The Rudolf Steiner Archive

I think that it is good right now to become familiar with the most varied areas of life and the laws of existence which I have been referring to during these lectures. I want to say these laws of existence take on an importance in their realm of the spiritual life, an importance of being, which up to now has frequently not been taken into account in world opinion. Particularly in our present time it is imperative to totally understand the current 5th post-Atlantean epoch in which we stand, with all its peculiarities, in order for us to become ever more and more conscious of how affective we are within it. You know of course that we consider the beginning of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch beginning at the start of the 15th Century, from about 1413 onward. The beginning of the 15th Century was a significant, profound, incisive point for western humanity. The creation of such an about-turn which came about didn't happen all at once, it was preparatory. In the first moments of this epoch one only sees a gradual expansion. Old patterns from the earlier epochs transform into the new one and so on. Preparations were being made for a long time which were only really being experienced as a mighty reversal at the start of the 15th Century.

If we want to consider another strong western historical impact in the centre of the Middle Ages, we may look at the rule of Charlemagne from 768 to 814. If you wish to visualize everything which happened in the West to the furthest boundaries up to the time of Charlemagne, you will have difficulties with this self-visualization. For many observers of history today such difficulties do not exist because they all shear it under the same comb. Only for those who want to look at reality, will such deep differences exist. It becomes quite difficult for people in today's world of experiences and impressions to reach a concept about the completely different condition of life in Europe up to the time of Charlemagne and beyond. We may however say that after Charlemagne, in the 10th, 11th and 12th Centuries a time began in preparation of our own epoch, the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Up to the time of Charlemagne old relationships actually flowed which in our present day, as we have already said, we can't have a true imagination. Then again preparations were beginning for a new epoch, and in these three centuries, the 10th, 11th and 12th—it started in the 9th already—events took place in Europe in all areas of life producing forces which were expressed later, particularly in the 15th century.

One can say these centuries just mentioned was a time for preparation but people today are hardly inclined to refer to this just as little as they will say Rome is in control of European affairs. The papacy in the time from the 9th century, before the middle of the 9th century where the ruling of Europe was so vigorously taken under control, where all relationships effectively extended, must not be imagined as the same effective papacy in a later century or even today. It can rather be said that in those times the papacy knew instinctively what the most important areas of life needed, in west, central or southern Europe. I already pointed out last time that the oriental culture was gradually pushed back; it had to wait in eastern Europe, in Byzantianism, in Russianness. There it waited indeed, waited right up to our present time.

General observations can develop particular clarity in those areas which, in the broadest sense, one can refer to as artistic. If you want an idea about what had been pushed back at the time to the East, what the west, central and southern Europe should not acquire, if you want to reach an understanding about it, then compare it with a Russian icon:

In the picture of the Virgin Mary of the East is an echo of what had been pushed back into the East at the time. In such a picture quite another spirit holds sway than can ever be found reigning in western, southern and central art; it is something quite different. Such an icon picture still today presents an image which has been born directly out of the spiritual world. If you imagine it in a lively manner you can't imagine a physical space behind the Russian Madonna image. You can imagine that behind the picture is the spiritual world and out of the spiritual world this image has appeared: just so are the lines, so is everything in it. When you take the basic character of this image as it is born out of the spiritual world then you have exactly that which had been held at a distance in the 9th Century from western, southern and central Europe:

Why? Such things should be thoroughly and objectively considered historically. Why did this have to be held back? Simply on the grounds that the nations of Europe—central, western and southern Europe—had completely different soul impulses which were not in the position to understand humanity out of original elementary nature, this was being pushed back, stopped in the East. The nature of the western European soul was quite differently focussed.

When this which was being pushed back to the East was transplanted into central, western and southern Europe, it could only remain external, outside the east of Europe; it could never grow together with the central, western or southern European soul distinctions. An area had to be created in western, southern and central Europe, an area for what gradually wanted to come out of the depths of the very folk soul itself.

I would like to say Rome, in actual fact, understood this with genial instinct. With disputes regarding dogmatism showing quite a different character, the content of dogma disputes is not the real story; the content of these disputes is merely the final spiritual expression. It goes much further. Among other things it was about what I have just been characterising for you. So we see that from the 9th Century and into the next centuries Rome worked ever more strongly for a space in Europe where the real striving of the folk souls could unfold. The striving of the folk souls also appeared in greater clarity.

You see, when you focus on what could have been brought to the fore if the eastern influence had not been pushed back but could stretch over Europe—Charlemagne made a large contribution - if it had stretched over Europe then Europe, as I've already mentioned, would have made available certain observations of representations which speak directly out of the spiritual world. This did not happen, firstly because Europe had to prepare itself for the materialistic 5th post-Atlantean period which was prepared most intensely in central Europe. Interest centred mainly on everything other than what came directly out of the spiritual world like line, form and colouring. Humanity was interested in something different. Above all there was an interest in Europe for contemporary events, for reporting and for results. By studying individuals, singled out in humanity, you realize they have positioned themselves in the course of historic, relatable events. The 10th, 11th, 12th Centuries can also be called the Germanic Roman Empire because from Rome the capacity was created, a capacity which spread for an interest in relating stories, an interest in the working of time and for conceptualising a particular form set in time.

You see, this is again a different viewpoint from the viewpoint I indicated in similar lectures in previous years. This cooperation of the central European empire with the Roman church and its spread is an inner image of the way the 5th post-Atlantic epoch prepared central Europe at the time. From this it is clear that central Europe prepared itself in this period with very little interest for spatial educational art. Constituted informative art became borrowed - just remember the presentation which I gave you in previous years—borrowed from what came over from the East, spread, one might say, through to the very joints of principal interest. What shot up out of the folklore itself was being told. The content which was to be told had to be taken out of national character, intimately connected with nationality.

You can encounter amazing images of central European life, life in the areas of the Rhine, the Donau and the northern coastline in the depiction of the songs of the Nibelungen, the Walthari and `Gudrun'. The manner and way in which these writings are presented indicate their obvious interest in events of the time. Look how in the time of Charles the Great when the poem `Heiland' originated, the stories of the Gospels are woven into the poem with central European characters, characters extracted from biblical events and placed directly into the central European interests of the `Heiland'. It had to be born out of the life of the European folk soul. Through this the eastern tradition, which cares little for the temporal and historical, was pushed back. For this reason, it was pushed back. If we observe how these concerns of the European nations rise from deep underground and reach the surface, then it is often only possible, and with difficulty, to really penetrate into the depth of feeling, into the deep soul experience which the European human spirit connected to in its own deepening encounter with the essential spiritual events. One might say, that which was pushed back to the East from spatial infinity and its manifestation out of space, which had to appear superficially in central Europe should reappear directly out of the human souls themselves, out of the depths of the soul, not out of the widths of space—but out of the depth of souls.

The mysterious prevailing of soul depths under the surface of direct observation was already something living at that time in human souls. During the centuries we've been talking about, people were instinctively permeated with the knowledge that their souls had in the depths of their being secret impulses, appearing only sometimes at celebratory moments in their soul experiences. Life seemed deeper than what the eyes could see, the ears could hear and so on; something unfathomable rose from soul depths as a profound experience. I could say we experience an echo of this kind of thing when we hear something as beautiful as the poetry of Walthers von der Vogelweide, who to some extend created an ending to a purely linguistic age, an age when the ability to depict formless manifestations in soul depths in a pictorial manner had not yet developed. In these soul depths we are stirred when we allow Walthers von der Vogelweide's small poem to work on us, where he speaks about his own life in retrospect. Maturing as a man when knowledge grew in his soul and light fell on his soul depths from which knowledge had previously appeared as mysterious waves in a dream, now appeared in a mood, he expressed as follows:

“Oh, whereto did all my years disappear!
I dreaming my life or is it real?
What appears for real, was it illusion's face?
I've slept so long and didn't even know it.
I've been woken and all is as unfamiliar
once was familiar, like my own hand.”

Thus speaks Walther von der Vogelweide at the end of the three long centuries, the 10, 11, 12th centuries, the epoch in which the Holy Roman Empire blossomed at the close of this time period. It was the period of time in which the interest for current events developed. Art demanded expression, images were to express events happening and going to happen in central, western and southern Europe. A glance to the East gives the impression of existence and peace, of a quiet contemplation out of the spiritual world. Events directly taking place here, born in the human soul, binding the soul with the greatest of all, the most mysterious, all this was eager to be represented in a pictorial manner. Fertilization from the South was needed anyway, where echoes of all the traditions having come from the East were still maintained. Bringing events to expression was the primary goal.

In this way striving in art was contained in the West, one might say, in two opposing streams, for certainly the representation of existence was pushed back East, but only pushed back—many things remained. Above all, something remained which can be observed in the East where strict rules determined the depiction of the icons, and old rules were being adhered to, where no violation was allowed through lines, expression, and so on. All this was transplanted into the West and alongside this was the requirement for everything experienced in the surroundings, united with traditions coming into central Europe from the South. Naturally depictions with this requirement firstly appeared in primitive, simplistic images according to biblical narratives, Bible stories. Only at the beginning of the next three centuries, the 13th, 14th and 15th did a power, one could call it, rise up out of Central Europe which could depict image-rich pictures. This power is thanks to specific facts; facts which during these centuries, the 13th, 14th and 15th, expanded and matured over the whole Central and Southern Europe as something one could call city domination, the blossoming of rural development. The cities, so proud at the time of their powerful autonomy, developed the particular powers of their folk in their midst. Such cities were not uniform, either as the old Germanic Roman Empire which was in decline, nor uniform as in the later state communities, because these cities were autonomous and could develop their individual strength according to the needs of the specific land, lifestyle and place. One doesn't understand the times of the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries if one does not again and again glance at the blossoming of city freedom at the time.

Let us visualize this flowering of city freedom—by roughly taking the 11th to 15th centuries—and consider what this freedom in the cities discovered in relation to art impulses. Some traditions originating from Rome remained. The main issue had been pushed to the East; yet some traditions remained behind, traditions of alignment, colour application and, in relation to facial expression, the eyes and nose had to be done in a certain way. Yet all of that counteracted with the aim to represent facts. These battles had two sides, we can see it here where the artistic element first only dares to appear, turns from within itself outward, where, I might say, the trained monk from Rome allows himself to be inundated with the influence from central Europe, the impulse to not merely depict biblical events but that the imagery appearing in the Bible, which are glimpses from the spiritual worlds, are depicted in such a manner that the Bible itself becomes the very expression of how people live in daily life. This was now imposed on the monk in his solitary work. When he paints his miniatures and represents biblical scenes in a small manner, he must be accountable on the one side for the remains of tradition and on the other side, what wants to manifest as life under the surface.

Today I have two such miniatures to show you from which you will see, how during the 11th, 12th and also in the 13th Centuries the battle between traditional painting and history was still visible in small paintings.

Look at such a painting from an evangelist representing the “Birth of Christ”—we considered this image in previous years.

See how much you are reminded of the tradition of mere existence. Consider how still here, I might say, these figures are shown in such a way which does not reflect how people in an outer naturalistic reality live but observe how the figures are born out of the imagination people made up of what the spiritual worlds were for them. From there the saints, the Christ figure himself appears; all this came out of another world. Behind the surface of the painting we can only imagine the spiritual world—of course pictorially and radically spoken.

Above all there is no trace of naturalism. Observe how there is no trace of perspective, no trace or an attempt in this painting to somehow represent space—everything is on the surface, all but intellectual representation. Despite all this, when you look at the single figures, you experience the urge of something wanting to be expressed. You will notice there are two things fighting with one another. Look at the face on the right and the one on the left and you will see how the eyes, maintaining something from tradition by the person in his monk cell had a thought from his teaching that somehow or other eyes had to be done, this and that way the expression had to be done—but he battled with it, he adjusted to a certain extent the view of the situation to the events.

Even in these tiny paintings made in the gospels, in books of the bible, this battle of the two elements can be seen in a struggle. Besides this you see again, for example in Cimabue even more, how existence was expressed in the oriental form. How we are absolutely reminded of the angel figures above - which already appear when it comes to Cimabue as an oriental echo of the conception of the pictorial—as a proclamation out of the spiritual world itself, as an experience of being, not of historical events!

Another test is the second picture, which I have prepared, which comes from the Trier Gospels:

Here we see the proclamation to the shepherds, above is Christ's birth. When you take this shepherds' proclamation of the angel announcing “Glory in the Heights and peace on earth to men of goodwill”, when you take this you discover a mixing of these two impulses.

In all three of the men's faces we find the endeavour: represent the facts! On the other side however everything at a distance is about natural observation; how traditions play into this! I would like to say, feel how the wings of the angels are in the book: wings should be depicted in such a manner that they are at an angle to the main scene, pointing to both sides, and so on. You sense the requirement and at the same time sense such a depiction impinges on the endeavour which can't be achieved according to the observation of historical events. Sense this and observe in all of them how little nature observation is apparent, how there is no trace of spatial application, no trace of perspective in this image, that everything is, I want to say, or implied in the place where they are depicted due to requirements of how something like this was to be done, teach, while still substantially in control.

Now we see how at the end of the three centuries of the Germanic Roman Empire the impulse from the establishment of cities to depict history and unite it with the requirements of experiential representation, how this urge in Central Europe came to a sudden and most beautiful flowering. Cologne is one of those cities where the city's freedom flowered the most intensively and at the same time had the possibility, through intensive expansion of the Roman Catholic dominance, to take up traditional design art coming over from the East. No wonder as a result that just in Cologne the possibility encounters us in how, in the most wonderful way this comes together, weaving the two impulses into one another: the one most ancient and revered tradition depicted—what a Madonna looks like—and the urge to represent history. How a Madonna had to look like—in the East was petrified spiritually, majestic, serene, but still, solidified. It had to wait. Movement was brought in from the West. The revelation brought in from above, from heaven, revealed in the Madonna figure, is to be experienced in the Russian Madonna as magnificently elevated and permeated with something one can see directly: the greatest beauty possibly revealed in a human face, the loveliest direct expression of the ability to love, human friendliness, human goodwill, everything living in the surroundings lived in an inner relationship with the revealed figure of the Madonna.

Consider this and then look at the painting done by Master Wilhelm:

Here you can see what I actually want to point out: you can see how an attempt is made to bring life, that means events, into being in the Virgin Mary depiction. Here individual observation merges with tradition right into the details, one might say: old prescriptions were only applicable to attitude, nobility of form, serenity but not much further than in the expression of line, thus tradition was already being experienced from individual observation. This is what we can admire so much in these masters.

Another painting by the same master:

Another painting by the same master ... to indicate what I have just mentioned, shown in another representation. Consider just how much has come through the traditional heavenly figure, the revealed form of the Redeemer's face, of Veronica's face, in which we can see something revealed directly out of soul depths. See for yourself how those angel faces looking up are already individualized! Consider how with this image, as a result of the individualizing of figures it is no longer possible to actually imagine heaven behind it. However, something else is possible. At the back of the image, which came out of the Eastern inclination (245) we can actually imagine the spiritual world, something in addition to what the image presents. Here (237) we can also imagine something else; we must feel something different from what the image depicts. We feel much of what has gone before due to knowledge from the Bible; we feel much of what has resulted, events have been experienced and what is depicted are scenes from before and after. Thus there is not something like a spiritual realm behind it; the experience is of something before and something afterwards. When the singular is represented—visual art does this after all—then a single element is lifted out of the events. This is what we find towards the conclusion of every time period, towards which Rome out of such a deep understanding through the three to four centuries created in the European realm, which wanted to rise out of folklore. The conclusion appears to us and how this works in Cologne, by such genial Masters being capable of creating something like this.

These two intertwining impulses which I have characterised flow together most remarkably here. Now I would like to indicate their power which had worked everywhere by showing you a couple of paintings, starting with Constance who probably learnt from this and many countries through which he travelled, to arrive in Cologne and gradually became the follower of so-called Master Wilhelm, Stephan Lochner. The first is the image of the Virgin Mary—we know it already:

In this image—you need only compare the single heads—you already notice the individualizing impulse which is fully expressed by the figures. This aspiration you can observe. You hardly see a tendency to use space; everything is on one plane, you see no possibility of somehow applying perspective, but you see the yearning, the desire and instinct which can be declared as events, fixed in the imagery, you see the desire characterized; you see the past and what will follow established in the imagery as a scene.

Now I ask you to look at the two preceding demonstrated paintings (237,238) by the Cologne masters which appeared when these masters were blossoming, somewhat around the years 1370 to 1410, therefore directly during the time the fourth post-Atlantean epoch was coming to a close. This painting by Stephan Lochner (239) already falls into the fifth post-Atlantean time. I have shown you images in consecutive order between the boundaries of the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean time.

What are the particular characteristics? Don't we see particular characteristics playing into representations in the 5th post-Atlantean time? Don't we see in the lowering gaze of Mary, the blessing little hand of the child, the differences in the right and left figures' expression, in the individual depiction of the additional figures—do we not see the characteristics of the 5th post-Atlantean time—how the character's act in the pictorial representation? Do we not see how the impact of personality arrives? Above all, don't we already here see the desire to express the element of the 5th post-Atlantean time within the imagery, the most important element for Central Europe: light-and-dark or chiaroscuro?—How little meaning the distribution of light and dark had in the old tradition! People lived in light and shadows but were not observing it, yet were feeling it - because they experienced light bringing joy, sensing life in light while darkness sank into rest, in darkness they withdrew into mysterious soul depths. This inner living in the world in the souls of single individuals which particularly comes to the fore in the 5th post-Atlantean time, as well as the application of chiaroscuro, indicate a distribution of light masses: in the middle the light is above the Child, we see this light dividing itself right and left in single masses, becoming lighter upwards, no longer completed as in earlier version only in a golden ground, but in a brightness. Thus the encroachment of individual characters is what we see here; nobody can actually look at these consecutive elements which I have demonstrated to you, without becoming aware that something, albeit quietly, but something new was coming into the 5th post-Atlantean time while the 4th post-Atlantean epoch faded.

Let us look once more at the previous Madonnas:

Memorise this child's face well and try to feel how much tradition still lives in it. Now consider once again another one:

Look at the Madonna and the Child and note how a really new impulse has entered just like a new impulse does enter with each individual. Considering the following paintings of Stephan Lochner. I want to stress that Stephan Lochner originated from a region where most people were incapable of absorbing tradition because most of them had the impulse to develop individualism. It is the region around the Bodensee in the region of Bavaria, the area of western Austria. Here the tribes strived out of their folk nature towards individualism, mostly rejecting tradition. Stephan Lochner was lucky, one might say, to aim for the Bavarian anticipation of individual expression, where, despite the striving for the individual, there still lived the great sublime sacred tradition of olden times. As a result, his individual impulse, much more pronounced than Master Wilhelm with his radical individual urge, he connected to his revolutionary individuation impulse with the smooth, typically Cologne imaging tradition to produce this image.

For an artist like Stephan Lochner depicting space within art had not yet been invented; to depict space could simply not be done at that time in Cologne, but his soul tried to introduce this into the images.

Fully within the historical events, completely within development this can be ascertained by a comparison between the Virgin Mary image of the West compared to that of the East:

Look at the next image:

... which you also know already; look at it particularly in the way the specific fits into the general, so typical in Stephan Lochner's work, how the dark and light come to the fore even if there is no continual intention of capturing space, to indicate perspective, but in the chiaroscuro we see another kind of spatial capture than that of perspective. The perspective is more to the South, one could say: invented by Brunellesco—I have explained this to you in previous years.

And now …

... in which you see there is no trace yet of composition and how here also, where the depiction would have insisted on a study of space, there is nothing about space, and how on the other side an attempt is made to depict each of the six accompanying figures as individuals, with an attempt to individualise the Redeemer Himself. Please recall the paintings of the Cologne Masters (237, 238) and compare these with the paintings of Stephan Lochner (239-242) which we have seen. It can't be overlooked how deeply this incision imprints on us what lies between the two: because this incision lies between the 4th and 5th post-Atlantean epochs. Stephan Lochner attempted to depict soul qualities, but he looked for representation in nature to find forms which express the soul. Master Wilhelm still hovered in a supersensible experience of the soul and his impressions came out of his inner feelings. He didn't depict them by looking at a model. Here (237) we still see a reference to the model in order for the soul itself to identify with it. Master Wilhelm still expresses his own feelings. Stephan Lochner is already a copier of nature. This is in fact realism: realism rising. We can clearly draw the boundaries between these two so divergent painters, during hardly decades.

So you see how the laws which we search for in spiritual science really come to expression in single spheres of life when these spheres are not taken as unimportant, but with their importance are led before the soul.

Now I would like to place this fact once again before your souls, by introducing two painters who worked more in the South. This took place in Cologne. Let us look more towards the South, to Bavaria, Ulm or the Rhine area and we will see the how conditions appear before and after the incision of the 5th into the 4th post-Atlantean epoch. I want to present two paintings to you by Lukas Moser, who lived in the beginning of the 15th Century, who can certainly be counted as being from the 4th post-Atlantean time.

Look at these paintings:

Try to sense how everything painted in it is done in such a way that one notices how the painter went through schooling which insisted: when you place figures beside one another you must place the one facing you, the other in profile; when you paint waves, you must paint them like this.

Thus you see the entire play of the sea's waves, not as they are observed, but “according to the rules”; you see the figures as prescribed “according to the rules”; nothing observed, everything composed. This image from the Tiefenbronn altar thus depicts the ocean voyage of the saints.

The following image shows the time of repose, the night time rest of the same saints:

... A medieval house built on to a church, strongly suggestive that nothing was observed but everything was painted out of the head. Look at the sleeping Saint Zedonius: he still wears the mitre as well as his gloves. It had to be painted according to the rules where the main interest is located. Consider this as an ongoing journey, because the saints are taking a trip, they sail on the sea, they rest at night, it tells a story. Yet it is presented as set out in an existed image remaining within tradition. Lazarus resting in the bosom of this mother!

We can look back to representations of earlier times when we have such an image in front of us. This is at the point where the 4th post-Atlantean time came to a close. In the West there were still prescriptions regarding how church imagery should be painted. Painting was done according to particular traditional rules. The painters obtained their method out of tradition: this is what the Saint Zedonius looked like, what Saint Lazarus looked like, Saint Magdalene and so on; they had to be painted according to prescriptions, not quite as strictly as in the East, but still according to the laws. However, he still had to depict desires, instincts and reveal a story! In this way the elements swim in and around and battle with the end of the epoch.

Let us also look back to the 13th, 12th and 11th centuries. In all the churches strict rules were set. Each picture had to look the same as another right through the whole of Christendom, only with a slight variation in the way the things were ordered. If Saint Zedonius was ordered, then he was to be painted according to prescription - that was the tradition.

Let us now think of the incision of the beginning of the 15th Century and go from Lukas Moser, the last latecomer of the 4th post-Atlantean epoch, over to Hans Multscher and see how these painters really already stood in the beginning of the initial blossoming of the 5th post-Atlantean epoch. Look at these paintings:

... and you observe how in these paintings the individual-personal appear, characterising the personality. Moser does not have any desire to look at nature. Here, (399) you find an artist who strives to work out of the soul—yet who does not have the slightest inkling of spatial treatment and above all mixes up multi-coloured things in relation to space and perspective - yet who strives to characterise it out of the soul, in such a manner as if nature itself is characterised in the soul. He already tries to depict individual figures.

It will become even clearer for you, what I've just been speaking about, particularly when you look at the three sleeping figures below. There is already an attempt, first of all, to express the soul element, but there is also an attempt to depict the nature of those sleeping. Compare this with what you can remember about the sleeping saints on their sea voyage (335) the resting time (336) and then you will realise what a mighty incision lies between these developments. See how the light-dark depiction is consciously brought in. Solely characterized this way and not by working with perspective does the painter reveal spatial relationships. Perspective is in fact incorrect because an actual cohesive vanishing point can't be found in any area of the painting; nowhere can a central point be found from where the layout is arranged; yet still a spatial relationship of a certain beauty exists through the chiaroscuro.

Look at this “burial” scene. You find everything, even in the depiction of the landscape itself, as characterised by the individual's penetration of tradition: interest in events without any indication coming out of the spiritual world.

You see here how particular individualizing elements enter the entire painting, an attempt is made in a corresponding manner to represent the guardians, the twist of their bodies enhancing the individualisation. I ask you to look up, to the left, how an attempt was made to represent the figure's particular situation, his unique experience, portraying his peculiar individual inattentiveness. Try and imagine how the painter tried to show the front view of the head, how on the right he characterises the skull of the other guardian, from behind. One can see how the attempt is made to show individual forms and also how the chiaroscuro comes in. One can see how through individualising, depiction of spatial element enters while perspective is not at all yet clear. You can imagine the point from which the individual lines go from the characters, but now you need to think apparently quite far towards the front, where the coffin is placed and you have to think again about another reference point—regarding the trees! These are painted in full frontal positions.

I wanted to show you how the legitimate developmental impulses I spoke about already last time in the Italian paintings have a profound effect and what rises as characteristic in our time, originating from the 15th Century, can only now be understood if you clearly take the entire, deep meaning of every time period, from the beginning of the 15th Century, which built the boundary between the 4th and the 5th post-Atlantean epochs.

What transformed itself here had already been living in all the events and becoming of Europe, but it was pushed back from the 9th Century because Europe was made incapable at that time; Europe first had to allow something else to take form out of the depths of its being. Those in the East waited in the meantime. We should promote an awareness today for what waited there and what wanted to rise to the surface in the East because these forces are available, these forces weave into present day events, still wanting to be active. A clear understanding of what pulsates through the world, what works in the world, we need to take possession of, this which is an urgent requirement for the present time epoch. This I am now and have repeatedly stressed in the past. Through the development of the middle age art in its characteristic time period I wanted to make this clear for you. You see, here we approach two incisive waves in history: one swell is everything which came easterly from the south, the other is, I would like to call it, coming from the depths itself. In these centuries - 13th, 14th and 15th, in the centuries of freedom in cities, what wanted to rise from soul depths to the surface was most strongly applicable. Then again from the 16th Century another setback came - development rose and fell, oscillated—and then, obviously not simultaneously, the continuation of what had been started in of the 15th Century became outwardly visible as I've indicated to you, on the one side living in van Eyck, on the other side Dürer, Holbein and so on.

We see in the lower lands, towards Burgundy on the one side and Nürnberg on the other, Augsburg, Basel, the results of what wanted to come as a wave rising from soul depths to introduce the 5th post-Atlantean period.

I wanted to introduce only one of the impulses of this 5th post-Atlantean epoch to you. About other impulses I have various opportunities to speak at the moment.

Automated Translation

What I have had in mind in the course of these reflections has been to cast light upon the form that social thinking should take today. I should like now to add something to what we have already discussed that may make it possible for you to lift these things to a higher level. This is really necessary just because of the special demands of the spirit of our epoch. Everything that I have presented to you and will still present, I hope you will consider, if I may repeat this request, not as a criticism of the existing conditions of the times, but simply to provide material suitable for giving direction to our judgment that may provide the foundation for a general survey of conditions characterized by the necessary insight. The spiritual-scientific point of view cannot be that of providing a social critique but solely that of calling attention to these things without pessimism or optimism. Yet this fact compels us, naturally, to use words that will be understood by some persons to be intended as criticism of one or another of the social classes. Such is not the case. When we speak here of the bourgeoisie, it is as if we were speaking of an inevitable historical phenomenon, and not for the purpose of raising any objection to what has simply been unavoidable according to certain spiritual-scientific points of view. I beg you to understand in the same way also what I shall present to you today.

Let us take as our point of departure the comprehensive motive force that underlies in powerful form the present social demands of the proletariat, just as it underlies all or many human movements. This force is more or less clearly expressed, but it is also instinctive, unconscious, confused, and unclear' though nonetheless fundamental in these movements. This consists in the fact that a certain ideal exists for bringing about a social order that will be satisfying in all its aspects. If we wish to describe in a radical way what is thus basic in these things, there is reason to say that an endeavor is made to think out and to realize a social order that will bring about a paradise on earth, or at least that happy state worthy of the human being that is looked upon by the proletariat population at the present time as something to be desired. This is called the “solution of the social problem.” What I have just said is inherent in the instinct behind what is called the solution of the social problem.

Now, in considering the expression “solution of the social problem,” it is necessary that the spiritual scientist, who should not surrender himself to illusions in any field but should fix his attention upon realities, shall in this case also indulge in no illusions. The essential fact in this field is that those who are striving for these things do not proceed from a standpoint free of illusions, but from a point of view confronted by a great number of such illusions, especially the fundamental illusion that it is possible to solve the social problem.

The fact that in our epoch there is no consciousness of the difference between the physical plane and the spiritual world, but the physical plane is looked upon in a certain instinctive way as the only world, is connected with the other fact that it longs to create a paradise on this physical plane. Because of this conception our epoch is compelled to believe that the human being is condemned either never to achieve justice, the harmonizing of his impulses and needs, or else to find these things within the physical earthy existence.

The physical plane, however, manifests itself to one who observes the world imaginatively, and thus takes cognizance of actual reality, in such a way that he must declare there is no perfection in this world but only imperfection. Thus, it is impossible to speak at all of an absolutely complete solution of the social problem. You may endeavor in any way you please, on the basis of all the profoundest knowledge, to solve the social problem, yet it will never be solved in the sense in which many persons expect the solution in our day. But this need not lead anyone to say that if the social problem is simply not to be solved, we should permit the old nonsense to continue on its course. The truth is that the course of things resembles the action of a pendulum: the force for the upward swing is gained in the downward swing. In other words, just as the opposite force is accumulated by the downward swing and is then used in the upward swing, such is the case also in the rhythmical succession characterizing the historic life of humanity. What you may consider for a certain epoch as the most perfect social order, or even as any social order at all, wears out when you have once brought it to realization, and leads after a certain time once more to disorder. The evolutionary life is not such that it steadily ascends, but its course consists in ebb and flow; it progresses with a wave movement. The best that you may be able to establish, when once realized on the physical plane, gives rise to conditions that lead to its own destruction after the necessary length of time. The state of humanity would be entirely different if this irrevocable law in the historic course of events were adequately recognized. It would not then be supposed possible in the absolute sense of the word to establish a paradise on earth, but people would be compelled to give attention to the cyclic law of humanity's evolution. As we exclude from consideration an absolute answer to the question, “What should be the form of social life?” we shall do the right thing by asking ourselves what must be done for our epoch? What are the exact demands of the motive forces of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch? What actually demands to be made a reality? With the consciousness that what is brought to realization will inevitably be destroyed in turn in the course of the cyclic reversals, we are compelled to see clearly that we can think socially also only in this relative way when we recognize the impelling evolutionary forces of a definite epoch. It is imperatively necessary to work in harmony with reality. We are working against reality when we suppose that we shall be able to accomplish anything by means of abstract and absolute ideals.

For the spiritual scientist, therefore, who desires to fix his attention upon reality and not illusion, the question takes the limited form of what bears the impulse within it to be brought to realization within the actual situation of the immediate present?

Our explanations of yesterday also were intended to be considered from this point of view. You interpret me quite wrongly if you suppose that I mean an absolute paradise will be brought about through the fact, let us say, that what is produced by labor will be separated from labor. On the contrary, I consider this, on the basis of the profound laws of the evolution of humanity, only as something that must necessarily occur at the present time. What is anchored in all the instincts of man, toward which the proletariat conception of life especially is striving, even if they sometimes push things to the extreme of such demands as those I enumerated to you yesterday as the demands of bolshevism—behind what people have in their consciousness there lies, of course, what they instinctively will to bring to realization. Anyone who directs his effort toward reality does not pay attention to programs proposed to him, not even that of the Russian Soviet Republic, but he endeavors to see what is still in instinctive form today behind these things that people express outwardly with stammering tongues. This is what really matters. Otherwise, if we do not view the matter thus, we shall never deal with these things in the right way. What men are instinctively striving for is absolutely inherent in the fundamental character of our fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which is essentially different from the fourth epoch, the Greco-Latin, and likewise from the preceding third, the Egypto-Chaldean. Men of today, in their social relationships—not as individuals, but in social group relationships—must will something absolutely definite.

Instinctively they do actually will this. They will today what could not have been willed in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch, or even up to the fifteenth century of our Christian era. They will today an existence worthy of the human being, that is, the fulfillment as a reflection in the social order of what they vaguely sense in this epoch as the ideal for humanity. Men will today instinctively that what the human being is in himself shall be reflected in the social structure.

During the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, this was different, and different likewise still earlier during the second epoch. In the second epoch, the ancient Persian, the human being was still entirely in his inner nature; man was then still a being of wholly inner nature. He did not then demand instinctively to find duplicated in the external world what he possessed inwardly as his needs. He did not need a social structure that would enable him to recognize in external things what he possessed inwardly as impulse, instincts and needs. Then came the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, and the human being demanded that the part of his being that was connected with his head should appear to him in the mirror of external social reality. So we observe that, from the third post-Atlantean epoch on, from the Egypto-Chaldean epoch, the endeavor was made to achieve a theocratic social arrangement in which everything pertaining to theocratic social institutions was in some way permeated by religion. The rest remained still instinctive. What was connected with the second man, the breast and breathing man, and what was connected with the metabolic man, remained instinctive. The human being did not yet think at all of seeing these reflected in the mirror of the external order. In the ancient Persian epoch there was also only an instinctive religion, guided by those initiated in Zarathustrianism. But everything that the human being developed was still inward and instinctive. He did not yet feel any need to seek things in external reflection in the social structure. He began during the period that ended approximately with the founding of the ancient Roman kingdom, the actual year was 747 B.C., to demand that what could live as though in his head should be found again in the social order.

Then came the epoch that began in the eighth century, 747 B.C., and ended in the fifteenth century A.D., the Greco-Latin epoch. Man then demanded that two members of his being, the head man and the rhythmic, breathing, breast man should be reflected externally in the social structure. What constituted the ancient theocratic order, but now only in an echo, had to be reflected. As a matter of fact, the real theocratic institutions bear a close resemblance to the third post-Atlantean epoch and this includes even the institutions of the Catholic Church. This continued, and something new was added to it that was derived especially from the Greco-Latin epoch. The external institutions of the res publica, those institutions that have to do with the administration of the external life so far as justice and injustice and such things come into consideration were added. Man now demanded as regards two members of his being that he should not only bear these within himself but should see them reflected externally as in a mirror.

For instance, you do not understand Greek culture if you do not know that the situation was such that the merely metabolic life, which is expressed externally in the economic structure, still remained instinctive, inner and without the need of external reflection. The tendency to demand an external reflection for this appeared first in the fifteenth century of the Christian era. If you study history in its reality, not in the form of legends fabricated within our so-called science of history, you will find confirmed even externally what I have told you on the basis of occult knowledge about the Greek slave class and slavery, without whose existence the Greek culture we so greatly admire would be unthinkable. This can be conceived as existing in the social structure only when we know that this whole fourth post-Atlantean epoch was dominated by the striving for an external system of institutions in the field of law and religion, but not yet for any other than an instinctive economic order.

It is our own epoch, the time that begins in the fifteenth century of the Christian era, in which the demand was first made to see the whole three-membered human being as a picture also in his external social structure.

We must, therefore, study the three-membered human being today since, for the first time, he develops a threefold instinct to have in the external structure, in the community structure, what I have mentioned to you, that is, firstly, a spiritual sphere, which has its own administration and its own structure, secondly, a sphere of administration, of security and order—a political sphere—that is likewise self-sufficing, and, thirdly, an economic sphere, because our epoch demands for the first time this economic sphere in external organization. The demand to see the human being brought to realization and pictured in the social structure arises as an instinct in our epoch. This is the deeper reason why it is no longer a mere economic instinct that is at work. The economic class that has just been created, the proletariat, strives toward the goal of setting up the economic structure externally just as consciously as the fourth post-Atlantean epoch set up the administrative structure of the system of laws, and the third post-Atlantean epoch, the Egypto-Chaldean, the theocratic structure.

This is the inner reason. Only by giving attention to this inner reason can you judge rightly the conditions of the present time, and you will then understand why I had to present to you this threefold social order a week ago. It has certainly not been invented as programs are invented today by innumerable societies, but it is asserted on the basis of those forces that can be observed if we enter into the reality of evolution. We must come to the point, for time is pressing in that direction, when the impelling evolutionary forces within the development of humanity shall really be understood concretely and objectively. Time is pressing in that direction. People still struggle against this. It is really astonishing even if we observe those who make the furthest advance. A short time ago a book was published entitled Letters of a Lady to Walther Rathenau Concerning the Transcendence of Coming Events. All sorts of things are, of course, discussed in this book. For example:

It is the intention of this pamphlet to publish the essential intuitional contents of epistolary writings. Personal communications have been excluded since they have no immediate relationship to this. The result is the elimination of the fragmentary letter form, and thus also the constant repetition of the customary salutations and conclusions. A lady endowed as a seeress communicates here to the author of the book, Of Things To Come, her unusual experience and knowledge in regard to the new soul of the time and the new birth of the world. The powers of the future struggling today for a higher form of life manifest themselves here in an individual human destiny as the experienced reality of the new soul powers.

It is strange that many things are here spoken of, but one observes something curious. The lady discovers that man can develop higher spiritual faculties and that genuine realities can be perceived only by means of these. The book really comes to an end with this. Its last chapter is entitled, Cosmic Conclusions Regarding the World Soul and the Human Soul. But the book proceeds no further than to the insight that a person can possess higher faculties and not to the point of telling what he actually perceives by means of these higher faculties. It is as if one should say to a person, “You have eyes,” but then not bring him to the point of seeing anything of reality with them. A strange attitude is taken by certain persons with reference to spiritual science. They actually shrink back in terror even if we merely begin to speak of what can be seen. One should like to say to an author such as this lady, “You admit that higher faculties may evolve in the human being. Spiritual science exists in order to report what one sees precisely in connection with important matters if these higher faculties are evolved.” But people shrink back from this and do not want to listen.

You see how urgently the time impels us to reach the point where spiritual science wills to arrive, and how meanwhile there are jumbled together in people those things of which I spoke in the latest issue of the magazine, “Das Reich,” edited by Alexander von Bernus, in my article entitled Luciferic and Ahrimanic Elements In Our Contemporary History, in the Life of Man. This is all in such a tangled mass in the human soul that even those who admit that it is possible to see a spiritual reality as a genuine reality that can be beheld regard as a fantastic person anyone who speaks concretely of such a spiritual reality.

I have referred to this lady simply because she is not a unique phenomenon. What appears in her appears in many individuals. It is actually a characteristic of the time that even though people feel impelled to look beyond the ordinary external reality, they still withdraw and refrain from doing so. In this book for example, attention is called to a certain relationship between human beings and cosmic forces. But one should not try, let us say, to explain to these people the content of my book, An Outline of Occult Science, in which these relationships are expounded. They then shrink back. But we do not gain an insight into social matters, which must be considered as I have told you, if we simply admit that it is possible to see and do not consider what can be seen. It is of enormous importance to realize this. Otherwise, we shall always make the mistake already pointed out in the first sentences I uttered today of making an absolute principle out of something that is valid concretely for the individual single case—so that the question is asked, for example, in regard to the social problem, “How must human institutions be set up throughout the world?” But this question is really not presented to us. Human beings in various parts of the earth differ from one another, and in the future this differentiation will increase. Utterly unreal thoughts are expressed by one, therefore, who supposes that it is possible to proceed socially in the same way in Russia, China, South America, Germany or France. Such a one expresses absolute thoughts where individual and relative thoughts alone correspond with reality. It is extremely important that this fact be clearly seen.

During recent years, when it was so important that these things should be understood in the appropriate places, it has been a source of great distress to me that they have simply been misunderstood. You will recall that I drew a map here two years ago that is now becoming a reality, and I did not show this map only to you. I presented the map at that time to explain how the impelling forces are moving from a certain side, since it is a law that, if we know these impelling forces, if we take cognizance of them, if we grasp them in our consciousness, they may be corrected in a certain way and given a different direction. It is important that this should be comprehended.

But no one in a responsible position has taken cognizance of these things, or taken them earnestly in the real sense of the word. Present events certainly show that they should have been taken earnestly.

Now the fact that must be taken into consideration in connection with these things is that, in regard to certain fundamental laws of world evolution, nothing is actually known in a comprehensive way such that this knowledge is brought into external application anywhere except within certain secret societies of the English-speaking peoples. This is something that it is important to observe. Secret societies among other peoples are fundamentally only a matter of empty phrases. Secret societies among the English-speaking peoples, on the contrary, are sources from which truths are acquired in certain ways by means of which things can be guided politically. I may speak of them some time, but it would take us too far afield today. Thus we may say that those forces flowing from these secret societies into the politics of the West move actually in accordance with history. They reckon with the laws of historic evolution. It is not necessary that in external matters everything shall be correct even to the dotting of the last “i”. What matters is whether the person proceeds in accordance with historic evolution in an objective sense, or whether he proceeds as a dilettante following his arbitrary notions.

The politics of Central Europe, for example, were predominantly amateur politics, utterly without relation to any historical law. The politics that were not amateurish, that followed the facts—or, if I may use the crass expression, professional politics—were those of the English-speaking peoples, the British Empire and its annex, America. This is the great difference, and this is the significant point that must be clearly seen. Its importance lies in the fact that what was known in those circles is actually flowing into the world of reality. It also flows into the instincts behind those persons who occupy positions as political representatives, even if they act only out of political instincts. Behind these are the forces to which I am now referring. You need not inquire, therefore, whether Northcliff or even Lloyd George is initiated to one degree or another into these forces. This is not what counts. The decisive question is whether or not there is a possibility that they may conduct themselves in accordance with these forces. They need to take up in their instincts alone what runs parallel with these forces. But there is such a possibility; this does happen, and these forces act in the general direction of world history. This is the essential point, and it is possible to act successfully within the interrelationships of world history only when one really takes up into one's knowledge what is going on in this manner in the world. Otherwise, the other person, who is acting knowingly in accordance with world history, or causing such action, always has the power, while the one who knows nothing of it is powerless. It is in this way that power may master powerlessness. This is an external occurrence. But the victory of power over powerlessness in these things depends, in the last analysis, upon the difference' between knowing and not knowing. It is this that must be clearly grasped.

It is important also to see that the chaos now in its initial stages in the East and in Central Europe demonstrates how terrible everything was that pretended to bring political order into this chaos but has now been swept away. But what is happening now in Central and Eastern Europe demonstrates that nothing but dilettantism permeates public life in this region. In the West, among the English-speaking population of the world, there is dominant everywhere by no means dilettantism, but—if I may be permitted to use the crass expression—an expert consideration of these things.

This is what will determine the form of the history of the coming decades. No matter what lofty ideals may be set up in Central and Eastern Europe, no matter how much good will may be manifested in one or another set of programs, nothing will be accomplished in this way if people are not able to take their departure from the motive forces that are derived in the same or even in a better way from the other side of the threshold of consciousness, just as the motive forces of the West, of the English-speaking peoples, are taken in the last analysis from the other side of the threshold of consciousness.

Those friends who have heard these things discussed that I have presented to you for years precisely as I am doing today, have always made a mistake in this connection and it is generally difficult to persuade even our best friends to abandon it. This is the mistake of thinking, “But what good does it do to say to people that one thing or another has its origin in certain secret centers of the West? Surely it is necessary to convince them first that there are such secret societies.” It has often been thought that the most important thing would be to awaken the conviction that such secret societies exist, but this is not what should receive primary consideration. You will meet with little response if you undertake to convince statesmen of the calibre of a Kuhlmann, let us say, that there are secret societies in possession of such impelling forces, but that is by no means the important point. Indeed, it is a blunder when this is considered fundamental. The fact that this is considered fundamental is due to the affectation of mystery brought over from the bad habits of the old Theosophical Society and still to be found even among anthroposophists. If anyone utters the word secret or occult and is able to refer to anything whatsoever that is secret or occult, what an altogether special distinction he thus confers upon himself! But this is not something that can produce favorable results when we are dealing with external realities. What matters is that we shall show how things occur and simply point out what anyone can understand with his sound common sense. Within those societies dealing with such occult truths as have a bearing upon reality, the principle was observed, for example, that after the Empire of the Russian Czar had been overthrown for the benefit of the Russian people, a political course would have to be pursued that would provide an opportunity to undertake socialistic experiments in Russia. People will not undertake them in Western countries because in those regions they are not considered advantageous or desirable.

So long as I simply assert that this has been stated in secret societies, it may be doubted. But, if it is pointed out that the whole direction of politics is such that this principle evidently underlies it, people are then within reality with their ordinary sound common sense. The important matter is that a feeling for reality should be awakened.

What has been developed in Russia is, fundamentally, only a realization of what has been purposed in the West. The fact that up to the present time only unskillful socialistic experiments are carried out by non-Englishmen, that things come to realization by all sorts of roundabout paths, is so well-known by these societies that they suffer no serious headaches because of them. They know that the important thing is to bring these countries to the point where socialistic experiments become unavoidable. If these are then conducted in connection with ignorance of the nature of a social order, one then actually forms the social order related to these lands and makes oneself the director of the socialistic experiment.

You see, the holding back of a certain kind of occult knowledge that is carefully practiced in these centers gives rise to enormous power. The opposite side cannot save itself in any way from this power except by acquiring this knowledge and confronting this power with it.

In this field there can be no discussion of guilt or innocence. Here we must speak simply of the inevitable, of things that must come to pass because they already exist under the surface, because they are at work in the realm of forces that are not yet phenomena. They are already forces, however, and will become phenomena.

Surely I need scarcely emphasize that I hold fast to what I have always asserted. The real being of the German people cannot perish. This real being of the German people must search for its path but it is important that it shall be able to find its path, that it shall not follow false roads in its search, and shall not search in ways where there is no knowledge. Do not interpret, therefore, what I shall now say in such a sense as to make it in the least contradictory of what I have asserted over a period of years. Things always have two sides and what I have indicated to you is, in large measure, a matter of the will. It is possible for this to be paralyzed if forces are brought into play also from the opposite side but these forces must rest upon knowledge, not upon an amateurish lack of it.

You see the essence of the thing is that if no resistance is raised from the East, and by the East I mean the whole region lying from the Rhine eastward even into Asia, British world domination will develop after the destruction of the Roman-Latin French element in the way intended by those forces that I have indicated once more today, as I have frequently done already, as lying behind the instincts. For this reason it is important that, in dealing with what Woodrow Wilson says, we shall not employ merely that kind of thinking generally developed in people today. Rather, what appears only in the instincts even in such a person as Woodrow Wilson should be grasped by means of a deeper knowledge. When formulated into all kinds of maxims, this infatuates people, and when it comes from Wilson's mind, infatuates for the sole reason that his mind is possessed in a certain way by subconscious forces.

The really important fact is that in groups in the West who keep their knowledge secret the greatest pains are taken to see that things shall develop in such a way as to insure under all circumstances the mastery of the West over the East. Whatever people may say today on the basis of their consciousness, the goal striven for is to establish a caste of masters in the West and a caste of economic slaves in the East, beginning with the Rhine and extending eastward all the way into Asia. This does not mean a caste of slaves in the ancient Greek sense, but a caste of economic slaves organized in a socialistic way to take up all sorts of impossibilities in the social structure that then shall not be applied among the English-speaking peoples. The essence of the matter is to make the English-speaking peoples into a population of masters of the world.

Now this is rightly thought out from that side in the most comprehensive sense. I now reach the proper place for the explanation of something that I beg you really to receive in full awareness of the fact that if such assertions are made today, they are made under the pressure and urgency of contemporary events and must really not be received except in an earnest sense. What I am here asserting is most carefully kept secret by the centers in the West to which I have often referred. It is considered obvious in the West that the people of the East shall not be permitted to know anything of these matters that these Western persons possess in the form of knowledge, as I have already said, through methods I may later discuss. They possess these things as knowledge in such a way that, since the others are not to know of them, world mastery shall be established through their help. This is the only possible method for attaining their ends.

Beginning with this fifth post-Atlantean epoch, definite forces will become prominent in the evolution of humanity. Human evolution is, of course, moving forward. Within the limits of the brief span of time that comes under the survey of anthropology or history in the field of external materialistic science, it is never possible to form a judgment regarding the forces manifest in the evolution of humanity. Little in the external process of development has undergone any change within this limited span of time. On the basis of this knowledge no one knows, for example, how utterly different things looked, even in the second epoch, not to mention the first or others still farther back. This can be known only through spiritual science. Only through spiritual science, likewise, is it possible to indicate the forces that will develop in future in a wholly elemental manner out of the nature of man. The fact that such forces, which will transform life on earth, will develop out of the human being is known in those secret centers. It is this that is concealed from the East by people in the West who intend to retain it themselves. It is known, moreover, that these capacities, possessed by man today only in their very first beginning, will be threefold in their nature. They will evolve out of the nature of man in the same way in which other capacities have come into existence in the course of humanity's evolution.

This threefold capacity, of which every knowing person within these secret circles speaks—these three capacities that will evolve in human nature, I must make intelligible to you in the following way. First, there are the capacities having to do with so-called material occultism. By means of this capacity—and this is precisely the ideal of British secret societies—certain social forms at present basic within the industrial system shall be set up on an entirely different foundation. Every knowing member of these secret circles is aware that, solely by means of certain capacities that are still latent but evolving in man, and with the help of the law of harmonious oscillations, machines and mechanical constructions and other things can be set in motion. A small indication is to be found in what I connected with the person of Strader in my Mystery Dramas.

These things are at present in process of development. They are guarded as secrets within those secret circles in the field of material occultism. Motors can be set in motion, into activity, by an insignificant human influence through a knowledge of the corresponding curve of oscillation. By means of this principle it will be possible to substitute merely mechanical forces for human forces in many things. The number of human beings on the earth today in actual fact is 1,400,000,000. Labor is performed however, not only by these 1,400,000,000 persons—as I once explained here—but so much labor is performed in a merely mechanical way that we say the earth is really inhabited by 2,000,000,000 persons. The others are simply machines. That is, if the work that is done by machines had to be done by people without machines, it would be necessary to have 600,000,000 more persons on the earth. If what I am now discussing with you under the name of mechanistic occultism enters into the field of practical action, which is the ideal of those secret centers, it will be possible to accomplish the work not only of 500,000,000 or 600,000,000 but of 1,080,000,000 persons. The possibility will thus come about of rendering unnecessary nine-tenths of the work of individuals within the regions of the English-speaking peoples. Mechanistic occultism will not only render it possible to do without nine-tenths of the labor still performed at present by human hands, but will give the possibility also of paralyzing every uprising attempted by the then dissatisfied masses of humanity.

The capacity to set motors in motion according to the laws of reciprocal oscillations will develop on a great scale among the English-speaking peoples. This is known in their secret circles, and is counted upon as the means whereby the mastery over the rest of the population of the earth shall be achieved even in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Something else is known also in those circles. It is known that there are two other capacities that will likewise develop. One, which I shall venture to call the eugenic capacity, will evolve primarily among people of the East, of Russia and the Asiatic hinterland. It is also known in those secret circles of the West that this eugenic occultism will not evolve out of the inborn potentialities of the English-speaking peoples, but only of the inborn potentialities belonging precisely to the Asiatic and the Russian populations. These facts are known in the secret circles of the West. They are taken into account and are looked upon as constituting certain motive forces that must become active in future evolution.

By the eugenic capacity I mean the removal of the reproduction of human beings from the sphere of mere arbitrary impulse and accident. Among the peoples of the East there will gradually develop a brilliantly clear knowledge as to how the laws of population, the laws of peopling the earth, must run parallel with certain cosmic phenomena. From this information they will know that, if conception is brought about in accord with certain constellations of the stars, opportunities will thus be given for souls that are either good or evil in their natures to obtain access for earthly incarnation. This capacity will be acquired only by those individuals who constitute the continuation of races, the continuation in the blood stream, of the Asiatic population. They will be able simply to see in detail how what works today chaotically and arbitrarily in conception and birth can be brought into harmony with the great laws of the cosmos in individual concrete cases. Here abstract laws are of no avail. What will be acquired is a concrete single capacity in which it will be known in individual cases whether or not a conception should occur at a particular time.

This knowledge, which will make it possible to bring down from the heavens the impelling forces for the moralizing or demoralizing of the earth through the nature of man himself, this special capacity evolves as a continuation of the blood capacity in the races of the East. What evolves as a capacity there I call eugenic occultism. This is the second capacity—the capacity that will prevent the evolution of humanity as regards conception and birth from taking its course according to arbitrary impulses, and more or less accidentally. I beg you to consider the enormous social consequences, the enormous social motive forces that enter here! These capacities are latent. It is well known in those secret circles of the English-speaking peoples that these capacities will evolve among the peoples of the East. They know that they themselves will not possess these capacities within their own potentialities bestowed upon them through birth. They know that the earth could not reach its goal, could not pass over from earth to Jupiter—indeed, they know that the earth would within a relatively short time diverge from the path leading to its goal if only the forces belonging to the West should be employed. It would gradually come about that only a soulless population could evolve in the West, a population that would be as soulless as possible. This is known. For this reason these people endeavor to develop within their own circles, through their capacities, mechanistic occultism. The endeavor is also made to establish a mastery over those peoples who will develop eugenic occultism. Every instructed person in the circles of the West says, for example, “It is necessary that we rule over India for the reason that only through the continuation of what comes out of Indian bodies—when this unites with what tends in the West in a wholly different direction, in the direction of mechanistic occultism—can bodies come into existence in which souls will be able to incarnate in future who will carry the earth over to its future evolutionary stages.” The English-speaking occultists know that they cannot depend upon the bodies that come out of the fundamental character of their own people, and so they strive to possess the mastery over a people who will provide bodies with the help of which the evolution of the earth may be carried forward in the future.

The American occultists know that they can never carry over into the future what they will to carry over unless they nurture what will develop in the form of bodies for the future within the Russian population through its eugenic occult potentialities, unless they gain the mastery of this, so that a social union can gradually come into existence between their own decadent race characteristics and the germinating psychic race characteristics of European Russia.

I must speak to you also regarding a third capacity, which is latent today but which will evolve. This is what I venture to call the hygienic occult capacity. Now we have all three: the materialistic occult capacity, the eugenic occult capacity, and the hygienic occult capacity. This hygienic occult capacity is well on its way and will not be long, relatively speaking, in arriving. This capacity will come to maturity simply through the insight that human life, in its course from birth to death, progresses in a manner identical with the process of an illness. Processes of illnesses are, in other words, only special and radical transmutations of the quite ordinary, normal life process taking its course between birth and death, except that we bear within ourselves not only the forces that create illness but also those that heal. These healing forces, as every occultist knows, are precisely the same as those that are applied when a person acquires occult capacities, in which case these forces are transmuted into the forces of knowledge. The healing power innate in the human organism, when transmuted into knowledge, gives occult forms of knowledge.

Now, every knowing person in the Western circles is aware that materialistic medicine will have no basis in the future. As soon as the hygienic occult capacities evolve, a person will need no external material medicine, but the possibility will exist of treating prophylactically in a psychic way to prevent those illnesses that do not arise through karmic causes because karmic illnesses cannot be influenced. Everything in this respect will change. This seems at present like a mere fantasy, but it is actually something that will soon come about. Now, the situation is such that these three faculties will not come into existence equally among all the peoples of the earth. Indeed, you have already seen the differentiation. This differentiation has to do, naturally, only with the bodies and not with the souls, which always pass, of course, from race to race, from people to people. But with the bodies this differentiation has much to do. From the bodies of the English-speaking peoples the possibility of developing eugenic occult capacities in the future through birth can never arise. It is precisely in the West that these will be applied, but the manner in which they will be applied will be that a mastery will be established over the Eastern lands, and marriages will be brought about between people of the West and people of the East. Thus use will be made of what can be learned only from the people of the East.

The potentiality of hygienic occult capacities is present in special measure among the people of the Central countries. English-speaking people cannot acquire the hygienic occult capacities through their inborn potentialities, but they can acquire these capacities in their development in the course of time between birth and death. These can become acquired characteristics during that time. In the case of the population occupying the area approximately eastward from the Rhine and all the way into Asia, these capacities will be present on the basis of birth. The population of the Central countries cannot acquire the eugenic occult potentialities through birth, but may acquire them in the course of their lives if they become apprentices of the people of the East. It is in this way that these capacities will be distributed. The people of the East will have not the least capacity for material occultism; they will be able to receive this only when it is given to them, when it is not kept secret from them. It will always be possible to keep it secret, especially when the others are so stupid as not to believe in things that are asserted by a person who is in a position to see into them. In other words the people of the East and those of the Central countries will have to receive material occultism from the West. They will receive its benefits, its products. Hygienic occultism will develop primarily in the Central countries, and eugenic occultism in the Eastern lands. It will be necessary, however, for intercommunication to exist between people. This is something that must be taken up into the impelling forces of the social order of the future. It makes it imperative for people to see that they will be able to live in future throughout the world only as total human beings. If an American should wish to live only as an American, although he would be able to achieve the loftiest material results, he would condemn himself to the fate of never progressing beyond earthly evolution. If he should not seek social relationships with the East, he would condemn himself to being bound within the earthly sphere after a certain incarnation, haunting the sphere of the earth like a ghost. The earth would be drawn away from its cosmic connections, and all these souls would have to be like ghosts. Correspondingly, if the people of the East should not take up the materialism of the West with their eugenic occult capacities that pull down the earth, the Eastern man would lose the earth. He would be drawn into some sort of mere psychic-spiritual evolution, and he would lose the earthly evolution. The earth would sink away under him as it were, and he would not be able to possess the fruit of the earthly evolution.

Mutual confidence among men in a profound inner sense is what must come about. This is manifest through their remarkable future evolution.

Within the intelligent minds of those centers of the West, a purpose exists to foster things only in the way in which they can foster them. It is not the business of Westerners to pay particular attention to what is evolving in the East from the viewpoint of the Eastern person; what evolves among others must simply be left to those others.

This is something that must be inscribed deeply upon our souls, that we arrive at a point here where guilt or innocence or similar concepts lose their significance, where the fact to bear in mind is that we must take these things in with the utmost earnestness, in the profoundest sense of the word, for the reason that these things embody a knowledge that alone is capable of passing over into the guidance of humanity in the future.

These things are of great importance, and it is important that we should view them in a certain way. Just consider that I have told you that three kinds of occult capacities will evolve and will intertwine over the entire earth, differentiated according to different peoples, in harmony with those of the West, of the Central countries, and of the East. I have said, indeed, that they will so intertwine that the people of the West will possess the potentialities of material occultism from birth, but will be able to acquire hygienic occultism; that those of the Middle countries will possess through birth primarily the potentiality for hygienic occultism, but will be able to acquire for themselves—if it is given to them—a material occultism from the West and a eugenic from the East; that those of the East will possess from birth the potentiality for eugenic occultism, but will be able to acquire for themselves from the Middle countries hygienic occultism.

These capacities appear differentiated, distributed among the humanity of the world, but at the same time in such a way that they intertwine. Through this intertwining will the future social bond of community life be determined throughout the world. But there are hindrances against the development of these capacities. These hindrances are manifold in character, and their action is really complicated.

For example, in the case of the people of the Central countries and the Eastern lands it is an important hindrance to the evolution of these capacities, especially their evolution in a knowing way, when strong antipathies against the people of the Western countries are active within them. Then these things cannot be viewed objectively. This is a hindrance in the evolution of these capacities.

But the potentiality of developing another occult capacity is also even strengthened in a certain way if it is developed out of a certain instinct of hatred. This is a strange phenomenon. We often ask ourselves, and we are dealing here with something that must be considered quite objectively, why such senseless abuse has been practiced in the Western countries. This also comes out of the instinct tending toward these capacities. For what constitutes the profoundest impelling forces in Western occultism is fostered by nothing more powerfully than by the development of feelings that are untrue but are sensed as in some way holy, and that can represent the people of the East and especially those of the Central countries as barbarians. The potentialities of material occultism, for example, are fostered by the attitude of mind constituting the so-called crusading temperament in America. This consists in the feeling that America is called to spread over the whole earth freedom and justice and I know not what other beautiful things. Of course, the people there believe that. What I am saying here has nothing to do with fault finding. The people believe that they are engaged in a crusade, but this belief in something false constitutes a support working in a certain direction. If a person should consciously make an untrue statement, he would not have this support. For this reason, what is now happening is tremendously helpful on the one side and a hindrance on the other in the development of those capacities that we must assert to be still latent at the present time in the case of most individuals who bear within themselves the will toward evolution in the future and are destined to influence profoundly the social structure of humanity.

Just think how everything that is happening at the present time is rendered luminous and transparent with understanding and insight when you fix your attention upon those backgrounds, and realize clearly that the subconscious instincts dealt with in our reflections lie back of everything that is constantly uttered today in a conscious way.

The most important fact in this connection, however, is that it is precisely the English-speaking peoples who, by reason of quite special evolutionary processes, possess occult centers where these things are known.

It is also known what capacities they will possess in future as members of the English-speaking population, and what capacities they will lack. They know how they must arrange the social structure in order that they may be able to subject to their purposes what is deficient in them.

It is the instincts that work in the direction of such things, and these instincts have already exerted their influence. They have exerted an enormous influence, a highly significant influence.

One especially useful means that can be set in motion by Western occultism when things are to be directed into the wrong channels consists in so influencing the East that it shall continue to hold fast in future to its ancient inclination toward the development of religion alone without science. The leaders of Western secret circles will take pains to see that nothing shall exist in their own regions constituting mere religion or mere science, but that there shall be a synthesis of both, the reciprocal influence of knowledge and faith. They will also take pains to see that this science shall work only in secret, that it shall permeate, for example, only the more important affairs of humanity and the political guidance of the world through the achievement of world dominion by the British. Contrariwise, if the East refrains as completely as possible from permeating religious conceptions with science, this will be enormously helpful in the spread of this world dominion.

Now just consider how everything Russian favors precisely this Western effort. The aspiration to be pious still continues in Russia, but not an aspiration to permeate the content of this piety with a science of the spirit. The aspiration remains in a certain way within an unclear mysticism, which would constitute an excellent means for supporting the dominion over the East that is willed by the West.

From another point of view, what is undertaken is to render science, which belongs to the earth, as theistic as possible. Just here the future of the English-speaking peoples has been most fruitful in recent times. They have achieved something tremendous by spreading throughout the world, in a fundamental sense, their scientific trend, that is, science void of religion, atheistic science. This has become the ruling power over the whole earth. Goetheanism, which is the opposite of this, quite consciously its opposite, could not develop even in the country of Goethe himself. It is an almost unknown affair in Goethe's own land! The dominating intellect in science today is kept completely harmonious with what is intended to become publicly manifest as the external expression of that science practiced by those circles in secret. They are, however, practiced there as a synthesis between science and religion. Thus there is atheistic science for the external world, but for the inner circles that are to guide the course of world events there is a science that also constitutes religion, and a religion constituting science.

The East can be kept in hand best of all if a religion without science can be maintained there. The Central countries can be kept in hand best if there can be grafted upon them a science void of religion, since religion cannot be grafted upon them. These things are aided in full consciousness by those who constitute the knowing ones within the circles we have mentioned, and instinctively by the others. Since the ruling powers of the Central countries, surviving from ancient times, have been swept away, there is nothing at present in the Central countries that can be put in their place. This makes it extraordinarily difficult, too, to form a correct judgment of the whole state of things at present in its world-historical setting. The whole world has been occupied with the question of guilt and of causes in connection with this war catastrophe. But all things will be illuminated only when we consider them against the background of the effective forces that do not come to manifestation in the external phenomena. Precisely for the reasons that have been set forth today, it is not possible to form opinions in regard to these things according to the categories, the thought categories, within which judgments are generally formed when the question of guilt or innocence is raised.

I am fully aware that at the present time, when Wilson has actually been called the Pope of the twentieth century, not in a disparaging but in an approving sense on the ground that he is justifiably the lay Pope of the twentieth century—I am well aware that even in the Central countries a confused judgment will gradually develop in regard to the course of this “war,” as it is called, for the reason that the correct statements of the questions are overlooked. Every document will confirm what I am saying, but they must be viewed in the light of what underlies them. It is most of all necessary to be able to form a judgment, which cannot be reached in this case by anyone except the person who can throw some light upon these things from beyond the threshold. I fear that the events now occurring day by day, we might say, will cause increasingly false methods of judgment to become prevalent, that an increasingly small number of persons will be inclined to deal with the questions in such a way as to produce fruitful results. I suppose that people will have curious ideas when they are informed now, for example, by the press—this might or might not be true—that the abdicated German Kaiser says, “I was really not even present when the war began; I was really not present at all. This was done by Bethman and Jagow! They did this.” (You have probably read this in the most recent papers.)

It is, naturally, unheard of that such a statement has been made by this mouth, obviously unheard of! But secretly influenced judgments, which are pushed into false ways by such things, are present everywhere. You see, what it-is necessary to bear in mind in this connection is that we must really give thorough consideration to the facts in order to be able to state the right questions. If we realize this, we shall then see that we should not view so superficially as is generally done the profound, tragic necessity lying at the bottom of this catastrophe. Even the superficial events must not be viewed superficially.

I will call your attention to an instance and you will see immediately why I select such an individual detail. Some time ago I undertook to make it clear to you that many sequences of events, sequences of facts, took place in Germany that beyond doubt might really have led to the war but were then broken off and did not lead to the war, whereas what actually led to the war did not have any real connection with these other things. I will not repeat today what I have already said to you in this connection. I should like, however, to have you consider one thing in order that you may see how in the course of world history, things that serve as external symptoms coincide, we might say, whereas the great affairs of which I have spoken to you today are behind these.

The question might be raised whether the whole war catastrophe, as it has come about since July or August 1914, might under certain circumstances have taken a different course. I shall not enter at present into the question whether or not this catastrophe as such could have been avoided—we shall have to turn to another page for that—but I will raise the question whether this catastrophe might have taken a different course.

Now, it might have taken a different course. This is entirely conceivable although there is nothing more than a methodological value in such statements after the event. It is entirely conceivable, both on the basis of the events and also on the basis of the occult backgrounds, that the whole catastrophe might have taken a different course. We have to form judgments according to a series of strata. What I am saying is valid only as regards a certain stratum of the facts. Within this stratum of the facts, something like the following might be arrived at in our judgment. We might say that it is conceivable that the war might have begun in 1914 in such a way that the German army would have marched toward the East and there would have been a time of waiting to see whether a beginning of war in the East would have led likewise to war in the West. It is conceivable that the main body of the German army might have been led against Russia and a mere defensive position taken up in the West, and that the Germans would then have waited to see whether or not the French, who were not bound in such a case by any treaty, would have attacked. The French would have had no obligation imposed upon them by a treaty at that moment if there had been no declaration of war in the East but the Germans had simply waited for the Russian armies actually to attack. They would certainly have attacked; there can be no doubt that they would have attacked. I do not deny that a different hypothesis might have been valid five years earlier, pointing in a different direction, but this was no longer possible in 1914. Within this stratum of the facts it is possible to conceive that the war might have taken its main direction toward the East. This might have been possible.

Yet, as things were, it was impossible. In spite of everything, it was still actually impossible for the reason that there was no plan of campaign with reference to the East. The idea had never been conceived that the event, the casus belli, could take place in any other way than that Germany would be provoked into an attack against Russia, and that the condition attaching to the treaty between Russia and France would thus apply to France, so that Germany would have to wage a war on two fronts. Under the influence of the axiom that had taken form in the German system of strategy from the beginning of the twentieth century, every consideration began with the idea that this war on two fronts could not be conducted in any other way than offensively. The only plan of campaign existing was to force France into a separate peace by means of a sudden invasion toward the West through Belgium—this was certainly an illusion, but such illusions existed—and then to hurl the masses of the army toward the East.

Now, I beg you to consider the nature of such a plan of strategy. Every detail for every day is calculated. There is an exact calculation as to how long it is permissible to wait from the day when the Russian general mobilization occurs until the first command is given for German mobilization, which cannot then be delayed but must continue further, because the Russian general mobilization constitutes the first impetus. On the day. thereafter, the second day thereafter, and the third day thereafter, this must take place. If there is a delay for a single day after the Russian general mobilization, the entire plan is thrown into confusion and can no longer be carried out. It is this that I beg you to consider. Such a thing as this therewith took its course, which was actually decisive at a moment when there was absolutely no Central European policy. This is naturally the essential point: there was no Central European policy. For von Bethman still continues today to talk nonsense. People were in despair when Bethman uttered his most unbelievable and impossible statements in the German Reichstag, and he continues still to utter them. There was absolutely no policy, but only strategy, but a strategy developed on the basis of one perfectly definite contingent event. Here it was not possible to change anything. Here nothing could be changed even with respect to the hour.

In other words, I beg you to reflect that it was not necessary according to the external causative circumstances for anyone in Germany to wish for a war; it had to occur in any case. It was not at all necessary to wish for it. I beg you to give attention to this fact. It had to begin for the simple reason that, the moment Russia issued the order for general mobilization, the thought arose in the mind of the German Commander-in-Chief, quite automatically and inevitably, “Now I must mobilize.” From that point on, everything proceeded automatically. This by no means occurred for the reason that it had been willed. It occurred for the reason that it had been prepared years before.

The attack through Belgium against France was to follow quite automatically upon the Russian general mobilization because this was considered the only rational thing to do. The Kaiser could not be told this for the reason, as I have already related to you, that people knew he was so indiscreet that, if this were said to him today, the whole world would know it tomorrow. The fact that the attack was to be through Belgium he learned first at the actual time of mobilization. Such things as this have happened many times. I beg you to give consideration to these things, and you will then say to yourselves that it was certainly not at all necessary for anyone inside Germany to will it. The war had to occur. I say this, however, on the condition that we shall remain within this stratum of facts. You may naturally pass over to a different stratum of the facts, but there you become involved in complicated questions.

The facts are such that something great that becomes a catastrophe for humanity, reminds us of the story of the good Rector Kaltenbrunner that I related to you in connection with Hamerling. Recall how I related this to you. I said to you that, if we let our minds rest upon the poetic personality of Robert Hamerling and understand him, we shall say to ourselves that what is effective in this personality is due in great measure to the fact that he went to Trieste at a certain definite time as a teacher in a German secondary school and that he was able to go from there on vacations to Venice. In other words, that he came to the shore of the Adriatic. The whole inner structure of soul of this Hamerling is due to the fact that he was able to live in Trieste on the Adriatic, as a teacher in a secondary school. This was the only thing he could do according to the preceding course of his development. How did he happen to go there? I told you that while he was a substitute teacher in Graz, he wrote an application for a position that had become vacant in Budapest. Now, just consider this. He sent an application there. If the official had received this and approved it, Hamerling would have spent the whole ten years in Budapest. His entire poetic personality would have been eliminated; it would not have existed. Anyone who knows this personality knows that this is true. How did it come about that he did not go to Budapest, but to Trieste? The good Rector Kaltenbrunner to whom the application had first to be delivered forgot all about the matter and left the application in his desk drawer so long that the position in Budapest was filled. After the position was filled and Hamerling said, “Good Heavens! I should have been so happy to get that position in Budapest!” the good Rector Kaltenbrunner blushed and said, “Bless my soul! I completely forgot your application. It is still lying in my desk drawer.” So Hamerling was saved from going to Budapest. The next time that Hamerling applied for a position in Trieste, the good Rector Kaltenbrunner, in the light of the preceding occurrence, did not forget to pass on the application. Hamerling came to Trieste and thereby became the Hamerling. Now I ask you whether the good Rector Kaltenbrunner gave Hamerling his place in the world as a poet. Yet there is no other primary cause among the external phenomena to explain this except that Hamerling became the real Hamerling through the fact that the good Kaltenbrunner, Rector in Graz in Steiermark, blundered. The simple fact is that it is possible to get under the surface of things only when we practice symptomatology. This guides us to the correct estimate of the external phenomena and to seeing what stands behind the symptoms. This is the really important point. This is what I should like to arrive at more and more.

When we survey the catastrophe of the present time, it is by no means a simple matter to find our way out of all the confusion. Just consider the great difficulty we face. Suppose that Lord Grey should undertake to prove, on the basis of the external documents alone, that he was entirely free of blame in connection with the outbreak of the war. Of course, this is the easiest thing in the world to prove. On the basis of the external documents it is possible to present the most convincing evidence that the British Government was not in any way to blame for the outbreak of this war. But what matters in all cases is the question as to how much weight attaches to this evidence. You can get under the surface of these things only if you state the question as I have stated it here before you for a number of years. “Would it have been possible, for example, for the British Government to prevent the invasion of Belgium?” Then you must say, “Yes, it would have been able to do so.” That is just what I demanded in my Memorandum, that unadorned facts should be presented to the world. These would naturally have brought it about that the gentleman who has now deserted and gone to Holland would even then have been obliged in some way to vanish. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that my Memorandum has received so little favorable response even in the case of those who could have formed a judgment of it. But I demanded that the events should be narrated from minute to minute—unadorned, without any coloring—the events that occurred at the same time in Berlin and in London between 4:30 Saturday afternoon—Saturday afternoon, you know, mobilization was ordered in Berlin at about 4:30, between 4:30 on Saturday afternoon and 10:30 that night. These decisive events, into which nothing enters of all those things about which the world has talked, afford the proof if they are simply narrated, that it would have been possible for the British Government to prevent the invasion of Belgium. It was not prevented. For that reason at 10:30 Saturday night, the only command to which His Majesty had aroused himself, contrary to the will of German strategy, this only command, that the army should be halted, that it should not be made to march toward the West but should be made to take a defensive position in the West—this sole order was countermanded at about 10:30 Saturday night, and the old strategy was adhered to. But the events must, then, be truly related from minute to minute, the facts merely narrated, which occurred between Saturday afternoon at 4:30 and Saturday night at approximately 10:30. From this there will then naturally result an entirely different picture. Most important of all it will lead to the correct formulation of questions.

It is to be feared that the public in all parts of the world will permit itself to be influenced by what is discovered in the archives, but the particular decisive facts that occurred between 4:30 on Saturday afternoon and 10:30 Saturday night, will probably never find their way out of the archives to the world. They have apparently never even been written down; that is, they have actually been written down but in such a way that the writings will never be found in the archives.

You see it is discretion in forming judgments that must also be attained. If this discretion in forming judgments can be gained it will be a great help toward the development of those latent capacities of which I have spoken to you today, which must develop in the future of humanity, differentiated in a threefold way in the various parts of the world. You will then discover that what I described to you a week ago as the only justifiable solution of the social problem so far as we can speak today in the sense indicated of such a solution, was by no means developed from mere intellectual ideas as an abstract program.

The nature of man is complicated, and very much of what actually goes on within the human being remains more or less beneath the threshold of consciousness, merely sending its effects up into consciousness. True self-knowledge cannot be won without first obtaining insight into the working of the sub-consciousness weaving below the surface in the impulses of soul. These, it could be said, move in the depths of the ocean of consciousness and come to the surface only in the wake of the waves they create. Ordinary consciousness can perceive only the waves that rise to the surface, and on the whole one is not capable of understanding their significance, so true self-knowledge is not possible. Merely pondering on what is washed up into consciousness does not lead to self-knowledge; for things in the depths of the soul often differ greatly from what they become in ordinary, everyday consciousness. Today we shall look a little into this nature of man in order to gain, from this point of view, an idea of how the subconscious soul-impulses in the human being really work.

In this field we can, of course, to a greater or lesser extent, speak only in pictures. But if you bring together much of what we have hitherto discussed within our Anthroposophical Movement, you will be able to understand the realities that want to speak through the pictures. We can say: The invisible nature of man, his ego, his astral body, his etheric body, work through his visible nature, so what is not manifest works through what is manifest. However, the manner in which what is evident works through what is not evident is very complicated. But if we work our way bit by bit through the various parts of this complicated process, and place them all together, we shall, in the end, attain an overall view of the being of man. Even this, though, will always remain incomplete, for the being of man is infinitely complex. But at least we can gain a certain basic knowledge of human nature as a valid foundation for self-knowledge.

Today we shall examine how the separate components of man's nature express themselves in a more or less pictorial or formalized manner through physical life. Here is a human being. To illustrate what I want to tell you, I shall start with what we recognize for earthly man as the aspect of which we are conscious: the ego. I must emphasize that pictorial explanations can very easily lead to misunderstandings, because things said earlier seem to contradict other things said later. Follow carefully, and you will soon notice that such contradictions are, in fact, non-existent.

So let us start with the ego-nature of man, with that component we call our ego. This ego-nature is, of course, entirely super-sensible; it is the most super-sensible part we have as yet acquired, but it works through the physical. In the intellectualistic sense the ego works in our physical being chiefly through the nervous system which is called the system of ganglia, the nervous system radiating from the solar plexus. Diagrammatically we can indicate this nervous system, this system of ganglia, this system of the solar plexus, thus (see diagram, dark shading). It is active in a way which, at first glance, does not appear to have much to do with what, in a materialistic sense, we could call the life of the nerves. Yet it is the actual point of contact for real ego-activity. This is not a contradiction of the fact that when we begin to see ourselves spiritually, we have to seek the centre of the ego in the head. Since the ego-component of the human being is super-sensible, the point at which we experience our ego is not the same as the point at which it chiefly works in us.

We must be quite clear what we mean when we say: The ego works through the point of contact of the solar plexus. What it means is this: The ego itself is equipped with only a very dull consciousness. The ego-thought is not the same as the ego. The ego-thought is what is washed up into consciousness, but the ego-thought is not the real ego. The real ego intervenes as a formative force in the whole human organism through the solar plexus.

Certainly you can say that the ego distributes itself over the whole body. But its main point of contact, where it particularly intervenes in the formative element of the human organism, is the solar plexus. A better expression would be the system of ganglia, because all the ramifications are part of this process—the system of ganglia. It is a process that lives in the subconscious and works in this system of ganglia. Since the system of ganglia plays its part in the circulation of blood as well, this does not contradict the fact that the ego expresses itself in the blood. The exact meaning of everything that is said must be considered. It is one thing to say: The ego intervenes through the system of ganglia in the formative forces and in all the life processes of the organism. But something else is meant when we say: The blood with its circulation is an expression of the ego in the human being. The nature of the human being is, as I said, complicated.

To understand the significance of what has been said, it will be useful to answer the following question: What is the relationship of the ego with the system of ganglia and all that is connected with it? How is this ego anchored, as it were, in the abdominal organs of the human being?

When the human being is in a normal state of health, the ego is chained to the solar plexus and all that is connected with it. It is bound by the solar plexus. What does this mean? This human ego, given to man during the course of earthly evolution as a gift from the Spirits of Form, has been, as we know, subjected to the temptation of Lucifer. The ego, as it now exists in man, and because it has been infected by luciferic forces, would be a bearer of evil forces. The truth of this fact must definitely be recognized. The ego is not a bearer of evil forces because of its own nature, but because it has become infected with luciferic forces through the temptation by Lucifer; it is in fact the bearer of truly evil forces, forces which, because of the luciferic infection, tend to distort the thought life of the ego towards evil. Since the moment when the ego was given to him, man has been able to think. If there had been no luciferic temptation, man would think only good thoughts about everythiug. But as the luciferic temptation did, in fact, take place, the ego does not think good thoughts, but thoughts infected by Lucifer. This is a fact of earthly evolution: the ego is malicious and dastardly. It thinks only of showing itself in a good light and consigning everything else to the shadow. It is infected with all kinds of egoisms. This is how it is, because it is infected by Lucifer.

Now the system of ganglia, the solar plexus, is something in man that has come over from the Moon incarnation of the earth. It is a kind of house for the ego; the ego fits into it in a certain way. In fact, it can be held a prisoner there. So we have the following state of affairs: Because of its luciferic infection, the ego tends all the time to behave in a dastardly, lying manner and place itself in the light, while consigning everything else to the shade. But it is held prisoner by the nervous system of the abdomen. There it has to behave itself. By means of the nervous system of the abdomen the properly progressing forces, which have come to us from ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon, compel the ego not to be a demon in the bad sense of the word. So the manner in which we bear our ego within us is to have it bound by the organs of the abdomen.

Assume now that these abdominal organs are unhealthy in some way, or not in a normal state. Not to be in a normal state means not to want to take in fully what fits into them spiritually, what spiritually belongs to them. The ego can be somewhat freer in its activity if the abdominal organs are not quite healthy. If this freeing is brought about by some physical hyperactivity, this can express itself in the human being in that the ego is let loose on the external world, instead of remaining bound. When the ego behaves freely in this way, we have a case of psychological illness: the human being displays the characteristics of the ego infected by Lucifer. The characteristics of the ego of which I have spoken then make their appearance. There is certainly no need to be a materialist in order to understand fully the manner in which the spiritual—in this case the ego—can be bound to physical organs in life between birth and death, though in a way that differs from what is perceived by a materialist. There is no need to be a materialist to see how, in a manner of speaking, the devil can throw off his chains and break loose. This is one instance of psychological illness.

The freeing of the ego, however, is not necessarily a question of psychological illness, because another state of affairs is also possible. In such an instance it is not a question of illness in the abdomen but rather a ‘switching off’ of its normal activity. This is what happens in the great majority of cases of hypnotic consciousness. The functioning of the system of ganglia in the abdomen is put into a state—either by natural causes or by all kinds of mesmeric effects—in which it is unable properly to keep the ego under control. Thus in this way, too, the ego has an opportunity to become more involved with its environment. It is not embedded in the system of ganglia and is therefore free to make use of channels to the outside world which enable it to perceive from a distance all kinds of processes in space and time which, when it is embedded in the system of ganglia, are processes which it cannot normally perceive.

So it is important to know that a certain relationship exists between the hypnotized state, which in a mild way switches off the normal activity of the processes bound to the system of ganglia in ordinary consciousness, and certain forms of madness, where the switching-off is caused by deformation or illness in certain abdominal organs. If the ego is freed, if it feels, you might say, free of its chains and is linked, not with its body but with the spiritual forces in its environment, this is always, in a way, a pathological state, just as is also the case in madness. That is why some forms of madness are characterized by the appearance of spite, mendacity, cunning and craftiness—everything that comes from luciferic infection; the urge to place oneself in the light and consign others to the shadow, and so on.

Now you will understand why a person's constitution of soul depends on the very way the shell which binds his ego is fashioned. In order not to focus too closely on the human being and perhaps offend some human souls, let us instead look for a moment at a lion, a savage carnivore, and how it compares with a bull or an ox. You can see the difference. Even though the lion has a group ego while the human being is endowed with an individual ego, we can still use this comparison. What is the difference between the lion's nature and the ox's nature? The lion is definitely a carnivore while the ox is for the most part a vegetarian. The difference is this: What in the lion corresponds to his group ego is less bound; the forceful activity suitable for his abdominal organs makes the ego freer, lets it loose more on its environment, whereas in the vegetarian ox the group ego is more bound to the abdominal organs. The ox lives more bound up in itself.

You can see why it can be good sense for human beings to become vegetarian—of course, only if they so wish. For what does a vegetarian diet bring about? It makes the abdominal organs even more capable of binding the ego, which, if this does not sound like a paradox, leads to the human being becoming more gentle. His evil demon is more internalized and lives less in the environment. Nobody, however, should persuade himself that he does not possess this demon, for he does, but it is more imprisoned within him. It would be easy to set up an experiment to compare the behaviour of hungry carnivores and hungry vegetarians. When hungry, one is apt to be less inhibited. So it would be likely that the hungry vegetarians, who are in the habit of containing themselves as a result of their vegetarian diet, would be the more savage. For hunger brings about changes in the functions of the abdominal organs, which are then less able to fetter the ego than they are when satiated. I do not mean to be absolute in what I say, because the carnivore in any case binds the ego less strongly than the vegetarian. But I said that, in comparison, the hungry vegetarian, in contrast to his state when satiated, is likely to be far more savage than the hungry carnivore, in contrast to his state when satiated.

Human nature is indeed exceedingly complicated. One very good way of attaining some knowledge as a basis for true, genuine self-knowledge in life is to pay attention to the connection between the spiritual and bodily parts. I should add, though, that vegetarians should take care not allow themselves to become too undernourished. If they are undernourished they are in danger of damaging themselves, and then their chains—the prison for their devil, who shows himself in wiliness, lies and so on—are weakened. They then let their devil out into the environment, and the environment is troubled by their problems. Either that, or else they themselves have the trouble. They fail to cope with themselves, for they either constantly have a mania for manifesting the various bad qualities of the ego, or—if they are well brought-up—they have the urge to keep all this to themselves, in which case, too, it can happen that they fail to cope with themselves. All kinds of dissatisfactions arise in their soul. It is important to see this.

Just as the ego has its point of contact in the system of ganglia, so does the astral body have its point of contact in all those processes which are linked with the nervous system of the spinal cord. Naturally, the nerves run through the whole body; but in the nervous system of the spinal cord we have a second point of contact. Included in this, of course, are once again all the processes connected with this spinal nervous system. I am not speaking of the cerebral nervous system. I mean the nervous system of the spinal cord which has to do, for instance, with our reflex actions and is a regulator for much that goes on in the human body. In the present context we must include all the processes regulated by this nervous system. Again we have to see that the astral body is either bound to everything connected with this spinal system or that it can become free of it, through illness or through partial somnolence brought about by mesmerism or something similar. The entity which is bound here received its luciferic attributes, which are mingled a little with ahrimanic attributes, as long ago as the time of ancient Moon. Therefore these are weaker than the luciferic attributes of the ego, but they are present in the astral body, too. If you want to turn your soul to a contemplation of the process by which this luciferic infection crept into the astral body, you will have to study what I said in my book Occult Science about the separation of the moon from evolution as a whole. This infection made its appearance during the time of ancient Moon. Here you will discover another reason for certain characteristics in the human being, characteristics of a hypnotic nature—higher hypnotic characteristics which are bound, in the main, to the organs of the chest and which bring in higher experiences than do the organs of the abdomen. At the same time you will see that if something is not in order, so that the astral body cannot be bound as it should be, something can again come about which is a psychological illness, a psychological disorder. Just as the ego can be released, causing signs of madness, so also can the astral body be released, which again leads to signs of madness.

When the ego is released, this leads, as I have said, to characteristics such as spite, cunning, wiliness, fraudulence, giving prominence to oneself and putting everyone else in the shade, and so on. When the astral body is released, this leads to volatility of ideas and lack of cohesive thought, manic states on the one hand or, on the other, to withdrawal, depression, hypochondria. Again, these conditions could be brought about by hypnotic or mesmeric intervention; but in this case the organs are not ill, but have had their normal physical function suppressed by the intervention of a hypnotist or mesmerist.

There is much in our human nature which must be held in check, for in a way we do belong to the devil. We are at least partially decent human beings solely because the devils in us are held in check by the divine spiritual forces which have developed in the proper way through the periods of ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon. Because of the various temptations, we do not possess all-that-great an aptitude for decency. A good many bad dispositions and moods of soul life are the result of meeting with the demon in us. The appearance of the demonic element comes about because what is bound can become unbound.

We shall speak on another occasion about what it is in the life between death and a new birth that binds those aspects that are bound by our physical body now, during life between birth and death. You will agree that we owe a great debt of gratitude to the cosmic order that here, between birth and death, we possess our physical organism, for without it we would have no prison for our higher components. When these higher components are set free, after we have laid aside our physical body, different conditions come into operation, which we will discuss another time. Suffice it to say that the higher components still retain some fetters, even then.

Now, just as the astral body is bound in this way by the system of the spinal cord and all the processes of organic life connected with it, so is the etheric body bound by the cerebral system and everything that belongs to it. Therefore, the etheric body has its point of contact by means of the cerebral system. Similar things could be said here, too. In our head there is a prison for our etheric body. Madness or hypnotic conditions come into operation if the body is not quite well and the etheric body is let loose. Left to itself, i.e., not enclosed in the prison of the head, the etheric body has the tendency to reproduce itself, thus becoming a stranger to itself and spilling over into the world, carrying its life into other things. This is a description of the conditions that come about if the prison warder releases the etheric body.

So we have three possibilities for psychological illness, and also three possibilities of escaping from the physical body. These three possibilities must definitely be taken into consideration—but of course in quite a different way—when a person is to become free of his physical body through Initiation. What we have been speaking about is a freeing brought about by illness, when the organs of the physical body do not remain healthy and are then incapable of containing the higher components. Somnolence of the brain would result if brain activity were damped down. The etheric body would be freed and a somnolent condition would take over. But when the brain is defective, the prison can no longer hold the prisoner—that is, the etheric body—which then embarks on its own adventures, endeavouring to live and create its own disordered, muddled life by opening out into the world. So you see clearly that psychological illnesses are, in the main, caused by a kind of freeing from the physical basis to which the various higher components of man belong during life between birth and death.

The etheric body, when it is freed, has mainly ahrimanic characteristics. Envy, jealousy, avarice and similar states will be pathologically exaggerated, always in connection with a kind af spreading into the environment, a kind of letting oneself go. Try to understand it like this: The only point of attraction for the ego is, more or less, the system of ganglia and whatever is connected with it; the astral body's point of contact is with the spinal system, but together with the system of ganglia; and the etheric body is linked with the cerebral system, but jointly, with both the spinal system and the system of ganglia. So, from this point of view, the system of ganglia also has to do with the brain, for instance, in so far as it serves all subconscious organic processes. If the system of ganglia brings about a process of illness which runs its course in the brain, then it could be the etheric body which is freed, even though the root cause lies in the system of ganglia. You see how very complicated things are.

Psychiatry today has, as yet, no means of distinguishing between these three forms of soul sickness. Psychiatry will only achieve some degree of perfection when distinction is made between psychological abnormalities brought about by the freeing from bondage of the etheric body, or the astral body, or the ego. Then there will be a really significant way of distinguishing between, and assessing, the various symptoms of psychological abnormality—and it will be important to assess them in this way.

You see from all this how self-knowledge can only be built up on a penetrating view of the complicated nature of the human being. Knowledge can certainly have disagreeable sides to it. But knowledge is not supposed to be a toy, for it is the most serious matter in the whole of human life. Someone who knows everything there is to know about human nature—if he is even only somewhat inclined to understand it in a way which is not egoistic, if he is inclined to think and feel about it in an objective way—can have in this knowledge an important healing factor at his disposal. One might be too weak to use this healing factor; but this knowledge is an important healing factor. It cannot be gained by remaining in one's subjective nature; it cannot be gained by failing to extricte oneself from this.

This is a great problem for a movement such as ours. On the one hand it is necessary to strive earnestly for the highest knowledge, but on the other hand not everybody who decides to join such a movement is inclined to accept such knowledge with total objectivity and with full earnestness. Such knowledge brings health to personal life only if one is not constantly busy reflecting upon one's own personality, if one is not constantly wondering: How do I feel, what is going on in me, how am I getting on in the world, what is living in my soul, and so on. It brings healing only if we free ourselves from all that and concern ourselves instead with the affairs of mankind as a whole, matters which concern every human being. Difficulty arises only if one wants to concentrate on oneself, if one cannot get away from oneself. The more one is capable of turning away from oneself and towards all that concerns people and the world in general, the more can knowledge become a healing factor.

How glad I would be if only you would believe this! A movement like ours gives plenty of opportunity for observing the very opposite of what I have been saying. It is, of course, natural and justified that people who cannot easily get away from themselves should turn to our Movement for comfort and hope and confidence. But if they do not honestly strive to get away from themselves, if they continue to concern themselves with their own head and their own heart—not to mention whatever else very many people in our Movement are concerned with—then knowledge cannot become for them what, in truth, it is. It is possible to be interested in knowledge in such a way that it becomes not only a personal, but also a general human affair. The more personal considerations are involved, the more one is distracted from what is healing in all the knowledge about the deeper aspects of the world.

From the points of view we have now reached we must endeavour to gain clarity about how certain impulses in human nature are connected with the freeing of the soul and spiritual element, either in states brought about by hypnosis or mesmerism, or in madness. A process of freeing is always connected with a merging into the spiritual element. But this is in turn bound up with a certain feeling of voluptuousness, with real voluptuousness, both direct and indirect. For whatever has become free—be it the etheric or astral body, or the ego—in a way pours itself into the spiritual world. And this pouring forth is defnitely connected with inner feelings of bliss.

Somebody with a psychological abnormality gains a certain satisfaction from his abnormal soul activity and is therefore loath to depart from it. In every age, those who have concerned themselves with the healing of psychological abnormalities have reported the following experience: When doctors have found a way of healing their patients, it happens that as the moment of health approaches, the patient senses that he can no longer freely merge with his spiritual environment and that he has lost a certain feeling of voluptuous bliss, so he begins to hate the doctor who has taken this from him. Usually those who are not psychologically ill are grateful to their doctor when he heals them, but efforts expended on the psychologically ill are met with the opposite. You will find this documented in the appropriate literature. Doctors have frequently found that when a cure is effected, or even only an attempt is made to overcome the sickness, the patient begins to find his doctor abhorrent because he is taking away what the patient really wants, especially in his subconscious, even if he would consciously deny this.

Such things lead us deep into the mystery of the human being's soul nature. We then also understand that the ego, or the etheric or the astral body, after endeavouring to work with the help of their physical tools, if they then become free, yet are still strong and imbued with the forms they had within their physical tools, can more easily unfold certain forces than was possible for them within the diseased organs. That is why people with periodic illnesses—for there are cyclic, periodic abnormalities of the soul—when they once again leave their organism, often feel that they have capacities which they do not otherwise possess. This gives them great satisfaction, and when they then return to their physical body a certain awareness of what they have experienced remains with them; they can sometimes be very clear about themselves and what has happened.

During the first half of the nineteenth century a well-known physician, Willis, cured someone suffering from madness; that is, he brought him to a point at which he was once more capable of thinking sensibly about himself. And this person, who was intelligent, wrote a kind of review of his madness. If you take into account what I have just said, you will well understand what this intelligent individual wrote. His illness involved the freeing of all three higher components. He wrote ‘I expected my fits of insanity with impatience ... with bliss’. Remember, he awaited the moment of leaving his body with impatience because he knew he would then enjoy a kind of bliss.

‘Everything appeared easy to me. No obstacles presented themselves either in theory or practice. My memory acquired, all of a sudden, a singular degree of perfection ...’

Someone who understands these things can tell from this that the patient must otherwise have suffered from severe constipation, i.e. an abdominal condition, which led to a dulling of his memory. As soon as his ego tore itself free, his memory was again intact.

‘Long passages of Latin authors occurred to my mind. In general, I have great difficulty in finding rhythmical terminations, but then I could write verses with as great facility as prose.’

You see how exactly the patient described himself, and it is understandable that in a certain way he endeavoured to induce the abnormal state. This cannot actually be done, of course, but he was glad when it came, for it brought him voluptuous enjoyment.

This is the main difficulty in the case of psychological abnormalities for, subjectively, the patients have to be led from a happy to an unhappy state of mind, and so they are truly downcast about it. In their ordinary consciousness this is different, of course, but in their subconscious they are downcast if they are cured. Of course they go to the doctor and say they want to be cured; but subconsciously they do not, in reality, want to be cured. This is the difficulty. The freed component or components resist with all their might being torn away from the bliss they enter when they are freed. You see how, by looking at things in this way, we do justice to the material foundation of our physical existence, and yet we do not become materialists.

Take a person who is stupid to a greater degree than is apparent in external life. There are such people. Well, stupidity is only one stage on the way to a certain abnormality of soul: namely, imbecility. The cause is possibly that the otherwise bound etheric body is free because the brain is too compact and cannot achieve sufficient fluidity in the way it works. Perhaps this person shoots himself in the head without killing himself. Someone who knows what to look for might find that this is not a bad thing, as long as he had not done himself any other harm. For the resulting loosening of his compact brain might lead to his becoming clever. There are certainly known cases in which head wounds have led to people becoming more wide awake than they were before.

There is truly nothing in the physically-perceptible world as complicated as the nature of the human being. It is more complicated than anything else in the world. To understand man in his totality you have to view him in the way I have been describing. We have seen, for instance, that in the human being as he stands before us with his head, the activity of this head depends in some degree on the etheric body connecting up in the right way to it. Abnormal activity comes about if the etheric body is freed, if it is unbound. Because of the way the human being is normally organized with regard to his sense organs and the nerves of his brain, the etheric body can have a normal relationship with the ordinary environment. What man is as a result of the special connection between his etheric body and his head makes him into a human being like all others in his existence between birth and death in the physical world. If we had nothing else about us except the normal connection of our etheric body with our head, all human beings would be the same, and there would also be no way of feeling connected with that part of our being that is immortal. For our head brings to us the experiences we have in life between birth and death through our senses, through the nerves of the brain.

Consider this in connection with what I have said about the loss of the head during the course of reincarnation: What is now our head was in our previous incarnation our body, and what is now our body will become our head in our next incarnation. We know about this connection with our immortal part which runs through all births and deaths, even though without the wisdom of spiritual science this knowledge can only take the form of a belief. Through our head we can understand this connection, but we can only have this knowledge because we have the system of the spinal cord as an organ of our astral body. This is where those ideas and feelings are wrought which bring us into a mutual relationship with our immortal, our super-personal, part.

Everything we possess only for this life between birth and death is given to us through the earthly, solid element in our organism. On other occasions I have pointed out that there is indeed very little of the solid element in our make-up, of which ninety-five per cent consists, in fact, of fluid, of a pillar of fluid. The human being is a pillar of water containing only five per cent of solid ingredients. Yet only this solid element can be the bearer of our ordinary thoughts in physical life; and only in so far as we are permeated by the fluid element with its pulsation can we know about our super-personal part. And this fluid element with its pulsation is linked with the spinal system, which for the most part regulates this fluid element and its pulsation.

How all this is related to certain things I have described on other occasions, to the pulsating rise and fall of fluid between the abdomen and the brain, I shall discuss tomorrow, for at the moment it would take us too far from today's theme. Now, because the human being bears the fluid element within him he is linked with his super-personal part. But this fluid element also establishes his specific personality. If we had only heads, we would all think the same, feel the same. But because we also have hearts, the fluid element, blood and other juices in us, we are specific in some degree; for through this element the hierarchy of the angeloi can have a part in our being. The hierarchy of the angeloi can intervene in us via the fluid element.

A third possibility for intervening in our being is given because even with the normal working together of the higher components with the system of ganglia, it is possible for the airy element and everything connected with it to have an effect on us. This happens in the process of breathing. It is very complicated, and it varies depending on where we breathe, on how much oxygen, how much humidity, how much sun warmth is in the air and so on. It is the hierarchy of the archangeloi, the archangels, who work on us via the airy element. And everything that works in us from the hierarchy of the archangeloi—both those who have progressed normally and those who are retarded—works via the system of ganglia. Also this is the route by which the folk spirits work, for they belong to the hierarchy of the archangeloi. The work done by the folk spirits in the human being takes its effect through the organs which are connected with the system of ganglia. This is why nationality is something so far removed from consciousness, something that works in such a demonic way. And for the reasons I have pointed out it is linked so strongly with everything to do with locality. For the locality, the local climate, is far more closely connected with the working of the hierarchy of the archangeloi than one might imagine. Climate is nothing other than what works on the human being via the air.

So you see that by discussing the system of ganglia one is indicating how the impulses of all that belongs to the folk soul work in man's unconscious. You will now also understand why, more than one might ordinarily think, belonging to a particular nation is connected with certain characteristics which are linked to the system of ganglia. More than one might think, the problem of nationality has to be seen in relation to the problem of sexuality. Belonging to a nation has the same organic foundation—the system of ganglia—as the sexual element. Quite externally you can understand this when you remember that you belong to a nation by birth, that is, your body develops inside that of a mother who belongs to a particular nation. This of itself creates a link. So you see what subterranean soul foundations connect the problem of nationality with the problem of sexuality. That is why these two impulses in life manifest in such related ways. If your eyes are open to life you will see a tremendous amount of similarity between the way people behave in an erotic sense and the way they show their connection to their nationality. I am not speaking either for or against either of these things, but the facts are as I have described them. Arousal of a nationalistic kind, which works particularly strongly in the unconscious if it is not brought up into ego-consciousness by making it a question of karma as I described the other day, is very similar to sexual arousal. It is no good glossing over these things by making out that the emotional illusions and longings of national feeling are noble, while sexual feelings are rather less so. For the facts are as I have described them to you.

From all this you will see that a good amount of agreement can be reached amongst people in matters of the head, for in the head everyone is the same. If we consisted of heads only, we would understand one another famously. It is peculiar to say: If we consisted of heads only. But when life has brought one together with all kinds of people one grows accustomed to speaking in paradoxes such as this. In parenthesis, let me tell you that I once met quite an important Austrian poet who also entertained philosophical thoughts and was terribly worried about the way human beings were growing ever more and more intellectual. He said: People are growing more and more intellectual, so in the end the rest of their body will waste away and there will be nothing left but walking heads. He was quite serious.

If, as I said, we were heads, it would be easy for us to reach an understanding about all kinds of things. It is less easy to reach an understanding about matters which have to be comprehended via the tool of the spinal system. That is why people are embattled with regard to their view of the world, their religion and everything else they connect with what is super-personal. And there is no doubt at all that today they are embattled also with regard to everything for which the system of ganglia is the organ. By this I do not mean the external war; I mean the war that speaks in the language of hate against hate, for the external war need not necessarily have anything to do with all that is unfolding in such a terrible way in the form of hate against hate.

It is essential for people to become conscious of these things. Only if people can come to understand the nature of the human being will it be possible to find a way out of that chaos into which mankind has entered. Tomorrow we shall speak more about this chaos. But we must be clear about one thing: The knowledge and understanding we gain about the complicated nature of the human being must be filled with a mood that I described just now as an impersonal mood.

So far I have only described harmless, personal moods such as those in people who cannot cope with themselves, who go on and on about their heart, or one thing and another. But in the world at large we meet with less harmless moods, either personal or belonging to the egoism of a whole group. Occult knowledge is not always applied in a selfless manner, as you saw during our considerations over the past few weeks. We can certainly look more deeply into the impulses at work in human history if we have an understanding of the complexity of human nature. For what we can come to know with regard to the individual is connected in turn with all that happens between people, both on a one to one basis and also between the different groupings that come about during human evolution.

Now I told you that occult knowledge was used by certain secret brotherhoods in order to give a turn to events which would serve not general human aims but the egoistic aims of a particular group. I told you that certain secret brotherhoods entertained views about how Europe ought to be structured and how they could influence that structuring. Today I want to add to what has already been made plain something that has not yet been mentioned. I do this because it seems to me to be a good thing that once at least, in however small a circle, something is said which will certainly be made known in the future, just as the division of Austria has been made known in the note from the Entente to President Wilson. Those who knew about these things could have sketched the division of Austria as long ago as the nineties—I do not want to go back any further—on the basis of the maps I have already mentioned.

Whatever is made publicly known is only a fragment. It flows into external, exoteric affairs at a time when it is considered to be useful; but the rest, meanwhile, is held back. Truly, I say what I am now going to tell you not from the slightest political or inflammatory motive, but solely in order to let you have the facts. They do exist in the world. I am truly very far from wanting to worry anyone, or persuade anyone to believe anything in particular or be anxious about anything; for I am concerned only with knowledge. So let me sketch approximately part of the future map of Europe as it was worked out in those secret brotherhoods. So as not to take too long, my sketch will only be approximate. As I said, this is the form which such secret societies thought Europe should take at some point in the future. [The lecturer drew.]

First they turned their attention to the southern European Balkan confederation. This was to be a kind of bulwark against Russianism. Obviously, in the West, Russianism was considered to be the opposite pole, definitely not something with which to remain linked for ever, but something against which there would always be a need to fight. Since the intention was to weld together the present Kingdom of Italy with the Balkan Slavs and the southern Slavs at present belonging to Austria, this confederation would comprise a large part of the Apennine peninsula, the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland, the southern part of Austria, Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia. To this the northern part of Greece would be added. The confederation would also include Hungary and the Danube estuary. This would be the Balkan confederation. Next to this, eastwards, would be everything belonging to Russia in the wider sense. In the programme shown in these maps it was always—I mention this expressly—sharply stressed that however Poland might behave, it was a necessity of world history that the whole of this country should, whatever the circumstances, be returned to the Russian Empire. From the start the programme said that Poland, including the parts now belonging to Prussia, must once again be included in the Russian Empire. So according to the programme, the Russian Empire would include today's Poland, and also Galicia reaching beyond the Slovaks. The part that I am shading here would dip in like a peninsula. This would be Bukovina. [Drawing was continued].

Then would come France which, starting at the Rhine estuary, would cover the territory over as far as the Rhine and the French-speaking part of Switzerland and would be bounded here by the Pyrenees, and here something like this. Nothing much was said about the Scandinavian peoples. No doubt they have been granted a good long respite.

The rest would be: German-speaking Switzerland with Germany and the German parts of Austria. They would cover this area. And these coloured parts would fall more or less into the sphere of influence, however that may appear, of the British Empire: Holland, Belgiurn, the coast, Portugal, Spain, the lower part of Italy—we can speak about the islands another time—and the southern part of Greece.

So here we have a map for which the one we tried to draw on the board yesterday is clearly a kind of payment on account. The Central European part looks quite similar to that implied by the note from the Entente to Wilson. This is what was seen to be an ideal structure for Europe. I repeat yet again: This is not something remotely intended to influence anybody. All I want to show is that this structure for Europe, clearly traceable by me to the nineties, or even the eighties, was taught in certain secret societies.

The reasons for wanting to shape Europe like this were also always given. The ways and means—of course the reasons were eminently sensible—for achieving this structure for Europe were more or less described. We shall talk about this tomorrow. Just let me say that I am not making this up. It is something that lived as a powerful impulse in many heads, something that had to be brought about, something that would have to be brought about by every effort.

I know very well how ill will could easily maintain that it is improper, in consideration of a particular point, to say such things precisely here, of all places. But I do not want to be inflammatory, nor do I want to set up a picture of the future, either for those nations now at war or for those who are neutral. I have nothing to do with these things. I speak about them merely to show you the impulses which existed in those circles. What we have here is a picture of the future arising from endeavours to use certain impulses in the egoistic interests of a group. Those who are shocked to see what would disappear, might remind themselves that we are concerned with the tasks of mankind in general. Things which emanate from the egoistic interests of a group are obvious, and there is no need to regard them as fateful, as pending fate. What I do regard as fatal, however, is the attitude of hiding one's head in the sand, of simpfy refusing to recognize such facts because they are uncomfortable, with the excuse that such things ought not even to be thought because they might cause disquiet. Of course I know that it could be said: We should not speak about such things because they might upset people who are honestly striving to be neutral. But the foundations on which we stand ought to have enabled us to transcend this kind of upset by now. We should be capable of looking at what is really happening in the world. And when I say these things it is on the assumption that you are sensible enough to take them in the right way.

RUDOLF STEINER: In the speech exercises that we will take now, the principal purpose is to make the speech organs more flexible.

Curtsey Betsy jets cleric
lastly light sceptic

One should acquire the habit of letting the tongue say it on its own, so to speak.

Tu-whit twinkle ‘twas
twice twigged tweaker
to twenty twangy twirlings
the zinnia crisper
zither zooming shambles
this smartened smacking
smuggler sneezing
snoring snatching.

Both these exercises are really perfect only when they are said from memory.

From “We Found a Path” (by Christian Morgenstern):

Those who don’t know the goal
can’t find the way,
they will trot the same circle
all their lives long,
and return in the end
whence they began,
their piece of mind
more disturbed than before.

RUDOLF STEINER: Now we will proceed to the task that we have been gnawing at for so long.

Someone presented a list of the human soul moods and the soul moods of plants that could be said to correspond to them.

RUDOLF STEINER: All these things that have been presented are reminiscent of when phrenology was in vogue, when people classified human soul qualities according to their fantasies, and then searched the head for all kinds of bumps that were then associated with these qualities. But things are not like that, although the human head can certainly be said to express human soul nature. It is true that if a person has a very prominent forehead, it may indicate a philosopher. If a person has a very receding forehead and is at the same time talented, such a person may become an artist. You cannot say that the artist is located in a particular part of the head, but through your feelings you can differentiate between one or another form. You should consider the soul in this way. The more intellectual element drives into the forehead, and the more artistic element allows the forehead to recede. The same thing is also true in the study of plants. I mean your research should not be so external, but rather you should enter more deeply into the inner nature of plants and describe conditions as they actually are.

Some remarks were added.

RUDOLF STEINER: When you confine yourself too much to the senses, your viewpoint will not be quite correct. The senses come into consideration insofar as each sense contributes to the inner life of human beings, whatever can be perceived by a particular sense. For example, we owe several soul experiences to the sense of sight. We owe different soul experiences to other senses. Thus we can retrace our soul experiences to these various senses. In this way the senses are associated with our soul nature. But we should not assert unconditionally that plants express the senses of the Earth, because that is not true.

Someone cited samples from the writings of Emil Schlegel, a homeopathic doctor from Tübingen.

RUDOLF STEINER: Schlegel’s comparisons are also too external. He returns to what can be found in the mystics—Jacob Boehme and others—to the so-called “signatures.” Mystics in the Middle Ages were aware of certain relationships to the soul world that led them into deeper aspects of medicine. You find, for example, that a definite group of plants is associated with a quality of soul; mushrooms and fungi are associated with the quality that enables a person to reflect, to ponder something, the kind of inner life that lies so deeply in the soul that it does not demand much of the outer world for its experience, but “pumps,” as it were, everything out of itself. You will also find that this soul quality, most characteristic of mushrooms, is very intimately associated with illnesses of a headache nature; in this way you discover the connection between mushrooms and illnesses that cause headaches. Please note that you cannot make such comparisons when teaching about animals.

There are, as yet, no proper classifications of plants, but by means of these relationships between human soul qualities and groups of plants you must try to bring some kind of classification into the life of plants. We will now attempt to classify the plant kingdom.

You must first distinguish what are properly seen as the different parts of the plant—that is, root, stem (which may develop into a trunk), leaves, blossoms, and fruits. All the plants in the world can be divided into groups or families. In one family the root is more developed; the rest of the plant is stunted. In another the leaves are more developed, and in others the blossoms; indeed, these last are almost entirely blossom. Such things must be considered in relation to each other. Thus we can classify plants by seeing which system of organs predominates, root, trunk, leaves, and so on, since this is one way that plants vary. Now, when you recognize that everything with the nature of a blossom belongs to a certain soul quality, you must also assign other organic parts of the plant to other soul qualities. Thus, whether you associate single parts of the plant with qualities of soul or think of the whole plant kingdom together in this sense, it is the same thing. The whole plant kingdom is really a single plant.

Now what are the actual facts about the sleeping and waking of the Earth? At the present time [September] the Earth is asleep for us, but it is awake on the opposite side of the Earth. The Earth carries sleep from one side to the other. The plant world, of course, takes part in this change, and in this way you get another classification according to the spatial distribution of sleeping and waking on the earth—that is, according to summer and winter. Our vegetation is not the same as that on the opposite side of the Earth.

For plant life, everything is related with the leaves, for every part of a plant is a transformed leaf.

Someone compared groups of plants with temperaments.

RUDOLF STEINER: No, you are on the wrong track when you relate the plant world directly to the temperaments.

We might say to the children, “Look children, you were not always as big as you are now.¹ You have learned to do a great many things that you couldn’t do before. When your life began you were small and awkward, and you couldn’t take care of yourselves. When you were very small you couldn’t even talk. You could not walk either. There were many things you could not do that you can do now. Let’s all think back and remember the qualities you had when you were very young children. Can you remember what you were like then and what kinds of things you did? Can you remember this?” Continue to ask until they all see what you mean and say “No.” “So none of you know anything about what you did when you were toddlers?

“Yes, dear children, and isn’t there something else that happens in your lives that you can’t remember, and things that you do that you can’t remember afterward?” The children think it over. Perhaps someone among them will find the answer, otherwise you must help them with it. One of them might answer, “While I was asleep.” “Yes, the very same thing happens when you are very young that happens when you go to bed and sleep. You are ‘asleep’ when you are a tiny baby, and you are asleep when you are in bed.

“Now we will go out into nature and look for something there that is asleep just like you were when you were very young. Naturally you could not think of this yourselves, but there are those who know, and they can tell you that all the fungi and mushrooms that you find in the woods are fast asleep, just as you were when you were babies. Fungi and mushrooms are the sleeping souls of childhood.

“Then came the time when you learned to walk and to speak. You know from watching your little brothers and sisters that little children first have to learn to speak and walk, or you can say walk and then speak. That was something new for you, and you could not do that when you began your life; you learned something fresh, and you could do many more things after you learned to walk and speak.

“Now we will go out into nature again and search for something that can do more than mushrooms and fungi. These are the algae,” and I now show the children some examples of algae, “and the mosses,” and I show them some mosses. “There is something in algae and mosses that can do much more than what is in the fungi.”

Then I show the children a fern and say, “Look, the fern can do even more than the mosses. The fern can do so much that you have to say it looks as if it already had leaves. There is something of the nature of a leaf.

“Now you do not remember what you did when you learned to speak and walk. You were still half asleep then. But if you watch your brothers and sisters or other little children you know that, when they grow a little older, they do not sleep as long as when they were first born. Then came the time when your mind woke up, and you can return to that time as your earliest memory. Just think! That time in your mind compares with the ferns. But ever since then you can remember more and more of what happened in your mind. Now let’s get a clear picture of how you came to say ‘I.’ That was about the time to which your memory is able to return. But the I came gradually. At first you always said ‘Jack wants.. .’ when you meant yourself.”

Now have a child speak about a memory from childhood. Then you say to the child, “You see, when you were little it was really as though everything in your mind was asleep; it was really night then, but now your mind is awake. It is much more awake now, otherwise you would be no wiser than you used to be. But you are still partly asleep; not everything in you is awake yet; much is still sleeping. Only a part of you has awakened. What went on in your mind when you were four or five years old was something like the plants I am going to show you now.”

We should now show the children some plants from the family of the gymnospernms—that is, conifers, which are more perfectly formed than the ferns—and then you will say to the children, “A little later in your life, when you were six or seven years old, you were able to go to school, and all the joys that school brought blossomed in your heart.” When you show a plant from the family of the ferns, the gymnosperms, you go on to explain, “You see there are still no flowers. That was how your mind was before you came to school.

“Then, when you came to school, something entered your mind that could be compared to a flowering plant. But you had only learned a little when you were eight or nine years old. Now you are very smart; you are already eleven years old and have learned a great many things.

“Now look; here is a plant that has leaves with simple parallel veins

and here is another with more complicated leaves with a network of veins. When you look at the blossoms that belong to the simple leaves, they are not the same as those on the plants with the other kind of leaf, where the blossoms and everything else are more complicated than in those with the simpler leaves.”

Now you show the children, for example, an autumn crocus, a monocotyledon; in these plants everything is simple, and you can compare them to children between seven and nine. Then you can continue by showing the children plants with simple blossoms, ones that do not yet have real petals. You can then say, “You have plants here in which the green sepals and the colored petals are indistinguishable, in which the little leaves under the blossom cannot be distinguished from those above. This is you! This is what you are like now.

“But soon you will be even older, and when you are twelve, thirteen, or fourteen you will be able to compare yourselves with plants that have calyx and corolla; your mind will grow so much that you’ll be able to distinguish between the green leaves we call the calyx and the colored leaves called petals. But first you must reach that stage!” And so you can divide the plants into those with a simple perianth—compared to the elevenyear- old children—and plants with a double perianth—those of thirteen to fourteen years.² “So children, this is another stage you have to reach.”

Now you can show the children two or three examples of mosses, ferns, gymnosperms, monocotyledons, and dicotyledons, and it would be a fine thing at this point to awaken their memory of earlier years. Have one of them speak of something remembered about little four-year-old Billy, and then show your ferns; have another child recall a memory of seven-year-old Fred, and then show the corresponding plant for that age; and yet another one could tell a story about eleven-year-old Ernie, and here you must show the other kind of plant. You must awaken the faculty of recalling the various qualities of a growing child and then carry over to the plant world these thoughts about the whole development of the growing soul. Make use of what I said yesterday about a tree, and in this way you will get a parallel between soul qualities and the corresponding plants.

There is an underlying principle here. You will not find parallels accidentally according to whatever plants you happen to pick. There is principle and form in this method, which is necessary. You can cover the whole plant kingdom in this way, with the exception of what happens in the plant when the blossom produces fruit. You point out to the child that the higher plants produce fruits from their blossoms. “This, dear children, can only be compared to what happens in your own soul life after you leave school.” Everything in the growth of the plant, up to the blossom, can be compared only with what happens in the child until puberty. The process of fertilization must be omitted for children. You cannot include it.

Then I continue, “You see, dear children, when you were very small you really only had something like a sleeping soul within you.” In some way remind the children, “Now try to remember, what was your main pleasure when you were a little child? You have forgotten now because, in a way, you were really asleep at that time, but you can see it in little Anne or Mary, in your little baby sister. What is her greatest joy? Certainly her milk bottle! A tiny child’s greatest joy is the milk bottle. And then came the time when your brothers and sisters were a little older, and the bottle was no longer their only joy, but instead they loved to be allowed to play. Now remember, first I showed you fungi, algae, mosses; almost everything they have, they get from the soil. We must go into the woods if we want to get to know them. They grow where it is damp and shady, they do not venture out into the sunlight. That’s what you were like before you ‘ventured out’ to play; you were content with sucking milk from a bottle. In the rest of the plant world you find leaves and flowers that develop when the plants no longer have only what they get from the soil and from the shady woods, but instead come out into the sun, to the air and light. These are the qualities of soul that thrive in light and air.” In this way you show the child the difference between what lives under the Earth’s surface on the one hand (as mushrooms and roots do, which need the watery element, soil, and shade), and on the other hand, what needs air and light (as blossoms and leaves do). “That is why plants that bear flowers and leaves (because they love air and light) are the so-called higher plants, just as you, when you are five or six years old, have reached a higher stage than when you were a baby.”

By directing the children’s thoughts more and more—at one time toward qualities of mind and soul that develop in childhood, and then toward the plants—you will be able to classify them all, based on this comparison. You can put it this way:

Pleasures of infancy (babies): Mushrooms and Fungi
Pleasures of early childhood (the awakening life of feeling, both sorrows and joys): Algae, Mosses
Experiences at the awakening of consciousness of self: Ferns
Experiences of fifth and sixth year, up to school age: Gymnosperms, Conifers
First school experiences, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth and eleventh year: Parallel-veined plants, Monocotyledons; Plants with simple perianth
Experiences of the eleven-year-old: Simple dicotyledons
School experiences from twelfth to fifteenth year: Net-veined plants, Dicotyledons; Plants with green calyx and colored petals

“You are not smart enough yet for these last experiences (the plants with a green calyx and colored blossoms), and you won’t know anything about them until you are thirteen or fourteen years old.

“Just think; how lovely! One day you will have such rich thoughts and feelings, you will be like the rose with colored petals and green sepals. This will all come later, and you can look forward to it with great pleasure. It is lovely to be able to rejoice over what is coming in the future.” The important thing is that you arouse within children’s hearts a joyful anticipation of what the future will bring them.

Thus, all the successive soul qualities before puberty can be compared with the plant kingdom. After that the comparison goes no further because at this point the children develop the astral body, which plants do not possess. But when the plant forces itself into fertilization beyond its nature, it can be compared with soul qualities of the sixteenth to seventeenth year. There is no need to call attention to the process of fertilization, but you should speak of the process of growth, because that agrees with reality. The children would not understand the process of fertilization, but they would understand the process of growth, because it can be compared with the process of growth in the mind and soul. Just as a child’s soul is different at various ages, so also the plants are different because they progress from the mushroom to the buttercup, which is usually included among the most highly developed plants, the Ranunculuses. It is indeed true that, when the golden buttercups appear during spring in lush meadows, we are reminded of the soul life and soul mood of fourteen-and fifteen-year-old boys and girls.

If at some time a botanist should go to work along these lines in a thoroughly systematic way, a plant system would be found that corresponds to fact, but you can actually show the children the whole external plant world as a picture of a developing child’s soul. Much can be done in this way. You should not differentiate in the individualized way practised by the old phrenologists, but you should have one clear viewpoint that can be carried right through your teaching. Then you will find that it is not quite correct to merely take everything with a root nature and relate it to thought. Spirit in the head is still asleep in a child. Thus, thinking in general should not be related to what has root nature, but a child’s way of thinking, which is still asleep. In the mushroom, therefore, as well as in the child, you get a picture of childlike thinking, still asleep, that points us toward the root element in plants.

Rudolf Steiner then gave the following assignments:

1. To comprehensively work out the natural history of plants as discussed up to this point;

2. The geographical treatment of the region of the lower Rhine, from the Lahn onward, “in the way I showed you today when speaking of lessons in geography”: mountains, rivers, towns, civilization, and economics.³

3. Do the same for the basin of the Mississippi.

4. What is the best way to teach the measurement of areas and perimeters?

• 1. According to the Waldorf curriculum, the children are around eleven years old when they are taught about the plant kingdom.
• 2. The perianth is the envelope of a flower, particularly one in which the calyx and corolla are combined so that they are indistinguishable from one another; these include such flowers as tulips, orchids, and so on. The perianth is single when it has one verticil, and double when it has both calyx and corolla.
• 3. See Practical Advice to Teachers, lecture 11.

The principles were developed for teaching music to the first and second grades.

RUDOLF STEINER: Children should be allowed to hear an instrument, to hear music objectively, apart from themselves. This is important. It should be a matter of principle that well before the ninth year the children should learn to play solo instruments, and the piano can be added later for those for whom it is considered advisable. What matters most is that we make a right beginning in this sphere.

Further remark on the concept of interest, proceeding to algebra:

If \(A =\) amount, \(P =\) principal, \(I =\) interest, \(R =\) rate of interest, \(T =\) time, then \(A = P + I\).

Since

$$I = \frac{PRT}{100}$$

then

$$A = P + \frac{PRT}{100}$$

RUDOLF STEINER: It would never be possible to describe capital in this way these days; this formula only has real value if \(T\) equals a year or less, because in reality two cases are given: Either you remove the interest each year, in which case the same initial capital always remains, or else you leave the interest with the capital, in which case you need to figure according to compound interest. If you omit \(T\)—that is, if you figure it for only one year, then it is an actual thing; it is essential to present realities to the children. Do not fail to observe that the transition to algebra as we have spoken of it, is really carried out—first from addition to multiplication, and then from subtraction to division. This must be adhered to strictly.

RUDOLF STEINER explained the transition from arithmetic to algebra with the following example: First you write down a number of figures in which all the addenda are different:

Some of the addenda could also be equal:

Or all the addenda could be the same:

If you proceed, as described in our previous discussion, to replace numbers with letters, then you could have the equation:

\(S_1 = a + a + a\); that is, three \(a\)’s, or three times \(a = 3a\).

then

then

\(S_3 = a + a + a + a + a + a + a\); or seven times \(a = 7a\)

and so on. I can keep doing this; I could do it \(9\) times, \(21\) times, \(25\) times, I can do it \(n\) times:

\(S_n = a + a + a ... n\) times \(= na\)

Thus, I get the factor by varying the number of the addenda, while the addendum itself is the other factor. In this way multiplication can easily be developed and understood from addition, and you thus make the transition from actual numbers to algebraic quantities:

\(a × a = a2\), \(a × a × a = a3\).

In the same way you can derive division from subtraction. If we take b away from a very large number a, we get the remainder \(r\):

\(r = a – b\)

If we take b away again, we get the remainder:

\(r_2 = a – b – b = a – 2b\)

If b is taken away a third time we obtain:

\(r_3 = a – b – b – b = a – 3b\) and so on.

We could continue until there is nothing left of number \(a\): suppose this happens after subtracting \(b\) \(n\) times:

\(r_n = a – b – b – b ... n\) times \(= – nb\) When there is nothing left—that is, when the last remainder is \(0\), then:

\(0 = a – nb\)

So a is now completely divided up, because nothing remains:

\(a = nb\)

I have taken b away n times, I have divided \(a\) into nothing but \(bs\), \(a/b = n\), so the \(a\) is completely used up. I have discovered that I can do this \(n\) times, and in so doing I have gone from subtraction to division.

Thus we can say: multiplication is a special case of addition, and division is a special case of subtraction, except that you add to it or take away from it, not just once, but repeatedly, as the case may be.

Negative and imaginary numbers were discussed.

RUDOLF STEINER: A negative number is a subtrahend [the number subtracted] for which there is no minuend [the number from which it is subtracted]; it is a demand that something be done: there being nothing to do it with, thus it cannot be done. Eugen Dühring rejected imaginary numbers as nonsense and spoke of Gauss’s definition of “the imaginary” as completely stupid, unrealistic, farfetched nonsense.¹

From addition, therefore, you develop multiplication, and from multiplication, rise to a higher power. And then from subtraction you develop division, and from division, find roots.

addition—subtraction
multiplication—division
raising to a higher power—finding roots

You should not proceed to raising to a higher power and finding roots until after you have begun algebra (between the eleventh and twelfth years), because, with roots, raising to a power of an algebraic equation of more than one term (polynomial) plays a role. In this connection you should also deal with figuring gross, net, taxes, and packing charges.

A question about the use of formulas.

RUDOLF STEINER: The question is whether you should avoid the habitual use of formulas, but go through the thought processes again and again (a good opportunity for practicing speech), or whether it might be even better to go ahead and use the formula itself. If you can succeed, tactfully, in making the formula fully understood, then it can be very useful to use it as a speech exercise—to a certain extent.

But from a certain age on, it is also good to make the formula into something felt by the children, make it into something that has inner life, so that, for example, when the \(T\) increases in the formula \(I = PRT/100\), it gives the children a feeling of the whole thing growing.

In effect, this is what I wanted to say at this point—that you should use the actual numbers for problems of this kind—for example, in interest and percentages—in order to make the transition to algebra, and in doing so, develop multiplication, division, raising powers, and roots. These are things that certainly must be done with the children.

Now I would like to ask a question: Do you consider it good to deal with raising to a higher power and finding roots before you have done algebra, or would you do it later?

Comment about raising to a higher power first and finding roots after.

RUDOLF STEINER: Your plan then would be (and should continue to be) to start with algebra as soon as possible after the eleventh or twelfth year, and only after that proceed to raising to a higher power and finding roots. After teaching the children algebra, you can show them in a very quick and simple way how to square, cube, raise to a higher power, and extract the root, whereas before they know algebra you would have to spend a terribly long time on it. You can teach easily and economically if you take algebra first.

A historical survey for the older children (eleven to fourteen years) was presented concerning the founding and development of towns, referring to the existence of a “Germany” at the time of the invasion of the Magyars.

RUDOLF STEINER: You must be very careful not to allow muddled concepts to arise unconsciously. At the time of Henry, the so-called “townbuilder,” there was of course no “Germany.” You would have to express what you mean by saying “towns on the Rhine” or “towns on the Danube” in the districts that later became “German.”²

Before the tenth century the Magyars are not involved at all, but there were invasions of Huns, Avars, and so on. But after the tenth century you can certainly speak of “Germany.” When the children reach the higher grades (the seventh and eighth grades) I would try to give them a concept of chronology; if you just say ninth or tenth century, you do not give a sufficiently real picture. How then would you manage to awaken in the children a concrete view of time?

You could explain it to them like this: “if you are now of such and such an age, how old are your mother and father? Then, how old are your grandfather and grandmother?” And so you evoke a picture of the whole succession of generations, and you can make it clear to the children that a series of three generations makes up about 100 years, so that in 100 years there would be three generations. A century ago the great grandparents were children. But if you go back nine centuries, there have not been three generations, but \(9\ x\ 3 = 27\) generations. You can say to the child: “Now imagine you are holding your father’s hand, and he’s holding your grandfather’s hand, and he is, in turn, holding your great-grandfather’s hand, and so on. If they were now all standing together side by side, which would be Henry I, which number in the row would have stood face to face with the Magyars around the year 926? It would be the twenty-seventh in the row.” I would demonstrate this very clearly in a pictorial way. After giving the children this concrete image of how long ago it was, I would present a graphic description of the migrations of the Magyars. I would tell them about the Magyars’ invasion of Europe at that time, how they broke in with such ferocity that everyone had to flee before them, even the little children in their cradles, who had to be carried up to the mountaintops, and how then the onrushing Magyars burned the villages and forests. Give them a vivid picture of this Magyar onset.

It was then described how Henry, knowing he had been able to resist the Magyars in fortified Goslar, resolved to build fortified towns, and in this way it come about that numerous towns were founded.

RUDOLF STEINER: Here again, could you not present this more in connection with the whole history of civilization? It is only a garbled historical legend to say that Henry founded these towns. All these tenth century towns were built on their original foundations—that is, the markets—before then. But what helped them to expand was the migration of the neighboring people into the towns in order to defend themselves more easily against the Magyars’ assaults, and for this reason they fortified these places. The main reasons for building these towns were more economic in nature. Henry had very little part in all this.

I ask you to be truly graphic in your descriptions, to make everything really alive, so that the children get vivid pictures in their minds, and the whole course of events stands out clearly before them. You must stimulate their imagination and use methods such as those I mentioned when I showed you how to make time more real. Nothing is actually gained by knowing the year that something occurred—for example, the battle of Zama; but by using the imagination, by knowing that, if they held hands with all the generations back to Charles the Great, the time of their thirtieth ancestor, the children would get a truly graphic, concrete idea of time. This point of time then grows much closer to you—it really does—when you know that Charles the Great is there with your thirtieth ancestor.

Question: Wouldn’t it also be good when presenting historical descriptions to dwell on the difference in thought and feeling of the people of those times?

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes. I have always pointed this out in my lectures and elsewhere. Most of all, when speaking of the great change that occurred around the fifteenth century, you should make it very clear that there was a great difference between the perception, feeling, and thought of people before and after this time. Lamprecht too (whom I do not however especially recommend) is careful to describe a completely different kind of thinking, perceiving, and feeling in people before this time.³ The documents concerning this point have not yet been consulted at all.

In studying the books written on cultural history you must, above all, develop a certain perceptive faculty; with this you can properly assess all the different things related by historians, whether commonplace or of greater importance, and so gain a truer picture of human history.

Rudolf Steiner recommended for the teachers’ library Buckle’s History of Civilization in England and Lecky’s History of Rationalism in Europe.

RUDOLF STEINER: From these books you can learn the proper methods of studying the history of human progress. With Lamprecht only his earlier work would be suitable, but even much of this is distorted and subjective. If you have not acquired this instinct for the real forces at work in history, you will be in danger of falling into the stupidity and amateurism of a “Wildenbruch” for example;⁴ he imagined that the stories of emperors and kings and the family brawls between Louis the Pious and his sons were important events in human history.

Gustav Freytag’s Stories from Ancient German History are very good;⁵ but you must beware of being influenced too much by this rather smug type of history book (written for the unsophisticated). The time has come now when we must get out of a kind of thinking and feeling that belonged to the middle of the nineteenth century.

Mention was made of Houston Stuart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.⁶

RUDOLF STEINER: With regard to Chamberlain also you must try to develop the correct instinct. For one part of clever writing you get three parts of bad, unwholesome stuff. He has some very good things to say, but you must read it all yourselves and form your own judgements. The historical accounts of Buckle and Lecky are better.⁷ Chamberlain is more one of these “gentlemen in a dinner jacket.” He is rather a vain person and cannot be accepted as an authority, although many of his observations are correct. And the way he ended up was not particularly nice—I mean his lawsuit with the “Frankfurter Zeitung.”

Kautsky’s writings were mentioned.⁸

RUDOLF STEINER: Well yes, but as a rule you must assume that the opposite of what he says is true! From modern socialists you can get good material in the way of facts, as long as you do not allow yourselves to be deceived by the theories that color all their descriptions. Mehring too presents us with rather a peculiar picture;⁹ because at first, when he was himself a progressive Liberal, he inveighed against the Social Democrats in his book on Social Democracy; but later when he had gone over to the Social Democrats he said exactly the same things about the Liberals!

An introduction was presented on the fundamental ideas in mathematical geography for twelve-year-old children, with observations on the sunrise and the ecliptic.

RUDOLF STEINER: After taking the children out for observations, it would be very good to let them draw what they had observed; you would have to make sure there is a certain parallel between the drawing and what the children saw outside. It is advisable not to have them do too much line drawing. It is very important to teach these things, but if you include too much you will reach the point where the children can no longer understand what you are saying. You can relate it also to geography and geometry.

When you have developed the idea of the ecliptic and of the coordinates, that is about as far as you should go.

Someone else developed the same theme—that is, sunrise and sunset—for the younger children, and tried to explain the path of the Sun and planets in a diagrammatic drawing.

RUDOLF STEINER: This viewpoint will gradually lose more and more of its meaning, because what has been said until now about these movements is not quite correct. In reality it is a case of a movement like this (lemniscatory screw-movement):

Here, for example, [in position 1] we have the Sun; here are Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and here are Venus, Mercury, and Earth. Now they all move in the direction indicated [spiral line], moving ahead one behind the other, so that when the Sun has progressed to the second position we have Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars here, and we have Venus, Mercury, and Earth over there. Now the Sun continues to revolve and progresses to here [position 3]. This creates the illusion that Earth revolves round the Sun. The truth is that the Sun goes ahead, and the Earth creeps continually after it.

The ancient Egyptian civilization was described.

RUDOLF STEINER: It is most important to explain to the children that Egyptian art was based on a completely different method of representing nature. The ancient Egyptians lacked the power of seeing things in perspective. They painted the face from the side and the body from the front. You may certainly explain this to the children, especially the Egyptian concept of painting. Then you must point out how Egyptian drawing and painting was related to their view of natural history—how, for example, they portrayed men with animal heads and so on.

In ancient times the habit of comparing people with the animals was very common. You could then point out to the children what is present in seed form, as it were, within every human face, which children can still see to a certain extent.¹⁰ The Egyptians still perceived this affinity of the human physiognomy with animals; they were still at this childlike stage of perception.

Question: What should one really tell children about the building of the Egyptian pyramids?

RUDOLF STEINER: It is of course extraordinarily important for children too that you should gradually try to present them with what is true rather than what is false. In reality the pyramids were places of initiation, and this is where you reach the point of giving the children an idea of the higher Egyptian education, which was initiation at the same time. You must tell them something about what happened within the pyramids. Religious services were conducted there, just as today they are conducted in churches, except that their services led to knowledge of the universe. Ancient Egyptians learned through being shown, in solemn ritual, what comes about in the universe and in human evolution. Religious exercises and instruction were the same; it was really such that instruction and religious services were the very same thing.

Someone described the work of the Egyptians on the pyramids and obelisks, and said that several millions of people must have been needed to transport the gigantic blocks of stone, to shape them, and to set them in place. We must ask ourselves how it was possible at all, with the technical means available at that time, to move these great heavy blocks of limestone and granite and to set them in place.

RUDOLF STEINER: Yes, but you only give the children a true picture when you tell them: If people were to do this work with the physical strength of the present day, two and a half times as many people would be necessary. The fact is that the Egyptians had two and a half times the physical strength that people have today; this is true, at least, of those who worked on the pyramids and so on. There were also, of course, those who were not so strong.

Question: Would it be good to include Egyptian mythology?

RUDOLF STEINER: Unless you can present Egyptian mythology in its true form, it should be omitted. But in the Waldorf school, if you want to go into this subject at all, it would be a very good plan to introduce the children to the ideas of Egyptian mythology that are true, and are well known to you.¹¹

• 1. Karl Eugen Dühring (1833–1921), German positivist philosopher and economist. Wrote Kapital und Arbeit (Capital and Labor), and Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie (Logic and Epistemological Theory).
• 2. This could as well apply to speaking of “America” in regard to events and places prior to the time of Columbus and the European settlers.
• 3. Karl Gottfried Lamprecht (1856–1915), historian who developed the theory that history is social-psychological rather than political.
• 4. Ernst von Wildenbruch (1845–1909), German writer, author of Spartacus.
• 5. Gustav Freytag (1816–1895), German writer, promoter of German liberalism and the middle class. His books included a series of six historical novels.
• 6. Houston Stuart Chamberlain (1855–1927), British publicist, naturalized German citizen. Wrote on the superiority of the Western Aryan race.
• 7. Probably refers to Henry Thomas Buckle (1821–1862), English historian, who wrote the incomplete History of Civilization in England. William Edward Hartpole Lecky 1838–1903), Irish historian who wrote on modern European history.
• 8. Karl Johann Kautsky (1854–1938), German Marxist theorist, journalist, and secretary to Friedrich Engels in London, he opposed Bolshevism and the Russian revolution.
• 9. Franz Mehring (1846–1919), German Socialist historian and journalist.
• 10. See The Foundations of Human Experience, lecture 9.
• 11. See Rudolf Steiner, Egyptian Myths and Mysteries, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1990.

[ 1 ] I could not at that time bring myself to reflections concerning public life in Austria which might have taken a deeper hold in any way whatever upon my mind. I merely continued to observe the extraordinarily complicated relationships involved. Expressions which won my deeper interest I could find only in connection with Karl Julius Schröer. I had the pleasure of being with him often just at this time. His own fate was closely bound up with that of German Austria-Hungary. He was the son of Tobias Schröer, who conducted a German school in Presburg and wrote dramas as well as books on historical and aesthetic subjects. The last appeared under the name Christian Oeser, and they were favourite text-books. The poetic writings of Tobias Gottfried Schröer, although they are doubtless significant and received marked recognition within restricted circles, did not become widely known. The sentiment that breathes through them was opposed to the dominant political current in Hungary. They had to be published in part without the author's name in German regions outside of Hungary. Had the tendencies of the author's mind been known in Hungary, he would have risked, not only dismissal from his post, but also severe punishment.

[ 2 ] Karl Julius Schröer thus experienced the impulse toward Germanism even as a young man in his own home. Under this impulse he developed his intimate devotion to the German nature and German literature as well as a great devotion to everything belonging to Goethe or concerning him. The history of German poetry by Gervinus had a profound influence upon him. [ 3 ] He went in the fortieth year of the nineteenth century to Germany to pursue his studies in the German language and literature at the universities of Leipzig, Halle, and Berlin. After his return he was occupied in teaching German literature in his father's school, and in conducting a Seminar. He now became acquainted with the Christmas folk-plays which were enacted every year by the German colonists in the region of Presburg. There he was face to face with Germanism in a form profoundly congenial to him. The roving Germans who had come from the west into Hungary hundreds of years before had brought with them these plays of the old home, and continued to perform them as they had done at the Christmas festival in regions which no doubt lay in the neighbourhood of the Rhine. The Paradise story, the birth of Christ, the coming of the three kings were alive in popular form in these plays. Schröer then published them, as he heard them, or as he read them in old manuscripts that he was able to see at peasants' homes, using the title Deutsche Weinachtspiele aus Ungarn.¹

[ 4 ] The delightful experience of living in the German folk life took an even stronger hold upon Schröer's mind. He made journeys in order to study German dialects in the most widely separated parts of Austria. Wherever the German folk was scattered in the Slavic, Magyar, or Italian geographical regions, he wished to learn their individuality. Thus came into being his glossary and grammar of the Zipser dialect, which was native to the south of the Carpathians; of the Gottschze dialect, which survived with a little fragment of German folk in Krain; the language of the Heanzen, which was spoken in western Hungary.

[ 5 ] For Schröer these studies were never merely a scientific task. He lived with his whole soul in the revelation of the folk-life, and wished by word and writing to bring its nature to the consciousness of those men who have been uprooted from it by life. He was then a professor in Budapest. There he could not feel at home in the presence of the prevailing current of thought; so he removed to Vienna, where at first he was entrusted with the direction of the evangelical schools, and where he later became a professor of the German language and literature. When he already occupied this position, I had the privilege of knowing him and of becoming intimate with him. At the time when this occurred, his whole sentiment and life were directed toward Goethe. He was engaged in editing the second part of Faust, and writing an introduction for this, and had already published the first part.

[ 6 ] When I went to call at Schröer's little library, which was also his work-room, I felt that I was in a spiritual atmosphere in the highest degree beneficial to my mental life. I understood at once why Schröer was maligned by those who accepted the prevailing literary-historical methods on account of his writings, and especially on account of his Geschichte der Deutschen Dichtung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.² He did not write at all like the members of the Scherer school, who treated literary phenomena after the fashion of investigators in natural science. He had certain sentiments and ideas concerning literary phenomena, and he spoke these out in frank, manly fashion without turning his eyes much at the moment of writing to the “sources.” It had even been said that he had written his exposition “from the wrist out.”

[ 7 ] This interested me very little. I experienced a spiritual warmth when I was with him. I could sit by his side for hours. Out of his inspired heart the Christmas plays lived on his lips, the spirit of the German dialect, the course of the life of literature. The relation between dialect and cultured speech became perceptible to me in a practical way. I experienced a real joy when he spoke to me, as he had already done in his lectures, of the poet of the Lower Austrian dialect, Joseph Misson, who wrote the splendid poem, Da Naaz, a niederösterreichischer Bauernbua, geht ind Fremd.³ Schröer then constantly gave me books from his library in which I could pursue further what was the content of this conversation. I always had, in truth, when I sat there alone with Schröer, the feeling that still another was present – Goethe's spirit. For Schröer lived so strongly in the spirit and the work of Goethe that in every sentiment or idea which entered his soul he feelingly asked the question, “Would Goethe have felt or thought thus?”

[ 8 ] I listened in a spiritual sense with the greatest possible sympathy to everything that came from Schröer. Yet I could not do otherwise even in his presence than build up independently in my own mind that toward which I was striving in my innermost spirit. Schröer was an idealist, and the world of ideas as such was for him that which worked as a propulsive force in the creation of nature and of man. I then found it indeed difficult to express in words for myself the difference between Schröer's way of thinking and mine. He spoke of ideas as the propelling forces in history. He felt life in the idea itself. For me the life of the spirit was behind the ideas, and these were only the phenomena of that life in the human soul. I could then find no other terms for my way of thinking than “objective idealism.” I wished thereby to denote that for me the reality is not in the idea; that the idea appears in man as the subject, but that just as colour appears on a physical object, so the idea appears on the spiritual object, and that the human mind – the subject – perceives it there as the eye perceives colour on a living being.

[ 9 ] My conception, however, Schröer very largely satisfied in the form of expression he used when we talked about that which reveals itself as “folk-soul.” He spoke of this as of a real spiritual being which lives in the group of individual men who belong to a folk. In this matter his words took on a character which did not pertain merely to the designation of an idea abstractly held. And thus we both observed the texture of ancient Austria and the individualities of the several folk-souls active in Austria. From this side it was possible for me to conceive thoughts concerning the state of public life which penetrated more deeply into my mind.

[ 10 ] Thus my experience at that time was strongly bound up with my relationship to Karl Julius Schröer. What, however, were more remote from him, and in which I strove most of all for an inner explanation, were the natural sciences. I wished to know that my “objective idealism” was in harmony with the knowledge of nature.

[ 11 ] It was during the period of my most earnest intercourse with Schröer that the question of the relation between the spiritual and natural worlds came before my mind in a new form. This happened at first quite independently of Goethe's way of thought concerning the natural sciences. For even Schröer could tell me nothing distinctive concerning this realm of Goethe's creative work. He was happy whenever he found in one or another natural scientist a generous recognition of Goethe's observations concerning the beings of plants and animals. As regards Goethe's theory of colour, however, he was met on all sides by natural scientific conceptions utterly opposed. So in this direction he developed no special opinion.

[ 12 ] My relationship to natural science was not at this time of my life influenced from this side, in spite of the fact that in my intercourse with Schröer I came into close touch with Goethe's spiritual life. It was determined much more by the difficulties I experienced when I had to think out the facts of optics in the sense of the physicist.

[ 13 ] I found that light and sound were thought of in an analogy which is invalid. The expressions “sound in general” and “light in general” were used. The analogy lay in the following: The individual tones and sounds were viewed as specially modified air-vibrations; and objective sound, outside of the human perception, was viewed as a state of vibration of the air. Light was thought of similarly. That which occurs outside of man when he has a perception by means of phenomena caused by light was defined as vibration in ether. The colours, then, are especially formed ether-vibrations. These analogies became at that time an actual torment to my inner life. For I believed myself perfectly clear in the perception that the concept “sound” is merely an abstract union of the individual occurrences in the sphere of sound; whereas “light” signifies a concrete thing over against the phenomena in the sphere of illumination. “Sound” was for me a composite abstract concept; “light” a concrete reality. I said to myself that light is really not perceived by the senses; “colours” are perceived by means of light, which manifests itself everywhere in the perception of colours but is not itself sensibly perceived. “White” light is not light, but that also is a colour. [ 14 ] Thus for me light became a reality in the sense-world, yet in itself not perceptible to the senses. Now there came before my mind the conflict between nominalism and realism as this was developed within scholasticism. The realists maintained that concepts were realities which lived in things and were simply reproduced out of these by human understanding. The nominalists maintained, on the contrary, that concepts were merely names formed by man which include together a complex of what is in the things, but names which have no existence themselves. It now seemed to me that the sound experience must be viewed in the nominalist manner and the experiences which proceed from light in the realist manner.

[ 15 ] I carried this orientation into the optics of the physicist. I had to reject much in this science. Then I arrived at perceptions which gave me a way to Goethe's colour theory.

On this side the door opened before me through which to approach Goethe's writings on natural science. I first took to Schröer brief treatises I had written on the basis of my views in the field of natural science. He could make but little of them; for they were not yet worked out on the basis of Goethe's way of thinking, but I had merely attached at the end this remark: “When men come to the point of thinking about nature as I have here set forth, then only will Goethe's researches in science be confirmed.” Schröer felt an inner pleasure when I made such a statement, but beyond this nothing then came of the matter. The situation in which I then found myself comes out in the following: Schröer related to me one day that he had spoken with a colleague who was a physicist. But, said the man, Goethe opposed himself to Newton, and Newton was “such a genius”; to which Schröer replied: But Goethe “also was a genius.” Thus again I felt that I had a riddle to solve with which I struggled entirely alone.

[ 16 ] In the views at which I had arrived in the physics of optics there seemed to me to be a bridge between what is revealed to insight into the spiritual world and that which comes out of researches in the natural sciences. I felt then a need to prove to sense experience, by means of certain experiments in optics in a form of my own, the thoughts which I had formed concerning the nature of light and that of colour.

It was not easy for me to buy the things needed for such experiments; for the means of living I derived from tutoring was little enough. Whatever was in any way possible for me I did in order to arrive at such plans of experimentation in the theory of light as would lead to an unprejudiced insight into the facts of nature in this field.

[ 17 ] With the physicist's usual arrangements for experiments I was familiar through my work in Reitlinger's physics laboratory. The mathematical treatment of optics was easy to me, for I had already pursued thorough courses in this field. In spite of all objections raised by the physicists against Goethe's theory of colour, I was driven by my own experiments farther and farther away from the customary attitude of the physicist toward Goethe. I became aware that all such experimentation is only the establishing of certain facts “about light” – to use an expression of Goethe's – and not experimentation with light itself. I said to myself: “The colours are not, in Newton's way of thinking, produced out of light; they come to manifestation when obstructions hinder the free unfolding of the light.” It seemed to me that this was the lesson to be learned directly from my experiments. [ 18 ] Through this, however, light was for me removed from the properly physical realities. It took its place as a midway stage between the realities perceptible to the senses and those visible to the spirit.

[ 19 ] I was not inclined forthwith to engage in a merely philosophical course of thinking about these things. But I held strongly to this: to read the facts of nature aright. And then it became constantly clearer to me how light itself does not enter the realm of the sense-perceptible, but remains on the farther side of this, while colours appear when the sense perceptible is brought into the realm of light. [ 20 ] I now felt myself compelled anew to press inward to the understanding of nature from the most diverse directions. I was led again to the study of anatomy and physiology. I observed the members of the human, animal, and plant organisms in their formations. In this study I came in my own way to Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. I became more and more aware how that conception of nature which is attainable through the senses penetrates through to that which was visible to me in spiritual fashion.

[ 21 ] If in this spiritual way I directed my look to the soul-activity of man, thinking, feeling, and willing, then the “spiritual man” took form for me, a clearly visible image. I could not linger in the abstractions in which men generally think when they speak of thinking, feeling, and willing. In these living manifestations I saw creative forces which set “the man as spirit” there before me. If I then turned my glance to the sense-manifestation of man, this became complete to my observation by means of the spirit-form which ruled in the sense-perceptible.

[ 22 ] I came upon the sensible-supersensible form of which Goethe speaks and which thrusts itself, both for the true natural vision and for the spiritual vision, between what the senses grasp and what the spirit perceives.

[ 23 ] Anatomy and physiology struggled through step by step to the sensible-supersensible form. And in this struggling I through my look fell, at first in a very imperfect way, upon the threefold organization of the human being, concerning which – after having pursued my studies regarding this for thirty years in silence – I first began to speak openly in my book Von Seelenrätzeln.⁴ It then became clear to me that in that portion of the human organization in which the shaping is chiefly directed to the elements of the nerves and the senses, the sensible-supersensible form also stamps itself most strongly in the sense-perceptible. The head organization appeared to me as that in which the sensible-supersensible becomes most strongly visible in the sensible form. On the other hand, I was forced to look upon the organization consisting of the limbs as that in which the sensible-supersensible most completely submerges itself, so that in this organization the forces active in nature external to man pursue their work in the shaping of the human body. Between these poles of the human organization everything seemed to me to exist which expresses itself in a rhythmic manner, the processes of breathing, circulation, and the like. [ 24 ] At that time I found no one to whom I could have spoken of these perceptions. If I referred here or there to something of this, then it was looked upon at once as the result of a philosophic idea, whereas I was certain that I had disclosed these things to myself by means of an understanding drawn from unbiased anatomical and physiological experimentation.

[ 25 ] For the mood which depressed my soul by reason of this isolation in my perceptions I found an inner release only when I read over and over the conversation which Goethe had with Schiller as the two went away from a meeting of the Society for Scientific Research in Jena. They were both agreed in the view that nature should not be observed in such piece-meal fashion as had been done in the paper of the botanist Batsch which they had heard read. And Goethe with a few strokes drew before Schiller's eyes his “archetypal plant.” This through a sensible-supersensible form represents the plant as a whole out of which leaf, blossom, etc., reproducing the whole in detail, shape themselves. Schiller, because he had not yet overcome his Kantian point of view, could see in this “whole” only an “idea” which human understanding formed through observation of the details. Goethe would not allow this to pass. He saw spiritually the whole as he saw with his senses the group of details, and he admitted no difference in principle between the spiritual and the sensible perception, but only a transition from the one to the other. To him it was clear that both had the right to a place in the reality of experience. Schiller, however, did not cease to maintain that the archetypal plant was no experience, but an idea. Then Goethe replied, in his way of thinking, that in this case he perceived his ideas with his eyes. [ 26 ] There was for me a rest after a long struggle in my mind, in that which came to me out of the understanding of these words of Goethe, to which I believed I had penetrated Goethe's perception of nature revealed itself before my mind as a spiritual perception.

[ 27 ] Now, by reason of an inner necessity, I had to strive to work in detail through all of Goethe's scientific writings. At first I did not think of undertaking an interpretation of these writings, such as I soon afterward published in an introduction to them in Kürschner's Deutsche National Literatur. I thought much more of setting forth independently some field or other of natural science in the way in which this science now hovered before me as “spiritual.” [ 28 ] My external life was at that time not so ordered that I could accomplish this. I had to do tutoring in the most diverse subjects. The “pedagogical” situations through which I had to find my way were complex enough. For example, there appeared in Vienna a Prussian officer who for some reason or other had been forced to leave the German military service. He wished to prepare himself to enter the Austrian army as an officer of engineers. Through a peculiar course of fate I became his teacher in mathematics and physical-scientific subjects. I found in this teaching the deepest satisfaction; for my “scholar” was an extraordinarily lovable man who formed a human relationship with me when we had put behind us the mathematical and scientific developments he needed for his preparation. In other cases also, as in those of students who had completed their work and who were preparing for doctoral examinations, I had to give the instruction, especially in mathematics and the physical sciences.

[ 29 ] Because of this necessity of working again and again through the physical sciences of that time, I had ample opportunity of immersing myself in the contemporary views in these fields. In teaching I could give out only these views; what was most important to me in relation to the knowledge of nature I had still to carry locked up within myself.

[ 30 ] My activity as a tutor, which afforded me at that time the sole means of a livelihood, preserved me from one-sidedness. I had to learn many things from the foundation up in order to be able to teach them. Thus I found my way into the “mysteries” of book-keeping, for I found opportunity to give instruction even in this subject.

[ 31 ] Moreover, in the matter of pedagogical thought, there came to me from Schröer the most fruitful stimulus. He had worked for years as director of the Evangelical schools in Vienna, and he had set forth his experiences in the charming little book, Unterrichtsfrage.⁵ What I read in this could then be discussed with him. In regard to education and instruction, he spoke often against the mere imparting of information, and in favour of the evolution of the full and entire human being.

• 1. German Christmas Plays from Hungary.
• 2. History of German Poetry in the Nineteenth Century.
• 3. Ignatius, a peasant boy of Lower Austria, goes abroad.
• 4. Riddles of the Soul.
• 5. Questions on Teaching.

Today, we will include a presentation of German poetry in the circle of reflections that we are now cultivating during this time. The first part of this presentation will be dedicated to the poet in whose presence we have the great and intimate satisfaction of seeing him in our midst today: our dear Professor Friedrich Lienhard. And it is in keeping with a deep feeling for the unique life's work of our esteemed friend that I want to express, albeit late, following the feelings that have been expressed to Friedrich Lienhard by the broadest circles of the German people on the occasion of his birthday a few weeks ago. It certainly corresponds to our deepest feelings when I express to him today the complete merging of all our warmth with the festive joys that have surrounded him, which have shown him how much that which he has been able to give to his people from the depths of his gifted nature resonates in the hearts of many.

Certainly, my dear friends, there was a wider circle that is more important for historical development today than our narrower circle, which in a festive mood has approached Friedrich Lienhard in the last few weeks. But with all our hearts we join with our feelings, with our sentiments, with what Friedrich Lienhard was fully entitled to hear in these weeks: the deepest agreement of her innermost feelings with his feelings. Many have spoken to him about it. The highest recognition that science can give to human intellectual endeavor has been bestowed upon Friedrich Lienhard by his, I would say, mother university. This is a source of great joy to us and, I am sure, to all those who are able to feel the deep debt of gratitude that exists towards human intellectual achievement. All those who heard about how Lienhard's mother university awarded the honorary doctorate, the recognition of science for human intellectual achievements, were overcome with the deepest satisfaction and joy. And in the deepest sense, we empathized with everything that has happened around him in the past few days, empathized because what is so infinitely sacred to us, what we cling to with all our love and striving, also seems to permeate his work.

It can be said that more recent human culture has produced much that is significant in the way of poetic art. In many places, what present culture can give to people flourishes in poetic achievements. The future will decide, and the heart of the present can already sense how it will decide, which of these blossoms are so closely linked to the temporality of contemporary culture that they will also fade when that culture, with its sole affiliation to the present, sinks into the past. And what is culture of our time has been brought up from the depths of the human being, that it blossoms, grows and greens towards that which is eternal, which will remain of our culture of the times, as something that carries the seeds of the future and will be a support for the ongoing spiritual culture of humanity. We want to be connected to the eternal in the present, to everything that reaches into the future, with all our hearts. And we hear this in the words of Friedrich Lienhard. When we connect with the wonderful natural moods that sound so uplifting, so enchanting, so delightful, so graceful in Friedrich Lienhard's poetry, then we feel how, behind his work, in his work, the spirits of nature themselves surge and weave. We feel drawn through the word, through the thought, through the feelings, to the creative nature, with which we also want to connect in knowledge through spiritual science. And we feel that these poems arise from what seizes man from the eternal, that they express this eternal in the temporal for the upliftment, the joy, the elevation of the human heart and soul. This makes us intimate with all of Lienhard's poetry. It makes us read and listen to it; it makes us, I would say, live and weave ourselves into it from the very first line, feel connected to its life element, to its creativity, and at the same time feel how the soul's life force, the spirit's air of life, overflows in us when we are allowed to let the impressions of his poetry take effect on us. Then again, when he conjures up the figures of ancient times out of the mysterious fog of existence, in lively activity and lively effectiveness, then we feel that yearning of humanity come to life, which expresses itself in the fact that the human human soul must look beyond everything that takes place historically on the outside, before the eyes and ears and the other senses of humanity, and plays itself up into the mythical, which, as an eternal element, encompasses the historical-temporal. And in this truly mythical element, in this element that connects human hearts with the eternal, we feel the figures that Friedrich Lienhard conjures out of the darkness and yet so full of light of prehistoric times.

On the one hand, Lienhard's poetry elevates us from the sensual to the spiritual and creative side of nature, from the present to the past. On the other hand, in his creations, we feel how they carry us into that which can take hold of us from everyday life in a deepening way can take hold of us in a deepening way, enabling us to live in the here and now as a spiritual and living being, how these poems connect us with everything humanly close and humanly lofty, how they develop heart and mind for everything that lives and moves in the world with man. Immersing ourselves in his poetry, we are able to live through its magic with so much that conquers and elevates human hearts in nature and spirit. And so, living with his poetry, we experience the most intimate happiness, the happiness that is the guide to man's true home.

So I ask you, my dear Professor Lienhard, to accept this greeting, which comes from the faithful search for understanding of the impression of your life's work, your life's work that has incorporated so much meaningful and eternal from the development of humanity and entitles us to greet you for all that we now hopefully expect from you in this incarnation. Please accept these words as a promise that we would like to extend to you, not out of passing feelings, but out of a deeper understanding of your life's work to date. Take them as an expression of our desire for all that we may hope for to come from you. Please accept my words as a prelude to every greeting that we wish to extend to you on your future journey through life. May what we strive for be bound to what you strive for. This bond will be sacred to us and we will always view it in such a way that we feel happy and satisfied to see the poet Friedrich Lienhard in our midst. Every moment that we spend in your company will be a moment of heartfelt joy and satisfaction for us.

I wanted to express this to you as a greeting before we now open our hearts to your work again for a short time.

Recitation by Marie Steiner from 'Poems' by Friedrich Lienhard: Faith; Morning Wind; Forest Greeting; The Creating Light (see page 216 for texts),

Lonely Rock

A rock beckons me in the golden air,
High and alone.
Around its summit is the scent of the heath
And evening glow.
A faithful little bee rings out in the herb
Flower bells, pure and calm.
Whoever looks out from there over the land
The world is his!

ELFENTANZ

Raschelgewänder und seidene Schuh',
Krone, Korallen und Bänder dazu
Rundaradei!
Rauschen und schleifen wir, singen dabei,
Rauschen und singen wir,
we swing our rustling skirts
around the ash tree, around into May,
Rundaradei, eia, rundaradei!

Do you want to catch us?
You have to dance with us!
Do you have feet as silky as ours?
Are you as flexible,
Are you as cuddly,
Are you as fast and as swinging as we are?

The leaves on the bush,
They turn in the breeze
The grass-green skirts and flicker in the process!
And if from the blue
The nights a thaw came,
So dances and sparkles in the morning of May!

Drink the light and dance yourself lively!
Drink the light and then up the hill!
A pearl from the early grass splashes down on you, Imagine an elf leaping at you! Finches, oh, see how they fly, Little clouds, oh, see how they glide, Everywhere, everywhere, faces of the sun, You alone in the midst of it all, a darkened man!

Do you want to grab us?
You have to drag along with us!
Do you also have little feet as silky as ours?
Are you as flexible,
Are you as cuddly,
Are you as fast and as nimble as we are?

He stumbles and lurches,
The clogs of the shaggy bear!

Nimble, buzz around him,
Flirting, confusing him!
Whirlwind, caressing wind, teasing wind: there!
Tousle him fine,
Pluck him fine,
Pluck and pluck and pluck him fine!
Hey, and so we float airily and free!
Down there, you catch me now, catch me, catch me,
Tear the train behind me, kiss my cheek, after all,
Catch me – catch me – catch me –
Gone!

SUMMER NIGHT

Strange night! In the reed and moor,
How the dry reed rustles and slurps!
It embraces as if it were alive,
And sighs as it releases them again.

How sweet the rustling sounds!
I have always loved the night wind:
It breathes voices and souls into the reeds, the birches, the moonlight
It breathes voices and souls into them.

Many ghosts are dancing, the world is loud,
The smallest herb stirs and giggles.
From the old knight's tower,
An owl laughs into the enchanted night...

EVENING RED

I long for a homeland that has no earthly boundaries,
I long for an eternal heavenly city out of human need.
The evening glow shines brightly and clearly, the spring rustles gently in the Wasgenwald
How soon my day on earth will pass, and all my daily work!

Oh, come, thou universal night, which knows no earthly measure,
From whose depths star upon star burns upon our tiny star!
I am not tired of the day's work, and yet I am tired of the day
I long for your vastness, you unlimited heavenly city!

AUTUMN ON ODILIENBERG

1. Autumn bells

Through red forest and bell singing,
Through an autumn day's sparkling dew
I seek on anxious heights
The stronghold of a holy woman,
Seeking sunshine above the clouds!
Oh misty walk,
Oh rugged slope,
I will a proud life long
be a pilgrim!

2. The blue flower

The earth smiles as a garden land
On the pilgrim who found the blue flower.

A lily blooms from the deep forest blue:
The bright monastery of a holy woman.

And though I search always, always, always,
You, silent mountain, are the blue flower.

3. Autumn Walk

How beautiful you are! You're a web of golden hair,
I walk transfigured through a fairy-tale grove.
All my soul soars up to God,
A smoke that lost itself in the blue of the heights.

Am I the one who walks dreaming in the falling leaves,

As this earth is full of colors,

Odilienberg is as beautiful as heaven!
In nothing but light, valley and hill dissolve,
And bliss was mine, which was so full of sorrow
Thank you for everything, you blessed year!

SUNDAY MORNING ON THE ODILIENBERG

What laughter and radiance today in the forest and shimmering meadow?
Odilia walks over the mountain and blesses the sunny valleys.

The early bells awaken far and near from weekdays and worries
There is a wondrous radiance on this Sunday morning!

From Otrott and from Heiligenstein, from Klingental and further:
A holy Jacob's ladder rises from the sound of the bells!

And all the saints who have ever lived in the land of the Alisassen
They gather in the “Heidenstadt”, in invisible lanes!

And all the Celts and warriors who long ago converted to the Lord
They crowd like a forest of flowers around the one who is highly revered.

Oh sea of spirits, oh sea of sounds, oh radiance in forest and meadow
Odilia walks over the mountain and blesses the sunny district!

ST. ODILIA

Patron Saint of Alsace

Her heart was a sun,
her eyes were dead and gray!
And from the clear forehead
of the beautiful woman
flowed the golden hair
in a rich flood —
Oh Holy Woman of Odilia,
make me pious and good!

In a mountain spring
she washed her white hands
and her blind eyes
Then she saw her Alsace
in pure May blossom
standing before her eyes
Oh holy woman of Odilia,
teach me to see!

In the monastery the bells are ringing,
The world is drowning in the fog
But see, the stars are shining brightly
From the summer night sky,
But see, Strasbourg is shining brightly
Over to our heights
Oh Holy Lady of Odilia,
Alsace is beautiful!

We will then connect with what we hear from Friedrich Lienhard's poetry, some of a poet who, like Friedrich Lienhard, shows us that the most Germanic nature finds its way out of its self-conception to the eternal of an ideal world view, who also shows us how the whole intimate empathy with the vibrations of the German being broadens the view to universality, to an all-worldly view, how the German view does not narrow, how it leads out to the great wide plan, where all that is human comes into its own and nothing human is misunderstood.

Wilhelm Jordan is the other poet, of whom we want to hear the piece of his Nibelung poem, especially where he wants to introduce a mood of the human heart, where the heart opens out of the temporal in order to listen for counsel for the temporal out of the eternal. How the German hero seeks counsel not only in the external world, but also from spiritual beings who speak through nature and through the soul's outer being. How the German hero opens his heart to this counsel in order to repel the threat that comes from the Huns in the east and threatens the burgeoning of German culture. This scene, which is so poignantly connected with the innermost German feeling, but with the feeling of world culture, is then inserted into our present performance.

From “The Nibelungs” by Wilhelm Jordan. The Saga of Sigfrid, 18th Song.

Just then spoke to the servants
Of the sanctuary in the grove at Holmgart,
Now already infirm and very old, the seeress Oda:

“I thought to rest from the runic office, The little time that my pilgrimage On earth still lasts; but highly significant Is this message from the reeve of Berne; The noble Ditrich, who has long since been in charge of Ditmar, Tired of age, of the power. His bravest man and armorer, Hildebrant, the son of Herbrant,he sent, together with Siegfried's steward,to the mighty mother of men and his most valiant man and armorer,
Hildebranten, the son of Herbrant,
Sandt' he, together with Sigfrid's carer,
to the mighty mother of men and gods,
to give account, to seek advice
and guiding light from the fall of the lots...

But small is the measure of human wisdom;
So let us now pray for revelation
From the omniscient spirit of the mighty goddess,
Who bears all happenings in her womb,
And sees the shadow cast of what is still uncreated.
Omnipotent mother of men and gods,
Once more in this hour,
Strengthen the mouth of the weary. For the last time,
Before I die, I will ascend
The golden throne on the hollow step
And, with incense clouds swirling around my forehead,
From the disappointing breath from the eternal depths,
boldly gaze into the future. —
So now speak, messenger, Ditrich of the Berners:
What does he ask of the goddess of the Goth leaders ?“

Then the offspring of Heribrant spoke:

”What will help us to salvation
from the Hunnic hordes?
What is the goal of the future for a German?"

Once the question had been asked, she climbed the ladder
weakly and with difficulty. With a golden knife
she cut the rice, came down slowly,
carved the smooth bark with runes,
divided the stick into small pieces,
And turned away, she drew them
On the white carpet... Then she tied on the cloth,
Woven from unbidden, black kid
Wool, bent down, selected,
Reaching blindly, went into the grotto
And bade the princes and witnesses follow her.

Then she mounted the chair. She lined up the rods
On the holy table made of the wood of a fir tree,
Which the storm blast had once split to the root,
And then read the motto according to their position.

Then she sat lost in deep thought,
While the steam in dense clouds
Enveloped her head, to which a hundred winters
Had bleached the hair to a blinding snow.

Now at last she beckons. The incense evaporates,
eyes roll in holy ecstasy
and sparkle with fire, but only into the distance
do they gaze, enraptured, perceiving the future.
And so the divinely gifted began:

"In a surging confusion, shadows of princes and peoples and future strugglesappear to me. But in the space of the searching soul,thousands of yearsdeceptivelymove together in view.

Oh, Ditrich, consider
The envy in the neighborhood!
Otherwise a relative
Will throw you from the throne,
And you seek security
And help to return home
In bitter banishment
With the dreaded enemy.

What threatening urge
From east and west!
There Hun hordes,
Here Merowig's might.
Thus languishes the question
Of rights and realms;
Obey the hero,
That aids to salvation.

Here, the ruling
domestic sovereign
binds the envious neighbors
to a glorious empire;
There lie the corpses,
There rise the cities,
The Lechfeld illuminates
the sun of victory.

Be strong in the West,
Conquer in the East,
And take in the North
The march to the sea,
Only do not seek the concubine
In the south of the mountains,
For spirits and bodies
You poison with your kiss.

Oh King, do you fail to recognize
The meaningful legend
Of the future's salvation
Through domestic discipline?
The fruit tree of the frosty land
Becomes sick and crippled,
Because, to ennoble it,
The palm branch does not fit.

Woe! scarlet red foam
The rivers of blood,
The staggering crowd
Is discouraged and swears.
Then the red beard rages
Hidden in the mountains,
Until the raven pair, waking up,
Calls him to Valhalla.

Then the proud ones pray
And bow their foreheads
Like penitents to the dust
Before the rising star.
What crowns in the manger
The infant victor?
Three kings come
And call him Lord.

Oh, Master of mercy,
The furious, wild
And heartless Hilde
Banishes thy commandment;
Their sword shelters the weak, —
Not again awake —
To the rage of revenge
The envy and the need.

Gone, forgotten
Are gods and heroes,
Inaudible fade away
Their praise and their song.
The fearless fathers
Admired wisdom
Is cunningly slandered
And shamelessly reviled.

Incomprehensible feud
Empties the land,
Sending children and old men
To fight for a grave.
The bearer of the crown,
Struck by the crook,
There he bends barefoot
To the prayer of repentance.

But the magician trembles;
You, little rod, destroy for him
The bulwark of his castles;
His letter is burnt.

Dawn is announced
By the candles of the children's tree:
The time of estrangement
Will soon be over.

Another age of disaster,
Full of doubt and discord?
Brothers are consumed
With an excessive lust for murder.
Like greedy vultures
The Franks estrange
The best of the castles
On the rushing Rhine.

But the flames do not burn for long
The shining embers;
We overthrow the proud
From the defiant throne,
And it repents in exile
On a lonely island
The despot despairing
The disruption of the realm.

Therefore, though the earth
Has more warriors than herbs
To fight the world war,
Be fearless, my people.
Full of proud thoughts
The German endures
The storms with strong patience.

The day of recovery will come,
We will find the leader,
Who remembers our fathers
My people will win.
They will fight the battles,
They will adorn themselves with wreaths
And forge the crown
Of the united power.

The seeress spoke it; then she sank down
And gasped for breath, gasping and groaning,
With a broken look, her head on her chest.
Now she raises her head again as if listening,
With flaming eyes and flying hair.

“O Sigfrid,” she cries, “look at the sun!
It fades, it blackens: the wavering lights,
That shimmer through the shadows of the trees, they form
Not discs as usual, no, sharp sickles.
The toads lament, the owl hoots, So that midday becomes night; the murderous marten Stalks and catches the sleepy birds. As much as you thirst, you dare not drink: For behind you... Help! - wait, Hela! Oh woe - stricken - the world goes to ruin
Dreadful scream - terrible night.

Speech failed her. She leaped up,
As, with an arrow through the heart, the stag leaps up in the air
Plunged to the ground and was dead.

When, deeply moved by the words of the seer
And shaken, stunned by the horrors of death,
Odas' remains surrounded the others,
Then disappeared unnoticed from the threshold of the grotto
And won the expanse of Sibich, the Welsche.

Note: The notes on instruction given on the Logoi (last lecture in Part 1 and Part 2) did not cover the ‘creation out of nothing’ concept which is an essential part of it. The extracts from other lectures which follow are intended to make up for this.^*

From a lecture in Berlin on 30 October 1903⁹⁶

World evolution can be seen to be in three stages—conscious awareness, life and form. The different kinds of conscious awareness come to expression in the seven planets Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. Seven worlds of life are gone through on each planet, and each of these in turn through seven states of form.

Our physical Earth is such a form state, the fourth form state or globe in the fourth life world of the fourth planet or state of consciousness. Let us now think of the Earth as it is today and ask ourselves: What are we doing here? We take objects from the world around us, first of all from the mineral world, and make them into artefacts. We make combinations, creating a whole from separate things. This is creative work in form. Something new may also arise in another way, similar to the way in which stems, leaves and flowers arise from the root of a plant. The flower is not put together like a machine, where things are combined, but needs to grow from something which is already there, in a process which is part of life. Something new is created out of something which is already there.

With the third way of producing something, which is from the conscious mind, the process is such that we may say: Essentially there was nothing there, really—a nothing.

Let us go back to the very beginning of such a planetary evolution, the very beginning of Saturn evolution. What do we observe there? No physical planet existed as yet, not even in the most subtle arupa form, and the moment has not yet come when Saturn exists in its first beginnings. Nothing existed as yet of our planetary chain, but the whole fruit of the preceding planetary chain was there. It is rather like waking up in the morning, when we have not yet done anything, and all we have in mind is the memory of what we did the day before. Going back to the very beginning of Saturn evolution we thus have the memory of an earlier planetary chain, of what went before, in the spirits which were then manifesting.

Let us now go to the end of the planetary chain, to the time when the Vulcan stage will come to an end. In the course of the planetary chain, the potential, which was there to begin with has gradually emerged as creation. In the beginning, therefore, conscious awareness flowed out; out of the content of what had gone before, from memory, conscious awareness created something new. Something will thus be there at the end, which was not there at the beginning, and that is everything which has been learned. The potential, which was there at the beginning has flowed out into all kinds of things and entities. A new conscious awareness has arisen at the end, with new content—a new content of the conscious mind. It is something which has arisen from nothing, from lessons learned.

If we look at renewal in life, we have to say that there must be a seed to make it all possible. But the new content of conscious awareness at the end of a planetary evolution has truly arisen from nothing, from lessons learned. This needs no foundations, it creates something which arises out of nothing. We cannot say that when someone looks at someone else that he has taken something away from that other person when he afterwards keeps a memory of them. This memory has arisen from nothing. This is the third way of creation—out of nothing. The three ways of creation are thus the following.

Combining existing elements (form)

Letting new structures with new life content arise from existing foundations (life)

Creating from nothing (conscious awareness).

These are three definitions of spirits that give rise to a planetary chain, are at the back of a planetary chain. They are called the three Logoi. The third Logos produces by combining. When something else arises from a substance, something with new life, the second Logos is behind it. And whenever something arises from nothing, we have the first Logos. The first Logos is therefore also often called ‘something that lies hidden in the things themselves’, the second Logos ‘the substance dormant in the things which creates living things from living things’, and the third Logos ‘the one which combines all that is, putting the world together from those things’.

The three Logoi always move through and into one another in the world. The first Logos also learns of the inner wisdom and of the will. The creative activity of the first Logos is learning from experience, that is, gathering thoughts out of nothingness and then again creative work based on the thoughts which have come from nothingness. Creation out of nothing does not mean, however, that there would have been absolutely nothing there. It means that things were learned from experience in the course of evolution and that new things were created in the course of evolution, with something which exists melting away, as it were, and something new is created out of the experience.

Creation happens like this, to use an analogy: Someone looks at another person and remembers the image. If he had the creative gifts of the first Logos he would be able to say to himself: ‘Right, I’ve seen N and also know the idea of N in reverse. I can also produce a negative of him, with black where there’s white and vice versa.’ He has thus learned from the object and its negative and created something completely new. He might endow this with life. It would be a new structure which did not exist before. Let us now assume something does this with many people and those many people were to perish. The observer would then be able to create a new world on the basis of what he has learned.

If we study the world, we will always see the three Logoi interacting. Let us visualize the way the three Logoi work with reference to the human being in our planetary system. Let us think of a point at the beginning of Saturn evolution when nothing was as yet in existence. What happened there? Everything that had existed before was allowed to come out drop by drop, as it were. What arose there would have been the very first pouring out of matter from the sum of what had been learned from earlier experiences. Everything that had been taken in before was made to flow out in form of matter. This also included the matter from which humanity would later arise. Initially this matter existed merely as matter. The out-flowing had to be continually built up and brought together by combination. The combining of the matter which had flowed out was a new creation. It was initially the work of the third Logos; once matter had flowed out it was therefore the work of the third Logos.

What significance did this have for the human being? It meant that first of all, all the parts were brought together which would then make up his physical body. At the time, on Saturn, the human being was very much an automaton. If you had spoken a word into him he would have said it out again. Forms of entities were created. This is called ‘the work of the third Logos’. It continued into the Sun period of evolution when the human being also received his ether body, life. That was the work of the second Logos. Let us now continue on into the Earth period. There the human being himself was given conscious awareness, that is, the possibility of learning from experience out of nothing. That was the work of the first Logos. The Saturn human being received the principle which is form in him. The Sun human being received the principle which is life in him from the second Logos. The Earth human being received the principle that would develop into conscious awareness in him from the first Logos.

We need to get a clearer understanding of the concept of conscious awareness. For this, we need to get a complete idea of this concept on a specific plane. Human beings are conscious, but we need to know where his conscious awareness is. Today, human beings are conscious on the physical plane when we speak of waking consciousness. This might, however, also be on the astral plane. A creature which has its life on the physical plane and its conscious awareness on the astral plane is an animal.

In the human being, conscious awareness is localized in the head. In the case of an animal, a tiger for example, conscious awareness is on the astral plane. It creates a focus for itself outside the head and from there it influences the tiger. When a tiger feels pain, the pain also goes across to the astral plane. The organ for this is in front of the head in a tiger, where human beings have their forehead. In human beings, the focus has become enclosed in the head and filled with the forebrain; conscious awareness has been captured by the brain and frontal skull and is therefore on the physical plane. In the tiger, and in all animals altogether, the focal point for consciousness lies in front of the head, in the astral; that is where it goes into the astral world. It is different again with plants. If we were able to trace their conscious awareness we would, going from above downwards, always come to the tip of the root. Following the line of growth we would then come to the centre of the earth. That is the point where all sensations of plants come together, where the conscious awareness of plants is absorbed. It is in direct connection with the mental world. The whole plant world has its conscious awareness in the mental sphere. Conscious awareness for the whole of the mineral world is in the highest spheres of the mental world, on the arupa plane. The conscious awareness of stones is such that if we wanted to find the focus we would find it to be like a kind of Sun atmosphere. When we work on the mineral world here on Earth, breaking stones, every single act connects in a specific way with this Sun atmosphere. We thus have a range of entities on the physical plane, but their conscious awareness is on different planes.

Lecture given in Stuttgart on 15 September 1907⁹⁷

Let us first of all investigate the meaning of involution and evolution. Let us consider a plant, a fully developed plant with root, leaves, stems, flower and fruit, in short with all the parts which a plant is able to have. That is the one thing. And then consider the tiny seed from which the plant may arise again. Looking at the seed we see just a small grain, but the whole plant is already inside it, wrapped up in it, as it were. Why is it in there? Because the seed grain was taken from the plant, and the plant has put all its powers into it. In occultism, distinction is therefore made between two processes. One is that the seed unrolls and develops into a whole plant—evolution; the other that the plant folds up, its structure creeping into the seed, as it were—involution. So if a life form which has many organs develops in such a way that nothing is visible any more of those organs, that they have shrunk together into the seed, this is called ‘involution’, and the going apart, unfolding is called an ‘evolution’. This duality alternates everywhere in life, but always only in the sphere of the manifest. You can see this not only in plants; it is like this also in the higher spheres of life.

You might, for instance, follow the evolution in your mind of European cultural life from Augustine to Calvin, beyond the Middle Ages. If you consider the cultural life of that time you will find a degree of mystic inwardness in Augustine himself. You cannot read his works, especially his Confessions, without getting a sense of the inwardness of this man’s life of feelings. If we then move on in time we come to the marvellous figure of John Scotus Erigena a monk who had originally come from Scotland and was therefore also called John the Scot and lived at the court of Charles the Bald. He did not do so well in the Church. Legend tells of the brothers torturing him to death with their pens. This should not be taken literally, however. It is true, however, that he was martyred. John wrote a magnificent book De Divisione Naturae (about the divisions of nature), which shows great profundity. Then we come to the mystics of the Pfaffengasse,⁹⁸ where this inwardness of feeling spread among large masses of people. These were not only the leading clerics but also the populace; people who worked in the fields or in a smithy—all were caught up in this inwardness of feeling which was a trait of that time. Moving on we come to Nicholas of Cusa who lived from 1401 to 1464. We can continue like this to the end of the Middle Ages; we will always find that depth of feeling, an inwardness that spread through all levels of society.

If we compare that period with the one which followed, beginning in the 16th century and continuing into our own time, we perceive a tremendous difference. To begin with, there was Copernicus who had a comprehensive thought which brought a renewal in cultural life; he made it so much part of human thinking that anyone who believes in something different today will be considered a fool. We come to Galileo, who discovered the laws that govern the swing of a pendulum on observing the movement of a lamp in a church. We can thus follow the course of time step by step, and would always find the complete opposite of the Middle Ages. Feeling grew less and less, the inwardness vanished; the rational mind, the intellect, emerged more and more, with people getting cleverer and more intelligent all the time.

We thus have two periods of time which were exact opposites in character. Spiritual science gives us the explanation for this. There is an occult law which says that it must be like this. The period from Augustine to Calvin was one of mystic evolution and intellectual involution; since then we have been living in a period of intellectual evolution and mystic involution. What does this mean? From Augustine to the 16th century it was a time when mystic life unfolded in the outside world. Something else existed at the time that was only a seed—intellectual life. If was like a seed lying hidden in the soil of the mind which then gradually unfolded after the 16th century. Intellectual life was thus in involution at that time, just as a plant lies in its seed. Nothing can arise in the world that has not first been in such an involution. From the 16th century onwards, intellectual thinking has been in evolution, and mystic life has gone into the background; it is in involution. Now the time has come where this mystic life must emerge again. The theosophical movement must help it to unfold again, to go into evolution.

Involution and evolution are thus always alternating in life in the sphere of the manifest. However, if we stop at this we are only looking at the outside. To see the whole, there has to be a third principle which is behind those two. What is this third principle? Imagine you come up against a phenomenon in the outside world and reflect on it. You are there, the outside world is there, and your thoughts arise in you. Those thoughts were not there before. If you develop the idea of a rose, for example, it will only arise the moment you relate to the rose; you were there, the rose was there; and when the thought, the image of the rose arises in you, something entirely new comes up which has not been there before.

This also applies in other spheres of life. Think of Michelangelo at work. He hardly ever used models. Let us imagine, however, that he collected a group of models. Michelangelo was there, the models were there. But the image of the group in Michelangelo’s soul is something new; it is a completely new creation. This has nothing to do with involution and evolution. It is something completely new which arises in the relationship between an entity able to receive and an entity able to give. New creations like this always arise when essence relates to essence. They are a beginning. Remember how we considered the way thoughts are creative here yesterday, how they can ennoble the soul and will later even work on the forming of the body. Something which some entity thinks, the creation of a thought, an idea, will work on and continue to have an effect. It is a new creation and also a beginning, but it does have consequences. If you have good thoughts today, those thoughts will bear fruit into the far distant future, for your soul follows its own way in the world of the spirit. Your body will go back into the elements again, it will decompose. But even if everything out of which the thought has arisen vanishes, the thought will continue to work.

Let us take the example of Michelangelo again. His magnificent works have raised the hearts and minds of millions of people, but they will fall to dust one day. There will be generations that will no longer see any of his creations. What lived in Michelangelo’s soul before his images assumed physical form, something which was first of all a new creation in his soul—this will live on. It will remain and will emerge at later stages of evolution and take form. Do you know why we have clouds and stars today? Because there were entities in the long distant past which had the thought of clouds and stars. Everything arises from thought creations, and the thought is a new creation. Everything has arisen from thoughts, and the greatest things in the world have come from the thoughts of the godhead.

There you have the third principle. In the sphere of the manifest, things alternate between evolution and involution. But behind this, deeply hidden, lies the third principle, and this alone gives the fullness, a creation which is entirely new, having arisen from nothing.

Thus there have to be three things—creation out of nothing, and then, when this manifests and proceeds in time, it assumes the forms of the manifest: evolution and involution.

Lecture given in Berlin on 17 June 1909⁹⁹

In Christian esoteric language, creating out of the given is called ‘being creative in the spirit’, and creation out of given situations that are right, beautiful and full of virtue is called the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is beatitude for the human being when he succeeds in creating something which is right or true, beautiful and good out of nothing. For human beings to be able to create in the sense of this Holy Spirit, they had first to be given the foundation for this, as for all creation out of nothing. They were given this foundation when the Christ came into our evolution. When human beings on Earth became able to have living experience of the Christ event, they were also able to rise to being creative in the Holy Spirit. It is thus the Christ himself who creates the most eminent, most profound basis. If human beings come to be such that they stand firmly on the ground of the Christ experience, that the Christ experience is the vehicle into which they enter so that they may develop further, then the Christ sends the Holy Spirit to them, and they become able to create what is right, beautiful and good in terms of further evolution.

We see, therefore, how the Christ event came on Earth as a final conclusion, as it were, of what had been impressed in the human being through Saturn, Sun and Moon. It has given humanity the most sublime principle which will enable them to live into the prospect of the future and be more and more creative out of the given situations, out of something which is not in this place or in that one, but depends on how human beings relate to the realities that surround them, which is the Holy Spirit in the most comprehensive sense. This is yet again such an aspect of Christian esoteric thinking. This relates to the most profound thought we are able to have concerning all evolution, the thought of creation out of nothing.

Because of this no true theory of evolution can ever leave aside the thought of creation out of nothing. Let us assume there were only evolution and involution. This would be endless repetition, as we see it in plants. All there would be on Vulcan then would be what had its beginning on Saturn. But in addition to evolution and involution the thought of creation out of nothing came in the middle of our evolution. When Saturn, Sun and Moon had passed, the Christ came to the Earth as the element of great enrichment, so that there will be something that is wholly new on Vulcan, something which did not yet exist on Saturn. Someone who speaks only of evolution and involution, will speak of the process of evolution as though everything would just repeated itself, like a cycle. Such cycles can never truly explain world evolution, however. We need to add this creation out of nothing to evolution and involution, something which brings something new into the existing situations. This gives us true understanding of the world.

• *. New translations have been made of these excerpts for this volume, as the German editions have changed since the lectures were first translated into English.
• 96. In Foundations of Esotericism (see note 13).
• 97. In Occult Signs and Symbols, tr. S. Kurland; New York: Anthroposophic Press 1972.
• 98. In the Pfaffengasse—popular name given to the region on the left bank of the Rhine where ecclesiastical states were numerous—Chur, Constance, Basle, Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Trier, Cologne.
• 99. In Geisteswissenschaftliche Menschenkunde GA 107 [in German].

The evolution of Art in Middle Europe up to the time when Dürer and Holbein entered this stream of evolution is one of the most complex problems in the history of Art. Especially in Dürer's case—to speak of all the elements that culminate in him, we have to deal with a whole series of interpenetrating impulses. Another difficult problem is the relation of this artistic evolution to that other one, the culmination of which we considered a short while ago: the Italian Renaissance, the great masters of Italy.

Needless to say, we can do no more than emphasise a few salient points. To understand what is really important in the evolution of this European Art, we must realise, above all, the existence of a peculiar talent, a peculiar activity of fancy, of imagination which had its mainsprings in Middle Europe. I mean that Central Europe which we may conceive extending approximately from Saxony to Thuringia, to the sea, to the Atlantic Ocean. Peculiar impulses of artistic fancy or imagination proceed from this region of Middle Europe. As impulses of fancy they go back into very olden times. In a certain way they were undoubtedly at work even at the time of the first spread of Christianity in the more Southern regions. These Northern impulses of the imagination stand in clear contrast to those of a specifically Southern nature. The difference is not easy to characterise, but we may describe it somehow thus: the Southern impulses of imagination are rooted in a certain power of perception for the quiet form, the form at rest, inasmuch as form, and color too, spring forth from deeper manifestations which lie hidden, in a certain sense, behind what is directly, physically perceptible. Accordingly, whatsoever the Southern imagination seeks to reproduce in Art, it tends rather to raise it above the level of the individual. It tends to raise the Individual into the Typical, the Universal, into a realm where the more special, earthly and human qualities will melt away. It is a striving to reveal how something that lies beneath the outer objects works into their forms and colors. This impulse of imagination also evolves a certain tendency to come to rest in the well balanced composition—placing the figures side by side in certain mutual relationships—a power of composition which, as you know, reaches its highest eminence in Raphael.

The Mid-European impulse of artistic fancy is of a very different kind. Tracing it back into the oldest time, we find that to begin with it makes no immediate effort to take hold of the form as such, or to achieve a restfulness of composition. Its interest is in the quick event which it portrays; it seeks to express what comes from the soul's impulses, to portray how the living Will of man expresses itself in gesture and in movement—not so much in the well-measured Form that is appropriate to human nature, but in the gesture in which the soul itself is living, in which it seeks to find expression itself as in its own sign or token. Such is the Northern impulse of artistic fancy. He who is sensitive to these things will always feel through it the working of ancient runes, where twigs or treetrunks or the like were thrown together, to express something through their positions as they fell. The sign or token, and the inner life which it contains underlies this kind of imagination, which is able, therefore, to unite itself far more with the individual expression of the soul's life; with all that springs directly from the Will-impulse of the soul. Little is left to us of what was there in olden times,—I do not mean so much as finished works of Art but as ideas of human life and cosmic processes. All this was exterminated root and branch with the spread of Christianity. Little is left of what wls contained in the old Paganism. Once more, I do not mean perfect works of plastic Art—nor will I say symbolical—but rather sign-like representations of their ideas about the world and life. If more of these things had been preserved, even the outer world would feel how the essential thing in the Northern Art is this imagination working more from within outward—from the impulses of Will and not contemplative vision. This imagination, working forth from the impulse of the Will, must be regs.rded as the fundamental note in all the cultural life that spread from the North towards the South. And, I may say, more than is generally realised, spread out in this direction. The time will come when men will see and unravel how much of these Northern impulses lies hidden, above all, in the art of the Renaissance. It is hard to recognise in the finished and extant works of Art, whether of the North, or of the South, or Spain, the true nature of the impulses that they contain. For these impulses flowed together from many quarters. Consider, for instance, all that is living in the famous “Last Supper” of Leonardo da Vinci in Milan. Compare it with the earlier pictures of the Last Supper which were derived more purely from the Southern spirit. See what dramatic life and movement he has expressed in the relations of the several figures, see the individual characters of soul which shine out of these faces. Then you will realise, working in all this, a Northern impulse that spread mysteriously towards the South. Something is here poured out, needless to say, poured out into the purely Southern imagination—albeit correspondingly toned down—which we observe again in quite another sphere in Shakespeare. For Shakespeare's figures are certainly born out of the Northern Spirit. They always express the individual human being himself, they no longer contain what comes, as it were, out of the Supersensible, using the human figure and human action like a mere instrument for its expression.

But we may go still further, my dear friends. Strange though it may sould today, if we observe Michelangelo's wonderful foreshortenings in the Sistine Chapel we cannot but realise, even in this element of movement, an impulse coming from the North. These impulses were but submerged and overlaid by Southern ones. We can see a special instance of this process in Raphael, whose imagination, growing up amid the loneliness of the Umbrian Hills, had remained, after all, more or less purely Southern. All that Raphael observed in Leonardo, in Michelangelo—influenced as they were by Northern impulses—all this he took and rounded off and ‘classicised’ if I may put it so, into his marvellous composition.

These are a few bare indications of profound problems, which if we cannot master we do not understand the medieval Art at all. For the same reason, more than elsewhere we find in the oldest extant medieval Art the expression of the word itself in signs quite naturally wedded with the plastic arts. The artistic elaboration of letters into exquisitely printed miniatures, in the biblical works created in Europe at that time, give us a feeling of something absolutely natural. In the oldest period of Christian culture we find the monks—all of whom undoubtedly absorbed Mid-European impulses—decorating their litanies and other books in this way, causing the letters, as it were, to blossom forth into miniature paintings. This was no mere external habit. It sprang straight from the feeling of an inner connection between sign and picture. The sign or token wedged its way into pictorial description, as it were. Now the ‘sign’, once again, is a direct expression of the human Will, the human life of soul. Here, therefore, we have the natural transition from that which seeks expression in sentences and words to that which flows into the painted miniature or into the sculptured ivories with which they decorate the covers of their books. Truly, in all these things there blossomed forth something that was afterwards no longer there for Mid-European Art. In every case these miniatures reveal a creation with inner life and impulse of the soul, combined with a certain naivete, a certain uncouth simplicity in respect to what the South could reproduce with such abundant skill; I mean, what lives in the Form itself, in the Form that belongs to the pure human nature before the movement and mobility expressing the individual life of the soul, works from within and pours itself into the nature of these forms. Take any of these miniatures in the old Bibles. Again and again you will see it is the artist's impulse to express, albeit through the traditional biblical figures, what he himself may have experienced in soul. A guilty conscience, for example—all such experiences of the soul are expressed magnificently in the older Mid-European miniature painting. This, as I said, is combined with great uncouthness in point of Form; I mean that human form to which man himself, through his own individuality, does not contribute, but in which the Divine and spiritual being that underlies all Nature is revealed.

Now the impulse which I have just characterised rayed out again and again from Middle Europe, and as it did so it lost itself in what was raying outward meantime from the South. It lost itself, for instance, in the spread of Christianity and Romanism. Moreover, that which rayed out from Middle Europe was fertilised in turn from the South. All that was gained from the South by way of mastery of Form and of Color, too, inasmuch as it manifests the underlying spirituality of nature, all this entered into the flower of the Northern impulse. Thus did the several impulses grow into one another, layer upon layer, interweaving.

Evolution, therefore, did not take place continuously but more or less by sudden starts. Again and again we feel impelled to ask: What would have evolved if, instead of these sudden impacts, there had been a continuous process of evolution? We have the following feeling, for example (though, needless to say, these are mere hypotheses); What would have been the outcome if that which was contained, during the early Carolingean and Ottonian periods, in the miniatures and sculptured ivories above described, had been enabled to evolve straightforwardly to a great Art? What actually took place was very different; the Romanesque and Classical carried forward on the advancing wave of Christianity, poured itself out into all this, bringing with it in architecture and in sculpture, the impulse of Form which we described just now—the Southern impulse. Then were the Northern impulse of movement and expression, and the Southern of form and color wedded to one another (though when I speak of color in the Southern impulse I must qualify once more:—Color as the manifestation of the underlying Spiritual that is expressed in Nature, not of the individual).

But there was yet another thing. We may say that with the decline of the Ottonian period the first Northern impulse came to an end. The classical and Romanesque grew into it, spreading into the tributary valleys of the Rhone and Rhine. Into these regions especially, but further afield as well, a Classical impulse found its way. The two impulses coalesced and attained their height towards the 12th and 13th centuries. Then from the West emerged another impulse, which had been preparing in the meantime. Once more, then, the impulse of contemplative Vision—the Southern impulse, properly speaking,—was wedded in mid-European Art with that impulse of movement which, as I described just now, sprang essentially from the element of Will. But meanwhile in the West a different impulse was preparing, and grew into the union of the other two, till from the 12th and 13th centuries it was completely interwoven with the united impulse which I characterised just now, raying outward from the basins of the Rhone and the Rhine. This other impulse, prepared in the West, also resulted from the flowing together of two distinct impulses. It appears in the sublime forms of the Gothic. Truly, in Gothic Art once more two impulses have come together. The one is carried thither from the North. It contains, if I may describe it so, a practicality of life, a cleverness in skill and understanding, a certain realism. It comes to Europe on the Norman waves of culture. The other impulse comes from Spain, and more especially from Southern France. Thus we have coming from the North an element of intelligence, utility and realism (but we must not confuse this with the later realism; this early realism sought to understand the Universe, the Cosmos, and wanted to see all earthly things in their connection with the heavenly). From the South, on the other hand, and concentrated most of all in Southern France, there came what we may describe as the mystical element, striving upward from the earthly realm and reaching up to Heaven. Hence the peculiar nature of the Gothic, for these two elements have grown together in it, a mystical element and an intellectual. No one will understand the Gothic who cannot see in it on the one hand this mystical element which, concentrated in the South of France, grew especially in the 9th, 10th and 11th centuries. It brings into the Gothic Art that mysterious quality of striving upward from below, while united with it, on the other hand, there is an element of cool intelligence and craftsmanship, which is never absent from the Gothic. The sublime upward striving of the Gothic forms is mystical; their interlacings, and ingenious relationships come from another quarter, adding to the mystical element the height of craftsmanship.

Thus in the Gothic the one side and the other are peculiarly united. These impulses which poured themselves into the Gothic flowed over again from the West, notably in the 12th and 13th centuries, to permeate once more the artistic creation of Mid-Europe.

But we must bear in mind another thing in this connection. It is true that in the natural course of civilisation there was always a tendency for things to interweave with one another, layer upon layer; for every impulse always tends to spread. The Classical element of Form is interwoven, for example, in the works proceeding from the Gothic. But this is only the one tendency. In Middle Europe there always remained a certain impulse of revolt which is especially to be observed in Art. Again and again, this impulse tends to bring out a strong element of Will and Movement and expression. Thus, after all, that which flows inward, both from the South and West, is ever and again more or less repelled, pushed back again. In Middle Europe they felt the Classical and in later times even the Gothic as a foreign element.

What is it, essentially, that they feel as a foreign element? It is that which in any way tends to blot out the individuality. They feel in the Roman and Classical something that is hostile to the individual. Nay, in later times they even feel in the Gothic an element beneath which the individual must groan and soffocate. In the artistic life especially, there is in Middle Europe the mood which afterwards finds expression in another sphere, in the Reformation,—a mood already voiced by spirits such as Tauler or Valentin Weigel. Perceiving how the Gothic and the Classical wedged their way into the Mid-European principle and completely overwhelmed it, we must say that in the centuries before Dürer, the Mid-European principle as such, in its own impulses, failed and fell and was unable to come forth, being overwhelmed by the other. Yet it lived on; in thoughts and feelings it was always present. It is the same element which speaks so eloquently out of the subsequent conceptions of Nature, seeking to unite with bold intelligence Heaven and Earth—seeking to comprehend all other things by laws discovered also on the Earth.

But in the heart of it all something quite different is holding sway; it comes to expression very beautifully in the words of Goethe's Faust. Imagine Faust in his study, which we may naturally conceive in Gothic forms. He has studied all that we might describe as Romanism and Classicism, Over against it all he sets the human individuality—the self-supporting individuality of man. Yet how does he contrast it? To understand how Faust opposes the human individuality to all these things in the midst of which he finds himself, we must realise that to this day there thrives almost unnoticed, in Middle Europe, something that unites this country most wonderfully with the East. When today we read or hear of the part that was played in the primeval Persian culture by light and darkness—Ormuzd and Ahriman—we take these things too abstractly. We fail to realise how the men of earlier ages stood in the midst of real and concrete forces. Real light, real darkness, in their mutual interplay, were a direct real experience to the men of former days; and this experience stood nearer to the impulse of Movement and enpression than to the Southern one of Form and composition, where things are placed in quiet balance side by side.

In the creative weaving of the World, light and darkness weave together. Influences of light and dark ray out upon all that lives and moves on Earth, as man and animal. Through light and shade, and through their mutual enhancement to the world of color, we feel the connection between the inner expression of the soul of man that flows into his movements, and something Heavenly and Spiritual which lies far nearer to this human impulse of movement than anything the Southern Art is able to express. Man walks along, man turns his head. With every step, with every turning of the head, new impulses of light and shade appear. When we study this connection between light and movement we enter into something which, as it were, links earthly Nature with the elemental. In this interplay of elemental with earthly Nature the man of Middle Europe lived with a special intensity whenever he could rise to creative fancy. Hence, though the fact has scarcely been observed as yet, color arises very differently in Middle Europe than it does in the South. Color, in the Southern Art, is color driven outward from the inner nature of the being to the surface. That which arises from the artistic imagination of Mid-Europe is cast on to the surface by the interplay of light and darkness; it is color playing over the surface of things. Many things as yet imperfectly realised will only be understood when we perceive this difference in coloring; when we perceive how on the one hand the color is cast on the object and plays over its surface, while on the other hand it surges from within the object to the surface. The latter is the Southern Art of color. Color in Mid-European art is color cast on to the surface, springing from the interplay of light and shade, glistening forth out of the weaving and willing of the light and darkness. As all these things interpenetrate, layer upon layer, the several impulses are not so easily perceived; yet they decidedly exist.

This impulse in Mid-Europe is connected in its turn with what I would call the magical element which we find in the old Persian civilisation. For the interplay of light and shade—light and darkness—is deeply connected with the ancient Persian wisdom of the Magi. Here we have the mysterious manifestations of the life of soul and spirit, as it works at the same time in man himself and in the elemental weaving of the light and shade that play around the human being. It is as though his inner being entered into a hidden relationship with the light and shade that play around him, and with the glistening life of color that springs from light and darkness. This is a thing that lies forever in the element of Will; it brings the quality of magic into connection with the feelings of the soul. And man himself, through this, comes into relation with the elemental beings—those beings who, to begin with, manifest themselves within the elements. Therefore Faust, having turned away from all the philosophic, medical, legal and theosophical studies coming to him from the South, gives himself up to magic. But in doing so he must stand firm and secure within himself. He must not be afraid of all the influences in the midst of which a man is placed when he would stand firm on his own personality alone. He must have no fear of Hell or of the Devil, he must march firmly on through light and darkness. Think how beautiful this feature is: Faust himself working and weaving in the wondrous twilight of the morning! Think how the play of light and darkness enters the famous monologue of Goethe's Faust. It is a wonderful artistic inspiration, intimately connected with the Mid-European impulse. It is equally a poem or a painting, out of the very depths of the Mid-European principle.

Here, again, we have a connection between Man and the naturalistic life and being of the Elements. This is a trait that also played its part in Mid-European conception of the Christian tradition coming upwards from the South. Like a perpetual rebellion, this element wedges itself in; this element by which Mid-Europe is akin to Asia, to an ancient Asiatic civilisation.

All these different influences play into one another; and now into the midst of all this evolution, Albrecht Dürer, an absolutely unique figure in the history of Art, comes upon the scene. Born in 1471, he died in 1526.

I have studied Dürer again and again, as an individual figure, it is true, but placed as he is in the whole context of Mid-European culture, I could never understand him in any other way. Through the infinite and countless channels whereby the unconscious life of the human soul is connected with the life and civilisation around him, Dürer is related to his environment.

We see him at an early age in his portrait of the Jungfer Furlegerie (above) bringing out the light and shade of the figure, modelling this most wonderfully. Here we already recognise the working of the impulse I described just nau. Here and throughout his life, Dürer is particularly great in expressing what arises from the above-described experience and sympathy of man with elemental Nature. He brings this element into all that he absorbs from biblical tradition. At the same time, he has great difficulty in adapting himself to the Southern element. We might say, it is a right sour task for him. How different in Leonardo's case: It seems perfectly natural to Leonardo to take up the study of anatomy and physiology, and so receive into his faculty of outward vision uhat was formerly given to a more occult sensitiveness, as I explained in the last lecture. For Dürer it is a sour task—this study of anatomy, this studious mastery of the forms in which the Divine and spiritual, transcending the individual human being, comes to expression in the human figure. It does not come natural to him to make these studied forms his min, so as to re-create the human figure, as it were, after the pattern first created by God. That is not Dürer's way. His way is rather this: to trace in all existing things the inner movement, the impulse of Will; to follow up uhat brings the human nature into direct connection with all things moving in the outer world,—with light and shade and all that lives therein. This is Dürer's kingdom. Hence he always creates out of the element of movement, whereto his oun original artistic fancy is directed.

Is it not perfectly natural for the everyday, workaday things of human life to have found their vay into the evolution of these impulses? An Art which mainly seeks to express the Divine that works in man, the Universal type that transcends the human individual,—such an Art will of its own inherent impulses be less inclined to portray uhat in the everyday life of man stamps itself upon his form and figure,—from his everyday calling, from the familiar experiences of his life. In the Mid-European Art, on the other hand, this element plays a great part, and in this respect a special impulse proceeded from the districts which we now call the Netherlands. Thence came the practical impulse, if I may call it so, permeating the artistic imagination with all that is stamped upon the human being by the familiar reality of earthly things, so that in his gestures, nay, his form and mien and physiognomy, he grow, together pith this earthly kingdom.

Such impulses flowed together in Mid-Europe, in ways most manifold; and only as we disentangle them (Which would require, of course, far more than these few abstract sketches), do we come to true understanding of what is characteristic in Mid-European Art. We shall still have to bring out many a single point; for these things cannot all be said, we can but hint at them.

We will now begin with the period when the Classical impulse grew together with the Mid-European. We shall see some of the sculptured figures in the Cathedral at Naumburg in Germany, representing individual human beings of that time.

Especially in these sculptured works, you see most beautifully combined on the one hand, the perfect striving for expressiveness of soul, and on the other hand the relatively perfect mastery of form which they had absorbed by this time from the South. You will see this especially in these sculptures of the Cathedral at Naumburg, belonging to the thirteenth century. At that time the Mid-European feeling had grown together in Mid-Europe with the power of form which they received from the Classical. While on the other hand, the same Mid-European feeling blossomed forth in the creations of Walther von der Vogelweide and Wolfram von Eichenbach. Remembering that this was the time which brought to the surface these great poets, we shall have before us a clearer picture of the stream of civilisation which was then flowing over Central Europe.

Wonderfully, in this work, you see the life of the soul poured out into the facial expression.

Intensely individual expressiveness of soul, not in the least immersed in any Universal type, is here united with a high technique of Form—a faculty which, as I said, they had received from the South.

We will now turn to works derived more out of the Gothic thinking. We will show some sculptures from the Cathedral at Strassburg.

These figures are far more adapted to the surrounding architecture than the ones we saw just now. The expression is still most decidedly determined from within, but the forming of the figures is also called forth by the surrounding architecture. We observe this feature even more if we go further West.

It is characteristic of that time to represent the Church as the power that overcometh. Again and again you will find these motifs of conquered demons or the like.

The Church is represented in the figure of this woman.

Please impress upon your minds not only the head with its peculiar expression, but the whole gesture of the figure. We will show the Church once more so that you may compare and see the wonderful contrast of the soul's life expressed in the two figures, Synagogue and Church.

As a further instance of the working-together of Southern and Mid-European impulses, we will now give some examples of the School of Cologne. The Cologne Master of uncertain identity, often known as the Master Wilhelm, combines great delicacy of form and line with tender intimacy of expression, as you will see in the following:

Observe, too, the lower figures, see how the forms are created out of movement and gesture. The following well-known picture of the Virgin in the Cologne Museum is by the same Master.

I beg you to observe, in all the following pictures, how these Masters love to express the life of the soul, not only in facial expression and in gesture, but especially in the whole forming of the hands. That epoch, more than any other, was working at the perfection of the hands, in relation to the inner life. I mention this especially because it is brought to a great height in Dürer who with the greatest joy portrays all that the soul can bring to expression in the hands.

In this Cologne Master, we truly see a pure permeation of the Southern element of Form with Mid-European expressiveness of the soul. We will now go on to the Master who came from Constance to Cologne, in whom the element of expression rebels once more against the element of Form, albeit this later Master learnt very much from his predecessor—from the creator of the last two pictures.

I refer, of course, to Stephen Lochner, who, deeply rooted as he is in the Art of expression, if I may say so, adapts himself with a certain revolutionary opposition to what he learns in Cologne from the former Master and his pupils.

Here, then, ye have the works of Stephen Lochner following on those we showed just now. However closely he adapts himself to them, we see in him a new beginning—once more, a fresh creation from within. He came to Cologne in 1420. He who became more or less his teacher there—the Master of the “Veronica” and of the “Madonna of the Sweet Pea”—had died about 1410. In 1420 Stephen Lochner came to Cologne.

A wonderful picture by Stephen Lochner: Mary in a bower of roses. Observe the immense mobility of the figures and the attempt to bring movement into the picture as a whole. We can only reproduce it in light and shade; far more is expressed in the coloring. See the mobility that comes into the picture by the spread veil, out of which God the Father looks down on the Madonna and the Child. See how every angel does his task,—what movement this brings into the whole picture. The picture grows into a composition born out of the very movement. In the Southern impulse you have composition born of restfulness; movement comes into it only when the Northern impulse is added. Here, in this work of Stephen Lochner's, everything is inner movement from the outset.

We will now show some examples of the work of another Master—one who received strong impulses from Flanders, from the West. The Western impulses are clearly visible in him. I refer to Martin Schongauer, who lived from 1420 to 1490. Here you will see the same artistic tendency, combined, however, with the Western impulse from Flanders.

You see how this brings in a far more realistic element.

This essentially visionary picture is conceived most realistically and with great individuality. It is, indeed, an extraordinarily true Imagination which enables the artist to embody in such realistic figures the human passions, the content of a temptation. Side by side with the human figure he places that which lives as a reality in the astral body when temptation comes upon us.

Here, again, you have a temptation of Saint Anthony. This one, however, is by Grünewald, who lived from 1470 to 1529. In Grünewald you will admire more or less the culminating point of all that flowed together in the preceding efforts. Real individual expression is combined with great technical power. Grünewald, in many respects, is far more influenced by the Southern imagination than Schongauer. It is most interesting to compare the two “Temptations,” Their subject is the sable. We might even conceiyg,them as the Temptation which came to him on the one day in the former picture, and that which comes on the following day in this one The point is not the detailed subject but the artistic treatment as such which shows, undoubtedly, a higher perfection in this artist than in the forMer.

This is the central picture in the famous Isenhaimer Altar, now at Colmar. Observe, to the very smallest detail, how the characterisation always flows from the expression. Even the little animal down here partakes in the whole action. Study the flowing of the soul into the hands.

One wing of the Isenheimer Altar. Another temptation of St. Anthony, also by Matthias Grünewald.

This is the other wing of the same Altar:

Next is the Predella of the Isenheimer Altar. The representation of character in these works of Art is perfect in its kind.

Also a part of the same Altar-piece.

This, then, is Master Grünewald who represents in a certain respect the very summit of what we have seen coming over, evolving more and more, from the thirteenth century into the fifteenth, and on into the sixteenth.

We will now pass on to a different element, where with comparatively less technical ability (for in these last pictures the technical ability is very great) we find a nee effort to express what I called just now the “rebellion” in individual characterisation. We will pass on to Lucas Cranach, who, though with far less ability, brings out the expressiveness and inner life of the soul with revolutionary impulse. He shows how the soul finds outward expression even in the everyday, workaday life of man. In Lucas Cranach this impulse is especially active.

Here you have the purest Reformation mood, although it is a Madonna,—it is the mood of the Reformation through and through. To a high degree, the human element outweighs all other considerations. Look at the figures, both of Mother and Child, and you will see that this is so.

An individual human being is painted here to show how he reveres the Christ. A personality with both feet on the ground, he expresses as a deliberate Will-impulse of the soul the reverence he feels for the Christ. The whole conception shows how this very soul comes to expression in the human feeling. The man's identity is known, it is Albrecht von Brandenburg.

We now come to the most eminently mediaeval artist, Albrecht Dürer.

More in the period of his youth.

Study once more the hand; observe how the very hair is arranged to bring out the effects of light and darkness.

Here you have Dürer's Holy Trinity: Father, Son and Spirit. The conception is truly born out of the whole spirit of the age—a conception reaching far beyond all thought, and yet in some way it was mastered by that time. The conception is here worked out in Dürer's way, with his wonderful drawing. Study it carefully, and you will see how everywhere, even in his drawing, he is aiming at the light and shade, and arranges the composition accordingly.

For a definite reason we will now once more show Raphael's famous picture known as ‘Disputa,’ which is familiar to you all.

You know what is characterised in this picture: Below, the College of Theologians engaged in the study of the truths of Theology; and there bursts into this gathering the Revelation of the Trinity; Father, Son and Spirit. !le see three stages, as it were: the Spiritual Beings rising ever higher,—those who have passed through the Gate of Death, those who are never incarnated. We see the composition of the figures down below arranged quite in the Southern way; the fundamental conception of the picture is expressed in a restful composition, the various figures balanced side by side; the very movement flows into this state of rest. Now let us return again to Dürer's ‘Holy Trinity,’ painted almost at the same time as this.

Compare this composition with the other. Once more you have three stages, but the composition here arises out of movement. It is wonderfully contrasted with the other, the Southern composition created almost simultaneously with this. The picture is in Vienna, the coloring is very beautiful. It is quite untrue to suggest that in creating this composition Dürer was influenced in any way by anything he had received from the South. On the contrary, the Southern painters can frequently be shown to have been influenced by Northern compositions—if not by Dürer's own. Indeed, in one instance it can be historically proved:—

For his Crucifixion (undoubtedly a later picture), Raphael had Dürer's drawings before him. Needless to say, we make no such assertion in this case; but the idea that Dürer himself was influenced must be rejected. The motif lay in the whole spirit of the time; it existed in the widest circles, and this work of Dürer's is thoroughly a product of the Mid-European impulse.

Here we see Dürer, too, as a master in characterisation. The picture represents Jesus among the Doctors of the Law, but needless to say, the heads of the characters are surch as the artist saw around him in his own environment.

This is the famous picture of the four Apostles. The excellence of the picture lies in the sharp characterisation of the difference of the four Apostles, in temperament and character.

This is the center-piece of the ‘Paumgartner altar.’

I have inserted this picture because it shows Dürer's conception of movement,—movement proceeding directly out of the human being.

This is the famous picture of the Christian knight, or, as it is often called: ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel,’—the Knight, Death and the Devil. Observe how entirely this picture is a product out of the age. Compare it with the passage from ‘Faust’ to which I just now referred.

“Tis true, I am shrewder than all your dull tribe, Magister, doctor, priest, parson and scribe; Scruple or doubt comes not to enthral me, Neither can devil nor hell now appal me.”

There you have the character who will fear neither Death nor the Devil, but go his way straight forward through the world. So, indeed, he must be represented—the Christian knight who has revolted thoroghly against all the doctors, masters, scribes and priests that have encumbered him. He has to go his way through the world alone, fearing neither Death nor the Devil that stand across his path. He leaves them on one side, and perseveres on his way. ‘The Christian Knight’ this picture should be called. Death and the Devil stand in the way; he marches over them, passes them by unfalteringly. The same mood of the time, out of which the monologue in Goethe's "Faust" is consciously created, comes to expression in this picture by Dürer.

Look at this thoroughly medieval room. The composition is born purely out of the light and darkness, and it is consciously intended so. Look at the light that floods the room. Placed into the light, there is the dog asleep, getting least light of all, more or less in the shade. Then the lion, as it were, a creature of more [?ill; he seems to be dreaming, and there is much light on his face. The contrast of the two animals is intentionally thus expressed in their relation to the light that falls upon them. And now contrast with these St. Jerome himself. On him the light is also falling, but at the same time he seems to ray it back again out of himself. Man and animal—saint and animal—are contrasted simply by being placed in the light. So, too, the skull. Dog and lion, saint and skull; the whole composition is ordered with respect to the light and shade.

It is like a very history of evolution, magnificently expressed by placing the different figures thus into the light. It is one of the greatest qualities in Dürer to bring out with such creative power mthe inherent force of composition that lies in the interplay of light with different objects and living creatures. Of course, the main figures do not alone make up the composition. But we must especially adraire in this picture the bringing out of the force of composition which lies inherent in the light and shade.

Of course, you must not take such a statement as beyond cavil, but this picture seems placed into the world for the express purpose of showing what Dürer intended in his treatment of light and shade, his power of composition out of light and darkness. As if to show what he intends, he puts together the angular body of the polyhedron and the round sphere. In the sphere he shows how light and darkness work together; he lets the light fall on the sphere in a quite peculiar way. Having studied the distribution of the light on the sphere, you may proceed to observe how the effects of light expressed in the folds of the garment correspond to those of the spherical surface. Dürer lets them fall in such a way as to express in the arrangement of the folds all that comes to expression by way of light and shade on the simple surface of the sphere. Now let us go on to the polyhedron, and compare this in turn. According to the angle of the surface, it is light, half-dark, quite dark, and brilliantly illumined. Then he sets down a being of more fleeting form, once more in order to portray the falling of the light upon the surfaces, even as he showed it in the polyhedron. So that in every place you have the question: What says the light to this object? What says the light to this being? You may compare the effect of light and shade in every case as in the Polyhedron and in the sphere. In this picture Dürer has created a work of immense educational value. You cannot do better than use this picture if you want to teach the art of shading. Up here, to the right of the bat that carries the word, ‘melancholia,’ he lets a source of light appear—something that is self-luminous, in contrast to the reflected light expressed on all the other surfaces.

(At this point some one interposed the question: Has the picture any deeper meaning?)

Why should this not be deep enough? Why look for any deeper meaning? If you only study the magical and mysterious qualities of light in space, you will find in this a far deeper meaning than if you set to work with symbolic and mysterious interpretations. Such interpretations lead us away from the true domain of Art. Even if deeper meanings can be seen in it—as, for instance, in the table of planetary figures on the right, and other things of that kind,—it is far better simply to associate these things with the character and setting of the time. It was natural in that age to put such things as these together. But we do better to remain within the sphere of Art than to look for symbols. I even think there is considerable humour in this picture, inasmuch as the title (somewhat amateurishly translated, I admit) may be intended to convey, as a more humorous suggestion, the words, ‘black colouring.’ What he really meant with the word ‘Melancholia’ was something like ‘black coloring.’ In a rather hidden way (though, as I said, this is a little amateurish) the word may well be held to designate ‘black coloring’ or ‘blackness.’ That, at any rate, is far more likely than that it was intended to express some profound symbol. Dürer was concerned with the artistic treatment—the plastic quality, the forming of the light. Please do not think there is no depth in this plastic treatment of the light; do not look out for artificial symbolical interpretations. Is not the world deep enough if it contains such light-effects as these? They, indeed, are far deeper than any mystical contents we might hunt for in this picture because it happens to be entitled ‘Melancholia.’

We now pass on to Holbein, an artist essentially different from Dürer. Born in Augsburg, he then lives in Basle, and afterwards loses himself—disappears, as it were,—in England. He is a realist in an especial sense. Even where he creates a composition, he carries his strong realism into the clement of portraiture. At the same time he strives to express what I referred to just now; the things of everyday in the life of the soul. I beg you to observe how the milieu, the calling, the whole environment in the midst of which a man is living, is stamped upon his soul and character. Holbein expresses this in a wellnigh extreme way; he seeks to draw it forth out of the soul, creating the whole human being out of the very time in which he lives.

Here, again, you have the same motive. An actual human being of the time (it is the Burgomaster of Basel, Herr Mayer, with his family) is shown worshipping the Madonna. This picture is in Darmstadt. There is a very good copy in Dresden, so good that for a long time it passed as a second version by Holbein himself. Here you will see the extreme realism of Holbein, whereas in Dürer there are those elements which we tried to characterise before—quite universal elements. I'm sorry we have no slides of Holbein's ‘Dance of Death.’ Perhaps we may show these another time, for Holbein is especially great in his treatment of the motif of Death:

In conclusion, I will show you something which, while not in direct connection with the other, belongs, nevertheless, to the same artistic context.

This sculpture of the Madonna, which is in Nuremburg, reveals to perfection what the Mid-European art could achieve in gesture and tenderness of feeling. It is by an unknown artist. You must imagine this Madonna, opposite her, perhaps, St. John, a great Cross with the Christ in the center; for this Madonna of Nuremberg belongs undoubtedly to a Crucifixion group. Here you have the very flower of German Art in the 16th century or perhaps a little later. Much of the tenderness in the Madonnas which we showed today will be found again in this one, especially in the unique posture.

We have tried to show you, my dear friends, all those things which, seen in the connection I have tried to indicate, bring out in clear relief the individuality of Dürer. One only learns fully to recognise Dürer when one considers him in connection with the time—his own time and the time before him. More than is generally imagined, there lives in Dürer the greatness of that impulse which led, in another sphere, to the assertion and rebellion that we associate with Faust. In Dürer, indeed, there lived, artistically speaking, a goodly piece of Faust.

You will get a real feeling of the time in which Dürer lived and out of which he was born, if you take such pictures as his ‘St. Jerome,’ his ‘Melancholia,’ and his ‘Christian Knight,’ and many another, and compare them with the mood that goes out from the first monologues of Goethe's Faust—which must, of course, be placed in the whole setting of the time, even as Goethe himself intended it. Nay, more, you could compare Dürer's ‘St. Jerome’ with certain actual pictures of Faust and you would find a real connecting link. When I spoke of Dürer's creating out of light and shade, I certainly did not mean it in a banal sense. Needless to say, anyone who wishes to imitate some fragment of reality can work out of the light and shade. This is one of the most characteristic features in Dürer, while on the other hand he also has in him the longing for individual characterisation which is so remarkably expressed in his ‘Heads of Apostles.’

We have thus tried to bring before you a few of the important points in the old Christian Art. On the next occasion we shall refer to some others which entered the main stream here or there. Then we shall see the whole in its totality.