The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today and next time I am going to speak about the Gospel of St. John. I would mention that what I have to say will only really be comprehensible to those who are already somewhat familiar with spiritual science. It would, however, take us too far out of our way if we went into everything unfamiliar to non-theosophists. You are probably aware that latterly New Testament textual criticism has discredited the John Gospel as an historical source. It is said in theological circles—at least in advanced circles—that the first three gospels, the synoptic gospels, are the only documents relevant to the life of the founder of Christianity. They are called synoptic because they can be taken together to form a general picture of the life of Christ Jesus. On the other hand modern theologians try to interpret the John Gospel as a sort of poetic work, a confession of faith, the writings of a person portraying his feelings, his intimate religious life as it was born in him through the impact of Christianity. Thus the John Gospel could be considered as a devotional work, a deeply felt confession of faith, not as anything that could be taken as Christian historical facts.

But for everyone who immerses himself in the writings of the New Testament, one fact is indisputable: an immediate life flows from the John Gospel, and there is a conviction, a source of truth of a different nature to that proceeding from other religious writings. There is a certainty, which needs no outer confirmation. There is a feeling that comes over one when one meets the John Gospel if one is sensitive to inner soul life and spiritual devotion. Only with the help of spiritual science can one understand why this is so. Many a time have I told you how spiritual science helps towards a more intimate connection with religious documents.

You all know that when one first meets the scriptures one adopts the attitude of a simple person and takes the facts as they are described, without criticism; one takes the bread of religious life from these sources and is satisfied with it.

Many people of our day who had this naive outlook and then became “clever”, became “enlightened”, noticed the contradictions in the gospels. Then they rejected the gospels and lost faith. They said: We cannot reconcile remaining faithful to these writings and seeking wisdom in them with our conscience and our sense of truth. This is the stage of the “clever” ones, the second stage.

Then there is the third way that people approach religious documents. They begin to explain them symbolically. They begin to see symbols and allegories in them. This is the way of free-thinkers, especially in recent times.

Bruno Wille, the editor of the paper “Der Freidenker” (The Free Thinker), has now chosen this way. He has taken to explaining symbolically the Christ myth and the Bible in general. The really necessary way of development that man needs, an inner turning point, cannot follow from this. Those who are less ingenious will explain the scriptures less ingeniously. Others who are more ingenious will be better. Much will be read into it that springs from human ingenuity. The third way is thus a half believing, but arbitrary, attitude.

Then there is quite a different standpoint. One learns that there are realities pertaining to higher worlds, that besides our world of the senses, there are soul-spiritual things, and that religious revelations are not concerned with the sense world but present facts of a higher world. Those who have gotten to know the realities of the astral world which lies behind our sense world, and of the devachanic (or mental world) which lies even deeper, will come to a new and higher understanding of religious sources. It is impossible to understand the John Gospel without rising to such higher worlds. The John Gospel is not a poetic work, nor a writing arising from mere religious fervour, but sets forth revelations from higher worlds that the writer of the gospel has received. It is something like this—I will briefly describe it. The supporting evidence I will not deal with today; perhaps I can go into it next time. The writer of the John Gospel learned, through experience in higher worlds, what took place at “the beginning of our era“ that related to the life of the founder of Christianity, and his acts.

Let me give you an example of the difference between just knowing, and truly comprehending. We have recently mentioned here that someone can be next to us, we can see what he looks like, but we need not necessarily really know him for what he is. I have told the story of the singer who, at an evening party sat between Mendelsohn and someone else she did not know. She got on very well with Mendelsohn, but towards the other guest, though he was very courteous, she felt an aversion. Afterwards she asked, “Who was that bore on my left?” The answer was, “It was the famous philosopher Hegel”. If the lady had been told previously that the great philosopher Hegel would be present at a party, that alone would probably have been enough for her to have accepted the invitation. But because he sat beside her unknown, he was a bore. This is the difference between seeing and understanding, between just knowing and comprehending.

He who was the founder of Christianity could not readily be recognised if one only possessed the ordinary intellect employed in the sense world. It needed that which the Christian mystics so often expressed in profound and beautiful language. This was what Angelus Silesius meant when he said:

There is an inner experience of Christ—there is the possibility to realize inwardly what took place outwardly as events in Palestine between the years 1 and 33 A.D. He who came into this world from higher worlds must be understood from a higher world. And he who portrayed Him most deeply had to raise himself to the two higher worlds we have mentioned, the astral and the devachanic, or mental worlds. This elevation of John, if we so name him, was the elevation into these two higher worlds. His Gospel reveals this to us.

The first twelve chapters contain John's experiences in the astral world. From chapter thirteen onwards it is his experiences in the devachanic, or mental world. He who wrote it down says of Christ (the words are not to be taken literally): Here on this earth He lived, here has He worked with divine powers, with occult powers. He has healed the sick, he has gone through everything from death to resurrection. It is impossible to understand these things with the ordinary intellect. Here on earth there is no science or learning by which one could really understand what occurred. But there is the possibility of rising to the higher worlds. There one can find the wisdom to understand Him who walked here on earth among us. Thus did the writer of the John Gospel rise to the two higher worlds and become initiated. It was an initiation, and the writer describes his initiation into the astral world and the devachanic, or mental world.

In olden times, in regions where man's body was still suited to these things, such an initiation took place as follows. The person had to go through a sort of sleep-state. What now takes several years in a modern European initiation—because the modern European can no longer go through the process I will describe—what today is achieved through long exercises of meditation and concentration, was achieved in a short time by some individuals, after the appropriate exercises of meditation and concentration. I particularly emphasise that anyone who really wishes to receive initiation must, in some form or other, face the two important experiences about to be described—though in a somewhat different way. He must go through a sort of sleep condition. To understand the nature of sleep, let us remind ourselves what takes place when one sleeps. One's higher bodies are then separated from one's lower bodies. Man consists of a physical body, which one can see with one's eyes. The second member is the etheric body which surrounds the physical body and which is much finer than the physical body. Currents and organs of wonderful variety and splendour are active in it. The etheric body contains the same organs as the physical body. It has a brain, heart, eyes etc. They represent the forces which formed the corresponding organs. It is as if one cooled water in a vessel until it becomes ice. In this way you should picture the arising of the physical organs through the densifying of the etheric organs. The etheric body extends only a little beyond the physical body.

The third member is the astral body. It is the bearer of desires, wishes, passions, etc. It permeates the physical body in the form of a cloud. There are colours—violent passions appear as lightning flashes. The peculiarities of temperament glide through the body in glowing points of varying intensity.

The whole inner man is expressed in a luminous form. This is the real ego of man, the bearer of the higher centre of his being. In normal sleep the physical and etheric bodies are lying in bed. They are closely united. The astral body and all the rest is separated. As long as one does not do anything particular one is unconscious when the astral body is outside the physical body. One is as unconscious as one would be in the physical world without eyes or ears. One could live as long as one liked in the physical world; if one had no eyes there would be no colours, if one had no ears there would be no sound. So it is when the astral body is outside the physical body. It is spread out in the soul world, but one does not see this world or become aware of it because one has no astral sense organs. They must gradually be formed. If a person does not practice exercises he remains unconscious in higher worlds. But if he does practice then he can attain consciousness in these higher worlds. When his astral body acquires organs he begins to see the astral world around him. Those of you who have often attended these lectures will know that there are seven such organs. They are called wheels, chakrams or lotus flowers. The two-petalled lotus flower lies between the eyes—between the eye-brows, the sixteen-petalled lies in the region of the larynx, the twelve-petalled lies in the heart region. If these organs are gradually developed one becomes clairvoyant in the astral world.

This astral vision is something quite different from physical sight. You can get some idea of astral vision if you think of the flow of dream life. In dreams we have symbolic pictures—true symbols. One sees symbols. One loses consciousness of what takes place here in the physical world, but one can experience in symbolic pictures such events as the life of Christ Jesus as John describes it from his own experience in the astral world. Descriptions of this nature form the content of the first twelve chapters of the John Gospel. Don't misunderstand me. I know many will say: If all this is astral experience, then it is nothing real and what is told us of the founder of Christianity is not authentic. But this is not the case. It would be as if one denied that a man of flesh and blood could be a genius, because one cannot see genius. Although one learns the truth of Christ Jesus only on the astral plane, it is still a fact that he lived his life on the physical plane. We are dealing with symbols on the astral plane and outer reality on the physical plane. Nothing is taken away from the facts when we understand them more deeply in the sense of the John Gospel.

Initiation in the astral world is preceded by, and depends on what is called meditation. This means that the soul sinks into itself—I have often described it here. To reach a meditative experience one must make oneself blind and deaf to all sense impressions. Nothing must be able to disturb one. Cannons can go off without one being aware of it in one's inner life. One does not achieve this at once, but through constant practice one can attain this capacity. One must empty oneself also of all past experiences. Memory must be wiped out. The soul must be concerned only with itself and then out of its inner being there arise the eternal truths which are able—not only to awaken our understanding—but to release capacities which lie slumbering under a spell in our souls. These great eternal verities will rise up in man according to the maturity he has attained through his karma—the one, as Subba Row says, in seven incarnations, another in seventy years, another in seven years, others in seven months, seven days or seven hours.

John sets forth the means whereby his soul was led to perception on the astral plane. The formula he used for meditation stands at the beginning of his gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was a God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him, and without this Word was not anything made that was made. In it was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

In these five sentences lie the eternal verities which loosed the spell in John's soul and brought forth the great visions. This is the form of the meditation. Those for whom the John Gospel is written should not read it like any other book. The first five sentences must be taken as a formula of meditation. Then one follows John on his way, and attempts to experience oneself what he experienced. This is the way to do it; so it is meant.

John says: Do what I have done. Let the great formula, “In the beginning was the Word” work in your souls and you will verify what is said in my first twelve chapters.

This alone can really help towards understanding the John Gospel. Thus is it intended and thus should it be used. I have often spoken of what the “Word” signifies. “In the beginning” is not a good translation. It should really read: Out of the primal forces emerged the Word. That is what it means: The Word came forth, came forth out of the primal forces. Thus “in the beginning” means: coming forth out of the primal forces.

When man is in this sleep condition he is no longer in the sense world. He moves into a soul world and in this soul world experiences what the sense world really is. The truth of the sense world is revealed. He starts out from these words derived from the sense world leading back to the primal forces, and rises up to the words of truth. Every truth has seven meanings. For the mystic, immersed in contemplation it has however this meaning: The knowledge, the Word which emerges, is not something that merely applies to yesterday and today, but this Word is eternal. This Word leads to God because it was ever with God, because it is the very essence that God has planted into all things.

There is however, still another way of understanding this, and one acquires it if one returns day after day to the momentous words: “In the beginning was the Word”. When one begins to understand, not with the intellect, but with the heart, so that the heart becomes one with these words, then the power begins to work, and there begins the state of mind of which John speaks. He says it with great clarity: “All things were made by Him and without the Word was not anything made that was made”.

What do we find in this Word? We find life. What do we perceive through this life—through this light? We must take these religious texts quite literally if we want to attain higher knowledge. Where does this light shine? In the darkness of night. It comes to those who sleep. It comes to everyone who sleeps. But the darkness comprehended it not—until the ability develops to perceive it on the astral plane. Thus is the fifth verse to be understood literally. The astral light shines into the darkness of night but man does not normally see it, he must first learn to see.

As all this became reality for the writer of the John Gospel, the light dawned and he saw who He was, He whose disciple and apostle he was. Here on earth he had seen Him. Now he had found Him again on the astral plane, and he knew that He who had walked the earth in the flesh only differed in one respect from what lived in his own deepest inner self. In every single man there lives a divine man. In the distant future this divine man will arise resurrected in every man. As man stands before us today he is, in his outward appearance, to a greater or lesser extent, an expression of the inner divine man, and this inner divine man works constantly on the outer man.

Last Thursday [Public Lecture, Berlin, 15 Feb, 1906. “Reincarnation and Karma”] I already pointed out how one can illustrate this by a simple comparison. Look at a child. One could be tempted to say that these innocent features came from the father or mother, an uncle or an ancestor. However, everything within the child expresses itself in the features, in the gestures of the hands and in all its movements. What slumbers in the child strives to come to expression. Finally the individual emerges and the physiognomy becomes an expression of the individual soul, while previously it showed more of a family type. In primitive man the individual soul is usually still slumbering and has but a meagre existence. In the course of many incarnations and efforts the individual emerges, the soul aquires more power over the physical body, and the physiognomy takes on the imprint, or the expression of the inner man. An immature person expresses little of the power of the soul. Gradually man matures, and full maturity is reached when the inner word has become flesh completely—when the outer has become an exact imprint of the inner, so that the spirit shines through the flesh. This however, John only understood once his higher self had appeared clearly before his astral eyes. It stood in front of his astral eyes and he knew: This is I. Today have I experienced it on the astral plane. However it will gradually descend as it did in Him, who I followed. This is the deep relationship between Christ Jesus and the divine man that exists in every man. This is the deep inner experience of John.

The inner soul lives unconscious in man and he only becomes aware of it through the processes we have described.

What does it mean to say: something becomes conscious. Can we become conscious of something which lives within us? As long as it only lives within us we are not aware of it. Man is not aware of what he carries within him, what is subjective. I will use a crude comparison to make clear what I mean. You all have a physical brain but you cannot see it. It would have to be taken out, and then you could see it. For the same reason, though there is a certain difference, you cannot see your higher self. It is the “I” within you. But it must come out if you are to see it, and this can only happen on the astral plane. When it is outside and confronts you, then spiritually, it is as if you had a physical brain on a platter and made it the object of your sense perception.

The writer of the John Gospel describes this process. His own higher ego appears before Him—his own higher ego, which in its fullness represents the Christ. When you know this you will be able to understand certain hints and truths in the John Gospel. You will be able to understand certain things quite well with the help of what I said up to now. In occult language one describes what this ego inhabits—the physical body, which it has built for itself to dwell in—as the temple. Thus one says: The soul dwells in the temple.

It is not altogether a painless procedure when for the first time the soul must leave the temple of the body so that it becomes visible outside of it. This leaving of the body is not without pain. All that forms this higher connection with the physical body are bands that are not so easy to loosen. Imagine that you are bound with fetters and you break loose. You would experience pain through this tearing apart. It is like a process of tearing apart when the astral body leaves the physical body when it leaves it, perceptibly. Leaving the body in sleep is different, one is not aware of it. If one leaves it consciously then one experiences pain.

When man begins to develop astral consciousness, things on the astral plane appear to him as in a mirror. The number 165 should not be read as 165 but as 561—as reflected writing. Everything appears reversed on the astral plane. Even time is reversed. When you follow someone on the astral plane you start, to begin with, from where he is. Then you go back to his birth. You can follow him on the physical plane forwards; on the astral plane backwards. Leaving the physical body is like this: It is as though we were leaving the temple of the physical body and were laid hold of from all sides. This is the occurrence which John wants to describe. He left his body in order to experience the Christ, his own higher divine self, confronting him. People around him have their astral bodies bound strongly to their physical bodies as if with fetters. Had John remained like them he would have continued to be fettered to his physical body. Now let us read how this occurrence is described pictorially and symbolically in the John Gospel, chapter 8, verses 58 and 59: “Jesus said unto them, verily, verily I say unto you: Before Abraham was, I am. Then took they up stones to cast at him: but Jesus hid himself, and went out of the temple, going through the midst of them”, through the hindrances. With this ends the eighth chapter. This is the passing out of the astral body from the physical body. The final act, leading to the leaving of the physical body and to higher vision, usually lasts three days. When these three days are up, one attains a consciousness on the astral plane comparable to that previously experienced on the physical plane. Then one is united with the higher world.

In occult language this union with the higher world is called the marriage of the soul with the powers of the higher world. When one has left the physical body, this appears to one as a mother would appear to a new-born child, were the child able to be conscious at birth. Thus the physical body confronts one, and the astral body can very well say to the physical body: This is my mother. When one has celebrated this marriage one can say this. One can look back on the former union. This can happen after three days. This is the occult procedure on the astral plane. In chapter 2, verse 1, it is stated: “And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there”. This is the pictorial expression for what I have just said. It happened on the third day.

When a person enters the astral world, he finds himself in a region from which he can rise a step further into a still higher world—the mental, or devachanic world. This entry into the devachanic world can only be gained at the expense of the complete extinction, the death of the lower nature. He must go through the three days of death and then be awakened. Once he has attained vision of the astral plane and the pictures of the astral plane have confronted him, he is mature and ready to receive knowledge on the mental or devachanic plane. It is possible then to describe the awakening on the devachanic plane. To find oneself on the higher plane with conscious clarity of thought, this is the awakening of Lazarus.

John describes the awakening of Lazarus. Previously he has shown that through this chain of events one can enter the higher worlds. In chapter 10, verse 9, it is said: “I am the door: by me if any man enter in he shall be saved and shall go in and out and find pasture”. This is the awakening of what was wrapped in sleep and is now awakened on the devachanic plane. John goes through it. John is Lazarus, and John means nothing more nor less than what is described in his first twelve chapters. He describes as an astral experience that he was awakened on the astral plane. Then followed the initiation for the devachanic plane. Three days he lay in the grave, and then he received the awakening. The raising of Lazarus is the awakening of John who wrote the gospel.

Read everything up to the chapter on the raising of Lazarus and you will find no mention of John anywhere. Consider Lazarus and John. It is said of John (John, ch. 13, v. 23): “Now there was leaning on Jesus' bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved.” Regarding Lazarus, you find the same words—that He loved him. It is the same person. He is not mentioned previous to the awakening. He appears for the first time after he is “raised from the dead”. These are the enigmas hidden in the John Gospel. The disciple whom the Lord loved is he whom the Lord himself has initiated. The writer of the John Gospel was he whom the Lord loved. How was he able to say this? Because he had been initiated, first on the astral plane and then on the devachanic plane. If one is able in this way to find the deeper meaning of the John Gospel, then will one be able to understand it in its true profundity, and then it becomes one of the greatest texts ever written. It is the description of the initiation into the depths of the inner life of the soul. It has been written so that everyone who reads it can follow the same path. And this one can do. Sentence for sentence, word for word, one can find within oneself, by rising to the higher plane, what is described in the John Gospel. It is not a biography of Christ Jesus but a biography of the developing human soul. And what is described is eternal and can take place in the heart of every human being. This text is an example and a model. Hence it has this living and awakening power which not only makes people into Christians but enables them to awaken to a higher reality. The John Gospel is not a profession of faith, but a text which really gives strength, and a self-supporting, independent higher life. This springs forth from the John Gospel, and he who does not merely want to understand it, but to live it, has truly comprehended it.

With these few words I could only touch on the contents. Next time we will go into certain details. Then you will see how every single sentence confirms what we have said today in general terms. Step by step you will then see that the John Gospel is not addressed merely to the human intellect, but to man's entire soul forces, and that real soul experience springs from it.

The previous talk should provide the basic mood for the today's explanations. In that talk, I wanted to show in particular that in the basic mood of the theosophist nothing of fanaticism should be contained. It has maybe arisen from the whole tone of the last talk that one should not consider the reasons against theosophy, as if one should disprove them bit by bit in this talk. One should rather consider them in such a way that they show a part of those thoughts, sensations, and feelings that arise to someone who approaches theosophy from the today's consciousness. Putting it another way, one should not consider the arguments against theosophy as unjustified but as highly entitled arguments in the sense of modern consciousness, as those which arise as real and not only as putative difficulties. However, from it I feel justified to speak in this talk in such a way that everything that I argue for theosophy today is considered in the same light as the refutations of theosophy I gave “tentatively” as it were in the previous talk.

I have there characterised the contents of theosophy briefly with few words, and I have said how one has to think about the origins of theosophy, about the real origins of that knowledge. These origins do not arise to the usual normal consciousness, but they arise only if the human being submits himself to certain inner exercises that reach beyond the normal experience, and cause that condition which happens, otherwise, while falling asleep—but in completely different way—that all the outer impressions are quiet and also all thoughts and sensations which evoke them. Unless then by the processes of the soul life the unconsciousness of sleep occurs, but such strong inner forces are unfolded that the consciousness remains, and if forces are brought up from the soul which slumber, otherwise, under the surface of the consciousness, then a higher intuitive faculty appears in the soul. Then such a soul is on a higher level in the same situation as a blind-born who is successfully operated and sees the world of light and colours spread out. In the same sense, all things and beings of the spiritual world are around us of which theosophy or spiritual science speaks. However, they can dawn on us if the spiritual eyes, the spiritual ears are woken from slumbering as it were by inner mental-spiritual energy. Then a new world appears before us.

I have said that the outer science must take offence at such a thing just because it strives seriously and conscientiously for making the contents of knowledge independent from the human subject. Since one argues rightly that that which the human being experiences in his inside is nothing but something subjective that everybody experiences different which can have an individual subjective validity only. If the human being may get from his subjective soul experiences to convictions about another world different from the physical world—an opponent of theosophy may say—, he may sort that out for himself. For one cannot prove this in the same way as those things which we get as knowledge with experiments, scientific observation or historical research.—Hence, some people will probably accept these things and say, indeed, the outer research has its limits; it cannot lead us into the areas that are maybe the most valuable ones to us; but everybody has to sort out for himself what exceeds the outer research, because everybody must have an individually coloured picture of that which exceeds sense perception.

However, if this were right, one could not maintain theosophy, then everything would be only something that every single human being would have for himself as his subjective conviction, and theosophy could not at all claim any objective validity. However, this is not in such a way. The human being can only find out this if he does the soul exercises to get to such origins of the supersensible knowledge.

In such an orienting talk, I can indicate only sketchily, what it concerns. From the comparison of the waking state with the sleeping one arises that the forces of our soul can grow weak with falling asleep and do no longer bring up cognitive forces from the depths. Hence, the darkness of unconsciousness spreads out while falling asleep. Therefore, that who wants to go through this state consciously has artificially to cause such moments of seclusion from the outside world in which he still has an inner experience. He has to evoke strong inner forces. You attain them by meditation and concentration of thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Unless we consider that only which the outer world gives us as a mediator of knowledge or as impulses of our action, but if we start delving into important, strong impressions of the outside world at first, while we solve these strong impressions from the outside world using them not directly, but taking them in our souls—separated from the outside, then we gradually develop forces slumbering in the soul. I would like to show that at an example.

We can see how one human being helps the other. This can cause such a strong impulse of compassion in our souls that this impulse moves us to tears. We may be minded in such a way that we get such an impulse of compassion every time when we see such an action. This can be increased in us in such a way that we ourselves act benevolently if we see the hardship of a fellow man that we can have empathy with him and are stimulated to an action of compassion from the impression of the outside world. Perhaps we can advance so far that we unfold the same feeling that expresses itself in the tears even if we have faced a picture of such an action only. There are numerous people who, for example, if they read a novel get to a passage where only the picture of human misery and human compassion is conjured up before their souls, and then tears appear. They are touched by that which is only a picture of outer reality so that in their souls a similar impulse is released as it can be released, otherwise, only by an outer impression of physical reality.

However, if we assume now that we think in the usual consciousness simply about such an action, then we will already notice that this impulse is endlessly weaker that we are not able to increase it in such a way that it moves us to tears.

If we are able by soul exercises to think a thought which is associated with compassion, with helpfulness, with empathy without being induced from the outside world anyhow,

If we let such a thought emerge freely and can delve into it in such a way that we completely identify with it,

If we let this picture become strong so that it shakes our soul in such a way as it can happen, otherwise, only by an outer impression,

We have made a start with a “feeling meditation.”

If you let such a feeling meditation be active in yourself not once, not fifty times, but over and over again, you notice that such a meditation conjures up forces into such feelings from our soul which develop it internally. To someone who does such exercises these pictures appear which are still vivid in another way than possibly pictures of usual imagination are. If you delve into such meditations repeatedly, you experience yourself really in such a way, as if you were full of inner life as you only feel, otherwise, if you have impressed the inwardness into your outer body.—Yes, while the soul is stressed and penetrated with that which the meditation emits and immediately enters our consciousness, you experience something so that you say to yourself, I live now with everything with which I have secluded myself, otherwise, in sleep from my physical body. I live in it so strongly and vividly as I only can live if I am in my physical body and my eyes and ears and the other senses carry the outer impressions to me.

What I characterise here one cannot prove anyhow theoretically but only experience. After one has experienced it, it is available in our consciousness as an immediate feeling: Now you are free of your outer body; now, however, you do not live in nothing, but in a spiritual-mental essentiality that is as real as the experiences of the physical body.—Such a consciousness has to exist before doing research in the spiritual world. Someone who has attained such a consciousness is possibly as far as somebody who has prepared everything for an outer experiment, so that he only needs to set all things in motion to recognise a physical principle by this experiment. Then he is so far that he can penetrate into the origins of the spiritual world that are always around us.

However, I have to stress repeatedly that such soul exercises are only necessary to do research to experience in the spiritual world; however, they are not necessary to understand what the spiritual researcher gets down from the spiritual worlds and tells as results. Since the messages of theosophy can be understood with the natural feeling of truth and with healthy logic. The spiritual researcher can only investigate the facts and beings of the spiritual world, however, every unprejudiced person can understand them with natural feeling of truth and healthy logic.

Thus, we have to say, the origins of this worldview that we call theosophy are gained only by developing the soul. If now anybody wants to argue, everything that the human being produces this way as knowledge that is not controlled by the outer reality is the opposite of scientificity in modern sense because it is something individual and, besides, every human being must get to something different. On the other side, one has to stress that it is, indeed, completely right which is said this way but only for certain preparatory levels of soul development. The human being has to survive some serious fights and many a thing that only is significant for himself if he wants to advance to such knowledge. He probably gets to know how difficult it is to separate himself from the world to which we belong anyway with these subjective soul experiences. Immense difficulties thereby arise. There many things happen in us that apply only to us.

Then, however, you reach a point of soul development where you know immediately: now I am way beyond the subjective; now I experience truth, which is free of everything subjective. Now one has the immediate feeling, one has penetrated into the world of spiritual-mental realities. A simple consideration shows that there is also within our usual sciences a particularly prominent one with which knowledge is gained in such a way, as I have just characterised: mathematics. Already with the simplest mathematical operations, you can convince yourself that truth is gained with entire isolation of the soul. He who has found, however, such a truth knows that everybody who carries out the same operations must get most certainly to the same results. Nobody can recognise the theorem of Pythagoras—even if one visualises the operations of thought on the board—other than that one experiences the suitable relations internally. Someone who has worked once internally on the theorem of Pythagoras knows that everybody must get to the same result. Thus, it is with the mathematical cognition. Now we can say that the method of spiritual research takes place after the same principle as in mathematics that one considers as the surest science. Millions of people may think different about a mathematical theorem, somebody who has experienced it in his inside once knows that it is true. That also applies to the knowledge that you attain in the spiritual world.

Somebody who wants to do epistemological objections could say, one attains the mathematical truths in the deepest inside of the soul, but one cannot directly apply them to existence. Indeed, we can figure relations out in reality with the mathematical knowledge—somebody may say—, but no mathematics can decide on whether beings really exist who carry these mathematical principles in themselves; one has to experience reality in other ways than with mathematical judgements.

This objection is completely justified. It belongs even to those, which one holds to the theosophist, so that he cannot easily defend theosophy. However, with this objection, one has to consider that the human being does not experience with mathematical judgements what he experiences if he rises to a supersensible world. No mathematical judgement can give the view of the own ego as an object of the own ego, as if we leave our personality and look at ourselves. We cannot find our ego as an object with mathematical judgements. The view of the own ego is essential. With the mathematical judgements, we remain within our personality, with them we cannot penetrate into the outer reality. At the moment when we face ourselves, we have withdrawn from our body with a part of our being and have entered into objectivity. We feel in the things, we are inside of reality. This is the difference, the fact that mathematics gets, indeed, to inner certainty, but does not reach reality. Against it, the supersensible knowledge reaches reality. Hence, someone who advances on the way of spiritual research also gets to a new concept, a new idea of reality. Now with this new concept of reality that is at the same time a visual conception the human being can approach the consideration of human life. We want to bring that home to ourselves with the help of an example.

For the sensory view, the human being enters existence at birth and he finishes it at death. For the time before birth or conception and for the time after death the outer sense perception cannot recognise anything of man's objective nature. However, if the human being faces himself and has learnt to look from without at the human being in the just characterised way, her realises at the same time that this outer nature, which the senses can perceive, is based on something supersensible that is the real creator of this sensory organism. He realises that from the moment of birth on the mysterious human development begins. There we can realise how from a deep subsoil of human existence in the still uncertain features of the child certain trains gradually impress themselves, how his gestures and abilities develop more and more certain from within outwardly. The brain, the tool of our thinking, develops after birth still long; it is still transformed and organised. Now, however, the brain is the tool of our mental experience. If we look at this human life spiritual-scientifically, we have to ask ourselves, when does the moment take place in the human life where the mental-spiritual is completely able to use its tool, the brain? This is not yet the case in the first childhood years. Since, otherwise, the child did not need to attain many things by the impressions of the outside world and by imitation, and we did not need to educate the child. Only in the course of the first years, we can gradually use the tool of the brain. We can express this spiritual-scientifically in such a way: our brain becomes able first in the course of our life to become the tool of the ego.

When we are somewhat older—twenty years or more—, we have completely learnt to use our brain, to go back to former life epochs, then the spiritual-scientific observation shows that the brain has been only worked out during the early childhood. It becomes obvious to the spiritual researcher that that which is later in the human being to use the brain is the same as that which has worked on the development of the brain from forces that no sensory eye can see. Someone who approaches these matters with reason can say, so you state that you behold a childish spiritual atmosphere around the child head and that from this childish atmosphere, from a kind of head aura spiritual forces are emitted which work on the brain of the child, so that it can later become the tool of the ego. Then, you state, this head aura, which like an astral form surrounds the child head, slips into the inside to use this as tool from within on which it itself has worked in childhood. Thus, you state that that which uses the brain is a spiritual thing in childhood. It moves from without inwards, is active in the human organism first, then it enters into its inside and considers and understands as ego the world with the tool which has come about with its own power. No tool can be put into the service of the intelligent human culture that the human intelligence itself has not produced.

If you have attained such a spiritual view that you behold the spiritual-mental of the human being working on the configuration of your figure as it develops in life, then you can almost say to yourself: therefore, it is the spiritual-mental that is involved in that which is its physical.—You may still say to yourself, so we have to acknowledge the mental-spiritual in such a way that it exists before the physical-bodily because the physical-bodily has to be developed only.—However, you have to advance with observing and have to ask yourself then, is that spiritual-mental which has formed the brain the same for all human beings that works before birth on the human being? Alternatively, is it anything individual for every human being?

Of course, a real observation of life cannot help admitting that every human being is built individually that he has, hence, individual abilities that depend on the use of his outer instruments, on his outer forces, and, hence, he cannot be built up by a general human nature but by a human individuality.

That is, if we ascend to the creator of the human figure that appears to the clairvoyant in the aura of the child, we have to say, it is created completely individually. If we look as an expert educator at the adolescent human being, we can see how certain abilities appear, with one human being this way and with the other that way. About these abilities, we have to say, they search for that which is available just in a certain cultural region, for example, one child has an artistic talent, the other has a manual talent, a third an intellectual one, and so on.

Where from does that originate which appears in our present life? What urges the adolescent child to such performances that are given in our culture? That has developed beyond the child for which it strives. The child has this or that ability, this or that particular talent. If, however, we want to recognise this coherence, we have to go back in our culture to former states. If such a child were not related to that which happens on earth, it could be, indeed, inclined to something general, but not to something particular that originated from our cultural life. Hence, it is comprehensible that the child must have acquired certain relationships with that which it searches within the culture for its ability. Hence, we cannot think different, the souls which embody themselves and show this or that ability were already on earth once and have prepared themselves at that time to that for which they develop such affinity.

However, in the normal consciousness we can only think this. Then, however, we realise that spiritual science can ascend from this mere possibility of thinking to the view of the facts. Now one can ask, where can one observe the childish aura outwardly, which immerses itself in the inside to use the brain as its tool?

Yes, this moment appears very clear. Every human being who tries to remember his former living conditions gets to a certain point only—then memory breaks off, and at most still the parents or those who were around him can tell him what was before. However, every human being has to suppose that his ego also existed in the times that he cannot remember. To the precise observer this time coincides with the time when the human being learns as a child to say “I" to himself; that is when the ego-consciousness appears. Up to this time, the memory of a human being also goes back. What exists before the awakening of the ego-consciousness escapes from memory. Here we have the time: the child that has said: “John is there”, “Mary is there”, says now: “I am there.” At the time when the human being starts feeling as an ego, the clairvoyant consciousness beholds the childish aura moving into him.

From this fact, we may conclude that our memory is determinative in no way of the existence of our ego. We are also allowed to stress that beyond doubt there is a time in our life where the ego exists and still the human being cannot find this ego in his memory. However, someone who would like to believe that the ego awakes only then or would be impressed into the human being when the child learns to say "I", would believe something absurd. If our ego extends more backward than our memory reaches, we also are not surprised if spiritual science states that it is possible to expand the ego even more—behind birth to former lives. However, one just gets gradually to the view of the ego in these stadia of development which are not accessible to the normal consciousness, with particular soul exercises, meditations et cetera. I would like to describe the most elementary of such soul exercises here.

The human being has to develop a particular mood in himself that one may call “calmness” if he wants to behold into the future. If he can behold with calmness into the future, he has reached a lot to attain the higher beholding. One can describe this mood possibly in such a way: the human being says to himself, the world may praise us, it may condemn us, this or that may be imposed to us in future, dreadful or nice things—I shall stand upright and accept everything that may come with equanimity and face future intrepidly.

You can describe this very easily—but you can attain it only with long soul practise of meditative kind. If the human being develops this mood in himself, he learns to push the gate open at first that separates the usual consciousness from the experiences of the first childhood; then he learns to look into the first childhood years and then even further. Briefly, he makes the retrospect of former lives on earth accessible to himself. We bring in as a special method of it the achievement of an intrepid mood for the future. With absolute calmness toward the future, we acquire the possibility to pursue the course of our ego up to the point where the ego-consciousness appears in life. Then, however, the spiritual researcher does not want to stop, but he can extend his consciousness beyond the usual measure, and the repeated lives on earth can become reality to him.

One can still argue a lot against that which I have indicated today. However, I wanted only to give the ways on which you can find the methods to defend theosophy. I could only break the first ground, but the pursuit of this way can gradually lead to defending theosophy against such attacks that are completely justified, seen from the other side.

It is similar if these attacks concern the moral area. There we had to say that those have a certain authorisation who say, your teaching of reincarnation almost supports egoism. Since people may say to themselves, we have to do the good; since if we do the bad, we have to harvest the fruits of the bad in the future life. However, if we do the good, we harvest the fruits of the good. It is subtle egoism only which arises from it. One can expand this also to the work of karma. If we dwell on this idea, we may possibly say the following, we consider a human being, for example, who says to himself, I want to do the good, because the good brings me good fruits, and it is not advantageous to do the bad, because I have to carry the fruits of the bad, so I abstain from it.—We compare such a human being with another who thinks in a upright way about the things with which he is concerned, we assume, for example, parents who have the principle of educating their children to competent human beings. If we could ask these parents, why they do this, we would maybe get the answer, when we have grown old once, we have children who are able to cope with life who can support us then.—There we have a case that shows us that the good is done because of the fruits, which are to be expected once, because such an education is carried out certainly also from a selfish viewpoint.

Where to may such a viewpoint still lead, even if it is selfish? Since the fact that people have the viewpoint to educate their children to capable persons, so that they have support in old age, this is at first—quite objectively considered—a thing that one cannot manage with moral declamations. It is rather something that shows that the proposition of the philosopher is true: preaching morality is easy, founding morality is hard.—However, that is not to say that one should not educate his children from such a viewpoint, but that one recognises how the human beings have become under such an influence. If the parents use any care to educate their children to capable human beings, and then the children become capable in life, they do not only help their parents, but they are also useful members of the human society. However, we can notice an additional effect. If the parents start educating their children in such a way—even if their viewpoint was selfish at first—, then something unselfish awakes soon with such an education. That is reached which could not be reached by mere preaching moral: life itself educates us from egoism to altruism.

Just as with education, it is with the principle that we may have if we do the good and omit the bad, so that we have the fruits of the present life in the next life. This is selfish at first, but we know that the human nature has such an egoism. However, it does not concern that that is in such a way, but it concerns the question: how does life overcome egoism?

There we can realise that a human being can accept the teaching of karma in such a way that he says to himself, I abstain from the bad because it brings me bad fruits, and I will do the good because I have the good fruits. However, then under the influence of this principle the selfish attitude changes gradually into an unselfish one.

Hence, we have to say, if any ethics puts up ever so nice principles, nevertheless, it resembles—if it only preaches the good—a person who stands before an oven and says, dear oven, you know that it is your nature to warm up the room.—There you may preach long; it does not become warm. However, if we spare our sermon and give coal and wood as fuel into the oven, it makes the room warm, and then we found its oven morality without preaching. That also applies to the human beings. The expert of psychology is clear in his mind how little is done in life by mere preaching morality. Morality has to flow as a force into the human nature. If we give the soul the karma doctrine as fuel material, then it is maybe accepted at first because of egoism, but the soul forces are thereby stoked up, so that then from egoism the unselfish action can arise.

Thus, theosophy as doctrine does not only concern ethics, but we understand it as a sum of ideas that work in the soul and change us into other human beings. Nobody understands the karma doctrine in such a way that he says, I still have many lives before myself; I still have time up to the next life to become a decent human being.—Nobody can think this way. Someone who penetrates himself with the karma doctrine knows: you experience the fruits of your current life in the next life; now you lay the foundation for a decent, human being you can be in the next life. However, if you do not create the causes for a decent human being now, you cannot become one in the next life.

If you understand the karma doctrine correctly, you cannot carry egoism too far. Ssince it will persuade us any time to transform not only egoism into altruism, but also to realise that we do not fatalistically build on that which destiny imposes to us. We recognise that we ourselves have caused what works then in our karma.

Now I would still like to come on that which could be argued from the religious view against theosophy. There one may say, the theosophist acknowledges that in the human being something highest lives, as a drop is from the sea of the divine. There that which the human being can gain to himself is put, so to speak, like a divine force into the human soul, and then with such an attitude one cannot develop that devotion to that Being that interweaves the world. The mood—anybody may say—which the really religious human being feels in the most unselfish devotion to God who penetrates the universe would be impaired by the theosophical mood which transfers a spark of the divine into the human being as his “higher ego” which gradually struggles through to the viewpoint of Paul: not I—but Christ in me. One has to say, everything that the human being can recognise is got out from that which interweaves the universe.

Is not anything else possible? If one understands that which I have represented in the best sense, you may say to yourself, so a part of God's power lives in you. You are given not only to yourself, but you stand there with a part of God's power. If you have proceeded for a while—in this or in the next life—then consider what was your duty there. It was your duty to develop the seeds of God's power, which are laid in you—in other words, to make yourself more and more similar to that which this power demands from you. Gradual development, gradual perfection becomes the duty, so that God's power can arise in you more and more active. Theosophy does not demand such a religious feeling that consists only of the mere devotion to the divine, but such one that says to itself, I have to work on my perfection. If I do not do this, I let God's seeds in myself undeveloped, and then I do not become a picture, but a caricature of the divine. However, this must not happen. I have the duty to perfect myself.

That is active devotion to the divine. That is a religious mood that calls on the human being to do more and more for his knowledge, to care more and more for his moral, to be keener and keener to develop those forces that have been put as divine forces into his soul. Thus, we live with a religious mood in the future that does not provide a passive devotion to the divinity, but a mood that demands from us to make our egos more and more divine. Toward the divine that interweaves and lives in the universe, it would be the biggest breach of duty if we left our egos imperfect. We are not allowed to leave the talent unused that we have received; we have to make the most of our talents. One has to take this active mood into consideration if one speaks about the religious element that can come from theosophy.

Thus, you can realise that there are many things, which one brings in as elements to show that theosophy can strengthen life on one side, can change egoism into altruism, and cause a religious mood which can unfold an active piety for the future. We considered the other side of the question last time. We may say, the objections and refutations are entitled which one may argue against theosophy, but then we can position ourselves against these objections in such a way as I have stated now. Then we can ask our whole human being, not only our mind and our reason unilaterally, and we can say to ourselves, nevertheless, maybe it is true that there are things that begin where reason stops. Then we must set our whole human being in motion, and he has to decide. However, every single soul can decide this. Hence, theosophy is the spiritual element that speaks most intensely to the human individuality, while it calls upon the human individuality to the highest decision even compared with reason.

If the human being feels to be put into such living and holy impulses, he gradually finds the way which reveals him: you stand here on this earth; you belong as a physical-sensory human being to the physical-sensory world, and you belong with your soul and mind to a spiritual world.

You receive your mission from the spiritual world, and you have to impress into the whole earth development what you have brought down from the spiritual world. You have the mission to be a mediator between the earth process and the spiritual that forces its way to the earth, which wants to flow into the earth existence. If you learn to recognise by theosophical meditation that it is in such a way, and you can change the theosophical deepening into a disposition which gives you that infinitely blissful fulfilment of your mind, of your heart which can express itself in the consciousness of the connection with the temporal, the transient as well as with the everlasting, then you can say to yourself that you are rooted with your being in the everlasting that you are bound, indeed, as a sensory human being to the earth, but only to realise the everlasting in earthly form with your mission.

Theosophy can become such an attitude, if it changes in the human being with a basic mood that one can artistically express with the words:

The things of cosmic space
Speak to the human senses,
They change in the course of time.
The human soul lives recognising,
Spatially unlimited and not
Confused by the course of time,
In the realm of the eternal spirit.

Our Atlantean ancestors differed more from the men of to-day than may be imagined by anyone who is wholly limited to the world of sense for his knowledge. This difference extends not only to the outward appearance, but also to mental capacities. Their science and also their technical arts, their whole civilisation, differed much from that of our day. If we go back to the early times of Atlantean humanity we shall find there a mental capacity altogether different from our own. Logical reasoning, the calculatory combinations upon which all that is produced at the present day is based, were entirely wanting in the early Atlanteans, but in place of these they possessed a highly-developed memory. This memory was one of their most prominent mental faculties. For example, they did not count as we do by the application of certain acquired rules. A multiplication table was something absolutely unknown in early Atlantean times. No one had impressed upon his understanding the fact that three times four were twelve. A person's ability to make such a calculation, when necessary, rested on the fact that he could remember cases of the same or a similar kind. He remembered how this was done on former occasions. Now it must be clearly understood that whenever a new faculty is developed in a being, an old one loses its force and precision. The man of the present day has the advantage over the Atlantean of possessing a logical understanding and an aptitude for combination; but on the other hand his memory power has waned. We now think in ideas, the Atlantean thought in pictures; and when a picture rose in his mind he remembered many other similar pictures which he had formerly seen, and then formed his judgment accordingly. Consequently all education then was quite different from that of later times. It was not intended to provide the child with rules or to sharpen his wits. Rather was life presented to him in comprehensive pictures, so that subsequently he could call to remembrance as much as possible, when dealing with this or that circumstance. When the child had grown up and had reached maturity, he could remember, no matter what he might have to do, that something similar had been shown to him in the days of his instruction. He saw clearly how to act when the new event resembled something already seen. When absolutely new conditions arose, the Atlantean found himself compelled to experiment; while the man of to-day is spared much in this direction, being furnished with a set of rules which he can easily apply in circumstances new to him. Such a system of education gave a strong uniformity to the entire life. Things were done again and again in exactly the same way during very long periods of time. The faithfulness of memory offered no scope for anything at all approaching the rapidity of our own progress. A man did what he had always seen done before; he did not think, he remembered. Not he who had learnt much was held as an authority, but he who had experienced a great deal and could therefore remember much. It would have been impossible in Atlantean times for anyone who had not reached a certain age to be called upon to decide on any affair of importance. Confidence was placed only in one who could look back on a long experience.

What is here said does not refer to Initiates and their schools, for they indeed are beyond the average development of their time. And for admission into such schools, age is not the deciding factor, but rather the consideration, whether the candidate in his former incarnations has acquired the ability to assimilate the higher wisdom. The confidence placed in Initiates and their agents in Atlantean times was not based on the extent of their personal experience, but on the age of their wisdom. For an Initiate, his own personality has ceased to have any importance; he is entirely at the service of the Eternal Wisdom, and therefore the characteristics of any period of time have no weight with him.

Thus, while the power of logical thinking was still wanting, especially in the earlier Atlanteans, they possessed in their highly developed power of memory something which gave a special character to their whole activity. But other powers are always bound up with the nature of one special human force. Memory is nearer to the deeper foundations laid by Nature in man than is the power of reason; and in connection with the former, other impulses were developed which bore greater resemblance to those lower nature forces than the motive forces of human action at the present day. Thus the Atlantean was master of what is called the Life-Force. Just as we now draw from coal the force of warmth, which is changed into the force of propulsion in our methods of traffic, so did the Atlanteans understand how to use the germinal force of living things in the service of their technical works. An illustration of this may be given as follows: Let us think of a grain of corn; in it slumbers a force; this force acts in such a way that out of the grain of corn the stalk sprouts forth. Nature can awaken this sleeping force in the grain, but the man of to-day cannot do so at will. He must bury the grain in the earth, and leave its awakening to the forces of Nature. The Atlantean could do something more. He knew what to do in order to transform the force in a heap of corn into mechanical power, just as the man of our day can transform into a like power the force of warmth in a heap of coal. In Atlantean times plants were not cultivated merely for use as food, but also in order that the slumbering force in them might be rendered serviceable to their commerce and industry. Just as we have contrivances for transforming the latent force of coal into the power to propel our engines, so had the Atlanteans devices for heating by the use of plant-seeds in which the life-force was changed into a power applicable to technical purposes. In this way were propelled the air-ships of the Atlanteans, which soared a little above the earth. These air-ships sailed at a height rather below that of the mountains of Atlantean times, and they had steering appliances, by means of which they could be raised above these mountains.

We must picture to ourselves that with the advance of time all the conditions of our earth have greatly changed. These air-ships of the Atlanteans would be quite useless in our days. Their utility lay in the fact that at that time the atmosphere enveloping our earth was much denser than now. Whether, according to the scientific conceptions of the present day, such an increased density of the air can be easily conceived, need not concern us here. Science and logical thought can never, from their very nature, determine what is possible and what impossible. Their task is only to explain what has been proved by experience and observation. And the density of the air here spoken of is, in occult experience, as much a certainty as any given fact of the world of sense can be to-day. And just as firmly established is the fact—perhaps even more inexplicable to the physics and chemistry of our time—that in those days the water over the whole earth was much more fluid than it is now. And owing to its fluidity, water (being driven by means of the life-force in seeds) could be used by the Atlanteans for technical purposes impossible to-day. On account of the densification of water, it has become impossible to set it in motion and to guide it in the same premeditated manner as was once possible. From this it is sufficiently evident that the civilisation of Atlantean times differed fundamentally from our own, and it will also be readily conceivable that the physical nature of an Atlantean was quite different from that of the contemporary man. Water when drunk by the Atlantean could be worked upon by the life-force within his own body in quite another way than is possible in the physical body of to-day. And thus it arose that the Atlantean could use his physical strength at will, quite otherwise than ourselves. He had, as it were, the means within himself of increasing physical forces when he required them for his own use. It is only possible to picture the Atlanteans correctly when one knows that they had conceptions of fatigue and the loss of strength absolutely different from our own.

An Atlantean settlement, as may be gathered from what has already been said, bore a character in no way resembling that of a modern town. But there was a much closer resemblance between it and Nature. We can only give a faint suggestion of the real picture when we say that in early Atlantean times—till about the middle of the third sub-race—a settlement resembled a garden in which the houses formed themselves out of trees whose branches were intertwined in an artistic manner. Whatever the hand of man fashioned at that time grew naturally in like manner. Man, too, felt himself entirely akin to Nature, and so it arose that his social instinct was quite different from our own. Nature is indeed the common property of all men; and whatever the Atlantean built up with Nature for its foundation, he regarded as common property, precisely as the man of to-day thinks it only natural to regard as his own private property that which his acuteness and his reason have produced.

Anyone who familiarises himself with the idea that the Atlanteans were endowed with such mental and physical powers as have been depicted, will likewise learn to understand that at still earlier periods mankind presents an aspect which but very faintly reminds us of what we are accustomed to see to-day. And not only man, but Nature which surrounds him, has also changed enormously in the course of time. [With regard to the time-periods at which the conditions shown held sway, something more will be said in the course of these communications. For the present the reader is warned not be surprised if the few figures given him in the previous chapter seem to contradict what he finds elsewhere.] The forms of plant and animal have altered; the whole of terrestrial Nature has undergone a transformation. Regions of the earth which were formerly inhabited have been destroyed, and others have arisen.

The forefathers of the Atlanteans lived on a part of the earth which has disappeared, the principal portion of which lay to the south of what is Asia to-day. In Theosophical literature they are called Lemurians. After passing through various stages of evolution the greater number fell into decadence. They became a stunted race, whose descendants, the so-called savages, inhabit certain portions of the earth even now. Only a small number of the Lemurians were capable of advancing in their evolution, and it was from these that the Atlantean Race developed. Still later something similar occurred. The great mass of the inhabitants of Atlantis fell into decadence; and the so-called Âryans, to which race belongs the humanity of our present civilisation, sprang from a small division of these Atlanteans. According to the nomenclature of the “Secret Doctrine,” Lemurians, Atlanteans, and Âryans are Root-Races of humanity. If we think of two such Root-Races preceding the Lemurian, and two following the Âryan in the future, we have altogether seven. The one always arises out of the other in the manner pointed out in the case of the Lemurian, Atlantean, and Âryan Races. And each Root-Race has physical and mental qualities entirely different from those of that which precedes it. While, for example, the Atlantean brought his memory and everything in connection with it to a high degree of development, the duty of the Âryan of the present is to develop thought-power and all that appertains thereto.

But each Root-Race itself must pass through different stages, and these again are always sevenfold. At the beginning of a time-period belonging to a Root-Race, its leading characteristics appear in an immature state; they gradually reach maturity, and then at last decadence. Thus, the members of a Root-Race are divided into seven sub-races. However, it must not be imagined that one sub-race immediately disappeared on the development of a new one. On the contrary, every one of them continued to exist for a long time, while others flourished beside it. Thus there are always dwellers on the earth, living side by side, but showing the most varied stages of evolution.

The first sub-race of the Atlanteans arose from a portion of the Lemurian Race which was greatly advanced and capable of further evolution. For instance, in this latter race the gift of memory showed itself only in its very earliest beginnings, and even so much did not appear until the latest stages of its evolution. It must be realised that a Lemurian could indeed make images of his experiences, but could not preserve them as recollections; he immediately forgot what he had pictured to himself. That, in spite of this, he lived to a certain extent a civilised life; for instance, that he possessed tools, erected buildings, and so on, was not due to his own imagination, but to an inner mental force which was instinctive. Yet we must not imagine an instinct similar to that which animals possess at the present time, but an instinct of another order.

The first sub-race of the Atlanteans is called in Theosophical literature the Rmoahal. The memory of this race was especially derived from vivid sense-impressions. Colours which the eye had seen, tones which the ear had heard, continued to operate long within the soul. This was manifested in the fact that the Rmoahals developed feelings quite unknown to their Lemurian ancestors. For instance, adherence to that which had been experienced in the past constituted part of such feelings.

Now the development of speech depended on that of memory. As long as man did not remember the past, there could be no narration of experiences by means of speech. And because the first rudiments of a memory appeared in the latest Lemurian period, it was only then possible that the ability to give names to things heard and seen could begin to appear. It is only those who have the faculty of recollection who can make any use of a name which has been given to an object; and consequently it was in the Atlantean period that speech found its development. And with speech a tie was formed between the human soul and things exterior to man, since he then produced the spoken word from within himself, and this spoken word appertained to the objects of the outer world. Through communication by means of speech a new bond also arose between man and man. All this, indeed, was still in an elementary form at the time of the Rmoahals; but nevertheless it distinguished them profoundly from their Lemurian ancestors.

Now the forces in the souls of these first Atlanteans still retained something of the force of Nature. Man was then in a certain manner more nearly related to the Nature-spirits surrounding him than were his descendants. Their soul forces were more Nature forces than are those of the men of the present, and so, too, the spoken word which they uttered had something of the might of Nature. Not only did they name objects, but their words contained a power over things and over their fellow-creatures. The word of the Rmoahal possessed more than mere meaning; it had also power. When we speak of the magic force of words we indicate something which was a far greater reality at that time, and for those men, than it is for men of the present. When a Rmoahal pronounced a word, this word developed a force akin to that of the object designated by it. Hence it is that words had the power of healing at that time, and that they could hasten the growth of plants, tame the rage of animals, and produce other such effects. All this force gradually faded away among the later Atlantean sub-races. It might be said that that fullness of strength which was a product of Nature wasted away little by little. The men of the Rmoahal race regarded such fullness of strength altogether as a gift from mighty Nature herself; and this relation of theirs with Nature bore for them a religious character. Speech was, to them, something especially sacred, and the misuse of certain tones in which dwelt a significant power was to them an impossibility. Every individual felt that such misuse must bring him terrible injury. The magic of such words, they thought, would change into its opposite; that which rightly used would cause a blessing would bring the author to ruin if wrongly employed. In a certain innocence of feeling the Rmoahals ascribed their power less to themselves than to Divine Nature working in them.

It was otherwise in the second sub-race (the so-called Tlavatli peoples). The men of this race began to feel their own personal value. Ambition, an unknown quality among the Rmoahals, showed itself in them. We might say that the faculty of memory grew into the comprehension of life in communities. He who could look back on certain deeds demanded from his fellow-men some recognition of his ability. He claimed that his work should be held in remembrance, and it was this memory of deeds that was the basis on which rested the election, by a group of men allied to each other, of a certain one as leader. A kind of kingship arose. Indeed, this recognition extended beyond death. The remembrance, the commemoration of forefathers, or of those who, during life, had one merit, arose in this way, and thus in single family groups there grew up a kind of religious reverence for the dead—in other words, ancestor-worship. This has continued to spread into much later times and has taken the most varied forms. Among the Rmoahals a man was still esteemed only according to the degree in which for the moment he was able to make himself valuable by the greatness of his power. Did anyone want recognition for what he had done in former days, then he must show by new deeds that he still possessed the old power. He must call to remembrance his old achievements by the performance of new ones. That which had once been done was valueless in itself. Not until the second sub-race was the personal character of a man of so much account that his past life was taken into consideration in the estimation of it.

A further result of the power of thought in drawing men to live together appeared in the fact that groups of men were formed who were united by the remembrance of deeds done in company. The forming of such groups originally depended wholly upon the forces of Nature, on their common parentage. By his own intelligence man had as yet added nothing to that which Nature had made of him. One mighty personality now enlisted a great company to share in a common undertaking; and the remembrance of this work, being retained by all, built up a social group.

This manner of living together in social groups only impressed itself forcibly when the third sub-race (the Toltec) was reached. It was therefore the men of this race who first founded what may be called a commonwealth, the earliest kind of statecraft. The leadership, the government, of this commonwealth passed from ancestors to descendants. That which had formerly continued only in the memory of their fellow-men, the father now transferred to the son. The deeds of their forefathers would be kept in remembrance by the whole race. The achievements of an ancestor continued to be cherished by his descendants. However, we must clearly understand that in those times men really had the power to transfer their gifts to their offspring. Education was based upon the representation of life in comprehensive pictures, and the efficacy of this education depended on the personal force which proceeded from the teacher. It was not an intellectual power which he sought to excite, but rather those gifts which were more instinctive in character. By such a system of education the father's ability was really, in most cases, transferred to the son.

Under conditions like these, personal experience won for itself more and more importance in the third sub-race. When one group of human beings severed itself from another group, it brought with it for the foundation of its new community the vivid recollection of what it had experienced in its former surroundings. But all the same, these memories contained something with which they were not in sympathy, something in which they did not feel at ease. In this connection, therefore, they sought something new, and thus conditions improved with every new settlement of the kind. And it was only natural that the improved conditions should find imitators. These were the facts on which rested the foundation of those flourishing commonwealths that arose in the time of the third sub-race, and are described in Theosophical literature. The personal experiences undergone found support from those who were initiated into the eternal laws of mental development. Mighty rulers received initiation in order that personal ability might have its full provision. A man gradually prepares himself for initiation by his personal ability. He must first develop his forces from below upwards, so that enlightenment may then be imparted to him from above. Thus arose the King-Initiates and Leaders of the people among the Atlanteans. In their hands lay a tremendous amount of power, and great, too, was the reverence paid to them.

But in this fact lay also the cause of their fall. The development of memory led to enormous personal power. The individual began to wish for influence by means of this power of his; and the greater the power grew, the more did he desire to use it for himself. The ambition which he had developed became selfishness, and this gave rise to a misuse of forces. When we consider what the Atlanteans were able to do by their command of the life-force, we can understand that such misuse must have had tremendous consequences. An enormous power over Nature could be placed at the service of personal self-love.

And this was what happened in full measure during the period of the fourth sub-race (the original Turanians). The members belonging to this race, who were instructed in the mastery of the forces mentioned, made manifold use of these to satisfy their wayward wishes and desires. But these forces put to such a use naturally destroy one another in their action. It is as if the feet of a man wilfully moved forwards while at the same time the upper part of his body desired to go backwards.

Such destructive action could only be arrested by the cultivation of a higher force in man. This was thought-power. The effect of logical thinking is to restrain selfish personal wishes. We must seek the origin of this logical thought in the fifth sub-race (the original Semites). Men began to go beyond the simple remembrance of the past, they began to compare their various experiences. The faculty of judgment developed, and wishes and desires were regulated according to this discernment. Man began to calculate, to combine. He learnt to work in thoughts. Whereas formerly he had abandoned himself to every wish, he now asked himself whether, on reflection, he approved of the wish. While the men of the fourth sub-race wildly rushed after the satisfaction of their desires, those of the fifth began to hearken to the inner voice. And this inner voice had the effect of checking the desires, even if it could not crush the demands of the selfish personality.

Thus did the fifth sub-race implant within the human soul the interior impulses of action. In his own soul man must decide what to do and what to leave undone. But, while man thus gained thought-power inwardly, his command over the external forces of Nature was being lost. The forces of the mineral kingdom can be controlled only by means of this combining thought, not by the life-power. It was therefore at the cost of the mastery of the life-force that the fifth sub-race developed thought-power. But it was just by so doing that they created the germs of a further evolution of humanity. Now it is no longer possible for thought alone, working entirely within the man, and no longer able to command Nature directly, to bring about such devastating results as did the misused forces of earlier times, even if the personality, self-love, and selfishness were ever so great. Out of this fifth sub-race was chosen its most gifted portion, which outlived the destruction of the Fourth Race and formed the nucleus of the Fifth,—the Âryan race, whose task it is to bring to perfection the power of thought and all that belongs thereto.

The men of the sixth sub-race—the Akkadian—trained their thought-power still more highly than did the fifth. They distinguished themselves from the so-called original Semites by bringing into use in a wider sense the faculty mentioned. It has been said that the development of thought-power did not indeed allow the demands of the selfish personality to attain such destructive results as were possible in earlier races; but that, nevertheless, these demands were not killed out by it. The original Semites at first regulated their personal affairs as their reason suggested. In place of crude desires and lust, prudence appeared. Other conditions of life presented themselves. Whereas the races of former times inclined to recognize as their leader him whose deeds were deeply engraved in the memory, or who could look back on a life rich in recollections, such a rôle was now rather adjudged to the wise man; and if formerly that was considered decisive which was still fresh in the memory, so now that was regarded as best which appealed most strongly to the reason. Under the influence of thought men once clung to a thing till it was considered insufficient, and then in the latter case it came about naturally that he who had a novelty capable of supplying a want should find a hearing. A love of novelty and a longing for change were, however, developed by this thought-power. Everyone wanted to carry out what his own sagacity suggested; and thus it is that restlessness begins to appear in the fifth sub-race, leading in the sixth to the necessity of placing under general laws the capricious ideas of the single individual. The glory of the states of the third sub-race lay in the order and harmony caused by a common memory. In the sixth this order had to be obtained by deliberately constructed laws. Thus in the sixth sub-race must be sought the origin of law and legislation. And during the third sub-race the segregation of a group of human beings took place only when in a manner they were compelled to leave, because they no longer felt comfortable within the prevailing conditions, brought about by recollection. It was essentially different in the sixth. The calculating power of thought sought novelty as such; it urged men to enterprise and new undertakings. Thus the Akkadians were an enterprising people inclined towards colonization. It was commerce especially that fed the young and germinating power of thought and judgment.

In the seventh sub-race—the Mongolian—thought-power also developed; but in them existed qualities of the earlier sub-races, especially of the fourth, in a much greater degree than in the fifth and sixth. They remained true to their sense of memory. And so they came to the conclusion that the most ancient must also be the wisest, must be that which could best defend itself against the attack of thought. They had indeed lost the command of the life-force, but that which developed in them as thought-power had in itself something of the power of this life-force. It is true they had lost the power over life, but never the direct, instinctive belief in the existence of such a power. This force, indeed, became to them their God in Whose service they performed everything which they considered right. Thus they appeared to their neighbours to be possessed of a mystic power, and the latter yielded to it in blind faith. Their descendants in Asia and in some European regions showed, and still show, much of this peculiarity.

The power of thought implanted in man could only attain its full value in evolution when, in the Fifth Race, it acquired a new impulse. After all, the Fourth could only place this power at the service of that which had been fostered by the gift of memory. It was not until the Fifth was reached that such forms of life were attained as could find their instrument in the faculty of thought.

I

Wilhelm Preyer was a bold researcher, a fertile thinker full of stimulating ideas, a tireless seeker of new paths and goals in science and cultural life. Physiology was at the center of his work. His comprehensive mind was at home in all areas of natural science. His thoughts and facts flowed from everywhere, which he processed into the great body of ideas that he envisioned as physiology in the broadest sense of the word. His writings open up broad, spiritual vistas. It was quite impossible for him to tread well-trodden paths. What he attacked became something new through his work, through his thinking. He had a clear, unclouded view of everything significant that has occurred in the intellectual life of recent decades. He always knew what had a future. Ernst Haeckel says in the preface to Preyer's recently published biography of Darwin: "Like me, you belong to the small number of neuroscientists who, immediately after the publication of Darwin's epoch-making work on the origin of species, were convinced of its tremendous importance and who had the courage to firmly defend its fundamental views at a time when the vast majority of their peers were still hostile or dismissive." Preyer was not one of those scholars and thinkers who are happy in their narrowness, who acquire a sum of convictions through tradition and then take a few steps further themselves in the direction that is thereby marked out for them. The belief that they are following a safe path makes such scholars unsuitable for committing great errors. They do not take bold risks in science. Preyer dared a great deal. Some of his ideas are regarded as aberrations by his peers. Much of what he held as his view will prove to be untenable in the course of time. But he was more inspiring as an erring man than the others, who could not fail to be so, because great errors cannot be made in the circulation of small scientific coins. It is said of Lombroso that he liked the new in intellectual life simply because it was new. Something similar is true of Preyer. He liked to immerse himself in areas of science that were young. Hypnotism, graphology, the question of whether Bacon was the author of Shakespeare's plays, occupied him and inspired him to write writings and essays that are valuable and original, even though their content must meet with strong doubts. Preyer turned his work and his thoughts to things that seem so absurd to some that he does not even want to talk about them seriously. The scientific study of manuscripts was his favorite occupation in recent times. Finding the soul of man, his essence, his character in his handwriting was considered by him to be the task of scientific graphology. Scientific prejudices and a certain type of scholarly education have led many people to believe that it is unscientific to get involved in certain things. The majority of our scientific contemporaries are of the opinion that such things as graphology are incapable of scientific treatment. They arrive at such an opinion because they have formed very definite ideas about what is possible in nature and what is not. They simply reject what does not correspond to these ideas. Minds like Preyer cannot allow themselves to be captured by such ideas. They know how tenuous the "truths" are that make up the content of our sciences. They know how uncertain, how hypothetical much of what the majority of scientifically educated people regard as absolutely certain is. That is why they are convinced that even things that at first seem very doubtful can provide important insights and experiences. Nothing in spiritual life is so certain that one can say: because we recognize these or those laws about one area of nature, something else can only be counted as an impossibility. Everything must be tried, everything must be thought through: this was Preyer's leitmotif. It led him to his immensely interesting investigations into "The Soul of the Child". In the book he wrote on this subject there are more and more significant psychological experiences and ideas than in the writings of the exact fashionable psychologists who want to get close to the human soul through experimentation in the laboratory. Preyer has a keen eye for the intimate aspects of a child's life and a tremendous gift for deduction. His observations come together in an admirable way to form a great scientific edifice. Preyer is both a master of detailed work and an ingenious discoverer of great connections. His biography of Darwin is a masterpiece in terms of penetrating the subject matter with great effective ideas. In a few meaningful strokes, Preyer outlines the contribution that Darwinism has made to all areas of modern intellectual life.

Preyer is never interested in knowledge alone. He wants to put what he has gained through scientific observation at the service of life. His book "The Soul of the Child" not only has the task of exploring the human soul, but also the other task of creating a solid psychological foundation for education. "The realization that psychogenesis is the necessary foundation of pedagogy is becoming more and more apparent. Without the study of the development of the young child's soul, education and the art of teaching cannot be founded on solid ground. ... The art of making the young child become is much more difficult than that of training it prematurely," he says in the preface to the aforementioned work. The views he expressed on the necessary reform of the secondary school system flow from the same source. Preyer is radical here. He wants the classical grammar school education to be replaced by one in the spirit of the modern scientific approach. The knowledge that moves our time should be passed on to young people by the grammar school. One need only have the courage to think in the spirit of our time and one must agree with Preyer's ideas. Only despondent spirits who are averse to any reform can disagree here. Such spirits are afraid of any upheaval. They see how the old works; they cannot or do not want to imagine how the new will work. They want the old because it is comfortable. Lively minds like Preyer hate stagnation as such. They will always carry reformatory ideas with them because they want all things to always be in a state of becoming, in flux.

II

Preyer emphasizes that "every physiological system that claims to be complete is forced to fill numerous and large gaps with conjectures. And because these are always subjective, there is no physiological doctrine that enjoys general approval. The energetic thinker made extensive use of the right to make such assumptions. For he knew that facts usually only reveal their nature to the researcher when he has first formed hypothetical ideas about their connection. The law that ultimately proves to be the correct one can be very different from the one expressed in the form of a conjecture; after all, the latter first pointed the way that led to the former. Preyer made a bold assumption about the origin of life. His courage of thought did not allow him to stop at this fundamental question of all physiology. Many contemporary physiologists do not dare to say a word about this question because science does not seem to be far enough along for them. Others are of the opinion that in the not too distant future it will be possible to solve the riddle of the origin of life by artificially producing living matter from carbonic acid, ammonia, water and salts in the laboratory. This, they believe, will prove that living things in nature once developed from inanimate things through primordial generation. The organic processes will then only appear as complicated mechanical, physical and chemical processes, and it will be possible to explain them with the help of the laws of physics and chemistry, just as the phenomena of inorganic nature are explained today. A third type of researcher, however, considers this to be completely impossible. Bunge, for example, explains: "The more thoroughly, versatilely and thoroughly we strive to investigate the phenomena of life, the more we come to the realization that processes which we had already believed we could explain physically and chemically are of a far more complex nature and for the time being defy any mechanical explanation. ... All processes in our organism that can be explained mechanistically are just as little phenomena of life as the movement of leaves and branches on a tree shaken by a storm, or as the movement of pollen blown by the wind from the male poplar to the female." The latter is also roughly Preyer's opinion. He did not admit that living things could ever have arisen from inanimate things, because the organic law seemed to him to be of a higher order than the inorganic law. Either it took place in earlier epochs, which lie far behind us in the past, and no longer takes place today, or it took place in the past and is still taking place today. In favor of the former case, it is argued that during the rapid cooling of the earth's surface there were completely different conditions than now, different air and light, different distribution of solids and liquids, different chemical compounds and different temperatures of the oceans. It is therefore possible, according to well-known researchers, that the peculiar, non-recurring process of primordial generation could have taken place under such peculiar, non-recurring conditions until the earth's surface, gradually becoming more similar to the present one, had changed to such an extent that living bodies existed, but could no longer come into being without the interposition of living bodies." Preyer believes that this view is based on weak foundations. "It is incomprehensible what, once the conditions for the combination of dead bodies into living ones were in place, whereupon life arose and persisted, should change so that it could continue in its lowest forms and develop further, but could no longer renew itself through primordial generation, but only through procreation. There is no reason why, if once self-generation took place, it should not also take place now." The conditions that are necessary for life today must have already existed at the time of the primordial generation, otherwise the generated life could not have survived. The change in these conditions of life can therefore not be a significant one. If procreation was possible in prehistoric times, it must also be possible today. But all attempts to artificially produce living things from lifeless things in the laboratory have failed. "It is true," says Preyer, "that in the next few years more such experiments will be made, and in particular efforts will be made to produce artificially in the laboratory the conditions which alone are realized on the deep seabed, but no cogent argument can be advanced in favour of the view that a positive result can be obtained at all. The number of chemical elements that can be used for such experiments is small, and even if the quantitative ratios, the absolute quantities, the degrees of pressure and the temperatures of the individual ingredients are highly variable, the possibilities of mixing in experiments remain confined within relatively narrow limits, particularly with regard to the thermal limits that are conducive to protoplasmic movements alone."

Those who deny that living matter has developed from inanimate matter in the course of time, and yet wish to remain on the basis of today's natural science, must assume that living matter is uncreated, eternal. Eberhard Richter decided on this view. In May 1865 he defended the opinion that the germs of life are eternal. However, since they could not thrive on the earth when it was molten, they must have reached our planet from other celestial bodies later, when the cooling was sufficiently advanced. Richter says: "Astronomy shows that masses of fine substances float in space; from the almost disembodied comet tails to the meteor stones that glow in our atmosphere and frequently fall to earth. In the latter, chemistry has detected remnants of organic matter (coal) in addition to molten metals. The question of whether these organic substances, before they were destroyed by the incandescence of the aerolite, consisted of shapeless primordial ooze or of formed organic structures, is to be decided in favor of the latter, because we have corresponding experience of this in our atmosphere." After Richter has spoken of the fungal germs and infusoria present in the earth's air, he says: "But if microscopic creatures float so high in the earth's atmosphere, they can also occasionally, for example under the attraction of passing comets or aerolites, reach outer space and then be caught on another world body that has become habitable, i.e. that enjoys the appropriate warmth and humidity, and develop again through self-ascending activity." Richter links his basic idea to all sorts of things that are untenable. Nevertheless, it cannot simply be dismissed out of hand. It is a fact that numerous organisms, germs and eggs on earth can retain their viability for centuries without showing the slightest sign of life. Such living substances fall into a lifeless state when deprived of the necessary conditions of life, but they can be revived if the right conditions are created. They are called anabiotic. It could therefore be that the bodies that fall to earth from outer space contain substances in which there is dormant life that can be awakened on earth under suitable conditions. In this way, the once dead Earth could have been populated with life. This hypothesis is so unadventurous that Helmholtz and Thomson have spoken out in favor of its scientific justification.

Preyer nevertheless quite rightly describes it as inadequate. It achieves nothing. She says that life did not originate on Earth from something lifeless, but came to it from other world bodies. The same question is repeated for the other world bodies. Did it originate there from inorganic matter or was it eternally present? Preyer resorts to another hypothesis. Why should not the living, the primordial, be the first and the inanimate have developed from the living alone that was present at the beginning? Preyer finds the view quite justified that "through life processes alone, which were already present before the formation of the earth, everything inorganic came into being through excretion, solidification, decomposition, cooling of living bodies, as is also the case today". Preyer finds that the difference between the inorganic and the organic is often shown by natural scientists in a completely false light. Some inorganic processes can be seen as transitions from the inanimate to the living. They represent analogies of life activity, if one looks closely. "An obvious example is the sea, which breathes in the same air as we do, takes in many things as its daily food and assimilates them by dissolving them so that they become constant marine components. The sea as such - like an organism - can only exist within narrow temperature limits, because if it solidifies when it cools down too much or evaporates when it gets too warm, its life dies out. The oceans also show currents in their interior. Rivers carry water to them like veins carry the nourishing juice to the body parts. The ejecta of the sea, its dead parts, the ice, reactants and products of its metabolism are thrown onto the beach. It produces heat through the friction of its water masses against each other, and if it is colder than the air, it swallows up its heat. It constantly generates itself anew, like protoplasm... Fire, too, can generally be called alive. It breathes the same air that we breathe, and suffocates when we deprive it of it. It consumes with insatiable greed what its lambent organs seize and feeds on its prey. It grows with slow movement, beginning in the dark, like the germ imperceptible, then it glows, unfolds ever more rapidly, growing into a heaven-aspiring blaze and propagates itself with terrifying haste, sending sparks everywhere, giving birth to new fires." Imagine these phenomena, reminiscent of life, heightened to full vitality, and you have that state of the once living earth mass from which both the presently living and the presently lifeless have separated. Preyer does not assert that the simplest life-substance we know today was present from the beginning of the formation of the earth, but that the beginningless movement in the universe is not a merely mechanical or physical one, but that it is a living one, and that the simple life-substance must necessarily have remained after the bodies now called inorganic had been separated out by the life-activity of the glowing planet on its surface. "The heavy metals, once also organic elements, no longer melted and did not return to the cycle that had excreted them. They are the signs of the rigor mortis of premature gigantic glowing organisms, whose breath may have been luminous iron vapor, whose blood was liquid metal and whose food may have been meteorites."

A similar idea to Preyer was later put forward by G. Th. Fechner in his "Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen". He also conceived of the universe as originally animate.

Preyer's view must attract philosophical minds. They will never be able to understand how the phenomena of life can be explained by the summation of mechanical, physical and chemical processes. That living things transform themselves into inanimate things is quite understandable and proven by daily experience; that living things develop from inanimate things contradicts all observation that penetrates into the essence of things. The inorganic processes are present in the organic body in a heightened form, in a form that they do not have within inorganic nature. They cannot increase themselves into organic activity, but must first be captured and appropriated by an organism in order to serve life.

In contrast to the hypothesis of primordial generation, Preyer's is the more philosophical one. More refined minds will agree with Preyer when he says: "It is indeed reasonable to assume that the life and warmth of celestial bodies and organisms in the narrower sense are not merely inseparably bound together by the same great laws, but in the last instance originate from the same source. The sun lives the most intense life. And even if our earth is only its satellite, it still has light from its light, warmth from its warmth and in its 'womb life from its life: and it is no mere fantasy to think that we humans also originally come from the fire in the firmament."

III

Preyer derives the lifeless from the living. For him, the universe is a large, all-encompassing organism. From this view, it is only one step to the further step of imagining the world as an animated, spirit-filled organism. Preyer has also taken this step. He regards the propositions of mechanics, "matter is dead; it does not feel", as an aberration. He assumes that even the smallest, apparently dead body particle is endowed with sensation, i.e. with spirit. It corresponds to the facts to assume that "nowhere is there a sharp boundary between sentient and insentient beings, but that all matter has a certain capacity for sensation, which, however, can only give rise to sensation in a certain, extremely complicated arrangement and movement of the particles. Hence the simple substances, the dead bodies, even if they are in part very easily changed by slight influences, cannot, in spite of their dark sensory faculty, feel perceptibly, but as soon as they become components of the gray matter of the brain or only of the living protoplasm (through the ingestion of food), together with others, in an incalculably complicated movement, the sensation arises explosively, if an impression is now exerted on them."

The spirit originally slumbers in matter, but it is active in this slumbering state, it shapes matter, it organizes it until it has assumed such a form that it can itself appear in a manner appropriate to it. This is the leitmotif that Preyer is guided by in all his. Preyer's observations and thinking in physiology and psychology. He did not want to follow organic development merely to see how one form emerges from the other. He sought in the activity, in the function that an organ ultimately has to perform, the reason why it develops in a certain way. "What determines the final form in the development of the stem? I answer: the function. Only when this is activated does the differentiation of the substrate of the original beings begin. It is not the organ from which the function has to derive its origin, but originally the reverse is the case. The functions create their organs. Or, to avoid an expression that is difficult to define, one can say: the need determines the organic form, which is then inherited and only precedes the function in the embryo of higher animals, at least in the disposition." For Preyer, the highest, the last thing that comes into being is the creator of the first, of what precedes it in time. "Every single function of man must be traced step by step, once in individual life back to its first appearance in the living egg and then in the series of animals that are still close to his ancestors, and from these further on to the protoplasm, which is no longer animal, nor plant, but only living. Then one will begin to know where the higher and lower functions, for example speaking and seeing, as well as breathing and growing, come from, and how they have become what they are." The need to speak causes certain organs to undergo such a development that they ultimately become organs of speech. To anyone who views organic development in this way, the endeavor to explain the processes of life and soul mechanically can only appear as a historically strange aberration. "If physiology were really nothing other than physics and chemistry applied to the processes of life, then it would not be a science in itself, it would resemble technology and mechanical engineering and other applied disciplines," says Preyer, and he continues: "The fact that it could even come to be regarded and defined as the physics of organisms or the science of the mechanism and chemistry of living bodies is a historically important fact. The great error arose from the physical explanations of individual phenomena of life that have only become more frequent in this century, especially in recent decades, and from the many artificial reproductions of chemical products of animal and plant metabolism. ... No one doubts that research into the processes of life cannot progress without the continual utilization, application and development of physical and chemical principles and theories. But this does not mean that the science of life is nothing more than the physics and chemistry of living bodies... There are so many processes in the healthy organism which, remaining incomprehensible to physicists and chemists, do not even come within the scope of their investigations that the extension of physical-chemical explanations to them must also be called inadmissible, unscientific, arbitrary. This is a case of misguided induction, as is often observed in childhood: because many things taste good that end up in the mouth, everything must be put in the mouth."

Preyer has made a number of interesting observations in the field of sensory physiology and psycho-physiology and published the results of these in writings that are exemplary in their sharp formulation of what is presented. In my opinion, these works are also influenced by the idea that it is the mind that shapes the organism. What is the interaction between mind and body? How do the senses work to provide the spirit with what it needs to maintain itself? These are questions asked by those who believe that the spirit creates such an organic form for itself that it can manifest itself in a manner appropriate to its needs. Preyer made the dependence of muscle contraction on the strength of the stimulus exerted on the muscle on the one hand and the dependence of the movement triggered in the muscle on the stimulus on the other (the myophysical law) the subject of an important treatise (1874). He also investigated the nature of sensations ("Elemente der reinen Empfindungslehre", Jena 1877) and made observations about which vibrations are perceived as sound and which no longer manifest themselves as sound because they are too slow or too fast ("Über die Grenzen der Tonwahrnehmung", Jena 1876). His research into the nature of sleep, hypnosis and mind-reading all have the same origin: he wanted to recognize the intimate relationships between the spiritual and the physical. And his endeavors in the field of graphology are no less rooted in his basic idea. He wanted to recognize in the written word the spirit that had created its own body.

I should like to help everyone understand, if I can, the characteristics of the spiritual realms we are studying in these lectures. For this reason, I am going to add a little story to shed light on the questions we have already considered and on those ahead of us.¹³

Some time ago Professor Capesius was inwardly quite disturbed and puzzled. It came about in the following way. You will have noticed in The Portal of Initiation that Capesius is a historian, a professor of history. Occult research has shown me that a number of well-known modern scholars have become historians through a particular connection with an Egyptian initiation in the third post-Atlantean epoch, either directly within an initiation cult or else by being attracted in some way or other to the Temple Mysteries. You will notice that Capesius is a historian who depends not only on external documents; he tries also to penetrate to the historical ideas that have played a part in human evolution and in the development of civilization.

I must admit that in characterizing Capesius in The Portal of Initiation, The Probation of the Soul, and The Guardian of the Threshold, I was continuously aware of his link to the Egyptian cult of initiation shown in detail in Scenes Seven and Eight of The Souls' Awakening. We must keep in mind that what Capesius's soul experienced during his Egyptian incarnation forms the foundation for his later destiny and for his present-day soul. Capesius has therefore become a historian, concerned in his professional life chiefly with what has been brought about in successive epochs by the varying character of peoples, civilizations and individuals.

One day, however, Capesius came across some literature about the philosophy of Haeckel. Up to then he had not paid much attention to these ideas, but now he studied various articles on Haeckel's atomistic view of the world. This was the reason for his tortured state of mind; a peculiar mood descended on him when he met this atomistic philosophy at a relatively late period in his life. His reason told him: We really cannot get behind natural phenomena properly unless our explanations involve atoms by way of a mechanistic conception of the universe. In other words, Capesius came more and more to recognize what is, in a sense, the one-sided correctness of atomism and a mechanistic view of nature. He was not one to fight fanatically against a new idea, for he had confidence in his own intelligence, which seemed to find these ideas necessary to explain the natural phenomena around him. Yet it troubled him. He said to himself, “How desolate, how unsatisfying for the human soul this conception of nature is. How poorly it supports any ideas one would like to acquire about spirit and spiritual beings or about the human soul!”

Capesius was thus driven back and forth by doubt; therefore he set out—almost instinctively, I might say—on the walk he so often took when his heart was heavy, to the Baldes' little cottage. Talking over things with those warmhearted people had many times provided him with a real emotional lift, and what Felicia Balde gave him in her wonderful fairy tales had refreshed him. And so he went there. As Dame Felicia was busy in the house when he arrived, he met first his good friend Felix, whom he had gradually grown fond of. Capesius confided his troubles to Felix, describing the doubts that the knowledge of Haeckelism and the atomistic theory had brought. He explained how logical it seemed to apply it to the phenomena of nature, but on the other hand how barren and disheartening such a conception of the universe is. In his distress, Capesius more or less sought help for his state of soul from his fatherly friend.

Now Felix is quite a different character from Capesius. He goes his own unique way. Turning aside at once all Haeckel's ideas and theories, he explained how the matter really stands. He said: “Certainly there must be atoms; it is quite correct to talk about them. But we have to understand that atoms, in order somehow to form the universe, must stratify and arrange themselves in such a way that their relationships correspond in measure and number; the atoms of one substance form a unit of four, another of three, another of one or two; in this way the substances of earth came about.”

It seemed to Capesius, who had a good grasp of history, that this was somewhat Pythagorean. He felt that a Pythagorean principle had the upper hand in Felix, who was arguing that there is nothing we can do about the atoms themselves but that within them we find the wisdom of measure and number. More and more complicated became the argument, with ever more complicated numerical relationships, where—according to Felix—cosmic wisdom in combining the atoms revealed itself as a spiritual principle among them. More and more complicated became the structures that Father Felix built up for Capesius, who gradually was overcome by a peculiar mood. You could describe it by saying that he had to strain every nerve so much in deciphering this complicated stuff that, even though the subject interested him immensely, he had to suppress a desire to yawn and to sink into a kind of dream state.

Before our good professor dropped completely into a dream, however, Dame Balde joined them and listened for a while to the expounding of numbers and structures. She sat there patiently, but she had a peculiar habit. When something not altogether pleasant or congenial bothered her, and she had to control her boredom, she would clasp her hands together and twirl her thumbs around each other; whenever she did this, she was able to swallow her yawns. And now after she had twirled her thumbs for a short time, there came a pause. She could finally try to stir up Capesius with a refreshing story, and so Felicia told her good friend the following tale.

Once upon a time there stood in a very lonely region a great fortress. Within it lived many people, of all ages; they were more or less related to one another and belonged to the same family. They formed a self-contained community but were shut off from the rest of the world. Round about, far and wide, there were no other people nor human settlements to be found, and in time this state of things made many of the people uneasy. As a result, a few of them became somewhat visionary, and the visions that came to them might well, from the manner in which they appeared, have been founded on reality.

Felicia told how a great number of these people had the same vision. First, they saw a powerful figure of light, which seemed to come down out of the clouds. It was a figure of light bringing warmth with it as it came down and sank into the hearts and souls of the people in the fortress. It was really felt—so ran Felicias' story—that something of glory had come down from the heights of heaven in this figure Of light from above.

But soon, Felicia continued, those who had the vision of light saw something more. They saw how from all sides, from all around the mountain, as though crawling out of the earth, there came all kinds of blackish, brownish, steel-grey figures. Whereas it was a single figure of light coming from above, there were many, many of these other forms around the fortress. Whereas the figure of light entered into their hearts and their souls, these other beings—one could call them elemental beings—were like besiegers of the fortress.

For a long time the people, of whom there was a fairly great number, dwelled between the figure from above and those besieging the fortress from outside. One day, however, it happened that the form from above sank down still further than before, and that the besiegers come closer in towards them. An uncomfortable feeling spread among the visionaries in the fortress—we must remember that Felicia is telling a fairy tale—and these visionaries, as well as all the others, fell into a kind of dream state. The figure from above divided into separate clouds of light, but these were seized upon by the besiegers and darkened by them, so that gradually the people of the fortress were held in a dream. The earth life of the people was thereby prolonged for centuries, and when they came to themselves, they found that now they were divided into small communities scattered over many different parts of the earth. They lived in small fortresses that were copies of the great, original one they had inhabited centuries before. And it was apparent that what they had experienced in the ancient fortress was now within them as strength of soul, soul richness and soul health. In these smaller fortresses they could now bravely carry on all sorts of activities, such as farming, cattle raising and the like.

They became capable, hard working people, good farmers, healthy in soul and body.

When Dame Felicia had finished her story, Professor Capesius felt as he usually did, pleasantly cheered. Father Felix, however, found it necessary to provide some explanation for the images of the story, for this was the first time Felicia had told this particular tale. “You see,” Felix began, “the figure that came from above out of the clouds is the luciferic force, and the figures that came from outside like besiegers are the ahrimanic beings....” and so on; Felix's explanations became more and more complicated. At first Dame Felicia listened, clasping her hands together and twirling her thumbs, but finally she said, “Well, I must get back to the kitchen. We're having potato pancakes for supper and I don't want them to get too soft.” So she slipped away.

Capesius sank into such a heavy mood through Felix's explanations that he no longer could listen properly and though he was really very fond of Father Felix, he could not altogether hear what was being explained.

I must add that what I have just been relating happened to Capesius at a time when he had already met Benedictus and had become what one could call his pupil. He had often heard Benedictus speak about the luciferic and ahrimanic elements, but though Capesius is an extremely intelligent man, he never could quite fathom these remarks of Benedictus. Something seemed to be missing; he could not begin to understand them. So this time when he left the Balde cottage, he turned over in his mind the story of the fortress that multiplied itself. Almost every day he pondered the tale.

When he later came to Benedictus, Benedictus noticed that something had taken place in Capesius. Capesius himself was aware that every time he recalled the story of the fortress, his soul was peculiarly stirred within him. It seemed as if the story had worked upon his inner being and strengthened it. Consequently he was continually repeating the tale to himself—as if in meditation. Now he came to Benedictus, who perceived that the forces of Capesius' soul had been newly strengthened.

Benedictus began therefore to speak about these things in a special way. Whereas earlier Capesius—perhaps because of his great learning—would have had more trouble grasping it all, he now understood everything extremely well. Something like a seed had fallen into his soul with Felicia's story and this had fructified his soul forces.

Benedictus said the following. Let us look at three different things: First, consider human thinking, human concepts, the thoughts that a person carries around within himself and ponders when he is alone to help him understand the world. Everyone is able to think and to try to explain things to himself in complete solitude. For this he doesn't need another person. In fact, he can think best when he shuts himself up in his own room and tries as best he can, in quiet, self-contained pondering, to understand the world and its phenomena.

Now then, said Benedictus, it will always happen to a person that a feeling element of soul rises up into his solitary thoughts, and thus there will come to every individual thinker the tempting attraction of the luciferic element. It is impossible for someone to ruminate and cogitate and philosophize and explain everything in the world to himself without having this impulse coming out of soul sensitivity as a luciferic thrust into his thinking. A thought grasped by an individual human being is always permeated to a great extent by the luciferic element.

Capesius had earlier understood very little when Benedictus spoke about luciferic and ahrimanic elements, but now it was clear to him that there must lurk in the solitary thoughts a person forms in himself the allurements of luciferic temptation. Now, too, he understood that in the human activity of individual thought Lucifer will always find a hook with which he can snatch a human being out of the forward-moving path of world evolution; then, because a person separates himself with this kind of thinking from the world, he can be brought to the lonely island that Lucifer—himself separated from the rest of the cosmic order—wants to establish, setting up on that island everything that separates itself into a solitary existence.

Benedictus, after directing Capesius's attention to the nature of lonely, personal, inner thinking, said, Now let us look at something else. Consider what writing is: a remarkable factor of human civilization. When we look at the character of thought, we have to describe it as something that lives in the individual human being. It is accessible to Lucifer who wants to lead our soul qualities out of the physical world and isolate them. This solitary thinking, however, is not accessible to Ahriman, for it is subject to the normal laws of the physical world—that is, it comes to life and then passes away. Writing is different. A thought can be put into writing and snatched from destruction; it can be made permanent. I have sometimes pointed out that Ahriman's effort is to reclaim what is alive in human thinking as it goes toward destruction and to anchor it in the physical sense world. That is what typically happens when you write something down. The thoughts that otherwise would gradually disperse are fixed and preserved for all time—and thus Ahriman can invade human culture.

Professor Capesius is not the sort of reactionary who wants to forbid the teaching of writing in the early grades, but he understood that with all the books and other reading matter people are piling up around themselves, the ahrimanic impulses have entered the evolution of human culture. Now he could recognize in solitary thought the luciferic temptation, in what is written or printed, the ahrimanic element. It was clear to him that in the external physical world, human evolution cannot exist without the interplay of ahrimanic and luciferic elements everywhere in everything. He realized that even in our forward-moving evolution, writing has gained greater and greater importance (and to recognize this, one does not have to be clairvoyant but need only look at the developments of the last couple of hundred years). Ahriman is therefore continually gaining in importance; Ahriman is seizing more and more influence. Today when the printed word has acquired such immense significance—this was quite clear to Capesius—we have built great ahrimanic strongholds. It is not yet the custom (spiritual science has not brought things completely to the point where the truth can be openly spoken in public) that when a student is on his way to the library, he would say, “I've got to hole up and cram for an exam in such and such a subject down at Ahriman's place!” Yet that would be the truth. Libraries, great and small, are Ahriman's strongholds, the fortresses from which he can control human development in the most powerful way. One must face these facts courageously.

Benedictus then had something more to explain to Capesius. On the one hand, he said, we have the thoughts of the individuals, on the other, the written works that belong to Ahriman—but between them there is something in the center. In whatever is luciferic we have a single whole; men strive after unity when they want to explain the world to themselves in thought. In what is written, however, we have something that is atomistic. Benedictus now disclosed what Capesius could understand very well, for his mind and heart had been so enlivened by Dame Felicia's tale.

Between these two, solitary thought and writing, we have the Word. Here we cannot be alone as with our thinking, for through the spoken word we live in a community of people. Solitary thinking has its purpose and a person needs no words when he wants to be alone. But speech has its purpose and significance in the community of other human beings. A word emerges from the solitude of the single individual and unfolds itself in the fellowship of others. The spoken word is the embodied thought but at the same time, for the physical plane, it is quite different from thought. We need not look at the clairvoyant aspects I have mentioned in various lectures; external history shows us—and being a historian, Capesius understood this very well—that words or speech must originally have had quite a different relationship to mankind from what they possess today.

The further you go back into the past, you actually come—as occult research shows—to one original language spoken over the whole world. Even now when you look back at ancient Hebrew—in this regard the Hebrew language is absolutely remarkable—you will discover how different the words are from those in our own languages of western Europe. Hebrew words are much less ordinary and conventional; they possess a soul, so that you can perceive in them their meaning. They themselves speak out their inner, essential meaning. The further you go back in history, the more you find languages like this, which resemble the one original language. The legendary Tower of Babel is a symbol of the fact that there was really once a single primeval human language; this has become differentiated into the various folk and tribal languages. That the single common language disintegrated into many language groups means that the spoken word moved halfway towards the loneliness of thought. An individual does not speak a language of his own, for then speech would lose its significance, but a common language is now found only among groups of people. Thus the spoken word, has become a middle thing between solitary thought and the primeval language. In the original common language one could understand a word through its sound quality; there was no need to try to discover anything further of meaning, for every word revealed its own soul. Later, the one language became many. As we know, everything to do with separation plays into Lucifer's hands; therefore as human beings created their different languages, they opened the door to a divisive principle. They found their way into the current that makes it easy for Lucifer to lift human beings out of the normal progress of the world, foreseen before his own advent; Lucifer can then remove them to his isolated island and separate them from the otherwise progressive course of human evolution.

The element of speech, the Word, finds itself therefore in a middle state. If it had been able to remain as originally foreseen, without Lucifer's intervention, it would belong to a central divine position free from the influence of Lucifer and Ahriman; then, in accordance with the progress of the divine world order, mankind could have set sail on a different current. But language has been influenced on the one side by Lucifer. While a thought grasped in solitude is the complete victim of the luciferic forces, the Word itself is laid hold of only to a certain extent.

On the other hand, writing, too influences language; the further mankind progresses, the more significant is the effect of the printed word on spoken language. This comes about when folk dialects, which have nothing to do with writing, gradually disappear. A more elegant kind of speech takes their place, and this is even called “literary speech.” The name indicates how speech is influenced by writing, and you can still notice how this happens in many localities. I am often reminded how it happened to me and my schoolmates. In Austria where there are so many dialects all mixed up together, the schools insisted on the pupils' learning the “literary speech,” which the children to a great extent had never spoken. This had a peculiar result; I can describe it quite frankly, for I myself was exposed to this literary language over a long period of my life, and only with the greatest effort could I get rid of it. It sometimes even now slips through. Literary speech is peculiar in this: that one speaks all the short vowels long and all the long vowels short, whereas dialect, the language born out of the spoken word, pronounces them correctly. When you mean the Sonne, “sun” that is up there in the sky, dialect says d'Sunn. Someone, however, who has gone through an Austrian school is tempted to say, Die Soone. Dialect says, der Sun for Sohn (“son”); the school language says der Sonn.

English	German	Dialect	Literary Speech
sun	Sonne (short vowel)	Sunn (short)	Soone (long)
son	Sohn (long vowel)	Sun (long)	Sonn (short)

This is an extreme example from an earlier time, of course, but it illustrates my point.

You see how writing works back on the spoken language: it generally does work back on it. If you look at how things have developed, you will find that language has already lost what grows out of the earth and soil and is most vital, most elemental, most organic; people speak more and more a book language. This is the ahrimanic element in writing, which continually influences the spoken word from the other side. However, someone who wants to go through a normal development will easily notice from the three things Benedictus gave Capesius as examples, how senseless it is to wish to eliminate Ahriman and Lucifer from human evolution.

Consider these three activities: solitary thought, the spoken word, and writing. No sensible person, even when he fully recognizes the fact of Lucifer's influence on thinking and Ahriman's influence on writing, will wish to root out Lucifer where he is so obviously at work, for this would mean forbidding solitary thought. Admittedly, for some people this would be a most comfortable arrangement, but chances are that none would be willing to advise it openly. On the other hand, we would not want to do away with writing. Just as the positive and negative electric charge indicates a polarity in external physical nature, we will also have to agree that the contrasting ahrimanic and luciferic elements have also to exist. They are two polarities, neither of which we can do without, but they must be brought into the right relationship to measure and number. Then the human being can move between them in the middle ground by way of the spoken word—for indeed the Word was meant to be the vessel for wisdom and insight, the vehicle of thoughts and mental images. A person could say, “I must so train myself in using words that through them I allow everything self-willed and merely personal to be corrected. I must take into my soul the wisdom that past ages have unlocked out of the word. I must pay attention not only to my own opinion, not only to what I myself believe or can recognize correctly through my own ability, but I must respect what has come down through the various cultures, through the efforts and wisdom of the various races in human evolution.” This would mean bringing Lucifer into the right relationship to the Word. We would not do away with isolated thinking but, realizing that the spoken word belongs to the community, we would try to trace it back through long periods of time. The more we do this, the more we give Lucifer his rightful influence. Then instead of merely submitting to the authority of the Word, we protect its task of carrying earth wisdom from one epoch of civilization to the next.

On the other hand, if someone fully understands the matter, he must take it on himself not to submit to the rigid authoritarian principle that belongs to writing—whether it be most holy in content or completely profane—for otherwise he will fall victim to Ahriman. It is clear that for the external materialistic world we have to have writing, and writing is what Ahriman uses to detach thinking from its course toward destruction; this is his task. He wants to hold thinking back from flowing into the stream of death: writing is the best means of keeping thoughts on the physical plane. In full consciousness, therefore, we must face the fact that writing, which carries the ahrimanic element in itself, must never gain the upper hand over mankind. Through our vigilance we must keep the Word in the middle position, so that on the left and on the right—both in our thinking and in our writing—the two polar opposites, Lucifer and Ahriman, are working together at the same time. This is where we should stand and it will be the right place if we are clear in mind and heart that there must always be polarities.

Capesius took hold of all this that he heard, with his soul forces strengthened by Felicia. His attitude to what Benedictus was explaining was quite different now from earlier explanations that Benedictus had given him of the luciferic and ahrimanic elements. Fairy tales flowing out of the spiritual world were more and more fructifying the forces of his soul, so that Capesius himself perceived how inwardly strengthened and fortified his soul capacities had become. In Scene Thirteen of The Souls' Awakening this is represented; a soul force within Capesius designated as Philia appears to him as a spiritually tangible being, not as a merely abstract element of his soul. The more Philia becomes alive in his soul as a real being the more Capesius understands what Benedictus expected from him. At the time when he had first heard the enlivening story of the fortress that multiplied itself into a great number of such buildings, it did not at first affect him. In fact, he almost began to slumber; then when Father Felix was talking about the atoms, he really was practically asleep. Now, however, with his soul so matured, Capesius recognized the threefoldness inherent in the whole stream of world evolution: on one side the luciferic solitary thought, on the other, the ahrimanic writing, the third, the middle state, the purely divine. He now understood the number three as the most significant factor in cultural development on the physical plane; he surmised that this number three can be found everywhere. Capesius viewed the law of number in a different way than before; now, through the awakening of Philia within him, he perceived the nature of number in world evolution. Now too, the nature of measure became clear: in every threefoldness there are two polarities, which must be brought into an harmonious balance with each other. In this, Capesius recognized a mighty cosmic law and knew that it must exist, in some way or other, not only on the physical plane but also in higher worlds. We shall have to enlarge upon this later in more precise descriptions of the divine spiritual world. Capesius surmised that he had penetrated to a law acting in the physical world as though hidden behind a veil and in possessing it, he had something with which he could cross the threshold. If he were to cross the threshold and enter the spiritual world, he must then leave behind him everything stimulated merely by physical experience.

Number and measure—he had learned to feel what they are, to feel them deeply, to fathom them, and now he understood Benedictus, who brought up other things, at first fairly simple ones, to make the principle fully clear. “The same predominance of the triad, of polarity or opposition in the triad, of harmonious balance,” Benedictus told Capesius, “is found in other areas of our life. Let us look from another point of view at thinking, mental images, or ideas. First of all you have mental images; you work out for yourself the answers to the secrets of the universe. The second would be pure perception; let us say, simply listening. Some people are more likely to ponder about everything introspectively. Others don't like to think but will go around listening, will receive everything through listening, then take everything on authority, even if it's the authority of natural phenomena, for there is, of course, a dogma of external experience, when one is pushed around willingly by the superficial happenings of nature.”

Benedictus could soon show Professor Capesius also that in lonely thinking there lies the luciferic attraction, whereas in mere listening, or in any other kind of perceiving, there is the ahrimanic element. But one can keep to the middle path and move between the two, so to speak. It is neither necessary to stop short at abstract, introspective thinking wherein we shut ourselves away within our own souls like hermits, nor is it necessary to devote ourselves entirely to seeing or hearing the things our eyes and ears perceive. We can do something more. We can make whatever we think so inwardly forceful that our own thought appears before us like a living thing; we can immerse ourselves in it just as actively as we do in something heard or seen outside. Our thought then becomes as real and concrete as the things we hear or see. That is the middle way.

In mere thought, close to brooding, Lucifer assails man. In mere listening, either as perception or accepting the authority of others, the ahrimanic element is present. When we strengthen and arouse our soul inwardly so that we can hear or see our thoughts while thinking we have then arrived at meditation. Meditation is the middle way. It is neither thinking nor perceiving. It is a thinking that is as alive in the soul as perception is, and it is a perception of what is not outside man but a perception of thoughts. Between the luciferic element of thought and the ahrimanic element of perception, the life of the meditating soul flows within a divine-spiritual element that alone bears in itself the rightful progress of world events. The meditating human being, living in his thoughts in such a way that they become as alive in him as perceptions of the outside world, is living in this divine, on-flowing stream. On his right are mere thoughts, on his left the ahrimanic element, mere listening; he shuts out neither the one nor the other but understands that he lives in a threefoldness, for indeed life is ruled and kept in order by number. He understands, too, that between this polarity, this antithesis of the two elements, meditation moves like a river. He understands that in lawful measure the luciferic and ahrimanic elements must be balanced in meditation.

In every sphere of life the human being can learn this cosmic principle of number and measure that Capesius learned after his soul had been prepared through Benedictus's guidance. A soul that wants to prepare itself for knowledge of the spiritual world gradually begins to search everywhere in the world, at every point that can be reached, for the understanding of number, above all the number three; it begins then to see polar opposites revealed in all things and the necessity for these opposites to balance each other. A middle condition cannot be a mere flowing onward, but we must find ourselves within the stream directing our inner vision to the left and to the right, while steering our vessel, the third, middle thing, safely between the left and right polarities.

In recognition of this, Capesius had learned through Benedictus how to steer in the right way upwards into the spiritual world and how to cross its threshold. And this every person will have to learn who wants to find his way into spiritual science; then he will really come to an understanding of the true knowledge of higher worlds.

• 13. See also Rudolf Steiner, Three lectures on the Mystery Dramas, (Spring Valley, Anthroposophic Press, 1983).

In the lectures which it has been my lot to deliver, I have often drawn attention to an observation which might be made in real life, and which shows the necessity of seeking everywhere below the surface of life's appearances, instead of stopping at first impressions. It runs somewhat as follows.—A man is walking along a river bank and, while still some way off, is seen to pitch headlong into the water. We approach and draw him out of the stream, only to find him dead; we notice a boulder at the point where he fell and conclude at first sight as a matter of course that he stumbled over the stone, fell into the river and was drowned. This conclusion might easily be accepted and handed down to posterity—but all the same it could be very wide of the mark. Closer inspection might reveal that the man had been struck by a heart-attack at the very moment of his coming up to the stone, and was already dead when he fell into the water. If the first conclusion had prevailed and no one had made it his business to find out what actually occurred, a false judgment would have found its way into history—the apparently logical conclusion that the man had met his death through falling into the water. Conclusions of this kind, implying to a greater or lesser degree a reversal of the truth, are quite customary in the world—customary even in scholarship and science, as I have often remarked.

For those who dedicate themselves heart and soul to our spiritual-scientific movement, it is necessary not only to learn from life, but incessantly to make the effort to learn the truth from life, to find out how it is that not only men but also the world of facts may quite naturally transmit untruth and deception. To learn from life must become the motto of all our efforts; otherwise the goals we want to reach through our Building¹ as well as in many other ways will be hard of attainment. Our aim is to play a vital part in the genesis of a world-era; a growth which may well be compared with the beginning of that era which sprang from a still more ancient existence of mankind—let us say the time to which Homer's epics refer. In fact, the entire configuration, artistic nature and spiritual essence of our Building attempts something similar to what was attempted during the happenings of that transitional period from a former age to a later one, as recounted by Homer. It is our wish to learn from life, and, what is more, to learn the truth from life.

There are so very many opportunities to learn from life, if we wee willing. Have we not had such an opportunity even in the last day or two? Are we not justified in making a start with such symptoms, particularly with one that has so deeply moved us? Consider for a moment!² On Wednesday evening last, many of our number either passed by the crossroads or were in the neighbourhood, saw the wagon overturned and lying there, came up to the lecture and were quite naturally, quite as a matter of course, aware of nothing more than that a cart had fallen over. For hours, that was the sole impression—but what was the truth of the matter? The truth was that an eloquent karma in the life of a human being was enacted; that this life so full of promise was in that moment karmically rounded off, having been required back in the worlds by the Spiritual Powers. For at certain times these Powers need uncompleted human lives, whose unexpended forces might have been applied to the physical plane, but have to be conserved for the spiritual worlds for the good of evolution. I would like to put it this way. For one who has saturated himself with spiritual science, it is a plainly evident fact that this particular human life may be regarded as one which the gods require for themselves; that the cart was guided to the spot in order that this karma might be worked out, and overturned in order to consummate the karma of this human life. The way in which this was brought home to us was heartrending, and rightly so. But we must also be capable of submerging ourselves in the ruling wisdom, even when it manifests, unnoticed at first, in something miraculous. From such an event we should learn to look more profoundly into the reality. And how indeed could we raise our thoughts more fittingly to that human life with which we are concerned, and how commemorate more solemnly its departure from earth, than by forthwith allowing ourselves to be instructed by the grave teaching of destiny which has come to us in these days.

Yet it is a human trait to forget only too promptly the lessons which life insistently offers us! It is on this account that we have to call to our aid the practice of meditation, the exercise of concentrated thinking, in order to essay any comprehension of the world at all adequate to spiritual science; we must strive continually towards this. And I would like to interpose this matter now, among the other considerations relative to our Building, because it will serve as an illustration for what is to follow concerning art. For let us not hold the implications of our Building to be less than a demand of history itself—down to its very details.

In order to recognise a fact of this kind in full earnest, it must be our concern to acquire the possibility, through spiritual science, of reforming our concepts and ideas, of winning through to better, loftier, more serious, more penetrating and profound concepts and ideas concerning life, than any we could acquire without spiritual science.

From this standpoint let us ask the downright question What then is history, and what is it that men so often understand by history? Is not what is so often regarded as history nothing more at bottom than the tale of the man who is walking along a river's bank, died from a heart attack, falls into the water, and of whom it is told that he died through drowning? Is not history very often derived from reports of this kind? Certainly, many historical accounts have no firmer foundation. Suppose someone had passed by the cross-roads between 8 and 9 o'clock last Wednesday evening and had had no opportunity of hearing anything about the shattering event which had taken place there: he could have known nothing, only that a cart had been overturned, and that is how he would report it. Many historical accounts are of this kind. The most important things lying beneath the fragments of information remain entirely concealed; they withdraw completely from what is customarily termed history. Sometimes possibly one can go further and say that external reports and documents actually hinder our recognition of the true course of history. That is more particularly so if—as happens in nearly every epoch—the documents present the matter one-sidedly and if there are no documents giving the other side, or if these are lost. You may call this an hypothesis but it is no hypothesis, for what is taught as history at the present time rests for the most part upon such documents as conceal rather than reveal the truth.

The question might occur at this point: How is any approach to the genesis of historical events to be won? In all sorts of ways spiritual science has shown us how, for it does not look to external documents but seeks to discern the impulses which play in from the spiritual worlds. Hence it naturally cannot describe the outward course of events as external history does, It recognises inward impulses everywhere. Moreover, the spiritual investigator must be bold enough, when tracing these impulses on the surface, to hold fast to them in the face of outer traditions. Courage with regard to the truth is essential, if we would take up our stand on the ground of spiritual science, The transition can be made by attempting to approach the secrets of historical “coming into being” otherwise than is usually done.

Consider all the extant 13th and 14th century documents about Italy, from which history is so fondly composed. The tableau, the picture, obtained by thus assembling history out of such documents brings one far less close to the truth one can get by studying Dante and Giotto, and allowing what they created out of their souls to work upon one. Consider also what remains of Scholasticism, of its thoughts, and try to reflect upon, to reproduce in yourself, what Dante, Giotto and Scholasticism severally created—you will get a truer picture of that epoch than is to be had from a collection of external documents. Or someone may set himself the task of studying the rebellion of the Protestant spirit of the North or of Mid-Europe against the Catholicism of the South. What can you not find in documents! Yet it is not a question of isolated facts, but of uniting one's whole soul with the active, ruling, weaving impulses at work. You come to know this rising up of the Protestant spirit against the Catholic spirit through a study of Rembrandt and the peculiar nature of his painting. Much could be brought forward in this way.

And so it comes about that historical documents are often more of a hindrance than a help. Perhaps the type of history bookworm who subsists upon documentary evidence would be elated by a pile of material on Homer's life, or Shakespeare's. From a certain point of view, however, one could say: Thank God there is no such evidence! We must only be wary not to exaggerate a truth of this kind, not to press it too far. We must indeed be grateful to history for leaving us no documents about Homer or Shakespeare. Yet something might here be maintained which is one-sidedly true—one sided, but true, for a one sided truth is nevertheless a truth. Someone might exclaim: How we must long for the time when no external documents about Goethe are available.

Indeed, with Goethe it is often not merely disturbing, but an actual hindrance, to know what he did, not only from day to day but sometimes even from hour to hour. How wonderful it would be to picture for oneself the experience undergone by the soul of a man who at a particular time of life spoke the fateful words:

“ I've studied now Philosophy
And Jurisprudence, Medicine,
And even, alas! Theology,
From end to end, with labour keen;
And here, poor fool! with all my lore
I stand, no wiser than before.”

“Faust”, Part I,
(Tr. Bayard Taylor)

If one wished to find the answer oneself in the case of such men, one might well yearn for the time when all the Leweses, and so on, whatever their names may be, no longer tell us what Goethe did the livelong day in which this or that verse was set down. And what a hindrance in following the flight of Goethe's soul up to the time in which he inscribed these words:

“The sun-orb singe, in emulation
‘Mid brother spheres, his ancient round. . .”

What a hindrance it is that we are able to refer to the many volumes of his notebooks and correspondence, and to read how Goethe spent this period. This view is fully justified from one angle, but not from every angle; for although it is fully justified in the case of Homer, Shakespeare, and so on, it is one sided with regard to Goethe, since Goethe's own works include his “Truth and Poetry” (“Dichtung und Wahrheit”). An inherent trait of this personality is that something about it should be known, since Goethe felt constrained to make this personal confession in “Truth and Poetry”. Hence the time will never come when the poet of “Faust” will appear to humanity in the same light as the poet of the “Iliad” or the “Odyssey”. So we see that a truth brought home to us from one side only can never be given a general application; it bears solely on a particular, quite individual case.

Yet the matter must he grasped still more profoundly. Spiritual science tries to do this. By pointing out certain symptoms, I have repeatedly endeavoured to show that modern culture aspires towards spiritual science. In my Rätsel der Philosophie³ I have tried to show how this is particularly true of philosophy. In the second volume you will notice that the development of philosophy presses on towards what I have sketched in the concluding chapter as “Prospect of an Anthroposophy”. That is the direction taken by the whole book. Of course this could not have been done without some support from our Anthroposophical Society, for the outer world will probably make little of the inner structure of the book as yet.

I said that Goethe must be regarded differently from Homer. On the same grounds I would like to add: Do we then not come to know Homer? Could we get to know him by any better means than through his poems, although he lived not only hundreds but even thousands of years ago? Do we not get to know him far better in that way than we ever could from any documents? Yes, Homer's age was able to bring forth such works, through which the soul of Homer is laid bare. Countless examples could be given. I will mention one only one, however, which is connected with the deepest impulses of that turning-point during the Homeric age, much as we ourselves hope and long for in the change from the materialistic to the anthroposophical culture.

We know that in the first book of the Iliad we are told of the contrast between Agamemnon and Achilles: the voices of these two in front of Troy are vividly portrayed. We know further that the second book begins by telling us that the Greeks feel they have stood before Troy quite long enough, and are yearning to return to their homeland. We know, too, that Homer describes the events as if the Gods were constantly intervening as guiding divine-spiritual powers. The intervention of Zeus is described at the beginning of this second book. The Gods, like the Greeks below, are sleeping peacefully; so peacefully, indeed, that Herman. Grimm, in his witty way, suggests that the very snoring of the heroes, of the Gods and of the Greeks below, is plainly audible. Then the story continues:

Now all other gods and chariot-driving men slept all night long, only Zeus was not holden of sweet sleep; rather was he pondering in his heart how he should do honour to Achilles and destroy many beside the Achaians' ships And this design seemed to his mind the best, to wit, to send a baneful dream upon Agamemnon son of Atreus. So he spake, and uttered to him winged words: ‘Come now, thou baneful Dream, go to the Achaians' fleet ships, enter into the hut of Agamemnon son of Atreus, and tell him every word plainly as A charge thee Bid him call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with al' speed, for that now he may take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang.’

So spake he, and the Dream went his way when he had heard the charge. With speed he came to the Achaeans' fleet ships, and went to Agamemnon son of Atreus, and found him sleeping in his hut, and ambrosial slumber poured over him. So he stood over his head in seeming like unto the son of Neleus, even Nestor, whom most of all the elders Agamemnon honoured.”⁴

Zeus, then, sends the Dream down from Olympus to Agamemnon. He gives the Dream a commission, The Dream descends to Agamemnon, approaching him in the guise of Nestor, who we have just learned, is one of the heroes in the camp of the allies.

“In his likeness spake to him the heavenly Dream: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses? To sleep all night through beseemth not one that is a counsellor, to whom peoples are entrusted and so many cares belong. But now hearken straightway to me, for I am a messenger to thee from Zeus, who though he be afar yet hath great care for thee and pity. He biddeth thee call to arms the flowing-haired Achaians with all speed, for that now thou mayest take the wide-wayed city of the Trojans. For the immortals that dwell in the halls of Olympus are no longer divided in counsel, since Hera hath turned the minds of all by her beseeching, and over the Trojans sorrows hang by the will of Zeus. But do thou keep this in thy heart, nor let forgetfulness come upon thee when honeyed sleep shall leave thee.’ ”

This, then, is what takes place. Zeus, the presiding genius in the events, sends a Dream to Agamemnon in order that he should bestir himself to fresh action. The Dream appears in the likeness of Nestor, a man who is one of the band of heroes among whom Agamemnon is numbered. The figure of Nestor, whose physical appearance is well-known to Agamemnon, confronts him and tells him in the Dream what he should do. We are further told that Agamemnon convenes the elders before he calls an assembly of the people. And to the elders he recounts the Dream just as it had appeared to him:

“Hearken, my friends. A dream from heaven came to me in my sleep through the ambrosial night, and chiefly to goodly Nestor was very like in shape and bulk and stature. And it stood over my head and charged me saying: ‘Sleepest thou, son of wise Atreus tamer of horses?’ ”

(Atreus' son then tells the elders what the Dream had said. None of the elders stands up excepting Nestor alone, the real Nestor, who utters the words:)

“My friends, captains and rulers of the Argives, had any other of the Achaians told us this dream we might deem it a false thing, and rather turn away there from; but now he hath seen it who of all Achaians avoweth himself far greatest. So come, let us call to arms as we may the sons of the Achaians ...”

Do we not gaze unfathomably deep into Homer's soul, when we know—are able to know, to perceive, by means of spiritual science—that he can recount an episode of this kind? Have we not described how what we experience in the spiritual world clothes itself in pictures, and how we have first to interpret the pictures, how we should not permit ourselves to be misled by them? Homer spoke at a time when the present clairvoyance did not yet exist; at a time, rather, when the old form of clairvoyance had just been lost. And in Agamemnon he wanted to portray a man who is still able to experience the old atavistic clairvoyance in certain episodes of life. As a military commander he is still led to his decisions through the old clairvoyance, through dreams. We know what Homer knows and believes and how he regards the men he writes about; and suddenly, in pondering on what is described in this passage, we see that the human soul stands here at the turning-point of an era.

Yet that is not all. We do not only behold in Agamemnon, through Homer, a human soul into which clairvoyance still plays atavistically, nor do we only recognise the pertinent description of this clairvoyance; but the whole situation lies before us in a wonderfully magical light. Homer is humorous enough to show us expressly that it is Nestor who appeared to Agamemnon; the same Nestor who is subsequently present and himself holds forth, Now Nestor has spoken in favour of carrying out the Dream's instructions. The people assemble; but Agamemnon addresses them quite differently from what is implied in the Dream, saying that it is a woeful business, this lingering before Troy: “Let us flee with our ships to our dear native land”, he exclaims. So that the people, seized by the utmost eagerness, hasten to the ships for the journey home. Thus it rests finally with the persuasive arts of Odysseus to effect their about-turn and the beginning of the siege of Troy in real earnest. Here, in fact, we gaze into Homer's soul and discern in Agamemnon a lifelike portrayal of the transition from a man who is still led by the ancient clairvoyance to a man who decides everything out of his own conclusions. And so with an overwhelming sense of humour he shows us how Agamemnon speaks to the elders while under the influence of the Dream, and later how he speaks to the crowd, having bade farewell to the spiritual world and being subject now, to external impressions alone. Homer's way of depicting how Agamemnon outgrows the bygone age and is placed on his own feet, on the spearhead of his own ego, is wonderful indeed. And he further implies that from henceforward everything must undergo a like transition, so that men will act in accordance with what the reason brings to pass, with what we term the Intellectual or Mind Soul, which must be ascribed pre-eminently to the ancient Greeks. Because Agamemnon is only just entering the new era and behaves in a quite erratic and contradictory way, first in accordance with his clairvoyant dream and then out of his own ego, Homer has to call in Odysseus, a man who reaches his decisions solely under the influence of the Intellectual Soul. Wonderful is the way in which two epochs come up against each Other here, and wonderfully apposite is Homers picture of it!

Now I would ask you: Do we know Homer from a certain aspect when we know such a trait? Certainly we know him. And that is how we must come to know him if we want rightly to understand world-history—an impossible task if nothing but external documents were available. Many other traits could be brought forward, out of which the figure of Homer would emerge and stand truly before us. We can come close to him in this way, as we never could with a personality built up only from historical documents. Just think what is really known of ancient Greek history! Yet through traits of this kind we can approach Homer so closely that we get to know him to the very tip of his nose, one might say! At one time there were men who approached Homer in this way, until a crude type of philology came in and spoilt the picture. Thus does one know Socrates, as Plato and Xenophon depict him; so also Plato himself, Aristotle, Phidias. Their personalities can be rounded off in a spiritual sense. And if we thus hold these figures before our mind, a picture arises of Hellenism on the physical plane. To be sure, one must call in the aid of spiritual science. As the sun sheds its light over the landscape, so does spiritual science illumine for us the figure of Homer as he lived, and equally of Aeschylus, Socrates, Plato, Phidias.

Try for a moment to visualise Lycurgus, Solon or Alcibiades as a part of Greek history. How do they present themselves? As nothing but spectres. Whoever has any understanding of an Individuality in the true sense must recognise that in the framework of history they are just like spectres, for the features that history sets itself to portray are so abstract as to have a wholly spectral quality. Nor are the figures of later ages which have been deduced from external documents any less spectral in character.

I am saying all this in the hope that gradually—yes, even in things that people treat as so fixed and stable that the shocks of the present time are treated as mere foolishness—spiritual science in the hearts of our friends may acquire the strength and courage to bring home an understanding that a new impulse is trying to find its way into human evolution. But for this we shall need all our resources; one might say that we shall need the will to penetrate into the true connections that go to make up the world, and the power of judgment to perceive that the true connections do not lie merely on the surface. In this regard it is of surpassing importance that we should learn from life itself. For very often—to a far greater extent than one might at first suppose—error finds its way into the world through a superficial reliance on the external pattern of facts, which really can do nothing but conceal the truth, as we saw in the cases described. In the field of philosophy particularly, it is my hope that precisely through the mode of presentation in the second volume of the “Rätsel der Philosophie” many will find it possible to recognise the connection between the philosophic foundations of a world-conception, as presented in the “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity” and the “Outline of Occult Science”. If on the one hand we are looking for a presentation of the spiritual worlds as this offers itself to clairvoyant knowledge, then on the other hand there must be added to the reception of this knowledge a penetration of the soul with the impulses which arise from the conviction, that man does not confront the truth directly in the world, but must first wrest the truth from it. The truth is accessible only to the man who strives, works, penetrates into things with his own powers; not to the man who is ready to accept the first appearances of things, which are only half real. Such a fact is easily uttered in this abstract form, but the soul is inclined over and over again to back away from accepting the deeper implications of what is said.

I believe many of those who have tried to enter into spiritual science with all the means now at their disposal will understand how in our Building, for example, the attempt has been made through the concord of the columns with their motifs and, with everything expressed in the forms, to enable the soul to grow beyond what is immediately before it. For a receptive person, beginning to experience what lies in the forms of the Building, the form itself would immediately disappear, and, through the language of the form, a way would open out into the spiritual, into the wide realms of space. Then the Building would have achieved its end. But in order to find this way, much has still to be learnt from life.

Is it not a remarkable Karma for all of us, gathered here for the purpose of our Building, to experience through a shattering event the relationship between Karma and apparently external accident? If we call to our aid all the anthroposophical endeavours now at our disposal, we can readily understand that human lives which are prematurely torn away—which have not undergone the cares and manifold coarsenings of life and pass on still undisturbed—are forces within the spiritual world which have a relationship to the whole of human life; which are there in order to work upon human life. I have often said that the earth is not merely a vale of woe to which man is banished from the higher worlds by way of punishment. The earth is here as a training-ground for human souls. If, however, a life lasts but a short while, if it has but a short time of training, then forces are left over which would otherwise have been used up in flowing down from the spiritual world and maintaining the physical body. Through spiritual science we do not become convinced only of the eternality of the soul and of its journey through the spiritual world, but we learn also to recognise what is permanent in the effect of a spiritual force by means of which a man is torn from the physical body like the boy who was torn from our midst on the physical plane. And we honour, we celebrate, his physical departure in a worthy manner if, in the manner indicated and in many other ways, we really learn, learn very much, from our recent experience, Through Anthroposophy, one learns to feel and to perceive from life itself.

• 1. The First Goetheanum, later destroyed by fire.
• 2. Note by translator: A seven-year old boy was smothered by an overturned horse-drawn removal van, quite unnoticed since darkness had already set in. The boy, who was in the habit of running an errand for his mother at this hour, normally went another way.
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy
• 4. The Iliad, Book II. (Macmillan, 1949)

For many years now, I have been giving the lectures on spiritual science during the winter season from this very place. I have always tried to begin these lectures with a consideration of the connection between the particular view of the spiritual world that is represented within this spiritual science, as it is meant here, and the general spiritual life. And already last winter, I tried — which must be particularly obvious in our present fateful time — to turn my attention to the feelings that are currently living within the German people, to that time of German spiritual development in which, out of the very core of the German being, a connection, a living together with the spiritual world, was sought in a truly idealistic form. In our time, in which the German nation must defend itself against a world of enemies in its existence, in its hopes for existence, it must be particularly obvious to look to the time of which one of the most popular historians of the German nation says: it is the time in which the idealistic spirits of this German nation have shown that even in times of extreme distress, in times of extreme hostility, the German character is able to salvage that greatness which can be saved by cultivating the spiritual life, as it appears to be inherent in the very deepest characteristics of this nation. We need not fall into the error of our opponents, who today believe, in such a strange and peculiar way, that they must particularly characterize the importance of their own nation by belittling the nature of the opponents. We need not fall into the error, for example, of those of whom we now hear that the German Weltanschauung itself must have seduced them into leading the German people into the most savage warfare. We can, without making the mistake of belittling our opponents, turn our attention to what the German people believe, must believe, according to their very nature: that their world-historical task is rooted in the deepest inwardness of their nature. And there is no need, as so many of Germany's enemies do today, to form an opinion about the popular, be it one's own or that of another people, out of direct hatred and antipathy in the present.

And so let us take as our starting-point for today's consideration an idea which an outstanding mind, relatively calm, was able to form in a time long before our own fateful time. This idea was formed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schiller's great friend, who was able to delve so wonderfully into the essence of the development of humanity, who knew how to depict the needs of man within the development of world history in such a subtle way, In 1830, when Wilhelm von Humboldt looked back on what Schiller's friendship meant to him, but also on what Schiller's significance for the development of the German people was, on what Schiller's entire intellectual development was, he expressed himself in the following way about the German essence:

Thus someone who has devoted much thought to the feelings that go with knowing this points to what he had to believe lies in the task and the immediate destiny of the German people.

And when we look at what has shaped the German character from the spiritual side in the great age when German idealism raised Germanness to the stage of thought; and when we point to the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century with all what had developed up to the immediate phase of development of our time, then we see something that cannot be grasped by the certainly significant but not very lofty concept, let us say, of the internationality of science and the like, which, insofar as it concerns science, is self-evident. But what emerged so powerfully in Germany's greatest periods in terms of intellectual development was that at that time, through those minds that felt so intimately connected to German nationality, such as Fichte, for example, the question of the whole significance of knowledge, of what man can achieve through the knowledge that he develops as science; the question of the relationship of this knowledge to the secret of the world, to the eternal-working, eternal-spiritual in the world itself. That knowledge has been called into question, that knowledge itself has become a mystery, and that it is precisely through this tendency towards the mysteriousness of knowledge that man has had to make the matter of this knowledge a personal and yet objective and factual human interest, that is the tremendously significant thing is how one can feel connected in every fiber of one's being to what man can achieve through an ideal in his striving, through the pursuit of knowledge; how one can strive for knowledge full of light and yet still raise the question: Can one go beyond this knowledge, or rather must one go beyond this knowledge if one wants to arrive at the deepest thing that connects man to the eternal sources of existence? And the reason why this riddle could present itself to the German soul in its best minds in a particularly intense way lies in the fact that during the period of German idealism, the striving asserted itself to have knowledge not only as something that something that teaches you about the world in terms of concepts, something you can stand coolly opposed to in your desire to dissect the phenomena of the world, but to have knowledge as something that lives in the whole soul and sustains the human being. It was precisely out of this yearning for the vitality of knowledge, out of this intimate feeling of connection with knowledge, that the great riddles of knowledge arose. It seems as if one only wants to have knowledge, only wants to cultivate a science, if this science can really live in such a way that one can also find the way to the sources of existence in the experiencing of knowledge.

It is appealing to see how German minds want to live in their knowledge, in their science, in a much higher sense than is usually meant when one speaks of the connection between life and science. Last winter, in a similar context, I tried to characterize Fichte's idiosyncrasy, this noble German spirit who, in one of the most difficult times in the development of the German people, placed his spiritual striving entirely at the service of his people, who, from the depth of his spirit, found the most wonderful words of power to inspire German enthusiasm. The way in which he felt connected with the pursuit of knowledge, and how he strove to rise to German idealism, is part of what Fichte was able to be to his people. A picture that has been preserved for us can illustrate this beautifully. Forberg, who heard Fichte speak when he tried to bring to life, from the depths of his striving for wisdom, what he saw as his connection with the weaving, ruling world spirit, said the following beautiful words about Fichte's way of speaking about spiritual matters:

And if one wants to characterize Fichte's German nature, one must point out how, by wanting to rule in the realm of concepts, he sought within this realm of concepts something that was more than what is often called concepts and ideas, something that was a revival of those forces of the human soul, which are one with the creative powers of all existence, those creative powers that live outside in nature, that have placed man himself in nature, that guide and direct historical life, that interweave and permeate all existence. But in order to gain such a view in full vitality, Fichte could not stop at the abstractness of the concepts, at concepts that are only views. For this he needed concepts that were directly experienced and imbued with soul by an element of activity that not only illuminates the human soul, but also strengthens it, so that this human soul, by first withdrawing from the external world, feels connected to the very innermost part of reality. And so Johann Gottlieb Fichte directed his contemplation to something living in the human soul, something that is being willed into existence. And what he sensed there, as flowing into his will, he experienced as if the divine spiritual forces that permeate and interweave the world were entering the soul, and the soul itself felt at rest within the divine experience. If one wishes to call this trait in Johann Gottlieb Fichte mystical, then one must remove from this expression everything that brings any kind of nebulousness into the world view; one must then bring this concept together with everything that is the highest energy of knowledge in Fichte's entire striving. Then German idealism appears as if compressed into a focal point, not only when Fichte talks about German nationality, but especially when he speaks of the highest matters to which his thinking and, one might say, his inner experience turns. In his attempt to visualize the ruling will in his own soul and to make it come alive before those to whom he speaks, he speaks about this will as if he were aware that the innermost essence of the whole world lives in this will. He speaks as if he himself felt the exalted will of the world pulsating in the human soul's own will, when this human soul, in its striving for knowledge, goes back to the innermost outflow and activity of the will itself. Fichte speaks wonderful words here:

Thus Fichte addresses what he senses as the will of the world by deepening his quest for knowledge, so that it may find what, in the innermost part of the soul, holds that soul together with the sources of existence; that from which the soul must create if it wants to feel that its creation in harmony with the historical and eternal powers that guide all existence itself. That science, through an idealistic consideration of life, must lead to such a grasp of human inwardness that in this inwardness, at the same time, the innermost of the world's existence in human striving is embraced, that is the basic feature of German idealism. And with this idealism, Fichte's philosophical comrades basically also face the great riddles of existence. |

From a certain point of view, I tried last winter to present this very arena of thought within German idealism and the world view of this German idealism. I undertook to show how Fichte tried to grasp the world through the experience of the innermost nature of the human will itself, by wanting to grasp the human soul where the will can delve into it. I wanted to show how Fichte, in his attempt to penetrate to the human ego in its essence, could not be satisfied with grasping this ego in being or in mere thinking, in the sense of Descartes with his “I think , therefore I am”, but how Fichte wanted to grasp the self, the innermost essence of the human soul, in such a way that there lies in it something that can never lose its existence because it can create this existence anew in every moment. Fichte wanted to show the living, ever creative will as the source of the human ego; not by a judgment of the kind: I think, that is something, therefore I am — not by that did Fichte want to find the essence of the ego, but by showing that even if this ego were not in any given moment, or if it could be said of it, on the basis of some evidence, that it were not, then this judgment would be invalid on the grounds that this ego is a creative one, because it can, in every moment, generate its existence anew out of the depths of this ego. In this perpetual re-creation, in this continuity of the creative, in this connection with the creative of the world, Fichte tried to recognize the essence of the ego in the will, to preserve it in the will, to shape the striving for knowledge in a living way.

And Schelling, Fichte's philosophical companion, who in many respects went so far beyond him, placed himself before nature in such a way that nature was not for him what it otherwise is in many respects for external science: a sum of phenomena that one dissects; rather, for Schelling, nature was to the human spirit in its nature, except that the human spirit stands in the present, experiences itself, but nature has lived through this spirit, so that it now rests enchanted in it, so that it hides behind its veil and reveals itself through its external appearances. Just as one regards a person in relation to his physiognomy, not only describing this physiognomy formally like a statue, but looking through the physiognomy to what is the living soul life, what looks through the physiognomic features, what spiritualizes and warms the outer form. Through the outer phenomena of nature, through the outer revelations as through the physiognomy of nature, Schelling wanted to go back to what is spiritual in nature, to unite the spirit in the soul with the spirit in nature. And from this arose in him that one-sided but bold way of striving for knowledge, which is expressed in Schelling's saying: “To comprehend nature is to create nature!” That in the human soul there could be something that only needs to be dragged into creative, living existence, and by so doing, not creating the outer phenomena of nature, but creating images that are the same as what lives behind nature, is expressed in the words: “To understand nature is to create nature!” Today, there is truly no need to take this philosophy of German idealism dogmatically; one need not be a follower of it, that is not the point. What is important is to get to know the power and inner soul from which such a direction of spiritual life arises. And so someone could be an opponent of the dogmas of German idealism in the fullest sense of the word, but find something resiliently alive, something that carries the future, in the way the human soul wanted to penetrate into the deepest secrets of existence back then.

And in this context, we may refer to Hegel, the third in this series, who was not afraid to ascend into the coldest realms of pure thought. For Hegel believed that when the soul withdraws from all the warmth of external observation, from all direct resting in natural existence, when it is all alone with the concepts that live in the soul in such a way that this soul is no longer present with its arbitrariness in the thinking of the concepts, but the soul abandons itself to the process of how one concept arises from the other, how concepts prevail within her, without her turning in any way to anything other than to these prevailing pure, crystal-clear and transparent concepts, which she lets prevail and weave within her as they themselves want, not as the soul wills, - then, Hegel believed, in this process, in this flowing of concepts, a union of the soul with the ruling world spirit itself, which lives out itself in concepts, which, through the millions of years, by sending its concepts commanding through infinity, allowed the outer world to emerge from the condensation of these concepts and then placed man into it so that man can awaken in his soul these concepts from which the world itself emerged. Is it really one-sided, the way Hegel delves into the world of existence by trying to penetrate to the sources of existence by squeezing out all other reality from the pure world of concepts? Is it one-sided in the sense that the World-Spirit, which flows and weaves through the world as if it were a mere logician, conjure up the world out of pure logic, this striving, which arises directly from the German essence and German nature, also shows how the German spirit, in its striving for knowledge, by its very nature seeks to connect with that which lives in the soul, that which can be directly beheld in the soul in its inwardness and which, by being thus beheld, simultaneously seizes the spirit flowing in the world. The fundamental principle of this striving is the seizing of the world-spirit by the spirit developed in the soul. And even if the right way of relating to world-life and its knowledge can only be solved by the human soul in a reasonably satisfactory way in the farthest, farthest future, the way in which it has been attempted within German idealism , this way of seeking the world spirit is so intimately connected with the German essence and at the same time it is the way in which, in our time, the eternal must be sought in the temporal human soul.

One can see how closely interwoven with German striving this kind of knowledge is when, at the dawn of the newer spiritual striving, one looks at how two phenomena confront each other at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century; that is, the time when those forces first emerged that gave the newer world view the impulses for European development. It is interesting to see how the German soul relates to this dawn of intellectual life, for example, by juxtaposing two images from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. Regardless of one's own opinion of this remarkable spirit, let us consider him only in the context of the development of modern spiritual striving, if one places Jakob Böhme and compares him with a contemporary striving spirit in Western Europe, with a spirit who is also characteristic of his people, as Jakob Böhme is characteristic of his people, with Montaigne.

Montaigne is also a great and important figure, expressing one of the elements that arise at the dawn of the modern intellectual life. He is the great doubter. He is the one who, from within French culture, receives the following impulse: Let us look at the world. It reveals its secrets to us through our senses. We will try to reveal these secrets through our thinking. But who can say, in any way, that the senses do not deceive; that what is revealed to the senses from the depths of the world can somehow have a connection, which can be visualized, with the sources of existence. And who can deny, this great doubter asks, that if one does not rely on the senses, but on judgment, on thinking, if one seeks evidence and each piece of evidence in turn demands evidence, and the new proof in turn demands another proof, that one can then proceed along the chain of proofs and must also proceed, because everything that one believes to have proven appears fleeting when one looks at it more closely. Neither thinking nor sensual observation can provide any certainty. Therefore, a wise man, according to Montaigne, is one who does not seek such certainty at all; who has an inner irony about the phenomena of the world and about the knowledge of the sources of existence; who knows that although one can reflect on and observe all things , but that one thereby acquires only a knowledge that one can just as well admit as reject, without having any hope of attaining anything else through spiritual striving than precisely such a thing to which one can only relate doubtfully and ironically.

At the same time, within the German being stands Jakob Böhme, who undertakes the journey into the depths of the human soul by means of mere inner development of soul powers, by mere immersion in what the soul can draw up from its depths. And in the fact that he finds these depths of the human soul in the way he believes he is able to find them, he was clear about it, he was convinced that by descending into the depths of the human soul, he at the same time hears the sources of all existence, natural and spiritual, of all comprehensive existence, flowing into these depths. For Jakob Böhme, descending into the depths of the soul also means reaching out into the divine spiritual life that governs the world. And so Jakob Böhme sought this path; that in this path there can be no question of doubt or of an ironic mood in the Montaignean sense, because Jakob Böhme in his way is clear about the fact that he lives in the spirit, because one cannot doubt that in which one lives, in which one co-creates by immersing oneself in it. And one would like to say: Only a revival of this endeavor of Jakob Böhme's in a higher form lies in what lives on the scene of German idealism through the spirits just mentioned. And these just mentioned spirits basically all turn their gaze to a personality who – however much this has been doubted from a narrow-minded point of view – in her entire being, in her entire nature, emerged from the deepest popular German culture, to Goethe. And Fichte, the philosopher who was only struggling for clarity, who was never satisfied if he could not express what he had to say in concepts with sharp outlines, Fichte, who could be considered a dry, sober man of knowledge — that was not his way, but that is what characterizes his striving characterizes – who could be thought of as far, far removed from Goethe in the nature of his being, – Fichte addressed beautiful words to Goethe in which he wanted to express how he tried to align himself with the highest that he strove to bring forth, with what Goethe was by nature. When Fichte had brought the first, most abstract, one might say coldest, most historical, form of his “Wissenschaftslehre” to print, he presented the book to Goethe and wrote to him:

“I regard you and have always regarded you as the representative (of the purest spirituality of feeling) at the present level of humanity. It is to you that philosophy rightly turns. Your feeling is the same touchstone!”

Words that each of the others could have addressed to Goethe in the same way, and indeed each of them did address to Goethe in one way or another, as history shows.

And when Schiller, in his “Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man”, which, as I allowed myself to characterize here last winter, have been far too little appreciated, tried to answer the question from the depths of Kantian philosophy: How must the human soul strive in order to truly come to live together with the spirit of the world in freedom in the harmonious interaction of all its powers? And when Schiller turned his gaze to Goethe, he saw in him something like the German spirit in one of its centers, seeking to bring forth before the world, out of the deepest inwardness of his being, the highest that he had come to. Schiller admired the pure, free humanity of the ancient Greeks, that pure, free humanity that, on the one hand, is allowed to turn to external nature, but which does not allow this nature to have such an external hold on it as the more recent spiritual striving, in which man becomes unfree in his striving in the face of the coherence of nature. This Greek nature, which on the other hand became so aware of itself in the depths of its soul that it sensed itself as nature itself, also in its innermost being, this Greek element, which stood before Schiller's soul like a model of all human striving and living, Schiller saw it shine anew in Goethe's nature and life in the face of the newer spirit of the people. And Schiller characterized this at about the same time as Fichte wrote the words just quoted to Goethe, in a letter to Goethe with the following words:

"For a long time now, although from a considerable distance, I have been watching the course of your mind and have noted the path you have set out on with ever-renewed admiration. You seek what is necessary for nature, but you seek it by the most difficult route, which any weaker force would do well to avoid. You take all of nature to get light on the individual; in the totality of its manifestations, you seek the explanatory basis for the individual. Step by step, you ascend from the simple organization to the more complicated, in order to finally build the most complicated of all, the human being, genetically from the materials of the entire structure of nature. By recreating him in nature, as it were, you seek to penetrate his hidden technology. A great and truly heroic idea, which shows sufficiently how much your mind holds the rich totality of its conceptions together in a beautiful unity. You could never have hoped that your life would be enough for such a goal, but even just to embark on such a path is worth more than any other ending – and you have chosen, like Achilles in the Iliad, between Phthia and immortality. If you had been born a Greek, or even an Italian, and if from your cradle you had been surrounded by a refined nature and idealizing art, your path would have been infinitely shortened, perhaps made entirely superfluous. You would have absorbed the form of the necessary into the first view of things, and with your first experiences the great style would have developed in you. Now that you have been born a German, now that your Greek spirit has been thrown into this Nordic creation, you had no choice but to either become a Nordic artist yourself or to replace what reality withheld from your imagination by the application of your powers of thought, and thus to give birth to a Greece from within and in a rational way, so to speak.” The creative force that arises from the deepest inwardness, that not only creates the present, but that even gives birth to the past anew out of its own essence: the Goethean spirit. In this letter, Schiller selflessly characterizes it wonderfully, in which he truly laid the foundation for the friendship between these two minds, Goethe and Schiller; Schiller wonderfully characterizes this inwardness of the creation of the Goethean spirit. And truly, Goethe appears in the image of German idealism with all his striving.

Therefore, out of the striving of Goethe's personality, a poetic figure could arise that – I do not believe that one has to be prejudiced to say this – is uniquely placed in world literature and in the whole of world creation, the figure of Faust. How does he stand there, this Faust? As the highest representative of human striving, but still – after all, he is a university professor at heart – as a representative of the striving for knowledge, for knowledge! And right at the beginning of Faust, what becomes a riddle, what becomes a big question? Knowledge itself, the striving for knowledge becomes a question! Two elements come to life in this Faustian legend. And one must point out this living out of the two elements if one wants to understand the basic character of Goethe's Faustian creation on the one hand and, on the other hand, its connection with the innermost nature of German spiritual striving.

Of course, the term magic and everything connected with it is not exactly popular today. But Goethe was compelled to place his Faust before magic, after knowledge and insight had become a question, a riddle, for Faust. And the fact that today we are able to separate everything that is conventionally associated with the concept of magic from a deeper spiritual striving will be my particular task tomorrow in the lecture where I want to speak about the eternal powers of the human soul. But the way in which Goethe has Faust turn to magic can perhaps be thought of as quite separate from all the wild superstition and nebulous striving associated with the word magic and with magical striving in general. One can overlook secondary matters and look at the main thing, namely, the fundamental human striving as expressed in Faust. Why must Faust, who has really been involved in all human sciences, wanted to gain clarity in all human sciences about that which underlies existence as a source, why must Faust turn to magic, to a completely different way of interacting with nature than is the case with the ordinary pursuit of knowledge? Why? Because Faust has experienced everything that can be experienced in the pursuit of knowledge; because he has experienced everything that can be felt by a person who has a yearning for the depths of the nature of the world; everything that can be felt by a person when he feels alive in himself, which external science can comprehend. This science visualizes the laws of nature in concepts, in ideas. But do I exist with these concepts, or do I only have something in these concepts that weaves itself as a ghost in my own soul and that perhaps, with regard to this image, is clearly, but not with regard to its life, directly connected to the sources of existence? What forces itself into the soul as a question of this kind can be felt in different ways. It can be felt weakly, but it can also be felt strongly, so that the enigma that lives itself into the soul through these feelings becomes like a nightmare from which this human soul wants to free itself. For the soul can say to itself: All this knowledge is only something that one forms on the basis of existence. All this knowledge is something that has been subtracted from existence. But I must still descend into existence with what I experience in myself.

What one might say Schelling believed in his presumptuousness, Faust cannot believe: that by living in concepts, one creates in nature. Rather, he wants to descend into nature. He wants to seek out nature where it lives in creation. He wants to unfold an activity that is such that the human soul accomplishes it, but which, in that this activity is within the soul, is both creating nature and creating soul at the same time. Because Faust cannot do this in any other way, he tries to do it by seeking to invigorate within himself the path that ancient magicians have tried. Faust tries to have something in his soul that does not merely depict nature in terms within him, but that appears to him in what lives and creates behind appearances. He seeks to bring the spiritual in the creative power of nature, which flows and weaves through the world, which surges up and down in the tides of life and the storm of action, not only into knowledge, but seeks to connect with it in a living way. He seeks the path to it in such a way that the spiritual creation of nature stands beside him, as the soul of a human being stands embodied here in physical existence, so that one experiences existence, not just knows about it.

And in this way Faust stands before nature in the same way as—one need only point to a spirit like Jakob Böhme, in his own way, one need only look at that which underlies German philosophical striving in the idealistic period—Faust, yearning , yearning for knowledge, expecting certain achievements, to which he wants to rise, so in the face of nature, so next to nature, as befits the innermost life and weaving of the German spirit: to create nature in the soul and to let it become living science, living knowledge. That is why Goethe has to bring his Faust together with magic.

There is something else that Goethe brings together with his Faust, something that perhaps even more than the magical element that confronts us in the first scenes and then continues in what I would call a directly dramatic way, while it loses itself as a magical element – which seems perhaps even more wonderful than this magical element for this Goethean Faustian poem, which is now also intimately interwoven with the spiritual striving of the German people.

Let us try – as I said, without pronouncing dogmatically or in any way on the value – to place ourselves in the position of Jakob Böhme; let us try to bring to life before our soul one of the aspects of Jakob Böhme's striving. A great question confronts Jakob Böhme with regard to the riddle of existence, the question that arises from the contemplation of the world when one says: The world is governed by the World Spirit in its goodness, in its wisdom. He who is able to immerse himself in the spirit of the world senses the surging of the world's wisdom, the surging of the world's benevolence. But evil intrudes, evil in the form of suffering, evil in the form of human deeds. If we do not look at the abstraction of the thought, but at a striving for knowledge that is based on feeling and emotion, a striving for knowledge that takes hold of the whole person, we stand in awe at the way in which Jakob Böhme raises the question of the origin of evil. He cannot avoid saying to himself: the spirit of the world, the divine spirit of the world, must be thought of as connected with the sources of life; but one does not find the origin of evil by immersing oneself in the spirit of the world. And yet evil is there. — With tremendous intensity, the question of the origin of evil arises in the quest for knowledge of Jakob Böhme. He seeks to answer it by asking about evil, as one might ask about the origin of the deeds of light. What Jakob Böhme has developed in depth can only be illustrated here through this comparison, for the sake of brevity. For, just as one can never derive from the light that which appears as the deeds of light, but always needs darkness for this; just as one can never derive darkness, with which light must appear together, from the light itself, but rather one must go to this source of light if one wants to examine the deeds of light in external nature, Jakob Böhme attempts to find the essence, not merely the principle, of evil, not in the Divine either, but in that which takes its place beside the Divine, like the shadow, like the darkness beside the light, which one does not seek in the light, but for which one does not need reasons in the same way as for the light itself. He seeks to find it by undertaking the previously characterized journey into the depths of the soul and at the same time trying to grasp the existence of the world at its sources in the soul. Thus he does not confront evil as something that can be recognized in a concept, but as something that he tries to grasp in its reality. In his attitude towards evil as something that cannot be grasped conceptually but only in reality, Schelling is followed in his very significant treatise “Philosophical Investigations Concerning the Essence of Human Freedom and the Related Objects”, 1809. Schelling consciously follows Jakob Böhme in his search for evil.

Goethe, from the depths of the German soul, sensed this riddle of evil in a completely different way. Just think what a challenge it was to create a work of poetry in the way that Goethe did in his Faust. On the one hand, Goethe had to present a purely inward striving, which, after all, could only be expressed, one might think, by depicting a person who presents himself to the world lyrically. Goethe seeks to bring it to dramatic life as Faust stands before the world. He does this, however, by allowing what lives in the soul to shine through in such a way that it is inwardly alive in the soul and becomes external. The dramatic not only places the human being in the world as he stands in it lyrically, but also as he stands in it actively. This enables Goethe, as a dramatist must, to lead man out of subjectivity, out of the mere inwardness of the being into the outer world. But one should try to imagine what a challenge lay in what can be characterized in the following way. Now Faust is to strive, as man does when he lets the riddles of existence take effect on him, to go forward in the world, to become a fighter in the world. And yet such struggles, which arise from the riddles of knowledge, are inner struggles. As a rule, man stands alone in this, and as a rule nothing dramatic is connected with it. Dramas proceed differently, in that one simply lets the interior of the human soul unroll. What enabled Goethe to transform what is basically only an internal matter of the human soul into a vivid dramatic image? Simply by the fact that, just as he brings the human soul out into nature through magic on the one hand, on the other hand he brings this human soul out into the big wide world by trying to show that when one seeks out seeks out evil and wants to experience it in its reality, one cannot understand it merely as an inner principle and seek an inner explanation for it, but one must step out into life as it confronts one full of life. Therefore, Goethe cannot direct his attention to evil in such a way that he finds something in him that is mere philosophy, but he must direct his attention to the essence, to one who fights Faust, to one who is the embodiment of evil, who is as alive as the principle of evil as man is alive here in his physical body. And he must be able to feel and show that the fight against evil is not just an abstract, inward struggle, but that it is a struggle that is waged hourly, momentarily, in which man lives. In everything he does, he essentially encounters evil. Thus this obstacle was overcome. What is otherwise an abstract philosophical principle was brought into direct existence, into essential existence. Walking, changing, acting, fighting were brought about, which one otherwise speaks about. For these reasons, on the one hand, the magical element had to be revived in Faust, in that Faust tries to penetrate the shell of nature. On the other hand, evil had to be contrasted with Faust as something essential, something that is much more than what is usually called an idea or a concept; something that is usually conceived as living only within the soul had to be embodied, placed out into the world. And so in poetry, too, there was a need to resort to that deepening of the conception of evil which we find as such a wonderful fundamental trait of the German spiritual striving, from Jakob Böhme up through all the deeper German spirits who cannot satisfy themselves by seeking evil only in philosophical concepts, but who want to go out into the world. And in going out into the world, they encounter evil just as one encounters another human being in the physical world. In order to spiritually unlock the inner world, the striving had to connect with such a view of evil. That is to say, just as nature is to be sensed through magic to its sources, so spiritual life is to be placed in the context of human life by showing evil itself as a spiritually active being. Thus, as a poet, Goethe elevates man to the realm of the ideal, but of the living ideal.

And he was faced with a dilemma in yet another way: he, the great artist, of whom Schiller said that he could give birth to a Greece out of his own inwardness. He was faced with a dilemma in yet another way, one that we may only gradually come to see in its full significance. In Faust, we see the striving human being. Many commentators on Faust have emphasized the fact that Goethe did a great deed in having Faust redeemed, in not allowing Faust to perish, as was the case in earlier representations of Faust, but in having him redeemed, because, in accordance with the newer world view, one must assume that within man lie the forces that can achieve victory over evil. Yes, what this actually means for the overall view of the Faust epic is something that is not usually considered. One says, offhand: Goethe's Faust could only become what it is if Goethe had the idea from the very beginning to take into account the innermost nature of man in such a way that Faust could be redeemed. One imagines a drama, one imagines a work of art that takes place in time and that is supposed to be great, in such a way that one knows from the beginning what must come out in the end. And that is what it should actually be. For man, as one so often says, must bring with him his convictions from the highest riddles of life. Actually, nothing more and nothing less is expressed by this than that “Faust” should, by its very nature, be the most boring piece of writing in the world. After all, every pedant today knows, or at least believes he knows, that if man strives correctly, he should ultimately be redeemed. And now one of the greatest poets is to present a grandiose world poem in order to show this self-evident truth through all possible forms! And yet, Goethe has succeeded in embodying the thought just expressed, not in some abstract way, but in presenting living life before us through a long, long series of images. Why? Simply because he has shown how that which, when inwardly conceived in abstract thoughts, would be a mere truism, a matter of course, is set forth in life in a completely different way; because he attempts to extend life, on the one hand, in the direction of the magical , on the other hand, towards the spiritual side; because the striving for nature is not a striving for knowledge but a magical one; because the striving for evil or the recognition of evil is not just a philosophical matter but a matter of life. How does something become a matter of life that is otherwise only the soul's inner, abstract striving? It becomes a matter of life when the human being, when he stands before nature in the same way that Faust stands before nature in the sense of his striving, wants to go beyond abstract knowledge. He wants to go beyond that which can only live in concepts, which spins itself out as ideas, as concepts. He wants to enter into the sphere of nature, where there is creative life, with which the soul's own creative life connects, in order to go beyond nature's creation through mere abstract conceptual life.

But when you take hold of the matter in full life, you enter into that in man from which man in turn emerges by being able to acquire consciousness in his concepts. One need only go back to what, for example, the Greek Stoics strove for in their earnest quest for knowledge. They wanted a wisdom that would smooth the world, that would survey the world, and that would have nothing to do with human passion. Man should become dispassionate, dispassionate, in order to feel his soul absorbed in the calm conceptual grasping of the wisdom that pervades the world. Why did the Stoics want this? Because they felt that one comes out of a certain intoxication of life, out of a half-unconscious immersion in life, by coming to dispassionate understanding. Stoicism consists precisely in the search for a life free of intoxication.

Now, in the course of human evolution, the personality that is to be represented in Faust stands before nature in such a way that knowledge becomes a question for it, the very thing by which man tries to save himself from the intoxication of life. He can enter into the intoxication of life by immersing himself with the creative powers of the soul, but he does not absorb the same powers with which he has just risen, but rather he submerges himself seeking to connect the foundations of the soul with the foundations of nature. But from this arises what is now the error of Faust in the first part of the story, the submerging into sensuality, into sensual life, even into the outer trivial life, which he must undergo in his own personality because he is to connect what lives in his own personality, what lives in the depths of his soul, with what lives in the depths of world existence. The task of the first part of Faust and also of a large part of the second part is to present in a lively way the error by which man can be tested in his soul.

To what extent man, by wanting to grasp the world personally, the world in its power through knowledge, exposes himself to the danger of being submerged in the personal and being drawn into the whirlpool of life, is depicted in “Faust”. And that does not depend on some abstract doctrine, but on the will, on the character of this Faust. It is only through this that the poem becomes a poem. And on the other hand, since the human being strives for a real knowledge of evil and is not satisfied with a principal, conceptual understanding of evil, he must break through the ordinary life of the soul; for there he finds only concepts, ideas and feelings. He must go through this soul life, he must go to the place where man, without seeing the essential reality through the senses, perceives an essential reality through the pure soul experiences, from the spirit. This becomes the task of the one who wants to recognize evil in its reality through direct experience. This becomes the task of Faust in relation to Mephistopheles. But man cannot approach evil at all as he is at first. It is virtually impossible to approach evil as man is at first; for one must know the world, and one can only know it by knowing it in the soul. One must form concepts. One must have in one's soul that which can be experienced in one's soul. After all, as newer philosophers have so rightly and so wrongly asserted, one cannot transcend one's consciousness. But if one remains in consciousness, evil remains only an abstract concept, does not appear in essence.

Faust is faced with a great, so to speak, impossible task. But great, as it says in “Faust” itself, is “he who desires the impossible”. Faust is faced with the virtually impossible task of going beyond that which is the sole source of his consciousness, of going out of consciousness. This will be his further path, the path out of the ordinary consciousness of the soul. Tomorrow we will speak about the path of knowledge out of the ordinary consciousness to those realms where the spirit is grasped directly as spirit. This stands before Faust as a task. He cannot find evil in its essential nature in the field to which consciousness is initially directed. Therefore, he must again, and now not in a general, trivial, abstract way, come to find the reconciliation of man with existence, but in the way that he is able to do so as an individual human being. It must be shown how he finds his way out of ordinary consciousness to an understanding of life that now comes from deeper forces of the soul.

Thus we see Faust going, I might say, everywhere touching and feeling the existence of the world, feeling it inwardly, to see where he can find the gate through which he can penetrate into the inner being. Thus we see how he soars so high that, having transformed the soul and transformed it more and more, he really descends in experience to those depths towards which Jacob Boehme strove and which are then hinted at to us in the second part of “Faust” that Faust finds something widest, greatest, highest and at the same time deepest, which he had already striven for in his walk to the Mothers, in that his senses fail him, in that he goes blind and in his inner being inner bright light comes to life. Out of the ordinary consciousness, to a different consciousness, to a consciousness that slumbers in the depths of the soul, as the depths of the sources of nature slumber under the shell of nature that one sees with the outer senses, to a deeper consciousness that always accompanies man between birth and death, but that is not present in the ordinary field of consciousness. Faust must be guided in two ways through the strengthening of the spiritual life to the gates that lead from the abstractness of the idea to the livingness of spiritual existence itself: As a magician, Faust knocks at the gate of existence, which leads from mere observation of nature to co-creation with nature; in his dealings, in the living, dramatic dealings with Mephistopheles and with all that is structured by them, Faust knocks at the other gate, at that other gate that leads from the ordinary consciousness of the soul to a superconscious, supersensible consciousness, which opens up a spiritual world, from which evil also really originates, behind the ordinary existence of the soul, just as external natural revelation is only the expression of that which lives and moves entirely in nature.

Through the connection with what, one can say, is peculiar to the German national spirit, Goethe created a piece of writing that could only become a piece of writing in the most difficult sense. For the most non-sensuous, the most distant from the senses, the purely inward, was to be shaped dramatically. But this inwardness can only become dramatic if it is expanded in two directions. And Goethe sensed the necessity of this expansion in two directions. In doing so, he created the possibility of placing this unique poetry, which in a sense no one else in another nation would have conceived in the same way, into the world evolution.

If one has these thoughts, one can perhaps still raise the question: Yes, but did Goethe not actually create a work of art that requires a great deal of preparation to understand? It almost seems that way. For the commentaries that scholars, both German and non-German, have written about Goethe's “Faust” fill several libraries, not just one. But if one were to believe that a great deal of preparation is needed to understand the Faust epic, then the thought must arise: what did Goethe actually make this Faust epic out of? Was it the result of a philosophical quest? Was it speculation about the magical foundations of nature? Or was it speculation about the sources and origins of evil? No, truly not! He saw the puppet show, a pure folk performance, the folk play of Faust, which was presented to the simplest minds. He transformed what lives and breathes in it according to his own mind. The Faust legend, therefore, presents us with a work of art and a work of the spirit in the best sense of the words. If we look only at the most general aspect of its origin, it shows how this summit of German intellectual life has its source in the most direct folklore, that is, in the most elementary of the folk spirit, and how German idealistic intellectual striving is connected with the essence of the German folk spirit. It can also be proved historically from the origin of the highest poetry of mankind from the simplest folk drama. This is a significant world-historical drama, that a spirit that can delve so deeply into the folklore in its inner work, like Goethe, is able to create something supreme out of the most primitive folklore, something supreme that, as we have been able to show, is also connected to the most significant philosophical pursuit, to the philosophical idealistic pursuit in Germany's great intellectual period. In Faust — as I said, these things must not be taken dogmatically — we see the striving Fichte. How? Fichte does not seek to grasp being and the ego by bringing thought to consciousness, as Descartes and Cartesius did. Instead, Fichte seeks to grasp being and the ego by connecting with the world-creating powers that play into the inner soul, so that the ego creates itself in every moment. We see this, only translated into the dramatic will, into the directly living, flashing up again in Faust. Faust is not satisfied with the self that human striving for knowledge was able to convey to him, but he wants to experience his own self directly in the spiritual world. The whole progress of the dramatic action in 'Faust' consists in the fact that the ego, in its dealings with the world, creates itself anew, always elevating itself. Fichte lives in Goethe's Faust; Schelling also lives in Goethe's Faust, in that Faust, on the one hand, seeks to unite the truth of magic with his soul, but also seeks true striving in the depths of the soul seeks the true striving in the depths of the soul; in that which cannot be found in the ordinary life of the soul, in thinking, feeling and willing, he seeks it in his dealings with the representative of evil, as a direct spirit. Faust truly seeks out nature where it lives in creation. Schelling had, I might say, presumptuously explained it when he said: To understand nature is to create nature! Fichte stands on healthier ground when he says: To understand nature is to live with one's own creation in the creation of nature. But one can see how the power for a deeper striving for knowledge, for the sources of existence, also lives in Fichte. Hegel strove for the sober thought, and one cannot be more sober than Hegel. The world spirit with which the soul in Hegelian philosophy seeks to unite itself becomes a mere logical spirit. To think of the divine spirit of the world as a logical soul that only builds the world logically! It must not be taken dogmatically, but it must be taken as an expression of the striving that remains mystical even in the most extreme logic, that seeks a union of the deepest part of the soul with the summit of the whole existence of the world itself in nature and history. Hegel must also be taken in this way, that one cannot find one's own self in what the senses provide us, but only in what the human soul can achieve within itself when it comes out of the sensual world. This is also what Hegel's philosophy strives for. And Faust, after his eyesight has gone, is illuminated by a brighter light within. What Hegel seeks on the right path, only to fail to perceive as the right goal, is what Faust seeks: to let one's own self merge with the world-self, to unite with it, and thus to experience the world-self in one's own self.

As Wilhelm von Humboldt said, can we not say that this German striving has not only tried in a beautiful way to establish harmony between philosophy – if one wants to call the pursuit of a worldview such – and poetry, and art in general, but that the German spirit has also brought this striving to external expression in a very unique way in Faust? Is not the very essence of Germanness characterized in this harmonious blending of the creations of the imagination with the quest of the sense of truth? Is it not otherwise in the world, where one finds that the imagination creates in freedom, but in unreality? The sense of truth creates according to the necessities of existence, but it does not come to a real life through this, only to an objectification, to a representation of experience. To bring fantasy out of its unreality and to animate that which it is able to create in such a way that the created lives together with the living spirit, so that harmony, harmonious harmony between poetry and philosophy can also exist in a work of art for once – that is what Goethe attempts, out of the whole originality and the truly not at all philosophical nature of his being. And when he has achieved this harmonizing of poetry and philosophy, of imagination and philosophy, by connecting with the most popular sources of the German spirit, then we may say: just as this Goethean work (we might also show it in other of his works, but it is most clearly and explicitly shown in his “Faust” — shows itself in connection with what the idealistic German world view has sought; there it is, as it now stands before us, seemingly the spiritual heritage of a few who prepare themselves especially for it. One can also see that, basically, supporters and opponents have tried to come to terms with the paths taken in the Goethe, Schiller, Schelling and Hegel era in the further course of German intellectual life up to our time. Infinite efforts have been made to understand the paths taken at that time along which one can find the sources of existence. But anyone who delves deeper into the ideas of those who lived in the arena of German idealism may come to the conclusion that what was developed there need not remain the property of only a few, of only a few individuals. Of course, if today we want to delve into the world view as presented by Fichte, Schelling and Hegel themselves, if we get involved in their books, it is understandable that we will soon close the books again if we do not want to make a special study of them. For it is understandable to say: All this is quite incomprehensible. Nor is there any criticism to be made of those who claim that it is incomprehensible and indigestible. But there is a possibility, and this possibility is actually offered by human development, that what appears to be an indigestible good for a few can become quite popular, can really find its way into the whole spiritual cultural life of humanity. In order to grasp the cosmic striving of man in the way it was grasped in German idealism, it was necessary that some people should devote themselves entirely to the particular formulation of concepts and ideas, that they should attempt this in a solitude of spiritual life that stands alone as such.

But it does not have to stay that way. It is possible to popularize that which lives in Fichte's thoughts, which are so abstract, so abstruse, and, as many might say from their point of view, so convoluted – I know that for many people I am saying something paradoxical, but time will teach that it is correct – if you live into the spirit and the way of thinking, to present it in such a way that it can be directly conveyed to the boy or girl in earliest youth; that it can be understood in the way one understands something that lies completely in the nature of human life if one wants to grasp this human life. And so with all the other spiritual heroes! It can be done just as it can with the Grimm fairy tales. It takes no more spiritual activity of the soul to recognize, feel and sense Goethe, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in the depths of their creations than it does to grasp a fairy tale in the right imaginative way, as it is in the Grimm fairy tales. But the path will first have to lead people to live with something that belongs to the highest that humanity has gone through in terms of knowledge and poetry. And that is the significance of this idealistic striving of the German spirit. If one can show how one can grasp the essence of the soul in a simple way by appealing to the creative powers that lie within everyone, if one can show how these powers can be accessed in the right way, then one can bring this to people in a simple, elementary and direct way, whereas Fichte, to find it for the first time, needed a particularly high level of intellect. The same applies to everything else. But is what I am saying really so incredible? I do not think that anyone who remembers how he learned to understand the Pythagorean theorem at school will find it so incredible. But that does not mean that he is inclined to consider himself a Pythagoras, although the spiritual level and power of Pythagoras was necessary to first discover the Pythagorean theorem. An intense stream of spiritual world experience will flow from what the best German minds have sought in lonely, abstruse thoughts within German idealism, down to the most ordinary aspirations and lives of human beings.

And there is much, infinitely much, in this ordinary striving of man, if he is able to relate to the ever-creative and to feel that the human ego is creatively creative in the infinite. It is only by merging with the creative forces of nature that the human soul will be able to experience and feel the great beauties of nature as it reveals itself. And in a similar way, this applies to the other elements of this German intellectual life.

One must feel this, then the right feeling comes over one for the connection of the German striving with the entire world striving. And to revive this feeling in our days, it seems certainly appropriate to our destiny-bearing time. And it already belongs to that in which the German soul finds its strength. In conclusion, an example of this.

Even before the unity of the German people, the new German state, came about out of the context of the world, out of history, an unknown spirit writes beautiful words in his contemplation of Goethe's “Faust”. It was in 1865. I only quote these words of an otherwise quite unknown interpreter of Faust because they express what countless others have felt in exactly the same way. Since the emergence of the elevation in German idealism, which we have spoken of again today, countless of the best German minds have felt the connection between the paths that the idea takes in idealism into the spirit of nature and into the deeper foundations of the soul-spiritual itself. They felt that there is a connection between what the German spirit at its height has created for thought, what it has given to humanity as the sum of thoughts and artistic creations, and a connection between all this and what can also live in the German deed, in what the German people have to do when they have to carry out their world struggles on a different stage than that of thought. The connection between German intellectual life and German action was most deeply felt by those who knew how to place German thought and German idealistic work highest in their way of thinking. And from the contemplation of the past of German idealism, with its ascent to the heights where thought introduces to the life of the spirit—from the contemplation of this sphere of German idealism, there has always emerged the most beautiful hope that the German people will find the impulse for action from the same source when they need it.

What could be shown by many can be exemplified by one – and deliberately by one who is little known, Kreyssig, an explainer of Faust. Kreyssig, in 1865, wrote a paper about Goethe's “Faust” in which he tried to clarify, in his own way, what Goethe actually wanted with his “Faust.” He concludes with the words:

“And so we would then also know the overall impression that the contemplation of this giant monument of our great educational epoch, which after all remained unfinished and fragmentary, leaves behind, here we cannot summarize it better than in the simple memory of a passage from the famous legacy of the then 75-year-old poet to the younger world, which was preparing to take on new paths.”

Kreyssig cites Goethe's own thoughts, where he envisages the way in which Goethe sought a path into the spiritual world into old age. Kreyssig states how the power that leads into this spiritual world seems to him to be connected with the power that German action is to create in distant, distant times, which Goethe, as an old man, could only guess at:

The earnest style, the high art of the ancients,
The primeval secret of eternal forms,
It is familiar with men and with gods,
It will leaf through books as readily as through rocks.
For what Homer created and the Scipios
Will never live in the learned hothouse!
They wanted to transplant us into the hothouse;
But the German oak grew to the whole!
A storm of growth has overtaken it,
It has taken the glass of the hothouse with it.
Now grow, O oak, grow to the delight of the world.
I can already see new solar auras flying.
And when my gray eyelashes close,
a mild light will still pour forth,
from whose reflection of those stars
the late grandchildren will learn to see,
and in prophetically higher visions
to accomplish greater things for the world and humanity.

And the “Faust” interpreter adds - in 1865 -:

"Let us add the wish that the words of the master, who looks down on us with a mild light from better stars, may come true for his people, who are seeking their way to clarity in darkness, confusion and struggle, but, God willing, with indestructible strength, and that “in those higher accounts of God and humanity, which the poet of 'Faust' expects from the coming centuries, German action too, no longer as a symbolic shadow, but in beautiful, life-affirming reality, may one day find its place and its glorification alongside German thought and German feeling!"

Thus thought a German personality in 1865 of the German idea in connection with the hoped-for German deed. How the disembodied souls of such personalities may look upon the field in which the German deed is called upon for its realization today!

But precisely in connection with the faith, love and hope of such personalities, and especially of those personalities who, either through creation or understanding, have stood within the world view of German idealism, it may be said: the German need not, if he wants to recognize the impulses that are to inspire him, disparage any opponent. He has only to reflect on what he must believe, according to the innermost part of his being, to be his world-task. He must therefore reflect that he looks up to the way in which it has been handed down by his fathers, his ancestors, to his time; how it has become a force for the present, and how from this force, which is before his eyes, which lives in his soul, from the present hope may spring into the future.

Indeed, in the context of the present with German idealism, one can say from the innermost feeling: By looking to the past of thought or to what he has striven for outside of thought, the German feels feel his world task; he may feel it in this fateful time, he may feel it out of his love for his past and out of his faith in the power of the present, which becomes his when he has the right love for what the past has brought him. And from this love and from this faith, from this dual relationship between past and present, will spring in the right way that which, transcending blood and pain, allows us to glimpse a blessed present: German hope for the future. Thus, by delving into the idealism of the German essence, we can create a triad of love for the German past, faith in the German present, and hope for the German future.

WE have yet to speak today of the principle of Initiation, or esoteric training. And we will speak of the two methods of training which take into special consideration what has been explained here concerning human evolution. For we must be clear that in a certain way we find the truth by retracing our steps to earlier stages of humanity.

It has been said that the inhabitants of old Atlantis could perceive wisdom in all that surrounded them. The further we go back into the far past, the more we find states of consciousness through which men were able to perceive the creative powers which pervade the world, the spiritual beings which surround us. All that surrounds us has arisen through these creative beings and to see them is indeed the meaning of “knowledge.”

When mankind had developed to our present stage of consciousness (and this has only come about during our fifth post-Atlantean epoch) a longing was left in the soul to penetrate again into the spiritual realms. I have told you how in the ancient Indian people there lived from the beginning that deep longing to know the real spirit behind all that surrounds us in the world. We have seen how they had a feeling that all that surrounded them was a dream, an illusion; how their only task was to evolve upwards to the ancient wisdom that had worked creatively in early times. The pupils of the ancient Rishis strove to tread the path which led them through Yoga to look up into the realms from which they had themselves come down. They strove away from Maya to these spiritual realms above.

That is one way which man can take. The most recent way of attaining to wisdom is the Rosicrucian path. This path does not point man to the past but to the future, to those conditions which he will further live through. Through definite methods the pupil is taught to develop in himself the wisdom which exists in germ in every human being.

This is the way which was given through the Founder of the Rosicrucian esoteric stream, known to the outer world as Christian Rosenkreuz. It is not an unchristian way, rather is it a Christian path adapted to modern conditions, and lies between the actual Christian path and the Yoga path.

This path had been partially prepared long before the time of Christianity. It took on a special form through that great initiate, Dionysius the Areopagite, who in the esoteric school of Paul at Athens inaugurated the training from which all later esoteric wisdom and training have been derived.

These are the two paths of esoteric training particularly fitted for the West. All that is connected with our culture and the life we lead and must lead, is lifted up, raised into the principle of initiation through the Christian and through the Rosicrucian training. The purely Christian way is somewhat difficult for modern man, hence the Rosicrucian path has been introduced for those who have to live in the present age. If someone would take the old purely Christian path in the midst of modern life he must be able to cut himself off for a time from the world outside, in order to enter it again later all the more intensively. On the other hand the Rosicrucian path can be followed by all, no matter in what occupation or sphere of life they may be placed.

We will describe the purely Christian way. It is prescribed as to method in the most profound Christian book least understood by the representatives of Christian theology, the Gospel of St. John, and as to contents, in the Apocalypse or Secret Revelation.

The Gospel of St. John is a miraculous book: one must live it, not merely read it. One can live it if one understands that its utterances are precepts for the inner life, and that one must observe them in the right way. The Christian path demands of its disciple that he considers the St. John Gospel a book of meditation. A fundamental assumption, which is more or less absent in the Rosicrucian training, is that one possesses the most steadfast belief in the personality of Christ Jesus. The pupil must at least find it possible to believe that the most lofty Being, the Leader of the Fire-Spirits of the Sun evolution, was physically incorporated as Jesus of Nazareth; that Christ Jesus was not merely the “Simple Man of Nazareth,” not an individual like Socrates, Plato or Pythagoras. One must see his fundamental difference from all others. If one would undergo a purely Christian training one must be sure that in him lived a God-man of a unique nature, otherwise one has not the right basic feeling that enters the soul and awakens it. Therefore one must have an actual belief in the first words of the beginning of St. John's Gospel: “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and a God was the Logos “to the words” And the Logos became flesh and dwelt among us.” Thus the same Spirit who was the ruler of the Fire-Spirits, who was linked with the transforming of the Earth, whom we also call the Spirit of the Earth, has actually dwelt among us in a garment of flesh, he was actually in a physical body. That must be recognised! If one cannot do this then it is better to undertake another method of training. One, however, who has accepted this basic condition and calls before his soul in meditation every morning through weeks and months the Gospel words down to the passage “full of grace and truth,” and moreover in such a way that he not only understands them, but lives within them, will experience them as an awakening force in the soul. For these are not ordinary words, but awakening forces which call forth other forces in the soul. The pupil must only have the patience to bring them before his soul continuously, every day, then they become the forces which the Christian training needs, aroused through the awakening of quite definite feelings. The Christian path is more an inner one, whereas in Rosicrucian training the experiences are kindled by the outer world.

The Christian path is pursued by an awakening of the feelings. There are seven stages of feeling which must be aroused. In addition are other exercises which are only given personally to the pupil, and suited to his special character. It is, however, indispensable to experience the 13th Chapter of St. John's Gospel, so to experience it as I will now describe. The teacher says to the pupil: You must develop quite definite feelings. Imagine the following: the plant grows from the soil, but is of a higher order than the mineral soil from which it grows. Nevertheless the plant needs it, the higher could not exist without the lower, and if the plant could think, it would have to say to the earth: It is true that I am higher than thou, yet without thee I cannot live. And it must incline itself to the earth in gratitude. Likewise must the animal bear itself to the plant, for it could not exist without plant life, and even so must the human being bear himself with regard to the animal. And if man has ascended higher, he must say to himself: I could never stand where I do without the lower. He must bow thankfully before them, for they have made it possible for him to exist. No creature in the world could subsist without the lower, to which it must feel gratitude. So even Christ, the very highest, could not exist without the twelve, and the feeling of his inclination to them in gratitude is powerfully portrayed in this 13th chapter. He, the highest of all, washes his disciples' feet.

If this is thought of in full wakefulness as a basic feeling in the human soul, if the pupil lives for weeks and months in reflection and contemplation which deepen this fundamental feeling—the gratitude with which the higher should look down to the lower to which it really owes its existence, then one awakens the first basic feeling. The pupil will have entered deeply enough into the experience when certain symptoms appear, an external symptom and an inner vision. The external symptom is that one feels the feet to be laved by water; in an inner vision one sees oneself as the Christ washing the feet of the twelve. This is the first stage, that of the Washing of the Feet. The event in the 13th Chapter of St. John's Gospel is not only an historical event, it can be experienced by all. It is an external symptomatic expression of the fact that the pupil has raised himself thus far in his life of feeling, nor does this sign fail to appear when he has progressed to this point in the enhancement of his feeling-life.

The second stage, the Scourging, is passed through if one deepens oneself in the following: How would it fare with you if the sufferings and blows of life broke in on you from every side? You should stand upright, you should make yourself strong to meet all the sorrows that life offers, and should bear them. This is the second fundamental feeling which must be experienced. The outer feeling of it is an irritation on the whole surface of the body, and a more inner expression is a vision in which one sees oneself scourged, at first in dream, and then in vision.

Then comes the third, which is the Crowning with Thorns. Here week-long, month-long one must live in the feeling: How would it fare with you, if you must not only undergo the sorrows and sufferings of life, but if even the holiest, your spiritual being, should be subjected to scorn and derision? And again, there must be no lamenting, it must be clear to the pupil that he must stand upright in spite of all. His inwardly developed strength must make him able to stand erect despite mockery and scorn. Whatever threatens to overthrow his soul he must stand erect! Then in an inner astral vision he sees himself with the crown of thorns and is sensible of an external pain on the head. This is the sign that he has advanced far enough in his life of feeling to be able to make this experience.

The fourth is the Crucifixion. Here the pupil must again develop a quite definite feeling. Today man identifies his body with his ego. One who would go through the Christian initiation must accustom himself to carry his body through the world as if it were a foreign object, a table, for instance. His body must become foreign to him, he bears it in and out of the doorway as something external, not himself. When a man has advanced far enough in this fundamental feeling, there is revealed to him what is called the “Ordeal of the Blood.” Certain reddenings of the skin appear on certain places in such a way that he can call forth the wounds of Christ, on the hands, the feet and on the right side of the breast. When the pupil by his depth of feeling is able to develop in himself the Blood Ordeal, the external symptom, then appears likewise the inner, the astral, in which he sees himself crucified.

The fifth is the Mystic Death. The pupil raises himself ever higher to the feeling: I belong to the whole world; I am as little an independent being as the finger on my hand. He feels himself embedded in the whole world, as if a part of it. Then he experiences the feeling that all around him grows dark, as if a black darkness envelops him, like a pall that becomes dense around him. During this time, the pupil of the Christian initiation learns to know all the sorrow and all the pain, all the evil and wickedness that attaches itself to mortal man. That is the Descent into Hell; each one must live through it. Then something comes to pass as if the veil were torn asunder, and the pupil sees into the spiritual worlds. This is called the Rending of the Veil.

The sixth is the Burial and Resurrection. When the pupil has advanced so far he must say: I have already accustomed myself to look on my body as something foreign, but now I see everything in the world as standing as near to me as my own body, which indeed is only taken from these substances. Every blossom, every stone, is as near to me as my body. Then the pupil is buried in the earthly planet. This stage is significantly linked with a new life, with the feeling of being united to the deepest Soul of the planet, with the soul of the Christ, who says, “those who eat my bread tread me underfoot.”

The seventh, the Ascension, cannot be described; one must have a soul that is no longer dependent on thinking through the instrument of the brain. In order to be sensible of what the pupil undergoes in what is called the Ascension, it is necessary to have a soul which can live through this feeling.

This passing through states of humility and deep devotion represents the nature of the Christian initiation, and he who earnestly goes through it experiences his resurrection in the spiritual worlds. Today it is not possible for all to undertake this path, and so the existence of another method leading to the higher worlds has become a necessity. That is the Rosicrucian method.

Here again I must refer to seven stages which will give a picture of the content of this training. Much of it has already been described in Lucifer-Gnosis,¹ much can only be given from teacher to pupil within the school, and yet an idea must be formed of what the training provides. It has seven stages, though not consecutive, it is a question of the pupil's own individuality. The teacher prescribes what seems to him adapted to his pupil, and much else forms a part that cannot be made public.

The seven stages are the following:

1. Study
2. Imaginative knowledge
3. Inspired knowledge, or reading the Occult Script
4. Preparation of the Philosopher's Stone
5. Correspondence between Macrocosm and Microcosm
6. Living into the Macrocosm
7. Divine Bliss

Study in the Rosicrucian sense is the ability to immerse oneself in a content of thought not taken from physical reality but from the higher worlds. This is called the life in pure thought. Modern philosophers for the most part deny this; they say that every thinking must have a certain vestige remaining from sense perception. This, however, is not the case, for no one, for example, can see a true circle; a circle must be seen in the mind; on the blackboard it is only a collection of tiny particles of chalk. One can only attain to a real circle if one leaves aside all examples, all actual things. Thus thinking in Mathematics is a super-sensible activity. But one must also learn to think supersensibly in other fields.

Initiates have always exercised this kind of thinking in regard to the being of man. Rosicrucian theosophy is such super-sensible knowledge, and its study, with which we are now occupied, is the first stage of the Rosicrucian training itself. I am not bringing forward Rosicrucian theosophy for any external reason, but because it is the first stage of the Rosicrucian Initiation. People think often enough that it is unnecessary to talk about the principles of man's being, or the evolution of humanity or the different planetary evolutions, they would rather acquire beautiful feelings, they do not want to study earnestly. Nevertheless, however many beautiful feelings one acquires in one's soul it is impossible to rise into the spiritual worlds by that alone. Rosicrucian theosophy does not try to arouse the feelings, but through the stupendous facts of the spiritual worlds to let the feelings themselves begin to resound. The Rosicrucian feels it a kind of impertinence to take people by storm with feelings. He leads them along the path of mankind's evolution in the belief that feelings will then arise of themselves. He calls up before them the planet journeying in universal space, knowing that when the soul experiences this fact it will be powerfully gripped in feeling. It is only an empty phrase to say one should address oneself direct to the feelings, that is just indolence. Rosicrucian theosophy lets the facts speak, and if these thoughts flow into the feeling nature and overpower it, then that is the right way. Only what the human being feels of his own accord can fill him with bliss or blessedness. The Rosicrucian lets the facts in the cosmos speak, for that is the most impersonal kind of teaching. It is a matter of indifference who stands before you; you must not be affected by a personality, but by what he tells you of the facts of world-becoming. Thus in the Rosicrucian training that direct veneration for the teacher is struck out, he does not claim it nor require it. He wishes to speak to the pupil of what exists, quite apart from himself. One who will press forward into the higher worlds must accustom himself to the kind of thinking in which one thought proceeds from another. A thinking of this nature is developed in my Philosophy of Spiritual Activity and Truth and Science. These books are not written in such a way that one can take a thought and put it in another place; much more are they written as an organism arises, one thought grows out of another. These books have nothing at all to do with the one who wrote them; he gave himself up to what the thoughts themselves worked out in him, how they linked themselves one to another.

Study, then, for one desiring to make a somewhat elementary approach means acquiring a certain knowledge of the elementary facts of spiritual science itself, whereas for one who wishes to go further it means an inner meditation in a thought-structure which lets one thought grow out of another, out of itself.

The second stage is Imaginative Knowledge, the knowledge which unites with what is given to the pupil in the study-stage. The study is the basis, it must be perfected through individual imaginative knowledge. If you think over various things that I have touched upon in the last lectures, you will find traces—in the echo for instance—of what were everyday occurrences on Saturn. It is possible to look on all around us as a physiognomy of an inner spiritual element. People walk over the earth and it is a conglomeration of rocks and stones to them, but men must learn to grasp that all surrounding them is the true physical expression for the Spirit of the Earth. Just as the body is ensouled, so is the earth planet the external expression for an indwelling spirit. When men look on the earth as possessing body and soul as man does, then only they have an idea of what Goethe meant when he said “All things corruptible are but a semblance.” When you see tears run down the human countenance you do not examine by the laws of physics how quickly or how slowly the tears roll down; they express to you the inner sadness of the soul, just as the smiling cheek is the expression for the soul's inner joy. The pupil must educate himself to see in each single flower in the meadow he crosses, the outer expression of a living being, the expression of the Spirit dwelling in the Earth. Some flowers seem to be tears, others are the joyful expression of the earth's Spirit. Every stone, every plant, every flower, all is for him the outer expression of the indwelling Earth Spirit, its physiognomy that speaks to him. And everything “corruptible” or transitory becomes a “semblance” of an eternal, expressing itself through it. Feelings like these had to be attained by the disciple of the Grail, and by the Rosicrucian. The teacher would say: Behold the flower chalice which receives the ray of the sun, the sun calls forth the pure productive forces which slumber in the plant and hence the sun's ray was called the “holy lance of love.” Look now at man; he stands higher than the plant, he has the same organs within him, but all that the plant harbours in itself, perfectly pure and chaste, is in him steeped in lust and impure desire. The future of human evolution consists in this: man will again be chaste and pure, and speak forth his likeness into the world through another organ which will be the transformed organ of generation. Chaste and pure without desire, without passion, man's generative organ will be; and as the calyx of the blossom turns upward to the holy love lance, it will turn to the spiritual ray of wisdom, and fructified by this will bring forth its own image. This organ will be the larynx.

The Grail pupil was shown: the plant on its lower stage has this pure chalice, man has lost it; he has degenerated to impure desires. Out of the spiritualised sun ray he must let this chalice come again, in chastity he must develop that which forms the Holy Grail of the future.

Thus the pupil looks up to the great Ideal. What comes to pass in the slow evolution of the whole human race is experienced earlier by the initiate. He shows us mankind's evolution in pictures and these pictures work quite differently from the abstract thoughts which have been produced by the modern materialistic age. If you picture evolution in such lofty and powerful pictures as the Grail, then the effect is different from that of ordinary knowledge, which is unable to exercise any deep influence on your organism. Imaginative knowledge works down on the etheric body and thence on to the blood and this is the medium which acts formatively on the organism. Man will become increasingly more able to work on his organism through his etheric body. All imaginative knowledge based on truth is at the same time healing and health giving, it makes the blood healthy in its circulation. The best educator is imaginative knowledge, if man is only strong and devoted enough for it to be able to work on him.

The third stage is Reading in the Occult Script, that is, not only seeing isolated pictures but letting the relationship of these pictures work upon one. This becomes what is called occult script. One begins to coordinate the lines of force which stream creatively through the world forming them into definite figures and colour-forms through the imagination. One learns to discover an inner connection which is expressed in these figures and this acts as spiritual tone, as the sphere-harmony, for the figures are founded on true cosmic proportions. Our script is a last decadent relic of this old occult writing and is modeled on it.

One comes to the fourth, Preparing the Philosopher's Stone, through exercises of the breathing process. If man breathes as ordained by nature he needs the plant-world for his breathing.

If the plant were not there he could not live, for it gives him oxygen and assimilates the carbon which he himself breathes out. The plant builds its own organism from this and gives back oxygen, thus through the plant world oxygen is continually renewed for man. Humanity could not exist by itself; eliminate the plant world and mankind would in a short time die out. So you see the cycle: you breathe in oxygen which the plant breathes out, you breathe out carbon which the plant inhales and from which it builds up its own bodily nature. Thus the plant belongs to me, it is the instrument by which my life is sustained. You may see in the coal how the plant builds its body from carbon, for coal is nothing else than the dead remains of plants.

Rosicrucian training guides the pupil through a definitely regulated breathing process to form that organ that can within himself effect the transformation of carbon into oxygen. What is today done by the plant externally, will later on, through a future organ which the pupil is already developing through his training, be effected in man himself This is slowly being prepared. Through the regulated breathing process man will bear in himself the instrument for the preparation of oxygen; he will have become akin to the plant, whereas now he is of a mineral nature. He will retain the carbon in himself and build his body from it, and hence his body will later on be more plant-like, then he can turn towards the holy love lance. The whole of humanity will then possess a consciousness like that gained by the initiate today when he raises himself into the higher worlds.

This is called the transmutation of human substance into that substance of which carbon itself is the basis. This is the Alchemy which leads man to build up his own body as does the plant today. One calls this the preparation of the “Philosopher's Stone” and carbon is its outer symbol. But it is not the Philosopher's Stone until the pupil can create it himself through his regulated breathing process. The teaching can only be given from teacher to pupil, it is wrapped in deep secrecy, and only after he is completely purified and made ready can the pupil receive this mystery. If it were to be made public today, then men in their egoism would gratify their lowest needs through the misuse of this highest mystery.

The fifth is the Correspondence of Microcosm and Macrocosm. When we survey the path of human evolution we see that what lies within man today has gradually entered from without—for instance, the glands were an external growth on the Sun, like our modern fungi; all that today lies within the human skin was once outside. The human body is, as it were, pieced together from what was spread outside it, each separate member of your physical body, etheric body and astral body was somewhere outside in the universe. This is the macrocosm in the microcosm. Your very soul was outside in the Godhead. Whatever is within us corresponds to something which is outside, and we must learn to know the true correspondences in ourselves.

You know the spot on the brow just above the root of the nose; it expresses the fact that a certain something which was formerly outside has drawn into man. If you penetrate this organ in meditation, sink yourself into it, this denotes more than a mere brooding in this point, you learn to know then the part of the outer world which corresponds to it. The larynx, too, you get to know and the forces which build it. Thus you learn about the macrocosm through sinking yourself into your own body. This is no mere brooding within yourself! You should not say: God is within and I will seek Him. You would only find the puny human being whom you yourself magnify into God! One who only speaks of this inward brooding never comes to real knowledge. To reach this by the path of Rosicrucian Theosophy is less comfortable and demands real work. The universe is full of beautiful and marvelous things, one must be absorbed in these, one must seek God in his individual expressions, then one can find him in oneself and then only does one learn to know God as One. The world is like a great book. We find its letters in created things, we must read these from beginning to end, and then we learn to read the book microcosm and the book macrocosm from beginning to end.

This is no longer a mere understanding, it lives over into feeling, it fuses the human being with the whole universe and he feels all things to be the expression of the divine Spirit of the Earth. If a man has reached this point, he voluntarily performs all his deeds in accordance with the will of the whole cosmos and this is what is known as Divine Bliss.

When we are able to think thus, we are treading the Rosicrucian path. The Christian school is based more on the development of inner feelings, in the Rosicrucian school all that is spread out in physical reality as the divine nature of the earth is allowed to work upon us and reverberate in us as feeling. These are two ways which are open to all. If you think in the manner of modern thought then you can take the Rosicrucian path, no matter how scientific you may be. Modern science is an assistance if you do not merely study cosmic evolution, reading the letters, as it were, but carry your research into what is concealed behind, just as in a book one does not consider the letters but reads the meaning by their aid. You must seek the spirit behind science, then science becomes to you but the letter for the spirit.

What has been said is not meant to be a comprehensive account of the Rosicrucian training, it is only meant to serve as an indication of what can be found in it. It is a path for present day man, it makes him capable of working into the future. These are only the elementary stages, to give some idea of the way. We can thus realise how through the Rosicrucian method one may oneself penetrate into the higher mysteries.

Spiritual Science is necessary to humanity for its further progress. What is to take place for the transforming of mankind must be brought about through men themselves. He who accepts the truth in his present incarnation will mould for himself in later incarnations the outer form for the deeper truths.

Thus what we have discussed in this lecture course is coordinated to a whole. It is the instrument which is to work creatively for future civilisation. It is taught today because the man of the future needs these teachings, because they must be directed into the evolutionary path of mankind. Everyone who will not accept this truth of the future, lives at the cost of other men. But he who accepts it lives for others, even if at first he is impelled by an egoistic longing for the higher worlds. If the path is the right one then it is of itself the destroyer of self seeking and the best educator of selflessness.

Occult development is now needed by mankind and must be implanted into it. An earnest, true striving for truth, step by step, this alone leads to genuine brotherliness, this is the magician which can best bring about the uniting of humanity. This will serve as the means to bring about humanity's great goal, unity; and we shall reach this goal when we develop the means to it in ourselves, when we seek to acquire these means in the noblest, purest way, for it is a matter of hallowing humanity through these means.

Thus Spiritual Science appears to us not only as a great ideal, but as a force with which we permeate ourselves and out of which knowledge wells up for us. Spiritual Science will become increasingly more widespread, it will penetrate more and more all the religious and practical aspects of life, just as the great law of existence penetrates all beings; it is a factor in humanity's evolution.

This is the sense in which these lectures on Rosicrucian Theosophy have been given. If it has been understood, not only abstractly, but so that feelings have been evoked through knowledge of facts, then it can work directly into life. When this knowledge flows into all our members, from head to heart and thence into the hand, into all that we do and create, then we have grasped the foundations of spiritual science. Then we have grasped the great task of civilisation which is laid in our hands, and then from this knowledge feelings, too, are developed which one who likes to take things easily would prefer to develop direct.

Rosicrucian Theosophy does not wish to revel in feelings, it wishes to bring the facts of the spirit before your eyes. The pupil must take part, must let himself be stimulated by the facts which have been described, feelings and sensations must be aroused in him through them. In this sense Spiritual Science should become a powerful impulse for the sphere of feeling, but at the same time be that which leads us direct into the facts of super-sensible perceptions, which lets them first arise as thoughts and then leads the seeker upward into the higher worlds.

This was intended to be the significance of these lectures.

• 1. Dr. Steiner refers to the articles in Lucifer-Gnosis afterwards published as Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.

In the middle one of these three lectures there are a number of anthroposophical truths in particular that I would like to develop for you. We shall then see what a great impact on a person's everyday life these particular truths have, and that is what we will talk about tomorrow. Today I just want to draw you attention to some deeper aspects of the being of man.

People very often do not ask the question as to which of man's forces are used to acquire knowledge of supersensible worlds. They try to answer this question merely by saying that there is a possibility of acquiring supersensible knowledge by means of certain forces in man. But what the actual connections are between these forces and man's being, they do not usually ask. That is why so little importance is attached to making knowledge of supersensible worlds really fruitful in ordinary life. It can be said that supersensible knowledge is becoming more and more essential to man, just in our time. In that case it is vital to understand what its connection is with ordinary everyday life.

As you know, the first of the capacities that leads man into supersensible realms is the force of Imagination, the second capacity is the force of Inspiration and the third capacity the force of Intuition. The question now is whether these capacities need concern us at all except in their connection with knowledge of supersensible worlds or whether these capacities have any part to play in the rest of man's life?—You will see that the latter is the case. As my little book Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy tells you, we can see human life running its course in three stages: from birth to the change of teeth, from the change of teeth to puberty, and from puberty till about the twenty-first year. If you do not regard man purely superficially you will be struck by the fact that the nature of man's development is entirely different in the three different seven-year stages. The pushing through of our permanent teeth, as I have often mentioned, is connected with the development of forces that are not merely confined, let us say, to our jaws or their neighbouring organs, but fill our whole physical body. There is work in progress within our physical body between birth and the seventh year, and this work comes to an end with the pushing through of our permanent teeth.

It is obvious that the forces doing this work of developing the physical body are supersensible, isn't it? The perceptible body is only the material in which they work. These supersensible forces, active in the whole of man's organisation during the first seven years of his life, become, as it were, suspended when their purpose has been achieved and the permanent teeth have appeared. At the age of seven these forces go to sleep. They are hidden within the being of man; they go to sleep within him. And they can be drawn forth from your being when you do the sort of exercises I describe in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds as leading to Intuition. For the forces that are applied in the acquisition of intuitive knowledge are the same forces that you grow with at the time of life when this growth culminates in the change of teeth. These sleeping forces that are active within the human body until the seventh year are the forces you use in supersensible knowledge to reach Intuition.

Now the forces that are active from the seventh year to the fourteenth year and go to sleep at puberty in the depths of the body, are drawn forth and form the power of Inspiration. And the forces that in bygone times used to be the source of youthful ideals between the fourteenth and the twenty-first year—it would be too much of an assertion to say that this still happens today—the forces that create organs in the physical body for these ideals of youth, are the same forces you can draw forth from their state of slumber and use for the acquisition of Imagination.

From this you will see that the forces of Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are not just any old forces got from we do not know where, but are the same forces as those we grow with from our birth to the age of twenty-one. So the forces that live in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition are very healthy forces. They are the forces a human being uses for his healthy growth and that go to sleep within his body when the corresponding phases of growth are completed.

I have just shown you the connections between the forces of supersensible knowledge and man's everyday existence. Something similar, though, can be said about the forces of man's normal nature, man's nature as it appears in ordinary life. Only there it is not so obvious. A very important force in ordinary life—and we have discussed it many times—is the force of memory. The power of memory is active within us when, as we say, we remember something we have experienced. But, as you all know, there is something peculiar about the power of memory. We have got it and yet we haven't got it. Many a person struggles at some moment of his life to try and remember something that he cannot remember. This wanting to remember but not being able to remember entirely, arises through the fact that the force we use in our souls to remember with is the same force that transforms the food we eat into the kind of substances our body can make use of. If you eat a piece of bread and this bread is transformed inside your body into the sort of substance that serves life, this is apparently a physical process. This physical process, however, is governed by supersensible forces. These supersensible forces are the same forces you use when you remember. So the same kind of forces are being used on the one hand for memory and on the other hand for the assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body. And you actually always have to oscillate a bit between your soul and your body if you want to dwell in memory. If your body is carrying out the process of digesting too well, you may find you will not be able to draw enough forces away from it to remember certain things. There is an inner struggle going on the whole time in the unconscious between a soul process and a bodily process every time you want to remember something. Looking at memory is the best way to understand how absurd it is basically, from a higher point of view, for some people to be idealists and other people materialists. The assimilation of foodstuffs in the human body is doubtless a material process. The forces controlling it are the same as the forces at work in a process of ideas, namely the force of memory. You only see the world aright if you see it as being neither materialistic nor idealistic, but are capable of following up the ideal aspect of what is presented in a material way and following up the material aspect of what is presented as idea. The spiritual quality of a world conception is hot being able to say 'Over there is base materialism, which is for the 'dregs' of humanity, and over here is idealism, which is for the elect—and the speaker usually includes himself among these—but the essential quality of a really spiritual world conception lies in its capacity to take what it has grasped in the spirit and bring it down into material existence so that material existence can be understood and not despised. That is the fallacy of many religious denominations, that they despise material existence instead of understanding it and looking for the spirit within it.

The crux of the matter is really to go into these things, and not, as is still largely the case, to deal in empty phrases where mysticism is concerned. After having as it were shown you how these things can really be gone into, I would now like to bring something of very great importance. When people speak of material existence and supersensible existence they usually speak of them as though material existence were spread out in the world and as though supersensible, non-perceptible existence were somewhere behind or above this. If you imagine you simply have physical-perceptible existence on the one hand and supersensible existence on the other, you will never understand man. There is no way of really grasping man if you look at things from the point of view of the perceptible world versus the supersensible world. In reality it is like this: The world of the senses and the world in which we work and live socially are spread out around us. Let us represent diagrammatically by means of this line this world that is spread out around us (see horizontal line of drawing). You will only have a complete picture of what is actually there in the world if you imagine that there are forces above this line, supersensible forces (red side). We neither perceive these supersensible forces by means of our ordinary senses nor by means of our intellect bound to our ordinary senses. We perceive only what is in the realm of this line.

But there are forces under this line as well. If we actually want to include the whole of the imperceptible or spiritual realm we must speak of subsensible as well as supersensible forces. So we must imagine that there are also subsensible forces here (orange side).

Thus we have the sense world, supersensible forces and subsensible forces. Where does man himself, as an ordinary person, belong? The part of him you see standing in front of you belongs entirely to this line. But supersensible forces from one side and subsensible forces from the other side work into the part of man that belongs to the line. Man is the result of supersensible and subsensible forces. Now which of man's forces are supersensible and which are subsensible? All the forces connected with understanding are supersensible, that is, everything we make use of for understanding. And these are the same forces that also form our head. So we can say that the supersensible forces are the forces of understanding.

Now subsensible forces also work into man. What kind of forces are these? These are will forces. All the will forces, everything in man that is of the nature of will, is subsensible.

An obvious question is where do these subsensible forces, these will forces, come from? They are the same forces as the forces of the planets, that is, from our point of view, the forces of the earth. Yes indeed, the forces of the earth are perpetually working into man. And it is our forces of will that are connected with these forces of the planets, these forces of the earth. The forces of understanding come to us from the world's periphery, and pour into us as it were from outside, from the outside of the planet. The forces of will enter into us from the planet itself. This is how the forces of our own planet earth live within us. The moment we enter birth the forces of planet earth are active within us.

The question now arises as to how this activity is distributed. There is a considerable difference in this respect in the first, second and third stage of life, that is, up till the seventh year, the fourteenth year and the twenty-first year. The will working in us up till the seventh year works entirely from out of the planet's interior. It is very interesting to see spiritual-scientifically that in everything working in the child up till the age of seven it is the forces of the earth's depths that are active. If you want to see an actual manifestation of the forces of the earth's interior, then make a study of everything going on in the child up till the age of seven, for these are the forces from within the earth. To delve down into the earth to find the forces of the earth's interior would be absolutely wrong. You would only find earth substances. The forces that are active in the earth come to manifestation in the work they do in the human being up till his seventh year. And from the seventh to the fourteenth year it is the forces of the encircling air that work in man, forces that still belong to the earth, to the earth's atmosphere. These are predominantly at work in everything developing in the human being between seven and fourteen. Then comes the most important stage of all, from fourteen to twenty-one. At this stage the subsensible passes over into the supersensible. Here a kind of balance is created between the subsensible and supersensible. Now the forces of the earth's whole solar system work at organising the human being.

So we have the earth's interior in the first period of life; encircling air in the second period of life, that is, what the earth itself is embedded in. The forces streaming down from cosmic spaces in so far as these cosmic spaces are filled with our own actual planetary system, up till the twenty-first year. Not until the age of twenty-one does man tear himself away, as it were, from the influences brought about in him from outside by the planets and the planetary system belonging to these.

Please notice that in everything I have referred to as having an influence on man, bodily influences are of course included. They are bodily processes that the forces from the planet's interior bring about up till the seventh year. They are bodily processes that are formed by the circulating air in connection with the breathing and so on between the seventh and the fourteenth year. There is no doubt that they are bodily processes, in fact actual transformations of bodily organs are brought about; everything being connected with man's growing and becoming larger. Thus man grows beyond all this work being done on him by the earth; all this ceases at twenty-one.

What happens then, however? What happens after twenty-one? Up till twenty-one we draw on what comes from the earth and its planetary system in the way we have described. We build up our constitution with the earth's help. Then, after we have reached the age of twenty-one, we have to draw on ourselves. We gradually have to release what we have put into our organism from out of the forces of the planet and the planetary system.

Activities going on in the blood forces always used to ensure that this happened in the past. As you will probably know, man has not learnt to release the planetary forces, himself, after the age of twenty-one. And yet he has been doing so. He did it as an unconscious process. The capacity was in his blood. It was built into him to do it. The important change in our present time—and the present extends over a long period of several centuries, of course—is that man's blood is losing the capacity to release what we have put into the organism in this way, before twenty-one

The important changes taking place in humanity at the present time are based on the waning of the forces in the blood. These things cannot be testified by external anatomy and physiology; to do that they would need to investigate bodies from the tenth or ninth centuries in order to discover that blood was different then. And they would not even have had the chemical tests to do it. But through spiritual science we can know with certainty that man's blood has grown weaker. And the great turning-point when human blood began to grow weak lay in the middle of the fifteenth century.

What are the consequences? The consequences of this are that what we cannot carry out unconsciously any more by means of our blood, we have to carry out consciously. We have to educate ourselves to do consciously what was simply done unconsciously by man's blood in the past. For the strength in our blood is in the process of fading away. What would happen if a time were to come when human beings completely lost hold of their youth, and were unable to draw on their youthful forces, if there were no means of resorting to doing consciously what was once done unconsciously by the blood?

You must not take these things in a purely theoretical way, of course. As theories, they may be interesting, but to take them as theories is not enough. Nowadays they have to be put into practice, for they are connected with the practical matter of the evolution of mankind. They must be put into practice to the point of making us conscious that man's whole educational system has to change. We have to help man to develop a strong, conscious capacity to re-experience later in life, as though with the force of elemental memory, what he has received in his youth.

Everywhere, people are still working contrary to this requirement. For instance they are proud of the visual aids used in primary school education, and they attach great importance to getting down to the mental level of the child as far as possible, and not teaching him anything that extends beyond his mental capacity. They actually rig up calculating machines so that they can teach the children to do all kinds of sums by counting balls. Nothing must go beyond the child's mental capacity. These visual aid lessons get frightfully trivial and trite. It is bound to lead to nothing but commonplace concepts if they avoid giving the child anything beyond its own mental capacity. People who do this, thoroughly overlook an important yet subtle observation of human life.

Supposing a child is taught in such a way that he takes a particular thing in, not because it is absolutely on his own mental level, but because his teacher's warmth of enthusiasm gets passed on to him, and the child takes the thing in because the teacher in his enthusiasm tells him about it. The child takes it in just because it lives in the warmth emanating from the teacher. If the child absorbs something that reaches beyond his understanding, purely because of the infectious quality of his teacher's enthusiasm, he will not yet understand what he has taken in, as people say in superficial life. Yet what he has taken in lives in his soul. At the age of thirty the grown-up will remember what the child took in, perhaps at the age of ten. He re-experiences it. He has become mature now, and he can understand what he is able to release from the depths of his soul; he can understand the thing he was taught purely through the force of enthusiasm, and which he is now able to release from his mature mind. You know, these are the most valuable moments in life, when your mental life does not have to be restricted to what comes to meet you from outside, but you re-experience what you took in in your younger days with inadequate understanding, and which you can now release and absorb with your more mature mind. The more care you take that the child does not just get the sort of lessons where it matter-of-factly takes in what it understands—for that will disappear with the passing years, and neither joy nor enthusiasm will come from it later—the more you will be doing for the person's later development; for lessons taken in purely through the teacher's warmth are life giving when they are re-experienced.

Nowadays this is of particular importance in teaching- In earlier times it was not so important, for in those days the releasing was carried out by the blood, whereas now it has to be brought to consciousness. It certainly makes a difference if you understand the kind of things that are being put to practical use by spiritual science. Because if you understand them in the right way you will find an opportunity somewhere in life of making practical use of them for the good of humanity. In this case, if you understand it properly, you will find an opportunity to make use of the fact that our blood is becoming weak, by attaching all the more importance to the teacher's capacity for enthusiasm.

But people are so little aware nowadays of what is at stake. For standardised education still plays a great part, that is, the kind of education that works with a whole set of standard rules. Education is learnt, how to teach a child is learnt, how to arrange the lesson is learnt. Comparing this with our present day consciousness it would be like learning that man consists of carbohydrates, protein and so on—these are our constituents and they undergo such and such changes inside our body, and we cannot eat before we have understood this; for we do not eat in a physiological sense until we understand it.—I told you once, and you may even have experienced this yourselves—, that you can already come across a thing like this:—You visit someone who has a scale standing beside his plate, and he carefully puts a piece of meat on the scales to find out how much it weighs, for he may only eat a piece of meat of a quite specific weight. Physiology already determines his appetite. But not everybody does it this way yet, thank goodness! It is important to understand that physiology is not part of the eating process but covers other aspects, and that a person can eat without having studied physiology, the physiology of the nutritional process. But we do not take it for granted that we also ought to teach, that is, teach in a living way, without having absorbed standardised education. This standardised education is exactly the same thing to a good teacher as the aesthetics of colour is to an artist. He can have studied aesthetics of colour very well, but he will not be able to paint because of that. The ability to paint comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of the aesthetics of colour. The ability to teach comes from an entirely different quarter from the study of education. The important thing, today, is not to give would-be teachers a seminar of some sort of standardised education that prescribes dogmas, but to give them the sort of thing that makes them become teachers and educators in the same way as people become artists or botanists. It is that the educator has to be born in a person and not that education has to be learnt.

What has to be understood just because of this very change in man's set-up is that education has to be a real art. In the time of transition people were at sixes and sevens as to what to do about education. That is why they invented so many abstract educational systems. The essential thing today, however, is to give people a real knowledge of man, especially if they are teachers. You see, if you possess this real knowledge of man and work out of it with children, a remarkable thing will happen: Let us suppose you are a teacher and have your pupils in front of you. If you are a student of standardised education, the kind that follows the rules, then you will know exactly how you have to teach, because you will have learnt the rules. You will teach according to these rules, today, just as you taught according to these rules yesterday and will teach according to them tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. But if you are the artist kind of teacher you are not nearly so well off. For now you cannot teach yesterday, today, tomorrow and the day after tomorrow according to the same rules, but have to learn from the child afresh each time, how he has to be taught; it must be man's own nature every time that determines what you do. And it is ideal if the teacher can teach the way the child tells him to teach, and can keep on forgetting actual education and has not got a clue about the rules. For the moment the child stands in front of him again he will again be electrified by the growing child and will know what he has to do with him.

You must pay attention to the way things have to be said, to the way things have to be spoken about today. You cannot speak about these things today in such a way that they can be put into so and so many satisfying principles, but you can only speak about them by pointing to something alive, something that cannot be reduced to abstract principles but which is alive and produces ever more life. That is the crux of the matter. That is why spiritual science is needed in actual life today, because spiritual science is not merely for the head but is for the whole of man and releases will impulses. Indeed it ought to enter into many realms of life, so that impulses of will are eventually brought into every sphere of human activity.

I have demonstrated this in one particular realm of life, namely education, and shown how the education of children under the age of twenty-one can be made to bear fruit for later life. People do not receive an education only up to the age of twenty-one, though, for education carries on throughout the whole of life. But this only happens in a healthy way if people learn from one another.

This too was done by the blood in earlier ages of history. When people met in social life they used to learn things from one another unconsciously, some people learning more and others less, according to the way their blood worked. But our blood has grown weak and has lost its power. This activity, too, has to be replaced by more consciousness. People must achieve the art of acquiring relatively more for themselves from other people compared with what they produce from out of themselves. In earlier times it was sufficient to rely on life. The blood did everything. Now it is essential for people really to develop a sense for the other person's being. This will come about as a matter of course if people steer their thoughts in the direction of spiritual science. Different kinds of thoughts are stimulated with spiritual science than without it.

You will not doubt this fact, for the way spiritual science is received by people who do not want to know anything about their thoughts shows that spiritual scientific thoughts are different from thoughts without spiritual science. It is necessary to develop a totally new way of thinking. The kind of thinking we develop when we accustom ourselves to working with supersensible thoughts is the kind of thinking that has an effect on our organism. And when I told you today that memory is the same force that transforms food into substances man needs for his organism you will no longer be astonished to find that other forces can be transformed in man, like for instance the force with which we understand supersensible things being the same one that helps us to know the human being better than we would know him if we had no healthy longing for supersensible knowledge.

You people study what is in my Occult Science, and to do that you have to develop certain concepts that most people would still call 'Utter madness'. A few days ago I got yet another letter from someone studying Occult Science, and he says that nearly every chapter is pure nonsense. You can understand people saying it is pure nonsense. Why, it is quite obvious that they often say it these days. Yet these people who do not put themselves out to accept the kind of concepts that lead to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan, and do not get down to developing ideas about a world that is not limited to the senses will also not acquire any knowledge of man. They do not see the human being in the other person but notice at the most that one person has a more pointed nose than the other, and one has blue eyes whereas the other has brown. But they notice nothing of man's inner being that manifests as his soul and organises his body. The same force which enables us to take an interest, and I am not saying now that it enables us to have supersensible occult powers, but the same force that enables us to take an interest in supersensible knowledge also gives us the kind of knowledge of man that we need today.

You can set up the most grandiose social programmes and develop the finest social ideas, but if people shy away from acquiring any knowledge of man and do not see any real humanity in one another, they will never be able to bring about social conditions. They cannot produce social conditions unless they establish the possibility that people can be social. But people cannot be social if they do not see the human quality in one another, but live entirely within themselves. Human beings can only become social if they really meet one another in life, and something passes between them. This is the root of the social problem. Most people say of the social question nowadays, that if certain things were arranged in such and such a way people would be able to lead a social existence.—But it is not like that. If things are arranged like that, social people will be good people in a social sense, and anti-social people will be anti-social with any sort of arrangement.

The essential thing is to make the sort of arrangements that allow for human beings to develop really social impulses. And one of these social impulses is knowledge. But as long as you go on educating people, for instance, with an eye to their becoming clerks or army officers or some other kind of civil servant, you will not educate them to recognise the human quality in others. For the sort of education that is good for becoming a clerk or an officer only helps you to see clerks and officers in other people. The kind of education that makes human beings of people also enables them to recognise people as human beings. But it is impossible to recognise people as human beings if you do not develop a sense for supersensible knowledge. And the realm in which supersensible knowledge is most indispensable is in the art of education. Therefore the natural scientific, materialistic way of thinking has done more damage in the field of education than anywhere else. And here you can experience the most amazing things.

In every department you find well-meaning people today, who want to reform everything, even revolutionise them. But if you talk to these people about these things, something very strange transpires. They will admit quite honestly to a particular conviction about reforming things. Yet one of them who happens to be a tailor will ask you how his existence as a tailor is going to be affected when things change. And another person, who is, let us say, a railway clerk, asks you how his life as a railway clerk is going to suffer when things are changed.—These are only given as examples to show you that people are perfectly in agreement that everything should be changed as long as nothing changes and everything remains exactly the same. The vast majority of people today are convinced that everything must stay exactly the same when it changes. Make no mistake about the fact that the sort of social improvement people long for today is of extremely abstract dimensions. People long for a great deal, but nothing must change where their comfort is concerned.

And this is particularly true where it is a of people taking an inner step into an entirely new situation. Nevertheless the essential thing is that people open themseIves to the possibility of making the transition to thinking in quite a new way about man changing himself in his innermost being.

All sorts of questions arise from these considerations, questions that are absolutely pertinent to life. What we must realise is that we have constructed a deeper foundation for these questions, by saying that although certain forces appear to be of a spiritual-soul nature, they also come to expression in our bodily nature. For the capacity is terribly lacking today, to bring down to a material level what we think of on a spiritual level. Not until we are capable of bringing down on to a material level what we think of as being spiritual shall we be able to grasp the actual nerve of the social question.

Thus it is virtually a matter of aiming towards a way of thinking that really develops a knowledge of man that is at one and the same time a social impulse. A way of thinking based on anything else is not adequate. A mentality based on the life of the state or the life of economics creates clerks and officers. But the sort of mentality we need creates human beings. This can only be the sort of thought life that breaks away from the sphere of economics and the life of the state. That is why our Threefold Social Organism had to happen. We had to show in a radical way that any kind of dependency of thought life on economics or on the life of the state had to stop, and thought life had to be set up on its own basis. Then thought life will be able to give economics and the life of the state what economics and the state cannot give to the life of thought.

That is the important thing, that is what is vital! Whole human beings will only arise again when we work out of an independent life of thought.

Our consideration during my presence this time will be to contemplate the vital earnestness embedded in anthroposophical knowledge needed for the great task of our time. When we say “with regard to the great task of our time” we don't need to think of something drifting over our heads which has been organized by some person in authority but we should be clear today that whatever weaves between people in everyday life contains, or is permeated to some extent, with something which belongs to the great task of our time. This should obviously be one of the primary implications of the Anthroposophic world view moving through our souls. This Anthroposophic world view directs us towards recognizing the existence of the spirit within everything, not existing somewhere in abstract heights, but living within the existence surrounding our everyday lives. This is what we must learn to apply to the great task of life and to every small daily experience and action.

When we consider life today from this angle we can ask ourselves: what are the components of life surrounding us from the reference point of spirituality? We have the remnants of ancient knowledge in various forms which was passed traditionally by word of mouth to adherents gathered in communities and their faith in the everlasting nature of the human being. In the most varied forms, most differentiated nuances, this most varied knowledge of this faith was brought to people. Humanity lived within this faith with the belief that all their soul needs were satisfied through this way. Besides this belief of confessions respective to their followers of that time, we have a popular addition today which originated from science, attributed to the present educational institutions. This science was gradually skilled by only considering sense-physical matter, at most penetrating it with inadequate spiritual suggestions, the latter now on the wane. The tendency is increasing towards regarding science as the only physical sense perceptible observation which at best can be combined with the mind.

Wherever we look at today's civilized world we get the impression that people create from two sources: on the one hand out of what is taught as so-called serious, exact knowledge, accepted on authority because on authority everyone accepts knowledge if they have not themselves worked within the subject of the knowledge in question, and therefore this knowledge is mostly accepted. Besides this, people surrender to their popular publications regarding how they should think about facts regarding astronomy, physics and chemistry, about biology, zoology, mineralogy, botany, history and so on, and more besides, submitting to it all and agreeing to be informed in such a way that they can say: All this must be true because it originates from the people who are in control of things through familiar instances of authority and so we accept whatever else flows from their various declarations. Proposing the creation of a bridge between the two is kicked out, because these declarations mostly instruct people to keep knowledge and faith separate and in no way try and merge them. Rising out towards a conscious penetration of these facts is rarely found. Efforts are necessary throughout to recognize scientific authorities arriving through the usual channels to presenting exact knowledge. However, one is inclined not to research these things in order to prove how they really relate to their creation through their scientific methodology.

On the other hand one is disinclined to research the origins of knowledge propagated through tradition which today is offered by official representatives. Awakening fully consciously towards what actually is presented rarely happens. When it does happen it very seldom results in seeing the issue in its true light. Should we accept it offends someone if we oppose what is termed dogma within the Catholic or Protestant denomination, regarding this dogma as “nonsense,” then we are opposing it for the sake of it and at the same time rejecting traditional confession, without finding the possibility to replace it with an alternative.

An example of dogma—I want to refer to a central dogma—is for instance that of the Trinity, the threefold personality of the godly Being. Whoever finds a dogma such as this presented through the denominations, finds it easy to some extent to oppose it according to today's scientific way of thinking. This expression can easily be revealed as “nonsense” in such a dogma. Whoever does go back to the way such a dogma was created will find that dogmas of common confessions have for a long time been propagated within humanity and that the point of origin of these dogmas, often characterized as humanity's earlier evolutionary steps according to instinctive clairvoyance, atavistic clairvoyance, are there, by looking into the spiritual world. Out of such clairvoyance these dogmas have emerged and one can say that something like the Trinity dogma has emerged out of deep, thorough insights within the structure of world existence. At one time this dogma of the Trinity was a deeply recognized truth. It presented a deep insight into the relationship of reality. However this was during ancient times when within the soul's abilities the powers of an instinctive clairvoyant knowledge fitted within such a dogma. This dogma then spread itself. It no longer fits into the current teachings of human soul forces. As a rule each person who has experienced this dogma from its origins has since then gone through several earthly incarnations. Souls had various experiences during these incarnations. In the outer world this dogma has been retained, transmitted from one generation to the next. Today it has taken on a form through words used to proclaim it which no longer can be understood. Now these souls are born again and come across this dogma in church. There is no human relationship between on the one side what the confession of the human soul is met with and on the other side what the soul from within itself strives to experience and to know. What works so badly at present is not that the dogmas are false but that the dogmas are in a form trapping the truth which in today's time are obsolete and thus the dogmas no longer offer what the soul of today needs. Thus we can say: these dogmas are preached today as if breathed by the wind.—Even those who inwardly confess to them do not apply these confessions as soul truths because they don't understand them for the most part. By accepting something which is not understood, creates an inner falsehood. As a result of this inner untruth so much damage has been done through the falsehoods in the world.

The results of untruthfulness within humanity in the last few years have really been immeasurable. Basically it shouldn't surprise us that this is so, from the simple basis that when the soul lives in falsehood the ego can be recognised as not having any sense of truthfulness in outer life. This should be kept in mind by all those who believe today that they should uphold traditional declarations. This is quite a serious situation with which we need to deal in this area.

Regarding dogmas, one could say the souls who have experienced various earthly lives where these dogmas were current, have grown out of them since they were formulated. Just as I have mentioned in the last two lectures that we need to be serious about these things, so we must during the examination of repeated earthly lives be serious. Vitally serious.

Just look from the same point of view at what humanity is given today through physical science. Here knowledge is being formed from purely physical sense perceptions. This has to be joined with what lives in the soul which has to fill itself with something which is merely sense perceptible material.

Examine how a living person stands within his or her life. They carry within them a soul which has gone through earthly lives and now don't find any connection to outer religious declarations. They connect however in certain areas of their life with what today is recognized as scientific. The question must be asked: What happens in the human soul when it connects with this recognised, merely physical sensory aspect of observable science? The soul, now integrated in the physical organism, had during an earlier incarnation incorporated quite a different relationship to nature, to the environment and the relevant world which cannot today be found in this knowledge. Only relatively few presently incarnated souls can be discovered who were not sufficiently incorporated in their former life in such a way as to relate to a definite knowledge containing spiritual imaginations, as I mentioned about natural phenomena, by incorporating a spiritual element. The sheer abstract science which has developed over the last three to four centuries didn't exist before. Not so very far back the kind of natural science existing then was such, even though it contained a sense perceptible element, it also contained within it something permeated by the spiritual. As a result many people who don't accredit it with anything special, presently with physical sense perceptible science don't find anything satisfactory about science, so they leave it lying and don't bother about it, or go digging and researching all kinds of tomes, what Basilius Valentinus or some or other person had handed out for natural science. It is true that all kinds of spirituality lived within the imagination about nature it at that time, but today, deep respect is only stirred within those who engage with it and just because it is not understood it is regarded most profound.

The important thing here is that even today's incarnated soul has no real relationship with ancient wisdom and with what goes on through the rest of life which is already fed, even grafted in school, in some or other form coming from sense perceptible observations. What is really presenting itself here if one considers the inner aspect?

Within our body we have the soul which has been in previous lives yet we come to some extent into our body without having any relationship to what the soul had experienced in a previous life. Throughout various earthly lives—as a necessity for the development of freedom—the soul developed in such a way that it was emptied of all it had absorbed before, in order not to have a relationship any longer to anything taken up earlier and thus have available capacity for what is actually living in the world at present. Our soul no longer brings with it anything from former earthly lives. We do bring results of our moral qualities with us but basically not what has lived in us from earlier earthly lives from which any kind of innate knowledge of world secrets could result. Today souls do not enter bodies in the same way it happened in Greek times. Souls who incarnated during the Hellenistic time entered life with still some old empowered knowledge which enlivened the body with soul spiritual life forces. Today this is not the case. Today the soul enters the body in a way which is consumptive. To an ever increasing degree this is the case; the souls which are born today has some destructive influence and lame the body, gradually dragging death forces through it. If evolution is to continue this way it will lead to the undermining and decline of earthly life. People would become weaker and weaker in their will forces. People will appear less and less able to have a grasp for detecting active impulses. People will gradually go through life like automatic detectors. How sad this is that we have to see the future in this way, and how seldom it happens that people are inwardly fired up through lively ideas. How often we find that people at present can be said to suffer from a soul sclerosis, turning out dead ideas and only allowing their minds to accept tradition and thus becoming machines.

It is really like this: if we go with an unprejudiced attitude through life and observe how people are placed in life, we can basically not differentiate, one person from another, amongst dozens of them. We can actually not tell them apart. We talk to A, to B, and then with C and they all say the same thing. Each one individually believes in having said something particular, but we can't find any particular difference between them, they all say the same thing. We actually only have one kind of human being in a variety of copies, and we can ask ourselves: Are we not being deceived—isn't what we talked about today the same as yesterday's conversation?—This corresponds completely to the observation of consecutive earthly lives in relation to our present earthly life. The soul no longer brings with it what it had in earlier lives, which went from one earthly life to the next and ever again appear, although with a decreasing power which is like an innate wisdom. That is no longer there. When we consider such souls and their connection to the external, sense perceptible scientific observation, then we see they are packed with transitory wisdom; with a wisdom which when expressed in imaginative ideas, is regarded as transitory. In order to conceal this fact by a terrible illusion, the old “Law of conservation of matter” in the nineteenth century was reinvented by the “Law of the conservation of energy.” This law was made up to conceal that there is nothing which can be conserved in nature, that everything is transient, even matter and energy. Nothing is left over for the soul when it is reincarnated in the future as a human machine; the soul being crammed with sensory observation and scientific material, because this fails to exercise anything alive and gives no fructifying power to the soul.

The soul born today comes over from an earlier earthly life, eager to be fructified by something which in turn will help it progress in its next earthly life. However the absorption of knowledge stemming only from the perishable offers a soul death; murders the soul. This is something which must be considered in all earnestness today, when the idea continues that non-understanding can relate to obsolete dogma, that only laming, deadening can come through non-spiritually penetrated scientific knowledge, and that the soul must experience a second death, suffer a soul death. It depends on individuals and on humanity, to rejuvenate their souls. Humanity dare not choose some comfortable passive attitude and say: I am an everlasting being, and the everlasting kernel of my being will preserve me forever through all circumstances.—This doesn't correspond to the effect of reality. The everlasting kernel within human beings exists of course but it has to be fructified in this decisive age if it doesn't want to be destroyed. There is no other way to keep the soul alive than to break free of mere sensory scientific observations and to justify a true spiritual science and to see how in all sensory observations the spirit is alive even in relation to physical facts. It comes down to not only registering purely sensory material but to promote what lives in everything that is sensory and penetrate it with spiritual imagination which actually lives within it and must not be excluded. As a result the souls coming out of a previous earthly life can take up this spirit-filled natural science, become fructified and thereby enable their vitality to be carried forward to the next incarnation. The continued existence of the soul, its health, in fact the continued existence of the soul life itself, the aversion to the soul death of humanity depends upon the spiritualization of our natural knowledge!

From of these facts and not out of any kind of prejudice today we are required to spiritualize natural science. When so many human beings turn against this spiritualization then this attitude, while ignorant about the actual meaning of these facts, are spurred on by minds we all well know about, in order to assert themselves so much more in their human nature, thus reducing what souls bring with them from earlier incarnations. Out of the entire grain of our present lives where the spiritual is being composed out of not only spiritual science but also sense perceptible knowledge, it is apparent in the most absurd sense that repeated antagonistic acts are against the intention to spiritualize natural science. It can't be stressed often enough how necessary it is in our time to deeply and inwardly understand such things—and if I dare use such a word—modify such facts. We can't take this seriously enough that today there's a rejection of spiritually permeated scientific knowledge, whether it comes across in the manner which I've heard mentioned—I don't know to what extent it is connected to the truth—through a decision by colour supporting students who boycotted lectures in the last weeks or if it appears in some other form. Today one can collect a whole jolt of writings opposing spiritual science. Dark, unsavoury streams validate that these things like to slumber and yet relatively soon they will become strongly apparent. Today it is much more comfortable to be unaware of things than being aware of them. However we no longer stand at a point where we can undo the past and remain uncommunicative to the world. This can no longer be allowed. The only way now is forwards. However this forward striving is connected to an active participation which can take on ever more evil forms—one can no longer call them discussions, but let us do so—“discussions” of the time. Only if we succeed from a strong basis, only if each one does his or her part and can come together, representing spiritual science and not be shy, everywhere unreservedly characterize it in an unconcealed manner where hidden aspects let hostility rise against spiritual science, only then can we hope to survive. It deals far less with only the literal interpretation of hostility against spiritual science, being caught up and acting defensively against it. It is certainly in one way or another necessary but it is not enough. Ultimately it is only a secondary appearance—when out of foolish misleading or misunderstanding ill-willed hostility rises against spiritual science. This is to some extend something secondary which naturally needs to be placed in the right light. Secondary it's obvious—I have recently mentioned it in an open lecture—what such people like Frohnmeyer have to say regarding the main statue group in Dornach, which can be experienced as a Christ figure: “In Dornach can be found a `Statue of the ideal human being' with above a `luciferic' trait and below one with animal characteristics.”—It is certainly necessary to point this out but ultimately not only to merely defend spiritual science but from a far deeper, more meaningful foundation. Whoever is capable of presenting such a terrible falsehood in the world, damages humankind in everything which is written and spoken, where it works instructively on mankind. Not only is it most significant that such a bludgeon of a lie is spoken but it is most significant that a person today is capable of such a strong lie as a symptom of paths mankind followed earlier. Attacks on spiritual science are recognisable according to how today's sense of truth is grasped. As a result, wider field work should be carried out in the spiritual realm. This is what it comes down to. We dare not shrink back from encountering this lack of a sense of truth on all fronts. Humanity must learn to understand that only with a real sense of truth can one work into the future when the soul has to find the way through this incarnation into the incarnation of the next age. Today this doesn't involve some kind of formality but actually the real life of the soul through consecutive earthly lives. If you search you will find the connection between every earlier characterized falsehood in thinking—in outer encountered confessions of the soul, without an inner connection with the truth—and the falsehood of the outer world. Actually it is quite an amazing phenomenon that such falsehoods come to the fore so strongly particularly in those—which doesn't mean I want to say they are not present in colleagues of other faculties—who pose as teachers of mankind, who should be the great Keepers of the Seals of religious truths.

This is the primary responsibility of today's humanity who strives for some kind of relationship with a spiritual life: to seek out cultural historical falsehoods. It is extraordinary how deeply these cultural historical falsehoods are taken up. They are a characteristic of our time. From out of politics where it has sown its foul marsh plants it has finally penetrated into other areas. Already the condition has arisen that people can hardly differentiate between truthfulness and falsehood in relation to certain phenomena of life. You see, step by step a certain life phenomenon plays into falsehood in daily life which plays a role in both daily life as well as in the greater affairs of life. Finally falsehood today itself has sprung from the same tendency, unconcerned whether it appears amongst enlightened men—certainly lit by a strange light—who gather in Geneva, or whether it appears in various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossipers. Whatever has lived as spirit in Geneva's various bourgeois and proletarian coffee-gossiping found it a popular falsehood, and I might mention in parenthesis—those present should not take it as evil—those who are within the Anthroposophical movement haven't quite been ratted out. This untruthfulness is a cultural phenomenon of the present and needs to be examined. Above all it should in no circumstances be excused but should be characterized before the contemporaries are revealed. We repeatedly experience that when something appears out of a pressing urgency and point to these things, that individuals within the anthroposophical movement, while finding these things uncomfortable, while they must live within this falsehood and as a result experience the characteristics of falsehood and find if highly uncomfortable some way or another, always take this characteristic of untruth as evil.

These things I have spoken about today should be thought about in relation to my two or three previous lectures related to the reincarnation of souls into today's civilised world, as well as to the interests present in part of humanity, that decisive element which wants to connect with humanity in the present age, and not to allow it to come close to humanity, can give an understanding of the immense seriousness of the task of our time within which we stand.

These present tasks are permeated with the deepest earnestness. Because of this, because it is so essential to examine these points of view on our home ground, I had spoken about things in conclusion and how painful it is for me that today so much time is taken into account without the simultaneous possibility of continuing the earlier anthroposophical work, as it was accessible just before this need—a requirement it is indeed—to work through these things which have often been spoken about and even today do actually exist. If we should want to place ourselves really in the right relationship with these things then it is necessary, imperative from out of the spiritual beings of present tasks.

Today we must make it increasingly clear: Our friends have engaged themselves in the anthroposophical movement in manifold ways since its inception at the start of the twentieth century. The anthroposophical movement is something which is not only a reality on the physical plane but which forms an uninterrupted ingredient of the spiritual worlds, a direct part of the spiritual world. Obviously outer practical participation is also a part of the spiritual worlds but not in the sense as it is within the anthroposophical movement. Regarding this, I want to say a few words.

The anthroposophical movement continues in its spiritual aspects whether the people representing it are hardworking or lazy; whether they make the effort to work progressively or against progress, going forward quicker or slower, yet they remain present in their spiritual reality. Because it has become necessary to bring about practical things in life which have grown out of the demands of the present, it appears different with these things. These things must be done at their allotted time, because it is impossible to cope with them when they are not completed at the right time. For things in practical life it can be so that when done in a slow trot, they simply happen too late. Within the anthroposophical movement one has in many cases become accustomed to things happening slowly or quickly. It is becoming more often the practice that what has been acquired here is being applied to things where the same practice is unsuitable. This is precisely what lies at the foundation of what I have recently wanted to characterise, by my indication to create a renewed possibility for that from which everything finally flows namely the anthroposophical movement, and maintaining it as such. How long have I already pointed out that it is not possible to have personal interviews now? Yes my dear friends, we have in the last days of the past week—very few people really work in practical matters—we have filled our days until three in the morning. People still turn indignant when their wishes are not taken into account after a personal meeting. However I'd like to know where the time should come for that. It has to be understood. For this reason no kind of casual manner should exist in anthroposophical life—just the opposite—a life enforcing strength comes from the anthroposophical life. As you are guaranteed that such empowerment comes from anthroposophical life, then other necessities will impact on practical life by themselves. Above all else this re-strengthening must come. This empowerment must come in such a way as to drive out all dreaminess from the soul. Whatever is brewing in some or other island of life, not bothered by what is going on in life today, is exactly what lames the pursuit of real tasks. These tasks are paralyzed when people on the one hand remain blind, sleepy towards what is happening in outer events around them and on the other, their salvation, even though this is more the lust of their soul becoming involved in all kinds of alien mystical problems on their island of life.

I'm touching on something extraordinarily important, something which is a direct application of ideas regarding the great tasks of our time and our own movement.

Every one of us must work together towards the enlivening of the anthroposophical movement. We can only work towards the strengthening of the anthroposophical movement when we cultivate a free and open insight for what causes decline in the greatest part of our cultural life. Anthroposophists for the most part don't worry about the appearances of decline. They don't get anything out of turning to the force permeating our civilization today which steers it towards the abyss. Despite it not wanting to be heard on the one side, on the other side it is again forgotten, I have to ever again point out that things do not improve on their own. Today's contemplative brooding, which is a kind of transcendental demonstration with many, is something which harms us tremendously. Instead of shaking up the will and saying to yourself: `I will do this'—contemplation persists whether here or there the relationships are such that something could be done.

My dear friends, at the beginning of the (20th) century the way the anthroposophical movement was thought about is not the way you would think about it today. Clever people who appeared at that time would have stipulated how things must work, and the cleverer ones would have distinguished between Schwabing and Munich, and everyone could hear the grass grow which indicated who could procure which area. Then some came who had discovered extraordinary relationships in Hannover and Frankfurt. This was encountered all over the place. If someone had really listened then no one would have taken a single step. At the time it was already a wicked thing but today, where much is dealt with in everyday practical life, it is even more evil because today it is not about tracking down such grass growing but that we engage our will forces to do something, to really work. It is of course tremendously easy to say: `I sense the transcendental atmosphere of this or that place, that one could do this or that ...' It is much easier than doing something. One should hardly ever apply the external and as far as possible bring about the inner approach. This is something which of course can't be stressed enough.

With anthroposophical seriousness encouraged, the real power can be cultivated in our relationship to external things and these must be encountered with real interest. We need to know after all what is going on in the world—and there are many things that do advance. Yet in our circles it is amazing how few are concerned with what is happening.

I want to highlight a deplorable fact. This fact has many causes but there is only enough time today to list a few. Clearly the subscription to our magazine for three-foldness hasn't increased by a single one. In addition our membership comprises thousands and thousands of members. It is really very sad that such a fact must be recorded. Yet this is a fact and this is only one of them. Do you believe that it is quite true to say that the opponents are the other guys and they are at their posts everywhere? These machinations are spreading around us. I say these things not without care and not without caution for what we should incur today, when we don't summon all the individual strengths we have. We need them. We must be steeped in so much anthroposophy that we can get to it or we will be too late. On the other hand I don't see that what has to be undertaken is being done, to then only lapse by saying that we got to it too late.

There is much beauty in the advancing, above all in the participation, of some students in our striving. From this very area the most fruit can develop when these things are met with real, true understanding but we must be clear about how these things should be met. Nebulous mysticism is out of the question. It depends on how something is met out of one's inner life's diligence.

So this and much more can be said today but I think that whatever else you need can be discover within yourselves when you develop a train of stimulated thought and take it further. In order for you to develop further is the issue I want to pose as my preliminary wish at the conclusion of this last agreement. Now the times are such that I can't express such a wish in what is to be fulfilled in years to come but that I can only look for the weeks when I can be here again. Basically the situation is like this, that we really use our time, that actually not a single week can be lost because we have not used it.

Therefore my dear friends, I would like to say two things in conclusion: first I want to express the wish that what I have said today must be understood until our next meeting, and secondly, that our next meeting can take place as a result of things which have been aligned with this wish. With this in mind I wish you farewell!