The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Without doubt, the questions raised by social problems are among the major concerns of many today. We are dealing with social issues wherever there is a genuine concern with present conditions in humanity's evolution and with the impulses that threaten the future. The contemporary way of viewing and dealing with social issues, however, suffers from a fundamental defect. This is the same defect that afflicts so much of our mental and moral life and indeed our entire civilization: the prevailing intellectualism of our age. The social problems are so often examined merely from the limited viewpoint of intellectualism. Whether the social question is approached from the "left" or from the "right," the overly intellectual aspect of each approach is revealed by the fact that certain theories become the starting point from which it is said that this or that ought to be established, that this or that ought to be abolished. Generally, little account is thereby taken of the human being himself, as if there were no individually distinctive qualities in each human being, as if there were only a generality, "man." No attention is paid to the uniqueness of the individual human being. This is why the entire consideration of social issues has become so abstract, something that rarely affects the social feelings and attitudes that are active between one person and another.

The inadequacy in our consideration of social issues is most clearly evident in the domain of health care, of hygiene. In so far as it is a public matter, concerning not the individual so much as the whole community, health care or hygiene—possibly more than any other social domain—is a subject suitable for social consideration.

It is true that there is no lack of advice, available either in talks or in the literature, concerning hygiene in public health. It should be asked, however, how does such advice about hygiene come into the social life? It must be mentioned that whenever individual rules concerning the proper care of health are promulgated as the result of medical or physiological science, it is generally the trust in a scientific field that provides the basis for accepting such rules, rules whose inner validity one is not actually in a position to test. It is purely on the basis of authority that statements about hygiene emerging from libraries, examining rooms, and research laboratories are accepted by large segments of the population. There are those who are convinced, however, that in the course of modern history over the last four centuries a longing for democratic regulation of all issues has arisen in humanity. Then they encounter this entirely undemocratic belief in authority demanded in the domain of health care or hygiene. This undemocratic attitude of belief in an authority conflicts with the longing for democracy that has reached a kind of culmination today, although often in a highly paradoxical way.

I know very well that what I have just said may seem paradoxical, because issues of health care are often simply not considered in relation to the democratic demand that matters of public interest concerning every mature citizen be judged by that community of citizens, either directly or indirectly through representation. It must certainly be said that it may not be possible for the views concerning hygiene, the hygienic care of public life, to be fully subject to democratic principles, because such matters do, in fact, depend on the judgment of specialists. On the other hand, should one not strive toward greater democratization than contemporary circumstances permit in a domain that is as close, as infinitely close, to the concerns of every individual, and thus to the whole community, as the care of public health?

We certainly hear a great deal today about the necessity for proper air, light, nourishment, sanitation, and so forth, but the regulations laid down to order these things cannot, as a rule, be tested by those to whom they apply.

Now please do not misunderstand me. I would not like to be accused of taking any particular side in this lecture. I would not like to treat in a one-sided way what today is generally treated one-sidedly, in a partisan way or from the standpoint of a certain scientific conviction. I have no desire to uphold ancient superstitions of devils and demons passing in and out of human beings in the form of disease, nor to support the modern superstitions that the bacilli and bacteria pass in and out of human beings, causing the different diseases. We need not occupy ourselves today with the question of whether we are really faced with the results of the spiritualistic superstitions of earlier times or with the materialistic superstitions prevalent today. I would prefer to consider something that permeates the whole culture in our time, especially in so far as this culture is determined by the convictions of modern science. We are assured today that the materialism of the middle and last third of the nineteenth century has been overcome, but this statement is not very convincing to those who really know the nature of materialism and its opposite. The most one can say is that materialism has been overcome by a few people here and there who realize that the facts of modern science no longer justify the general explanation that everything in existence is merely a mechanical, physical, or chemical process taking place in matter.

The fact that a few people here or there have come to this conclusion, however, does not mean that materialism has been overcome, for usually when it comes to a concrete explanation or forming a view of something concrete, even these people—and the others as a matter of course—still reveal a materialistic tendency in their way of thinking. True, it is said that atoms and molecules are merely harmless, convenient units of calculation about which nothing more is asserted than that they are abstractions; nevertheless, the considerations are atomistic and molecular in character. We are then explaining world phenomena out of the behavior or interactions of atomic and molecular processes, and the point is not whether we picture that a thought, feeling, or any other process is connected only with material processes of atoms and molecules; the point is the orientation of the entire attitude of our soul and spirit when our explanation is based only on atomic theory, the theory of smallest entities. The point is not whether verbally or in thought a person is convinced that there is something more than the influence of atoms, the material action of atoms, but whether he is able to give explanations other than those based on the atomic theory of phenomena. In short, not what we believe is essential but how we explain, how we orient our souls within. Here I must say that only a true, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science can help eliminate the defect of which I have spoken.

That this must be the case I would now like to show concretely. There is hardly anything more confusing today than the distinctions that are so often emphasized between man's bodily nature and his soul and spirit, between physical illnesses and the so-called psychological and mental illnesses.¹ This view of the relevant relationships and distinctions between such facts of human life as a diseased body and an apparently diseased soul suffers from the materialistic, atomistic way of thinking. For what is really the nature of the materialism that has gradually come to be the world view of so many of our contemporaries and that, far from being overcome, is today in its prime? What is its nature? The nature of this materialism does not lie in observing material processes, in looking into the material processes that also take place in the human corporeality, in reverently studying the marvelous structure and activity of the human nervous system and other human organs, of the nervous system of the animal or organs of other living beings. This does not make one a materialist. Rather one is made a materialist through omitting the spirit from the study of these material processes, through looking into the world of matter and seeing only matter and material processes.

What spiritual science must assert, however, is this (and today I am only able to summarize this point): wherever material processes appear outwardly to the senses—and these are the only processes that modern science will admit as observable and exact—they are but the outer manifestation, the outer revelation, of activities behind which and in which lie spiritual forces and powers. It is not characteristic of spiritual science to look at a human being and say, "There is his physical body—this body is a sum of material processes, but the human being does not consist of this alone. Independent of this he has his immortal soul." It is far from characteristic of it to speak like this and to build up all kinds of abstract and mystical theories and views about this immortal soul that is independent of the body. This does not at all characterize a spiritual world view. It can definitely be said that, in addition to his body, which consists of material processes, the human being also has an immortal soul, which then enters some kind of spiritual realm after death. This does not make one a spiritual scientist in an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. We can be spiritual scientists in the true sense only if we realize that this material body with its material processes is a creation of the soul element. We must learn to understand, down to the smallest detail, how the soul element—which was already active before birth, or, let us say, before conception—fashioned and molded the structure and even the substantiality of the human body. We must really be able to perceive everywhere the immediate unity of this body and the soul element and how, through the working of the soul-spiritual in the body, the body as such is gradually destroyed. This body undergoes a partial death with every passing moment, but only at the moment of death is there a radical expression, you could say, of what has been happening to the body in each moment as the result of the soul-spiritual. We are not spiritual scientists in the true sense until we perceive concretely and in detail this living interplay, this continuous influence of the soul in the body, and endeavor to say: the soul element incorporates itself into the entirely concrete processes, into the functions of the liver, the process of breathing, the action of the heart, the working of the brain, and so forth. In short, when we describe the material part of the human being we must know how to portray the body as a direct result of the spiritual. Spiritual science is thereby able to place a true value on matter, because in the separate concrete, material processes it observes not merely what is confirmed by the eyes or yielded by the abstract concepts of modern science through outer observation; spiritual science is spiritual science only when it shows everywhere how the spirit works in matter, when it regards with reverence the material workings of the spirit.

Such a view guards one against all the abstract chit-chat about a soul independent of the bodily nature, for where the life between birth and death is concerned, man can only spin fantasies about this. Between birth and death (with the exception of the time of sleep), the soul-spiritual is so utterly given up to bodily activity that. it lives in it, lives through it, manifests itself in it. We must be able to study the soul-spiritual outside the course of earthly life, realizing that human existence between birth and death is but the outcome of the soul-spiritual. Then we can behold the really concrete unity of the soul-spiritual with the physical bodily element. This is an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for then it becomes possible to see the human being with all his individual members as an outcome of the soul-spiritual.

The mystical, theosophical views that evolve all kinds of noble-sounding, beautiful theories about a spirituality that is free of the body can never serve the concrete sciences of life, they can never serve life. They can serve only the intellectual or psychological craving to be rid of the outer life as soon as possible, and then they weave all sorts of fantasies about the soul-spiritual in order to induce a state of inner satisfaction.

In this anthroposophically oriented spiritual movement it behooves us to work earnestly and sincerely to develop a spiritual science that will be able to enliven physics, mathematics, chemistry, physiology, biology, and anthropology. No purpose is served by making religious or philosophical statements to the effect that the human being bears an immortal soul within him and then working in the different branches of science just as if we were concerned only with material processes. Knowledge of the soul-spiritual must be gained and applied to the very details of life, to the marvelous structure of the body itself. You will come across many mystics and theosophists who love to chatter about the human being as composed of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego, and so forth, yet they haven't the least inkling what a wonderful manifestation of the soul life it is when a person blows his nose! The point is that we must see matter not simply as matter but as the manifestation of the spirit. Then we will begin to have healthy views concerning the spirit, views that are full of content, and with them a spiritual science that may be fruitful for all the other sciences.

This in turn will make it possible to overcome the specialization in the various branches of science resulting from the materialistic trend of scientific knowledge. I have no desire whatever to deliver a diatribe against specialization, for I am well aware of its usefulness. I know that certain things must be dealt with by specialists simply because they require a specialized technique. The point I would make is that the person who holds fast to the material can never reach a view of the world that is applicable to life if he becomes a specialist in the ordinary sense. For the range of material processes is infinite, both outside in nature and within the human being.

For instance, we may devote a long time—as long, at any rate, as professional people devote to their training—to the study of the human nervous system. If material processes are all we see in the working of the nervous system, however—processes described according to the abstract concepts of modern science—we shall never be led to any universal principle upon which a world view can be based. As soon as you begin to look at the human nervous system, for example, from the viewpoint of spiritual science, you will find at once that this nervous system cannot be considered without your finding the spirit active there, which leads us inevitably to the soul-spiritual underlying the muscular, skeletal, and sensory systems, and so on. The spiritual does not separate into single parts as does the material. Characterized very briefly, the spiritual unfolds like an organism with its members. Just as I cannot truly study a human being if I look merely at his five fingers and cover the rest of him, so in spiritual science I cannot study a single detail without being led by perceiving the soul-spiritual within this detail to a whole. If I were to become a brain or nerve specialist, I would still be able, in observing this single member of the human organism, to form a picture of the human being as a whole—I would reach a universal principle in relation to a world view, and I could then begin to speak about the human being in a way comprehensible to every healthy-minded, reasonable human being.

This is the great difference between the way that spiritual science is able to speak about the human being and the way that specialized, materialistic science is bound by its very nature to speak. Take the simple case of a textbook in common use today that is based on such a specialized, materialistic science. If you do not know very much about the nervous system and try to read a textbook on the subject, you will probably lay it aside. If you do manage to get through it, you will not learn much that will help you to realize the worth and dignity of the human being. If, however, you listen to what can be said about the human nervous system on the basis of spiritual science, you will be led everywhere to the entire human being. Spiritual science so illuminates the entire human being that the idea arising within you suggests the worth, the essence, and the dignity of the human being.

The truth of this is nowhere more evident than when we observe not the healthy human being in his single parts but a person who is ill, where there are so many deviations from the so-called normal condition. When we are able to observe the whole human being under the influence of some disease, everything nature reveals to us in the sick person leads us deeply into cosmic connections. We are led to understand the particular constitution of this human being, how the atmospheric and extraterrestrial influences work upon him as the result of his particular constitution, and we are then able to relate his human organization to the particular substances of nature that will act as remedies. We are thereby led into wider connections. When we add to our understanding of the healthy person all that we are able to learn from observation of the sick person, a profound insight will arise into the interconnections and deeper significance of life. Such insight, however, becomes the foundation for a knowledge of the human being that can be shared with everyone. True, we have not as yet accomplished very much in this direction because spiritual science has only been able to be active for a short time. The lectures given here must therefore be thought of merely as a beginning.² By its very nature, however, spiritual science is able to work upon and develop what is contained in the separate sciences in such a way that what everyone should know about the human being can be introduced to everyone.

Think what it will mean if spiritual science succeeds in transforming science in this way, succeeds in developing forms of knowledge about the human being in health and illness that are accessible to general human consciousness. If spiritual science succeeds in this, how different will be the relations of one human being to another in social life; what a greater understanding one person will have for another, far greater than there is today when people pass one another without the one having the slightest understanding for the particular individuality of the other. Social issues will be removed from intellectual considerations when the most diverse realms of life are based upon objective knowledge and concrete experiences of life. This is evident especially in the domain of health care. Think what a social effect it would have were there to be a real understanding of what is healthy in one person, what is unhealthy in another; think what it would mean if health care were taken in hand with understanding by the whole of humanity. Certainly this does not mean that we should encourage scientific or medical dilettantism—most emphatically not—but imagine that a sympathetic understanding of the health and illness of our fellow man were to awaken not merely feeling but understanding, an understanding that grows from a view of the human being—think of the effect it would have in social life. Then indeed it would be realized that social reform and reconstruction must proceed in their separate realms from expert knowledge, not from general theories—whether from Marx or Oppenheimer—which lose sight of the human being as such and want to organize the world on the basis of abstract concepts.³ Healing can never spring from abstract concepts but only from a reverent awareness of the individual spheres of life. And hygiene, the care of health, is very special because it leads us most closely to the joy of our fellow man through his healthy, normal way of life, or to his sufferings and limitations through what lives in him more or less as illness.

This is something that directs us immediately to the particularly social way in which spiritual science can be active in the domain of hygiene or health care. For let us say that someone nurtures the knowledge of the human being in this way, the knowledge of the healthy and sick human being; if he now specializes to become a physician, and if such a person is placed within human society, he will be in a position to bring about enlightenment within this society, he will find understanding. The relationship of such a physician to society will not be merely the usual one in which, unless one is the doctor's friend or relative, one goes to the physician's house only when something hurts or has been broken; rather a relationship will develop in which the physician is continuously the teacher and advisor for a prophylactic health care. In fact, there will be a continual participation of the physician not only in treating an illness that he discovers in someone but in maintaining a person's health in so far as this is possible. A living social interaction will take place between the physician and the rest of society. In turn, medicine itself will be illuminated by the health of such a knowledge. Because materialism has extended itself even into medical considerations in life we have become truly entangled in some strange conceptions.

Thus on the one hand we have all the physical illnesses. They are investigated by observing the abnormalities of the organs or the various processes that are thought to be of a physical nature and are to be found within the boundaries of the human skin. Then the goal is to seek to rectify what is found to be wrong. In this case, the view of the human body in its normal and abnormal conditions is completely materialistic. Then, on the other hand, there are the so-called psychological or mental illnesses.' As a result of materialistic thinking, these are considered to be merely diseases of the brain or nervous system, although efforts have also been made to find their causes in the organ systems of the human being. Because there is generally no conception of the way in which the soul and spirit work in the healthy human body, however, it is impossible to arrive at a conception of the relationship of mental illness—so-called men-tal illness—to the rest of the human being. Thus mental illness is even thought about materialistically by that curious hermaphroditic science, psychoanalysis, though it definitely does not understand the material either. Mental illness stands there without our being able to bring it together in any meaningful way with what actually takes place in the human organism. Spiritual science is now able to show—and I have recently drawn attention to this—that what I have been speaking about here is not merely a program but is something that can be pursued in detail, as has been attempted during the opportunities offered here in the recent course for physicians.⁴ Spiritual science is able to show in detail how all so-called psychological and mental illnesses have their source in disturbances of the organs, in organ deterioration, in enlargement and shrinking of the organs in the human organism. A so-called mental illness arises sooner or later whenever there is some irregularity in an organ, in the heart, in the liver, in the lungs, and so on. A spiritual science that has penetrated to the point of knowing the spirit's activity in the normal heart is also able to discover in the deterioration or irregularity of the heart the cause of a diseased life of spirit or soul, called mental illness today.

The greatest fault of materialism is not that it denies the existence of the spirit; religion can see to it that due recognition is given to the spirit. The greatest error of materialism is that it provides us with no knowledge of matter itself, because, in effect, it considers only the outer side of matter. It is just this that is the defect of materialism, that it lacks insight even into matter. Take, for example, psychoanalytical treatments where attention is merely directed to something that has taken place in the soul and is described as a "complex,"" which is a pure abstraction. A more appropriate way to pursue this would be to study how certain soul impressions, which were made on a person at some period of his life and are normally bound up with the healthy organism, have come into contact with defective organs, e.g., with a diseased rather than a healthy liver. It must be considered that this may have happened long before the moment when the defect becomes organically perceptible.

There is no need for spiritual science to be afraid of showing how so-called psychological or mental illness is invariably connected with something occurring in the human body. Spiritual science must show emphatically that when merely the soul element, the soul "complex""—a deviation from the so-called normal soul life—is studied, the most that can be achieved is a one-sided diagnosis. Psychoanalysis, therefore, can never lead to anything more than something diagnostic, never to a real therapy in this domain. In mental illness, therapy must proceed by administering therapy for the body, and for this reason there must be detailed knowledge of the ramifications of the spiritual in the material. We must know where to take hold of the material body (which is, however, permeated with spirit) in order to cure the disease of which abnormal conditions of soul are simply symptoms. Spiritual science must emphasize again and again that the root of so-called mental or psychological illnesses lies in the organ systems of the human being, but it is possible to understand abnormal organ function of the human being only when the spirit can be pursued into the minutest parts of matter.

Looked at from the other side, all those phenomena of life that seemingly affect merely the soul or work in the soul element—for instance, all that is expressed in the different temperaments and the activity of the temperaments in the human being, what is expressed in the way the child behaves, plays, walks—all this is studied today only from a soul-spiritual point of view, but it also has its bodily aspect. Faulty education of the child may come to expression in later life in some familiar form of physical illness. In certain cases of mental illness, we must often look to the bodily element and look for the cause there; however, in certain cases of physical illness, we must look to the spiritual in order to find the cause. The essence of spiritual science is that it does not speak in abstractions about a nebulous spiritual aspect as do mystics or one-sided theosophists; rather it traces the spirit right down into its material workings. Spiritual science never conceives of the material as modern science does today, but it always penetrates to the spirit in all study of the material. Thus it is able to observe that an abnormal soul life must inevitably express itself in an abnormal bodily life, although the abnormality may, to begin with, be hidden from outer observation.

On all sides today, people form entirely false pictures of a serious, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science. This may have a certain justification when they listen to people speak who do not truly penetrate to what is actually important but speak only of abstract theories such as that the human being consists of such and such, that there are repeated earthly lives, and so forth. These things are, of course, full of significance and beauty; but the point is that we must work earnestly in this spiritual scientific movement, truly entering into a particular subject, into the individual spheres of this life.

In the widest sense, such a spiritual scientific movement leads again to a socially minded community of human beings, for when one is able to perceive how a soul that appears sick radiates its impulses into the organism, when one can really feel this connection between the organism and the soul that appears to be ill—feels this with understanding—and when on the other hand one knows how the general ordering of life affects the physical health of the human being, how the spiritual, which apparently exists in social arrangements only outwardly, works into the physical care of health of the human being, then one will stand in a completely different way within human society.

A true understanding of the human being will be gained, and we will treat each other quite differently. Individual character will be understood quite differently, knowing that one person possesses certain qualities and another possesses quite different ones. We will learn how to respond to all variations, to see them in relation to particular tasks; it will be known how to make use of the different temperaments in human society in the right way and particularly how to develop them in the right way.

In relation to health care or hygiene, one domain of social life in particular—that of education—will be most strongly influenced by such a knowledge of the human being. We cannot, without a comprehensive knowledge of the human being, evaluate the consequences of allowing our children to sit in school with bent backs so that they never breathe properly, or the repercussions of never teaching children to speak the vowel or consonant sounds loudly, clearly, and in a well-articulated way. As a matter of fact, the whole of later life depends on whether the child in school breathes in the right way and whether he is taught to speak clearly and with good articulation. I say this merely by way of example, for the same thing applies in other realms. It is an illustration, however, of the specific application of general hygienic principles in the sphere of education. The whole social significance of hygiene is revealed in this example.

It is also apparent that, rather than further specialization, life demands that the specialized branches of knowledge be brought together to form a comprehensive view of life. We need something more than educational norms according to which the teacher is supposed to instruct the child. The teacher must realize what it means for him to help the child to speak clearly and articulately. He must realize what it will mean if he allows the child to catch his breath after only half a phrase has been spoken and does not see to it that all the air is used up in the phrase being uttered. There are, of course, many such principles. A proper appreciation and practice of them, however, will live in us only when we are able to measure their full significance for human life and social health; only then will they give rise to a social impulse.

We need teachers who are able to educate children on the basis of a world view that understands the true being of man. This was the thought underlying the course I gave to the teachers when the Waldorf School in Stuttgart was founded.⁵ All the principles of the art of education that were expressed in that course strive in the direction of making human beings out of the children who are being educated, human beings in whom lungs, liver, heart, and stomach will be healthy in later life because as children they were helped to develop their life functions in the right way, because, in effect, the soul worked in the right way.

This world view will never give a materialistic interpretation to the ancient saying, "A healthy soul lives in a healthy body"" (Mens sana in corpore sano). Interpreted materialistically, this means that if the body is healthy, if it has been made healthy by every possible physical method, then it will, of itself, be the bearer of a healthy soul. This is pure nonsense. The only true meaning is that a healthy body shows me that the force of a healthy soul has built it up, has molded it and made it healthy. A healthy body proves that an autonomous, healthy soul has worked in it. This is the true meaning of this saying, and only in this sense can it be an underlying principle of true hygiene. In other words, it is quite inadequate to have, in addition to teachers who are working from an abstract science of education, a school doctor who turns up every fortnight or so and goes through the school with no real idea of how to help. What we need is a living alliance between medical science and the art of education. We need an art of education that teaches the children in a way conducive to real health. This is what makes hygiene or health care a social issue, because a social issue is essentially an educational issue, and this, in turn, is essentially a medical issue, but only if medicine, hygiene, are fructified by spiritual science.

These matters are extraordinarily significant in relation to the theme of hygiene or health care as a social issue. For if one works with spiritual science and if spiritual science is something concrete for the human being, then one knows that contained within spiritual science is something that distinguishes it from what is contained in mere intellectualism—and natural science in the present is also mere intellectualism—from what is contained in mere intellectualism or in a merely intellectually developed natural science or in a merely intellectually developed history or jurisprudence today. All the sciences today are intellectualistic; if they claim to be experiential sciences, this is based only on the fact that they interpret intellectually their experiences based on sense observation. What is offered in spiritual science is essentially different from these intellectually interpreted results of natural science; it would be most unfortunate if what lives in our intellectualistic culture were not merely a picture but a real power that worked more deeply on the human being. Everything intellectualistic remains only on the surface of the human being. This sentence is to be taken very comprehensively.

There are people who study spiritual science only intellectually, who make notes: there is a physical body, etheric body, astral body, ego, reincarnation, karma, and so forth. They make notes of it all, as is the custom in modern natural or social science, but they are not sincerely devoting themselves to spiritual science when they cultivate this way of thinking. They are simply carrying over their ordinary way of thinking into what they encounter in spiritual science. What is essential about spiritual science is that it must be thought in a different way, felt in a different way, must be experienced not in an intellectual way but quite differently. It is for this reason that by its very nature spiritual science has a living relationship to the human being in health and illness, but a relationship altogether different from what is often imagined.

By now, some people must be sufficiently convinced of the impotence of our purely intellectual culture in dealing with those suffering from so-called mental illnesses. One who suffers from such an illness may say to you, for example, that he hears voices speaking to him. No matter what intellectual reasoning you use with him, it proves useless, for he makes all kinds of objections, you may be sure of that. Even this might indicate that one is dealing here with an illness not of the conscious or unconscious soul life but of the organism.

Spiritual science teaches, moreover, that one cannot come to grips with these so-called psychological and mental illnesses by means of the kinds of methods that take recourse to hypnotism, suggestion, and the like; one must rather approach mental illness by physical means, which means by healing the organs of the human being. This is exactly where a spiritual knowledge of the human being is essential. Spiritual knowledge knows that so-called mental illnesses cannot be affected by soul or spiritual procedures, because mental illness consists precisely of the fact that the spiritual member of the human being has been pressed out, as it were, as is normally the case only in sleep. As a consequence, the spiritual member grows weak, and we must cure the bodily organs so that the soul and spirit may be taken up again in a healthy way.

When, as a result of spiritual scientific work, Imagination, Inspiration, and Intuition arise, they are able to penetrate into the whole organism, as they proceed not from the intellect or the head alone but from the entire human being.⁶ Through real spiritual science, the physical organization of the human being may be permeated with health. The fact that there are dreamers who feel ill or show signs of the opposite of health in their spiritual scientific activities is no proof to the contrary. There are so many who are not really spiritual scientists at all but who simply amass intellectually vast collections of notes about the results of spiritual science. Spreading the real substance of spiritual science is in itself a social hygiene, for it works upon the whole human being and regulates his organic functions when they develop extreme tendencies in one direction or another, either toward dreaminess or the reverse. Here we have the overwhelming difference between what is given in spiritual science and what appears in merely intellectual science. The concepts arising in the domain of intellectualism are far too weak to penetrate the human being and to work healthily upon him, because they are merely analogies. Spiritual scientific concepts, on the other hand, have been drawn from the entire human being. Lungs, liver, heart, the entire human being and not the brain alone have participated in building up spiritual scientific concepts, and what they have derived from the strength of the entire human being adheres to them, penetrates them, as it were, in a sculptural way. If one then permeates oneself with such concepts, if one receives them cognitively through the sound human intellect, they work back again onto the entire human being in a hygienic, health-engendering way. This is how spiritual science can penetrate and give direction to hygiene, health care, as a social concern.

In many other ways too—now I can only offer an example—spiritual science will be able to lay down guidelines for the life of humanity in the domain of health, if it gains a firm footing in the world. Here let me give just one brief indication. The relationship of the waking human being to the sleeping human being, the great difference between the human organization in waking and sleeping, is one of the subjects that spiritual science must study again and again. How the spirit and soul act in waking life, when they permeate each other in the bodily, soul, and spiritual aspects of the human being, how they act when they are temporarily separated from each other in sleep—all these things are studied conscientiously by spiritual science. Here I can do not more than refer to a certain principle that is a well-founded result of spiritual scientific investigation.

In our life we occasionally see so-called epidemic illnesses that affect whole masses of the population and are therefore essentially a social concern. Ordinary materialistic science studies these illnesses by examining the physical organism of the human being. It knows nothing of the tremendous significance that the abnormal attitude of the human being to waking and sleeping has for epidemics and the susceptibility to epidemic illnesses. What takes place in the organism during sleep is something that, if it becomes excessive, predisposes the human being to so-called epidemic illnesses. There are people who, as the result of too much sleep, initiate certain processes in the human organism, processes that ought not be set in motion because waking life should not be broken up by such long periods of sleep. These people have a much stronger predisposition to epidemic illnesses and are less able to resist them.

You yourselves can assess what it would entail to explain to people the proper proportion of sleeping to waking. Such things cannot be dictated. You can, of course, tell people that they must not send children with scarlatina to school, but you cannot possibly dictate to people in the same way that they must get seven hours of sleep. And yet this is much more important than any other prescription. People who need it should have seven hours of sleep, and others for whom this is not necessary should sleep much less, and so on.

These matters, which are so intimately connected with the personal life of human beings, have a tremendous effect upon social life. How these social effects come about, whether a larger or smaller number of people are obliged, owing to illness, to be absent from their work, whether or not a whole region is affected: all these things depend upon the most intimate details of man's life. Here hygiene plays an immeasurably important part in social life. Regardless of what people may think about infection or non-infection, with epidemics this element really plays a part in social life. Here external regulations are of no avail; the only thing you can do is to educate people within society so that they are able to understand the physicians who are trying to explain prophylactic measures. This can give rise to an active cooperation in the maintenance of health between the physician who understands his profession and the layman who understands the nature of the human being.

I have described here an aspect of hygiene or health care as a social issue that is utterly dependent on a free spiritual life. We must have a spiritual life in which within the spiritual realm there are those engaged in nurturing this spiritual life, even in so far as it extends into the various practical domains such as hygiene; they must be completely independent of everything that does not yield pure knowledge, that does not bring about the nurture of the spiritual life. What the individual can achieve for the greatest benefit of his fellow man must grow entirely out of his own capacities. There should be neither governmental norms nor a dependence on economic powers. The individual's achievements must be placed entirely in the sphere of the intimate, personal connections that only exist between individuals, in the trust, based on understanding, that those who require the services of a capable person can bring to that person. There, a spiritual life is needed—independent of all authority, governmental or economic—which is active in a manner that arises purely out of spiritual forces. If you consider what can bring about a hygiene intimately united with insight into human nature and social behavior, you will also recognize that the spirit obviously must be managed by those who nurture it; not the specialists active as experts in governmental agencies but rather those active in spiritual life must be the sole managers of this spiritual life. This becomes especially clear if one goes into the individual branches of activity, such as hygiene, with real experience, as is required by the separate, concrete realms "“ and this could be shown to hold good in other realms as it does for hygiene. When hygiene or health care exists as a real social institution, based on social insight arising from the free spiritual life, then the economic aspects of such a hygiene can be handled in a totally different way, especially if the independent economic life is constituted as I have described in my book The Threefold Social Order.⁷

If the forces for the nurture of hygiene or health care that are latent in society, resting in its womb, as it were, are taken up with human understanding, if they result in social institutions, then out of the independent economic life, without consideration of dependence on profit or governmental impulses, can emerge what is necessary to support a genuine hygiene. Only then will the kind of idealism enter economic life that is necessary for the nurture of hygiene in human life. If the mere profit motive prevails in our economic sphere, it always has the tendency to become increasingly incorporated into the political state, and the generally accepted opinion is that one must produce what yields the most profit. If this idea continues to prevail, then the independent impulses of a free spiritual life cannot manifest in the domain of hygiene or health care, and spiritual life will then become dependent on political or economic forces; then the economic will govern the spiritual, but the economic must not prevail over the spiritual. This fact is most evident to one who wants to arrive at what the spirit demands in the economic life, to one who wants to serve a genuine and true hygiene.

The forces of the free spiritual life in the threefold social organism arrive at the insight which becomes a matter of public concern; an understanding of the human being becomes a public concern in the threefold social organism. The human being must stand within a free spiritual life in order that a firmly grounded hygiene can be nurtured. On the other hand, people must develop the idealism through which the products of the economic life are met with an understanding that results not merely from a sense for profit but out of insights emerging from the free spiritual management of hygiene or health care. Once this insightful, social human understanding has arisen, this human idealism, there will emerge a willingness to work economically simply because the social situation of humanity requires hygienic service. If these requirements are met, people will be able to meet democratically in parliaments or other such gatherings. For then, out of a free spiritual life, the recognition emerges of the necessity for hygiene as a social phenomenon; attention to what is necessary for hygiene as a social issue emerges from an impartial and professionally managed economic life through the high intentions that would be developed within it. Then mature human beings will deliberate on the ground of the economic life out of their insight and understanding of the human being as well as out of their relations to an economic life at the service of hygiene. Then people will be able to meet as equals within the legislative, rights, or economic life concerning the measures that are necessary regarding hygiene and the care of public health.

Were all this to come about, however, laymen or dilettantes would not do the healing; rather, the mature person will encounter as an equal and with understanding whoever advises him on matters of hygiene, namely, the experienced physician. For the layman, the understanding of the human being that is nurtured in social life, with the help of the physician, makes it possible to meet expert knowledge equipped with understanding, so that in a democratic parliament the layman is able to say "yea"" with a certain understanding and not merely out of pressure from authority.

When we consider impartially how the spiritual, legislative, and economic members of the social organism work together in such a special domain, we discover the complete justification of the idea of the threefold nature of the social organism. This idea is met with disapproval only when it is understood merely abstractly.

Today I was able to give you no more than a sketchy indication of what speaks for the necessity of the threefolding of the social organism if one thinks correctly about a particular, concrete domain such as hygiene. If those paths are followed, toward which I have only been able to point today in their beginnings, one will see that whoever meets the impulse of the threefold social organism with abstract concepts will work against it in a certain way. Such a person will generally bring up the obvious objections. Whoever enters the various domains of life with a full inner understanding, however, entering into the individual realms that matter so much in social life, whoever truly understands something in a concrete realm of life and takes the trouble to understand something about true practical life in any domain, will be led again and again in the direction that has been suggested by the idea of threefolding the social organism.

This idea did not arise out of a dreamy or abstract idealism; it arose as a social demand of our time and of the near future, especially out of the concrete and sober observation of the individual domains of life. By penetrating these individual domains of life with what is active out of the impulse for threefolding the social organism, one will find for all these domains just what they so desperately need today. This evening I only wished to give a few indications concerning how what emerges out of spiritual science regarding the social life can penetrate human society as a social concern, arising out of a socially nurtured understanding of the human being. Striving for a realization of the threefold social organism can fructify what can be accepted today only on the basis of belief in authority, through a completely blind subjection. Through the enrichment that hygiene or health care can receive from a medicine fructified by spiritual science, it can become a social, a truly social concern. It can become a democratically nurtured, common public concern in the truest sense.

In the discussion following the lecture, Rudolf Steiner added the following comments in response to prepared questions.

In matters such as I have discussed today, it is essential that one be able to enter into the whole spirit of what has been expressed. For this reason, it is difficult at times to give appropriate answers, for the questions have already been formulated in such a way that they bear the stamp of contemporary thinking and attitudes. Before answering such questions, it may first be necessary to reformulate them or at least to provide some sort of appropriate explanation. Having said this, I will begin at once with the question that may appear to many of you to be so exceedingly simple that it ought to be able to be answered with a few sentences or even with one sentence:

"How can a person rid himself of the habit of sleeping too long?"

In order to answer this question appropriately, it would be necessary for me to give an even longer lecture than I have already given, because I would first have to bring various elements together. It is possible to say the following, however. The intellectual attitude of soul is almost universal in humanity today. It is particularly those who believe they are judging or living out of feeling or who believe, for one reason or another, that they are not intellectual who are most subject to the intellectual attitude of soul. The fundamental character of the intellectual soul and organ life is that through it our instincts are destroyed. The correct instincts of the human being are destroyed. It is actually so that one must point to primeval humanity, or even to the animal kingdom, to discover instincts that are not yet entirely destroyed. On another occasion a few days ago, I pointed to a very telling example. There are birds who, out of greed, feed on certain insects, for instance spiders. After consuming these spiders, which are poisonous to them, the birds get convulsions, seizures, and die a miserable, agonizing death soon after swallowing the spider. If henbane is in the vicinity, however, the bird flies there, sucks the healing sap from the plant, and thus saves its own life.

Now, just think how there we see developed something that in the human being is shriveled down to the few reflex instincts such as the movements we make without any deep deliberation to encourage the departure of a fly that has alighted on our nose. A defensive instinct arises in response to this insulting stimulus. In the bird feeding on the spider, the consequence of the effect the spider has in the bird's organism is a defensive instinct to this insult, driving it to do something very reasonable. We would still be able to find such instincts among ancient populations if only we interpreted history properly. In our time, however, we have different experiences.

It has always been exceedingly painful to me, accustomed as I am to seeing a fork, knife, and spoon next to a plate, to see instead a scale next to the plate of someone sitting down to eat. This really happens! Such a person weighs the piece of meat and only then knows how much meat he should eat for his particular organism. Just think how bare of all truly original instincts humanity has become to require such a measure! The important thing, then, is that one not remain stationary within intellectualism but rise instead to a spiritual scientific way of knowing. You will now believe that I am speaking pro domo, even if also pro domo of this great house, but I am not speaking pro domo. I am really speaking about what I believe to have recognized as the truth, quite apart from the fact that I myself represent this truth. It can readily be seen that if one penetrates not only into what is intellectual but into what needs to be grasped by way of spiritual science and which therefore confronts humanity more in a pictorial sense, it becomes noticeable that by taking hold of knowledge not accessible to the mere intellect one is again led back to healthy instincts, if not in a single life then perhaps -more so in those matters that lie in the underpinnings of life. Whoever concerns himself, be it ever so briefly, with developing this completely different soul attitude, which must be developed if one really wants to understand something of spiritual science, will again be led back to healthy instincts in matters such as the proper requirement for sleep. Animals do not sleep too much under normal conditions, and primeval man did not sleep too much either. It is only necessary to educate oneself again to have healthy instincts, which were lost by virtue of the intellectual culture prevalent today. It can be said that a truly effective means of ridding oneself of the habit of sleeping too long is to be able to take up spiritual scientific truths without falling asleep as a result. If a person falls asleep at once upon hearing spiritual scientific truths, then he will be unable to rid himself of the habit of sleeping too long. If one succeeds, however, in being truly present inwardly while working through spiritual scientific truths, then this inner human aspect will be activated in such a way that one can actually discover the exactly appropriate time needed for sleep for one's own organism.

Again, it is exceedingly difficult to give intellectual rules prescribing the amount of sleep an individual person requires who is suffering, let us say, from a kidney or liver disorder that has not made him ill in the ordinary sense. As a rule, such a prescription would not lead to anything of consequence. To induce sleep in an artificial way is not the same as when the body, out of its own need for sleep, refuses the entry of the spirit only for as long as is necessary. It can thus be said that a proper hygiene emerging out of spiritual science will also bring the human being to the point at which he can determine in the right way the proper amount of sleep for his own organism.

The other question that was posed here also cannot be answered so simply: "How can a person know how much sleep he needs?"

I would like to say that it is not at all necessary to reach the answer through discursive thinking; that is not necessary at all. It is necessary to acquire those instincts that can be acquired not by receiving collections of notes out of spiritual science but by the way in which one understands spiritual science if it is understood with full inner participation. Once this instinct is achieved, a person is able to discern in an individual way how much sleep is appropriate for him. This is what can be said as a rule in response to such a question. As I said, I can give only a kind of direction for how questions like this can be answered; this may not be what is expected, but what is expected is not always what is right.

"Is it healthy to sleep in a room with the window open?"

Such a question, too, cannot actually be answered in general terms. It is certainly conceivable that for one person, sleeping in a room with an open window is very healthy, depending on the particular construction of his respiratory organs; for another person, however, it might be better to air out the room before sleeping and then close the windows while sleeping. What is necessary, in fact, is to gain an understanding of the relationship the human being has to his environment in order then to be able to make a judgment in each individual case in accordance with this understanding.

"How, from a spiritual scientific point of view, do you explain the development of mental disturbances associated with crimes that are committed, that is, how, in such a situation, can one recognize the bodily illness which lies at the foundation of the mental disturbance?"

If one were to try to deal with this question thoroughly, it would really be necessary to enter into a discussion of all criminal and psychiatric anthropology. I would simply like to say the following: first, in considering such matters, one must presuppose that the organic predisposition of someone who becomes a criminal is abnormal right from the outset. In this direction, you need only follow up the relevant studies by Moriz Benedikt "“ the first really significant criminal anthropologist⁸ "“ and you will see how in fact the pathological investigation of the forms of single human organs can be brought into connection with this predisposition to criminality. There you already have an inherent abnormality, although materialistic thinkers, such as Moriz Benedikt, naturally draw the wrong conclusions from their findings, because it is certainly not an absolute requirement that whoever shows signs in this direction is inevitably a born criminal. What is important is that one is definitely able to work on the defects within the organism "“ I mean the organ defects, not the already existing mental illness, but the organ defects "“ and to have an effect especially through education and later through the appropriate spiritual element, if only the state of affairs is studied from a spiritual scientific point of view. Therefore the conclusions arrived at by Benedikt are not correct. Such organ defects can already be discovered, however.

Then one must also be clear about the fact that there are also non-intellectual elements in ordinary human life, more in the realm of feelings or emotions, which set off reactions. These work first on the glandular activity, the secretory activity, but from there they have an influence on the other organs. In connection with this issue, I would advise you to read an interesting little book concerning the mechanics of emotions that has been put out by a Danish physician.⁹ There you can read much that is of value for the topic under consideration. Take the bodily predisposition that can be traced in everyone who truly comes into consideration as a criminal; add to that everything that has had consequences for the apprehended criminal, consisting of emotional disturbances and the continuation of these emotional disturbances into the organs; then you have the path by which to seek for those defective organs which as a consequence bring forth mental illness, specifically the mental illness associated with committing a crime. In this way, we must attempt to obtain a clear idea about such connections.

"What is the relationship of theosophy to anthroposophy? Is the theosophy which was presented here previously no longer fully recognized?"

I would simply like to say that nothing has ever been presented here other than an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, and what has been presented here today has always been presented in this way. The common identification of our presentations with so-called theosophy is simply based on a misunderstanding. This will remain a misunderstanding because, within certain limits, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science moved for a time within the framework of the Theosophical Society; even in the framework of that society, however, the representatives of an anthroposophically oriented spiritual science never presented anything other than what is presented here today. This was tolerated in the Theosophical Society only so long as matters didn't look too heretical. The anthroposophists were thrown out, however, as soon as it was noticed that anthroposophy was something completely different from the abstract mysticism manifested so often in theosophy. This expulsion was undertaken by the other side, but what is presented here never had any other form than it has today. Of course, those who concern themselves with matters superficially and who listen only to those who haven't gotten beyond a superficial comprehension as members of the Anthroposophical Society "“ for one needn't always be outside in order to understand anthroposophy superficially or to confuse anthroposophy with theosophy; one can also be in the Society "“ those who therefore achieve only a superficial knowledge of what is going on get confused about the issues. What I have characterized here today regarding a particular area has never been presented here in any other way.

Of course there is continuous work, and certain things may be said today in a much more precise, thorough, and intensive way than was possible fifteen, ten, or even five years ago. This is just the nature of working, that one progresses in the formulation of making oneself understood in such difficult matters as spiritual science. It is really unnecessary to engage in any discussion with those who, out of ill will, attribute to us all kinds of changes of world view because of a more recent, more complete expression of something said incompletely on an earlier occasion. Discussions with such ill-willed persons are really a waste of time, because spiritual science, as it is meant here, is something living and not something dead. And whoever believes that it cannot progress and wants to nail it down where it is and where it once was, as happens so often, does not believe in what is living; he would prefer to make it into something dead.

"Would you please say something about the origin of an epidemic such as influenza or scarlet fever? How does it come about if not by the spreading of bacteria? In many illnesses the causative agent has been scientifically determined. What is your position in relation to this issue?"

If I were also to deal with this question concerning which I have indicated that I do not wish to take sides, I would have to give another entire lecture. Nevertheless, I would like to direct your attention to the following: a person may be impelled, in accordance with his knowledge, to direct attention to the fact that for illnesses accompanied by the occurrence of bacilli or bacteria, there are deeper causes "“ acting as primary causes "“ than the mere occurrence of bacteria; such a person does not assert that bacteria don't exist. It is one thing to assert that bac-teria exist and that they increase during the course of an illness; it is quite another to seek the primary cause of the illness in the bacteria. What needs to be said regarding this I have developed in great detail in the course that is being held here now [4], but it takes time to deal with the issues properly. This also applies to certain elements that must be considered before this question can be dealt with, and this cannot be done so quickly in a question-and-answer period such as this. Nevertheless, I will point out the following, the human constitution is not such a simple matter as one often imagines. The human being is a multi-membered being. Right at the beginning of my book, Riddles of the Soul,¹⁰ I stated that man is a threefold being. First there is what can be called the nerve-sense man, then the rhythmic man, and thirdly the metabolic man. This is the human being. These three members of human nature work into one another and may not, if the human being is to be healthy, interact with one another without in a certain way maintaining a separation of the different realms. For example, the nerve-sense man, which is far more than contemporary physiology imagines it to be, may not extend its influence without consequences on the metabolic man, unless its effects are mediated by the rhythmic movements of the circulatory and respiratory processes which, as is well known, extend into the outermost periphery of the organism. This working together, however, can be interrupted in a certain way. This working together is brought about by something very specific. (When such questions are posed "“ if you will pardon me "“ one must also answer in accordance with the facts; I will attempt to be as decent as possible, but it is nevertheless necessary to say a few words that must also be listened to as related to the facts.) It is so, for example, that in the lower man processes occur that are incorporated into the entire organism. If they are incorporated into the entire organism, then they will work in the right way; if, however, they are heightened by various processes, either directly in the lower body, so that they become more active, or through the corresponding processes, which are always there in the human head or in the human lung being diminished in their intensity, then something very curious takes place. Then it becomes evident that, in order to have a normal life, the human organism must develop processes that may develop to the extent that they are integrated into the entire human being. If a process is heightened excessively, however, then it becomes localized; a process arises, for example, in the lower body of the human being, through which there is an improper separation of what goes on in the head or lung, which corresponds to certain processes in the lower body. Processes always correspond to one another in such a way that they proceed parallel to one another; thereby what ought to be present in the human being only to a certain extent, whereby he maintains his vitality, the soul- and spirit-bearing vitality, is brought beyond a certain level. This then encourages an atmosphere, as it were, in which all kinds of lower organisms, all kinds of tiny organisms, can develop. The nurturing element for these small organisms is always present within the human being, only it is spread out over the whole organism. If it becomes concentrated, it provides the life soil for small organisms, for microbes. The reason they can thrive there, however, must be sought in the exceedingly fine processes in the organism which then prove to be the primary cause.

I am really not speaking out of an antipathy for the bacillary theory. I certainly understand the reasons people have for believing in the bacillary theory. You must believe that if I did not have to speak this way because of the facts I could well recognize these reasons. Here, however, we have a knowledge that necessarily leads to the recognition of something else which impels one to speak in the following way: I see a certain landscape in which there are many exceedingly beautiful and well cared-for cattle. I now ask, why are there favorable conditions in that area? They come from the beautiful cattle, I determine. I explain the conditions of life in this area by explaining that beautiful cattle have moved in from somewhere and then spread over the landscape. "“ Don't you agree that such an explanation does not correspond with the facts? Instead, I must look for the primary causes: the diligence, the understanding of the people in that area, and they will explain to me why such beautiful cattle develop on this soil. I would give quite a superficial explanation if I were to say: here it is beautiful, a nice place to live, because beautiful cattle have moved in. The same logic is applied when I find a typhus bacillus and then claim that a patient has typhus because typhus bacilli have moved in. To explain typhus, entirely different factors are necessary than merely to draw attention to the typhus bacillus. In submitting to such erroneous logic one is led astray in many other ways. The primary processes that provide typhus bacillus with the foundation for its existence certainly bring about all kinds of other problems that are not primary. And it is very easy to confound completely or even interchange what is secondary with the actual original form of illness. This is as much as I can say now that could lead to a proper perspective on these issues and show what must be done in order to put in its proper place what is justifiable within limits.

Maybe you can see, nevertheless, from the way in which I have given this answer "“ even if I have done so only sketchily and could easily be misunderstood "“ that I am not at all concerned here with the popular hollering about the bacillary theory; we are interested rather in studying these matters very seriously.

"Please give us a few examples of how bodily organic disturbances bring about soul-spiritual illnesses."

This question would naturally, if it were answered thoroughly, lead much too far, but here, too, I will point out just a few things. You see, in the historical development of medical thinking it is not, as is presented today, that the healing art began with Hippocrates and then developed further. So far as can be traced, very curious things are found in Hippocrates' writings, and rather than the mere beginnings of contemporary intellectual medicine we have in Hippocrates remnants of an ancient, instinctual kind of medicine.

In addition, we find something else, however. In this ancient, instinctual medicine, as long as it was still valid, one did not speak of psychological depressions of a certain kind, which is indeed a very abstract kind of expression; rather one spoke of hypochondria, i.e., cartilage in the lower body. It was known, therefore, that when hypochondria occurred, one was dealing with disturbances in the lower body, with a hardening in the lower body. One cannot say that the ancients were more materialistic than we are.

Similarly, it can very easily be shown that certain chronic lung defects are definitely connected with what could be called a false mystical sense of the human being. And so one could point to all kinds of things completely apart from what the ancients suggested for the organic realm with the temperaments, again all corresponding to a proper instinct. For them, the choleric temperament originated out of the white gall; the melancholic temperament arose out of the black gall and whatever the black gall brings about in the lower body; the sanguine temperament arose out of the blood; and the phlegmatic temperament arose out of the phlegm, what they called phlegm. When they saw deviations of the temperaments, these suggested deviations in the corresponding organic aspects. How this was regarded in the instinctual medicine and hygiene may again become part and parcel of a soul attitude in a strictly scientific way and can be supported from the standpoint of our contemporary knowledge.

Here is another question concerning which great misunderstandings can arise: "Do you know about iris diagnosis? Do you acknowledge it as a valid science?"

It is generally correct that in an organism, and especially in the complicated human organism, conclusions regarding the whole can be arrived at out of all kinds of details, if these details are looked at in the right way. Furthermore the role that the isolated part plays in the human organism is very significant. What the iris diagnostician investigates in the iris is on the one hand very isolated from the rest of the human organism; on the other hand, it is inserted into the rest of the organism in a remarkable way so that it is actually a very expressive organ. Especially in such matters, however, one ought not to schematize, and the error in such matters often lies in the fact that a schema is made. It is definitely so, for example, that people with different soul and bodily constitutions show different signs in the iris from other people. A prerequisite, then, for a meaningful application of this technique would be such an intimate knowledge of what happens in the human organism that whoever had this knowledge actually would no longer need to look into a single organ. To be dependent on an intellectual adherence to certain rules and schemas is of little, if any, value.

"What relation do diseases have to the course of world history, especially those that have arisen more recently?"

A whole chapter of cultural history! Well, I will only comment on the following: in order to study history one must have a sense for what can be called symptomatology; that is, much of what is taken today as history can be considered only a symptom for what lies much deeper, that is, the spiritual stream carrying these symptoms. Thus what resides in the depths of the development of humanity is also symptomatic or comes to expression in this or that disease of an era. It is interesting to study the relationships between what works in the depths of the evolution of humanity and what takes its course in the symptoms of this or that disease. The existence of certain diseases may point to impulses in historical development that could elude a symptomatology not applying such a method.

This question, however, could lead to something else, which is "˜also not unessential when one pursues the history of humanity. Diseases, regardless of whether they occur in a single person or in a society by way of an epidemic, are in many instances also reactions to other excesses. From the point of view of public health, these other excesses may be taken as much less serious; from a moral or spiritual point of view, however, they are nevertheless considered to be very serious. But you must not apply what I just said to the question of healing or hygiene, for that would be very wrong. Diseases must be healed. In hygiene, it is important to be active in furthering or helping the human being. One may not say, "I will first see whether it may be your karma to have this illness. If so, I must let you have this illness; if not, then I can cure it." This way of looking at the issue is not valid if one is concerned with healing. What may not be valid regarding our intervention in the case of helping another human being, however, may nevertheless be objectively valid in the world outside. And there it must be said that much of what develops as a disposition to moral excesses engraves itself so deeply into the organization of the human being that reactions then appear in certain diseases and that the disease is the suppression of a moral excess.

In the individual person it is not of much significance to pursue these things, because the individual ought to be allowed to go through his individual destiny, and one really ought not to meddle in this, just as one doesn't meddle with the personal mail of other persons, unless, from the viewpoint that is so close at hand, it is "opened by government decree in times of war." Just as little as one ought to snoop into other people's personal mail, so little ought one to meddle with another person's individual karma. With the history of the world it is a different matter, however; there one ought to be concerned, because there the individual human being plays, you could say, only a statistical role. One must always point out that statistics are very helpful in letting life insurance companies know what the mortality rate is according to which they can determine their rates. These things are quite accurate. The calculations are correct and everything is very scientific. But one needn't simply die at the moment that has been specified by statistics; one also needn't live as long as has been calculated. Other issues arise when the individual human being comes into consideration. If groups of human beings, or even the whole historical development, come into consideration, however, it can be very helpful not to be superstitious but rather to be very scientific. If one studies to what extent symptoms of an illness occur that are corrective for other excesses, then one can, in fact, already look for certain repercussions of the illness or at least a calling forth by the illness of something that would have occurred in a completely different form if the disease had not arisen.

These are only a few indications of how something might be considered that is touched on by this question.

Now, however, our time has progressed so far that we will follow the others who have already left us.

• 1. In German, these illnesses are called Seelen-oder Geisteskrankheiten, diseases of the soul or spirit as opposed to diseases of the body. As Steiner is speaking here of the role of soul and spirit in bodily phenomena, it may be helpful to keep in mind the thought of soul-spiritual illnesses, though in the translation we have chosen the more commonly used English equivalents, psychological and mental illnesses.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner is referring here to a number of lectures given by various scientists during the medical course at the Goetheanum in Dornach.
• 3. Karl Marx (1818-1883); Franz Oppenheimer (1864-1944), an economist.
• 4. Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Science and Medicine, 20 lectures given in Dornach, 1920, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1975.
• 5. Rudolf Steiner, The Study of Man, lectures given at the founding of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, 1919; Rudolf Steiner Press, London, reprinted 1981.
• 6. See chapter five in Rudolf Steiner's An Outline of Occult Science, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., reprinted 1984.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, The Threefold Social Order, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y.
• 8. Moriz Benedikt (1835-1920), professor of neuropathology at the University of Vienna; founder of criminal anthropology.
• 9. Carl Georg Lange (1834-1900), professor of pathology in Copenhagen.
• 10. Rudolf Steiner, Von Seelenrätseln, 1917; excerpts of this are published in English under the title, The Case for Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner Press London, 1970.

Dear Attendees!

Unlike in previous years when I had the honor of speaking here in this city about subjects of spiritual science, last year I did not venture to speak about a subject of spiritual science in the strict sense, but rather about something that is connected with the spiritual development of the German people, who are currently facing one of the most significant events in world history, with world-historical facts that have no equal in the entire developmental history of modern times. And so, honored attendees, may this evening's reflection also be dedicated to such a topic, the reflection of a certain current in German intellectual life, which I believe, however, not out of a vague feeling, but out of real spiritual-scientific conviction that it contains, in the most essential, in the very most essential sense, German intellectual development, the seeds of that spiritual science as it was always meant, when I was allowed to speak about it here in earlier years.

This spiritual science wants, in the best sense of the word, to be a real science, a real, genuine continuation of the scientific world view that has emerged over the past three to four hundred years in the development of humanity. As a spiritual science, it aims to penetrate into the spiritual realm of the world, just as natural science methodically penetrates into the external world through the external senses and through the mind bound to the external senses, into the mind bound to the external senses and its observations, and into the external senses and their observations.

However, spiritual science requires a certain development of the human soul for its research. It is necessary for this research that what can lead to it is first developed from the human soul. To a certain extent - to apply Goethe's often-used words again today - the spiritual eyes and ears that slumber in man himself must first be awakened from the human soul so that he can look and listen into the spiritual world.

Now, however, it might seem from the outset, esteemed attendees, as if, when speaking of science - and that is the opinion of some; some think that one has no right to speak of anything other than such a thing that belongs to all nations. In certain circles, there is the opinion that one is already thinking unscientifically if one allows oneself the opinion that even that which is the scientific study of the world has its origins in the essence of folklore. However, as superficial as this opinion may be, it is superficial when it comes to the deeper objects of spiritual science.

The moon is also common to all peoples of the earth, but how the thoughts and feelings that the individual peoples have attached to the experiences of the moon differ. One could indeed say: that may relate to poetry. But when it comes to penetrating the deeper secrets of the world, then the different predispositions that exist in different ways in the individual peoples speak. And according to these different predispositions, people penetrate more or less deeply into the secrets of existence.

The German does not need to resort to the clay when speaking of the significance and value of the German national character for the development of the world and humanity, as the opponents of Central Europe are currently doing, using our fateful time not only to vilify the German character in the most hateful way possible, but to downright slander it. The German can quite appropriately penetrate into that which has emerged in the course of his intellectual development. And it will be shown that this appropriate consideration leads precisely to placing German essence, German intellectual life, in the right place in the world development of humanity, not through self-assured arrogance, but by letting the facts speak.

When we consider the events that affect us all so deeply today, that claim so many, so many victims from humanity, that fill us with so much definite hope and confidence, when we consider these events, then there is really only one fact that needs to be mentioned – to strike a chord that will resonate again and again in the future history of humanity: Today, around Central Europe, 777 million people stand, in a row, 150 million hostile. The 777 million people have no reason to envy the size of the land on which the other 150 million live in Central Europe; the people of the so-called Entente live on 68 million square kilometers, and the people of Central Europe live on only 6 million square kilometers!

But leading personalities in particular have repeatedly managed, out of the 777 million, to insult and defame even the best and highest intellectual products of the 150 million.

It is therefore particularly appropriate for the German to reflect on his intellectual life in such a way that it may appear to him as rooted in the actual germinating power of his nationality.

And so, esteemed attendees, we are repeatedly and again and again, although this should only be mentioned in the introduction today, repeatedly and again and again referred to the three great figures within the German world view development, which today, unfortunately, may say, unfortunately, no longer considered in the right, deep way, but whose essence nevertheless lives on to this day, and whose essence wants to rise again, [whose essence] must belong to the best impact forces of German spiritual culture in the future. Three figures are pointed out: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, those personalities in the development of the German world view who tried to lift the German people in time onto the scene of the development of thought, of the highest, purest development of thought, in the time when, from the depths of this national life, such minds as Lessing, Herder, Goethe, Schiller and all the others who belong to them have worked so that what has come from them after the Greek intellectual blossoming of humanity means a time of the highest intellectual blossoming of humanity for anyone who is unbiased.

And how does Johann Gottlieb Fichte appear in the mind's eye of the human being? That which lived in his soul as feeling made his world view appear to him, who can be called one of the most German of men, as something that he had attained by having something directly in his lonely soul life, something like a kind of dialogue with the German national spirit itself.

This mood of the soul emerged when he delivered his powerful “Discourses to the German Nation,” which sought to reveal all the power and developmental possibilities of German nationality in order to give impetus to the further development of “Germanness,” as Fichte himself put it.

But what is the essence of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's endeavors? It can be said that everything that has been striven for in the best sense from the center of the German soul for centuries appears again in Fichte in the most powerful way. Thus it is that Fichte wanted to gain a well-illuminated world view, an energetic understanding of the world through this. What Fichte strove for was to delve into the human soul, to inwardly experience its deepest powers, to experience them in such a way that in this experience he also experiences what the world as a whole is living through and working through as a spiritual, world-creating entity. [What Fichte strove for was to] experience the spiritual, world-creating essence in one's own soul in such a way that, by unfolding one's own soul powers, one experiences what works and lives and dwells in the innermost part of the world. That was what Fichte wanted: to experience the spirit of the world by making it present in one's own soul.

That was for him the true meaning of the word “knowledge”. That was for him also the content of all truth worth striving for by man – the truth that for him was the direct expression of the divine spirituality that lives through the world, that knowledge, as truth, permeates the human soul so that this human soul can grasp it in an inward, powerful experience. But through this, Fichte felt as if the whole world were pulsating and alive and interwoven with the will of the world, with the divine will of the world.

And as man grasps himself in his innermost being, as he becomes in the truest sense an I-conscious being, an imprint arises within this I, a revelation of the world-will pulsating through the world, which is completely imbued of what Fichte calls the “duties”; those duties that could never reveal themselves to one from a merely material world, that penetrate from the world of the spiritual into the human soul, [which] grasp the will of humanity; so that for Fichte, the external sensual, material world becomes that which, like the material-physical, expands before us, in order to be able to live out the dutiful will and the will-imbued duty in anything.

Not that Fichte diverted his approach from the external sense world, not as if he wanted to escape into a one-sided world free of the senses! It is not like that; but it is the case that everything that the eyes can see externally, that the hands can grasp, for Fichte became the tool, the means of the spirit, so that the spirit could present itself, [so that] the spirit, -the spirit permeated by duty, the duty that man can grasp in his soul, can be represented by an external materiality: a world view that Fichte himself, in the very sense of the word, regards as a world view.

One may say, esteemed attendees, while remaining entirely objective: Nothing stands in such contrast to another as this Fichtean world view stands, say, to the world view born of the spirit of the French Romance language, as it was outlined by one of the greatest French philosophers, Cartesius or Descartes, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as an embodiment of the French spirit itself – a philosophical embodiment. Descartes, the Frenchman, the Frenchman who, like Fichte from the Germanic, so from the French national character draws and creates, Descartes starts from the fact that man feels himself a stranger to the outer world, that man must start from doubt in his soul. There can be no doubt for Fichte in the sense that Descartes means it, for his knowledge is an immediate co-experience of that which lives and breathes through the world. Fichte does not place himself outside of the spirit of the world by knowing, but inwardly seeks to unite with the spirit.

Descartes, on the other hand, stands before the world as mere observation, as external observation. What kind of world view emerges from this? One need only mention one thing that appears as a consequence of the French Descartesian world view. As I said, it is really not necessary to develop national biases, but one can remain objective when saying this. What is one consequence of Descartes' view of the world? Well, it is enough to mention that Descartes, in his striving, which also emanates from self-awareness, but from mere rational, intellectual self-awareness, not from the living inner life, like Fichte's self-awareness, this Descartes' view of the world imagines the world as a large machine, as a powerful mechanism. And for Descartes, animals themselves are moving machines, inanimate, moving machines.

Everything that developed as a mechanism in later times, as a mechanistic world view, which also took hold in other nations from France, basically leads back to this starting point of Descartes.

You only have to consider the contrast: On the one hand, the Roman philosopher who turns the world into a machine; on the other hand, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who wants to pour out the soul itself over the whole world from the German folk tradition, so that this soul can experience everything soulful, everything in the world that is pulsating with will – and one has expressed something important about the relationship of the German folk spirit to its western neighbor.

This Descartesian worldview then produced, I might say, one materialistic outgrowth after another. We see how, at the end of the eighteenth century, the worldview that Goethe encountered from France emerged, and of which Goethe, from his German consciousness, said: Oh, how bleak, how desolate! And then the philosopher shows us atoms moving, colliding, pushing each other – a mere mechanism! And all this is supposed to explain the rich abundance of the world in which we live?

It is fair to say – again, entirely objectively: From the abundance and vibrancy of the German mind, Goethe turned away from this merely mechanistic world view, which then, in de La Mettrie's “Man a Machine” at the end of the eighteenth century, had a flowering that of all those who want to build a worldview based on superficial vanity, on that vanity that would be quite satisfied if there were no human soul, but if, like a phonograph, the human mechanical thinking apparatus purred away what man has to say about the world. And well into the nineteenth century, this worldview continued to unfold.

We see it in [gap in transcript], but we also see it in a spirit like – yes, it is still not called French today, but is still called Bergson – like in Bergson, who has found the most shameful thing, again and again, to defame and slander that which wells up from the German soul as a world view. One would like to say: Because he can see nothing else in a world picture that is alive, that is filled with inner life, he believes he can defame it, defames this German world picture as such, which shows - as he repeatedly says in his writings – how the German, from his lofty position at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, has descended and degenerated completely into a mechanistic world mechanism.

It is a pity that this so celebrated Bergson not only drew a picture of the world - I have explained it in detail, not only in my book “The Riddles of Philosophy”, written before the war - but not only drew a picture of the world that was much more powerful, much more forceful, by a German mind, Preuss, who is rarely mentioned and little known, the German thinker, thinker, for example in his book “Spirit and Matter” 1882 [is presented] - of which Bergson either knows nothing, which is an equally big mistake, or does not want to know anything - but not only this, but it has also been shown that entire pages in the so-praised writings of Bergson are simply copied from Schelling or from Schopenhauer! – That is one way of relating to the intellectual life of Central Europe!

This intellectual life is contrasted with that of Fichte, an intellectual life that does not want to understand the world as dead, but that wants to understand the world as a spiritual-living entity, down to the smallest parts, and for which knowledge is nothing other than the experience of this spiritual vitality of the world. Just as with the French conception of the world, Fichte, with his energetic grasp of the human ego, in which he wants to experience the world, stands in contrast to the English conception of the world, that English conception of the world that took its starting point from Baco of Verul am, and which, one might say, has found its repulsive sides, its repulsive one-sidedness, precisely in the most recent world view that English intellectual life has produced in so-called pragmatism – in Baco von Verulam. As Goethe, for example, very profoundly remarks, one sees everywhere how [Baco von Verulam] actually regards the spiritual life in such a way that what otherwise [lives] in the human spirit as truth is actually only there to summarize and form the diversity of the external materials and forces of the world, which can be seen with the eyes and grasped with the hands, and to again disassemble them and the like. A means of dominating the external physical world is philosophy, based on Baco von Verulam, basically everything that could be called philosophy. And up to our days, this meaning has been preserved.

What actually appears as pragmatism? Within English intellectual life, something highly peculiar appears as pragmatism – Schiller, James and other representatives of this pragmatism. For these representatives of pragmatism, for these pragmatists, truth is not something that man experiences inwardly like an image of gods or spirits, something that – as in the Fichte in the sense of Fichte, enters the human soul from the spirit that pulsates, lives and weaves through the world, but in the sense of this pragmatism, truth is actually only something that man thinks up in order to have a direction in the multiplicity of external phenomena.

For example, the soul - this concept of “soul”, this unified concept of soul - you cannot see the soul: What is it then for pragmatism? For pragmatism, the unifying concept of soul, the unifying concept of the ego, of self-awareness, is nothing more than a means of holding together the manifoldness of the soul life and its expressions in the body, so that they do not fall apart in contemplation; so that one has, as it were, brackets and bindings. Concepts are created for the external material. How far removed this is from Fichte's world view, drawn from the depths of the soul, for which spirit is the most original of the world and reality, the spirit that flows into the individual human soul life. And by feeling this influx, man knows himself one with the spirit of the world. And then the external world becomes, as Fichte put it, a field for the spirit to unfold in. Exactly the opposite!

Here with Fichte: the spirit is supreme, the actual reality, the highest living thing, for the sake of which the external world of the senses exists, so that the spirit can find its means of expression in it. There: the mind is capable of nothing more than creating binders and clamps in its concepts and ideas, so that it - which is the main thing - can place these concepts in the service of external material reality, and can ultimately find itself in external material reality.

It is indeed necessary, most honored attendees, to consider the interrelations in this very light. Only through this does the German come to a real, enlightened realization of what is actually taking place in the depths of his people.

Then, in one of the most difficult times in German development, Fichte tried to express what emerged to him as a power of consciousness from this soul power, which was connected to his inner life of will, in order to inspire, to strengthen, to invigorate his people. He did this in his “Addresses to the German Nation” to the German Nation» that the true man of world-view does not merely live in unworldly contemplation, but that these contemplations can intervene directly in that which the time demands and what mankind – I would like to say – [in fact] needs in order to be strengthened and invigorated in soul.

And at the appropriate moment, a second personality appears before us alongside Fichte – the second personality who tried no less to grasp the innermost part of the world with his own soul. These spirits sought to grasp the whole, great world spirit with their own souls, investing their entire personality.

In the case of Fichte, I probably only needed to tell you a few details of his life so that you could see how truly what he experienced – I would say – on the icy heights of thought, but which were permeated by pure human warmth in his case, was connected to his personality, to his immediate human being. A picture of the very young Fichte: he is a good student, already devoting himself to his duties at school as a six- or seven-year-old. His father rewards the young boy by giving him the book 'The Horned Siegfried' for Christmas when he is seven. Fichte, the young Fichte, the boy, is completely gripped by what comes to life through the human personality that is in a soul like that of “Gehörnte Siegfried”! And so it turns out that he now needs to be admonished because he is no longer as diligent at school as he was before. One day we see the boy in his blue farmer's smock; he is standing by the stream that flows past his father's house: suddenly he throws the “Gehörnte Siegfried”, which he was holding in his hand, into the water, and he stands there crying and watches as the book floats away in the waves. His father arrives and is initially indignant that his little boy has thrown the book he had given him into the water. Then he has to learn that in this case what Fichte later made the actual core of his philosophical work – the dutiful will – that this dutiful will already lived in the boy Fichte in such a way that he could not bear, by the distracted attention to the “Horned Siegfried”, no longer fulfill his duty as a learner! And everything he experienced as a boy was probably already connected with the innermost workings and nature of his soul.

And once, when Fichte was nine years old, the estate neighbor from the neighboring village came to Fichte's place of residence. He wanted to hear the sermon; but he was too late. He could no longer hear the pastor preach; the church bells had already rung. So it was suggested that the nine-year-old boy could retell the content of the sermon to the estate neighbor. And they sent for him. Young Fichte entered in his blue peasant's smock; and after he had behaved somewhat awkwardly at first, he approached the public figure and developed the thoughts that he had taken in from the sermon with such intimacy that it was clear: he had not only taken something in externally, but had united with his whole soul what he had listened to.

Thus it was that this personality – one might say – that, if I may use the trivial word, it always absorbed everything that affected it with the whole person, out of its own genius, so effectively that everything that came from this person, on the one hand, bore the deepest human character, and on the other hand, rose again to the highest heights of world-historical contemplation.

One beautiful trait of this most German of German thinkers, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, must be emphasized again and again: when Fichte later spoke to his audience as a professor, he did not want to speak like someone else who simply conveyed the content of what he had conquered to his listeners. Someone who knew Fichte well and had often heard him speak said that his words rushed forth like a thunderstorm that discharges in individual sparks; [and he said] that he not only wanted to produce good people, but great people.

And in such a way was also the work-you can not say-set up, the work of this German, because in the thoughts of this German thinker lived something in this lecture, which was much more than presented: He wanted, by mounting the lectern, to carry something up to this lectern, which flowed as a living entity from him into flowed from him into the audience, so that the audience, if they listened attentively and left the lecture hall, took with them not only a content, not only a teaching, but something that was more in their soul than what they had brought into the lecture hall, something that seized their whole humanity, permeated it, inspired it! And truly, Fichte knew how to work in this way, to penetrate so directly to the center of the human soul, that he wanted to bring his listeners, these listeners, in direct contact with his listeners, to revive in themselves what really connected them – one might say – immediately connected them to what the soul could experience of the spiritual that flows and permeates the world.

So, for example, he once said to his listeners: “Imagine the wall.” The listeners turned their eyes to the wall and thought, “That would be easy.” After he had let them think about the wall for a while, he said, “So, now imagine the one who imagined the wall!” At first they were amazed. But now a way had been found to win the hearts and minds of the audience directly for the realization of the secrets of the world, as they can play out in the human soul.

And so, with his whole personality directly immersed in the life of knowledge, was also Johann Wilhelm Schelling, of whom those who saw him – and I certainly knew such people! – who saw and heard him – not only read his books and knew what was in his books – thus they said that something emerged from his sparkling eyes that was like the gaze of knowledge itself!

Schelling, too, wanted to experience directly in his own soul what lives in nature as spirit. For him, the soul was only something like the outer face of a spirit that lives and weaves through the world. And as the human soul approaches nature, it recognizes in nature what it itself is as spirit and soul.

Spirit flows through the world. It forms an external impression by crystallizing nature around itself. In this way, it creates the ground for the spirit itself to appear in the human soul on this ground. Therefore, for Schelling, the spirit of nature and the spirit of soul grew together into a unity. And with such a view, he knew how to rise to wonderful possibilities. He only penetrated them in seemingly dry concepts – incidentally, in concepts and ideas that sometimes rose to the most tremendous, most alert, intuitive glow. He only spoke in seemingly dry terms about nature and about how one can be in harmony with nature and the spiritual world, and how the concepts arise from nature and how one can be in harmony in cognition.

Once he said the word, the word that was certainly one-sided: To recognize nature is to create nature. - Certainly, a one-sided word; one can only recreate nature in the act of recognizing it. But Schelling felt such a close kinship between what takes place in the human soul and what takes place in nature that he could imagine himself to be living as if he were creating natural forces when he believed that the right cognitive drives had been released in the soul. And so, on the one hand, the human form appears to Schelling as the highest natural expression of the natural forces of the spirit and soul, and on the other hand, art [...] that which is the human expression of spiritual striving.

One would like to say: Schelling feels the highest as two halves that only complement each other: what the artist is able to create in art, on the one hand; the human form, on the other hand, as the crown and blossom of nature. And so we see how Schelling developed a world view that is entirely born out of – indeed, itself appears like a rebirth – the rebirth of the human mind. The German mind itself has become the organ of vision in Schelling, to see in nature and in intellectual life that which speaks to the human mind as external sensory objects speak to the human eyes and ears.

But as a result, Schelling has become the one for the German spiritual development who could raise to an enormous height that which, as a spiritual world, could inspire from the Romance world view, for example, Giordano Bruno, but only inspire. How passionately born out of the [Italian] world-feeling the world-picture of Giordano Bruno appears, if we compare it with the world-picture—with the calm world-picture reborn out of the German soul—of Schelling.

And the third is Hegel. Hegel, the third, the philosopher of the Germans who, I might say, lived in the most intimate union with the Goethean Weltanschauung; Hegel, who, I might say, sought on the third of the paths that were possible from the German folk, on the third of the paths to lead the soul to the place where it can directly grasp the spiritual activity and weaving and essence of the world.

In Johann Gottlieb Fichte, it is the will that pulses through the soul and creates expression in duty; in Schelling, it is the feeling, the innermost part of the soul, while a natural will takes hold of it and gives it birth; in Hegel, it is the life of thought - the life of thought that is felt by Hegel in such a way that, as the thoughts that he lets pass through his soul are moved and experienced by this soul, they appear directly as thoughts of the divine-spiritual life of the world itself, which permeates all spaces and all times. So that man, by letting his thoughts live in himself, free from sensuality and without being influenced by the outside world, has the divine-spiritual thinking of the world simultaneously living and revealing itself in him through this experience of thought. Admittedly, this is how Hegel became a spirit who created a world view as if the whole world were built only out of logic – which is one-sided. But he added to what Fichte and Schelling had offered, the third sound from German folk tradition.

It may be said that what makes Hegel appear particularly as a German spirit is that, unlike Descartes, for example - Rosenkranz, a faithful disciple of Hegel, wrote the fine book “Hegel as a German National Philosopher” - what makes Hegel particularly German spirit, is that, unlike Descartes, who also bases everything on thinking but only arrives at a mechanistic view of the world, he does not experience thinking as if thinking were something that arises in the soul and is alien to existence, but rather: the spirit, the world spirit itself thinks itself in man. The world spirit itself sees itself through thinking in man. In his thinking, Hegel feels interwoven with the thoughts of the world spirit.

One can also say that Descartes' one-sided, naked view of the world is given life – if only as a thought – in Hegel's view of the world.

Today, ladies and gentlemen, there is no need to take a dogmatic stand on the views of the three men mentioned. We can go further than that today; to be a partisan or an opponent may perhaps view all that these minds have expressed as one-sided. There is no need to take a dogmatic stand on them; they can be seen as an extension of what lives and weaves in German national character. They are something that has emerged from the flowering of German intellectual life, which will certainly change in many ways over time as it continues to flourish and bear fruit, but which can provide the deepest and most significant insights for anyone striving for spiritual knowledge of the world because a spiritual world knowledge must arise from such a germ within German intellectual life, as was striven for by Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and basically arose out of the spirit of Goethe.

What is peculiar about these three personalities is that they basically express three sides, three different shades of something that hovers invisibly over them, that was the common expression of the highest peak of German intellectual life at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, and that in Goethe and others the great fruits emerge in such a way that one always starts not to seek a knowledge of the world in such a way that one simply applies man as he stands in his powers, but that one first tries to awaken the human powers of knowledge that lie deeply dormant in the depths of the soul, and with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear - as I said, these are Goethe's words - then wants to look out into the world and life with the opened spiritual eye and spiritual ear.

This is how Goethe did it. That is why Goethe, following Kant, speaks of an intuitive power of judgment, which he ascribed to himself. And truly, from this intuitive power of judgment emerged the blossoms of Goethe's achievements. “Intuitive power of judgment” - what does Goethe mean? The ordinary power of judgment lives in human concepts. With this power of judgment, man faces things, he faces nature; he looks at it with his senses; with his mind he judges what he has seen with his senses. Goethe says to himself: If one can see the spiritual through the power of judgment, just as the eyes see the sensual, then one lives and moves in the spiritual. - And so Goethe wanted to look at plants and animals, so he wanted to look at human life. And so he observed it! And so he even wanted to be active in the field of physics.

There one comes upon a chapter in which it is clearly shown how German folk-life must express something different about the external facts of physical life than, for example, English folk-life. The time has not yet come, however, to see the connections in this area.

For more than thirty years now, I myself have endeavored – I may say this without immodesty, because it is simply a fact – to show what Goethe actually wanted, from a spiritual view of nature, from an judgment, as [he opposed his] theory of colors to Newton's color theory, which is based on atomism and mechanism, as a theory of life.

Today, physics cannot yet understand this. But once German culture in the spiritual realm truly reflects on itself, one will understand how the German spirit in Goethe had to rebel against Newton's purely mechanical scientific view in the field of color theory as well.

And the chapter “Goethe versus Newton” – by that I mean German science versus the mechanical utilitarian English science. This chapter will reappear. And perhaps it is precisely such a chapter that will show the relationship of the German soul in its depth and in its deeper contemplation of knowledge to the other judgments of Europe's striving for knowledge.

And what place the German national soul has come to occupy in the overall development of German intellectual life is only one particular, special aspect; but this particular, this single, special aspect is the expression of the general that lived in the Goethe , and that lives on into our days, albeit – I would like to say – under the stream of consciousness, but nevertheless clearly in all deeper recognition of the spiritual in the German: to seek the spiritual organ of knowledge.

Fichte called it a “higher spiritual sense” when he spoke to his Berlin students from 1811 to 1813. Schelling called it “intellectual intuition.” To arrive at a higher organ of spiritual knowledge – which is uncomfortable, and which a philosophy based merely on utility or mechanism, like the Romance or British philosophy, cannot achieve – to create an organ of knowledge organ that is built out of the spirit and can therefore look into the spirit; [that] does not see the spirit in abstract, dry, empty theoretical concepts, but grasps it as fully as the outer senses grasp the world of the senses.

And because such striving was so powerfully alive in the development of the German spirit, it was possible that even lesser minds that followed the time of Goethe were seized and imbued with what had germinated and sprouted in the great age of German life that has just been discussed, and that these lesser minds could even create something that is more similar to the paths that are actually the real paths to grasp the world spiritual as a human spirit in a living way, to get something that is even more similar to this real path than what appeared in Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. Because there is so much that is fruitful in this Fichte-Schelling-Hegel worldview, it could have such a fertilizing effect even on lesser minds, who - let us say - like Fichte's son, Immanuel Hermann Fichte, come to recognize how in what sensually to man as a human-like form – also as a sensual animal form, but there it does not have the same meaning – what lives in the sensual human form as in a finer bodily organization in a coarser bodily organization, as we say in spiritual science: an etheric body alongside the coarse physical body; and how in this etheric body [work] the great cosmic forces that give birth to man out of the eternal, just as the physical forces give birth to him physically out of the physical. That is to say, Hermann Immanuel Fichte is already seeking a way to directly access the external physical, not only through thoughts, not only through abstractions, but by directly grasping in a higher, spiritual-sensual way that lies beyond birth and death in man.

And then we see a remarkable spirit, little known, who also walks this path, undoubtedly not as ingeniously and magnificently conceived as Schelling and Fichte, for example, but advancing further along the actual spiritual-scientific path than they, because he was allowed to live after them. Although he wrote his wonderful book “Glimpses into the Essence of Man” in 1811, we can still say that Troxler – for that is who we mean – is one of those who are truly at home in a forgotten chapter of German intellectual life. Because he lived later, Troxler was able to find true paths into the spiritual world when even his greater – greater than he – his greater predecessors could not.

It is remarkable that Troxler, when he presented his “[Lectures] on Philosophy” in 1835, spoke of the fact that man can develop something in his soul if he only wants to, something that relates to the purely intellectual view of the world, which works in theoretical concepts and, so to speak, only collects individual concepts from observation, how something could develop in the human soul, which he calls Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler, an “super-spiritual sense”. “Supra-spiritual sense” - that is a soul power that Troxler refers to as [one that] can only be developed in man, and which does not, I would say, merely grasp things conceptually, not so abstractly as ordinary abstract cognition, but which grasps things so fully, so fully, that they , like the spirit itself, before man; that man thereby beholds a spiritual world, which is not exhausted in concepts, like even Hegel's, but which sees spiritual reality as the senses see sensual reality, so that the world is truly enriched by a new element of its being, by the spiritual. But the spiritual consists of concrete, fully developed entities that stand side by side and interact with each other in such a way that they can be grasped by the senses.

“Supra-sensible meaning” is one soul force. Troxler speaks of the other as the “supra-sensible spirit”. So that one must see in it that which can be developed in the human soul as a special power, so that the soul comes to go beyond the ordinary sensual, and yet not to fall into spiritual emptiness, as for example the mechanical natural science, but [that one comes to a] being filled by the spirit.

“Supersensible spirit”, “superspiritual sense” - for Troxler, these are two faculties in the human soul. He speaks of this in 1835; and one can receive an enormously significant stimulus for that which one can call knowledge of the spirit from these Troxler lectures, which consciously emerged from the depths of German nationality. For it is this German nationality that encourages us not to look at the world merely from the outside, but to really feel again and again, in what the soul can experience most intimately, the flooding through of the soul-spiritual being of the human being and of the whole world itself. Thus this German national character is called upon to develop something that otherwise could not have occurred within a national character in the course of time.

Now let us see how strangely - even if one characterizes quite one-sidedly that which is really in the sense of this national character - can be expressed, and what can be proved about these characterized spirits, let us look at what it is. We must say that we also see mysticism within the spiritual development of France and England, but this mysticism exists alongside other forms of science. It is either condemned to lead a sectarian existence alongside other forms of science or to close itself off as a special spiritual current.

German intellectual life, by rising to something like what Schelling, Hegel, Fichte, Troxler, Immanuel Hermann Fichte have achieved, shows that one can, in the fullest sense can remain in the fullest sense of the word in a scientific spirit and can work precisely out of a scientific spirit, and that which is to be achieved through mysticism, for example, does not stand alongside this scientific current, but can be directly and organically connected to it and can emerge from it.

Therefore, we see how, for example, in Hegel there arises something that lives in the purest clarity of thought – even if many dispute it, it is still so – but there is nothing in the purest clarity of thought that might be just a nebulous mysticism of feeling or what would be a mystic prattling about all kinds of things, but what, with crystal-clear thoughts, at the same time wants to grasp the thinking of the world mystically in its own thinking: we find thought-like mysticism - if the word may be used - in Hegel. And we find this intellectual mysticism spiritualized — because the life of thought is inwardly illuminated by the supersensible spirit, by the supra-spiritual meaning — in such personalities as, for example, Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler.

It is interesting to see how Troxler endeavors to reveal what should lead to a world view from the forces of the soul, how what man knows reveals itself from what actually stands behind what man has in ordinary everyday life for the maintenance and orientation of his life. In Troxler's view, man has faith - faith, which, in the realm of religious belief, supports humanity's highest spiritual supports, but which also plays a major role in other areas of human life: faith. Man has this faith in his soul life. I am not just repeating Troxler's words, but speaking as one would have to think if one took in what Troxler said and developed it a little further. This power of belief is something that the outer physical body must have, something that can be grasped by the soul just as it arises directly in the soul, even without the development of higher cognitive powers. But behind this belief lives, hidden in the soul, [a higher organ of knowledge, so that belief is, as it were, for ordinary daily life, the living out of this higher organ of knowledge. Troxler calls what lives behind faith: spiritual hearing, the supersensible, spiritual hearing. So that in Troxler's sense, faith is to be imagined as the beautiful that flows in from an unconscious or subconscious spiritual part of the soul, which drives faith to the surface. But if it is developed itself, it becomes a spiritual ear that would become hearing in the spiritual world. Spiritual hearing means perceiving in the same way as the sensory ear perceives external sounds that live in the air.

Love, a soul power, which we again find as if born out of the soul-spiritual, the most beautiful power of outer human life, love – behind it stands for Troxler – I would like to say: for Troxler's pious mind – a spiritual, a soul power of knowledge. He calls it “soul feeling”, “soul sensing”.

Thus faith is, as it were, the outer expression, the outer image of what lives in the full soul as hearing. Thus love is the outer fruit of what lives in the inner soul as spiritual sensing, as spiritual feeling.

For Troxler, hope is the outer expression of that which lives in the soul as a higher soul power, as a higher soul sense, as a super-spiritual sense in the soul as an inner spiritual eye.

It is a wonderful image, but one that is not born out of fantasy alone, but is based on real facts of the soul life that everyone can develop within themselves. A wonderful image. There stands man within the physical and the spiritual world. There he develops, in relation to what flows through the world as the Divine-Spiritual, and in relation to what flows towards him from people and other beings: faith, hope, love. He develops them because, when he carries within him that which can stand free of the body in relation to the spiritual world, because he carries within him that which hears spiritually, feels spiritually and can see spiritually. And because the human being, that which he is in his soul, has been shrouded for the time between death – or, let us say, until birth with the bodily covering – that which connects him through spiritual hearing to the world-tone harmony , with the spiritual harmony of the world, which connects him to the world, which through grace leans towards him from the spiritual, through spiritual groping, which connects with him through spiritual vision, which wraps itself for him in faith, love, hope. [And so the soul forces that confront us in everyday life and in ordinary soul education are, for Troxler, an expression of a spiritual life that slumbers down there in the soul, that weaves and lives, and that, when developed, can enter into a direct connection with the spiritual-soul life of the whole world that flows around us. In this, the Troxler feels so at home in this, one can say, temporarily forgotten link in German thought and spiritual development.

Beautifully, wonderfully, he expresses this feeling of being at home by expressing himself in connection with other spirits who have striven for something similar. He says:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body [or assumed a kind of shell for the spirit in this], a soul that had an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the inner, higher human being for them. This view, even if it is only an explanation, was also held by most of the first great church fathers, such as Origen, Irenaeus, Lactantius, Tertullian, and Augustine. In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously jokes about an entire, inward, spiritual man who wears all the limbs of the outward man on his spirit body. Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way; and even when Jean Paul humorously jokes about the Bonnese under-skirt and the Platner-esque soul-corset, which are said to be hidden in the coarser body rock and martyr's robe, we still hear him asking, “What is the use and origin of these extraordinary talents and desires within us, which, like swallowed diamonds, slowly cut our earthy shell? [Why was I stuck to the dirty lump of earth, a creature with useless wings of light, when I should rot back into the birth clod without ever wriggling free with ethereal wings.] “The inner man,” he even says in another place, “this ‘veiled God in nature, is not himself of stone, like these.] In the stony limbs’

of man

“grow and mature according to a way of life unknown to us. We could”

"we could cite a myriad more similar ways of thinking and writing, which in the end are only different views and ideas in which [the one Evangelical Apostolic idea, which Paul revealed to the Corinthians, , saying: “A body animated by the soul is sunk, and a body animated by the spirit rises, for as there is a body endowed with a soul, so there is also a body endowed with a spirit.” And in this is] contained the true, only doctrine of the individuality and immortality of man.

Troxler wanted a science that approached the world from all the powers of human nature, not just from the intellect and the ordinary, so-called powers of knowledge, but - but a science, a knowledge that the whole personality contributes to the world, so that in turn the whole human personality, the whole human being, can recreate or relive the world within itself. Not only in poetry, Troxler believes, but also in real knowledge it must become so. Therefore Troxler says the beautiful words in 1835:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the newest philosophy, which [we have long since recognized as the one that founds all living religion and] must reveal itself in every instance of anthroposophy, thus in poetry as well as in history,] is now rising, it cannot be be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true personality or individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it confronts with it as absolute spirit or absolute personality."

Thus, Troxler is faced with the idea of an anthroposophy, as he calls it, an anthroposophy that is not, like anthropology, the study of that which can be observed externally in man with the senses and with the mind from which these senses seem to be drawn, but a higher kind of anthropology ology stands before Troxler's eyes, before Troxler's spiritual eye, which wants to develop an organ in man that is basically only the higher man in man, who then, to use this Goethean expression, directly recognizes and experiences that which is also higher than all nature: the higher nature in nature.

Then, when the whole personality presents itself to the world as a cognitive organ, as a super-spiritual sense organ, as a supersensible spiritual organ – as a “super-spiritual sense, as a ‘supersensible spirit’, [as a] spiritual organ, so that the world comes to life in the whole personality, then, in Troxler's view, ‘anthroposophy’ arises!

Thus, as if in a forgotten aspiration of German intellectual development, anthroposophy lives in the germ. Its blossoms and fruits will sprout from this German intellectual life if one correctly understands German intellectual life. And that they are intimately connected with this German intellectual life - I would like to say: every being, every trait of this German intellectual life shows it to us. It is the case in the world, esteemed attendees, that individual things that flourish in the development of humanity must live for a time, I would say, as if under the stream; the rest of the stream shows something else, something superficial; but under the stream, the deeper things live on. And so it is with what can now sound to us as a faded note from German intellectual life.

Or is it not wonderful, absolutely wonderful, when we see how out of this intellectual life - it was in 1858, when a pastor, a simple pastor in Sachsenberg in the Principality of Waldeck - Pastor Rocholl, published a little book - yes a truly wonderful booklet, in which he wanted to explain how the human spirit must elevate and strengthen itself in order to be able to join that which, as the spirit of the world, permeates and flows through the world. This wonderful, forgotten little book, which in the most eminent sense is, I would say, a document of the just mentioned faded tone of German spiritual life, is called: “Contributions to German Theosophy”. It was published in 1856 by a simple pastor, in whom his theosophical reflections sprouted from his piety. But it is a little book that must be said to rise to a truly wonderful height of spiritual insight and spiritual feeling about the world, even if it may often seem fantastic in relation to what spiritual science has to say today.

One need not be either a supporter or an opponent of these things, but one can simply face them by saying to oneself: they are an expression of what lives in German national culture. And so I could cite many, many more examples, especially from German intellectual life. Everywhere one would find confirmation that this striving for spiritual science is present in German intellectual life, which today has to present itself as half-forgotten – forgotten! And forgotten in such a way that it must be recognized in the course of time. It does no harm for something like this to be forgotten. Why does it do no harm?

Well, dear attendees, the secrets of the world that are in nature do not impose themselves in such a way that they do not need to be explored first! Why should we believe that the spiritual history of mankind does not also contain such secrets that need to be explored first? Why should we believe that only that which - I want to say - has come to light through the favor of the destiny of the time, that only that is the essence of the progress of humanity? In the subsoil of human development lives that which can only be found by those who come afterwards; but that is how it is in the history of ideas; it is also in the history of nature.

But basically, all these minds were more or less aware that – I have already used this image in relation to Fichte – that which lived in them and which was to lead them in their souls to the spiritual secrets of the world, that this was, so to speak, a dialogue with the German folk spirit itself.

And now let me give you another example. I would also mention the remarkable Karl Christian Planck, from whose posthumous writings the Testament of a German was published not so long ago. Karl Christian Planck, who, proceeding from a truly spiritual point of view, sought to place man in the context of the whole of existence. The time will come when such minds will be recognized, minds that have drawn from the depths of the German soul, when there will be full consciousness of the fact that in order that the German spirit may develop fully can fully develop – also in the realm of knowledge, everything foreign, which sometimes – like Newton's theory of colors – is more readily understood by the superficial human soul than the German, for the understanding of which one must first prepare.

What does the earth look like to a modern mind, which is completely sickened by the Romanesque-British-mechanistic in the scientific view, by the world view that is born entirely of the mind, which Schelling even called a mental power in 1803, what does the earth look like to such a view? Now the earth stands as revealed by external mechanical geology: mineral-mechanical.

Before Planck's soul, this lonely thinker in Germany, who had his first books published in Ulm in the 1860s, speaking out of the most genuine German essence, speaking out of the spiritual, but only being recognized by the better minds, how does the earth stand before his mind, before this consciously German mind? Like a mighty organism! Yes, not just like an organism, but like a blessed, spiritualized organism that has shaped its own spiritual-soul out of its own spirit: the human being himself! For Planck, the human being, with all that lives and moves in him, belongs to the earth. One does not fully understand the earth if one does not see man as the flower of the earth. For Planck, to regard the earth as the mere geologist does would be just as if one were to regard the plant only in its root and not to go to its flower. The earth must be regarded in such a way that the possibility of human development lives in the earth itself; that the earth bears within itself something that, out of its forces, out of its being, demands man as its flower!

Thus Planck's world view goes out into the great from its spirit. And how does he speak himself? In 1864, in his “Foundations of a Science of Nature,” he writes wonderful words about the earth:

“What power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

the author

“He is fully aware of the power of deeply rooted prejudices from the previous view of his”

that what must now first fight for its recognition will one day appear as the simplest and most self-evident truth, and that in it not only his cause, but the truly German view of things, will triumph over all still unworthy external and un-German conception of nature and spirit.

What our medieval poetry has unconsciously and profoundly foreshadowed will finally be fulfilled in our nation in the maturity of the times. The impractical inwardness of the German spirit, which has been afflicted with harm and ridicule (as Wolfram describes it in his Parsifal)

written in 1864, before Wagner's Parsifal!

“Finally, in the strength of her unceasing striving, she attains the highest; she looks into the last simple laws of things and of human existence itself; and what the poem has symbolized in a fantastically medieval way in the wonders of the Grail, the mastery of which her hero attains, that conversely receives its purely natural fulfillment and reality in the enduring knowledge of nature and of the spirit itself.”

It is important to realize that such spirits are rooted in German intellectual life. It is not very helpful to keep pointing this out, but they live unconsciously in the best minds of German intellectual life.

Karl Christian Planck – I referred to him as early as 1900 in the first edition of my Rätsel der Philosophie (Mysteries of Philosophy), which at the time was called Über Welt- und Lebensanschauungen (On World and Life Views); now again in the new edition of Rätsel der Philosophie, to show what he means within the overall development of German intellectual life. One can say, dear honored attendees, in such spirits one can grasp how the German spirit has precisely this special cognitive faculty, to let the soul-spiritual experience flow into it, to let that which weaves and lives in the secrets of the world — I would like to say — in the innermost part of nature and of the spirit.

For years, I would even say, it was not given to those who are now surrounding us like a hostile ring, to recognize this, even in its external outlines, [those who now live] on 6 million square kilometers against 68 million square kilometers [within which the German national character develops]. How often the jokes that are heard from everywhere, saturated with hatred and truly defamatory, are cheap in comparison to German intellectual life, which is hated and defamed, and in relation to which one is not aware of the position it must occupy in the world by virtue of its very own strength. One only needs to recall how Emile Boutroux, not long before the war, still traveled around Germany lecturing on the beauty of German intellectual life, on the fraternization of German and Latin intellectual life – and now he repeatedly and repeatedly brings up his so that they can hear again and again that the German spirit is averse to looking at the things of the world; this German spirit imagines that it can carry everything within itself and give birth to the whole world from its own interior.

And in one of his most recent speeches, Emile Boutroux did not disdain to take the following hateful joke into his mouth – and he apparently found listeners – to make the following joke about German intellectual life and its nature. He said: The Frenchman, when he wants to describe animals, goes to a menagerie to look at the animals and then describe them; the Englishman, when he wants to describe animals, travels around the world and describes what he can observe there; the German sits down in his study — he neither travels the world like the Englishman nor goes to the menagerie like the Frenchman — but sits in his study and draws from his own inner being, from what he can experience within himself, the image of the lion and the elephant and so on.

It's just a shame – we are accustomed to the French being a witty people, aren't we? – but it's just a shame that this joke – those who know a little about intellectual history are aware of this – was first made by Heinrich Heine, that even this joke, with which the Frenchman wants to poke fun at German intellectual life, was born on German soil!

And if you wanted to go into the joke: the German would not go to the menagerie or not to the desert, would not observe the animals outside, but would create them from his own inner being. Brehm, if you were to hold Brehm's book with his observations of apes up to such a know-nothing, such a frivolous mocker, he would slander the German people, saying that they create not through world travel but from within. [Let it be said in reply that the greatest work of world travel – which must be recognized by anyone with an open mind as the work that first scientifically discovered America – comes from von Humboldt, the German!

Where it matters to live with nature and observe nature, the German truly does not need the Romance reference. And what this remarkable Frenchman Boutroux, who has become a famous man in France through a few successful sentences, has to say about German inwardness, is truly quite far removed from what this German inwardness turns out to be when you look at it at its core, as we have tried to do today with a few words.

Now, dear attendees, if we try to hear other voices, for example, Eastern voices, the matter becomes even clearer. There one must say: in Eastern Europe, on Russian soil – not only despite the great philosopher Soloviev, but precisely because of the peculiar nature of the great philosopher Soloviev, one can say – in Eastern Europe today there can be no understanding of this peculiar relationship of the human soul to the world-pervading spiritual and living essence; but over there everything is such that there is still no understanding for the experience of the spirit pulsating and permeating the world in one's own inner soul being, that one wants everything to be met halfway, that everything should come only as a revelation, albeit a spiritual revelation from outside. Thus, even the greatest Russian philosophers of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century opposed themselves completely to the actual essence of Central Europe, and by the way, even to Western Europe.

What they repeatedly had to say, great minds of Russian intellectual culture – the German just did not realize this because he simply took – I would like to say – the extraordinarily vivid description of a Tolstoy, a Dostoyevsky – the German did not realize this at all! Within Russian spiritual life, basically, only the view exists. This whole life, as it has been expressed in Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, in the other Western European minds, is horrible, is repulsive basically, is an abstract life of thought, something that does not reach the heart and mind of the real human being. All this must be replaced by that which lives in the Russian human being. Whether something is categorized as political or not is not the point. The Testament of Peter the Great contains the whole spiritual philosophy of Russia; in the nineteenth century, philosophers express the same basic tenor, which amounts to regarding Western and Central Europe only as something horrible and obsolete.

Megalomania is the direct consequence of such a world view, which fancies itself as mature, but only fancies itself as mature out of immaturity. And so, for example, one can indeed experience the following. First of all - let me explain this in conclusion - an outstanding Russian spirit of the nineteenth century, Yushakov, turns his gaze towards Asia in 1885, because it is imminent that something must grow out of the same nationality in the East, directly like a great, world-historical mission. But this could never arise from the peoples of Western or Central Europe. And so, in 1885, Jushakow wrote a remarkable book, whose gaze is initially directed towards Asia – a remarkable book!

In this book, the following is expressed: When we look over to Asia, we find an old, wonderful world culture in Asia, which has only just grown old. This world culture wanted to understand itself by juxtaposing two spiritual entities: Ahriman and Ormuzd. Ormuzd is revered by these Asians, especially by the Iranian Asians, to whom, for example, the Indians and the Persians also belong, as the spirit that wins the fruits from the earth; but who also brings spiritual striving into the human soul, elevating it and allowing it to experience the spiritual.

In contrast to this stands Ahriman, who is connected with the spirit of the Iranians, the Turanians, who led the Asians through evil in such a way that the blessed conditions of Ormuzd were thwarted by him. And there we see - says Jushakow - in Asia over there Ormuzd and Ahriman fighting out their battle and man placed in this fight.

In 1885, dear attendees, please note that Yushakov wrote this! And he says: Oh, these poor Asians! What have the selfish, decrepit Europeans done to them? What have they let them become!

Yushakov presents the matter as if the Europeans, out of their selfishness and decrepitude, had taken away from the Asians what Ormuzd had brought to them as a blessing. But the Russians, out of their own philosophy of life, must bring the invigorating element of their world view into all its decrepitude. The Russians must come and help the Asians, they must join forces with the Asians. That is what Jushakow says. As I said, the focus is on Asia.

I am not saying this, Yushakov said it in 1885. And Yushakov said something remarkable: the wonderful, blessed alliance of the peasants – the Russian peasants – and the Cossacks will penetrate into Asia and will join forces with the poor Asians against Ahriman, in order to maintain the blessings of Ormuzd.

And who is Yushakov mainly opposed to? In 1885 – I have to keep emphasizing this – he says: Oh, these Asians, they have suffered terribly at the hands of the horrific Europeans, who only wanted to appropriate, in the most terrible selfishness, what Asian civilization, under Ormuzd's fruitfulness and blessing-bringing, has created for humanity. How did the Europeans view the Asians? And which Europeans does Jushakow have in mind? Jushakow, in 1885, has the English in mind; oddly enough. Let us hear what he says: “These Asian peoples are regarded by the English only as if they existed to clothe themselves in English garments, to clothe themselves in English fabrics, to fight with each other with English weapons, to work with English tools, to eat from English vessels and to play with English baubles.” Then he continues – in 1885:

"England exploits millions of Hindus, but its very existence depends on the obedience of the various peoples inhabiting the rich peninsula. I wish

– says Yushakov – my Russian

"Fatherland nothing similar - I can only rejoice that it is ‘

sufficiently far removed’

from this state of affairs, as brilliant as it is sad,

and has nothing to do with this terrible England. So Yushakov in 1885; so a Russian in 1885 looks over to Asia.

This is probably the reason why the Russians allied themselves with England shortly afterwards, not to help the Asians against Ahriman, but to destroy what, with such deep roots, can represent such a spiritual life – in addition to all the other German qualities – as it was allowed to be described.

And so, from the place where 150 million people have to live with 777 million, there must be a powerful awakening of consciousness of what the German essence has fundamentally meant in the development of humanity.

Among those Germans whose gaze was turned to the German character, there was always an awareness of it - an awareness on both sides of the Erz Mountains, in Styria as well as on the Rhine and in the far east of Germany. And just as that which today is being forged together by the great events in Central Europe - basically, among those who understood it, always wanted to forge together - may show us a beautiful word from an Austrian German, a word written in 1862 by the Austrian German Robert Hamerling.

I may well point to these circumstances on the other side of the Erz Mountains, for the reason that I myself have spent almost thirty years of my life under German Austria as a German Austrian myself, taking part in the discussions and struggles that Germans have to face within Austria.

It is the same Hamerling who expressed his attitude towards Austria and Germany in the beautiful words: “Austria is my fatherland, but Germany is my motherland” – words that every Austrian-German who can see beyond external circumstances lives with in the indeterminable. I need not say anything about Robert Hamerling's other intellectual achievements, I just want to point out that in 1884 it was Robert Hamerling who, from Graz, called out heartfelt words to Germany when it was learned that a statue of the goddess Strasbourg was being erected in Paris and that the German flag was being burned at a festival celebrating the goddess Strasbourg. At that time, it was Robert Hamerling who sent the words from Graz to Germany:

Believe in revenge,
And in the victor's wreath of laurels:
Do not hope to steal back
A piece of German land!
You may rave like ravens Around an Alsatian statue,
Strasbourg you will not have,
Strasbourg nevermore.

In 1862, in one of his earlier poems, “Germanenzug”, the same Robert Hamerling had the ancient Germans, the ancestors of the Germans, passing before his spiritual eyes as they moved across from Asia. He leaves them still encamped in Asia, on the borders of Europe. He beautifully describes the image of the evening, the evening image, how the setting sun is above them, how the moon is rising; then he describes how everything falls asleep among the wandering Germans, how only one watches, with blond curls, with radiant eyes, inspired by the essence of his people: Teut. The genius speaks to Teut, who wants to speak of the future essence of Germanness. The genius of the German people speaks, for example, to Teut, the words to the blond, representative youth of the Germanic peoples:

"To whom will the word break out of the depths of the soul one day
Like your people, so rich, so delicate, so powerful?
Who breathes so solemnly into the strings So boldly and strives and fights on all paths?
Whom leads so high, so deep his urge, his foreboding?
Who grasps so faithfully the near as the far?
Where does every earthly and heavenly zone
reflect as in your thinking, O Teuton?

Then Hamerling continues by pointing out that what the Asian sought, and what the ancestors of the Germanic peoples sought in Asia, when they extinguished the human essence and suppressed the ego in order to rise to the spirit of the world, must reappear in a later form. This Asiatic way, which also appears today in Hinduism, can no longer be the present way. Now that the Christ Impulse has entered the world, the human ego must be attached to the world spirituality in a different way. The ego must be elevated, strengthened, as we see in the three - Fichte, Hegel, Schelling - and others; the ego must be strengthened; but in the way it must be, now that the greatest impulse in humanity, as the earth has seen the Christ impulse, as it must be, as the Asian striving must appear on a higher level, so it appeared from the deepest root of the national being. And that is what Robert Hamerling wants to express by also letting the genius speak to the blond Teut, to the blond representative of Germanness.

"But however proudly you may aspire, high above other swarms, you will always retain the ancient, sacred fire: the dream-filled drunkenness of God, the blissful warmth of the heart of of the old Asian homeland. This holy ray of calm existence will be devotion that wants to sink into God."

And that is precisely what the German strives for, what rises from all science, from all knowledge: this carrying over of even what can be known, as if to the altar of a divinized world view itself. Spiritual science does not want to be religion, nor does it want to replace it; it wants to place itself as true science alongside religion – it does not want to affect religion in the least, it wants to accept it – like a current that presents itself as true science, which also only wants to support religion, not replace it in any way. But what spiritual science can achieve is offered at the same time – to use Böhme's expression – in order to experience drunkenness of God, that is, to experience the spiritual of the world in one's own soul being.

That is what was felt by the German philosopher, the German mystic Jakob Boehme, and what may appear as a motto, a guiding principle of the German essence itself, when Jakob Boehme says: When you turn to the deep phenomena of the world and gaze at the stars and the earth, you see your God, and in the same you live and strive and walk, and in this God you will be buried.

This is a world view that has been decided upon from German knowledge, a spiritual world view.

And how do you encounter it? Let us just take a very brief look at Russia, to conclude. Russia needs a new delusion today: the delusion of Europe's decrepitude. It needs this new delusion of Europe's decrepitude to prove that this European intellectual life, and especially the Central European intellectual life, is outdated; a new delusion, as Russia always needed a delusion.

France – yes, one would like to remain completely objective, not to do wrong to anyone. The German has no need to join in the tones in which his enemies are indulging today. So perhaps we can listen to a French poet himself, who, not long before the war, created a dramatic portrayal of his people that is quite interesting: the French have become accustomed over the centuries to everyone listening to them. They have recently come to see themselves as the ones who set the tone in all external culture. And so Rostand himself, the Frenchman himself, believes it in this poetic representation. The Frenchman is like a cockerel: when he crows in the morning, the sun rises. And so he gradually comes to believe that because he crows, the sun rises. And he cannot imagine that the sun would rise even if he did not crow.

The Frenchman needs a new belief; he must be able to believe that nothing can happen in the world if he does not crow. He needs a new belief about his own nature. And basically, you only have to let the historical events since 1870 really affect your soul to see how this new belief has gradually emerged and how it has not left the French national spirit. You can also read about it in my little book, Thoughts During the Time of War. For Germans and those who do not believe they have to hate them.

One would not want to do the English an injustice either. But when one hears how one of the leading contemporary English politicians lets it be known to the Germans across the Channel that “might before right” applies to them, and that this would be a German principle – then one must emphasize: The principle of “might before right” as a truly justified one can be found in the works of the English writer Thomas Hobbes, where it is first mentioned. The phrase “might before right” is a specifically English product, and all law is rooted in might. And so one could find many things; one would not want to do wrong, as I said, but I must say the sentence: All these nations, they need something to numb themselves about what they are actually doing in world history, to numb what they are doing, they need something like a fog that shrouds the truth. England needs a new lie – that can be said, without becoming in any way unobjective, from the facts themselves. And Italy? Yes, before the war a not insignificant Italian politician – for there were minds that were not so naive that they would have believed before the war that Italy would ever stand up for the Central European powers, and so I was not particularly struck by this – when a not insignificant Italian politician told me: We need a war in Italy, because our people have become impotent and lazy and careless; only war can reinvigorate them. So we need the war, a new sensation, a new passion, a tremor in the soul of the people, that is why Europe is worried.

As I said, these are the words of an Italian politician. Therefore, one can say: It will seem understandable that Italy, in order to numb itself to the real truth of the situation, would have to appoint a new saint: the sacro egoismo, the holy egoism - a new saint, a strange saint indeed. And even stranger is his hierophant, the high priest Gabriel d'Annunzio.

However much the image that will arise from these circumstances in the world history of humanity is forgotten, the German can also look at these things with calm confidence, as - let it be said again - on this side and on the other side of the Ore Mountains has always done my dear teacher and friend Karl Julius Schröer spoke the following words in Austria in 1859:

Let Russia and England wisely deliberate,
It may not be unwelcome,
If we get into a little fight here,
If they take away our good right
[You, German brothers, will not - advise here,
The enemy's attack will only unite us
And among us, every ambition will fade
Before: being one people in word and deed.

And if one among us has erred,
If discord has arisen in a German heart,
There is but one thing that now inspires us:
What we have in common, our joys and our sorrows!
So then let us also have in common:]
A German war, if not a German peace.

1859 – spoken in Austria by someone who felt at one with his soul with what lives and breathes in the German national identity. And then he said, the same person, that

A spirit is rising, a giant to behold
[Who will not long gather all his strength
The German spirit rises up aflame with courage
Wherever you look in all German districts.

He has been called a master in many ways,
In art and knowledge, in building systems,
He can be seen for the first time overall,
then he will be recognized by the world] for real.

I am only reading these sentences so that you can see how what the German can feel about the source and root of German national life was not just created today, as there are enough and sufficient people sitting among the honored audience here who know that I spoke about the German essence for years and years before the war, and also about the relationship to other nations. The German need not fall back on the tone that he can now hear from those who hold him as if in a ring, as if in a great fortress. He may quietly look at what he can gain from an objective observation of the nature of his people. For what he gains in this way presents itself to him where it appears like a pure tone in the development of German intellectual life, first as a germ, as a root, which will later bear flowers and fruit. And so the best that is in German intellectual life, which, as we have seen, is not yet blossom and fruit, but only root and germ, will bear blossom and fruit in the future.

And with his soul, the German turns in the present difficult time of trial, which fills us all with sure hopes and confidence, he turns with these sure hopes and confidence that fill him, to the future, in his whole heart united with the view into this future, to what will develop as the flowering and the fruit of the German national character, of German life and of German strength in general, despite all the hateful and defamatory things that are said today against this German essence – what will develop, what may be addressed by knowledge as that which will develop because it must develop!

When Goethe in ripe old age looked back upon the whole development of his life, he named three men who had had most influence upon him; Linné, the Naturalist, Spinoza, the Philosopher, and Shakespeare, the Poet.

To Linné he placed himself in opposition and through this reached his own point of view regarding the forms of plants and animals. From Spinoza he borrowed a mode of expression which enabled him to give out his ideas in a thoughtful language which was deeper and richer than that of Philosophers. In Shakespeare he found a spirit that fired his own poetic gift according to the inmost demands of his own being.

Anyone who can gain an insight to the soul strivings of Goethe as these comes to light in his Götz and Werther, where he reveals what he had gone through inwardly, can also see what took place in him when first he absorbed himself in Hamlet.

A vivid impression of this is to be obtained from his statement that Shakespeare is an interpreter of the World-spirit itself. Goethe holds that Shakespeare's genius openly reveals what the World-spirit hides within Nature's activities. His whole attitude towards Shakespeare is expressed in this statement.

It is only within the last five hundred years that what we to-day call Intellectualism has taken possession of our soul life. In the outlook which obtained earlier the soul of humanity was active in a different way. Understanding through thinking played a secondary part.

A battle against the overlordship of thought is visible in Goethe's soul. He still wishes to experience the world inwardly with different soul forces. But the mental life which surrounds him makes thought the basic element in the activities of the soul. So Goethe asks himself: Can one get into intimate touch with the surrounding world through thought? Such a possibility stirs him deeply and out of the overwhelming effect it has upon his soul, his Faust is born.

Goethe presents Faust to us as a teacher who had worked for ten years in a period which saw the advent of Intellectualism. As yet however Intellectualism had only a slight hold upon human nature, and in Philosophy, Jurisprudence, Medicine and Theology Faust does not as yet recognize it as a power which could carry conviction. He could, as a man of science, fall back upon the understanding of an earlier time when men realized spirit in Nature without the intermediary of intellectuality. He wishes to obtain direct vision of spirit. What Faust went through in vacillation between thinking experience and spiritual vision became for the young Goethe an inner battle.

Hamlet and other Shakespeare characters arose before Goethe's soul as he passed through this inner battle. Hamlet, who obtains his life's tasks through soul experiences which appear to him as expressive of relationship to the Spiritual world and who not only is thrown through doubt into inaction, but also through the power of his intellect. The deep abyss of the soul life is contained in Hamlet's words:

The native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.

The youthful Goethe had often looked into this abyss and the glimpses he had caught of it intensified his sympathy with Hamlet's character.

By following the soul life of Goethe one is led from the Hamlet frame of mind to that of Faust and thus one can experience a bit of Goethe biography. It has not got to be proved through documents, neither need it be historic in the ordinary sense of the term. And yet it will reflect history better than what is usually so named.

One gains a picture of Faust as he lived in Goethe, as the teacher born out of a soul condition which oscillates between intellectualism and spiritual vision. During ten years Faust instructs his pupils under these conditions of wavering and one can well imagine to oneself Hamlet as one of these pupils; not the Hamlet of the Danish Saga but Shakespeare's Hamlet. For Goethe has represented in his Faust the teacher who could have Hamlet's 'native hue of resolution sickled o'er with the pale cast of thought.' In this light Shakespeare is the poet who has before his soul a character born out of the waning of consciousness of the Middle Ages and a New Age. Goethe is the one who wants to penetrate into that world outlook in which such characters develop fully.

In many Shakesperian characters Goethe could feel the reflection of this waning consciousness. This brought Shakespeare so near to him, for it was connected with his feelings for Art. Into this feeling for Art Spinoza's intellectualism penetrated and in Spinoza there existed already that mental activity which gives the thought life of modern humanity its soul bearings.

This 'Spinoza-ism' became tolerable to Goethe only when he came to stand before Italian works of art and could feel in these works as an artist that necessity of material creating which Spinoza could clothe only in pure thought.

Together with Herder he had adopted Spinoza's philosophy but only in Italy could he write from the aspect of art what was impossible through reading Spinoza; 'There is necessity, there is God.'

In order to feel on sure ground in Art, Goethe realized the need of an outlook upon the world, but this outlook would have to include Art as one of its most important elements and not relegate it to an inferior place. The creative spirit in the world revealed itself to Goethe in Nature but he found in Shakespeare the artist who revealed the Spirit in his own creation.

Goethe felt deeply how from his inmost being man must strive toward scientific knowledge, but he felt no less deeply how in this striving thought can wander away in error. He felt himself thus in danger with Spinoza. With Shakespeare he felt himself within the world of direct, artistic outlook. Goethe has himself spoken of his relation to Shakespeare in these words: 'A necessity which excludes more or less or entirely all freedom, as with the ancients, is no longer endurable to our way of thinking; Shakespeare came near this however, for he made necessity moral and thus joined the old world to the new world to our joyful astonishment.'

In his youth Goethe found the way to the 'New World' through Shakespeare because Shakespeare understood in his dramatic characters how to hold the balance between the impelling necessity of Nature's activities in man and his freedom in his thought life. The mutual relationship of these two elements must be experienced to-day if we do not want to loose hold of reality through our life of thought.

NOTE BY EDITOR: In the last lecture of the recent course on dramatic art¹ Dr. Steiner put before us an interesting point of view regarding the representation of Hamlet's character on the stage.

It has always been the custom to make of Hamlet a deeply philosophic character and in rendering the great soliloquies this side of his being has always been brought into evidence. But Dr. Steiner in a reading which he gave of the 'To be or not to be' soliloquy, showed a new aspect of the Hamlet mind which amplifies what he has written in the above article. Hamlet's mental penetration was not that of a New World philosopher. He did not 'reason out' as a modern thinker does. His thoughts oscillate as do his feelings and it is an error to attribute ponderous weight to the statements in this particular speech where the man himself was merely reflecting his passing, changing feelings and ideas. A modern thinker would never have spoken of death as 'the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns,' when but a few moments previously he had encountered and spoken with his dead Father.

Hamlet is typical of a transition state when the ascendancy of logical reasoning over inner feeling as a perceptive faculty was not established as it became in times nearer our own.

Dr. Steiner's rendering of the speech in what one might name a 'homely' way would probably offend such actors who only see the philosopher in Hamlet, but it is true to the historic aspect of human development in which Hamlet stands as a remarkably complete symbol.

The full significance and true aspect of Hamlet's outlook therefore can be grasped through Anthroposophy.

• 1. Speech and Drama, 19 lectures, Dornach, 5th to 23rd September, 1924.

Men could not reject a spiritual knowledge such as Anthroposophy, if they would but observe with the necessary attention the everyday phenomena of their own mental life. For these phenomena are eloquent witnesses to its reality.

On the one side, looking towards the inner life of man, there stands the fact of Memory. In memory, the experiences man has with the things of the world are preserved in the soul. On the other side is external Perception, behind which the thoughtful human soul feels irresistibly impelled to surmise and seek the inner secrets of the World of Nature.

In both directions, the conscious experience of man comes up against a 'nothingness.'

That which comes to us in memory is no longer there in the outer world. External perception can indeed stimulate, but it cannot bring forth the memories of past experience. On the other hand, careful observation will shew that for the experience of memory man is in every case dependent on his own bodily nature. We feel the memory rising up into consciousness from an exercise of our bodily nature. Science can indeed confirm this, but the feeling is sufficiently certain even without it. Science will shew for instance how memory is impaired by a diseased condition of certain parts of the body. These proofs however only corroborate what is directly evident to the naïve consciousness of man,—provided this be combined with accuracy of observation, which may very well be the case, for the naïve feeling need not be superficial; it is quite able to perceive deeply and truly. Thus in the act of memory man feels how there arise out of his body the forces which—as though with unseen spiritual hands take hold of facts which are no longer there in the world of external Nature. This experience is certainly more delicate, less tangible than others which we have through the immediate sense of life. Yet in its way its evidence is no less certain than that of pains or pleasures, for example, where we know with the sureness of a direct experience that their source is in the body.

On the other side we have our perceptions of the outer world. The life of the soul comes up against these perceptions; it cannot penetrate through them to that which they reveal. Impelled as it is to surmise that something is there revealing itself,—with its own activity it can go no further. Here it has reached its 'nothingness.' It cannot but surmise that it stands at the frontier of a world full of inner content, and yet, as it seeks to penetrate through the perceptions, it feels itself—spiritually—reaching out into the void.

We need only take one more step in this reflection. Behind Memory there begins the region where our own body—for the ordinary consciousness—vanishes into the unknown. Behind Perception, external Nature does the same. The relations of these two to the conscious inner experience of man are of the same kind. Now in Memory, with its foundation in a bodily activity, there arises Thought. For it is in thought that our memories of past experience come forth into conscious life. But thought is also kindled by outward Perception. That which manifests itself to us from without, is brought home to our inner consciousness in thought. Thus do the inner life of Man and the external world of Nature meet in the element of Thought.

And is not this a meeting as it were of old acquaintances? With what a happy sense of kinship does the soul contrive to understand new things perceived in the light of old experience remembered. The strongest sense of the reality of life comes to the soul when it can do this. The inner life of memory, the outer world in perception, meet not as strangers but as friends, who have something to tell one another upon a common subject.

Now the inner force which lives in memory can be intensified. By working upon his soul, man can strengthen the force that shews itself in memory. This possibility, and the way in which it can be realised, are subjects which have frequently been dealt with in these columns.

In doing this, man strikes and penetrates into his bodily nature more deeply than in the process of ordinary consciousness. With the deepened, strengthened force of memory he now perceives himself to be discovering those bodily activities which—as we saw—are always involved in the normal memory process. Indeed, lie not only approaches but penetrates right into them. Vet it is nothing of a bodily nature which comes before the soul at this point. We must picture it as follows. It is as though a shadow-figure, seen against a wall, were suddenly to come to life and step towards us. It is familiar to its because thought is familiar. For it stands there in the soul in just the same way as a thought in ordinary consciousness. But while a thought is not alive, this is alive. It is an 'Imagination.' Like a thought, it is justified by its relationship to a reality. It is therefore not in the least what we should ordinarily call a fancy or imagination. For we perceive at once that it relates to a reality,—in the very same way as the thought in which we hold a memory relates to a reality.

But there is this difference. The thought refers to a reality which was once there in our experience and is now no longer there. The Imagination—though in the very same manner—brings before our soul a reality which in the ordinary experience of life has never yet occurred to us. We have in fact entered a sphere of spiritual perception.

We have penetrated into our own body, yet it is not' Body' but 'Spirit' which we have struck here. It is indeed the Spirit which underlies the Body. We take hold of it 'with spiritual hands,' in the same way as we take hold of past experiences when they arise in ordinary memory.

And as in Thought external Nature meets the inner life of Man, so in Imagination the Spirit of Nature meets the human Spirit. The Spirit that is in Man, taken hold of in Imagination, goes out to meet the Spirit that is in Nature, and this Spirit too reveals itself now in Imagination. To the ordinary consciousness, Thought arises in the act of Memory and kindled by Perceptions from the outer world. To the strengthened consciousness, Imagination arises in the living inner experience of the soul itself, and kindled by a no less living experience of the outer world.

All this can be achieved in the full light of consciousness, where self-deception, suggestion, auto-suggestion and the like are quite impossible. Anyone who reaches true Imagination, lives in it as he lives in the most certain thought, the reference of which to a reality is unmistakable. When we have ceased to allow the slightest vagueness or unconscious element in our experience of the relation of our thoughts to reality, we shall certainly not fall into illusions in our experience of Imagination.

Herein lies the reason why the man who has attained true 'Imaginative Experiences' can speak of them to one who has not yet done so, while the latter can accept his statements with full conviction without giving himself up to any blind belief in authority. In effect, he who tells of Imaginations is only speaking of what is there in the listener himself—beneath the level of his memories—as his own reality of Spirit. In every-day life when a memory is recalled to a man, not by his own thought alone but by another man in conversation with him, he will say to himself, 'I certainly did have that experience in the course of my life, in my ordinary consciousness.' So when he listens to a statement of Imaginative Experience he can say, 'That is I myself in my spiritual perceptions, hitherto unknown to my ordinary consciousness. The man who tells of true Imaginations has only helped me to call up into consciousness what my consciousness had not yet called up for itself. My relation to him is of the same kind as my every-day relation to a man who might remind me of something that had slipped my memory.'

The World of the Spirit, in effect, is simply a thing 'forgotten' by the ordinary consciousness, which—strengthened and intensified—can rediscover it like a returning memory of past experience.

When these lectures were first translated into English and published in ANTHROPOSOPHY: A Quarterly Review of Spiritual Science in 1929, lecture 16 “Earthquakes, Volcanoes, and the Will of Man” was not published. Rene Querido translated this 16th lecture into English from the French and kindly furnished the diagram following lecture 16 which shows the interior of the Earth. Rene Querido also wrote the preface for this reprint edition.

The present cycle of lectures was given in 1906 in Paris and the report of it by Edouard Schuré now published in English in its entirety for the first time marks the beginning of a new phase in the life of Rudolf Steiner. Accompanied by Marie von Sievers (later Marie Steiner), Rudolf Steiner had been invited, by the famous French author and dramatist Edouard Schuré, to address a group consisting mainly of Russians in a small villa on the outskirts of Paris. Among them were writers of note such as Dimitri Merejkowski, his wife Zinaida Hippius, a poetess in her own right, and S. Minski. Originally it had been planned that the course be held on Russian soil but the revolution of 1905 had made that impossible.

At this time Edouard Schuré (1841–1929), a man of 65, stood at the height of his career. He had written more than a dozen major works including The Great Initiates (1889), A History of the German Lied, A Collection of Celtic Legends, two important works on Richard Wagner, and a number of dramas striving to recapture the lost ritualistic element of the ancient mysteries on the stage. He felt powerfully drawn not only to Richard Wagner the composer, but also to the man. He had met the maestro on three occasions and was present in Munich at the dramatic opening of Tristan and Isolde.

Schuré's interest in the occult was profound. He had written The Great Initiates (1889) as a result of his deep connection over a period of many years with Margherita Albana-Mignaty, who continued to inspire him even after her death. Rudolf Steiner often referred to the importance of this book and although it was written ten years before the end of Kali-Yuga (the Age of Darkness), he spoke of this work as a herald of the new Age of Light, when human beings would again seek for their spiritual connection with the great initiates of the past. For some time before their first meeting in Paris, Marie von Sievers and Schuré had corresponded. An unusual set of circumstances led to the fact that indirectly it was Schuré who had brought about the meeting between Marie von Sievers and Rudolf Steiner which was to prove so fruitful for the growth of the Anthroposophical movement. Unable to reply to a specific question related to the occult, Schuré advised the young Marie von Sievers to turn to Rudolf Steiner in Berlin. A little later Marie von Sievers wrote so enthusiastically to Schuré (in excellent French) of her meeting that he, too, wished to become acquainted with Steiner personally. This was to happen six years later in Paris on the occasion of these lectures. The recognition must have been immediate. Schuré, twenty years Steiner's senior, never tired of recounting this significant meeting: for the first time, he felt himself to be in the presence of an initiate. “Here is a genuine Master who will play a crucial part in your life.” Schuré recognized Steiner as one who stood fully in the world of today and yet could also behold in clear consciousness the boundless vistas of the super-sensible. A warm friendship quickly developed between the two men: vacations spent together in Barr (1906–1907) in Schuré's summer house in the Alsace; long walks over the Odilienberg, and an active correspondence (mostly on the part of Marie Steiner, who translated several of Schuré's dramas into German). The substance of a number of intimate conversations has been recorded by Rudolf Steiner in the “Document of Barr.”¹ In 1907 Schuré's Sacred Drama of Eleusis was produced under the direction of Rudolf Steiner at the great Munich Congress of the Theosophical Society. It was on this occasion that Rudolf Steiner said that from this time on, art and occultism should always remain connected. In 1909 the first performance of Schuré's drama, The Children of Lucifer, was given using a German translation of the French text by Marie Steiner. The deeper connection now becomes obvious: Schuré the poet, a Celtic-Greek soul, devoted to the renewal of the ancient mysteries, and one of the first Frenchmen to recognize Richard Wagner's impulse towards the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (a total ritualistic experience embracing all the art forms), now whole-heartedly supported Rudolf Steiner in the great Munich endeavors (1907–1913). This period saw the birth of the mystery dramas and the first performances of Eurythmy. It was also in Munich that plans had been made for the building of the First Goetheanum (the House of The Word) which was later erected on the Dornach hill near Basel in Switzerland.

The war years (1914–1918) brought an unfortunate clouding over of their friendship due to Schuré's stubborn chauvinism which nevertheless did not interfere with his continued championing of Richard Wagner. But with Rudolf Steiner, he broke his connection. A few years after the war the friendship was renewed and it must have been an amazing sight to have seen the old, still robust, white-haired Schuré in animated conversation with Steiner as they walked up and down on the terrace of the First Goetheanum in Dornach. Years later, Schuré would still speak of his profound indebtedness to Rudolf Steiner both for the personal help he had received from him and for his having brought the new mysteries clearly to expression in an age of materialism.

These lectures were given on the fringe of the International Theosophical Congress held in Paris and attended by delegates from many countries. Rudolf Steiner himself attached a distinct importance to this course in Paris where he formulated a basic view of Esoteric Christianity which a few years later was to separate him radically from the Theosophical Society. In the 37th chapter of Rudolf Steiner, The Story of My Life (written in 1924–25 shortly before his death) we find the following passage:²

In the Paris cycle of lectures I brought forward a perception which had required a long process of “ripening” in my mind. After I had explained how the members of the human being—physical body; etheric body, as mediator of the phenomena of life; and the “bearer of the ego”—are in general related to one another, I imparted the fact that the etheric body of a man is female, and the etheric body of a woman is male. Through this a light was cast within the Anthroposophical Society upon one of the basic questions of existence which just at that time had been much discussed. One need only remember the book of the unfortunate Weininger, “Geschlecht und Charakter,” (Sex and Character), and the contemporary poetry.

But the question was carried into the depths of the being of man. In his physical body man is bound up with the cosmos quite otherwise than in his etheric body. Through his physical body man stands within the forces of the earth; through his etheric body within the forces of the outer cosmos. The male and female elements were carried into connection with the mysteries of the cosmos.

This knowledge was something belonging to the most profoundly moving inner experiences of my soul; for I felt ever anew how one must approach a spiritual perception by patient waiting and how, when one has experienced the “ripeness of consciousness,” one must lay hold by means of ideas in order to place the perception within the sphere of human knowledge.

It is perhaps not without significance that it was in Paris, where Thomas Aquinas had elaborated some seven centuries earlier his Christ-oriented Scholasticism, that Rudolf Steiner gave his first course on an Esoteric Christian Cosmology appropriate to the dawn of the new Age of Light. Schuré's notes in French of the 18 lectures, published in French in 1928, constitute the only record of this course. They now appear for the first time in English translation in their entirety in book form, readily available to the modern student of the Science of the Spirit.

R. M. Querido

• 1. The “Document of Barr,” dated Sept. 9, 1907 and printed in English translation in the Golden Blade, 1966.
• 2. Rudolf Steiner Publishing Co., London and New York, 1928.

[ 1 ] The description of the life of the philosophical spirit from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present time, which has been attempted in this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy, cannot be of the same character as the survey of the works of the preceding thinkers. This survey had to remain within the most restricted circle of the philosophical problems. The last sixty years represent the age in which the mode of conception of natural science attempted, from different points of view, to shake the foundation on which philosophy formerly stood. During this time, the view arose that maintained that the results of natural science shed the necessary light on the question of man's nature, his relation to the world and other riddles of existence, which the intellectual work of philosophy had formerly sought to supply. Many thinkers who wanted to serve philosophy now tried to imitate the mode of investigation of natural science. Others laid the foundation for their world conception, not in the fashion of the old philosophical mode of thinking, but simply by taking over that basis from the mode of conception of natural science, biology or physiology. Those who meant to preserve the independence of philosophy believed it best to examine thoroughly the results of natural science in order to prevent them from invading the philosophical sphere. It is for this reason necessary, in presenting the philosophical life of this period, to pay attention to the views that, derived from natural science, have been introduced into world conceptions. The significance of these views for philosophy becomes apparent only if one examines the scientific foundations from which they are derived, and if one realizes for oneself the tendencies of scientific thinking according to which they were developed. This situation is given expression in this book by the fact that some parts of it are formulated almost as if a presentation of general natural scientific ideas, and not one of philosophical works, had been intended. The opinion appears to be justified that this method of presentation shows distinctly how thoroughly natural science has influenced the philosophical life of the present time.

[ 2 ] A reader who finds it reconcilable to his mode of thinking to conceive the evolution of the philosophical life along the lines indicated in the introduction of the first volume of this book, and for which the more detailed account of the book has attempted to supply the foundation, will also find it possible to accept the indicated relation between philosophy and natural science in the present age as a necessary phase of its evolution. Through the centuries since the beginning of Greek philosophy this evolution tended to lead the human soul toward the experience of its inner essential forces. With this inner experience the soul became more and more estranged in the world that the knowledge of external nature had erected for itself. A conception of nature arose that is so exclusively concerned with the observation of the external world that it does not show any inclination to include in its world picture what the soul experiences in its inner world. This conception considers it as unjustified to paint the world picture in a way that it would show these inner experiences of the human soul as well as the results of the research of natural science. It characterizes the situation in which philosophy found itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, and in which many currents of thought can still be found in the present time. Such a judgment does not have to be artificially introduced to the study of the philosophy of this age. It can be arrived at by simply observing the facts. The second volume of this book attempts to record this new development, but it has also made it necessary to add to the second edition a final chapter that contains “A Brief Outline of an Approach to Anthroposophy.”

One can be of the opinion that this account does not belong in the framework of the whole book but, in the preface to the first volume, it was announced that the purpose of this presentation “is not only to give a short outline of the history of philosophical problems, but also to discuss these problems and the attempts at their solution through their historical treatment.” The view expressed in this book tries to show that many situations arising from the attempted solutions in the philosophy of the present tend to recognize an element in the inner experience of the human soul that manifests itself in such a way that the exclusive claim of natural science can no longer deny that element a place in the modern world picture. As it is the philosophical conviction of the author of this book that the account of the final chapter deals with soul experiences that are adequate to bring fulfillment to the search of modern philosophy, he feels he was justified in adding this chapter to his presentation. As a result of observation of these philosophies, it seems to the author to be basically characteristic of them and of their historical manifestation that they do not consistently continue their direction toward the goal they are seeking. This direction must lead toward the world conception that is outlined at the end of the book, which aims at a real science of the spirit. The reader who can agree with this can find in this conception something that supplies the solutions to problems that the philosophy of the present time poses without giving answers. If this is true, the content of the last chapter will also throw light on the historical position of modern philosophy.

[ 3 ] The author of this book does not imagine that everyone who can accept the content of the final chapter must necessarily also seek a world conception that replaces philosophy by a view that can no longer be recognized as a philosophy by traditional philosophers. What this book means to show is that philosophy, if it arrives at the point where it understands itself, must lead the spirit to a soul experience that is, to be sure, the fruit of its work, but also grows beyond it. In this way, philosophy retains its significance for everyone who, according to his mode of thinking, must demand a secure intellectual foundation for the results of this soul experience. Whoever can accept these results through a natural sense for truth, is justified in feeling himself on secure ground even if he pays no special attention to a philosophical foundation of these results. But whoever seeks the scientific justification of the world conception that is presented at the end of the book, must follow the path of the philosophical foundation.

[ 4 ] That this path, if it is followed through to its end, leads to the experience of a spiritual world, and that the soul through this experience can become aware of its own spiritual essence through a method that is independent of its experience and knowledge through the sense world, is what the presentation of this book attempts to prove. It was not the author's intention to project this thought as a preconceived idea into his observation of philosophical life. He wanted to search without bias for the conception expressed in this life itself. He has at least endeavored to proceed in this way. He believes that this thought could be best presented by speaking the language of a natural scientist, as it were, in some parts of the book. Only if one is capable of temporarily identifying oneself completely with a certain point of view is it possible to do full justice to it. By this method of deliberately taking the position of a world view, the human soul can most safely obtain the ability to withdraw from it again and enter into modes of conception that have their source in realms that are not comprised by this view of the world.

[ 5 ] The printing of this second volume of The Riddles of Philosophy was about half finished before the great war that mankind is now experiencing broke out. It was finished just as this event began. This is only to indicate what outer events stirred and occupied my soul as the last thoughts included in this book passed before my inner eye.

Rudolf Steiner
September 1, 1914, Berlin

[ 1 ] In the study of Anthroposophy, sleeping and waking have been dealt with often and from varied points of view. But our understanding of these facts of life must be deepened and refreshed again and again, when other points in the constitution of the world have been considered by us. Our previous explanation, showing how the Earth is the seed of a newly arising macrocosm, will give us fresh possibilities for a deeper understanding of sleeping and waking.

[ 2 ] In the waking state, man lives in the Thought-shadows cast by a dead and dying world, and in the Will-impulses into the inner nature of which, with his ordinary consciousness, he can no more penetrate than into the processes of deep, dreamless sleep.

[ 3 ] Where sub-conscious impulses of Will flow into the shadows of Thought, the free dominion of self-consciousness arises. In this self-consciousness, the human ‘Ego’ lives.

[ 4 ] While man experiences his environment in this condition, his inner feeling is permeated by extra-earthly, cosmic impulses, entering from a remote and cosmic past into the present time. He does not become conscious of this fact. For a being can only become conscious of things in which it partakes with its own, dying forces, and not with the growing forces that are the creative kindlers of its life. Thus man experiences himself in consciousness while that which lies at the basis of his inner being is lost to the eye of his mind. And by this very fact he is able, during the waking state, to feel himself so entirely within his shadowed Thoughts. There is no glimmer of life to hinder the full absorption of his inner being in the dead and dying. But from this his ‘life in the dead and dying,’ the essential being of the earthly sphere conceals the fact that it is in reality the seed of a new Universe. Man in the waking state does not perceive the Earth in its true nature. The cosmic life that is germinating in the Earth escapes him.

[ 5 ] Thus man lives in what the Earth gives to him as the basis of his self-consciousness. In the age of unfolding of the self-conscious Ego, the true form both of his inner impulses and of his outer environment is lost to his mind's eye. But as he thus hovers over the true being of the world, he experiences in consciousness the being of the ‘I’: he experiences himself as a self-conscious being. Above him is the extra-earthly Cosmos; beneath him, in the earthly realm, a world whose true essence is hidden from him. But in between, the free ‘I’ manifests itself, its essence radiating out in the full light of knowledge and of free volition.

[ 6 ] It is different in the sleeping state. In sleep, man lives in his astral body and Ego in the germinating life of the Earth. The strongest ‘urge into new life’ is there in the environment of man in dreamless sleep. His dreams too are permeated by this life, though not so intensely as to prevent him from experiencing them in a kind of semi-consciousness. Gazing half consciously upon his dreams, man witnesses the creative forces whereby he himself is woven out of the Cosmos. Even while the dream lights up, the Astral—kindling man to life—becomes visible as it flows into the etheric body. In this lighting-up of dreams, Thought is still alive. It is only after man wakens that Thought is gathered up into the forces whereby it dies and becomes a shadow.

[ 7 ] This connection between our dream-conceptions and our waking thoughts is of the greatest significance. Man thinks within the sphere of those very forces whereby he grows and lives. Yet he cannot become a thinker until these forces die.

[ 8 ] At this point there dawns in us a true understanding of why it is that man takes hold of the reality of things in Thought. For in his thoughts he possesses the dead picture of that which, working from the fully living reality of the world, builds and creates him.

[ 9 ] It is the dead picture. But this dead picture proceeds from the work of the greatest painter—from the very Cosmos. It is true that the life remains out of it. If it did not, the Ego of man could not unfold. Nevertheless, the full content of the Universe, in all its greatness, is contained within this picture.

[ 10 ] So far as was possible at that time and in that context, I indicated this inner relation of Thought and World-reality in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom.’ It is in the passage of that book where I say that there is indeed a bridge leading from the thinking Ego's depths to the depths of Nature's reality.

[ 11 ] Sleep extinguishes the ordinary consciousness because it carries us into the germinating life of Earth—the Earth as it springs forth into the new, living Macrocosm. When the extinction is overcome by Imaginative consciousness, there stands before the human soul—not a sharply outlined Earth in mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of Nature—but a vital process, kindled to life within this Earth and flaming forth into the Macrocosm.

[ 12 ] It is thus: In the waking state man must lift himself with his own Ego-being out of the being of the world, in order to attain to free self-consciousness. And in sleep he unites with the being of the world once more.

[ 13 ] Such is the rhythm in the present moment of cosmic time the rhythm of man's earthly existence outside the inner being of the world while he experiences his own being in consciousness, and of his existence within the inner being of the world where the consciousness of his own being is extinguished.

[ 14 ] In the condition between death and a new birth, the human Ego lives within the Beings of the Spirit-world. Then, everything that was withdrawn from man's consciousness during his waking life on Earth comes into it again. The macrocosmic forces emerge from their full state of life in a far distant past to their dead and dying nature in the present. And there emerge the earthly forces—the seed of the new living macrocosm. Then the human being looks into his sleeping states as clearly as in his earthly life he looks forth upon the Earth that glistens in the sunlight.

[ 15 ] The Macrocosm, as it is today, has indeed become a thing of death. Yet it is through this alone that between death and a new birth man can undergo a life which signifies, compared to the waking life on Earth, a loftier awakening. For it is indeed an awakening, whereby he becomes able fully to control the forces that light up so dimly and fleetingly in dreams. These forces fill the Cosmos, they are all-pervading. From them the human being derives the impulses through which, as he descends on to the Earth, he forms this body—the greatest work-of-art of the Macrocosm.

[ 16 ] That which lights up so dimly in the dream—deserted, as it were, by the clear light of the sun—lives in the Spirit-world where the spiritual Sun flows through and through it, and where it waits until the Beings of the Hierarchies or man himself shall summon it to the creation of a new existence.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 17 ] 156. In Waking life, to experience himself in full and free Self-consciousness, man must forego the conscious experience of Reality in its true form, both in his existence and in that of Nature. Out of the ocean of Reality he lifts himself, that in his shadowed Thoughts he may make his own ‘I’ his very own in consciousness.

[ 18 ] 157. In Sleep, man lives with the life of his environment of Earth, but this very life extinguishes his consciousness of Self.

[ 19 ] 158. In Dreaming, there flickers up into half-consciousness the potent World-existence out of which the being of man is woven and from which, in his descent from Spirit-world, he builds his body. In earthly life this World-existence with its potent forces is put to death in man; it dies into the shadows of his Thought. For only so can it become the basis of self-conscious Manhood.

We have been reflecting on the significant events which took place—as it were, behind the scenes of world history—during the nineteenth century. The nature of it all is such that if one does not want to be entirely abstract, it is necessary to characterize many of the things which have to be said with regard to the spiritual world by considering their reflection or mirror-image in the physical world, for events here in the physical world truly do reflect spiritual events.

Before going on, I want to draw your attention to something of great significance which lies behind all these things. As you know, the transition from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantean period of civilization came in about 1413, that is in the fifteenth century. This has been characterized in many ways, but let me add today that spiritual guidance of earthly affairs involved mainly members of the hierarchy of Archangels—you will find some of the details in the small volume entitled The Spiritual Guidance of Man and of Humanity.¹ As I said, they were mainly involved. Try with all intensity to gain an image of this: angelic spirits pursued their tasks in the spiritual worlds. Much happened on earth as a result. History, human life in the fourth post-Atlantean age, resulted on earth. Angelic spirits belonging to the hierarchy of Angels served the higher hierarchy of Archangels; they did this in such a way, however, that the relationship between members of the two hierarchies was entirely above the earthly and in the spiritual realm, hardly touching on human life. This changed with the coming of the fifth post-Atlantean age, for then the members of the hierarchy of the Angels became more independent in their task of guiding humanity. Thus humanity was more under direct guidance from the Archangels during the fourth post-Atlantean age and will be under direct guidance from the Angels during the fifth age—that is throughout our present fifth age, until the fourth millennium. We can therefore no longer say that the relationship is entirely unconnected with the physical world. This is how the fact can be presented at the spiritual level.

It can also be presented at a more physical level, for all things physical are in the image of the spirit. Looking for the indirect route by which the Archangels guided humanity by working with the Angels during the fourth post-Atlantean age, we can say: This was done via the human blood. And the social structure was also created via the blood, for it was based on blood relationship, on blood bonds. Both the Archangels and the Angels had their dwelling place in the blood, as it were. Truly, the blood is not merely something for chemists to analyse; it is also the dwelling place of entities from higher worlds.

During the fourth post-Atlantean age, therefore, the blood was the dwelling place of Archangels and Angels. This is changing with the fifth post-Atlantean age, for the Angels—I am referring to the Angels of Light, the normal Angels—will take possession more of the blood, and the Archangels will be more involved in the nervous system. This is putting it in the terms of the modern science of physiology. Using an older terminology I might also say: during the fifth post-Atlantean age the Archangels are essentially more at work in the brain and the Angels in the heart. You see, therefore, that a major change has occurred which can be traced all the way to the physical structure of human beings.

The things people do and achieve here on earth are connected with the spirits which are at work in them. People tend to imagine—not always correctly—that Angels and Archangels are somewhere in Cloud-cuckoo-land. If we were to take the whole of human neurological life as a place, and the whole of the blood life as another place, and add what belongs to these when we are in the other worlds between death and rebirth, we would have the realms of the Archangels and Angels.

The fifteenth century marked a specific period in earth evolution and in the corresponding evolution of the spiritual world. We can characterize the events of the time more or less as follows. In the fifteenth century the earth held the greatest attraction for the regular Archangels who were seeking to make the transition from the blood to the nervous system. Going back from the fourteenth to the thirteenth, twelfth and eleventh centuries we find the earth's power of attraction growing less and less; beyond that time it would grow less and less again. We might say the Archangels were directed by higher spirits to love earthly existence most of all during the fifteenth century. Strange as it may seem to many people today who think only in grossly materialistic terms, it is nevertheless true that earthly events are connected with such things. How did America come to be rediscovered in such a strange way, and people began to make the whole world their own again—exactly at that time? Because at the time the Archangels were most attracted to the earth. They therefore guided partly the blood and partly the nervous system in such a way that human beings began to go out from their centres of civilization to make the whole earth their own. Events like these must be seen in conjunction with spiritual activities, otherwise they cannot be understood. It does, of course, sound peculiar to people who think in crude materialistic terms if you say: America was discovered and everything we read about in so-called history happened because, within certain limits, that was the time when the earth held the greatest power of attraction for the Archangels.

The Archangels then began to train the Angels to take possession of the human blood, whilst the Archangels wanted to make the transition to the nervous system. By the early 1840s the point had come where certain retarded Angels made the attempt to take the place which belonged to the Archangels in the nervous system rather than reside and reign in the blood. We are therefore able to say that in the 1840s a significant battle developed in the way I have described and, if we consider its most material physical reflection, it took place between the human blood and the human nervous system. The Angels of Darkness were cast out of the nervous system and into the human blood, and now wreak the havoc in the human blood which I have described. It is because they are at work in the human blood that all the things I have described as due to the influence of retarded Angels are happening here on earth. It is because they are at work in the human blood that people have become as clever as I have said. All this developed slowly and gradually, of course, and we are able to say that whilst the profound break came in 1841, the whole of the nineteenth century had been infected with it.

An evolution of profound significance has thus been initiated. One important fact to which I have already drawn your attention in these lectures² is that not later than the seventh millennium in earth evolution women will grow infertile, and reproduction will no longer be possible. If matters went entirely according to the normal Angelic spirits in the blood, human reproduction would not even continue for as long as this; it would only continue until the sixth millennium, or the sixth post-Atlantean period of civilization; according to the wisdom of light, the impulse for reproduction would not continue beyond this time in the seven periods of civilization in this postAtlantean age. However, it will go on beyond this, into the seventh millennium and possibly a little beyond. The reason will be that those cast-down Angels will be in charge and will give the impulses for reproduction.

This is highly significant. In the sixth post-Atlantean period of civilization, the human fertility which depends on the powers of light for its impulses will gradually come to an end. The powers of darkness will have to intervene so that the affair may continue for a time. We know the seeds for the sixth postAtlantean period of civilization lie in the East of Europe. The East of Europe will develop powerful tendencies which do not allow physical human reproduction to continue beyond the sixth period of civilization but, instead, let the earth enter into a form of existence in soul and spirit. The other impulses for the seventh post-Atlantean period of civilization, in which procreation will be guided by impulses from the cast-down Angels, will come from America.

Consider the complex nature of these things, which can only be discovered—I have to stress this again and again—by direct observation of the spiritual worlds. Mere theorizing will generally lead to error, for with this we tend to follow a single line of thought which will finally led to the statement that human procreative life will be extinguished in the sixth postAtlantean period of civilization. It needs actual spiritual observation to enable us to observe the different currents which interact to produce the whole. You have to put a great deal into it if you are to arrive at significant insights and their interactions, such as those of which I have been speaking.

The enormous complexity of human beings becomes apparent when you consider that now, in the fifth postAtlantean age, Archangels and Angels are active in them via the nervous system and the blood, but so are the abnormal spirits which oppose them. This is where the forces are anchored which act with each other, against each other and so on; there we see what is happening in reality. Looking at events in outer life, one only sees the surface wave and not the forces which cast it to the surface.

We can give another instance of the way in which the spirits of darkness, who were cast down in 1879, seek to exert an influence—before 1879 from the spiritual world and since then from the human realm. You will recall something of which I spoke in an earlier lecture:³ that humanity as a whole is getting younger and younger. If we go back to ancient India, we find that people remained young and capable of physical development well into ripe old age; during the Persian epoch less so, in Egypto-Chaldean times even less, until into Graeco-Latin times people were only capable of development until they reached the span extending from their twenty-eighth to their thirty-fifth year. Today they have grown even younger and are only capable of development up to their twenty-seventh year, as I told you. Later a time will come when this only goes to the twenty-sixth year, and so on. You will recall that I referred to someone who is at the hub of things at the present time and who can only be really understood if we realize that the age of 27 plays such a special role in life today—and this is Lloyd George. For it is always significant when the life of the soul coincides with the outer life of the body.

The fact that in our fifth post-Atlantean age people are naturally capable of further development only until they reach their 20s, is important as a basis for the concerted action of Archangels and Angels. The normal spirits, the spirits of light, want to direct human evolution in a certain way. This is as follows: human beings are naturally capable of further development until they are in their 20s; the spirits of light want to keep this an intimate affair, letting it proceed without much ado in human beings; then, in the twenty-eighth year, between the twenty-eighth and thirty-fifth years, the development which has gone on quietly is to emerge. Mark well, therefore. Something which evolves in the human blood until people reach their twenty-eighth year is to enter more into people's self-awareness, it is to be handed over to the blood in self-awareness. It is therefore the intention of the normal spirits, the spirits of light, that the inner life should develop quietly, unambitiously and selflessly and only come into action when individuals have reached the age of 28, when the years of apprenticeship are behind them, as it were, and they become journeymen, and finally masters.

The spirits of darkness which had been cast down from the spiritual world rebelled against this. They wanted people to take an active role in life and be masters at using the external intellect in their twenties, rather than go through quiet inner development.

Here you have a social phenomenon traced back to its spiritual foundations. A significant battle is taking place among us, you will find. The spirits of light only want us to reach maturity and be ready to take on an active role in public life after the twenty-eighth year. The spirits of darkness want the time put forward, so that it comes before the twenty-eighth year; they want to push people out into public life at an earlier time. All the impulses in our social life which reflect these elements have their origin in this—when in some place or other, for instance, the request is made to bring the age of majority down even further, into the 20s or even earlier than the 20s. There you have the origins of these elements.

People do, of course, find it uncomfortable to know such things today. For they make it evident to what extent the spirits of darkness are causing havoc in public affairs. Much of what I have been saying has so far been known instinctively and atavistically by people. This has come to an end, however, and people will have to be prepared to gain conscious knowledge of things that used to be known instinctively and were also instilled into human minds by the ancient Mysteries. Spiritual principles must be included in shaping the social structure; they have to be thought of, rather than people wanting to shape the world blindly on the basis of mere emotions. The spirits of darkness find it easiest to achieve their aims if people are asleep to what goes on in the spirit. They can then easily gain power over what that they cannot achieve if people enter consciously into the spiritual impulses that are active in evolution. Much of the mendacity which exists in the world today serves the purpose of rocking people to sleep so that they do not see the reality, are deflected from reality, and the spirits of darkness have it all their own way with the human race. All kinds of things are falsely presented to people to deflect them from truths they could experience if they were awake and, indeed, ought to experience, if human evolution is to proceed in a fruitful way. This is the age when human beings must take affairs into their own hands.

It will be of real importance to see certain things in their true light, which, however, will only be possible if one knows the spiritual powers involved. We may say that the nineteenth century brought everything which can cause people to be deflected from the truth. Just think what it really meant that Darwinism intervened so profoundly in human evolution, even at the most popular level of thinking, exactly during the most important phase of nineteenth-century evolution. It is strange to see what people sometimes come up with in this respect. For example, Fritz Mauthner's famous Dictionary of Philosophy⁴ includes the interesting statement that it was not how Darwin overcame teleology, the theory of design and purpose, which mattered, but the fact that he did overcome it. In other words, in Mauthner's view it was most fruitful that someone presented organic evolution taking its course without involving spiritual entities and their designs and purposes.

Now, for someone who is able to see these things in their proper light, the matter appears as follows. If you see a horse-drawn vehicle, a cab with a horse in front, the horse is drawing the cab. You will, of course, say that the driver is sitting on the box and guiding the horse with the reins. But if you ignore the driver, you will find it interesting to study what goes on in the horse to make it draw the cab; you can go into every detail of how the horse sets about drawing the cab, if you leave aside the fact that it is given its intention by the cab driver.

This is the actual basis of Darwinian theories; one simply leaves aside the driver, saying it is an old superstition, a prejudice, to say that the driver is guiding the horse. The horse is drawing the cab, anyone can see that, for the horse is in front. Darwinian theory is entirely based on this kind of logic. Being thus biased, it has, of course, brought to light some excellent truths which are of the first magnitude. But it blocks all possibility of a real overview. Countless scientific facts suffer at the empirical level from the fact that people overlook the driver. They speak of cause and effect; but they seek the cause for the movement of the cab in the horse, considering this to be a great advance. People fail to realize that this type of confusion between horse and driver—such ‘horse theories’, if you will forgive my putting it bluntly—exists right, left and centre in modern science. These theories cannot be proved wrong, just as it is not wrong to say the horse draws the cab. This is quite correct, but true and false in the outer sense is not the issue. Materialistic thinkers will always be able to refute a spiritualistic thinker who knows that the driver is there as well. Here you see where the hairsplitting, astute, critical intellect could lead, which the spirits of darkness want human beings to have. It does not matter about getting things right, let alone complete; what counts is that one follows the model where the horse draws the cab. Logic can easily separate from reality and go its own way. It is possible to be utterly logical and at the same time be far from reality.

Something else has to be considered when we speak of human evolution. It is that the spirits of darkness have power mainly over the rational mind and intellect. They cannot get hold of the emotions, nor the will and, above all, not the will impulses. This touches on a profound and most significant law of reality. You have all of you, though to a different degree, reached a sufficiently respectable age for it to be fair to say you have lived several decades, or two or three decades at least. In the last decades we have seen a wide variety of social efforts, many supported by press journalism, some also by book journalism, but very few based on real knowledge and on the facts. We have seen strange forms of social and political life evolve in Europe and America. Yet, strangely, we find in all these things the ideas belonging to the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, but not the emotions, nor the will impulses. This is strange indeed. It can only be discovered if we carry out genuinely honest and conscientious investigations in the spiritual world. People who came down from the world of the sprit in the 1840s to incarnate in human bodies and are now up in that world again know about these things; they have the point of view of the spiritual world and know that in recent decades the intellects were active which were ripe for the age, whilst the will impulses were still those of the 1840s. The will moves much more slowly in human evolution than do ideas. Please take this as a highly significant truth: the will moves much more slowly than do thoughts. For example, the patriarchal, solid-citizen-type habits of people who were not being rebels or revolutionaries in the 1830s and 1840s but were more inclined to follow the general trend, continued to live on into the decades of which I am now speaking. Their thoughts went ahead, however, and so there are continuous discrepancies between thought life and will life in evolution, discrepancies which do not show themselves in all, but only in some, spheres of life.

It is entirely due to this that something became possible in the nineteenth century which had not been possible in any previous century. Superficial historians may well disagree, but it is pointless to go against it. What I mean is this: never before in the historical epochs of human evolution did the intellect, or acumen, positively intervene in life. Go back to the slave rebellions in ancient Rome; the slaves were essentially aroused by rancour, by will impulses. In the nineteenth and on into the twentieth century this is different. Modern social democracy does not compare, historically speaking, with the old slave rebellions; it is something entirely different, born out of theories produced by Lassalle,⁵ but mainly by Karl Marx,⁶ including his theory of the class struggle. A purely critical element, purely theoretical, based on ideas, set people going and made them into agitators. This was because the people who took up Marxism and became agitators still had the will impulses of the 1840s. They had not been able to catch up as far as the will was concerned. This discrepancy in will had the effect that, under the guidance of certain powers, a purely intellectual movement generated agitation among the masses.

This is something which did not exist before; it shows, even more than what I said yesterday, that in the nineteenth century, partly during the time when the Spirits of darkness were still above, and then after they had come down, they sought above all to encourage the physical intellect by working through one particular stream. There you see it at work, you see it take hold of the emotions, even, in the 1830s and 1840s, and for once acting not as pure intellect alone to convince people. You see the direct effect of the intellect in agitation, revolution, revolutionary longings. Never before had the intellect been at the helm to that extent. It is important to consider this. We must penetrate the time with understanding by discovering what goes on behind the scenes in ‘world history’.

Ask anyone who does not take much interest in these matters how old history is, and for how long humanity has been engaged in the discipline known as ‘history’ today. They will say that it goes a long way back. But ‘history’, as we know it today, is not much more than a hundred years old. Before that, memorable events and ‘histories’ were recorded ‘world history’, as it is called, where a thread is followed through human evolution, is just slightly over a hundred years old. Look at the stories or histories which preceded this. Why did modern history come up? Because it is a product of transition. Are there any special reasons why history, in the way it is handled today, should be regarded as a science? Well, we can give a number of reasons, the main one being that several hundred professors are employed as professors of history at all the universities on earth. This reminds me of an individual who taught criminal law and who tends to come to mind whenever we speak of the reasons for developments. This individual taught criminal law at a university. He always started his lectures with what he considered to be proof of human freedom. Well, he did not produce much by way of real reasons: ‘Gentlemen, freedom has to exist, for if there were no freedom there would be no criminal law. The fact is that I am a professor of criminal law; therefore criminal law must exist; it follows that human freedom also exists.’

Whenever you hear opinions expressed on what are said to be developments in the course of human evolution, you will hear the fine words: ‘History has shown.’ Look at the things that are being written on current events. Again and again you will see the phrase ‘history has shown this,’ when someone wants to present his nonsense about what will happen once peace is made. They will say: ‘It was like this after the Thirty Years War,’ and so on. These truths are of the kind of which I have spoken before when I said that, according to people's calculations, a war cannot take more than four months today. In reality, history does not teach us anything. In materialistic thinking, sciences can only be called such if one has repeated instances which allow one to draw conclusions as to future developments. When a chemist does an experiment, he knows that if he combines certain substances certain processes will occur; combining the same substances again will result in the same processes, and the third time it will be the same again. Or one gets a certain cloud combination which generates lightning; a similar combination will again generate lightning. Modern thinking is based on premises according to which a science cannot be a science unless it rests on this type of repetition. Do think this through. History cannot be a science for people who take the materialistic point of view, for things do not repeat themselves in history, the combinations are always new. It is therefore not possible to draw conclusions by using the method employed in other sciences. History is merely a product of transition. It only became a science in the nineteenth century. Before then, memorable events were described. You see, writing your family history is not considered to be ‘history’ either. Even the German word for history, Geschichte, is far from old. Other languages do not even have this word, for the word ‘history’ has quite a different origin. In the past, the singular was das Geschicht, as in das Geschicht der Apostel, and so on, ‘what has come to pass’.⁷ Then the plural die Geschichten came to be used, which is the straightforward plural of das Geschicht. Today we have to say die Geschichte. Yet in Switzerland die Geschichten was still the plural of das Geschicht 150 years ago. Then the article was changed and one said die Geschichte—singular—which had been the plural when the word had the article das. This is the origin of the word; you can read it up in works on etymology.

The term ‘history’ will only have real meaning when spiritual impulses are taken into account. There we can speak of what really has come to pass and, within limits, of what happens behind the scenes. Limits are set in so far as we compare this with what can be predicted to apply in the physical world in future—the position of the sun next summer, for example, and so on, but not every detail of the weather. The world of the spirit also has elements which are like the weather of the future in relation to the future position of the sun. Generally speaking, however, the course of human evolution can only be known on the basis of its spiritual impulses. History is therefore embryonic and not what it is supposed to be; it will only finally be something when it makes the transition from its 100 years of existence to consideration of the spiritual life which is behind the scenes of what comes to pass at the surface level for humanity.

It means that people must really wake up in many respects. We merely need to take up a theme which is not without significance for the present time, such as the theme I have just taken up: How old is history? Many people—and this is not to blame individuals but merely the system used in schools—have never had the least idea that history is still so young and cannot yet be in accord with reality. Imagine what it would be like if natural science were only 100 years old and you wanted to compare it with earlier stages in natural science! These things only move gradually from being something which is merely learned, to becoming real life. It is only when this is seriously considered and these issues become issues in education that people will come to understand the reality of life.

On the one hand people must be introduced to the life of nature when still young, as one sees in some—I am saying some—of the stories in Brehm's work,⁸ where it is really possible to gain a living perception of things which happen through creatures from the animal world. Distinction must be made above all between anything based on reality and the allegorical, symbolic tales told by people whose approach to nature is entirely superficial. These would merely come between the children and their understanding of reality. The point is that we should not tell them anything symbolic and allegorical, but introduce them to the real life of natural history. We might consider the life of bees, not in the way zoologists do, but rather in the way of someone who enters into things with heart and soul, without being sentimental about it. Maeterlinck's book on bees⁹ is, of course, very good, but it would not be suitable for children; it might induce someone to write a children's book on bees, or perhaps on ants. You would have to avoid any form of allegory, nor should you speak of abstract spiritual entities; you would really have to go into the concrete reality.

On the other hand, ‘history’, which is nonsense and harmful to children as it is now written, would have to be handled in such a way that one could always feel the spiritual at work in it. Of course, you cannot tell children, not even boys and girls at grammar school, what actuality happened in the nineteenth century; you can give expression to the real situation through the way in which the story is told, in the way in which events are grouped and by the value given to one element or another.

The stories concocted for the nineteenth century are certainly not what is needed to give even people of more mature years an idea of what really happened. We ought to show how something was in preparation during the first, second, third and fourth decades of that century, which really came to life in the forties. All we have to do is to describe things in such a way that the individual concerned gets a feeling for events in Europe and America during the 1840s: this something special is ‘chumbling and churning’ in there, if you will forgive the expression.¹⁰ Then again, when one comes to the 1870s, we would not say it was the time when the Angels were cast down from heaven, but we can speak in a way for people to see, and feel, that a major change came at that point in the nineteenth century. Anthroposophy can also enrich earlier history. The rubbish presented as Greek and Roman history in schools today could really come to life if the anthroposophical impulses we have come to know were brought into it. No need to use exactly these terms and ideas, but tell the story in such a way that it emerges in the telling. People have moved a long way away from this and must come closer to it again.

This is the only way in which people can get a sense of reality. They lack this sense today even with regard to the most primitive aspects of life around them and the events in which they share. People think they are realistic and materialistic today when, in fact, they are the most abstract of theorists you can think of, stuffed full with theories, fast asleep in nothing but theories and not even aware of the fact. If one of them should happen to wake up—it is not a matter of chance, but if we use the popular way of saying it we might say: If one of them should by chance wake up and say something whilst awake, he would simply be ignored. It is the way things are today.

You will no doubt have heard that certain people are over and over again proclaiming to the world that democracy must spread to the whole civilized world. Salvation lies in making the whole of humanity democratic; everything will have to be smashed to pieces so that democracy may spread in the world. Well, if people go on to accept ideas presented to them as they are, with wholesale acceptance of the term democracy, for instance, their idea of democracy will be like the definition of the human being which I gave you: A human being is a creature with two legs and without feathers: a plucked cockerel. The people who are glorifying democracy today know about as much about it as someone who is shown a plucked cockerel knows about the human being. Concepts are taken for reality, and as a result illusion may take the place of reality where human life is concerned by lulling people to sleep with concepts. They believe the fruits of their endeavours will be that every individual will be able to express their will in the different democratic institutions, and they fail to see that these institutions are such that it is always just a few people who pull the wires, whilst the rest are pulled along. They are persuaded, however, that they are part of democracy and so they do not notice they are being pulled and that some individuals are pulling the strings. Those individuals will find it all the easier to do the pulling if the others all believe they are doing it themselves, instead of being pulled along. It is quite easy to lull people to sleep with abstract concepts and make them believe the opposite of what is really true. This gives the powers of darkness the best opportunity to do what they want. And if anyone should wake up they are simply ignored.

It is interesting to note that in 1910 someone wrote that large scale capitalism had succeeded in making democracy into the most marvellous, flexible and effective tool for exploiting the whole population. Financiers were usually imagined to be the enemies of democracy, the individual concerned wrote, but this was a fundamental error. On the contrary, they run democracy and encourage it, for it provides a screen behind which they can hide their method of exploitation, and they find it their best defence against any objections which the populace may raise.

For once, therefore, a man woke up and saw that what mattered was not to proclaim democracy but to see the full reality, not to follow slogans, but to see things as they are. This would be particularly important today, for people would then realize that the events which reign with such blood and terror over the whole of humanity are guided and directed from just a few centres. People will never realize this if they persist in the delusion that nation is fighting nation, and allow the European and American Press to lull them to sleep over the kinds of relations that are said to exist between nations. Everything said about antagonism and opposition between nations only exists to cast a veil over the true reasons. For we shall never arrive at the real truth if we feed on words in order to explain these events, but only if we point to actual people. The problem is that this tends to be unpalatable today. And the man who woke up and wrote these statements in 1910 also presented some highly unwelcome accounts in his book. He produced a list of fifty-five individuals who are the real rulers and exploiters of France. The list can be found in Francis Delaisi's La Democratie et les Financiers,¹¹ written in 1910; the same man has also written La Guerre qui vient, a book which has become famous. In his La Democratie et les Financiers you will find statements of fundamental significance. There you have someone who has woken up to reality. The book contains impulses which allow one to see through much of what we should see through today, and also to cut through much of the fog which is made to wash over human brains today. Here again, we must resolve to look to reality.

The book has, of course, been ignored. It does, however, raise issues which should be raised all over the world today, for they would teach people much about the reality which others intend to bury under all their declamations on democracy and autocracy and whatever the slogans may be. The book also gives an excellent exposition on the extremely difficult position in which members of parliament find themselves. People think they can vote according to their convictions. But you would have to know all the different threads which tie them to reality if you wanted to know why they vote for one thing and against another. Certain issues really must be raised. Delaisi does so. Thus, for example, he considers a member of parliament and asks the question: Which side should the poor man support? The people pay him three thousand francs a year and the shareholders pay him thirty thousand francs!’ To pose the question is to answer it. So the poor dear man gets his three-thousand-franc allowance from the people, and thirty thousand francs from the shareholders! I think you will agree it is a good piece of proof, a sign of real acumen, to say: How nice that a socialist, a man of the people like Millerand¹² has gained a seat in parliament! Delaisi's question goes in another direction. He asks: How far can someone like Millerand, who was earning thirty thousands francs a year for representing insurance companies, be independent?

So for once someone did wake up. He is well aware of the threads which run from the actions of such an individual to the different insurance companies. But such things, reported by someone who is awake and sees the truth, are ignored. It is, of course, only too easy to talk about democracy in the Western world. Yet if you wanted to tell people the truth you would have to say: ‘The man called so and so is doing this, and the one called so and so is doing that.’ Delaisi has found fifty-five men—not a democracy but fifty-five specific individuals—who, he says, govern and exploit France. There, someone has discovered the real facts, for in ordinary life, too, a feeling must awaken for the real facts.

Here is something else from Delaisi: There was once a lawyer who had all kinds of connections, not just insurance companies, but centres of finance, financial worlds. But this lawyer wanted to aim even higher; he wanted sponsorship not only from the worlds of finance, industry and trade, but also from the academic world of the French Academy. This is a place where the academic world can raise one to the sphere of immortality. There were two ‘Immortals’ within the Academy, however, who were involved in illegal trust dealings. They found it perfectly possible to combine their work for immortality with trust dealings which the law of the land did not permit. Then our sharp-witted lawyer defended the two Immortals in court and managed to get them off, to whitewash them so that no sentence was passed. They then had him admitted to the ranks of the ‘Immortals’. Science, responsible not for the temporal things of the world but for things eternal and immortal, made itself the advocate of this selfless lawyer. His name is Raymond Poincar.¹³ Delaisi tells the story in his La Democratie et les Financiers.

It is not a bad thing to know these things, which are ingredients of reality. They must be seriously considered. And one is guided to develop something of a nose for reality when one takes up anthroposophy, whilst the materialistic education people have today, with innumerable channels opening into it from the Press, is designed to point not to the realities but to something which is cloaked in all kinds of slogans. And if someone does wake up, as Delaisi did, and writes about how things really are, how many people get to know about it? How many people will listen? They cannot listen, for it is buried by—well, by a life that again is ruled by the Press. Delaisi shows himself to be a bright person, someone who has gone to a lot of trouble to gain real insight. He is no blind follower of parliamentarianism, nor of democracy. He predicts that the things people think are so clever today will come to an end. He says so expressly, also with reference to the ‘voting machine’—which is approximately how he puts it. He is entirely scientific and serious in his discourse on this parliamentary voting machine, for he understands the whole system which leads to these ‘voting machines’, where people are made to believe that a convinced majority is voting against a mentally unhinged minority. He knows that something else will have to take the place of this if there is to be healthy development.

This is not yet possible, for people would be deeply shocked if you were to tell them what will take its place. Only people initiated into spiritual science can really know this today. Forms which belong to the past will definitely not take its place. You need not be afraid that someone speaking out of anthroposophy will promote some kind of reactionary or conservative ideas; no, these will not be things of the past, but they will be so different from the ‘voting machine’ which exists today that people will be shocked and consider this madness. Nevertheless it will enter into the impulses of evolution in time. Delaisi, too, says: In organic development certain parts lose their original function and become useless but still persist for some time; in the same way, these parliaments will continue to vote for quite some time, but all real life will have departed from them.

You know that human beings have parts of the body which are like this. Some people can move their ears because the muscles for this existed in the past. We still have those muscles, but they have become atavistic and have lost their function. This is how Delaisi sees the parliament of the future; parliaments will be such atavistic remnants which have died and will drop off, and something quite different will come into human evolution.

I have quoted Delaisi and his book which appeared not so long ago, in 1910, to show you that there really are enough people—for one such individual will be enough for many thousands. It is important, however, not to ignore these people. Apart from my efforts to introduce you to the laws of spiritual life and the impulses of spiritual life, I also regard it to be my function to draw attention to significant elements in present-day life. It means, of course, that initially you will hear aspects called significant in these lectures which are not considered significant in life outside, if you find them mentioned at all. The things we do must be radically and thoroughly different from those which are done outside. And we can only truly follow the science of the Spirit in the way it should be followed if we accept this in all its depth and seriousness.

• 1. Steiner, R. The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and of Humanity. (GA 15) Tr. by H. Monges. Anthroposophic Press, New York, 1970.
• 2. See lecture 5.
• 3. See lecture 2.
• 4. Fritz Mauthner (1849–1923), Woerterbuch der Philosophie, neue Beitraege zu einer Kritik der Sprache (translates as ‘Dictionary of Philosophy, New contributions to a critique of the language’), 2 vols, 1910/11. The statement relating to Darwin is to be found in a section on history. It reads as follows: ‘It is not the way in which Darwin annihilated teleology that will remain for ever; what will not be forgotten is the fact that he sought to understand the world of nature without resorting to teleology.’
• 5. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–1864), German social democrat.
• 6. Karl Marx (1818–1883), founder of modern international Communism.
• 7. Das Geschicht, or die Geschichte, derives from the past participle of the verb geschehen, to have come to pass; die Geschichte nowadays translates into English as ‘history’, or ‘story’, ‘account’, depending on the context. (Translator)
• 8. See Note 2 of lecture 11.
• 9. Count Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949), Belgian dramatist and writer. Nobel prize for litersture 1911. His La vie des abeilles (1901) has been translated into English. Maeterlinck also wrote La vie des termites (1926) and La vie des fourmis (1930).
• 10. See Note 7 of lecture 8.
• 11. Francis Delaisi (b. 1873), French social scientist and writer.
• 12. Alexandre Millerand (1859–1943), the first socialist to hold ministerial Position in a French government. Minister of Commerce 1899–1902, of Works 1909–1910, of War 1912–1913.
• 13. Raymond Nicholas Poincar (1860–1934), president of the French Republic 1913–1920; his policies were extremely anti-German.

We come now to the end of this cycle of lectures, during which thoughts about the so-called “culture” of the present day may well have occurred to you. We have had to direct our attention in some detail to the remarkable way the ahrimanic and luciferic forces penetrate this culture. A discerning person who has some understanding of the insights of spiritual science will look objectively at modern life and surely perceive all its confusion and chaos. For many years it has been my custom to point to this as little as possible and instead, by helping to open up the spiritual world, to use our time together in a more positive way. But it must be emphasized, now as always, that a good many misunderstandings have crept into our work, into our active efforts, through this self-imposed moderation—the word is indeed not chosen arrogantly; even so, we shall not deviate greatly from this custom of ours. And in consideration of this, two things are essential: first, a clear, objective understanding that evolution, the development of the post-Atlantean world, has led far and wide to the chaotic, complex, to some extent inferior, second-rate condition of modern civilization, but that for this there is a certain valid necessity. It is not enough merely to criticize; a clear, objective understanding is needed.

On the other hand, we have to oppose the chaos and confusion of modern intellectual life with clarity of vision, as long as we are supported by the perspectives revealed by spiritual science. Ever and again we have well-meaning, good-natured friends exclaiming that here or there something quite anthroposophical has appeared; then we have to recognize the deficiency of these so-called anthroposophical things. I have said I would not deviate from my custom, but now, at the end of this cycle, I would like to refer to at least one especially grotesque example of this tendency. There are those nowadays who like to blow themselves up into a professional stance without the least understanding of anything—and people who don't practice discrimination can very easily be carried away, given the chance, by high-sounding phrases. This must really disappear from our circles. We must acquire, each one for himself, the power of clear, objective discrimination. Then we would have a better idea than has been the case up to now of the relationship of second-rate movements and individuals to our own movement.

Tendencies of this kind come up in many different ways. I would like to mention just one of them, not to criticize or to lay before you a case of specific hostility toward our work but merely to characterize the problem. A publisher in Berlin²⁵ has brought out an edition of The Chymical Wedding and other writings of Christian Rosenkreuz. Many of our friends and others interested in occult movements will obviously snap up this new reprint of works that have never been easy to find. But now there is an Introduction to the Chymical Wedding that really outdoes everything imaginable in grotesque erudition—I won't give it a more exact name. Let me read you a few lines of this Introduction, on page 2, without going any further into the rest of the article.

“When we approach the occult sciences with precise critical methods”—with these words, many people will be misled—“one will soon be aware that from this point on, one can get in touch with the two poles mentioned above.” I shall not discuss what these poles are, for it is all merely ...; I will forego any description. “For this the newly formulated concept of Allomatics is especially valuable, as under its guidance one easily masters difficulties coming from both sides.” Allomatics is something that will impress many people. “Allomatics is the study, the science and the philosophy of the Other (the word is derived from Greek allos, the other, in contrast to autos, self). Allomatics teaches the nothingness and nonexistence of the Ego. Everything is and comes from the non-Ego, from outside, from above, from below, in short, from the Other.”

All this erudition continues throughout the article, in order to prepare the reading public for The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreuz. I would call it—and I am not speaking from animosity but with objective logic—absolutely the same thing as originating a “Pearology” or “Pearomatics” in the place of xenology or allomatics. With exactly the same logic that this remarkable duffer derives the world from I and non-I, we could also derive the world from a pear and everything not a pear, that is, the Other of the pear. We could use the same words and concepts in order to explain the whole world as pear and non-pear. Nothing is missing from the world and its phenomena, according to this gentleman, if we explain it by means of Pearomatics, the doctrine of pear and non-pear instead of the doctrine of Ego and the Other.

Allomatics is presented as a work of great learning, with parallels to embryology in order to appear erudite. Its tone is that of many academic works that are taken seriously and are often honestly received by our friends—I say this again not with animosity but in fact in a spirit of brotherliness—as though they were important works and not merely the products of our inferior age. This points up a lack of discrimination between what has inner value and what is pure nonsense at a low level of literature. Since the author of this introduction is also one of the people who originated or repeated the foolish Jesuit tale, ²⁶ it can be said quite objectively that we can estimate from this the kind of opposition springing up lately from all sides against our movement. It is important to achieve the right attitude to everything in occultism that, creeping out of so many corners of the world, is regarded by many as of equal significance to profound, scrupulous spiritual science. Another important thing to acquire, if you wish to profess honestly your allegiance to spiritual science, is the right sensitivity to these various gentlemen and their writings; this sensitivity will lead to ignoring them instead of kowtowing and hailing everything they bring out. One should actually suggest to them that instead of taking the time to produce such writing, they could make themselves more useful to humanity in other ways, for instance by taking up fretsaw work.

We really must look at such things with complete objectivity; we must get used to sizing up correctly and turning our backs on very many ingredients of modern culture. For this we need only the right kind of thinking and the sensitivity to such people and their work. One thing we have to be clear about: the phenomena of our time are perfectly comprehensible if we remember how the ahrimanic and luciferic forces have thrust themselves into human development.

Every impulse and tendency of human evolution changes from age to age; in the same way, as I have often pointed out, the ahrimanic and luciferic influences also change. Our epoch is to some degree a sort of reversed repetition of the Egyptian-Chaldean age, but as a reversed repetition the luciferic and ahrimanic forces generally play a different role today in the external culture. During the ancient Egyptian-Chaldean age the human soul, looking out on what was happening, could say: From one side the ahrimanic influence is coming; from another, the luciferic. In this ancient civilization the distinction, outwardly, could still be made. However, by the Greco-Roman age one can say that Lucifer and Ahriman confront the human soul directly and hold themselves in balance there. Anyone who enters deeply into the fundamental nature of the Greco-Roman civilization will be able to observe the state of balance between Lucifer and Ahriman. But in our time it has changed again. Lucifer and Ahriman now are in league together in a kind of partnership in the outer world. Before these forces reach the human soul, they are knotted together externally. In ancient times the skeins of influence from Ahriman and Lucifer were quite separate, but nowadays we have them tangled and knotted together within the development of our civilization. It is extremely difficult for a human being to unravel the entanglement and find a way out of it. Everywhere in our cultural happenings we find luciferic and ahrimanic threads interwoven in a higgledy-piggledy mixture, stirring up a great deal of violent political agitation and even playing into many of the abstract ideas and superficial proceedings in full swing now and in times to come; until we are clear about this, we will not be able to form a sound judgment of the conditions around us.

We need to be watchful of the chaotic entanglement of luciferic and ahrimanic threads. For no one today is more challenged to come to terms with these forces than he who is on the path of spiritual knowledge, he who is trying to arm his soul with clairvoyant capacities in order to discover something he cannot know with his ordinary consciousness: the real being of man. This must always be the true goal of spiritual science. From the descriptions already given, it is evident that as soon as a person approaches the higher worlds, he has to step across a threshold. As an earth-being who has made his soul clairvoyant, he must go back and forth across that threshold and know how to conduct himself rightly in the spiritual world on the far side, as well as on this side in the physical world. Both in lectures and now repeatedly in our Mystery Dramas, this important threshold experience has been referred to as the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold.

A person can actually ascend into the spiritual worlds—this has often been said—and have quite a few experiences there without having a meeting with the Guardian, something that is partly terrifying but on the other hand highly significant, indeed of infinite importance for the sake of a clear, objective perception of those worlds. I have pointed to this and everything connected with it in my book, The Threshold of the Spiritual World, at least as far as I could while treating the material in an aphoristic way. I have gone further in the course of these lectures, and now I should like to add only a few details to characterize the Guardian of the Threshold. Should I try to describe everything about the meeting with the Guardian, I would indeed have to hold another long cycle of lectures.

May I point out again that when a human being leaves his physical body in which he lives with the physical world around him, he enters the elemental world and lives in his etheric body, just as in the physical world he lives in the physical body. Then when he leaves the etheric body clairvoyantly, he lives in the astral body surrounded by the spiritual world. We have pointed out that on leaving the astral body the human being can then be within his true ego. Around him will be the supra-spiritual world. When he enters this world, he has finally attained what he has always possessed in the depths of his soul, his true ego. He reaches now the spiritual world in such a way that his true ego, his other self, is revealed, actually enveloped in the element of living thought-being.

All of us walking about on the physical plane have this other self within us, but our ordinary consciousness not only is not aware of it but cannot know that we will not perceive it until we ascend into the spiritual and supra-spiritual worlds. Our true ego is actually our constant companion within us, but when we meet it on the threshold of the spiritual world, it is there in a remarkable way, in fact one can say, decked out quite peculiarly. There on the threshold our true ego is able to clothe itself in all our weaknesses, all our failings, everything that induces us to cling with our whole being either to the physical sense world or at least to the elemental world. Thus we confront our own true ego on the threshold.

Abstract Theosophy can simply say: that is oneself, the other self, the true ego. But in the face of the actual reality, we won't find much meaning in the phrase: it is oneself. Of course, we all move about in the spiritual world in the form of our other self, but there we are entirely another. When we dwell consciously in the physical world, our other self is actually very much another, a stranger to us, a being that is much more foreign to us than any other person on earth. And this other self, this true ego, decks itself out in our weaknesses, in everything we should really forsake but don't wish to forsake, habits of the physical sense existence that we still hang on to when we wish to cross the threshold. And there on the threshold we actually meet a spirit being different from all other spiritual beings we could meet in the super-sensible worlds. The other beings appear to us in coverings more appropriate to their nature than those of the Guardian of the Threshold. He arrays himself in everything that arouses in us not only anxiety and distress but also disgust and loathing. He clothes himself in our weaknesses, in things that bring us to admit: Our fear of separating from him makes us shudder, or it makes us blush, overcome with shame, to have to look at what we are, at what the Guardian has wrapped himself in. While indeed this is a meeting with oneself, it is more truly the meeting with another entity.

To get past the Guardian of the Threshold is not at all easy. Actually it is much easier to behold the spiritual world than it is to behold it rightly and truthfully. To catch a few impressions of the spiritual world, especially in our modern time, is not all that difficult. To enter that world, however, in such a way that we behold it in its full reality, we must be well prepared for the meeting with the Guardian, however long it delays in coming to us; then we will experience the spiritual world correctly. Most people, or at least very many of them, get as far as the Guardian. The important point is that we should come consciously to him. Every night we stand unconsciously before the Guardian. Certainly he is a great benefactor of mankind in not allowing himself to be seen, for very few human beings could endure it. To bring into consciousness what we experience every night unconsciously is to meet the Guardian of the Threshold. People usually get just to the edge of the boundary where, one can say, the Guardian stands. But at that moment, something very peculiar happens to the soul: it perceives this moment in a twilight state between consciousness and unconsciousness and will not allow it to come to full consciousness. On that borderline the soul has the impulse to see itself as it really is, clinging to the physical world with all its weaknesses and faults, but this is unbearable. Before the event can become fully conscious, the soul—through its utter loathing—deadens, as it were, its awareness. Such moments of the soul's obliterating its consciousness are the best points of attack for the ahrimanic beings.

We come indeed to the Guardian of the Threshold by developing a sense of self that is especially strong and forceful. We have to strengthen our sense of self, if we wish to rise into the spiritual world. But in the process of strengthening our sense of self, we also strengthen all the tendencies, habits, weaknesses and prejudices that are held back and limited in the external world through our education, through custom and through the outward culture. On the threshold, the luciferic impulses assert themselves strongly from within, and when the human soul tends to deaden its awareness, Lucifer immediately unites with Ahriman, with the result that the entrance to the spiritual world is barred.

If a person with a healthy inner life searches out the insights of spiritual science without dwelling in a state of morbid craving for spiritual experiences, nothing particularly harmful will happen at the boundary line. If he attends to everything that should be attended to in the form of rightful, genuine spiritual science, nothing more will happen than that Lucifer and Ahriman balance each other for the striving soul at the threshold and the soul simply does not enter the spiritual world. But when the person has a special craving to get in, a so-called “nibbling at the spiritual world” can take place.²⁷ Ahriman then, condensing what the soul has “nibbled,” pushes into the soul's consciousness what otherwise couldn't enter it. With this, the person experiences in condensed form what he has taken from the spiritual world, so that it looks exactly like the reproduction of physical impressions. In short, he will be the victim of hallucinations and illusions; he will believe he has approached a spiritual world, because he has come as far as the Guardian of the Threshold. However, he has not passed the Guardian but has been thrown back because of his nibbling at the spiritual world. Everything he took in has condensed to what could contain genuine pictures of that world but does not contain the most important element, the one that will guarantee the soul a clear perception of the truth and the value of what he sees.

In order to pass the Guardian of the Threshold in the right way, it is absolutely necessary to develop self-knowledge: truly genuine, unsparing self-knowledge. It is a neglect of one's duty to the progress of evolution if one refuses to rise into the spiritual worlds, should karma make it possible in this present incarnation. It would indeed be wrong to say to oneself, “I shall not enter the spiritual worlds for fear of going astray.” We should strive as intensely as we can to enter them. On the other hand, we must clearly understand that we may not shrink from what the human being is most apt and most willing to shrink back from: genuine, truthful self-knowledge. Nothing is actually so difficult in life as plain, honest self-knowledge. What a lot of queer things one can find in this regard! One meets people who continually emphasize out of their ordinary consciousness that they're doing this or that with complete selflessness, that they desire simply nothing at all for themselves. In trying to understand such souls, we often find that they really believe it's so, and yet, in their subconscious they are thoroughgoing egoists and want only what suits themselves. Oh, we can also find people who out of their upper consciousness, let's say, make speeches, lay down the law, publish things and in a few short pages put down words such as love and tolerance eighteen to twenty-five times, actually without having the very slightest trace of love or tolerance in their make-up. There is nothing we can be so easily deceived about as ourselves, if we fail to watch continually the practicing of honest, sterling self-knowledge. However it is difficult indeed to practice self-knowledge in a direct way. People have shut their eyes to it so completely that instead of acknowledging what they are at the present time, it has happened that they prefer to admit to being apes during the Moon epoch²⁸—actually prefer that to acknowledging what they are today, so great can be our delusions in contrast to the moral obligation of genuine, honest self-knowledge.

A good exercise for someone striving in the spiritual sphere would be to say every so often something like this: “I will think back over the last three or four weeks—or better still, months—letting all the important happenings in which I was involved pass before my inner eye. I will deliberately disregard whatever injustice may have been done to me. I will omit all the excuses for my difficulties that I've expressed so frequently, such as, for instance: it was someone else's fault. I will not for a moment consider that any other person could have been to blame but I myself.” When we reflect on how constantly we are inclined to make others and not ourselves responsible for what we don't like, we will be able to judge how valuable such a review of our life can be, in which we knowingly eliminate thoughts of injustice done to us and in which we do not allow criticism or blame of another person to arise. If you undertake such an exercise, you will discover that you are gaining a totally new relationship to the spiritual world. Such an effort will bring about a great change in the disposition and mood of one's soul.

In seeking the path to clairvoyance, the extreme difficulty of entering the higher worlds without danger, as we have said repeatedly, shows how essential it is not to come apart, not to fall to pieces, when we have to “put our head into the ant hill.” We need then an immensely strengthened consciousness of self, such as a person may not develop in the physical world if he is not to be a rank egoist. In higher worlds, however, if he wants to maintain himself, stay aware of himself, realize himself, he must enter those worlds with an intensified feeling of self. Then, on coming back to the sense world, he must also have the ability to do away with this consciousness of self, in order not to be a thoroughgoing egoist. Thus, two contrasting statements can be made: in the higher worlds of spiritualities, man needs a strengthened consciousness of self; but in contrast, despite the strong feeling of self that one must find in the spirit world, what one must find in the physical world is that the spirit must come to life in a particular way: in all that one can describe as love in the physical world, the capacity for love, for sympathy and compassion, for the sharing of joys and sorrows.

Those who enter clairvoyantly into the higher worlds, know that what Maria says in The Souls' Awakening is true,²⁹ that really the ordinary sense-consciousness we have on the physical plane is a kind of sleep when compared to what we feel and experience in higher worlds; our entrance there is an awakening. That human beings living in the physical world are asleep in relation to the experience of higher worlds, is absolutely true. It is only because they are always asleep that they are not aware of sleeping. What the clairvoyant soul crossing the threshold experiences in the spiritual world is an awakening into a strengthened feeling of self. In the physical world, on the other hand, there can be an awakening of the self through love, the kind of love characterized in one of our first lectures here as “the love for another person's disposition and qualities, for him and for his sake.” That kind of love is protected from the luciferic and ahrimanic influences and in the physical sense-world is actually under the sway of the, good, progressive powers of the universe. The character of love is most clearly evident in the experiences of clairvoyant consciousness. The egoism we develop in the physical world, without being willing to acquire self-knowledge, shows up when it is carried into spiritual worlds. Nothing is so disturbing, nothing can be so bitter and disheartening as to experience the result of our failure to develop love and compassion in the physical world. Ascending into the spiritual world, we are filled with anguish by the selfishness and lack of love we have achieved in the physical-sense world. When we cross the threshold, everything is revealed, not only the obvious but also the hidden egoism that rages in the depths of men's souls. Someone who with outward egoism frankly insists that he wants this or that for himself is perhaps much less egoistic than those who indulge in the dream that they are selfless, or those who assume a certain egoistic self-effacement out of theosophical abstractions in their upper consciousness. This is especially the case when the latter declaim their selflessness in all sorts of repetitions of the words “love” and “tolerance.” What a person carries up into higher worlds in the form of an unloving lack of compassion is transformed into hideous, often terrifying figures he meets on entering the spiritual worlds, figures that are extremely disturbing for the soul.

At this point comes one of the very significant moments that should be taken into account when we speak about the kinds of knowledge and experience we meet in higher worlds. As soon as a person comes into those worlds and finds himself in a region of loathsome things, it would then be best for him to face them boldly, with courage, while admitting to himself, “Yes, I have indeed carried all this egoism up into the higher worlds ... it would truly be best for me to face this egoism boldly and honestly.” But the human soul usually tends to shake off these repulsive things before becoming thoroughly conscious of them, and gives a kick, one can say, just as horses do, to get rid of these disagreeable forms. And then, at the very moment when we get rid of the results of our egoism, Lucifer and Ahriman have an easy game with the soul: in partnership, it is not at all difficult for them to lead the human soul into their special kingdom where they can produce all sorts of spiritual worlds, which the human being will take for the truly genuine one grounded in the cosmic order. We can say that developing truly genuine love and thoughtful, honest compassion are the right preparation for the soul that wants to find its way clairvoyantly into the spiritual worlds. When you reflect a little on how hard it is to acquire true compassion and the true capacity for love in this world of ours, you will not find these words completely unimportant.

We should be clear that these descriptions, characterizing our crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, will lead to a truly genuine knowledge of the being of man. It is only through such descriptions that we will discover what man really is, and discover too our relationship to the way the human being approaches the higher, spiritual worlds, this time between death and a new birth, in a somewhat different but still natural way.

Here I must say a few words about something I pointed out in the last chapter of The Threshold of the Spiritual World. From earlier descriptions in Theosophy and Occult Science we know that when we step through the portal of death and lay aside our physical body, we still have the etheric body for a short time, perhaps only a few days; then we put this aside as well. Now we can say that after putting aside the etheric body, we are at first within the astral body; in the astral body the soul goes on a sort of further journeying. The etheric body is laid aside; its destiny depends on the world which it now enters, the elemental world. You remember that we discussed how the force of transformation holds sway in this elemental world. Everything is in continual change. The etheric body, separated now from the human soul, is delivered up to the elemental world and there goes through its destined transformations. In the following years, for some a shorter time, for others longer, we live within the astral body in what from the standpoint of clairvoyant consciousness can be called the elemental world. However, in the period immediately after death we find that the soul has a quite definite impulse. In the physical world we are not apt to look continually at our own liver, spleen or stomach—for this would be impossible. We simply cannot see inside the body. People on the physical plane are not in the habit of turning their eyes inward into the body; they look instead at the world around them. But just the opposite is the case after we have passed through the portal of death and live in the world that is called the Soul World in my Theosophy. There the characteristic tendency of the soul is to direct its particular attention to the destinies of its own etheric body. The soul's outer world, its environment, consists of the transformations our etheric body passes through during the whole kamaloka time. We observe how the elemental world takes our etheric body into itself. If one has been “a decent sort” here on the physical plane, one will see how the “decentness” gets on well with the laws of the elemental world. If one has been “a bad sort,” one will see how poorly the etheric body (for it has had its share in being “a bad sort”) gets on with the laws of this world; it is everywhere rejected. Even though our etheric body has been laid aside, we direct our whole attention to it. By looking at the ever-changing fate of our etheric body, we are made aware of what we once were: this is our kamaloka experience.

People should not criticize anthroposophy for saying all this. Aristotle and others taught quite differently: for example, that this looking back on one's own destiny after death would last a whole eternity; a man might live to be eighty or ninety years old and then would have to look eternally at what he had done to his own etheric body. Anthroposophy teaches the truth, that this looking back on the etheric body and on the destinies we have brought about in it by what we have been, lasts one or two or three decades. And this is our environment in the elemental world, an environment formed by beings similar to the human etheric body and by the transformations of these beings as well as by the transformations of the human etheric body itself. One can describe this pictorially and come to the same characterization that I have given in my book Theosophy as the passage of the soul through the soul world.

In order to describe the spiritual world in the right way, one cannot keep pedantically to the hard and fast concepts so useful in the physical world. We should be clear that our whole environment during the kamaloka time is dependent on our mood of soul, dependent in such a way that the elemental world we have just described gradually adapts itself to the soul world. In the elemental world more than anything else one sees a dispersing, little by little, of etheric substance, which as it evanesces can be described from stage to stage as has been done in my Theosophy

The time comes, in this period between death and a new birth, when there takes place what the clairvoyant consciousness has to bring about somewhat less naturally, as we have discussed earlier. After laying aside his etheric body, the human being lives in his astral body, until the time comes when this astral body detaches itself from the true ego; it is in the ego that he will live from that point onwards. This detaching of the astral body is quite unique; it is not like a snake slipping off its skin but rather a loosening on every side, a growing larger and larger until the astral body becomes one with the whole cosmic sphere. In doing this, it becomes ever thinner, while being absorbed by the whole surrounding world. At first one stands, in a sense, in the very center of one's own spiritual environment. On every side the astral body loosens itself and is absorbed in all directions, so that the environment we have about us after death, after this loosening, consists of the spiritual world and also of all that has been absorbed into it from our own astral body. We see this astral body of ours gradually go forth, becoming less and less distinct, of course, as it grows larger. We feel ourselves within the astral body—as has been described in many lectures—and nevertheless separate from it. These things are extremely difficult to describe. To picture it, just imagine a great swarm of gnats. From a distance it looks like a dark-colored ball, but when the gnats fly off in all directions, there's no longer anything to be seen. It is just the same with the astral body. While being absorbed by the whole cosmic sphere, it becomes less and less distinct. We watch it gradually drifting away until it is lost. What is lost is the astral body that is always with us when we pass through the gate of death; one can call it our past, what we once were. It was our link with the experiences we had in the physical world, living in our physical and etheric bodies. We see our own being, as it were, disappearing into the spiritual world, and this experience is very similar to the one created voluntarily by a human being seeking the discovery of his true ego in the spiritual world. The harrowing and significant impression that someone can have who is journeying on the path to a clairvoyant consciousness takes place naturally after death as just described. After death, however, a real forgetting takes place, all the sooner the less the soul proves to have been prepared and strengthened. Selfless, unegoistic souls, often criticized as weak in physical life, are precisely the strong ones after death; for a long time they will be able to watch the memories that had urged them on from physical existence towards the spiritual world. The so-called strong egoists are the puny souls after death; their astrality, dispersing gradually as a sphere, leaves them very quickly.

And now the time has come when everything one can remember disappears. It returns, but in an altered manner. Everything lost is brought back to us again. In the way it gathers together, it shows—as a consequence of what has departed—what it should become: A befitting new life must be constructed according to karma on the foundation of the old earth life. Thus there thrusts in from infinity towards a central point what must return to our consciousness from oblivion and be given back to us; with this we can become carpenters of a new life shaped by karma. In this sense an experiencing of nothing but oneself within the true ego, which is a kind of forgetting, takes place at the middle point between death and a new birth.

Today most human souls are still so little prepared for this forgetting that they experience it in a sort of spiritual soul-sleep. Those who are ready for it, however, experience just at this moment of forgetting, which is the transition from the preceding earth life to the preparation of the coming one, what is called the Cosmic Midnight in The Souls' Awakening. The scene of the Cosmic Midnight, in which one can enter deeply into the necessities of existence, is indeed connected with the most profound mysteries of human existence. We can say that the mystery of the human being, his true nature in which he lives between death and a new birth, is something the ordinary consciousness can never discover, although it discloses itself to the clairvoyant soul. We have described here, from the standpoint of the clairvoyant consciousness, the experience of having one's astrality absorbed by the spiritual world; it has also been described exactly, step by step, as the actual spirit-land in my Theosophy and Occult Science. What comes naturally to the soul after death can be brought about voluntarily for the clairvoyant consciousness; this has been described in Theosophy. The same terms are used here as in Theosophy and Occult Science.

We have tried in both this lecture cycle and in the drama cycle to characterize the nature of the cosmos and the entity of man, who has a share in the cosmos. After such a discussion, it may perhaps be permissible to add for any person setting out on the path here described that he will need to continue it to some extent on his own. On trying to penetrate ever more deeply into The Souls' Awakening, you will notice that so many answers to the mysteries of life are dawning on you that you realize, the dramas are there to unveil and reveal the mysteries.

I can point out an example to you. Try to experience further in meditation what is shown in The Souls' Awakening and what I have said here about Ahriman as the Lord of Death in the world. Beginning with Scene Three this appears clearly, but it was already hinted at in Scene One with the words Strader says to the Business Manager, “And yet will come what has to come about.” The Manager hears in these few words something like a gentle whisper from the spiritual world; it gives rise to the beginning of his spiritual discipleship. There it is more or less hinted at, but gradually, from Scene Three onwards, we see more and more clearly how the moods and forces preparing the death of Strader are coming closer. We shall not understand why Theodora appears and tells Strader what she will do for him in the spirit-land, unless we get the feeling—though a somewhat vague one, as it has to be at this point—that something important can be expected. In the same scene, we shall not perceive rightly what Benedictus means when he describes his clairvoyance as being impaired unless we can feel how the forces of Strader's approaching death are influencing this clairvoyance. In Scene Eleven, a simple, straightforward but very significant scene, we shall not get the right impression of the dialogue between Benedictus and Strader unless we connect Strader's visionary picture with his presentiment that everything he is using to strengthen his soul will turn its destructive, power at some time on himself; unless, too, we connect this with the repetition of Benedictus's speech about his spirit vision being impaired, so that we have a premonition of what is looming ahead. The mood of the approaching death of Strader is diffused over the whole, development of even the other persons in this play from Scene Three onwards. When you bring this together with what has been said about Ahriman as the Lord of Death, you will enter more and more deeply into knowledge that leads to the mysteries of the spirit, especially by considering also how Ahriman takes a hand in the mood of the drama, which is dominated by Strader's death impulse.

Again, the last meeting of Benedictus and Strader, a meeting intended to be of real significance towards the end of the drama, as well as the final monologue of Benedictus, cannot be understood unless we bear in mind both the rightful and the unlawful interference of Ahriman in the world of the human soul and in the Word of cosmic realms. These things were not intended merely to pass through your minds, but in order for you to immerse yourselves more and more deeply in them.

It is an objective fact rather than criticism to point out how clearly it can be shown that the published writings and lecture-cycles of the last three or four years have really not been read as they could have been read in order to grasp what was implied or even what was stated quite obviously. This is not meant as a reproof—far from it. No, it is said because almost every year at the close of the Munich lecture course, through everything having to do with it, thoughts stand before the soul that sound an alert concerning the presence of our Anthroposophical Movement in the modern world. One has to consider what should be the rightful place of the Movement within the chaotic happenings of our present so-called culture. Clear, awakened thinking about this rightful place of the movement will not be reached unless we keep one thing in mind: that our present-day life will most certainly stagnate and become sclerotic unless it receives refreshment and healing from the flowing springs of serious, genuine occultism. On the other hand, just such a series of lectures that makes us aware perhaps of the need to turn to spiritual science could also stress something important to everyone of us: the feeling of responsibility.

In the deepest layers of our souls is imprinted everything connected with our feeling of responsibility, as are our efforts to understand how this movement of ours can make itself felt, the movement that is so urgently needed today, even with all its faults and darker sides. There, too, in those deepest layers we perceive in various ways the kind of movement ours should be and what, quite understandably, it only can be at present. This can hardly be expressed in words, and the one who bears it rooted deeply in his heart will preferably not put it into words. For sometimes this responsibility weighs so heavily on one's soul that it seems thoroughly disheartening. Disheartening, because the occultists are turning up on every side today and so little of the necessary feeling of responsibility is at hand.

Certainly for the healing and development of humanity we would welcome the blossoming of anthroposophical wisdom as the finest and greatest thing that could happen now and in the near future; at the same time, we would also like to welcome, as the best and often the most satisfying addition to it, the feeling of responsibility streaming into and awakening every individual who is taken hold of by spiritual science. Still more highly should one value the emergence of a feeling of responsibility.

In truth, we would consider our movement especially fortunate if we could see it flowing out into the world with this feeling of responsibility as a lovely echo on all sides. Many of those who are sensitive to the meaning of responsibility would be able to bear things more easily if they could observe an abundance of such echoes. Still, there are many things that one can only hope for and await in the future; one must have faith while waiting, and have confidence that the human soul through its own integrity will grasp what is right and trustworthy, and that what ought to happen will really happen. As we now separate after this course of lectures, we can clearly feel all this. Actually, one would so much like to leave in each soul something that could awaken it and radiate as warm enthusiasm for our movement but also as a feeling of responsibility for it.

The most splendid sign and seal on our spiritual scientific striving would be for us all to be able to feel how strongly linked together we are—even when we are far apart—in a true spirit community of souls having a similar warm enthusiasm for our movement, a similar love and devotion to it, and at the same time with a feeling of responsibility for it.

And now let these be my parting words to you as we go our separate ways after the time we have spent here together: May the reality and truth of the spiritual life grow ever stronger through our heart's participation in it, so that we are still together, even when we are separated in space. Let us be united by the reality of the warm enthusiasm alive in us, radiating from an open-hearted, devoted participation in the truth. And let us combine with it a genuine, upright awareness of responsibility, or at least an effort to attain it, for all that is sacred to us and so urgently needed for the world. Such a feeling brings us immediately together in the spirit. Whether our destiny brings us together in space, whether our destiny scatters us apart to our various tasks and occupations in life, our hearts will certainly be united by our enthusiasm and our feeling of responsibility. Joined together in this way, we are entitled to hopeful trust and confidence in the future of our movement, for it will then make its way into our culture, into the spiritual development of humanity, as it must do. It will find its way and find its home, so that we discern our anthroposophy like a gentle sounding from the spiritual world that brings warmth to our hearts.

What ought to happen will happen—and it must happen. Let us try to be so equal to this spiritual community of ours that insofar as it lies in us, what ought to happen, what must happen, shall happen through us.

• 25. Dr. Ferdinand Maack, ed., Chymische Hochzeit, (Berlin, Hermann Barsdorf Verlag, 1913).
• 26. Dr. Ferdinand Maack, Zweimal Gestorben. (Leipzig, 1912).
• 27. See Lecture II in this volume.
• 28. Besant and Leadbeater, Man: Whence, How and Whither.
• 29. See Maria's speech in The Souls' Awakening, Scene 2.

In order to round off, so to speak, what we could only superficially outline during the last few days regarding education based on anthroposophical investigations, I would like to add something today, as an example of how these ideas can be put into practice, about how the Waldorf school is run. What has to emerge clearly from the spirit of this education is that equal consideration be given to everything pertaining to the human body, soul, and spirit. If the actual teaching is carried out as characterized, therefore, it will at the same time become a kind of hygiene in the life of the child and, if necessary, even a therapy.

To see this clearly, one has to be able to look at the child's being in the right way. And here it must be understood that everything we have said about the child's development, from birth to the change of teeth, is revealed most of all in the activities of the nerve-sense system. Every organic system naturally extends over the entire human body, but each system is at the same time localized in a definite part of the physical organism. Thus the nervous system is mainly organized in the head. But when speaking about the three main organic systems of the human being—the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-motor system—we do not imply that they are confined only to the head, the chest, and the metabolic-limb systems, because this would be completely inaccurate. It is impossible to divide the human organization into three separate spatial regions. It can only be said that these three systems interpenetrate one another, that they work and weave into each other everywhere.

The nerve-sense system is, nevertheless, localized primarily in the region of the head. The rhythmic system, which includes everything of a rhythmic nature in the human being, is mainly organized in the chest organs, in the organs of breathing and blood circulation. Here one must not ignore the fact that everything that furthers the rhythms of digestion—and ultimately those of sleeping and waking—also belongs to the rhythmic system, insofar as digesting, and sleeping and waking are based physically within the human organism. The actual chemical-physiological process of digestion is closely connected with all that forms the human motor system. As for movement itself, a reciprocal activity occurs between the nutritional and digestive system on the one hand, and the actual physical movement on the other.

All of this means that, although the three systems work naturally into each other during the child's early years until the change of teeth, the formative and malleable shaping forces involved in the child's growth and nourishing processes work mainly downward from the head, the center of the senses and the nervous system. Consequently, if a young child becomes ill, that illness is due primarily to the influences of the nerve-sense system. That is why young children before their second dentition are especially likely to suffer from illnesses that originate from within—those called childhood illnesses.

The influences that emanate from the environment, those that reach children through their urge to imitate, have a very powerful effect on this vulnerability to childhood illnesses, more than is commonly realized by the medical profession within the current materialistic climate. Thus, a sudden outburst of anger by an adult, when witnessed by a young child, can be responsible in many cases for an attack of measles. I am not referring to the psychopathic outburst of a psychopath, but to a less violent form of temper that can very often be seen among people. The shock that follows, together with its moral and spiritual implications, must certainly be seen as a contributing factor for measles. Furthermore, all these influences that work on the child will remain as after-effects until almost the ninth year. If a teacher happens to become very angry in school (for example, if a child accidentally spills some ink, and the teacher reacts by shouting, “If you do that again, I'll pour the entire inkwell over your head!” or “I'll throw it at your head!”), then we shouldn't be surprised when this has a very damaging effect on the child's physical health. Of course, I have chosen a fairly drastic example, but this kind of thing can happen too easily in a classroom.

Inner dishonesty in teachers also has a very harmful effect on children, even after their second dentition. Falsehoods can take on many different guises, such as insincerity or hypocritical piety, or establishing a moral code for the children that the adults would not dream of applying to themselves. In such cases the element of untruth weaves and lives in the words spoken, and in what unfolds in front of the child. An adult may remain totally oblivious to it, but children will take it in through the teachers' gestures. Through the nerve-sense system, dishonesty and hypocrisy have an extremely powerful effect on the organic structure of the child's digestive tract, and especially on the development of the gall bladder, which can then play a very significant role for the rest of the child's life.

All pedagogical interactions have to be permeated by this intensive awareness of how spirit, soul, and body constantly interweave and affect each other, even though it is unnecessary for teachers to speak of it all the time. And since the human organism, from the head downward, is so active during these early years—that is, from the polarity of the nerve-sense system—and because abnormal conditions can easily override socalled normal conditions in the head region, the child is particularly vulnerable to childhood diseases at just this age.

The years between the change of teeth and puberty, strangely enough (and yet, true to the nature of the human organism) are the child's healthiest years, although this is not really surprising to anyone with insight into human development. This is because the child's entire organic structure at this age radiates from the rhythmic system. This is the very system that never becomes tired or overstimulated on its own. Symptoms of illness that occur during these years are due to outer circumstances, although this statement must not be taken too strictly, of course, and only within the context of actual life situations. The child who is subject to illness at this particular age, when the rhythmic system plays such a dominant part has been treated improperly, one way or another, in outer life.

When puberty is left behind, the occurrence of illness radiates outward from within—that is, from the metabolic-motor system. That is the time of life when the causes of illness, to which young people are exposed, arise from within. Because the method of teaching the actual lessons plays a large part in the physical well-being of the students, we must always allow a certain physical and soul hygiene to be carried, as if on wings, by our educational ideas and methods. This must always be part of whatever we do with our classes, particularly during the second period of childhood.

Here certain details can be indicated. Let us take, for example, a child with a melancholic disposition. If you give that child sugar—an appropriate amount, of course—you will find that the sugar has a totally different effect than it would have on a predominantly sanguine child. In a melancholic child the sugar will have a suppressive effect on liver activity. This gradual lessening of liver activity, in radiating out into the entire being of the child, effectively curbs the melancholic tendencies from the physical side. It is a useful expedient, but one has to understand it. Using it as an aid does not mean the denial of soul and spirit, because anyone who knows that spirit is working in all physical or material processes—as anthroposophy reveals—will not view the effect of an increased sugar-intake on the activity of the liver as something merely physical, but as the working of soul and spirit brought about by physical means. (Naturally, the result always depends on the correct dosage.) In the case of a sanguine child it can be beneficial to stimulate liver activity by withholding sugar.

This is an example of how knowledge of the interaction and mutual working of body, soul, and spirit can greatly benefit the three systems of the human being. It definitely allows one to say as well that, contrary to frequently held opinions, Waldorf pedagogy (which arises from spiritual foundations) certainly does not neglect the physical aspects of education. On the other hand, you will find that other forms of pedagogy, bent on developing the physical part of the child according to fixed, abstract rules indeed serve it least, because their adherents do not realize that every soul and spiritual stirring within a child has a direct effect on his or her physical nature.

Because of all this, I felt it necessary to give a seminar course before the opening of the Waldorf school, for the benefit of those who had been chosen to become its first teachers.¹ One of the primary aims of this course was to bring the fundamental and comprehensive thought of the working together of soul, body, and spirit into the new pedagogy before its actual launching; for knowledge of this has been lost gradually during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—more so than is generally realized.

During the years after the Waldorf school founding, shorter supplementary courses were also given.² It goes without saying that anyone who seriously considers taking an active role in Waldorf education must live in the spirit of these courses. This is what really matters. If one wants to treat a certain subject in a living way, the details are not as important, because they can always be worked out of the spiritual background. The details will then also appear in proper perspective. You may already have seen, through talks given by Waldorf teachers such as Dr. von Baravalle³ and Dr. von Heydebrand,⁴ how the attempt was made to let the spirit living in this education flow into the ways of teaching various subjects. Something like lifeblood will pulse through the lessons when the human structure is comprehended in terms of an all-comprising spiritual entity. In this respect, of course, much of what can be said today will have to remain brief and superficial.

I mentioned yesterday that a united faculty of teachers, functioning like the soul and spirit of the entire school organism, is absolutely fundamental to running a Waldorf school. According to one of its pedagogical impulses, it is not so much a statistical collection of the teachers' observations expressed during the meetings that is important, but that a living and individualizing psychology should be jointly developed from out of the actual experience of teaching lessons. I would like to give you an example.

In our school, boys and girls sit next to each other. When we started, there were just over one hundred students in the Waldorf school. But our numbers have grown so quickly that we had seven hundred pupils last year, which necessitated opening parallel classes, especially in the lower grades of the school. Now we find that there are more girls than boys in some classes, while in others there are more boys. The number of boys and girls more or less even in very few classes. To insist on equal numbers in each class would not only be pedantic, but would not work. First of all, new arrivals do not come neatly paired, and, second, such a scheme would not represent real life. The right way to proceed in such a situation is to make it possible to apply educational impulses whatever the outer circumstances may be.

All the same, we soon found that a class with a majority of girls presented a very different psychological picture than those with more boys, aside from outer circumstances—that is, aside from the most obvious. What gives such a class its psychological character is the imponderable element that easily escapes one's notice. Nevertheless, when working together in our meetings, the opportunity was presented to make fruitful investigations in this direction. And it soon became clear that sharing such questions of common interest greatly contributed to the school's becoming a living, ensouled organism.

Let's imagine someone who says, “I want to think only thoughts that will be useful to me later in life. I don't want to allow anything to enter my soul that does not have direct value for later life, because this would be uneconomical.” Such a person would become an appalling figure in life! First, because such a person would have nothing to dream about—indeed, could never dream. Of course, people who are inclined in this direction might simply reply, “Dreams are unimportant. One can very well do without them, because they really don't mean anything in life.” True, dreams have little consequence for those who accept only external reality. But what if there were more to dreams than just fantastic images? Naturally, those who believe they see something highly significant and deeply prophetic in every dream, even if it is only caused by the activities of their liver, bladder, or stomach—people who consider dreams more important than events in waking life—they will not draw any benefit from their dreaming. Yet, if one knows that in one's dream life forces are expressed—even if only indistinctly—that have either a health-giving or an illness-inducing effect on the breathing, circulatory, and nerve-sense systems, then one also knows that half of the human being is mirrored in these dreams, either in a hygienic or in a pathological sense. Further, one will recognize that not to dream at all would be similar to undermining the digestion or circulation through taking some form of poison. It is important to realize that much of what may appear unnecessary in a human being for outer life, nevertheless, plays an important part—similar to the way we see outer nature. Just compare the infinite number of herring eggs, distributed all over the seas, with the number of herrings actually born, and you could easily reproach nature for being tremendously wasteful. However, this could only be the opinion of those who do not know of the powerful spiritual effects the dead herring eggs have on the growing herrings. A certain number of eggs have to die so that a certain number of eggs may thrive. These things are all interconnected.

If we now relate this thought to the school as a living organism, we have the following situation: In the staff meetings of our teachers such matters as the proportion of boys to girls, and many other problems, are being worked through from a psychological and pneumatological aspect as part of a common study of soul and spirit. Efforts are made continually to effect a new understanding of the psychological and pathological problems facing the school. And, in order to cover every contingency, something else is essential in the life of a school, something we have in the Waldorf school, and that is a school doctor. He is a full-time staff member, who also teaches various classes in the school. This allows the teachers—insofar as they actively take part in all the meetings—to discuss and work through pathological and therapeutic questions, as well as those posed by the specially gifted child. Problems are studied not only for the benefit of individual cases—more or less statistically—but they are worked through in depth. In this way, much can be learned from each individual case, even if it does not always appear to be immediately useful.

One could compare this situation with someone who has taken in one thing or another, and declares it to be of no use in life. Nevertheless, life may prove otherwise. Similarly, whatever is worked through by the teachers in these meetings, creating a living psychology, a living physiology, and so on, continues to have an effect, often in very unexpected places. Imagine you had occupied yourself, let's say, with the spiritual functions of a child's gall—forgive this expression, but it is fully justified—and that through this study you had learned to find a way into this kind of thinking. If you were now suddenly called on to deal with a child's nose, you actually would relate very differently to the new situation. Even if you may think, “What is the good of learning all about the gall if now I have to deal with the nose?” Once you find a point of entry, you meet every problem and task differently.

In this sense, the teaching faculty must become the spirit and soul of the entire school organism. Only then will each teacher enter the classroom with the proper attitude and in the right soul condition. At the same time, we must also remember that, in just these matters, an intensely religious element can be found. It is unnecessary to have the name of the Lord constantly on one's lips or to call on the name of Christ all the time. It is better to adhere to the command: “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord God in vain.” Nevertheless, it is possible to permeate one's entire life with a fundamental religious impulse, with an intensely Christian impulse. Certain experiences of old, no longer known to the modern mind, will then begin to stir in one's soul, experiences deeply rooted in human evolution, in the Christian development of humankind. For example, teachers who in the depths of their souls are seeking the proper stimulation for finding appropriate forms of pedagogy (especially in these pathological-physiological areas) would do well to allow themselves to be inspired, time and again, by what radiates from the Gospel of Saint Luke. (To modern ears such a statement must sound bizarre.) On the other hand, teachers who want to instill the necessary idealism for life in their students, would do well to find a source of inspiration by reading again and again the Gospel of Saint John. If teachers do not want their pupils to grow up into cowards, but into the kind of people who will tackle life's tasks with exuberant energy, they should look for inspiration in the Gospel of Saint Mark. And those who are enthusiastic to educate the young to grow into perceptive adults, rather than into people who go through life with unseeing eyes, may find the necessary stimulation in the Gospel of Saint Matthew. These are the qualities that, in ancient times, were felt to live in the different Gospels. If our contemporaries were to read that in past ages the Gospel of Saint Luke was felt to radiate a healing element in a medical sense, they could not make anything of it. On the other hand, if they entered life as real pedagogues, they would begin to understand such matters again.

This is one way one can speak about these things. It is just as possible to speak of them in an entirely different way, no less religious or Christian. For instance, the main theme during a seminar course could well be the four temperaments of the human being—that is, the psychic, physical, and spiritual natures of the choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic temperaments. First, one would give a description of these four temperaments and then one could discuss how they must be treated in class. For example, it has a salutary effect if one seats choleric children together in one corner of the classroom, giving a certain relief in this way to the rest of the class, because the teacher is freed from having to constantly discipline them. Choleric children can't help pushing and hitting each other. If they now find themselves suddenly at the receiving end, this in itself produces a thoroughly pedagogical effect, because the ones who do the pushing and shoving, goading others into retaliating, are being “shaped up” in a very direct way. And if, by seating the phlegmatics together, one lets them “phlegmatize” each other, this also has a wonderfully pedagogical effect. However, all this needs to be done with the appropriate tact. One really has to know how to handle the situation in each individual case. You will find a detailed treatment of the children's various temperaments in the published version of the first training course, given to the teachers of the Waldorf school.⁵

What I have said about the four Gospels, fundamentally speaking, is exactly the same when seen from a spiritual perspective, because it leads one into the same element of life. Today it is ordinarily felt that, if one wants to learn something, the relevant elements have to be put neatly side by side. But this is a procedure that will not lead to fundamental principles, as they have to be dealt with in actual life. For example, one cannot understand the human gall or liver system unless one also has an understanding of the human head, because every organ in the digestive tract has a complementary organ in the brain. One does not know anything about the liver unless one also knows its correlative function in the brain. Likewise, one does not have an inner understanding of the immense inspiration that can flow into the human soul from the Gospels, unless one can also transform these into the ways that character and temperament are imprinted into the human individuality here on Earth. To livingly comprehend the world is very different from comprehending it through dead concepts.

This will also help one to see that if children are raised in light of the education spoken of here, one allows something to grow in them that will outlast their childhood days, something that will continue to affect them throughout their lives; for what do you have to do when you grow old? People who do not understand human nature cannot assess how important certain impulses, which can be implanted only during childhood, are for life. At that tender age it is still possible for these impulses to be immersed into the soft and pliable organism of the child, still very open to the musical-formative forces. In later years the organism becomes harder, not necessarily physically, but in any case, tending toward psycho-bodily hardening. What one has absorbed through one's upbringing and education, however, does not grow old. No matter how old one has become, one is still inwardly endowed with the same youthful element that one had from, say, the tenth to the fifteenth year. One always carries this element of youthfulness within, but it has to remain supple and flexible to the degree that the now aged brain—perhaps already covered by a bald head—can use it in the same way that the previously soft brain did. If a person's education has not helped this process, however, the result is a generation gap, which appears so often these days, and is considered unbridgeable.

Sometimes people say something that is actually the opposite of what is really happening. For example, one often hears the comment, “The young today don't understand the elderly, because old people no longer know how to be young with the young.” But this is not the truth. Not at all. What really happens is that the young generation expects the old generation to be able to properly use the physical organization which has grown old. In this way, young people recognize something in the old that is different from their own condition, something they do not yet have. This is the quality that leads to the natural respect for old age. When young people meet an old person who can still use an already-bald head in the way children use their tousled heads, they feel that something can be received from the older generation, something that they cannot find in their contemporaries. This is how it should be.

We must educate young people so that they know how to grow old properly. It is the malaise of our time that as young people grow up, they do not recognize among the older generation those who have aged properly. They see merely childish individuals, instead, who have remained at the same level of development as the young generation. This is because of the inadequate education of old people who cannot properly use their physical organization, and they remain infantile. The expression “overgrown kids” is really chosen with great ingenuity, for it implies that such persons lost the ability to get hold of their entire organism during the course of their lives.⁶

They can work only with the head, which is precisely what children or young people are meant to do. So the young respond by saying, “Why should we learn from them? They are no further along than we are; they are just as childish as we are.” The point is not that old age lacks youthfulness, but that it has remained behind, is too infantile, and this causes difficulties today. You see how expressions, sometimes chosen with the most goodwill, mean the opposite of what they intend convey.⁷

These things must all be seen in the proper light before education can stand on its feet again. This has become more than necessary today. Forgive this somewhat drastic way of saying it, but in our intellectual age education really has been turned upside-down.

Thus, one of the characteristic features of Waldorf pedagogy is to learn that it is not the externals that are important. Whether a teacher draws substance to nourish the souls of students from the different qualities of the four Gospels, or whether this is done by using what was presented in the Stuttgart teachers' training course with regard to the four temperaments does not matter at all. What does matter is the spirit that reigns in everything developed there. Because of how superficially these things are often regarded today, it could easily happen that someone, when told that the treatment of the four temperaments could be studied in the fundamental course given in Stuttgart, could also consult a later course where one would find something about the teacher's attitude toward the four Gospels. The reaction of such a person might well be, “In this case, I should study the later course as well.” It certainly is a good thing to approach different subjects by using different sources. But there is also another way of looking at it—that is, one may find a common message running through both courses, given in two different places at different times, even though outwardly the subjects may appear very different. This inner correspondence found within different lecture courses can be uncomfortable because of the way their various points are interlinked, instead of fitting into the more conventional patterns of cause and effect.

Thus, the educational course given here at the Goetheanum just over a year ago (where some English friends were present, and which was rendered very competently and artistically by Mister Steffen)⁸ can be compared with what I presented to you again differently in this course.⁹ You will find that, basically, the substance of both courses is the same as, for example, the head and the stomach; each form a part of one organism. It may be uncomfortable that, because of how various themes mutually support each other, one cannot say: I have read and understood the first course; and because the later one is supposed to carry the same message, there is no need for me to study it as well. The fact is, however, that, if one has studied both courses, the earlier one will be understood in greater depth, because each sheds light on the other. It could even be said that, only when one has digested a later teachers' course, can one fully understand an earlier one because of these reciprocal effects. Mathematics is built on purely causal sequences, so it is possible to understand earlier stages without any knowledge of subsequent stages. But when it comes to teaching in a living way, its subject is affected by mutual interconnections, so that what was given at an earlier date may receive further elucidation by what was presented later.

I mention this because it is all part of the living spirit that has to permeate the Waldorf way of teaching. One has to have the good will that wants to know it from all sides, and one must never be satisfied with having comprehended one particular aspect of it. As a Waldorf teacher, one has to be conscious of the necessity for continually widening and deepening one's knowledge, rather than feeling satisfied with one's achievements and, indeed, considering oneself very clever. If one has lived into the Waldorf way of teaching, such delusions are soon overcome! For a real Waldorf teacher, everything that flows from this activity must be permeated with true heart and soul forces. It has to spring from the right kind of self-confidence, which rests on trust in God. When there is awareness of the divine forces working within, one will be fed by a constantly flowing fountain of life, flowing since time beyond memory, and very much apart from what one may or may not have learned externally. It is only the beginning of the way when self-confidence stems from outer achievements. One is in the proper place when self-confidence has led to confidence in the working of God, when it has led to an awareness of the power of the words: Not I, but the Christ in me. When this happens, self-confidence also becomes self-modesty, because one realizes that the divine forces of Christ are reflected in whatever is carried in one's soul. This spirit must reign throughout the school.

If it were not present, the school would be like a natural organism whose lifeblood was being drawn out, or that was slowly being asphyxiated.

This is the spirit that is most important, and if it is alive, it will engender enthusiasm, regardless of the staff or the leadership of the school. One can then be confident that a somewhat objective spirit will live throughout the school, which is not the same as the sum of the teachers' individual spirits. This, however, can be nurtured only gradually within the life of the teaching staff.

As a result of working in this way, something has emerged in the Waldorf school that we call “block periods” or “main lessons.” These main lessons—much longer than the ordinary lessons, which allow one subject to be studied in depth—do not distract children, as often happens because of too many subject changes. For example, students might typically be given a geography lesson from 8 to 8:45 A.M., followed by an entirely different subject, such as Latin, from 8:45 until 9:30 A.M. This might be followed again by math, or some other lesson. Block periods of main lessons, on the other hand, are structured so that the same subject is taught every day for about three or four weeks (depending on the type of subject) during the first half of the morning session. For example, in a main lesson period, geography would be studied for perhaps three or four weeks—not severely or in a heavy-handed way, but in a more relaxed, yet completely serious way. When the same subject is taken up again during one of the following terms, it will build on what was given during the previous block period. In this way, the subject matter covered during one year is taught in block periods instead of during regular weekly lessons. This method is, no doubt, more taxing for teachers than the conventional schedule arrangements would be, because such lengthy geography lessons could easily become boring for the children. This is solved by the teachers' much deeper immersion in the subjects, so that they are equal to their freely-chosen tasks.

After a mid-morning break, which is essential for the children, the main lesson is usually followed by language lessons, or by other subjects not taught in main lesson periods. Two foreign languages are introduced to our pupils as soon as they enter the first grade in a Waldorf school. Using our own methods, we teach them French and English—the aim not being so much a widening of their outer horizons, but an enrichment of their soul life.

You will ascertain from what was said yesterday that physical movement, practiced most of all in eurythmy and gymnastics, is by no means considered to be less important, but is dealt with so that it can play a proper role within the total curriculum. Similarly, right from the beginning in the first grade, all lessons are permeated by a musical element according to various ages and stages.

I have already indicated (with unavoidable briefness, unfortunately) how our pupils are being directed into artistic activities—into singing, music-making, modeling, and so on. It is absolutely necessary to nurture these activities. Simply through practicing them with the children, one will come to realize exactly what it means for their entire lives to be properly guided musically during these younger years, from the change of teeth through the ninth and twelfth years until puberty. Proper introduction to the musical element is fundamental for a human being to overcome any hindrance that impedes, later in life, a sound development of a will permeated with courage. Musical forces effect the human organism by allowing, as smoothly as possible, the nerve fluctuations to become active in the stream of breath. The breath-stream, in turn, works back upon the functions of the nervous system. The breathing rhythms then work over into the rhythms of the blood circulation, which in turn act on the rhythms of sleeping and waking. This insight, afforded by anthroposophical investigation, of how musical forces creatively work within the structure of the human being, is one of the most wonderful things in life.

One learns to recognize that we have an extremely sensitive and refined musical instrument in the raying out of the nerves from the spinal marrow, from the entire system of the spinal cord. One also learns to see how this delicate instrument dries up and hardens, whereby, inwardly, the human being can no longer properly develop qualities of courage, if musical instruction and the general musical education do not work harmoniously with this wonderfully fine musical instrument. What constitutes a truly delicate and unique musical instrument is coming into being through the mutual interplay between the organs of the nerves and senses with their functions on the one hand, and on the other hand, the human motor functions with their close affinities to the digestive rhythms and those of sleeping and waking.

The upper part of the human being wants to influence the lower part. By directing the child's entire organism toward the realm of music, we enhance the merging of external sounds (from a piano during music lessons, or from the children's singing voices) with the nervous and circulatory systems, in what can be recognized as a divine plan of creation. This is a sublime thing, because in every music lesson there is a meeting between the divine-spiritual and what comes from the earthly realm, rising, as it were, within the child's body. Heaven and Earth truly meet in every achievement of musical culture throughout human earthly evolution, and we should always be aware of this. This awareness, plus the teachers' knowledge that they are instrumental in bringing together the genius of Heaven with the genius of Earth, gives them the enthusiasm they need to face their classes. This same enthusiasm is also carried into the teachers' staff meetings where the music teacher may inspire the art teacher, and so on. Here you can see clearly how essential it is that spirit works through every aspect of Waldorf education.

To give another example: not long ago, during one of our teacher meetings, it truly became possible to work out to a large extent what happens to the students' spirit, soul, and body, when first given eurythmy exercises and then directed in doing gymnastics. Such insight into the relationship between gymnastics and eurythmy (which is very important to how these lessons are presented) was really accomplished in one of our teacher meetings the other day. Of course, we will continue our research. But, this is how teacher meetings become like the blood that must flow through the school as a living organism. Everything else will fall into place, as long as that is allowed to happen.

Teachers will know also when it is proper to take their classes for a walk or for an outing, and the role of gymnastics will find a natural and appropriate place within the life of the students, regardless of which school they attend. Doubts and anxieties will disappear with regard to the remark: What is done in a Waldorf school may all be very good, but they neglect sports there. Admittedly, it is not yet possible for us to do everything that may be desirable, because the Waldorf school has had to develop from small beginnings. Only by overcoming enormous obstacles and external difficulties was it possible to have gone as far as we have today. But when matters are taken care of with spiritual insight, the whole question of the relationship between physical and spiritual will be handled properly.

The following analogy could be used: Just as it is unnecessary to learn how the various larger and smaller muscles of the arm function (according to the laws of dynamics and statics, of vitalism, and so on) so that one can lift it, so it is also unnecessary to know every detail of the ins-and-outs of everything that must be done, as long as we can approach and present lessons out of the spirit that has become transformed into the proper attitude of the teacher—as long as we can penetrate properly to the very essence of all our tasks and duties.

I could only give you brief and superficial outlines of the fundamental principles and impulses, flowing from anthroposophical research, according to which the Waldorf school functions. And so we have come to the end of this course—primarily because of your other commitments.

At this point I would like to express once more what I already said during one of our discussions: If one lives with heart and soul, with the ideal of allowing education to grow into a blessing for all humankind in its evolution, one is filled with deep gratitude when meeting teachers from so many different places; for you have come to this course to obtain information about the way of teaching that arises from anthroposophical investigation, which I have attempted to place before you. Beyond whether this was received by one or another participant with more or less sympathy, I want to express my deep gratitude and inner satisfaction that it was again possible for a large group of souls to perceive what is intended to work on the most varied branches of life, and what is meant to fructify life in general through anthroposophy. Two thoughts will remain with you, especially with those who dealt with the organization and practical arrangements of this course: the happy memory of the gratitude, and the happy memory of the inner satisfaction as I expressed it just now. And the more intensely these thoughts can be inwardly formed—the thoughts of the work based on such gratitude and satisfaction—the more hope will grow that, in times to come, this way of teaching may yet succeed for the benefit of all of humanity.

Such hope will intensify the loving care for this way of teaching in those who already have the will to devote themselves to it with all their human qualities.

It should also be said that it was not only the Waldorf teachers who may have given you something of their practical experience, because those of you who have been present here as visitors have certainly given equally to them. By allowing us to witness what lives in us begin to live in other souls as well, you have fanned the glow of love that is both necessary and natural, and just that can engender genuine enthusiasm. And we may hope that out of feelings of gratitude and inner satisfaction, of hope and love that have flowed together during this course, good fruits may ripen, provided we can maintain the necessary interest in these matters, and that we are inwardly active enough to sustain them.

Ladies and gentlemen, my dear friends, this is what I want to pour into my farewell, which is not to be taken as formal or abstract, but as very concrete, in which gratitude becomes a firm foundation, and inner satisfaction a source of warmth, from which hope will radiate out, bringing both courage and strength. May the love of putting into practice what is willed to become a way of teaching for all human beings be turned into light that shines for those who feel it their duty to care for the education of all humankind!

In this sense, having to bring this course to its conclusion, I wish to give you all my warmest farewell greetings.

Question: Would it be possible to implement the Waldorf way of teaching in other countries, in Czechoslovakia, for example?

Rudolf Steiner: In principle it is possible to introduce Waldorf education anywhere, because it is based purely on pedagogy. This is the significant difference between Waldorf pedagogy and other educational movements. As you know, there are people today who maintain that if one wants to give pupils a proper education, one must send them to a country school, because they consider an urban environment unsuitable for children's education. Then there are those who hold the opinion that only a boarding school can offer the proper conditions for their children's education, while still others insist that only life at home can provide the proper background for children. All of these things cease to be of real importance in Waldorf education. I do not wish to quarrel about these different attitudes (each of which may have its justification from one or another point of view), but since Waldorf education focuses entirely on the pedagogical aspect, it can be adapted to any outer conditions, whether a city school, a country school or whatever. It is not designed to meet specific external conditions, but is based entirely on observation and insight into the growing human being. This means that Waldorf pedagogy could be implemented in every school.

Whether this would be allowed to happen, whether the authorities that oversee education, the establishing of curricula, and so on would ever agree to such a step being taken, is an entirely different question. There is nothing to stop Waldorf pedagogy from being applied anywhere in the world, even tomorrow, but the real question is whether permission for this to happen would be granted. This question can be answered only in terms of the various local government policies. That is really all one can say about it.

• 1. See Rudolf Steiner, The Foundations of Human Experience, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996, and Practical Advice to Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1976, and Discussions with Teachers, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1967.
• 2. See Balance in Teaching, Mercury Press, Spring Valley, NY, 1990; Education for Adolescents, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996; and Deeper Insights into Education (to be republished).
• 3. Dr. Herman von Baravalle (1898–1973) teacher of mathematics and physics at the Waldorf school in Stuttgart.
• 4. Caroline von Heydebrand (1866–1938) class teacher at the Waldorf school.
• 5. See footnote page 171. See also the 1909 lecture, “The Four Temperaments,” contained in Rudolf Steiner, Anthroposophy in Everyday Life, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995.
• 6. The German expression is Kindskopf, literally “child's head.”—Trans.
• 7. See Rudolf Steiner's The Youth Section of the School of Spiritual Science, March 9, 1924 (published in The Constitution of the School of Spiritual Science, Anthroposophical Society in Great Britain, 1964), which states:
  
  But the youth today does not see in the older men and women any human quality different from its own, yet worthy of its emulation. For the older people of the present day are not really “old.” They have taken in the content of many things and can talk of these. But their knowledge has not ripened in them. They have grown older in years, but in the soul they have not kept pace with the advancing years. They speak out of an older brain in just the same way that they spoke when the brain was young. Young people feel this fact. They do not perceive maturity when they are with their elders; they see their own young condition of soul in older bodies, and they turn away, for this does not seem true to them.
• 8. Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Swiss poet, novelist, playwright, and a leading student of Rudolf Steiner beginning in 1907.
• 9. See Rudolf Steiner, Soul Economy and Waldorf Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1986.