The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The object of the lectures I gave here immediately before Christmas was to indicate man's connection with the whole Cosmos and especially with the forces of spirit-and-soul pervading the Cosmos. Today I shall again be dealing with the subject-matter of those lectures but in a way that will constitute an entirely independent study.

The life of man, as far as it consists of experiences of outer Nature as well as of the inner life of soul and spirit, lies between two poles; and many of the thoughts which necessarily come to man about his connection with the world are influenced by the realization that these two polar opposites exist.

On the one side, man's life of thinking and feeling is confronted by what is called ‘natural necessity.’ He feels himself dependent upon adamantine laws which he finds everywhere in the world outside him and which also penetrate through him, inasmuch as his physical and also his etheric organisms are part and parcel of this outer world. On the other hand, he is deeply sensible—it is a feeling that is bound to arise in every healthy-minded person—that his dignity as man would not be fully attained if freedom were not an integral element in his life between birth and death. Necessity and freedom are the polar opposites in his life.

You are aware that in the age of natural science—the subject with which I am dealing in another course of lectures¹ here there is a strong tendency to extend the sway of necessity that is everywhere in evidence in external Nature, to whatever originates in the human being himself, and many representative scientists have come to regard freedom as an impossibility, an illusion that exists only in the human soul, because when a man is faced with having to make a decision, reasons for and reasons against it work upon him. These reasons themselves are, however, under the sway of necessity; hence—so say these scientists—it is really not the man who makes the decision but whatever reasons are the more numerous and the weightier. They triumph over the other less numerous and less weighty reasons, which also affect him. Man is therefore carried along helplessly by the victors in the struggle between impulses that work upon him of necessity. Many representatives of this way of thinking have said that a man believes himself to be free only because the polarically opposite reasons for and against any decision he may be called upon to make, present such complications in their totality that he does not notice how he is being tossed hither and thither; one category of reasons finally triumphs; one scale in a delicately poised balance is weighed down and he is carried along in accordance with it.

Against this argument there is not only the ethical consideration that the dignity of man would not be maintained in a world where he was merely a plaything of conflicting yes-and-no impulses, but there is also this fact, that the feeling of freedom in the human will is so strong that an unbiased person has no sort of doubt that if he can be misled as to its existence, he can equally well be misled by the most elementary sense-perceptions. If the elementary experience of freedom in the sphere of feeling could prove to be deceptive, so too could the experience of red, for instance, or of C or C sharp and so on. Many representatives of modern natural scientific thought place such a high value upon theory that they allow the theory of a natural necessity which is absolute, has no exceptions and embraces human actions and human will, to tempt them into disregarding altogether an experience such as the sense of freedom!

But this problem of necessity and freedom, with all the phenomena associated with it in the life of soul—and these phenomena are very varied and numerous—is a problem linked with much more profound aspects of universal existence than are accessible to natural science or to the everyday experience of the human soul. For at a time when man's outlook was quite different from what it is today, this disquieting, perplexing problem was already a concern of his soul.

You will have gathered from the other course of lectures now being given here that the natural scientific thinking of the modern age is by no means so very old. When we go back to earlier times we find views of the world that were as one-sidedly spiritual as they have become one-sidedly naturalistic today. The farther back we go, the less of what is called ‘necessity’ do we find in man's thinking. Even in early Greek thought there was nothing of what we today call necessity, for the Greek idea of necessity had an essentially different meaning. But if we go still farther back we find, instead of necessity, the working of forces, and these, in their whole compass, were ascribed to a divine-spiritual Providence. Expressing myself rather colloquially, I would say that to a modern scientific thinker, the Nature-forces do everything; whereas the thinker of olden times conceived of everything being done by spiritual forces working with purposes and aims as man himself does, only with purposes far more comprehensive than those of man could ever be. Yet even with this view of the world, entirely spiritual as it was, man turned his attention to the way in which his will was subject to divine-spiritual forces; and just as today, when his thinking is in line with natural science he feels himself subject to the forces and laws of Nature, so in those ancient times he felt himself subject to divine-spiritual forces and laws. And for many who in those days were determinists in this sense, human freedom, although it is a direct experience of the soul, was no more valid than it is for our modern naturalists. These modern naturalists believe that necessity works through the actions of men; the men of olden times thought that divine-spiritual forces, in accordance with their purposes, work through human actions.

It is only necessary to recognize that the problem of freedom and necessity exists in these two completely opposite worlds of thought to realize that quite certainly no examination of the surface-aspect of conditions and happenings can lead to any solution of this problem which penetrates so deeply into all life and into all evolution.

We must look more deeply into the process of world-evolution—world-evolution as the course of Nature on the one side and as the unfolding of spirit on the other—before it is possible to grasp the whole meaning and implications of a problem as vital as this; insight can indeed only come from anthroposophical thinking.

The course of Nature is usually studied in an extremely restricted way. Isolated happenings and processes of a highly specialized kind are studied in the laboratories, brought within the range of telescopes or subjected to experiment. This means that observation of the course of Nature and of world-evolution is confined within very narrow limits. And those who study the domain of soul and spirit imitate the scientists and naturalists. They fight shy of taking into account the whole man when they are considering his life of soul. Instead of this they specialize in order to accentuate some particular thought or sentient experience with important bearings, and hope in this way eventually to build up a psychology, just as efforts are made to build up a body of knowledge of the physical world out of single observations and experiments conducted in chemical and physical laboratories, in clinics and so forth.

Yet in reality these studies never lead to any comprehensive understanding either of the physical world or of the world of soul-and-spirit. As little as it is the intention here to disparage the justification of these specialized investigations—for they are justified from points of view often referred to in my lectures—as strongly it must be emphasized that unless the world itself, unless Nature herself reveals to man somewhere or other what results from the interworking of the details, he will never be able to build up from his single observations and experiments a picture of the structure of the world that is confirmed by the actual happenings. Liver cells and minute activities of the liver, brain-cells and minute cerebral processes can be investigated and greater and greater specialization may take place in these domains; but these investigations, because they lead to particularization and not to the whole, will give no help towards forming a view of the human organism in its totality, unless from the very beginning a man has a comprehensive, intuitive idea of this totality to help him in forming the separate investigations into a unified whole. In like manner, as long as chemistry, astro-chemistry, physics, astro-physics, biology, restrict themselves to the investigation of isolated details, they will never be able to give a picture of how the different forces and laws in our world-environment work together to form a whole, unless man develops the faculty of perceiving in Nature outside something similar to what can be seen as the totality of the human organism, in which all the separate processes of liver, kidneys, hearts, brain, and so forth, are included. In other words, we must be able to point to something in the universe in which all the forces we behold in our environment work together to form a self-contained whole.

Now it may be that certain processes in the human liver and human brain will not for a long time to come be detected with enough accuracy to be accepted by biology. But at all events, as long as men have been able to look at other men, they have always said: The processes of liver, stomach, heart, etc. work together within the boundary of the skin to form a whole. Without being obliged to look at each and all of the separate details, we have before us the sum-total of the chemical, physical and biological processes belonging to man's nature.

Is it possible also to have before us as a complete whole the sum-total of the forces and laws of Nature that are at work around us? In a certain way it is possible. But in order not to be misunderstood I must emphasize the fact that such totalities are always relative. For instance, we can group together the processes of the outer ear and then have a relative whole. But we can also group together the processes in that part of the organ of hearing which continues on to the brain and then we have another relative whole; taking the two groups together, we have another, greater whole, which in turn belongs to the head, and this again to the whole organism. And it will be just the same when we try to comprehend in one complete picture the laws and forces that come primarily into consideration for man.

A first complete whole of this kind is the cycle of day and night. Paradoxical as this seems at first hearing, in this cycle of day and night a number of natural laws around us are gathered together into one whole. During the course of a day and night, processes are going on in our environment and penetrating through us which, if separated out, prove to be physical and chemical processes of every possible different kind. We can say: The cycle of the day is a time-organism, a time-organism embracing a number of natural processes which can be studied individually.

A greater ‘totality’ is the course of the year. If we review all the changes which affect the earth and mankind during the course of the year in the sphere surrounding us—in the atmosphere, for example—we shall find that all the processes taking place in the plants and also in the minerals from one Spring to the next, form in their time-sequence an organic whole, although otherwise they reveal themselves to us and also to different scientific investigations as separate phenomena. They form a whole, just as the processes taking place in the liver, kidneys, spleen and so forth form a whole in the human organism. The course of the year is actually an organic whole—the expression is not quite exact but words of some kind have to be used—the year is an organic sum-total of occurrences and facts which it is customary in natural science to investigate singly.

Speaking in what sounds a rather trivial way, but you will realize that the meaning is very profound, we might say: if man is to avoid having to surrounding Nature the very abstract relationship he adopts to descriptions of chemical and physical experiments, or to what is often taught today in botany and zoology, the time-organisms of the course of the day and the course of the year must become realities for him—realities of cosmic existence. He will then find in them a certain kinship with his own constitution.

Let us begin by thinking of the cycle of the year. Reviewing it as we did in the lecture before Christmas, we find a whole series of processes in the sprouting, growing plants which first produce leaves and, later on, blossoms. An incalculable number of natural processes reveal themselves from the life in the root, on into the life in the green leaves and in the colored petals. And we have an altogether different kind of process before us when we see, in Autumn, the fading, withering and dying of outer Nature.

The cosmic happenings around us form an organic unity. In Summer we see how the Earth opens out all her organs to the Cosmos and how her life and activities rise towards the cosmic expanse. This applies not only to the plant world but to the animal world too in a certain sense—especially to the lower animals. Think of all the activity in the insect world during the Summer, how this activity seems to rise up from the Earth and is given over to the Cosmos, especially to the forces coming from the Sun. During Autumn and Winter we see how everything that from the time of Spring onwards reached out towards the cosmic expanse, falls back again into the earthly realm, how the Earth as it were gradually increases her hold upon all growing life, brings it to the stage of apparent death, or at least to a state of sleep—how the Earth closes all her organs against the influences of the Cosmos. Here we have two contrasting processes in the course of the year, embracing countless details but nevertheless representing a complete whole.

If with the eyes of the soul we contemplate this yearly cycle, which can be regarded as a complete whole because from a certain point it simply repeats itself, recurring in approximately the same way, we find in it nothing else than Nature-necessity. And in our own earthly lives we human beings follow this Nature-necessity. If our lives followed it entirely we should be completely under its domination. Now it is certainly true that those forces of Nature which come especially into consideration for us as Earth-dwellers are present in the course of the year; for the Earth does not change so quickly that the minute changes taking place from year to year make themselves noticeable during a man's life, however old he may live to be.—So by living each year through Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, we partake with our own bodies in Nature-necessity.

It is important to think in this way, for it is only actual experience that gives knowledge; no theory ever does so. Every theory starts from some special domain and then proceeds to generalize. True knowledge can only be acquired when we start from life and from experience. We must not therefore consider the laws of gravity by themselves, or the laws of plant life, or the laws of animal instinct, or the laws of mental coercion, because if we do, we think only of their details, generalize them, and then arrive at entirely false conclusions. We must have in mind where the Nature-forces are revealed in their cooperation and mutual interaction—and that is in the cyclic course of the year.

Now even supervisial study shows that man is relatively free in his relation to the course of the year, but Anthroposophy shows this even more clearly. In Anthroposophy we turn our attention to the two alternating conditions in which every human being lives during the 24 hours of the day, namely, the sleeping state and the waking state. We know that during the waking state the physical, etheric and astral bodies and the Ego-organism form a relative unity in the human being. In the sleeping state the physical and etheric bodies remain behind in the bed, closely interwoven, and the Ego and the astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies.

If with the means provided by anthroposophical research—of which you will have read in our literature—we study the physical and etheric bodies of man during sleep and during waking life, the following comes to light. When the Ego and the astral body are outside the physical and etheric organism during sleep, a kind of life begins in the latter which is to be found in external Nature in the mineral and plant kingdoms only. And the reason why the physical and etheric organisms of man do not gradually pass over into a sum-total of plant or mineral processes is simply due to the fact that the Ego and astral body are within them for certain periods. If the return of the Ego and astral body were too long delayed, the physical and etheric bodies would pass over into a mineral and vegetative form of life. As it is, a tendency to become vegetative and mineralized commences in man after he falls asleep, and this tendency has the upper hand during sleeping life.

If with the insight afforded by anthroposophical research, we contemplate the human being while he is asleep, we see in him—of course with the inevitable variations—a faithful copy of what the Earth is throughout Spring and Summer. Mineral and vegetative life begins to bud in him, although naturally in quite a different way from what happens in the green plants which grow out of the Earth. Nevertheless, with one variation, what goes on during sleep in the physical and etheric organism of man is a faithful image of the period of Spring and Summer on the Earth. In this respect, the organism of man of the present epoch is in tune with external Nature. His physical eyes can survey it. He beholds its sprouting, budding life. As soon as he attains to Inspiration and Imagination, a picture of Summer is revealed to him when physical man is asleep. In sleep, Spring and Summer are there for the physical and etheric bodies of man. A budding, sprouting life begins. And when we wake, when the Ego and astral body returns, all this budding life in the physical and etheric bodies withdraws and for the eye of seership, life in the physical and etheric organism begins to be very similar to the life of the Earth during Autumn and Winter. When we follow the human being through one complete period of sleeping and waking life, we have before us in miniature an actual microcosmic reflection of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. If we follow man's physical and etheric organism through a period of 24 hours, contemplating it in the light of Spiritual Science, we pass, in the microcosmic sense, through the course of a year. Accordingly, if we consider only that part of man which remains behind in the bed when he is asleep or moves around when he is awake during the day, we can say that the course of the year is completed microcosmically in him.

But now let us consider the other part of man's being which releases itself in sleep—the Ego and astral body. If again we use the kinds of knowledge available in spiritual investigation, namely Inspiration and Intuition, we shall find that the Ego and astral body are given over while man is asleep to spiritual Powers within which they will not, in the normal condition, be able to live consciously until a later epoch of the Earth's existence. From the time of going to sleep until the time of waking, the Ego and astral body are withdrawn from the world just as the Earth is withdrawn from the Cosmos during Winter. During sleep, Ego and astral body are actually in their Winter period. So that in the being of man during sleep there is an intermingling of conditions which are only present at one and the same time on opposite hemispheres of the Earth's surface; for during sleep man's physical and etheric bodies have their Summer and his Ego and astral body their Winter.

During waking life, conditions are reversed. The physical and etheric organism is then in its Winter period. The Ego and astral body are given over to what can stream from the Cosmos to man in his waking state. So when the Ego and astral body come down into the physical and etheric organism, they (i.e. Ego and astral body) have their Summer period. Once more we have the two seasons side by side, but now Winter in the physical and etheric organism, Summer in the Ego and astral body.

On the Earth, Summer and Winter cannot be intermingled. But in man, the microcosm, Summer and Winter intermingle all the time. When man is asleep his physical Summer mingles with spiritual Winter; when he is awake his physical Winter mingles with spiritual Summer. In external Nature, Summer and Winter are separated in the course of the year. In man, Summer and Winter mingle all the time from two different directions. In external Nature on Earth, Winter and Summer follow one another in time. In the human being, Winter and Summer are simultaneous, only they interchange, so that at one time there is Spirit-Summer together with Body-Winter (waking life), and at another, Spirit-Winter together with Body-Summer (sleeping life).

Thus the laws and forces in external Nature around us cannot neutralize each other in any one region of the Earth, because they work in sequence, the one after the other in time; but in man they do neutralize each other. The course of Nature is such that just as through two opposing forces a state of rest can be brought about, so can an untold number of natural laws neutralize and cancel out each other. This happens in the human being with respect to all laws of external Nature, inasmuch as he sleeps and wakes in the regular way. The two conditions which appear as Nature-necessity only when they succeed each other in time, are coincident and consequently neutralized in man—and it is this that makes him a free being.

Freedom can never be understood until it is realized how the Summer and Winter forces of man's spiritual life can neutralize the Summer and Winter forces of his outer physical and etheric nature.

External Nature presents to us pictures which we must not see in ourselves, either in the waking or in the sleeping state. On no account must this happen. On the contrary, we must say that these pictures of the course and order of Nature lose their validity within the constitution of man, and we must turn our gaze elsewhere. For when the course of Nature within the human being no longer disturbs us, it becomes possible for the first time to gaze at man's spiritual, moral and psychic make-up. And then we begin to have an ethical and moral relationship to him, just as we have a corresponding relationship to Nature.

When we contemplate our own being with the aid of knowledge acquired in this way, we find, telescoped into one another, conditions which in the external world are spread across the stream of time. And there are many other things of which the same could be said. If we contemplate our inner being and understand it rightly in the sense I have indicated today, we bring it into a relationship with the course of time different from the one to which we are accustomed today.

The purely external mode of scientific observation does not reach the stage where the investigator can say: In the being of man you must hear sounding together what can only be heard as separate tones in the flow of Time.—But if you develop spiritual hearing, the tones of Summer and Winter can be heard ringing simultaneously in man, and they are the same tones that we hear in the outer world when we enter into the flow of Time itself. Time becomes Space. The whole surrounding universe also resounds to us in Time: expanded widely in Space, there ring forth what resounds from our own being as from a centre, gathered as it were, in a single point.

This is the moment, my dear friends, when scientific study and contemplation becomes artistic study and contemplation: when art and science no longer stand in stark contrast as they do in our naturalistic age, but when they are interrelated in the way sensed by Goethe when he said that art reveal; those secrets of Nature without which we can never fully understand her. From a certain point onwards it is imperative that we should understand the form and structure of the world as artistic creation. And once we have taken the path from the purely scientific conception of the world to artistic understanding, we shall also be ready to take the third step, which leads to a deepening of religious experience.

When we have found the physical forces and the forces of soul-and-spirit working together in the inner centre of our being, we can also behold them in the Cosmos. Human willing rises to the level of artistic creative power and finally achieves a relationship to the world that is not merely passive knowledge but positive, active surrender. Man no longer looks at the world abstractly, with the forces of his head, but his vision becomes more and more an activity of his whole being. Living together with the course of cosmic existence becomes a happening different in character from his connection with the facts and events of everyday life. It becomes a ritual, a cult, and the cosmic ritual comes into being in which man can have his place at every moment of his life. Every earthly cult and ritual is a symbolic image of this cosmic cult and ritual—which is higher and more sublime than all earthly cults.

If what has been said today has been thoroughly grasped, it will be possible to study the relationship of the anthroposophical outlook to any particular religious cult. And this will be done during the next few days, when we shall consider the relationship between Anthroposophy and different forms of cult.

• 1. The Birth of Natural Science in World-History and Its Subsequent Development. Course of 9 lectures given at Dornach from 24th December, 1922 to 6th January, 1923.

(Rudolf Steiner, in his opening address to the audience of this lecture course which took place on the large farming estate Schloss Koberwitz in Silesia (Germany), sends his thanks to all who have co-operated in creating the occasion of these agricultural lectures and talks. He especially thanks Count and Countess Keyserlingk for their hospitality. He then continues: – )

I am quite convinced that everyone here will be perfectly satisfied with the hospitality that has been provided. Whether you will be equally satisfied with the course of lectures itself is a question which is perhaps open to dispute, although we shall do our best, during the discussions which will take place later, to reach accord on what has been said. For you must remember, that though in many quarters there has been an ardent desire for such a course of lectures, it is the first time that I have undertaken such a task from within the heart of Anthroposophical striving.

A course of this kind naturally makes many demands, for it will show us to what an extent the interests of Agriculture are bound up with those of the widest circles of human existence and that there is scarcely a single sphere of life which has not some relation to Agriculture. Prom some viewpoint or another all the various interests of life are contained in Agriculture. Here we shall naturally only touch upon the central portion of the subject itself. But this necessity will lead us to detours which are inevitable, because everything which is said will have Anthroposophy itself as a basis. I would in particular ask you to forgive me if in the introductory lecture to-day there is much that seems so divergent from our subject that many of you will not immediately see what bearing it has upon specifically agricultural problems. But what we shall say to-day of things which may seem remote will nevertheless be the basis of our work.

The cultural life of modern times has had particular and serious effects upon Agriculture. It has had economic consequences, the destructive character of which few people to-day have the slightest idea. And it was in order to defeat these tendencies that certain economic enterprises were attempted from within the Anthroposophical Movement. This work was undertaken by industrialists and business men, but they did not achieve all the aims they had set themselves, simply because at the present time there are too many opposing forces to allow of this attempt being really understood. The individual is helpless in the midst of these existing hostile powers, and the inner kernel and essential aims of these economic strivings which originated in the Anthroposophical Movement have therefore never really come under discussion.

What were the practical questions at issue? I will explain them, taking Agriculture as an example in order to deal with the matter in concrete rather than in abstract and general terms. There are to-day a great many books and lectures on so-called Economics. These contain chapters on Agriculture; the authors try to deal with this subject on the basis or economics. Sow in connection with Agriculture this whole business, books and lectures oh economics is manifest nonsense. This nonsense is, however, very widespread to-day. Everyone should be able to see that Agriculture and its place in the social order can only be discussed when one starts from a knowledge of what is entailed in the growing of turnips, potatoes and corn. Without this it is useless to discuss the principles of Economics involved. These things must be unravelled on the basis of the actual facts, they cannot be established on vague theoretical assumptions.

If you say this to those who have listened to a number of their university colleagues talking about Economics in relation to Agriculture, it will strike them as completely absurd, because they regard the subject as already established. But this is not the case. Judgment in agricultural matters must come from practical knowledge of field and forest and of the breeding of animals. There can be no fruitful vision in Agriculture or in anything else so long as people do not realise that this hovering over the subject from the point of view of Economics is mere talk and nothing more; one must go back to the practical foundations in every department of life. You can say of a turnip that it has such and such a colour and consists of such and such constituents. But that is not to understand the turnip—not by a long way, nor, above all does it take into account the living relation of the turnip to the soil, to the season at which it ripens, and many other important matters.

Let me make this clear by an illustration taken from another sphere. If you observe the needle of a compass you discover that one end always approximately points to the North, the other to the South. But you seek the cause for this not in the magnetic needle itself but in the earth as a whole, at one end of which is what is called the Magnetic North, at the other end is the Magnetic South Pole. To try and discover from the magnetic needle itself why it should so obstinately turn in one direction would be absurd. For its constant maintenance of direction can only be understood in relation to the whole earth. Yet what in the case of the magnetic needle is clearly absurd, is regarded by many people as sense when it comes to other things. The turnip is regarded as growing only within the narrow confines of its immediate earthly surroundings, but this becomes impossible if one comes to the point that its growth may be dependent upon innumerable factors which are not present on earth at all but in its cosmic surroundings. And thus in practical life many things are explained and ordered to-day as though we had to do only with the narrow isolated phenomenon, and not with activities and influences coming from the whole Universe. The various departments of modern life have suffered very gravely through this, and would have suffered still more had not people continued to rely upon a certain instinct in these matters in spite of all the advances of modern science.

To turn to a completely different sphere, it has always been a source of satisfaction to me that people who, following their doctor's orders, weigh every morsel of the food they eat—so many ounces of meat, so many ounces of cabbage (some people even have scales on the table beside their plates)—it is always a source of satisfaction to me, when the unfortunate individual still feels hungry, so long as he has not had enough, and thus proves that instinct is still present in him. In the same way, instinct was at the root of all the work of man in this realm before there was a science of the subject, and its indications were often very sure ones. The old calendars with their versified rules of practice that one still finds among peasants are often surprisingly wise and expressive. And it is quite possible for a man with sure instincts to avoid superstition in these matters. For along with very profound sayings concerning the sowing and reaping of grain we get occasional sayings directed against extravagances, for example “If the cock crows on the dunghill it will either rain or stay as it is” (Kräht der Hahn auf dem Mist, so regnet es, oder bleibt wie es ist) Instinctive wisdom is always sufficiently armed with a sense of humour to be on its guard against superstition. Speaking from the Anthroposophical point of view, what we have to do is not so much to return to the old instincts as, through a deeper spiritual insight, to discover things which can be supplied ever less and less by the instincts as they have become uncertain.

This task demands that in studying the life of plants, of animals and of the earth itself, we should extend our views to the whole cosmos. For while it is quite right to reject a trivial connection between rain and the phases of the Moon, yet on the other hand the following has happened, I have told the story already on other occasions. In Leipsic, there were two professors, one of them. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a man gifted with keen insight in spiritual matters, claimed that from external observations which he had made, the existence of a connection between periods of rain and the course of the Moon around the earth was not a mere superstitious belief. He had come to this view through statistical evidence. But his colleague, the famous Professor Schleiden, denied the contention on theoretical grounds. These two University professors were both married, and Fechner, who had a certain sense of humour, said; “Let our wives decide which of us is right.” Now it so happened that in those days at Leipsic, water was scarce and had to be fetched from a distance. So, it was the custom in order to have sufficient for washing day, to collect rain which ran from the houses in pitchers and barrels. Frau Professor Schleiden did this, and so did her neighbour, Frau Professor Fechner. But there was not room for them both to set out their pitchers and barrels in the courtyard at the same time. So, Professor Fechner said: “If my honoured colleague is right and the time of the month does not matter, then Frau Professor Schleiden can put out her pitchers at the time when according to my reading of the lunar phase there will be less rain, and my wife will put out hers during the period when my calculations tell me there will be more rain. If my theory is all nonsense, Frau Professor Schleiden will no doubt gladly fall in with this arrangement.” But lo and behold! Frau Professor Schleiden would do nothing of the sort and preferred to go by Professor Fechner's statement rather than by that of her husband.

And so it often happens. Science may be right, but practice cannot be ruled by the “Tightness” of science. But to speak more seriously. This example has only been introduced in order to show that we must look a little further than we are accustomed to look nowadays when we are considering that which alone makes it possible for man to live on this planet—I mean Agriculture. I cannot say whether what I am going to say out of Anthroposophy will be satisfactory to us in every respect, but I shall try to bring before you what Anthroposophy can contribute to Agriculture.

I will now begin to draw your attention to some facts within our earthly existence which have an important bearing upon Agriculture. We are accustomed nowadays to lay the chief stress upon the physico-chemical constituents of any substance. Now I propose to start from an examination not of the physico-chemical constituents, but of something which lies behind them and is of very special importance to the life of the plant on the one hand, and of the animal on the other. Human life, and to a certain extent the life of animals as well has become emancipated to a large extent from world-workings outside them. The nearer we come to man, the more strongly marked is this emancipation. In both human and animal life, we find manifestations which seem to be entirely independent of extra-terrestrial influences or even of the atmospheric influences surrounding the earth. Hot only does this seem so, but it actually is the case in regard to many things in life. True, we know that certain atmospheric changes will accentuate the pain attending certain illnesses. What is less well known is that certain illnesses, and certain other life phenomena imitate in their rhythms the course of certain processes in Nature, but do not coincide with those of these natural processes their beginnings and endings. We need only recall one of the most important phenomena, female menstruation, which in its rhythmic character is an imitation of the monthly changes of the Moon, yet the beginnings and endings of the two phenomena do not coincide. There are many more intimate manifestations—both in the male and the female organisms, which imitate the rhythms of Nature. For example, a closer study of the periodicity of sun-spots would bring us to a better understanding of much that happens in the social life. But these things are not noticed, because the social phenomenon which corresponds to the periodic change of the spots on the sun, does not begin and end when they do, but has become emancipated from them. The periodicity and rhythm are the same but there is no coincidence in time. It is easy enough to dismiss as nonsense the statement that human life is a microcosm which imitates the macrocosm. If for instance one refers to certain illnesses having a period of fever which lasts seven days, it could be objected that whenever the corresponding external phenomena occurred in Nature, the fever ought to appear and run a parallel course; but the fever does not do this! Nevertheless, it is true that the fever retains the inner rhythm even if its beginning and end do not coincide with those of the external event. This emancipation from cosmic events is almost complete in the case of man: it is less complete in the animal; while plant-life is to a high degree immersed in the general Cosmic life of Nature and also in its earthly surrounding. For this reason, we shall never acquire any real understanding of plant-life unless we realise that everything on earth is only a reflection of what takes place in the cosmos. This reflection is hidden in the case of man because he has emancipated himself. He carries within him only the inner rhythm. But the connection is still there in the highest degree in plants, and it is to this that I wish to direct your attention in this introductory talk.

In the immediate vicinity of the earth, we have the Moon and the other planets. The old instinctive science which reckoned the Sun, as one of the planets had one of the following sequence: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Now, without going any further into the astronomical aspect of the subject, I wish to point to the relation which exists between planetary life and life on the earth. If we consider life on the earth in general the first thing we have to take into account is the very important part played by the what I might call the life of the siliceous substance in the world. You will find this siliceous substance in the very beautiful mineral quartz enclosed in prismatic and pyramidal forms. Quartz is siliceous substance combined with oxygen; remove the oxygen mentally, and you have the so-called silicon. This silicon is regarded by modern chemistry as one of the elements (oxygen, etc.) and when united with oxygen may be regarded as a chemical substance. But we must not forget that this silicon which lives in the mineral quartz makes up from 27% to 28% of the crust of the earth, i.e. a higher percentage than that of any other substance on earth, except for oxygen, which amounts to 47% to 48%. Now silicon, in the form in which it appears in such stony substances as quartz, does not at first seem to possess very much importance if we consider only the material of the soil of the earth with its plant growth. Quartz is not soluble in water—the water trickles through it. It thus seems to have no connection with the ordinary commonplace view of “conditions of life.” But if you take the Equisetum (horsetail) you will find that it consists of 90% of silicon (the same substance of which quartz consists) in very fine distribution through its form. This shows the enormous importance which this substance, silicon, must have. It forms nearly one half of everything on the earth. And vet so completely has its importance been overlooked that its use has been neglected even where it can have the most beneficent results. Silicon forms an essential constituent of many remedies used in Anthroposophical therapy. A whole series of diseases is treated either internally or by baths, with this substance, the reason being that what appears in the form of abnormal conditions of the sense organs, (it only appears there, it does not really lie there) the internal sense organs, as cause of pain, is strangely accessible to the influence of silicon. And in general silicon plays the greatest conceivable part in what has been called by the old-fashioned name of the “household of Nature,” for it is present not only in quartz and other stones, but in a highly-refined state in the atmosphere. Indeed, it is present everywhere. One half of the earth at our disposal consists of silicon. What then is the function of this substance?

To answer this question let us assume that our earth contained only half of the quantity of silicon which it actually does possess. We should then have plants in more or less pyramidal form: the blooms would be atrophied, and indeed all plants would assume generally the shape of the cacti which strikes us as so abnormal. The cereals would look grotesque; their stems would grow thick and fleshy towards the base, but the ears would be emaciated and without grain.

So much for silicon. On the other hand, in every part of the earth, although not in such abundance as is silicon, we find lime and their allied substances, (limestone, potash and sodium). If these were present in smaller proportions we should have plants whose stems were only narrow and twisted, we should have only creepers. There would be blooms of course, but they would be useless and yield nothing of any food value. It is only through the balance of these two formative forces—as embodied in these two substances, silicon and limestone—that plant life can flourish in the form in which we know it to-day.

Now everything siliceous contains forces that come, not from the earth, but from the so-called distant planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—the planets beyond the Sun. These planets work indirectly upon plant-life through silicon and allied substances. But the planets near the Earth namely, Moon, Mercury and Venus, send out forces into the plant-life and animal life on earth through the medium of the limestone and kindred substances. Thus, of any cultivated field it may be said that the forces of both silicon and limestone are at work in it. The silicon mediates the influences of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the limestone those of Moon, Venus and Mercury.

Now let us turn to the plants themselves. There are two things to notice about all plants. The first is that the plant world as a whole and every single species have the power to perpetuate their kind and develop the force of reproduction, etc. The second is that the plant as a member of a relatively low order of Nature serves as nourishment for members of higher orders. These two fundamental tendencies seem at first to have little to do with one another. For if we only look at the passing on of the step from parent plant to offspring and so on, it is a matter of indifference to the formative forces of Nature whether or not the plant is used for food. The two interests (i.e. of Nature and Man) are completely different, and yet the forces of Nature act in such a way that the inherent powers of reproduction and growth and of producing generation after generation of plants, are active m the cosmic influences exercised upon the earth by the Moon, Venus and Mercury through the mediation of limestone.

If we consider plants which are not used for food, which do nothing but reproduce themselves, we focus our interest in the cosmic forces of Venus, Mercury and Moon, related to reproduction. But in the case of plants which are eminently suitable for food because their substances have become perfected to the point of forming food-stuffs, for human and animal consumption, it is the planets Mars, Jupiter and Saturn that are working through the medium of silicon. Silicon opens up the being of the plant to the expanses of the Universe, it awakens the plant's senses, so that it absorbs the formative forces bestowed by the distant planets, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. From the sphere of Moon, Venus and Mercury on the other hand, the plant absorbs only that which makes it capable of reproducing itself. Now this seems at first to be just an interesting theory. But every insight taken from a wider horizon leads us quite naturally from theory to practice.

If then certain forces coming from the Moon, Venus and Mercury enter the Earth and become effective in plant-life, the question arises: What will promote and what will restrain the activity of these forces? For instance, in what way can the activities of Moon or Saturn be modified in their influence on plants? If we observe the course of the year, we shall find that on some days there is rain and on others none. All that the modern physicist observes is the fact that on rainy days more water falls on the Earth than on dry days! Water moreover is to him something abstract consisting of oxygen, hydrogen, and nothing more. If water is decomposed by electrolysis it is split into two substances, each of which acts in its own way. But this tells us nothing about water. There is much more hidden in water than appears in the chemical properties of hydrogen and oxygen. Water by its very nature is eminently fitted to bear along with it the forces coming from the Moon on to the Earth. So, it comes about that it is water which distributes the lunar forces throughout the earthly realm. There is a certain kind of relation between the Moon and the water on the Earth. Let us suppose that after a rainy spell there is a full Moon. Now the forces coming from the Moon when it is full causes something tremendous to happen on Earth. They shoot right into the whole growing forces of the vegetable kingdom. They cannot do so if there has not been a rainy spell beforehand. We must always realise the importance of sowing seed after rainy days followed by the full Moon, and we should never work at random (true, something will always come up). The question: How to connect our seed-sowing with rain and full Moon has definite practical importance, because the forces that come from the full Moon work powerfully and abundantly on certain plants after rain, but only weakly and sparingly after a spell of sunny weather. The old adages of husbandry contained such knowledge. People recalled the adage that told them what to do. These adages or saws are looked upon nowadays as superstition and scientists are not yet sufficiently interested to work out a real science of the matter.

Furthermore, around the Earth we find the atmosphere. In addition to consisting of air, the atmosphere has the property of being sometimes warm and sometimes cold. At times, there is certain accumulation of heat which, if the tension becomes too great, may discharge itself in a thunderstorm. Now what can we say about warmth? Spiritual observation shows that while water has no relation to silicon, warmth is so powerfully related to it that it enhances the activity of the forces working through silicon, namely, the forces coming from Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. These forces coming from Saturn, Jupiter and Mars have to be valued on quite a different scale from that adopted in the case of Moon. Venus and Mercury, for it must be remembered that Saturn takes thirty years to go around the Sun, while the Moon takes only about thirty or twenty-eight days to pass through all its phases. Thus, Saturn is only visible for fifteen years, and consequently stands in quite another relation to the growth of plants compared with the Moon. As a matter of fact, Saturn is not only active when it is shining down on the Earth, it is also active when its rays have to pass from below, as it were, through the Earth.

Now as Saturn takes thirty years to revolve around the Sun we find that at certain times it shines directly on one spot on the Earth, and that it can work upon this spot by going right through the Earth. (See Drawing No. 1). The strength with which the Saturn forces influence plant-life on Earth always depends upon the warmth-condition of the air. If the air is cold they cannot reach the plants, if the air is warm they can. How then can we see their influence at work in the plant? We see it not in the annuals but in the perennials; not in those plants which grow up and die in the course of one year leaving only their seed behind them, but in those which are perennial. It is the latter whose growth Saturn promotes with the help of the warmth forces of the Earth. The effect of these forces working through the mediation of warmth, is to be seen, for instance, m the bark or cortex of trees and in everything that makes the plant a perennial. When the lives of plants are limited to the short span of a single year, it is because of the relation in which, those plants stand to the planets with short periods of revolution. On the other hand, that which emancipates itself from the fleeting process and is made permanent in the formation of bark around the growing trees is connected with the planetary forces working through the mediation of warmth and cold, and the periods of revolution in these cases are long. Thirty years in the case of Saturn, twelve in the case of Jupiter. Again, it is well for anyone who wants to plant an oak tree to know something of the periodicity or Mars, for an oak tree planted during the appropriate period of Mars will thrive much better than one planted unthinkingly, at any moment that happens to be convenient. Or, if you have a plantation of conifers, where the Saturn forces play so great a part, it will make all the difference if the trees are planted when Saturn is in the so-called ascending period rather than at another time. Anyone who has insight into these matters can tell quite accurately in the case of plants that are doing well or badly whether or not they have been tended with a right understanding of their relation to planetary forces. For what is not always obvious to the external eye is revealed to more intimate observation.

To take an example: If we burn wood taken from a tree which has been planted without an understanding of the cosmic rhythms we do not get such a healthy heat as from wood taken from a tree which has been planted with right understanding. It is precisely on the little matters of everyday life that these things play so great a part and that the importance of such differences are revealed. But people live their lives almost unthinkingly. They do not take the trouble to consider such details and everything goes on like a machine. If you pull the right trigger, the machine works, and the materialistically-minded imagine that the whole of Nature works on the same principle. And yet regarding Nature so and working upon her in this way brings us face to face with certain stupendous results in practice. Why, for instance, is it impossible to-day to obtain such fine potatoes as I remember eating in my youth? It is impossible to find such potatoes even in the districts in which they used to be grown. (It is really so! I have tested them everywhere!) The nutritive forces of certain foods have actually declined over a passage of time. The last decade shows this quite distinctly. The reason is that we no longer understand the intimate forces at work in the whole cosmos. These must be sought for once again, and sought for along such lines as I have indicated to-day by way of introduction. I have merely touched upon certain questions which extend far beyond the horizon of contemporary vision. We shall not only continue this consideration, but shall search more deeply for a means of applying it to practical life.

I propose to devote the time that remains at our disposal to the consideration of the rearing of live-stock and the cultivation of fruit and vegetables.

Naturally there will not be time to treat the subject at very great length, but in order to obtain a fruitful starting point, we must gain insight into all the factors which come into consideration. We shall do this to-day, and tomorrow we shall pass on to the more practical aspect of the subject.

I shall ask you to-day to join me in the consideration of rather more recondite matters, to follow me into what is nowadays an almost unknown territory, although the instinctive husbandry of the past was thoroughly conversant with it. The beings in Nature—minerals, plants, animals—we will disregard man for the moment—are often regarded as though, they existed in completely separate realms. It is the custom to-day to look at a plant as though it existed by and for itself, and similarly one species of plant is also regarded as being isolated from other plant species. So these things are neatly sorted and fitted into genera and species, as though they were being put into boxes. But things are not like this in Nature. In Nature—nay, in the world—being as a whole, all things are in mutual interaction. One thing is always being affected by another. In these materialistic days, only the more palpable effects of this interaction are noted, such as when one thing is eaten or digested by another, or when the dung of animals is used for the soil. In addition to these, however, finer interactions amongst more delicate forces and substances are continually taking place: through warmth, through the chemical-etheric element which is continually at work in the atmosphere, and through the life-ether. Unless we take account of these more delicate interactions, we shall make no progress, at any rate in certain departments of Agriculture. In particular we must look to those more intimate interactions which take place in Nature when we have to deal with the life together of plant and animal on the farm. We must look with understanding not only upon those animals which undoubtedly stand close to us, such as cattle, horses, sheep, etc., but also, for example, upon the manifold insect world, which during a certain period of the year hovers around the plants. Indeed, we must learn to look with understanding at bird-life too. Humanity to-day is very far from realising how much farming and forestry are affected by the expulsion from certain districts of certain kinds of birds as a result of modern conditions. Here again light can be thrown on the subject by conceptions given by Spiritual Science. Let us therefore extend some of these ideas which have been working upon us and come by their help to a yet wider vision.

A fruit tree—apple, pear or plum—is something completely different in kind from a herbaceous or cereal plant as any kind of tree outwardly is indeed. But, putting aside any preconceived notions, we must find out wherein the peculiarity of the tree lies. Otherwise we shall never understand the function fulfilled by fruits in the economy of Nature. I am speaking, of course, of the fruit that grows on trees. If we look at a tree with understanding we shall find that the only parts of it which can really be reckoned as plant are the tender twigs, the green leaves and their stalks, the blossoms, the fruits. These grow out of the tree just as herbaceous plants grow out of the soil, the tree being in fact “earth” in relation to the parts that grow out of it. It is as though the soil were heaped up—but a somewhat more quickened soil than the ordinary soil in which our herbaceous and cereal plants grow.

If, therefore, we want to understand the nature of a tree, we must observe that it consists of the thick trunk, to which are attached the branches and boughs. On this ground the specifically plant-like parts grow, viz. leaves and blossoms, which are as much rooted in the trunk and branches as cereal and herbaceous plants are rooted in the earth. The question therefore arises: is this plant this plant-like part—which may be regarded as more or less parasitical, really rooted in the tree?

We cannot discover an actual root on the trees. We conclude, therefore, that this plant, which develops its leaves and blossoms and twigs up aloft, must have lost its roots in growing on the tree. But no plant is complete without its root. It must have a root. Where, then, does the actual root of this plant reside?

Now, the root is only invisible for our limited outer vision. In this case one does not see it, but has to understand where it is. What do we mean by this? The following concrete comparison may help. Suppose I planted a large number of herbaceous plants so closely together that their roots were intertwined and grew into each other, forming a completely matted mass or pap of roots. You can well imagine that this pap does not remain chaotic, but that it organises itself into a unity so that the sap-bearing vessels unite with each other. In this organised root-pap, it would not be possible to distinguish where one root finished. and the other began, and a common root-organ would arise (See Diag. No. 12). A thing like that does not, of course, exist in the soil, but such a root-formation is actually present in the The plants that grow on the tree have lost their root, have become relatively separated from it and are only, as it were, etherically connected with it. What I have drawn hypothetic ally is really the layer of cambium (a layer of living cells lying between the last-formed wood and the outer bark) in the tree and we cannot regard the roots of these plants otherwise than as having been replaced by the cambium. From this tissue, which is always forming new cells, these plants unfold themselves just as from the root below an herbaceous plant unfolds above the soil. We can now begin to understand what the tree really is. The tree with its cambium—which is the only cell-producing layer in the tree, is actually heaped-up earth, which has grown upwards into the air element and therefore requires a more interiorised form of life than is present in the ordinary soil which contains the root. Thus, we must regard the tree as a very curious entity, whose function it is to separate the “plants” growing on it (twigs, blossoms, fruit; from their roots; an entity which places between them and their roots a distance which is bridged only by spirit—or more strictly by the Etheric. It is in this way we need to look, with a macro-cosmic understanding, into the facts of growth.

But the matter goes much farther. What results arise from the existence of a tree? That which is around the tree in the air and outer warmth is of a different plant-nature from that which grows up from the soil in the air and warmth and forms the herbaceous plant. It is a plant-world of a different order, possessing a far more intimate relation with the surrounding astral element. Lower down that element is eliminated from the air and warmth in order to make them mineral-like, so that they can be used by man and beast. [See Lecture II. They become “dead” air and warmth.]

It is true, as I have said, that the plant we see rowing upon the ground is surrounded, as with a cloud. v the astral element. But around the tree, the astral element is far denser. So much so, that we may say: Our trees are definitely collectors of astral substance.

Here one might say it is quite easy to reach a higher development and become “esoteric”—I do not mean clairvoyant but clair-sentient as to the sense of smell. One has only to acquire the capacity for distinguishing between the scent of plants growing in the ground, the peculiar smell of orchards, especially in the spring when they are in flower, and the aroma of forests. Then one is able to tell the difference between a plant atmosphere poor in astral elements, such as that of herbaceous plants growing in the soil and an atmosphere such as we sniff with such pleasure when the scent of trees is wafted in our direction. And if you train your sense of smell to distinguish between the scent of soil-grown (herbaceous) plants and the scent of trees, you will have developed “clear-smelling” for the thinner and for the denser forms of the astral element. The countryman, as you see, can very easily acquire this “clear-smelling” though this faculty, common in the old days of instinctive clairvoyance, has been much neglected in recent times.

If, now, we realise the consequences to which this may lead the question will arise: What is happening in that part of the tree which may be regarded as the opposite pole from the “parasitical” plants on the tree which collect this astral element. What is happening through the cambium?

Now. the tree makes the atmosphere far and wide around it richer in astral element. What happens while the “parasite” growth goes on above in the tree? The tree here has a certain inner vitality, a powerful etheric life in it. The cambium tones down this vitality, making it more mineral in nature. “While about the upper part of the tree an enrichment of the astral substance is going on, the cambium causes an impoverishment of the etheric life in the tree. The tree within is deprived of etheric life as compared with the herbaceous plant. In consequence, this produces a change in the root. The root of the tree becomes more mineral, far more mineral than the roots of the herbaceous plants. But by becoming more mineral, the tree-root withdraws some of the etheric life from the soil; it makes the soil around the tree slightly more dead than it would be around a herbaceous plant. This must be fully borne in mind, for these natural processes always have a great significance in the economy of Nature. We must therefore seek to understand the significance of the astral wealth in the atmosphere around the tree and of the etheric poverty in the region of the roots.

If we look around us, we can find the further connection. It is the fully developed insect which lives on and weaves in this enriched astral element which wafts through the trees; whereas the impoverished etheric element beneath, spreading in the soil and throughout the whole tree (for, as I pointed out yesterday in connection with human Karma, a spiritual element always works throughout the whole being) is that which harbours the' larvae or grubs. Thus, if there were no trees on the earth there would be no insects. The insects that flutter around the upper parts of the trees and through the forests depend for their life upon the presence of the trees; and exactly the same thing is true of the grubs.

Here we have yet another indication of the inner connection between all roots and animal life beneath the soil. This is especially evident in the case of the trees. But this same principle which is so striking in the case of the trees is present in a modified form throughout the whole of the vegetable world, for in every plant there lives something that tends to become a tree. In every plant the root and what is around it tends to throw off the etheric life whereas the upper growth strives to attract the astral element more closely to itself. For this reason, there arises in every plant that kinship with the insect world which I have specially characterised in the case of the tree.

This relation, however, to the insect world in fact extends so as to comprise the whole of the animal world. In former times insect grubs, which can only live upon the earth because of the presence of tree roots, transformed themselves into other kinds of animals, similar to larvae and remaining at the larva stage throughout their lives. These animals then emancipated themselves to a certain extent from the tree-root nature and adopted a life which extends also to the root region of herbaceous plants. And now we find the curious fact that certain of these sub-terrestrial animals, though far removed from being larvae, yet have the ability to regulate the amount of etheric life in the soil if this amount becomes excessive. When the soil becomes, as it were, too much alive and the sprouting etheric life too strong, these animals of the soil see to it that this excess is reduced. They are thus wonderful vents which regulate the vitality in the soil.

These lovely creatures, for they are of the greatest value to the earth are no other than the common earthworms. One ought to study the life of earth-worms in relation to the soil, for these wonderful animals allow just that amount of etheric life to remain in the soil as is needed for the growth of plants. Thus, in the soil we have these creatures, earth-worms and their like, distantly resembling larvae. One ought in fact to see to it that certain soils which require it, are supplied with a healthful stock of worms. We should soon see how beneficent such a control over this animal-world in. the soil can be, not only for vegetation but also thereby for the rest of the animal kingdom, as we shall show later.

Now there are certain animals which bear a distant resemblance to the insect world, to that part of it which is fully developed and winged, I mean the birds. It is well known that in the course of the development of the earth something very wonderful took place between the birds and the insects. It is as though, to put it figuratively, the insects had one day said: “We do not feel strong enough to ‘work-up’ the astrality sparkling around the trees, we shall therefore use the ‘desire-to-be-a-tree’ of other plants. We shall flutter around these, and leave largely to you birds the astral life that surrounds the trees.” Thus, there arose in Nature a proper “division of labour” between the birds and the butterflies; and this co-operation in the winged world brought about in a wonderful manner the right distribution of astral life wherever it was required on the surface of the earth. If these winged creatures are removed, the astral life will fail to accomplish its proper function, and this will be noticeable in the stunted condition of the vegetation. The two things are connected; the world of winged animals and all that grows out of the soil into the air. The one is unthinkable without the other. In farming, therefore, we must see to it that birds and insects fly about as they were meant to do; and the farmer should know something about the breeding and rearing of birds and insects. For in Nature—I must repeat this again and again—everything, everything is connected.

These considerations are of the utmost importance for a right understanding of the questions before us and we must therefore hold them very clearly in our minds. The winged world of insects brings about the proper distribution of astrality in the air. The astrality in the air has a mutual relationship with the forest which directs it in the proper way, much as in the human body the blood is directed by certain forces. And this activity of the forest, which is effective over a very wide area, will have to be undertaken by something quite different in a district where there is no forest. Indeed, in districts where woods alternate with arable land and meadows that which grows in the soil comes under quite different laws from those which rule in completely unwooded districts.

There are certain parts of the earth which were obviously wooded areas long before man took a hand. In certain matters, Nature is cleverer than we are. and it may safely be assumed that if a forest grows naturally in a certain district it will have its uses for the neighbouring fields and for the herbaceous and cereal vegetation round about. In such districts one ought therefore to have the intelligence not to uproot the woods but to cultivate them. Ana as the earth is gradually changing through climatic and cosmic influences of all kinds, one should have the courage, when the vegetation becomes poor, not merely to indulge in all sorts of experiments in the fields and for the fields, but to increase the area of woods in the neighbourhood. And when plants run to leaf, lacking the power to produce seed, one should take bites out of the neighbouring woods. The regulation of woods in districts which Nature intended to De wooded is an integral part of agriculture, and must be examined with all its consequences from a spiritual point of view.

Again, the world of grubs and worms may be said to stand in a mutual relationship to the lime, i.e. to the mineral part of the earth; while the world of birds and insects, of all that flies and flutters about, has a similar relationship to the astral element. The relation between the worm and grub world and lime brings about the drawing off of the etheric element, as I explained a few days ago, from a different point of view. This is the function of lime, but it performs this function in cooperation with the world of worms and grubs.

If these ideas are carried out in more detail, they will lead to other things which—and that is why I have expounded them with such confidence—were applied, in the days of instinctive clairvoyance, in the right way. But this instinct has been lost, rooted out by the intelligence, as have been all such instincts. Materialism is to blame for men's having become so clever and intellectual. In the days when they were not intellectual, they were not so clever, but they were far wiser and learned through their feelings how to go about things; and we must learn to act with wisdom once again through Anthroposophy, but this time the wisdom will be conscious. For Anthroposophy is by no means something clever and intellectual—it strives for wisdom. And we must try to draw near to wisdom in all things and not be content merely to learn by rote an abstract jingle of words, such as “Man consists of a physical body, etc.” The main point is that we should introduce this knowledge into everything; then one finds the way to discriminate—especially if one really becomes clairvoyant in the sense that I have explained to you—and to see things in Nature as they really are. We shall discover, for example, that birds can become harmful if they are not in the neighbourhood of a wood of conifers which can turn what they do into something useful. Our vision is then further sharpened and we begin to discern the presence of yet another relationship. It is a very delicate relationship, similar to those I have been dealing with, but which can appear in a more tangible form. All growing things that are neither trees nor small plants, i.e. all shrubs such as the hazel bush have, an intimate relationship with mammals. If, therefore, we wish to improve the mammals on our farm, we shall do well to plant such bush-like growths. The mere presence of the bushes has a beneficent influence, for in Nature all things stand in constant reciprocal relationship.

But let us go a step further. Animals are not so foolish as human beings. They very soon notice the presence of this relationship. They find that they like these shrubs; this liking is inborn in them, and they enjoy eating them. They begin to eat what they need of the shrubs, and this has a wonderfully regulating effect upon the rest of their diet. But this insight into the intimate relations in Nature will also throw light upon the nature of harmful influences. Just as conifer woods stand in intimate relationship to birds and shrubs to mammals_? so do all kinds of fungi stand in a relation similarly intimate to the lower animals, to bacteria and the like, viz. to parasites. Harmful parasites are closely connected with fungi. They develop where fungus-life is dispersed. In this way, there arise plant diseases and other greater ills in plants. If, however, we can contrive to nave not only woods, but also well-watered meadows suitably situated in the neighbourhood of cultivated lands, these will be useful in forming a good breeding ground for fungi. One should see to it that the moist meadows are well-planted with such growths. We then make the following remarkable discovery, that if a meadow, not necessarily very large, but rich in fungi (e.g. mushrooms) is situated near cultivated land then the fungi, because of their kinship with bacteria and other parasites, will keep these creatures away from the farming-land. For mushrooms “hang together” with these little creatures more than do other plants. Thus, in addition to the other methods I have advocated for combating plant pests there is also the possibility of keeping these tiny creatures, these vermin away from cultivated land by converting land in its vicinity into meadows.

It is so important for success in agriculture that the right amount of acreage should be assigned respectively to woods, orchards, shrubberies and meadows with a natural growth of fungi, that one often gets better results-even if one reduces the extent of tilled land accordingly. Generally speaking, to cultivate the whole of the acreage at one's disposal, leaving no room for the other factors of which I have spoken, and to count in consequence upon larger crops is certainly no real economy. The extension of the tilled area is counterbalanced by a lowering in the quality of the produce because the increase in the cultivated area is made at the cost of the other factors. One cannot be engaged in a thing like farming where Nature is the “manager,” without realising the inter-connections and inter—actions which exist between all her processes.

Now let us look at something which will make clear to us the relation of plant to animal and, conversely, of animal to plant. What is an animal in reality, and what is the plant-world? (In the case of plants it is better to speak of the whole of the plant-world). We must look for the relationship between the two because only by this means can we come to understand the feeding of animals. For feeding is only properly done if it is done in accord with the true relationship between plant and animal. What are animals? We examine them, we even dissect them, study their muscles and nerves and admire the forms of their skeleton. But this does not tell us what an animal is in the whole economy of Nature. We shall only get at this if we grasp what it is with which the animal is most intimately connected in its environment.

Now with its system of nerves and senses and with part of its breathing system, the animal “works-up” all that which comes through the air and warmth. The animal does this to the extent that it is a separate being. (See Diag. No. 14). We may make a schematic drawing to indicate this. With regard to everything lying in its periphery, the animal lives with its nerves and sense system and part of its breathing system immediately in air and warmth. The animal has an immediate connection with air and warmth, its bony system being actually formed from the warmth which in particular mediates the influences of the sun and the moon. Its muscular system is formed from the air, which again works as a mediator of the forces of sun and moon. But as regards its relation to earth and water, the animal is not able directly to assimilate. It must first absorb them into its digestive tract and then work on them with what it has itself become through air and warmth; it works upon earth and water with its metabolic system and with a part of its breathing system, which passes over into the metabolic system. The animal must therefore have already come into existence by virtue of air and warmth if it is to be able to “work up” earth and water. This, therefore, is the animal's way of living in the sphere of earth and water. The process of transformation which I have described takes place, of course, by means of forces (dynamically) rather than by means of substances (materially).

Let us now try to answer the question: What is a plant?

The plant stands in an immediate relation to earth and water just as the animal does to air and warmth. The plant, therefore_? through a kind of breathing and through something very distantly resembling a sense system absorbs earth and water in the same direct manner as the animal absorbs air and warmth. Thus, the plant and earth and water live directly together. And now_? of course, you will say: If the plant lives in immediate contact with earth and water as the animal does with air and warmth, then no doubt the plant “works up” air and warmth inside itself just as the animal “works up” earth and water? But this is not the case. We cannot reach spiritual truths merely by analogy. The fact is that whereas the animal absorbs earth and water into itself, the plant actually gives off the air and warmth which it experiences dimly through its connection with the soil.

Thus, air and warmth do not go into the plant, or at any rate do not enter deeply into it; instead of being devoured by the plant, air and warmth are given off by it. And this process of elimination is the important thing. Organically the plant stands in inverse relation to the animal. That which in the animal is important as a process of nutrition becomes in the plant an elimination of air and warmth, and as in that sense we can say that the animal lives by absorbing food, in the same sense does the plant live by giving off air and warmth. And in virtue of that quality it may be said that the plant is virginal. Its character is not to absorb greedily but actually to give out that which the animal takes from the world in order to live. Thus, the plant lives by giving.

In this giving and taking, we can recognise something which played a very important part in the old instinctive knowledge of these matters. “In Nature's economy, the plant gives and the animal takes.” What is contained in this saying garnered from Anthroposophy was once common property in times of instinctive clairvoyance into Nature. Even m later days, much of this knowledge has remained among' those gifted with a peculiar sensitiveness in these matters, and in the works of Goethe you will sometimes come across the phrase: “In Nature everything lives through giving and taking.” Goethe did not fully understand the phrase, but he adopted it from ancient customs and traditions and he felt that it pointed to something in Nature which was true. Those who came after him understood nothing of this, and so did not understand what he meant when he spoke of taking and giving. Goethe also speaks of taking and giving in connection with breathing, in so far as breathing inter-acts with metabolism. He uses the words “taking and giving” in a fashion, semi-clear.

To sum up, I have shown you that in a certain sense the woods, orchards and shrubberies on the earth act as regulators in producing the right kind of plant-growth, and that under the soil grubs and other worm-like creatures act similarly in conjunction with lime. This is how we should envisage the relationship between the cultivation of fields, of fruit and of cattle, and then proceed to put our knowledge into practice. We shall endeavour to do this in the last hour that remains at our disposal, so that our Experimental Circle may work out these things more fully in the future.

In the last two lectures I tried to indicate the point in time when the scientific outlook and manner of thinking, such as we know it today, arose in the course of time. It was pointed out yesterday that the whole character of this scientific thinking, emerging at the beginning most clearly in Copernicus’ conception of astronomy, depends on the way in which mathematical thinking was gradually related to the reality of the external world. The development of science in modern times has been greatly affected by a change—one might almost say a revolutionary change—in human perception in regard to mathematical thinking itself. We are much inclined nowadays to ascribe permanent and absolute validity to our own manner of thinking.

Nobody notices how much matters have changed. We take a certain position today in regard to mathematics and to the relationship of mathematics to reality. We assume that this is the way it has to be and that this is the correct relationship. There are debates about it from time to time, but within certain limits this is regarded as the true relationship. We forget that in a none too distant past mankind felt differently concerning mathematics. We need only recall what happened soon after the point in time that I characterized as the most important in modern spiritual life, the point when Nicholas Cusanus presented his dissertation to the world. Shortly after this, not only did Copernicus try to explain the movements of the solar system with mathematically oriented thinking of the kind to which we are accustomed today, but philosophers such as Descartes and Spinoza²⁴ began to apply this mathematical thought to the whole physical and spiritual universe.

Even in such a book as his Ethics, the philosopher Spinoza placed great value on presenting his philosophical principles and postulates, if not in mathematical formulae—for actual calculations play no special part—yet in such a manner that the whole form of drawing conclusions, of deducing the later rules from earlier ones, is based on the mathematical pattern. By and by it appeared self-evident to the men of that time that in mathematics they had the right model for the attainment of inward certainty. Hence they felt that if they could express the world in thoughts arranged in the same clear-cut architectural order as in a mathematical or geometrical system, they would thereby achieve something that would have to correspond to reality. If the character of scientific thinking is to be correctly understood, it must be through the special way in which man relates to mathematics and mathematics relates to reality. Mathematics had gradually become what I would term a self-sufficient inward capacity for thinking. What do I mean by that?

The mathematics existing in the age of Descartes²⁵ and Copernicus can certainly be described more or less in the same terms as apply today. Take a modern mathematician, for example, who teaches geometry, and who uses his analytical formulas and geometrical concepts in order to comprehend some physical process. As a geometrician, this mathematician starts from the concepts of Euclidean geometry, the three-dimensional space (or merely dimensional space, if he thinks of non-Euclidean geometry.)²⁶ In three-dimensional space he distinguishes three mutually perpendicular directions that are otherwise identical. Space, I would say, is a self-sufficient form that is simply placed before one's consciousness in the manner described above without questions being raised such as: Where does this form come from? Or, Where do we get our whole geometrical system?

In view of the increasing superficiality of psychological thinking, it was only natural that man could no longer penetrate to those inner depths of soul where geometrical thought has its base. Man takes his ordinary consciousness for granted and fills this consciousness with mathematics that has been thought-out but not experienced. As an example of what is thought-out but not experienced, let us consider the three perpendicular dimensions of Euclidean space. Man would have never thought of these if he had not experienced a threefold orientation within himself. One orientation that man experiences in himself is from front to back. We need only recall how, from the external modern anatomical and physiological point of view, the intake and excretion of food, as well as other processes in the human organism, take place from front to back. The orientation of these specific processes differs from the one that prevails when, for example, I do something with my right arm and make a corresponding move with my left arm. Here, the processes are oriented left and right. Finally, in regard to the last orientation, man grows into it during earthly life. In the beginning he crawls on all fours and only gradually, stands upright, so that this last orientation flows within him from above downward and up from below.

As matters stand today, these three orientations in man are regarded very superficially. These processes—front to back, right to left or left to right, and above to below—are not inwardly experienced so much as viewed from outside. If it were possible to go back into earlier ages with true psychological insight, one would perceive that these three orientations were inward experiences for the men of that time. Today our thoughts and feelings are still halfway acknowledged as inward experiences, but he man of a bygone age had a real inner experience, for example, of the front-to-back orientation. He had not yet lost awareness of the decrease in intensity of taste sensations from front to back in the oral cavity. The qualitative experience that taste was strong on the tip of the tongue, then grew fainter and fainter as it receded from front to back, until it disappeared entirely, was once a real and concrete experience. The orientation from front to back was felt in such qualitative experiences. Our inner life is no longer as intense as it once was. Therefore, today, we no longer have experiences such as this. Likewise man today no longer has a vivid feeling for the alignment of his axis of vision in order to focus on a given point by shifting the right axis over the left. Nor does he have a full concrete awareness of what happens when, in the orientation of right-left, he relates his right arm and hand to the left arm and hand. Even less does he have a feeling that would enable him to say: The thought illuminates my head and, moving in the direction from above to below, it strikes into my heart. Such a feeling, such an experience, has been lost to man along with the loss of all inwardness of world experience. But it did once exist. Man did once experience the three perpendicular orientation of space within himself. And these three spatial orientations—right-left, front-back, and above-below—are the basis of the three-dimensional framework of space, which is only the abstraction of the immediate inner experience described above.

So what can we say when we look back at the geometry of earlier times? We can put it like this: It was obvious to a man in those ages that merely because of his being human the geometrical elements revealed themselves in his own life. By extending his own above-below, right-left, and front-back orientations, he grasped the world out of his own being.

Try to sense the tremendous difference between this mathematical feeling bound to human experience, and the bare, bleak mathematical space layout of analytical geometry, which establishes a point somewhere in abstract space, draws three coordinating axes at right angles to each other and thus isolates this thought-out space scheme from all living experience. But man has in fact torn this thought-out spatial diagram out of his own inner life. So, if we are to understand the origin of the later mathematical way of thinking that was taken over by science, if we are to correctly comprehend its self-sufficient presentation of structures, we must trace it back to the self-experienced mathematics of a bygone age. Mathematics in former times was something completely different. What was once present in a sort of dream-like experience of three-dimensionality and then became abstracted, exists today completely in the unconscious. As a matter of fact, man even now produced mathematics from his own three-dimensionality. But the way in which he derives this outline of space from his experiences of inward orientation is completely unconscious. None of this rises into consciousness except the finished spatial diagram. The same is true of all completed mathematical structures. They have all been severed from their roots. I chose the example of the space scheme, but I could just as well mention any other mathematical category taken from algebra or arithmetic. They are nothing but schemata drawn from immediate human experience and raised into abstraction.

Going back a few centuries, perhaps to the fourteenth century, and observing how people conceived of things mathematical, we find that in regard to numbers they still had an echo of inward feelings. In an age in which numbers had already become an abstract ads they are today, people would have been unable to find the names for numbers. The words designating numbers are often wonderfully characteristic. Just think of the word “two.” (zwei) It clearly expresses a real process, as when we say entzweien, “to cleave in twain.” Even more, it is related to zweifeln, “to doubt.” It is not mere imitation of an external process when the number two, zwei, is described by the word Entzweien, which indicates the disuniting, the splitting, of something formerly a whole. It is in fact something that is inwardly experienced and only then made into a scheme. It is brought up from within, just as the abstract three-dimensional space-scheme is drawn up from inside the mind.

We arrive back at an age of rich spiritual vitality that still existed in the first centuries of Christianity, as can be demonstrated by the fact that mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were considered to be almost one and the same. Mysticism, mathesis, and mathematics are one, though only in a certain connection. For a mystic of the first Christian centuries, mysticism was something that one experienced more inwardly in the soul. Mathematics was the mysticism that one experienced more outwardly with the body; for example, geometry with the body's orientations to front-and-back, right-and-left, and up-and-down. One could say that actual mysticism was soul mysticism and that mathematics, mathesis, was mysticism of the corporeality. Hence, proper mysticism was inwardly experienced in what is generally understood by this term; whereas mathesis, the other mysticism, as experienced by means of an inner experience of the body, as yet not lost.

As a matter of fact, in regard to mathematics and the mathematical method Descartes and Spinoza still had completely different feelings from what we have today. Immerse yourself in these thinkers, not superficially as in the practice today when one always wants to discover in the thinkers of old the modern concepts that have been drilled into our heads, but unselfishly, putting yourself mentally in their place. You will find that even Spinoza still retained something of a mystical attitude toward the mathematical method.

The philosophy of Spinoza differs from mysticism only in one respect. A mystic like Meister Eckhart or Johannes Tauler²⁷ attempts to experience the cosmic secrets more in the depths of feeling. Equally inwardly, Spinoza constructs the mysteries of the universe along mathematical, methodical lines, not specifically geometrical lines, but lines experienced mentally by mathematical methods. In regard to soul configuration and mood, there is no basic difference between the experience of Meister Eckhart's mystical method and Spinoza's mathematical one. Anyone how makes such a distinction does not really understand how Spinoza experienced his Ethics, for example, in a truly mathematical-mystical way. His philosophy still reflects the time when mathematics, mathesis, and mysticism were felt as one and the same experience in the soul.

Now, you will perhaps recall how, in my book The Case for Anthroposophy,²⁸ I tried to explain the human organization in a way corresponding to modern thinking. I divided the human organization—meaning the physical one—into the nerve-sense system, the rhythmic system, and the metabolic-limb system. I need not point out to you that I did not divide man into separate members placed side by side in space, although certain academic persons have accused²⁹ me of such a caricature. I made it clear that these three systems interpenetrate each other. The nerve-sense system is called the “head system” because it is centered mainly in the head, but it spreads out into the whole body. The breathing and blood rhythms of the chest system naturally extend into the head organization, and so on. The division is functional, not local. An inward grasp of this threefold membering will give you true insight into the human being.

Let us now focus on this division for a certain purpose. To begin with, let us look at the third member of the human organization, that of digestion (metabolism) and the limbs. Concentrating on the most striking aspect of this member, we see that man accomplishes the activities of external life by connecting his limbs with his inner experiences. I have characterized some of these, particularly the inward orientation experience of the three directions of space. In his external movements, in finding his orientation in the world, man's limb system achieves inward orientation in the three directions. In walking, we place ourselves in a certain manner into the experience of above-below. In much that we do with our hands or arms, we bring ourselves into the orientation of right-and-left. To the extent that speech is a movement of the aeriform in man, we even fit ourselves into direction of front-and-back, back-and-front, when we speak. Hence, in moving about in the world, we place our inward orientation into the outer world.

Let us look at the true process, rather than the merely illusionary one, in a specific mathematical case. It is an illusionary process, taking place purely in abstract schemes of thought, when I find somewhere in the universe a process in space, and I approach it as an analytical mathematician in such a way that I draw or imagine the three coordinate axes of the usual spatial system and arrange this external process into Descartes’ purely artificial space scheme.

This is what occurs above, in the realm of thought schemes, through the nerve-sense system. One would not achieve a relationship to such a process in space if it were not for what one does with one's limbs, with one's whole body, if it were not for inserting oneself into the whole world in accordance with the inward orientation of above-below, right-left, and front-back. When I walk forward, I know that on one hand I place myself in the vertical direction in order to remain upright. I am also aware that in walking I adjust my direction to the back-to-front orientation, and when I swim and use my arms, I orient myself in right and left. I do not understand all this if I apply Descartes’ space scheme, the abstract scheme of the coordinate axes. What gives me the impression of reality in dealing with matters of space is found only when I say to myself: Up in the head, in the nerve system, an illusory image arises of something that occurs deep down in the subconscious. Here, where man cannot reach with his ordinary consciousness, something takes place between his limb system and the universe. The whole of mathematics, of geometry, is brought up out of our limb system of movement. We would not have geometry if we did not place ourselves into the world according to inward orientation. In truth, we geometrize when we lift what occurs in the subconscious into the illusory of the thought scheme. This is the reason why it appears so abstractly independent to us. But his is something that this only come about in recent times. In the age in which mathesis, mathematics, was still felt to be something close to mysticism, the mathematical relationship to all things was also viewed as something human.

Where is the human factor if I imagine an abstract point somewhere in space crossed by three perpendicular directions and then apply this scheme to a process perceived in actual space? It is completely divorced from man, something quite inhuman. This non-human element, which has appeared in recent times in mathematical thinking, was once human. But when was it human?

The actual date has already been indicated, but the inner aspect is still to be described. When was it human? It was human when man did not only experience in his movements and his inward orientation in space that he stepped forward from behind and moved in such a way that he was aware of his vertical as well as the horizontal direction, but when he also felt the blood's inward activity in all such moving about, in all such inner geometry. There is always blood activity when I move forward. Think of the blood activity present when, as an infant, I lifted myself up from the horizontal to an upright position! Behind man's movements, behind his experience of the world by virtue of movements, (which can also be, and at one time was, an inward experience) there stands the experience of the blood. Every movement, small or large, that I experience as I perform it contains its corresponding blood experience. Today blood is to us the red fluid that seeps out when we prick our skin. We can also convince ourselves intellectually of its existence. But in the age when mathematics, mathesis, was still connected with mysticism, when in a dreamy way the experience of movement was inwardly connected with that of blood, man was inwardly aware of the blood. It was one thing to follow the flow of blood through the lungs and quite another to follow it through the head. Man followed the flow of the blood in lifting his knee or his foot, and he inwardly felt and experienced himself through and through in his blood. The blood has one tinge when I raise my foot, another when I place it firmly on the ground. When I lounge around and doze lazily, the blood's nuance differs from the one it has when I let thoughts shoot through my head. The whole person can take on a different form when, in addition to the experience of movement, he has that of the blood. Try to picture vividly what I mean. Imagine that you are walking slowly, one step at a time; you begin to walk faster; you start to run, to turn yourself, to dance around. Suppose that you were doing all this, not with today's abstract consciousness, but with inward awareness: You would have a different blood experience at each stage, with the slow walking, then the increase in speed, the running, the turning, the dancing. A different nuance would be noted in each case. If you tried to draw this inner experience of movement, you would perhaps have to sketch it like this (white line.) But for each position in which you found yourself during this experience of movement, you would draw a corresponding inward blood experience (red, blue, yellow—see Figure 2)

Of the first experience, that of movement, you would say that you have it in common with external space, because you are constantly changing your position. The second experience, which I have marked by means of the different colors, is a time experience, a sequence of inner intense experiences.

In fact, if you run in a triangle, you can have one inner experience of the blood. You will have a different one if you run in a square.

What is outwardly quantitative and geometric, is inwardly intensely qualitative in the experience of the blood.

It is surprising, very surprising, to discover that ancient mathematics spoke quite differently about the triangle and the square. Modern nebulous mystics describe great mysteries, but there is no great mystery here. It is only what a person would have experienced inwardly in the blood when he walked the outline of a triangle or a square, not to mention the blood experience corresponding to the pentagram. In the blood the whole of geometry becomes qualitative inward experience. We arrive back at a time when one could truly say, as Mephistopheles does in Goethe's Faust, “Blood is a very special fluid.”³⁰ This is because, inwardly experienced, the blood absorbs all geometrical forms and makes of them intense inner experiences. Thereby man learns to know himself as well. He learns to know what it means to experience a triangle, a square, a pentagram; he becomes acquainted with the projection of geometry on the blood and its experiences. This was once mysticism. Not only was mathematics, mathesis, closely related to mysticism, it was in fact the external side of movement, of the limbs, while the inward side was the blood experience. For the mystic of bygone times all of mathematics transformed itself out of a sum of spatial formations into what is experienced in the blood, into an intensely mystical rhythmic inner experience.

We can say that once upon a time man possessed a knowledge that he experienced, that he was an integral part of; and that at the point in time that I have mentioned, he lost this oneness of self with the world, this participation in the cosmic mysteries. He tore mathematics loose from his inner being. No longer did he have the experience of movement; instead, he mathematically constructed the relationships of movement outside. He no longer had the blood experience; the blood and its rhythm became something quite foreign to him. Imagine what this implies: Man tears mathematics free from his body and it becomes something abstract. He loses his understanding of the blood experience. Mathematics no longer goes inward. Picture this as a soul mood that arose at a specific time. Earlier, the soul had a different mood than later. Formerly, it sought the connection between blood experience and experience of movement; later, it completely separated them. It no longer related the mathematical and geometrical experience to its own movement. It lost the blood experience. Think of this as real history, as something that occurs in the changing moods of evolution. Verily, a man who lived in the earlier age, when mathesis was still mysticism, put his whole soul into the universe. He measured the cosmos against himself. He lived in astronomy.

Modern man inserts his system of coordinates into the universe and keeps himself out of it. Earlier, man sensed a blood experience with each geometrical figure. Modern man feels no blood experience; he loses the relationship to his own heart, where the blood experiences are centered. Is it imaginable that in the seventh or eighth century, when the soul still felt movement as a mathematical experience and blood as a mystical experience, anybody would have founded a Copernican astronomy with a system of coordinates simply inserted into the universe and totally divorced from man? No, this became possible only when a specific soul constitution arose in evolution. And after that something else became possible as well. The inward blood awareness was lost. Now the time had come to discover the movements of the blood externally through physiology and anatomy. Hence you have this change in evolution: On one hand Copernican astronomy, on the other the discovery of the circulation of the blood by Harvey,³¹ a contemporary of Bacon and Hobbes. A world view gained by abstract mathematics cannot produce anything like the ancient Ptolemaic theory, which was essentially bound up with man and the living mathematics he experienced within himself. Now, one experiences an abstract system of coordinates starting with an arbitrary zero point. No longer do we have the inward blood experience; instead, we discover the physical circulation of the blood with the heart in the center.

The birth of science thus placed itself into the whole context of evolution in both its conscious and unconscious processes. Only in this way, out of the truly human element, can one understand what actually happened, what had to happen in recent times for science—so self-evident today—to come into being in the first place. Only thus could it even occur to anybody to conduct such investigations as led, for example, to Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood. We shall continue with this tomorrow.

• 24. Spinoza, Benedictus: Amsterdam 1632–1677. The Hague. Philosopher, mathematician, had Humanistic and Talmudistic training. By vocation, optician and politician. His main work Ethics with the characteristic full title Ethica Ordine Geometrica Demonstrata (Ethic Represented by Geometric Method) could only be published by his friends after his death. See Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age and Riddles of Philosophy.
• 25. René Descartes: Lat., Renatus Cartenius, Le Haye (Tourraine) 1598–1650 Stockholm. Mathematician, physicist, philosopher. Educated by the Jesuits in La Fleche, he first became a soldier and was part of some campaigns but turned away from outer life to enter into the loneliness of a striver for knowledge, living first in Paris and then for a long time in Holland. He died in Stockholm, having been called there by Queen Christine. For him, doubt of tradition, but also of all sense perception, was the starting point of his philosophy and he found in self-consciousness the security of all being (“Cogito ergo Sum”). He developed the method of analytical geometry and gave an explanation of the rainbow. Main works: Essays, 1637, in it “Discours de la Methode and Dioptiric,” “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia,” 1641; “Passions de L'Ame,” 1650. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 26. Non-Euclidian geometry is a prime example of “the self-contained inner ability to think.” C. Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855) discovered first that one can think more than only a geometric system. Because nobody understood this, he decided not to publish his results and to withdraw from the fruitless quarrel. Independently of Gauss in 1828 N.I. Lobatschewskij and in 1829 J. Boljai first published their solutions to the same problem. Rudolf Steiner often spoke about the meaning of this achievement, as in Wege und Ziele des geistigen Menschen in the lecture “Der Heutige Stand der Philosophie und Wissenschaft,” (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1973; GA Bibl. Nr. 125). See also: Georg Unger, Physic am Scheidewege (Dornach: 1948), pages 19–28, and Vom Bielden Physikalischer Begriffe, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 31–32 and 193–194.
• 27. Johannes Tauler: About 1300–1361 Strasbourg. Preacher and pastor, Dominican, mystic, student of Meister Eckhart. Sermons and writings in German by W. Lehmann, 1923; see also Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, the chapter “Friendship with God.”
• 28. Rudolf Steiner, The Case for Anthroposophy (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1970).
• 29. In a reply to two lectures, which Walter Johannes Stein and Eugen Kolisko gave to defend two articles on “Anthroposophy as Science” in the Goettingen newspaper, Hugo Fuchs, Professor of Anatomy, spoke sarcastically of a human being with head, breast, and belly system. (From a report of the newspaper Die Dreigliederung des Sozialen Organismus, August 1920, No. 5).
• 30. From Goethe's Faust, Part I, the scene in the Student Room with Faust and Mephisto. See Rudolf Steiner, The Occult Significance of the Blood (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1967).
• 31. William Harvey, 1578–1658, physiologist, Professor of Anatomy, London, discoverer of the main bloodstream: De Motu Cordis et Sanguinis (1628).

Now that we have gathered together a number of elements in order to get at the essence of the Apocalypse, we will have to look more at the Apocalypse itself, and we will have to arrange things in such a way that we begin with several questions which are connected with the goal or end of what the Apocalypticer sees and what he wants to communicate to mankind; later on we will see why this particular choice of study materials is appropriate.

If we look at what he gives, one could say that it is a communication to human beings, a revelation to human beings, but a revelation which differs considerably from what arises when other communications which don't proceed from clairvoyance are brought to men. The Apocalypticer points out that it was a special event, a mighty enlightenment which enabled him to make his statement to humanity. However, thereby the Apocalypse appears as something which arises as a fact and an event which belongs to the continuation of Christian evolution.

We can say that of course the Mystery of Golgotha is the great starting point of Christian evolution upon earth which towers over everything else and which could only be anticipated and hoped for before; but then come the individual facts which must occur in order that Christian evolution continues from the Mystery of Golgotha through all the cycles of time to come. And the revelation which occurred through the Apocalypse is such an event. The author of the Apocalypse is fully aware that he's thereby not only putting what he experienced and is communicating to people into present-day evolution, but that what lies in the reception and further elaboration of the Apocalypse is a reality.

You see, the important, difference between Christianity and other religious confessions is that one has teachings in the ancient religious confessions, whereas the deed of Golgotha is the important thing in Christian evolution, and more deeds must be added to this important one. Therefore, the important thing for Christianity to do is to look for a real connection with the Mystery of Golgotha, and it's not of primary and fundamental importance to have the gospels interpreted for one. In recent times Christianity has taken on intellectualistic forms through the influence of intellectualism. One could, say that this is why that famous statement could be made: Jesus doesn't belong in the gospels. In other words, one can take the content of the gospels as teachings, but one doesn't have to: take the teacher who stands, behind them into account; he's not important. This means that, only the Father belongs in the gospels. It's as if the main thing about the Mystery of Golgotha was that Christ Jesus has appeared and has given a teaching from the Father. That is not the important thing. The important thing is that a deed was done on Golgotha—that Christ Jesus lived on earth and did the deed on Golgotha. The teaching is an incidental, accessory thing. Christianity must struggle through to, a recognition of this again, but it must also do it.

And so the Apocalypticer is aware that he receives this revelation and that this fact has taken place and that he works on through this fact; this is the important thing for him. For what is continually happening as a result of this? You know that from a formal viewpoint present-day man is living in such a way that he wears his three garments, physical body, etheric body and astral body which is connected with a certain normality. When he is in a sleeping condition the astral body and ego are outside the physical and etheric body and are in the earthly environment, in the spiritual region of the earthly environment, which is behind sensory, physical phenomena. They are not equipped for perceptibility in people today, they only become equipped through initiation. Man lives a dull existence during sleep, and only retains a general feeling about this on awaking, or he sees things in dreams, which emerge from sleep in the way which has often been described. Now if we don't think anything else than this; we have man's astral body and ego in the spiritual world, and they stand in that world in such a way that they can receive no direct impressions of Christ and his real nature.

Thus if we would think nothing else than what I just mentioned, the ego and astral body would enter the spiritual world every night and would have no direct connection with the Christ, would come back again to this earthly, physical garment, and since the Mystery of Golgotha has taken place in the course of earth evolution, they would have an impression of Christ, for the Christ is in the earth's aura, but this impression would remain dull. Just as other nocturnal impressions remain dull for day consciousness, so this impression that the Christ dwells in the physical and etheric bodies which lie there during sleep would only be perceived in the way that the sleeping condition is perceived by someone when he is waking up, and no distinct, clear experience could be there.

Let's suppose that right after the Mystery of Golgotha was accomplished, human beings were there who experienced what happened and who could communicate their direct impressions of the Mystery of Golgotha to others. And in fact Christ gave his apostles an esoteric training and a number of important teachings after his resurrection. All of this was handed on and it continued in the first decades after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished. At a certain point this had to come to an end. And we can see how it gradually died down in certain circles. It's correct to say that there were tremendous esoteric teachings about Christianity in the writings which were denounced for being gnostic and in other writings of old church teachers who were apostolic students or pupils of apostolic students, which were then eradicated by the church, because the church wanted to get rid of the cosmic elements which were always connected with these teachings. The church destroyed very important things. They were destroyed; a reading of the akashic records will restore them to the last dot on the “i” when the time has come to restore them again.

Nevertheless, the great impressions which were there would have faded for outer historical evolution. The Apocalypse appeared the moment these things were in danger of dying out. And if the Apocalypse is taken in properly—and various people have made this attempt in the second epoch after the Mystery of Golgotha—if the Apocalypse is taken in, if this grand picture, this prophetic picture of evolution penetrates man's astral body and ego, then the ego and astral body bear a revelation which comes directly from the spiritual world—as I told you in the first lecture—which is really a kind of a letter, a direct verbal revelation from the spiritual world which is connected with visions. If this is taken into the astral body, and namely into the ego-organization and carried out into the sphere of the earth's aura during sleep, it means that all those who had taken in this Apocalypse; with inner understanding were gradually inscribing its content into the ether of the earth's aura. So that one can say: the presence of Christ gives the fundamental tone in the earth's aura, and he continues to work in it.

This Christ impulse has a strong influence upon man's etheric body every night when the astral body and ego are outside of the physical and etheric body, except that the average person is usually not able to find the Christ impulse which is contained in the etheric body when he returns to the physical body in the morning with his ego and astral body. But when John's pupils in the wider sense of the word take in the content of the Apocalypse, it becomes inscribed in the ether of the earth's aura. What is inscribed there then works upon the human etheric body between the times of going to sleep and waking up. It was inscribed there already through the great, significant impressions which the author of the Apocalypse, or better said, the receiver of it, got from divine, spiritual beings, so that people who have an inclination to relate themselves to the Mystery of Golgotha can expose their etheric body to the content of the Apocalypse during their sleeping condition. This is a real thing. Through the necessary Christ sentiments one can bring about such a condition of sleep that what is as it were brought about in the earth's ether by the content of the Apocalypse and what lies in the direction of Christ-evolution is inscribed in man's etheric body. This is the way it really happens. This is what was present as the deed of the Apocalypse revelation which continued to have an effect.

And in one's work as a priest one can quietly say to those souls who are entrusted to one's care: the Christ has entered earth evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha. He inspired the writing of the gospels to serve as a preparation, so that their content can pass over into men's astral body and ego—one has to use suitable terminology here—and so that they are prepared to receive the Christ impulse in their etheric body when they wake up. Through the fact that the Apocalypticer is focusing on Christian evolution and is describing it through the various epochs of evolution and into the future, what is present in this evolution is incorporated into man's etheric body in a concrete way.

You see, therewith we have something in earth evolution which is quite new with respect to the ancient mystery teachings. For what did the ancient mysteries really convey to initiates? They gave them what one can see if one surveys the real spiritual nature of what was laid down an eternally long time ago, as it were, and if one finds the divine being who has been working along certain lines all the way back to eternity in outer physical activities. So that the initiates in the ancient mysteries didn't expect to get anything else into their etheric body than what gets into one's etheric body through the results of initiation.

A Christian initiate gets past this point. He wants to take what has come into earth evolution in the course of time, namely, everything which is connected with the Mystery of Golgotha and with Christ, into his etheric body. So that in fact the revelation of the Apocalypse is the beginning of a kind of an initiation for the whole Christian world, and not for individuals; but individuals can prepare themselves to participate in it.

One could say that it's only this which opens up a path to get beyond the Father-nature principle. According to its form, all ancient initiation is basically a Father initiation. One sought nature and the spirit in nature and one could be satisfied with that. For man stood in the world. Now the Christ has been there in the earth. Now he remains there; he did his deed and he remains there now. One cannot take in what has taken place through the Mystery of Golgotha through an ancient initiation. One has to raise oneself into a world of the, spirit which is not the one that streams through the ancient mysteries. What streams through the old mysteries only hoped that the Mystery of Golgotha would stream through the new mysteries at some point. However, man now connects himself with the spirit directly through the spirit and not through nature. In ancient times initiates always chose the detour, through nature. New initiates, that is, many half or partly initiated people in the later centuries after the Mystery of: Golgotha—not in the first ones—thought that they connected themselves with the spiritual nature of the world through what has flowed into it through Christ and through what has been built upon Christ. This is the way such an initiate looked upon the Apocalypse; this is the way it was looked, upon at that time. Thus he looked upon it as something, which he spoke about as follows: Nature is one way to get into the spiritual world, and the marvelous knowledge which is revealed through the Apocalypses is the other way. It is a perplexing, felicific thing when the spiritual investigator encounters people in the second to sixth centuries—but not before—who. Say: “Nature is great,”—they meant what one knew about nature in antiquity—“but what is disclosed in a supersensible way by, the Apocalypticer or other apocalypticers is just as great or greater.” For nature leads to the Father, and what is opened up by the Apocalypticer leads through the Son to the Spirit. One was looking for a path to pure, unmediated spiritual things through something like the Apocalypse.

At the: same time this pointed to a real change which must and will come about when men make themselves worthy of it. In ancient times one had the strong feeling that man comes out of the spiritual world but that he has a development which connects itself strongly with what comes to meet him in the physical, sensory world. One felt this connection with the physical sense world ' very strongly and one was of the opinion that man has become a sinful, iniquitous being because he connects himself with the matter which is present in the earth.

By contrast with this another time was to be prepared, and it was foreseen by the Apocalypticer and announced in advance. He looked for an image or the right Imagination in order to place what is behind these secrets before the soul in imaginative pictures. And so he renewed and summarized an idea which was commonplace in esoteric Hebraic teachings. But only there. One pointed out the following there. Souls come out of the spiritual world. These souls which come out of the spiritual world clothe themselves in what comes out of the earth, and when they build houses for the most external work of the spirit, cities arise. But when they ensheathe the inner activity of the human soul, the human body arises out of the earth's building blocks. Thereby the concept of the construction of outer dwelling places merged with the concept of the building of one's own body. That was a beautiful and wonderful image, because it has such a factual foundation, namely, that one looked upon a house as a sheathe for the more extensive and extended part of one's deeds, soul processes and soul functions that—one saw the sheathe for this in the outer house. However, one had the beautiful and wonderful idea: If I do an outer deed in a house which is built for me out of earthly matter, and I use the house walls and the whole house as a sheathe, this is just the hardened, scleroticized extension of what is there when I do the inner deeds of the soul. Whereas man's body is the first house which man builds for the innermost deeds of the soul.

Then when he has his body and he extends what he has, he builds himself a second house; this second house is built out of the earth's ingredients. That was a very common idea, that one really looked upon one's body as a house, and that one looked upon a house as the outermost garment which man puts on here in the physical earth world.

Therefore, one looked upon man's housebuilding activity as something which proceeds from the soul's creative activity. In past times man was very much grown together with his house and the like, namely when he could think: O.K., he certainly has this body and this skin (See drawing). And now if he would get another skin in the course of his life for the more extensive activity of his soul, it would be a tent; except that this doesn't grow, he has to make it himself.

Now one feature of the Hebraic esoteric doctrine was that one looked upon the absorption of earthly ingredients for human development and the flowing together and control of earthly things in a quite particular way. You see, with respect to the physical, one will always admit: The earth is arranged in such a way that it has a north pole where cold accumulates, as it were. And one will describe this north pole from the nature of the earth in a physical, geographic way, and one will consider it to be an important part of the earth. Hebraic esoteric doctrine also did this with the soul activities which are contained in the earth's forces and in a way which was the opposite of the situation with the north pole on the earth it looked upon Jerusalem, the very concrete Jerusalem, as the place where cultures run together and the most perfect houses are collected. This was a pole for the concentration of outer culture around the human soul, and its culmination was Solomon's temple.

Now one felt that this was exhausted in the evolution of the earth, and the people who knew something about the Hebraic esoteric teaching looked upon the destruction of Jerusalem after the Mystery of Golgotha as something which was not an outer event that was brought about by the Romans; they thought that the Romans were the puppets of spiritual powers and that they only carried out the plan of the spiritual powers. For they thought that this method of looking for ingredients from the earth in order to build human bodies and houses was no longer usable. When Jerusalem became great all the substances and materials from the earth which were to be used in order to build human bodies and houses had become exhausted.

If one translates this Hebraic esoteric teaching into the Christian one, it means that: If the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place, Jerusalem would have been destroyed anyway. But what can be a new construction by men who create with the aid of the earth would not have been inserted into this destruction. A kind of a seed of a completely new structure was laid into what was destined to be destroyed in Jerusalem. Mother earth dies in Jerusalem. Daughter earth is expectant or lives in the expectation of another seed. Bodies and houses are not built from the earth here through the gathering together of ingredients as in the old Jerusalem which stands there as the culmination of what occurs on the earth, but the earth rises as a spiritual pole of the old Jerusalem. One will no longer be able to or it will be increasingly difficult to make something like the old Jerusalem from the earth's ingredients. Another time arises instead which was laid down as a seed by the Mystery of Golgotha. Men receive something from above which envelopes them, more on the outside, or more on the inside. The new city sinks down from above and pours over the earth—the new Jerusalem. The old Jerusalem was made out of the earth and its substances: the new Jerusalem is made out of spiritual ingredients from heaven.

You will think that such an idea is rather strange by comparison with everything which is thought in our time and compared with what you could learn from what is thought in our time. How does one picture man's development from an anatomical, physiological viewpoint today? Man eats, stuffs food into his stomach, digests it, throws off certain substances and replaces what has to be replaced by the substances he assimilates.

However, this is not what happens, for man is a three-membered being who consists of a nerve-senses man, a rhythmic man and a metabolic limb man. None of the substances in food go into the actual metabolic limb man—they all go into the nerve-senses man. The nerve-senses man absorbs the salts and other substances which are needed and which are always finely distributed in air and light, and it guides them into the metabolic-limb man. The latter is fed entirely from above. It's not true that it gets its substances from physical foods. Diseases arise if substances from the earth, enter the metabolic limb man. All of the food which is taken in and digested only supplies the organs of the nerve-senses man. The head is formed by substances, from the earth. The organs of the metabolic-limb man are formed by things from the heavens. What is in the rhythmic man is only a coarser indication which goes in two directions. Man doesn't eat the oxygen in the air—he inhales it. This is coarser than the way that man assimilates things for the metabolic-limb man. Man takes in what he needs for the metabolic-limb man through a very much finer breathing. Respiration is something which is coarser. And what man does with oxygen to produce carbonic acid is something which is finer than what happens so that the food stuffs which go through the stomach can supply the head. This is the transition in the rhythmic man.

This is the real story about man's building and its processes. The truth of the matter is that what is created by the materialistic view and is taught by anatomy and physiology is nonsense. The moment one knows this one knows that what builds up the human body doesn't only come from below upwards from the earth's plant, mineral and animal kingdoms, and one knows that what supplies the organs which are often considered to be the coarsest ones comes from above. Then one will be able to see that there was a kind of a surplus in nourishment from below until Jerusalem was destroyed. A surplus of what comes from above gradually begins to be important after the Mystery of Golgotha.

Even though we saw that people have twisted the facts around, things are developing in such a way today that nourishment from above is becoming more important than the one from below. Thereby man is being transformed. Our head is no longer like the heads people had in ancient times. They used to have foreheads which receded more. (see drawing) Present-day foreheads protrude more; the outer brain has: become more important. This is the thing which has changed. What is becoming more important in the brain is more like digestive organs than what is at the center. The peripheral brain is more like man's digestive organs than the delicate tissues in the whiter brain, that is, in the continuation of the sensory nerves into the center of the head. And metabolic organs are nourished from above.

One can understand these things right down to the smallest details if one has the will to speak about certain things in the way that the Apocalypticer does when he says: Here is wisdom. Except that what is in the ordinary knowledge which is living and weaving among people today is not wisdom, but darkness. What one calls “scientific results” today is definitely the result of Kali Yuga; it is a total eclipse of the human mind. One should look upon this as a secret and not blare it out in the streets. Something is esoteric if it remains in a certain circle. You see, the growing of the new Jerusalem has already begun, has begun since the Mystery of Golgotha.

When man's earth period will be completely fulfilled he will not only be able to work heavenly substances into his body through his senses but he will also extend this heavenly substance to what will then be an outer city through what one calls spiritual knowledge and art—an extension of the body in the way that I explained. The old Jerusalem was built from below upwards, the new Jerusalem will really be built from above downwards. This is the tremendous perspective which arose from a vision, a super-colossal vision of the Apocalypticer. He became aware of this mighty thing: Everything arises here which men could build out of the earth upwards, as it were, and becomes concentrated in the old Jerusalem. This came to an end. He saw this rising up and this melting away in the old Jerusalem and he saw the approach of the human-being city, the new Jerusalem from above, from the spiritual worlds.

This is the goal, the last tendency of the revelation in the Apocalypse. In this respect it really contains Christian paths of humanity and Christian goals of humanity. If we try to understand them, we arrive at a certain peculiarity concerning the Apocalypse which some people have an inkling of although they can't quite understand it. Anyone who makes a serious effort to understand the Apocalypse cannot help asking himself: How do I do this? How do I get into this, how do I get into the idea about the old and new Jerusalem, what do I have to do in order to understand it? Anyone who seriously wants to understand the Apocalypse cannot help telling himself: I have to get into its content and I can't just continue to talk about images which have no content for me. In order to get into the content one needs a cosmology and a view of humanity which can only be given by a new Anthroposophy and by a real perception of' the spiritual world. One comes to Anthroposophy through the Apocalypse because one is using the means to understand the Apocalypse and because one notices: John received the Apocalypse from regions where Anthroposophy was before it came to human beings.

This is why one needs the transition; one has to understand the Apocalypse in an Anthroposophical way if one wants to understand it in an honest and serious way. You notice this most of all in something like the final goal, the new Jerusalem. However, you have to know the secrets about the building up of man from above and below better than science knows them. Then you can extend these ideas to the overall activity of men on earth, which is also from below upwards and which changes into one from above downwards. The building of the old Jerusalem will change into the spiritual building of the new Jerusalem from above downwards. People should grow into what is being built in a spiritual way not just in the exegetes' symbolical, theoretical, pictorial way but in such a way that the spirit becomes just as real for us as the material and physical was for thousands of years.

To the extent that you are worthy of it you will look upon the new Jerusalem as something which hangs down from above in just as real a way as the old Jerusalem stood on its foundations from below upwards, and you won't just take this in a pictorial way or in the way that the exegetes present it. This is something which one has to remember the Apocalypse contains no symbols, but references to quite concrete facts and to what happens, and not to something which just wants to indicate the events through symbols. That is the important thing. This is the way we have to feel and find our way into the Apocalypse. We will take this up again tomorrow.

In a series of lectures the fact has now been brought home to us that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited view.

In order to describe this spiritual essence we were obliged in the last lecture to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of the reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the ‘true’—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the elements of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the movement of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:--Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? In this lecture we shall follow the same system as in the last. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with the inner experience of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn, Sun and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experience than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in the astral body. There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in the advance of that world of ideas which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, must come from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole sequence in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from astonishment at something. This wonder, this astonishment, from which every form of learning must proceed, belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which first arises from wonder, in that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We should be able actually to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles: Any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through any kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge created by the atmosphere of vital power, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of is satisfaction.

But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, astonishment at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and astonishment. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: ‘In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may fill me.’ So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner ‘wondering’ is our perception of the quality of an outer ‘wonder’ to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That however depends on himself, or at least it need only do so. And he should not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as ‘a wonder’ unless he can in a certain way make claim to explain it because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a ‘wonder’, when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experience a man may have on the physical plane to disprove, what must at first be described as a ‘miracle’, anything connected with the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this fundamental basis of all knowledge is already established in him. He demands that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that astonishment or marvel, upon which is based all the ancient Greek philosophy, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between this idea and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have said that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, and their sacrifices being rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principle factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most vital points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Entities even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed through to the Higher Entities but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon was caused by their feeling within them what they had wished to send up to the Higher Entities as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the Higher Entities, remained behind within the Beings themselves—thereby was developed in certain Beings—in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we sacrifice in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the Higher Entities resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was; the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a pain, which gives birth to Longing, just as was the case with the Beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearances on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Entities of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: ‘Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now lam shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!’ The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice is as a longing after the Higher Beings, into such a condition that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the Higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the substance of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as a relation is established between these beings and the Higher Entities which conveyed the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Entities united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun [Editor's Note: The Sun was once a planet]—and that the Sun refused to accept it and threw it back; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their Being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Entities; this makes it first possible for them, hi place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the Higher Entities. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the Higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the Higher Entities in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those Higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If a planet were able to pour all its contents into the Sun and these were not rejected, the essence of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those it would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun had thrown it back: an estrangement of what we must call the contents of the sacrifice takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: ‘The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great Cosmic purpose.’ Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the ‘displacement’—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the Cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal Cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted from the outset. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this alien stamp is imprinted from the beginning. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feeling, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent from the beginning:—that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from Resignation, from Renunciation—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution; to that which comes into existence through the renunciation by the Higher Entities of Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the attribute of the inner contents of certain Beings, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in a concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at a corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death, was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any Cosmic substance or Cosmic Being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If (1) fire represents the purest sacrifice—and where-ever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if (2) behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if (3) we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, (4) which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which was severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid was formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of the relation of death to the earth; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: ‘In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death!’ All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya. That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement presents itself to occult science from yet another side, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would he just the same as saying that our fingernails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which s complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we/cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we trim it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we put them to death it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the finger-nail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, and that is an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organ towards the Sun; and in Autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore it its natural colour even if we dye it.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that ‘death’. In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Higher Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man, is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the ‘Christ-Being’ it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their beings in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call ‘death.’ Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything about death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the realities of the higher worlds play their part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: ‘This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for that’; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, ‘this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds’. Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for an ample multitude of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure of the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event on of man gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in the 20th century. From now on these capacities will gradually spread, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, may be able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth--know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death--is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding first in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane? On the physical plane so that we can stand by it, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that ‘no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!’ This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane, has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be ‘proved’. Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as these produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there I Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove, the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it took place leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books, as is set forth in Christianity as a Mystical Fact. They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the constellations, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical happenings; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event will happen on the earth; by the position of the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves; no matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess. Anthroposophy cannot be contradicted. In the lecture I gave here, entitled: ‘How can Theosophy be established?’ I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: ‘I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls’; off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: ‘This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls’. The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for ‘reality’ may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to the realities and in doing so we have shewn that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the results of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true essence of the earth or solid matter is death, like the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this has occurred death itself has entered the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

Thus the fact has now been brought home to us in a series of lectures that behind all that we call Maya or the great illusion, there is the Spiritual. Let us once again ask ourselves in what way it has been made evident that the spiritual is to be discerned behind everything perceptible to our senses and our physically limited grasp of the world.

In order to describe this spiritual element we were obliged in the course of the last lectures to sweep the nearest external phenomena away from our field of vision and pierce through to such qualities of reality as those described as the willingness to sacrifice, and the virtue of bestowal or renunciation, in fact, to those virtues with which we can only become acquainted by looking into our own souls, and which we can only fully comprehend by means of our own souls. Now if we are really to attribute such virtues as these to what we have to think of as the reality—we might almost say the “true”—behind the world of illusion, we must admit that in this world of true existence, in this world of reality, there lives that which fundamentally, as regards its qualities, can only be compared with the qualities we primarily perceive in our souls. For instance if we have to characterise that which is outwardly expressed in the phenomena of heat, presenting it in its true character of sacrificial service, as the flowing sacrifice in the world, it means precisely that we must reduce the element of heat back to the spiritual, to the incorporeal, doing away, as it were, with the outer veil of existence, showing that which in the external world is similar to what we recognise as the spiritual in ourselves.

Now before we carry these observations further, another idea is necessary. That is the following. Does all that we have in this world of Maya or illusion really vanish into a sort of nothingness? Is everything around us in this world of sense, the world of our external comprehension which to us appears as the real or part of the real—is all this actually nothing?

It would indeed be quite a good comparison if we were to say that the world of truth, the world of reality, is at first concealed, as the inner forces of a lake or even of the ocean are concealed in the body of water, and that the world of Maya might be compared with the rippling play of the waves on the surface. That would be a good comparison; for it shows exactly that there is in the depths of the ocean something that causes the rippling of the waves above, something that is the substantiality of the water and the configuration of its force. So that whether we select this example or any other is a matter of indifference, we may very well put the question:—Is there in the wide realms of our Maya or illusion, anything that is real? To-day we shall follow the same system as in the last lectures. We shall slowly approach what we wish to bring before our mind, by starting with inner experiences of our soul; and indeed, as we have moved forward spiritually through the Saturn-, Sun- and Moon-existence, and have now approached that of the Earth, we shall start from more intimate, we might almost say more common soul-experiences than those referred to in our last lecture. We then started from the hidden depths of the soul-life, from what arises in what we call the “astral body.” There we felt longing arising within it, and we saw how the longing works in the nature of man, actually leading the life of the soul to find satisfaction only in meeting that picture-world which we have been able to grasp as the inner movement of that life. We thus found the way from the microcosmic soul to that cosmic creating which we ascribed to the Spirits of Movement. To-day we shall begin with a still more intimate experience of the soul, one indeed to which attention was already drawn in ancient Greece, which in its reality is even to-day of profound significance. It is indicated in the words: all philosophy, and all striving for a certain kind of human knowledge, proceeds from Wonder. This is really the case. Any man who has devoted a little reflection and thought to the whole process in experience in his own soul, as to how he was brought to any particular learning, will come to know that a sound way to learning is always to start from wonder, from amazement at something. This wonder, this amazement, from which every form of learning must proceed belongs precisely to those experiences of the soul which we described as bringing sublimity and life into anything, however dry. What kind of learning would it be which found a place in our soul, without proceeding from wonder! It would truly be a learning swamped in prosiness and pedantry. That process in the soul which leads from wonder to the bliss we feel when our riddles are solved, which has raised itself above wonder, that alone constitutes the sublimity and vital power of the process of acquiring knowledge. We really ought to be able to feel the dryness and withering of any knowledge not originating in these two movements of the mind. Sound knowledge is framed in wonder and the bliss of solved riddles; any other kind of knowledge may be acquired externally and established by man through some kind of reasoning. But a knowledge not framed by these two feelings, does not spring from the soul of man in real earnest. All the fragrance of knowledge that is created by the atmosphere of the life element in knowledge, proceeds from these two, from wonder and the bliss of its satisfaction. But what is the origin of wonder itself? Why is it that wonder, amazement at anything external, arises in our souls? It arises, because, when we first meet with a being, a thing or a fact, it appears strange to us. This strangeness is the first element leading to wonder and amazement. But we do not feel this for everything that is strange to us; but only for that to which we feel ourselves in a sense related, so related that we say: “In this being or thing there is something that is not as yet in me, but which may pass over into me.” So that we can feel related to a thing yet strange, which at first we must grasp through wonder and astonishment, our inner “wondering” is our perception of the quality of an outer “wonder” to which a man at first as far as his own perception goes, considers himself in no wise related. That, however, depends on himself; or at least it need only do so. And he would not adopt a challenging attitude towards what appears to him as “a wonder” unless he were in a certain way to demand that it should disclose itself to him because it is related to him. Why else should people who start from purely materialistic or purely intellectual concepts deny what others designate as a “wonder,” when they have no direct proof that a fabrication, a falsehood, is brought forward? Even philosophers to-day are obliged to admit that it can never be proved by any of the phenomena known to man, that the Christ incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth did not rise again. Proof can be brought against this assertion; but what is the manner of these proofs? Logically they are not tenable! Even enlightened philosophers now admit that. For all the reasons brought against it from the materialistic side—as for instance, the statement that no man has yet been seen to have risen like Christ—all these reasons are on the same level as the argument of a man who had never seen anything but fish and therefore wished to prove the non-existence of birds. It is impossible logically to prove by the existence of one class of beings, that others do not exist. Just as little is it possible through the experiences one may have of men on the physical plane to deduce something—which in the first place is described as a “miracle,” concerning the event of Golgotha. But if something is communicated to a person, which although it may be true, he must call a miracle and he says that he cannot understand it, he does not thereby contradict what we have said about the idea of wondering; for his attitude shows clearly that this starting point of all knowledge is already established for him. He demands, in fact, that what he has been told should find an echo in himself. He wishes it to become its own property intellectually and as he believes that he cannot have that, and it is not related to him, he challenges it. Even if we ourselves arrive at the concept of the miraculous, we should see that amazement or marvel, upon which is based all philosophy in the sense of ancient Greece, is aroused by a man finding himself confronted with something strange to him, but to which at the same time he recognises a relationship. Let us try to create a connecting link between these ideas and those brought before our minds in the last lecture.

We have shown that a particular advance in evolution was brought about through the willingness of certain Beings to sacrifice, but that their sacrifices were rejected and thrown back, and we learnt to recognise in the rejected sacrifice one of the principal factors in the ancient Moon-evolution. One of the most important points in that evolution is the fact that during that period sacrifice was to be offered by certain Beings to Beings even more exalted, and that it was renounced by them; so that, as it were, the smoke of the sacrifice offered by the ancient Moon-Beings pressed up to the higher Beings but was not accepted by them; and that this was sent back as substance into the Beings who had desired to offer it up. We also saw that much of the peculiar character of the Beings belonging to ancient Moon consisted in their feeling within themselves what they had wished to send up to the higher Beings as sacrificial substance. We saw, indeed, that this, which aspired, but was unable to ascend to the higher Beings, remained behind within the Beings themselves—and that thereby was developed in certain Beings, in the Beings of the rejected, the force of Longing. We have still, in all that we experience in our own souls as longing, a legacy from the bygone events on ancient Moon when those Beings found their sacrifice rejected. In a spiritual sense the whole character of the ancient Moon-evolution, its whole spiritual atmosphere, may be described in many respects by saying that Beings were present there who desired to offer sacrifice, but found that this sacrifice was not accepted because the higher Beings resigned it. The peculiar feature of the spiritual atmosphere of ancient Moon was: the rejected sacrifice. And the rejection of the sacrifice offered by Cain, which symbolically represents one of the starting points of the evolution of earthly humanity, appears as a kind of recapitulation of this peculiar feature of the ancient Moon evolution taking place in the soul of Cain, who sees that his sacrifice is not accepted. This is something which reveals to us a sorrow, a pain which gives birth to longing, just as was the case with the beings belonging to the old Moon-existence. We saw in the last lecture, that between this rejected sacrifice and the longing arising in these beings through its rejection, an adjustment was produced through the appearance on the old Moon of the Spirits of Movement. They created a possible way by which the longing arising in the Beings of the rejected sacrifice, could in a sense be satisfied. You must picture the position very clearly in your minds. You have the exalted Beings to whom sacrifice is about to be made; the substance offered in sacrifice to them rejected; and the longing thereby arising within the Beings who desired to offer and now feel: “Had I been able to accomplish my sacrifice, the best part of my own being would be living in those exalted ones; but now I am shut out from them, I am here while they are yonder!” The Spirits of Movement, however, and this can be taken almost literally, bring the Beings in whom the rejected sacrifice glows as a longing for the higher Beings, into such positions that they can approach them from many different sides. That which remains in them as the sacrifice which could not be offered, can at any rate now be adjusted, through the wealth of impressions received from the higher Beings, who are as it were, encircled by the Beings of the rejected sacrifice. So is adjusted what could not be harmonised, because of the rejection of the sacrifice, inasmuch as in the position of these Beings to the higher Beings a relation is established between them which conveys the impression of a presented sacrifice. We can form a clear idea of what this implies, if we think symbolically of the more exalted Beings united as a Sun, and then, in one position, as a planet, the less exalted gathered together. Now suppose that the Beings of the lesser planet wished to make sacrifice to the greater planet—to the Sun, and that the Sun refused to accept it; the substance of the sacrifice must remain in the Beings whose sacrifice was not accepted. Then in their loneliness, their isolation fills their being with longing. Now the Spirits of Movement bring them into the periphery of the more exalted Beings; this makes it first possible for them, in place of the direct upward flow of their sacrificial substance, to set that substance itself in motion and thereby to bring it into connection with the higher Beings. This is exactly like a man who cannot be contented within himself by means of a single great satisfaction, but experiences a number of partial satisfactions; the result of these different experiences being to set all his feelings in motion. This was gone into more minutely in the last lecture. We saw that as the Beings were unable to feel an inner connection with the higher Beings through the sacrifice, impressions came to them outside in the place of this, by which we saw that they were still able to obtain a certain satisfaction.

But it is an undeniable fact that that which was to have been offered up would have continued its existence within the higher Beings in a different fashion from its state within the lower Beings. The actual conditions necessary to that existence are in those higher Beings. It became necessary, therefore, for different conditions of existence to arise in the lower Beings. This again can be symbolically expressed. If the whole substance of a planet could flow into the Sun and it were not rejected, the Beings of that planet would find different conditions of existence within the Sun from those they would have met with in the planet outside if the Sun throws them back: an estrangement of what we must call the “contents of the sacrifice” takes place, it is alienated from its origin.

Now bear in mind the thought that certain Beings are compelled to retain within them something which they would gladly have offered up in sacrifice, and concerning which they both feel and perceive that it could only attain its real meaning, if it could be offered up.

If you can picture the feelings of such Beings, you will have an idea of what may be called: “The exclusion of a certain number of Cosmic Beings from their actual meaning, their great cosmic purpose.” Certain Beings have within them something, which, speaking symbolically, could only fulfil its purpose elsewhere. The consequence of this is that the “displacement”—if we may once more speak symbolically—of the rejected incense, of the rejected sacrificial substance, excludes it at first from the rest of the cosmic process.

If you grasp these thoughts with your feeling—not with your reason, for that does not extend to matters such as these—you will perceive that this represents something like a rending away from the universal cosmic process. To the Beings who rejected the sacrifice it is only something they put away from them; to the other Beings, those within whom the sacrificial substance is retained, this is a something on which an alien character is imprinted. Thus there are Beings in whose substance this estrangement from its origin is imprinted. If we can present these things to our soul through inner feelings, we are reminded of something in which an alien character is inherent: that is Death! Death is none other than that which necessarily enters the universe with the rejection of the sacrificial substance of those Beings who then had to retain it within themselves. Thus we advance from the resignation, the renunciation of what has been rejected by the higher Beings—which we encounter at the third stage of evolution—to Death.

In its true significance death is neither more nor less than the nature of essential contents, contents which are shut out and not in their proper place. Even when death comes to a man in concrete form it is fundamentally the same thing. For when we look at the corpse left behind in the world of Maya, we know that it consists of nothing but matter which at the moment of death was shut out from the Ego, astral body, and etheric body, alienated from that within which alone it had a meaning. The physical human body without the etheric body, astral body, and Ego has no meaning, it is purposeless; at that moment it is excluded from its purpose. That which we can no longer perceive when a man dies, is then for us in the macrocosm. On account of the Cosmic Beings who belong to higher spheres having rejected what was to have been brought to them in sacrifice, the rejected sacrificial substance within the Beings to whom it was thrown back lapses into death, for death signifies the exclusion of any cosmic substance or cosmic being from its actual purpose.

We have now come to a spiritual characteristic of what we call the fourth element in the Universe. If fire represents the purest sacrifice—and wherever we encounter fire or heat, behind it there is its spiritual counterpart: Sacrifice—if behind all the air spread out around our earth there really lies the virtue of giving, a really flowing virtue; if we may describe flowing water or the element of fluidity as spiritual resignation or renunciation, so must we describe the element of Earth, which alone can be the bearer of death—for death would not exist without it—as that which has been severed from its purpose by renunciation. Now we have something in a concrete form, showing how the solid is formed from the fluidic. For this too reflects a spiritual process, in a certain sense. Suppose ice forms in a pond; the water then becomes solid. The real reason of this is that the water in becoming ice is cut off from its purpose. This gives us the spiritual process of solidification, the spiritual process of the Earth's becoming; for as far as the distinguishing marks of the four elements are concerned, ice too is earth, and fluid alone is water. Earth is the element in which death appears and may be experienced.

We began by putting the question as to whether anything real could be found in our world of illusion and Maya, whether there is anything in it corresponding to a reality. I want you to hold clearly to the idea we have just been considering. At the beginning of this course I told you that the concepts to be considered were somewhat complicated. It will therefore be necessary that we should not only try to understand them, but also to meditate upon them; for only then will they be clear to us. Now let us take this conception of death, that is, of the earthly; for it presents a truly remarkable aspect. Whereas concerning all our other concepts we could say that there was nothing real in all the world of Maya around us, but that the reality must be looked for in the spiritual behind it—we have now ascertained that within the world of Maya there is that, which, precisely because it is divided from its purpose, because it ought to be in the spiritual world, may be called death. Thus something is cut off in Maya, which actually ought not to be there. In the whole wide realm of Maya, or the great illusion, we have nothing but deception and illusion before us. Yet there is something there which corresponds to a reality, because it is cut off from its true meaning in the spiritual; and as soon as it enters Maya it encounters annihilation and death. That declares to us nothing less significant than the great occult truth: “In the whole world of Maya one thing only shows itself in its reality—Death! All other phenomena must be traced back to their reality; all other phenomena entering into Maya have reality behind them; death is the single reality in Maya for it consists in the fact that something was cut off from reality and taken into Maya, That is why death is the one and only reality in Maya. And now if we turn from the universal Maya to the great principles of the world, a very important and essential consequence of this statement, that in our world of Maya, Death is the only reality, presents itself to occult science.

We can approach what I want to say from yet another side. We can begin by considering the beings of the other kingdoms surrounding us. We may ask: do minerals die? To the occultist there could be no sense in saying that minerals die. It would be just the same as saying that our finger-nails die when we cut them. The finger-nail is nothing which as complete being has claim to existence; but it is part of us, and when we cut it off we separate it from ourselves, tear it away from the life it has in connection with us. In reality it dies only when we ourselves die. In the same sense, according to occult science, the minerals do not die. They are merely members of one great organism, just as a finger-nail is a member of our own, and although a mineral may appear to perish, it is in reality only severed from this great organism, just as the piece of finger-nail is severed from our organism when we cut it off. The destruction of a mineral is no death; for the mineral has no life in itself, but only in the great organism of which it is a member. The plant as such is not independent; it is a member—not of one great organism, like the mineral—but of the whole organism of the earth. To occult observation there would be no sense in speaking of individual plant-organisms, only of the organism of the earth of which the plants everywhere form part. And when we bring them to their “death” it is just as when we cut away one of our finger-nails. We cannot say that the fingernail has died. Just as little can we say that of the plants; for they belong to a great organism that is identical with the whole earth, an organism which falls asleep in spring, sending forth the plants as its organs towards the Sun; and in autumn it takes them back into itself when it gathers their seeds into itself. There is no sense in considering the plants as independent, for the whole earth organism does not die when its separate plants fade—just as we ourselves do not die when our hair goes grey, although we cannot restore its colour by natural means.

We are, however, in a different position from the plants. But the earth may in this respect be compared to a man who could restore his grey hair to its natural colour. The earth does not die; what is observed in the fading of the plants is a process that takes place on the surface. So we can never say that the plants really die. And even of the animals we cannot actually say that they die, as we die. For in reality a separate animal does not exist; what really exists is its group-soul, which is in the super-sensible world. The reality of the animals is only to be found on the astral plane as group-soul, and the individual animal is condensed out of that. The death of an animal means the casting off a member of the group-soul, which replaces it by another.

Thus what we encounter at death in the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms is only apparent death, only in the world of Maya is that “death.” In reality man alone dies, for he has developed his individuality so far that it descends into his physical body, in which during the earth-existence he must become real. In reality death has only meaning for the Earth-existence of man.

If we grasp this we must say: Man alone can truly experience death. Thus for man there is, as we learn through occult research, a real overcoming of death, a real victory over death. For every other being death is only apparent, and does not in reality exist. If again we were to ascend higher—from man to the Beings of the Hierarchies—we should find that they do not know death in the human sense; so that in reality actual death, that is death on the physical plane, comes only to those beings who have to acquire something on that plane. Now man has to acquire his ego-consciousness there. Without death he could never find it. Neither with respect to the beings below man in rank, nor to those higher than man is there any meaning in speaking of actual death. But on the other hand as regards the Being whom we call the “Christ-Being it must clearly be impossible to obliterate his most significant earth deed. For indeed we have seen that the most essential event to be considered in connection with the Christ-Being is the Mystery of Golgotha; that is, the conquest of death by life. But where can this conquest of death alone be accomplished? Can it be accomplished in the higher worlds? No! For even as regards the lower beings referred to as the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms—as they have their true being in the higher, super-sensible worlds—we cannot speak of death. And in the course of our studies this winter we shall further show that neither among the Higher Beings can there be a question of death; only of change, metamorphosis, transformation. Only with regard to man can we speak of the incision into life that we call “death.” Man can only experience this death on the physical plane. If man had never descended to the physical plane, he would know nothing of death; for no being who has not trodden the physical plane knows anything of death. In other worlds there is no such thing as that which we call death, nothing but transformation, metamorphosis. Would Christ undergo death He must descend to the physical plane! There alone could He experience it.

Thus we see that even in the historical development of man, the reality of the higher worlds plays its part in Maya, in a remarkable way. Whereas concerning every other historical event we can only interpret it correctly by saying: “This historical event took place here on the physical plane, but the cause of it is up above in the spiritual world, we must look for it there”; we cannot say of the event of Golgotha, “this event is here below on the physical plane and something corresponding to it exists in the higher worlds.” Christ Himself belongs to the higher worlds and came down to the physical plane. But there is no prototype above of what was accomplished on Golgotha, such as we must look for with respect to other historical events. That was enacted on the physical plane alone! Among the many proofs of this fact which occult science is able to provide, is the following: That the event of Damascus will, in the course of the next three thousand years, as we have often said, be renewed for a sufficiently great number of mankind. This means, that capacities will be developed in man which will enable him to perceive the Christ as an etheric figure on the astral plane, as Paul saw Him on the road to Damascus. The event of man's gradually becoming able to perceive the Christ by means of the higher faculties which will be developed in the next three thousand years, has its beginnings in our twentieth century. From now on these capacities will gradually arise, and in the course of that span of time a vast number of persons will know, by personal vision into the higher worlds, that Christ is a reality; that He lives; they will learn to know Him in the life He lives now. And not only will they know the nature of His present life, but they will also be convinced just as Paul was—that He died, and rose again. But the foundation for this cannot be laid in the higher worlds: it must be laid on the physical plane. Thus if anyone comes to have an understanding of these things, if even at the present time he understands that the development of Christ Himself is progressing—and that at the same time certain human capacities are also developing, if his understanding of modern Anthroposophy has taught him this, then there is nothing to prevent him, when he has passed through the portal of death, from taking part in this event when it actually appears as a first shining forth of Christ in the world of man. So that a man who prepares himself in his physical body to-day for this event, maybe able to experience it in the intermediate life, between death and re-birth. But those who do not prepare for it, who acquire no understanding in this incarnation, will, in the life immediately following this—the life between death and re-birth—know nothing of what is taking place with respect to the Christ for the next three thousand years from our present century. They will have to wait until they are again incarnated and then make necessary preparations on the earth. The death at Golgotha, which is enacted on earth as the origin of all the subsequent Christ development can only be understood in the physical body. Of all the facts important to our higher life, this alone is comprehensible in the physical body. It is then further developed and perfected in the higher worlds, but we must first have understood it while in the physical body. Just as the Mystery of Golgotha could never have taken place in the higher worlds and has no prototype there, but is an event which—since it includes death—is confined to the physical plane, so, too must the comprehension of it be acquired on this plane. Indeed, it is one of the tasks of man on earth to acquire this understanding in some one of his incarnations.

So that we must say: we have found pre-eminently on the physical plane something which displays an undeniable reality, a direct truth. What then is real on the physical plane On the physical plane, so that we can recognise it as real, we have a reality, death—death in the world of man, not in the other kingdoms of nature. When we wish to study the historical events that occur in the course of the earth's development, we must look for a spiritual prototype for each one of them—but not for the Mystery of Golgotha! There we have something which in itself directly belongs to the world of Reality!

Now it is extremely interesting that another aspect of what has just been said, can also be seen. It is really remarkably significant to observe that this event of Golgotha as a real event is to-day denied, and that people say—speaking of external history—that it cannot be proved by any historical connection. Among vital historical facts there is hardly one so difficult to prove on external realistic, historical grounds, as the Mystery of Golgotha. Just think how easy it is in comparison with this to work on historical ground if we wish to prove the existence of a Socrates, a Plato, or any of the Greek heroes, in so far as they were of significance to the progress of man in the external world, and how up to a certain point it is perfectly justifiable to say that “no history can assert that there ever was a Jesus of Nazareth!” This statement cannot be contradicted historically! This cannot be dealt with like other historical facts. It is very remarkable that this Event, which occurred on the external physical plane has this in common with all super-sensible facts: they cannot be “proved.” Much the same people who deny the existence of a super-sensible world lack the capacity for grasping this fact, which is not super-sensible. Its existence can be surmised by its effects. But, these people think that effects such as these might also appear, even without the real event having occurred in history; and they attribute these effects to sociological relations. To one who knows the inner course of the world's development, the idea that effects such as those produced by Christianity could be brought about without having a power behind them, is just as wise as it would be to say cabbages could grow in a field without having been sown there! Indeed we might go yet further, and admit that it was not possible for those who took part in the final shaping of the Gospels to prove the historical event of the Mystery of Golgotha—as historical event—on historical grounds! For it went by leaving hardly any trace perceptible to outer observation. Do you know how those who took part in the later compiling of the Gospels convinced themselves as to these events, with the exception of the writer of the John-Gospel, who was an immediate contemporary? They could not above all convince themselves by historical documents, for they had nothing but oral traditions and the Mystery-Books (as is set forth in Christianity as Mystical Fact). They were able to convince themselves of the actual existence of Christ Jesus by the star-constellation, for they were then still very learned as to the connection between the Macrocosm and the Microcosm. They knew how to set up a map of the heavens for that point of the world's history (as can still be done to-day); and they concluded: if the stars were in such and such a position, then He whom they call the Christ must have lived on earth at that time. In this very way the writers of the Gospel of Matthew, Mark and Luke convinced themselves of the historical event; they obtained the rest clairvoyantly. But first they convinced themselves in the same way as we can make sure to-day that any particular event can happen on the earth; through the constellations in the Macrocosm. Anyone who knows anything of this cannot but believe in them. It is a fruitless task to prove the inaccuracy of what is brought against the historical status of the Gospels. Rather should we, as anthroposophists, understand that we must take a very different stand: one which is only possible through an insight into occult science.

With reference to this I should just like to mention a point I already endeavoured to establish elsewhere. That is, that the realities of which Anthroposophy speaks cannot be injured by any objections, however correct these may be in themselves. No matter how correctly people may argue from the knowledge they themselves may possess, that does not disprove Anthroposophy. In the lecture I gave entitled: “How can Theosophy be established?” I made use of the example of the little boy in a village whose duty it was to fetch rolls for the family breakfast. Now in that village each roll cost two kreuzers and he was always given ten kreuzers. The baker gave him a number of rolls, and being no great arithmetician, he did not trouble to count them, but brought them home. But a foster-son entered the family and was sent for the rolls instead of the other boy. This lad was a good reckoner and he said to himself: “I have been given ten kreuzers, each roll costs two kreuzers, therefore I must bring home five rolls;” off he went, bringing back six rolls. He said to himself: “This must be wrong, I ought not to have so many, and as my reckoning is correct, tomorrow I must only bring back five rolls.” The next day he took the ten kreuzers, and again he received six rolls. The reckoning was correct—only it did not correspond with the reality; for that was a different matter. The reality was that it was the custom in that place to give six rolls instead of five to anyone who spent ten kreuzers. The boy's argument was quite correct; but did not accord with reality.

In like manner the cleverest thought-out objections to Anthroposophy may all agree with each other, yet need have nothing to do with the reality; for “reality” may be based on very different foundations. The example quoted is quite practical, and serves to explain, even scientifically, what is correctly calculated, and what is actual fact.

We have tried to trace the world of Maya back to reality and in doing so we have shown that all Fire is sacrifice, everything of the nature of Air is the generous flowing virtue of giving, and Fluid the result of renunciation and resignation. To these three truths we have to-day added the fact that the true nature of the Earth or solid matter is death, the cutting off of any substance from its cosmic purpose. Because this severing has entered, death itself enters the world of Maya or illusion as a reality. Even the Gods themselves could not taste death at all without descent into the physical world in order to comprehend death in the physical world, the world of Maya, or illusion. This is what I wished to add to-day to the concepts we have already formed. But once more let it be said that if we wish to arrive at a clear understanding of these concepts which are so necessary, and if we are thoroughly to enter into the various ideas in St. Mark's Gospel, the only possible way of doing so is by careful meditation and by bringing these things again and again before the soul. The Gospel of St. Mark can only be understood if based on the greatest and most significant cosmic conceptions.

These lectures will perhaps have given you some idea of what a complicated being man is and from how many sides we must consider him if we would come near to his real nature. I want now to point to one more fact of evolution, and it is one that may be classed among the most significant of all the results we can arrive at when, with the help of clairvoyant research, we study the whole course of man's evolution—looking back over the period from very ancient times until to-day, and looking forward to what shall come for the race of man in the future. I have, in the course of these lectures, drawn your attention to a perception that man can acquire when he educates his faculty for knowledge in the way we described; when, that is to say, his soul in its efforts after knowledge enters into the moods we characterised as wonder, reverence, wisdom-filled harmony with the events of the world, and lastly, devotion and surrender to the whole world process. You will remember I explained how if the soul enters upon these moods or conditions, man's faculty of knowledge can gradually rise to a perception of two converse processes that are everywhere around him. Man learns to distinguish in his environment between what is becoming and what is dying away. He says to himself at every turn: Here I have to do with a process of becoming, something that will reach perfection only in the future, and here again, on the other hand, I encounter a gradual dying away, a gradual disappearing. We perceive the things of the world as existing in a region where everything is either coming into being or passing away. And I pointed out in particular how the human larynx is really an organ of the future, how it is called to be in the future something entirely different from what it is to-day. To-day it merely communicates to the outer world by means of the spoken word our inner moods and conditions, whereas in the future it will communicate what we ourselves are in our entirety; that is to say, it will serve for the procreation of the whole human being. It will be the reproductive organ of the future. A time will come when the larynx will not merely help man to express by means of the word what is in his heart and mind, but man will use the larynx to place his own self before the world; that is to say, the propagation of man will be intimately connected with the organ of the larynx.

Now in this complicated microcosm, in this complicated “little world” which we call “man,” for every such organ that is only as yet a seed and will later on in the future attain a higher degree of perfection, there is another corresponding organ which is gradually dwindling, gradually dying away. And the corresponding organ for the larynx is the organ of hearing. In proportion as the hearing apparatus little by little disappears, in proportion as it grows ever less and less, will the larynx grow more and more perfect and become more and more important. We can only estimate the greatness of this fact when we look back, with the help of the Akashic Records, into a far distant past of mankind and then from what our research reveals are in a position to form some conception of what the ear was once like. Great new vistas are opened up for a knowledge of the nature of man when we trace back the human ear to its original form. For in its present state this hearing apparatus of ours is no more than a shadow of what it once was. To-day it hears only tones of the physical plane, or words that express themselves in tones on the physical plane. But that is only a last remnant of what used to flow into man through the hearing; for through this hearing apparatus once flowed into man the mighty movements of the whole universe. And as to-day we hear earthly music with our ear, so in ancient times did world music, the music of the spheres, flow into man. And as to-day we men clothe words in tones, so in times past did the divine Word of the Worlds clothe itself in the music of the spheres—that Word of the Worlds of which the Gospel of St. John tells, the Logos, the divine Word. Into what we may call man's hearing in the old sense of the word, there flowed from the spiritual world a heavenly music, the music of the spheres, just as now into our hearing flows the human word and the earthly music, and within the music of the spheres was what the divine Spirits spoke. And as to-day man compels the air into forms with his word and his singing and his tone, so did the divine words and the divine music bring forth forms.

And now let us consider that most wonderful of all the forms created by Divine music. We may approach it in the following way. When to-day you give utterance to a word or even only to a vowel, let us say the sound “A”—then through this sound the possibility arises of creating a form in the air. It was in like manner that form entered into the world out of the cosmic Word, and the most precious of all these forms is man himself; man himself was created in his original state by being spoken out of the divine Word. “The Gods spake!” As to-day the air comes into forms through the word of man, so did our world come into its form through the Word of the Gods. And man is the most excellent of these forms. The organ of hearing was, of course, then infinitely more complicated than it is now. It is to-day quite shrunk and shriveled. To-day it is an external organ, penetrating only a limited distance into the brain, but once it extended inwards over the whole human being. And everywhere throughout man's being moved the paths of sound which spoke man into the world, as the utterance of the Word of God. Thus was man created—spiritually—through the organ of hearing, and in the future, when he has ascended again, he will have an ear that is quite small and rudimentary. The meaning and purpose of the ear will have completely gone. The ear is in a descending evolution; to compensate for this, however, the larynx, which is to-day only like a seed, will have developed to greater and greater beauty and perfection. And in its perfection it will speak out what man can bring forth for the world as the reproduction of his being, even as the Gods have spoken Man into the world as Their creation. So is the world process in a sense reversed. When we consider the whole human being as he stands before us we have to see in him the product of a descending evolution, and when we take an organ like the ear we find it has already reached a densification of the bony matter in the small bones of the ear, it is, as it were, in the last stage of descending evolution. The sense as such is disappearing. Man, however, is developing on into the world of spirituality, and his ascending organs are the bridges that carry him over into spirituality. Such is the relationship between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit. The world of the senses makes itself known to us in descending organs, and the world of the spirit in ascending organs.

And it is the same everywhere. In the whole world as it presents itself to our view we can follow in some way this becoming and dying. And it is important that we should learn to apply the idea to the other things in the world. It will teach us a great deal. Thus in the mineral world, for example, we can also find something that is in an ascending evolution, something that is to-day only at the seed stage. It is quicksilver. Quicksilver is a metal that will undergo transformations in the future but transformations that will lead to greater perfection. Quicksilver as metal has not yet pulverised all the forces that every substance possesses in the spiritual before it becomes substance at all. Powers that belong essentially to the nature of quicksilver still remain in the spiritual, and these it will in the future be able to bring forth and place into the world. It will assume new forms. Thus quicksilver corresponds in the world of the minerals to the human larynx, and also in a sense to the organ that is attached to the larynx—the lung. Other metals—copper, for example—are in a kind of descending evolution. Copper will, in the future, show itself as a metal that has no more inner spiritual forces to place out into the world, and that is consequently more and more obliged merely to split up and crumble to cosmic dust.

I have here set before you a few examples of connections which will in future increasingly become an object of study. Men will study more and more the relationships between the processes of becoming and of passing away in the several kingdoms of nature, and will learn to find—not through experiments and tests but through an Imaginative knowledge—relationships between particular metal substances and particular organs in the human body. And as a result substances whose effects are already partially known from external experience will, through Imagination, be able to be known in all their healing power, in all their reproductive and restorative power over the human body. All kinds of relationships and connections will be discovered between the several things and beings of the world.

Thus, man will come to recognise that the virtues which lie in the seed of a plant are differently connected with man than the virtues contained in the root. All that we find in the root of a plant corresponds in a manner to the human brain and to the nervous system belonging to the brain. [see Summary] It goes so far that in actual fact the eating of what is to be found in plant roots has a certain correspondence with the processes that take place in the brain and nervous system. So that if a man wants his brain and nervous system to be influenced from the physical side in its task as physical instrument for the life of the spirit, he receives with his nourishment the forces that live in the roots of plants. In a sense we may say that he lets think in him what he thus receives in food, he lets it do spiritual work in him, whilst if he is less inclined to eat of the root nature of plants it will be rather he himself who uses his brain and nervous system. You will see from this that if a person consumes a quantity of root food he is liable to become dependent in respect of his experiences as soul and spirit; because something objective and external works through him, his brain and nervous system surrender their own independence. And so if he wants it to be more himself who works in him, then he must diminish his consumption of roots. I am not, my dear friends, giving suggestions for any particular diet, I am merely informing you about facts of nature. And I warn you expressly not to set out to follow what I have said without further knowledge. Not every person is so far advanced as to be able to dispense with receiving the power of thought from something outside himself; and it may very easily happen that a man who is not ripe to leave it to his own soul-life to provide him with the power of thinking and feeling—it can easily happen that if such a man avoids eating roots he will fall into a sleepy condition, because his soul and spirit are not yet strong enough to evolve in themselves out of the spiritual those forces which are otherwise evolved in man quite objectively, and independently of his soul and spirit. The question of diet is always an individual question and depends entirely upon the whole manner and condition of the development of the person in question.

Again, what lives in the leaves of plants has a similar connection with the lungs of man, with all that belongs to the system of the lungs. Here we may find an indication of how a balance can be created, for example, in a person whose breathing system, owing to inherited tendencies or to some other condition, works too powerfully. It would be well in such a case to recommend the person not to eat much of what comes from the leaves of plants. There may be another person whose breathing system requires strengthening, and then we shall do well to advise him to eat freely of such food as comes from leaves. These things have their close connection also with the healing forces that are in the world in the several kingdoms of nature, for those parts of the individual plants which have a definite relationship to man's organs contain forces of healing for those regions of man's organism. Thus, roots contain great forces of healing for the nervous system, and leaves for the lung system.

The flowers of plants contain many healing forces for the kidney system, and seeds in a particular way for the heart, but only when the heart sets itself too strongly in opposition to the circulation of the blood. If the heart yields too easily to the circulation, then it is rather to the forces that are in the fruits, i.e. in the ripened seeds, that we must turn. These are some of the indications that result when we take into consideration that the moment we pass from man to surrounding nature all that presents itself to our senses in the world of nature is actually only the surface.

• Roots—Brain.
• Leaves—Lungs.
• Flowers—Kidneys.
• Seeds—Heart.
• Fruits—Blood system.

In the plants, what belongs to the world of the senses is only on the surface. Behind what reveals itself to sight and taste and smell are the soul-and-spirit forces of the plant. But these soul-and-spirit forces are not present in such a way that we could speak of each single plant as ensouled, in the same way that each single human being is ensouled. That is not the case. Whoever were to imagine it would be giving himself up to the same delusion as a man who thought that a single hair or the tip of the ear, or, let us say, a nose or a tooth, were ensouled. The whole human being is ensouled in his totality, and we only learn to look into the soul nature of man when we pass from the parts to the whole. And we must do the same in the case of every living thing. We must take care to observe it spiritually and see whether it is a part or in some sense a whole. All the various plants of the earth are by no means a whole for themselves; they are parts, they are members of a whole. And as a matter of fact we are only speaking of a reality when we speak of that to which the several plants belong, as parts belong to a whole. In the case of man we can see at once to what his teeth, his ears, his fingers belong; physically they belong to the whole organism. In the case of the plants we do not see with the eye that to which the single plant belongs, we cannot perceive it with a physical organ at all, for the moment we reach the whole we come into the realm of the spirit. The truth about the soul nature of the plant world is that it has the plants for its individual organs. There are, as a matter of fact, for our whole earth only a few beings who are, so to say, collected together in the earth and have as their single parts the plants, just as man has the hairs on his body.

We can, if we wish, refer to these beings as the group souls of the plants. We can say, when we go beyond what our senses can behold of the plant, that we come to the group souls of the plants, which are related to the single plant as a whole to a part. Altogether there are seven group souls—plant souls—belonging to the earth, and having in a way the centre of their being in the centre of the earth. So that it is not enough to conceive of the earth as this physical ball, but we have to think of it as penetrated by seven spheres varying in size and all having in the earth's centre their own spiritual centre. And then these spiritual beings impel the plants out of the earth. The root grows towards the centre of the earth, because what it really wants is to reach the centre of the earth, and it is only prevented from pushing right through by all the rest of the earth matter which stands in its way. Every plant root strives to penetrate to the centre of the earth, where is the centre of the spiritual being to which the plant belongs.

You see how extraordinarily important is the principle we laid down—to go always to the whole in the case of every being or creature, to see first whether it is a part or a whole. There are scientists in our days who look upon the plants as ensouled, but they look upon the individual plant in this way. That is no cleverer than if we were to call a tooth a man; both stand at the same mental level. Many people are ready to think, when they hear views like this put forward, that they are quite theosophical, just because the plants are regarded as having soul; but really all such talk on the part of science has no value at all for the future, the books are so much waste paper. To look for individual souls in the separate plants is to say: I will extract a tooth from a human being and look in it for a human soul. The plant soul is not to be found in the single plant but has its most important point in the centre of the earth, whither the root tends, for the root is that force in the plant which strives ever towards the most spiritual part of plant existence.

When we are considering a theme such as this we shall find, my dear friends, that we come across statements made from the standpoint of the present-day view of nature which can bring us near to the gateway of truth, but only to the same degree as Mephistopheles can bring Faust into the realm of the Mothers—namely, just to the outermost door and no further. For as little as Mephistopheles can go down with Faust into the realm of the Mothers, so little can present-day natural science enter into the spiritual. But as in a certain sense Mephistopheles gives the key, so does natural science. Natural science gives the key, but it does not want to enter itself, even as Mephistopheles does not want to enter himself into the realm of the Mothers. It is true in a sense that natural science gives us clues which, if we have acquired the mode of knowledge described in these lectures, can often bring our knowledge to the gateway of truth.

Natural science to-day, following the impulse of Darwin, has drawn—from observation of the world of the senses alone—an important conclusion; natural science speaks of the principle of the so-called “struggle for existence.” Who is not ready to see this struggle for existence all around him as long as he takes cognizance only of what the external world of the senses affords? Why, we meet with it at every turn. Think of the innumerable eggs laid by the creatures of the sea, how many are destroyed and perish, and how few actually grow up and become new creatures. There you have, apparently, a fearful struggle for existence. One could well begin to lament over it if one listened only to the world of the senses, and say: of the millions and billions of eggs so many, so very many, go under in the struggle for existence and so few survive. But this is only one side of a thought, my dear friends. Take hold now of the same thought at another end! In order to bring your thinking on in a certain direction, let me ask you to grasp the same thought at another point. You can also lament in a similar way over the struggle for existence in another connection. You can cast your eyes over a field of corn where so-and-so many ears are standing, each holding so-and-so many grains of corn, and you can ask the question: How many of these grains of corn are lost in some way or other and never fulfil their true purpose; and how few of them are planted again in the earth that they may become new plants of the same kind as the old ones? We can thus look over a field of corn that is promising a rich and plenteous harvest and say to ourselves: How much of all that sprouting life will perish without having attained its goal! Only a very few grains will be buried in the earth for new plants of the same kind to arise. Here again we have an instance, only in a rather different sphere from that of the sea-creatures, where also only a very few come to fulfilment.

But now let me ask you what would become of the human beings, who must eat something, if every single grain of corn were buried again in the earth? Let us suppose that it were possible—theoretically we can suppose anything—for such an abundant growth to take place that every single grain of corn could come up again; but we must also think of what would happen to the beings who have to find their nourishment from corn. Here we come to a strange pass; a belief that might appear justified when we look at the world of the senses is shaken. When we look at a field of corn in respect of its own physical existence we might seem quite justified in concluding that every single grain should grow into a whole plant. And yet the standpoint is perhaps false. Perhaps in the whole connection of things in the world we are not thinking correctly when we ascribe to each single grain of corn this aim and object, namely to grow into a whole plant. Perhaps there is nothing to justify us in saying that the grains of corn which serve other beings for food have somehow failed in their cosmic aim. Perhaps there is nothing that compels us to say that the eggs of the creatures of the sea have failed in their aim when they have not grown into fishes. It is in reality no more than human prejudice to suppose that every single seed ought to become again the same being. For we can only measure the tasks of the individual beings when we turn our eyes to the whole. And all the eggs that perish by the million in the sea every year, and do not grow into fish, provide food for other beings who are only not yet accessible to man's vision. And in very truth those spiritual substances which struggle their way through to existence and become the countless eggs of the sea that are apparently lost—they do not lament that they have missed their goal; for their goal is to be nourishment for other beings, to be received up into the very being of these other beings. Man stands outside with his intellect and imagines that only that has meaning which strives towards the goal which he, through his senses, is bound to see as the ultimate goal. But if we look at nature without prejudice and with an open mind we shall see in every single stage of every single being a certain perfection and fulfilment, and such perfection does not rest only in that which the being will eventually become, but is contained already in what it is.

These are some of the thoughts, acquired in occultism, which must take root in your heart and minds. And if you now turn away from the external world and look into your own soul you will observe that you have there in your soul a rich store of thoughts. Thoughts are perpetually streaming into your soul, perpetually lighting up within it; and only a very few of these thoughts are clearly grasped, only a very few become a conscious part of the human soul. When you go for a walk in the town, reflect how much enters your soul by way of your senses, and yet how little you observe in such a way that it becomes a permanent part of your soul-life. You are continually receiving impressions, and the sum of all the impressions you receive is related to the portion of them which becomes a permanent conscious possession of your soul as the great mass of fish spawn in the sea that is brought into being year by year is related to the proportion of it that actually grows into fish. You, as well, have to be forever going through this same process in your own soul, the process of bringing, over a vast region, only a very small quantity to fulfilment. And when man begins to lift the veil a little and gain some vision of the great flood of pictures of fantasy and of thought out of which he emerges when he emerges from sleep—the dream affords for many persons a last trace of the immeasurably rich life man leads in sleep—then he can come to realise that there is meaning in the fact that he receives so many impressions that do not come to clear consciousness. For the impressions that actually come to clear consciousness are lost to the inner work of man, they cannot work upon the system of the sense organs, nor the system of the glandular organs, nor the system of digestion, neither can they work upon the systems of nerves, muscles and bones. That which becomes conscious in the soul, and which present-day man carries in him as his conscious inner soul-content, has no more power to work upon the organism; its characteristic is that it is torn loose from the mother earth of the whole human being and thus comes into his consciousness. All the rest of the soul-content—which bears the same relation to these conscious thoughts and ideas as the many eggs do to the few that become fish—all the countless impressions that come into our soul from without and do not come into consciousness, work upon the whole human being.

Everything in his environment works continually upon man in his totality. The dream can sometimes teach you how far what lives on in your soul as conscious idea, how very far that is from being all that enters your soul; many other impressions are entering your soul all the time. You have only to give attention to such things and you will find they occur constantly in life. You dream of some situation. Perhaps you dream you are standing opposite a man who is talking with another man. You are standing there and making a third. In your dream you have a clear and exact picture of the countenance of the man opposite you. You say to yourself: “How do I come to have such a dream? It gives the impression of being concerned with people I know in physical life, it seems to relate itself to physical life. But where does it come from? I have never heard or seen this person.” And now you pursue it further; and when you examine carefully you find that a few days ago you were opposite this person in a railway carriage, only the whole experience passed by you without your consciousness being awakened. In spite of that, however, it entered deeply into your life. It is only owing to inexactitude of observation that people as a rule know nothing about these things.

The conceptions that dreams bring before us in this way are by no means the most important of the impressions that work upon the soul. The most important are quite other impressions. Think for a moment, my dear friends, how the process I described to you yesterday has been continually happening all the time in the evolution of humanity. By means of his bony system man has been continually producing Imaginations, by means of his muscular system he has been sending into the world Inspirations, and by means of his nervous system Intuitions. All these are now there in the world. The outstreamings that are evil, each man must himself receive back again and carry away through his destiny. But the rest builds up and takes form and is perpetually there in man's environment. In very deed all the Imaginations and Inspirations and Intuitions that man has given out into the earth world, even only since the Atlantean catastrophe, are present and are part of our environment. The good things man has given out—these the individual men do not need to take back again in the course of their Karma; but what they have sent out into the spiritual atmosphere of the earth all through the centuries of the successive epochs is actually present for the men who are now living on earth, just as much as the air is present for physical man. As man breathes physical air, as the air from his environment enters right inside him, so do the Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions that have been developed penetrate into man, and man partakes of them with his soul and spirit. And now it is important that man should develop a real relation to all this in his environment, that he should not meet what he has himself imparted to the earth in earlier epochs of its existence as if it were strange to him, as if he were unconnected with it. He can, however, only become connected with this spiritual content he has given to the earth when he gradually acquires the power to receive it into his soul.

How can this come about? When we come to make a deep study of the spiritual meaning of earth evolution we discover that in the time when post-Atlantean man had still something left of ancient clairvoyance, Imaginations, Inspirations and Intuitions were communicated in great abundance to the spiritual atmosphere of the earth. That was a time when spiritual substance was given forth in large measure. Since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, and especially from the present day onwards, we gradually send out less and less; what falls rather to us is to receive the old substance, for it is something with which we are intimately connected; we have the task to take up again into ourselves what has been sent out. That means it is required of man to replace an earlier spiritual outbreathing by a spiritual inbreathing. Man must grow ever more sensitive and receptive to the spiritual that is in the world. In ancient times that was not so necessary, for men of those olden times were able to put forth from them spiritual substance, they had, so to speak, a reserve store. But this reserve of spiritual substance has been so deeply drawn upon since the fourth post-Atlantean epoch that in future man will, in a sense, only be able to send out what he has first absorbed, what he has first inbreathed. In order that man may be able to take his place with full understanding in this new task in earth existence—to this end is Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science there in the world. When a man feels drawn to Anthroposophy it is not just that it takes his fancy as one among many other things in the world that take his fancy. He is drawn to Anthroposophy because it is intimately and deeply bound up with the whole of earth evolution, intimately bound up with the task that lies immediately before man to-day in evolution, namely to develop understanding for the spiritual all around him. For from the present time onwards it will be the case that those who do not develop understanding for the spirit behind the senses, for the world of the spirit behind the world of the senses, will be like men whose breathing system is so injured that they cannot take in air and they suffer from difficulty in breathing. To-day we still have left in our ideas a certain inheritance from primeval human wisdom, and we feed upon these old ideas. If, however, we are able to observe the evolution of mankind in modern times with the eye of the spirit we shall perceive that while discoveries abound in the field of the material and external, in the spiritual a kind of exhaustion shows itself, a strange poverty of spiritual content. New ideas, new concepts, arise less and less among mankind. It is only those who do not know of ancient concepts and who are always rediscovering the old for themselves—that is to say, their whole life long remain in a sense immature—who can imagine that it is possible for ideas to develop and mature in these days. No, the world of abstract ideas, the world of intellectual ideas is exhausted. There are no more new ideas springing up. The time of Thales marks the rise of intellectual ideas for Western thought. And now we stand at a kind of end; and philosophy as such, philosophy as a science of ideas, is at an end. Ideas and thoughts belong only to the physical plane, and man must learn to lift himself up to what lies beyond ideas and thought, that is, beyond the world of the physical plane. To begin with he will lift himself up to Imaginations. Imaginations will again become for him something real and actual. That will bring about a new fructification of the spiritual in mankind. That is why, my dear friends, Anthroposophy or Spiritual Science gives Imaginations of great and mighty world processes. Note how different from everything else of its kind is the description given of Saturn, Sun and Moon. Compare it with the abstract concepts of natural science. Everything in Spiritual Science has to be given in pictures, it has to be presented in such a way that it is not directly realisable in the external world of the senses. We say of Old Saturn that it had a condition of warmth, of warmth alone. That is sheer nonsense for the present-day world of the senses; for the world of the senses knows nothing of warmth substance as such. But what is nonsense for the world of the senses is truth for the world of the spirit, and the next step required of man in the near future is to live his way into the world of the spirit. Those who will not resolve to breathe the air of the spirit—and Spiritual Science has come into the world to make the soul of man susceptible to the air of the spirit—those who do not want to make themselves responsive to Spiritual Science will actually approach a condition of spiritual shortness of breath and spiritual exhaustion. One can already see many persons approaching this condition, and it leads on to a spiritual wasting and decline, to an actual “consumption” of the spirit.

Such would be the lot of men on earth if they wanted to stop short at the world of the senses. They would go into a spiritual decline. In the future development of civilisation there will be men full of sensitiveness for the spiritual, full of heart for all that Spiritual Science will give, and for the world of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition as it springs up spontaneously in the souls of men. So will it be for a part of humanity: they will have understanding and devotion for this world of the spirit. And it will be these men who will fulfil the task that is set before the earth in the near future. Others perhaps will be content with the world of the senses, not wanting to go beyond it, not wanting to go beyond that shadow picture which the conceptions of philosophy and of natural science afford. Such people are moving in the direction of spiritual shortness of breath, spiritual consumption, spiritual sickness and disease. They will become dried up in earth existence and not attain the goal that has been set for earth evolution. Evolution goes on, however, in such a way that each one is compelled to ask himself the question: Which way will you choose? In the future men will stand, as it were, on two paths, to the right and to the left. On one path will be those for whom the world of the senses alone is true, and on the other will be those for whom the world of the spiritual is the truth.

And since the senses, such as the ear, for example, will disappear, since at the end of the earth all the senses that belong to the earth will have completely disappeared, we can form some idea of what that consumption and wasting away will be like. If we abandon ourselves to the world of the senses we abandon ourselves to something which abandons man in the future of earth evolution. If we press through to the world of the spirit we develop ourselves in the direction of something that wills to come nearer and nearer to man in the future of earth evolution. If we want to express it in a symbol we may say that it is possible for man to stand there at the end of the earth evolution and to speak as Faust did when he had been blinded physically—(for man will be not only blinded to the world around him but deaf to it in addition, he will stand there blind and deaf and deprived of taste and smell)—he will be able to say with Faust: “But in my inmost spirit all is light—yes, and all is glorious ringing tones and words of men!” Thus will the man be able to speak who has turned to the world of the spirit. But the other, the man who wanted to remain at the world of the senses would be like a Faust who, after he was blinded, would be compelled to say: “Blind hast thou become without, and within shines no light of the spirit, darkness alone receives thee.”

Man has to choose between these two Faust natures in his relation to the future of the earth. For the first Faust would be one who had turned to the world of the spirit, whilst the second would be one who had turned to the world of the senses and had thereby become closely united with something of which man must feel that it is unsubstantial and unreal, and moreover that it robs him of his own reality and being. Thus does that appear which we set out to discover and bring from occult heights—thus does it appear, my dear friends, in its relation to the immediate daily life of man. I think I need not spend words in pointing out what moral principles and will impulses for present-day humanity can proceed from a real understanding of occult science.¹ For out of a rightly understood wisdom will a rightly understood goodness and virtue be born in the human heart. Let us strive after a real understanding of world evolution, let us seek after wisdom—and we shall find without fail that the child of wisdom will be love.

• 1. Printed by C. F. Hodgson & Son, Ltd., 2 Newton St., London, W.C.2.

It has often been said that when Spiritual Science will spread, it should play its part as a true force of life. And this assertion may be strengthened by the most varied considerations of life's relations. By the very fact that we become more and more acquainted with the characteristics of that invisible world which is the foundation of the visible world, do perceptions, concepts take hold of our soul which in their turn become impulses toward quite definite actions, toward a quite definite attitude in life. Of special importance will be the attitude which may be initiated in regard to the so-called dead, concerning those who during our life span go through the time between death and a new birth. Just as man here in the physical body is, through his soul and body, related in the most varied ways with the physical world, and the spiritual nature underlying it, so does he also stand between death and a new birth in the most varied relations to the facts, happenings, and beings of the supersensible world. And just as human beings have an occupation, an activity, in the physical world between birth and death, so they also have activities, occupations, if you please, between death and a new birth. What we may learn about human life and human activity between death and a new birth will lead more and more to what is called the removal of the abyss which, especially in our materialistic age, opens up between those living on earth and the dead. Between the living and the so-called dead, an increasing mutual intercourse will be established.

Let us today call attention to details in this intercourse between the living and the dead, as well as to the occupations and ways of living of the souls who live between death and a new birth. Those who die before others with whom they had relations here on earth must naturally often look back from the spiritual world on the beings they loved, or who have otherwise remained in the life on earth. Now, the question is whether such souls existing between death and a new birth can perceive human beings living here between birth and death. If we have developed the faculties which enable us to penetrate into the life between death and a new birth, we have quite special, one might say, deeply moving experiences. For instance, one may find souls of the dead who sometimes say the following in the language which is possible between the departed souls and the seer, and which can only be understood by the latter who is able to look from our world into the world of the dead. In the following way, for instance, a soul was able to make itself known to the seer after death (it was a soul embodied in its last incarnation in a male body): “All my thoughts and memories go back to that person who was my faithful wife when I was below in the life on earth; she was, so to speak, the sunshine of my life. When, my business completed, I came home in the evening, my soul was refreshed by what she was able to be for me, by what then came into my soul from hers. A true spiritual bread of life she was for me, and longing for her has stayed with me. My spiritual eye is directed toward the earth and I cannot find her, she is not there. From all I have learned, I know that this soul must be on earth as she was before in a physical body, but for me she is as though extinguished, as though she were not there.”

This deeply moving experience one may often have with reference to souls who think back about those left behind and who feel as though fettered, so that they cannot get through, cannot look down on these earthly souls. They are fettered, not by their own essential being, but rather by the other soul left behind. And if one investigates the reason why the soul from the beyond cannot perceive the soul remaining on earth, then one learns that the soul who has remained on earth has not, on account of the existing circumstances of our age, been able to be inspired by, to be imbued with, any thoughts which might become visible, be perceptible, to a soul having gone through the portals of death. We might make another comparison. Souls who have gone through the portals of death and long for the sight of those remaining in physical bodies, such souls have a dim idea of the existence of others on the physical plane, but are unable to manifest themselves to them. Just as one who is dumb is unable to call attention to himself by means of language, therefore is inaudible to others, so does the entire soul remain mute to the disembodied soul who longs for it; it is in its spiritual nature inaudible to the one who has already passed the portals of death.

There is a great difference between one soul and another here on earth, depending on whether these souls have one content or another. Let us consider a soul who lives here in the physical body and from the time of awaking to the time of going to sleep is only concerned with thoughts taken from the material world; such a soul, filled entirely with thoughts, concepts, ideas, and sensations taken solely from the material world, cannot be perceived at all from the other world. No trace of such a soul can be found. A soul that is filled with spiritual ideas, as for instance those which Spiritual Science gives, and which is aglow with and irradiated by spiritual ideas—such a soul is perceptible from the beyond. Therefore, souls who have remained behind, however good they may be as human beings, are without reality and imperceptible to the world beyond if they are immersed in materialism. These are deeply shocking, terrible impressions for the seer who certainly has attained serenity. But these experiences, possible with reference to the world beyond, especially in our era, are numerous. In our era it is just as though every contact were cut off between souls who here are often so closely linked. This is frequently the case when a soul has gone through the portals of death; while it can always be found that the souls who live beyond, who have gone through the portals of death and look down on human beings harbouring spiritual thoughts, even though only now and then, and letting them permeate their soul, can then perceive these, so that these earthly souls remain real souls for them. Even more significant: what is touched upon here can become of practical import. The spiritual thoughts which souls harbour here can not only be perceived, they can be understood by the souls beyond. And in this way something can be brought about which may become of great importance for the intercourse between souls here and souls beyond, namely, that which may be called “Reading to the Dead.” And such “Reading to the Dead” is often extraordinarily important.

Here, too, the seer can have the experience that human beings who have entirely disregarded spiritual wisdom, now have a strong longing for spiritual wisdom and wish to hear about it after having passed through the portals of death. Then, if the souls that have remained behind make a clear mental image of the dead person and, at the same time, bring to mind an anthroposophical train of thought or open an anthroposophical book and in thought, not aloud, read to the dead whose spiritual image stands before them, the dead will become aware of it. It is in the anthroposophical movement that we have had, in this regard, the most excellent results, when still living anthroposophists read of their departed relatives. One can often see how these dead long to hear what penetrates to them from here. One thing is of especial importance during the time immediately after death in order that one may enter into a relationship with a soul. It is not possible without further ado to enter into relation with any supersensible being. There is often much deception, much illusion in this respect, it is not as easy as it seems. It is a grave error to think that a human being need only to die in order, so to speak, to come into contact with the whole spiritual world. On one occasion I met a man who was otherwise not really very smart, but who, nevertheless, talked incessantly about Kant, Schopenhauer, and so forth who even gave lectures on Kant and Schopenhauer. This man, when I lectured about the nature of immortality, answered me in a rather smug way. He said: “Here on earth we cannot know anything about immortality, since we do not experience it until we die.” One might say that, with his present equipment, he will not differ in his soul very much after death from what he is now. It is deep prejudice that believes the souls become quite wise as soon as they have passed through the portals of death. On the contrary, we cannot after death establish so easily connections with human beings, if we have not already established them before death. Connections that have been already established here are effective for a long time. It does not occur readily that a soul be instructed immediately by souls in the beyond, because it cannot have a connection with them. But the departed human being has connections with people on the earth, and they can bring him the food for which he is starving, they can bring him spiritual wisdom by reading to him and thus bring about immensely meritorious effects. The dead would not be helped if we read them external, materialistic science, perhaps chemistry or physics; that is a language they do not understand because these sciences are of value only for life on earth. But what is said about the spiritual worlds in the language of anthroposophy remains comprehensible to the dead. During the time immediately following death, one thing, however, has to be considered; during that period the souls retain an understanding for things communicated in the languages they usually spoke here on earth. Only after a time do the dead become independent of language; then one may read to them in any language and they will understand the thought content. During the time immediately following death, the departed is also more connected with the language he has last spoken, if he has exclusively spoken only one language. We should really consider the fact that during the time immediately following death we have to send our thoughts to the dead,—we must send our thoughts to them—in the language they were accustomed to. Here we have come to a point in our considerations which can teach us how the abyss may be bridged over by the fact that anthroposophy flows into our spiritual life in this world and in the other world, in the world in which we live between death and a new birth. While materialism only allows us to bring into life an intercourse between souls confined to their earthly existence, anthroposophy will open the way for a free communication, an intercourse between the souls on earth and the souls dwelling beyond in the other world. The dead will live with us. And truly, what we may call the passing through the portals of death will often after a time be felt merely as a change in the form of existence. And the entire change in the life of spirit and of soul, which will take place when such things have become common knowledge, is going to be of great significance.

We have just dealt with an example of the effect of the living on the dead. We may also form a conception of the way the dead in their turn affect the living. Several times I have ventured to mention—please excuse the personal reference—that in the past I had to instruct many children. I had to instruct several children in a family where only the mother was living; their father was dead and I felt it to be my task—this must be the task of any educator—to discover the potentialities and talents of these children in order as educator to guide and instruct them. Regarding these children of whom I am speaking, something remained incomprehensible; no matter what was tried they showed a certain behaviour that was not a consequence of their inherent qualities or of their surroundings. One could not quite manage them. In such cases one must call on everything for help; and spiritual research resulted in the following: the father had died, and in consequence of special circumstances, which had occurred among the relatives, he was not in accord with the way in which the children were being treated by the relatives nor with the things which happened within the intimate family circle—and, because of special circumstances, his influence had an effect on the children. And it was not until the moment I could take into consideration that there was something special which neither derived from potentialities nor from surroundings, but which came out of the supersensible world from the departed father who directed his forces into the souls of his children—it was not until then that I could be guided by it. Now I had to take into consideration what the father really wanted. And the very moment I investigated the will of the father who had passed through the portals of death, and considered him as a real person, like the other persons in physical existence who had their joint effect on the children—it was then that I succeeded in my task.

This is a case in which it was clearly shown that spiritual knowledge can tell us, indicate to us, the effect of the forces from the supersensible, spiritual world on this physical world. But in order to perceive such a thing one needs the right moment. One must try, for instance, to develop a kind of force which makes it possible to perceive, as it were, the raying in of the supersensible force—in this case that of the father—into the souls of the children. This is oftentimes difficult. It might be easy, for instance, to try to recognize how the dead father wants to implant this or that thought into the children's souls. But that often proves incorrect and, especially, it cannot always be repeated. It may then prove to be a good device to procure a picture giving the father's form, the way he looked at the last; if a distinct picture of his handwriting is held in memory and is kept there before the mind's eye, and we thus prepare ourselves for the kind of instruction meant here by concentrating on handwriting or picture, then we take into our own work the views, the intentions, the aims of the dead person. The time will come when we are going to take into account what the dead want for those left behind. Today we can only take into account the will of those who are on the physical plane. There will be a mutual, one might say a free intercourse between the living and the dead. We shall learn to investigate what the dead want for the physical plane. Just imagine the great upheaval, one might also say of the external factors of physical life, when the dead shall play a part and through the living have an effect on the physical plane. Spiritual Science, if it is rightly understood, and it always must be rightly understood, will not be a mere theory. Spiritual Science will become more and more an elixir of life which pervades all existence, transforming it the more it spreads. And it will surely accomplish this, for its effect will not be that of an abstract ideal which is preached, or which is “sold” by societies. It will, slowly but surely, take hold of the souls on earth and transform them.

There will be an enrichment of our conceptions in many other respects. In our existence our life with the dead shall change because we shall understand what the dead are doing. Many things now remain quite incomprehensible regarding the relations between the world here on earth, the physical plane, and the world which we experience between death and a new birth; for much that happens here in the physical world remains incomprehensible. And since all that happens here corresponds to what happens beyond, the relation of the world and humanity to the supersensible world remains incomprehensible. But if anthroposophy is rightly understood, comprehension will increasingly take the place of non-comprehension in this realm.

Now a relationship will be established which may show what strangely devious ways are taken by the beings who, so to speak, carry out the further development of world wisdom. Strangely devious ways are taken by these beings, but nevertheless, if we follow them, they show themselves full of wisdom in every respect. Let us consider various conditions. Let us first consider souls whom the eye of the seer may perceive in their occupation between death and a new birth. There we see—and again that is for the seer something deeply affecting—we see many souls who are condemned for a certain time between death and a new birth to be the slaves of the spirits who send sickness and death into physical life. Thus we see there souls between death and a new birth who are under the dominion of beings whom we call the Ahrimanic spirits, or the spirits of hindrance, of those who work at death in life, and of those who bring obstacles into life. And a hard lot it is which the seer observes, in some souls, when they have to submit in this manner to the slave yoke. If one traces back such souls to the life they led before they passed the portals of death, one finds that the souls who for a certain time after death must serve the spirits of resistance have prepared this for themselves by self-indulgence during life. And the slaves of the spirits of sickness and death have prepared this fate for themselves by having been unscrupulous before death. So there we see a certain relation of the souls of men to the evil spirits of sickness and death, and to the evil spirits of resistance. But now let us take a further look at the following, let us look at the souls who here on earth are subjected to that which such souls must do. Let us look at the souls who perish here on earth in the flower of their youth without reaching the death of old age. Let us look upon the souls who here on earth are subjected to sickness, who are pursued by misfortune, as obstacle upon obstacle arises before them. What does the seer observe when he considers souls who die early or are pursued by misfortune and then pass into the spiritual world? What does the seer notice about such souls? One may have strange experiences concerning human destinies on earth. We shall point to at least one example, to one of the very moving destinies on earth, and which may certainly happen.

A child (a little girl) is born; the mother dies at the birth of the child; the child is orphaned at birth with regard to the mother. The father, on the day the child is born, learns that his whole fortune which was tied up in a ship on the high seas is lost; he learns that the ship has been wrecked; because of this he becomes melancholic; he, too, dies, leaving the child completely orphaned. The little girl is adopted by a wealthy woman; she is very fond of the child and wills her large fortune to her. The woman dies while the child is still comparatively young. The will is probated and a technical error is found—the child does not get a penny of what was willed to her. For the second time she is cast out into the world penniless and must hire out as a servant, must do menial work. She meets a man who falls in love with her, but they cannot be united on account of the prejudices governing the community: they belong to different denominations. But the man loves her so very much that he promises to adopt her faith as soon as his father, already very old, dies. He goes abroad; there he learns that his father has fallen ill. His father dies; he adopts the girl's faith, and as he hurries to her side, she falls ill and dies. When he returns, she is dead. He feels the deepest pain and will not be satisfied until the grave is opened so that he can see her once more. And from the position of the corpse, it can be seen that the girl was buried alive. This is a legend—Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet, has retold it in his writings—it is a legend which is not reality, but it might occur in innumerable instances. We see that a human soul does not merely perish in the flower of her youth but we see her pursued by misfortune from the beginning of life in a certain way. In the working out of such conditions those souls cooperate who, on account of unscrupulousness, become the servants of the evil spirits of sickness, death and misfortune. Thus such unscrupulous souls must be active in the preparation of such hard fates; here is a relationship! To the seer this is especially evident in such happenings as, for instance, the catastrophe of the Titanic, by investigating the effect of the souls who for lack of conscience have become the servants of these spirits of sickness and misfortune. Karma must be carried out, these things are necessary; but it is an evil fate which engulfs the souls who, after death, are bowed down under such a yoke of slavery.

But let us ask further: What about the souls who here on earth suffer such a fate, who perish in the flower of their youth, who are destroyed early by epidemics? What about these souls, when they pass through the portal of death into the spiritual world before their time? We learn the fate of these souls when with the eye of the seer we penetrate, so to speak, into the occupation of the spirits who give a forward impulse to the evolution of the earth, or to all evolution. These beings of the Higher Hierarchies have certain forces, certain powers to further development; but they are in a certain way limited with regard to these forces and powers. Thus the following becomes manifest:

The completely materialistic souls, those who lose all sense of the supersensible world, are in fact already in this our era threatened by a kind of blight, a kind of cutting off from progressive development. And in a certain way already in our era the danger exists that a large portion of humanity may not be able to keep up with evolution, because they are, so to speak, bound to the earth by the heaviness of their own souls, being completely materialistic souls, so that they are not taken along for the next incarnation. But this danger is to be deflected according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies. The truth is that the hour of decision for the souls who, having cut themselves off completely, are not carried along with the evolution, that the hour of decision does not come until the sixth period—actually, not until the Venus evolution. Souls must not fall prey to the downward pull of gravity to such an extent that they are compelled to remain behind. It is actually according to the decision of the Higher Hierarchies that this must not happen. But these beings of the Higher Hierarchies are in a certain way limited in their forces and capabilities. Nothing is unlimited, even among the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. And if it were only a question of the forces of these Higher Hierarchies, then completely materialistic souls, through themselves, would have to be already cut off in a certain way from progressive evolution. The beings of the Higher Hierarchies really cannot alone by themselves save these souls—so an expedient is used. Namely, the souls that die here an early death have, as souls, a possibility before them. Let us say they die through some catastrophe; for instance, they are run over by an express train—then indeed the bodily sheath is taken from such a soul; it is now free from its body, denuded of its body, but it still contains the forces which might be active in the body here on earth. By going into the spiritual world such souls carry up very special forces, which in fact still might have been effective here on earth, but which have been prematurely diverted. Forces, especially applicable in helping, are carried up by those who die early. And the beings of the Higher Hierarchies use these forces to save the souls whom they could not have saved by their own power.

Souls that are materialistically inclined are thus led away to better times and saved, since their strength is only sufficient for the regular course of mankind's evolution. Salvation is achieved by the fact that these beings of the Higher Hierarchies experience an increase of strength by such unused forces coming from the earth, which have still unused energy. These forces accrue to the beings of the Higher Hierarchies. Thus the souls who perish early help their fellowmen who otherwise would be submerged in the morass of materialism. Here we have what those souls must do who depart early. Strange interdependence, is it not, in the complicated ways of world wisdom! Thus the world wisdom permits, on one side, the sentencing of human souls for lack of conscience to cooperate in bringing sickness and early death into the world. The souls who suffer it are used by good beings of the Higher Hierarchies to help other men. In this manner happenings that seem evil outwardly in maya are often transformed into good, but in complicated ways. The ways of wisdom which are taken in the world are very complicated. It is only gradually that one learns to find one's way in these paths of wisdom. One might say: There, up above, the spirits of the Higher Hierarchies sit in council. Because men must be free, they are given the possibility of plunging into materialism, into evil. The Hierarchies give them so much freedom that these human souls, so to speak, escape them, these souls who could not, by their own strength, carry on up to a certain point of time. They need souls who develop on earth forces which retain their inner potential through the premature separation from the body when these souls have to return to the spiritual world in consequence of accident and an early death. This early death is brought about by the services of human souls who, in pursuance of their freedom, have fallen into unscrupulousness. A wonderful cyclic path is opened up here, we may say, a cyclic path of world wisdom. We should not believe at all that the so-called simple things are the universal ones. The world has become complicated. It really was a significant word of Nietzsche which was revealed to him as though by inspiration, when he said: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day had thought.” Those people are completely in error who think that everything may be grasped by the day-wisdom of the intellect. For the higher spiritual light is not that which shines into the wisdom of the day, but that which shines into the darkness. We must seek this light in order to find our way in the darkness in which, nevertheless, the world wisdom is at work.

If we accept such concepts, ideas and thoughts, my dear friends, then it may come about that we contemplate the world with other eyes than before. And it will become more and more necessary that we learn to contemplate the world with new eyes; for humanity has lost many things since ancient times. What it is we lost may be understood if we consider the following:

Still in the third post-Atlantean period there were intermediate states between sleeping and waking, in which souls looked up into the world of the stars and saw not merely physical stars, as is the case today, but the spiritual beings of the Higher Hierarchies; the directing and leading forces of stellar destiny and stellar movement were observed by them. And what existed as old stellar maps from immemorial times when all kinds of drawings were made of group souls, looking like animals without being animals, all this is not born out of fantasy, but is spiritually perceived. The souls perceived this in the realm of the spirit. They were able to carry this spiritual element through the portals of death. The soul has now lost this vision of the supersensible world. Today when the souls are born, they confront the physical world with the bodily sense organs and see nothing but the external physical world. They no longer can see that which surrounds the external physical world as the world of spirit and of soul, the world of the Higher Hierarchies, and so forth. But what is the nature of the souls who appear in the bodies of today? All the souls of persons sitting here were incarnated in former times, and the great majority were incarnated in Egypto-Chaldaic bodies and through those bodies they looked out into the world in which they also had spiritual perception. This spiritual experience they took into themselves, it exists in them today. Not in all the souls; but the souls who today no longer see anything but physical facts, they once lived in contemplation of the spiritual world, they lived a completely perceptive life of the spiritual world. How do these souls live now? They live exactly as though they had totally forgotten this spiritual world. They have forgotten the spiritual perceptions they once absorbed. But what we have forgotten is merely forgotten for our present consciousness; it still lives in the deepest recesses of our souls. Thus the peculiar situation exists: the souls living today have around them, consciously, nothing but a physical sense image of the world; but in their inner being the perceptions which once they received as true spiritual vision are still living unconsciously in the depths of their souls. Of these perceptions the souls know nothing; they only show peculiar conceptions which burrow in the depths of the soul, but which do not rise into consciousness; these conceptions have a paralyzing, deadening effect. And thus something actually arises in the human beings of today which exists in them as a deadening element.

If as a seer one contemplates the human being of today as he is anatomically constructed, one finds in this human being, especially in the nervous system, certain currents, certain forces which are forces of death and which stem from conceptions that were alive in former incarnations. These spiritual conceptions which he has now forgotten have a consuming quality. This would show itself more and more, the farther man advances toward the future, if there were not something present which counteracts it. What could this be? Nothing but bringing up into consciousness that which was forgotten. One must remind the souls of that which they have forgotten. That is what Spiritual Science does, fundamentally it does nothing but remind the souls of the conceptions they have absorbed. Spiritual Science lifts these conceptions into consciousness. In this way it gives again to men the possibility of enlivening what would otherwise be like a dead impulse in life.

Now note these two things which you received in the course of today's consideration. On the one hand the seer perceives human souls who have passed through the portal of death, who long for the souls left behind, whom they cannot perceive, because in these souls there exist only materialistic images of the world, though they may perhaps belong to quite good men. For the seer, though he may have achieved calmness of soul, it is deeply moving to perceive these starving souls. On the other hand, the seer looks into a future of humanity which will contain more and more dead matter, if it does not revivify the conceptions which it once received and which will kill it, if they are not raised into consciousness. The seer would have to look into a future when people, through all kinds of hereditary traits would show signs of old age much earlier than is the case today. Just as one may see today examples of infantile old age, even senility, so people would then show, soon after being born, wrinkles and other indications of old age, if through lack of spiritual knowledge forces did not appear which are memories of conceptions once received in a natural way. In order to provide the dying human race with a life-giving elixir, in order to give the dead the possibilities of coming into contact with the relatives they have left behind on earth—in order to accomplish this, the seer, conscious of this fact, searches for a language which is not only understood here on earth by the souls incarnated in a physical body, but which is spoken in common by the souls living here between birth and death and those souls living beyond between death and a new birth—a language common to the living and the dead.

And truly, it is not that one feels mere sympathy for what is a Spiritual Science—a theoretical sympathy as for other things—truly, this is not what should prompt us; but he who really understands, he who looks into the world, feels that this Spiritual Science has a world-mission. He says to himself: the necessity exists to find the common language, to find the elixir of life which keeps men from becoming arid regarding the various conceptions we mentioned. That is the mission of Spiritual Science for the spiritual worlds themselves. One feels this mission as a high and sacred duty, as something very serious and significant. And we must not merely find pleasure in the ideas which Spiritual Science can give us for our theoretical satisfaction, but we must feel the spiritual power which it must derive from the necessities of the development of humanity and of the world. Then we shall have the right feeling for the reason, for the existence of Spiritual Science, why it has to be implanted into the spiritual life of humanity. It is this feeling which we must actually achieve and we must be permeated by it. This feeling has a highly curative power, it is one which brings to the human soul a real harmony of its forces. This is a fact. The more we allow our souls to be permeated with that which belongs to the world of supersensible truths, the more our feelings will become inwardly able to direct us in our lives, the more essential will these feelings become. The man who is merely pleased with Spiritual Science, who embraces it out of curiosity, or for some similar reason, that man will perhaps make a very bad use of it in his life. But he who is permeated by the feeling we characterized above, by that sacred feeling that comes to us because we know that Spiritual Science must exist out of inner necessity, he will take his place in life with the right attitude toward this Science. He will be able to find his way through Spiritual Science, at least inwardly, even in the most difficult situations; he will perhaps find it especially when outwardly the greatest difficulties arise. For Spiritual Science is an affair of the future, it has entered into the world today because it must serve mankind in the most comprehensive sense, in the most comprehensive manner. But the result of this is that those who in a way have a fear of the spiritual worlds in the depths of their souls manifest this fear in their consciousness as hatred.

Many human feelings are related to each other; ambition and vanity, for instance, are related to fear. And in a complicated manner all kinds of feelings are related to each other. Why is man ambitious, vain? What does it mean to be ambitious, vain? To be ambitious, vain, means wanting to be valued in the opinion of one's environment, and to take pleasure in the value one gains in the opinion of one's environment, to take intense pleasure in that opinion. Why does one want that? One may want it for a number of reasons. But today is the time when men, if we look into the depths of their souls, reveal themselves as particular cowards. Some of them who appear to be quite robust in their outward consciousness are cowards in the depths of their soul. And they seek all kinds of narcotics when they have such fear of the supersensible worlds. That is, because some people are afraid of losing their foothold when they gain access to the spiritual worlds, fear overcomes them; but they want to stifle this fear, sometimes because they are afraid of the earnest and solemn strength which they must use in order to enter into the spiritual worlds. We have seen many a man who believed he could be in the spiritual world at the end of four weeks, but there are—oh, the most terrible of terrors—hindrances: it proves impossible for this man to become in this incarnation, on the basis of spiritual knowledge, that which he would like so much to be—a famous man. Many a man then loses his joy, that is what he is afraid of, and he wants to stifle this fear; and so he creates against this Spiritual Science an antipathy permeated by hatred and vanity.

This mood will spread farther and farther in the present, for the inwardly cowardly, outwardly vain souls will become more and more prevalent in the world. And it may well come to pass that much more hatred, many more attacks will be launched against Spiritual Science than has been the case so far. Thus, there is certainly sufficient reason to see quite clearly, to feel quite clearly in all these things; in spite of the characterized feelings, we should have harmony, even though outwardly it may often seem that everything may go awry. To see clearly and distinctly, that will be necessary if one wants to stand firm on the ground of spiritual knowledge. For in our times those who most intensely believe they are qualified to criticize often do not know at all what they are talking about. There are people who, let us say, begin to write articles about Spiritual Science, who criticize terribly the “fantasies” of the spiritual researcher. Then, in the second half of the article there appears all kind of information about the author, which is entirely false, which is not true. A wild fantasy governs these descriptions. No one who ascends to the supersensible worlds could think up such fantasies as the person who in the first part of his article has criticized the “fantastic” Spiritual Science. Thus things are turned around in the human soul. Those who think they can tell the truth very clearly and who are gifted with a certain impure imagination about the facts of the physical plane partially stupefy themselves by holding forth against that which is supersensibly perceived. Thus humanity seeks oblivion not merely by means of alcohol, but by all kinds of other means. In many things we must see clearly, and the spiritual conception of life will give us the guidance to clear seeing. The most varied narcotics are sought and also found, and they are found for the reason that demonic beings are increasingly active in the hidden depths of the souls of men. These demonic beings will certainly be released by degrees against that which is to fructify humanity from the spiritual side.

This is something, my dear friends, which I wanted to paint before your souls just at this time as a kind of picture of the future, because it is well that we remind ourselves in our time of the way we shall have to take a firm and secure stand on the ground of this Spiritual Science by creating the right feelings toward it and its mission, if we really recognize this Science and its mission. From this ground we can tranquilly watch in our innermost being the development into the future, even though perhaps we may be brought outwardly more and more into disharmony, even though we may more and more be put in the wrong.

Privately printed for the members of the College of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. No one is considered competent to pass judgment upon these writings who has not acquired the prerequisite knowledge demanded by this school, either through the school itself or in a manner approved by it. Opinions expressed by other persons will be disregarded; the authors of the writings in question will engage in no discussion regarding them.

This lecture was given at Basel in December of 1918, and is included in Volume 187 of the Bibliographic Survey, 1961. It is lecture 1 of 8 from the lecture series: How Can Humanity Find the Christ Again? It was published in German as, Wie Kann die Menschheit den Christus Wiederfinden? Das Dreifache Schnattendasein Unserer Zeit und das Neue Christus-licht. It has been translated from notes unrevised by the lecturer, by Olin D. Wannamaker.

Like two mighty pillars of the spirit have the two annual festivals, the festivals of Christmas and Easter, been set by the Christian cosmic feeling within the course of the year, which should be a symbol of the course of man's life. We may say that in the conception of Christmas and the conception of Easter there stand before the human soul those two spiritual pillars upon which are inscribed the two great mysteries of man's physical existence which he must look upon very differently from the way in which he views other events in the course of his physical life. It is true that a super-sensible element is projected into this physical life—through sense observation, through intellectual judgments, through the content of feeling and will. But this super-sensible element is in other cases clearly manifest as such—for instance, when the Christian cosmic feeling undertakes to symbolize it in the festival of Pentecost. In the Christmas conception, however, and that of Easter, attention is drawn to those two events occurring within the course of the physical life which are in their external appearance purely physical but which—in contrast with all other physical events—do not immediately manifest themselves as physical events. We can look upon the physical life of man as we look upon nature; we can thus look upon the external side of the physical life, the external manifestation of the spiritual. But we can never view with our physical vision the two boundary experiences of the course of human life—not even the external aspect, the external manifestation—without being brought face to face, even through our physical vision, with the tremendous riddle, the element of mystery, in these two events. They are the events of birth and death. And in the life of Christ Jesus stand these two events of man's physical life—and likewise in the Christmas and Easter conceptions, reminding us of them—confronting the responsive Christian heart.

In the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter, the soul of man wills to look upon the two great mysteries. And, as it thus looks, it finds in this contemplation strength filled with light for man's thought, content filled with power for the will, an upright lift of the whole man, from whatever situation he needs this upright lift. As they thus confront us, these two pillars of the spirit—the thought of Christmas and the thought of Easter—they possess an eternal worth.

But, in the course of man's evolution, his capacities of conception have approached in manifold ways the great Christmas thought and the great Easter thought. During the earliest times of the evolution of Christianity, when the Event of Golgotha had penetrated with shattering effect into human emotions, men gradually found their way to the view of the Redeemer dying on Golgotha, as they came during the earliest Christian centuries to feel in the Crucified One hanging on the cross the thought of Redemption, and gradually formed for themselves the great and powerful imagination of the Christ dying on the cross. But in the later times, especially since the modern age began, Christian feeling—adapting itself to the materialism rising in human evolution—has turned to the picture of the childlike element entering the world in the newborn Jesus.

We can certainly say that a sensitive feeling will find in the way in which the Christian sentiment of Europe has turned during recent centuries to the Christmas manger something of a materialistic Christianity. The craving—this is not said in a bad sense—to caress the infant Jesus has become trivial in the course of the centuries. And many a song about the infant Jesus felt in our day to be beautiful—or charming, as many express it—will not seem to us to possess a deep enough seriousness in the presence of these more serious times.

But the Easter thought and the Christmas thought, my dear friends, are two eternal pillars, eternal memorial pillars, of the human heart. And we can truly say that our age of new spiritual revelations will cast a new light upon the Christmas thought; that the Christmas thought will gradually come to be felt in a new form and in a glorious way. It will be our task to hear in the present world events the call to a renovation of many an old conception, a call to a new revelation of the spirit. It will be our task to understand how a new conception of Christmas, for the strengthening and uplifting of the human soul, is working its way up through the present course of world events.

The birth and death of the human being, no matter how we may analyze them, how intensely we may look at them, manifest themselves as events which play their role directly upon the physical plane, and in which the spiritual is so dominant that no one who earnestly reflects upon things could deny that these two events, these earthly events of human life, give evidence as they work upon the human being that man is the citizen of a spiritual world. No vision of the natural world can ever succeed—in the midst of what can be perceived by the senses, understood by the intellect—in finding in birth and death anything other than events in which the intervention of the spirit is manifested directly in the physical. Only these two events manifest themselves thus to the human heart.

As to the Christmas event also, the event of birth, the human and Christian heart must have an ever deepening sense of mystery. We can say that men have seldom risen to the level whence they could, in the true sense, direct their look to the mysterious nature of birth. Very seldom, indeed, but then in concepts that speak to the utmost depths of the human heart.

So it is, my dear friends, in the conception associated with the spiritual life of Switzerland of the fifteenth century, with Nicholas von der Flue. It is related of him—and he himself related this—that, before his birth, before he could breathe the outer air, he had beheld his own human form, that which he would wear after his birth should have occurred and his life should have begun its course. And he had beheld before his birth the ceremony of his own christening, the persons who were present at the christening and who shared in his earliest experiences. With the exception of one elderly person who was then present and whom he did not know, he recognized the others because he had already seen them before he beheld the light of the world.

However we may view this narration, we shall not be able to escape the impression that it points in a way to the mystery of human birth, which confronts world history so magnificently symbolized in the Christmas conception. In the story of Nicholas von der Flue we shall find the suggestion that there is connected with our entrance into the physical life something which is concealed from the every-day view of humanity only by a very thin partition wall; by a wall which can be broken through when such a karmic situation exists as was present in the case of Nicholas von der Flue. Such a startling allusion to the mystery of birth and of Christmas still meets us here and there; but we must say that humanity has as yet become very little aware of the fact that birth and death, the two boundary pillars of human life facing us in the midst of the physical world, reveal themselves even in their physical manifestation as spiritual events, such as could never occur within the mere course of nature; as events in which, on the contrary, spiritual divine Powers intervene, as is evident in the very fact that both these boundary experiences of the course of human life must still remain mysteries, even in their physical manifestation.

The new revelation of the Christ now leads us to contemplate the course of man's life—so we may safely say—as Christ wills that we should contemplate it in the twentieth century. Let us recall today, as we desire to enter deeply into the thought of Christmas, a saying reported to have been uttered by Christ Jesus which can rightly lead us to the Christmas conception. The saying runs thus: “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” “Except ye become as little children”—this is truly not an exhortation to strip away all the mystery character of the Christmas conception, and to drag it down to the triviality of “dear little Jesus,” as many folk songs and artistic songs have done—but the folk songs less than the artistic—in the course of the materialistic evolution of Christianity. This very saying—“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven”—impels us to look upward to mighty impulses surging through the stream of human evolution. And in our own present time, when all that is taking place in the world surely does not give occasion for lapsing into trivial conceptions of Christmas, when the human heart is filled with so much that is painful, when this human heart must reflect upon so many millions of human beings who have met their death in the last few years, must reflect upon countless multitudes who hunger for food,—in this time surely nothing is fitting for us save to behold the mighty thoughts within world history which impel humanity in its onward course, thoughts to which we can be guided by the saying, “Except ye shall become as little children,” which we can supplement by this other saying: “Unless you live your life in the light of this thought, you cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”

My dear friends, the very moment when the human being enters into the world as a child he withdraws from the world of spirit. For what occurs in the physical world, the procreation and growth of his physical body, is only the ensheathing of that event which cannot be described otherwise than by saying that man in his deepest being withdraws from the spiritual world. Man is born out of the spirit into a body. When the Rosicrucian said: “Ex deo nascimur,” he meant the human being to the extent that he enters the physical world. For that which constitutes the sheaths around the human being, which renders him a physical totality here on the earthly globe, is what is indicated by the saying: Ex deo nascimur. If we look at the centre of the human being, at the inner midmost entity, we must say that man journeys out of the spirit into the physical world. Through that which occurs in the physical world, that upon which he has looked down from the land of the spirit before his conception or his birth, he is enveloped in his physical body, in order that he may experience in his physical body things which cannot be experienced except in such a body. But, in his centre-most being, man comes out of the spiritual world. And he is of such a nature that in his earliest years—to the eyes of those who will to see things as they are in the world, who are not blinded by the illusion of materialism—he is of such a nature, this human being, that he reveals even in his earliest years how he has come out of the spirit. What we experience in connection with the child is of such a character, for those who possess insight, as to reveal to one's feeling the after effects of experiences in the spiritual world.

It is to this mystery that such narrations as that associated with the name of Nicholas von der Flue are intended to allude. A trivial view, strongly influenced by a materialistic mode of thinking, declares in its simplicity that the human being gradually develops his ego in the course of his life from birth to death; that this ego becomes more and more powerful and mighty, more and more distinctly manifest. This is a naive way of thinking, my dear friends. For, if we look upon the true ego of man, upon that which comes into a physical sheathing at the birth of the human being out of the spiritual world, we then express ourselves very differently about man's whole physical evolution. That is, we then know that, as the human being progressively develops in the physical body, the true ego actually vanishes out of the physical form, that it becomes less and less manifest; and that what develops here in the physical world between birth and death is only a mirrored reflection of spiritual occurrences, a dead reflection of a higher life. The right form of expression would be to declare that the entire fullness of the being of man gradually disappears into the body, becoming continually less and less manifest. As the human being lives his physical life here upon the earth, he gradually loses himself in his body, to find himself again in the spirit after death. So does one who knows the facts express himself. But one who is ignorant of the facts declares that the child is incomplete, and that the ego little by little develops to an ever greater perfection, growing out of the undefined subconscious levels of man's existence. He who knows what is beheld by the spiritual seeker must express himself in just this realm otherwise than is done by the sense-consciousness of our age, enmeshed in external illusions, still always materialistic in the trend of its sentiments.

Thus man enters the world as a spiritual being. His bodily nature, while he is a child, is still undefined; it has as yet laid small claim to the spiritual nature, which enters the physical existence as if there falling asleep—but appearing to us so little filled with content only because we can perceive this spiritual being, in ordinary physical life, just as little as we can perceive the sleeping ego and astral body when they are separated from the physical and etheric bodies. But the fact that we do not perceive a being does not make it less perfect. This is what the human being has to acquire by means of his physical body—that he entombs himself more and more in the physical body for the purpose of achieving by means of this burial in the body capacities which can be acquired only in this way, only through the fact that the spirit and soul being for a time loses itself in the physical existence. In order that we may always remember our spiritual origin, that we may grow strong in the thought that we have journeyed out of the spirit into the physical world—it is for this reason that the Christmas conception stands there like a mighty pillar of light amid the Christian cosmic feeling. This thought, as a Christmas thought, must grow ever stronger in the future spiritual evolution of humanity. Then will the Christmas conception become powerful again for humanity; then will mankind once more approach the Christmas festival in such a way as to draw forces for the physical life out of the Christmas conception, which can remind us in the right way of our spiritual origin. Seldom can this Christmas thought be so powerful at the present time as it will then be in human hearts. For it is a strange fact, but rooted in the very laws of spiritual existence, that what comes to light in the world—bearing mankind forward, helpful to mankind—does not at once appear in its ultimate form: that it first appears, as it were, tumultuously, as if prematurely brought forth by unlawful spirits in world evolution. We understand the historic evolution of humanity in its true meaning only when we know that truths are not to be understood only as they first appear oftentimes in world history, but that we must consider in relation to truths the right moment for their entrance into human evolution in their true light.

Among many kinds of thoughts which have entered into the evolution of modern humanity—certainly inspired by the Christ impulse, but at first in a premature form—is the conception of the equality of mankind before God and the world, the equality of all men, a thought profoundly Christian but capable of an ever increasing profundity. But we should not place this thought before men's hearts in such a generalization as that given to it by the French Revolution, when it first appeared tumultuously in human evolution. We must be aware of the fact that this life of man from birth to death is involved in a process of evolution, and that the primary impulses working upon it are distributed in time. Let us reflect about the human being as he enters into the sensible existence: he enters life filled with the impulse of the equality of the human nature in all men. We sense the child nature with the greatest intensity when we see a child permeated through his whole being by the conception of the equality of all men. Nothing which creates inequality among men, nothing that so organizes men that they feel themselves different from other men—nothing of all this enters at first into the child's nature. All this is imparted to the human being in the course of the physical life. Inequality is created by the physical existence; out of the spirit human beings come forth equal before the world and God and before other human beings. Thus does the mystery of the child declare.

And to this mystery of the child the Christmas conception is united, which is to find its deeper meaning in the new Christian revelation. For this new Christian revelation will take into account the new Trinity: the human being, as he directly represents humanity; the Ahrimanic; and the Luciferic. And, as it comes to be known how the human being is placed in the world in a relationship of balance between the Ahrimanic and the Luciferic, it will be understood also what this human being really is in the external physical existence.

Most of all must understanding come about, Christian understanding, in reference to a certain aspect of human life. Clearly will Christian thought proclaim in future what has already been affirmed by certain spirits since the middle of the nineteenth century, though in stammering accents and never quite distinctly. When we grasp the fact that the thought of equality enters the world in the child, but that forces of inequality later develop in man, as if from the fact of his having been born, forces that do not seem to belong to this earth, then just in regard to the conception of equality another profound mystery faces us. To see into this mystery, and through seeing into it to gain a true conception of man, will belong from the present time onward among the weighty and essential needs in the future evolution of the life of the soul. This is the depressing problem that faces man: Truly, human beings grow to be unlike, even though they are not so in childhood, by reason of something that is born within them, that is in the blood: their varied gifts and capacities.

The question of gifts and capacities, which cause so many inequalities among men, faces us in connection with the thought of Christmas. And the Christmas festival of the future will always admonish men most earnestly, reminding them of the origin of that which differentiates them so widely over the earth, the origin of their gifts, capacities, talents, even the gift of genius. They will have to inquire about the origin of these. And a true balance within the physical existence will be attained only when the human being can point rightly to the origin of the capacities which differentiate him from other men. The light of Christmas, or the Christmas candles, must give to evolving humanity an explanation of these capacities; it must answer the profound question: Do individual human beings suffer injustice between birth and death under the ordering of the universe? What is the truth about faculties and gifts?

Now, my dear friends, many things will be seen in a different light when humanity shall have been permeated by the new Christian feeling. Most particularly will it be understood why the Old Testament occult conception possessed a special insight into the nature of the prophetic gift. What were the prophets who appear in the Old Testament? They were personalities who had been sanctified by Jahve; they were those personalities who were permitted to employ in the right way special spiritual gifts reaching far above those of ordinary man. Jahve had first to sanctify their capacities, which are born in men as if by reason of their blood. And we know that Jahve works on human beings between their falling asleep and awakening We know that Jahve does not work within the conscious life. Every true believer of the Old Testament said within his heart: That which differentiates men as regards their capacities and gifts, which rises to the level of genius in the nature of the prophet, is born, indeed, with the person, but it is not used by him for a good purpose unless he can sink down in sleep into that realm in which Jahve guides his soul impulses, and transforms from the spiritual world gifts which are otherwise only physical, inherent in the body.

We point here to a profound mystery of the Old Testament conception. The Old Testament view, including that in regard to the nature of the prophet, must disappear. New conceptions must, for the redemption of humanity, enter into the cosmic historic evolution. That which the ancient Hebrew believed was sanctified by Jahve in the unconscious state of sleep the human being must become capable of sanctifying in the modern age while he is awake, in a state of clear consciousness. But he can do this only if he knows, on the one hand, that all natural gifts, capacities, talents, even genius, are Luciferic endowments, and work in the world Luciferically. unless they are sanctified and permeated by all that can enter into the world as the impulse of the Christ. We touch upon a tremendously important mystery of the evolution of modern humanity when we grasp the central kernel of the Christmas conception, and call attention to the fact that the Christ must be so understood and so felt by men in their hearts that they stand as New Testament human beings before the Christ and say: “In addition to the inclination of the child, his aspiration, toward equality, I have been endowed with various capacities and talents. But they can lead permanently to good results, to the welfare of humanity, only provided these gifts, these talents, are dedicated to the service of Christ Jesus; only if the human being strives to permeate his whole nature with the Christ, in order that human gifts, talents, genius may be freed from the grasp of Lucifer.”

The heart permeated by the Christ takes away from Lucifer what works otherwise Luciferically in man's physical existence. This thought must powerfully influence the future evolution of the human soul. This is the New Christmas thought, the new annunciation of the influence of the Christ in our souls, bringing about the transformation of the Luciferic—which does not enter into us because we journey out of the spirit, but is to be found in us because we are clothed in a blood-permeated physical body which bestows upon us capacities derived from the line of heredity. Within the Luciferic stream, within that which works in the stream of heredity, do these characteristics appear, but they are to be conquered and mastered during the physical life by that which the human being can feel in connection with the Christ impulse, not through Jahve inspiration in sleep, but through the fruition of man's experiences in full consciousness.

“Direct yourself, O Christian, to the Christmas thought”—thus does the new Christianity speak—“and lay there upon the altar set up for Christmas every differentiation you have received as a human being from your blood, and sanctify your capacities, sanctify your gifts, sanctify even your genius as you behold it illuminated by the light which comes from the Christmas tree.”

The new annunciation of the spirit must speak a new language, and we must not be dumb and unheeding toward the new revelation of the spirit which speaks to us in this deeply serious age in which we live. When we are sensitive to such thoughts, we are living with the power with which man ought to live in this time in order to discharge the great duties which are to be assigned to humanity in this very age. The full gravity of the Christmas thought must be experienced: that in our day there must enter into the waking consciousness of humanity what the Christ willed to say to men when he uttered the words: “Except ye become as little children ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” The thought of equality which the child manifests, if we look upon him in the right way, is not convicted of falsehood by reason of these words, for that Child whose birth we commemorate on Christmas eve, proclaims to human beings in the course of their evolution through the history of the world—revealing ever new thoughts—clearly and distinctly, that the differentiating gifts we possess must be placed within the light of the Christ who ensouled this Child; that all which these differentiating gifts bring about within us human beings must be placed upon the altar of this Child.

You may now ask under the inspiration of the Christmas thought: “How may I experience the Christ impulse within my own soul?” Alas, this thought is often a heavy burden in men's hearts.

Now, my dear friends, that which we may call the Christ impulse does not become rooted in our souls in a moment, forthwith and tempestuously. And in different ages it takes root differently in man. In our day man must take into himself in full clear waking consciousness such cosmic thoughts as have been stammeringly imparted by spiritual knowledge as guided by Anthroposophy, to which we belong. As these thoughts are proclaimed to him—provided he truly understands them—they can awaken within him the assurance that the new revelation, the new Christ impulse of our age, truly enters into him on the wings of these thoughts. And such a person will sense the new impulse if only he pays heed to it.

Make the endeavour, in the sense we intend, in living reality as is appropriate to our age, to take into yourselves the spiritual thoughts of the guidance of the world; seek to take them into yourselves, not as mere teaching, not merely as theory—-seek so to imbibe them that they will move your souls to their very depths, warming, illuminating, permeating them—that you shall bear them livingly within you. Seek to feel these thoughts so intensely that they shall become to you something which seems to pass through your body into your soul and to change your very body. Seek to strip away from these thoughts all abstractions, anything theoretical. Endeavour to discover for yourself that these thoughts are such as constitute a true nourishment of the soul. Seek to discover for yourself that, with these thoughts, not merely thoughts alone enter your souls, but spiritual life coming from the spiritual world.

Enter into the most intimate inner union with these thoughts, and you will observe three things. You will observe that these thoughts gradually eliminate something from within you, which appears so clearly in human hearts in our age of the consciousness soul: that these thoughts, however they may be expressed, eliminate self-seeking from the human soul. When you begin to notice that these thoughts kill egoism, destroy the force of self-seeking, you have then, my dear friends, sensed the Christ-permeated character of spiritual thought guided by Anthroposophy.

In the second place, when you observe that, in the moment when untruthfulness approaches you anywhere in the world, no matter whether you yourself are tempted to be too careless about truth or whether untruthfulness approaches you from another direction—if you observe that in the moment when untruthfulness enters the sphere of your life, an impulse makes itself felt by you, warning you, pointing to the truth, an impulse which will not permit untruth to enter your life, always admonishing you and impelling you to hold fast to truth, then do you sense, in contrast with the life of the present day, so strongly inclined toward mere appearance, the living impulse of the Christ. No one will find it easy to lie in the presence of spiritual thoughts guided by Anthroposophy, or to lack all feeling for mere appearance and untruth. A sign pointing your way to the sense of truth—apart from all other knowledge—you will feel in the thoughts of the new revelation of the Christ. When, my dear friends, you shall have reached the point where you do not strive for a mere theoretical understanding of spiritual science, as this is sought in relation to any other science, but when you have reached the stage where the thoughts so penetrate you that you say to yourself: “When these thoughts become intimately united with my soul, it is as if a Power of conscience stood beside me admonishing me, pointing me toward truth,”—then will you have found the Christ impulse in the second form.

In the third place, when you feel that something streams from these thoughts which works even into your body, but especially into the soul, overcoming sickness, making the human being well and vital, when you sense the rejuvenating, refreshing power of these thoughts, the adversary of illness, then will you have sensed the third part of the Christ impulse in these thoughts. For this is the goal toward which humanity strives through the new wisdom, in the new spirit—to find in the spirit itself the power to overcome self-seeking: to overcome self-seeking through love, the mere appearance of life through truth, the force of illness through health-giving thoughts which bring us into immediate unison with the harmonies of the universe, because they flow from the harmonies of the universe.

Not all that has been indicated can at present be attained, for man bears within him an ancient heritage. It is a mere lack of understanding when such a back-stairs politician as Christian Science twists into a caricature the thought of the healing power of the spirit. Yet, even though our ancient heritage renders it impossible for thought to become sufficiently potent at present to achieve what the human being craves thus to achieve—perhaps, from a self-seeking motive—nevertheless thought possesses healing power. In such things human thinking is always perverted. Some one who understands these things may say to you that certain thoughts give health, and the person who hears this may at a certain time be affected by this or that illness. Indeed, my dear friends, the fact that we cannot at present be relieved of all illnesses by the mere power of thought is due to an ancient heritage. But are you able to say what illnesses would have overtaken you if you had not possessed the thoughts? Could you say that your life would have been passed in its present degree of health if you had not possessed these thoughts? In the case of a person who has applied himself to spiritual science guided by Anthroposophy and who dies at the age of 45 years, can you prove that, without these thoughts, he would not have died at 42 or 40 years of age? Human beings tend always to think from the wrong direction when they deal with these thoughts. They direct their attention to what cannot be bestowed upon them, by reason of their karma, but do not pay attention to what is bestowed upon them by reason of their karma. But if, in spite of everything contradictory in the external physical world, you direct your look with the power of inner confidence which you have gained through intimate familiarity with the thoughts of spiritual science, you then come to feel the healing power, a healing power which penetrates even into the physical body, refreshing, rejuvenating—the third element, which the Christ as the Healer brings with his never ceasing revelations into the human soul.

We have desired to enter more deeply, my dear friends, into the thought of Christmas, which is so closely bound up with the mystery of human birth. What is revealed to us today out of the spirit as the continuing extension of the Christmas thought we desired to bring in brief outline before our minds. We can feel that it gives strength and support to our lives. We can feel that it places us amid the impulses of cosmic evolution, no matter what may befall, so that we can feel ourselves in unison with these divine impulses in the evolution of the world; that we can understand them, and can draw power for our will from this understanding, and light for our life of thought. Man is evolving; it would be wrong to deny this evolution. The only right course is to go forward with this evolution.

Moreover, Christ has declared: “I am with you always even to the end of the world.” This is not a phrase; it is truth. Christ has revealed Himself not only in the Gospels; Christ is with us; Christ reveals Himself continually. We must have ears to harken to what He is ever newly revealing in the modern age. Weakness will overcome us if we have no faith in these new revelations; but strength shall be ours if we have such faith.

Strength will come to us if we have faith in the new revelations, even should they speak to us from life's seemingly contradictory suffering and misfortune. With our own souls we pass through repeated earth lives during which our destiny comes to fulfilment. Even this thought, which empowers us to sense the spiritual behind the external physical life, we can realize only when we take into ourselves in the truly Christian sense the revelations following one upon another. The Christian—the true Christian—when he stands before the candles on the Christmas tree, should begin to work with the strengthening thoughts which can come to him today from the new cosmic revelation, to give power to his will, illumination to his life of thought. And his feeling should be such that the power and the light of this thought may enable him in the course of the Christian year to draw close to that other thought which admonishes of the mystery of death—the Easter thought, which brings the final experience of the earthly life of man before our souls as a spiritual experience. For we shall sense the Christ more and more if we are able to place our own existence in the right relation with His existence. The medieval Rosicrucian, uniting his thought with Christianity, declared: Ex deo nascimur; in Christo morimur; per spiritum sanctum reviviscinius. Out of the Divine have we been born as we contemplate ourselves as human beings here on the earthly globe. In Christ we die. In the Holy Spirit we shall be again awakened. This actually pertains to our life, our human life. If we turn our look away from our life to the life of Christ, then what is represented in our life is a mirrored reflection. Out of the Divine are we born; in Christ we die; in the Holy Spirit we shall again be awakened. This saying, which is true of our first-born Brother, the Christ living in our midst, we can so affirm that we shall feel it to be the Christ-truth raying forth from Him and mirrored in our human nature: Out of the Spirit was He begotten—as this is represented in the Gospel of Luke in the symbol of the descending dove—out of the Spirit was He begotten; in the human body He died; in the Divine will He rise again.

Truths which are eternal we can take into ourselves in the right way only when we see them in their contemporary reflection—not made into something absolute, made abstract in a single form. And if we feel ourselves as human beings, not only in an abstract sense but human beings existing actually at a certain time when it is our duty to act and to think in harmony with this time, then shall we seek to understand the Christ, who is with us always even to the end of the world, in His contemporary language as He teaches us and gives us light regarding the Christmas thought, filling us with the power of the Christmas thought. We shall desire to take this Christ into ourselves in His new language. For the Christ must become intimately related to us. Then shall we be enabled to fulfil in ourselves the true mission of Christ on the earthly globe and beyond death. The human being in each epoch must take the Christ into himself in his own way. This has been the feeling of human beings when they have looked in the right way at the two great pillars of the spirit: at the Christmas thought and the Easter thought. Thus did the profound German mystic, the Silesian, Angelus Silesius, contemplating the Christmas thought, declare:

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

And, contemplating the Easter thought, he said:

The cross of Golgotha must be upraised in thee
Ere from thy sin its power shall make thee free.

Truly the Christ must live within us, since we are not human beings in an absolute sense, but human beings of a definite epoch. The Christ must be born within us according to the sound of His words in our epoch. We must seek to bring the Christ to birth within us, for our strengthening, for our illumination, as He has remained with us until now, as He will remain with mankind throughout all ages even to the end of earthly time, as He wills now to be born in our souls. That is, if we seek to experience the birth of Christ within us in our epoch, as this event becomes a light and a power in our souls—the eternal power and eternal life entering into time—we then behold in the true way the historic birth of Christ in Bethlehem and its counterpart in our own souls.

Should Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
And not in thee, then wert thou still forlorn.

As He creates the impulse in our hearts today to look upon His birth—His birth in human events, His birth in our own souls—so do we deepen the Christmas thought within us. And then we look away to that night of consecration which we ought to feel coming to pass within us for the strengthening and illumination of human beings for the endurance of many evils and sorrows which they have had to live through and will yet have to live through.

“My Kingdom,” said Christ, “is not of this world.” It is a saying which challenges us, if we look upon His birth in the right way, to find within ourselves the path to the Kingdom where He abides to give us strength, where He abides to give us light amid our darkness and helplessness through the impulses coming from the world of which He himself spoke, of which His appearance on Christmas will always be a manifestation. “My Kingdom is not of this world.” But He has brought that Kingdom into this world, so that we may always find strength, comfort, confidence, and hope out of this Kingdom in all the circumstances of life, if we only will come to Him, taking His words to heart—such words as these:

“Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.”