibility that confronts us as a danger—the not being able to age. We can be reborn and the Luciferic powers con hold us back at the stage of childhood, they can condemn us in some way not to become mature. Those people who give themselves up all too easily to an ardent enthusiasm, a nebulous mysticism, who have a disinclination for severely contoured thinking and scorn to form clear concepts of the world, those people, that is to say, who scorn to develop inner activity of soul and go through life more or less in dream—they are exposing themselves to the danger in their next incarnation of not being able to grow old, of remaining childish in the bad sense of the word. It is a Luciferic attack that will break into humanity in this way.

Such human beings would then not descend rightly into earthly life in the next incarnation, they would not leave the spiritual world sufficiently in order to enter earthly life. The Luciferic powers, who at one time formed a connection with our earth, endeavour to unfold instincts in man that would make his earthly evolution come to a stage where men remain children, where they do not grow old. The Luciferic powers would like to bring about a condition where no aged people walked about on earth but only those who spent their life in a sort of illusory youth. In this way, the Luciferic powers would gradually bring the earth planet to the point of becoming one body with one common soul, in which the separate souls, so to say, were swimming. A common soul-nature of the earth, and a common bodily-nature of the earth, that is Lucifer's aim for humanity's evolution. He would make of the earth a great organic being with a common soul in which the single souls would lose their individuality,

I have often explained that the course of earthly evolution does not depend on the mineral, plant, animal kingdoms, which are all, in fact, waste products of evolution, but on what takes place within the boundary of the human skin. The evolutionary forces of our planet lie within the organisation of man. If you remember this you will understand that what finally becomes of the earth cannot be learnt by forming physical concepts, such concepts have only a narrow, limited interest for us. In order to realise what will become of the earth we must know the human being itself. But the human being can enter into a union, a relation of forces with the Luciferic power that has united itself with the earth, and then the earth can carry too few individualised beings; it can become a collective being with a common soul-nature. That is what the Luciferic powers are striving for. If you take the picture that many nebulous mystics describe ns a desirable future state, where they want to merge into the ALL, to vanish in some kind of pantheistic Whole, you will be able to see how this Luciferic tendency is already living in many human souls.

On the other hand, the Ahrimanic beings have also entered into a connection with our earth. They have the opposite tendency. They act above all through the forces that drew our organism, into itself between birth and death, that permeate our organism through and through with spirituality, that is, make us more and more intellectual, imbue us increasingly with reasoning and intelligence. Our waking intelligence depends on the connection of the soul with the physical body, and when this is exaggerated and becomes too strong, then we become too similar to physical existence and likewise lose the balance. The inclination then arises which hinders man in future from alternating in the right way between earthly life and the spiritual life that lies between death and a new birth.

That is the goal for which Ahriman strives; he would hold men back in the coming earthly age from passing in the right way through earthly life and super-earthly life. Ahriman wishes to hold man back from going through future incarnations. He would like even now, in this incarnation, to cause man to live through everything that he can live through on earth. But that can only be done intellectually, one cannot do that in full humanity. It is, however, possible for man to become so clever that in his cleverness he can conceive of all that still may be on earth. In fact, many men have just such an ideal, that is, to form an intellectual concept of all that may yet come about on earth, But one cannot acquire the experiences that are still to be passed through in future lives. In this life, one can only acquire the pictures, the intellectual pictures, and these then become hardened in the physical body. And then man reaches a profound disinclination to go through future incarnations. He positively sees a sort of blessedness in not wanting to appear on earth again.

I have often pointed out that oriental culture has fallen into decadence and Ahriman is particularly able to create this deviation in the decadent East. While the Orientals are inwardly under the influence of Lucifer, Ahriman can approach their nature and implant in them the inclination in a definite incarnation to wish to have done with earth existence and not appear again in a physical body. The Ahrimanic approach is the more easily accomplished since the Oriental is already under the power of Lucifer. It can then even be placed before men as an ideal by certain teachers, who are in the service of Ahriman, that in a certain incarnation, before the earth itself has reached its goal, they should have finished with physical existence on earth.

Certain theosophical teachings have slavishly borrowed various things from the modern decadent Orient. Among these tenets appears one which has never in any way been taken over into our anthroposophical conception, namely, that it even denotes a special grade of perfection for a human being to appear no more in an earthly life. That is an Ahrimanic impulse and one in fact, that can also bring about something of a terrible nature. The earth could reach the point not, as desired by Lucifer of becoming a great unitary organisation with a unitary soul-nature, but of becoming over-individualised. Men would someday reach a stage of Ahrimanic development where they would. certainly die, but the terrible part would be that, after they had died, they would become as like the earth as possible, would continue to cling to the earth, so that the earth itself would become merely an expression of separate individual human beings. The earth would become a sort of colony of the single individual human souls.

This is what Ahriman strives to do with the earth: to make it entirely an expression of intellectuality, to intellectualise it completely. It is absolutely essential for mankind to realise today that earthly destiny depends on man's own will. The Earth will become what the human being makes of it. It will not be what physical forces make of it. These physical forces will die out and have no significance for the Earth's future. The Earth will be what man makes of it.

We are living in a decisive hour of earthly evolution in which humanity can choose one of three paths. One can live in nebulous mysticism, in dreaming, in an infatuation for things of the physical, senses, that is, in going along in a muse—for life in material nature is indeed only musing and brooding—in a sleep condition in which one passes through life without clear ideas. That is one of the tendencies to which man may incline.

A second tendency would be for men to permeate themselves entirely with intellect and intelligence, to gather together as it were everything that intellect can gather together, to scorn all that poetry and phantasy can spread over earthly existence, to turn everywhere to the mechanical and to dried-up pedantry. Men stand today before the decision either to become spiritual voluptuaries entirely sunk in their own existence—for whether one submerges in one's own existence through nebulous mysticism or material desolation is ultimately only two sides of the same thing—or else to consider everything prosaically, to bring everything into a routine scheme, to classify and correlate everything. Those are two of the possibilities.

The third possibility is to seek for the balance, the equilibrium between the two. One cannot speak of the equilibrium in so definite a way as of the two extremes. One must strive for equilibrium by not being too strongly attracted by either, but pass through the two in a proper balance of life, letting the one be regulated and ordered by the other.

This cosmic hour of decision stands before the human soul today. Man can decide to follow the Luciferic temptation and not let the earth complete its evolution, to let the earth resemble the Old Moon, or rather make it a caricature of the Old Moon, a great organism with an individualised dreamy soul, in which the human beings are contained as in a common Nirvana. Or man can become over-intellectualised, give up the common possession of the earth, desire to have nothing in common, but ossify the body and make it sclerotic by permeating it with too much intellect. Man can decide whether to make the body a sponge through nebulous mysticism and sensuality, or make it a stone through over-intellectuality, over-self-sufficiency. And modern humanity looks as if it did not desire the balance between the two alternatives, but wanted the one or the other.

We see on the one hand an ever-increasing expansion of the Western instincts which aim at intellectuality, self-sufficiency, pedantry, and form opinions in such a way that intellectualism is pressed too strongly into the body. On the other hand, we see the danger threaten from the East that men burn up and consume the body. We see it in the conceptions of the decadent Orient and we see it—only another aspect—in the frightful social developments arising in Eastern Europe. The hour of decision has already arrived. Mankind must decide today to find the equilibrium. And the actual task set before man can only be recognised from the depths of spiritual-scientific knowledge. One must study those ideas that can show what possibilities of evolution lie before mankind in two directions, On the one hand we have the merging in Nirvana which has in fact become a “sacred doctrine of the Orient”—though far removed from the ancient conception of Nirvana which meant a striving for equilibrium out of the old clairvoyance. The Nirvana as now conceived by the decadent Oriental is the world of Lucifer. On the other hand, what the modern Western civilisation is striving for—in so far as it does not fill itself with the knowledge of Spiritual Science—is the mechanising of the world, a continuous striving to make the processes of human existence mechanical. Ahrimanising on the one hand—Luciferising on the other hand.

I described lately from a certain aspect the chaotic, unorientated life of recent times and if this should continue then undoubtedly humanity would become Ahrimanised. This process can only be checked if the conception of the spiritual world is brought into the over-intellectual life, the over-individualised human existence completely saturated with egoism. This concept of the spiritual world is needed everywhere, but above all it is necessary for a spiritual impulse to enter the different sciences. Otherwise it will gradually come to the point where the various sciences rule mankind like some abstract authority. Humanity will become totally Ahrimanised by these different sciences which encircle man with authoritative power. It is especially important at the present day when social life problems are so thrusting at human evolution to lift up the gaze to the connection of man with his planetary life.

Within the old religious Faiths man's conception of this connection with the spiritual world is outworn and stunted. It is stunted to a merely abstract intellectual acknowledgment as, for instance, the evangelical Confession threatens to become, or stunted to an external power-principle as the Roman Faith. Those are in fact only other expressions for what is drawing near man to seduce him. It is essential, however, for man to find his inner orientation and to acquire an inner impulse so that the view may be unimpeded of what links him to his planet and through his planet to the whole cosmos. Men must feel again that Geology is not knowledge of the earth. A colossal mineral mass on which are watery oceans and which is surrounded by air is not the earth, and what surrounds us as Milky Way and suns, that is not the universe, The universe is Ahrimanic beings beneath, Luciferic beings above, which appear through the outer sense-illusion, and Beings of the normal Hierarchies to whom man raises himself when through both sense-illusions he comes to the truth; for the actual Beings do not appear in the external sense-illusion, they only manifest themselves through it.

The man of today must recognise this: I can consider the earth. If I am able to interpret what appears on the earth below as the emanation of Spiritual Beings then I perceive what lives in Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones. But if I am unable to form a spiritual picture of what lives on the earth, if I surrender myself to the illusion of its material appearance, then I remain geologist. I cannot swing myself up to geosophist, then my being becomes Ahrimanised. And if I gaze up to the star-worlds and only form concepts of what I see physically, then I make myself Luciferic. If I am able to read the Spirit in what appears to me in outer semblance. if I can say to myself: Yes, I behold stars, I behold a Milky Way and suns, they inform me of Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis—Spirits of Wisdom. Powers, Mights—then I find the equilibrium.

It is not a question of talking of cosmic beings as superior to earthly beings, the point is everywhere to penetrate the sense-appearance to the genuine essentiality, to that essentiality with which we as men are really connected. Sense-appearance of itself does not deceive us. If we interpret sense-appearance in the right way, then the Spiritual Beings are there, then we have them. Sense-appearance as such is not deceptive, it is our concept of it that can be deceptive, through our too close relationship with the earthly between birth and death on the one hand, through our too close relationship on the other hand with the extra-earthly while we dwell there between death and new birth.

If man confines himself to what has gradually formed within our civilisation he experiences hardly anything of such views. And our civilisation has totally forgotten that it was once different. People read today even with a certain eagerness what was written about Nature in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries but they do not read it with enough discernment. If they read with discernment they would realise that the time in which man thinks as he does now is only a few centuries old. They would see that people thought differently about things of the outer world in the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth centuries, even in the fourteenth century; that in the stone, in the earth, they did not see stone, earth, but the body of the divine-spiritual. And in the stars they certainly did not see what one sees today but the revelation of the divine-spiritual. It is only in recent centuries that man has merely a geology and a cosmology but not a geosophy and a cosmosophy! Under the cosmology he would become Luciferised, under the geology he would become Ahrimanised, unless he saved himself by finding the equilibrium through a geosophy and a cosmosophy, And, in fact, since man is born out of the whole universe all this together is needed to give Anthroposophy. Anthroposophy consists of these different “sophies,” cosmosophy, geosophy, and so on. We only understand man aright when we know how to bring him into a spiritual connection with the universe. Then we shall not look for him in a one-sided way in his relationship with light, levity, which would mean servitude to Lucifer, nor one-sidedly in his relationship with gravity, a servitude to the Ahrimanic powers, but endeavour to pour into his will the impulse to find the equilibrium between levity and gravity, between inclining to the earthly and inclining to the Luciferic. Man must reach this balance and he can do so only by again acquiring the super-sensible in addition to his sense-concepts.

Now, still something of a complete paradox: Bring before your soul what has just been said, and how man must know of it so that he can come to a decision in this world-age; assume that one must actually speak of a possible Ahrimanising and Luciferising of the world. Bring this before your soul as a weighty matter for humanity. Then take what you read today in popular literature, what reaches your mind from lecture rooms and other educational institutions, and observe the immense disparity, then you will see what is required if men are to come out of the present decadent life to what is of urgent importance. Serious work in spiritual fields is urgently necessary and this can only be accomplished if one resolves to take earnestly such ideas as we have again discussed today.

Tomorrow we will continue further.