The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Recently, many members of the Anthroposophical Society, especially those with a scientific background, have come to believe that a discussion should take place between what is given in Anthroposophy as world knowledge and what is given today as scientific world knowledge based on the assumptions of the second half of the 19th century. Yes, it is believed that if one, as it were, accommodates science in a certain way, responds to it as much as possible, this could result in something extraordinarily favorable for anthroposophy.

It is precisely because scientific activity has entered the Anthroposophical Society, which in other respects is to be welcomed as an extremely gratifying fact, that an extraordinary number of errors have arisen with regard to the point mentioned.

We must not forget that in the course of the 19th century, under the influence of what was gradually called and is still called science, general human knowledge has taken on a character in relation to which anthroposophical knowledge of the world is quite different. One must assume that anyone who has grown into present-day scientific life with their habitual way of thinking will find it impossible to switch to the anthroposophical view without further ado. Therefore, one must be aware that no kind of approval of the anthroposophical view of the world can come from this side in the near future.

Those people who either have not grown into today's scientific work with their habitual way of thinking or who, as young people, grow into it and then out of it again, will be the ones who will mainly recognize the validity of anthroposophical world knowledge.

To bring a little life into what I have just said, I would like to speak today about an initial perspective on the path of Anthroposophy through the world. I would like to structure these three lectures somewhat aphoristically so that friends who have come from far away can take as much with them as possible. I would like to tie in with all kinds of phenomena in the life of civilization today, but in the main I would like to seek the content for these lectures in purely anthroposophical discussions.

We know what the facts are that a person experiences when they pass through the gate of death. Today, in order to present the physical perspective of anthroposophy to our souls, so to speak, we will first consider only the very first period of life after passing through the gate of death. It has often been mentioned how, throughout their entire life on earth, human beings have such a close connection between their physical body and their etheric body or formative forces that this connection is maintained throughout their entire life on earth.

When a person interrupts the ordinary state of consciousness during their life on earth through the state of sleep and dreams, they carry the astral body and the ego out of the physical and formative forces. These, in turn, are so closely connected that they do not separate. Thus, in the course of a normal twenty-four-hour day, the separation that occurs in the course of a normal day is such that the physical body and the etheric or formative body on the one hand and the ego and the astral body on the other hand separate, while each side forms a closely knit whole.

When a person now passes through the gate of death, it is different. Then it happens that the physical body is discarded first and that for a very short time a connection is established between the I, the astral body and the etheric body, which was not present during life on earth. This connection gives the first experiences that a person goes through after death, which only last for days. What are these experiences?

They consist of the person, as if melting away from himself, seeing everything that he has taken in through his senses and also through the mind, which combines the perceptions of the senses, during his life on earth.

During our life on earth, we become accustomed to seeing colored things and processes that shine in colors in our view when we look out into the world. But we also retain the impressions of colors in our memory, albeit in a weakened form. We carry them with us through our memory. It is the same with the impressions of the other senses. And if we are honest in self-observation, then we say to ourselves: Actually, when we sit in the quiet chamber and let our memories, that is, our inner selves, play, what we experience from our inner selves is composed of the shadowy images of external impressions. In our ordinary consciousness, we live either in the immediate, vivid impressions of the external world or in the shadowy memories of it. We will talk tomorrow about what we have beyond that. Today we only want to call to mind very strongly that during our whole life on earth this consciousness is filled with colors and color processes that spread over things, with sounds, with sensations of warmth and cold, in short, with the impressions that we receive through the senses, and with their shadowy afterimages in the inner life of the soul, as one might also say, in memory. Let us consider this as a kind of starting point.

Everything we experience melts away when we pass through the portal of death. Within a few days, so to speak, everything that fills our soul from birth to death has dissolved into the greater cosmos. This can be called: The etheric body or formative forces of the human being separate from the I and the astral body, after first entering into a connection with them that did not previously exist in earthly life.

Now let us imagine more precisely what this experience is like. I will make a schematic drawing for this purpose. Let us assume that the physical body of the human being is characterized by this schematic drawing; the etheric or formative body is characterized by this schematic drawing (shaded in yellow). We only experience what I have characterized as this, this interrelated structure of physical and etheric bodies, when we are stuck inside after waking up. So we actually always experience it from the inside. And to help us recall this as accurately as possible, I would like to design the drawing in the following way. I will indicate green for the part of the etheric body that seems inward. The physical body is discarded at death anyway, so we need not consider it at this point. And I will indicate what is directed outwards from the etheric body with this red line.

I just said that we only experience this structure of the etheric body from the inside after waking up; so, in a sense, we only experience what shines inward in the green. We do not experience what shines outward in the red.

When we have passed through the gate of death and enter into a certain connection with the etheric body with our ego and our astral body, this connection happens in the following way. You must now imagine that the whole etheric body turns like a glove when you turn all the finger linings inside out, as you would normally do with the skin, turning the inside out. So that I now have to draw what is colored red on the outside in the earthly state as the inner part, and what is colored green on the inside, I have to draw green on the outside. The entire etheric body turns in on itself. But this turning around is connected with an immeasurably rapid enlargement of the etheric body. It grows, it becomes gigantic, it expands immeasurably far into the universe, so that I would now have to make the drawing something like this (large green board 8 circles).

And whereas we used to be in there with our ego and our astral body, we are now (red circle) facing the etheric body that expands into the cosmic, but we look at it from its other side. That which we previously carried with us without meaning, the red on the outside, is now turned inwards. What was previously turned inwards and what alone has meaning for us during our life on earth is now turned outwards, no longer of any concern to us, and disperses into the universe. But in this green – of course presented schematically – is contained everything that we have had within us during our life on earth as a colored, sounding, and so on world.

As green, so to speak, goes through the etheric body turning to the other side, we lose it completely and we get a very different world as an impression. We must not imagine that we can still have the same world that we had during our life on earth after death. This world goes away. To imagine, for example, that after death we could experience, for my sake, in a different edition, the content of earthly life, that is quite wrong, that does not correspond to the facts. What we experience through the turning of the etheric or formative body is indeed of a gigantic size compared to the content of earthly life, but it is something quite different. We experience the whole of our earthly education through the fact that the outside is now turned inwards, in powerful impressions that are different from the sensory impressions. We do not experience the blush of the rose, but we experience how we have formed the blush of the rose within us as an idea. That is where it begins to be not as calm as it is in physical life. There, in earthly life, the roses are so beautifully arranged in a rose garden, and each one gives peace, and one feels suspended in the peace. Now the rose garden becomes something completely different, now the rose garden becomes an event in time. And as we gradually let our gaze wander from one rose to the next, as we formed the image of the first rose, the second, the third rose and so on within us, this, as in a living becoming, in a lightning-fast rippling and weaving, one rose after the other arises, but not as roses, but as images that unfold, this now emerges as our inner life as if in a sea of events. And so we are confronted with something we have not seen during our life on earth: the becoming of this earthly life, the gradual development of this earthly life. We know how our soul has become from childhood on. That which we have left completely unnoticed during our earthly life is now playing out in us. It is as if we had stepped out of ourselves, had become a second person and were watching how we gradually formed the simple ideas of childhood, the more complicated ones of later years, and so on. We see the emergence of all this earthly life from its inner side. We see how this earthly life, this earthly existence, is formed from hour to hour. Yes, we gain the impression that this whole earthly life is actually formed from the cosmos. For everything we perceive grows into the immeasurable, into the cosmic, and by growing into it, we become clear about the fact that what has been formed in us in earthly life is also formed from the cosmos.

And now we are gradually getting a valid idea of what it is like to live this human life on earth. Let us take as our starting point what is more or less believed today with regard to this life on earth. Man eats, and in doing so he takes the substances that are outside into his own organism. This is an undeniable fact. He also changes these substances. He changes them in his mouth, and then all the more so in the rest of his organism. What is absorbed goes into the whole organism, really goes into the whole organism. Science will still come and say: But we are also constantly losing substances to the outside. We need only think of how you cut your nails and your hair if you are not yet bald. You can see from the dandruff and so on how the human being loses matter, loses substance. And it is common knowledge today that in this way, by constantly losing matter, the human being completely rebuilds itself over the course of about seven years.

So that, if I want to put it drastically, everything sitting here on the chairs, in terms of the material, was scattered all over the world eight or nine years ago. Let me put it this way: what is sitting here on these chairs could only have gathered over the last seven to eight years. If what was in all of you more than seven or eight years ago were still sitting here in muscle tissue and so on – you are already older, so you will have regenerated several times – you would not all be sitting here.

So, of what you carried as your muscle meat, blood and other things at home or elsewhere seven or eight years ago, nothing is sitting there; you have gradually cut it off, shed it and so on.

But if science is now materialistically oriented, then how does it answer? It says something like this: During these last seven years we have all been eating. That which we have eaten now is here, and that which we ate earlier is no longer here. For example, each of you sitting here has a heart, doesn't he? Now, the physical matter of this heart, so science tells you, has renewed itself in the last seven to eight years. So you definitely have a new heart compared to your condition nine years ago, let's say. Yes, you could say something like that, if you think in terms of the present.

But it is not so. This idea exists only because people do not know what I have just explained to you, do not include it at all in the realm of their scientific observation and thinking. They know nothing of that reversal of the ether or formative forces of the body, of what shows us, after we have passed through the gate of death, how the whole being has actually come into being bit by bit. Because if one knows this, then one is also able to look into the human organism quite differently. And only then does one learn to recognize the truth.

One can believe that the cabbage, potatoes, other vegetables, cherries, plums and so on that one has enjoyed over the past few years have gradually accumulated this heart matter. But it has not. Essentially – listen to me when I say this – the heart you carry within you has not much to do with the material you have taken in over the last seven to eight years. Rather, the heart you carry within you today has essentially arisen in a very mysterious way out of the ether of the cosmos, which you have drawn together into the density of the heart over the last seven to eight years. So it is not that your heart has been renewed out of physical matter of the last seven to eight years, but it has been renewed out of the cosmos. You have renewed your heart and your other organs out of the ether. You have actually made yourself into a new person over the past few years, not from the earth, but from the cosmos. This can be seen from the effects of the etheric body after death, how it has worked during the whole of life on earth, that we have always regenerated ourselves from the cosmos.

Now your materialistic conscience – after all, everyone has to have one of those – will say: But we did eat. We did absorb external matter, and internal processes took place as a result.

Yes, but these internal processes have less to do with your actual, deeper nature than you might think.

Now we can even state a fact that may seem somewhat grotesque to today's thinking: You are all sitting there now; what you have renewed in yourselves over the past seven to eight years did not live in the cabbage and on the potato fields, but lived out in the universe in the sun, moon and stars, coming down from there, and you formed yourselves anew out of the universe. In doing so, we have pointed out an error that simply has to arise from today's thinking. They seek only the relationships of human regeneration to physical earth matter, but not to ether. And the consequence of this is that once one has become accustomed to the ideas presented in current physiology, one cannot help but regard everything that is given from the anthroposophical point of view as a kind of fantasy. Therefore, we must be clear about how fruitless discussions are today, how only by mastering both fields, contemporary science and anthroposophy, can we shed light on them from both sides, but how we must not give ourselves over to the hope – because if we give ourselves over to this hope, it is actually to the detriment of anthroposophy! - that those who are accustomed to materialistic ideas can be drawn over to it so easily by a discussion. One must have very clear and precise ideas about this. Then one will realize that, first of all, the whole way in which one appropriates anthroposophy must be appropriated by people before they can even enter into this anthroposophical way of looking at and knowing things.

I said that essentially we actually regenerate our new human being from the cosmos. We do not find the substances in the cosmos that we then find in the heart, of course not, because there they are so thin that they cannot be detected by physical means on earth. There they are ethereal. But what appears as dense heart matter at a certain age has only just condensed from the cosmic ether. So what is there today was all still out in the heavens, in the stars, nine or ten years ago, and what has remained, what has pushed its way in from the matter that should actually have formed out of the ether, that is what causes illness. When we carry physical matter that is too old within us, then that is one cause of illness. And deep insights into the nature of disease are gained when one knows how matter, instead of being expelled, persists; for all matter that is taken up as physical earth matter is actually doomed to be expelled again. If it persists in the organism, then it becomes the cause of disease.

You can also see from this how this really real knowledge, which we can only gain by having an insight into what occurs in us as first experiences shortly after we have completely discarded the physical body, plays a practical role. So after death, everything that we have had in the way of sense impressions and the mind's processing of sense impressions melts away from us. We look at the world quite differently. Minerals, plants, and animals, as we previously looked at them, are not there at all. How people become, that is there.

We have passed through the gateway of death. We have thereby resigned from the scene of the earth. We have stepped onto the scene of the cosmos: Another world surrounds us. It is as if we had stepped out of a small chamber of earthly existence into the majestically vast chamber of the cosmos, and we feel spread out over the cosmos, would truly not fit into the small earthly chamber. So we have entered the scene of the cosmos. And on this scene of the cosmos we must now remain until we descend again to our earthly existence, only that we now enter into contact with completely new worlds, with worlds whose essence belongs to the higher hierarchies.

This consideration, which one gains so directly in connection with man, must, however, be extended to the whole of nature. And I would like to characterize to you what has to happen there in the following way.

Let us assume, for example, that we have gone back a very long time in evolution, in the evolution of the earth. We would encounter very different living creatures and very different events on earth. You know that there have been periods of time when giant animals of a lower kind lived that no longer exist today. The entire species has died out and is no longer present. The paleontologist and geologist search for individual remains in the formations of the earth. Let us assume that I would draw schematically this very old development, where, for example, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, these strange beasts, would have lived here on earth. Yes, these creatures were not formed out of physical earthly matter, they were formed out of the cosmos, out of ether. And when the time approached when these creatures gradually died out, the entire etheric matter remained, if I may put it that way. (See drawing: yellow.) Now there were no more creatures. But all the etheric matter from which these creatures had formed remained behind, just as our etheric body remains behind. And this etheric matter was the cause that in later times, after this etheric formation had passed through the cosmos, other beings formed in earthly existence. Of these, in turn, the etheric remained behind. From these, other entities formed. And finally, the world of animals emerged as it exists today.

So if you have three consecutive periods here, first period, second period, third period, you have, let's say, consecutive animal forms. But for the following one to always arise from the previous one, a passage through the cosmos with the help of the ether is necessary, just as a passage through the cosmos between two earth lives is necessary for man. And if we finally have entities here (see drawing: red), then that can in turn pass into the ether, and there, formed out of the ether in a certain period, the human being can appear. But the influence has always happened in a roundabout way through the cosmos.

Now comes the purely materialistic observer. He sees all this, and now he believes that one thing has arisen out of the other. Certainly, on earth it also follows; but an etheric activity, a cosmic activity lies in between.

In the 19th century, it became common practice to look only at what follows on the earth, but not at what cosmic activity is beyond the earthly. Therefore, the consideration remained: ultimately man, before that simpler forms, still simpler forms and so on. This is what we can obtain as the development of organisms through natural science, which does not involve the etheric. This natural science could obtain nothing other than what it did obtain. If one admits its presuppositions, that one should not get involved in the ethereal, one poses the question in such a way that one should only consider that which belongs to earthly existence; yes, then there is no other choice than to present the physical evolutionary current. Darwinists have done this, Haeckel has done this, and to demand more as earth science or even to want to polemicize against what has come about as earth science is nonsense. Because only when one adds the knowledge of the ethereal world can that arise which belongs to it. So you see, there is no point in direct polemic; but if someone wants to remain on the ground of natural science, he can. And to the other, who speaks of some other principles of formation in what is on earth, he can always say: Yes, that has no significance at all. That is not there, he will say, when he has become accustomed to the merely earthly way of looking at things.

If one wants to speak differently, then one must first acquire knowledge of the ethereal world. So for a valid, reasonable polemic against today's science, the only thing left to do is to say: In your field, o naturalist, you are quite right, nothing else can come of it, we do not deny that, we fully admit that. But if you want to talk to us about what we mean, well, then you must first familiarize yourself with the elementary processes in the cosmic ether, then we can talk to each other. Otherwise you are not grounded in reality if you do not start from these things.

You see, a member sitting here has written a little book on botany from a spiritual scientific point of view. A very disparaging review of it appeared recently in a local paper. Well, what can one say about that! I said: Imagine you were the botanist who wrote this review, you had never heard of anthroposophy and this second edition of your little book came to your notice. It is only natural that you would write just like him! The fact that you do not do so, but on the contrary have written the little book yourself, is the very reason why you have taken up anthroposophy in the first place. You only have to put yourself in the other person's shoes for once, and then you can write all these opposing things yourself. But you see, if you want a person who has once put himself in one direction with all his habits of thought to be different, if you want him to be an anthroposophist, it seems to me almost like someone who has had a blonde daughter suddenly wants a black one. It doesn't work like that. What man has become through today's science is not something that can be changed in the twinkling of an eye. You have to think realistically.

The period that followed the mid-19th century gave the whole state of mind a very specific character. I will give you an example of this from a completely different angle.

You know that there is something today called analytical psychology, psychoanalysis. I have often said here that psychoanalysis produces some beautiful things; but, first of all, it arises from an incomplete, amateurish knowledge of human physiology, so it is amateurishness. Then it arises from an amateurish knowledge of the human soul, of human psychology. That is also amateurism. And because one usually follows the other, the things multiply, and psychoanalysis is actually amateurism squared. - If you multiply d by d, you get d?. But it does have an effect, even if only in an amateurish way, if it is pursued further. And one can also understand that this thing could gradually emerge from inadequate physiology and psychology. But it does rub off on people's minds, this way of thinking does rub off!

Today we have an enormous literature about it. You could fill a large library with psychoanalytic literature. People argue terribly in it, so that if you go into the polemics, it is sometimes quite interesting. Well, this psychoanalysis has also been mentioned here from time to time. One can really fill a library with what has been written about it. But if so much is written in this field, then there must be a lot of study in it, at least on the surface. This colors the state of mind of people.

Now there is something very peculiar. You see, in 1841, there was already a psychoanalytic literature in Central Europe. But it consisted of only fourteen lines. They read: “In our modern overcrowded consciousness, we throw many things around that we cannot develop because we lack the time. They remain in us in the form of tasks that we could work on. They are, to quote Tieck, unborn souls that, yearning for existence, hover in the background of our own soul as if in a limbo."

You see, in these fourteen lines - if you make the lines longer, there is even less - the principle of the whole of psychoanalysis is contained. At that time, it was called “unborn souls” that live in the background of the soul in a limbo, struggling for existence. Now it is called “hidden provinces in the depths of the soul,” “soul provinces,” and so on. In those days, however, it was considered such an insignificant thing that it was noted in a few lines. Today our civilization has come to write entire libraries about it. But everything essential, everything fundamental, is contained in those fourteen lines. But in those days, when it was all contained in just fourteen lines, the libraries were filled with different books than they are filled with today, and people who wanted to learn took in different material.

If today, as a young student, you somehow study psychology and are supposed to write a dissertation, you can't avoid psychoanalysis. You have to study it. Yes, it rubs off on the soul. In 1841, the essential was expressed in these fourteen lines. It was not considered something so important that could have such a tremendous significance for human thought. And so it has been with many things.

It means something tremendous, whether we look at any field of facts or whether we do not look. In those days, in 1841, people slept through psychoanalysis. This thought, which I read to you in the fourteen lines, only emerged in a single person, in Karl Rosenkranz. He dreamt about it once. Dreams pass quickly and do not have much influence on life. But people filled their waking hours with other things. Today, on the other hand, much is missed because one has to be awake for psychoanalysis and similar things.

This matter really needs to be looked at carefully, then it will be possible to say where to start in order to bring anthroposophy to bear in the world. In any case, polemics are not the answer. Polemics are almost like someone lying in a room and snoring terribly, and cannot be woken up at all, and someone else is watching, and now the person watching is trying hard to make the snorer, who is sleeping through everything, understand

what the other is saying. He cannot understand him. Nor is it possible for two fields of spiritual life to communicate with each other if each sleeps for the other's field and only watches for his own.

Now there will still be many who sleep for anthroposophy. They will not wake up so quickly for anthroposophy. But one would like the anthroposophists to wake up for the others, so that they know why anthroposophy is the all-embracing one, not only out of their blind faith but out of a real insight into the quality of the other and also encompasses what the others consider to be the only one, and how anthroposophy broadens the horizon because it goes beyond those areas that the others consider to be merely within a narrow horizon.

In this way I have presented one of the perspectives, the perspective that arises when we ask about the details of what surrounds us as the earth world and what melts away after death. It is the physical perspective. In order to be understood, it leads us into that which is immediately adjacent to it, into the etheric.

Later, we will look at the soul perspective, how the human being awakens to the soul perspective, and then conclude with a consideration of the spiritual perspective of anthroposophy. These will be the three perspectives of anthroposophy.

If we want to categorize what we can get to know as the stages of the path into the spiritual world into what is already known from ordinary life, it is important to be able to correctly assess the three states of consciousness in which a person already finds themselves in ordinary life. We have already described these three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming and sleeping. And we also know how a person actually only experiences true waking consciousness in their thinking, in their imagining, and how feeling already works in such a way that, although it appears different in its experiences than the world of dreams, in its overall constitution, in the way it relates to the person, it is the same as the world of dreams. We experience feelings in our ordinary consciousness in an equally indeterminate way to dreams, but not only in such an indeterminate way, but also in a context similar to that of dreams.

The dream strings image to image. It does not care about the connections in the outside world as it strings image to image. It has its own connections. It is basically the same with the world of feelings. And the person who, for ordinary consciousness, would have such an emotional world as he has a world of ideas would be a terribly sobering, terribly dry, icy person. In the world of ideas, that is, in full wakefulness, one must pay attention to what is commonly called logic. It would be impossible to get on in real life if one were to feel everything as one thinks it.

And then we have mentioned several times: the will emerges from the hidden depths of human existence. It can be imagined, but its actual nature, how it works and weaves in the human organism, remains as unknown or unconscious to the human being as the experiences of sleep itself. And it would also be extremely disturbing for the human being if he were to experience what the will actually does.

The will is in reality a process of combustion, a process of consumption. And to always perceive how one consumes one's own organism in the act of willing, and then having to replace what has been consumed again and again through nourishment or sleep, would, if it accompanied the entire waking life, not be a very comfortable process for ordinary consciousness.

Now, in a sense, we can compare the world of human feelings in a waking state, so to speak waking dreams, and the world of dreams in a state of drowsiness or half-sleep, in their images, more so that the human being does not initially perceive these images as I, but as something that is the outside world. The dreaming person experiences what is happening as dream images so strongly as an external world that he can sometimes perceive himself within these dream images.

What should interest us particularly about these dream images today is this: we live through ordinary life, one experience after another. The dream shakes these experiences up. It pays little attention to the way a person in an awake state has experiences in context. It is a poet that unfolds the strangest inclinations.

A philosopher told of himself that he often dreams that he has written a book that he has not actually written, but in the dream he believes that he has written the book, a book that is better than all his other books. But at the same time he dreams that the manuscript has been lost. He can't find it, he has misplaced it. And now he rushes from drawer to drawer, searching through everything in his dream, but he can't find the manuscript. He is overcome by an incredibly uncomfortable feeling that he has lost this manuscript of his very best book and may never find it again. He then wakes up to this unease. Of course, this is quite an experience, especially for the philosopher I mean, who has written many books. They have been published in such large numbers that once, when I was visiting this philosopher, where the philosopher's wife was also present, the wife told me: Yes, my husband writes so many books that one always competes with the other.

It was actually always rather practical in this philosopher's house, so that I once, when I was visiting this philosopher with a publisher, actually got a little annoyed because I wanted to discuss epistemological problems with him. Now I had dragged the publisher along, actually he had dragged himself along, and the philosopher immediately started: Can you tell me from your expertise whether a great many copies of this or that work of mine are available from antiquarians? – So there was a very practical sense in the philosopher's house. I don't want to disparage that, I am just telling it as something characteristic. Now, someone else might have dreamed something else, which would have colored the experiences in a fantastic way as well.

Everyone can know that the dream does not proceed in the same way as the external experience, but that other connections are created in the dream. But on the other hand, everyone can also know how the dream is intimately connected with what the human being actually is. It is indeed the case that many dreams are actually reflections of even the physical human interior, and one already weaves in dreams as in something that is intimately connected with one.

Now one gradually becomes really aware of how the dream arranges the experiences in its own way. If you keep this very clearly in mind, you will gradually come to know that you do live in this dreaming after all. Only in this dreaming you live in the times when you either just go out of the physical body and the etheric body or when you return to them. It is actually in these transitions between waking and sleeping, sleeping and waking that the dream takes place. I have repeatedly given examples showing that the most important part of the dream takes place during waking and falling asleep. Among the characteristic examples, I have given this one – you remember it – in which a student dreams that two students are standing at the door of a lecture hall. One of them says something to the other that, after the thing called a comment, absolutely demands satisfaction. It comes to a duel. Everything is vividly dreamt, going out to the duel, first choosing seconds and so on, until the shooting begins. He still hears the bang, but it immediately turns into the blow that a chair, which he has knocked over at that moment, has done. So at that moment he wakes up. This fall of the chair triggered the whole dream. The dream thus fades at the moment of waking, it only appears to do so because it has its own time within it, not the time that it would last. Some dreams last so long according to their inner time that you don't sleep as long as you would have to sleep if the dream lasted the time it carries within itself. Nevertheless, a dream is intimately connected with what a person experiences inwardly, but experiences inwardly down to his physical body.

People in ancient times were well aware of such things, and for a certain kind of dream – you can read about it in the Bible yourself – the ancient Jews said: God has punished you in your kidneys. So they knew that a very specific kind of dream was connected with the function of the kidneys. On the other hand, you only need to read something like “The Seer of Prevorst” and you will find how people actually describe the damage to their organs in their dreams, people who are particularly predisposed to doing so, so that some diseased organ is symbolically visualized in powerful images, which can lead to the remedy being presented alongside this diseased organ. In ancient times this was even used to induce the patient himself, in a certain respect, to indicate his remedy from his own dream interpretation. And what was practiced in the authorized temple sleep must also be studied in this direction.

When we look at the whole relationship between dreams and external experiences, we have to say that dreams protest against the laws of nature. From waking to sleeping, we live by natural laws. Dreams pay no heed to these natural laws. In a sense, the dream turns its nose up at the laws of nature. And what is being researched as the laws of nature for the external physical world is not the lawfulness of the dream. The dream is a living protest against the laws of nature. If, on the one hand, you ask nature what is true, it answers in the laws of nature. If you ask the dream what is true, it does not answer in terms of natural laws. And the person who judges the course of a dream according to natural laws will say that the dream is lying. In this ordinary sense, it does lie. But this dream does come close to the spiritual and supersensible in man, even if the images of the dream belong to the subconscious, as one can say in the abstract, and one does not judge it correctly if one does not know that it comes close to the inner spiritual reality of the person.

Now, however, this is something that is difficult to admit in our time. One wants to abstract the dream. They want to judge it only by its fantastic nature. They do not want to see that in a dream we have something before us that is connected with the inner being of man. Is it not true that when a dream is connected with the inner being of man and protests against the laws of nature, it is a sign that the inner being of man itself is something that protests against the laws of nature.

Please understand that this is a weighty word, that when you get to the person, their inner being actually protests against the laws of nature. For what does that mean?

When today, the scientific way of thinking observes the laws of nature in a laboratory-like manner from what is outside in nature, then this scientific world view also approaches the human being and treats him as if the laws of nature were also continuing within him, in his inner being, or, to put it better, within his skin. But that is not the case at all. This inner being is much closer to the dream with its denial of natural laws than to the natural laws; the human inner being is such that it does not act and develop its activities according to natural laws. The dream, which in a certain sense is a reflection of this human inner being in its composition, is a testimony to this. And for those who understand this, it is simply the case that they have to say that it is actually absurd to believe that the same laws prevail within the heart and liver as externally in nature. Logic belongs to the external nature. The dream belongs to the inner being of man, and whoever calls the dream fantastic should also call the human inner being fantastic. He can feel that, because the way the human interior unfolds between birth and death here in earthly life, where an illness emerges from one corner and a sense of well-being from another, is much more similar to the realm of the 'I' than to external logic. But our present way of thinking completely lacks this way of approaching the human interior, because our present way of thinking is completely absorbed in what is observed in the outer nature or in the laboratory. One wants to find this in the human interior as well.

In this respect, it is really of great importance that we learn, for example, how the way in which science often deals with what plays a role in the physical aspect of human beings is treated today. We know that proteins, fats, carbohydrates and salts are essential to human life - in essence, of course. We know that. So what does science do? It analyzes the protein and finds so much oxygen, so much nitrogen, so much carbon in it, in percentage terms; it analyzes the fats, the carbohydrates, and so on. We now know how much of each is present. But you never learn from such an analysis what influence, for example, the potato has played in European culture. There is also little mention of this influence of potato food on European culture, because from this analysis, where you simply find how differently carbon, nitrogen and so on are distributed in one food and in another, you never find out why, for example, rye is preferentially digested by the forces of the lower digested by the forces of the lower abdomen, while the potato, on the other hand, requires forces up to the brain to digest it, so that when a person eats an excessive amount of potatoes, his brain has to be used to digest the potatoes, and so some of the brain power is lost for thinking.

It is precisely in such things that one notices how neither today's materialistic science nor the more theologically colored views come close to the truth. Science describes food in much the same way as if I wanted to describe a watch, and now I begin: the silver is mined in a silver mine; it is done in such and such a way. Then the silver is loaded up and shipped to the cities, and so on. But we stop at the watchmaker. We no longer look into his workshop. Then, perhaps, you describe the porcelain dial and how the porcelain is made. Again, they stop at the watchmaker's workshop. This is how today's science deals with food. It analyzes it. In doing so, it says something that actually says nothing about the importance of food in the human organism, because despite all the analysis, there is a big difference between enjoying the fruit of something, for example rye or wheat, and enjoying the tubers, as with potatoes.

Tubers fit into the human organism quite differently than fruits or seeds. So we can truly say that today's way of thinking no longer sees through material existence at all. Therefore, materialism is the world view that does not even know matter in its effects. Spiritual science must shine into it so that we can get to know matter. That is why the materialistically minded say: Anthroposophy is fantastically spiritual. And those who have theosophy or theology and want to stop at the abstracted spirit, which never comes to real work, where it never comes so far that it really shows how it intervenes as spirit in the material effects, they say that Anthroposophy is materialistic because it brings its insights to matter.

And so one is actually attacked from two fronts, both by those who treat everything ideally and abstractly and by those who treat everything materially. But those who treat everything ideally and abstractly do not get to know the spirit, and those who treat everything materially do not get to know matter. In this way, a way of thinking is developing more and more today that cannot reach people at all.

Now, however, something very strange has actually happened in our spiritual development in recent times. People can no longer help but admit at least the dark sides of spiritual life if they do not want to be completely stubborn. And it is a characteristic monument to the way in which people who are so completely immersed in science behave when they enter these dark areas of spiritual life, or something else that I will mention in a moment – but cannot deny.

A notable example of this is the book by Ludwig Staudenmaier: “Magic as an Experimental Science”. It is almost as if one were to say: “The nightingale as a machine”. But after all, this book could be written as something quite characteristic of our time.

So how does this man actually work? The strange thing about him is that his life has driven him to it, that the magical has been approached experimentally through himself. He had to start experimenting with himself one day, I would say, out of a dark destiny. After some of his experiences, he could no longer deny that, for example, there are writing mediums. You know that I don't recommend these things and always explain their dangers; but when there are writing mediums, as there are, something very strange happens, and one must very critically separate truth from error. Well, this writing of things that the person does not have in mind at the moment when he writes them, this mediumistic writing became an experimental problem for Staudenmaier, and he began to put the pencil to paper himself, and lo and behold, things came out that he had never thought of. He wrote the strangest things. Do you think it is also a surprise when someone who thinks entirely scientifically takes a pencil in his hand, makes himself the writing medium and now believes that it will not work. But now this pencil suddenly acquires power, guides the hand, writes down all kinds of things that amaze you. That happened to Staudenmaier.

And what surprised him most was that this pencil became moody – that's what people say – just as a dream becomes moody, writing completely different things than he had intended. It seems, you can tell from the context, that the pencil once exerted a compulsion on the hand: “You are a cabbage!” and to write similar nice things.

Now, these are things that the gentleman certainly did not think of himself! And after such things had accumulated, and the pencil had repeatedly written the craziest things, Staudenmaier asked: Yes, who is it actually that is writing? – Now it answered: It is spirits who are writing. That was not true in his opinion, because ghosts do not exist for a scientifically minded person. What should he say now? He can't say that the spirits have lied to him, so he says: his subconscious is constantly lying. It's a terrible story, isn't it, when the subconscious suddenly comes to the conviction in the person himself that, for example, he is a cabbage and writes it down, so that, as they say in ordinary life, it is in black and white.

But he continued to behave as if spirits were speaking. So he asked them why they didn't tell the truth. They replied: 'Yes, that is our nature, we are just the kind of spirits who have to lie to you; it is in our character, we have to lie.

That was extremely characteristic. Now, however, we are entering a realm where things really get quite tricky, because, you see, if it turns out that the truth only sits up there and lies are constantly told down there, it naturally creates an uncomfortable situation. But if you are completely caught up in a natural scientific world view, then in such a case you cannot help but come to the conclusion that there is a liar inside you.

Nevertheless, Staudenmaier comes to the conclusion that objective spiritual beings never speak, but only the subconscious. You can put everything into such general terms.

But you see, it is characteristic that these spirits did not even try to guide Staudenmaier's hand in such a way that they might have written down a new mathematical proof for him or solved a scientific problem. That is actually the most characteristic thing, that they always said something different.

There were occasions when Staudenmaier was beside himself, and then a doctor friend would advise him to go hunting. Such instructions are common in medical advice. For example, getting married is sometimes a particularly popular piece of advice in medicine. In this case, the advice was to go hunting to get out of this crazy stuff, to distract himself, so to speak.

But lo and behold, even though he went hunting magpies, as he describes in detail, always looking out for magpies, all sorts of demonic figures peered down from the trees, not magpies. There sat on some branch such things, like something that was half a cat and half an elephant, turning up its nose at him or sticking out its tongue at him. And when he looked away from the tree into the grass, he saw not hares, but also all kinds of fantastic figures, who did their juggling with him.

So not only had the pen written down all sorts of stuff, but now the higher imagination was also stimulated in such a way that not magpies appeared, but demons, all sorts of ghostly creatures, so again a lie.

In any case, we can say that this experimenter came close to a world very similar to the world of dreams, and that this world is also a protest against the whole natural-law context. For what would the natural-law context have been? Well, he would have taken his gun off his shoulder, shot a magpie, and there would have been a magpie down there. But none of that appeared, only what I have characterized to you: once again a protest against natural law, from the spiritual world of the night side, into which the man had pushed. And if the man had stopped at the subconscious, he should at least have said to himself: If all this is down there in the subconscious, then my subconscious protests against the laws of nature. - For what does this subconscious actually tell him? Yes, it conjures up all kinds of demons and the like, as I have described. That tells him something quite different from what he has imagined about himself. So he should at least conclude from this: If the world were only organized according to natural laws, then my inner self could not exist at all, then I could not exist as a human being, because when this inner self speaks, it speaks quite differently than in natural laws. So a completely different world belongs to the inner self of man than the one over which the laws of nature are spun, a world that protests in its coherence against the laws of nature.

That, after all, is the only interesting thing about this magical experimenter or experimenting magician, who has impressed so many people so extraordinarily. It is something that shows us how, in fact, man can come to perceive such a world in other ways as well, as the world of dreams, which otherwise more or less always occurs in life, is in its contexts.

And this leads to the realization, through a correct view of ordinary life, that simply because man is there, the ordinary world, interwoven with natural laws, is adjacent to another world that is not interwoven with natural laws.

If you look at these things correctly, you have to say to yourself: there is the world interwoven with natural laws, which we study. Bordering on this is another world that has nothing to do with natural laws; quite different laws prevail in it. So, by immersing oneself in a real way in the world of dreams, one arrives in a world where natural laws cease. The fact that the human being's ordinary consciousness initially perceives this world in a fantastic way is merely due to the fact that he does not have the ability to recognize the connections that confront him. He brings the fantasy with him. But that which lives and weaves there is precisely another sphere of the world, into which the human being plunges in his dreams.

This leads us directly to something else. If you talk to someone who is completely absorbed in the world view that is currently in vogue, they will say: I study the laws of falling by looking at a falling stone. I discover the laws of gravitation. Then I go out into the world and apply them to the stars as well. And then it is thought: Here is the earth, where I find the laws of nature, and there is the cosmos. I think, blackboard 10, the laws that I have found here on earth also apply to the Orion Nebula or to anything.

Now everyone knows that, for example, gravity decreases with the square of the distance, that it becomes weaker and weaker, that the light decreases, and I have already said: So the truth of our natural laws also decreases. What is true in relation to natural laws on our earth here is no longer true out there in the universe. That is only true up to a certain distance. But out there in space, outside a certain width, the same lawfulness begins that we encounter when we immerse ourselves in a dream. Therefore, people should realize that when they look out at the Orion Nebula, they should actually not think physically, using the experimental method, to understand the Orion Nebula, but rather begin to dream, because the Orion Nebula shows its lawfulness according to dreams.

One can say that people actually knew about such things at one time, and intuitions still remained for later times, especially with thinkers who were able to concentrate quite well.

One such naturalist, who did not live in the second half of the 19th century but in the first, was Johannes Müller, who was the teacher of Haeckel. He was a man who could truly concentrate at all times. He was completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. The fact that one can really live like that, concentrated in whatever one is doing, sometimes leads to more; in some respects, as I will mention in a moment, it may have downsides. Johannes Müller, for example, was once asked about something during a summer course he taught. He said, “That is something I only know during the winter lectures, not in the summer.” He was so focused on the material for his summer lectures that he freely admitted that he only knew the rest during the winter.

But this Johannes Müller, for example, once confessed the very interesting fact that he can really cut up corpses for a long time to come to something; he does not come to it, he does not get into what he actually wants to understand. But sometimes he succeeds in dreaming about what he has experimented on, and then he sees much deeper into the matter, then things open up for him. It was in the first half of the nineteenth century. Then someone could still allow himself such extravagances, even if he was a famous natural scientist.

So, man enters into a completely different world, into a completely different order of things, when he dreams. And on proper consideration, it must be assumed that actually, if one were to do as Johannes Müller did, one would not have to think about the Orion Nebula as one does in the observatories or in the astronomical institutions, but one would have to dream about it, then one would know more about it than if one thought about it. I would like to say that this is connected with the fact that in pastoral ages, when shepherds slept in the pasture at night, they actually dreamed about the stars, and they knew more than later people know. It is really true, it is so.

In short, whether we go into the depths of man and approach the world of dreams or whether we go out into the wide universe, we meet, as the ancients said, outside the zodiac a world of dreams.

And here we are at the point where we can understand what the Greeks meant when they used the term “Chaos”. I have read all kinds of explanations of Chaos, but I have always found them far from the truth. What did the Greeks mean when they spoke of Chaos? He meant the lawfulness that one gets a glimpse of when immersed in a dream, or that one must assume in the outermost circumference of this universe. This lawfulness, which is not the lawfulness of nature but something else, the Greeks attributed to chaos. Yes, they said, chaos begins where the lawfulness of nature can no longer be found, where a different lawfulness reigns. For the Greeks, the world was born out of chaos, that is, out of a context that was not yet natural law, but rather like a dream or, as it still is today, the worlds of the constellation of Orion, the hunting dog and so on. First, you enter a world that at least announces itself to man in the fantastic but vivid world of dream images.

But now it is the case that when the physical natural world lies here, we enter into a second current, so to speak, by immersing ourselves in dreams. But then we enter into a third current, which lies beyond the world of dreams and no longer has any direct relationship to the laws of nature. The world of dreams protests in its imagery against the laws of nature. In this third world, it would be quite nonsensical to say that it follows natural laws. It completely and boldly contradicts natural laws, because it also approaches people. While the dream still comes to light in the world of vivid images, this third world first comes to light through the voice of conscience in the moral world view.

When we have the world of nature on the one hand and the world of morality on the other, there is no transition. But the transition lies in the world of dreams or in the world that the experimenter has experienced in the field of magic, where things have told him something quite different from the connections of natural law.

Between the world interwoven with natural laws and the world from which our conscience speaks as it flows into us, lies the world of dreams for ordinary consciousness. But this leads directly to the fact – because this is at the same time the waking world, this the dream world, this the sleeping world – that this brings us to the idea that during sleep the gods actually speak to man of what is not natural but moral, what then remains for man as the voice of God in his inner being when he wakes up, as conscience.

In this way, the three worlds are connected, and two things can be understood: on the one hand, why the world of dreams protests against the natural context, and on the other hand, to what extent this world of dreams is a transition to a world whose reality remains hidden from ordinary consciousness, to the world from which moral views also come.

If one then finds one's way into this world, one finds there the further spiritual world, which can no longer be grasped in terms of natural laws, but in terms of spiritual laws, while in dreams natural laws mix colorfully with spiritual laws, spiritual laws with natural laws, because the dream world is a transitional current between the two worlds.

Thus we have illuminated from another side how man integrates himself into the three worlds.

Since we are still able to meet today, it seems right to me to refer again to some things that have been said just recently, and which are of some importance for the whole attitude of man in our time.

That there is such a thing as the necessity for a new attitude of man in our time should be clear from the considerations that have been presented to you here and elsewhere in this time. That the kind of judgment that was usual in the previous epoch can no longer carry man into the future is something that must be recognized today. This must be emphasized again and again, because it is precisely against this that the feelings and perceptions of the present-day human being still most resist. The present-day human being would also like to be present, so to speak, when a new era is ushered in – it is so obvious to him that a new era must approach – but he does not want to become a different person himself. He would like to continue judging things in the way he has been accustomed to judging them so far. And even when he does manage to bring himself to admit that a new way of judging things must take hold, he always falls back into the old way of thinking. He does this particularly because the new attitude actually demands a radical introspection of the person. And this radical introspection is actually very, very unpleasant for the modern person.

Now, if we want to grasp the full depth of what underlies what has just been said, we have to take a good look, with good will, at the whole way in which we have become accustomed to living our lives in the modern era, especially since that point in time that I have often characterized as the point of a major turning point in the development of humanity, since the middle of the fifteenth century. One can say: That which today arises in a radical way from human hearts as demands has actually always been smoldering to a greater or lesser extent below the surface of people's consciousness since that time; but all things that develop always develop unnoticed for a time and only then become fully ripe to break out and enter into existence quite radically.

Now, in our recent endeavors, we have had to point out a certain threefold structure from a variety of perspectives. You know that our entire external public work is permeated by the impulse of threefold structure. But here I have also had to point out that human knowledge, if it is not to lead people astray, must also be based on the threefold nature of the human being itself. Science, which human beings have developed out of a certain necessary lack of clarity, this science, which, as it is now, also began in the mid-fifteenth century, regards the human being more or less as a unity. It is not clear to it that the human being really is a threefold being, which must be described as a main human being or nerve-sense human being, as a rhythm human being or breathing and circulation human being, and as a metabolism human being. These three aspects of human nature are quite distinct in their essence. The reason why people do not really want to admit that human beings themselves live in this threefold structure is because, when they want to structure something, they want to arrange the things so nicely next to each other. We see time and again that when people do make an effort to organize something, they want to have this organization side by side, they want to store the parts of this organization next to each other so that they can see them nicely with their external powers of perception. This is the basis of the strange essay that the Tübingen professor wrote against the threefold order. I have already mentioned that the good Professor von Heck, with complete disregard for what is actually said in the threefold social order, has constructed his own threefold order. He cannot understand the kind of thinking that is at issue here at all; he cannot penetrate to the feeling that we live in an age in which a new thinking, a new feeling, is necessary. And so he hears about a spiritual, a legal or state, and an economic member of the social organism. Three members, he says. In the one member we have known so far, we have gradually become accustomed to a parliamentarism. It has been hard enough for people of this kind to get used to it; they prefer to be governed centrally, from the top down, but they have got used to parliamentarism. But if you do go in for it, then paragraph A, paragraph B and paragraph C must stand side by side. Intellectual, legal, economic, that must be so outwardly tangible if one is to get involved in it at all. Yes, in this way, by approaching the new with the old way of thinking, one will certainly not make any headway. And one can very well criticize the threefold order, as Professor von Heck does, but it is still his own absurd threefold order that he criticizes, and not the one that the Federation for Threefolding is currently sending out into the world.

Now, all this is connected with the fact that man instinctively resists what is most necessary in our time, the reorientation of all thinking and feeling. And this reorientation of thinking and feeling will not come either until one is willing to gain at least subjective, initial relationships to spiritual science, to the real knowledge of spiritual life. And on the one hand, people will have to be willing to recognize the threefoldness in social life as a necessity, but also to acknowledge the threefoldness of the human being himself as a fact given by nature. But the fact that the human being does not have these threefoldness neatly nested side by side, but that one link always merges into the other, that is precisely what confuses the new human being who is bound to his old ideas. For, of course, when I speak of the head organization, of the nerve-sense organization, this head organization, when viewed externally, is first of all centered in the head. It has its center in the head, in the head itself. But it sends out the necessary extensions into the whole of the rest of the human being; for the sense capacity is, of course, in the whole human being. That is to say, as a head human being, the human being is only a nerve-sense human being in terms of the main thing; the whole human being is a nerve-sense human being. And as a rhythm human being, the human being is a chest human being. The rhythmic system, the breathing and circulation system, has its center in the chest. So the point is that man, as a rhythmic being, is a chest being. The respiratory and circulatory systems are localized in the chest system, but of course the rhythm, the rhythmic activity, is sent into both the main system and the metabolic system. So only in the main sense is the chest human being a rhythmic human being. And it is the same with the metabolism. Of course, metabolism is also present in the head, also in the chest, but it is regulated by the limb system, as I have always characterized it. So what has to be listed as limbs runs into the other. Of course, this confuses people who always want to draw lines and who only want to have what occurs to them standing side by side.

A different way of looking at things, a completely different way of relating to reality, is therefore necessary for the human being who wants to engage in thinking and also in willing and doing for the near future. But one should not think that these things have only one meaning for cognition or for the world view. These things have their own special significance for the life of humanity, for our whole attitude towards life. And this must be taken into account very carefully. We must judge our whole life from this point of view and then ask ourselves the question: How must it be reshaped? In a sense, we have a threefold structure in our lives, but this threefold structure demands, firstly, a precise understanding and, secondly, further development. The precise understanding must arise from the fact that, with a certain fertilization of knowledge through spiritual-scientific contemplation, one looks at what is actually present in our lives. What is there in our lives? What we demand as a special link through the threefold order is, of course, there, but it is only mixed up in a chaotic way with the other two, the legal and the economic links. The spiritual is part of our real life, in that man simply needs a certain spiritual guidance for external culture, for external life. Without spiritual guidance there is no external cultural life. In our present life, this spiritual guidance is not based on an original, elementary expression of human nature, but on something that has been handed down. It is based on something that has been transmitted to man historically. You will surely remember that when one speaks of the newer spiritual life that arose with the great transformation in the fifteenth century, one speaks not of a new creation but of a renaissance or reformation. One speaks, and rightly so, not of a new creation but of a rebirth, of a re-establishment of something old. And in a certain sense, spiritually we live only in a re-established old age. Spiritually speaking, we live from the inheritance of what has, in a certain sense, been concentrated out of much older, oriental and Egyptian spiritual culture in Greek culture. The fact that we have our old Greek gymnasium today is, I would say, only a clear indication that our spiritual life is actually a Greek renaissance.

But what is Greek intellectual life based on? It is difficult to see through this because Greek intellectual life has, in a certain way, very strongly developed that on which it is based: oriental intellectual life. But it has greatly transformed this oriental spiritual life. As a result, if you delve into Greek intellectual life with a mere sense of knowledge, without taking into account spiritual-scientific presuppositions, you do not realize what this Greek intellectual life is actually based on. It is entirely dependent on the fact that the members of the conquering class were instinctively granted the right to reveal the spiritual, while the members of the conquered class were not granted this right. Greek culture actually contains a dual population: the ancient population that inhabited the Greek peninsula in European primeval times and which had a very different social structure from that of later Greeks. The later Greeks, we can actually begin with the incursion of that intellectual power that found its expression in the royal dynasties of Agamemnons and so on. This Greek life spread over a native population. And these conquerors were of a different blood than the native population. You notice this different blood in what I have already mentioned here, in Greek sculpture. This Greek sculpture has clearly separate types: the Zeus type, which has different ears, a different nose, and a different position of the eyes than the Hermes-Mercury type, which in turn has a different nose than the satyr type. These last two types point to the Greek indigenous population, who were of a different blood than those we know as the bearers of Greek culture. This means that the entire configuration of Greek intellectual life, which we have adopted as the Renaissance, is of an aristocratic nature, a reformed theocracy of the Orient and Egypt. It is built on the view that the things of the world do not reveal themselves, as was later believed, through proof, but that they want to reveal themselves through revelation: on the one hand through revelation on the part of the oracles or the like, that is, through that which breaks into the human world as spiritual revelation; but that which is to rule the world also reveals itself as deeds. Man does not want to decide about these deeds with his reason and intellect, but he lets powers decide that are outside of him. Among the latter, Greek culture adopted the martial principle of the Orient. It has only transformed it, so we do not notice that in Greek culture two things have merged: theocracy and militarism. But theocracy and militarism are the elements of aristocracy. So we take into our spiritual life, precisely with the grammar school, with the adoption of Greek, an aristocratic element that has, on the one hand, theology and, on the other, military decision. Theology, which does not arrive at its truths by way of proof; military decisions, which do not arise out of human reason but, according to human views, are the result of an external judgment by God or nature. We have this, so to speak, in our social organism through Greek culture, which achieved so much in its state and in its epoch. Through Greek culture we have the aristocratic way of feeling of human beings. And these things must be taken psychologically. Of course, none of the people of the present day will become a Greek in his attitude when he absorbs the aristocracy of the classical period into himself, but he will become something that no longer fits into our time: he will become a bearer of an aristocratic principle that must be overcome. No matter how much enthusiasm there may be for this aristocratic element in our time, no matter how much it may be accepted, in so far as it expresses itself in the life of the mind and in the forms of the life of the mind, this aristocratic element is based on something very agreeable, on Greek culture, which we certainly do not want to do without. But in the way it is based on Greek culture today, it cannot become the general basis of human culture. Therefore, it must be introduced into our culture in a completely different way. This is something that we, so to speak, carry within us as the first element: a spiritual life configured from Greek culture.

Now, however, we also carry a second element within us, namely Roman life. We not only carry Greek life, chaotically mixed into our social culture, into our spiritual life, in terms of its form, its design, its structure, but we also carry Roman legal life within us. We basically carry within us the obsession of shaping that state which was only good and right for the development of humanity in the time when Roman civilization flourished and in the place where it flourished. Greek intellectual life and Roman legal life are within us. It is extremely interesting to see how, in the middle of the fifteenth century and later, European legal life actually wanted to establish itself on its own foundations, how it wanted to develop something quite different from what actually emerged. The ideas of Roman law broke in and permeated the structure of the states, just as Greek intellectual life permeated the structure of the states. And so our legal life did not become something that emerged from an original, elementary impulse of human nature, but something like a kind of renaissance, an adoption of an old one.

But where they could not take up an old one was the basis of economic life. You can cling to an old spirit, you can cling to old legal forms, but you cannot eat what the Greeks ate, nor what the Romans ate. Economic life does not tolerate this transfer of the old. Economic life developed out of Central European, Germanic, Frankish and other conditions, and it did so with a certain elemental force. But it was permeated by the renaissance of spiritual life and by the renaissance of legal life. And it is interesting how people feel: yes, in our social organism only economic life is viable, in the newer sense, viable. Marx and Engels in particular have this feeling. I have described it somewhat in the fourth number of our threefolding newspaper under the title “Marxism and Threefolding”. Marx and Engels feel: Yes, in relation to economic life, it is moving forward according to newer impulses, and these newer impulses only have to be properly developed; they are not yet present in the external world of facts, but they are present in human longing. And so Marx and Engels want an economic life that no longer influences people, as Greek life did, by governing them in relation to their spiritual powers. Marx and Engels no longer want a social structure that influences social life in the sense of Roman law. They see this as a foreign body of modern economic life. They feel the strangeness and therefore want to throw it out. They want to establish something in economic life that no longer rules over people, and a law that only administers production processes, economic circulation of goods, and so on. But that is not the only task of modern times. The task of the modern age is to recognize that, while economic life must be transformed and given the configuration demanded by human longings, we can no longer make do with a legal life that no longer fits into our economic life, nor with a spiritual life that is based only on the Renaissance. In our time we need not only a reasonable organization of economic life, we need a reorganization of the legal system to take the place of Roman law, and we need a complete renewal of intellectual life. That is to say, we need not only a spiritual renaissance, but a spiritual re-creation. And Christianity, too, which has fallen into the Greek and Roman ages, cannot be understood by us as it was understood through the medium of the Greek and Roman, but must be newly understood by us with a newly created spiritual life. That is the secret of our time.

Look around you at the old in the European East. There you will find that in this European East, Christianity in Russian Orthodoxy has been permeated with the Greek world view. We have taken up Christianity in the Roman world view, not in the Greek. As a result, we no longer have anything inside us that comes from the Greek world view, but we do have inside us in Christianity what comes from the Roman conception of law. Let us try to recognize the basic structure of this Roman conception of law. The Roman conception of law is based on not regarding people in terms of their blood. In Greece, one was worthy if one belonged to the teutonic blood, the aristocratic blood. What the gods revealed through members of the aristocratic blood was also the right thing, the wise thing. In the Roman cultural element, it was different. There it gradually emerged that one was what one became through one's incorporation into the abstract state, into the constitutional state. One did not become, as with the Greeks, a person of blood, but a person of the state, a citizen. One was nothing special except as a citizen of the state. It was inconceivable that a person should stand there with body, soul and spirit, but it was important that he should be registered in the state system, that the state system should stamp him as a citizen. And when citizenship spread from the Italian peninsula, from Rome, to the whole of the Roman Empire, it was a tremendous event. For in those days people felt that it was something connected with life. But has it not remained so for us in a sense? It has remained for us in a sense that we organize our entire public life according to our system of government, which is derived from Roman thought and feeling.

I once had an old acquaintance who had acquired a childhood sweetheart when he was eighteen, but he could not marry her in his eighteenth year. He had to wait and first earn some money. And so the man had become sixty-four years old. In order to be able to marry, he went back to his hometown, because the love of his youth had remained faithful to him and he wanted to marry her. But what had happened? The church and parsonage, where the baptismal records were kept, had burnt down and the baptismal records had been destroyed. The man had no baptismal certificate. He wrote to me from his hometown and said: Yes, according to my common sense, it seems to me that the fact that I was born is proof that I am here, but people don't believe me because I don't have a baptismal certificate that testifies in writing that I am here. So, first of all, it must be stated that one is there, that one is outwardly categorized. Of course, when you tell someone something like this, they say it's an exaggeration. But it is not an exaggeration. Because this plays a major role in our public relationships. This is the way of thinking that has taken the place of the theocratic way of thinking of the Orient, and which has been somewhat transformed by Greek culture. The Roman way of thinking is an abstract one. The Orient believed in divine powers that enter into man through blood. In the Orient, the person open to the divine was the person related by blood. In the Roman cultural element, one was imbued with the belief in concepts, in ideas, in abstractions. This belief, which was a metaphysical one, in contrast to the theological belief of the Orient, was joined by jurisprudence. Just as militarism is the sister phenomenon of theocratic aristocratism, so jurisprudence is the sister phenomenon of the abstract civil principle of ideas that already appeared in Romanism. Metaphysics and jurisprudence are siblings. The time is coming when not only things will be accepted as revelations, but when everything is to be proved. Just as one proves in jurisprudence that someone has stolen, so it should be proved that not only is 2 times 2 four, but also that there is a God. This led to the recurring proof of God's existence. All the proof of our scientific logic is nothing more than a metamorphosed legal logic. That this legalism has entered into our public life, you can, if you care to, truly recognize everywhere even today. Just think how people complain that in the most diverse administrative offices in the administrative apparatus, which is entirely formed out of the Roman Empire, that where people should sit who understand something of the technical, lawyers sit, not technicians. That is really the case. Lawyers sit in these positions everywhere. That is the second thing that has entered our lives, just as theocracy and militarism were the first sibling couple. Theocracy and militarism, that is, Greekness, is rooted, however strange it may sound, in the spiritual constitution of man; Romanism is rooted in its conception of law. And from these foundations, which I have mentioned to you, the Western Roman Catholic Church also differs from the Eastern Greek Catholic Church. The Eastern Greek Catholic Church has remained more of a spiritual matter. The Roman Catholic Church is actually, at its core, a completely civil and legal institution. It has always asserted itself as such. It has transformed what should be purely spiritual into legal institutions. But it has even introduced legal concepts into the Catholic worldview. The justification of man before God through confession and such things, which arise entirely from legal thought, can be found at every turn in later Catholic dogmatics, which is not originally Christian but Roman dogmatic, permeated by Roman thought. And what has passed through Roman thought, the strongest, most abstract expression of it, is actually found in Protestantism, which is based entirely on a legal concept: on the justification of man by faith.

These are the old elements that are in our cultural life. One must turn one's gaze to these old elements without prejudice, because in our time they are ripe to die. Marx and Engels realized this. But they did not realize that we now need something new to take their place. They believed that economic life should continue in the mere administration of the branches of production, goods and things; the rest would come by itself. It does not come by itself. In addition to the material administration of the branches of production and goods, we need a democratic legal structure and a new creation of spiritual life. Nothing material can give birth to anything spiritual. Therefore, the threefold social order is intimately connected with the whole challenge of our time. It emphasizes the necessity of replacing the old spirit that has been squeezed out of our culture with a new spirit, with a new creation of the spirit. We, as people of culture, cannot be satisfied with a new Renaissance. We cannot reheat the old, but need a new creation of the spirit. This is what spiritual science, oriented to anthroposophy, seeks to be. It will therefore be most contested, because people cling to the old. And secondly, we need a new creation of the legal system, which must be brought completely into the democratic channel, which must be created in such a way that it cannot be created from the old conditions, because never in the old conditions does man face man as man, but always with some class or privilege involved. That is the task of the man of the present: to really put himself in the position of the new creations. In many cases he lacks the courage to do so. But this courage will have to be mustered. It will be mustered when the most lethargic part of our population, and that is the part that has gone through academic studies – on the whole it is so, there are exceptions of course – when this drowsiest part of our population, when it is willing to break with tradition, whether it be in the form of revelations that came to us from Greece or abstract ideas that came to us from Rome. One must consider the possibility of developing a right through a democratic state, of developing a spiritual life through a new creation that stands on completely free ground and must therefore break with all the nonentities that are based only on the preservation of the old or on anything nebulous and unclear. Please consider from this point of view what is taking place in these days.

The Social Democratic Party claims – I am not talking about nuances here – to be the party that will bring about a reorganization of modern economic life. Leninism within this social democracy is actually the most consistent expression of this social democratic view, because Lenin is truly a worthy successor to Marx. This Leninism wants to create a spiritual life out of mere economic life on the ground, where that is least likely to happen because it is contrary to the instincts of the people. It wants to do this through Lunacharsky's alchemy. I am not speaking about these things in response to any news, so that one can say that fairy tales are being told about Russia and the like. There is no need to listen to the descriptions, because they are naturally colored by subjective perception. The bourgeois will describe it differently than the Social Democrat. No, I am basing myself on what Lenin himself said in his work. I know that what underlies his view is not the creation of a new culture, but the destruction of an existing one. I do not want to talk about the school system as it is described, but about the laws that are being given to the Russian school system, and from that no intellectual life can arise. It is not what is described that matters to me, but what the same people do when they want to create something new out of their illusions. We in Central Europe are not yet so far advanced, we cannot yet make these great mistakes, but we are well on the way to ruining everything that wants to come in the future.

Do not Marx and Engels take the view that economic life is everything, and that spiritual life must develop out of it? That is theory, that is utopia. What happens in reality? One feels: Yes, if we merely make economic institutions in relation to the present culture, then a real spiritual life does not seem to come of it after all. So one makes compromises with the old spiritual life: social democracy with the center. According to Marx and Engels, it should not be the Center that rises from the smoke that would enter into our brains and those of future generations in a stimulating way, but it should arise from the independence of economic life as the superstructure. Very strange, in the Marxian and Engelsian theory: economic substructure, economic substructure; spiritual, ideological superstructure, law, custom, intellectual life in general, however, — illusionistic theory. In reality: the economic foundation, social democracy; the superstructure is taken care of by the Center and the Roman clericalism. The foundation: the Marxist-inspired economic state or the Marxist-inspired economic cooperative; the illusory superstructure: the ideal man who arises from the illusion and is supposed to surrender; the reality: the fat Erzberger. You see, these things look grotesque when you say them out loud, but they express reality and, if they are seriously considered, they show where we actually stand and what errors we are heading towards. But they also show that we will not escape from these errors unless we decide to approach the re-creation of a spiritual life and treat this re-creation of the spiritual life sympathetically. We must treat it sympathetically because the time has come when spiritual life cannot remain merely a world view, cannot remain merely a theory, but must be incorporated into the practical treatment of life.

The fact that modern medicine could only rely on one natural science and build itself on one natural science, which did not take into account the threefold human being, the nerve-sense human being, the rhythmic human being and the metabolic human being, has made this modern medicine, which is now something practical, both as hygiene and as a healing method, one-sided, which is already felt not only by many people, but also by many doctors, thank God. But our medicine will never be placed on a sound foundation if it is not based on the threefold nature of man. Oh, the head man, who is modeled on the cosmos, is something quite different. Therefore, something quite different are those irregularities in human nature, the pathological irregularities that are of cosmic origin. Something else is the damage to human nature that has a telluric origin and that essentially comes from the detour through the metabolism, that has an earthly origin, not a cosmic one. Something else is everything that is connected with what is between the cosmos and the earth, with what lives partly in the air and also in the water. In the future, this must become the starting point for a truly freely pursued medical study. For it is indeed peculiar that of these three things, which I have just mentioned and which, in truly practical medicine, must be built up on the basis of the threefold nature of the human being, only one can actually, I might say, be learned in the official, scholastic way. One can only study that which is based on the human metabolic system through the methods that exist today solely through our university teaching, which is modeled on Greek and Roman life. And actually, our whole medical-scientific way of thinking is a way of thinking based on the metabolic system. Because the way we have science today, there is actually only the science of metabolism. But if you want to add the other things, that which can occur in human nature as damage through air and water, then you are actually dealing with a lot of individual things. What occurs in humans as damage from air and water is very individual, and can only be learned through dedicated interaction with older physicians who already have experience in this field. This can only be acquired by a young person joining an old, experienced doctor, not in a school-like way, but as an assistant, which is what happens in today's clinical assistantships, but as a caricature, pushed down into the metabolic sphere. It must be the case that a certain medical instinct, a certain medical intuition, which in some people is more pronounced and in others less so, borders on clairvoyance, occurs in the case of someone who is an assistant to an older doctor, and so that he does not even think of treating things in a merely typical and schematic way, but that he combines, out of instinct, new individuality and older individuality, in which he has been trained and which he does not merely imitate. And what comes to the human organism in the way of damage from the head, which, as I said before, although it permeates the whole person, is only centered in the head, cannot be taught at all. There is no method by which one can learn to recognize from the outside those diseases that arise in the human organism from the head. These can only be recognized through original talent, and this talent must be awakened. Therefore, it is necessary to consider from the very beginning whether such abilities can be awakened in a particular person.

You see, this is where the attitude comes into play, which must develop in the independent spiritual organism, and which will go to the point of paying attention to human talent, that is, putting each person in the place to which he is led by his particular talent. It is therefore necessary that this particular spiritual life be truly placed on its own feet, for only in a free spiritual life, where the talents are allowed to rule freely, will the talents also be truly recognized. In this way, by entering into the spiritual, man returns in a certain way to the natural, the nature-like, and this in turn will give rise to possible relationships. You all know that today we suffer from the fact that all conditions can no longer be properly cared for because we do not administer the things of the world from a natural way of thinking, that is, from a spiritual way of thinking. There are certain positions in the state or elsewhere; but there are always far too many people for these positions. There are always many more applicants than are needed. Other positions are not filled because people are not trained. Certain professions cannot exist because people are not educated. In the free spiritual life, as envisaged by the idea of a threefold social organism, none of this can happen, because the human being does not shape things out of arbitrariness, but because he shapes in harmony with the great laws of the world. And where that happens, things usually go well. Wherever human arbitrariness is used to shape things contrary to these great laws of the world, things usually do not go well. And the Roman system has the greatest predisposition to arbitrariness. The purely metaphysical-legal system has the greatest predisposition to mere arbitrariness. The Greek system had a certain instinct arising from consanguinity, even if this instinct only thinks for the minority. The economic system has its own natural necessity. The metaphysical-legal system is what distances man most from the foundations of nature in terms of his feelings and perceptions. The Roman-legal system is what we should consider first and foremost without prejudice. Because until we have overcome it in all areas, we will not make any further progress. If someone were to ask today: Will there really be enough people in the future, or not too many, for a particular profession in the leading positions, arising out of an independent spiritual life? then one can only answer: These things cannot be answered in the way that logic works, which is constructed according to the pattern of Roman jurisprudence, but rather in the way that the logic of facts works. Some decades ago, the news spread from Vienna to the educated world, as they say, that people had been found who could regulate the type of births in the future. That is, in the future it would be possible to regulate whether what is to be born will be a boy or a girl. You know, this Schenk theory caused quite a stir, and people had great hopes for it. Do you know what the real effect would be? The effect would be that in this approximate order, in which about the same number of men and women are born, the greatest disorder would arise if gender were left to human arbitrariness. The greatest disorder would result. And so it will be when, with regard to other, less natural things, people again apply their arbitrariness. The fact that we have too many people for one occupation and too few for another is due to the unnatural nature of human thinking and human institutions. The moment this arbitrary, metaphysical-legal Roman way of thinking and organizing is replaced by one that is inspired by spiritual science and intuition, and which in turn merges with what was also an older instinct, we will once again enter into a life that regulates the social order in such a way that it can endure.

As you can see, the new social thinking cannot be properly grasped from a merely abstract way of thinking. In a sense, one must already have entered into a kind of marriage with nature itself. And those people who today believe most in thinking naturally think most unnaturally, because they think in a distorted Roman-legal way, which has spread into all our affairs. One would not believe how, for example, even in something as far removed as possible from Roman law, in medicine and medical thinking, this abstract quality has crept in.

And now we must not forget that this whole abstract being has become so unnatural since the 1870s. We can only distinguish between what came before and what came after. Until the 1870s, old traditions were still in place in all areas. The good elements of the various renaissances were still at work. For in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear to see that the old was losing its validity for human progress, and that humanity must strive for new creations, both in the legal sphere and in the entire spiritual life. For only in this way will economic life, which is quite clearly demanding its own reorganization, be imbued with such human thoughts, which are necessary.

But the necessary practical activities, such as medicine, can only be enriched if something completely new is created from spiritual life, not if renaissances are started from spiritual life. New creation of spiritual life, that is what we need.

It was truly a product of the necessity of our time that anthroposophically oriented spiritual science was combined with social action in the Federation for the Threefold Social Organism. And in recent months, the necessity has also arisen to seek a closer connection between the social and the spiritual. Of course, the old guard will have something against it too. They had something against the threefold social order in general; they will also have something against this hand-in-hand approach. People have no sense of how strong the old guard is. They also have no sense of how necessary it is in our time to cut off the plaits and thus overcome European Chinese culture, otherwise Asian Chinese culture could become far too dangerous for us if we continue to wear the plaits of European Chinese culture.

Now, in our circle, a certain understanding of this necessity arising from the spiritual-scientific foundations has begun, and we have indeed seen that the elements are present to at least prepare humanity for a certain receptivity for the new spiritual striving. Friends of ours have worked to spread the anthroposophical worldview here in Stuttgart and in the surrounding area, and it has been a great success. It is to be hoped that these things, which are also eminently necessary socially today, will be understood. It is wrong to believe that humanity at large is not open to these things. In the present time, if we want to understand what is socially necessary, we need a thinking that has been trained by those concepts and ideas that come from spiritual science. Because, you see, in addition to all the other contradictions in the present, there is also this contradiction: legal-Roman, merely logical thinking and spiritual-scientific thinking. Spiritual scientific thinking, which everywhere is based on the logic of facts – Roman Catholic legal thinking, which is only based on the logic of concepts, only on the selfish logic of man. This thinking will never be strong enough to see through reality. I have given you a clear, concrete example of this.

In Zurich, Avenarius taught, in Prague and Vienna Mach taught, and one of his students was Fritz Adler, the son of old Adler. Mach and Avenarius, with their purely positivistic sensory assurance, were good average people, they were good present-day people, or, for that matter, good past-day people, for there is supposed to be something new in the present. And all those who represented the philosophy of Avenarius and Mach naturally believed themselves to be good present-day people. This was still the case, as a rule, with the first generation of students, when they formulated purely positivistic theories of sense perception, but no longer with the next generation of students. Then the logic of the facts came into play, and it was characterized by the fact that Avenarius and Mach are the political philosophers of Bolshevism. Imagine these honest Central European citizens, who certainly never went too far in this direction, as the idols, the philosophical idols of the Bolsheviks. This is the logic of facts, it is a logic that can be seen through by anyone who engages in spiritual scientific knowledge that goes with the facts. Those who think only in Roman-legal terms analyze the philosophy of Mach, the philosophy of Avenarius. Yes, they find nothing in it that could be logically extracted and then become a practical system of Bolshevism. Oh no! Even what people could do according to the views of such a purely conceptual logic, such a purely metaphysical logic, is also good. That is to say, what the Roman-minded logician must think of as the consequence of Avenarius's world view is good bourgeois. But what the logic of reality develops from it is Bolshevism. Today we need concepts that master reality, that enter into reality. We have strayed very far from reality through the Roman-legal essence, which has crept into everything, everything. Today people believe that they are expressing their own free human nature. In reality, they only express what has been instilled in them by the Roman or Catholic - but that is also Roman - legal being. That is why it is difficult today to bring to people that which does not arise from human arbitrariness, but which springs from the facts themselves. Of course, spiritual science itself must sound different in the way it is presented than what has been produced in this way. But in the depths of human nature there is already a yearning that meets the moods of spiritual science. And if there is enough perseverance and courage, it is precisely from these currents, which can be found today in some of our friends, that spiritual science will be carried out into the world; it will arise out of these currents that which the present time needs. Today, we should not be deterred by the appearance of opinions that come only from the Romanic bourgeoisie in their way of thinking, saying: Oh, if humanity is to advance through what you mean, then it will take decades! That is nonsense again in the face of reality. It is again nothing more than Roman-legal logic. The truth must be thought differently. If you look at a plant as it grows, it develops leaf after leaf, slowly at first. And anyone who thinks that it will always continue at that pace is quite mistaken. Then there is a jolt, and the calyx and petals develop rapidly from the leaf. And so it will be, if only we ourselves have the strength to persevere with what we can achieve spiritually and socially. It depends on the will. It may look for a long time as if things are going very slowly. But then, when everything that can grow has come together, the turnaround will come suddenly. But it will only work well if as many people as possible are prepared for it. That is what I wanted to tell you right now as a kind of conclusion to our work during these weeks, which I would like to call our “Stuttgart Weeks”. For it is a matter of not slackening our efforts to work for the good of our own cause. Not looking to the left, not looking to the right, but looking to the good that flows from our own cause, that is what matters. And avoiding, even if only in our thoughts and feelings, to have any mistrust of what flows from this cause itself. No matter how much the things that flow from our cause are attacked, we must not be deterred by such attacks. For these attacks, we need only take a closer look at them all, and we will soon find that they sound and resonate from the old, even if they want to be “confessions of renewal”. For all renewal today can only come about if economic thinking is joined by new legal thinking and a new spiritual life. This is what we must regard as a necessity, what we want to infuse into everything, what we must permeate ourselves with in order to participate in the social reorganization of humanity.

That, my dear friends, was what I wanted to say to you today, because I firmly believe that the iron we have forged so far must not cool, it must remain warm. Then it will achieve everything that can lead humanity along the path it should take. That is why I would like to summarize this reflection, which sought to summarize some of what we have been doing here in recent weeks, in two words. These two words are very old, but modern man must grasp them in a new way, in such a way that he encounters them with the feelings and emotions that arise from spiritual science. And these words are: Learn and work!

We cannot today indulge in the naive belief that we already know everything and that we can draw up programs from what we know. We have to find ideas from life today, but life renews itself every day, and we have to have the confidence to learn something new from life every day. And we must not be cowards who believe that they can only work when they can build on so-called secure ideas, whereby they always mean those ideas that have been handed down from time immemorial. We must have the courage to learn while working and to work while learning. Otherwise, man will not be able to enter the future and its demands. This will also be his new Christianity. Many people today go through a certain conflict. They remind you when you speak in the anthroposophical sense of the Mystery of Golgotha, that according to their opinion, according to the Gospel, Christ died on the cross to redeem souls through his deed, that therefore the souls that only believe in Christ are redeemed without their doing anything. It is certain – you can read about it in my book, “Christianity as Mystical Fact” – that something happened through the Mystery of Golgotha, in which the human being, with his present consciousness, has no direct part, for the present consciousness only begins in the middle of the fifteenth century. But that is not the point today, that we lazily surrender to what takes care of us outside of ourselves. We must not speak today as some Catholic church dignitaries, for example, speak, whether high or low, and say: You will not advance socially unless Christ is at the center of all social activity. — Recently, I have experienced in many a gathering that the Christ was also mentioned in this way. Yes, my dear friends, I used my spiritual ear a little while listening, so that I heard that outwardly resounded through the hall, one does not advance socially without the Christ, but inwardly only the Benedictus resounded, not the Christ. Inwardly it was not about the Christ, but about the Benedictus. I mean the one who now sits on the Roman See. And that is precisely why humanity is not making progress today, because it relies on something other than what connects with its own soul. The Christ must also be understood anew. The external church cannot take the place of Christ. Only what man experiences within himself can help him to progress. Therefore, no one understands the Christ who does not understand that he must be reborn in the soul of every single person. But man must also work on his spiritual formation. Only when we believe that our actual human powers are not born with us, but that our actual human powers for the future will be those that we ourselves develop within us, only then do we stand on truly Christian ground. Not the Christ who is born with us – that is only God the Father – but the Christ whom we experience in ourselves by developing towards him, that is the Christ who must be grasped.

Today there are books by Protestant Christians, for example Harnack's book “The Essence of Christianity”. Cross out the word “Christ” everywhere in this book, and the book changes from a lie to a truth. As it is, it is a lie, because wherever “Christ” is written, it should say: the Father-God. What Harnack writes refers only to the general fatherly nature-god. There is nothing in the book about the Christ. That has been added by way of lies. The Christ can only be found by the transformed, transmuted human nature, by human nature that is engaged in its own activity.

That is what must be overcome today, but with which, unfortunately, instead of thinking of overcoming, the world makes compromises. The compromises that are made outside today are also made within the soul, and if our souls were not so terrible compromisers, then there would be no such terrible compromises in the outer life as the one that now comes from Weimar, the school compromise. Today, people of a compromising nature slink through existence, and they are the ones who experience everything in retrospect, who do not move forward. We can only move forward if we have the will to learn and the courage to incorporate what we have learned into life. Only from this will and courage can the new motto arise:

I want to learn, I want to work.
I want to learn by working.
I want to work by learning.

Translated by Antje Heymanns

When we look at what seems to have run like a kind of Leitmotif through this winter’s lecture cycle, when we focus on what lives within man as his nature and which we observe not only once between birth and death, but which we presuppose to exist in repeated Earth lives—then the question about the foundation of man’s development in his one life, in one earthly incarnation, appears to become quite essential for us, especially in our present time. Because the human being of the present certainly questions and searches when he encounters the peculiar manifestations of predisposition, talent and education of human beings. However, as he is not much inclined to look away from what appears to be manifesting itself in a life, and to focus his gaze instead on the real builder, the actual creator within a human being, then even the questions of this contemporary will easily assume the character of a half-measure, of vagueness. You see, when one presumes that something exists in human nature that like the actual inner enlivening force runs through many lives, then one encounters the completely enigmatic nature of this human being that is worthy of exploration. Then one will want to see questions about predispositions, talents and education in a completely new light, in a very different light from how they can be seen, when one’s gaze focuses only on what is presently so often emphasised: heredity, predispositions inherited from one’s ancestors. It is not as if Spiritual Science wants to turn the eyes away from that what is expressed in inherited characteristics—it is not so that it ignores all careful observations of all that what the outer senses and the intellect focussed on these could say. However, Spiritual Science knows that all this relates to the very essence of man like something that man uses by taking it in, just as in physical life the outer matter is absorbed by the small germ of a living being who determines its own form out of itself; yet what is supposed to enable it to express this form in its external life—the substantial, the material—it acquires from its environment. By and large, we must recognise the way a human being lives as a confluence of everything that comes into being at birth, with that in which man’s essence and individuality will be embedded and from which it draws its spiritual and soul nourishment.

For example, if we as educators have tasks concerned with a human soul who steps into existence and from hour to hour, from week to week reveals more and more of its inner abilities; if we face a human being who is growing up like a holy riddle that we have to solve, that has come to us from infinity so that we provide it with an opportunity to unfold itself and to develop, then a whole sum of new tasks, new views, new possibilities will indeed arise for all human relationships in existence. Thus we see a human being step into existence at birth and presuppose that, in a certain way, he brings the core of his being at birth into existence. If we do not look at catchwords and theories but at facts, then external natural science also shows us how this spirit and soul core of a human being continues to work on a child even after its birth, and how what we encounter as bodily organisation changes, and is plastically shaped under the influence of spirit and soul. External science, for example, can also illustrate how what we must first see as a tool for external activities, how this brain, when it is stepping into existence at birth, is a still an undefined, yet still quite plastically malleable matter in a human being; and how, what he endeavours to absorb of spiritual treasures of his environment, penetrates forming and shaping the plastic matter of our brains like an artist and works on it.

If we make the assumption—and this is a fact and has been mentioned several times already in different contexts—that a human being, who, after birth, would helplessly be placed on a lonely island, cannot acquire the ability to speak, then we must say: The spirit and soul content that we meet wrapped up in language from birth onwards is not something that emerges from man’s inner being, it is not merely attached to his disposition, or something that he receives, as it were, without the influences of his spirit and soul environment—like he receives his second set of teeth at age seven due to inner predisposition—instead speech is something that works on a human being. Speech works like an actual sculptor, who, as it were, forms the brain. We can well follow, also externally, scientifically, this sculpturing of the brain throughout the early times, yes, even for years. If it will then anatomically and physiologically be proven that human language ability, memory for certain language concepts, is bound to one or another organ and each word is, as it were, kept like a book in a library, then we are allowed to ask: What has shaped the brain for this initially? And we can answer: The same that existed as spirit and soul in the language vocabulary in a human being’s environment.

This shows us, that in regard to a human being’s entire soul-development, we have to differentiate everything he experiences in his thoughts, imaginations and feelings—also in his will impulses and emotions—everything, so to speak, that is merely inner experience, from something else that remains an inner experience so that it intervenes in the outer physical organisation, plastically sculptures it, and thus shapes it into a tool for future mental capabilities or future spirit and soul life. This can be illustrated best by tracking one ability of a human being throughout his life, that shows quite different sides, although these different sides have been repeatedly thrown together by external psychology: when we follow our memory.

When we acquire something through our memory, by memorising, then we do this by way of tools, of which one of the main ones is repetition. We have then made it our own, and are able to repeat it. Yet everyone knows the awkward thing—forgetting; because things are forgotten again, disappear from our memory, so that we are unable to reproduce them at a later date. Or aren’t you able to remember how much you had to learn and recite by heart in your youth, and how much of it you are no longer able to recite by heart? But does really everything disappear that we have memorised?

We will now only consider that of which man will say later: I have forgotten it —namely that which he is unable to retrieve so that he can reproduce it. Is it really completely gone? It is present in a similar way to what has already been mentioned, which in normal human life is always forgotten: like the wonderful, rich, first experiences of childhood are forgotten. In our normal human life, we can only remember back to a certain point in time. Yet prior to this point in time we have gained infinitely many impressions. Who would not acknowledge this, if he would observe the development of a child in its first life years in a really unbiased way.

But is it forgotten in the sense we normally speak about forgetting? Is it really not there at all? Does it no longer play a role in the human soul? Yes, it does play an important role in the human soul. Because what our first childhood impressions are like, whether we experience joyful or sad things, love or indifference, these or other outer impressions, on these depends infinitely more than what is usually thought—such as what someone is capable of doing later in life—depends on the overall mood and the entire constitution of his soul.

What is forgotten in the early years is more important than is generally acknowledged, as it forms and shapes us in our soul being. This is also the case with what we learn later—we forget the wording, the thought, but it remains in us as a certain mood of soul. If a person learnt at a certain age, for example, ballads or other literary works about great heroes with very specific tasks, with quite defined characteristics, then he might forget the thoughts and occurrences and so on, and will not be able to reproduce them; but what he has learnt remains within the structure of his own character, maybe as soul strength, or as a way to face life and allow joy and sorrow to approach him.

What we forget turns into moods, sentimental values, yes, into will impulses; it becomes what rests more or less unconscious within our soul life, yet it still works and forms within us. Only sometimes, through very particular processes later in life, it is revealed that those forgotten things are actually not quite forgotten. Because, if one takes relevant measures and places something familiar in front of someone’s soul, then that person will remember something that was seemingly forgotten. Thus one can prove that the memory is still present within him, but something like a blanket has been put over it in the unconscious layers of his soul life. In this way we can really see how what we forget, what disappears from our memory works formative and creative on our soul, and then often reveals itself in the mood with which we face joy and suffering, in our courage, in our bravery or cowardice; or also in our fearfulness and anxiety towards life. What we see sinking down, as it were, out of the treasure trove of memory into our more subconscious, works creatively on our soul itself. Basically, we ourselves are what the things we have forgotten have made of us. Because what else is a human being actually, than the way how he enjoys, how he can be brave, and so on! If we look at a human being not in an abstract but in a concrete way, then we have to say:

The human being is the harmonic interweaving and inter-play of his characteristics, so that he himself is limited by what flows down into deeper levels of his consciousness. We observe this in the course of life.

From all that has been taken into account so far, and from what is still to be added, it can follow that the soul-spiritual that sinks into deeper layers, sinks even deeper when a human being crosses the threshold of death. Because every time when someone, through what he absorbs, wants to work formative on his external physical organisation during his life, he finds that in this life a particular organisation already exists. This is shaped one way or another, he enters life with these or other dispositions. That what is creative in our souls must storm against this. Let's assume that through what we absorb courage could be build up within us as a trait. But if we have an organisation that is more suited to being chicken-hearted than to be a courageous human being, then we must more or less fight against something that we have got in our life from our structure. When we go through the time between death and a new birth, the essence of this human development lies in us creating in advance the archetype, the original shape of our new physical body, for our new physical earthly structure.

There we do not meet any limits and resistances such as are presented to us between birth and death. We build plastically with what we have obtained during life, the basis, the basic strengths for a new corporeality within wider limits than it is the case between birth and death. Hence we may say: Those forgotten concepts, which only affect our soul during our life between birth and death, work to shape our next physical organisation when we step through the portal of death, until the time of our re-incarnation, and work themselves into what is connected with our new bodily structure. In this way, we will stride through birth into our new existence with such dispositions that reach down into even deeper levels of our being than those ideas that were forgotten in the life between birth and death.

From all of this it becomes quite understandable that the human being, because he brought forth from life, from his immediate environment, the causes for the organisation of a new corporeality, that he indeed needs in a certain way the same conditions again.

It is different with animals, where, as we have seen from observations on the ‘human soul and animal soul’ and ‘human spirit and animal spirit’, the organisation is determined by line of heredity. There the animal appears with wholly defined tendencies that want to express themselves plastically, because these tendencies were not derived from the animal’s environment. Let us consider how little an animal acquires from the external world through education or conditioning, and how little it therefore needs a stage, located in the outer world, to bring out again what has been absorbed of educational principles. The human being, however, needs such a stage. Therefore he steps clumsily into this world, steps into the world so that we once again only have to put the finishing touches to the finer formation of his organisation. This explains the living and weaving of man’s individuality, of his true essential beingness, in the early years of his existence. Therefore his spirit organ, his brain, steps plastically determinable, malleable into existence, and basically, only after birth the last decisive pathways, lines and directions are added, that determine how the predispositions must be realised.

This illustrates, how what matters in regard to development needs to be viewed as something that came across from earlier developmental stages, and therefore it is less important to have defined, stubborn educational principles, than to look at each individual human being, at each individuality as a problem, as a holy riddle that needs to be solved, and that it is up to us to create opportunities, so that this riddle is solved in the best possible way.

An education is uncomfortable if it cannot establish any firm educational principles at all, but instead has to appeal to a principle that is related to the artistic within the educator, to observe what emerges from the essential nature of a human being. It is even more inconvenient than someone saying in a regimented way: these or those abilities are to be expressed in this way or that way. But we only have the right attitude towards the growing human being if we regard him in each case as an individuality, as something special in itself.

Although if one insists on seeing things trivially, and some people have a talent for seeing everything trivially, you could say: Individuality does not only show in a human being, but also in each single animal. Of course it shows. No one speaking from the basis of Spiritual Science will deny this. I have often said, that if one speaks about individuality in this sense, then one must be more precise, must be conscious, that if one wants to see things trivially, you can also speak about the biography and individuality of a quill. I knew a man, who—because in his days nibs were still cut from goose quills—was able to distinguish between the quills, because everyone cut their own quills, each one developed a personal relationship with him. And because the latter had an excellent fantasy, he would have been able to write a detailed biography of every single quill. However, as far human beings are concerned, it is not about applying the standard of triviality, but a standard drawn from the depths of realisation.

It is just through such observations that we can see the way and manner in which a human being forms and shapes his actual being, plastically forms his outward appearance, his outer organisation and lives out his actual being in it. From this, in turn, we can see how life happens in the early years and how it reshapes and remodels itself with the development of man, and what it utilises of what it can absorb from its environment. In the first years of a human being’s life we find that it is of very special importance to preserve for him his abilities, so to speak, to intervene plastically, malleably in his physical or body and soul organisation, and that we do not block the opportunity for him to intervene plastically.

We block someone’s opportunity most of all, if we stuff him too early with concepts and ideas that relate only to the external sensory nature and which have the strictest contours, or if he is pinned down to an activity that is theoretically confined to very specific forms. Then there is no variability, no modification, and no opportunity to develop the spirit and soul capabilities, in the way the soul is active from day to day, from hour to hour. Let us assume a father would be a terribly obstinate man, who has adopted the following principle:

My boy must become like I was! Throughout my whole life I have made shoes for my customers in this way, and my boy must make his shoes in the same way. My boy must think like me! Thus, into the environment of this boy a spirit and soul structure is brought, that works on his spirit and soul organisation just like it has worked on the father. Through this, the boy will be pressed into very specific forms, although this should be about exploring the individuality that steps into existence, and then, based on insight gained from this, shaping the spirit and soul organisation.

The educational instinct of humanity has already created a wonderful tool through general consciousness by which the human being in the early years of life is given the possibility to work on the changeable, the modifiable, the flexible of his spirit and soul, so that there is free scope for the forming of the human being. That is ‘play’. This is also the best way to keep a child occupied without giving it concepts that are bound into fixed contours, but such that give the thoughts room for manoeuvre, so that it can wander off here or there.

Only then one will find the course of thought that is predetermined by the inner predisposition. If I tell a fairy tale in such a way that it stimulates the inner activity of the child, without concepts being formed in pre-determined contours, but so that the outlines of the concepts remain flexible, then the child works like someone who tries and by trying attempts to find out what is right. The child works on finding out how its spirituality needs to move so that it can best sculpt its organisation in the way it is internally pre-formed. And it is the same with playing. Play differs from activity that is pressed into solid forms in that when playing one is to a certain extent able to do what one wants—so that one does not have sharp contours in thoughts and mobilities of organs from the outset. Hence, the soul-spiritual organisation of a human being will have an effect again in a free, determinable way. Play and the activity of the spirit and soul of the child in the first years of life, as just described, arise from a deep awareness of what the nature and essence of a human being really are.

Whoever who wants to become a real educator, will, also for the later years, definitely be conscious that indeed each single ability, as it were, must first be studied, recognised and determined in an evolving human being. Yet there is an opportunity to observe certain great principles. Such principles then lead us to the way in which the essential core of a human being, which stretches from birth to birth, utilises the external that lies in the line of heredity.

It is most interesting to focus on the way in which the spirit and soul core of a human being utilises the qualities, characteristics, virtues and so on, of father and mother, of paternal and maternal ancestors in completely different ways to build something new. And indeed: the paternal and maternal qualities are not equally used by the individual core of a human being, instead this is based on a very specific law. Just this law is infinitely instructive. If we attempt to grasp it in its completeness to fully see through it, then we must look at how two things assert themselves in the human soul. One of these is the rationality, to which we now want to add the ability to think in pictures, in concepts, faster or slower, cleverer or dumber. The other is the general direction of will and feeling, of the emotions, the interest that we take in our surroundings. The whole manner of how we are able to perform something, depends on whether we have a spirit that is agile or slow, or dull, or one that penetrates into things; if we are astute or not. What a human being is able to achieve for his fellow human beings and how we achieve it depends on us understanding of how to connect our interests in the right way to what goes on in our surroundings. Some people have good pre-conditions, but they have little interest in their fellow men and the environment. In this case the interest does not draw the abilities out. Hence it is necessary to pay as much attention to the interest within us, as to whether the flexibility of our rationality allows us to achieve this or that for our contemporaries.

Now, we can imagine that the whole kind of interest is linked to the way a human being’s desires are shaped, how the external approach to the entire life is organised, how a human being develops as being clever or clumsy. In short, the whole nature of the soul life—which is connected to our interactions with the external world and our greater or lesser interest and our skilfulness for this outer world—the most important elements for this are inherited by a human being from the father. Our interests and that which from these interests makes us skilful and capable to use our organs and our entire being, is as a rule an inheritance from the father. Thus the soul takes the appropriate elements from the father, so that it can form those characteristics within itself. In contrast, the intellectual agility, with which imaginative activity, pictorial imagination and inventiveness are connected, are received by our individuality when we come into existence at birth as heirloom from the mother’s characteristics. You will find that Schopenhauer has in a certain way hinted at this extraordinarily interesting chapter; he had an inkling of it, however, he was not in a position to also point out the deeper things.

On the other hand we are allowed to also say something else. In a certain way the following is borrowed from the father; how, what lives in the father as his manner of relating to objects, what his interests are, the desires towards objects, how he demands, wants, wills, if he is a brave man who courageously intervenes in life conditions or withdraws faint-heartedly, if he is pedantic or generous, also his characteristics that are connected to the will-impulses. By contrast, all that is flexibility of the soul, of the rationality, we find is passed on from the mother. Now, however, an interesting difference comes to light, which can only be observed when looking at the whole scope of life. Then you will find evidence of this everywhere; namely with regard to sex, there is a immense difference. It can be said that the relationship of a son to his father and mother is wonderfully described in Goethe’s words : “I’ve got my stature from my father, to lead a serious life,” this includes all that is related to the interactions of a human being with the external world. “From my mama I’ve got the cheerful nature, the joy to fabulate,” —this includes the entire nature of the spiritual life.

Yet when we now look at the daughter, it becomes apparent that in a peculiar way, the father’s qualities appear in the daughter so that they are now lifted one level above the nature of the will-impulses, from the nature that expresses itself more in the communications with the environment—into the soul.

Hence we can find a father’s qualities—of course this applies only in the same circumstances—who always courageously steps in, who has a lively interest in this or that, and therefore lives out a certain seriousness in his communications with his environment—are being adopted by the individuality of the daughter in such a way that they are lifted up into the soul, so that a daughter exists with a serious soul life, with the character life of the father translated into the soul which makes, what was probably viscous in the father, more flexible, so that the most important qualities that we encounter in the father as more external, show themselves as more internalised by the daughter.

Therefore we can say: the character traits of the father live on in the soul of the daughter; the soul characteristics of the mother, the alertness of the spirit as well as the talents and abilities that can be developed, live on in the son. Goethe’s mother, the old ‘Mrs Councillor’, was a women who was able to fabulate, in whom the fantasy functioned in the most wonderful way. This went down one level in the son, became an aptitude, an organisation, so that the son Goethe had the ability to give to humanity what lived in the mother. We can see, how the maternal qualities are lowered by one level in the sons, so that they are transformed into organ abilities; whilst the father’s characteristics are lifted up one level by the daughters, so that we encounter them as internalised and spiritualised.

Perhaps nothing is more characteristic than the beautiful contrast between Goethe and his sister Cornelia, who was just like the old Councillor, internalised, spiritualised a quiet, serious nature and thus was able to be for the poet, already in his boyhood, what he needed: an exceptionally good companion. Now take this into account and consider how Goethe, according to his description, felt unable to develop a favourable relationship with his father. This was because the paternal characteristics were externalised in the old Mr Councillor. What Goethe needed were these characteristics, but he could not understand them as they existed in his father, whom they fitted. Spiritualised they lived in his sister, who could thus be such a good comrade to him.

Now walk with me through history and you will see how each step confirms what has been said and how wherever you find hints, you could provide historical confirmation of such a matter. The most beautiful confirmation in this regard we got from the mother of the Maccabees , who with heroic greatness lets her sons face death for what she believes and what her fathers believed, with these great, beautiful words: “I have given you the outer corporeality; but the one who has created the world and human beings, has given you what I could not give you, and he will take care that you will get it back again, if you lose it for the sake of your faith!”

How often will just the maternal element be held up to us in history: from Alexander’s mother and the mother of the Gracchen to our present time, when we see characteristics appear in a person that show that someone is able to affect his surroundings, that he has the strength and talents and also the body and soul organisation for this. We could open the history of great man everywhere, wherever we wanted to: everywhere we will find the maternal characteristics translated in such a way that they have descended one level, and have become abilities placed into life. Let us take the example of Bürger's mother and his father, from whom he has also inherited the willpower characteristic. Basically, he did not have much in common with his father: his father was glad when he did not need to concern himself with the development of the little boy. Yet the mother had a wonderfully agile spirit; it was she who possessed the right grammatical and stylistic expression. This in turn was necessary for the poet, he inherited those traits from his mother, and they just came about because he belonged to the next generation. Or, let us think of Hebbel and the relationship he had with his father. Anyone who knows the poet Hebbel better will sense that in all the rough idiosyncrasies and stubbornness of interests there is a distant echo of his father’s legacy. In this respect, the old master bricklayer Hebbel has bequeathed much to his son. But the son and his mother understood each other. It was the mother who protected her son from becoming a master bricklayer in his birthplace, instead of later giving his dramas to mankind. It is quite touching to read how Hebbel himself tells in his wonderful diaries, what connected him with his mother.

These examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. Yet we should definitely not conclude that things are wrong, just because we believe to be observing life and encounter something different here and there. This would be like someone saying: The physicists verify for us the law of gravity; I will now, by way of installing many contraptions, prove to them, that this law can be impaired. Laws are not there for us to consider every single circumstance, but to focus on what is probable. This it how we must do it in natural science and how we must do it in Spiritual Science. Yet Spiritual Science is not at present advanced enough to proceed in a similar way. If one takes this into account, one finds confirmation of the above law of paternal and maternal heredity everywhere. Yet when looking at a whole human being, one must be clear, that what we call the human soul, and which expresses itself in the entire body and soul structure of man, is nothing simple. Again, one could have an unreserved will for trivialities and ask: ‘Why do you Anthroposophists have the quirk to distinguish three soul-members in the soul, and even multiple members in human nature? You are talking about a sentient soul, an intellectual soul and a consciousness soul. It would be much easier to talk of the soul as of a unitary entity in which one thinks, feels and wills.’ Yes, it is certainly more simple, more convenient—and also trivial. At the same time, this is something that scientific observation of a human being cannot in truth promote. Not out of a desire to divide and to make many words has the structure of the human soul into a sentient soul arisen—which means into the part, that initially establishes contact with the environment and receives perceptions and feelings from outside, and in which desires and instincts also develop. This then is to be separated from the part in which, in a certain sense, what has been gained has already been processed. We activate our sentient soul when we face the outer world, receive from it impressions of colours and sounds, but also by allowing that to come to the surface what we as normal human beings initially cannot control: our drives, desires and passions. But when we withdraw and process within what we have absorbed by way of perceptions and so on, so that what has been stimulated in us by the external world transforms itself into feelings, then we live in our second soul-limb, the intellectual or mind soul. And insofar as we direct and guide our thoughts and are not being kept on a leash, we live in the consciousness soul.

In ‘Occult Science’ or in ‘Theosophy’ you will see, that the three sheaths of the soul have even more relationships—of a different kind—to that what is in the external world. This is so not because we enjoy to categorise, but because what is called the sentient soul is related to the cosmos in a completely different way from what we call the consciousness soul.

It is the consciousness soul that isolates man, that leads him to perceive himself quite rightly as an internally self-contained being. What we call the intellectual soul, is what brings him into a relationship with his environment and the entire cosmos, hence he is a being that appears to be like an extract, like a confluence of the whole world. Through the consciousness soul man lives within himself, isolates himself. The main, most important thing that one experiences in the consciousness soul is that what amongst a man’s aptitudes is the latest one to be developed: The ability to think logically, so that we can form opinions, thoughts and so on. This rests within the consciousness soul. In relation to these characteristics, the individual core of a human being that comes into existence at birth is in fact the most inclined to isolation. This innermost core of a human being is the last to reveal itself. While its sheathing, its bodily organisation is the earliest to emerge, its actual individuality emerges last. But the way a human being currently is—he has been different in the past and will be different in the future—he actually develops his opinions, terms, concepts in the most isolated part of his being. These therefore exert the least influence on the overall construction and detailing of his entire personality and only emerge as aptitudes when the entire personality is already firmly established and plastically shaped.

There we see how the talents of man develop in a particular sequence. Firstly, we see what lives in the least isolated, separated element of the human being, in the sentient- or emotional soul. This has therefore the most strength to intervene in the entire human organisation. Hence we can see that getting close to a child with opinions, theories and ideas is least likely, when this sentient soul wants to shape these most intensely from within. We will only get close to a child when we affect its sentient soul—as I have presented in my essay ‘The Education of the Child from the perspective of Spiritual Science.’ Especially during the first life years one has to ensure not to develop theories or teachings, but that the child is instead encouraged to imitate, that one sets living examples for it to copy. This is of infinite importance, because this urge to imitate appears as one of the very first predispositions that one can influence. Admonitions and teachings are least effective during this time.

The child imitates what it sees, because it must form itself in accordance with its relationship to the external world. We lay the first foundation for the whole personal nature of the child, when during the first seven years we are living examples of what the child is allowed to imitate, when we can guess how we must behave in the presence of the child. However, this is for many a most peculiar educational principle. Most people will ask how the child should behave, and there comes Spiritual Science with its demands: the people should learn from the child how they must behave in its environment—down to words, attitudes and thoughts! Because the child is much more receptive in its soul than is generally believed, especially more receptive than an adult human being.

There are people with a certain sensitivity, who, for example, immediately recognise when a person comes in who is going to spoil the good mood. Even though little attention is paid to this nowadays, it happens incredibly often with children. And what you do in detail is much less important than the kind of person one endeavours to be, what kind of thoughts, of concepts one nurtures. It is not enough, that one keeps silent in front of the child about something, but allows oneself to think thoughts that are not meant to be for the child. But instead our thoughts need to be lived out in such a way that we have the feeling: this may live on in the child and should live on. This is inconvenient, but it is still right!

When the change of teeth has occurred, consideration will be given to what we may call ‘building on authority’—not building on what someone might do, but what he holds within himself as personality. It is most important that a child in the first years of life must be able to imitate what we speak, do and think, and in the second epoch perceives us as a human being on whom it can rely, so that it can say: What he does, is good! It is not so that we are admonishing the child from the seventh to the fourteenth, sixteenth year of life, based on the principle to develop a moral theory to show it that this must be done, that must be stopped—but rather we pass on to the child the best treasure, when its rational or intellectual soul can have the perception: What this human being next to me does, is good! I must refrain from doing, what he refrains from doing! — This is of infinite importance.

Only from the age of about fourteen to sixteen, does the possibility arise for a human being to build upon the most isolated part of his being, on the consciousness-soul, i.e. on that which forms in his consciousness soul: on his opinions, concepts and ideas. However, these must first have a solid foundation, and this must be created. If we do not create this by providing the opportunity through education, as the individuality allows us to recognise, and if we do not thereby clear the way for free development, then the human being will be seized by a different element: by the firmness of his hull nature. Then he externalises himself; his individuality, which goes from life to life, does not intervene, but he becomes a slave to his bodily organisation, which comes from the outside into the human being and subjugates him. Man shows this by not being master of his spiritual and soul part, but by being completely dependent on his body and soul organisation and showing rigid characteristics that are unchangeable. On the other hand, a human being in whom we took care to ensure that his predispositions are realised as far as possible, retains a certain flexibility throughout his whole life, and is also able to cope with new situations in later life. In comparison, in another person the organisation is externalised and takes on rigid forms, and that person retains them throughout his whole life. We live in an epoch, where the individuality of someone is little appreciated and hence there are few opportunities to convince oneself that the individuality is still agile and vigorous and able to cope with new situations and truths. We now arrive at a chapter in which we can gain insight into how some people simply must face life.

How many people, when they have looked into a world view and are convinced of it, try to convince others of it as well. They believe it is a very commendable effort when they say: Since I am seeing it so clearly, I should actually be able to convince everyone else of this! However, this is naivety. Our opinions are not dependent on something being logically proven to us. This is possible in the fewest cases. Because opinions and convictions of a person are formed out of completely different substrata of his soul—out of his will nature, his mind and emotional nature, so that a person can understand your logical arguments quite well, can follow your astute conclusions and then afterwards does not take them in at all, simply because what a person believes and what he professes does not flow from his logic or his understanding, but from the whole personality, namely from those limbs where will and mind arise. However, our thinking is the last of all our dispositions to emerge, when the bodily organisation has long since been completed. This is the most isolated field. This is where we find the least access to other people. We can reach more people, when we seize them in those parts that lie deeper: their mind and will. Here, intervention in bodily organisation still happens. However, if a human being grows up in a very materialistic sphere, lets say, where only material substance is deemed valid, then, during the time of his growing up, a sum of mind and will-impulses are formed that plastically shape his physicality and his brain. Later he can then acquire quite good logical thinking, but this no longer intervenes in the plasticity of his brain. Logical thoughts are the most powerless within the human soul. Therefore it is especially important to also find access to other people in the soul, not just in logic. If someone has already trained his brain in a certain way, then this brain, which only reflects the old concepts over and over again, cannot realise logic anymore because it has become physical. Hence, in regard to such world views, which are build on the purest, the sharpest of logic, as is the case with Spiritual Science, one cannot hope to be effective by going from person to person to convince someone. If someone, who understands the spiritual scientific impulse, would like to believe that he could convince people by persuasion or by way of logic—if for instance someone wants to believe that a spiritual scientist indulges in such illusion—then he is very much mistaken! Because in our era there is a large number of such people who, due to their overall personality, their will nature and emotional nature do not look out for what the spiritual world and spiritual research are. Out of the great mass of people who live around us, those who have a disposition for Spiritual Science will self-select, will go to what they dimly foresee, what they already have within their souls. A selection, a choice can only be made with regard to a worldview based on what is capable to purely encompass logic, human consciousness. Hence the Spiritual Scientist approaches human beings and knows how to differentiate between them: There is someone to whom you can preach for years, he is unable to grasp your thoughts. You first would have to make him conscious of this; would have to speak to his soul, but he himself is not able to reflect from out of his whole soul-toolkit, out of his brain. Another man is built in such a way that he can understand what Spiritual Science shows in its logically developed way, and he therefore also finds his way into what is basically already living in his soul.

In this way and manner we have to face the great cultural tasks of the present or the future. We need to recognise how the total personality of a human being relates to what a person, in the course of his development and education, is able to absorb incrementally of new truths, of such things that really must be united with his personality. When we have once again understood, that basically the soul-spiritual is the shaper, the sculptor, the artist for body and soul, then one will place greater importance on conducting the development of the spirit and soul in a human being in such a way that he can get a handle on it—especially in the years when he is open for education—and is powerful in regard to the way in which he can affect his body and soul. We have to be clear that a lot can be sinned against in this regard. We can see from our presentations, how human preference and so on, contributes much more to the formation of views than pure logic. One could only let pure logic alone speak when desires and instincts are completely silent. Prior to that we must be clear, that if we believe we have one-sidedly shaped a person’s aptitudes in a particular area, then what we have not considered will come to light in a peculiar manner.

Let us assume that we educate a man in such a way that we only bring to expression his abstract talents, as it is often done at school. Then the pure concepts and abstract ideas cannot intervene in the whole soul- and emotional life. This then remains undeveloped, uneducated and will confront us later in all kinds of trivial lifestyles. Later in life, two natures often become apparent. Even in people of high standing—if they have not been able to integrate within themselves what is located in the depth of personality—preferences, inclinations, likings, which are more deeply rooted assert themselves in other ways. Which examinee would not have experienced, that no matter how clever the examiner is who confronts him, who is able to maintain an overview over much of his science—the one-sidedness will come to expression by him having a preference for how the answers he wants to hear have to be worded. And woe betide many an examinee, if he doesn’t know how to put what he has to say into the words the examiner wants to to hear.

In this regard, in a book about psychology by Moriz Benedict, a lot of correct things were said about mistakes in human education. Also this, which is true: When two candidates were tested by two different examiners the misfortune happened that one candidate gave Examiner A answers shaped as if the Examiner B had asked the questions. If he would have given the answers to the other examiner, he would have passed the exam splendidly. And with the other candidate it was the other way round! Hence both failed the exams!

This can illustrate to us how what is indisputable can very well be clothed in logical forms. Yet as soon as we are not able to immerse our ideas in thought-education during our upbringing, no suitable field can be found to work from here formatively on man. How then must we behave towards the human being? In the time in which a person is preferably still being modelled plastically, and in which abstract concepts and ideas are least effective, we must behave in such away that we confront him with as few concepts and ideas as possible, and only with ideas that are as pictorial as possible. For this reason I have stressed that the pictorial, the illustrative—which is as little removed as possible from the actual picture, the form and contour—is taken up conceptually. Because what is absorbed in this way as a picture, as a form or as a figure of fantasy, has great strength to intervene in our bodily organisation. That the pictorial we encounter in the design intervenes in the physical organisation can already be deduced from seeing how little it helps to try and convince someone who is sick, who is in a particular situation, that he should be doing this, and refrain from doing that. This is of little help. But if you set up an apparatus, something like an electrifying machine , so that the sick person can form a picture for himself, and then give him two handles that do not let any current go through—as long as he has the picture in front of his eyes, he will feel the current, and that will help! But wherever it is so beautifully declaimed that imaginative power plays a major role, we must be clear, that this is not about any kind of imaginative power but only about visual imagination.

We live in an age in which it has become customary, to pay very little homage to the following principle of Spiritual Science—that a human being only becomes able to form concepts and ideas between the age of fourteen or sixteen and age twenty-one, twenty-two; that one then picks up concepts that are only to be shaped later. Instead, before this age, people nowadays become mature enough to write newspaper articles, which are either above the line or not up to standard, that are printed and then accepted by people. This then makes it difficult to keep abstract concepts away until the characterised age and to put the pictorial, the illustrative in front of a person’s eyes. Because the illustrative has the power to intervene in the organisation of body and soul.

You can always find confirmation of what I am saying now, however, one does not always pay attention to it. Moriz Benedikt , for example, complains that many college students are often quite clumsy in later life. Why is this so? Because the whole education is so nondescript, so little concerned with the illustrative and adheres only to abstract ideas even when languages are taught. In contrast, we can feel the illustrative that we encounter, right into our hand, because the objects themselves step in front of us as pictures.

It could be said, that if you want to imagine an object, you must move in such a way that you feel with your hand in a circle or in an elliptic shape the growing together with the object in pictures. It is not only imitating the manual dexterity, but also feeling and learning to love objects, that show us how a pictorial, an illustrative imagination twitches in our limbs, makes our limbs agile and mobile. Today we can find many people, who, if a button is torn off, are not able to sew on a new one. This is a great disadvantage. The most important things is, that we are able to intervene in the external world with everything we have. Of course, we cannot learn everything. But we can learn about how the spirit and soul slide down out of the spiritual into body and soul and make our limbs agile. And no one, whom we have instructed in his youth to try and copy the feeling of what is outside of him, will be a clumsy person later in life. Because what already lies below the threshold of our consciousness, can work most essentially on our organisation. This also applies to language. One learns a language best at a time when one is not able to understand the language grammatically, for at that time one learns with the part of the soul-being that belongs to deeper layers.

This is how humanity developed—and this is how the individual human being must develop. Elsewhere I have pointed out how Lorenz Müllner , in a school-director’s speech, drew attention to the St. Peter’s Church in Rome—how magnificent it stands there, how secretly the spatial laws are embedded within the mechanics of the cupola construction, so that one can see the spatial mechanics expressed in the most wonderful way. Now he pointed out though, that only through the laws which Michaelangelo expressed therein, and which Galilei subsequently by way of his high-flying spirit discovered, did Galileo give mechanical science to us. I have also pointed out, that the date of Michaelangelo’s death almost coincides with the birthdate of Galilei, so that the abstract laws of mechanics—which live in the consciousness soul of a human being—appeared later than that, what Michaelangelo had built into the space out of his deeper soul-members. Just as the higher members of the soul develop on the foundation of the lower ones, just as we have to develop our limbs based on our predispositions, so that we can look back on them and gain an understanding of them—so it works in every single life. In each individual life, too, man must be surrounded by human company, must place himself into that which immerses him in a kind of atmosphere, into the spirit and soul of our surroundings. Then, what a human being brings with him into existence, is shaped and built. But the human being does not only bring along what is given to him from the hereditary line, but something that will be determined in the most diverse way by a third, namely by the eternal individuality of the human being. This human individuality needs the inherited characteristics, must acquire and develop them. This also stands higher than that which comes into existence with our individuality. We step into existence at birth: A creative, productive spirituality acquires—when we cannot yet build any concepts—the plastic substances from the hereditary line. Only later the consciousness-soul is added. So we look at something individual within human nature, which plastically forms the capabilities and talents. When we become educators, it is our task to solve, what we consider to be a spiritual riddle, for each human being anew.

This all points us to a mood. When Goethe, at the excavation of Schiller’s bones found his skull and saw the distinctive forms, saw how the human individuality had worked on this, he saw: into this form the liquid spirit of Schiller had to pour itself, so that he could become what he did become, which Goethe was able to express thus:

What greater gain in life can man e'er know
Than when God-Nature will to him explain
How into Spirit steadfastness may flow,
How steadfast, too, the Spirit-Born remain.

Such an expression by Goethe needs to be understood in the context of the situation. If one takes it without looking at what it is that as spirit-made in firm shape is sculptured, misunderstands him. Nor does anyone understand him, who is unaware of the depth of Goethe’s insight into the eternal weaving of an individuality, who goes from birth to birth and always newly reincarnates, and who is the true architect of the human being. How we have received our organs from the spirit, which in turn are organs of spirit, basically could be said by simply using a childish comparison: the clock shows us time, but we could not use it, if it had not first been formed by the human spirit. — We need our brain for thinking in the physical world, but we could not use it for thinking, if the cosmic spirit would not have formed it. And we would not have sculptured it with such an individuality, if not our individuality had poured itself as a spiritual product into our brain, which was formed out of suitable human species substance. Then we understand more deeply, what we were able to say today, and what Goethe meant when he pointed towards that in a human being, which in his nature is determinative for all his talents and capabilities—as if the stars themselves would be perceived like any situation in the world, and how that which effects man’s inner being as something eternal, passes through the threshold of death only to advance to new forms of development. In short, we may summarise what we have observed today, in the mood of Goethe’s thoughts, which he expressed in the “Orphic Primal Words”:

As stood the sun to the salute of planets
Upon the day that gave you to the earth,
You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing
Heeded the law presiding at your birth.
Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be
None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.
No time there is, no power, can decompose
The minted form that lives and living grows.

I would like to introduce some of the material that I will be presenting here over the next few days today by taking up the life and teaching of a personality whom I have already mentioned here and there in the lectures and whom I have also dealt with in more detail in the third chapter of my book “Von Seelenrätseln” (Soul Mysteries). I will have much to say about this personality, Franz Brentano, as one of the representative spirits of the second half of the 19th century, for reasons that will become clear as we move forward in our considerations. Some of these indications can also be found in the journal 'Das Goetheanum'. I am linking up with Brentano's teaching and life today for a specific reason, namely the publication of the first volume from Franz Brentano's estate, which covers one of the most important chapters of the world view, namely the teaching of Jesus as illuminated by Franz Brentano himself.

Franz Brentano, a philosopher, died in Zurich in 1917 at the age of seventy-nine. With his death, a philosophical life came to an end that undoubtedly ranks among the most interesting in history and, above all, in the second half of the 19th century. Not only did a philosophical teacher live in Franz Brentano, but also a philosophical personality lived in him, a personality in whom philosophical striving emerged from the full extent and depth of the personality.

The philosopher Brentano is a member of the family to which Clemens Brentano, the German romantic, belonged. Clemens Brentano was the uncle of the philosopher Franz Brentano. And Clemens Brentano is a member of the family that was friends with Goethe through Sophie La Roche and Maximiliane Brentano, and that two, at the beginning of the 19th century, often interrelated intellectual currents . These were Catholicism on the one hand – we are dealing with a devout Catholic family in the Brentano family – and the romantic spirit on the other. Clemens Brentano truly created some of the most beautiful German romantic poetry, and, emerging from the romantic atmosphere of German intellectual life, he was an extraordinarily important storyteller. One would like to say that, through the German Romantics' telling of tales, the German fairy tales were transformed in such a way that a light from the spiritual world really shone on those to whom fairy tales were told from just such a source. And our philosopher Franz Brentano heard tales told by Clemens Brentano, his uncle, when he was still a very young child.

For us, two aspects are important here. One is that Franz Brentano emerged from this spiritual atmosphere. He was born in 1838. In 1842 Clemens Brentano died. And on the other hand, we have to consider that Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholic romanticism, grew into the strictest scientific view that prevailed in the second half of the 19th century in the spiritual life of modern civilization. Franz Brentano grew up in such a way that even as a child a pious spirit entered his soul. The religious element is something that comes naturally to him from his soul. And Catholicism does not enter his soul as something external, but as something that constitutes the essence and weave of this soul. With complete inwardness, the boy Franz Brentano embraces Catholic piety and grows into it. He has awakened within himself, brought up by romanticism, a powerful intellectualism. While in the romanticists of the Clemens Brentano school, the spiritual lived in the form of fantasy, while a genius like Clemens Brentano paid little attention to the rules of logic and strove to gain the spiritual world in flight, but in flight of the imagination , to gain the spiritual world and to live in it, this high regard for the intellectual life, which was also developed in Franz Brentano, was transformed into a special talent for the elaboration of strict concepts.

This was helped by the fact that, coming from Catholicism, it was, so to speak, natural for Franz Brentano to make philosophical-theological studies his own. And his fine spirituality had led him early on to penetrate the web of thought of Aristotle and then also into the strict conceptual training of medieval scholasticism. In this medieval scholasticism, as I have already explained in more detail here, Aristotelianism also lived on. And one would like to say: While Franz Brentano retained the disposition to take intellectual flights of fancy, he could not develop unconcerned with the logical powers of the human soul, in the manner of Clemens Brentano, for example, but he developed precisely the strictest logic and only arrived at his conceptualization through the strictest logic. But however great the development of Franz Brentano's abilities in logical training, in theological-philosophical matters, his genuine Catholic piety was even greater in his early youth.

There is something truly remarkable about the modern scholastic training that Franz Brentano, in particular, was able to undergo out of his Catholicism. We must always repeat: the really strict logic, not that superficial logic which is contained in today's everyday education and also dominates science, but what really strict logic is, which is connected with the whole human being, not only with the human head, that already emerges from scholasticism. Scholasticism is the art of logical conceptualization to the highest degree. But in the Middle Ages and in Catholicism to this day, scholasticism was used only to support Catholic doctrine of revelation, in the sense that I once explained by discussing 'Thomism.

With a mind like Franz Brentano's, a very specific spirituality developed precisely out of Catholic piety and out of the rigorous training of scholasticism. He developed the ability to simply take the existence of a spiritual world for granted. By immersing himself in Catholicism and scholastic theology, he was, after all, living in the spiritual realm, and he could not help but live in the spiritual realm. And he grasped this spirituality by developing it in strict logic. He was truly a true Catholic. He was a Catholic in the strictest sense, and although he cultivated the strictest logic within himself, he would never have allowed himself to criticize Catholic revealed doctrine, up to a certain point in his life.

I beg you to imagine just once a human being in all his human depth, in whom the strictest logic lives, which in so many modern minds has practiced the most disparaging criticism of Catholic revealed doctrine. This gave rise to strong doubts in him, but he pushed them all down into the subconscious, never allowing them to surface into consciousness; for the moment they did arise in consciousness, he pushed them down. He said to himself: Catholic revealed doctrine is a closed system and shows very clearly that it has come to earth from the spiritual worlds themselves, albeit by the most varied detours, and also through people. It shows its own truth, and one must always assume, when doubts arise, that one can err as an individual human being in the face of such an all-encompassing system of such venerable greatness as Catholicism. Since it belongs to the teachings of Catholicism that only the councils could ever speak about the truth of the dogmas, Franz Brentano, in his state of mind, could never allow himself to really assert a doubt against the doctrine of revelation if any doubt arose from the unconscious. He pushed everything aside, he simply said to himself: It is impossible to really accept such a doubt. But the doubts, in his feelings, in his sensations, in his unconscious, were terribly stirring in his soul. He did not do as the rationalists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did, and give himself up to these doubts, but always pushed such doubts aside as something forbidden.

Then an event occurred that caused a mighty upheaval in his soul. Brentano was born in 1838. He was ordained a Catholic priest in his sixties, and it was as a Catholic priest, but with the state of mind I have just described to you, that he became a professor of philosophy at the University of Würzburg. And so he was affected by the movement for the dogma of infallibility, which was developed towards the end of the 1860s. This dogma was to be declared in 1870. As an excellent theologian and pious Catholic, Franz Brentano – who was still a relatively young man at the time – was commissioned by the famous Bishop Kezteler to say what could be said from the point of view of Catholic theology about the dogma of infallibility.

I will first describe the sequence of external events. Ketteler was one of the German bishops who rebelled most vigorously against the establishment of the dogma of infallibility. He had a memorandum prepared by Franz Brentano, which was to be presented by Ketteler at the bishops' assembly in Fulda, in order to decide on behalf of the German bishops that they would not endorse the dogma of infallibility. Ketteler also presented the full content of Brentano's memorandum, which was directed against the dogma of infallibility, at the bishops' assembly in Fulda. That is the outward appearance, to which only the fact needs to be added that the German bishops then fell down, that when they were gathered in Rome and the dogma of infallibility was to be declared, they finally submitted and agreed to the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano criticized this dogma in the negative sense as a non-Catholic doctrine for Bishop Ketteler. And then the infallibility dogma was declared.

In what position was Franz Brentano as an excellent theologian and as a devout Catholic? He would never have allowed himself to criticize a dogma that he had already grown into. But when Bishop Ketteler called on him to criticize the dogma of infallibility, it had not yet become a dogma, was only about to become one. So he allowed himself to attack this nascent dogma with his intellect. It was also entirely in line with the thinking of Bishop Ketteler, who was initially also against the dogma of infallibility. So Franz Brentano would never have challenged an existing dogma out of his mood at the end of the sixties. But infallibility was not yet a dogma, and so he criticized it with tremendous acumen. For what Ketteler had put forward at the bishops' meeting in Fulda was precisely Brentano's memorandum.

But now infallibility became a legitimate Catholic dogma. You see, not a mere intellectual consideration, but the fact that he had grown together with one of the most important events of modern Catholicism was a decisive turning point for Franz Brentano. What might not have happened at all through a mere intellectual step: his break with the Church occurred for him in connection with these events. He was the most important critic of the dogma of infallibility and at the time had to ask himself: Was the orthodox Christian Franz Brentano, who had criticized the dogma of infallibility from the depths of Catholic consciousness before 1870, still a Catholic when after 1870 the dogma of infallibility had now become a legitimate dogma? You see, there are facts here that play a stronger role in people's lives than an intellectual decision, which in most cases is worthless, can do. And so a man as upright and as alive in his conscience as Franz Brentano could do nothing but leave the Church. You have only to take the whole context to see how deeply Franz Brentano had actually grown together with a certain side of the intellectual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Thus Franz Brentano stood as a philosopher, in a sense cast out of his Catholic career. He had a completely different education from the other philosophers of the 19th century; for the education he had is not otherwise evident in the philosophers outside the Church. But now he was included in the series of philosophers outside the Church. In this context, the 19th-century scientific way of thinking had made the strongest possible impression on him. This scientific way of thinking had indeed set the tone for the whole of scientific life since the middle of the 19th century. And when Franz Brentano habilitated in Würzburg, he did so with the thesis: “In philosophy, no other methodological principles can prevail than in true science.” Natural science made such a deep impression on him in its method that he could not help but say: philosophy must make use of the same methods as natural science if it wants to be a real science.

It is really not easy to untangle the mental tangle in which Franz Brentano was entangled in the 1860s. Let us just look at the situation objectively. On the one hand, we have a person who was perhaps one of the greatest experts on Thomism and Aristotelianism of his time, an extremely sharp thinker and conceptualizer, but all this based on Catholic doctrine. On the other hand, we have a man who is extremely impressed by the scientific method. How is that possible? Yes, it is quite possible, for the following reason. Take the meaning of medieval scholasticism. Medieval scholasticism is a science that works according to scholastic concepts for the spiritual, but a science that commands itself to know only something about the external sense world, and then some insights that result from conclusions from the sense world, while everything supernatural is left to revelation, to which intellectual knowledge should not dare.

Thus, in medieval scholasticism, we have a strict division: the realm of sensory knowledge with some conclusions, such as the existence of God or other similar conclusions; these belong to human knowledge. On the other hand, the actual mysteries, the contents of the supersensible world, can only be gained through revelation, that is, through what the Church has preserved from the revelations of the supersensible worlds that have come to people at various times in a manner that the Church considers legitimate.

But that was already the preparation for the modern scientific view. This modern natural science also only wants to draw sensory knowledge and at most some conclusions from sensory knowledge. This modern natural science does not even know that it is the continuation of scholasticism, only that certain radical minds have done it somewhat differently than the scholastics. Let us visualize this schematically. The scholastic says to himself: With the intellect and with ordinary science, I gain knowledge of the ordinary sensory world and some conclusions that arise from it (yellow); then there is a boundary beyond which lies the supersensible world, into which one cannot penetrate (red). It is no different with modern natural science! It says: With human knowledge, one penetrates into the sensual world and can draw some conclusions that follow from this knowledge. The scholastics said: Above that lies the supersensible world, which one must recognize through revelation. Radical spirits of the modern world said: One can only recognize the sensual world, we leave out the supersensible world, which does not even exist, or at least one cannot recognize it. In this they became agnostics. What was current in scholasticism with regard to the knowledge of the sensual world and some of the conclusions drawn from it was merely continued in the modern scientific attitude, so that a mind that had so earnestly absorbed scholastic training throughout its youth needed to see nothing in the modern scientific method but the continuation of scholastic views. But for him, because he was also a devout Catholic, the spiritual world was again a matter of course. So Franz Brentano was actually only more consistent than hundreds and hundreds of others, both on the Catholic and on the non-Catholic side.

So Brentano turned to the scientific method. But this scientific method must either become aware of its limitations or else declare agnosticism or the non-existence of the supersensible world. If, nevertheless, one perceives the supersensible world as a matter of course, but can no longer hold to the truth of Revelation – because one can no longer hold to the truth of the Church – as was the case with Franz Brentano, then one is in a special situation.

A superficial mind can easily get by in such a situation. He either denies the existence of the supersensible world or he does not care about it. Franz Brentano could not do that. But precisely because of his strict scholastic training, he was able to express the thesis that true philosophy must use no other methods than those of true natural science.

Now you all know that anyone who, despite saying yes to the scientific method, still wants to arrive at a spiritual world through knowledge must ascend from the ordinary scientific method to what I call exact clairvoyance or exact seeing, which is developed according to the methods I have described in my books. But Franz Brentano recoiled from the development of this kind of seeing, from the development of any kind of method that went beyond the natural sciences and yet was supposed to be cognitive. He was influenced by the attitude he had as a Catholic towards revelation. Science was not allowed to enter into revelation. He could understand a natural-scientific method that was limited only to the sense world; but precisely when one takes this seriously, one must develop supersensible abilities. He recoiled from this.

In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano became a philosopher, no longer a theologian, but a simple philosopher. We may say that such a personality, in whom one finds all the storms and struggles that took place in the intellectual life of the time very distinctly marked, and in whom one must say in the end: he did not become the victor in his own soul - such a personality is naturally often much more significant and much more interesting than others who easily, in lightly-draped concepts, can cope with everything possible.

In this frame of mind, Franz Brentano was now called to Vienna, to that Austria of which I spoke to you here the other day. I have characterized its peculiar spirituality, and if you recall what I said about Austria at the time, you will understand that a philosopher of this kind could make a great impression in Vienna. And that is precisely what Brentano did. He was extraordinarily interesting as a personality, even in his outward appearance. He had a very intellectual head and sparkling eyes, which probably had something similar to the eyes of the romanticist Clemens Brentano. Franz Brentano was actually strikingly interesting in his personality, in that when you saw him walking, for example when he mounted the podium, he always had something about him, as if he had not quite slipped into his physical body. Almost every movement, whether walking or moving the arms, the facial expressions, the formation of the words themselves, all this had something unnatural about it. One always had the feeling that something was dangling with the physical body, as if one were dangling with clothes. And yet the whole thing made an extraordinarily sympathetic and spiritualized impression. One could not help feeling that it was quite natural for this personality, with her always serious tone of voice, with her constant striving to shape concepts in the strictest way, but who in turn gave the impression of having lived in her thinking not in her head , but lived a little above her head, it was basically quite natural for her to feel in her physical body as if she were in a suit that was not quite right for her, that was too big or too small, we can say, too big. And some things that one would have found flirtatious in the movements of another person were interesting in Franz Brentano.

Franz Brentano endeavored to apply scientific method everywhere. When he treated intellectual problems, he treated them with an attitude inspired by scientific method. But I would like to say: the theologian was still there in the tone of voice. There was a great difference, for example, between hearing the scientific method used by any old naturalist and by this philosopher who had grown out of theology.

For those who had some idea of Franz Brentano, it was quite natural that when he came to Vienna in 1874, he initially became, in a sense, the darling of Viennese society, that is, of the society that particularly loved such famous personalities as Franz Brentano was at the time. The women in particular – for the men of this society were less concerned with education, especially in the 1870s – had a particular taste for Franz Brentano, because one could always hear something witty from him. He was superior to you, and yet again he was not completely superior to you; but then you were also superior to him. When he came, he took off his greatcoat awkwardly. It was so easy to help him, and you could feel so superior to certain sides of his nature when you could help him, when you could support him, for example, so that he wouldn't fall over the doorstep and the like, or when he didn't found the spoon right away, or when he, who liked to do so, cut the meat so long on one side and then on the other, until it was no longer individual pieces, but something that in some areas of Germany is called a mess. So you could feel superior and yet at the same time see something like the revelation of a spiritual world through him.

A poet, Adolf Wilbrandt, who was sometimes extraordinarily witty but never very receptive to the depths of the human being, tried to ridicule this in a somewhat disdainful way in his “Guest from the Evening Star”. This novella was seen everywhere in Vienna as a mockery of Franz Brentano, but it is really only in the sense that I have just characterized it.

Now, at the time when Franz Brentano, in the state of mind I have described, was giving his lectures in Vienna, he enjoyed an enormous popularity for the time. One must bear in mind that philosophy was not a very respected subject at the time. But Franz Brentano had already attracted a large audience in Würzburg as an associate professor, and in the same lecture hall where students had written “sulfur booth” on the door after the first lecture by his predecessor – they did not go there again later. In this same auditorium maximum, Franz Brentano read about philosophy, and the lecture hall soon filled up. And so the lecture halls in Vienna where he gave lectures were always full.

One of his first literary works was his “Psychology”. He had set out to write a psychology using a scientific method. It was intended to be four or five volumes. The first volume appeared in the spring of 1874. He had promised the second volume for the fall, and so it was to continue. He had set about investigating, using a scientific method in the strictest sense of the word – just as one investigates whether a metal heats up or cools down, or whether heat is conducted from one metal to another – how one idea follows another, how one idea and another correspond, in short, all the smaller relationships of the soul life. He did not go further. But he had already said in the first volume: Science must also be used for the study of the soul, for psychology. But if this scientific basis were to be bought at the price of modern psychology having nothing to say about the fate of the better part of the human being when the body is given up to the elements of the earth, then something quite valuable would indeed be given up for the sake of this scientific basis. For Brentano — who, of course, lived in the spiritual, but who, of course, could not prove it using the scientific method — this spiritual was by no means something that he did not want to see as an object of knowledge. He definitely wanted to penetrate into the spiritual world with knowledge, but he also wanted to remain with natural science.

And so this first volume remained the only one of Brentano's “Psychology” to be published. He was too true and scientifically conscientious a man to have continued in the sense of mere formalism. Of course he could easily have done that, and he could still have produced psychologies of that kind, like those of the others. But if Brentano had continued a psychology, it would have had to be true on every page, like the first volume, true, of course, within the limits within which man can penetrate to truths. But Franz Brentano wanted to remain in the realm of natural science. This did not lead to a continuation into the soul. He could not deny the soul, as those psychologists have done who have written “souls without souls.” He could only fall silent. And so he wrote no second volume to his first, much less the following volumes.

The Brentano students resented my stating this fact in the third chapter of my book “On Soul Puzzles” because they themselves are inclined to explain the matter much more superficially. But even if one were to decide to say: well, perhaps the Brentano students know better that this was not the reason, from Brentano's estate or from the fact that they were close to him, the first volume from the Brentano estate, which has been excellently edited and introduced by the Brentano student Alfred Kastil, does in fact show the same frame of mind in Franz Brentano that prevented him from adding a second volume to the first of his psychology. In this first volume of Brentano's estate, the first chapter is entitled “The Moral Teaching of Jesus according to the Gospels,” which was written long after he left the church. In the strictest sense, he did not want to accept anything that was not compatible with a strictly scientific attitude. The second chapter is: “The teaching of Jesus about God and the world and about his own person and mission according to the Gospels.” The third chapter is particularly detailed and is a critique of Pascal's thoughts on the defense of the Christian faith. Then, after a short interlude about Nietzsche as an imitator of Jesus, there is an appendix: The Truth of the Faith in a Brief Presentation of its Essential Content.

It is tremendously moving to have this little book about the teachings of Jesus by Franz Brentano in front of you, after Jesus and his teachings have been written and spoken about from all possible points of view in the 19th century, from orthodox, semi-orthodox, free-thinking , from completely atheistic points of view, and much has been written and spoken about Jesus and his teachings, taking everything for help, for example, from David Friedrich Strauß, what is there in the way of mythology and so on. It is moving to see how the excellent philosopher Franz Brentano, who had left the Church, characterizes in his own way Jesus' moral teaching and its lasting significance, then Jesus' teaching about God, the world and Jesus' own mission, then the whole significance of the Church's dogmatics and church administration, the significance of the Church as it is presented apologetically by Pascal. It is touching to see how Franz Brentano, in turn, appears in a forceful way as Pascal's astute opponent and now speaks out about Catholicism as such. It is touching because here we have the Brentano of his youth before us, with all his piety, with all his great ability to immerse himself in the spiritual, and yet also the man of the strictest scientific mind , an attitude that grows out of scientific methodology, a man who, for example, could not be impressed by so-called modernism because Brentano is a deep spirit and modernism, even Catholic modernism, is something shallow. So, despite having fallen away from the Church, he did not, for example, express any kind of approval of modernism.

In the 19th century, spirits who believed they stood on the ground of natural science, such as David Friedrich Strauß, had in the strictest sense of the word asked the question: Are we still Christians? Do we still believe in a God? — These two questions were asked and answered in the negative by David Friedrich Strauß, and by countless others as well. They simply did not have the same profound training as Brentano. Their cognitive life was therefore also less tragic. They had less to struggle for than the scientific method, for it was easier for them, because of their superficiality, to abandon themselves to it than it was for Franz Brentano, for whom it was difficult to abandon himself from his depth. Nevertheless, he considered this scientific method to be absolutely necessary in our time.

I am relating this to you because I believe that by taking the pure facts of his inner and outer life, the example of this personality can give us a clearer insight into the workings and essence of civilization in the second half of the 19th century than if I were to describe it in the abstract. Franz Brentano's psychological makeup is such that, if one regards him primarily as a psychologist, one must say: Everything in this man's abilities tends actually toward the development of supersensible knowledge, so that the soul can be observed. If Brentano had wanted to write even the second volume of his Psychology, he would have had to arrive at imaginative knowledge, and then at inspired knowledge, and so on. He did not want that. Because he did not want to do this, he conscientiously refrained from writing the second and third volumes. Nevertheless, in a sense he became a victim of the scientific method, an honest and conscientious victim. And just as only supersensible knowledge, in the sense in which I have described it, for example, in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”, can penetrate to the real nature of the soul, so only such supersensible knowledge of what natural science offers can penetrate to what is present as the all-pervading and weaving spiritual world.

Purely scientific astronomy knows of heavenly bodies floating out there in space. At most, it analyzes the nature of the light of these heavenly bodies using spectral analysis. But for it these are all spheres floating in space. All this is spiritless. And the content of zoology, biology, botany and mineralogy is spiritless. By the very nature of its method, natural science must extract the spiritless and leave the spirit unconsidered. Spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense must in turn lead to the spirit. supersensible knowledge, not only in psychology but also in the world in general, leads to spirituality.

Just as Brentano was unable to approach the nature of the soul with his strictly scientific attitude in his “Psychology”, he was just as unable to truly approach the Mystery of Golgotha when he had abandoned Catholic dogmatics. How can one approach the Mystery of Golgotha? Only if you can grasp that the world is interwoven with a supersensible spiritual. In this supersensible spiritual there is an entity, as I have often described to you, the Christ, who lived as Christ-entity in the body of Jesus of Nazareth when the Mystery of Golgotha took place. Without spiritual science, one comes to no other understanding than that of the personality of Jesus. Only anthroposophical spiritual science can reveal how the divine Christ lived in Jesus. Franz Brentano did not want that.

But he still retained enough from his Catholic consciousness that Jesus has a central significance in the whole evolution of the earth. That was clear to him. Just as it was clear to him that the soul is immortal, but that he could not find this immortality in a cognitive way, so it was clear to him that Jesus forms the center of earthly development. But he could not find the transition from Jesus to Christ. And so we see that he is emotionally and willfully seized in an enormously strong way by the significance of Jesus' personality and Jesus' teaching. Take sentences like this: “Not overcome” - as David Friedrich Strauß thinks - “if one interprets it harmoniously and pays attention to its essential features, the teaching of Jesus in history, but in its perfection in life, has still not been achieved. Because of human weakness, it will still take hard struggles to achieve full victory, but because of its inner strength, it will be impossible for it to ever perish. Conscience will always bear witness to the truth and sacred beauty it contains. Indeed, it has done so since pre-Christian times among pagans and Jews and in the Asian Orient as well as in the European Occident, so that Jesus' moral teaching does not so much signify a mighty advance by proclaiming entirely new commandments, but by the fact that Jesus illustrated them in such a way by the incomparable example he gave in his life and death that the possibility of such sublime virtue was fully grasped and thus inspired imitation with a higher courage. This example will shine forever and no prophecy is more certain than when one says in this sense: Jesus and no end.” Thus the philosopher and former Catholic, the excellent theologian Franz Brentano, who could not arrive at Jesus as the Christ only because of his scientific mentality!

Compare these beautiful words about Jesus as the center of earthly development with much of what has been written by theologians who remained in the Church, and form an opinion about them. But also form an opinion about what it means when a person with the state of mind that I have characterized says the following about Jesus' world view: “So Jesus' world view was not only geocentric,” that is, not only but also Christocentric, and in such a way that not only the whole history of the earth, but also that of pure spirits, both good and evil, is ordered around the person of the one man Jesus, and in every respect finds its understanding only through the purposeful relation to him. The world is a monarchy, not only in view of the one all-powerful God, but also in view of that creature which, before all others, is his image."

Thus Franz Brentano approaches the personality of Jesus. But still, he comes from this personality of Jesus, of whom he says that his world-view is not merely geocentric but Christocentric, and that not only men on earth but also higher spirits, both good and evil, are guided by it. He comes from the personality of Jesus, not to the essence of Christ.

And so there is a terrible contradiction in him. For he does ask himself: What is this man Jesus, around whom the whole of human history revolves? But there is no idea in Franz Brentano that would lead to such a reality that the Christ in Jesus could really be grasped. For only he who grasps the Christ in Jesus can think of making him the center in such a way.

Here too, although he at least brought it to a literary conclusion for religious reasons, but then did not publish it himself, and it was only published by his students, here too Franz Brentano did not reach the end of his quest, although he was, so to speak, standing directly at the gate, which he only had to open to arrive at the immortality of the soul and also at an understanding of the mystery of Golgotha. That is why it is such an extremely interesting document, this little book by Franz Brentano, 'The Teaching of Jesus and Its Permanent Significance', because Franz Brentano certainly had an idea of this permanent significance. Once again, after he has presented the teaching of Jesus and its permanent significance as the second chapter, he asks again: Are we still Christians? The answer will depend, he says, on the sense in which the question is put. And then, however, after blaming modern education for the fact that a real Christ-idea cannot arise, he says once more: “Perhaps someone will call the hopes I have expressed here vain, because the mighty influence that Jesus' teaching and example has exercised on humanity is essentially connected with the fact that one has ascribed to him a divine nature and thus professed a belief in which, according to my own admission, even the most advanced no longer hold today.” There he comes, I might say, into the unclear.

"But they overlook the fact that the possibility of such influence did not begin with the belief in the divinity of Jesus, but rather that looking at his example, as it is presented in the Gospel narratives, was one of the strongest motives that led to the belief in the divine superiority of his person. No other... could be placed at his side, and the more these centuries grow into millennia, the more will be given to distinguish him and to shine as a light in our own lives.

They feel once more how close Franz Brentano came to the gate of the supersensible world, and how he was held back by the most powerful guide of modern civilization, by the methodology and spirit of the natural sciences.

And so, after this publication from Brentano's estate, one can say what one also had to say about his writings printed during his lifetime: Franz Brentano stands there like a ghost from the second half of the 19th century, who with every phase of his mental life driven to the apprehension of the supersensible world, but who allowed this apprehension of the supersensible world to be forbidden to him by natural science, just as he allowed the criticism of dogma to be forbidden to him by the dogma itself. Thus it is that Franz Brentano, precisely through what he was unable to achieve, stands before us as a luminous personality, as one of the most significant personalities of the second half of the nineteenth century, and teaches us, perhaps like few others, to recognize how the intellectual heritage of the nineteenth century, which entered the twentieth century, actually relates to the development of humanity in terms of its effects.

I have spoken of Franz Brentano at some length because the fact is immediately apparent that the first work of this important philosopher, published by his students from his estate, was a work about the life of Jesus, the teaching of Jesus. That provided the external point of contact. But I wanted something more profound with the presentation of this philosopher's life. I wanted to show, through a person who was not just a thinker, not just a scientist, but who was truly a seeker of truth as a whole human being, how a personality of this kind had to position itself in the spiritual life of the second half of the 19th century.

Franz Brentano was born in 1838, so he was a student at the very time when the scientific mentality was emerging within modern civilization. He was a student who, as you have seen, was a devout Catholic who, as a devout Catholic, held firmly to the spiritual world, but only in the way that was possible from Catholic religious practice and Catholic “theology.” This man, who had thus grown into a certain self-evident grasp of the spiritual world, of the immortality of the soul, of the existence of God and so on, did so as a scientist, and indeed as the most conscientious scientist imaginable, in the era when scientific thinking meant everything. So that, more than with any other personality, when one is familiar with Franz Brentano, one has the feeling that here is a person of deep spirituality who, however, in the face of the scientific attitude of the 19th century, did not rise to it, could not penetrate it to a real grasp of spiritual life. I do not actually know of any personality in modern times in whom the necessity for the anthroposophical world view emerges so characteristically. In the case of Franz Brentano, one would like to say: he actually only needed to take one or two steps further and he was with anthroposophy. He did not come to it because he wanted to keep to what was scientifically common practice. Franz Brentano, precisely because of what I described yesterday as the characteristic of his personality, even in his outward appearance, through the dignity of his demeanor, through the seriousness that was present in everything he uttered, already gives the impression that he could have become a kind of leading personality in the second half of the 19th century.

You may now rightly ask: But how is it that this personality has remained quite unknown in the broadest circles? Franz Brentano actually became known only to a narrow circle of students. All these students are people who received the most profound inspiration from him. This can still be seen in the work of those who are in turn the students of those students, for it is they who are actually still around today. Franz Brentano made a significant impression on a narrow circle. And most of the students in this circle are certainly so minded towards him that they perceive him as one of the most stimulating and significant people for centuries.

But the fact that Brentano has remained unknown in the widest circles is characteristic of the entire development of civilization in the 19th century. One could, of course, cite many personalities who, in one direction or another, are also representatives of intellectual life in the 19th century. But you could not find a personality as significant and as characteristic as Franz Brentano, no matter how hard you looked. Therefore, I would like to say: Franz Brentano shows that although natural science, in the form it took in the 19th century, can acquire great authority, it cannot exercise spiritual leadership within the whole of culture despite this great authority. For that, natural science must first be developed into spiritual science; then it has everything in it that can truly, together with spiritual science, assume a certain leadership in the spiritual life of humanity.

To understand this, we must today take a broader view. If we look back to the earliest times of humanity, we know that a kind of dream-like clairvoyance was present everywhere as a general human faculty. To this dream-like clairvoyance, the initiates, the initiates of the mysteries, added higher supersensible knowledge, but also knowledge about the sensory world.

If we were to go back to the very early days of human development, we would find no difference in the way the physical and the supersensible are treated. All spiritual life has proceeded from the mystery schools, which were basically churches and art institutions at the same time. But in the deepest sense, this spiritual life influenced all human life in the old days, including state and economic life. Those who were active in state life sought the advice of the mystery priests, but so did those who wanted to provide impetus in economic life. There was actually no separation between the religious and scientific elements in those ancient times. The leaders of religious life were the leaders of intellectual life in general and were also the people who set the tone in the sciences. But more and more, the development of humanity has taken shape in such a way that those currents of human life that originally formed a unity have separated. Religion has become separate from science, from art.

This happened only slowly and gradually. If we look back to Greece, we find that there was no natural science in our sense, and alongside it, for example, philosophy; rather, Greek philosophy also discussed natural science, and there was no separate natural science. But as philosophy in Greece emerged as something independent, the religious element had already separated from this philosophy. Although the mysteries were still the source of the deepest truths, in Greece, especially in later Greece, what the mysteries gave was already being criticized from the standpoint of philosophical reason. But religious revelation continued, and when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, it was essentially religious revelation that set out to understand this mystery. Whatever understanding of theology still existed within European civilization during the first few centuries is no longer properly understood by people today; they refer to it disparagingly as 'gnosis' and the like. But there was a great deal of spiritual understanding in this gnosis, and there was a clear awareness that One must understand spiritual matters in the same way as one understands today, for example, gravity or the phenomena of light or anything else in the physical sense. They did not have the awareness that there is a science separate from religious life. Even on Christian soil, the first church fathers, the first great teachers of Christianity, were absolutely convinced that they were treating knowledge as something unified. Of course, the Greek separation of religious life was already there, but they included both the contemplation of the religious and the rational contemplation of the merely physical in the treatment of all spiritual matters. It was only in the Middle Ages that this changed. In the Middle Ages, scholasticism arose, which now made a strict separation - as I already pointed out yesterday - between human science and what is actual knowledge of the spiritual. This could not be attained through the application of independent human powers of knowledge; it could only be attained through revelation, through the acceptance of revelations. And more and more it had come to be that one said: Man cannot penetrate the highest truths through his own powers of knowledge; he must accept them as they are delivered by the church as revelation. Human science can only spread over what the senses give and draw some conclusions from what the senses give as truths, as I said yesterday.

Thus, a strict distinction was made between a science that spread over the sensory world and that which was the content of revelation. Now, for the development of modern humanity, the last three to five centuries have become extraordinarily significant in many respects. If you had told a person from those older times, when religion and science were one, that religion was not based on human knowledge, he would have considered it nonsense; for all religions originally came from human knowledge. Only it was said: If man confines himself to his consciousness, as it is given to him for everyday life, then he does not attain to the highest truths; this consciousness must first be raised to a higher level. From the old point of view, it was said just as one is forced to say today, for example, according to what I have presented in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds” and in the second part of my “Occult Science in Outline”: that man must ascend through special treatment of his soul abilities in order to gain higher knowledge. This was also said in ancient times. People were aware that with ordinary consciousness one can only recognize what is spread around man; but one can further develop this consciousness and thus arrive at supersensible truths. Thus in those ancient times one would not have spoken of a revelation reaching man somewhere without his own activity. That would have been felt to be nonsense. And so all the dogmas contained in the various church teachings originally come from such initiation truths. Today, people easily say: dogmas such as the Trinity or the Incarnation must have been revealed, they cannot be approached through human cognitive abilities. But originally they did arise out of human cognitive abilities.

And in the Middle Ages, people had progressed to a greater use of their intellect. This is characteristic, for example, of scholasticism, in that the intellect was used in a grand sense, but only applied to the sensual world, and that at this stage of human development one no longer felt capable of developing higher powers of cognition, at least not in the circles in which the old dogmas had been handed down as doctrines of revelation. Then they refused to pave the way for man to the supersensible world through higher powers of knowledge. So they took over what had been achieved in ancient times through real human knowledge, through tradition, through historical tradition, and said that one should not examine it with human science.

People gradually came to accept this attitude towards knowledge. They gradually got used to calling belief that which was once knowledge, but which they no longer dared to attain; and they only called knowledge that which is actually gained through human cognitive abilities for the sensual world. This doctrine had become more and more pronounced, especially within Catholicism. But as I already told you yesterday: basically, all modern scientific attitudes are also nothing more than a child of this scholasticism. People just stopped at saying that the human intellect could only gain knowledge about nature, and did not care about the supersensible knowledge. They said that man could not gain this through his abilities. But then it was left to faith to accept the old knowledge as handed-down dogmas or not.

After the 18th century had already proclaimed mere sensual knowledge and what can be gained from it through rational conclusions, the tendency emerged in the 19th century in particular to only accept as science what can be gained in this way by applying human abilities to the sensual world. And in this respect, the 19th century has achieved an enormous amount, and great things are still being achieved in the field of scientific research through the application of scientific methods.

I would like to say that the last public attempt to ascend into the spiritual world was made at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century by the movement known as German idealism. This German idealism was preceded by a philosopher like Cart, who now also wanted to express the separation between knowledge and belief philosophically. Then came those energetic thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Flegel, and these stand there, at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century, like last mighty pillars, because they wanted to go further with the human capacity for knowledge than mere sensory knowledge and what can be deduced from it.

Fichte, Schelling and Hegel are very different from one another. Fichte started from the human ego, developed an enormous power precisely in grasping the human ego, and sought to conquer the world cognitively from the human ego. Schelling developed a kind of imaginative construction of a world view. This impetus in the imaginative construction of thoughts even brought him close to an understanding of the mysteries. Hegel believed in the thought itself, and he believed that in the thought that man can grasp, the eternal lives directly. It is a beautiful thought when Hegel said that he wanted to recognize the spirit and conquer it from the point of view of thought. But only those who grasp Hegel's general striving, this striving towards the spirit, can really taste him. For when one reads Hegel — most people soon stop reading, after all — he is, despite his belief in the spirituality of thought, a terribly abstract thinker when he expounds his ideas. And it is true that, although the impulse that lived in Hegel in terms of the spirit was an immensely strong one, Hegel gave mankind nothing but an inventory of abstract concepts.

Why was that so? It is indeed a tremendous tragedy that these robust, powerful thinkers, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, did not actually penetrate to spirituality.

This is because, in the general civilization of that time, humanity was not yet mature enough to really open the gates to the spiritual world. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel only got as far as thought. But what is the thought that lives in man in ordinary consciousness?

Do you remember what I said some time ago? When we follow a person's life from birth to death, we have the person before us as a living being; soul and spirit warm and illuminate what stands before us as a physical being. When the person has died for the physical world, then we have the corpse in the physical world. We bury or cremate this corpse. Just think what a tremendous difference there is for an unprejudiced human observer of life between a fully living human being and a corpse. If you can only grasp this difference with your heart, then you will be able to understand what the spiritual scientist has to say about another phase of life, when man is considered between death and a new birth, as he is as a soul-spiritual being in a spiritual world, how he develops there, how he, while growing old here on earth, becomes younger and younger in the spiritual world until the moment when he finds his way down to a physical embodiment. What lives in man can be grasped just as much with the higher spiritual powers as one can grasp what lives in a physical human being. And then one can ask oneself: What remains of it when the human being has been born, what presented itself to our view in the spiritual world above, before the soul-spiritual descended? What remains in the human being, perceptibly, are his thoughts. But these thoughts, which the human being then carries within himself here on earth through the physical body, are the corpse of the thoughts that belong to the human being when he lives between death and a new birth in the spiritual and soul world. The abstract thoughts we have here are quite a corpse compared to the living being that is in man between death and a new birth, just as the corpse is in the physical compared to the living person before he has died for the physical world.

Those who do not want to take the step of enlivening abstract thoughts allow nothing more to live in them than the corpse of what was in them before they descended to earth. And only this corpse of thoughts lived in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, however magnificent these thoughts are. One would like to say: In ancient times, when religion, science and art were still one, something of the life that belongs to man in the spiritual world still lived on in earthly thoughts. Even in Plaio, one can perceive in the sweep of his ideas how something supermundane lived on in him. This is becoming less and less. People keep the knowledge of the supermundane as revelation. But otherwise the human being would not have been able to become free, he would not have been able to develop freedom. The human being comes more and more to have nothing but the corpse of his prenatal inner life in his thinking. And just as one sometimes finds in certain people, when they have died, an enormous freshness in the corpse for a few days, so it was with the corpse-thoughts of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: they were fresh, but they were nevertheless just those corpses of the supersensible, of which a real spiritual science must speak.

But I ask you now: Do you believe that we could ever encounter a human corpse in the world if there were no living people? Anyone who encounters a human corpse knows that this corpse was once alive. And so someone who really looks at our thinking, our abstract, our dead, our corpse thinking, will come to the conclusion that this too once lived, namely before man descended into a physical body.

But this realization had also been lost to man, and so people were experiencing dead thinking, and they revered everything that came to them from living thinking as a revelation, if they still placed any value on it at all. This was particularly confirmed by the great advances in natural science that came in the period I have already mentioned, when Franz Brentano was young.

To the many peculiarities of Franz Brentano, I must add two more today. Yesterday I wanted to characterize the personality more, today I want to point out the development over time. Therefore, today's consideration must be somewhat more general.

In addition to all the qualities that I mentioned yesterday about this Franz Brentano, who grew out of Catholicism but then became a general philosopher, he had an immense antipathy towards Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. He did not rail against them as Schopenhauer did, because he had a better education; but he did use harsh words, only more delicately expressed, not in the same truly abominable tone as Schopenhauer's. But one must realize that a man who grows out of Catholicism into a new outlook cannot, after all, have any other attitude toward Fichte, Schelling and Hegel than Franz Brentano had. When one has outgrown scholasticism, one wants to apply to the sense world what for Hegel, for example, is the highest human power of cognition, thinking, and in the sense world, thinking is only an auxiliary means.

Just think: with this thinking-corpse one approaches the sense world, one grasps inanimate nature first. You cannot grasp living nature with this thinking anyway. This thinking corpse is just right for inanimate nature. But Hegel wanted to embrace the whole world with all its secrets with this thinking corpse. Therefore, you will not find any teaching about immortality or God in Hegel, but what you do find will seem quite strange to you.

Hegel divides his system into three parts:

logic, natural philosophy, and the doctrine of the spirit = art, religion, science

Logic is an inventory of all the concepts that man can develop, but only of those concepts that are abstract. This logic begins with being, goes to nothingness, to becoming. I know that if I were to give you the whole list, you would go crazy because you would not find anything in all these things that you are actually looking for. And yet Hegel says: That which emerges again in man when he develops being, nothingness, becoming, existence and so on as abstract concepts, that is God before the creation of the world.

Take Hegel's logic, it is full of abstract concepts from beginning to end, because the last concept is that of purpose. You can't do much with that either. There is nothing at all about any kind of soul immortality, about a God in the sense that you recognize it as justified, but rather an inventory of nothing but abstract concepts. But now imagine these abstract concepts as existing before there is nature, before there were people, and so on. This is God before the creation of the world, says Hegel. Logic is God before the creation of the world. And this logic then created nature and came to self-awareness in nature.

So first there is logic, which, according to Hegel, is the god before the creation of the world. Then it passes into its otherness and comes to itself, to its self-awareness; it becomes the human spirit. And the whole system then concludes with art, religion and science as the highest. These are the three highest expressions of the spirit. So in religion, art and science, God continues to live within the earth. Hegel registers nothing other than what is experienced on earth in everyday life. He actually only proclaims the spirit that has died, not the living spirit.

This must be rejected by those people who seek science in the modern sense, based on a scientific education. It must be rejected because, when one penetrates into nature with dead concepts, the matter does not go so that one remains with the abstractions. Even if you are so poorly educated in botany that you transform all the beautiful flowers into the number of stamens, into the description of the seed, the ovary and so on, even if you have such abstract concepts in your head, and then go out with a botany drum and bring back nothing but abstract concepts, at least the withered flowers are still there, and they are still more concrete than the most abstract concepts. And when you, as a chemist, stand in the laboratory, no matter how much you fantasize about all kinds of atomic processes and the like, you cannot help but also describe what happens in the retort when you have a certain substance inside and below it the lamp that causes this substance to evaporate, melt and so on. You still have to describe something that is a thing. And finally, when physicists in optics also draw for you how light rays refract and describe everything that light rays still do according to the physicists, you will still be reminded of colors again and again when that beautiful drawing is made that shows how light rays pass through a prism, are deflected in different ways. And even if all color has long since evaporated in the physical explanation of color, you will still be reminded of the colors. But if you want to grasp the spiritual with a completely abstract system of concepts and with completely abstract logic, then you have no choice but to use abstract logic. A person like Franz Brentano could not accept this as a real description of the spirit, nor could the other scholastics, because at least they still have tradition as revelation. Therefore, as a student in the mid-19th century, Brentano was faced with a truly irrepressible thirst for truth and knowledge, with an inner scientific conscientiousness that was unparalleled in his time, so that he could not receive anything from those who were still the last great philosophers of modern civilization. He could only accept the strict method of natural science. In his heart he carried what Catholicism with its theology had given him. But he could not bring all this together into a new spiritual understanding.

But what is particularly appealing is how infinitely truthful this human being was. Because – and this brings me to the other thing I mentioned – when we look at the human being as he is born into the physical world, as he makes his first fumbling movements as a child, as we first fumbling movements as a child, we see in an unskillful way the unfolding of what was tremendously wise before it descended into the physical world. If we understand spiritual science correctly, we say to ourselves: We see how the childlike head organism is born. In it we have an image of the cosmos. Only at the base of the skull do the earthly forces, as it were, brace themselves. If the base of the skull were rounded, as the top of the head is rounded, the head would truly be a reflection of the cosmos. This is something that human beings bring with them. We can certainly regard the head, when we consider it as a physical body, as a reflection of the cosmos. This is truly the case.

I was criticized for mentioning an important fact in public, but without mentioning such facts, one cannot actually get to the world's interrelations: I have publicly stated that there is a certain arrangement of furrows in the human brain, certain centers are and so on. Even in these smallest details, this human brain is a reflection of the starry sky at the time when the person is born. In the head we see an image of the cosmos, which we also see externally with our senses, even though most people do not perceive its spiritual aspect. In the chest organism, in what mainly underlies the rhythmic system, we see how the roundness of the cosmos has already been somewhat overcome by adapting to the earth. But if you follow the chest organism with its peculiar formation of the spine with the ribs and sees how this thoracic organism is connected to the cosmos through breathing, then, even if only in a very altered form, something like an image of the cosmos can still be seen in the thoracic, in the rhythmic organism. But no longer in the metabolic-limb organism. There you cannot possibly see anything that is modeled on the cosmos. Now, the formation of the head is connected with thinking, the thoracic organism, the rhythmic organism with feeling, and the metabolic-limb organism with will.

Why is it precisely the metabolism-limb organism, which is actually the most earthly part of the human being, that is the seat of the will? This is how it is connected: in the human head we have a very faithful image of the cosmos. The soul-spiritual has flowed into the head, into the formative forces. One could say that the human being learned from the cosmic forces before descending to earth and formed his head accordingly. He still forms the thoracic organism a little, but no longer the limb organism at all. The will is in the latter. So that when one looks at the human external organism, thinking must be assigned to the head, feeling to the middle man and willing to the metabolic-limb organism. But in what is really the lowest, the metabolism and the limbs, the spiritual also maintains itself best, so that in our thinking we have only a corpse of what we were before we descended. In our feelings we have a little more, but feeling, as you know, remains in a dream-like state, and the will, one no longer even notices with the ordinary consciousness. The will remains entirely in the unconscious, but in it there is still most of the life of what we were before we descended to earth. When we are developed as a child, most of our immortal soul is in our will. Now, most people do not have many scruples; they say: Man has the three soul powers within him, thinking, feeling and willing. You know, these three soul activities are listed as if they were present for ordinary consciousness, whereas in anthroposophy we first have to point out that actually only thinking is fully awake. Feeling is already like dreams in people, and people know nothing at all about willing. I must emphasize again and again: Even if we only want to raise an arm, the thought, “I am raising my arm,” flows into the organism and becomes will, so that the arm is actually raised. Man knows nothing of this, he sleeps through it in the waking state, just as he otherwise sleeps through things from falling asleep to waking up. So instead of saying: we have in us the waking thinking, the dreaming feeling, the sleeping willing, they say: we have thinking, feeling and willing, which are supposed to be on a par with one another.

Now imagine a person who has an infinite sense of truth and who works with modern science, that is, who only uses thinking. The modern natural scientist, whether he is using a microscope, looking at the cosmos through a telescope, or doing astrophysics with a spectral analyzer, always turns only to conscious thinking. Therefore, it became an axiom for Franz Brentano that all unconsciousness had to be rejected. He wanted to stick only to ordinary conscious thinking, and for this he did not want to develop higher cognitive abilities. What could we actually expect from such a person when he speaks of the soul, when he wants to speak as a psychologist? One might expect that he would not speak of the will at all in psychology if he sticks only to the conscious. One might expect that he would cross out the will entirely, be quite uncertain about feeling, and really treat only thinking correctly.

Other, more superficial minds have not come to this. Franz Brentano's psychology does not divide the soul faculties into thinking, feeling and willing, but into imagining, judging and into the phenomena of love and hate, that is, into the phenomena of sympathy and antipathy, that is, of feeling. You will not find any will in him at all. The right active will is absent from Brentano's psychology because he was a thoroughly honest seeker of truth, and he really had to admit: I just can't find the will.

On the other hand, there is something tremendously moving in seeing how infinitely sincere and honest this personality actually is. Will is absent from Brentano's psychology, for he separates judgment and imagination so that he now has three parts to the life of the soul; but judgment and imagination coincide in terms of the capacity of the soul, so that he actually has only two.

Now consider the consequence of what appears in Brentano. What does he have in reality i. in man? By becoming a modern natural scientist and not giving anything a value that does not present itself to conscious thinking according to the natural scientific method, he excludes volition from the human soul. And what does he thereby eliminate? Precisely that which we bring with us as living beings from our state before we descend into a physical body.

Brentano was confronted with a science that eliminated precisely the eternal in the soul for him. The other psychologists did not feel this. He felt it, and therefore there arose for him the tremendous abyss between what was once a doctrine of revelation that spoke to him of the eternal in the human soul, and what he could find alone according to his scientific method, which even cut away the volition and thus the eternal from the human soul.

Thus Brentano is a personality who is characteristic of everything that the 19th century was unable to give to humanity. The gates to the spiritual world had to be opened. And that is the reason why I have spoken to you about Franz Brentano, who died in Zurich in 1917, because in him I see the most characteristic of all those philosophers of the 19th century who already had a serious striving for truth But they were held fast by the fetters of the natural-scientific spirit, which did not want to rise to a spiritual comprehension of the world, and in this way show everywhere that the time has come when this spiritual conception is needed. What, after all, is the difference between what spiritual science in the anthroposophical sense really wants and the tragic striving of a man like Franz Brentano? That Franz Brentano, with tremendous acumen, has brought in the concepts that can be obtained from ordinary consciousness, and said: That is where you have to stop. But the knowledge is not complete; one strives in vain for real knowledge. But he was never satisfied with that; he always wanted to get out. He just could not get out of his natural science. And that remained so until his death. One might say that spiritual science had to begin where Brentano left off, had to take the step from ordinary consciousness into higher consciousness. That is why he is so extraordinarily interesting, indeed the most interesting philosopher of the second half of the 19th century, because in him the striving for truth was truly something personal. It must be said: if you want to study one symptom of what a person had to experience in the development of science and in the spiritual development of modern times, you can consider this nephew of Clemens Brentano, the philosopher Franz Brentano. He is characteristic of everything that a person has to seek and cannot find with the usual scientific method. He is characteristic of this because one must go beyond what he strove for with such an honest sense of truth. The more closely one looks at him, right down into the structures of his psychology, the more this becomes apparent. He is precisely one of those minds that show: humanity needs a spiritual life again that can intervene in everything. It cannot come from natural science. But this natural science is the fate of modern times in general, as it has become the fate of Brentano. For like the true modern Faust of the nineteenth century, Brentano sits first in Würzburg, then in Vienna, then in Florence, then in Zurich, wrestling with the greatest problems of humanity. He does not admit to himself that “we cannot know”, but he would have to if he were fully aware of his own method. He would actually have to say to himself: natural science is what prevents me from undertaking the path into the spiritual world.

But this natural science speaks a strong, authoritative language. And so it is also in public life today. Science itself cannot offer people what they need for their soul. The greatest achievements of the 19th and 20th centuries could not give people a kind of guiding spirit. And this scientific attitude is a strong obstacle due to its powerful authority, because wherever anthroposophy appears, science initially opposes it, and although science itself cannot give people anything, when it comes to anthroposophy, the question is: does science agree with it? — For even those who know little about science have the overriding feeling today that science is right, and if science says that anthroposophy is nonsense, then it must be right. As I said, people do not need to know much about science, because after all, what do the monistic speakers know about science? As a rule, they have in mind the general things that applied three decades ago! But they act as if they were speaking from the full spirit of contemporary science. That is why many people see it as an authority.

One can also see from Brentano's inner destiny the outer destiny, not the inner destiny of the anthroposophical world view, but its outer destiny.

Dornach, 6 January 1916

It is my task to say a few words about the difference in the way of thinking and imagining in our fifth post-Atlantic period compared to the fourth post-Atlantic period. In particular, I would like to suggest today the element of thinking and feeling in relation to which much has changed from one period, from one cycle to the other. And I would like to suggest in particular the extent to which certain types of ideas and feelings have, as it were, descended into a deeper sphere, in order to then suggest what is particularly necessary in the fifth post-Atlantic period, in which we ourselves are, so that humanity can once again undertake an ascent.

For a long time I have been trying to find out how this matter can be most vividly presented, and today, based on this research, I would like to try to illustrate it. For this reason, I would like to begin by telling you something, let us say, in a kind of novelistic form, which has come together for me from certain things.

I would like to tell you about a family that lived not so long ago and was closely related to another family. And because all kinds of events that occurred to one family were extremely interesting and significant to a member of the other family, this member of the other family tried to get to the bottom of the reasons for these events. I will start from the fact that in this first-named family there was a young girl – as I said, the matter belongs to the past to some extent – who had not yet reached her twenties. The father of this girl was a warrior, and the time we are now looking at in particular was before a major war that the father of this girl had to take part in. But the girl was engaged, so to speak, to another warrior who also had to go to war, and she was extremely fond of him, so that she was deeply, deeply unhappy about him having to go to war. And since she thought that her father was partly to blame for the outbreak of the war, she also harbored a kind of resentment against him, without her father noticing at first. And the more the time approached, the more this young girl's ideas and feelings became confused. She could not bear the thought of losing her beloved. And because these feelings were so deep within her, her image of her own father became completely distorted. The resentment within her grew more and more. The war came. But what had taken hold in the young girl's soul grew almost to the point of mental confusion, to the kind of mental confusion that doctors in our time regard as a kind of mental illness. And so this young girl had all kinds of mental experiences, especially when the war broke out, but they were already on the verge of mental illness: visions and all sorts of similar things. In particular, she had a strong vision that her lover would fall in the war, and that everything she could have achieved in the world with her lover would be lost with his death, and that she would actually become a victim of the war with all her intentions. The mental illness worsened more and more. The doctors decided that it would be best to move her to a rural area far away, where she was well supervised and where she also had a beneficial effect on some of the people around her, as can happen with such patients. However, there was never any hope that the full abnormality of the mental illness would not reappear if she were removed from the circumstances and placed in different ones. And so she lived there for years.

The war was long over, and other fatal circumstances had occurred in the family, which I will not characterize in detail, all sorts of fatal circumstances, including the fact that after quite a number of years, the brother of this girl also suffered from mental illness. The strange thing was that the brother, who had transformed the girl's mental illness into masculinity, was now, after all sorts of other decisions that had been made, brought by a reasonable person to the very place where the girl was. And lo and behold, the quite remarkable fact emerged that the brother, despite also being considered mentally ill, had a favorable effect on the girl, and that they recognized each other in their loneliness, in which they had met among the other people, and through the whole environment, despite not having seen each other for many years, and recovered together. So that the girl could return home and establish a kind of asylum in her home country, which was set up in such a way that especially those who were ill, like the two of them, could be healed in a reasonable way, through knowledge of the reasons, in a spiritual way. The asylum she founded had a deeply religious character.

Now, I said, this family, to which these events belonged, was closely related to another family. A member of that other family was very interested in all these strange events and said: This must be investigated, what a curious case actually exists. The events that I am now describing happened just a few years ago. So he turned to a man with a background in medicine and science, a doctor whom he knew and who called himself a psychopathologist because he specialized in psychopathology. Let's call this doctor, this psychopathologist, Lövius, Professor Dr. Lövius. He first told the doctor what he knew, namely about the two children, about how the girl's illness had come about through resentment towards her father; how he had been able to observe her, what he had seen of the matter. Professor Dr. Lövius listened very carefully, made an extraordinarily serious face, thought deeply and said: “There must be a hereditary predisposition to a high degree. Hereditary burden, that is quite unquestionable, we have to do it with a hereditary burden. There we must look exactly in the family acts, must explore every single one!

And lo and behold, all sorts of things were found in the family records. As luck would have it, it turned out that the characteristics and qualities of the ancestors could be researched far back, to the grandfather, great-grandfather and even to the great-great-grandfather. Professor Dr. Lövius studied this case for a long time, and more and more people found it confirmed that they were dealing with an extraordinary case of hereditary strain, as it was called, and with a typical case of hereditary strain, with an exceptional case. Professor Dr. Lövius, who had already examined the psychopathy of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Viktor Scheffel, Hebbel and others, found this school case extremely interesting and compiled all the data from which this school case can be explained.

Let us try to follow the man schematically. So, first of all, we are dealing with the daughter of that warrior and her brother, who we know about the case – these are the two individuals to begin with. If we go further, we come to the father. The father was the first to be targeted by Professor Dr. Lövius, who found that he had something extraordinarily violent in his character and was an ambitious man, albeit also a man with a lot of initiative. He had qualities that were found in his brother in a very peculiar way, as strengths that had been converted into strength – in such a case, one has to examine the entire family relationships. But the father of the two siblings was an extremely ambitious man who was extraordinarily full of initiative.

Such excess of ambition, drive, and a certain resistance to the world, of course, must be traced further back in the line of inheritance. So they went up to the father's father first. So we come to the father's father, who in turn had a brother. It turned out to be extremely interesting that the brothers had certain similarities and also differences through two generations. There was the father of the father, that is, the grandfather of our young girl, who – while the father was just an overly ambitious and energetic man – was already a kind of ruffian. In the father, the trait had weakened. But the brother was an amiable man who, through his kindness, actually degenerated into the pathological, into the abnormal. Abnormal – that is the similarity – they both were in the generation before last, but one degenerated into a ruffian and the other into kindness. And then Professor Dr. Lövius came to the conclusion that this ruffian, that is the grandfather of our young girl, was always out to sow discord and mischief in his brother's family. And this ruffian really managed to corrupt his brother's sons completely, as stated by Professor Dr. Lövius – so we are now with the grandfather. He made one of them a gambler and corrupted the other in some other way. In short, he thoroughly corrupted the father's sons. This much could be gleaned from the family records: all sorts of evil things had happened. It was not possible to get to the bottom of the matter. But this much was clear: ultimately, one man had behaved so badly towards his brother, the other man, that the whole family, all the sons, had degenerated, with only one remaining who decided to avenge his father on his brother. But by doing so, he only brought more disaster into the families through these acts of revenge, namely into the family of our girl's father. All kinds of unpleasantness ensued.

And now Professor Dr. Lövius said to himself: You have to go further up the line of descent. For this young girl had shown very strange visions at the beginning of her madness. She dreamt constantly of very distant regions, where she had not been during her girlhood, but which corresponded strangely with a certain locality. From a family diary, Dr. Lövius found out that in these visions something was alive from the area where the great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather had once been. “Oh,” the professor said to himself, ”this is a particularly interesting case study: heredity appears in the visions; the great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather were somewhere other than in the area where their descendants last lived! And what earlier generations had experienced was inherited in such a way that the great-granddaughter or great-great-granddaughter had visions of it in madness! - Of course, this was something extraordinarily interesting for the professor. So he came to the conclusion that the grandfather had a father again, who, as I said, according to an old family diary, had emigrated from a completely different, foreign region, where the culture was very different. I will not mention any localities because it is so unpleasant now: the nations are so opposed to each other, and if you mention localities now, it will immediately evoke feelings. So great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather came from a foreign region. Now, from this diary it turned out that this great-grandfather was also a strange person. He had done all sorts of crazy things in this remote area, and was also a ruffian who occasionally became violently insane. Since he had done all sorts of things in his rages, he could not remain in the area, he had to emigrate and wandered to the area where the descendants were. But in the area where the descendants were, he immediately caused trouble again, even though he later became a very respected man. In the area where the descendants were, he caused trouble by simply killing the father in a duel because he was in love with a woman and her father did not want to admit the marriage. That's how he got the daughter. The matter was, as they say, covered up, and he was able to become a respected man.

Now, thanks to the family book, Professor Dr. Lövius was able to trace his family back to his great-great-grandfather. And this great-great-grandfather was a particularly remarkable person. He lived in a very exotic place and was someone who had acquired a kind of deeper insight into the secrets of history. He was a very spiritual person. But, said Professor Dr. Lövius, someone who exaggerates spirituality as much as this great-great-grandfather did, there is already something wrong with him upstairs. And when he looked further into the family papers, he found that this great-great-grandfather, despite being thoroughly versed in spiritual matters, had retained certain human qualities. Above all, he could not stand all the other people who had not come to spiritual knowledge in his way, but in some official way. They were a thorn in his side. And to do some kind of mischief to them was something he found almost like a spiritual delicacy. What I am going to tell you now is an event that took place in the 1760s. But things repeat themselves: Eduard von Hartmann did something similar with the philistine people of the 19th century, which I have often told about. This great-great-grandfather of mine once published something like a writing – but he did not put his name to it, but had it appear anonymously – in which he very thoroughly refuted everything that was his own teaching. He presented everything as confused and stupid and foolish, and always in such a way that the others could really delight in it, because he always cited their reasons, what they might have said: these were delicacies for the others; he had played a great trick on them.

Then Professor Dr. Lövius said to himself: Now, there you see it all! Even as far back as the times of the great-great-grandfather, one can see in the line of inheritance what has now manifested itself in such a terrible way in the descendants. Even the good side of the great-great-grandfather, his spiritual gift, showed itself again in the great-great-granddaughter, who founded a kind of spiritual asylum. As you can see, all good and bad qualities are hereditary burdens in this school case to the highest degree! So this story was of extraordinary interest to Professor Dr. Lövius. It was a matter of course that he had set out to write a thick book about this typical school case and he once explained it to a colleague. And you see, on this occasion, someone was listening who didn't want to, but couldn't help it, he listened. One who not only had knowledge of human nature, but also knowledge of the world in the sense of the development of humanity, listened and had all sorts of thoughts while Professor Dr. Lövius was telling his case. I will present these thoughts to you in a version – the version is not very important – and I will always refer to this family tree, to the family tree of the school case of Professor Dr. Lövius.

So the following thoughts came to man: Once upon a time, in the course of human evolution, there was a respectable family. The fate of the founder of this family, Tantalus, who atoned in Tartarus, is well known in the widest circles. He was initiated into the secrets of the gods. The Greeks express this by saying that a person who is privy to the secrets of the gods can even take part in the meals of the gods. But he had something that he felt was like a thorn in his side, or one could also say, like a delicacy, to deceive the gods, the officially recognized gods. And so he offered them – as you all know – as a delicacy for the gods, his own son, whom he had cut into pieces. And the gods, who in their omniscience made a mistake, ate of it and also drank of the blood. For this, Tantalus was thrown into Tartarus, and he had to endure the Tantalus torments, of which the Greek myths tell. Through a series of crimes that took place from link to link, the revenge of the gods was now inherited by the last descendants. First, Pelops, the son of Tantalus, was expelled from heaven, into which the gods had taken him. He wandered across Asia Minor to Greece, and won Hippodameia by defeating her father to become his wife.

The listener was not aware of the fact that the professor Dr. Lövius had a duel with the father and thereby acquired the wife. As his luck proved, he had not yet been deprived of the grace of heaven. But soon he made himself so unworthy of her favor through various actions that the blessing left his house. From his marriage with Hippodameia sprang the two sons Atreus and Thyestes, who fled with the guilt of murder stained on their souls to Argos, where they inherited the throne of this kingdom from their cousin Eurysthes. There the pair of brothers committed new atrocities, so that the royal palace of Mycenae was the scene of a blood feud that destroyed the individual members of the two families from child to child. The worst crime was the so-called 'Thyestes' meal. Atreus, who learned that his wife had been seduced into infidelity by Thyestes, invited the latter and his two sons to a banquet. The guilty man accepted the invitation and came to the meal.

This reminded this judge of character very much of the quarrel between the grandfather and his brother, who had seduced his sons and got them into all sorts of trouble, causing the sons to perish, as it was written in the family records.

But the horrible thing happened: Atreus presented the brother with the secretly slaughtered pair of sons. He drank of the blood. — This is actually also “inherited guilt”: the old Tantalus had already done this to the gods, now his grandson is doing it! — This was an atrocity that made Apollo turn his sun-horse away in horror as he looked down on Mycenae. Their avenger was a son of Thyestes, named Agisthus, who was born later. Aegisthus, informed of the terrible incident, first killed his uncle Atreus and then also waylaid his children.

Atreus had two sons by his wife A&rope, Agamemnon and Menelaus, called the Atrides or Atreus Sons. Aegisthus, the last son of Thyestes, hatched treacherous plans of revenge against them. But he could not emerge from hiding until the two related brothers had undertaken the great military expedition to Troy. After their departure, he knew how to beguile the passionate queen. Clytemnestra had borne her husband three daughters and a son – the daughter of most interest to us is called Iphigenia – and the son Orestes. Iphigenia, the eldest daughter, was offered as a sacrifice on the altar of Artemis, or Diana, for this goddess had conceived a fierce resentment against the departing Greeks and had to be reconciled by the daughter. The mother hated her husband and went along with the whispered thoughts of murder. Now we know that Iphigenia was taken to Tauris and came to in the enclosure of a temple. We know that she was transported to a rural area, to an environment where she was harmless, a fate similar to that of our great-great-great-granddaughter. I need not recount the further events in the house. But now the myth reports the following: After Orestes had found his sister Iphigenia in Tauris and she had cured him of his madness, he brought her back to Greece. Then it is further related that Iphigenia, after she had returned to Greece, built a kind of oracle, a place of sacrifice for the Taurian Diana, which translated into Greek would be roughly the same as if someone were to build an asylum for the sick according to such spiritual scientific principles as I have mentioned.

What I wanted to say is this: the same process is conceivable in ancient Greece and in more recent times. It takes place depending on the times. For you can see that the process from the 19th and 18th centuries, which I have just related, could have taken place exactly as I have related it. No one will be able to doubt the slightest detail. Likewise, no one will be able to doubt the whole story that I have developed. But there is a certain difference: namely, how one feels about this case, how one thinks about it.

We have seen how Professor Lövius stated in the 19th and 20th centuries: “Hereditary burden! School case!” The Greek said to himself: “When something like this happens, it expresses the deeper forces at work in the history of humanity,” and he created a myth about it. Professor Dr. Löviusse did not exist in ancient Greece, but a poet did who, in a deeper sense, understood these one, two, three, four, five generations (see drawing) and wrote a poem about them in such a way that poets have continued to write about them ever since, right up to Goethe's magnificent “Iphigenia”. And yet the difference is not that great. For just think, today you only need to pick up a psychology or psychiatry book by one of the many natural scientists that deals with the study of the soul and mental faculties, and you will find everywhere that it says the following: the healthy person as such is extremely difficult to study in terms of his or her mental characteristics. But at the bedside of the sick and in the clinic and through the dissection of the mentally ill, one also learns a great deal about the normal workings of the healthy soul, and an enormous amount is inferred from the sick soul about the healthy one. I need only recall that, for example, the speech center, the place where speech is concentrated, was thought to be recognized by examining it in a sick person who suffers from a lack of speech ability. So they said to themselves: it is precisely by what is out of order that we can learn what prevails in the healthy.

Now, if we think of this not in the 19th century, but in the language of the Greeks, it would sound like this: If we want to know what forces prevail in the course of human development, we must not go to those people and study them who, in their mental life and all that they are, show only what is so-called healthy, but we must go to all kinds of people who, compared to the normal, have abnormal characteristics. And so, these Greek poets, who were still in some respects Greek sages because they combined wisdom and beauty, tried to understand what happened to the Greeks. And so it came about that these Greek poets portrayed the fate of Greek civilization in these abnormal generations.

But the Greeks were different in some ways. The big difference between the way Professor Dr. Lövius speaks and the way the Greek speaks is that the Greek knows something about the secrets of the human soul. There is a great difference between what is evoked in the soul by the story of the extraordinary myth of the Atrides, Iphigenia, Tantalus and Pelops, and all the ideas that are attached to our soul when we hear the bespectacled Professor Dr. Lövius say, “All hereditary burden!” For “hereditary burden” is what the school case fulfills in its full form according to modern science, according to the knowledge of the fifth post-Atlantic period. In this we have the opposite of a person who is still completely within Greek thinking. Imagine the Greek who also wanted to describe how Iphigenia, after she had lived through what the Greek expressed in the events at Aulis, would then have been transported to a foreign land, to Tauris, where she would have experienced the reunion with Orestes and so on, and imagine how all this was taken up again in Goethe's Iphigenia! Imagine the single moment when King Thoas of Tauris stands before Iphigenia, in Goethe's dictum, when he woos Iphigenia and she feels obliged to utter the words: “Hear! I am of the house of Tantalus!” — “You speak a great word calmly.”

All Greekness is revived in what the Greeks or the resurrected Greek says in such a case of the soul life of the Greeks: “I am of the family of Tantalus.” And then it seems as if, after this has been said, Professor Dr. Lövius chuckles in through the window: “Hihihi! Hereditary burden!” — There you have the whole difference between what the fourth post-Atlantic period offered and what the fifth, our post-Atlantic period offers. Because in fact the two things can be compared. I have not exaggerated in the slightest sense, but have described quite objectively. The two things may be compared with each other, and that is because the place of the creation of Greek myth, the place of what was meant by Greek myth, has now been taken by the doctrine of hereditary burden, even in poetry. For ultimately, one need only compare Sophocles or Aeschylus with Ibsen to see exactly the same contrast in poetry, except that in Greek times, scholarship and poetry were not so divorced from one another. You only need to read what I have said about the mysteries and the origin of art and religion from the mysteries to understand that there was no Greek Professor Dr. Lövius alongside the Greek Ibsen: they would have been one and the same. But they would have been the ones who composed the whole myth, that which the myth contained as truth. For what health was, what the art of healing was, what the art of Mercury with the Mercury staff was, in ancient Greece this was also presented in the form of stories, just like this story of Tantalus' sex and Iphigenia. In those days it was not usual to speak in abstract terms, but one spoke in images. And through images one presented the truth. And that which filled the life of the Greek soul, that which organized this Greek soul quite inwardly, that bears relation to what is accepted today as the truth, for the original character of truth, such as: “Hear! I am of Tantalus's family!” to: “Hihihi! Hereditary burden”.

That, my dear friends, is what one must write on one's soul about something that has descended from ancient Greece to the present day. It can give us guidance about what needs to be developed in order to ascend again. That would take us too far today. I will present the continuation of these reflections tomorrow for those who still want to hear it.

Yesterday I tried to draw your attention, by means of pictorial representations, so to speak, to the great difference in the state of mind of people within the fourth and fifth post-Atlantic periods, in the latter of which we ourselves live. This is a difference to which one is indeed not inclined to pay much attention today, in our present time. Let us just realize what an average person of the present day, who is “clever”, that is, who has absorbed the prevailing basic concepts of the present, has to say about what was hinted at yesterday. He will have something like the following to say: It is all very well and good what the ancient Greek imagined in his fantasy about the succession of generations from Tantalus to Iphigenia, and it is all very well and good that Iphigenia is, so to speak, placed in an aura of ruling fate. But after all, it is all just fantasy. It is the point of view that is generally adopted today by intelligent people. Koridan, whom we have just seen in the Palatine pastoral play, does not say so from the beginning, but Mops does: “It's all just fantasy!” But it is roughly this point of view that today's Mops (pardon!) Has.

Now we must direct our entire attention to what an enormously convincing power this point of view has for people of today, how impossible it is for them to imagine that someone could enter someone who, instead of giving the information to such a personality, “hereditary burden,” as I quoted to you yesterday, could put forward something similar to the Iphigenia-Tantalus myth. And if he were to put it forward, everyone would of course say: fiction! In fiction, anything goes, but such fiction has absolutely nothing to do with truth, with real knowledge. And basically, that is the point of view that is currently adopted towards all art. Contemporary humanity is completely and utterly of the opinion that truth can only be attained through concepts, through theories, through such concepts, through such theories that are taken from external physical reality, and everything else, however beautiful, is fiction. In the present situation, one cannot imagine that any other point of view could be justified or even possible, that someone could take a different point of view without actually being insane. Just imagine that someone would even make the request – I dare to say this here, but I am well aware that it is only possible among us to say this – let's assume that someone would come up with the idea of saying: In medical lecture halls, there should be less talk of hereditary burden and the like, but things should be presented in a way that resembles a Greek myth. If the person concerned were to say this as if he meant it, as if he were serious and not making a bad joke, the least that contemporary culture could do to him would be to send him to a sanatorium. There is hardly any other conceivable outcome, is there! The conviction is so deeply rooted in the present that another point of view is not even possible: truth can only be found in the way that is currently officially recognized, and everything that people used to seek through their souls was just childishness, it was myth, it was poetry, it was not truth. But the modern man can be sure that we have finally come so far that the souls in all future eras will never feel anything but the truth of what has just been suggested. One can be quite convinced of this: if it were ever possible to transform air navigation into ether navigation, and if, in the sense of today's physicists, the ether really existed in the universe, and if a balloon were designed that would take some of our clever earthlings, who have never been foolish enough to enter a spiritual-scientific society, to Mars, and on Mars they would reveal other views of some kind or other than the one just mentioned, so one would say: Of course, these Martians are just making things up! They have not yet grasped the concept of how to recognize the way in which truth can really be found. The fact that another point of view might be possible could, under certain circumstances, be taken seriously in the present day even by someone who does not have an outlook based on spiritual science. But then, if he is really able to seriously reflect on world views, a terrible fate may await him. Nietzsche was one who tried to apply a different standard and who, in the sense of his book “Beyond Good and Evil”, even criticized truth. But he meant the truth that the present time alone recognizes, and he wanted to assert a different point of view, namely the point of view of life, the point of view of the life of the soul above all things. He was unable to come to spiritual science, and so he had to pay for this point of view with his mental health. Another point of view would be, for example, to ask: How do such concepts as those processed in Greek myth affect the human soul? And how do such concepts as those processed by the present age affect the human soul according to the type of “hereditary burden”? How do these concepts affect the human soul, the whole life of the human soul? How do they work? And there is an enormous difference. Man can summarize a number of generations, such as those from Tantalus to Iphigenia, either by doing so in an original way [like Nietzsche] or by believing in such a summary as in something real: he who can bring to life such ideas, such feelings associated with such ideas in his soul, brings an invigorating element into the whole of his soul life. But the person who works only with such concepts as that is of the hereditary burden, which brings into the soul life a killing element, a drying element. And this drying element will gradually be brought about under the influence of one-sided physical, biological and so on knowledge, a drying, a killing element. Never will these physical, chemical, biological sciences be able to produce anything in the present that can contribute to the inner fulfillment of the life of the soul.

Anyone who wants to observe can see it in outward things. Try it out for yourself. Buy Ostwald's little book “Natural Philosophy” – which can be found in the Reclam Library – and try to get by with this little book if you are looking for food for your soul! See for yourself how everything an excellent chemist has to say about all kinds of natural connections is dealt with on many pages, but how everything that is supposed to serve the soul is crammed into a few pages and presented in such abstractions that it can only have the effect of drying up the soul! And the line of development does not go so far as to promise that these biological, physical and chemical directions will in future fulfill the soul. That is not the case at all. On the contrary, the further the individual sciences progress, the less they will be able to offer anything that could even resemble nourishment for the soul. And when the time comes that the connection between the individual souls and the old religious conceptions will have been completely eradicated by modern natural science, then the soul will have no nourishment at all. The souls of adults would then still preach all kinds of things to children that they themselves do not believe — then the souls of adults would spend their day starting with breakfast, slurping the newspaper between spoonfuls. Now there is less and less about the spiritual goods of humanity in the newspapers, but more and more about other things. Then people will go about their daily work, will perform the tasks necessary for the material provision of humanity. Then they will have lunch, will do something similar in the evening, and if there are people who have time, they will kill it playing games or the like because it cannot be filled with some thoughts that have real value through a spiritual world. Yes, what will they do in the evening? Perhaps it will still be accepted that people go to see plays or the like, in which they do not believe after all. Some will read a book, perhaps about such things that were produced in the “childlike” times of humanity, which were indeed beautiful, but like Raphael's or Michelangelo's pictures. And one can be quite clear about it: it is quite beautiful, but it has nothing to do with reality.

Let us not deceive ourselves: the times are moving towards something that will dry up and kill the life of the soul. If we now consider what the above can teach us, we find that there is already an enormous desolation in it. For what is the meaning of the emergence from the fourth post-Atlantic period into our fifth post-Atlantic period? This meaning consists in the fact that in the fourth post-Atlantic period, in the ancient Greek period, for example, people were not as isolated with their souls as they are today. They still had an inner connection between souls, but they also in certain last remnants of visions, of inspirations of Diana, as they were understood at that time, of inspirations of Diana, of Artemis, of what emerged from the subconscious depths of the soul. And these visions really did appear to people in pictures. It can be said that people still had the last remnants of visionary images in their minds about human relationships, about social life, and they used these images as a guide. It is quite nonsensical to believe that the Greeks would have imagined something in the same way that we imagine things in the present day. It is quite nonsensical to believe that. When the Greeks undertook the expedition to Troy and thus prepared for a march to Troy, it would have been quite impossible for them to proceed with such an undertaking for any reasons that are acquired by reason or animated by feeling as they are today. It would have been quite inconceivable for the Greeks. They knew that when they undertook something of this kind, they were placing themselves in a greater context of humanity and the world, and that what had to live in their souls could not be something that had anything to do with ordinary feelings playing out on the physical plane. They saw the deeper reasons and brought them to bear in imaginative visions. They certainly said: there was a contest between the three goddesses Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena, and Paris was to receive the prize of this contest, Helen. It was a picture, but in the picture the Greek felt and sensed great spiritual connections that went through the world.

People today might imagine that the Greeks undertook the Trojan War for similar reasons to those of the present day, and that someone then sat down and invented the whole myth as a poetic explanation of the Trojan War. This is again an externalized notion of the present day. The myth was a vision, an imaginative representation of the deeper forces at work. Now, of course, if it does not lead too far away from the present task, I could discuss how Helen was the representative, how imagination was for the whole relationship between Greece and the Near East, how the whole contest between the three goddesses showed what the impulse of Greek soul life was, and how Greek soul life had to work its way up to what it later presented to the world. But as I said, the consideration of this myth would take us too far from our present task.

We want to bear in mind that there still lived remnants of a visionary clairvoyance that sought the truth in images, and that poetry was not as it is today, where it is presented as something that is invented , but that it was something that was experienced in a visionary way and then lived out in external forms, but that it was not opposed by a dry, pedantic, purely theoretical science that would have been proud of its concepts of truth, as is the case with present-day theoretical science. So people still saw connections between people. This has been completely lost. It had to be lost because individualism had to arise. People would never have arrived at that individualism, for which the great educator must be the culture of the fifth post-Atlantean period, and which will gradually develop during this fifth post-Atlantean period. People had to lose their old clairvoyance, even in its last remnants, in order to be completely detached – each individual for himself – from what can still be perceived of the interrelations. Man had to be narrowed down, so to speak, in his spiritual experience to his individual forms of existence on the physical plane. He had to be narrowed down. This could only happen if he lost everything that led him beyond his own body, so that he was completely enclosed in his own body. If you have a vision of what connects you to other people, then you have an awareness of social life. The human being of the fifth post-Atlantic period should no longer have this. He became entirely dependent on what he could experience within his own skin. And so the individualistic concept of the human being emerged at its first stage, at what one can say is the most brutal stage, at which, to a certain extent, he still stands.

If man today wants to feel what he actually is, he thinks first of all – even if he has other theories that are even more beautiful – of what he is within his body, within his skin, really within his skin. It is difficult to evoke a clear idea about this, because it is true and is not believed at all in the present day, because people like to delude themselves with all kinds of idealism in order to hide the fact that basically they only believe in themselves, insofar as they are enclosed in their own skin. But this transition had to take place. It had to take place for the reason that man must gradually realize that what is within his skin is, in a sense and within certain limits, prepared by his karma. What was Greek fate man had not prepared for himself, it connected him with his line of generations. What man of the future will feel as karma will consciously connect him with other men. Man will have to consciously feel his karma as something real. As you can imagine, it is still infinitely difficult for today's man to feel karma consciously. It is accepted as a theory, but to feel karma consciously is still very, very difficult for today's man. For I once said: Suppose we receive a slap in the face from someone. Certainly, outwardly, insofar as we are enclosed in our body and are beings between birth and death, we have to defend ourselves against it. But the higher point of view must be applied: Who gave you the slap in the face? Who put the one who gave you the slap in the face there so that he could give you the slap in the face? He would not be there if you had not placed him there through the way you are connected with him through karma. Think how terribly difficult it is for a person in the present time to think like this! Christians believe that they are people of the present, but they will still follow the one who advises them If someone strikes you on the left cheek, turn the other also – in thought, outwardly it will not work. And this distinction between inward and outward is not yet made by people. It becomes quite hopelessly difficult for them to somehow live in karma.

And yet, when we live our way into life from our embryonic state through birth, through our first childhood into our life, then that which helps to shape our body is our karma. Between our last death and our present birth, we have lived through and have even made it our business to live through how we have to experience karma and what kind of body we have to give ourselves so that it can live out its karma. We thus act, I might say, by kneading the soul-forces through our body. We even localize by placing ourselves in the place in the world where we can live out our karma. Thus we work out our personal destiny with the consciousness that we have between death and a new birth.

This is the opposite of the Greek idea of fate. But in order to come to this idea as a living one, man must pass through individualism, he must first grasp himself as an individual, I would say, in a very brutal way. And in this way of grasping himself as an individual, man is. But, I would say, he has had to accept something, really accept something, in order to live out the feeling: I am locked inside my skin and my flesh. He has had to accept something, man. That is: that he became a slave, a soul slave, to this corporeality. He allowed himself to be enslaved by corporeality, and the body initially became the master of a new, believed destiny. An Iphigenia felt in the age of which I spoke yesterday – every single sentence in yesterday's presentation is correct: I indicated approximately how many years she still lacked until she reached the age of twenty – an Iphigenia who had visions as far as Tantalus, which visions are now interpreted as reminiscences, caused by heredity. Such an Iphigenia is no longer possible in our present day. Such an Iphigenia, who, above all, grasps morally and ethically what lives in the generation, up to Tantalus: “Hear! I am of the Tantalus family!” That is not possible today. For today the doctor steps up to her and explains: hereditary burden! Your father, your mother, your grandfather, your grandmother and so on had such and such a condition, hereditary burden! And that's where it all comes from! — But this makes it clear that today's soul lives gasping under the yoke of physicality, gasping even in its perception, in its sensation.

Basically, my dear friends, we can see this gasping under physicality when we look at what has become of people under a certain school of thought

of the 19th century. They only looked at the physical and, because they only looked at the physical, got the descent of man purely from the animal world. Scientifically, too, man gasps under that to which his body connects him. And it will hardly be easy to draw people's attention to what is at the root of this. For people may come and say when their attention is drawn to all these things: “Do you think you can refute the legitimate aspects of Darwinism? Surely it is all well proven!” – It is certainly well proven, it is very well proven, but that is not the point. The point is that the sense of truth has changed. In the sense of this changed sense of truth, one can, of course, prove the whole thing rigorously. One must be out of touch with the present if one cannot feel what it is actually about.

But all this has practical consequences! With tremendous vehemence, external culture steers towards implementing the things that are thought in practical life and no longer allowing impulses of the spiritual and soul to apply within practical life. And how close are we today to asserting such things, for example in education or didactics, in upbringing! How close are we today to asserting such things in the education of young children! But just imagine if it ever came to pass that people would demand not only the things they demand of young children today, but also quite different things. Imagine if it ever came to pass that it became the duty of every parent to have a child examined by a materialistic doctor for its inherited characteristics once it has reached a certain age, which will then be determined by scientific-statistical data. In the meantime, however, the school system will have been divided into different categories, and after the medical examination by the materialistic doctor, the children will then have to be put into this or that school, perhaps even into this or that kindergarten, depending on their “hereditary burden”.

Today, people are still amazed when someone talks about such a perspective. But that is precisely what is so terrible about being amazed. One should not be amazed at all by such things, because if the form of Darwinism that is theoretically advocated today were true, then it would have to be done that way. That is the main thing: then that would be the only means, and it would be unscrupulous of people if they did not do it that way. There could be the slight possibility, the slight possibility, that, say, someone once, I don't know how, cheated the doctor a little, and a doctor issued a certificate that, in the opinion of others who were not officially appointed to do so, is not correct; while should have been put in section two, where there are certain “hereditary conditions,” the child may have been put in section five, where, according to the doctor's certificate, the future geniuses are, and then it could turn out that the child has become more intelligent than the person examining him! But that could only happen by “mistake.” The fact that something like that would be possible would not fool many people, would it!

This is just to give you an impulse to gain an insight into the direction in which this trend is heading, a trend that is still only theoretical in many cases today. Today it is only the fat drops on the soup, but these fat drops on the soup will become more and more powerful. More and more materialistic fat will be added, and then finally the whole plate will be full of this materialistic fat, and humanity will have to face the consequences. But this is precisely the point where people, through a world view, will have to overcome the great dangers that lie in the practical application of current theories. Once that which is in our spiritual science has found inner soul-life in a large number of souls, then one will not be able to persuade the person in whom the spiritual-scientific truths have found inner soul-life of all kinds of “hereditary burdens.” Rather, he will say: No matter how much you can prove about what my father, my mother, my grandfather, my grandmother and so on, I know that besides what I carry in my hereditary impulses, I still have that soul that has nothing to do with these hereditary impulses, because at the time when the bequeathing, the previous generation was there, this soul was in the spiritual world between death and the present birth. I also carry these forces within me, and one day I will see if I will not conquer the “hereditary burden”! — Certainly, as long as one believes in the theory of inheritance, and as long as spiritual-scientific truths do not become flesh and blood, one will not be able to conquer inheritance. One will only be able to conquer it when the spiritual-scientific concepts really come to life in the souls and become flesh and blood. But for that to happen, much else must happen.

Of course, it can be believed that spiritual truths will gradually gain more and more conviction for those who see through them, but many other things will have to be added. I therefore started today with an aperçu about art. Consider how far what is called truth today has departed from art and poetry since Greek times, how in the fifth post-Atlantic period a gulf arose between what people call truth and what they call art. But that has a lot to do with how the present generation, the present humanity, has related to art in general. And here it is really not without value if you take a look at how people today relate to art in general. There is an art in which — because it is of primary importance for the fifth post-Atlantic period and its aftermath — it is precisely not possible to make mistakes in world history, I repeat, it is precisely not possible to make mistakes; in which people today are also compelled to look at the artistic aspect: that is music. Only in music are people today inclined to recognize the artistic, because the nature of music forces them not to see music as a representation of external reality. For one can only fail to recognize the artistic in the very outermost reaches of the musical. If someone were to just listen here and there to see if music imitates the sound of waves or the whispering of the wind or something similar, then we would know that what imitates the sound of waves or the whispering of the wind or something similar is a secondary matter in music; that something completely different is at stake here, namely inner form, which in reality cannot be observed in any way externally on the physical plane. Thus music is protected by its inner nature from being drawn too strongly into the tendencies of the fifth post-Atlantic age.

The present age has less to offer poetry. There are things that lead from the artistic to the non-artistic, and in many poetic activities these things occur particularly. How many people today will still have a real feeling for the artistic in poetry, just as one must have a feeling for the artistic in music? Most people, when confronted with something, ask: is it true in relation to this or that model in reality? Yes, we have a whole art of naturalism that judges everything poetic only in terms of its conformity to external, physical reality, whereas in poetry it is irrelevant whether something conforms to external, physical reality. It is just as unimportant for a piece of writing whether a character is drawn truthfully in the external, physical sense as it is whether a musical performance imitates the sound of wind or waves. So that one can say that the present generation is less predisposed to poetry than to music. In truth, it does not depend on whether I describe something that is true about this or that reality in four stanzas, but rather on how the second stanza arises from the first, how the third arises from the first two, and so on; in a sonnet, it does not depend on expressing this or that, but rather on how the four, four, three, three lines intertwine; how do the four lines intertwine? What inner impulses live in them – similar to melodies or harmony, but transferred to the realm of the imagination, to the realm of sound? – There is actually very little feeling for that.

A woman, a very witty woman, once gave me a novella – it was a long time ago, about thirty years – and said that I should read it and give her my opinion. This novella was of such a nature – one was dealing with a very witty woman – that something was told, as one might tell an external event, so that I found myself obliged to say: the whole thing requires, above all, that you undertake a division that you, so to speak, carve out three novellistic stanzas, a first novellistic stanza - I now mean in a figurative sense -, a second, a third, and that an inner structure, an inner structure of an artistic nature, extends into it. - You should have seen the way the lady in question looked at me - to demand such a thing! What - she said - three stanzas should I do? she said, ironically, at my suggestion.

Then there is the next art, for which the present generation has even less aptitude, and that is painting. Painting, how it lives out of form and color, how it must see the artistic and does not have to look at it: how does what is depicted bear a physical resemblance to this or that external object? Of course, the artistic aspect can also lie in physical similarity, for example in portraiture or the like, but then something quite different is important than the likeness. What matters is that the artistic aspect comes through precisely in the way the work is treated. And there is terribly little of that in humanity at present. What people judge first in painting today can be compared to wanting to judge music by the similarity of a melody or something similar to something external in nature.

However, the descent from music to poetry is also noticed in another way, and it is also noticeable in the present in another way. Someone may consider themselves a musical genius, but they still have to study something. Today, however, poetic geniuses consider it quite dreadful if they are supposed to have studied something for the finer technical aspects. And there is almost a similar tendency with regard to painting or the like.

But when it comes to sculpture, people's understanding of the subject sinks even lower still in relation to the present day. When judging sculpture, people consider almost nothing else except what might be produced if a series of sounds were heard and one spent the whole night trying to determine which natural phenomenon it resembled. Most judgments passed on plastic art and sculpture are actually of this kind, and it is only through sculpture that we can see that an understanding of sculpture will arise when spiritual science can be sought in the human personality in a living way. Remember many of the things I have presented here – and had to present here on purpose – about the way of empathizing with the space above and below, right and left, front and back; remember all these discussions. Remember the arguments I had about the left and right sides of the human being, and consider how much can be developed in this way, this experiencing of the etheric body of the human being, which first shapes the physical forms, an experiencing that the Greeks had instinctively, that was lost in the fifth post-Atlantic period, and that must be resurrected. One can already say: the time must come when sculpture will be conceived in such a way that everything that today pushes people to their judgment is left out, and everything that people are only willing to consider in relation to music is included.

Not to mention architecture! For if people today were not forced to place their chairs somewhere in the room with the table, and to put a cover around it, and if they were not forced to somehow enter the rooms and look out into the open, then they would not find any forms today that somehow signify an architectural design. For what do architects do? They study Renaissance forms, classical forms. That is to say, they imitate, because you cannot put up mere cubic forms or polyhedral or similar boxes everywhere. That architecture will be able to give birth to forms again will depend entirely on people learning anew to feel how the Creative Power of the world pours into forms. For this had to be lost in the time of individualism. And so it is necessary to revive it; necessary that in addition to what is to bring life into the conceptions of the human soul, the artistic perception is also added, that the artistic contributes essentially. That is why it is good that a number of our dear friends have not only heard theoretical lectures on art within our spiritual-scientific endeavors, but have also actively participated in the creation of certain forms and other artistic endeavors, even if what is created here is only a beginning for something in the future.

I would like to say that the last refuge that the world-view people of the present day have chosen is what they call: reason taught by external experience. With this reason, taught by outer experience, people have now built the present-day worldview of materialism, and more and more the purely mechanical and biological, physical, chemical concepts are to become decisive for the worldview, and there is no inclination to go into the liveliness value of the concepts, into the way in which they can enliven the soul. I have expressly emphasized that the great advances in scientific research must be recognized by our spiritual science, that we should not expose and embarrass ourselves by constantly railing against scientific progress. One only rails against it as long as one does not know it. When one gets to know it, one gets an impressive impression. And we should really realize that we should not complain about science because we belong to spiritual science if we have no idea whatsoever of any kind of natural science. But let us turn again to what world view values there are in current science, or rather to the way in which current scientific concepts can become precisely the significant world view values. We live in difficult and oppressive times today. We see how death is spreading across wide areas in an endlessly oppressive manner. We see how suffering and pain are spreading, a picture that every soul should contemplate today. Especially in our time, it is so depressing when souls divert their gaze from the great world events and are so concerned with their own personal affairs. From this point of view, my dear friends, it has caused me, for example, such infinite pain in the past year that so much personal information has come to light in our ranks at a time when the great interests of humanity could so intensely approach our soul. But I don't want to talk about this and that at all, I just want to draw attention to it.

How do people of the present day face such overwhelming events of the times? There may be those who say: Does not the transience of the physical, especially in this time when we see thousands and thousands of deaths taking place all over the world, make us so aware that people must awaken within themselves all the ideas that can arise in them about the eternal powers of the human soul? Are not these events particularly suited to lead human thoughts to the eternal powers of the human soul? And so one could imagine that perhaps someone who was already very inclined to surrender completely to Ahriman, that is, to materialism, would be reminded by the force of the present impressions of the vanity of the transitory, of the withering away of the transitory, to turn his gaze to the eternal. That would be conceivable. But if we look at some of what comes to light in reality, if we take one of the most outstanding scientific visionaries of the present day, if we take Ernst Haeckel. What is the approximate content of Ernst Haeckel's “thoughts of eternity”? He says: “We see countless people passing away, an inexplicable fate befalling the physical life of man on earth. Don't we realize from this how worthless any thoughts about the eternity of the human soul are when we see that people can be cut down like that? Is this not proof that the scientific world view is right when it says: Nothing of meaning extends beyond the merely physical and corporeal? Is what we are experiencing now not proof that those who speak of an eternity of the human soul are wrong?

It cannot be said that the one who, from the present-day concepts, would be made aware of eternal forces in the human soul through the present-day events, would be more logical than the one who says: We see people dying after all, through what I can only call chance! How can one believe that there is really meaning in human development or that eternal values are there! From the present standpoint, it cannot be said that one is more or less logical than the other. You cannot consider one idea logical and the other illogical if you are seriously concerned with logic. For those who argue in this way are reminded of what lies in the present scientific achievements. One can truly admire these infinitely. One can say: just think what chemical science has achieved, and mechanical science! It has perhaps achieved wonderful things when it comes to bringing about this or that in human progress, but it has also used its wonderful achievements to create very ingenious instruments of murder. This science can be completely neutral. It can produce the most wonderful instruments for exploring the secrets of nature, and through the same achievements, the most horrible instruments of murder! And so it is with this science in general. It can prove from the harrowing events that human souls cannot be absorbed in transience, and that precisely these events prove – it can prove this just as well! – that the human soul is something eternal. These scientific concepts are completely neutral.

Something positive must come, the message, the tidings, the revelation must come from the spiritual worlds, and these spiritual worlds must work through their inner power! You know that what comes through these revelations will not contradict but will be in full harmony with the achievements of natural science. Therefore, those who believe that scientific concepts will ever develop into a satisfactory world view are stating something quite nonsensical. Spiritual research must be added to scientific concepts, and therein lies the way to escape from the great dangers of the present. Attention must be directed to the fact that the downward path is the one that is connected with the very greatest progress, and that the upward path is the one that must come from the revelation of spiritual life. We must be radical in this fact of world events alone and only. That is what matters. Only spiritual science will be able to speak again of deeper secrets.

Truly, my dear friends, it is not easy for the concept of karma to take root in the soul. This will only happen when a larger number of people are able to see the narrowness of such concepts as “inherited burden,” the invalidity and infertility of such concepts, and look at what lives in the soul. Then, when people come and see a child of whom the physical doctor says: 'He will live out such and such, but there is nothing to be done, because the father was like that, the mother was like that, the grandfather was like that, the grandmother was like that and so on, there is nothing to be done – when the physical doctor says that, then people must have a sense that this too can be true, that there is a soul in this that has prepared itself for something quite different from what the physical doctor believes according to heredity, for something quite different between its last death and the new birth, and that above all this must not be left fallow, but these forces must be developed at all costs. Spiritual knowledge must become the norm in the world, and people will be able to see that it is unscrupulous not to turn their attention to the spiritual and soul realm. They will have to realize that if they do not turn their attention to these spiritual qualities during the education, they will remain latent. For at a certain age, the physicality has already been expressed; the spirit can no longer penetrate it, and then it remains fallow for the incarnation in question, which should have been noticed.

This is where spiritual science takes on a practical significance. It is to be hoped that this practical significance will be recognized. These are the things that I wanted to bring before your soul today in connection with yesterday.

Automated Translation

We have already gained an insight into the complexity of the human being. This is not always borne in mind, because, out of a certain complacency in our quest for knowledge, we strive for simplicity, for a simplification of knowledge, for a certain schematism. Only a more exact study of the things we have observed over the years can show us the complexity of the totality of human nature.

Take, for example, the fact that the human physical body arose in relation to its first predisposition in the distant past, during the ancient Saturn period. What arose at that time as the first predisposition of the human physical body, we still carry within us today, but in such a way that we have to recognize it from the transformed product that we have gradually become. After we have passed through the evolution of the sun, moon and earth as a physical human body, it is no longer possible for us to recognize with ordinary perception what came into being during the ancient Saturn time. For this human body has been transformed during the time of the sun, moon and earth. During the time of the sun it has undergone a transformation through the etheric body permeating it; during the time of the moon it has undergone a transformation through the astral body permeating it, and during the time of the earth it has undergone a transformation through the I permeating it.

If we now consider only the physical human body, not yet the etheric body as such, not the astral body and not the I, but only the physical body, we must say that this physical body has undergone four main transformations.

Once it was there as a physical body, and the higher limbs of human nature were not yet in it. Then it was transformed under the influence of the ether body, then under the influence of the astral body and finally under the influence of the ego. But all this is the physical body, it is a product of the transformation of the physical body.

Let us make a note of this: first we have the first formation of the physical body during the old Saturn time. Then, under the influence of the solar time, we have what the etheric body makes of the physical body, that is, the original formation, and what the evolution of the sun makes of it. Then, under the influence of the moon-time, we have what the astral body makes of it, and during the earth-time, what the I makes of it. These are four forms of transformation of the physical body (see diagram on page 13). We have now considered what is brought about by the etheric and astral bodies and by the I in this physical body. But we have not considered the higher aspects of human nature in themselves, nor what changes have taken place over time in the etheric body, the astral body and the I. During the sun time, the etheric body is added; it undergoes its own development during the sun time and then undergoes changes during the moon time through the influence of the astral body and during the earth time through the influence of the I, so that this etheric body also has a threefold nature. Finally, during the moon time, the astral body is added; it develops for itself in its astrality during the moon time and during the earth time through the I. But now only during the earth time the I itself is added as a single one.

We can now also look at the whole from a different point of view. When we consider the I, we actually have a fourfold I within us. We have within us that which the I makes out of the physical body. We then have that which the I makes out of the etheric body, then that which it makes out of the astral body and then the I itself in the I.

But now let us pose a different question. When we see a person as they are on the physical plane – we know, when we count the sections of the diagram, that the person is a ten-fold being – so when they stand before us on the physical plane, what of their entire ten-fold being do we actually see?

1. Physical body 2. Etheric body 3. Astral body 4. I
5. Etheric body 6. Astral body 7. I
8. Astral body 9. I
10. I

Now, basically, very little of all this is initially present in the physical plane; most of what I have written here about this tenfold nature remains hidden. What is present initially is this I here (diagram p. 19: I 1). What is this I? This I is what the physical body is, what the I has made out of the physical body. Please pay close attention to what I am going to say, because only then can you get a real idea of it.

When you look at someone, the shape of their head, the physiognomy of their nose and mouth, when you see what they are like – even if you dissect them as an anatomist or physiologist – that is what the I has made out of their physical body.

What existence in the moon, the sun or Saturn has made of the physical body escapes your gaze, and remains hidden from you. Only what the I makes of the physical body is there before your physical eyes. Only by paying attention can we form a clear concept of the matter.

I will try to help you further with another consideration to explain the matter. If you have an animal in front of you, for example a dog, a wolf, a cat, then you have a form that is made by an astral body. When you look at a human being, you have a form that extends into the blood circulation, which is made by the I. When you look at an animal, on the other hand, you have a form that is made by the astral body.

What remains hidden is the configuration of the physical body, which is made by the etheric, the astral and the physical body itself. What we experience externally is actually an embodiment of the ego. Let us bear this in mind. It is an embodiment of the ego, and when we speak precisely about the human being, we should say: the human being in his entire form, right down to the blood circulation, is an ego embodied on earth.

So we perceive what the I does with the physical body. But what do we not yet perceive? What we do not yet perceive is precisely this I. If you call this I 1 and this I 4 (see the diagram on page 19), then I 1 is perceptible from the outside, I 4 is what you do not perceive from the outside, but only as a self-experience. When you experience yourself in your self-awareness, when you experience what you perceive, what you feel, what you think, in short, when you experience yourself as I, then you perceive this I as such: that is the I that philosophers speak of. I 4, then, you perceive as an inner experience.

Now you would not be able to perceive it as an inner experience if only the ego were really there. I have already told you that we not only sleep at night but also during the day. We are not fully aware of all our inner experiences, and to the extent that we sleep during the day, the beings of the higher hierarchies also live in us during the day.

In this I live, stretching out their impulses from the spiritual world, the Angeloi, the Archangeloi and the Archai. In that which sleeps most of all, in the decisive will, the power of the Archai lives first. The angels and archangels also live in the will, but the deepest impulses of the will always come from the archai. Only, as I have already explained to you, man knows very little about his will. The power of the archangels lives in man's feelings and the power of the angels in his thinking. We may say that the Archai, who give the will, the Archangeloi, who give the feelings, and the Angeloi, who give the thinking, live in us as unconscious self-awareness. And all this strives and weaves into the I and finally becomes what man calls his inner soul life.

But actually only the I is known. 1 Just as behind what we see as the embodiment of the I lies what the astral body, the etheric body and the physical body itself have made out of the physical body, so behind what we experience inwardly lies what the angels, archangels and archai bring about. So that we can say: In essence, the human being knows very little about what he actually is.

When one person meets another, they perceive the other person's I 1; when they look into themselves, they perceive their own I 4. So eight of the ten limbs remain hidden at first. But even if these limbs remain hidden from us, we can still say that their effects come to light in certain individual phenomena of human experience. What the I does with the etheric body remains hidden. How the I here, which I would like to call I 2, behaves in the etheric body remains hidden at first, but only seemingly so. We will see in a moment that something comes out.

What the I 1 looks like is revealed to us when we meet a person, in their shape and form. Of course, the I 2, that is, what the I makes out of the etheric body, can only appear to a clairvoyant in the same way that the I 1 manifests itself in the physical form for external perception. The etheric body is not a body of form but of motion. You can sense, even without clairvoyance, how the I2 sets the etheric body in very specific rhythmic movements, just as the I1 gives the physical body its form. But these rhythmic movements, these inner movements of the etheric body, come to expression in the physical body by pressing through into it, or rather, they come to expression in the physical world.

We try to express through eurythmy movements what the I can produce in the etheric body in terms of movements, I would say, to the extent that this can already happen in the present. If you could imagine a poem or piece of music eurythmized in such a way that you could abstract, disregard the physical body and only look at what the etheric body is doing, then you would have the I in the etheric body moving within.

We try to defy Ahriman with this eurythmy; because Ahriman has come into the world, the human etheric body has become so hardened that it could not develop eurythmy as a natural gift. People would perform eurythmy if Ahriman had not hardened the human etheric body to such an extent that the eurythmic cannot be expressed; for this eurythmic must force its way through only one limb of the human physical body and is held captive by the other limbs of the physical body.

The etheric body, which is actually caused to live in eurythmic movements through music, singing and also speaking, is held back by the heaviness of the physical body, that is, Ahriman, from actually carrying them out and can only express them through a single limb: it can only be deposited in the lungs and larynx by forcing the air through them. This is how speech and song come about. We can therefore say that the I, by wanting to thoroughly organize and thoroughly eurythmize the etheric body, must be content with one part of the human being in song and speech, instead of taking hold of the whole human being.

When a person sings or speaks, a spectrum of the whole person always comes to light in the tone and in the vocalization. What one hears is the tone, the vowel. But for the clairvoyant consciousness, what comes to light is basically the whole person, the whole person in a certain form of movement.

A, E, I, O, U, that is always a whole person, namely a spectrum, an ethereal ghost of the whole person. Only the etheric body is moved in a one-sided way, so that when you hear a person speak: A, E, I, O, U – it happens that you see five people in succession, only always in different forms of movement and in such a way that the whole person is not always seen fully and evenly, but sometimes more of the head, sometimes more of the hands, sometimes more of the legs. The other parts then, I would say, recede into darkness, into gloom.

But now, in connection with that same I 2, of which I have just told you, there is an entity from the series of the angels that resounds in its effects in language and song. But this Angelos is precisely the one of whom I have spoken several times in these lectures. This is something that, of course, cannot come to consciousness at all, because not even what I have just told you about the activity of the I in the etheric body comes to consciousness when people sing or speak. A being from the hierarchy of the Angeloi pours into all of this. This is a servant of the folk spirit, and in this way the particular language coloring comes into the human being from the folk spirit. The fact that the folk spirit belongs to the hierarchy of the archangeloi is connected to the higher realms. It is a complicated path by which the folk-like, the national, enters the human being. But that is how it is integrated, in this way and at this point. Behind this Angelos stands the folk spirit, which is an entity from the series of archangeloi.

We will now call this next ego, which again remains hidden, ego 3. Man does not experience this ego 3 directly either. For that which one experiences directly is ego 4. What one sees from the outside is ego 1. And when we perceive the effect of ego 2 from the outside, it is when a person sings or speaks. I3 lives in very subconscious regions; it lives in everything that man is capable of in the scope of his imaginative creativity. Everything that man can produce within himself in the way of imaginative pictures, pictures that are not copies of the physical external world, comes from I3, so that we can say: it lives as creative imagination in the broadest sense.

What you find in my Philosophy of Freedom under the title Moral Imagination would also have to be described here. It appears as a moral imagination that creates moral principles. Everything creative, for good or ill, belongs to this part of the human being. I said, “for better or for worse,” because you might think that there are many people who show a striking lack of imagination. One can only say, “Oh, if only they had more real imagination!” Because a little cultivation of real imagination is a good remedy for certain harms of life.

I would like to draw your attention to just one thing. There are people who seem to have no imagination at all in the areas where one often seeks imagination. Yes, when they sometimes take the opportunity to express themselves about imagination, they even show a pronounced hatred for all imaginative creations. But if you get at their souls, they show that they basically have a great deal of imagination: no sooner do they hear a word about their neighbor that is detrimental to him, than they invent whole stories and tell the most outrageous things about their neighbor. All lies are the product of the imagination, a transformation of the imagination into evil. And if you take this extension of the imagination into evil, you will realize that imagination is quite widespread in the human world. If you consider all the creations of fantasy that people bring about by saying this or that about their fellow human beings, or by otherwise passing this or that off as their own, you will find a considerable amount of fantasy even in those people who, in the ordinary, more noble sense, have little imagination. Human abilities sometimes go astray, and mendacity and slander are devious forms of fantasy.

All in all, we can say that down there in the stream of human nature, there rests I3, because in everything that man can create out of himself, that wells up out of the depths of his soul life, in good and in evil, is that which comes from I3. But this I-3 is influenced by beings from the category of the angels and beings from the category of the archangels, for better or for worse, by nature, by Lucifer or by Ahriman.

You get an image of human nature when you define it here. (See diagram: I 4, I 3, I 2, I 1.) When you define it here, you have the revelation of the human ego on the outside; when you define it here, you have the revelation of the human ego on the inside. Between the two, you have what I would call half-outside, the expression of the inside to the outside; that is I 2. I 3 is what is only half inside, namely coming from unknown depths into the inside. On the other hand, what lies upwards from this oblique line here is something of the hidden human nature that lies towards physical nature. What lies below this oblique line are the nearest spiritual hierarchies that are connected with the human being. Basically, when we speak of the human being on earth, we have in mind hardly anything other than what lies within this line. Above it, however, is everything that is present in man as a residuum, as a remnant from the old Saturn, Sun and Moon times.

If you draw a line here ( )), you get everything that is hidden in the moon time in man. If you draw a line here (©), you get everything that is hidden in the sun time in man. If you draw a line here (h), you get everything that is hidden in the Saturn time in man.

If you draw a line here (9), you get what will become apparent during the Jupiter period, when man will live among the Angeloi. If you draw a line here (9), you get what will become apparent during the Venus period, and here at the end you get what will become apparent during the Vulcan period.

This scheme gives you a rough idea of the complexity of human nature. It is good not only to look at things as they present themselves in the course of our cycles, but also to relate the individual things to each other. Today I wanted to give you an example of how these things can be related to each other.

There are various ways to find such a scheme. First, I will tell you how a clairvoyant arrives at such a scheme. The clairvoyant will say to himself: I meet a person; from this person, I first perceive his outer form with physical perception, everything that belongs to the outside. But now, with clairvoyance, I can deepen this form; in a sense, I get to the bottom of the outer form. If I then disregard the outer form, I perceive an ethereal being, and into this ethereal being play, song, and in general all sound expressions, play a part. This deepens the outer form for me. In the same way I can deepen my inner life. I can develop my self-awareness in the way one develops it in ordinary physical life. But then you can also deepen it. You can pour your inner life into the world, which otherwise only manifests itself as a fantasy. But then something real arises. Then imagination really arises, then fantasy ceases to be mere fantasy. The human being enters into a feeling that tells him: fantasy is no longer merely fantasy, but is immersed in something real. Something comes to meet you and you know that this is the inner and this is the outer (see drawing), and they come to meet each other.

This is how the clairvoyant consciousness experiences it. Then it has to piece together what it can experience in the vision by placing itself in the time of the moon, the sun and Saturn. In this way, one can clairvoyantly and creatively experience the necessity of such a scheme within oneself. Those who have gone through the first stages of initiation can experience it that way.

But even if you have not yet reached this stage, you can help yourself to a certain extent, so that you gradually come to experience inwardly what is approaching you from the outside. If you take everything that has been presented so far about spiritual science, you can put this scheme together yourself, as it is written here. You just have to make an effort not just to read in succession, but to try to connect the things that have been presented. You can form this scheme from the available cycle material. And that is very useful, because by processing the material offered in the cycles in this way, one progresses from an external assimilation to an internal processing. This internal processing has a high value for real progress.

Today I have given you an example of how to build such a scheme from the cycles. I now hope that many of you will gradually build such schemes. Then, firstly, there will be less uninspired speculation about the content of the cycles, and that is very good; and secondly, through such compilations, real inner evolution will take place. Individuals will progress when such fruitful compilations are made. You cannot just make a few such combinations from the cycles. From what is now available as cycle material, if you make it fruitful, you can make not only hundreds, but many, many thousands, perhaps even more, of such combinations. So you see, you have enough to do if you apply what is given in the cycles in a correspondingly fruitful way.

If you go from such a scheme to an expansion of the scheme, then you will go even further. If you separate what is actually on the physical earth plane, this fourfold formation of the ego, then you can say: everything here lies under the diagonal strip, and everything there lies above it. For these points, we just have to reverse the order. What has been written down here, you have to put up there. Then we have the six points at the top; so we have to make six points up there and write what are here six links on these six points. What is up here, we would have to write down below. We could make six points again and we could write the six points where the upper points are.

But we do not need to do that, because the cosmos has already done that for us. That which is on the earth is there; and although that which lives in us from the Saturn, Sun and Moon periods is hidden for the time being, and that which will come as the Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan periods is also hidden, the traces of it are still 'present in the universe, in the Zodiac, in the zodiac.

So this scheme can be expanded. Everything that is not human on earth can also be found if we ascend or descend. This is just a hint of how you can connect our elementary teachings with what is contained in the cycles about the spiritual hierarchies and their connection with the worlds.

But you will also find much that can be applied to pedagogy, let us say. Even pedagogy will arise when we look at something like we have now discussed in the right way.

Consider that we have come to the conclusion that language and singing are present in I 2. So that we can say: language and singing have been driven out of the whole of human nature by Ahriman. Once this is properly understood, something extraordinarily important for real life will arise. First of all, the principle will arise for singing pedagogy that one must evoke an awareness in the person learning to sing of the part played by the etheric body in the process: so to speak, of the continuous transmission of sounds to the etheric body. Only when this involvement of the etheric body in singing is really taken into account will the impulse for change occur, which, with regard to vocal pedagogy, must necessarily come from our principles. In practical terms, this will be reflected in the fact that singing teachers will increasingly encourage their students to connect the feeling in the physical organs less consciously, but to develop more consciousness in what, so to speak, is adjacent to these physical organs. The singer must have a feeling, not so much of the movement of the organs, but of what the air in and around them does in its movement. An emancipation of the conscious experience of the sound in the air from the experience of the sound in the organ is what will follow from the correct recognition of the spiritual-scientific principles in singing pedagogy.

Likewise, with regard to speech technique, especially as regards recitation, it will become more and more apparent that here too it is a matter of becoming truly aware of the elementary interweaving while speaking artistically.

In this way it is possible for the tone to become a truly artistic tone, for the speaker to gain a sense of awareness that, in speaking artistically, one is not merely living locked up in one's own skin; rather, I would put it this way: the person speaking artistically will feel the sound in the air, feel the tone in the air as a living being, and through this feeling of the tone as a living being, there will be something like an undertone, like an undertone in speaking. Feeling the sound in living speech: this in turn will enrich the pedagogy of recitation.

It is precisely by responding to the intimacies of spiritual science that something meaningful for teaching and learning in life will arise. Much of what resonates when touching on such things as those touched on today is actually still quite unknown to humanity today. For example, it would be good to develop an awareness of how a certain new formulation of sounds has been attempted in individual areas of my Mystery Dramas. This can most easily be followed in the seventh picture of the first Mystery Drama. But there are also such passages in the other Mystery Dramas where this can be followed.

A certain inner shaping of the sound – in addition to everything else that is in it – is the expression of a new element in poetic creation, of which there is hardly a trace anywhere today, but which will take the place of what rhyme, end rhyme or initial rhyme was in earlier times. A certain inward, I would say ethereal-poetic experience of the sound as opposed to the more external-physical experience of the sound, as it is in end rhyme or in initial rhyme. There is a need, even in our increasingly prosaic recitation, to strip away the old forms. Not many people today are willing to use the initial rhyme, the alliteration, as Jordan tried to do; and not many reciters today are willing to emphasize the final rhyme as it was originally emphasized. It is better to emphasize the sense. But that is prose; it is not poetic speech if one merely recites in a manner that is analogous to the sense. Poetic recitation would be recitation with an excellent emphasis on that which is not the prosaic element in the artistic form. But that will only be possible again when one, instead of living in the externals of sound configuration in rhyme or external rhythm, lives in that inner rhythm. In this way one will have to live into the sound in the way I have discussed in another area: as I have discussed it in recent lectures, where I spoke of living into the individual tone in musical composition in the future.

All these examples show that it is not enough to learn the theories of spiritual science, but that it depends on an inner experience of what we take in and on a penetration of the whole soul with what spiritual science wants, as I have already said on another occasion.

And it is precisely with this that we should begin our work. Insofar as something that is capable of providing inspiration can be presented externally, it should be presented in this building, in order to feel an effect in the whole soul and not just in the eye through the contemplation of forms and colors. But what has been suggested will only be fully realized when we feel impelled to shape our whole life in the same way — wherever this is possible today — as was attempted in this building. But then we must also try to make spiritual science truly alive, to really pour it into what we undertake and want to do. It is necessary to become aware that with the spiritual-scientific world view, something is to be given that produces a kind of new human being in that old human being who has come to us like an heirloom from earlier earth evolution. At the same time, with spiritual science, we absorb the prerequisites that serve to help give birth to what is to be born for the future of the earth.

If one wants this, then one must indeed connect one's entire being deeply, deeply with spiritual science. We have already experienced beautiful examples of such penetration here and there. We have often spoken of an outstanding example. I would like to take this opportunity to mention a few words by our friend Christian Morgenstern, which represent such an example of how spiritual science can penetrate our hearts and souls as a soul experience. It is not by absorbing spiritual science in theory that it really penetrates us, but only when it is lived in every fiber of our being.

And this is one example, one example among many, of how spiritual science has been so beautifully expressed in a poem like Christian Morgenstern's. This poem could seemingly have been written from a different worldview, but in reality it breathes the spirit of our spiritual science in every line, and not only in every line, but also in the vocalization - but vocalization here taken in a spiritual sense.

I am born of God as all being is born of God.
I go to God to die with all that is mine.
I return home, O God, to live as Thine.

First I was given out of Thy I.
then it was a matter of acquiring what had been given,
of raising it breast to breast to Thee as a Thou.

But pride in the midst of it wanted to ruin it,
and it became You, and You were lost to it...
Until You, overpowering, summoned me!

Then I was born to You for the second time:
for I understood to die for the first time,
for I felt to live for the first time.

We have tried to substantiate certain truths about the inner life of the fifth post-Atlantean period and about the development of the period from the sources that spiritual science opens up, using individual examples that simply result from the study of the physical world. Yesterday, in particular, we pointed out how important it is to note that a certain crisis can also be observed in the outer life during the 19th century. I have often pointed out how the mid-19th century in particular represents the crisis of materialism, and yesterday we were able to show, using a particular example from our own area, how certain indications — only indications, but still indications — of insights that could only come through anthroposophy were present, but how these insights are buried, I would say historically buried, just as a geological history of the earth is buried. that can only come through anthroposophy, but how these insights are buried, I would say, historically buried, just as one geological layer of the earth is buried and another lies above it. And so one would be able to prove in many cases in the spiritual life of modern times how the urge, the drive for a deeper insight, as it is opened up by anthroposophy, was present, especially present from certain conditions of earlier times in the course of the first half of the 19th century, and how then, brought about by the great advances in natural science, another layer, a completely opposite layer of human thinking, human thinking, has been superimposed on it, so that today what was already there is extremely difficult to reveal. And those people who today draw their concepts and ideas only from the uppermost layer covering the lower one, are strangely in darkness about what was already there. In this way, quite grotesque things arise.

Especially when you look at Troxler, who was also born in Switzerland and taught there for many years, and consider him in the context of European intellectual life, as I tried to do in my last book, The Riddle of Man), one can see in him how, although he did not yet have the things that can now come through spiritual science or anthroposophy, he worked towards them, I would like to say, in certain ideas, concrete ideas. In a straight line of development, if this existed in human development, but it is not given to the human race, a real spiritual deepening could have arisen, as it must be drawn today from the sources that spiritual science has. Then, in this country least of all, would spiritual science appear today as a foreign plant, but it would appear to those people who would only know the spiritual life of the 19th century in one of its most important representatives, as a continuation of the spiritual life. And if someone who was familiar with Swiss intellectual life were to speak at the Aarau conference in May 1916, he would say something like this: With this anthroposophy, we Swiss in particular do not have anything foreign coming into the country, but rather we greet an old acquaintance in this anthroposophy; after all, we have even been given a beautiful, wonderful definition of anthroposophy by our fellow countryman Troxler. In connection with the whole historical life, especially in this country, that would be the truth if it were told. But instead of that, in this Aarauer Aura in the writing, of which I already spoke to you yesterday, another thing was said. First of all, this spiritual science is lumped together with other things in order to be able to present it as a quantite negligeable, so to speak. It is said: “The overview may only use what is necessary for the characterization” — the overview that is to be given in this speech.

"Among these movements, all of which are immigrants in our country, the best known are the Christian Scientists, popularly known as faith healers, the Mazdaznan, the Theosophists and finally the Anthroposophists with their enormous temple in Dornach.

So we see that while it would be so nice to correspond to reality, that in Anthroposophy we would greet an old acquaintance here, Anthroposophy is declared to be an intruder. You see, that is just one symptomatic expression, but it could be multiplied not by thousands but by millions in our time, such a symptomatic expression of how our time is inclined to speak untruthfully. This is precisely what one should study in the impulses that underlie our contemporary culture: what the inclination towards untruthfulness is in our time. Of course, one soon realizes why the man in this case tells the untruth. He does not know the truth, of course, and has no idea of this truth, because he probably has not read much by Troxler. But that is precisely the characteristic of our time, that the most uncalled stand up and become teachers, enlighteners of the people, and that this must necessarily be connected with the spreading of untruth. Lack of thought is what underlies such things.

Now it is a matter of seeing these things in a deeper context. First of all, seeing that these things already arise from impulses, as we have discussed them in the course of this week, and that they must be seen through by our friends, so that our friends with spiritual science can place themselves in our present life in the right way. For it cannot be denied that it is quite difficult for many to assert themselves today as spiritual scientists, as confessors of spiritual science, in view of the situation in the world and what is happening in the outer world, and what, as can be seen more and more, naturally cannot find anything in this spiritual science that it understands. First of all, one must see the bigger picture. Some time ago, we characterized how completely inaccurate the theories of natural scientists are in the face of reality, given the great progress they have made in the world of facts. The facts that natural science has brought to the surface of existence can only be admired; it is truly a great achievement. But what has been said about the struggle for existence, about selection, about all the problems related to the problem of birth and kinship, all this is as inaccurate as possible, as is already recognized by scientists today. I even explained this in the public lecture in Basel.

But all of this is connected through the way in which certain old traditions have emerged in modern times with the present form of these old traditions. It is intimately connected with this. Modern times have indeed shown that they need the old times for their educational life. For the humanities scholar, this is not surprising, because the humanities scholar knows that certain impulses repeat themselves in every age. So it is only natural that impulses which intervene in a different form in the fifth post-Atlantic period in the development of humanity should also arise as repetitions of the fourth post-Atlantic period. This fourth post-Atlantic period began, as we know, in the eighth century BC and ends in the fifteenth century AD. Since the fifteenth century AD, we have entered a completely new era, as can be seen even on the surface, as we demonstrated yesterday with a few examples. But certain things that took place in the fourth post-Atlantic period are repeating themselves on a different level in our period. And I would like to say: “Outwardly, this fifth post-Atlantic period has indeed shown that it even has to consciously carry over certain things from the fourth post-Atlantic period. Did we not see how in the 15th century Greek scholars emigrated to Western Europe and brought ancient Greek scholarship in a new form first to Italy and then to the rest of Europe? What blossomed in European intellectual life through the impulses that arose from the traditions of an older time is called the Renaissance. And more than one might think, today's life still depends on the Renaissance.

But in other ways, too, one can show everywhere how, in relation to certain things, this fifth post-Atlantic period wanted to build on the fourth post-Atlantic period. Is it not a remarkable fact that Pico de Miranda, in the 15th century, when one could still speak more freely about Christianity than today, undertook to invite the most important scholars from all over Europe to Rome to discuss with them nine hundred theses that would essentially show how to arrive at a worldview suitable for the coming era. Of course, for obvious reasons, nothing much came of this. But this Pico de Mirandola, who was steeped in Greek culture, tried to substantiate Christianity in all its profound wisdom by drawing on Plato and Platonic philosophy. He believed that with the help of Plato, the Greek philosopher and greatest philosophical genius of the fourth post-Atlantic period, Christianity could be proven. So he wanted to create a connecting bridge between Plato and Christianity. One would like to say what a wonderful perspective would have resulted from this if such things could have been successful, if another geological layer had not been superimposed on top of it, if today in Europe we had a free, genuine Christianity permeated by Platonic philosophy!

But something else preceded that. Something preceded it that is connected in the deepest sense with many peculiarities of more recent spiritual life. If we take a look at the origin of Christianity, if we take a look at the time in which that exalted Being, whom we have come to know as the Christ, embodied Himself in a human body, and at the time in which that human life of feeling spread life, which was linked to this greatest event of the development of the earth, to the Mystery of Golgotha, which alone gives meaning to life on earth – if one takes a look at this time of the first spread of Christianity, then one notices that among those who, as a small group of people, brought this Christianity to Europe, there were some – they were then called Gnostics, especially by their opponents – who lived in the belief that the highest ideas, the highest wisdom, were necessary to make understandable the most significant event in the evolution of humanity on Earth.

We know that it is a misunderstanding of today's spiritual science to lump it together with Gnosticism. That is not the point. Gnosticism is something that was alive in the first Christian centuries, and was then buried like an old geological layer, and it cannot revive in the old form; it would then take on a Luciferic character. What is today spiritual science or anthroposophy must be born completely out of our time, and precisely this must be born completely out of our time, must fully reckon with all the great advances of the scientific world view. Thus spiritual science must not be confused with Gnosticism; but it must be recognized that the Gnostics, starting from the highest ideas, attempted to understand the Mystery of Golgotha by way of a spiritual evolution of the universe. And there is a deep striving for wisdom in the Gnostic systems. Everywhere we look, if we examine the matter from a spiritual-scientific point of view, we see how Christianity appears, I might say is borne by the Gnostic vehicle, as it appears to have been born out of a broad wisdom. It is one of the peculiarities of the development of Western civilization from the beginning of our era to the present day that this development was met with all the might of the wisdom in which Christianity was steeped. In a sense, the Gnostics were the ones most fiercely opposed. That is why only a few of their writings have come down to us, and most of what we know about the Gnostics comes from the writings of those who supposedly refuted them. But they did not refute them, they only eradicated them, they only pushed back the actual wisdom. That is the peculiar thing that was to be pushed back by the European impulses, the actual wisdom. And therein lies the origin of the fact that today even well-meaning people say: Well, these anthroposophists, if you look at their idealistic, ethical striving, that may still be acceptable; but what they want to research about world evolution, about the evolution of humanity, that goes - even well-meaning people say - into the regions of the worst fantasy. In order to make such a judgment possible, the sources of wisdom that also flowed in Gnosticism first had to be suppressed so that later European humanity could have the belief that the Lord gives His to His own in their sleep, and it is so beautifully preached that one says that the Most High must be simple. But what is really meant is that it must be comfortable, that it must not be necessary to expend any thought at all in order to find those regions, or to expend any spiritual effort at all in order to find those regions from which the deepest things in humanity have emerged.

And so we see that the West developed almost exclusively under this principle of suppressing the Gnostic. But this Gnostic element has not been completely suppressed. It has been suppressed in relation to the people, in relation to the broad masses, to whom, as we were able to discuss yesterday, it was even denied to get hold of the Bible until the invention of the printing press. But in a sense, the old wisdom that was already there was passed on. It was passed down and kept alive, as we have already indicated, in certain occult brotherhoods, which found their way into the education of Western Europe, occult brotherhoods that have developed up to modern times, some of which have been preserved in older forms, some of which have developed into what is today called modern Freemasonry. We know that such occult fraternizations, under this or that name, do indeed preserve a certain knowledge, a certain store of wisdom, but only through tradition, and that they do not endeavor to cultivate this store of wisdom in a truly living way. Until recent times, until the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantic period, it was indeed easy to preserve such wisdom in the circles of those occult brotherhoods that closed themselves off from the outside world and selected their people, those they wanted to admit, to whom they gave of this wisdom what they wanted to give them. Until recent times, it was relatively easy. Today, even that is more difficult, and there is a vast literature, as you know, in which the various degrees into which one is said to be initiated are communicated, along with their rituals and their so-called secrets. In particular, there is a vast English and French literature in this field.

On the whole, however, it can be said that what is written in these books of this literature will not be of much use to anyone in particular. Although there are enough people today who study this literature, even study it “with great zeal,” the students of such literature are still for the most part those who can say, “There I stand, I poor fool, and am as wise as before,” although these people often do not disdain to say what they do not know, though not often “with bitter sweat,” but still with great pomp. For this literature is so composed that he who has not special keys cannot penetrate it. This is due to the fact that in times when one no longer had direct access to the old Gnostic insights gained through clairvoyance, these things were also handed down in such inner occult brotherhoods in a purely external way. Of course, there have been individuals throughout the centuries, albeit only a limited number, who knew certain secrets associated with this ancient wisdom. But at the same time, these people chose to express themselves in such a way that they did not speak to the ordinary mind, which was increasingly emerging in humanity, but that they spoke through all kinds of signs and symbols. And so it has become more and more common in those occult brotherhoods to communicate what was preserved as ancient knowledge through signs and symbols, through very specific symbols. And to remain silent about these symbols and their meaning was strictly imposed on those who were truly initiated to a certain degree. So that there was actually always a fairly large group of people for such occult fraternization who knew the symbols but did not understand them. They then began to interpret the symbols. Nothing special comes of that, because something special only comes of it if you really learn to read the symbols. Then there was a small, limited number of people who really learned to read the symbols. These people did indeed arrive at a certain insight, at a certain wisdom, which was couched in the style of the old wisdom, which, as we know, still arose from atavistic human clairvoyance. We can best understand what this old wisdom was really like if we once again take a closer look at something that I have already touched on in recent weeks. On the one hand, let us consider the scientific research of modern times. I am referring less to the natural-scientific world view than to the way in which this natural-scientific research is carried out. Here we must say: in the relevant institutions, laboratories, cabinets, observatories, clinics and so on, the facts of nature are investigated. Certainly, in the course of time, the most magnificent things have come out of these things, and it must be emphasized again and again that spiritual science fully recognizes the progress of natural science. Great and momentous things have come out of it. But what has come out is, I might say, based only on the exploitation of a lucky groping in the dark. Anyone who takes an interest in the course of scientific research will notice this. The fact that this scientific research has produced the great technical advances that influence our whole lives today does not speak against it. These technical advances are also based on the fact that, to a certain extent, there is a wise guidance in the fact that certain things have been revealed in the last few centuries that could then be applied to our technical advances. But what all this scientific research has not led to is the revelation of certain secrets that can be expressed through what can be researched in laboratories, clinics and observatories. Of course, it was possible to find out how to make this or that powder by “scientific research” in the spirit of modern times; it was possible to find out how to make this or that machine, and then to bring this or that machine to a truly magnificent level of perfection. All that could be done. But the longed-for secrets of existence were not revealed. In modern times, we know how the chemical composition of a substance called phenacetin works on the human body. We know because we have tried it. And all that is attempted today in technical progress is an application of the tried and tested. Research is not aimed at revealing secrets. Sometimes this research does come up with hypotheses, but hypotheses never lead to the unveiling of secrets, but only to the transposition into nature of what has already been conceived. Thus, on the one hand, in modern times we have a natural science that, while it does diligent, conscientious research and from which we can learn a great deal, is unsuitable for pointing to the secrets of existence. One can achieve an extraordinary amount with this natural science, but know nothing at all about the connections of existence. That is on the one hand.

On the other hand, one has certain truths of faith, truths of religious creeds. In these religious creeds it is said - let us take something quite ordinary - that the human soul is immortal. Something is said about the nature of the Godhead and so on, but nothing is done to apply these truths to real objects, such as a soul that one wants to explore, that one wants to talk about in concrete terms. Concepts and ideas are sought that are, so to speak, beneficial to man, that he likes, and from which he can indeed be edified; these are sought. But these ideas are not applicable to anything that is actually there; rather, these ideas are supposed to refer to something that is not there. One avoids applying these ideas to something that is actually being explored in one's immediate life. So that today religious denominations talk about something with their beliefs that no one actually has a concrete idea of, something that they at most convince themselves that they have a concrete idea of. When someone wants to talk intelligently about such things, he speaks as I quoted an important contemporary theologian as saying the other day: “You natural scientist, you have the human being as nature reveals it; I retain the human being as a free being!” But when you then follow his words, he simply hands everything over to natural science, even saying that the human being is such that his freedom is taken from him by nature. I would like to know what he is talking about at all. He remains in what has been handed down to him through words. And such a person does not have more than what has been handed down to him in words.

Now, such things differ quite significantly from what the ancient Gnostic wisdom actually was; but they have transferred their way of thinking, their way of imagining, to what wants to open up in many ways, theoretically or otherwise, in modern times. Because everywhere in such occult societies or in non-occult societies that include occult circles, people talk about so-called esotericism. But what one often hears in this esotericism is also nothing more than what does not refer to anything specific that can be grasped, but what is modeled on religious truths as they are often taught today without object. An esoteric truth does not become esoteric by being spoken of with a certain very drawn-out story that marks a sentimentally exalted expression: Oh, that is abysmally esoteric, one dare not say it... because...! What one so often dare not say has no very abundant content. If you go back to older times, there were indeed things that were quite esoteric and were not shared by certain individuals who possessed them with those who were not considered mature. But these were truly not abstract truths, but very, very concrete truths. Today, the outer world can only gain an idea of the concreteness of such truths by looking at the last foothills of these older truths. And these foothills are just fading away, so to speak, at dusk, in the evening twilight of the fourth post-Atlantic period. In Paracelsus, however, we do find some indications, last foothills, weak foothills of the old deeper insights; but he does not speak abstractly when he speaks of such foothills of the old deeper insights; he speaks very concretely, so concretely that one sees how, in his work, spiritual life flows together with natural life in the imagination. For example, when he speaks of man, he speaks of salt, mercury, and sulfur. You can read about it in my writing: “Mysticism in the Dawn of Modern Spiritual Life.” He speaks, then, of external natural things, but he speaks of the deeper character of these external natural things. He speaks in a sense that it is not possible to speak of these things today, as one will speak again when this spiritual science or anthroposophy, which we practice, experiences a corresponding continuation. Then we shall again dig into that which should not hover in cloud-cuckoo-land, but which should really delve into the secrets of nature; we shall again speak in the most concrete way. These were also only offshoots of an ancient knowledge, of which Paracelsus still spoke.

You understand what is at stake when one wants to characterize this ancient knowledge. It is about not just looking into a void when you really want to develop spiritual concepts, but also to see the natural existence with your concepts, as it were, in a glass of water that you heat up and from which, when it cools down again, salt settles to the bottom, the spiritual process, that spiritual process that also takes place in our human organism itself. As you are all listening to me, something very similar is happening in you to what happens in this glass of water containing dissolved salt that is treated in such a way that the dissolved salt settles to the bottom. And only when one can follow this entire cycle of phenomena, but as they are spiritually, through the different spheres, then one speaks of real Gnostic knowledge. And again, Paracelsus saw something quite different from what a chemist or physicist sees today when sulfur burns. For what happens when sulfur burns will happen again in all of you when you go home, go to bed and sleep through what you have thought through here. And so it was for Paracelsus that he saw the spiritual in the processes everywhere in the outer nature – but as I said: only in the last foothills. That was the old esoteric, which was really strong-minded enough to imbue itself with ideas that had real value and that intervened in external existence. But that is why this old esoteric was connected with the highest human activity, which was developed for social life. There was a certain power in the old esoteric; because the one who understood something about the spiritual world could do something. Today many people can do something, because they learn from science to achieve a high level of skill; but they do not understand the subject, and those who understand it, that is, who repeat the words that come from understanding, they cannot do anything, they want the secrets to remain “secrets”, as I hinted to you yesterday. This time had to come, because humanity had to undergo a crisis in moral terms, and because certain secrets had to be reconquered from human freedom, which only took place in our fifth post-Atlantic period.

But the truth cannot be stopped. And in what I hinted to you the day before yesterday, that certain people now already see how smoke, which is developed, becomes sensitive and follows the sound, how even flames follow the sound, lies the beginning of a realization, to which the time must come, to a realization that will lead to what, for example, Goethe hints at in the evocation of the spirit. Because the beginning of this is, after all, this seeing of the smoke being transformed, which I hinted at the day before yesterday. But people today would only misuse certain things. Precisely the important things that still have to come out within our fifth post-Atlantic period, they just have to come out slowly, because today people would misuse them badly. I will have to refer to such things in the following period. In particular, I will have to point out the relationships that currently exist between spiritual science and various branches of knowledge, for example medicine. And then, in the following period, I would still like to speak about a very important topic, about the so-called karma of the human profession, because the concept of the various professions will have to change significantly for the following period, and indeed for a period that will follow very soon. If people continue to understand what is meant by a profession in the way that arises from our present way of thinking, it will truly lead to social chaos. But more about that in later lectures.

Today, however, I want to point out something else. In the fourth post-Atlantic period, more and more things have developed in such a way that people began to carefully guard what they knew about the spiritual connections between nature and human existence, and this practice has been passed on to the occult fraternizations of which I have spoken. These occult fraternizations were, as already indicated, as a rule quite incapable of finding anything out about spiritual connections by themselves; but they did pass on certain old secrets. And those human beings who today have no connection with such occult fraternization, who often have no idea that such occult fraternization even exists, would be amazed if they really understood what lives in many a formula and in many a practice that is found within occult fraternizations, and how some people in such occult fraternizations, who then use the masses at their disposal for their own purposes, know certain secrets handed down from time immemorial, even about physical existence. Certainly, most of this knowledge has been handed down to the series of unfortunate alchemists, those unfortunate other people who, under this or that name, existed precisely in the transition period from the fourth to the fifth post-Atlantic period, who were so similar to the man of whom Faust said of his father said: “he was a dark honorable man... who, in the company of adepts, locked himself in the black kitchen, and, according to endless recipes, poured together the adverse,” and then did this or that with this adverse, poured together, as you know from this Faust scene. That was a time of much trial and error, but for the most part real wisdom had already been lost. This real wisdom, however, has found its way into many occult brotherhoods.

Now there is a law that must be observed if such things are to be considered at all. This law could be characterized in the following way: One could say that such things as the survival of wisdom among people are not bound to the laws of the dead, but to the laws of the living. Therefore, there must always be life in the further development of these things. These things cannot be simply handed down by tradition, for then they die, and then necessarily what is good in them must change into what is bad. And at first the impulse to let live was not present in the occult wisdom of these occult brotherhoods. All they did was to preserve a certain occult wisdom, to guard it from the world and to use it as they wished, and then at most to acquire a certain power through all sorts of atavistic mediumistic machinations or the like. It must be fully understood that these things will become worse and worse if they are not taken up by direct life. Therefore, occult truths must reproduce themselves in the worst possible way in those occult societies that preserve these occult truths, give them to their people in symbols, but do not work them in a living way. The good that lives has the same property as everything that is alive: after some time it must die if new life is not implanted in it. But there was also a certain temptation in the purely traditional preservation of occult wisdom in these occult fraternities. For those who are in living contact with the spiritual worlds, this temptation need not be present to the same extent. But for those in whom the living connection has already died to a certain extent, this temptation that I am referring to can very easily arise. And so certain occult fraternities were not at all free from the influence of such temptation. Such occult fraternities have enough graduates and adepts who put what they have seen of human wisdom at the service of human egoism, whether it be the egoism of individuals or that of groups.

In particular, it became more and more common among certain occult fraternities to combine what could be gained from occult wisdom with all kinds of political points of view and political impulses. And it must be said that such occult fraternities have thoroughly and closely combined what they have often practiced with clearly defined political tendencies. And in the case of occult fraternization, it is almost a characteristic of modern times that they have combined political tendencies with what they have been given from certain insights into interrelationships. — It is indeed extremely difficult to talk about these things in the present day because these things are immediately misunderstood, and it will really take a certain period of preparation before certain things can be spoken about at all. But it can be indicated that occult fraternization is definitely concerned with finding ways and means to bring the political affairs of modern times into their orbit, to shape them in their sense, or, in trivial terms, to gain political influence. And they have gained this in abundance and in a most satisfactory manner. And when the connections are once revealed between much of what has happened in modern times in political life and the sources in the occult fraternizations, from which it has happened through all sorts of channels that the public does not notice today, then strange discoveries will be made. For today more than ever, people talk about insisting on their freedom. But many a one who today presents himself to the world and talks about his freedom, who makes great declamations about his freedom, is anything but free. He just does not suspect how he is pulled by the various strings from this or that so-called occult side. And it would make an interesting chapter to describe how this or that so-called authoritative personality seemingly plays their great ideas out into the world from their own soul, how they are also celebrated by thousands and thousands, how entire groups of newspapers write for this personality write, it would be interesting to show how this machinery works, which pulls the strings from certain occult fraternizations, and how the relevant authoritative personality would appear to be quite unimportant in the process through her own individuality. For it must be emphasized that certain occult fraternities are aware of the sources of wisdom that were once so tapped, as I have indicated to you in recent weeks, but that these sources of wisdom are often misused. And they are always misused when they are applied in the way I have just indicated. Especially in an age in which, as in the fifth post-Atlantic period so far – you can see this from all the considerations we have been making in these weeks – occult knowledge has declined and people have been cut off, as it were, from the occult context for the outer life from the occult connections, those occultists who abused the old traditional occult knowledge had to work all the more strongly, but in a harmful sense. For the people were not at all armed against it. Hence it is that wherever honest occult knowledge appears, so many ways and means are sought to make it impossible. Honest occult knowledge, which simply represents the truth, is highly inconvenient for those who want to fish for occult knowledge in secret. We ourselves have had an example of this, which is not one of the most significant examples, but which can serve to illustrate a few points. When the Alcyone fraud was revealed by the Theosophical Society, it was linked to much more extensive intentions. They wanted a great deal from it. The fact that people believed in Alcyone was only a means to an end. The actual purpose was to be seen in something quite different. But that is why people found it so unpleasant when we vigorously rejected this Alcyone humbug, because they realized that the matter was being seen through, and that, you see, is the most unpleasant thing for occultists fishing in troubled waters for the occultists fishing in troubled waters, it is most unpleasant when they realize that someone has penetrated their plans, really penetrated the matter, and is not inclined to go along, but to go an honest, sincere way. If you study our entire movement, as it has developed for the last twenty-eight years, you will see that we have always tried to keep to the right path between public announcement and the practice of spiritual science, and we have even placed great emphasis on really going out to people and saying what people today will allow us to say. And further, particular emphasis is placed on our friends understanding how the demand to present a certain occult knowledge to humanity arises today, not out of arbitrariness, but out of the necessity of the time. And here it is necessary to take up the thread from such great minds as Troxler's, who expressed so beautifully the longing for spiritual knowledge such as is found in anthroposophy. But that this anthroposophy must rise up out of the upper geological layer that has settled over it is felt by many, many people.

Of course, one could easily believe that it is pessimistically described when, again and again, it is pointed out from this very place how the spiritual life of our time has come to a kind of dead end and that this coming to a dead end shows that rescue and help must come through spiritual science. But anyone who considers this to be an exaggeration, too radical or too pessimistic, has not studied the longings that have arisen in the last days of the best people of the 19th and 20th centuries. If you read any of Troxler's writings, you will see that such longings were particularly strong in him. At least he was still able to point to an anthroposophy, even if it did not take the form of today's spiritual science. Later times could no longer do so. I have often spoken to you about Herman Grimm, who is, so to speak, half Swiss, since his mother came from Switzerland; I have also recently pointed out how Herman Grimm from school as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis, in such a way that he says, scholars of the future will have a lot of trouble understanding how this fantasy could have been accepted by a certain age. This Herman Grimm, of course he could not come to spiritual science, the end of the 19th century was not suitable for that. But he saw the deadlock into which the newer spiritual life was moving. And it is interesting, endlessly interesting, to see how such people, such finely organized spirits, such spirits that have grown up with Goethe, how they constantly speak of something that they actually do not know, but that must come. They are constantly speaking of something that must come. The answer would be what spiritual science could give to humanity. But they know nothing about that. But they speak out of their longings in strong words, in words that surpass in radicalism much of what has been said here from this place, but which in turn show that the things have not been misunderstood.

Herman Grimm, the subtle observer of the intellectual life of humanity, especially from its artistic side, often turned his gaze to the question: Where should this lead, when one sees what has become of it in recent times? Certainly, he then consoled himself again and again: There will come a time when Goethe will be understood, when people will increasingly empathize with him. But on the other hand, other thoughts often occurred to him as well. He was able to appreciate the great advances that came about in the 19th century; but on the other hand, he also saw the dark side of this progress. In a volume of essays published in 1890, there is an interesting passage that, I would say, expresses precisely these sentiments. Herman Grimm says:

“The world is filled with the urge to achieve an unknown goal, for the love of which the tremendous efforts we are witnessing are being made.”

So it is an unknown goal; what he sees are multiple efforts towards an unknown goal. He says:

And now he states in abstract words what he alone knows about the goal:

“The goal is: to make all of humanity, in its final form, a kingdom of brothers who, yielding only to the noblest of motives, move forward together.”

But if there is such a longing to unite humanity in a realm of brotherhood, which, as we have also seen from lectures given recently, applies to the physical plane, then what is needed for this is the common bond of understanding for a general humanity. This general humanity is not present, however, if spiritual science cannot be spread; for the more recent development has been to fragment humanity. Then Herman Grimm continues:

“If you only follow history on the map of Europe, you might think that mutual general murder must fill our immediate future.”

We read these things today with a special feeling when a person looks at the fate of Europe in 1890 and comes to the conclusion:

“Those who follow history only on the map of Europe might believe that a mutual general murder must fulfill our immediate future; while those who study it on the globe” - that is, in the context of the earth with the whole world - “can be sure that the hour is approaching when the Germanic peoples, united in the same thoughts of the highest spiritual striving, will open the way to the true goods of human life for all the countless millions of Asia and Africa and what the world otherwise harbors.

And now comes the sentence that shows how people who saw what was happening in the 19th century in the destiny of humanity were able to speak about what they had seen with open eyes and not as sleepily as most of humanity. Herman Grimm continues:

“Allow these thoughts... .”

He is referring to the idea of the fraternization of peoples, as he has just expressed it, and of looking at the world through the lens of the globe.

“Permit this thought, which seems to be at odds with our enormous military armaments and those of our neighbors, but in which I believe and which must enlighten us, if it is not better to abolish human life by a communal decision and to set an official day of suicide.”

I think that such very serious sentences, which correspond to deep human feelings, could point to one thing: that seriousness is necessary for life in our time. Imagine what is going on in the soul of the person who expresses such feelings! But I know that many also read such a sentence and read it as one reads the newspaper today; they are incapable of looking into the seriousness of the times because it is more comfortable to sleep. But the lack of understanding of spiritual science arises from the complacency of oversleeping the demands of the time. The less one wants to sleep, the more one wants to understand how necessary it is not to sleep today, the more one will recognize that something like spiritual science is necessary for humanity. But for us, who are in spiritual science, it is necessary that we arm ourselves with this seriousness so that we can find the right relationship to the world that does not yet have this seriousness.