The Rudolf Steiner Archive

You will have seen in the last lecture that efforts were directed towards presenting certain conceptions (which we can make our own out of Spiritual Science), in such a way that they can be of service to us in grasping what surrounds us, daily and hourly, in present-day civilisation. If We want to add yet another to these considerations, as a final one, it can be summed up only thus: significant characteristics of our present time have been selected and brought into connection in various ways with what has sounded forth as the keynote of these studies.

If we determine to keep in mind what seems to stand out particularly in our time, we shall find that of all the limiting and hindering factors to-day, the worst is that the mode of thought and comprehension evolved during the recent centuries leads men to have little foresight of coming events. This is shown by the fact that most events come as a surprise, in the most curious way, and it is quite impossible to gain credence for anything that is foreseen. It is considered inevitable that remarkable events should take people by surprise. Speak of what is to come, and people are astonished , or they make ironical remarks about the apparent longing for some sort of prophecy. Suppose that anyone wished to call attention to conclusions such as may result from hypotheses like those we have lately brought forward here—for instance, what now looms over the world from the Far East—he would at present encounter little understanding or belief, although the fact already throws its shadow all too clearly before it. Far too little need is felt for a clear view into things. Connected with this is man's disinclination to admit the truths which, within the only circles open to them, point to future events.

Of course there is no question here of any kind of “soothsaying”; or of any sort of prophecy in the bad sense, but always an earnest, scientific method of thought and conviction derived from Spiritual Science. If we wish to ruminate upon the causes of this trend of the present day characteristic just mentioned, we may perhaps have to go far afield for them. Man as a rule is absolutely unconscious how far the causes of the thing lie from what appears as its effects . He generally looks for the causes much too near at hand.

If we are to look for causes of what has just been described, they must be sought in a tendency deeply ingrained in the human soul at the present time—a tendency towards dead conceptions and ideas devoid of life and vigor. It should be comprehensible that to think of the future, the imminent, with the same ideas as on the past, the determined, is impossible; but at the present time, value is attached only to what, in the current phrase can be “proved” and this question of proof is tied down to the special kind of proof which is popular today. Anyone who rightly understands this kind of proof knows that it applies only to truths connected with things in the universe which are in the process of dying. Therefore the only science or knowledge desired in the present age is concerned with what is dying and perishing—especially so in the case of those who claim to be the most enlightened. They welcome only a will bent in that direction. If we are not conscious of this, we are really preferring—in the widest sense of the words—to deal only with what is passing away. We lack the courage to think in terms of growing, becoming, for what is growing refuses to be grasped with the narrow, limited conceptions capable of being “proved”, which are suitable for what is passing away. So people protect themselves against the reproaches which are really implicit in what I have just pointed out.

To speak against these things, as one must do, involves the danger of incurring the reproach of frightful fantasy, dilettantism, or perhaps even worse. Conceptions are sought which protect people from the obligation of thinking about anything fruitful, or endowed with seeds of life for the future. One idea, according to this view, must be received by those who hold themselves to be among the really intelligent leaders of thought: the idea of “the conservation of matter and energy” as understood at the present time. Quite comprehensibly, everyone is adjudged to be a duffer who does not admit this indestructibility of force and matter to be a truth underlying the whole of science. Yet it is a fact that if we sound the depths of a real view of the universe, what we call matter and force are perishable and transitory; and all science, all knowledge attainable on the subject, our investigations into the transitory. Because it is insisted that science has to be concerned with that, and that only, it is dogmatically asserted that something solid, something permanent and there must be: either matter—In spite of its being transitory—or energy. This law of the permanence of matter and energy plays a great part even for those who are not concerned to analyze it scientifically; such a part that is clothes everything with mystery. Our scientific education is such that the dregs of opinion on the subject of the conservation of matter and energy penetrate our popular literature and are treated by the ordinary reader as something obvious.

Now we know, through a cold science, of the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth-developments. Nothing of what is now called matter and energy will pass beyond the Venus evolution. Hence the most lasting kind of matter, that which reaches Venus, will then come to an end. We have just passed the middle of our world-evolution, as we view it, and are in the fifth period of the earth-evolution, beyond the middle of that; and we are already living in the setting.: that is, in the time of devolution, in which the vanishing of matter and energy comes to pass. The right you take as we studied physics and chemistry would be this—that the knowledge acquired through these sciences bears only upon the transitory, which at latest will disappear from the universe with the Venus-stage. In the whole purview the present-day science there is nothing which deals with the permanent; because by means of the ideas and concepts that can be “proved” in a manner favored today, it is impossible to discover only what in this sense is transitory. Man moves only in the transitory.

An essential reform is necessary in our ideas concerning this most essential sphere, and those who consider themselves particularly scientific have the most to learn before they can replace their current notions with correct ones.—Now why am I saying this, seeing that the matter in its general bearing may not perhaps seem particularly important?

It really is important, because according to the concepts which men assimilate in the way I have described, other concepts are formed in conformity with which they will; they direct their will-power. From the mode of thought thus acquired are begotten social and political concepts. These latter shape themselves in accordance with the characteristic use made of such forces—a use consisting in this, that only the transitory is dealt with in such conceptions, and this habit spreads into ideas concerned with the living. This crops up in a particularly striking way as we look at the main points of the programms put forth by many who confidently regard themselves as the very last word in advanced thought. For instance, the schemes of many Socialists, very much in the public eye nowadays, all more or less adopt the theory of Karl Marx as a starting-point. This theory is the calamity of Russia two-day, because—for reasons I explained last time—what happens there according to historical premises can ensue elsewhere from Marxism. This way of looking at things is an extreme form of the determination to deal only with transitory. Anyone who familiarizes himself with the ideas of this school knows that the fanatical adherents of Marxism imagine themselves to be possessed of the ideas of the future, whereas they have only such as are directed to the transitory. This stands out naïvely in the so-called socialist view of life, for throughout it refuses admittance to ideas with a fruitful bearing on the future. It preaches the blessing of having none! The formula is repeated in many different ways:—Get rid of everything at present existing; then, of itself, without any reflection on the matter, something will result from the welter. This is unequivocally stated. But although it comes from the looks of those who have been brought up in Church doctrines for centuries and who do nothing but trace the events of the last centuries according to the Church, they must nevertheless say the following.—In truth this view refuses to entertain ideas with any germ of life in them: the only ones it admits are concerned with what is passing away; and the only effect of these ideas is to complete the process of destruction. Men believe they possess productive thoughts; that is all to no purpose unless the concepts are rooted in reality. These ideas are useless for establishing anything new; all they can accomplish is to turn destruction into an institution. This Socialism seems to me like a lady (a bygone person to-day) who cannot endure a crinoline. She hates the wide skirt and wants to alter it. But what does she do? She pads it out; so that it looks just as before, but is a stuffed out with wadding inside. Just so these Socialists: they never think of fertilizing what history has achieved with new concepts; they leave it alone—and themselves take the place of the former administrators. They hang on to the crinoline, but stuff it out. Look even at extremist views—they are simply a longing to administer what is perishing and dying out! To what is this due?

It is due to the fact that with the concepts of present-day science, concerned merely with things of the senses, based on the intellect, taking account only of material perception, all that one can encounter is the transitory, not the living. Only what is already dying can be grasped; nothing that is seed-bearing, growing. For the germinating, growing element must be grasped at least through Imagination, the first stage of higher knowledge; as described, for instance, in the book, “Knowledge of Higher Worlds.” And to attain to still higher knowledge of the “becoming”—Inspiration and Intuition must be applied. Those who approach such things with the outfit of ideas held hitherto may talk as much as they wish—they are only talking of laws which apply to what is on the way to destruction, unless they let themselves admit what super-sensible knowledge alone can reveal as the “becoming”. Things too-they are on a razor's edge. It is impossible to know anything on certain subjects, and civilization must fall into chaos if we are satisfied to live in it without admitting any vision of the spiritual.

What we need, and what is striven for through Spiritual Science, is a sort of revival of the Mysteries, in a form adapted to the modern mind. Unless we understand the meaning of the ancient mysteries, we shall not fathom the meaning of the epoch which is intermediate between them and what must come as the new form of the Mysteries. Comprehension of all this is necessary. The most startling experience for the pupils of the old Mysteries was to be shown clearly how the old atavistic, clairvoyant, hidden knowledge was doomed to extinction. This could not be grasped by observation, it had to be revealed in the Mysteries, where people were shown that something different from the old clairvoyant vision into the Spiritual World's was destined to become man's possession. There it was disclosed to the pupils of the Mysteries that this old capacity of the human soul, this vision of cosmic expanses in Imaginations, was dedicated to death. This was made them somewhat in the following way.—What can be perceived by physical senses on earth is not the content of the genuine Mysteries of the earth-existence; this is revealed only when the human soul ascends in the clairvoyant contemplation to Mysteries of the cosmos, of the super-earthly, and the cosmic events beyond the sphere of earth, unfold before it.—The ancient seers grasped all that, but not what happened on earth. The pupils of the tapestries were shown depth knowledge of that type, ascending into the Cosmos, would no longer be possible; and still more was disclosed to those who were to penetrate into the Christ-Mystery.

Something like this conception came to them: “Although the old seers did not speak of ‘the Christ,’ their inspirations came from the world in which Christ always was, for He is a Cosmic Being. He dwells in everything Cosmic and universal, in the whole content of man's old atavistic clairvoyant vision; but from the time when the Mystery of Golgotha is due to be enacted, all this will be no longer accessible to mankind in the old way.”

What happened? The Christ descended from the world of the cosmos to the earth. Because the cosmos was no longer accessible to men as in ancient times, because Christ was no longer to be found in the old way, because the kind of knowledge and state of soul with which men had formerly looked at the world was dying out, but Christ had to come down to them. He came to the earth. Everything, therefore, which enlightened spirits had ever known of the spiritual world in ancient times through the pagan tapestries and through pagan Mystery-knowledge, was summed up in the Christ, and could be beheld in Him. The one all-important thing was to recognize the Cosmic Being, Who in Christ descended to the earth from the cosmos. That was one point.

The other was this. Remember that through the intellect and of the senses only the transitory can be observed in all the array of systems, whether of nature, of social structures or of civilizations, and that transitory knowledge will endure no farther than the Venus-existence. But learned men, believing that their ideas point to the future, are very often immersed in what is passing away. And what the senses perceive and the intellect grasps there is no seed of the future; all of it is doomed to perish. If the only knowledge were concerned with that, there would be nothing but knowledge of death; because the actuality which surrounds us is itself doomed to death. Where shall we find the “enduring”? Where is the imperishable which shall outlast this existence, apparently permanent but doomed to die? While Adamson forces, to which materialistic superstition attributes permanence, betray their impermanence and fall to ruin, where is the imperishable to be found?

In man alone! Amongst all the beings, animals, plants, minerals, air, water, and everything that perishes, there is but one thing which will outlast the Earth-evolution and the evolution to follow it—that which lives in man himself. Man alone on earth bears within him an enduring element. One cannot speak of the permanence of atoms, matter, force, but only of the permanence of something in Man. This, however, can be seen only through Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. All else, perceived by our vision, is fleeting. The material, the physical, is entirely transient; the super-sensible, which outlives it, can be perceived only by super-sensible vision. In man, as he treads the earth, lies all that will be saved out of the entire Earth-existence. If we asked: “Where is the germ of something which will continue to grow on after the Earth, Jupiter, and Venus developments—from the present civilization into the future?” The answer must be: “In nothing external on earth; only in man”. In the part of his being accessible only to super-sensible knowledge, man is the cradle of the seed for the future. Only someone who is willing to include the super-sensible in his view is able to speak correctly of the future; otherwise he must err. Thus the Christ, dissenting from worlds becoming more and more inaccessible to human knowledge, had to unite Himself with Mankind—to take up His abode in Jesus of Nazareth and become Christ-Jesus, so that in a human body there might dwell that which bears within it the future of the Earth-development. So we have in Christ the Cosmic Being, that Cosmic Being whom ancient knowledge alone could grasp directly; and in the Jesus to whom the Christ came, we have what henceforth bears within it, in human will alone, the seed for the future. He cannot be comprehended purely as “Christ”, nor as “Jesus”. To speak of the “Christ” only, is not to comprehend Him; for the “Christ” of—for example—the old Docetics (a certain sect of Gnostics) belongs to the old atavistic clairvoyance and can no longer be laid hold of. And “Jesus” cannot be understood without taking into account the Christ Who drew into him. Unless we give due weight to this fact of the Christ in Jesus, we cannot grasp that only through the human seed on earth can the cosmic be saved for the future.

To understand how far Christ-Jesus is this double Being is a great task; but at the same time many have taken pains to create obstacles to such an understanding. In modern times it has been a question of inducing forgetfulness of indwelling of Christ in Jesus by all sorts of means. On one hand there is the extreme theological teaching which only and always speaks of “the simple man of Nazareth”, the man of physical nature, not of that Man who has in himself the seed for the future. Further, there is the Society founded to combat the Christ, and with that came to set up a false picture of Jesus: the Jesuit Society, which virtually aims at testing out the Christ-concept from the Christ-Jesus concept, and to install Jesus alone as an absolute ruler of developing humanity. We must see the connection of all this, for the different impulses here pointed out work and present-day life more than is supposed, and very intensely. Without open eyes and a longing to understand the concrete events around one, it is impossible not to be taken by surprise by what happens; a clearer view of such things as I have mentioned will be lacking. Our own time is in many respects too indolent to wish to achieve clarity; the concepts of Spiritual Science are too hard to compass, and are stigmatized status dilettante, unscientific, fantastic and the like. They are condemned for the reason, I have mentioned, because of the determination to take no account of what is really significant for the future.

Thus we see around us to-day this dreary waste in the midst of the chaos into which the old religious creeds and currents of thought have led. Within this chaos, which people with curious supposed to call “war” (a work which has ceased to be applicable for a long time now), we see an array of lifeless, barren thoughts and ideas, because fertile ones can come only from comprehension of the super-sensible, the spiritual. Man two-day has to choose between cultivating the vanishing, the dying, ending by becoming a pupil of Lenin—it's taking into account the super-sensible, wherein abides what has to come in the future. I am not referring simply to the London works his mischief now in Eastern Europe—I taken more as a symbol, for we have many such Lenins around us and the whole environment of our daily life, in one domain or another. Yet the world refuses to take in hand anything except what is dying.

Remember something I once pointed out here, ‘the plant lives,’ I said; it can be described as a living being. But what does ordinary science describe as the plant? Not what lives in it, for that of super-sensible; but the dead, literal part of it, which “fills out” the living element. We find nothing else described by modern science but the mineral filling of the living being, which brings death to it. Genuinely fruitful concepts regarding nature are consequently unattainable to-day. The concepts of present-day botany have no life. All that they describe as something filled out with a stony mineral substance, which circulates inside. That can be described equally well in the animal and in man. All three kingdoms become entirely different as soon as one gets away from this circulating mineral substance.

For instance, a certain Herr Uexküll has written an article on “The Controversy about the Animal Soul”. He is possessed by masochistic savagery as regards all knowledge of the soul, or anything that suggests it. I said “masochistic savagery” because in this article he writes: “It is impossible to decide whether a soul exists or not: all that can be decided is that science can settle nothing on the subject”—an ordinary savage kills; but anyone who is masochistically savage, like this Herr von Uexküll, only “probes” the dead and makes sneering remarks. That is thoroughly typical of modern science; but it is not noticed, because nobody wants to admit it. People refuse to breakthrough the dividing wall between themselves and their environment; hence they cannot reach the ideas they really need in order to learn once more how to understand their environment.

We know from spiritual science that the essential being of man, the kernel of his life, descends from the spiritual worlds, and unites itself with what surrounds him as a bodily-material chief between birth and death, or rather between conception and death. The problems of conception, of birth, of embryology, are investigated to-day; but they cannot be truly investigated, because the research is directed only to the dead part of man, which is embedded in the living. This path will never lead to a grasp of what alone can make the human being understandable. When Man the Suns in this way from the spiritual world, he is “received” by father and mother, and goes through all the stages of his embryonic development. Science two-day assumes that the parents give the child existence; and since father and mother are the center of the family, and the family is the foundation of the community, therefore the communities, which are extended families, consider men as their own property. Thus a galling idea is brought into modern life—but it is not really true.

What, then, does the act of conception bestow upon man? What does he gain? A Spiritual Science shows, what he receives is the possibility of becoming a mortal being—of dying. You will see, if you think of what is to be found in my various books, that it is the necessary consequence. With conception there is implanted in man what makes his death possible here on earth. The whole of life from birth is a development towards death, and the seed of death is implanted at conception. What man is as “man”, as a living being, is not by any means engendered at conception; but the possibility of death is thereby grafted onto what would otherwise be immortal. Parents are called to give death of a child! That is the paradox—they give it a opportunity of bearing a mortal body on earth. What lives in that body comes from the spiritual world. This is what makes the organism—the whole mechanism with which man is clothed and which was received by him with seed of death at conception—capable of life. We must learn to recognize man in his most concrete embodiment as a part of spiritual world-development. Then we shall learn not to stand before the loftiest problems with cowardly fear, past present-day science does, but to grasp them positively. If we shrink back from them, we shall fail to understand even our immediate environment.

Round about us to-day, live the most varied peoples. Just think of the incorrect ideas, for example, created by Woodrow Wilson out of his conception of nations and the peoples—a theme with which you are familiar. We must be quite clear that we cannot understand this conception of the people unless we take in the whole of earth-evolution. Whence comes, then, a division of humanity into “peoples”? We know from Spiritual Science of evolution proceeded through a Saturn-embodiment of the Earth, then the Sun-embodiment, with the ancient Moon following that, and then the present Earth-condition; afterwards will come a Jupiter-embodiment, and so forth. The course of evolution, however, was not so straightforward that the old Saturn-body simply changed into Sun, Moon, Earth; at one time a severance of the present Sun from the Earth took place, then a severance of the present Moon, so that we have a continuous evolution, and something which was cut off reunited, and once again severed. A connection with what I have just called “Cosmic Evolution” this severance plates part in the old clairvoyance. And for the old clairvoyance the human seed the future remained “chthonic”, as it was called in the old clairvoyance is, quite unconscious. For what comes from the universe was destined to decay; it was maintained only because it had come under the grip of the Luciferic power. In this way, out of the cosmos reform the many variations in the nations and peoples, but the cosmic forces were impregnated with Luciferic forces. Over against these diverse peoples stand something which was understood in a better time than this—universal humanity. It has a totally different origin. It may be discussed in the abstract, but can be truly spoken of only as one genuinely understands what the seed of the future in humanity is . It has no taint of Nation or peoples; for it is that which did not come down from the Cosmos but which the Christ came to find, and with which He indicted Himself. Christ, unlike the Jehovah-Deity, United Himself with no nation but with universal humanity. He was in the confraternity of those Gods from whom the nations took their rise, but He left that realm when it was ready to pass away; He came to earth and took up His abode in humanity at large. When we say, “Not I but Christ in us”, it is the greatest blasphemy against Christ-Jesus to invoke Him for any need other than that of universal humanity.

A grasp of this fact belongs to the most momentous concepts for the future. We must perceive the connection of Christ Jesus with humanity, and also how everything purely national lies outside the realm of Christ-Jesus, for it is the ancient remains of what was right for extinction at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha. Yet, as we see withered fruit in the orchards, so do all things linger on after their right time. So we were bound to get the science which is concerned only with knowledge of what is on the way to extinction, and which—whether it be natural science or social science—deals and ideas that apply only to the transient, in nature or in cultural life. Often in the history of civilization one can see the conflict between the tendency to cling to what is passing away, and to present as important the dead, abstract ideas connected with it, and the wish to grasp that germinal essence of humanity which alone is pregnant of the future. I have often referred to the significant conversation between Goethe and Schiller when both were in Jena for a conference of a natural history society, at which Batsch the botanist had lectured on plants. As they left, Schiller said to Goethe, “The botanist's outlook dismembers everything; it ignores the connecting links”. Goethe, in a few descriptive sentences, put before Schiller his “Metamorphosis” of plants, but the latter said, “That is not an experience more observation—it is an idea.” To which Goethe answered “Then I see my ideas with my very eyes.” What he had been describing was visible to him, as real as a thing perceptible by physical senses. They confronted one another—Schiller, representative of the mind unable to look up to the spiritual, bemused by dead, abstract ideas; and Goethe, who wished to derive from knowledge of nature what is imperishable, vital for the future, the imperishable in humanity, of which all that is transient is merely an image. He wanted to unite the transient with its archetype, the real. He was not understood, for he looked on the super-sensible, the imperishable, as though it were perceptible to the senses. Thus the urgent need of our time is that Goethe's teaching should be more widely developed and further elaborated in its own sphere. Then things will become clearer, and we shall see that the particular creeds, whether Jewish, or more particularly the Catholic, are only the presuppositions of what is old and outworn, standing out in evolution as parched remnants, supported only from outside; and that side-by-side with these, interpenetrating them, stands Americanism, which wishes to carry the transient into the future. Therein lies the kinship between Americanism and Jesuitism, of which I spoke last time.

Standing in opposition to all this is Goetheanism. By this I do not mean anything dogmatically fixed, for we have to use names for things which far transcend them. By “Goetheanism” I do not mean what Goethe brought up to 1832, but what will perhaps be thought in the next millennium in the spirit of Goethe; which may develop out of Goethe's views, concepts and sentiments. It may be concluded, therefore, that in everything connected with Goetheanism, outworn beliefs sees its particular any. The most extreme paradoxes are to be found in this sphere. It really is a paradox to find that the cleverest book about Goethe whatever may be said to the contrary—has been written by Jesuit, Father Baumgarten. No details concerning him is neglected. The usual distinguishing mark of Jesuit work on the subject is hostility to Goethe: but this is a highly intelligent, painstaking book, not superficially written. Yet it has happened to Goethe to be portrayed as an ordinary citizen of the 18th century, born in 1749 at Frankfort-on-the-Main, who studied at Leipzig, was given a post in Weimar, traveled in Italy, live to be old, was incorrectly called it on both came good to “Johann Wolfgang Goethe;” this was how he was described in the work of a distinguished English Gentleman, Lewes—which was much admired. A book headed “Johann Wolfgang Goethe,” describing him as an ordinary 18th-century citizen, is no real book. A cultural paradox lies in the Jesuit's book on Goethe for the trend of opposing forces in modern times can be seen in it, and where the real ones are to be found.

A small way it shows itself amongst us. So long as we were reckoned a “hidden sect”, Anthroposophy was seldom attacked; but when it began to spread a little, virulent attacks began, especially from the Jesuits; and the Journal, “Voices from Maria Leach”, now called “Voices of the Time”, is not content with one article, but contains a whole series about what I've called Anthroposophy. I must warn you, again and again, attacks come from this side, not to believe that from the point of view of these writers, it is for our good when they say that we “speak of the Christ”, or that we “promote understanding of Christ”. They forbid that everything; it is exactly what must not be done; outside the doctrines of the Church, there must be no assertion about the Christ! No-one in our circles need be so naïve as to believe that by being a good Christian, he can propitiate the Church. Just because he is a good Christian, and does all in his power to advance Christianity, he arrays Catholicism against him as a supreme enemy. It becomes more and more necessary to take care that naïveté in these contemporary matters should disappear from amongst us. We must more and more firmly determined to realize what is active in the forces around us, whether they be in the ascendant or are declining. We must get beyond the longing, present among us in so many forms, simply to penetrate a little way into an imaginative world. I have often said that we must above all be able to place our Spiritual Science alongside modern concepts, and bring keen observation to bear on life as it is in the present age; because to gain true insight into this is possible only from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.

How many people come to me and say, “I have seen this or that”. Well they may well have done so. Imaginations are not so very distant. “Was that the Guardian of the Threshold?” many then ask. A simple yes and no does not answer questions on such matters, because the answers involve the whole of human development. But the answers are given. I am now correcting my Occult Science, for a new edition. I see that in it may be found everything necessary for the answering of such questions. Every precaution, every limitation to be observed is exactly described; the feelings to be developed, the experiences to be undergone, are all set forth. To elaborate the whole content of Spiritual Science would have required 30 volumes. This one must be read carefully, drawing the necessary conclusions—and it can be done. I do not like writing thick books. But read attentively and it will be found that this book indicates clearly that he endeavors to enter the super-sensible world strides towards meeting the Guardian of the Threshold; but the meeting is not so simple a matter as to have a dreamlike imagination. The latter, of course, is the easiest method of entering that world. The meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold is fraught with tragedy; it is a vital conflict as regards all intellectual concepts and laws, all man's connections with this virtual world and with Ahriman and Lucifer. This life-and-death struggle must be endured by him who would meet the Guardian of the Threshold. Should this experience come to a man merely as a dreamlike imagination, it means that, he wants to slip through comfortably, so as to have a dream out of the Guardian of the Threshold as a substitute—nowadays people are fond of substitutes the commission!—for the real thing.

We must think healthily on the subjects; and it will then become evident that healthy thinking can alone provide the basis of a remedy against all superstition, and against all the charges made by superficial opponents of Spiritual Science. Moreover, in this kind of thinking, in this raising oneself to experience on the spiritual, lie all the necessary seeds for finding the real way out of the present world-catastrophe.

The layout must be grasped—not in the realm of the earth and senses, not in institutions which are mismanaged and sucking the life out of what exists. The thing to be grasped does not exist! We must be stirred with burning zeal for the top attention of what does not yet exist!

This non-existent thing can be grasped only according to the pattern given by super-sensible knowledge. It cannot be grasped by looking into the past. Such men as Kautsky prefer to look back into the past, finding and “Anthropology” the ground-plan of mankind. They tried to study conditions at a time when man was hardly yet created in order to understand the social connections of to-day. These two sons of a misconceived Catholicism, such as Kautsky, want to have it so. But one cannot look back to the past, because in the past, those things which have extended into the very latest present, were created by means of atavistic forces, instinctively. In the future, nothing more will be achieved “instinctively”, and if man holds only to the products of ages of instinct, he will never attain to what bears the future within it, and can lead out of this catastrophe. An active, earnest understanding of the present depends entirely upon a right attitude to the spiritual world.

I should have to say much if, continuing in this strain, I were to speak to you about many things closely related to this present time. Yet if, in the weeks while we are separated, you will bring rightly be for your souls what has been said in these lectures, and which should culminate in realizing the necessity for knowledge of the twofold figure of Christ Jesus, you will go far this summer in meditative comprehension of the cosmic Christ and the earthly Jesus; remembering that the cosmic Christ descended from the spiritual worlds because these worlds were henceforth to be closed to man's view, and that man must apprehend what lies within him as the seed of the future. In the cosmic Christ and the earthly human Jesus and their union, lies much of the solution of the riddle of the world—at least of the riddle of humanity. In man lies the seed of future; but it must be fructified by Jesus. If it is not so fructified, it will assume an Ahrimanic form, and the earth will end in chaos. In short, in connection with the Mystery of Christ-Jesus we can find a solution of many, many questions to-day; that we must endeavor so to seek these solutions as not to be lightly contented with what is so often taken for “Theosophy” or “Mysticism”or the like—a “Union with a spiritual”, and “entire absorption in the all”—We must really visualize the true conditions surrounding us, and try to permit them with what we gain from Spiritual Science. We shall then say to ourselves over and over again, with regard to the answers to many questions: truly man today is seeking for something very practical, not merely theoretical; he will find himself in a blind alley in which he can go no further, if he does not go with the spirit. Everything which does not go forward with the spirit will wither away.

This is a weighty question for the future of mankind. Has man the will to journey with the spirit? I would fain impress this on your hearts today as the feeling which can arise from the reflections we have pursued.

Probably we are meeting to-day for the last time in this room, which we used so gladly for years as a place for our studies. It was one of the first to be arranged in keeping with our own taste, and one can only work according to the opportunities that exist. We fitted it up as we did because we were always convinced that endeavors on behalf of spiritual Science ought not to be mere theory but should be expressed in everything wherein we meet as human beings. The room is now to be taken from us and we must look for another. Obviously, under present conditions, we shall not be able to fit it up as we did this room, but we must be content with it. This room has become dear to us, for we have come to regard it as impossible to speak elsewhere of our relations with the spiritual as we can in this place, where in many ways we have tried to do the same things that are being attempted in Dornach on a larger scale. In times gone by we had to try all sorts of arrangements. Perhaps there are still a few here who were present when we had to speak in a beer-shop; I stood there, facing the audience, while behind me the landlord or landlady filled beer-mugs. Another time we were in a room like a stable: we had booked another, but that was all they gave us. In other towns I have lectured in places with no boards on the floor, and that too had to be put up with; it is not exactly what could be wished for as an outcome of our movement, and it would be a misunderstanding if it were said that we would just as soon speak of spiritual things in any surroundings. The spirit's task is to penetrate into matter, and to permeate it completely. That is the sense in which I have been speaking of social and scientific life to-day.

For all these reasons it will certainly be very hard part in a few weeks from this room, which was fitted up so devotedly with the help of our anthroposophical friends; but we must look upon such a parting in the right way, as a symbol. People will be obliged to part from much in the course of the next few decades. They will be taken by surprise, although they do not believe it. One thing will be deeply rooted in those who have grasped the deepest impulse of Spiritual Science. Whatever may be spoken, this cannot be shaken, and that is what we have grasped in the spirit, and what we have determined to do and accomplish in the spirit. No matter how chaotic everything looks, that will show itself to be the right thing.

So many leaving this place is symbol for us. We must move into another, but we carried away with us something of which we know that it is not simply our own deepest inner being, at the deepest inner being of the world, of which man must build if he would build a right. He who stands within Virtual Science is convinced that no one can take away, either from us or from humanity, what we have accomplished through it, and that it must lead to human affairs to a healthy condition ; this he knows, to this he clings. We may not as yet be able to say how we shall accomplish many things; but we may be sure that we shall accomplish them rightfully if we steep ourselves in the knowledge of what Goetheanism signifies for Spiritual Science, and if on the other hand we accept what has recently been mentioned here—that's the world stigmatizes and defames all that is connected with Mid-European civilization of the 18th and early 19th centuries, and that we, bringing all this before our souls, can nevertheless take our stand on our sure convictions: whatever happens, this Mid-European culture will be fruitful for the future of mankind, which indeed depends upon it. To save their own faces, because they have no wish for this feature of mankind, the opponents of this particular culture defame it; but let us grasp it in the spirit, recognize its inner spiritual content, knowing that we can build upon it. Then we shall be sure that though all devilish powers vow its destruction, yet it will not be destroyed! But only that can escape destruction which is united with the genuine spirit!

Introductory Comments to the Lecture Cycle The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity Copenhagen, June 5, 1911

The Mission of the New Revelation of the Spirit

In the next few days I will have the opportunity to speak here about a theosophical subject that is important to me, namely, the spiritual guidance of the individual and humanity. Since our friends here have asked me to, I will preface my lecture series today with a few comments that may serve as a kind of introduction to the subject.

Theosophists must have as a characteristic what we may call an inherent yearning for self-knowledge in the broadest sense. Even people only slightly familiar with theosophy can sense that such self-knowledge will give birth to a a comprehensive appreciation for all human feeling and thinking as well as for all other beings. This appreciation must be an indispensable part of our whole theosophical movement.^S1

Often people do not understand clearly that in our German theosophical movement what lights up our way is the sign you know as the mark of the Cross with Roses. It is easy to harbor misunderstandings about our spiritual, theosophical movement that seeks to live into the spiritual life of today—that is, into our hearts and their feelings, our will and its deeds—under the sign of the Rose Cross. People easily misunderstand our movement. Many people, even those with good intentions, have difficulty realizing that our spiritual movement, working under the sign of the Rose Cross, is inspired in all its principles—in its whole feeling and sensitivity—to be understanding and tolerant of every human striving and every aspiration. Though this tolerance is an inherent characteristic of the Rosicrucian movement, it may not be obvious at first glance, because it lies in its depths. You will find, therefore, that people who confuse tolerance with the one-sided acceptance of their own opinions, principles, and methods are particularly likely to misunderstand our movement.

It is very easy to imagine this tolerance; yet to attain it is extremely difficult. After all, we find it easy to believe that people who disagree with us are our opponents or enemies. Similarly, we can easily mistake our own opinion for a generally accepted truth. For theosophy to flourish and be fruitful for the spiritual life of the future, however, we have to meet each other on an all-inclusive basis. Our souls must be filled with profound understanding not only for those who share our beliefs but also for those who, compelled by the circumstances of their own experience, their own path through life, may perhaps advocate the opposite of what we do. The old morality, now on the wane, taught us to love and to be tolerant of those who share our thoughts and feelings. However, with its truth, theosophy will more and more radiate a much more far-reaching tolerance into people's hearts. This more profound tolerance will enable us to meet others with understanding and encouragement and to live in harmony with them, even when their thoughts and feelings differ completely from our own.

This touches upon an important issue. What do people come upon first when they turn to the theosophical movement? What are they compelled to acknowledge first? Normally, the general insight people encounter first when they approach theosophy is the idea of reincarnation and karma—the idea of the continued working of causes from one life into the next. Of course, this is not a dogma for us. Indeed, we may have different opinions about this basic insight. Still, the conviction of reincarnation and karma forces itself upon us right from the start of our acquaintance with theosophy. However, it is a long way from the day we first become convinced of these truths to the moment when we can begin, in some way, to see our whole life in the light of these truths. It takes a long time for the conviction to become fully alive in our soul.

For example, we may meet a person who mocks or even insults us. If we have immersed ourselves in the teaching of reincarnation and karma for a long time, we will wonder who has spoken the hurtful, insulting words our ears have heard. Who has heaped mockery upon us—or even who has raised the hand to hit us? We will then realize that we ourselves did this. The hand raised for the blow only appears to belong to the other person. Ultimately, we cause the other to raise his or her hand against us through our own past karma.

This merely hints at the long path from the abstract, theoretical conviction of karma to the point where we can see our whole life in the light of this idea. Only then do we really feel God within us and no longer experience him only as our own higher self, which teaches us that a tiny spark within us shares in God's divinity. Instead, we learn to be aware of this higher self in such a way that a feeling of unlimited responsibility fills us. We feel responsible not only for our actions, but also for what we suffer, because what we suffer now is after all only the necessary result of what we did in the far-distant past.

Let us experience this feeling pouring into our souls as the warm, spiritual life blood of a new culture. Let us feel how new concepts of responsibility and of love arise and take hold of our souls through theosophy. Let us recognize that is no empty phrase to claim that the theosophical movement arose in our time because human beings need new moral, intellectual, and spiritual impulses. And let us be aware that a new spiritual revelation is about to pour itself forth into our hearts and our convictions through theosophy, not arbitrarily, but because the new moral impulses and the new concepts of responsibility—and, indeed, the destiny of humanity—require such a new spiritual revelation. Then we can know in an immediate, living way that it has a coherent meaning for the world that the same souls present here now repeatedly lived on earth in the past. We have to ask what this meaning is—why are we incarnated again and again?

We find this meaning when we learn through theosophy that every time we see all the wonders of this world with new eyes in a new body, we get a glimpse of the divine revelations veiled by the sensory world. Or, with our newly formed ears, we can listen to the divine revelation in the world of sound. Thus, we learn that in every new incarnation we can and should experience something new on earth. We understand that some people are destined by karma to announce prophetically what all of humanity will gradually, bit by bit, accept as the meaning of an epoch.

What people in the Theosophical Society—and in the theosophical movement in general—know because of these revelations from the spiritual world has to flow into all aspects of human culture. The souls living in this world now in their physical bodies feel drawn to theosophy because they know that this new element must be added to what human beings have already gained for themselves from the spiritual world in the past. We must keep in mind, however, that in every epoch the whole meaning of the mystery of the universe must be understood anew. Thus, in every epoch we have to meet anew what is revealed to us out of the spiritual worlds.

Our epoch is unique; though people often carelessly characterize every age as one of transition, this term—which is often just an empty phrase—applies in its truest sense to our time. Indeed, an epoch is dawning when we will have to witness many new developments in the evolution of the earth. We will have to think in a new way about many things. In fact, many people still conceive many new things in the old style and the old sense, finding it impossible to grasp the new in a new way. Our old concepts often lag far behind the new revelations.

Let me point out only one example of this. It is often emphasized—and rightly so—that human thinking has made tremendous progress in the last four centuries because it has been able to fathom the physical structure of the universe. Of course, it is only proper to highlight the great achievements of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Bruno, and others. Nevertheless, this has led to an argument that sounds rather clever and goes roughly as follows. Copernicus's ideas have led us beyond the earth into space. In the process, what Giordano Bruno suspected has turned out to be true: our earth is only a small celestial body among countless others. And in spite of this, so the argument goes, we are supposed to believe that the greatest drama ever, the central event of evolution, took place on this earth and that the life of Christ Jesus is at the center of evolution. Why would an event of such great importance for the whole universe have been played out here on this small planet earth, which—as we have learned—is only one tiny planet among countless others?

This argument seems plausible—so much so that to our intellect it looks clever and intelligent. However, this argument does not consider the depth of spiritual perception revealed in the simple fact that the starting point of Christianity, the beginning of the greatest event on earth, is set neither in a royal palace nor any other glamorous place, but in a manger with poor shepherds. Clearly, spiritual perception did not content itself with locating this great event on our earth, but also moved it to a remote corner of the earth. It is small wonder, then, that this perception strikes us as odd and peculiar next to the claim that we cannot possibly continue to “have the greatest drama of world evolution take place in a provincial theater.” (These words have indeed been used.) However, it is in the nature of Christianity to have the greatest drama of the universe take place in a provincial theater as well as elsewhere.

We can see from all this how difficult it is for us to respond to events with the proper, true perception. We have to learn a lot before we will understand what the right thoughts and feelings about human evolution are. Turbulent times are ahead of us—both for the present and for the near future. Much of the old is used up and worn out, and the new is being poured into humanity from the spiritual world. People familiar with human evolution predict—not because they want to but because history compells them—that our whole soul life will change during the coming centuries and that this change will have to begin with a theosophical movement that has a correct understanding of itself. But the theosophical movement must fill its role in this change with humility and with a true understanding of what has to happen for humanity in the coming centuries.

Only gradually and over time did people learn to study the structure of the universe with their intellect as Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Kepler, and Galileo did. It was only in recent centuries that people learned to interpret the world intellectually—in earlier times, they attained knowledge in a very different way. In the same way, new spiritual insights are to supersede intellectual knowledge today. Even now, human souls in their bodies are already yearning to look at the world not just intellectually. If materialism had not done so much to suppress these spiritual impulses, such souls, in whom we can virtually sense the passionate yearning for spiritual contents, could appear even more. These spiritual impulses could then make themselves felt more strongly in people who are only waiting for an opportunity to look at the universe and existence in a different way than they did up to now.

Privileged people, endowed with what we usually call “grace,” can often see in their minds' eyes what becomes the general vision of all humanity centuries later. As I have pointed out frequently, the experience of the impulse of the Christ event that Paul, an individual filled with grace, had on the road to Damascus will eventually become the common property of all human beings. As Paul knew through a spiritual revelation who Christ was and what he had done, so all people will eventually receive this knowledge, this vision. We are at the threshold of the age when many people will experience a renewal of the Christ event of St. Paul. It is an intrinsic part of the evolution of our earth that many people will experience for themselves the spiritual vision, the spiritual eye, that opened up for Paul on the road to Damascus. This spiritual eye looks into the spiritual world, bringing us the truth about Christ, which Paul had not believed when he had heard it in Jerusalem. The occurrence of this event is a historical necessity. This is what has been called the second advent of Christ in the twentieth century. Christ will be recognized as an individuality. People will realize that Christ has continually revealed himself by coming ever closer to the physical plane—from the moment when he appeared to Moses, as though in a reflection, in the burning bush to the time when he lived for three years in a human body. Seeing this, people will understand that Christ is at the center of earthly evolution.

A body has only one center of gravity; a scale has only one suspension point.If you support the scale beam in more than one place, you interfere with the effects of the law of gravity. A body needs only one center of gravity. That is why, concerning the central or pivotal point of evolution, occultists from antiquity to the present have acknowledged that evolution was headed toward one point, namely, the Mystery of Golgotha, and that human evolution began its ascent at this point. Still, it is very difficult to understand what the Christ event, the Mystery of Golgotha, really means for the spiritual guidance of humanity. To understand this rightly, we have to silence all the feelings and opinions from this or that denomination within us. We have to be as impartial and objective in regard to the Christian methods of education, which have prevailed for many centuries in the west, as we are regarding other religious methods of education. Only then can we really come to know the spiritual center of the earth's evolution. Nevertheless, in the coming centuries those who proclaim the spiritual central point of human evolution most fervently will be seen as “bad Christians”—or even as unworthy of being called Christian at all.

Many people find even the idea that Christ could incarnate in a human body only once, and only temporarily—for three years—difficult to understand. People who have familiarized themselves in more detail with what Rosicrucian theosophy has to say about this know that the physical body of Jesus of Nazareth had to be very complicated to accommodate the powerful individuality of Christ. As we know, one human being would not have been sufficient for this, and therefore two persons had to be born. The Gospel of St. Matthew tells the story of one of them, the Gospel of St. Luke follows the life of the other. We know, too, that the individuality who incarnated into the Jesus child we meet in the Gospel of St. Matthew had completed tremendous achievements in its development in earlier earth lives. At the age of twelve, in order to develop further capacities, this “Matthew-Jesus” individuality left its body to dwell in another earthly body—that of the “Luke-Jesus”—until its thirtieth year. Thus, everything humanity had ever experienced that was noble and great, as well as everything that was humble, worked together on the personality of Jesus of Nazareth so as to enable his body to take in the being we call Christ. We will have to develop a profound understanding to grasp what occultists mean when they say that there can be only one event on Golgotha—as in mechanics a body has only one center of gravity.

An epoch that faces great soul events, such as the ones we have briefly outlined here, is particularly suited to lead us to search our souls. Indeed, searching our own souls and hearts is now one of the many tasks of all true theosophists in the theosophical movement. We need to search our own hearts and souls—return within ourselves—to help us realize that it requires sacrifice to follow the path to the understanding of that singular truth of which the occultism of all times has unambiguously spoken.

Such times in which the shining lights of truth and the warm gifts of love are to be poured out over humanity also bring events confirming the truth of the proverb that “strong lights cast deep shadows.” The deep, black shadows that enter together with the gifts we have just spoken of consist of the potential for error. The human heart's susceptibility to error is inseparably bound up with the great gifts of wisdom that are to flow into human evolution. Let us not delude ourselves, therefore, into believing that the erring human soul will be less fallible in times to come than it has been in the past. On the contrary, our souls will be even more susceptible to errors in the future than ever before. Occultists have prophesied this since the dawn of time. In the coming times of enlightenment, to which I could only allude here, the slightest potential for error as well as the greatest aberrations can gain ground. Therefore, it is all the more necessary that we squarely face this potential for error and realize that because we are to expect great things, error can all the more easily creep into our weak human hearts.

Regarding the spiritual guidance of humanity, we have to draw the following lesson from this potential for error and from the age-old warnings of occultists: We must exercise the great tolerance we spoke of in the beginning, and we must give up our habit of blindly believing in authority. Such a blind belief in authority can be a powerful temptation and can lead to error. Instead, we must keep our hearts open and receptive to everything that wants to flow out of the spiritual worlds into humanity in a new way. Accordingly, to be good theosophists, we must realize that if we wish to cultivate and foster in our movement the light that is to stream into human evolution, we must guard against all the errors that can creep in with the light.

Let us feel the full extent of this responsibility and open our hearts wide to see that there has never been a movement on this planet earth that fostered such open, loving hearts. Let us realize that it is better to be opposed by those who believe their opinion is the only true one, than to fight them. It is a long way from one of these extremes to the other. Nevertheless, those who take up the theosophical movement spiritually will be able to live with something that has run through all history as a seed sentence, a motto for all spirituality—and rightly so.

Upon realizing that though there is much light, the potential for error is great, you may have doubts and wonder how we weak human beings can find our way in this confusion. How are we to distinguish between truth and error? When such thoughts arise within you, you will find comfort and strength in the motto: The truth is what leads to the highest and noblest impulses for human evolution, the truth should be dearer to us than we are to ourselves. If our relationship to truth is guided by these words and we still make a mistake in this life, the truth will be strong enough to draw us to itself in the next incarnation. Honest mistakes we make in this incarnation will be compensated and redeemed in the next. It is better to make an honest mistake than to adhere to dogmas dishonestly. After all, our path will be lit by the promise that truth will ultimately prevail, not by our will, but by its own inherent divine power.

However, if our circumstances in this incarnation propel us into error instead of into truth, and if we are too weak to obey when truth pulls us toward itself, then it will be good if what we believe in disappears. For then it does not, and should not, have the strength to live. If we are honestly striving for truth, truth will be the victorious impulse in the world. And if what we have now is a part of the truth, it will be victorious, not because of what we can do for it, but because of the power inherent in it. If what we have is error, however, then let us be strong enough to say that this error should perish.

If we take this as our guiding motto, we will find the standpoint that enables us to realize that, under any circumstances, we can find what we need, namely, confidence. If this confidence imbues us with truth, then the truth will prevail, regardless of how much its opponents fight it. This feeling can live in the soul of every theosophist. And if we are to impart to others what flows down to us from the spiritual world, evoking feelings in human hearts that give us certainty and strength for life, then the mission of the new spiritual revelation will be fulfilled—the revelation that has come to humanity through what we call theosophy to lead human souls gradually into a more spiritual future.

• S1. For the sake of historical accuracy and to indicate the tone of the original, we have not substituted or added “anthroposophy” where Steiner speaks of “Theosophy” or “anthroposophical movement” where he speaks of “Theosophical movement.” Nevertheless, the continuity between Rudolf Steiner's theosophy and anthroposophy should always be kept in mind. (See note 1)

Today I should like to indicate the extent to which religious systems reveal, in specific instances, their hidden spiritual-scientific foundations.

It is a small but important aspect of the occult scientific basis of religions that I wish to discuss. Even the simplest people in contemporary society recognize this hidden background of religions as a spiritual fact involving the deepest truths. Seeking these truths brings to light how wisdom-filled and fraught with mystery are the ties binding together the spiritual life of mankind.

Think of Christian prayer. You all know what it is. It has often been spoken of, and anthroposophists have often reflected upon its relation to the spiritual-scientific world view. This spiritual-scientific world conception has brought to members of the anthroposophic movement another method of elevating the human being—the human soul—to contact with the divine, spiritual, cosmic forces. This method is meditation, by which a person experiences the spiritual content within himself, and receives something of what is given by the great guiding spirits of humanity or by the spiritual content of great civilizations in which the human being immerses himself and so identifies himself with the divine spiritual currents in the world.

Meditating in even the simplest way upon one of the formulas pronounced by the spiritual leaders of mankind, admitting to the mind a formula that embodies a great thought—not every thought is suitable, as you know, but only one handed down for this purpose by the guiding spirits of humanity—and letting such a formula really live in the heart and experience, brings a person to union with the higher spirituality. A higher power, in which he lives, streams through him, and patient perseverance to the point of letting this flow of power strengthen him enough morally and intellectually, brings him to the moment when the content of his meditation can awaken the deeper forces latent in the human soul. This kind of meditation may reach any of a number of stages, from the smallest gain in moral strength to the highest attainments of clairvoyance. But time, patience and energy are needed to bring most people to the higher degrees of clairvoyance by this means.

Meditation is usually thought of as an oriental approach to the divine. In the Occident, especially in Christian communities, prayer has taken its place. It is by prayer that the Christian customarily approaches the Divine, and through it he seeks entry to the higher worlds.

It should be noted by the way that what passes for prayer today would by no means have been considered such in early Christian times, least of all by the Founder of Christianity, Christ Jesus Himself. For if it were to happen that someone were really to gain the gratification of his personal wishes by prayer or entreaty, he would soon entirely disregard the all-embracing effect that the granting of the prayer should bring. He would assume that the Deity granted his wishes rather than those of others. One peasant might pray for sunshine for a particular crop; another for rain for another crop. What would Divine Providence then do?

Or suppose two opposing armies are facing each other, with each side praying for victory and supposing its cause alone to be just. Such an instance makes immediately obvious how little universality and sense of brotherhood attach to prayers arising out of personal wishes, and the granting of such prayers by God can satisfy only one group of supplicants. People so praying disregard the prayer in which Christ Jesus set forth the fundamental attitude of mind that should prevail in all prayer: “Father, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done.” This is the Christian attitude of prayer.

Whatever the object of the prayer, this fundamental temper of mind must echo readily as an undertone in the soul of the petitioner for his prayer to be given in a Christian manner. When this is the character of his plea, the form of his prayer will be but a means of rising to higher spiritual realms to experience the Divinity within the soul. It will be such, moreover, as to expel every selfish wish and will-impulse. Its spirit will be that of the words, “Not my will, but thine, be done.” The result will be a rising to the divine world and absorption in it. Attainment of this soul mood in Christian prayer renders it similar to meditation, though more colored by feeling. Originally, Christian prayer was not essentially different from meditation. Meditation is more imbued with thought, however. Through it, the thoughts of the great leaders of mankind draw the meditant onward toward harmony with the divine currents streaming through the world. Through feeling, prayer accomplishes the same result.

The goal of both prayer and meditation is thus clearly the soul's union with the divine currents in the world. This union, on the highest plane, is the so-called unio mystica, or mystical union, with the Godhead.

Never could the human being attain to this union with God, never could he gain a relationship with higher spiritual beings, were he himself not an emanation of the divine-spiritual. Man's nature is twofold, as we know. In him are the four oft-mentioned human principles—physical body, etheric or life-body, astral body and ego. Then, within the ego, he has the possibility of unfolding for the future the three higher principles—manas, buddhi and atma, known in our western languages as spirit self, life spirit and spirit man.¹

To understand rightly this twofold human nature, let us consider the period of man's origin. From previous lectures, you will remember that man now represents the blending of these two natures—the blending of the three higher potentials (spirit self, life spirit and spirit man) with the four existing lower principles (physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego) developed in a far-distant past, which we term the Lemurian epoch of the earth. Tracing man backward from the present epoch through the Greco-Latin, Egypto-Chaldean, Persian and Indian periods of mankind to the great Atlantean flood recorded in the deluge-myths of all nations, we reach those ancestors of ours who lived on the land-mass we call Atlantis, between present-day Europe and America. Still further back, we come to a primeval land-mass, which we call Lemuria, lying between Australia and India. It was in the middle of that Lemurian period that the higher triad of spirit self, life spirit and spirit man united with the four lower human principles—physical body, etheric body, astral body and ego.

Correctly speaking, at that period in the Lemurian epoch, the highest being on earth was not yet a physical human being in our sense of the word. Only a kind of envelope existed, made up of the highest animal nature—a being, or collection of beings, made up of the four lower principles of human nature. But until then the higher human being, which is the internal part of human nature, destined to evolve further and further in the future through the three principles of spirit self, life spirit and spirit man, rested in the bosom of the Godhead.

To picture the scene at that time by a trivial modern comparison, it was as though all the people living on earth had been building bodies capable of receiving a human soul as a sponge absorbs water. Picture a vessel of water. It is impossible to tell where one drop of water ends and another begins. But picture also a number of little sponges immersed in the water, each soaking up a part of it. What had been a uniform mass of water is now distributed among the many little sponges. So it was with human souls in that remote age. Previously, they had been at rest, without individuality, in the bosom of the Divine First Cause, but at that particular moment they were absorbed by human bodies and so individualized, like the water by the sponges.

What was then absorbed by the separate bodies, or four lower principles, continued to evolve further, and will so continue into the future. In spiritual science it has always been called the higher triad, and the triangle and the square were made symbols, especially in the Pythagorean school, of the human being as he came into existence at the middle of the Lemurian epoch. The diagram on the next page thus represents the constituent elements of the human being,

But the higher, eternal portion, which passes through all incarnations, has a double character, as you can see, From one side it may be regarded as the primordial, eternal element of humanity and, from the other, as a drop of the Divine Essence given up by the Godhead and poured into the fourfold human vessel. As a result, a drop of the independently individualized Divinity is to be found in each of us human beings.

The three higher members of the human being—the eternal portion—may thus be looked upon as the three highest principles in man, but equally as three principles in the Godhead Itself. Actually, the three highest principles of human nature are at the same time the three lowest principles of the Divinity nearest to man. An enumeration of man's principles must start with the physical body, continue with the etheric body, astral body and ego, thence from spirit self to spirit man. But a corresponding enumeration of the principles of those Divine Beings who gave a drop of their own soul nature to man at the time of which we are speaking in the far-off past, must begin with spirit self, continue with life spirit and spirit man, and thence proceed to principles above spirit man, of which contemporary man can only conceive when he is a pupil of Initiates.

You see that the three principles of higher human nature may be looked upon as three divine principles, and today we shall so regard them, not as human, but as divine principles, describing them accordingly. The highest principle in us, which we shall only develop at the end of our earth incarnations, or, we may say, at the end of our present planetary course, is called spirit man in terms of spiritual or occult science. The original essence of this human principle is faintly comparable to the will element in present-day human nature. This comparison is not exact, but only a faint indication. Yet the fundamental character of this highest of the divine principles in us is of the nature of will—a kind of willing. This will element in us, today only feebly developed in our inner being, will become in the course of our ever ascending development the predominating principle in us.

Man is today essentially a consciousness, or understanding being, whereas in many ways his will is limited. He understands the surrounding world as a totality—that is, to a certain degree—but has no real control over all that he penetrates with his knowledge. This control by his will is a development of the future, and it will become ever stronger until he attains that central goal of existence known to spiritual science as “the great sacrifice,” signifying the power of will to sacrifice oneself completely, not merely in driblets of human sacrifice of the kind of which man is capable today with his puny present feelings and will power. In future time he will have developed the strength to sacrifice his whole being by letting it flow directly into material substance.

One may picture this “great sacrifice,” the highest expression of will in divine nature, by imagining oneself before a mirror in which one's image is reflected. This image is, of course, an illusion, a semblance. Now carry over this image to the point of imagining yourself dying, sacrificing your existence, your feeling and thought, your very being, to inject life into that image. Spiritual science in all ages has called this phenomenon the “outpouring,” “the emanation.” If you could really make this sacrifice, it would be clear that you would no longer be here because you would have given up your whole being to this reflected image to imbue it with life and consciousness.

When the will has become capable of making the “great sacrifice,” it actually creates a universe, great or small, whose mission is bestowed upon it by its creator. Such is the creative will in the Divine Being.

The second principle in the Godhead, life spirit, insofar as it has flowed into humanity, has already been indicated in the comparison that has been made with the mirror. This second principle is the reflected image itself.

Now imagine the inner being of a Divinity that has in this way created a universe, with itself as the center. If, for example, you imagine yourself as the central point in this room, surrounded not by these six surfaces of walls, ceiling and floor, but by a hollow globe that reflects its content, you will see yourself, as the central point, reflected on all sides, everywhere. In like manner you can picture a Divinity as a central will, reflected on all sides, and the mirror is both image of Divinity and the universe. For what is a universe? Nothing but a mirror of the essential nature of Divinity.

The universe lives and moves because the Divinity is poured into it—the “outpouring”—when Divinity makes the “great sacrifice” and is reflected in the universe. The pouring of life and being into a reflected image is an exact picture of this divine creative process.

The divine will expresses itself in infinite diversity, animating thereby the entire universe. In spiritual science, this process of Divinity repeating itself in infinite differentiation, in multiplicity, is known as “the kingdom,” distinguished from the will itself. The will is the central point; its reflection, the kingdom. The will is in this sense comparable with spirit man; the kingdom, or will's reflected image, with life spirit.

The kingdom, in turn, reproduces the being of the Divine in infinite variety. Observe it fully, at least to the extent to which it is our kingdom, our multiplicity, or universe. Observe its visible manifestations in minerals, plants, animals and human beings. The kingdom is manifested in each separate being of all these, a fact that even our language expresses in the terms “mineral kingdom,” “vegetable kingdom,” “animal kingdom” and all the great divisions of our universe. The kingdom is all these; each of these in turn, is a kingdom, and if we observe the mass of details involved, we find the nature of all to be divine. In all of them the divine being is reflected, just as the central being is reflected in a hollow globe.

So an observer, looking at the world in the sense of spiritual research, sees God reflected in every human being as an expression and image of the Divine. In a graded series of beings, in infinite diversity, the Godhead appears in the kingdom, and the separate entities are distinguished from one another in the sense of spiritual science by their names. An observer at a stage of existence sufficiently lofty to look upon all these separate entities as “emanations,” or “outpourings,” of the Divine is able to give these entities their names, to give each manifestation of the Divine its name.

Of all beings in the universe, only man thinks the name of each of the separate members of the great multiplicity of the kingdom, distinguishing each from all the others. The will, as we have noted is comparable with spirit man; the kingdom, or reflected image into which the will has been “outpoured,” is comparable with life spirit. The third of the three highest human principles that emanate from the Divine, by which the separate members of the great multiplicity of the kingdom are distinguished from one another and separately named, is comparable with spirit self. The occult science of the different religions has thus simply taught what it was that emanated from the Godhead and flowed into a person to become his eternal image or archetype.

Thus, if you could see yourselves in that condition to which you should finally rise—the condition of spirit man—you would recognize its will-like nature.

If you would rise in thought to a comprehension of the vehicle of will (spirit man)—in other words, to life spirit—you would see that it is the kingdom that represents it in the divine sphere.

If you would rise to penetrate what the names, or conceptions or ideas of things really signify in spirit, you would see that it is the name that represents this wisdom in the divine sphere.

So does ancient teaching reveal that the emanation of Divinity, which has flowed into human nature to form its eternal part, consists of name, of kingdom, of will. Thus what is called the higher triad in man is recognizable as part of the Divine.

To complete this picture, think of the four lower principles of perishable human nature. The three higher principles may be thought of, we know, as principles of the Godhead. Similarly, the four lower principles may be considered as of the perishable world, as human principles.

Think of the physical body, composed as it is of the same substances and Forces as is the seemingly lifeless world around it. The physical body could not go on existing without the inflow into it of matter and force from the surrounding world. The physical body, in a strict sense, is a continual thoroughfare for all that is in it. Into it and out of it again the substances continuously flow that are at one time of the outer world and at another time within us. In the course of seven years, as we have mentioned in other connections, the entire material composition of the human body is renewed. In none of you are the substances that were in you ten years ago. We are perpetually renewing the substances of our physical body. What was formerly in us is now somewhere else, distributed outside us in nature; something else has replaced it inside of us. The body's life depends upon this continual inflow and outflow of matter.

Just as we have considered the three higher human principles as parts of Divinity, we may observe the four principles of our lower nature as parts of Divine Nature.

The physical body may be seen as part of the physical substance of our planet. Its substance is taken from the material planet, then is returned to it. The etheric body likewise may be considered a part of the environment surrounding us here, and so also the astral body.

Think of the etheric body and the astral body together. The astral body, as you know, is the vehicle of all that lives in man as impulse, desire and passion, all that surges up and down in the soul as joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain. The etheric body, on the contrary, is the vehicle that represents and bears within it the more lasting qualities of soul.

Often I have compared the development of the etheric body and astral body with the hour-hand and the minute-hand of a clock. A great difference is observable between what you knew and experienced as an eight-year-old child and what you now know and have experienced, as I have also reminded you on other occasions. You have learned so much, gained so many concepts, in the intervening period. Much that your soul has taken in of joy and sorrow has left it again, actually has passed through it. How different are these relatively ephemeral experiences from such human elements as temperament, character and tendencies that are persisting and continuing. You will find, for instance, that if you were passionately inclined as a child, you are probably still so in later years. Most people keep throughout their lives such basic elements in their natures. It is to overcome this relatively stationary quality of the etheric organism that spiritual training and development are instituted; for, as has often been emphasized, such training is no matter of mere theoretical knowledge. The student has accomplished a great deal, indeed, if he has changed one quality of temperament to which he is predisposed, so speeding up the hour-hand of the clock even a little.

Whatever evolves slowly in this way—a human being's lasting tendencies, enduring qualities of temperament, habits that persist—is rooted in the etheric body; whatever changes quickly by contrast, minute- hand-wise, has its roots in the astral body.

Applying these facts practically to the human being in his environment, to life in the external world, the observer notices a person's connections with the epoch in which he lives, with a nation, with a family, all of which are revealed in his habits, temperament and enduring inclinations. These relatively fixed and abiding qualities tend to be observable, not only in the person himself, but in all with whom he is in any way connected—his family, his nation, etc. A nation's separate individuals are recognizable through their common habits and temperament. An individual who is to achieve a higher spiritual development, to unfold his higher nature, must change his disposition and basic habits. Such a man is called “homeless” in the terminology of spiritual science, because he is obliged to change his etheric body, through which he has been, except for this higher development, connected with his nation.

Life in one's native community reveals, too, that the qualities linking one to a family or nation, stirring one to feel relationships with individual people of the nation, are similar also to qualities widely discernible in one's era. If an ancient Greek should walk into your life, you would have little in common with him. His etheric body would be so unlike yours. Human beings understand one another through common qualities in their etheric bodies.

In the astral body, however, is rooted a man's ability to lift himself more readily out of certain qualities binding him to a common life with others, and to establish himself as a separate individual in his family, in his folk, so that he is not a mere Frenchman nor a mere German nor a member of a family, but stands out as a special individuality within the folk, the family, etc. Thus he can outgrow the totality of characteristics of his nation. Those qualities that he transcends are rooted in the astral body. The astral body is their bearer. The astral body is thus seen to bear more of what is individual and personal in man.

So it is that faults committed through the etheric body render a man more a sinner toward his fellow men through neglect of those obligations and conditions making social life possible among them, between one man and the next. On the other hand, faults of a more individual nature, a man's wrong-doings as a separate personality, result from qualities in the astral body.

Spiritual science has always termed as “guilt” (German, “Schuld”) those sins that are against the community, and that originate in a faulty etheric body. The more common English word “debts” (“Schulden”) has in German an origin similar to the word “guilt,” with its more moral connotation in English, signifying what one man owes another in a moral sense. Debt, or guilt, derives from defective qualities in the etheric body, whereas a defective element in the astral body leads to what spiritual science associates with the word “temptation.” The man yielding to temptation takes upon himself a personal fault, or failure.

The ego, or true personality, too, can commit faults. The Paradise story indicates the kind of fault through which an ego may fall. The human being's higher soul became an ego when it descended from the bosom of the Godhead and entered an earthly body for the first time. It was taken up by the earthly body like a drop of water by a sponge.

The higher soul, or individuality, can commit faults within the ego. These ego-failures, which are different from those stemming from faulty qualities of the etheric and astral bodies, occur through the very fact of a man's attaining independence. To rise gradually, in full consciousness, to freedom and independence, man had to pass through selfishness and egotism. As a soul, he is descended from the Godhead, which is incapable of egotism. A member of an organism never imagines itself independent; if a finger were to imagine itself independent, it would fall away from the rest of the hand and wither.

The self-dependence that is so necessary to human development, and that will attain its full meaning when its fundamental nature is unselfishness, could originate only from selfishness.

It was when this selfishness entered the human body that man became a self-seeking, egotistic being. The ego naturally follows the body's inclinations. Man devours his fellow man, follows selfish impulses and desires, is completely entangled in his earthly receptacle as the drop of water in the sponge.

The Paradise story shows the individual placed in a position to sin just by having become an individual, a really independent being. Whereas formerly he drew in what he needed from the universe, as a single drop in a mass of water derives its force from the mass, his impulses as a fully independent individuality derive wholly from himself. The eating of the apple in Paradise signifies this kind of error stemming from independence. It is significant, too, that the Latin malum means both “evil” and “apple.” All real meanings of words, of course, provided they have any spiritual scientific background, are deeply connected in an inner sense. Spiritual science never uses the word “evil” for any transgression that does not stem from the ego.

Evil is thus the fault proceeding from the ego. Trespass, or guilt, is the fault proceeding from the etheric body of a man in social relationships with his fellow men. Temptation may assail the astral body in any respect in which it is individually and personally at fault.

The fault of the etheric body:
Debts, or Guilt.
The fault of the astral body:
Temptation.
The fault of the ego:
Evil.

Consider the relation of the four lower principles of human nature to their environment, that is, the planetary conditions surrounding them. The physical body continually takes in physical substance as nourishment; so it maintains its existence. The etheric body's life in a finite condition is possible only by maintenance of fellowship with people into whose community one has grown. The astral body is maintained by overcoming temptation. The ego is maintained, and undergoes development in the right way, by not succumbing when “evil” threatens.

Now bring before your mind's eye the whole human being—the lower quaternary and the higher triad—so that you can say: In individual man there lives a drop of Divinity; he is evolving to the Divine through the expression of his deepest, innermost nature. In once expressing outwardly that deepest, innermost nature, he reveals that he has by gradual development transmuted his own being into what Christianity calls the “Father.” What lies hidden in the human soul and hovers before humanity as its great goal is called the Father in Heaven.

One wishing to attain that degree of development must be capable of bringing his higher triad and lower quaternary to the point at which they can maintain the physical body adequately. The etheric body must live socially so that an adjustment is effected with whatever exists of “trespass” within it. The astral body must not perish in “temptation,” nor the body of the ego fall in “evil.” Man must strive upward to the Father in Heaven through the three higher principles—the Name, the Kingdom, the Will.

The Name must be felt in such a way that it becomes hallowed. Look around you. All things in their diversity express the Godhead. In calling each thing by its name, you make it a member of the divine order of the world. By beholding in every single thing or being that you name in your environment some element that reveals in it a principle of Divine Being, you help make each part of your environment sacred. You hallow each part. You grow into the Kingdom—which is the outpouring of Divinity—and develop yourself up to the Will, which is spirit man but at the same time a principle of the Godhead.

Think, now, of a meditant who concentrates wholly upon this meaning of human development, and who wishes to gather this meaning—the seven principles of man's spiritual evolution—into seven petitions in prayer. How will he pray?

To express the aim of the prayer, he will have to begin, before he utters the seven petitions:

In this form of salutation, man concerns himself with the deepest foundation of the human soul, the inmost element of the human being, which Christian esoteric teaching characterizes as of the kingdom of spirit. The link of the first three petitions, which follow this exalted salutation, is with the three higher principles of human nature, with the divine substance within man:

The last lectures here were essentially devoted to an examination of the way in which we have to think about the present time consciousness. I then tried for the last time to reach back into earlier periods and to draw attention to the fact that what now lives in the souls has actually been preparing itself within Western civilization for a very long time. Today I would like to highlight some episodes from the immediate present that may draw your attention to how a spiritual life must necessarily arise out of the general consciousness of the times, simply out of the necessity inherent in the development of humanity. We can say: Wherever we observe man, whether in the West of present civilization, in the Middle or in the East, everywhere, on closer examination of the times, it can become clear to us how, without the onset of a spiritual impulse, things simply can no longer go on.

Today, we want to take a look at the last fifty years of Central European spiritual development, so as to prepare for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, by considering the characteristics of the beginning and the end. I will do this symptomatically. I will characterize some things at the beginning and at the end of these last fifty years.

If we go back to the beginning of the 1870s, we find a wide range of spiritual phenomena that indicate the state of the human soul at the time. I will highlight a few of these spiritual phenomena. In 1872 and 1873, for example, there was a sensational novel that was closely related to the trends of the time. These things are actually forgotten for the younger people in our time, but the novel I mean is one that did indeed capture the imagination in an extraordinarily incisive way fifty years ago. I am talking about Paul Heyse's “Children of the World”. Paul Heyse, who was a famous writer of novellas at the time, wanted to use this novel to depict a number of personalities in their lives, all of whom were already imbued with a certain vague religiosity, but who had at the same time fallen away from some religious denomination or other. So, the children of God, whom, I might say, Paul Heyse saw in the traditional terminology of belonging to some denomination, he wanted to contrast with the children of the world, who belonged to no denomination, who, as they were said at the time, were without religious affiliation, but who nevertheless had a certain tendency towards embracing a religious belief. Now I do not want to talk too much about this novel itself, but I would like to draw attention to how such a work, which thus portrays people who are undenominational, made an impression in those days.

I have often mentioned my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer before. He had the peculiarity of following intellectual phenomena as they made their impact in broader social life. Karl Julius Schröer characterized the effect of Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” by saying that it was extraordinarily strange how this novel was passed around fifty years ago, how it interested everyone, interested in how this novel actually gave people the idea that they had never thought about before: that they had no connection to any positive religious belief and that their religious search did not stop at any particular religious belief. And Schröer made the extraordinarily interesting comment at the time that people who had previously taken part in the religious practices of their church, who had thus gone along with their old religious practices, the customs of their church, out of habit, that such people said that this work actually expresses their innermost convictions. And then Schröer concludes with a sentence that is actually interesting: that in the face of such an apparition, religious disputes appear as an anachronism, as something that no longer fits into the present – he is referring to the present at the beginning of the 1970s – because people have already moved beyond them in their thinking. But as I said, although all this is true, we must still say: the people who are described there have lost all connection with any of the existing faiths, but there is a certain trait in them that allows them to find some kind of religiosity. They just can't find it. They go through the world without any religious affiliation, unable to find a connection to a spiritual world through religious feeling.

If we now look from such a phenomenon, which took place more within the literary-belletristic life, into the lecture halls, we find that it is roughly the same time in which the conviction of an extraordinary number of people within science was expressed by Du Bois-Reymond with the “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, which I have already mentioned frequently. In this famous lecture, which Du Bois-Reymond gave in 1872, it is stated that certain knowledge is only possible if one follows and penetrates the external phenomena of nature through experiment and observation, to a kind of mathematical-mechanical thinking about the structure of the world, to a kind of mechanism, an atomistic mechanism of the world. Science does not go beyond such a comprehension of the world, everything else must be left to faith. But if one had asked the people who spoke in this way at the beginning of the 1970s, such as Du Bois-Reymond in his “Grenzen des Naturerkennens” (The Limits of Natural Knowledge), how people should now seek their way into spiritual worlds in a religious way, no answer would have been forthcoming. There would only have been a comment, very similar to the comments made by the people in Paul Heyse's “Children of the World” who are described as having no religious affiliation.

Now it must be said that all those people who took part in the life that one calls educated, who absorbed something of scientific thought, who adopted something from other schools of thought, who lived in that time, were actually all more or less in a certain frame of mind. Whether they continued to practice their old religions or not depended essentially on old habits, on all kinds of prejudices and the like, and not on a strict and rigorous assertion of what the Zeitbewußtsein would have given to souls. In the last fifty years, people have actually lived in an indefinite, fickle relationship to the spiritual world. But we can also find something similar in other areas. A few years before the publication of Heyses “Children of the World” and Du Bois-Reymonds “Limits of Natural Knowledge”, the famous art writer Herman Grimm published “The Invincible Powers”, which is also a novel. In it, the prejudices and differences between social classes that dominate people in Western civilization are presented as invincible powers. And in an interesting way, this novel contrasts the differences in class and rank within Western civilization with what developed from certain, I would say unhistorical, habits in America as a new life, as a life that did not have to struggle in the same way with class differences and class prejudices. And it is interesting how Herman Grimm, at the end of the 1860s, that is, also about half a century ago, describes how, despite everything, European man, despite all his liberalism, despite all his humanism, does not have the strength to truly overcome class differences. These are insurmountable forces for him.

If you want to go deeper and ask yourself: Why are such things insurmountable forces for the European man? then one cannot get any other answer than this: because thinking, which in the case of the European has assumed a certain passive character, the thinking that I have characterized when, for example, I spoke about Richard Wahle, that thinking extends only to “events” and does not want to go into the primal factors, that therefore does not want to grasp forces but only wants to grasp appearances, because this thinking has dominated precisely the decisive people in the last fifty years. With such thinking, which has no power in itself, which is actually only a thinking, one might say, in powerless thought images, with such thinking one simply cannot overcome what has arisen in reality as class differences and class prejudices. What was needed was a thinking imbued with reality, a thinking permeated by reality. And this thinking permeated by reality, which once created the differences in social standing, which once created everything socially real, this dynamic thinking, in contrast to mere descriptive thinking, has actually been completely lost to people within European civilization over the last fifty years. It was absent from their science, which was therefore based only on observation and experiment; but it was also absent from their lives, so they continued to reproduce what had arisen from old habits based on old class prejudices. They did not think about it any further. Because if they had wanted to think about it, they would have needed active thinking. And when the proletarian class began to consider class differences, then this weak thinking, which contains no dynamism, was completely abandoned. It was said: these class differences do not come from forces that would have been within human thinking, but only from economic, physical forces. A conclusion was simply drawn.

There you have the situation at the starting point of our modern intellectual life fifty years ago. And now I want to present to you a work that was published recently and that is characteristic of our time, namely Werfel's “Mirror Man”. There you have something that has been born out of certain forces of our time, just as the “Children of the World” or the “Invincible Powers” were born out of the time of fifty years ago.

So what is the situation for people like Werfel today? In recent decades, this weak and anemic thinking has been at work. People have somehow sought something of a religious context, of a connection with a spiritual world, but nothing has emerged. But human nature cannot remain one-sided in the long run. It can do so in the development of world history for about fifty years, but then a reaction of human nature begins again. In a certain way, it wants to strive for something more powerful – if we stick with the last fifty years – than the powerless and insipid thinking was. Now, quite a few contemporary works already bear witness to this striving for a more powerful grasp of reality, but Werfel's 'Spiegelmensch' is particularly illustrative of this.

Werfel's “Mirror Man” compels us to speak about the present in this way: for long enough, people have sought their way in an indefinite, weak and impotent manner to something that makes man a full human being in the first place. Now an indefinite inner feeling asserts itself on the paths that have been taken in the last fifty years and which are actually not paths at all, but slippery passageways on which one continually slips. Nothing can really be achieved on these slippery passageways; one must get some iron into one's blood again. From such a striving for the times, something like this “mirror man” has emerged. Let us sketch with just a few lines what is depicted in this “mirror man”. It is not my intention to sin against the artistic by characterizing what is in this mirror man. But that is not the point at all; rather, we will see immediately afterwards that what I am about to say also touches on the artistic.

We see here a half-grown human being who has grown tired of the outer life as it can be led today. He takes leave of this outer life and now actually wants to become human. For he admits to himself that within the ordinary life, as we live it today, both in Asian and European and American civilization, one cannot really become human. You get up in the morning, have breakfast and do something to maintain yourself within the social order, you eat lunch or receive your guests and say things that perhaps need not be said, that ultimately do not aim to achieve much more than to make the lips move, that are not idle; you take your guests for a walk or whatever else you do today. You can't become a person in such company – I'm not quoting verbatim, I'm just characterizing. It is necessary to try a different path if you want to become a person. And so this “hero” – to use the old aesthetic style – tries to become a person by seeking admission to a monastery. But he is told that this is something extraordinarily difficult. I do not want to characterize the details, but only point out what is important to me today. He is therefore informed that it is something extraordinarily difficult and that, above all, he must be clear about the fact that he has to go through three stages of knowledge. In the first stage of knowledge, he would have to become clear about the human being's position in the world, insofar as this position is contained in the human ego itself. So this life in the ego and this striving to overcome the ego as the first level of knowledge. The second view of the world would consist in the fact that, after one begins to shed the ego in a certain sense, one no longer sees the world from one's prejudiced point of view, as one used to do before, when one had not even begun to shed the ego. And the third vision would be where man would truly penetrate into the world and its reality, not as seen by man living in his ego. He is told this. And he is admonished in the appropriate way not to want such an incarnation too urgently. He is made aware of the difficulties. But he does not back down.

So he is initiated in the appropriate way. The initiation takes place – I will mention only the essentials – by being led into solitude for the night, into a room where only a monk watches over him. And there, after he has initially abandoned himself to his thoughts, he falls into a brief sleep, from which he very soon believes he will wake up. And now he finds himself in the room whose one wall has a mirror on it. In this mirror he sees himself, and he is amazed at what is meant. It is meant that when one, after a collection of thoughts and after such a strong decision as this person has made, steps in front of his own reflection, one sees oneself in a different way. So it is actually pointed out that the person is only now beginning to see himself. The mirror image looks so similar to him, but yet again somewhat different. And by doing what must follow from such a surprising experience: by striking the mirror, believing that he has wounded himself, the mirror man steps out of the mirror towards him, that is, that of him which, in a certain respect, is himself and yet again not himself.

Now the person has arrived at the first step of knowledge. He must get used to not only going through the world as a person without ego consciousness, but also to having that which is himself and yet not completely himself, his mirror-person, accompany him. In the company of this mirror-man, who now tempts him to do all kinds of things in the outer world, lies a new encounter with world phenomena, with his own deeds, in that he finds himself precisely in the presence of his own ego.

Now, I do not want to go into the details. The person in question is actually lying in bed, but he goes through what he can go through according to his previous experiences of external world experiences and external actions. These are not always very nice. But how someone describes something like that depends on their own taste. You can see from the way the author describes things how he feels about such a case. People also experience the world according to their tastes. So we are led through the experiences of the world. Just as Mephisto in Faust has something of the driving force, this mirror man is now always the driving force, and he is led from event to event, being made to do many wrongs. Everything appears to him in a new light, because he has looked into the mirror and seen himself. He now sees one thing after another in the world. He sometimes sees things as they appear to him because he is an ego-person, and sometimes as they appear to him after he is already able to see his reflection. He becomes more and more familiar with the phenomena of the world. In the process, he comes out of his ego more and more. The mirror-man, who is rather slight at first, becomes fatter and fatter. This is a polar-parallel phenomenon, which is not uninteresting. And so this person now lives through the world by experiencing in a different way what he could have experienced earlier, now that he has seen his own self. And in the end he has become so entangled in the experiences of the world that he has to become his own judge, condemning himself to death, which is again very characteristic. He finds that he cannot really live in the world.

When he entered the monastery, he realized that it is impossible to live in today's society if you want to become a human being. This has increased to such an extent that now, when he has become his own judge, he condemns himself to death. And now he awakens. In a sense, he awakens from the execution of his own death sentence. He is again in the same room where he was. Now he looks at the mirror again. But by looking now, he notices, for example, that the mirror does not reflect a procession of monks passing by. Earlier, when he looked into the mirror, he saw himself and everything in front of the mirror. But now a procession of monks is passing by and is not reflected. He realizes from this that he is not standing in front of a mirror now, but that the mirror has become a window. He looks through it and sees out into the wide world, sees the landscape. He has attained the third vision. Now he sees the world, whereas at the beginning he saw only what the mirror gave. Because he had the mirror man at his side, he saw what he had seen before in a different way. But now, as it were, he sees through the surface of things - that is how it is presented - out into the free reality. It is, of course, implied that he now also sees out into the spiritual reality.

So we have a trilogy before us: the first is the mirror, the third is, let us say, the window. The mirror has become the window. So there we have the two polar opposite views of the world. At first, everyone sees in the other 'their own reflection', sees only what they already have within themselves in the other, where they are caught up in their own ego, and thus sees only their own reflection everywhere in their neighbor or in anything they see in nature. Finally, after breaking through the mirror, they no longer see the mirror, but through the surface of things into the spiritual. And in between

where the two merge into one another:

1. The mirror
2. One into the other
3. The window

Now, I would like to point out two characteristic features of this drama. The first is this: we see that there is a desire to depict a person in the process of rising to a certain religious connection with another world. That the first part, the mirror, is short, one can forgive, because it is very interesting to see how the person lives into an insight into his own ego, so that this ego becomes so concrete to him that it now accompanies him through his experiences in the world. The middle part is quite detailed, and a great many experiences are described. In order to find these appealing at all, one must have a taste, one could even say sometimes, distaste, for them. But as I said, everyone has to do it according to their own taste. In any case, this part, where one looks into the experiences of the world, is very long. But the third part is quite short, and what is seen out there is actually only hinted at, I would say symbolically, by looking through the window; nothing real comes into view. It is quite short, this third part. That is the one peculiarity I would like to emphasize. But the other peculiarity is this: one must recognize that here is the most beautiful expression of the striving to pour strength and energy into thinking. But one also sees that the modern man, of the kind that Werfel is, cannot do that at first. Why? Yes, it is very peculiar. When I had finished reading this drama – and I read with the greatest interest, I must say, because it is extremely significant for our present spiritual life as represented by individual personalities – I had to say the following to myself: the process is as follows: 1. Der Spiegel; 2. Eins ins andere; 3. Das Fenster. But one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Of course, it would have to be rewritten, but one could also read the whole thing backwards from front to back. Because why? It is entirely possible to understand the matter in such a way that one says to oneself: the way a person initially relates to the world is how things appear to him. He is no different from the things. He has not awakened to his sense of self. He stands before the window, looks out into the world. Now we could say that the old monk, to whom he has now come and to whom he says that he can no longer bear it, that everything is always only inside, what he sees through the window, that he wants to find himself – that the old man now says to him: Yes, there are three views to go through. The first view shows us the world without our finding our ego in it. We lose ourselves to the world. The second view allows us to gain something of the ego, and then, gradually, a multitude of beings comes towards us from the world. The world is brought to life, spiritualized. We used to see it as spiritless, now the world is spiritualized. Everywhere, from every being, from plants, animals, clouds and so on, something spiritual comes towards us. Many spiritual beings come towards us in this second part. In the third part, we wake up. We step in front of the window, we look out. But we see everything anew, because now we see the real world for the first time. The window has been transformed into a mirror, the human being has come to himself. He unites all these mirror beings that have come to meet him in the world of plants, animals, clouds; they are in his only self, which has become cosmic to him. And now, by recognizing himself, he actually sees the cosmos for the first time.

You could easily describe the whole thing backwards, the last part of the trilogy first, then the middle part, then the part with which it started. That is extremely interesting, because it is precisely this that makes this drama particularly characteristic of the present. What is the peculiarity of intellectualism?

Yes, the peculiarity of intellectualism is this: you can start with the idea anywhere and stop anywhere, and you can assert one thing and you can assert another – I have emphasized this many times. In terms of thought, you can prove anything, in terms of thought you can refute anything. Intellectualism, which is nothing more than a system of vapid and feeble thoughts, allows you to start anywhere and go somewhere, but you will stop at a certain point. But you can also start at this latter point and go the other way.

Today, one can be a very clever person and a gross materialist, because materialism can be quite well proven in an intellectual way. And if one is purely intellectual, one can, in the way it happened after our anthroposophical congress in Vienna at a meeting, one can, from the standpoint of today's monism, quite intellectually lead the fight against the spirit. One can prove very well that materialism is right. But one can also want to be a spiritualist and prove this just as well. All these things, as long as one lives only in the intellectual, can be proved quite well, and they have the appearance of tremendous cogency, these intellectualistic discussions.

And so it is in our time. People do not suspect, as they become entangled in spiritualism, materialism, realism, idealism, that they are becoming entangled in the intellectual spirit. They rightly feel: this can be firmly proven. They are the creatures of intellectualism. Because it is indeed true that things can be proved, that is why it is so dismal when one is obliged today to seriously discuss something based on reality, and then 'free discussion' is set up. One person says this, another says that, a third says something else. Basically, if you are just a little bright, you can say: they are all right. Of course, they are all equally wrong. The whole point of the talk is, after all, that one or the other sees what a tremendous swindle of one's own self it is to live in intellectualism, because with intellectualism, everything can be easily proven. The only thing that matters is that one has immersed oneself long enough in some direction or current, in some sect or party or something else, then one can quite rightly say: Yes, that's all clear; the other one who claims the opposite is an idiot. - Certainly, but the other one can just as easily prove that the first one is an idiot and his own claim is correct. Today, with the configuration that intellectual life has attained, this is perfectly possible and is taken for granted. And so it is a matter of course that one can write such a piece today without arriving at a real spiritual insight. The fact that Werfel is not approached proves that nothing significant is seen through the window; the spiritual insight would only begin if something significant were seen through the window. But if you merely describe three steps, and then, after describing how he woke up and looked out, you do not describe what he sees, if you make so many concessions to the general consciousness that you can write such a “Mirror Man” and still say something reasonable in response to something like “Occult Science in Outline” or “How to Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds” or the like: If one has to say that one would not be in one's right mind if one accepted it, and if one can only say: Yes, the person in question has arrived at the window, but I am wary of seeing what one sees when looking out through the window, then one is simply not yet ready to immerse oneself in the real spiritual life, then one is simply completely stuck in intellectualism.

That is why I was allowed to speak in this way. Of course, one would not have the right to give a philosophical critique of a work of art. But I did not give a philosophical critique at all; what I said is just as much an artistic view. Because it happens to you, you read a trilogy, read it with the utmost interest. Afterwards, when you're done, you suddenly feel upside down! It's an uncomfortable feeling, and to get back on your feet again, you would have to rewrite the whole story from back to front. It would take a very long time before you could finally work your way back to your feet, to your footing. Yes, it is quite true that one is also artistically cheated by becoming aware: in there is the spinning wheel of intellectualism, while the work of art must indeed make a beautiful impression. You cannot reverse that. Try to turn Goethe's “Faust” around, to start writing from the back to the front. You cannot! A work of art cannot be turned around. Here in this work you can, because the intellectualism predominates, because it has not penetrated to the real looking. Intellectualism has indeed received the vague, unconscious feeling that there must be juice and strength in the thoughts, but in reality neither juice nor strength has entered, there is nothing in it. There is only a pattern of a more real inner experience in it. And so we see just from something that is really full of spirit, which is extremely significant in terms of what our time can bring forth, where the path must go.

For fifty years it has been the case that people actually feel: they must go in the direction of something spiritual, but they would avoid the real path. So they take something out of all kinds of old traditions, like the three-part path and the like. But it is characteristic that today they take up this three-part path; you can find it in all kinds of books that describe some old atavistic clairvoyant paths.

As long as one refrains from accepting what one sees when looking through the window, this story of “mirror” and “one into the other” and “through the window” can very easily still be part of our spiritual life. It is easy to describe if one only has such general ideas about it. But as long as you stop at that, you still can't get out of intellectualism, which holds the people of the present day captive with a tremendous magic.

I have pointed out this intellectual element in our time in the most diverse forms. I have pointed out how one could get into all kinds of branches in the Theosophical Society, and there were great schemes, races and rounds, whole world systems and all kinds of things were built up in wonderfully intellectual forms - all intellectual! On the other hand, when it was a matter of characterizing the structure of the human being, there was a scheme: physical man: dense physical matter; etheric body: finer matter; astral body: even finer; kama manas: even finer; manas: even finer, ever finer and finer. Yes, but only from the intellectual point of view! This thinning out did not stop at all! But it is just purely intellectual. Just as you can always turn a wheel, you can, if you just stick to the intellectual, let matter become thinner and thinner. And so we had an intellectualized theosophy, and so we have here an intellectualized poetry that even borders on mysticism and that will certainly be admired by a great many of our contemporaries, and rightly so, because one can see from such poetry how the striving of our time is again turning towards something spiritual.

But my judgment is not an unartistic one. When I look at this mirror man who accompanies the hero throughout his entire evolutionary life, this mirror man is something completely different than Mephisto in relation to Faust. There is life in Faust. You know, I once showed how Mephisto is ultimately only the other side of Faust, like Wagner. “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” You resemble Wagner, you resemble Mephisto, and so on. But there is life in it. But it is not yet life when the self jumps out of the mirror, is initially frail and then becomes fatter and fatter as the person himself grows more and more out of life.

In short, what dominates from beginning to end is the inanimate, the abstract. The abstract can always be turned around. And because nowhere in the artistic work can one feel a full-blooded, intense contemplation, but everywhere one sees only thought-patterns blown up into images, one feels an unartistic quality. And it is strange that in the present day, this is often defended by saying: Anthroposophy, yes, that is only the pursuit of ideas, and that is not artistic. But in Anthroposophy, the aim is to gain insight, only one must really be prepared for this insight. One must look through a window and see something. But here, the actual artistic is called something that has not quite hatched, that is just about to hatch from the egg, but is content to remain in the egg. You know what I mean, that the chicken does not really hatch from the egg to live in the world. It is as if man wants to begin a journey of knowledge, but still avoids the spiritual world in all its concreteness and certainty. I don't want to say how the egg feels when the chicken just can't get out! But isn't it true that it is just the same with such intellectual products that don't really get out.

This is not to say anything against the value of such things. In the sense of the present I actually see something of the very first order in this mirror-man. But from a higher point of view it must be characterized and placed in the spiritual life, in the whole cultural life of the present, as I have tried to sketch it.

You will have noticed that all my lectures for years past have stressed the importance, both for the spiritual and social evolution of humanity, of the spread of what we spiritual scientists call the results of initiation research. You know also that by the word initiation, to use an ancient term, we understand a seeing into a spiritual world separated from our physical-sensible world by a kind of veil; a veil which may very easily lead to illusions. What is first given to man is the physical-sensible world, and he makes use of this either for the concerns of ordinary life or in pursuit of what today is called science. He combines his perceptions in the physical world with all kinds of concepts, ideas and so on; but all that does not lead him beyond the world of the senses; and we may say that the only means through which in ordinary life the human being can to a certain extent look beyond and above the sensible is in dreaming. The dream, as we experience it today in ordinary life, is only a poor imitation of what may be called experience in the super-sensible world. The super-sensible world has to be perceived not only with the same degree of consciousness that one has in ordinary life, a degree of consciousness which is not there in the dream condition, but with a consciousness of even higher degree. In order to experience the super-sensible world, one must enhance one’s consciousness, to come to a state which bears a similar relation to that of ordinary life, of ordinary consciousness, as that of ordinary consciousness bears to sleep consciousness, or at any rate to dream consciousness. Thus a kind of awakening out of the ordinary consciousness has to take place. Hence the dream is, of course, only a poor imitation of what is experienced in that other condition.

But really the dream differs far less from ordinary thinking than is believed to be the case. When you become aware of the picture world of an ordinary dream, it is actually in its content essentially the same as what underlies one’s thoughts, only that in thinking the human being enters into the outer world through his senses; and therefore what is arranged in the dream by mere analogy, is in thinking ordered in accordance with quite external relationships, is ordered by the perception of the outer sense world, in accordance with what this world says to us. You can have a kind of proof of this if you sit down and shut your eyes, or let us say if you are lazy and just allow your thoughts to wander, and then notice how they have wandered, notice that as you recall them in your mind you can hardly find between them any more connection than one finds in the events of a dream. The ordinary uncontrolled flow of man’s ideas is in a certain sense subject to the same law as that of the dream. It is only through our senses that we are torn out of our dreams. And as soon as we silence our senses, then we really begin to dream. This dream activity has to be intensified. It has to be so organized that it becomes permeated by a higher consciousness than that which our ordinary senses confer. Then imaginative consciousness arises, and then by degrees comes inspired consciousness, of which I told you yesterday in my public lecture, that it is recognized by Thomism as a justified source of cognition.

In our initiation science, then, we have the results of such an intensified condition of consciousness. The difficulty in the present evolution of humanity and in that of the near future is that humanity will most certainly need this science of initiation, and will not be able to get on without it, for if only the materialistic knowledge that has been developed in the last three to four centuries should continue to permeate human evolution, conditions such as we are now experiencing in the present social chaos of the civilized world will repeatedly recur, broken only by short intervals. What science has been able to give to humanity since the middle of the Fifteenth Century has certainly been sufficient for the making of technical discoveries; has been sufficient to spread over the earth a network of commerce and business intercourse, but it does not suffice for the creation of social arrangements really adapted to the consciousness of present-day humanity. That is something which has gradually to be realized. As long as the science of our universities, our recognized public education, rejects the science of initiation, as long as an external, material science is alone recognized, so long will humanity be perpetually in the grip of chaotic social conditions, such as we are now having. The science of initiation will alone be able to save humanity of the future from such chaotic social conditions. Above all, the science of initiation will be able to give those human beings who can approach it a consciousness of the fact that the life here on earth, which we enter through the gate of birth, is the continuation of a spiritual life which we have spent in the super-sensible world between the last death and this present birth. Now you know that this spiritual life which precedes our birth or conception is not spoken of in the churches of our modern civilized world. It is never spoken of, and for a quite definite reason. Because at a certain point of time, which coincides with that of the Greek evolution between Plato and Aristotle, all consciousness of a pre-natal spiritual life was lost. Plato speaks clearly of that life, but Aristotle vehemently defended the theory that every time a human being is born on the earth, a quite new soul unites with his physical body. The Aristotelian doctrine is that for each physically-born human being a new soul is created.

Now if one holds such a view, one cannot say otherwise than that the life which begins with death, which a man begins by throwing off his physical body—and of this Aristotle also speaks—continues to exist and does not again descend to earth. For, of course, unless one can speak of a prenatal existence, one has no justification for believing otherwise than that after his death man remains forever in a spiritual world. That had already led Aristotle to draw some very weighty conclusions. For instance, he argued that if anyone between birth and death here on earth has led a life which burdens his soul with evil, that human being is for all eternity forced to look back on that evil, which can never again be blotted out or overcome. So that according to Aristotle’s view, when the man dies, he has to look back eternally on the one earth life for which he has to pay.

This doctrine of Aristotle was taken over in its entirety by the Catholic Church, and when in the Middle Ages the Church sought for a philosophy which could carry its theology, it took over, as regards the life of the soul, this Aristotelian doctrine, and one can still today recognize its echo in the idea of eternal punishment in hell.

Now, after having for thousands of years had this doctrine of the origin of the soul with the body impressed upon them, how is it conceivable that people can free themselves from it again and arrive at the truth? They can only do so by receiving a new spiritual science. Without this renewal of spiritual science mankind will not be able to accept a life before birth as a justified belief or, rather, before conception. Just think what it signifies for the whole evolution of humanity not to speak of a prenatal life. When in the churches of today we are told only of a life after death, that simply arouses instincts connected with man’s egotistical desire not to be extinguished at death.

My dear friends, an essay, a thorough-going study is needed—“On the Cultivation of Human Egotism by the Churches”—In such a study one would have to explore the real motives which are worked upon in the sermons and doctrines of all the usual religious denominations, and one would everywhere find that appeal is made to the egotistical instincts of man, especially to the instinct for immortality after death. One could extend this study to cover more than a thousand years, and one would see that these religious denominations, by eliminating the life before birth under Aristotelian influence, have fostered in the highest degree the egotism in human nature. Churches, as cultivators of the deepest egotistical instincts, is a subject well worthy of study. By far the largest part of the religious life of the modern civilized world today panders to human egotism. This egotism can be felt in pronouncements which I could quote by the dozen. Again and again it is written, especially in pastoral letters, “that spiritual science busies itself with all kinds of knowledge about super-sensible worlds, but man does not need that. He only needs to have the childlike consciousness of his connection with Christ Jesus.” That is said both by pastors and by the faithful; this childlike connection with Christ Jesus is always emphasized. It is brought forward with immense pride against what is, of course, far less easy to attain—penetration into the concrete details of the spiritual world. It is preached over and over again. Again and again man is led to believe that he can be most Christian when he least exercises his soul forces, when he least strives to think something clear with what he calls his Christ consciousness. This Christ consciousness must be something which man attains by absolute childlikeness—so say these easy-going ones. And best of all they like to be told that Christ has taken all the sins of mankind on Himself, and has redeemed mankind through His sacrificial death, without men having to do anything themselves. All this points to the belief that through the sacrificial death of Christ, immortality is guaranteed after death; but that merely tends to nourish in humanity the most extreme egotism. By this cultivation of egotism on the part of the churches, we have finally brought about what is dawning today over all the civilized world. Because this egotism has been so widely cultivated, mankind has become what it is today. Just think if the human being, not merely theoretically with ideas and concepts, but with the whole inner life of his soul were to grasp the truth that this earthly life as he enters it through birth lays upon him the obligation of fulfilling a mission which he has brought with him from a life before birth! Just think how egotism would vanish if that thought were to fill our whole souls, if this earthly life were regarded as a task which must be fulfilled because it is linked to an over-earthly life through which we have previously passed! Egotism is combated by the feeling that stirs in us when we look upon life on earth as a continuation of an over-earthly life, just as it is fostered by the religious denominations which speak only of life after death. That is what is important for man’s social well being, to restore the fact of his pre-existence to the consciousness of mankind of the present and of the future, and of course the idea of reincarnation is inseparable from that of the pre-existence of the human soul.

Thus we can say that the Catholic Church itself accepted the Aristotelian doctrine and made it into a dogma of her own; but this dogma must now be replaced by the higher knowledge of repeated earth lives, of pre-existence, which Aristotle was clearly the first to leave out of account.

You see, if you can estimate what importance it has for mankind to absorb certain elements into its inmost life of soul, then you will recognize what it means for man’s life of feeling in its widest sense. It means that the human being gets quite another consciousness of himself. Now, my dear friends, let us add to what has just been said, the words of St. Paul, that this ordinary consciousness must become permeated more and more by the consciousness, “Not I, but Christ in me.” When we look upon ourselves as something different, Christ will also become different within us. If we look upon ourselves as something which, even as regards the soul-spiritual, has only originated at birth, then of course the Christ can only be in what has come into existence with this present birth, and will only have the task of carrying our souls through the gate of death and further through all eternity. But if we know that we have had a prenatal life, we can know also that it is the Christ Himself Who has laid on us a mission for this life on earth, that we have to develop our own forces, that we have to find Him in our forces, that we have to seek Him as the best we can have in us, the best in our spirit and soul.

The Catholic Church, by doing away with the spirit in the Eighth Ecumenical Council in Constantinople in the year 869 has always taken care that those belonging to it should never think about the real psycho-spiritual nature of man. The Church laid down in that Council that man consists only of body and soul, though the soul has a few spiritual attributes; but that to regard man as consisting of body, soul and spirit is heretical, and when the Jesuit Zimmerman brought forward certain reproaches against spiritual science, he reckoned as its deepest sin that it seeks to re-establish the validity of trichotomy, by declaring that man consists of body, soul and spirit. For thereby the true nature of man and also his real relationship to the Christ must inevitably come to light. But what the Church worked for more and more was that man should not come to a true understanding of his real relationship to Christ. We may say, my dear friends, that the development of the western churches consists really in drawing an ever denser and denser veil over the real secret of Christ.

You see, fundamentally, all institutions are built on external abstractions. When a state is young it has but few laws and people are relatively unfettered by them. The longer a state exists, and especially the longer the various parties in the state apply their clever arguments, the more laws are made until finally no one knows where he is, for there is no longer only one law, but everything is entangled in the meshes of intertwining laws from which one has the greatest difficulty in freeing oneself.

That is the case also with the churches; when a church begins to make its way through the world, it has relatively few dogmas; but men must have something to do, and just as the statesman is always making laws, so do Churchmen create more and more dogmas, until finally everything becomes dogma, dogma becomes consolidated. It is only since the time when Scholasticism was at its height that this consolidation of dogma has been especially noticeable in modern civilization. Anyone who really studies thoughtfully the Scholasticism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas will find that in their time everything to do with dogma was still fluid, still a matter for discussion, that discussion was still taken as a matter of course. True, in the Scholastic period there was already a certain opposition within the western church. There was the opposition between the Dominicans and the Franciscans. The Dominican Order, of which Scholasticism was the flower, developed its knowledge through strictly logical ideas. The Franciscan Order declined to do that; the Franciscans wanted to achieve everything through a childlike feeling. I will not now enter into the relation between Dominican and Franciscan teaching, but I should like you to imagine what it would be like if people fought as vigorously today about the content of Dominican and Franciscan doctrine as they did in the Middle Ages, when they discussed dogma so freely. Of course, the Roman bishop even at that time declared people to be heretics; and he could have gone on doing so for a long while, had not the secular governments come to his assistance and burnt the people whom he merely wanted to condemn. In this matter one has to admit that greater blame falls on the secular rulers. All this did not prevent there being free discussion in the Catholic Church at that time. This free discussion has gradually been completely eliminated. Free discussion was something which the Catholic Church, as time went on, could not stand. And why not? Because a quite new consciousness was arising in humanity. This was the transformation of consciousness in man, which took place, as I have often explained to you, in the middle of the Fifteenth Century. The human being wants ever more and more to form his own judgment from the depths of his own soul. In the Middle Ages that was not so. Man then had a kind of communal consciousness, and only a few learned people, the real scholars, could get beyond that. They were able to evolve out of this common uniform folk consciousness because they had been trained in Scholasticism. This also applies to a certain number who were trained in the Rabbinical teaching. In general, however, man’s consciousness was uniform. It was a community consciousness, a family consciousness. But the individual consciousness was developing more and more.

Now, one thing that the Catholic Church had always had, because it had attracted highly educated people, was historical foresight. The Catholic Church knows quite well what I am now saying, that the principle of modern development is to foster the individual consciousness of man—but the Catholic Church is unwilling to let this individual consciousness arise. She wants to maintain that dull communal consciousness, from which only those will stand out who have received a scholastic education. Now, my dear friends, there is a very good way of maintaining this dull communal consciousness—it is always a dull one. And this is to damp down the ordinary consciousness which a person has whenever he makes use of his sense organs, to subdue it thoroughly. Just as the dream damps down the ordinary consciousness, similarly the consciousness is subdued for the purpose of making of it a dull communal consciousness. Now one of the many characteristics of the dream is that in many respects it is a liar. Or would you deny that the dream is a liar, that it represents things which are not true? It is, however, not due to the dream but to the subdued consciousness that when we dream we cannot test what is true and what is untrue. Hence it is one of the properties of this subdued consciousness that it takes away from human beings the possibility of distinguishing truth from untruth. Now if one is versed in these matters, what does one do? One relates to people under authority things which are not true, and one does this systematically. Thereby one subdues their consciousness to the dim state of the dream consciousness. Thereby one succeeds in undermining what since the middle of the Fifteenth Century has been seeking to emerge as individual consciousness in the souls of men. It is a fine undertaking so to work under authority as to write articles such as are now appearing in the “Katholischen Sonntagsblatt”; for thereby one succeeds in preventing men from developing in the way they should since the middle of the Fifteenth Century! Although the individual may not know it, the whole hierarchy is behind what happens in this respect, and has organized things extremely well. If one believes that these things happen out of mere naivety or purely from rancor, one is making a great mistake. Naturally, we must fight lying and untruth with all the means at our disposal, but we must not believe that these lies proceed out of simplicity or even out of the belief that what is said is the truth; for if these people spoke the truth, they would not attain what is their purpose to attain, which is to subdue consciousness by deliberately telling men lies, and that is a mighty and diabolical undertaking.

Now, my dear friends, this, too, must be said quite frankly. The simplicity is entirely on the other side. Simplicity today is not on the side of the Catholic Church but on the side of their opponents. They do not believe that the Catholic Church is great in the direction I have described; they do not believe that the Catholic Church long ago foresaw that the social condition which has now come over Europe would some day come about, and that the Catholic Church took her own measures to make her influence felt in those social conditions. What the Catholic Church intends is to create a bridge between the most radical socialism, Communism, and its own domination.

You see, this magnificent foresight is something one has to recognize in everything which has a real spiritual basis, a spiritual foundation that is rooted in a real spiritual life, and not in mere abstraction. You see, with all this modern enlightenment one arrives at nothing which can have a far-reaching significance in the course of human evolution. But the ceremonies practiced in the Catholic Mass are of far greater significance than all the sermons from evangelical pulpits, because they are deeds accomplished in the sensible world, and in their form they are at the same time something which enchants the spiritual world into the sensible world. For that reason the Catholic Church has never been willing to deprive herself of magical means of working on human beings. These magical means do exist. And we must not believe that anything other than re-entry into the spiritual world in all true inner sincerity and uprightness can be effective against these things. And as what one might call an external sign that the Catholic Church has always had a connection with the spiritual world, you can take something which I have already told a few of you.

In the first decade of the Twentieth Century a Papal Encyclical was issued which declared various things to be heretical. Papal Encyclicals speak in such a way that they always adduce the doctrine in question and then say: “Whoever believes that is anathema.” Thus it quotes some doctrine taken from one of the books of Haeckel or someone, and then says: “Whoever believes that is anathema.” It does not state what is true, but says: “Whoever believes that is anathema.”

Now, you see, the science of initiation makes it always possible to investigate such things, and I set myself the task of making certain investigations concerning this Encyclical. I am bound to say that here, as in so many other things, what was promulgated by the Pope “ex cathedra” at that time was really drawn from out of the spiritual world. I mean that what has flowed into that Encyclical did come down from the spiritual world. But in an extraordinary way it was completely reversed! Everywhere where there should have been a ‘yes’ there was a ‘no’, and vice-versa. That is something—and I could give other instances—which shows that the Roman Church has today some sort of real connection with the spiritual world but one that is extraordinarily harmful for mankind. Therefore, we need not be surprised that it sees in the rise of modern spiritual science something which it wishes at all costs to get rid of, for, my dear friends, what is the effect of this new spiritual science? It brings about a consciousness of a prenatal life, of pre-existence. That may not be! Under no circumstances shall that happen! So spiritual science must be condemned; for spiritual science calls man’s attention to his own being, makes him aware that he consists of body, soul, and spirit. Under no circumstances may that be; therefore spiritual science must be condemned. People would see, for example, that the dogma of eternal damnation in hell is an Aristotelian consequence of the creation of the soul at physical birth. Suppose a Catholic theologian today studies the connection between Aristotle and Scholasticism, and perceives that the Scholastics derived their proof of the origin of the soul together with the physical body from the philosophy of Aristotle! He would see behind the scenes of the origin of dogma. What is done to prevent this? The theologian is made to take the oath against Modernism. He is made to swear that it is part of his creed that he can never come to a historical conclusion contrary to dogmas which are given out from Rome. The fact that he has taken this oath works so strongly on his feelings that he is confused in his sober research and can never come to see that dogma is bound up with the historical evolution of humanity. Now things cannot remain in this state if the science of initiation arises, and therefore this science of initiation must under all circumstances be condemned.

Why am I telling you these things, my dear friends? So that you may not take the matter too lightly. For in our anthroposophical spiritual science it is verily not a question of the sort of things which go on, for instance in the Theosophical Society. That the Theosophical Society is not to be taken seriously is clearly to be seen from the fact that one day it came to accept by a majority the whole farce of Krishnamurti as the reborn Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Such a comedy is only based on hypocrisy, even though this hypocrisy be taken seriously by many. But what should grow on the soil of Anthroposophy, of spiritual science, should be a search for truth, sincere through and through. It is therefore something which, as the Catholic Church is well aware, penetrates behind the scenes, to what must not be discovered if that church is to maintain the dominion in the world to which she lays claim.

All that I am now saying is simply to show you that these things may not be taken lightly. For it must be recognized that the Catholic Church has shown great foresight. Though the individual sheep follows the lead and merely obeys orders, though he may be ignorant of what this systematic lying means for the whole evolution of mankind—though the individual knows nothing and does as he is told, the whole system is thoroughly well established, for the lying will be believed by large numbers.

On the other side there is the naïve belief that all the external fabrication of natural laws which today forms the subject of our university education can be of significance for the further development of humanity, that all that nonsense about the conservation of matter and energy can be of significance for the further development of mankind! Today people cannot even look with an unprejudiced eye upon the snow which is spread before them every winter (if they are living in the temperate zone), yet through the covering of the forces of growth by the snow crust one part of the earth goes through a complete transformation; and folk consciousness which speaks of the purity of the snow knows far more than our modern science which talks of the conservation of matter and energy. Of course I can only say what I am now saying because I have spent many weeks in showing you how ill-founded are the modern laws of the conservation of matter and energy, how in fact in every human being matter and energy are destroyed, as they work up towards the head, and new matter and new energy arise. All these things are bound to be fiercely contested in some quarters, and the only thing which can help is for as many people as possible to become conscious of the present task of mankind—to be aware that the individual consciousness must lay hold of the world. It will do so, but it can either lay hold of the wisdom of the world or of the blind instincts. If it seizes hold of the blind instincts there will come about a completely antisocial condition, such as is now being prepared in Russia. That, my dear friends, will gradually evoke an antisocial condition against which the English or North American governments, not to speak of the French or any other, will be absolutely defenseless. It would be childish to believe that the English Parliament will be able to deal with what will then lay hold of humanity if the individual consciousness works merely by instinct. But there is one power which will be ready to deal with it, and that is the power of Rome. It is only a question of how it will be done. Rome can establish a dominion; it has the necessary means for this. Thus the only real question is not whether Bolshevism or the Anglo-Saxon bourgeoisie will get the upper hand; the question is whether there will be antisocial chaos, Roman domination, or the resolve on the part of mankind to fill itself with that spirit which in 869 at the Council of Constantinople the western Church declared it heretical to recognize.

There is no other alternative than that mankind determine not to go on living in the way which is natural when there are only materialistic thoughts about the world. How does mankind live in a materialistic world? People earn their living in accordance with the fluctuations of the market; there is no other measurement for the social order. After that they may perhaps have a philosophy of life, as a sort of luxury, but only as a luxury. Those supposed to be still more profound say that one must raise oneself into the spiritual world and leave the evil material world behind; a really profound nature can have nothing to do with the material world; he must understand nothing about the material world, but become a mystic and live in the higher world! But even these profound natures as well as the less profound have children and have the notion that these children must “earn,” that it would be very, very wrong if the children were not sent to schools where they would be trained in present-day methods of earning a living. Thereby they have already come to terms with the existing state of things; thereby they hand on this materialism to the next generation.

Now when someone talks like this he is an inconvenient person, and it is best simply to revile him, for to hear what I have just been telling you is for most people as if they were being irritated by vermin. Now people do not like being irritated in this way by psychic vermin and so they cover themselves with a thick skin which makes them impervious to what spiritual science has to say about our present culture. It is on this side then that the naivety lies; and when the Catholic Church saw that people were becoming so one-sided, they took care to have people specially trained, and in this they really were indirectly guided by spiritual impulses. And the foundation of the Jesuit Order by Ignatius Loyola as a result of fundamental influences from the spiritual world is one of the most significant events of metahistory, and in it one has to do with a strong spiritual efficacy.

Now, my dear friends, we must, of course, among ourselves be able to speak frankly; hence I have been obliged to speak of the grand but questionable training of the Jesuits. I also dealt with this theme in the cycle From Jesus to Christ, which some misguided member has now delivered into the hands of a mudslinger and fabricator of nonsense. You know that in the Karlsruhe cycle I discussed the fundamental basis of Jesuit training. What, may I ask, is the use of stating in each cycle that it is printed as a manuscript for members only, when mudslingers have the cycle at their disposal and can use it for the preparation of all sorts of lies? This incident bears out in a remarkable way what I have already often said, that the time would come when one could no longer count on these cycles being restricted to a small circle, for mankind is not at present fit to be entrusted with anything. Of course, everything written in that quarter is rubbish and untrue, but it is written not on the basis of my public writings, but of private cycles which have been passed on, and I have good reason to believe that one of the first cycles given into the hands of the Catholic clergy was that very Karlsruhe cycle on the Jesuits. For they on their part are not inclined to let the truth about Jesuit training be known. The world must know nothing of how Jesuits are trained; the world must know nothing of their powerful discipline.

Modern mankind in its simplicity is merely retarding its own consciousness. On the subject of the Jesuits there are absolutely no true ideas. There are numerous men within that Order of such spiritual capacity that if they were scattered about the world and did not spend their time in the way they do but were working at external science or painting or poetry, they would be honored as individual geniuses; they would be recognized as the great minds of mankind. Within the Jesuit Order there are countless men who would be great lights if they were to appear as individuals and were busy with something different—with, for instance, materialistic science. But these men suppress their very names; they submerge themselves in their Order, and one of the conditions of their strength is that the world should know nothing of the way in which many a head, clothed in black cassock and Jesuit cap, has been trained.

These things are intended to show you how fundamentally different the whole form of consciousness is in different categories of human beings. But our modern simpletons, who consider themselves enlightened, will not take these things seriously. That must be emphasized again and again, and that, my dear friends, is what I had to speak to you about today.

Now for the next two weeks while I am away we can have no more lectures here. In conclusion to what I have said, partly in public, partly in these private lectures, I had to add all that I have said here today in order that you should not ignore the importance of this misuse of our lecture cycles by our own members. Of course, when the cycles were given, I thought I had to do with people who would respect the undertaking which in a certain sense they had been given. But I was mistaken, and it is quite clear from the rubbish that appears in articles today who has all the cycles at his disposal!

As we consider the education of the older children, it will be especially necessary to address ourselves to the deeper aspects of human life and the cosmos. Without such a deeper understanding of life, we cannot really in good conscience accept the tasks connected with the high school.

We must understand that life is actually a totality, a oneness, and that by removing any one part of it, we do harm to it. As children, we grow into this life as we find it. We are placed into it by, in a way, sleeping into it. Just think of the absolutely unconscious way children confront the world during their first years. They then gradually increase their consciousness. But what does this mean? It means that the children learn to adapt their inner life to the world outside, to connect the outer world to the inner, the inner to the outer. They also learn to be conscious of the outer objects and to differentiate themselves from those objects.

This dichotomy between inner and outer grows ever stronger. The children look up, beyond the horizon, at the sky, they perceive the cosmos, they may even sense the existence of cosmic laws; but as a rule, the children grow into the totality of the world, into which they are received, without in any way getting close to the mystery of the connection between the human being and the cosmos.

The children continue to grow, they are cared for by the people around them, they are educated and instructed. The children develop in such a way that the necessity of participating in world events in some form or other rises from their whole individuality.

We prepare the children for world events by letting them play during the early years, thus awakening their activity. We make every effort to do things with them that meet and satisfy their needs, to educate them healthfully, hygienically—body, soul, and spirit. We try to do something else. We try to adapt them to the demands of the social and technological life. The attempt is made to educate the children in a way that allows them, later in life, to work, to participate in events, to interact with other people. We try to teach them skills and facts that allow them to participate in the technological life, so that their work can be meaningful and valuable for society, so that they themselves may find their place in life, their connection to the social life, to other people.

We do all of this. And in order that we do this in the right way, so that we, on the one hand, really meet the needs of human nature, so that we do not place human beings into the world with spiritually, psychologically (soul), and physically sick or stunted organisms, we must, on the other hand, admit to ourselves that human beings must grow into the social life in such a way that they can do something by which they may advance both themselves and the world. We must see to meeting both these demands.

And yet we have to tell ourselves that it is not easy today to accomplish this, to give the children what they need in these two areas. And if we take an unbiased look at our situation as teachers, it even causes us a certain skepticism, a certain doubt. We can easily understand today’s concerns and the many discussions on the subject. How should our children be educated? What should we do?

All these questions and problems that arise in our culture with such vehemence did not exist in older civilizations. You only need to study these old cultures without bias. Of course, there were a lot of things in those cultures that are incomprehensible to us today. We quite justifiably reject the slave and helot system of ancient Greece. But when we study the Greeks’ views on education, we shall soon see that such discussions as we have today—discussions in which so many diverse and opposing opinions are thrown about—would have been unthinkable then.

Beyond the effort we put into teaching, we need educational methods, and we need to develop teaching skills. But when we watch the heated discussions and see the impossibility of agreement—some emphasize the physical, some the mental-academic aspects, some these, some those methods—we arrive at the conclusion not only that teaching has become difficult but that in regard to our position as teachers and educators we cannot break away from being ignoramuses.

We should really have this feeling of helplessness; and it will, I believe, be even more pronounced if we take a wider view of the situation. You will get this wider view when you study how the current outpouring of educational principles and ideas has its roots in central European culture. I suggest that you make yourselves familiar with everything that was said about spiritual, psychological, and physical education by individuals steeped in central European cultural life. Read the books by Dittes and Diesterweg; read about their views on education.

I recommend to you the interesting essay in Karl Julius Schroer’s book Aspects of Education [Unterrichtsfragen], in which—quite correctly, I believe—he speaks of the place of physical education in the curriculum and offers a detailed program for this subject. During your perusal, I would like for you to consider the mode of thinking and the attitudes from which the thoughts arise. Consider how despite the real understanding of physical human nature and of the need to prepare the children for becoming practical and efficient adults, there is nonetheless also a strong consciousness of the reality of the soul and of the necessity to consider the human soul in all aspects of education.

Then compare—not the outward features; as anthroposophists you ought to be above doing that—compare what lies embedded in the depths of the soul, compare the basic attitudes contained in any of the numerous treatises on education in the Anglo-American literature. Everywhere in this literature you will find chapters on intellectual, aesthetic, and physical education. Think of the deeply held conviction from which they are written. You will get the feeling that the word “education” no longer applies. Everywhere in this culture—even when spiritual or intellectual education is mentioned—the human being is thought of as a kind of mechanism; it is thought that if the physical/corporeal organism, or mechanism, is properly developed, all the moral and intellectual development will follow as though by itself. We have with this view a much stronger inclination to the physical/corporeal in the human being.

I would like to suggest that the central European writers assume that it is possible to include soul and spirit in education and that by doing this the correct treatment of the physical will follow. The Anglo-Saxon idea emphasizes physical education. One then ignores a kind of tiny room inside the human being; one “educates” around the physical, along the periphery, and assumes that there is a tiny room in which the intellect and the moral and religious life are locked up, a kind of instinctive and logical religious and moral life. Once the physical body has been sufficiently educated, its forces will spread to within and dissolve the walls of this room, and the intellectual, moral, and religious life will by itself rush out. We must learn to read between the lines when we study these books and thus discover the underlying reasons and attitudes.

It is necessary to pay attention to these differentiations across the world today. It is much more important than merely observing superficially, in the modern fashion, when one considers these symptoms. Try to understand these symptoms of our transitional culture by following the extraordinarily important debates that have taken place in England during recent weeks. The debates have been triggered by the worsening social conditions and by the general industrial actions (strikes) that have threatened the whole social life. The press was reporting these discussions in full. And then, suddenly, a complete change of interest. Why? A season of ball games has begun, and interest in sport overshadows the interest in the most important social matters. Those involved in the discussions try to get away from the debating rooms as quickly as possible, rushing to the tennis courts, the football fields, and so on, with the feeling: “I want to move in a way that my muscles can grow as strongly as possible; I am interested in such important things.” I am probably describing the feeling in an amateurish way, but I cannot be bothered about detailed facts in this cultural phenomenon: “I am interested in such important matters as watching how somebody throws a ball-like object and how somebody else can catch it correctly with his big toe or another part of his body.”

The picture we get from studying these differentiations is indeed a peculiar one. Reading the papers is of little use. What the journalists are writing is of little significance. It is far more important to discover their reasons for writing about a subject. To enter a discussion with people, to listen to their opinions, is quite useless today. It is far more profitable to discover what is living deep down in their souls, to discover what induces them to act in a certain way, to have this or that opinion. It is this that matters today. What the French and German ministers are saying to each other, if one agrees with either the one or the other, is of no importance whatsoever. It cannot be the concern of someone who wishes to participate in the progress of our civilization. What matters is to discover the differing nature of the untruths expressed by these individuals. We must keep in mind the intentions behind the lies of both speakers.

We must know that we are living at a time when the words people are speaking have no longer any meaning; the forces behind and between the words are significant. A teacher wishing to educate modern youths must understand this, must become part of his or her age in this way, must do so in an ever deeper sense. But the teacher must not share the current basic characteristic attitudes and mode of thinking. When we today—permeated even a little with anthroposophical consciousness—take a walk in the streets, we no longer see human people; rather we see moles that move about in the smallest of circles, circles into which they were placed, moles whose thinking is limited to these narrow circles, cannot reach beyond them, moles who take no interest in what is happening outside these circles. If we do not succeed in growing beyond this molelike existence, if we cannot do more than reproduce the judgments and opinions—from various points of view—to which we have been conditioned through the events at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, then we cannot positively participate in what ought to be done, in order to overcome this unhappy situation.

If there is anyone who ought to be gripped by what I have just outlined, it is the teacher in charge of the young, who wishes especially to help the students to come to terms with their more mature age in the ninth and tenth grade classes. The whole school must be so structured that such ideas can be included. To do this, it is necessary to understand them even better, so that all of us, not only those directly involved in the higher classes, but all the teachers, can say to ourselves that what matters is that we have an elementary feeling for the whole of education and its practical application, that we experience the whole weight and force of our task—to place human beings into the world. Without this experience of our task, our Waldorf School will be no more than a phrase. We shall say all sorts of beautiful things about it, until the holes have become so large that we shall lose the ground under our feet. We must make it inwardly true, and we can do this only by getting ourselves to the stage at which we can have a thorough understanding of the teaching profession.

As we do this, the question will surely arise: As human beings at the present time, what are we really? We were placed into our age through the way we were brought up, conditioned by the events during the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. And what are you today, my dear friends? Some of you have studied philosophy or history in the way these subjects were taught in the high schools and universities at the beginning of this century. Some of you have studied mathematics or other practical subjects. Some of you have become teachers of singing or physical education. Various methods were used in teaching these subjects. There are those among you who, according to the predilection of the staff, accepted the model of the gentleman or lady, but with a physical/corporeal understanding. There are those of you who have preferred what could be called a more inward path, but a path made inward through intellectualism. We are the sum total, the result of the ways we were conditioned—as far as into our fingertips and toes.

We must be quite clear about our task today—namely, to take full charge of what has been implanted in us through our education. This is possible only through a timely exploration of conscience that extends beyond the individual aspects. Without such exploration we cannot grow beyond what our time can provide us with. And we must grow beyond what our time can give us. We must not become puppets of the trends developed at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. Above all, we must admit to the limitations of what is given us by today’s culture; through a comprehensive exploration of conscience, we must attain the correct knowledge, knowledge that will allow us to find our place in life.

At this point we ask: Has not everything that has made us the way we are been infected by the materialistic attitudes of our time? Certainly, there is no shortage of goodwill. But even this goodwill has been infected by the views that are the result of the natural-scientific world conception. And our knowledge of physical education has emerged from such views.

Humankind has really always wanted to hide from, to avoid, the necessity of exploring its conscience. Humankind has wanted to avoid the exploration that would thoroughly stir up its inner life by asking: How do we older people confront the young? When we look at the girls and boys reaching the age of sexual maturity, when we see them coming to us after having attained this maturity—if we wish to be honest with ourselves, we can only have one answer to the question: We don’t know what we should do for them, unless we educate and teach on the basis of fundamentally new concepts. Otherwise, we produce nothing but a wide gap between the young and ourselves.

This great question has practical dimensions. Take a good look at the youth movements as they have developed today. They are nothing else but documentation that our various experimentations have resulted in the loss of our leadership in education. Just look at what has happened. At the age we are now discussing, the young feel inwardly urged to withdraw from the leadership of the old, to take their guidance into their own hands; this happened with tremendous rapidity. We cannot fault the young for this. Discussion of this phenomenon is of great spiritual-scientific interest but not initially of pedagogical interest. Our pedagogical interest must be limited to the fact that the old have been responsible for their loss of leadership and understanding of the young.

Since the old no longer have anything of substance to give to the young, the teenagers and adolescents have formed themselves into groups [Wandervögel] that traverse the countryside with singing and conversing, searching in a vague way for what the older generation has failed to provide. Thoughts and words have become hollow; the older generation having nothing to give to the young, the young then roam the woods, searching among themselves for what they cannot receive from the words and models of their elders. It is one of the most significant phenomena of the present time. The young find themselves confronted by the great question that used to be answered in the past by the older generation but that now can no longer be answered by them, because their language is no longer comprehensible.

Remember your own youth? You had, perhaps, more courage than the members of such groups, took less interest in traipsing through the countryside. You managed to survive somehow. You pretended to listen to the older generation and adhered to the status quo. But the Wandervögel do not pretend. They have withdrawn from the older generation and have taken to the woods. We have seen this happen, and we have also witnessed the results of this youth movement. Not so long ago, they felt the need to make contact among themselves, wishing to discover for themselves what they could not get from their teachers, wishing to escape them and take refuge in nature. They mean to find their answers in some vague, undefined sphere. They make contact among themselves, forming small cliques.

It really is a strange phenomenon that is immensely instructive. The old have lost their leadership, have become philistines. They cannot accept the fact that this deep longing has awakened in the young, in the members of such groups. And how have the old reacted to this, those among them who are at least a little affected by modern times? They do not say to themselves: “We must advance to a deep exploration of conscience; we must from our mature stage of development find a way to the young.” No, they react differently: “Since the young,” they say, “do no longer wish to learn from us, we shall learn from them.” And you can see this happening in all our educational institutions—the old adapting to the will and demands of the young. When you look at this new phenomenon without prejudice, you will see that the old wish to be led by the young, that they have placed the leadership into their hands—representatives of the student body are now counselors and members of boards and trusts in educational institutions.

We must consider the deeper implications of this phase. What has it done to the young? They have passed from their need for contact, from their wish to find themselves in cliques, to searching for their inner (soul) life in a hermit existence. The final stage of this development is a kind of fear of contact, everyone feeling the necessity of relying only on himself or herself. The former certainty of finding answers in the world outside has given way to a kind of atomizing longing, a brooding: “What is the reason for my inability to do justice to the human being in me?” You can see this feeling spreading everywhere; you only need to be awake enough to see it. You can see this growing uncertainty in the fragmentation of soul forces. You can perceive a special fear, a horror vacui, that makes the young shudder and feel scared in view of their future. They are fearful of the life ahead of them. There is basically only one answer, one remedy—the deep exploration of conscience. And this cannot limit itself to externalities but must lead to the question: How has it come to pass that we, when we wish to lead and guide the young, no longer understand them with the forces of the old?

Let us, by contrast, take a look at a distant age, such as that of the ancient Greeks. The older Greeks, as we know from history, still had a certain understanding for the young. If you try to understand Greek culture, you will find a peculiar and very definite relation between the period from the thirteenth or fourteenth to the twentieth or twenty-first year and the period from the twenty-eighth to the thirty-fifth year. This is characteristic of both the Greek and Roman cultures—that people in their late thirties had a fine understanding for children between seven and fourteen and that people in their early thirties felt a special affinity for, an understanding for the needs of, teenagers and adolescents. There was this relation according to different age groups—a relation of those in the third seven-year period with those in the fifth and a relation of those in the second seven-year period with those in the sixth.

It really is not easy to see behind the mysteries of human evolution. But we can indeed clearly feel that for the Greeks when the girls and boys arrived at sexual maturity they looked up to the twenty-eight- and twenty-nine-year-olds, choosing the ones they liked best, the ones they wished to emulate in freedom. They could no longer obey an authority as such, only one of their choosing in this specific age group. As humanity evolved through the Middle Ages to our time, this relation became ever weaker until it disappeared altogether. People were thrown together in a helter-skelter way; a spiritually given structure gave way to chaos. This very real situation has, then, prompted a social problem in our world; in education, it has prompted a pedagogical/didactic problem. Without keeping in mind the whole of evolution, we cannot make any progress.

I would like to show you the cause for this phenomenon by pointing to a concrete fact. All you have then to do is to generalize this concrete fact in order to discover the causes for this lack of understanding between the old and the young. You see, during our current preparation for life, during our education, we are, for example, taught that there are some one hundred elements. We learn this, and when we become teachers we are, as a rule, aware of these chemical elements—that they exist, even though this theory has recently come under attack. But we have absorbed this knowledge, carry it within us, the knowledge that there are these one hundred or so elements, that through their synthesis and analysis everything in the world comes about. We even develop a world conception on this basis. And this is the farce, that during the last third of the nineteenth century a world conception was constructed on the basis of the then seventy chemical elements. This prompted the question: How could the planets, everything that solidified, arise through chemical and physical changes? How did abiogenesis come about through an especially complicated chemical synthesis? It was the wish to comprehend the whole world with thoughts that had their roots in such elements.

The Greeks would have thought of this one-sided intellectual (head) approach to the world as nonsense, as inhuman. If they had been told to imagine the world as the result of the synthesis and analysis of these one hundred elements, they would have felt, deep down, as though the human being would disintegrate into dust during the process. The Greeks would not have been able to comprehend it. What indeed would a human being do with such a world that consists of these elements that synthesize and analyze? What does it mean? What would happen? The world could well be there, be a gigantic cosmic test tube, but the human being, how would the human being exist in it? Is is as though we were to put a large test tube in a room, allow all sorts of elements to boil in it, and then open a door and push a human being through an opening into the tube, into this mixture of salts and acids. This the Greeks would have imagined if they had been asked to think of the world as structured by these elements. They would not have accepted this idea, their feelings would have resisted it. The picture I have just characterized would have arisen instinctively in their minds.

But we are not merely heads. It was only at fairgrounds that living, talking heads used to be shown as exhibits. No, we don’t exist as head only but as complete human beings. And if we wish to develop such ideas with only the head, if our life of feeling, of will, and of the whole physical organism were to be so constituted that we could believe in a world made up of such stuff, we would have to feel very differently, would have something different in our fingertips than what the Greeks had, the Greeks who would have dismissed such a notion as pure nonsense. One feels differently about, places oneself differently into, a world if one believes that the world is something that is fit for a test tube but not for the universe. The same point applies with regard to the social life in ancient Greece. We must consider these things.

We don’t just think that the world consists of one hundred elements. We carry this feeling into everything we do during the day—even when we wash and dry our hands. The fact that it is possible for our head to have such an inhuman world conception while we wash ourselves—thinking in this way impresses a definite quality into our feelings. And then—when we can think and feel in this way, when there is no room for the human being in such a world conception—when we then confront the fifteen-year-old girls and boys with this thinking and feeling, it should come as no surprise that we cannot reach them, that we don’t know what to do with our feeling and thinking. With this world conception we can lecture in universities and colleges, teaching what we believe to be right, but we cannot live with it. The graduates of our universities then become teachers who have no idea of their connection with the young. This is the terrible abyss that has opened up before us.

But as far as human beings are concerned, there is something in us at the age of fifty or fifty-five that bears a certain resemblance to today’s teaching of chemistry and physics. We then have become sclerosed to the extent that our inner organism faintly resembles the world outside. The cosmic powers are gradually doing something with us during the course of our lives on earth. We, too, harden in our physical organism in older age. At about fifty, we become dissociated; we, as it were, disintegrate inwardly into dust. But this dissolution is a gradual, slow process, not as cruel as what would be happening to us in a test tube. Neither does it go that far—although it has the same tendency; it is a more humane process. But at the age when we approach death something does begin to be active in us that is synonymous with the teaching of modern science. Our world conception is such that only the very old may comprehend it. Nature is kind. It compensates the old by making them childish.

Talking about such things in this way may make it seem as though one wishes to poke fun at the world. No, it is not a matter of humor; it is a matter of the deepest tragedy. It is true. We are describing the world today as processes that are synonymous with those in human corpses, no more. After our death something similar takes place. In older age, we have a presentiment of the processes in our physical body after death. And we describe nothing else in our modern sciences. Our cultural institutions are full with such knowledge that applies to the physical human being after death. But such knowledge does not live in our limbs. Such are the feelings we absorb from the thoughts given us today. And the traditional theological beliefs have become mere words, because they have no place in the teaching of natural science about the human corpse.

As long as we limit this teaching to a theory of knowledge, it is more or less harmless. If, however, we consider the human being as a totality and ask what happens to the human being when he or she is influenced by such a life, the question is one of life and death. And this we must not ignore, must not evade. The forces active in the children in our classrooms are quite different from those we learned about. We no longer know anything of what is active in them; we are separated from them by a gulf.

Yes, the Greeks would have considered our talk about the elements nonsensical. What did they say? They believed not that the structure of the world consists of some one hundred elements but that four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—are interacting in it. Our academics, our professors, the leaders of our culture and education will tell us: “This is a childish world conception. We left it behind and no longer bother with it.” Someone who has begun to think a little will tell us: “Oh well, we too are working with these things. Today we call them aggregate conditions—solid, gaseous, liquid. We see warmth differently from the naive way the Greeks did. Yes, we have them all, but we have developed them correctly. Of course, we admire the Greeks for their knowledge.” This is a benevolent, patronizing, condescending attitude: “We are fortunate in having progressed so far, in having discovered all these elements, whereas the ancients used to practice all sorts of animism and talked of earth, air, fire, and water.”

But these leaders are wrong. There is a deeper meaning to the conception of the Greeks. When the Greeks spoke of earth, air, fire, and water, they did not look at them as we do today. If you had asked one of those people who lived within the Greek world conception—and there were still a good number of them in the fifteenth century, the later ones having read about it in books; our modern people sometimes take a look at it without understanding it—if you had asked one of them: “What is your idea of fire, of warmth?” the Greek would have answered: “I think of fire as being warm and dry.” “What about air?” “I see air as warm and damp.” The Greek did not think of the physical properties in fire and air but rather formed an idea. This idea contained the sub-ideas: warm and dry, warm and damp. The Greeks did not limit themselves to the physical appearance but imagined the elements as inner qualities. One had to raise oneself to something that could not be seen by physical eyes, that had to be grasped by thinking, in order to get to a knowledge of the elements, of what one then called the elements.

What did they achieve by this? They arrived at an understanding that corresponded to the etheric in the human being—the etheric body in its effectiveness. This understanding of the elements as inner qualities allowed them to experience the etheric body. Their experience was not that of being in the etheric body but rather in how the etheric body worked in the physical. It is not possible to achieve this understanding merely by studying the interactions of oxygen and carbon intellectually. It is impossible to arrive at an understanding of the way the etheric body is working in the physical if one only studies the interactions of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and sulfur. Such studies take one away from the activities of the etheric, keep one within the physical. This means that one remains in the sphere in which the processes in the human being take place after death. The life processes, in which the etheric body is working in the physical, can only be understood by imagining warm and dry, cold and damp, warm and damp—by inwardly grasping the qualities with which the etheric body takes hold of the physical, by having this living comprehension of nature in the four elements. This is not a childish idea that regards only the physical but one that regards the working of the etheric. And this idea was lost in later times. But this has an effect on the whole of the human being. Think about it. People are growing up, are told that the world consists of one hundred or so elements—iodine, sulfur, selenium, tellurium, and so forth—all whirling into each other. This affects our feelings, to the extent that we, as human beings, are removed from the process. The elements are there, and we are not part of any of them.

One could have the justified idea of being a part of the other way of looking at the world, of looking at the four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—in the ancient Greek way: earth as cold and dry, air as warm and damp, fire as warm and dry, water as cold and damp. When one imagines these qualities and makes them live in oneself, they grip one—qualitatively. One becomes permeated by them, they take hold of the limbs; they take hold of us. Such ideas that reach as far as into the limbs make us into beings different from beings for whom the ideas affect the limbs only after death. The corpses in the graves may well feel in line with the one hundred or so elements that combine according to chemical laws. But such a concept does not do anything for the life of human beings. By contrast, in having this idea of the four elements, we perceive ourselves in our etheric bodies.

You see from such reflections that education has really become quite unnecessary today for us human beings. We have a culture, an education, that at best prepares us to be able to function outwardly, mechanically, to maintain the status quo in society. For this we are prepared. As human beings we get nothing. Our education does not reach our limbs but remains stuck in the intellect. It does not affect our feelings and will.

If we wish to have any effect at all, we must resort to sermons and the like. We must approach people from without. But we do not give them anything that affects their inner life. The way we deal with the young today involves a terrible untruth. We tell them to be good without providing the means whereby they can be good. All they can do is to obey us as their authority. If we can manage to cow people throughout their lives in one way or another, some order can be maintained. The police will deal with the recalcitrants.

Head knowledge has no meaning for the inner life. This is the reason for our impotence in relating to the young at the important time in their lives when they are supposed to connect the spirit and soul to the physical/corporeal, to bring them into a reciprocal relationship. What indeed are today’s adults to do with the young who wish to relate spirit and soul to the physical, to the life around them?

This is the situation we shall take as our starting point in tomorrow’s talk, when we shall further acquaint ourselves with this problem. My intention today has been to evoke in you the feeling that as soon as we are supposed to find a way to the hearts of children at a definite and important time in their lives, we are dealing with the important issue of a world conception.

The Munich Congress,¹³²¹³³ being the fourth after Amsterdam, London and Paris, was intended to mark a certain milestone in our theosophical movement. A kind of connection is to be made between the different nations also for our theosophical cause in Europe. I am not intending to give an actual report on the congress today but just to offer a few comments for those who were unable to be there.

The congress was to show one thing, something I had been emphasizing many times with reference to our theosophical cause—it was to show that theosophy is not meant to be a personal matter of broodingly looking inward. It is meant to play a role in practical life, be concerned with education, come to be at home in all branches of practical life. Those who have deeper insight and understanding of the true impulses of theosophy will know, even today, what opportunities this theosophy will provide in the future. It will be the harmony between things we see [outside] and feel inwardly. Someone able to see into things more deeply will see a major reason for the scattiness [of today's people], disharmony between the situation as it is and the things theosophy aims at. Not only theosophists have felt this, but also other important figures, Richard Wagner, for instance...

In earlier times every door lock, every house, every structure was a structure of the soul. Soul stuff had flowed into it. In the old days a work of art was part of human feeling and thinking. The forms of Gothic churches were in accord with the mood of people who would often walk a long way to those churches. They had the soul mood of the people. The worshipper walking to the church would feel that those forms were like putting one's hands together in prayer, just as the ancient German [entering a grove] would feel [the movements of the trees] to be something like a putting the hands together in prayer. Everything was more familiar to people in those times. You can still see this most beautifully expressed in the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. The way a whole small village would come together in the church was a true expression of the inner life in that village. Whole ether streams would gather in the place where the church stood. The materialistic age has split everything apart. People don't realize this, being unable to take a clear look at life. A seer will know, however, that when you walk through a town today you'll see practically nothing but things for our stomachs or the latest fashions. Anyone able to trace the secret threads in life will also know what has brought our materialistic civilization to this split-apart state.

Health can come for the outside world if it becomes a reflection of our inmost moods of soul. We can't achieve complete perfection right away, but an example has been given in Munich. The spiritual scientific view of the world was brought to expression in the auditorium. The whole hall was in red. People are often quite wrong about the colour red, one should not fail to perceive the deeper significance of the colour. Human evolution involves ascending and descending movements. Look at the original peoples. Their natural world is green. And what do they love most? Red! An occultist knows that red has a special effect on a healthy soul. It releases active powers in that soul, powers that encourage one to act, powers that should move the soul from taking it too easy to making an effort, even if this is far from easy. A room intended to have a solemn, festive mood needs to be papered in red. Someone who uses red wall paper in his living room shows that he no longer has a feeling for solemn moods, taking the red colour down to an everyday level. Goethe wrote the most excellent words one can think of about these things: 'The effect of this colour is as unique as its nature. It gives an impression both of solemnity and dignity and of charm and graciousness. It does the former in its dark, dense form, the latter when bright and diluted. And so the dignity of old age and the charm of youth may garb themselves in one and the same colour.'¹³⁴

Those are the moods which red creates, moods we are able to demonstrate using occult methods. Look at the countryside through a red glass and you'll get the impression: That's what it must look like on the day of judgement. Red makes us glad to see how far human beings have developed. Red is hostile to moods that hold us back, moods of sin.

Then we had the seven column motifs for the time when buildings might also be erected for theosophy. The column motifs were taken from the teachings of the initiates, from very early times. In theosophy it will be possible to provide architecture with genuinely new column motifs. The old columns have really long ceased to mean something to people. The new ones relate to Saturn, Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury and Venus. The capitals reflect the laws. Between the columns we had put the seven seals of the Book of Revelation, in Rosicrucian style. The seal of the Grail appeared in public for the first time.

We can also build theosophy. We can build it in architectural forms, in education and in the social field. The Rosicrucian principle is to bring the spirit into the world, to do fruitful work for the soul. And it will also prove possible to elevate art to the mystery art which Richard Wagner longed for so much. An attempt has been made in Edouard Schuré's mystery play.¹³⁵ He sought to follow the mystery plays of old. The underlying intention was to let theosophy crystallize in the developing structure of the world. The programme was in a solemn and festive red, showing a black cross with roses wound around it against a blue background. Rosicrucianism takes the things given through Christianity forward into the future. The initials given on the programme reflected the underlying thoughts.¹³⁶

Today I would like to consider some questions that may come up in relation to this. First of all: How would it be if theosophy were to move across into the Rosicrucian stream and come wholly into its own within this? In this respect let us consider some ideas relating to theosophical ethics or morality. It is not a matter of saying: You must do or not do one thing or another. Theosophy has nothing to do with demands and commandments but with facts and narratives.

Let us take just one example of a fact in the astral world; it will immediately be apparent that there is no need to preach morality—which does not serve any purpose anyway, for admonitions and commandments cannot be the basis of genuine morality which comes only with the facts of higher life. If you hear occultists say that a lie is murder and suicide, this acts as an impulse with such moral power that it simply does not compare with the simple admonition: You must not lie. If we know what a lie is and what the truth is, if we know that everything leaves its mark in the realm of the spirit, the situation changes. A narrative which is in accord with the truth creates vital energies for further development. Untruths that are spoken strike at the truth and this reflects on the individual himself. Every lie that is told will later have to be felt by the teller himself. Lies are the greatest obstacles to further development. It is not for nothing that the devil is called the spirit of lies and obstacles. The explosive substance of a lie kills objectively and discharges itself against the individual who put it out into the world.

We have three terms for the personal: the personal, the impersonal, and the more-than-personal. There were human ancestors once who were higher than any animal but lower than the human being. They consisted of physical body, ether body and astral body. Then the I was added, and this creates the higher parts out of itself, so that essential human nature will be sevenfold.

The evolution of physical body, ether body and astral body continued through long periods of time. They thus made themselves ripe to receive I-awareness into themselves. Today, we'll consider the tendencies of the three lower bodies and the way in which they developed. The human being gradually became more and more able to gain self-awareness. This is only possible with the power of egoism, self-seeking, which may be divine or devilish. We should judge these terms not merely by how we feel about them but according to their true essence. Independence made it necessary for human beings to grow egoistical.

Developing egoism brought with it the form of—apparent—loss of conscious awareness we call death in our present human life. Death developed to the same degree as self-seeking evolved. In the very beginning human beings did not die. They were like a part that dried up and would then grow again, more or less the way a finger nail may drop off and grow again. Our present-day way of dying and being reborn came into existence so that we may have the potential for our present I-awareness. Egoism and death are two sides of the same thing. The higher aspect of human nature is such that it overcomes egoism, works to rise to the level of the divine and thus overcomes death. The more the individual develops the higher part in himself, the more does he develop awareness of his immortality. The moment someone has become egoistical, he has also become an individual person. Animals are not persons and that is because they have their I as a group soul that does not descend from the astral plane. The individual personality lets the three bodies—physical body, ether body and astral body—be shone through by the I. This may of course be in an unclear, shadowy way, and in that case the individual concerned is weak in his personal identity.

This is clearly apparent to a clairvoyant. He sees a colourful aura around the individual which exactly reflects his moods, passions, feelings and sensations in currents and clouds of colour. If we were to go back to the time when the three bodies were only just ready to receive the human I, we would see an aura also for this creature which was not yet wholly human. This would, however, lack the yellow currents that reflect man's higher nature. Powerful personalities have an aura with powerful yellow radiation. Now you may be a powerful personality but not active; you feel things strongly inside but not be a man or woman of action. The aura will also show a lot of yellow. But if you are a woman or man of action, and your personality is actively influencing the world, the yellow will gradually change into a radiant red. An aura showing red radiance is the aura of someone who is active; but it must be radiant.

There is, however, a pitfall for personalities that want to be active. This is ambition, vanity. Strong natures are particularly prone to this. A clairvoyant sees it in their auras. Without ambition the yellow changes directly into red. If the individual is ambitious, the aura will contain a lot of orange. This pitfall must be avoided if the action is to be objective.

Weak personalities are more interested in being given things than in giving themselves and doing something. You will then see mainly blues, and if they are particularly indolent you see indigo. This is more an inner indolence than an outer one.

So you see how a strong or weak personality is reflected in the aura. People should overcome the personal element more and more and let the higher principle be active. This is why you hear such a lot about overcoming personal concerns and egoism. But this brings us to our main point. It is a question of whether we overcome the personal with the impersonal or the more-than-personal.

What does it mean, to overcome oneself with the impersonal? It means to weaken and force back the individual's powerful energies. That would mean being impersonal. More-than-personal would in some respect be the exact opposite of this. It would mean increasing the individual's energies, bringing out the powerful energies which a person has.

We find the I in the soul, and within it first of all the element of courage, but secondly also the soul's desirous and demanding qualities. Basically everything in the inner life goes back to these two things. And things receive different treatment there. This is due to the following. Human beings do not make enough of an effort to be open to higher things. They will develop, but it will be the lower principle which develops, with elements of courage and qualities of desire developing in a crude way. If they were simply to reduce this side of things, we'd have a civilization of the impersonal. Activity, which makes human beings human as they go out to be among others and do whatever they are capable of, will in a way always bring such individuals in collision with others. And they must experience collisions if they feel they are called on to do something.

We can also kill off our desires. This will make the personality colourless, however. Yet there's something else we can do, and that is to ennoble them. We need not reduce their strength. We can direct them towards higher objects. The personality need lose nothing of its strength then, though it will grow more noble and divine. We need not kill off desires, only transform them into finer and more noble desires. They can then come into their own with the same vehemence. An example. Think of a honky-tonk entertainment. Someone who does not go to it need not be an ascetic. He has merely transformed his lower desires into higher ones and so a honky-tonk would simply bore him.

This is an area where theosophy has been most misunderstood by theosophists. There can be no question of killing off the personal element. It needs to be helped to move up to something higher. Everything theosophy is able to give us will be needed for this. It is thus above all a matter of arousing interest in higher things. This does happen. People need not deaden their feelings for this, but direct them towards the higher, divine process of evolution, to the great realities in this world. If we direct our feelings towards these we will lose interest in the brutal side of life, yet our feelings will not be deadened but will grow rich, and the whole of our human nature will catch fire. If someone is fond of some nice roast pork, it is not a matter of getting rid of this feeling for roast pork but of transforming it. Our aim should be to metamorphose our feelings. The feelings which one individual has for the symphony of a meal are applied to a real symphony by another. If you preach overcoming desires and activity, you are preaching something impersonal. But if you show people the way in which they can direct their desires to things of the spirit, you point them towards things that are more than personal. And this more-than-personal must be the goal of the theosophical movement.

The science of the spirit is not intended to produce stay-at-homes and eccentrics but people who are active, going out into the world. How do we reach the more-than-personal, however? Not by eating into the personal, but by perceiving what is true, great and all-embracing. This is why it is not for nothing that we cultivate an eye for the great scheme of things in theosophy. This helps us to grow beyond trivial things and take things not in an impersonal way but in one that goes beyond being personal.

There is an area where we have a crossover experiment,¹³⁷ as it were, to establish the difference between personal, impersonal and more-than-personal. When it comes to love, you may easily think that the feelings which someone has for someone else are impersonal. But this may be a long way off from anything more-than-personal. People fall into a strange illusion here. They confuse self love with love for someone else. Most people think they love someone else but are in fact loving themselves in the other person. Giving oneself up to someone else is merely something to satisfy our own egoism. The individual concerned is not aware of this, but basically it is just a roundabout way of satisfying one's egoism.

We do not exist in isolation but are part of a whole. A finger is lovingly part of the hand and the organism. It would die if it weren't. In the same way a person could never exist without the rest of humanity. The result of this is that people like people.

Love sometimes simply comes from poverty of soul, and poverty of soul always comes from powerful egoism. If someone says he can't live without another person, his own personality is impoverished, and he is looking for something that will make him more complete. He dresses it all up by saying: I am getting impersonal; I love the other person.

The most beautiful and selfless love shows itself when one does not need the other person and can also do without him. The individual's then loving someone not for his own sake but for the sake of that other person. This does of course mean one has to be able to discern the true value of someone, which can only be done by entering deeply into the world. The more of a theosophist you are, the more you will learn to enter into the inner essence of another individual. And you'll then be all the more sensitive of his value and not love him for egoistical reasons. If you go through the world like this, you'll also see that some people have one kind of egoism, and others another, each living according to the value of his egoism.

What is needed is higher development of the personality. Impersonal love based on weakness will always also involve suffering. Love that is more-than-personal bases on strength and perception of the other person. It can be a source of joy and satisfaction. Swinging to and fro between all kinds of different moods in one's love is always a sign that this love is masked egoism and comes from an impoverished personality. This is how we can best see the difference between impersonal and more-than-personal—by looking at love.

Someone to whom the science of the spirit has not given a foundation in his life has failed to understand it, for it is a source of inner satisfaction in life for the future. If materialism were to continue to gain the upper hand, and with it also egoism, which is part of it, humanity would fall more and more into the pessimism which represents the burned-out ashes of burned-out minds. If humanity takes up the science of the spirit, true cheerfulness will be restored to it, and this is at the same time also the source of health. Disharmony ultimately comes from egoism, and the higher human being spreads a cheerful, happy mood. The more the higher, the divine comes into its own, the more will human beings be in harmony. We should think more about how we can help the whole of humanity than about how the science of the spirit may help us in particular. We will find it easier and easier to discover the source of genuine cheerfulness and joy, youth eternal, the more we make ourselves familiar with the ethics of the more-than-personal.

Negation is definitely not the aim with theosophy, but rather affirmation. The impersonal signifies negation, the more-than-personal affirmation, weak though it may still be. This also shows us the mission which the science of the spirit is given out of the essential nature of humanity. 'You'll know it by its fruits,' by the way it makes people fit and effective in life, with faces that reflect inner harmony. The spirit never shows itself in a woebegone face. Even the pain someone has to go through is transformed in the thinker's face and appears in a more noble form; the expression of pain has been purified in the harmonious face of a thinker. A woebegone face indicates that egoism has not yet been overcome. The science of the spirit encourages us to turn to the world around us without losing ourselves in that world. It takes us beyond the personal, not by destroying the personality, making it impersonal, but by enhancing it so that it will be more than personal.

• 132. Concerning this record of the lecture on 12 June 1907, based on poor-quality notes, see Rudolf Steiner's essay 'Der Kongress der Federation europäischer Sektionen der Theosophischen Gesellschaft in München' in Luzifer-Gnosis (GA 34), S. 590 ft".
• 133. Fourth Congress of the Federation of European Sections of the Theosophical Society, 18-21 May 1907 in Munich. See Steiner R. Rudolf Steiner, an Autobiography (GA 28), ch. 28; . Tr. R. Stebbing. New York: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1977; Occult Seals and Columns. London: Anthroposophical Publishing Co. 1924.
• 134. Zur Farbenlehre, Didaktischer Teil. Sechste Abteilung. Sinnlich-sittliche Wirkung der Farbe, 796.
• 135. Das heilige Drama von Eleusis, reconstructed by Edouard Schuré, translated from the French by Marie von Sivers, cast in free rhythms by Rudolf Steiner. The premiere was given on 19 May 1907, at the Munich Congress.
• 136. E.D.N. -1. C. M. - P. S. S. R. as the initial letters of the Rosicrucian words Ex deo nascimur. In Christo morimur. Per spiritum sanctum reviviscimus.
• 137. Testing two cross-over qualities that are inseparably bound up with one another. Either both are present or neither, so that one needs only search for one of them. The method goes back to Francis Bacon.

The truth of spiritual science and the practical life demands of the present. At the same time, a defense of anthroposophical spiritual science against its accusers.

Ladies and gentlemen, One might imagine that even the title of today's lecture would give rise to misgivings here and there. The title combines two aspects of spiritual science: the spiritual science that I have been privileged to represent here in Stuttgart for almost two decades and that is primarily concerned, as many believe, with the highest spiritual, with the supersensible aspects of the human being, and the directly practical life challenges of the present. And it will be my task today to overcome such prejudices, which the two fields cannot be reconciled with, and to show precisely how much depends on a correct understanding of the connection between spiritual knowledge and the most immediate practical demands of life, which we need today to get out of the great distress and misery of the time. I would therefore like to start with something directly practical.

Perhaps it might seem as if this has no connection with my lecture today: I would like to start with the temporary end of the English miners' strike, which was so frightening for the civilized world. The outcome, as you know, was quite uncertain for quite some time. The strike has been settled for the time being, settled through the negotiations of the parliamentarians with the working population. Anyone who has taken note of the way in which the parliamentary body and the working population have settled this strike through negotiations and who has an unbiased view of the course of events will have to say to himself: The way in which the measures have been agreed, it depends entirely on the development of the English economic situation in the next few years how quickly this strike will have to be repeated. For the question is: Will it be possible for the English economy to fulfill the conditions that have been agreed upon? In all likelihood it will not. It may be said that the clever Lloyd George sensed this. But this man has the ability to achieve results everywhere through forceful parliamentary speech. He has less opportunity to understand the conditions of reality and to bring about something through his measures that could have the necessary duration. He probably foresaw that too. That is why he advocated measures to the parties that would serve to bring into effect the forces of the state machinery the moment such a strike recurred. Now something very strange happened: the parties of the right, well into the center, were actually afraid of such measures. They did not really want these measures to become law. Everyone spoke out in favor of not letting these measures become law because they did not dare to point out what strict measures the state would take if the strike were to be repeated. Lloyd George gave a half-hour speech, and all doubts and fears were swept away. The speech had the effect that what he intended was seen as a necessity of state. This man, the very type of parliamentarian, had overwhelmed the people with his speech.

It is important to point this out if we want to consider the most important thing in the state of mind of the present, because it is actually in the processes of practical life that we see this state of mind of the present most clearly. The man had something to defend, something that pointed entirely to uncertainty, something whose outcome could not be known. He had no ideas that could have led to measures that seemed realistic, that would have been such that one could have said: these parties are throwing something into economic reality that promises to really help this economy. He had nothing like that. But he had the speech that dispelled people's fear, that motivated them to do something, which may not be realistic, but which first of all satisfies the way of thinking, the attitude, the state of mind.

This is characteristic of the present time. Above all, it is characteristic of what has emerged more and more in recent times, and is only now, in this time of great and terrible need, beginning to falter. It is characteristic of the particular conception of parliamentarism and its tasks. In parliamentarism, there are people who have general ideas about the course of necessary events, and there are people who take measures according to the interests they have, or even according to general, more or less even abstract ideas that they have of reality. And basically, for a long time within modern civilization, it was decided to intervene in reality based on ideas that could be talked about beautifully, but which did not have the power to intervene in reality based on an understanding of reality. And basically, this kind of thinking, this kind of outlook of present-day humanity is such that this outlook, this way of thinking, is alien to reality, that it is powerless to think out of reality and in turn to work through thoughts into reality.

Many examples could be cited of contemporary events that would prove the same as the settlement of the English miners' strike. One could point to many things that would show how people's way of thinking floats, as it were, above reality, but how, precisely at the points where decisions have to be made, the ideas that float above reality and should make the decisions cannot make them. Despite our materialism, despite our naturalism, despite our science that insists on experience, we have become a humanity that is out of touch with reality. This is basically the tragic fate of the present, that we have become a reality-alienated humanity. And do not the events of recent years stand before all of European humanity in their devastating, destructive effect? And do they not face the powerlessness of thoughts, the powerlessness of ideas, to conquer these events, to give them a form within which man can really live?

What does the truth of spiritual science have to do with all this? To answer this question, I must refer to a few things that I have repeatedly dealt with here in Stuttgart over many years, albeit before a smaller circle, I must first point out that this spiritual science is based on a special research method of soul development that conveys to man the view of his eternal core: of what man is before birth, before conception, and what he will become after death, but also what the soul and spiritual essence of man works on in the world of the senses between birth and death.

But in recent years, in addition to the spiritual-scientific knowledge that the human soul needs, in addition to the human yearning for knowledge, all kinds of practical institutions have been established. The Federation for the Threefold Social Organism has been added, which, from the particular type of spiritual-scientific way of thinking, wants to work in the social shaping of contemporary life in such a way that not ideas floating above reality in cloud cuckoo land are to prevail, but ideas that come from reality and can therefore also shape reality. Ideas that are practical in terms of reality are to be juxtaposed with social demands precisely from this spiritual science.

And it was out of this spiritual science here in Stuttgart that the Waldorf School was created, whose pedagogy and didactics, whose entire educational system does not seek to spread the world view of spiritual science, to instill it in children - that is not the case at all - but to apply the teaching and educational practice in the school that can arise from spiritual science. The Waldorf school wants to apply those practices through which the child, because it is educated by the spirit, can also become a truly practical human being through this spiritual education, to use Goethe's words, a human being who can stand in reality with his whole personality.

And even in recent times, the spiritual scientific way of thinking has given rise to the very practical institution of the “Coming Day”, which, from its circle, would like to have a healthy effect on economic life by replacing mere business routine with spiritual business and economic practice. And if these things are understood, my dear audience, then they will undoubtedly have many other things in their wake, because spiritual science is there for life, not for an unworldly brooding and pondering. In order to recognize it in this task, however, it must indeed be pointed out with some reference to its special nature.

This spiritual science, as it is meant here, grows directly out of the scientific spirit of the present, that scientific spirit that has emerged in the last three to four centuries within the development of civilized humanity, which has produced the special scientific attitude that today has such great authority. And I must point out, even if it may not seem popular at first, how, on the one hand, the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science that is meant here grows out of today's recognized science, but how, on the other hand, it completely transforms this recognized science, making it something completely different. The Dornach School of Spiritual Science course last September/October was intended to show that these individual sciences can become something different through spiritual science than they were before. This is also what the School of Spiritual Science course announced today and organized by the School of Spiritual Science students is intended to show.

To look at what spiritual science actually is, let us first consider the nature of today's recognized science, rightly recognized in its fields. This science, which has indeed celebrated its great triumphs particularly in the field of natural knowledge, and which has provided humanity with such indispensable services, attaches particular importance not only to recognizing the laws of nature, but also the laws of the historical development of humanity and other things, including social life, which are completely detached from the subjectivity and personality of the human being. Today's science regards it as its ideal to have ideas and to register the results of observations in such a way that these ideas of natural and other laws, these results of observation, are completely independent of the person who records them, who makes them. Today's science regards it as its ideal that man, as it were, completely eliminates himself by recognizing. And the more he eliminates himself, the more he lives completely impersonally in the abstract ideas, the stronger - one thinks - he is scientifically. But what does this science produce? The one who lives in this science can feel what it produces. It produces something like images of external reality, which, precisely because they must be impersonal according to the ideal of science, actually leave the human being completely cold, so to speak, inwardly separate from the human being.

Dear attendees, I would like to use a comparison to characterize what man experiences in today's science. Man strives to get external nature, external reality in general, through this science into himself in such a way that it lives in him like the mirror images that arise in a mirror from that which stands in front of the mirror. The content of this science is indeed something abstract, something pictorial. And no matter how much of this science one has within oneself, when one has, so to speak, crammed one's head full with the results of this science and one looks into one's inner being, into everything that lives in man in the form of a yearning for knowledge in relation to what he himself is, what lives in him, in order to warm himself to the world, so to speak, in order to find his way in the world, it is as if someone, in order to get behind the images of the mirror, would reach out his hand and grasp behind the mirror. Because one has only images, one does not grasp anything behind the mirror. Science is proud of the fact that its concepts and ideas are such that when one reaches into the immediate, warm human life, there is nothing of these images in it. Through this science, only recognition takes place, recognition in images, but it is not experienced. Nothing flows into the human being through the images of this science that answers the great, directly felt questions of existence: about the eternal in his being, about that which goes beyond birth and death. Nothing flows from the objective images of this science into the human being that points to the power that directly affects life from his inner warmth.

The nature of this science has often been described. Basically, it can only be described by someone who approaches it with a sense of insight, with a sense of what is truly human, and who then perceives in direct experience what I have just described, perceives how reaching into the soul of man, into the spirit of man, in relation to the images of science, is like reaching behind the mirror, into nothingness, in order to get behind the origin of the mirror images. The more we realize that we are grasping at nothing, especially when this science seizes upon its highest ideal in its field, the more we will also find why that which comes from this science cannot flow into practical life.

Yes, in the factory, in the industrial enterprise, in the commercial context, there is a need for leaders who work out of warm love for their fellow human beings, but also out of warm love for production and human interaction, for all external processes, who work out of the warmth of the soul. But our universities, our educational institutions, with their objective science, with their science that wants to be as impersonal as possible, send out into practical life those people who, on the one hand, look up to science, which lives only in cold images, and who, on the other hand, in practical life – because it cannot be warmed through by a spiritual life which starts from such spiritual science -, in this practical life only become routiniers, only become experimenters: no bridge between what the mind wants to see as science, which has the greatest authority in the present, and what one must do daily in direct life, and which therefore lives without ideas, purely according to routine!

Spiritual science, as it is conceived here, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, seeks to develop such a soul life, to shape such knowledge that one can say of it - I will again use a Goethean sentence -: this spiritual science should give an account of its method, of its entire procedure, to the strictest mathematician. But even though what is worked out in this spiritual science is to be completely permeated by the conscientiousness of the science of the present, which has celebrated such triumphs, even though this spiritual science is to have learned the full discipline of this science, it must, precisely because it works from this science, but with this spirit of science, not stop at the door of this science and rave about the limits of science, precisely for this reason this spiritual science must differ from ordinary science.

Ordinary science recognizes, it recognizes in unrealistic images; spiritual science experiences its spiritual content. The difference between the recognition and the experiencing of the soul is the difference between the external, scientific method and the spiritual scientific method. The one who wants to come to spiritual science in a searching way must come to the conclusion that in the depths of the human soul lie forces that can remain as hidden for the whole of human life as certain forces remain hidden in the child's soul if the child is not educated. One could imagine: If a child were not educated, it would remain at a certain stage of savagery. In this way, a sum of powers lives in every human soul, of powers of direct insight, which our present-day science - which wants everything to be impersonal and therefore does not want to develop the human being - does not want to extract from the soul, because that would be something personal, which is disregarded by this ordinary science. Spiritual science, however, proceeds as I have described in detail in my book “The Occult Science in Outline” or in “How to Know Higher Worlds?”. Spiritual science teaches that when the human soul undergoes certain exercises - exercises of which you can read the nature and essence in these works - the forces hidden in the soul emerge into consciousness and the human being becomes aware that he has other powers of perception than the powers of knowledge of ordinary science.

In the last lecture, I already pointed out that under our ordinary way of knowing, we have something that is very abstract, but which, in a certain way, aims at what is also decisive in the spiritual scientific method: it is mathematics. What we come to know as mathematical truths, we know through the direct intuition of the mathematical content arising from our soul. We need not establish anything externally. We also need not find anything externally confirmed. We know what we know through what arises from our soul. We consider the Pythagorean theorem to be true when we have understood it, and even if someone were to contradict it, we know through direct experience that it is a mathematical truth, and we do not demand any external confirmation. That which is admitted by the present-day scientific spirit only for mathematics can be comprehensively developed in the human soul, so that not only lines and line connections, numbers and number connections arise from this human soul, but that solutions to mighty world riddles arise, that truths arise about the essence of man and the essence of the world.

Why is this so? The person who does not gain an unbiased insight into the deep, intimate connection between man and the world will at first be amazed when he is told that truths about the nature of man and the nature of the world can arise from within man in a mathematical way. But the one who looks at what intimately connects the human being to the world, who realizes how everything that is out there in space and time basically lives in the human being, because the human being is born from the whole world and develops out of this whole world every day, it will not be surprising that the human being, who was formed out of the whole world, can also gain an insight into the whole content of the world. Spiritual scientific experience shows that this can arise because the human being is connected in his inner being, firstly, through his physical body with everything mineral, vegetable and animal in his environment; he carries these realms of nature in a higher form in his physical body. Secondly, however, he also bears within his spiritual-soul all that is spiritual-soul in the world. Therefore, if he only applies the appropriate methods for soul development, he can allow truths about the secrets of humanity and the world to arise from within him, just as mathematical truths arise within him.

But what is present in ordinary knowledge, which only comes to images, is different in this spiritual science; after all, it has to be brought forth from the most personal. The whole human being must go within himself to extract from within himself the treasure of truth about the world and about himself. In this way, the human being is also connected with what arises in him like a mathematical truth, but now like a truth that is intimately connected with his and the world's being. Those who only want objective images of the world can talk. It may be their need to have such objective images – but they will not come to the intimate truths about the life of the world and human beings through such images. The personality must be fully thrown into the process of recognition. But then recognition becomes experience. Then, my dear audience, by methodically developing the soul beyond the ordinary life, just as one must unfold the soul of a child in the ordinary life, the human being is inwardly transported in his entire soul-condition into an experience that is thoroughly different from the ordinary life of science.

In our ordinary, external life, we take an interest in what concerns us directly. We feel warmth when a friend tells us his fate; we feel anger when injustice is done; we feel pain when there is hardship around us, and so on. We are with our whole being, with our whole experience, with what confronts us in the external environment, which we experience through our senses and through other things in people, perceive. This is not the case in the experience of abstract science, which is of course good for nature, but not the case. After all, nature is basically dead to us. No wonder that dead science, which leaves us cold, is best suited for nature. But when man experiences that which can arise from his soul like a spiritual mathematics, then he takes a warm, living part in everything that really arises as an intuition of the world and of human life.

I would like to use two examples to clarify what I actually mean by this interest in the science that has been experienced. Some time ago, I gave a lecture here in Stuttgart that took up the famous book by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West. Those of you who were present and heard this lecture will not accuse me of underrating Spengler. I have said many words of praise; I have even called Oswald Spengler's expositions ingenious, and they are so. But at the time I also pointed out the fundamental error in Spengler's arguments. Today I would like to draw particular attention to another aspect of these arguments. I would like to point out the whole way in which the ingenious ideas of Spengler settle in the soul of someone who has come to experienced spiritual science. One can follow these ideas, which are ingeniously taken from all sciences that are currently in vogue, in detail; one can absorb them. If one is a spiritual scientist, one has knowledge that has been experienced in oneself, and if one then brings Spengler's ideas into one's soul, then one cannot simply experience one idea after another in one's soul, nor can one point out the contradictions of one's own ideas with the other ideas of today's science or with Spengler's entire world of ideas with cold cleverness. That would be abstract knowledge. That would be mere logic. A scholar in the humanities cannot stop at such mere logic, at such mere abstract knowledge. The scholar in the humanities takes up, for example, Spengler's ideas, which are born entirely out of the scientific spirit of the present. But as he lets one idea take effect in him and lets the other idea take effect in him, as these ideas live in him because he has absorbed experiential knowledge into himself, one idea disturbs the other. One idea, so to speak, skewers the other; one experiences within oneself the pain of being skewered. One experiences within oneself something like one experiences the external contradictions of life that are close to us. That is the difference between the science of experience and mere knowledge. What we otherwise only know from ordinary life – that we experience pain and joy, rapture, warmth and cold – is bestowed upon us through ideas when we have absorbed the science of experience, when we have absorbed what I have been calling anthroposophically oriented spiritual science for almost two decades now. What streams in from the whole human being into soul and spirit is that which is pain and suffering and joy and delight, that which is personality - and yet the human being remains objective in relation to the outside world. Just as one cannot say that a person is being subjective when they feel pain in the face of a painful external event, so too one cannot say that a person becomes subjective when they radiate their personal experience into what would otherwise be a cold world of ideas, because they radiate the power of their personality into their knowledge and into their experiential knowledge.

And I would like to give another example. It often happens in the present day that mere cognitive wisdom, that wisdom that lives in abstract ideas, develops into philosophical thinking. This wisdom, which to a certain extent only produces mirror images, impersonal, bloodless mirror images of external reality, can celebrate its great triumphs when it develops directly from external experience, because then this external experience acts on the senses, and the sensual impressions contain the vitality. But if we disregard these external sensory impressions, if we do not describe minerals, plants, animals, clouds, rivers, etc., but instead spin out into philosophy the ideas, mere mirror-image ideas, that we have gained from the external world, then something like Keyserling's philosophy results – this Keyserling philosophy, which is particularly evident today, consisting of the most anemic abstractions, which develop ideas that are mere mirror images of external experience and spin them out, thereby naturally squeezing out the content that is otherwise gained from external experience. In spinning out these mirror-image ideas, they arrive only at the most empty-content, most phrase-like ideas.

Those who have truly living knowledge, experiential knowledge within themselves, also feel something personally and directly about the anemic Kaiserling abstractions that are now being imposed on humanity in the “schools of wisdom”. He feels something like the way one feels physically when one lives in a room that is not airy enough, when one suffers from a lack of air, when one gasps for air that does not come. The one who has learned to grasp reality with these ideas, who has learned to submerge his cognitive faculty in reality, feels a painful sensation as if he were in a vacuum in which he cannot breathe when he has to digest the bloodless abstractions of Count Hermann Keyserling. But it is precisely such things that are characteristic of the present, for they express what the present develops out of the science of mirror images, which becomes unworldly, which believes that it is developing something particularly noble when it floats in this unworldliness, but which can never submerge itself in reality.

And, my dear assembled guests, if we now look at practical life in the world, we say of the old religious creeds: certainly, they are there - they should, as I explained in the last lecture, be collected and united by well-meaning people, so that a spiritual impulse may again pass through humanity. But they have become, so to speak, abstract; they are cultivated only to warm the abstract inner life of man. They no longer intervene in real, outer life. Just ask yourself how many of the real ideas of the denominations are still present in today's economic life, for example; they no longer have the strength to have an effect on it. And also, what people, out of a certain conservatism, retain of the spiritual life from ancient times: it is certainly venerable and also contains immeasurable truths, but it no longer has any life force today. What I would call the mirror-image scientific spirit seeks to have life force, but cannot have it due to its own inner essence.

This mirror-image scientific spirit has been absorbed by all those who are reflecting today on the possible shaping of social life. Lenin and Trotsky basically took up this mirror-image scientific spirit and wanted to implement it in the shaping of economic life; they wanted to create something new. The destructive spirit of a militarized economic state lives in Eastern Europe, and it is already conducting fairly insistent propaganda far into Asia. The spirit of mirror images wants to bring into reality of social life, and it will only be destructive. Because people believe in social theories and social paradises that are made out of this spirit of mirror images, the worst illusions arise, for they will plunder what practical life has brought forth in the past; what will be consumed and destroyed that which an economic system no longer appealing – perhaps more or less justifiably no longer appealing – has brought forth, but nothing new will emerge, because no reality can develop from mere images if it is to penetrate into practical life. But this spirit, which to a certain extent has emerged from mere thinking, schooled in the reality of the last centuries, especially the 19th century, this spirit has prevailed wherever those powers have emerged that then led to the terrible catastrophe disaster of 1914, because – I would like to say – you can see with your own hands how this spirit, which gradually gained more and more authority, but lost more and more and more of its sense of reality, how this spirit worked. I would just like to give a few examples.

I have already pointed out how a personality like Lloyd George, who is basically imbued with this spirit of unrealistic ideas, has a parliamentary effect but not an effect on reality. But one can cite something else: with the newer times, with the same times in which the spirit of science just described developed, humanity's call for freedom and democracy has also arisen. The states wanted to imbue themselves with freedom and democratic forces. It has been mentioned many times: in the Germany that has now been thrown to the ground by its enemies, what was the external state configuration in this Germany? It was expressed in the words “universal, secret, equal suffrage.” From the point of view of the right to vote, it was the freest constitution one could imagine. But where did this live? It lived on paper. The constitution was there; people were so little involved in reality with what was expressed there in an unrealistic idea that they could even bear that a person in the German Reich had the most free right to vote, but that the same person, who had the general, secret, equal right to vote for the Reich, voted in the most restricted right to vote in the individual state.

So one lived in a reality-alienated way, in a reality lie. And a personal regime, which basically had nothing to do with what was on paper, that was reality. There was no bridge between the beautiful ideas that were on paper and were therefore abstract, and what was external reality. And, ladies and gentlemen, after all, we also live now in some beautiful things that only exist on paper. Compare what people's aspirations are with what happens daily in intellectual, state and economic life, and you will see how, on the one hand, people have illusions, unworldly ideas, learned from unexperienced scientific and on the other hand, live in a reality that degenerates into routine because it is uninspired and devoid of ideas, and in which everything that is educated because it is unrealistic only gets as far as the word. There, I would like to say, one can point out the most painful things.

For example, in the country in which I myself spent three decades, half of my life, in Austria, there lived a man who particularly loved the German influence on Austrian civilization, who had grown entirely out of this German influence on Austrian civilization. The man understood what the word “fatherland” means. He had a living sense of the word “fatherland”. He was a man whose mind reached out beyond the mirror-image ideas of the present into a realistic view of the soul, even if he did not get very far with it, which was impossible in his age. He wanted to think in a realistic way, and he looked at his Austrian fatherland at least with a realistic feeling; his fellow countrymen, the Germans, lived there. He wanted to experience the feeling of home and country together with them. The political configuration of Austria, which was born out of the unreal spirit described today, learned from modern science, made him feel with pain that over there, beyond the Erzgebirge and the Bohemian Forest, his kindred Germans lived, with whom he felt he belonged to the same fatherland, but with whom he could only share the feeling of home. The person I am referring to is Robert Hamerling, the German-Austrian poet. I would like to say that out of a yearning for reality he coined a word that only those who have suffered greatly from the unreality of the present, through which the individual structures [of Austria] were gradually imbued with unreality as state structures, will feel in all its depth. Hamerling, with his sense of reality, could not bring himself to say what millions of Germans on the other side of the Ore Mountains and the Bohemian Forest have said in the phrase: “Austria is my fatherland”. For in saying that, they were saying something that was out of touch with reality, something born of cloud-cuckoo-land ideas, something that had no basis in reality. Hamerling said: “Germany is my fatherland, Austria is my motherland”. He needed a supplement to find reality. Spirits who want to be connected with reality had to resort to such expressions as Hamerling's “Austria is my fatherland, Germany is my motherland” if they wanted to assert their sense of reality against the sense of unreality that surrounds them, that surrounds us all in the surrounds us all in the present – that sense of unreality that grasps ideas only like mirror images, that, when it wants to reach behind these ideas into the human, into the reality of the human, finds emptiness, just as one finds nothing when one reaches behind the mirror. In past epochs, the best minds suffered from a longing for a reality that is completely practical, that directly engages life and yet is not spiritless, not without ideas, that can carry into reality that which is most valuable to man, that must be most meaningful to him, that can carry the ideas he has experienced.

Thus spiritual science is that which, on the one hand, through knowledge, strives towards the highest spiritual content that man can experience. But these are not experienced in mirror images; on the other hand, they are experienced in connection with the whole human being, and are drawn out of the whole human being. They therefore educate the human being to reality again. If spiritual science becomes a cultural element in the present and in the near future, as its representatives strive for, then it will not be what emanates from the existing educational institutions and what does not find the bridge to life, but rather something that connects idea, knowledge, and realization with warm human life at its very source, with that through which the human being is also involved in practical life. Anyone who strives for spiritual research on the one hand and on the other hand still has warm interests in everything human will have encountered many people in the recent past who have been placed in this or that place in life by the routine of life, the mindless mechanism of life. They felt the mechanistic aspect of their profession, which consisted in their standing in one place like a wheel in the state or economic machine. They felt, to a certain extent, that the way they stood was degrading to humans, because these professions sucked the essence out of people. After all, everything that existed as a configuration of economic and state life had emerged from unrealistic ideas. Oh, how alien to external reality were the ideas that people thought out of the science of mirror images, just as the ideas of the mechanic are alien to the machine. There we experienced science in all fields, whose ideas were as alien to external social life as the ideas of the mechanic are to the machine. There we experienced social politicians and statesmen, whose ideas were just as unrealistic in relation to practical life. No wonder that we are immersed in a practical life that absorbs people like a mechanism, like a machine. This feeling of being in a machine is the terrible, underlying cause of the burning social issues – unfortunately, they are not seen in their true form, everything else are just their offshoots.

If, instead of abstract science, instead of mirror-image natural science, the personality-warming spiritual science will radiate from the educational institutions, then this science will shape life in such a way that there can be no people who, at some point in their lives, feel as if they are in a wheel. For whatever is thought out from the deepest, most intimate humanity and really enters into social life as a social form will in turn have a human impact on everyone, even on those who, so to speak, occupy an outwardly low social position. What is recognized and seen as human at the top will resonate down into the human heart of the worker. What is already connected with the human being in theory, which is life, will be able to be life when it takes hold in practice at the bottom. Such a spiritual science can only flourish in freedom. Therefore, what has grown out of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a social impulse demands the free development of spiritual life, not state paternalism, not state supervision, and not the dependence of spiritual life on the economy, but its self-government. This is necessary so that the human being may find in the free spiritual life what he can only find in such a life: living knowledge, not mere mirror-image knowledge. This mirror-image knowledge is what the state and the economy in its abstractness squeeze out of itself. A living spiritual life that sets people free will be able to arise through the free self-administration of the individual members of the social organism.

And economic life will never be able to develop among people in such a way that one only talks, so to speak, about ideas that are unrealistic, that one only talks like routine parliamentarians, for example like Lloyd George, that one talks about ideas that have so little to do with economic life and so little prospect of being realized in the near future. In our parliaments, much is said about unrealistic ideas, learned from the wisdom of mirror images. What we need is a prosperous development of the economy, which is cracking at the seams. We can only achieve the recovery of our economy by handing over the economy to the people who manage it, that is, to all people, for free self-management, just as we hand over the spiritual life to free self-management.

Some people feel that economic life can only flourish if the economic operators themselves have it under free administration. But, again, they demand half-measures out of touch with reality. They demand, for example, that decisions be made in parliaments, where they are made by the majorities of the parties, who naturally do not judge from a technical and objective point of view. They demand that parliaments be advised by colleges of experts, formed from the professional associations and from the combination of consumers and producers and the like. But that, in turn, is an unrealistic half-measure, because imagine the sovereign parliament, advised by the economic body – and then the decisions are again made by the majorities.

No, that is not the issue. The only issue is that what happens in economic life should arise from the associations themselves that arise from the economy. The economic entities must conclude their contracts among themselves. They must disregard what people say who are not involved in any branch of the economy. Each branch of the economy must assert itself through direct negotiations from association to association. A free economic life based on objective and professional negotiations between economic entities must be established. Economic life, just like intellectual life, in free self-government – that is the only thing that can lead to a healthy future.

Then, between the self-governing spiritual life and the self-governing economic life, there will be the remaining area in which all people, as equals, can democratically deliberate in parliament. If we first eliminate the spiritual life, which must be based on abilities and grow out of abilities, and the economic life, which must be shaped out of the factual and the technical, if we first eliminate the right and the left, then what remains is the reality that depends on speeches, on the effects of words. Then there remains that into which constitutions can be fulfilled if they are not to remain merely on paper, as was the case with the former constitution of the German Reich.

This threefold order emerges directly from the true, inner character of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science as a way of satisfying practical demands in life. And many other practical things arise from anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, for example the Waldorf school, which is set up in such a way that it already serves the free spiritual life in its configuration, which depends on nothing but only on the abilities that can arise from the human being, from teachers and students.

This, I believe, characterizes what makes spiritual science eminently practical. Spiritual science does not take hold of abstract knowledge, or mere conceptual knowledge, but of the essence of knowledge. It therefore educates the human being in such a way that he can also carry into the management of everyday life that which is first taught to him in science. The science of the spirit is practical in its origin, and therefore it will establish a practice that, in its ramifications, despite being full of ideas, can be life-affirming and liberating for people.

And now, dear assembled guests, allow me to characterize the following with a few words: Like everything that has ever presented itself to the world as such a radical view, this spiritual science is also fought by those who simply cannot imagine that man could get out of the accustomed tracks. Today, most people who have anything to do with science have become so immersed in the spirit of unexperienced, merely conceptualized science that they cannot imagine that there can be a living spiritual knowledge as I have described it here over the past decades, and which I have only sketched out in its basic features. And they are capable of saying that what this spiritual science sees could perhaps be based merely on suggestion, whether it be self-suggestion or suggestion from others.

One hears very strange things – I must, especially when I am characterizing the nature of spiritual science as I understand it, conclude with a few words about such externalities – one hears very strange things. For example, it is said that what I have presented could be based on suggestions that came to me from reading the books of such personalities as Blavatsky and Besant. And now it is even being pointed out with a certain scientific rigor that I immersed myself in the writings of Blavatsky and Besant from 1900 or 1901 and that what is found in these writings is recurring in my spiritual science. Well, there is much in these writings that is ancient tradition. Just as the person who presents geometry today must present the geometric truths of the centuries again, so naturally much of what is in earlier books is also found in my writings again. But anyone who then claims that everything in my books can already be found in earlier ones [by Blavatsky and Besant], that nothing has been added, is either blind or is blatantly lying, because it is not true — as can be seen by anyone who compares my books with these other books.

But the approach is even more seemingly scientific. For example, it is said: Yes, Steiner was an esoteric disciple of Besant from 1901 to 1913. Well, I will tell you a fact. In 1900/1901 my book “Welt- und Lebensanschauungen im 19. Jahrhundert” (World and Life Views in the 19th Century) was published, which those people who like to fish for contradictions in my work count among my “naturalistic” books. Almost at the same time, my essay “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life and its Relationship to the Modern World View” was published. This writing was translated and published in an English magazine immediately after its publication. I was invited to give lectures within the Theosophical Society and was also invited to attend Theosophical meetings in London itself. There, my English translation of the writing 'Mysticism at the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life' had already been read. And one of the most important authorities among these English 'Theosophists' told me quite clearly at the time – I am just reporting: 'What is written in your “Mysticism” actually contains much of what we are striving for with our Theosophy.' – Well, the person to whom this was said truly had nothing to learn from Besant or Blavatsky. I am not saying this out of immodesty, but simply based on the facts.

But they went about it in an even more scientific way, thoroughly scientific. They even, as has been stated, went to Weimar, where I lived from 1889 to 1897, and made a fuss about it. And as a result of this trip, one could even claim that some lady, whose name one is willing to mention, said: “Steiner was an atheist during his time in Weimar.” Well, I have often had to explain that scientific conscientiousness sometimes goes as far as gossip. But I would like to tell you a small fact from my time in Weimar, so that you can get an idea of the alleged atheism of that period: it was roughly in the middle of my time in Weimar, at least after the publication of the first edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom”, when a Protestant clergyman who was extremely well respected in Weimar at the time gave a lecture in Weimar on “The Free Christian Personality”. You can read this lecture in the journal “Die Wahrheit” (The Truth), published by Christoph Schrempf; I don't know in which year, but not many were published, so it should be easy to find. There is a reference to the “Philosophy of Freedom” at one point. But at another point in this lecture there is a reference to me again, only the lecturer omitted to mention my name at this point. Of course, that doesn't matter; but it may be important, especially in view of the gossipmonger's claim about my Weimar atheism, to point out this passage in the lecture, which was also printed and given by a serious personality. This personality said roughly the following in the lecture:

Recently someone said to me that if one sees in the right way that God has infinite love within himself, one cannot speak of God's existence in the way one speaks of the existence of ordinary things, because love is devotion to another. And if God has the fullness of infinite love within himself, then he passes out of the fullness of this love into all beings through an outpouring of his being, and then one can no longer speak of God's self-existence in the ordinary sense.

This personality said at the time, from his purely evangelical point of view: Why should love be the Moloch that drives God out of Himself? —

Now, the deeper philosophical question that lies in this, I will of course not deal with today. But the one who spoke of divine love for this man in this way was I. And I ask you whether someone who speaks about the personality of God in such a way can be called an atheist? That is a truth, and this truth is to be documented. And as far as this truth is concerned, it makes no difference to me what can still be asked about my alleged atheism from this or that Weimar personality today.

And so I could cite fact after fact in refutation of the accusers of spiritual science, but the accusers are mostly not interested in really looking at the facts. They are only interested in shining their own light and therefore putting spiritual science in a correspondingly different light. I am never curious to hear what these people say, because it can usually be predicted what, for example, Count Hermann Keyserling, whom I have already mentioned today, said as a characteristic of my anthroposophy in his abstract book, which has the character that I have described today. This could be constructed from the outset out of Keyserling's empty wisdom. This is just as well known as what such a person has to say about spiritual science, who parrots Eduard von Hartmann's ideas like Drews. These people, even if they are Count Hermann Keyserling, always have one thing in common: since they basically lack the will to go into the matter, they always have one thing in common at one point, and I say this with all radicalism: they always have to lie. You find in one place in the book “Philosophy as Art” by Hermann Keyserling the assertion that I started out with what he considers my “materialistically shaped spiritual science” - which he only calls that because he has no idea about it, not even a blue one. You find there the assertion that I started from Haeckel's ideas, that the origin of my anthroposophy lies in Haeckel's ideas.

Now, ladies and gentlemen, I wrote about Haeckel at the end of the 1890s, and I must mention a fact here: in 1893, I presented the one-sidedness of Haeckel's world view in a lecture on a spiritual monism at the Vienna “Scientific Club”. I then returned to Weimar, where I had written my essay about the Society for Ethical Culture in one of the first issues of “Zukunft”. Haeckel wrote to me about this essay, and I sent him a copy of my Viennese lecture against materialistic monism. And Haeckel established the connection that led to Haeckel being very friendly towards my endeavors at the time. And it also led to a confrontation with Haeckelism, which was necessary from the scientific and spiritual development of the time, because Haeckelism was a force to be reckoned with. From this one can see - I say this truly only forced by what is being said by the enemy side, I have not said it long enough, I am not saying it out of any immodesty -: It is not true that I sought any connection with Haeckel; Haeckel approached me on his own initiative, in the way of the aspirations that I cultivated. I did not pursue Haeckel, but Haeckel, despite being Haeckel, came to me, just as I did not pursue the Theosophical Society, but the Theosophical Society came to me and requested my lectures. Hermann Keyserling is lying when he says that I started with Haeckel, because it can be proved that he is lying if you read the relevant chapter of my arguments with Haeckel in my “Einleitungen zu Goethes naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften” (Introductions to Goethe's Scientific Writings) from the 1880s. Anyone who claims that I started from Haeckel, despite the fact that this dispute with Haeckel is available, can be said to be lying, even if he founds wisdom schools.

This is the peculiarity of opponents of spiritual science: because they have no will to go into the matter, they always have to lie at a certain point. Whether they lie like Count Hermann Keyserling, somewhat more refined, in patent leather boots, or whether they lie like Professor Traub, or whether they lie so crudely, so “ferkelig” as the neighboring Rohm in Lorch, it does not matter. For there is an inner reason why these people, in what they bring forward against spiritual science, pass over to lies. If there were anything that would scientifically speak against spiritual science, I would be the first to take it up and discuss it. As I said in my last lecture here: the one who really goes through the psychological development that I have characterized, which must be gone through to become a spiritual researcher, knows that it cannot be a matter of suggestion. Just as I know that when I lift a kilogram weight, I have to strengthen my inner strength to do so, that in a sense my ego has to strengthen itself through the resistance, so I know that my ego has to strengthen itself if I want to have spiritual insight, whereas it does not strengthen itself through suggestion.

But people also put forward other arguments. For example, the absurdity is being repeated today that one should not recognize and pass on the spiritual-scientific knowledge that lives in my anthroposophy through mere thinking, but that it should be verified in the same way [as it has been researched]. Now, my dear audience, what is the reason for this verification? Mathematical truths are the model for spiritual-scientific truths. For example, approval and recognition by others of the Pythagorean theorem is not necessary; one learns to understand it from one's inner experience, others agree with it out of their free judgment, not out of any external experience. Spiritual truths need no confirmation, any more than mathematical truths do. They arise out of the free spiritual experience of the human being, not in the way that some of the opponents of spiritual science today believe. And then I have often said: spiritual training is part of the process of exploring spiritual knowledge, but not of processing it; this can be done with ideas, with ordinary common sense. Mathematics is also a model for this. To make mathematical discoveries, special mathematical abilities are necessary. Once the discoveries have been made, anyone who has mathematical ideas and has developed them to a corresponding level can substantiate, prove and carry them further. And so it is in spiritual science. And those who want to pick on such points simply do not understand the inner structure of spiritual science.

Now, I could continue this litany – I myself feel it is a litany – which actually only serves to hold up the proceedings, for a long time. And if those who now act as accusers of spiritual science, and there are very, very many of them, would go down to the ground on which spiritual science stands – which, to use this Goethean saying again, would like to give account to the strictest mathematician with regard to their methods and their discipline. If these accusers would only enter the terrain of spiritual science, they would realize that spiritual science is not at all opposed to today's scientific method, but that it recognizes this scientific method in terms of its discipline and its strict methods. Spiritual science recognizes this scientific method in its strict methods, only it leads them beyond themselves, as it should be shown by the thirty lecturers at the Dornach University courses and is to be shown here at further university courses. Other things would be brought to spiritual science, and indeed those things that - but in their true form, not in their caricatured and distorted form - have often been mentioned and refuted by this spiritual science itself as possible objections.

Today, my dear attendees, if you are completely grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, you are basically dealing with more important matters than with such a confrontation with insubstantial opposition. Today you are dealing with the answer to the question: How does the human being move from his life-filled knowledge to a social practice of life that is permeated by love? Cold mirror-image science introduces into practice what is loveless and empty of love. The knowledge that must be inwardly experienced as anthroposophically oriented spiritual science appears to the human being in such a way that he brings his whole personality into his outer activities, including his immediate life. And no matter how complicated the community may be, anyone who has been educated in spiritual science can also carry into their outer social life what they experience in spiritual science with the most intense part of their personality, regardless of whether they are in a leading or a non-leading position. For what is experienced with the whole personality also becomes an experience when it is put into action. But the outer experience in which the personality must be completely involved is the experience in love. A knowledge that strives for the world of ideas in the spirit, that engages the whole human being in such a way that this human being places himself in love in the social life, that he lets love permeate social ideas. Just as in spiritual research the direct experience of the spirit lives inwardly, so through the threefold social organism spiritual science brings love into the social life, into the community. It places the ideas as such into reality, so that love can be the bearer of these ideas in reality. Love in the social life can only be connected with experienced, not merely with cognitive science. Therefore, when one is grounded in spiritual science, as it is meant here, one's gaze is first of all directed to the connection between these spiritual scientific insights, this spiritual scientific life, with social love, with socially loving practice, which is not merely routine, but which is carried in love, by radiant ideas. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we need if we do not want to descend into barbarism but want to arrive at a new civilization.

We need a spiritual life that does not live in cloud cuckoo land, but that descends into practice; a practical life that does not look down on the unworldly spirituality with contempt, but that allows itself to be permeated with love by real ideas. We need a spirit that does not float ethereally in clouds, but that lives in practice. We need a practice that does not become an uninspired routine, but a practice that is filled with the Spirit. We need a spirit that illuminates the practice; we need a practice that is warmed by the Spirit. Then we can embark on a fruitful path into the future.

Mankind is always in need of truths which cannot, in every age, be wholly understood. The assimilation of truths is not significant only for our knowledge; truths themselves contain life-force. By permeating ourselves with truth we permeate our soul-nature with an element drawn from the objective world, just as we must permeate our physical being with air taken from outside in order to live. Deep truths are indeed expressed in great religious revelations, but in such a form that their real inner meaning is often not understood until much, much later.

The New Testament has been written; the New Testament stands there as a record for humanity—but the whole future course of the Earth's evolution will be required for a full understanding of the New Testament to be reached. In the future, men will acquire much knowledge of the external world and of the spiritual world also; and if taken in the right sense it will all contribute to an understanding of the New Testament. The understanding comes about gradually, but the New Testament is written in a simple form so that it can be absorbed and, later, gradually understood. To permeate ourselves with the truth that resides in the New Testament is not without significance, even if we cannot yet understand the truth in its deepest inwardness. Later on, truth becomes cognitional force, but it is already life-force, in so far as it is imbibed in a more or less childlike form. And if the questions we began to consider yesterday are to be understood in the sense in which they are imparted in the New Testament, we need knowledge of greater depth, greater insight into the spiritual world and its mysteries.

If we are to carry further the studies we began yesterday, we must again examine some occult mysteries, for they will be able to guide us to a further understanding of the riddle of guilt and sin, and from this point of view throw light on the relation of Christ to the human soul.

In the course of our anthroposophical work we have often been faced with a point of view which may be put as a question, a question often asked: Why did Christ die in a human body? Here indeed is a fundamental question concerning the Mystery of Golgotha. Why did Christ die, why did the God die, in a human body?

The God died because the evolution of the universe made it necessary that He should be able to enter into humanity; it was necessary that a God of the upper worlds should become the leader of the Earth-evolution. For this reason Christ had to become related to death. Related to death! One could wish that this expression will come to be deeply understood by the soul of man.

As a rule a man encounters death only when he sees another person die, or in other phenomena akin to death which are to be found in the world, or in the certainty that he must himself pass through the gate of death when his present incarnation is over. But that is only the external aspect of death. Death is present in a quite different form in the world in which we live, and attention must be drawn to this. Let us start from a quite ordinary, everyday phenomenon. We breathe the air in and we breathe it out again; but the air undergoes a change. When the air is exhaled it is dead air; as exhaled air it cannot be inhaled again, for exhaled air is deadly. I indicate this only in order that you may understand the meaning of the occult saying: “When the air enters into men, it dies.” The living element in the air does indeed die when it enters into man. That, however, is only one phenomenon. The ray of light which penetrates our eye must likewise die, and we should gain nothing from the rays of light if our eye did not set itself up against the ray of light, as our lungs do against the air. The light that enters into our eye dies in our eye; and through the death of the light in our eye it comes about that we see. We are filled with much that has to die in us in order that we may have our Earth-consciousness. Corporeally we kill the air; we kill also the rays of light which penetrate us, and so we kill in many ways.

When we call spiritual science to our aid, we distinguish four grades of substance—earth, water, air and warmth. We then enter the realm where we speak of warmth-ether, of light-ether. As far up as the light-ether we kill that which penetrates us; we slay it unceasingly in order that we may have our Earth-consciousness. But there is something we cannot kill by our Earth-existence. We know that above the light-ether there is the so-called chemical ether, and then there comes the life-ether. These are the two kinds of ether that we cannot kill. But because of this, they have no special participation in us. If we were able to kill the chemical ether, the waves of the Harmony of the Spheres would sound perpetually into our physical body, and we should perpetually destroy these waves with our physical life. And if we would also kill the life-ether, we should destroy and continuously kill within ourselves the cosmic life that streams down to the Earth. In earthly sound we are given a substitute, but it is not to be compared with what we should hear if the chemical ether were audible to us as physical human beings. For physical sound is a product of the air and is not the spiritual sound; it is only a substitute for the spiritual sound.

When the Luciferic temptation came, the progressive gods were obliged to place man in a sphere where, from the life-ether downwards, death lives in his physical body. But at that time the progressive gods said—and the words are there in the Bible—”Man has come to know the distinction between Good and Evil, but Life he is not to have. Of the Tree of Life he shall not eat.” In occultism, we can continue the sentence, “Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat”, by adding the words, “and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear.” Of the Tree of Life man shall not eat and the Spirit of Matter he shall not hear! These are the regions which were closed to man. Only through a certain procedure in the old Mysteries were the tones of the Sphere-Music and the Cosmic Life, pulsating through the universe, revealed to those who were to be initiated when it was given them, outside the body, to see the Christ in advance. Hence it is that the old philosophers speak of the Music of the Spheres.

In drawing attention to this, we indicate at the same time those regions from which the Christ came to us at the time of the Baptism by John in the Jordan. Whence did Christ come? He came from those regions which had been closed to man as a result of the Luciferic temptation—from the region of the Music of the Spheres and from the region of Cosmic Life. These regions had to be forgotten by man because of the Luciferic temptation at the beginning of Earth-evolution. At the baptism by John in the Jordan, Christ entered into a human body, and that which permeated this human body was the spiritual essence of the Harmony of the Spheres, the spiritual essence of the Cosmic Life—the element that still belonged to the human soul during the first phase of its time on Earth, but from which the human soul had to be shut out as a result of the Luciferic temptation. In this sense also man is related to spirit. With his soul he really belongs to the region of the Music of the Spheres and to the region of the Word, of the living Cosmic Ether. But he was cast out from those regions. They were to be restored to him in order that he might gradually be permeated again by the spiritual elements from which he had been exiled. So it is that from the standpoint of spiritual science the words of St. John's Gospel touch us so deeply: In the primal beginning, when man was not yet subject to temptation, was the Logos. Man belonged to the Logos ... the Logos was with God, and man was with the Logos, with God. And through the Baptism by John in the Jordan the Logos entered into human evolution—He became Man.

Here we have the all-important connection. Let us leave this truth as it stands there, and approach the question from another side. Life as a whole shows itself to us only from the external side. Otherwise man would know all the time how he absorbs the corpse of the light into his eye when he sees.

What was it that the Christ had to undertake in order that the fulfillment of St. Paul's saying, “Not I, but Christ in me”, might be made possible? It had to be possible that Christ should permeate the nature of man; but the nature of man is filled with what is slain by human nature in Earth-existence, from the light-ether downwards—the light-ether that dies in the human eye. The nature of man is filled with death; but the life-element in the two highest kinds of ether was withdrawn in order that human nature might not be laden with their death also. In order that Christ might dwell in us, He had therefore to become related to death, related to all the death that is spread out in the world, from the light down to the depths of materiality. Christ had to be able to pass into all that we bear within us as the corpse of the light, of the warmth, of the air, and so on. It was only because He was able to become related to death that He could become related to man. And we must feel in our souls that the God had to die so that he might be able to enfill us, we who had acquired death as a result of the Luciferic temptation, so that we might be able to say: “Christ in us.”

Many other things are hidden for man behind sense-existence. He turns his gaze upon the plant-world; he sees how the light of the Sun conjures the plants out of the soil. Science teaches us that light is necessary for the growth of plants, but that is only half the truth. Anyone who looks at the plants with clairvoyant sight sees living spiritual elements rising out of them. The light dips down into the plants and rises again out of them as a living spiritual element. In the animals it is the chemical ether that enters, and this chemical ether is not perceptible to man; if he could be aware of it, it would sound forth spiritually. The animals transform this ether into water-spirits. The plants transform light into air-spirits; animals transform the spirit active in the chemical ether into water-spirits. Finally, the cosmic ether, or life-ether, which man is prevented from killing and without which he could not live at all—he transforms the life-ether into Earth-spirits.

In a course of lectures given in Karlsruhe, From Jesus to Christ, I once spoke of the human “phantom”. This is not the time for drawing the connecting thread between what is to be said here and what was said then about the human “phantom”, but such connecting threads do exist and you will perhaps find them for yourself. Today I have to present the matter from another side.

There is perpetually engendered in man something that is also spiritual—the life in him. This is forever passing out into the world. Man projects an aura around him, an aura of rays whereby he continually enriches the earthly-spiritual element of the Earth. This earthly-spiritual element of the Earth, however, contains all the qualities, moral or otherwise, that man has acquired and bears within himself, for he sends it all out into his earthly environment. This is absolutely true. Clairvoyant sight perceives how man sends out his moral, intellectual and aesthetic aura into the world, and how this aura continues to live as earthly spirit in the spirituality of the Earth. As a comet draws its tail through the Cosmos, so does man draw through the whole of earthly life the spiritual aura which he projects. This spiritual aura is held together, phantom-like, during a man's life, but at the same time it rays out into the world his moral and intellectual properties of soul.

When in our occult studies we go back to the times before the Mystery of Golgotha, we find that the men of those days simply radiated this phantom-like entity, which contained their moral qualities, into the external world, into the external spiritual aura of the Earth. But humanity developed in the course of the Earth's existence, and just at the epoch where the Mystery of Golgotha came to pass, a certain stage had been reached in the evolution of this phantom-like entity. In earlier times it was much more evanescent; by the time of the Mystery of Golgotha it had become denser, had more form; and into this phantom-like entity there was now mingled, as a fundamental characteristic, the death which man develops in himself by killing the ray of light that enters into his eye, and so on, as I have explained. These Earth-spirit entities which radiate from man are like a stillborn child, because he imparts his death to them. If Christ had not come upon Earth, then, during the sojourn of their souls in earthly bodies, human beings could have continuously rayed out entities with the impress of death upon them. And with this impress of death there would have been bound up the moral qualities of man of which we spoke yesterday; objective guilt and objective sin. They would have lain within it.

Let us suppose that the Christ had not come. What would have happened in the evolution of the Earth? From the time in which the Mystery of Golgotha would otherwise have taken place, men would have spiritually created dense forms to which they had imparted death. And these dense forms would have become the very things that had to pass over to the Jupiter stage with the Earth. Man would have imparted death to the Earth. A dead Earth would have given birth to a dead Jupiter.

It could not have been otherwise, because if the Mystery of Golgotha had not come about, man would not have been able to permeate the radiations he gives out with the essences of the Music of the Spheres and the Cosmic Life. These essences would not have been there; they would not have flowed into the human radiations; but Christ brought them back through the Mystery of Golgotha. And when there is a fulfillment of the words, “Not I, but Christ in me”, when we bring about a relationship to Christ within ourselves, that which rays out from us and would otherwise be dead, is made living. Because we bear death within us, the living Christ has to permeate us, in order that He may give life to the spiritual Earth-being that we leave behind us. Christ the living Logos, permeates and gives life to the objective guilt and sin which detaches itself from us and is not carried further in our Karma, and because He gives it life, a living Earth will evolve into a living Jupiter. This is the outcome of the Mystery of Golgotha.

The soul, if it reflects, can receive Christ in the following way. It can realize that there was once a time when man was within the bosom of the divine Logos. But man had to succumb to the temptation of Lucifer. He took death into himself; into him there passed the germ by which he would have brought a dead Earth to birth as a dead Jupiter. The endowment which, before the temptation, the human soul had been destined to receive for its Earth-existence was left behind. With Christ it entered again into man's Earth-existence.

When man takes Christ into himself, so as to feel permeated with Christ, he is able to say to himself: “The endowment which the gods had allocated to me before the Luciferic temptation, but which owing to the temptation by Lucifer had to remain behind in the Cosmos, enters into my soul with the Christ. The soul becomes whole again for the first time by taking the Christ into itself. Only then am I fully soul; only then am I again all that the gods intended me to be from the very beginning of the Earth.” “Am I really a soul without Christ?” man asks himself, and he feels that it is through Christ that he first becomes the soul that the guiding divine Beings meant him to be. This is the wonderful feeling of “home” that souls can have with Christ; for out of the primal cosmic home of the soul of man the Christ descended, in order to give back to the soul of man that which had to be lost on Earth as a result of the temptation by Lucifer. The Christ leads the soul up again to its primordial home, the home allotted to it by the gods.

That is the bliss and the blessing in the actual experience of Christ in the human soul. It was this that gave such bliss to certain Christian mystics in the Middle Ages. They may have written much which in itself seems to be too strongly colored by the senses, but fundamentally it was spiritual. Such Christian mystics as those who joined Bernard of Clairvaux, and others, felt that the human soul was as a bride who had lost her bridegroom at the primal beginning of the Earth; and when Christ entered into their souls, filling them with life and soul and spirit, they experienced Christ as the soul-bridegroom who united Himself with the soul; the bridegroom who had been lost when the soul forsook her original home in order to follow Lucifer along the path of freedom, the path of differentiation between good and evil.

When the soul of man really lives into Christ, feeling that Christ is the living Being who from the death on Golgotha flowed out into the atmosphere of the Earth and can flow into the soul, it feels itself inwardly vivified through the Christ. The soul feels a transition from death into life.

So long as we have to live out our earthly existence in human bodies—and this will continue far into a remote future—we cannot hear directly the Music of the Spheres or have direct experience of the Cosmic Life. But we can experience the incoming of the Christ, and so we can receive, by proxy as it were, that which would otherwise come to us from the Music of the Spheres and the Cosmic Life.

Pythagoras, an Initiate of the ancient Mysteries, spoke of the Music of the Spheres. He had gone through the process whereby the soul passes out of the body, and he could then be carried away into the spiritual worlds. There he saw the Christ who was later to come to the Earth. Since the Mystery of Golgotha we cannot speak of the Music of the Spheres as did Pythagoras, but we can speak of it in another way. An Initiate might even today speak as Pythagoras did; but the ordinary inhabitant of the Earth in his physical body can speak of the Music of the Spheres and of the Cosmic Life only when he experiences in his soul, “Not I, but Christ in me”, for the Christ within him has lived in the Music of the Spheres and in the Cosmic Life. But we must go through this experience in ourselves; we must really receive the Christ into our souls.

Let us suppose that a man were to fight against this, that he did not wish to receive Christ into his soul. Then he would come to the end of the Earth period, and in the nebulous spirit-structure that had then taken shape out of the Earth-spirits arising in the course of human evolution, he would have all the phantom-like beings which had issued from him in former incarnations. They would all be there. The tendency indicated here would lead to a dead Earth, and this would pass over, dead, to Jupiter. At the end of the Earth period a man might have carried through and completely absolved his Karma; he might have made personal compensation for all his imperfect deeds; he might have become whole in his soul-being, in his ego, but the objective sin and guilt would remain. That is an absolute truth, for we do not live only for ourselves, so that by adjusting our Karma we may become egotistically more nearly perfect; we live for the world, and at the end of the ages the remains of our Earth incarnations will stand there like a mighty tableau if we have not taken into us the living Christ.

When we connect what was said yesterday with what is being said today (and it is really the same, only seen from two sides) we understand how Christ takes upon Himself the guilt and sin of Earth humanity, in so far as these are objective guilt and sin. And if we have inwardly realized this “Not I, but Christ in me”, the Christ in us, then He takes over the objective remains of our incarnations, and they stand there vivified by Christ, irradiated by Christ and permeated by His life. Yes, the remains of our incarnations stand there, and what do they come to, taken as a whole?

Because Christ unites them all—Christ who belongs to all mankind in the present and in the future—the remains of the single incarnations are all compressed together. Every human soul lives in successive incarnations. From each incarnation certain relics or remains are left, as we have described. Further incarnations will leave other remains, and so on, up to the end of the Earth period. If these relics are permeated by Christ, they are compressed together. Compress what is rarefied and you will get density. Spirit also becomes dense, and so our collective Earth-incarnations are united into a spiritual body. This body belongs to us; we need it because we evolve onwards to Jupiter, and it will be the starting-point of our embodiment on Jupiter. At the end of the Earth period we shall stand there with the soul—whatever the particular karma of the soul may be—and we shall stand there before our earthly relics which have been gathered together by Christ, and we shall have to unite with them in order to pass over with them to Jupiter.

We shall rise again in the body, in the earthly body that has condensed out of the separate incarnations. Truly, my dear friends, from a heart profoundly moved I utter these words: “In the body we shall rise again!”

In these days, young people of sixteen and even less are beginning to claim a creed of their own, and to talk of having happily grown beyond such nonsense as the “Resurrection of the Body”. But those who seek to deepen their occult knowledge of the mysteries of the universe strive gradually to rise to an understanding of what has been said to mankind, because—as I explained at the beginning of the lecture—it had first of all to be said, in order that men might grasp it as life-truth and come to understand it later. The resurrection of the body is a reality, but our soul must feel that it will rise again with the earthly relics that have been collected, brought together by Christ, by the spiritual body that is permeated with Christ. This is what our soul must learn to understand. For let us suppose that, because of our not having received into ourselves the living Christ, we could not approach this Earth-body, with its sin and guilt, and unite with it. If we had rejected the Christ, the relics of our various incarnations would be scattered at the end of the Earth period; they would have remained, but they would not have been gathered together by the Christ, who spiritualizes the whole of humanity. We should stand there as souls at the end of the Earth period and we should be bound to the Earth, to that part of the Earth which remains dead in our relics. Certainly our souls would be free in the spirit in an egotistic sense, but we would be unable to approach our bodily relics. Such souls are the booty of Lucifer, for he strives to thwart the true goal of the Earth; he tries to prevent souls from reaching their Earth-goal, to hold them back in the spiritual world. And in the Jupiter period Lucifer will send over what has remained of scattered Earth-relics as a dead content of Jupiter. It will not, as Moon, separate from Jupiter, but will be within Jupiter, and it will be continually thrusting up these Earth-relics. And these Earth-relics will have to be animated as species-souls by the souls above.

And now you will remember what I have told you some years ago: that the human race on Jupiter will divide itself into those souls who have attained their Earth-goal, who will have attained the goal of Jupiter, and into those souls who will form a middle kingdom between the human kingdom and the animal kingdom on Jupiter. These latter will be Luciferic souls—Luciferic, merely spiritual. They will have their body below, and it will be a direct expression of their whole inner being, but they will be able to direct it only from outside. Two races, the good and the bad, will differentiate themselves from one another on Jupiter. This was stated years ago; today we wish to consider it more deeply.

A Venus-existence will follow that of Jupiter, and again there will be an adjustment through the further evolution of the Christ; but it is on Jupiter that man will realize what it means to be perfected only in his own ego, instead of making the whole Earth his concern. That is something he will have to experience through the whole course of the Jupiter cycle, for everything he has not permeated with Christ during his earthly existence may then appear before his spiritual sight.

Let us reflect from this point of view upon the words of Christ with which He sent His disciples out into the world to proclaim His Name, and in His Name to forgive sins. Why to forgive sins in His Name? Because the forgiveness of sins is connected with His Name. Sins can be blotted out and transformed into living life only if Christ can be united with our Earth-relics, if during our Earth-existence He is within us in the sense of the Pauline saying: “Not I, but Christ in me”.

And wherever any religious denomination associates itself in its outer observances with this saying of Christ, in order to bring home to souls, again and again, all that is connected with Christ, we must seek this deeper meaning in it. When, in any religious denomination, one of Christ's servants speaks of the forgiveness of sins, as though by Christ's command, it means that with his words he forms a connection with the forgiveness of sins through Christ, and to the soul in need of comfort he says, in effect: “I have seen that you have developed a living relationship to Christ. You are uniting the objective sin and guilt, and the objective sin and guilt that will enter into your Earth-relics, with everything that Christ is for you. Because I have recognized that you have permeated yourself with Christ—therefore I dare say to you: your sins are forgiven.”

Such words always mean that he who in any religious denomination speaks of the forgiveness of sins is convinced that the person in question has found a connection with Christ, that he wants to bear Christ in his heart and in his soul. Because of this he can properly give comfort when the other person comes to him conscious of guilt. “Christ will forgive you, and I am permitted to say to you that in His Name your sins are forgiven.” Christ is the only forgiver of sins because He is the bearer of sins. He is the Being who gives life to human Earth-relics, and a wonderful link with Him is created when those who want to serve Him can give comfort in the words, “Your sins are forgiven”, to those who show that in their inner being they feel a union with Christ. For it is like a fresh strengthening of the relationship to Christ when the soul realizes: “I have understood my guilt and sins in such a way that it can permissibly be said to me that Christ takes them upon himself, works through them with His being.” If the expression “the forgiveness of sins” is to be an expression of the truth, it must always carry an undertone which reminds the sinner of his bond with Christ, even if he does not form it anew. Between the soul and Christ there must be a bond so intense that the soul cannot be reminded of it often enough. And because the Christ is bound up with the objective sin and guilt of the human soul, the soul can best remind itself in daily life of its relationship to Christ by always remembering, at the moment of the forgiveness of sins, the presence of the Cosmic Christ in the Earth's existence.

Those who join Anthroposophy in the right spirit, and not merely in an external sense, can most assuredly become their own father confessors. Most assuredly through Spiritual Science they can learn to know Christ so intimately, and feel themselves so closely connected with Him, that they can be directly conscious of His spiritual presence. And when they have solemnly vowed themselves to Him as the Cosmic Principle, they can in spirit direct their confusion to Him and in their silent meditation ask from Him the forgiveness of sins. But as long as men have not yet permeated themselves with spiritual science in this deep spiritual sense, we must look with understanding at what the “forgiveness of sins” signifies in the various religious observances of the world. Men will become spiritually freer and freer, and in this greater spiritual freedom their communion with Christ will become more and more a direct experience.

And there must be tolerance! A person who believes that through the deep inward understanding he has of the Spirit of the Mystery of Golgotha, the Christ, he can hold direct intercourse with the Christ, must look with understanding upon those who need the positive declarations of a confession of faith, and a minister of Christ to give them comfort with words, “Your sins are forgiven”. On the other hand, there should be tolerance on the part of those who see that there are men who can be independent. In earthly life this may be all an ideal, but the anthroposophist may at least look up to such an ideal.

I have spoken to you of spiritual secrets which make it possible for men—even those who have absorbed much anthroposophical teaching—to look still more deeply into the whole nature of our being. I have spoken to you of the overcoming of human egoism, and of those things we must understand before we can have a right understanding of Karma. I have spoken to you of man in so far as he is not only an “I” being, but belongs to the whole Earth-existence and is thereby called to help forward the attainment of the divine aim appointed for the Earth. The Christ did not come into the world and pass through the Mystery of Golgotha in order that He might be something to each one of us in our egoism. It would be terrible if Christ were to be so understood that the words of Paul, “Not I, but Christ in me” served only to encourage a higher egoism. Christ died for the whole of humanity, for the humanity of the Earth. Christ became the central spirit of the Earth, who has to save for the Earth the spiritual-earthly elements that flow out from man.

Nowadays one can read theological works—and those who have read them will bear me out—which assure us that certain theologians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have at last disposed of the popular medieval belief that Christ came to Earth in order to snatch the Earth from the devil, to snatch the Earth from Lucifer. Within modern theology there is an “enlightened” materialism which will not recognize itself as such but on the contrary imagines itself to be specially enlightened. It says: “In the dark Middle Ages people said that Christ appeared in the world because He had to snatch the Earth away from the devil.” But the true explanation leads us back to this simple, popular belief. For everything on the Earth that is not set free by Christ belongs to Lucifer. All that is human in us, all that is more than what is merely confined in our ego, is ennobled, is made fruitful for the whole of humanity, when it is permeated with Christ.

And now, at the end of our considerations during the last few days, I would not like to conclude without saying those further words to each single one of the souls who are gathered together here:

Hope and confidence in the future of our work can dwell in our hearts, because we have endeavored, from the very beginning, to fill what we had to say with the will of Christ. And this hope and confidence may allow us to say that our teaching is itself what Christ has wished to say to us, in fulfillment of His words: “I am with you always, even to the end of the Earth ages.” We have wished to be mindful only of what comes from Him. And all that He has inspired us with, according to His promise, we want to take into our souls as our spiritual science. It is not because we feel our spiritual science to be imbued with any sort of Christian dogmatism that we regard it as Christian, but because, having Christ within us, we look on it as a revelation of the Christ in ourselves. I am therefore also convinced that the springing up of true spiritual science in those souls who want to receive, with us, our Christ-filled spiritual science will be fruitful for the whole of humanity, and especially for those who welcome these fruits.

Clairvoyant observation shows that much of what is good, spiritually good, in our Movement proceeds from those who have taken our Christian spiritual science into themselves, and then, having passed through the gate of death, send down to us the fruits of this Christian spiritual science. The Christian spiritual science which those souls have taken into themselves and are now sending down to us from the spiritual worlds is already living in us. For they do not keep it in their own karmic stream for the sake of their own perfecting; they can let it stream into those who want to receive it. Comfort and hope arise for our spiritual science when we know that our so-called “dead” are working with us.

In the second lecture we spoke about these things in a certain connection. But today, when we have come to the close of the course, I should like to add a personal word.

While I have been speaking to the Norrköping Branch of our society, I could not be other than conscious always of the spirit of one who was so closely connected with us here. The spirit of Frau Danielsen looks down like a good angel on all that this Branch wants to undertake. Hers also was a Christian spirit in the sense described, and the souls who knew her will never feel themselves separated from her. May that spirit hover as guardian-spirit over this Branch! Most willingly and surely will it do so if the souls who work in this Branch receive it. With these words, spoken from the depths of my heart, I close these lectures, and I hope that we shall continue to work together on the spiritual path we have embraced.

In the last lecture, I spoke of a former view of life from which the modern scientific view has evolved. It still combined the qualitative with the form-related or geometrical elements of mathematics, the qualitative with the quantitative. One can therefore look back at a world conception in which the triangle or another geometrical form was an inner experience no matter whether the form referred to the surface of a given body or to its path of movement. Geometrical and arithmetical forms were intensely qualitative inner experiences. For example, a triangle and a square were each conceived as emerging from a specific inward experience.

This conception could change into a different one only when men lost their awareness that everything quantitative—including mathematics—is originally experienced by man in direct connection with the universe. It changed when the point was reached where the quantitative was severed from what man experiences. We can determine this moment of separation precisely. It occurred when all concepts of space that included man himself were replaced by the schematic view of space that is customary today, according to which, from an arbitrary starting point, the three coordinates are drawn. The kind of mathematics prevalent today, by means of which man wants to dominate the so-called phenomena of nature, arose in this form only after it had been separated from the human element. Expressing it more graphically, I would say in a former age man perceived mathematics as something that he experienced within himself together with his god or gods, whereby the god ordered the world. It came as no surprise therefore to discover this mathematical order in the world. In contrast to this, to impose an arbitrary space outline or some other mathematical formula on natural phenomena—even if such abstract mathematical concepts can be identified with significant aspects in these so-called natural phenomena—is a procedure that cannot be firmly related to human experiences. Hence, it cannot be really understood and is at most simply assumed to be a fact. Therefore in reality it cannot be an object of any perception. The most that can be said of such an imposition of mathematics on natural phenomena is that what has first been mathematically thought out is then found to fit the phenomena of nature. But why this is so can no longer be discovered within this particular world perception.

Think back to the other worldview that I have previously described to you, when all corporeality was regarded as image of the spirit. One looking at a body found in it the image of spirit. One then looked back on oneself, on what—in union with one's own divine nature—one experienced as mathematics through one's own bodily constitution. As a work of art is not something obscure but is recognized as the image of the artist's ideas, so one found in corporeal nature the mathematical images of what one had experienced with one's own divine nature. The bodies of external nature were images of the divine spiritual. The instant that mathematics is separated from man and is regarded only as an attribute of bodies that are no longer seen as a reflection of spirit, in that instant agnosticism creeps into knowledge.

Take a concrete example, the first phenomenon that confronts us after the birth of scientific thinking, the Copernican system. It is not my intention today or in any of these lectures to defend either the Ptolemaic or the Copernican system. I am not advocating either one. I am only speaking of the historical fact that the Copernican system has replaced the Ptolemaic. What I say today does not imply that I favor the old Ptolemaic system over the Copernican. But this must be said as a matter of history. Imagine yourself back in the age when man experienced his own orientation in space: above-below, right-left, front-back. He could experience this only in connection with the earth. He could, for example, experience the vertical orientation in himself only in relation to the direction of gravity. He experienced the other two in connection with the four compass points according to which the earth itself is oriented. All this he experienced together with the earth as he felt himself standing firmly on it. He thought of himself not just as a being that begins with the head and ends a the sole of the feet. Rather, he felt himself penetrated by the force of gravity, which had something to do with his being but did not cease at the soles of his feet. Hence, feeling himself within the nature of the gravitational force, man felt himself one with the earth. For his concrete experience, the starting point of his cosmology was thus given by the earth. Therefore he felt he Ptolemaic system to be justified.

Only when man severed himself from mathematics, only then was it possible also to sever mathematics from the earth and to found an astronomical system with its center in the sun. Man had to lose the old experience-within-himself before he could accept a system with its center outside the earth. The rise of the Copernican system is therefore intimately bound up with the transformation of civilized mankind's soul mood. The origin of modern scientific thinking cannot be separated from the general mental and soul condition, but must be viewed in context with it.

It is only natural that statements like this are considered absurd by our contemporaries, who believe in the present world view far more fervently than the sectarians of olden days believed in their dogmas. But to give the scientific mode of thinking its proper value, it must be seen as arising inevitably out of human nature and evolution. In the course of these lectures, we shall see that by doing this we are actually assigning far greater value to science than do the modern agnostics.

Thus the Copernican world conception came into being, the projection of the cosmic center from the earth to the sun. Fundamentally, the whole cosmic thought edifice of Giordano Bruno,³² who was born in 1548 and burned at the stake in Rome in 1600, was already contained in the Copernican world view. It is often said that Giordano Bruno glorifies the modern view of nature, glorifies Copernicanism. One must have deep insight into the inner necessity with which this new cosmology arose if one is to have any feeling at all for the manner and tone in which Giordano Bruno speaks and writes. Then one sees that Giordano Bruno does not sound like the followers of the new view or like the stragglers of the old view. He really does not speak about the cosmos mathematically so much as lyrically. There is something musical in the way Giordano Bruno describes the modern conception of nature. Why is that? The reason is that Giordano Bruno, though he was rooted with his whole soul in a bygone world perception, told himself with his outward intellect: The way things have turned out in history, we cannot but accept the Copernican world picture. He understood the absolute necessity that had been brought about by evolution. This Copernican world view, however, was not something he had worked out for himself. It was something given to him, and which he found appropriate for his contemporaries. Belonging as he did to an older world conception, he could not help but experience inwardly what he had to perceive and accept as knowledge. He still had the faculty of inner experience, but he did not have scientific forms for it. Therefore although he described them so wonderfully, he did not follow the Copernican directions of thought in the manner of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, or Newton.³³ Instead, he tried to experience the cosmos in the old way, the way that was suitable when the world cosmos was experienced within one's being. But in order to do this, mathematics would have had to be also mysticism, inward experience, in the way I described yesterday. This it could not be for Giordano Bruno. The time for it was past. Hence, his attempt to enter the new cosmology through living experience became an experience, not of knowledge but of poetry, or at least partially so. This fact lends Giordano's works their special coloring. The atom is still a monad; in his writings, it is still something alive. The sum of cosmic laws retains a soul quality, but not because he experienced the soul in all the smallest details as did the ancient mystics, and not because he experienced the mathematical laws of the cosmos as the intentions of the spirit. No, it was because he roused himself to wonder at this new cosmology and to glorify it poetically in a pseudo-scientific form. Giordano Bruno is truly something like a connecting link between two world conceptions, the present one and the ancient one that lasted into the fifteenth century. Man today can form scarcely any idea of the latter. All cosmic aspects were then still experienced by man, who did not yet differentiate between the subject within himself and the cosmic object outside. The two were still as one; man did not speak of the three dimensions in space, sundered from the orientation within his own body and appearing as above-below, right-left, and forward-backward.

Copernicus tried to grasp astronomy with abstract mathematical ideas. On the other hand, Newton shows mathematics completely on its own. Here I do not mean single mathematical deductions, but mathematical thinking in general, entirely divorced from human experience. This sounds somewhat radical and objections could certainly be made to what I am thus describing in broad outlines, but this does not alter the essential facts. Newton is pretty much the first to approach the phenomena of nature with abstract mathematical thinking. Hence, as a kind of successor to Copernicus, Newton becomes the real founder of modern scientific thinking.

It is interesting to see in Newton's time and in the age that followed how civilized humanity is at pains to come to terms with the immense transformation in soul configuration that occurred as the old mathematical-mystical view gave way to the new mathematical-scientific style. The thinkers of the time find it difficult to come to terms with this revolutionary change. It becomes all the more evident when we look into the details, the specific problems with which some of these people wrestled. See how Newton, for instance, presents his system by trying to relate it to the mathematics that has been severed from man. We find that he postulates time, place, space, and motion. He says in effect in his Principa: I need not define place, time, space, and motion because everybody understands them.³⁴ Everybody knows what time is, what space, place, and motion are, hence these concepts, taken from common experience, can be used in my mathematical explanation of the universe. People are not always fully conscious of what they say. In life, it actually happens seldom that a person fully penetrates everything he says with his consciousness. This is true even among the greatest thinkers. Thus Newton really does not know why he takes place, time, space, and motion as his starting points and feels no need to explain or define them, whereas in all subsequent deductions he is at pains to explain and define everything. Why does he do this? The reasons is that in regard to place, time, motion, and space all cleverness and thinking avail us nothing. No matter how much we think about these concepts, we grow no wiser than we were to begin with. Their nature is such that we experience them simply through our common human nature and must take them as they come. A successor of Newton's, Bishop Berkeley,³⁵ took particular notice of this point. He was involved in philosophy more than Newton was, but Berkeley illustrates the conflicts taking place during the emergence of scientific thinking. In other respects, as we shall presently hear, he was not satisfied with Newton, but he was especially struck by the way that Newton took these concepts as his basis without any explanation, that he merely said: I start out from place, time, space, and motion; I do not define them; I take them as premises for my mathematical and scientific reflections. Berkeley agrees that one must do this. One must take these concepts in the way they are understood by the simplest person, because there they are always clear. They become unclear not in outward experience, but in the heads of metaphysicians and philosophers. Berkeley feels that when these four concepts are found in life, they are clear; but they are always obscure when found in the heads of thinkers.

It is indeed true that all thinking about these concepts is of no avail. One feels this. Therefore, Newton is only beginning to juggle mathematically when he uses these concepts to explain the world. He is juggling with ideas. This is not meant in a derogatory way; I only want to describe Newton's abilities in a telling manner. One of the concepts thus utilized by Newton is that of space. He manipulates the idea of space as perceived by the man in the street. Still, a vestige of living experience is contained therein. If, on the other hand, one pictures space in terms of Cartesian mathematics, without harboring any illusions, it makes one's brain reel. There is something undefinable about this space, with its arbitrary center of coordinates. One can, for example, speculate brilliantly (and fruitlessly) about whether Descartes’ space if finite or infinite. Ordinary awareness of space that is still connected with the human element really is not at all concerned with finiteness or infinity. It is after all quite without interest to a living world conception whether space can be pictured as finite or infinite. Therefore one can say that Newton takes the trivial idea of space just as he finds it, but then he begins to mathematize. But, due to the particular quality of thinking in his age, he already has the abstracted mathematics and geometry, and therefore he penetrates spatial phenomena and processes of nature with abstract mathematics. Thereby he sunders the natural phenomena from man. In fact, in Newton's physics we meet for the first time ideas of nature that have been completely divorced from man. Nowhere in earlier times were conceptions of nature so torn away from man as they are in Newtonian physics.

Going back to a thinker of the fourth or fifth century A.D.—though people of that period can hardly be called “thinkers,” because their inner life was far more alive than the mere life in thoughts—we would find that he held the view: “I live; I experience space along with my God, and orient myself in space up-and-down, right-left, and forward-backward, but I dwell in space together with my God. He outlines the directions and I experience them.” So it was for a thinker of the third or fourth century A.D. and even later; indeed, it only became different in the fourteenth century. Thinking geometrically about space, man did not merely draw a triangle but was conscious of the fact that, while he did this, God dwelled within him and drew along with him. His experience was qualitative; he drew the qualitative reality that God Himself had placed within him. Everywhere in the outer world, whenever mathematics was observed, the intentions of God were also observed.

By Newton's time mathematics has become abstracted. Man has forgotten that originally he received mathematics as an inspiration from God. And in this utterly abstract form, Newton now applies mathematics to the study of space. As he writes his Principia, he simply applies this abstracted mathematics, this idea of space (which he does not define,) because he has a dim feeling that nothing will be gained by trying to define it. He takes the trivial idea of space and applies his abstract mathematics to it, thus severing it from any inward experiences. This is how he speaks of the principles of nature.

Later on, interestingly enough, Newton goes somewhat deeper. This is easy to see if one is familiar with his works. Newton becomes ill at ease, as it were, when he contemplates his own view of space. He is not quite comfortable with this space, torn as it is out of man and estranged completely from the spirit. So he defines it after all, saying that space is the sensorium of God. It is most interesting that at the starting point of modern science the very person who was the first to completely mathematize and separate space from man, eventually defines space as God's sensorium,³⁶ a sort of brain or sense organ of God. Newton had torn nature asunder into space and man-who-experiences-space. Having done this, he feels inwardly uneasy when he views this abstract space, which man had formerly experienced in union with his god. Formerly, man had said to himself: What my human sensorium experiences in space, I experience together with my god. Newton becomes uneasy, now that he has torn space away form the human sensorium. He has thereby torn himself away from his permeation with the divine-spiritual. Space, with all is mathematics, was not something external. So, in later life, Newton addresses it as God's sensorium, though to begin with he had torn the whole apart, thus leaving space devoid of Spirit and God. But enough feeling remained in Newton that he could not leave this externalized space devoid of God. So he deified it again.

Scientifically, man tore himself loose from his god, and thus from the spirit; but outwardly he again postulated the same spirit. What happened here explains why a man like Goethe found it impossible³⁷ to go along with Newton on any point. Goethe's Theory of Color is one particularly characteristic point. This whole procedure of first casting out the spirit, separating it from man, was foreign to Goethe's nature. Goethe always had the feeling that man has to experience everything, even what is related to the cosmos. Even in regard to the three dimensions Goethe felt that the cosmos was only a continuation of what man had inwardly experienced. Therefore Goethe was by nature Newton's adversary.

Now let us return to Berkeley, who was somewhat younger than Newton, but still belonged to the period of conflict that accompanied the rise of the scientific way of thinking. Berkeley had no quarrel with Newton's accepting the trivial ideas of place, space, time, and motion. But he was not happy with this whole science that was emerging, and particularly not with its interpretations of natural phenomena. It was evident to him that when nature is utterly severed from man it cannot be experienced at all, and that man is deceiving himself when he imagines that he is experiencing it.

Therefore, Berkeley declared that bodies forming the external basis for sense perceptions do not really exist. Reality is spiritual through and through. The universe, as it appears to us—even where it appears in a bodily form—is but the manifestation of an all-pervading spirit. In Berkeley, these ideas appear pretty much as mere assertions, for he no longer had any trace of the old mysticism and even less of the ancient pneumatology. Except for his religious dogma, he really had no ground at all for his assertion of such all-pervading spirituality. But assert it he did, and so vigorously that all corporeality become for him no more than a revelation of the spirit. Hence it was impossible for Berkeley to say: I behold a color and there is vibrating movement back of it that I cannot see—which is what modern science justifiably states. Instead, Berkeley said: I cannot hypothetically assume that there is anything possessing any corporeal property such as vibratory movement. The basis of the physical world of phenomena must be spiritually conceived. Something spiritual is behind a color perception as its cause, which I experience in myself when I know myself as spirit. Thus Berkeley is a spiritualist in the sense in which this term is used in German philosophy.

For dogmatic reasons, but with a certain justification, Berkeley makes innumerable objections against the assumption that nature can be comprehended by mathematics that has been abstracted from direct experience. Since to Berkeley the whole cosmos was spiritual, he also viewed mathematics as having been formed together with the spirit of the cosmos. He held that we do in fact experience the intentions of the cosmic spirit insofar as they have mathematical forms, for that we cannot apply mathematical concepts in an external manner to corporeal objects.

In accordance with this point of view, Berkeley opposed what mathematics had become for both Newton and Leibnitz,³⁸ namely differential and integral calculus. Please, do not misunderstand me. Today's lecture must be fashioned in such a way that it cannot but provoke many objections in one who holds to the views prevailing today. But these objections will fade away during the ensuring lectures, if one is willing to keep an open mind. Today, however, I want to present the themes that will occupy us in a rather radical form.

Berkeley became an opponent of the whole infinitesimal calculus³⁹ to the extent that it was then known. He opposed what was beyond experience. In this regard, Berkeley's feeling for things was often more sensitive than his thoughts. He felt how, to the quantities that the mind could conceive, the emergence of infinitesimal calculus added other quantities; namely, the differentials, which attain definition only in the differential coefficient. Differentials must be conceived in such a way that they always elude our thinking, as it were. Our thinking refuses to completely permeate them. Berkeley regarded this as a loss of reality, since knowledge for him was only what could be experienced. Therefore he could not approve of mathematical ideas that produced the indetermination of the differentials.

What are we really doing when we seek differential equations for natural phenomena? We are pointing to something that eludes our possible experience. I realize, of course, that many of you cannot quite follow me on these points, but I cannot here expound the whole nature of infinitesimal calculus. I only want to draw attention to some aspects that will contribute to our study of the birth of modern science.

Modern science set out to master the natural phenomena by means of a mathematics detached from man, a mathematics no longer inwardly experienced. By adopting this abstract mathematical view and these concepts divorced from man, science arrived at a point where it could examine only the inanimate. Having taken mathematics out of the sphere of live experience, one can only apply it to what is dead. Therefore, owing to this mathematical approach, modern science is directed exclusively to the sphere of death. In the universe, death manifests itself in disintegration, in atomization, in reduction to microscopic parts—putting it simply, in a crumbling into dust. This is the direction taken by the present-day scientific attitude. With a mathematics detached from all living experience, it takes hold of everything in the cosmos that turns to dust, that atomizes. From this moment onward it becomes possible to dissipate mathematics itself into differentials. We actually kill all living forms of thought, if we try to penetrate them with any kind of differential equation, with any differential line of thought. To differentiate is to kill; to integrate is to piece the dead together again in some kind of framework, to fit the differentials together again into a whole. But they do not thereby become alive again, after having been annihilated. One ends up with dead specters, not with anything living.

This is how the whole perspective of what was opening up through infinitesimal calculus appeared to Berkeley. Had he expressed himself concretely, he might well have said: First you kill the whole world by differentiating it; then you fit its differentials together again in integrals, but you no longer have a world, only a copy, an illusion. With regard to its content, every integral is really an illusion, and Berkeley already felt this to be so. Therefore, differentiation really implies annihilation, while integration is the gathering up of bones and dust, so that the earlier forms of the slain beings can be pieced together again. But this does not bring them back to life; they remain no more than dead replicas.

One can say that Berkeley's sentiments were untimely. This they certainly were, for the new way of approach had to come. Anyone who would have said that infinitesimal calculus should never have been developed would have been called not a scientific thinker but a fool. On the other hand, one must realize that at the outset of this whole stream of development, feelings such as Berkeley's were understandable. He shuddered at what he thought would come from a infinitesimal study of nature and had to do with the process of birth but a study of all dying aspects in nature.

Formerly this had not been observed, nor had there been any interest in it. In earlier times, the coming-into-being, the germinating, had been studied; now, one looked at all that was fading and crumbling into dust. Man's conception was heading toward atomism, whereas previously it had tended toward the continuous, lasting aspects of things. Since life cannot exist without death and all living things must die, we must look at and understand all that is dead in the world. A science of the inanimate, the dead, had to arise. It was absolutely necessary. The time that we are speaking about was the age in which mankind was ready for such a science. But we must visualize how this went against the grain of somebody who, like Berkeley, still lived completely in the old view.

The after-effects of what came into being then are still very much with us today. We have witnessed the triumphs of just those scientific labors that made Berkeley shudder. Until they were somewhat modified through the modern theory of relativity,⁴⁰ Newton's theories reigned supreme, Goethe's revolt against them made no impression. For a true comprehension of what went on we must go back to Newton's time and see the shuddering of thinkers who still had a vivid recollection of earlier views and how they clung to feelings that resembled the former ones.

Giordano Bruno shrank from studying the dead nature that was now to be the object of study. He could not view it as dead in a purely mathematical manner of thought, so he animated the atoms into monads and imbued his mathematical thinking with poetry in order to retain it in a personal sphere. Newton at first proceeded from a purely mathematical standpoint, but then he wavered and defined space (which he has first completely divorced from man through his external mathematics) as God's sensorium. Berkeley in his turn rejected the new direction of thinking altogether and with it the whole trend towards the infinitesimal.

Today, however, we are surrounded and overwhelmed by the world view that Giordano Bruno tried to turn into poetry, that Newton felt uncomfortable about, and that Berkeley completely rejected. Do we take what Newton said—that space is a sensorium of God—seriously when we think in the accepted scientific sense today? People today like to regard as great thinkers those men who have said something or other that they approve. But if the great men also said something that they do not approve, they feel very superior and think: Unfortunately, on this point he wasn’t as enlightened as I am. Thus many people consider Lessing⁴¹ a man of great genius but make an exception for what he did toward the end of his life, when he became convinced that we go through repeated earth lives.

Just because we must in the present age come to terms with the ideas that have arisen, we must go back to their origin. Since mathematics has once and for all been detached from man, and since nature has been taken hold of by this abstract mathematics that has gradually isolated us from the whole of nature, we must now somehow manage to find ourselves in this nature. For we will not attain a coherent spiritual knowledge until we once again have found the spirit in nature.

Just as it is a matter of course that every living man will sooner or later die, so it was a matter of course that sooner or later in the course of time a conception of death had to emerge from the former life-imbued world view. Things that can only be learned from a corpse cannot be learned by a person who is unwilling to examine the corpse. Therefore certain mysteries of the world can be comprehended only if the modern scientific way of thinking is taken seriously.

Let me close with a somewhat personal remark.⁴² The scientific world view must be taken seriously, and for this reason I was never an opponent of it; on the contrary, I regarded it as something that of necessity belongs to our time. Often I had to speak out against something that a scientist, or so-called scientist, had made of the things that were discovered by unprejudiced investigation of the sphere of death. It was the misinterpretation of such scientific discoveries that I opposed. On this occasion let me state emphatically that I do not wish to be regarded as in any way an opponent of the scientific approach. I would consider it detrimental to all our anthroposophical endeavors if a false opposition were to arise between what anthroposophy seeks by way of spiritual research and what science seeks—and must of necessity seek in its field—out of the modern attitude.

I say this expressly, my dear friends, because a healthy discussion concerning the relationship between anthroposophy and science must come to pass within our movement. Anything that goes wrong in this respect can only do grave harm to anthroposophy and should be avoided.

I mention this here because recently, in preparing these lectures, I read in the anthroposophical periodical Die Drei that atomism was being studied in a way in which no progress can be made. Therefore, I want to make it clear that I consider all these polemics in Die Drei about atomism as something that only serves to stultify the relations between anthroposophy and science.

• 32. Giordano Bruno: Nola 1548–1600 Rome. Dominican, 1563–1576, a great traveler. Main works developed at the English court at the time of Elizabeth I. After he returned to Italy he was imprisoned because of heretical teachings, and was burned in Rome after 8 years in prison. See Riddles of Philosophy, and The Spiritual Guidance of Man, by Rudolf Steiner.
• 33. Isaac Newton, Sir: Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire 1642–1727 Kensington, London. Born as a dwarf-like child. Grew up on a farm and went to village and small town schools until 1661. After he was accepted at the University he was of medium talent until his “flaming” as a genius physicist, astronomer, mathematician 1663–1664. Professor in Cambridge 1669–1701, member of the Royal Society London 1662 and from 1703 until his death, its President. Main work: Law of Gravitation, Mathematically Adapted to the Law of Motion from Kepler, developed 1666, published 1687 in Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica. The idea of an infinitesimal mathematics came from Newton in 1663; three years later he had developed his differential mathematics. His Optics, 1704, put forth the division of light in color as well as emission theory.
  
  Later Newton lost all interest in physics, mathematics, and also in the destiny and consequences of his works. He turned towards chemical and alchemical experiments and studies of their old traditions. In his old age he was interested in religious-speculative studies. Before his death he compared his life with a day, in which a child is playing with sand and mussels and is not aware anymore of the cosmos at his back. Literature: J.W.N. Sullivan, Isaac Newton 1642–1727 (London 1938).
• 34. In Newton's second edition of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principa Mathematica of 1713 the definition is “But I do not define, because it is well known to all of us.”
• 35. George Berkeley: Desert Castle, Thomastown, Ireland 1685–1753 Oxford. English philosopher and Anglican missionary, Bishop from 1734. Main works: Treatise Concerning the Principle of Human Knowledge, 1710; Alciphron, about ethics and free thinkers, 1732; Siris, concerning metaphysical questions. See: Riddles of Philosophy.
  
  Berkeley said: “One has to do it in such a way”: e.g., as in Paragraph 113 of Principles of Human Knowledge. In the writing De Motu (From Motion) is written in Paragraph 43: “Motion, even though perceived clearly by the senses, was darkened, but not because of its own being, but far more through commentaries by learned philosophers.”
• 36. In the work Optice by Newton, which is the Latin translation of his Optics (1704), published by Samuel Clarke in 1706 and approved with additions made by Newton, the formula appears only at the end of the book at the so-called 28th Problem: “If these questions are answered in the right way, could we then not ascertain the phenomenon that there is a being, unbodily, intelligent, which can perceive the endless universe as it were with its sense organs, and which seems to look into the innermost and is surrounding it with its all-embracing presence, while that in us that is usually feeling and thinking are only handed-down pictures in which we then perceive and observe our organs?” This thought seems not only to be Newton's, but was also presented in a similar way by Henry More, the Platonist from Cambridge who was a friend of Newton.
• 37. For his polemic concerning Newton's color theory, see Rudolf Steiner, Goethe the Scientist (New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950), especially the Introduction, “Goethe, Newton and the Physicists”; see also the forthcoming book, Heinrich O. Proskauer, The Rediscovery of Color (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press).
• 38. Leibnitz: Leipzig 1646–1716 Hanover. Philologist, mathematician, physicist, lawyer, statesman, priest. Mostly living at princely courts, traveling a lot. Discoverer of the Infinitesimal Calculus 1686, independently of Newton.
• 39. In his writing The Analyst (The Analyst, 1734, included in the book Writings about the Origin of Mathematics and Physics) the Table of Contents is in the form of 50 theses. No. 7, for example, is as follows: “Objections against the Secrets of Belief Which are Made Unfairly by Those who Admit Them in Science;” or No. 13: “The Rule for the Flux of Potency is Achieved through Unfair Reasoning;” and No. 22: “With the Help of a Double Mistake Analysts Come to their Truth, but not to Science, in which They do not even Know How They Came to Their Own Conclusions.” From the Polemic Dispute, which follows The Analyst, an example is: “No big name on this earth will ever cause me to take unclear things for clear ones. They think of one as if it were a crime to think one could see further than Sir Isaac Newton, even above him. I am convinced though that they speak for the feelings of many others. But there are also some ... who think and feel it unfair to copy some great man's shortcomings, and who see no crime in wanting to see further than Sir Isaac Newton, but further than the whole of mankind.”
• 40. Prepared by Mach and Lorentz, developed by Einstein, Special Theory of Relativity 1905, Common Theory of Relativity 1916. Made it necessary to revise Newton's Mechanics with the help of non-Euclidean Geometry. See also Riddles of Philosophy and Georg Unger, Von Bidden, Physicalischer Begriffe, Part 3 (Stuttgart: 1967), pages 100–122.
• 41. Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim: Kamenz/Lausitz 1729–1781 Brunswick. Dramatist, essayist, critic. Opens a new epoch in German literature and an. His last writing, “The Education of the Human Race,” (1780) finds it necessary to postulate reincarnation for the sake of the development of the human race. See Riddles of Philosophy.
• 42. The reason was a controversy in the magazine Die Drei of 1921–1922, pages 1107 and 1114, as well as in the following years publication (see pages 172–330 about the reality of atoms). See Rudolf Steiner's First Scientific Lecture Course: Light Course (Forest Row, England: Steiner Schools Fellowship, 1977).