The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The members of the Anthroposophical Society come into the Society, as indeed is obvious, for reasons that lie in their inner life, in the inner condition of their souls. And as we are now speaking of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society, nay of the Anthroposophical Movement altogether, showing how it arises out of the karmic evolution of members and groups of members, we shall need to perceive the foundations of this karma above all in the state of soul of those human beings who seek for Anthroposophy. This we have already begun to do, and we will now acquaint ourselves with certain other facts in this direction, so that we may enter still further into the karma of the Anthroposophical Movement.

Most important in the soul-condition of anthroposophists, as I have already said, are the experiences which they underwent in their incarnations during the first centuries of the founding of Christianity. As I said, there may have been other intervening incarnations; but that incarnation is above all important, which we find, approximately, in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth century A.D. In considering this incarnation we found that we must distinguish two groups among the human beings who come to the Anthroposophical Movement. These two groups we have already characterised. We are now going to consider something which they have in common. We shall consider a significant common element, lying at the foundation of the souls who have undergone such lines of evolution as I described in the last lecture.

Looking at the first Christian centuries, we find ourselves in an age when men were very different from what they are today. When the man of today awakens from sleep, he slips down into his physical body with great rapidity, though with the reservation which I mentioned here not long ago, when I said that this entry and expansion into the physical body really lasts the whole day long. Be that as it may, the perception that the Ego and the astral body are approaching takes place very quickly. For the awakening human being in the present age, there is, so to speak, no intervening time between the becoming-aware of the etheric body and the becoming-aware of the physical. Man passes rapidly through the perception of the etheric body—simply does not notice the etheric body,—and dives down at once into the physical. This is a peculiarity of the man of the present time.

The nature of the human beings who lived in those early Christian centuries was different. When they awoke from sleep they had a distinct perception: “I am entering a twofold entity: the etheric body and the physical.” They knew that man first passes through the perception of the etheric body, and then only enters into the physical. Thus indeed, in their moment of awakening they had before them—though not a complete tableau of life—still very many pictures of their past earthly life. And they had before them another thing, which I shall describe directly. For if man enters thus, stage by stage, into that which remains lying on the couch, into the etheric and physical bodies,—the result is that the whole period of waking life becomes very different from the experiences which we have in our waking life today.

Again, when we consider the moment of falling asleep nowadays, the peculiar thing is this:—when the Ego and astral body leave the physical and etheric, the Ego very quickly absorbs the astral body. And as the Ego confronts the cosmos without any kind of support, being unable at its present stage to perceive anything at all, man as he falls asleep ceases to have perceptions. For the little that emerges in his dreams is quite sporadic.

This again was not so in the times of which I am now speaking. The Ego did not at once absorb the astral body; the astral body continued to exist, independently in its own substance, even after the human being had fallen asleep. And to a certain extent, it remained so through the whole night. Thus in the morning the human being awakened not from utter darkness of unconsciousness, but with the feeling:—“I have been living in a world filled with light, in which all manner of things were happening.” Albeit they were only pictures, something was taking place there. It was so indeed: the man of that time had an intermediate feeling, an intermediate sensation between sleeping and waking. It was delicate, it was light and intimate, but it was there. It was only with the beginning of the 14th century that this condition ceased completely in civilised mankind.

Now this means that all the souls, of whose life I was speaking the other day, experienced the world differently from the man of the present time. Let us try to understand, my dear friends, how those human beings—that is to say you yourselves, all of you, during that time—experienced the world.

The diving down into the etheric and physical body took place in distinct stages. And the effect of this was that throughout his waking life man looked out upon Nature differently. He saw not the bare, prosaic, matter-of-fact world of the senses, seen by the man of modern times, who—if he would make any more of it—can only do so by his fancy or imagination. No, when the man of that time looked out, upon the world of plants, for instance, he saw the flowering meadow land as though there were spread over it a slight and gentle bluish-red cloud-halo. Especially at the time of day when the sun was shining less brightly (not at the height of noon-tide), it was as though a bluish-red light, like a luminous mist with manifold and moving waves and colours, were spread over the flowering meadow. What we see today, when a slight mist hangs over the meadow (which comes of course from evaporated water),—such a thing was seen at that time in the spiritual, in the astral. Indeed every tree-top was seen enveloped in a cloud, and when man saw the fields of corn, it was as though bluey-red rays were descending from the cosmos, springing forth in clouds of mist, descending into the soil of the earth.

And when man looked at the animals, he had not merely an impression of the physical shape, but the physical was enveloped in an astral aura. Slightly, delicately, and only intimately, this aura was seen. Nay, it was only seen when the sunshine light was working in a rather gentle way;—but seen it was. Thus everywhere in outer Nature man still perceived the spiritual, working and weaving.

Then, when he died, the experience he had in the first days after passing through the gate of death—gazing back upon the whole of his past earthly life—was in reality not unfamiliar to him. As he looked back upon his earthly life directly after death, he had a distinct feeling. He said to himself: Now I am letting go that quality, that aura from my own organism, which goes out into all that I have seen of the aura in external Nature. My etheric body goes to its own home. Such was man's feeling.

Naturally all these feelings had been much stronger in more ancient times. But they still existed—though in a slight and delicate form—in the time of which I am now speaking. And when man beheld these things directly after passing through the gate of death, he had the feeling: “In all the spiritual life and movement which I have seen hovering over the things and processes of Nature, the Word of the Father-God is speaking. My etheric body is going to the Father.”

And if man thus saw the outer world of Nature differently owing to the different mode of his awakening, so too he saw his own outer form differently than in subsequent ages. When he fell asleep the astral body was not immediately absorbed by the Ego. Now under such conditions the astral body itself is filled with sound. Thus from spiritual worlds there sounded into the sleeping human Ego,—though no longer so distinctly as in ancient times, still in a gentle and intimate way,—all manner of things which cannot be heard in the waking state. And on awakening man had the very real feeling: It was a language of spiritual Beings in the light-filled spaces of the cosmos in which I partook between my falling asleep and my awakening.

And when man had laid aside the etheric body a few days after passing through the gate of death, to live henceforth in his astral body, he had once more this feeling: “In my astral body I now experience in a returning course all that I thought and did on earth. In this astral body in which I lived every night during my sleep,-herein I am experiencing all that I thought and did on earth.” Moreover, while he had carried into his awakening moments only a vague and undetermined feeling, he now had a far clearer feeling. Now in the time between death and a new birth, as in his astral body he returned through his past earthly life, he had the feeling: “Behold in this my astral body lives the Christ I only did not notice it, but in reality every night my astral body dwelt in the essence and being of the Christ.” Now man knew, that for as long as he would have to go thus backward through his earthly life Christ would not desert him, for Christ was with his astral body.

My dear friends, it is so indeed, whatever may have been one's attitude to Christianity in those first Christian centuries, whether it was like the first group of whom I spoke or like the second, whether one had still lived as it were with the more Pagan strength, or with the weariness of Paganism, one was sure to experience—if not on earth, then after death—the great fact of the Mystery of Golgotha; Christ who had been the ruling Being of the Sun, had united Himself with what lives as humanity on earth. Such was the experience of all who had come in any way near to Christianity in the first centuries of Christian evolution. For the others, these experiences after their death remained more or less unintelligible.

Such were the fundamental differences in the experience of souls in the first Christian centuries, and afterwards. Now all this had another effect as well. For when man looked out upon the world of Nature in his waking life, he felt this world of Nature as the essential domain of the Father God. All the spiritual that he beheld living and moving there, was for him the expression, the manifestation and the glory of the Father God. And he felt: This world, in the time when Christ appeared on earth, stood verily in need of something. It was the need that Christ should be received into the substance of the earth for mankind. In relation to all the processes of Nature and the whole realm of Nature, man still had the feeling of a living principle of Christ. For indeed, his perception of Nature, inasmuch as he beheld a spiritual living and moving and holding sway there, involved something else as well. All this which he felt as a spiritual living and moving and holding sway,—hovering in ever-changing spirit-shapes over all plant and animal existence,—all this he felt so that with simple and unbiased human feeling he would describe it in the words: It is the innocence of Nature's being. Yes, my dear friends, what he could thus spiritually see was called in truth: the innocence in the kingdom of Nature. He spoke of the pure and innocent spirituality in all the working of Nature.

But the other thing, which he felt inwardly—feeling when he awakened that in his sleep he had been in a world of light and sounding spiritual being—of this he felt that good, and evil too, might there prevail. In this he felt, as it sounded forth from the depths of spiritual being, good spirits and evil spirits too were speaking. Of the good spirits he felt that they only wanted to raise to a higher level the innocence of Nature and to preserve it; but the evil spirits wanted to adulterate with guilt this guiltlessness of Nature. Wherever such Christians lived as I am now describing, the powers of good and evil were felt through the very fact that as man slept the Ego was not drawn in and absorbed into the astral body.

Not all who called themselves Christians in that time, or who were in any way near to Christianity, were in this state of soul. Nevertheless there were many people living in the southern and middle regions of Europe, who said: “Verily, my inner being that lives its independent life from the time I fall asleep till I awaken, belongs to the region of a good and to the region of an evil world.” Again and again men thought and pondered about the depth of the forces that bring forth the good and the evil in the human soul. Heavily they felt the fact that the human soul is placed into a world where good and evil powers battle with one another. In the very first centuries of Christianity, such feelings were not yet present in the southern and middle regions of Europe, but in the fifth and sixth centuries they became more and more frequent. Especially among those who received knowledge and teachings from the East (and as we know such teachings from the East came over in manifold ways), this mood of soul arose. It was especially widespread in those regions to which the name Bulgaria afterwards came to be applied. (In a strange way the name persisted even though quite different peoples inhabited these regions). Thus in later centuries, and indeed for a very long time in Europe, those in whom this mood of soul was most strongly developed were called ‘Bulgars.’ ‘Bulgars’—for the people of Western and Middle Europe in the later Christian centuries of the first half of the Middle Ages—Bulgars were human beings who were most strongly touched by this opposition of the good and evil cosmic spiritual powers.

Throughout Europe we find the name ‘Bulgar’ applied to human beings such as I have characterised. Now the souls of whom I am here speaking, had been to a greater or lesser degree in this very mood of soul. I mean the souls who in the further course of their development beheld those mighty pictures in the super-sensible ceremony, in which they themselves actively took part,—all of which happened in the spiritual world in the first half of the 19th century. All that they had lived through when they had known themselves immersed in the battle between good and evil, was carried by them through their life between death and a new birth. And this gave a certain shade and colouring to these souls as they stood before the mighty cosmic pictures.

To all this yet another thing was added. These souls were indeed the last in European civilisation to preserve a little of that distinct perception of the etheric and the astral body in waking and sleeping. Recognising one another by these common peculiarities of their inner life, they had generally lived in communities. And among the other Christians, who became more and more attached to Rome, they were regarded as heretics. Heretics were not yet condemned as harshly as in later centuries. Still, they were regarded as heretics. Indeed the others always had a certain uncanny feeling about them. They had the impression that these people saw more than other folk. It was as though they were related to the Divine in a different way through the fact that they perceived the sleeping state differently than the others among whom they dwelt. For the others had long lost this faculty and had approached more nearly to the condition of soul which became general in Europe in the 14th century.

Now when these human beings—who had the distinct perception of the astral and the etheric body—passed through the gate of death, then also they were different from the others. Nor must we imagine, my dear friends, that man between death and a new birth is altogether without share in what is taking place through human beings on the earth. Just as we look up from here into the spiritual world of heaven, so between death and a new birth man looks down from that world on to the earth. Just as we here partake with interest in the life of spiritual beings, so from the spiritual world one partakes in the experiences of earthly beings upon the earth. After the age which I have hitherto been describing there came the time when Christendom in Europe was arranging its existence under the assumption that man has no longer any knowledge of his astral or his etheric body. Christianity was now preparing to speak about the spiritual worlds without being able to presume any such knowledge or consciousness among men. For you must think, my dear friends, when the early Christian teachers, in the first few centuries, spoke to their Christians—though they already found a large number who were only able to accept the truth of their words by external authority—nevertheless the simpler, more child-like feeling of that time enabled men to accept such words, when spoken from a warm and enthusiastic heart. And of the warmth and enthusiasm of heart with which the men of those first Christian centuries could preach, people today, where so much has gone into the mere preaching-of-words, have no conception. Those however who were still able to speak to souls such as I have described today,—what kind of words could they speak? They, my dear friends, could say: “Behold what shows itself in the rainbow-shining glory over the plants, what shows itself as the desire-nature about the animals,—lo, this is the reflection, this is the manifestation of the spiritual world from which the Christ has come.” Speaking to such men about the truths of spiritual wisdom, they could speak, not as of a thing unknown, but in such a way as to remind their hearers of what they could still behold under certain conditions in the gently luminous light of the sun: The Spirit in the world of Nature. Again when they spoke to them of the Gospels which tell of spiritual worlds and spiritual Mysteries or of the secrets of the Old Testament, then again they spoke to them not as of a thing unknown, but they could say: “Here is the Word of the Testament. It has been written down by human beings, who heard, more fully and clearly than you, the whispered language of that spiritual world in which your souls are dwelling from the time you fall asleep till you awaken. But you too know something of this language, for you remember it when you awaken in the morning.” Thus it was possible to speak to them of the spiritual as of something known to them. In the conversation of the priests or preachers of that time with these men, something was contained of what was already going on in their own souls. So in that time the Word was still alive and could be cultivated in a living way.

Then when these souls, to whom one had still been able to speak in the living Word, had passed through the gate of death, they looked down again upon the earth, and beheld the evening twilight of the living Word below. And they had the feeling that it was the twilight of the Logos. “The Logos is darkening”—such was the underlying feeling in their souls. After their life in the 7th, 8th or 9th century (or somewhat earlier) when they had passed through the gate of death again and looked down upon the earth, they felt: “Down there upon the earth is the evening twilight of the living Logos.” Well may there have lived in these souls the Word: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. But human beings are less and less able to afford a home, a dwelling place for the Word that is to live within the flesh, that is to live on upon the earth.” This, I say again, was an underlying mood, it was indeed the dominant feeling among these souls, as they lived in the spiritual world between the 7th or 8th and the 19th or 20th century, no matter whether their sojourn there was interrupted by another life on earth. It remained their fundamental underlying feeling: “Christ lives indeed for the earth, since for the earth He died; but the earth cannot receive Him. Somehow there must arise on earth the power for souls to be able to receive the Christ.”

Beside all the other things I have described, this feeling became more and more living in the souls who had been stigmatised during their earthly time as heretics. This feeling grew in them between their death and the coming of a renewed revelation of the Christ—a new declaration of His Being.

In this condition of their souls, these human beings—disembodied as they were—witnessed what was happening on earth. It was something hitherto unknown to them, nevertheless they learned to understand what was going on, on earth below. They saw how souls on earth were less and less taken hold of by the spirit, till there were no more human beings left, to whom it was possible to speak such words as these: ‘We tell you of the Spirit whom you yourselves can still behold hovering over the world of plants, gleaming around the animals. We instruct you in the Testament that was written out of the spiritual sounds whose whispering you still can hear when you feel the echo of your experiences of the night.’ This was no more.

Looking down from above they saw how different these things were now becoming. For in the development of Christendom a substitute was being introduced for the old way of speaking. For a long time, though the vast majority to whom the preachers spoke had no longer any direct consciousness of the Spiritual in their earthly life, still the whole tradition, the whole custom of their speech came down to them from the older times,—I mean, from the time when one knew, as one spoke to men about the Spirit, that they themselves still had some feeling of what it was. It was only about the 9th, 10th or 11th century that these things vanished altogether. Then there arose quite a different condition, even in the listener. Until that time, when a man listened to another, who, filled with a divine enthusiasm, spoke out of the Spirit, he had the feeling as he listened that he was going a little out of himself. He was going out a little, into his etheric body. He was leaving the physical body to a slight extent. He was approaching the astral body more nearly. It was literally true, men still had a slight feeling of being ‘transported’ as they listened. Nor did they care so very much in those times for the mere hearing of words. What they valued most was the inward experience, however slight, of being transported—carried away. Men experienced with living sympathy the words that were spoken by a God-inspired man.

But from the 9th, 10th, or 11th, and towards the 14th century, this vanished altogether. The mere listening became more and more common. Therefore the need arose to make one's appeal to something different, when one spoke of spiritual things. The need arose somehow to draw forth from the listener what one wanted him to have as a conception of the spiritual world. The need arose as it were to work upon him, until at length he should feel impelled even out of his hardened body to say something about the spiritual world. Thus there arose the need to give instruction about spiritual things in the play of question and answer. There is always a suggestive element in questions. And when one asked: What is baptism? Having prepared the human being so that he would give a certain answer; or when one asked: What is Confirmation? What is the Holy Spirit? What are the seven deadly sins?—when one trained them in this play of question and answer, one provided a substitute for the simple elemental listening. To begin with this was done with those who entered the Schools where this was first made possible. Through question and answer, what they had to say about the spiritual worlds was thoroughly brought home to them. In this way the Catechism arose.

We must indeed look at such events as this. For these things were really witnessed by the souls who were up there in the spiritual world and who now looked down to the earth. They said to themselves: something must now approach man which it was quite impossible for us to know in our lives, for it did not lie near to us at all.

It was a mighty impression when the Catechism was arising down upon the earth. Very little is given when historians outwardly describe the rise of the Catechism, but much is given, my dear friends, when we behold it as it appeared from the super-sensible: “Down there upon the earth men are having to undergo things altogether new in the very depths of their souls; they are having to learn by way of Catechism what they are to believe.” Herewith I have described a certain feeling, but there is another which I must describe to you as follows:—We must go back once more into the first centuries of Christendom. In those times it was not yet possible for a Christian simply to go into a church, to sit down or to kneel, and then to hear the Mass right through from the beginning—from the “Introitus”—to the prayers which follow the Holy Communion. It was not possible for all Christians to attend the whole Mass through. Those who became Christians were divided into two groups. There were the Catechumenoi who were allowed to attend the Mass till the reading of the Gospel was over. After the Gospel the Offertory was prepared, and then they had to leave. Only those who had been prepared for a considerable time for the holy inner feeling in which one was allowed to behold the Mystery of Transubstantiation, only these—the Transubstantii as they were called—were allowed to remain and hear the Mass through to the end.

That was a very different way of partaking in the Mass. Now the human beings of whom we have been speaking (who in their souls underwent the conditions I described, who looked down on to the earth and perceived this strange Catechism-teaching, which would have been so impossible for them)—they, in their religious worship too, had more or less preserved the old Christian custom of not allowing a man to take part in the whole Mass till he had undergone a longer preparation. They were still conscious of an exoteric and an esoteric portion in the Mass. They regarded as esoteric all that was done from the Transubstantiation onward.

Now once more they looked down and beheld what was going on in the outer ritual of Christendom. They saw that the whole Mass had become exoteric. The whole Mass was being enacted even before those who had not entered into any special mood of soul by special preparation. “Can a man on earth really approach the Mystery of Golgotha, if in unconsecrated mood he witnesses the Transubstantiation?” Such was their feeling as they looked down from the life that takes its course between death and a new birth: “Christ is no longer being recognised in His true being; the sacred ceremony is no longer understood.”

Such feelings poured themselves out within the souls whom I have now been describing. Moreover they looked down upon that which became a sacred symbol in the reading of the Mass, the so-called Sanctissimum wherein the Host is carried on a crescent cup. It is a living symbol of the fact that once upon a time the great Sun-Being was looked for in the Christ. For the very rays of the Sun are represented on every Sanctissimum, on every Monstrance. But the connection of the Christ with the Sun had been lost. Only in the symbol was it preserved; and in the symbol it has remained until this day. Yet even in the symbol it was not understood, nor is it understood today. This was the second feeling that sprang forth in their souls, intensifying their sense of the need for a new Christ-experience that was to come.

In the next lecture, the day after tomorrow, we will continue to speak of the karma of the Anthroposophical Society.

My address this evening represents a break in our current series; its subject is quite different from yesterday's.¹ This morning I received a letter, and I feel compelled, even obligated, to bring it to the attention of each individual member of the Anthroposophical Society. I will explain my reasons after I read you the letter.

Letter from Heinrich and Gertrud Goesch to Rudolf Steiner

19 August 1915, Dornach

Dear Dr. Steiner:

Alongside the work dedicated to the good within your activity in our spiritual movement, I have noticed certain behaviors that serve evil purposes. On the good side, I am grateful for the esoteric knowledge and teachings you have imparted to us, for the mystery dramas you have given us, for the introduction of eurythmy, and for the art of the Johannesbau. In these contexts, I continue to recognize you as an envoy of the great white lodge and am filled with profound gratitude to you and to anything you do that is devoted to the good.

However, I perceive the way you cultivate relationships between yourself and other members of our spiritual movement as serving evil purposes, and I see this behavior as gravely endangering our movement. The relationships you create between yourself and other members turn the others into merely parts of yourself rather than independent spiritual entities alongside you. You only appear to act as a human being among equals. In actuality, you scorn any truly human connection and presume to intervene in the lives of others in a way that belongs only to the gods and not to any modern human being.

In this way, you create an anti-Christian relationship between yourself and the other members of our spiritual movement. These people have readied themselves to meet great spiritual teachings in our time, but you are making them poorer than the poorest materialists out there, who in spite of their distorted Christianity that has turned into its exact opposite are still able to develop a strong I. If it goes on like this, however, your followers will eventually fall prey to black magic as a result of the constant weakening of their I through how you behave toward them.

There have already been instances of highly respected members substituting a reliance on your word for reliance on the truth; they cut off any criticism of any part of your work, objecting that your critics would be placing themselves above you. They feel that putting oneself above you is such an act of wanton temerity as to be out of the question, and that with their objection the issue is resolved once and for all. The members are not to blame for erroneous ideas like this—you are. In your concern to promulgate ever more of your teachings, you have neglected to cultivate the attitude among your pupils that as Christians, individuals must put themselves not only below any other person, but also above any other; not only are the least of our fellow human beings of irreplaceable value to us in their most profound depths of being, but also the least of us carry responsibility for the most advanced and must oppose their errors. Your own teachings have strengthened me in this conviction. In real life, however, you apply a number of means that work counter to this Christian ideal of human community.

I will now discuss two of these means in detail so that the thrust of my contentions becomes clearer.

It is a fact that you have developed the habit of making promises and not keeping them. No one will maintain that you do not have a sufficiently clear view of the future, or that you are too weak to carry out your original intentions, either of which would constitute a certain justification for failing to keep promises. No, this is a case of deliberately causing disappointment. Since the promises were unsolicited and made at your own initiative, it is also a case of deliberate intervention into someone else's life in order do something that is by rights reserved for destiny. A disappointment that comes to us through karma has a direct and beneficial effect on our development. In contrast, a disappointment deliberately arranged for us by another person is at the very least a heavy blow, and if our confidence in the person delivering the blow is not shaken, it also constitutes a weakening of our I. The difference is the same as the difference between meeting an accidental death in a burning building and death by burning at the stake, premeditated by others.

Because of their trust in you, recipients of such a promise who are waiting for it to be kept get into a state of tension and uncertainty; meanwhile you are able to calmly survey their gradually increasing disappointment. Once the people in question have realized that the promise is not going to be kept, they will not take your word seriously in the future and thus will distance themselves from you, at least to some extent. However, since on the whole they continue to put their trust in you, they will lose all standards for the sanctity of giving one's word, and may perhaps begin to act as you do. As a result, they are dependent on you in a humanly unworthy fashion and will try to affect others in the same way you do.

Alternatively, people may respond in one of the three following ways: First, because of the confidence they have in you, they may assume that there must be a deep occult meaning behind the way you act. They will conclude that there can be profound occult reasons that permit or even obligate someone to make promises without intending to keep them. Occasionally we even meet people whose emotions are so confused that they admire that kind of behavior and take it as a sign of something superhuman. It is evident, however, that nothing in this world can authorize a modern human being to make promises without intending to keep them. Causing disappointment is something reserved for the gods who direct our karma.

This sort of conceptual confusion is all the more dangerous for a student of esotericism because modern spiritual science appeals to our healthy capacity for discernment, which is undermined by things like this. In a most unfortunate fashion, your word displaces the truth; the thought “I must not place myself above him” displaces the realization that you have done something evil. The human dignity of these people crumbles away bit by bit, and they turn into spiritually dependent tools in your hands.

The second possibility for those whose trust has been betrayed is that in order to be able to maintain their confidence in you, the people in question never let themselves become fully conscious of the fact that you never had any intention of keeping the promises you made to them. As a way out, they take your not keeping promises as a new revelation of a being they do not experience as really human and cannot hold responsible as they would a human being. This point of view is in fact already represented within the Society and is leading to your becoming ever more shadowlike as a human being.

The third and final possibility is that some people will choose the radical way out, forgetting the fact that a promise of some kind was ever made. This, too, robs people of a bit of their I. As a result, your coworkers in our spiritual movement will be shadows whose I is weakened, rather than independent individuals. You yourself, however, are the one to blame for all this.

A second example of the evil nature of your behavior is your refusal to accept any criticism of people working in our movement. On occasion, you have implied that any such criticism stems from negative emotions. This is a false assumption. I am not talking about malicious or destructive criticism. Many of our members, out of their sincere sense of responsibility, are capable of constructive criticism, and that is what I am talking about. The only possible reason for avoiding such criticism would be knowing that people in positions of responsibility are unfit for their jobs. In our modern age, people are meant to come together out of their own free will and freely create the kind of hierarchy and order necessary for us to accomplish what we have to do, and a certain amount of constructive mutual criticism is our only guarantee of success. In fact, the only way a true, natural, and appropriate hierarchical order can come about nowadays is if this kind of criticism is allowed to work.

If people who have been criticized do not choose to take action on justified accusations—and in fact they are morally obliged to actively seek criticism—they must give up their positions in the hierarchy so that the truth can triumph. Their superiors should not protect people like that by acting as if everything were going fine. This is what our modern age requires. However, if at any level in the hierarchical order mistakes are not criticized but tolerated and allowed to persist, we are only creating a false hierarchy that is based, not on real human capabilities and relationships, but on fiction—a fiction that is maintained only through further wrongdoing. Once again, the result is a lack of humanity and Christianity in our relationships in general, and once again you are to blame. In the organization of our Society as it has gradually developed under your guidance, the strengths of the members are usurped to the advantage of yourself and perhaps of certain other people prominent in this false hierarchy. Meanwhile, the Society's affairs are being mismanaged.

Personal oversensitivity on the part of those being criticized is something that needs to be eliminated; you might give a lecture about this sometime. As a general rule, especially if it comes at the right moment, criticism can take a stimulating and gratifying form and be free of any personal bitterness, so that its thorns are removed and the recipient can be glad to receive help in resolving the issue. The nervousness and animosity so prevalent among the critics spring in part from the justified feeling that even the most objective criticism will not be heeded, but will be looked at askance and disregarded. A truly superior person has no reason to fear criticism; true superiority can stand the test of even the most pointed criticism. In the event that people attempt to offer criticism out of a sense of responsibility but are not really able to grasp the facts of the case, those people can usually be made to see their misunderstanding sooner or later without any undue waste of time.

At the moment, I am not talking about a case like this one, where the criticism has already developed into a well-founded rejection of an entire self-contained system confronting me. In this case, no amount of postponement would make any difference. If in a specific instance, however, a person I myself recognize as superior—not simply someone who, for some unknown reason, is my superior in a false hierarchy—points out that I do not yet fully understand the case in question, I will gladly defer my criticism until the case can be considered closed. Under your influence, however, the principle at work in our spiritual movement is that any such criticism should be withheld indefinitely—until the facts of the case have been forgotten. And this principle applies not only to certain specific cases, but to all such instances. This is not only wrong and harmful to everyone, it also undermines our discernment, on which so much depends.

Once again, I have to point out the inherent contradiction between spiritual science's appeal to people's healthy power of judgment and the fact that in most instances in our movement, this power of judgment must be subordinated to incomprehensible reasons for measures being taken. You must admit, however, that at this point in time, two thousand years after Christ, people possess certain standards that all individuals can apply and must also allow to be applied to themselves, if they are not to be utterly lost. There are certainly a sufficient number of closed cases that really are subject to our judgment. The mere fact that a person feels compelled to think about a particular case usually suggests that he or she is capable of achieving some clarity in the matter, though not necessarily without help.

As things stand at the moment, our members are constantly expending a considerable portion of their spiritual energy on the useless task of seeking out hidden wisdom-filled motives for the evil behavior of yourself and your highest colleagues, while you stand by, calmly observing this waste of effort. Or, in order not to lose faith in you, these people have to decide to repress these truth-seeking forces in themselves and thus fall prey to partial stupefaction. What happens with these forces then? What a horrible thought to pursue! In any case, you represent a great focal point of forces of which individuals are merely the instruments, to be used as you choose for incomprehensible ends. There is no question in our movement of real interaction taking place between complete human beings, interaction in which each one is allowed to contribute his or her best. You are not a friend to all the members; your whole attitude rejects lively friendly relationships. In truth, for many people, you are the greatest enemy they have ever encountered.

All these things I have described are not only objectively evil, they also directly contradict the teachings you promulgate. It is from you that I learned the reasons that lead me to reject the way you act. As time goes on, you give an ever stronger impression of acting on your connection to the Christ impulse only in your lectures; outside the lectures, you embrace impulses that are quite the opposite. In parts, it already seems to me as if your teaching has been somewhat influenced by what you practice in real life—not the content of your teachings, but their formal structure. In their structure, certain sentences make promises that are then not kept and can only serve the purpose of subjecting the reader to fruitless thought and work. (See “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges.”)² If people try to explain this by saying that you, like any other human being, may have changed your mind over the course of time, you reject this as irksome criticism (Preface to Riddles of Philosophy, last paragraph).³ Both these passages, by the way, clearly show a change in style verging on the incomprehensible.

The kind of interpersonal attitude you create not only contradicts your teachings; your behavior also contradicts what you yourself demand of spiritual teachers in the modern age. Such teachers should appeal only to people's consciousness. Their self-chosen obligation toward their students is to never exercise any magical influence on the students' subconscious that the latter have not consented to or cannot control. You, however, are doing this incessantly through the behavior I described and through other occult means. For you, every handshake, every friendly conversation becomes a means of cultivating these false relationships. The bliss that fills the members after meeting with you is not the bliss of the communion of saints, but a merely Luciferic-Ahrimanic one. You, not the members themselves, are to blame for this. You even try to use these handshakes and friendly conversations to pull members back into the fold against their will once they have recognized the falsity of the relationships you try to create. I have perceived with certainty that you exercise undue influence on your followers in this way.

In the modern age, when any uncontrollable influence on the subconscious of others must be avoided, it is not enough to simply give lectures or introduce new spirituality. In addition, the life you lead together with the other members of our movement must be governed by Christian impulses; your relationships with your followers must become like those of Benedictus, so beautifully portrayed in your fourth mystery drama. In fact, now that we have received so much in the way of teachings, developing such relationships is the much more urgent obligation.

When I ask myself how it can possibly be that you whose task it was to proclaim these teachings can act in ways directly counter to them, I can conceive of two possible answers. On the one hand, I can guess at the reasons why the great white lodge might have had to choose a person who is not yet completely Christianized for this task, and in your capacity as teacher I still accept you as the envoy of the lodge. On the other hand, it seems to me that your most profound motivation is by no means actively evil, although what I have had to say might be erroneously interpreted to imply that. No, it is simply a too one-sided interest in renewing these teachings in a way appropriate to our times, and above all a fear of real life. By avoiding and obstructing real life and by creating substitutes for it, however, you allow an evil force to develop. In this, I see the greatest danger to our spiritual movement and to yourself.

Fully Christian occultists can never rest content with simply passing on teachings; they must also enter into a life partnership with their students. True relationships from person to person in the Christian sense require each one of us to be an open book to all others to the extent their individual strength permits. All people should give themselves completely to their fellows to whatever extent the latter can receive them. This should be the basis of any modern hierarchy. Those higher up in the hierarchy must turn to those beneath them with whatever they have to give. What you practice, however, is anti-Christian and just the opposite. Whenever possible you arrange things so that intentions are kept in the dark and events are treated as if they had not happened. It is not enough to confess that like anyone else, you too can have a weak moment. Whenever we meet any other person (a person who in the Christian sense is just as necessary as ourselves), we do so as people who are imperfect in some way and still need to learn. This fact must not only be admitted, it must be constantly confirmed in our actions as human beings. It is truly necessary to seek out this interaction with our fellows, no matter how much an occultist of the old school may dread it. It is not enough to simply protest against blind admiration; we must also seek out objective criticism.

In communities of this sort, spiritual teachers must renounce all the help available to them in pre-Christian times for making students receptive to their teachings. Above all, they must renounce the unapproachable authority of the teacher filled with divine wisdom, who taught students in whom the I had not yet been born. They must also do without the complete isolation of teachers and pupils from all human relationships. The problem I am pointing out here did not exist for pre-Christian initiators. The individual I had not yet been born, and the divine being working through the teachers had the authority to intervene in the destiny of the students in ways otherwise reserved for karma. But as Christians, we must see modern initiates first and foremost as human beings, and our confidence in them depends on them not exercising any superhuman influence on our destiny.

For someone who is directing all his energies toward the renewal of occult teachings for our times, the temptation is great to reject the difficult tasks of Christian community and to artificially make his teaching easier by any of the means appropriate in earlier times. However, these things have become evil in our times, and it would be better nowadays for the teacher to remain invisible except when promulgating the doctrine than it would be for him to relate to his students as you are doing. Maintaining and strengthening the I of each student is much more important than passing on the teachings—after all, the teachings are directed to the individual I. Any restriction of the ego's rights must also result in the teachings taking root within the individual in the wrong way. Any dulling of individual discernment represents a grave danger to those striving for the spirit.

I will admit that in one sense, this kind of right living is infinitely more difficult for you than for others. Christian occultists must take up a challenge that other people will face only in times to come; that is, to both live and be a seer. They are in constant danger of falsely confusing these different planes and the laws that govern them. But they cannot escape this danger by refusing the challenge; for without being able to orient themselves according to the Christ impulse, they would still get these two planes mixed up in unjustified ways. When this happens in a meeting with a pupil, the pupil will be the first to experience the disastrous results, although they will soon revert to the teacher.

The community of the Grail is perhaps the only place where this challenge has been met satisfactorily to any extent. You yourself admit that you are not totally satisfied with what you have been able to tell us about the Grail, and you have clearly described your own difficulties in researching the Grail mysteries, although you call the new initiates “initiates of the Grail.” Perhaps the Grail will grant us salvation in this difficult hour.

Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time, as you were well aware. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being. I will refrain from explaining this statement in greater detail at this point because that would lead us too far afield.

It is still possible for me to greet you from a distance with all due respect as the bearer of great teachings, as I attempted to do on that evening. But I cannot submit to exchanging handshakes and friendly conversations with you as if nothing had happened, and especially not since I have clearly seen that these very handshakes and conversations are one of your chief means of exercising impermissible influences on your pupils and since I cannot share the opinion of a certain respected member that these things exist for the purpose of testing one's own strength in the face of outside influences.

To inform you of the need to avoid further personal contact is the purpose of this letter inasmuch as it concerns the two of us personally.

With regard to yourself, my purpose in writing to you about this very serious matter is to see accomplished the little I can do as your fellow human being, namely, to confront you with the fact that a person on the physical plane and using physical means has been able to point out to you the evil in your actions. You would be condemned to a shadowy existence if no one would turn to you like this. I hope that the fact that at least a few people nowadays are capable of recognizing your errors as such, remembering them and taking a stand against them, will be of help to you in the now necessary process of restructuring life in our spiritual movement. There are a few other members whom I can expect to understand the matters under discussion here, and I shall inform them of the contents of this letter.

It is imperative, however, that you begin to thoroughly transform the relationship between yourself and other members of the movement, as I have indicated. The objective purpose of my writing to you is to express this in the hopes that our movement will continue to work in accordance with the intentions of evolution. What would be the consequence if you were to reject this challenge? At least in certain instances, you have already forfeited an activity that must have been assigned to you by the masters of the white lodge—the personal instruction of individuals. For as I have already said, a profound mistrust in your treatment of individual human destinies is all too justified. I can also not imagine how an esoteric lesson could take place under the prevailing circumstances.

If you restricted yourself to disseminating ever more aspects of the teachings but let everything else continue as before, and if not enough members were able to work their way through to the necessary insights, the Society would degenerate into an exoteric association at best. There are already certain signs of this happening, alongside the tendencies to evil and to stupefaction. Either that or, if your followers become aware of their responsibility, they will have to bring about a complete separation between the teacher and what is taught, leaving you to discharge the duties of your holy office as a guilty and tormented Amfortas among hungry and sorrowful disciples.

I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe these insights—which I achieved under the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell. But I have decided to send the letter anyway because the moment demands it.

When I wonder about the emotions with which you will receive this letter, the question of whether you will find your way to people with whom you can go through this experience and begin the necessary transformations weighs on me especially heavily. This is an area where, in this Christian age, the occultist as such is bound to fail and must be simply a human among humans, just as Christ Jesus had to experience things on Earth that he could not experience as a God. May you turn to this Spirit for help!

Heinrich Goesch
Gertrud Goesch

I have read you this letter, my friends, because it concerns each and every one of you just as much as it concerns me, and because it seems obvious to me that you must each decide for yourself to what extent you believe its claims correspond to actual practice within our Society. Otherwise people might think that I am afraid of this charge of contributing to the “stupefaction” of our members, and that I do not see you as sufficiently independent to leave it up to each one of you to judge the situation individually as you see fit.

However, you must realize that a letter like this cannot be seen in isolation; it is a symptom of what is going on in our Society. That is why I will take no part in discussing either this letter or anything that will need to be done as a result of it. It is clear that it must be left up to the members to decide what needs to be done and how to go about it, at least to begin with. In particular, I will refrain from saying anything about the passage claiming that promises have not been kept. If assessing this matter is left to individual discretion, each one of you will know how things stand, since each one of you must know what you have been promised and whether the promises were kept. However, I would expect and request the Society as such, or those members living in the neighborhood of the building in Dornach, to take a decided stand on this issue in the very near future.

I myself will not get involved in discussions on the matter at all. There are only a few things I want to tell you, and I ask you to take my remarks as what I have to say in connection with what I have just read, especially because it is obvious from other symptoms, not just from this letter, that many things I have said to members in lectures here in the course of the last few weeks and months have had no effect at all.

First of all, there is one thing I would like to emphasize. My friends, I cannot allow anyone to dictate how I conduct myself with members of the Society. It is up to me, and me alone, to decide how I find it necessary to relate to them. This is not to be taken as any kind of guideline for you; I am simply speaking for myself. I will not allow anyone to prescribe in any way how I should interact with members, inasmuch as this interaction has to do with the sins of omission I am supposed to have committed against them.

There is a very deep and weighty reason why this has to be the way it is. Not only this letter, but also many other things that have come up in the Society intermittently down through the years and with increasing frequency lately, show that many people simply do not make an effort to understand the kind of responsibility carried by someone communicating esoteric truths. It seems that many of our members don't want to try to understand what it sometimes takes to speak even a single sentence of that sort. With all the spiritual preparation it takes to give a lecture, it is simply not possible to sit with different little groups of members until two in the morning every night chatting about all kinds of useless and superfluous stuff. This fact is not sufficiently appreciated, nor are many other things that people seem to require of me and that then get counted as sins of omission. I need my time, and I need it in a totally different way than what people seem to want to understand. If I weren't using it the way I am, you would be hearing the same kind of stupid esoteric views from me that you can hear so much of in the rest of the world. So much for the sins of omission.

I also do not understand how the statement that my dealings with individual members and with groups of members are not Christian enough fits together with the complaint that I am exerting an undue influence over you by means of black magic whenever I take the liberty of shaking hands with one of you or involving you in conversation. I am certainly open to changing this practice if the Society will make its views on the subject known, because it is up to you, of course, whether you want to shake hands or get involved in a friendly conversation with me.

If this opinion becomes prevalent, it should be expressed, and then handshakes can, of course, be avoided in the future. For reasons I expressed earlier, I will not go into this any further, but there is still one thing I must mention because it is so very typical.

There is a passage in this letter that reads as follows: “Through the events I have described, my wife and I find ourselves in a situation with regard to yourself that makes it impossible for us to encounter you again in the way my wife did for the last time on Sunday, July 25, in the Schreinerei, and I on Thursday, August 5, on the steps leading to the eurythmy room. We were both in possession of this knowledge already at that time. Nevertheless, you shook our hands and drew us into conversation as if nothing had happened. Healthy tact would have made that kind of thing impossible for any non-clairvoyant, so in your case I have to recognize it as an attempt at impermissible intervention into my inner being.” Let me just mention that on the Friday before Sunday the 25th, a member of our Society approached me with an inquiry from Mrs. Goesch with regard to her child, who had fallen down and gotten hurt somehow. I responded by saying that if she wished, I could take a look at what was wrong with the child. Shortly thereafter that person returned, bringing Mrs. Goesch and the child to me. On the following Sunday, here in the Schreinerei, I intervened in the inner being of Mrs. Goesch by shaking her hand and asking her how the child was doing.

My encounter with Mr. Goesch on the stairs leading up to the eurythmy room on Thursday, August 5, consisted of my responding to Mr. Goesch, who had asked me whether it was all right for the child (whom I had just seen standing down by the door) to take part in eurythmy exercises again, by saying that of course that was entirely up to the parents, since what the parents wanted was the only thing to consider in whether or not the child should come to eurythmy again. At that point, I also made the mistake of extending my hand to Mr. Goesch. These are the two instances in which I intervened in someone else's inner being by means of black magic.

Let me still comment on one more passage from the end of this letter: “I am now coming to the end of what I want to say at present. I have not been able to clothe my insights—which I achieved through the guidance of the Keeper of the Seal of the Society for Theosophical Art and Style, who is under the protection of Christian Rosenkreutz—in the ideal form I had envisioned. The obstacles were still too great for someone only recently released from your spell.” I believe you all know who the so-called keeper of the seal is, and all I have to say about this is that the person in question has written a number of letters to both me and my wife in the past few months, including one Mrs. Steiner received only today.⁴ I will not discuss the matter of the “keeper of the seal” any further today; I just want to point out that her letters started coming around Christmas, mysteriously enough.

It may well be that I shall have to say something about this at some point, but I really do not want to do it today. I want you to come to a conclusion without being influenced by me. It is certainly almost impossible to be aware of the mysterious connection between this letter and the “keeper of the seal” and say nothing further about it, but today may not be the right time for that.

However, I do still want to mention that some years ago in fall I announced that due to certain embarrassing symptoms that had appeared within our Society, it seemed necessary to found a society of a more restricted sort.⁵ To begin with, I attempted to invest a number of long-term members close to me with certain offices, on the assumption that these people would become independently active in accordance with their new titles. At that time, I said that if anything came of it, the membership would hear about it by Epiphany. No one heard a thing, which means that the Society for Theosophical Art and Style does not exist. That is a perfectly justified assumption, since no one has heard anything to the contrary, and it is equally safe to assume that an announcement would have been made if my intentions had in fact been realized. The way my plans were received, however, made it impossible for this society to come about. It was simply an experiment.

My friends, I have often said that the Anthroposophical Society has to make sense as a society if it is to make sense at all. After all, other arrangements could be made for lecturing on esoteric teachings. I have also often pointed out that if certain signs and symptoms continue to appear in the Society, finding another form for it will become inevitable because the present form and present arrangements are not serving the purpose. I was trying to avoid certain things prevalent in the Theosophical Society when I founded the Anthroposophical Society, of which I do not want to be a member, since that is crucial to what I have to do for this spiritual movement.

Our Society also often comes under attack from outside, and of course these attacks are also directed at the Society's teacher and lecturer. This should lead our active members to take up the obligation to defend our cause, if they take the idea of our Society as seriously as they should. However, libelous pamphlets of the most despicable sort, containing the most unbelievable calumnies, have been appearing, and I leave it up to each one of you to judge whether everyone who could do something about them has taken the idea of the Society as seriously as would be necessary if the Society is to withstand these attacks from outside.

My friends, it is neither feasible nor possible for those who have an interest in the survival of the Anthroposophical Society to always first come to me to discuss what they ought to do in defense of me and our cause. That has to come to an end. If it does not, it would mean that it is actually true that people here are assigned their positions by me. I have to respect the independence of the members, even if that means, as it unfortunately does in many cases, that I have to deny them something. The fact of the matter is that the way things have been going, I could truly have done much more if I had not had to get involved in a lot of things that actually did not warrant my involvement. At least where the well-being of our Society is concerned, it is an absurdity to want to clear everything with me first. If what I want to do is to be accomplished on behalf of the Society, then please allow me the time to do it. The Society is wrongly conceived of if people are always turning to one individual; it must include taking personal initiative in what needs to be done on behalf of the Society.

For this reason, my friends, today's incident must be seen as an important and even crucial one. That is why I read you this letter, which is basically only an isolated symptom of something flaring up here, there, and everywhere. I will wait patiently to see what you, as members of the Society, will do about it. Meanwhile, I will continue to fulfill my obligations; the program will continue tomorrow as planned. But it goes without saying that how everything goes on after that will depend on the position the Society takes on what it has heard today. This is not something to be taken as an isolated case; it touches on many fundamental issues I have been pointing to for months in many discussions.⁶

When Rudolf Steiner had finished, a discussion took place; no stenographic record was kept. Some people must have spoken up in defense of the point of view expressed in Goesch's letter, because as one participant recollects, Rudolf Steiner left the room together with Marie Steiner, saying “I cannot have anything more to do with a society like this!”⁷ The great majority of those present must have been ashamed of this state of affairs, and on that same evening they composed this expression of confidence:

Dornach
August 21, 1915

Dear Dr. Steiner:

As members of the Anthroposophical Society, we wish to express our righteous indignation and our feeling of shame that someone of mendacious and immoral outlook, as evident in Mr. Heinrich Goesch's letter, has dared to address you in a fashion dictated by the most despicable delusions of grandeur.

We must painfully reproach ourselves for not having understood how to prevent what has happened and for having proved unable thus far to create a circle of people in which the thoughts and feelings expressed in this letter could not have arisen.

We ask your forgiveness as our loved and respected teacher. We also ask that you not retract your confidence in us, or rather, that you trust in us again, because we are firmly resolved to better realize the ideal of the Anthroposophical Society and to be more aware of our responsibility in future.

It is a matter of course that, given the point of view they represent, we no longer wish to consider Miss Alice Sprengel, Mr. Heinrich Goesch, and Mrs. Gertrud Goesch as having a place in our midst.

We ask you, dear Dr. Steiner, to take our signatures as an assurance of our unconditional and constant trust and our sincerest gratitude.

signed by Michael Bauer and over 300 others⁸

This vote of confidence was a spontaneous and purely human expression of the signers' relationship to Rudolf Steiner. The facts of the case are addressed in Rudolf Steiner's own contributions. The professional comments of one Dr. Amann (Basel, September 14, 1915) shed some light on the difficulties the members faced in judging the situation:

Among the members, the prevailing opinion is still that Mr. Goesch is not mentally ill, he is only under a bad influence.

When someone has a fever or is drowsy, that is easy enough for anyone to diagnose. On the other hand, mental illness is extremely difficult for even an expert professional to diagnose except in extreme cases.

From people's comments, it is clear that they cannot understand that Mr. Goesch is mentally ill and that they have misconceptions about this type of illness. They believe the mentally ill are necessarily idiots who cannot write intelligently.

Idiots are feeble-minded; the sluggishness of their brain does not allow them to think at all. Unless some organic illness causes feeble-mindedness as a secondary condition, they are born retarded. Exactly the opposite is true of someone who is mentally ill; here, we are dealing with a melancholy frame of mind and clouded logic. This condition, in turn, must be distinguished from insanity—insane people are dangerous!

People who are mentally ill forfeit none of the quality of their intellect. Their intellectual capacity actually increases, because they are inexhaustible when it comes to intellectual work; in fact, they are intellectually active all day and all night. Their illness lies in the fact that they become obsessed and hypnotized with their own fixed trains of thought and are not susceptible to any criticism from outside. These people suffer in secret under the thoughts that plague them until they have carried them to term and can present them to the public. The urge to be visibly productive and important is constantly present in them.

Rudolf Steiner continued in the same vein on the following evening, August 22, 1915, discussing the case further.

• 1. Lecture of August 20, 1915, Dornach, entitled “Episodische Betrachtungen fiber Raum, Zeit, Bewegung” (“Some Observations on Space, Time, and Movement”), in Der Wert des Denkens far eine den Menschen befriedigende Weltanschauung. Das Verhältnis der Geisteswissenschaft zur Naturwissenschaft (“Thinking's Value for a Humanly Satisfying World View: The Relationship of Spiritual Science to Natural Science”), GA 164, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This lecture has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 2. Rudolf Steiner, “Gedanken wahrend der Zeit des Krieges” (“Thoughts during the Time of War”), essay of July 5, 1915, in Aufsätze über die Dreigliederung des sozialen Organismus und zur Zeitlage: Schriften und Aufsätze 1915–1921 (“On the Threefolding of the Social Organism and on the Current Situation: Essays and Articles 1915–1921”), GA 24, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1982). [Not available in English—Translator.]
• 3. Rudolf Steiner, The Riddles of Philosophy, GA 18, (Spring Valley, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1973).
• 4. See p. 115 in this volume.
• 5. Address in Berlin, December 15, 1911, in Zur Geschichte und aus den Inhalten der ersten Abteilung der Esoterischen Schule 1904 bis 1919 (“On the History and Contents of the First Class of the Esoteric School, 1904–1919”), GA 264, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1984). [This volume has not been published in English—Translator.]
• 6. Rudolf Steiner may well have been referring to his description of different types of clairvoyance, and especially the difference between “head clairvoyance” and “gut clairvoyance.” Cf. the lecture series Wege der Geistigen Erkenntniss und der Erneuerung künstlerischer Weltanschauung (“Paths to Spiritual Knowledge and Renewal of Art Philosophy”), GA 161, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1980), and Kunst- und Lebensfragen im Lichte der Geisteswissenschaft (“Questions of Art and Life in the Light of Spiritual Science”), GA 162, (Dornach, Switzerland: Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 1985). [These volumes have not been published in English—Translator]
• 7. Hilde Boos-Hamburger in Mitteilungen aus der anthroposophischen Arbeit in Deutschland (“News about the Anthroposophical Work in Germany”), Vol 17, no. 1, Easter 1963.
• 8. Michael Bauer, 1871–1929, leader of the Albrecht Diirer Branch in Nurnberg. He was a member of the Vorstand of the Anthroposophical Society from 1913 until his retirement for health reasons in 1921.

In the present group of lectures I have wanted particularly to indicate that the entire constitution of the human soul is undergoing transformation. This becomes evident to anyone who observes the evolution of humanity carefully from a spiritual scientific point of view, of humanity even in historical times, which is what we have been chiefly considering. People's way of comprehending their conception of the world, their impulses to act: everything pertaining to the human soul-constitution is changing in such a way that the slightest idea of it is beyond the understanding of external science. For science works in this realm with utterly inadequate means. Yesterday we tried to show that especially what may be called the center of human soul-life, real ego-consciousness, appears to more intimate observation to have been entirely different in ancient times from the ego-consciousness of later epochs, and that again from our present. I tried to characterize these differences by saying that in ancient times, particularly the pre-Christian, man's consciousness of self still possessed elements of reality, while in our own era, which involves principally the development of the consciousness-soul, there is only a reflection of the true ego in what we consciously call our ego. I have referred to this fact in public lectures by saying that a man of our time, especially if he thinks he is a philosopher, does not arrive at the truth because he is confused by a philosophic maxim that plays a great role in today's world view, a role that is becoming disastrous, namely, the maxim “I think, therefore I am.” This Augustinian and Descartian maxim is not true for present-day man. The true form should now be: “I think, therefore I am not.” A human being in our time should be fully conscious of the fact that in all he includes in the word “I” or “I am,” in all he holds in his consciousness when he observes his inner soul-being, he possesses only a reflection. This reflection even includes all the concepts directly connected with his ego, concepts that must be worked through by his ego. As humanity of this present age we no longer have anything of reality in our inner soul-life. The reality, our true being, only shines into us—I explained yesterday how it shines in—and what we bear within us is merely the reflection. This fact will only become clear when we inquire into the science of initiation and observe the difference between the way a human being in ancient times could penetrate into the supersensible worlds on paths of supersensible training, and the way this is accomplished in our day. We will then be able to see that as we move on from the present into the future the paths into the supersensible world will be completely different from those of ancient times. This is especially what I wanted to make clear yesterday.

Some time ago I pointed to the objective fact underlying this whole evolution. I pointed out that if we ask what impulses, what forces are active in the evolution of the earth and the evolution of humanity, we learn that certain divine- spiritual Beings are active whom the Bible calls the Creators, the Elohim. (One could just as well take their title from another source.) We call them the Spirits of Form. I have shown, however, from various points of view that these Spirits of Form have to a certain extent—if I may use a trivial expression—finished playing their role on behalf of the most important concerns of mankind, and that other spiritual beings have taken it over.

Anyone with sufficient feeling for this fact that presents itself to supersensible research, namely, that the time- honored Gods, or God, must now be replaced in human consciousness by other impulses, will realize that indeed very much has happened in the evolution of mankind, even during historical times. Such an inner transformation of the whole human consciousness as is now taking place, and which will become more and more apparent, has certainly never occurred within historical times. As you know, I am not inclined to agree with the oft-repeated phrase: we live in a time of transition. I have often remarked that anyone can say of any time that one lives in an age of transition; and if he fancies the notion, he can consider the transition he has in mind the most important in world evolution. That is not the meaning intended in what I have said. Any time is a time of transition, but the important thing is to know what is in transition, what is undergoing metamorphosis. From other points of view other transitions may have been more significant; but for the inner soul-life of man the transition to which I am now referring, directed toward our immediate future, is the one most fraught with meaning of any in historical times.

Let us consider this further from a somewhat different point of view. When we call to mind clearly the soul-constitution in the time of ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, ancient Chaldea, it appears first of all not to have had a twofold structure as does the soul of present-day man. Perhaps we would better say that a twofold structure is now in preparation; indeed, it is in vigorous preparation, and can already be recognized in objective facts. What was formerly a mingling of soul-forces, so to speak, that worked together in the human soul, has been dividing since the fifteenth century. To a critical observer of human evolution this is quite evident. The conceptual life and the will-life were much more closely united in former times than they are now. They will separate more and more. The conceptual life, which is absolutely all we can lay hold of with our present consciousness (the ordinary, not the clairvoyant consciousness), is nothing more than a reflection of reality; and this life of conceptions also comprises all that we can grasp of our ego. On the other hand, we experience our will-life as in sleep. A man is as unconscious of what actually pulsates in his will as he is of events during sleep; but just as he knows that he has slept, in spite of knowing nothing about himself during sleep, so he knows about his will with his ordinary consciousness even though he sleeps through everything that he wills. If you have a white surface that reflects light, with some black spots on it that do not reflect the light, you see the black spots too, even though they do not reflect the light. Similarly, if you follow your life in retrospect, not only do you see your waking periods, but the periods of sleep appear in the course of your life as black spots. It is correct to say that you know nothing of yourself in sleep; but in a survey of your entire plane of consciousness the intervals of sleep may be said to appear as black spots. A person deceives himself if he thinks he knows more of his will than he does of his sleep. Man is conscious of his life of conceptions, and into this life of conceptions slip the black spots; these are the impulses of will. But man experiences these will-impulses as little as he experiences the sleep periods.

The will-life was less obscure to the consciousness of pre-Christian ancient times than it is today. Man was not so sound asleep with regard to his will; the instinctive will functioned, illuminated by the life of conceptions. On this account conceptions were not such pale reflections as they are today. Now we have on the one hand the conceptual life, which is only a reflection of reality, and on the other hand the will-life, which is a sort of sleep-condition punctuating our conscious life.

I said that what is contained in man's soul-constitution is also apparent objectively. Let us consider two phenomena that are extreme opposite poles. The rest of human life, so far as it is influenced by the human soul-constitution, resembles these phenomena. One of them is to be found today in the views which are especially developed in the so- called secret societies of the English-speaking peoples. (Such societies existing among other peoples, for instance, the Freemasons and similar organizations, depend entirely upon their original founding among the English-speaking peoples.) This is one extreme phenomenon. The other is to be found in the so-called Christian Church, wherever this has dogmas and rituals. These are two extreme, diametrically opposed phenomena.

There are other phenomena that are similar: for instance, what we call modern science resembles the secret-society view of the English-speaking peoples. Humanity is hardly aware that modern science is essentially similar to the views existing in these secret societies. I do not say influenced by them, but similar to them—for these things develop from different roots and then the trees become similar. It is the same with much that one finds in popular world conceptions. Today many people whose thinking does not conform to any kind of scientific world view have nonetheless similar aims. Among the scientific conceptions, philosophy alone—from an inner view—is still dependent upon the view of the Roman Catholic Church. Even the organization of man as body and soul, which philosophers regard today as unprejudiced science, is (as I have often stated) merely an outcome of the eighth Ecumenical Council of Constantinople,¹⁴ when the spirit was abolished by the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, “unprejudiced” philosophy is nothing but the elaboration of a Church Council resolution. There are individuals who do not look at things as they are painted by the universities of our time, but who really penetrate to the facts. To them, a philosophy that accepts this dualism of body and soul, and fails to stand for the true organization of man as body, soul, and spirit, is nothing but abstract superstition originating in that Church Council—unconsciously, of course. Now if you take these two opposite views, you may find them in modified form in science and in the popular world view—as the cold of the North Pole is modified in the Temperate Zone—but if the extremes are kept in mind, the matter will become perfectly clear. You see, the secret-society view of the English-speaking people, looking up to what it considers as underlying the whole cosmic process, emphasizes particularly the so-called Architect of the worlds, the great Master Builder of the worlds. These people picture to themselves in all sorts of symbols and rites the way the great Architects of all worlds work within the cosmic process. No one recognizes that this view persists as a ghost in modern science; but it does. It is a view tending to focus exclusively upon a mere reflection of the world, upon what is only a reflection of reality.

There you have the one extreme, which takes into account only the reflection of reality and when it becomes a dogmatic world conception, it is really something entirely outside reality. That is why so much mischief can be done with these things; it is why rites and symbols, very seriously intended, or seriously proclaimed, can become a masquerade or mere ostentation. It is something a human being consciously enjoys; it gives him a lively sensation, just because it takes account of the present-day consciousness, the consciousness that is a reflection of reality, that contains the reflection of reality.

The other extreme is offered by the Church. It is radically different from the world-conception “nerve” of the secret-society view. What the Christian Church offers reckons with the other pole, the pole of the will, with those human impulses that enter the consciousness only as sleep does at night. It reckons with a reality, to be sure, but a reality that is slept through. That is the reason also for the curious development of the Christian churches, which consists in their having gradually resolved the very different concepts of ancient times into their so-called concept of faith. Anyone who knows how the followers of almost all Christian views constantly turn away from knowledge and toward faith will feel something of sleep in this practice of faith. Their desire is to prevent at all costs any clearly conscious illumination of what strives to enter the human soul from those regions where sleep also originates. Therefore, what I have described as the content of the ancient Gnosis was reduced in earlier centuries to completely abstract dogmas, which were not intended to be comprehended but only to be accepted. And in Protestantism, knowledge has been reduced to a mere subjective belief, which has its special characteristic in its being based on something that cannot be proved, something beyond the province of science. There you have the two extremes that developed in the human soul-constitution as they are now related to objective facts.

Now we may ask what really underlies this splitting of the human entity into two-poles: the conceptual life, which has become a mere reflection of images; and the will-life, which has been forced down into realms of unconsciousness where it is asleep? The underlying cause is this, that in the historical evolution of humanity the impulse for freedom is struggling upward in the development of the human being. Even freedom, dear friends, is a product of evolution! Earlier times were not ready to awaken humanity to a real impulse for freedom.

This present time in which we live can be characterized on the one hand as I have just indicated: by the fact that the Spirits of Personality are replacing the Spirits of Form. Subjectively the struggling forth from the human soul of the impulse for freedom accompanies this outer, objective fact of evolution. Whatever course events may be taking externally, however chaotic all outer happenings may become, still at the same time we have in the present and the near future the struggle of the human being, in this very age of the consciousness soul (in which we have been living since the fifteenth century) the struggle of the human being to win through to an experience of the impulse for freedom. An understanding of this impulse is being sought by modern humanity, and will be sought more and more.

But this impulse can only break out of the human soul if the soul is capable of it. In earlier times freedom in its full range was not possible, for the simple reason that before the age of the consciousness soul every impulse was instinctive. Man cannot be free if he can only take into his consciousness what plays in from an instinctively conscious reality. Modern science still reckons on this absence of freedom, on inner necessity, because it is ignorant of the fact that in our consciousness as it is developed today, in the only kind of consciousness that can be developed through modern science, no real impulses can exist. (The contemporary scientific concepts show this reflection-consciousness to the highest degree.) Nothing exists in our consciousness that springs from some reality of our own body, soul, or spirit. Reality exists in it, to be sure—especially if we develop what in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity I have called pure thought—but it only exists in reflection. As soon as you find yourself within a reality, you are impelled by it, for reality is something; even if it acts upon you quite feebly, it is an element of necessity, it constrains you, and you must follow it. This is not the case when a reflection works upon your soul, for a reflection contains no activity, no force; it is a mere image that does not urge the soul or compel it. In this age in which the consciousness tends to have reflections, the impulse for freedom can be developed at the same time. By anything else a man would be urged to do something; but when his conscious conceptions are images and nothing but images, which reflect a reality but are not the reality, there is no reality to oppress him. He is able in this age to develop his impulse for freedom. This is a mysterious fact that underlies the life of our present time. That people have become materialists in this age can be traced to their feeling, when they contemplate their inner life, that they find no reality there, only images. And, of course, everything else is sought in the sense-world. It is true that we can find no reality, either spiritual or physical, within our soul; we find only images. This was not always so; it is only true for our age. Our age is suited to develop materialism because it has become nonsensical to say, “I think, therefore I am.” We should say, ‘‘I think, therefore I am not.” That means that my thoughts are only images. In the act of conceiving myself in thinking, I am not, I am only an image. This being-an-image, however, is what gives me the possibility of developing freedom.

This is another fact revealed by outer phenomena to those who survey life, may I say, according to certain leitmotivs; but its truth will only be fully revealed when we again take up initiation science, true spiritual science. You must realize, however, that today whenever people are active in philosophic or scientific pursuits, they are living very much on concepts inherited from an earlier time.

This can be seen very clearly in one of the contrasting phenomena we were considering. You can observe how the secret-society ideas of the English-speaking peoples have spread over the earth; and you will find that in these secret societies what is ancient is emphasized with a certain partiality. The more the age of any rite or dogma in this realm can be played up, the more—pardon the expression—they lick their fingers with pleasure. And when someone wants especially to captivate people with some sort of occult science, he at least announces that it is Rosicrucian, or even Egyptian—but surely old; it must be something or other old. That corresponds pretty well to the fact that in those societies knowledge that has been obtained in the immediate present is not cultivated. (Some direct research is carried on, to be sure, but only according to the rules of ancient, antiquated occult science.) On the contrary, anything such as we do here—spiritual science acquired by working directly out of the impulses of the present—anything of this sort is opposed with might and main. Opposition to anything modern is the fixed tradition of these extreme phenomena. And—leaving aside Goetheanism, which is something entirely new—if one considers thoughtfully the customary, trivial natural science and its mode of conception, one knows that all the real concepts with which it works, even all ideas (not the single laws of nature, but the forms of the laws of nature) are, fundamentally, inherited concepts. The experiments contain something new, the observations also; but the concepts are new in no sense whatever: they are inherited. And when we call the attention of one or another scientist to this fact, they become really indignant, fearfully angry, and they deny this source of their concepts.

Whence, then, comes modern thought that fancies itself so enlightened? My dear friends, it is merely the child of an ancient religion! To be sure, the religious conceptions have been discarded. People no longer believe in Zeus or in Jahve—many not even in Christ—but the mode of thought from the age when Zeus, Jahve, Osiris, Ormuzd, were believed in, the manner of human thinking has remained. It is applied today to oxygen, hydrogen, electrons, ions, Herzian waves; the object makes no difference, the mode of thought is the same. Only through spiritual science can a new kind of thinking be employed for the supersensible world and for this world as well. As I have often said, Goethe provided an elementary beginning in natural science with his morphology, which consequently is also combatted by the antiquated views. With his physics too Goethe created a beginning, but the fruitfulness of that beginning is still hardly recognized. Thus people work with what is left over—which, of course, is comprehensible. For in an age when the consciousness is filled, not with elements of reality, but with only reflected images, it is unable, if it is thrown entirely on its own resources as ordinary, everyday consciousness, to acquire much in the way of content.

On the other hand, how were the religious conceptions acquired? It is childish to suppose that the ancient theologians thought up the contents of the Old Testament, or more recent theologians those of the New Testament, in the way present-day philosophers turn out their inherited concepts. That is a childish way of thinking. What stands in the Old Testament and the New Testament, and in the other religious books of the various peoples, came from supersensible visions, but only from the very ancient supersensible visions. It was all revealed through supersensible knowledge; and as the revelations were accepted from the supersensible world, the thought-forms were accepted too. So that today a good zoologist or a good surgeon is—unconsciously—using the thought-forms, the kind of concepts, that the seer of the Old Testament or New Testament had gained in his way by his own effort. And from the visions he obtained, the seer also developed his mode of forming concepts. Naturally it angers people today when we say to them: Even though you are zoologists, or physiologists, and certainly work in a different field, you are nevertheless using the thought-forms that originated from the visions of the ancient prophets or the evangelists. In the course of the last four hundred years, since the rise of Copernicanism and Galileism, very few new concepts have been acquired, and still less concept-forms of any sort, or trends of thought. The little that has been gained is precisely what provides the foundation for again finding supersensible paths of knowledge—through the real, anthroposophically oriented science of the spirit. Therefore, as early as the eighties of the last century I indicated clearly in my introduction to Goethe's Morphology—and I had the words printed in italics—that I considered Goethe the Kepler and Copernicus of organic science. I intended in this way to point out the path that leads directly into supersensible realms, and that starts from the good elementary foundation which he created. Thus the kind of thoughts that continue to haunt human heads today came from ancient vision, that is, from atavistic supersensible perception. During this entire evolution of human consciousness the Creators of old, the Spirits of Form, were active; they revealed themselves to the supersensible consciousness. Now it is no longer these Spirits who are revealed to one who stands within the modern life of spirit: it is the Spirits of Personality.

You may ask, what is the difference? This is shown precisely in initiation science. The modern spiritual scientist is still someone very strange to the popular consciousness, even to the general scientific consciousness, because the latter contains only a spark of Galileism, Copernicanism and Goetheanism, and even that in very elementary form, for it is still commonly dominated by the mode of thought of the ancient seers. It was the Spirits of Form who had furnished the ancient visions, who then brought to life in man the conceptions that were active in the ancient religions and even in Christianity up to the present time. These Spirits of Form, whom we call Creators, manifested themselves, to begin with, in imaginations that arose in man involuntarily. That was their initial mode of revelation; then out of the imaginations grew the conceptions of all the ancient religions. You know that imagination is the first stage of supersensible knowledge, then comes inspiration, and then intuition. All those who wanted to reach supersensible knowledge in the ancient sense started from imaginations; they had to find their way to the Spirits of Form.

Today the way has to be found to the Spirits of Personality. Here, then, is a tremendous difference. For the Spirits of Personality do not give imaginations to whoever wants them: a man must work them out himself; he must go to meet the Spirits of Personality. It was not necessary to go to meet the Spirits of Form. Formerly a man could be what one may call favored by divine grace, because the Spirits of Form gave him their imaginations in the form of visions. Many still seek this path today, because it is easier—but it is only attainable now in a pathological condition. Mankind has evolved, and what was psychological in earlier times is pathological now. Everything in the nature of visions, everything that depends upon involuntary imaginations, is pathological in our time and pushes a man down below his normal level. What is demanded today of anyone who wishes to push forward to initiation science, or actually to initiate vision, is that he shall develop his imaginations in full consciousness. For the Spirits of Personality will not give him imaginations; he must bring the imaginations to them. And something else occurs today. When you develop, when you elaborate valid imaginations, then you meet the Spirits of Personality on your supersensible path of knowledge, and you find the power to verify your imaginations, to bring them to objectivity for yourself.

The most elementary course for the spiritual researcher today will usually be to seek imaginations from the soundest results of modern knowledge. I have pointed out that modern science is the best preparation for spiritual research, because it offers the possibility of rising to fruitful pictorial concepts, especially if it is carried on in the Goethean sense. Of course anyone can invent images that are merely fantastic; one can patch together all sorts of stuff into arbitrary imaginations. The images one makes must first be verified by the approach of the Spirits of Personality bringing inspirations and intuitions. These are really received from the Spirits of Personality. One knows with certainty that one is in communication with those Spirits, who reveal themselves to present-day humanity from remote depths of spirit; but they will remain unproductive for one unless one brings a language to them. They keep the imaginations for themselves. Earlier, the Spirits of Form placed imaginations before a person who had supersensible vision; but the Spirits of Personality keep them in their possession, and one must come to an understanding with those Spirits—just as one would with another human being with whom one should be having thoughts in common and interchange of these thoughts. One should have free converse in the same way with the Spirits of Personality. The entire inner structure of spiritual life has been changed. The involuntary character which was the basis of the ancient revelations has been transformed into an impulse which is experienced in free activity. Someone who is not superficial, who wants to find out what really can occur, will become aware as he follows world events today (perhaps at first from something quite superficial) that a new world-plan is seeking to be realized, that behind outer events something is trying to take place spiritually. This may be sensed from world- happenings, but thoughts about it are still very vague.

Especially in social life many people may have the feeling that something is trying to be realized, something wills to happen. But if one wishes to understand what it is that wills to occur, he must approach it with something that only he himself can bring to it. What I have indicated as one kind of social impulse that is needed—but only one kind, because it is not a program, but reality—has been learnt in this way. I can say, therefore, that it is not something thought out, or fashioned from some ideal (what is called an ideal today), but it is a conception of something that presses to be realized, and that will be realized. One can only put it into concepts if one has first acquired the ability to form imaginations, and then has had them verified, proved, confirmed by the Spirits of Personality who are weaving the new world-plan.

This present-day development demands of us that we strip away all that is out of date in current science, and really find our way into new thought-forms, so that in them we may reach not antiquated visions, but imaginations built up with all our will, which we may then offer to the objective process of the spiritual world and receive back verified. This is so completely, so radically different from all earlier methods of gaining supersensible knowledge that the numerous individuals who depend upon the earlier methods resist it with all their might. For something is demanded of persons seeking to gain supersensible knowledge, something that is radical, primal, elementary, that intends to penetrate to sources, something that must be reconciled with all that is, consciously or unconsciously, antiquated. That is the reason why the spiritual science presented here attaches so little value to all that is traditional. These traditional things are certainly worthy of respect, but the fact remains that we stand at the turning-point of human evolution; and we must fully recognize that the traditional is obsolete, and that something new must be won. Hence, in a spiritual science that takes today's conditions into account, there can be no thought of faith in the old sense, nor any inclination toward the so-called Master Builder of all worlds. For both pertain only to external consciousness. When one attains a consciousness that is outside the body and outside the course of life, that is really in the spiritual world, then will and conceptions flow together again into one reality. And what was mere architecture, mere form—lifeless forms and lifeless symbols—receives inner life. Empty, obscure faith becomes knowledge, concrete self-transforming knowledge. The two unite and become a living thing. This is what must be experienced by humanity. The ancient symbols and ancient rites must be felt to be out of date. The whole earlier mode of thought must be felt as something antiquated; and the rigid forms in that mode of thought must be given life.

Just think how much use is still made today of those antiquated concepts! Certainly something useful can be done with them in many fields; but humanity would become stiff and paralyzed and withered if our antiquated ideas did not yield to something else, something containing inner life. We can no longer continue to work under the symbol of world-architecture, with rigid forms, traditional symbols, traditional dogmas. Something must bring mankind and the world together, and it must be a spontaneous, living thing.

At the beginning of our Christian era, for example, it was not yet true even of Christianity that its development was founded on something living. I have often called attention to the fact that those who first wrote about Christianity did so from the standpoint of the ancient Egypto-Chaldean science. Even the dates were not historically established. Festival dates, for instance, were determined astrologically, also the dates of the birth and death of Christ Jesus. The whole Apocalypse rests on astrology. The latter was alive in ancient times, but today it is dead, it is simply mathematical reckoning. It will only come to life again when things are comprehended with living insight: when, for instance, the birth-year of Christ Jesus is not figured out by the stars, but is seen with the vision that can be gained today in the way described. With that, things come to life. There is no life today in a calculation that determines whether some star is in opposition or in conjunction with another, and so on; but there is life when the nature of the opposition is experienced, when this is experienced livingly, inwardly—not simply externally through mathematics. In saying this, no particular objection is intended to external mathematics; it can even shed light on many things—darkness on many things, too!—but it has nothing to do with humanity's real, immediate necessity. Nor can these things be perpetuated in the old way; they would bring nothing but aridity and paralysis to the development of mankind. Of course, in judging such things people are influenced by the thought that although they themselves need not become seers—for just healthy commonsense can grasp spiritual science—yet even this kind of thinking can only be acquired with effort, while on the other hand they can easily adopt the ancient traditions and methods, and still more easily believe the church dogmas.

Now we come to a fact that we have treated repeatedly from various points of view: namely, the change that is taking place in the constitution of the human soul. It indicates on the one hand the streaming forth of the revelation of the Spirits of Personality; on the other hand, it indicates the liberation within the depths of men's souls of the impulse for freedom—a fact reflected now so urgently in the great demands mankind is raising. Today's social demands can only be understood if one is able to perceive this evolution in the constitution of the human soul. Call to mind a remark I made yesterday: that people are beginning—at least beginning, I said—to sense their true ego when they come in contact with other people. The man of old understood “Know thou thyself!” in the external world. For supersensible cognition it is different; but the man of ancient times, when speaking of his ego, had something real in the external world, the world in which the human being lives with his ordinary consciousness between birth and death. Modern man has only a reflection of his true ego; but something of his true ego shines into him when he comes in contact with other people. Another person who is connected with him karmically, or in any other way, gives him something real. To express it radically: it is characteristic of human beings of our present age to be inwardly hollow—and we should acknowledge it. If we practice life-retrospection honestly and faithfully, we find that the influences other people have had upon us are much more important than what we ourselves have supposedly acquired. Present-day man, of himself, gains extraordinarily little unless he obtains knowledge from supersensible sources. He need not be clairvoyant. A person is driven to daily social intercourse because actually he is only real in someone else, in his relation to another person. As we approach the sixth post-Atlantean epoch, of which embryonic impulses are now present in Russia, this fact will become so potent that a current axiom will be: No happiness is possible for one individual without the happiness of all—just as a single organ in man can only function if the whole functions. In the future this will be recognized as an axiom simply because it will be a fact of consciousness. We are still far from it—you may make your minds easy!—for a long time to come you will be able to consider your own personal happiness even though it may be built upon much human misery. But that is the direction in which humanity is developing. It is simply a fact, as when a man has a cold he must cough. He finds that unpleasant. Just so, a few thousand years from now, there will be unpleasant soul-conditions aroused when a man wishes as an individual to have any sort of happiness in the world without its being shared by others. This interdependence of mankind is inherent in human evolution, and is making itself felt today in the social demands. This is simply the direction in which the human soul is developing.

In earlier times when a man looked within, he could still find something real, even in the life between birth and death. Today, materialism is actually not unjustified in this life between birth and death if we observe man only outwardly; for what the ordinary consciousness can trace within the human being in his earthly life has only to do with material facts. Supersensible facts underlie these, but, as I said yesterday, they cease soon after birth and leave a man to take a material course until his death, when the supersensible struggles forth again. It is not from mere charlatanism that contemporary scientific research is materialistic, it is from taking into account instinctively the conditions actually existing in man today. But the people do not see beyond this life between birth and death. As soon as they begin someday to see beyond it, natural research will end as a matter of course.

Man must for once dive down into this purely material life, so that, independent of it, he may gain the spiritual. Thus, to understand what is pulsating in the most urgent demands of our time, it is absolutely necessary to look into this transformation of the human soul-constitution. And it is only possible to observe it when one is willing to do so through the science of initiation.

• 14. Council of Constantinople: 869 A.D. See Rudolf Steiner, Building Stones for an Understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, GA 175 (London, Rudolf Steiner Press, 1972).

I have designated what is called analytical psychology or psychoanalysis as an effort to gain knowledge in the soul realm by inadequate means of cognition. Perhaps nothing is so well adapted to show how, at the present time, everything urges the attainment of the anthroposophically orientated spiritual science, and how on the other side, subconscious prejudices lead men to oppose a spiritually scientific consideration of the facts. Yesterday I showed you by definite examples what grotesque leaps modern erudition is obliged to take when it ventures upon soul problems, and how to detect these leaps in the mental processes of modern scholars. It was pointed out that one of the better psychoanalysts—Jung—divided patients into two classes: the thinking type, and the feeling type. From this starting point he assumed that in cases of the thinking type, subconscious feelings force their way up into consciousness and produce soul conflicts—or in the opposite type, that thoughts in the subconscious mind arise and conflict with the life of feeling.

Now it might be suggested that these things will be fought out in scientific discussion, and that we might wait until people make up their minds to overcome the subconscious prejudice against anthroposophical spiritual science. But passive waiting becomes impossible in that such things do not confine themselves to the theoretical field, but encroach upon life practice and cultural development. And psychoanalysis is not content to occupy itself with therapy alone, which might be less dubious since there seems to be little difference—I said seems—between it and other therapeutical methods; but it is trying to extend itself to pedagogy, and to become the foundation of a teaching system. This forces us to point out the dangers residing in quarter-truths in a more serious manner than would be called for by mere theoretical discussion.

Much that relates to this matter can be decided only with the passage of time, but today we shall have to enlarge the scope of our examination in order to throw light upon one aspect or another. First of all I wish to call to your attention that the facts which lie before the psychoanalyst really point to an important spiritual sphere which present-day man does not wish to enter in an accurate and correct manner, but would prefer to leave as a sort of nebulous, subconscious region. For our present sickly, materialistically infected approach, even in this domain, likes nothing better than a vague, mystical drifting among all sorts of incomplete or unexecuted concepts. We find the most grotesque, the most repulsive mysticism right in the midst of materialism, if you take mysticism to mean a desire to swim about in all sorts of nebulous thinking, without working out your world-conception into clear, sharply outlined concepts. The domain into which recognized facts are pushing the psychoanalysts is the field of extra-conscious intelligence and reasoning activity. How often I have dealt with these matters—without going into details, but merely mentioning them, since they are taken for granted by students of spiritual science. How often I have reminded you that reasoning, intellectual activity, cleverness are not confined to the human consciousness, but are everywhere, that we are surrounded by effective mental activity as we are surrounded by air, interwoven with it, and the other beings as well.

The facts before the psychoanalyst might easily refer to this. I quoted to you yesterday the case described by Jung in his book, Die Psychologie der unbewussten Prosesse. It had to do with a woman who, having left an evening party with other guests, was frightened by horses, ran in front of them along the street to the river where she was rescued by passers-by, brought back to the house that she had left, where she had a love scene with her host. From the standpoint of Freud or Adler the case is easily explained on the basis of the love-drive or the power-drive, but this diagnosis does not reach the vital point. Its foundation is reached only by realizing that consciousness does not exhaust the cleverness, calculation, the artfulness of what penetrates man as intelligence, and by realizing that the laws of life are not limited by the laws of consciousness.

Consider this case. We can at least raise the question: What did the woman really want, after she had been one of the party, and had seen her friend depart for the health resort? She wanted the opportunity for what actually happened, she wanted a legitimate excuse to be alone with the master of the house. Of course this had nothing to do with what was in her consciousness, what she realized and admitted. It would not have been “proper,” as we say. Something had to be brought about that need not be avowed, and we shall reach the real explanation by allowing for her subconscious, designing intelligence, of which she was herself unaware. Throughout the entire evening she had wanted to bring about a conversation with her host. If one is less clever a poor choice is made of means, if more clever a better choice. In this case it may be said that in the woman's ordinary consciousness, which admitted scruples as to what was proper or improper, allowed or not allowed, the right means could not have been chosen for the end in view. But in that which was stored below the layer of the ordinary consciousness the thought was incessantly active: I must manage a meeting with the man. I must make use of the next opportunity that presents itself in order to return to the house.

We may be sure that if the opportunity with the horses had not offered itself, supported by association with the earlier accident, she would have found some other excuse. She needed only to faint in the street, and would have been brought back to the house at once, or she would have found some other expedient. The subconsciousness looked beyond all the scruples of the ordinary consciousness, taking the attitude that “the end justifies the means,” regardless of whether they would or would not harmonize with ideas of propriety and impropriety.

In such a case we are reminded of what Nietzsche, who surmised many of these things, called the great reason in contrast with the small reason, the all-inclusive reason that does not come into consciousness, that acts below the threshold of consciousness, leading men to do many things which they do not consciously confess to themselves. Through his ordinary outer consciousness the human being is in connection first with the world of the senses, but also with the whole physical world, and with all that lives within it. To the physical world belong all the concepts of propriety, of bourgeois morality, and so forth, with which man is equipped.

In his subconsciousness man is connected with an entirely different world, of which Jung says: the soul has need of it because it is related to it, but he also says that it is foolish to inquire about its real existence. Well, it is this way: as soon as the threshold of consciousness is crossed, man and his soul are no longer in merely material surroundings or relations, but in a realm where thoughts rule, thoughts which may be very artful.

Now Jung's view is quite correct when he says that modern man, the so-called man of culture, needs particularly to be mindful of these things. For present culture has this peculiarity, that it forces down numerous impulses into the subconsciousness, which then assert themselves in such a way that irrational acts—as they are called—and irrational general conduct result. When the “power-urge” or the “love urge” are mentioned, it is because in the moment that man and his soul enter the subconscious regions they come nearer to the realm where these instincts rule; not that they are in themselves causes, but that man with his subconscious intelligence plunges into regions where these impulses are effective.

That woman would not have gone to so much exertion for anything that interested her less than her love affair. It required an especial preoccupation for her subconscious cunning to be aroused. And that the love impulse so often plays an important role is due simply to the fact that the love interest is so very common. If the psychoanalysts would only turn more of their attention in other directions, cease to concentrate upon psychoanalytic sanatoriums, where the majority of the inmates seem to me to be women—(the same reproach is cast upon anthroposophical institutions but, I think, with less justice),—if they were more experienced in other fields, which is of course sometimes the case, if there were a greater variety of cases in the sanatoriums, a more extensive knowledge might be obtained.

Let us assume that a sanatorium was equipped for giving psychiatric treatment especially to people who had become nervous or hysterical from playing the stock market. Then the existence of other things in the subconscious mind could be established with as much reason as the love-urge, introduced by Freud. Then it would be seen with what detailed cunning, and artful subconscious processes, the man acts who plays the stock market. Then, through the usual methods of elimination, sexual love would be seen to play a very small part, yet the subtleties of subconscious acuteness, of subconscious slyness, could be studied at their height. Even the lust for power could not always be designated as being the primary impulse, but altogether different instincts would be found ruling those regions, in which man submerges himself with his soul. And if in addition a sanatorium could be equipped for learned men who had become hysterical—forgive me!—it would be found that their subconscious actions seldom lead back to the love-motive. For those with any thorough knowledge of facts in this field realize that, under present conditions, scholars are seldom driven to their chosen science by “love,” but by quite different forces which would show themselves if brought to the surface by psychoanalysis. The all-inclusive fact is that the soul is led from the conscious down into the subconscious regions where man's unconquered instincts rule. He can master these only by becoming aware of them, and spiritual research alone can lift them into consciousness.

Another inconvenient truth! For of course it forces the admission, to a point far beyond what the psychoanalyst is prepared to admit, that man in his subconscious mind may be a very sly creature, far more sly than in his full consciousness. Even in this field, and with ordinary science, we may have strange experiences. There is a chapter on this subject in my book Riddles of the Soul In it I deal with the strictures upon Anthroposophy, found in a book entitled Vom Jenseits der Seele,¹ and written by that academic individual Dessoir. This second chapter of my book Riddles of the Soul will be a nice contribution to thinking people who would like to form an opinion of present scholarly ethics. You will see when you read this chapter what kind of opposition must be encountered. I will mention, of all the points therein indicated, one or two only which are not unconnected with our present theme.

This man makes all sorts of objections to this and that, founded upon passages taken from my books. In a very neat connection he tells how I distinguish consecutive periods of culture: the Indian, the old Persian, the Chaldean-Egyptian, the Graeco-Latin, and now we live in the sixth, he says, “according to Steiner.”

This forces us to refute these misstatements in a schoolmasterly manner, for it shows us the only way to get at such an individual. How does Max Dessoir come to assert, in the midst of all his other nonsense, that I said we are living in the sixth postatlantean culture period? It may be easily explained if you have any practice in the technique of philological methods. I was connected for six years and a half with the Goethe Archives in Weimar, learned there a little about the usual procedure, and could easily show, according to philological methods, how Dessoir came to attribute to me this statement regarding the sixth culture period. He had been reading my book Occult Science, an Outline, in which there is a sentence leading to a description of our present fifth postatlantean culture period. In it I say that there are long preparations and, in one section, that events taking place in the 14th and 15th centuries were prepared in the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. About five lines further on I say that the sixth century was a preparation for the fifth culture period. Dessoir, reading superficially, turned back hastily as scholars do, to the place that he had noted in the margin, and confused what was said about the culture period with what had been stated further back about the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries. Thus he says “sixth culture period” instead of fifth because his eye had moved backward a few lines.

You see with what a grand superficiality such a person works. Here we have an example of how such “scholarship” may be philologically shown up. In this literary creation such mistakes run through the entire chapter. And while Dessoir affirms that he has studied a whole row of my books, I could prove, again philologically, which ones of mine compose this “whole row.” He had read—and but slightly understood—The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, for he devotes a sentence to it that is utter nonsense. And he read Occult Science, but in such a way as to bring out the kind of stuff that I have described. He read in addition the small work The Spiritual Guidance of Man, and the little pamphlets on Reincarnation and Karma, and Blood is Quite a Special Fluid. These are all that he read, as may be shown by his comments. He read nothing else. These are our present ethics of scholarship. It is important once in a way to expose, in such a connection, the erudition of the present day. Out of the long list of my books he chooses a very small number, and founds upon them, with quite perverted thinking, his whole statement. Many of our scientists today do exactly the same thing. When they write about animals, for example, they usually have for a foundation about as much material as Professor Dessoir extracted from my books.

Quite a pretty chapter could be written from observations of Dessoir's subconscious mind. He himself, however, in a special passage in his book, permits us to take account of his subconsciousness. He relates rather grotesquely that when he is lecturing it often happens that his thoughts go on without his full conscious direction, and that only by the reaction of his audience does he recognize that his thoughts have taken a line independent of his attention. He tells that quite naively. But only think! From this fact he embarks upon extended consideration of the many peculiarities of human consciousness. I have pointed out somewhat “gently” that Dessoir thus strangely reveals himself. I said at first: It cannot be possible that he means himself. In this case he must simply be identifying himself with certain clumsy lecturers, and speaking in the first person. It would be imputing to him a good deal to suppose that he is describing himself. But he really does exactly that. Well, in the discussion of such matters many odd things must be noted.

He disposed of The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity by one remark, with the addition of a sentence that is Dessoirish, but did not originate with me. The whole matter is crazy. He says at the same time “Steiner's first book, the The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity.” This forces me to point out that this book forms the close of a ten year period of authorship, and to offer this incident as an example of academic ignorance, and ethics. I know of course that although I have shown how incorrect his statements are, people will say again and again: “Well, Dessoir has refuted Steiner.”—I know it very well. I know that it is speaking against walls to try to break through what men imagine they have long since got rid of—belief in authority!

But this chapter alone will prove the difficulties against which spiritual science must struggle because it insists upon clear, sharply outlined concepts, and concrete spiritual experiences. There is no question of logic with such an individual as Dessoir, and a lack of logic characterizes in the broadest sense our present so-called scientific literature.

These are the reasons why official learning, and official spiritual trends, even if they work themselves away from such inferiority as the university psychiatry or psychology, are not in a position to make good because they lack the smallest equipment for a genuine observation of life. So long as it is not realized how far from genuine research and from a sense for reality that really is which poses as scientific literature—I do not say, as science, but as scientific literature—and often forms the content of university and especially of popular lectures—so long as this authoritative belief is not broken through, there can be no cure. These things must be said, and are compatible with the deepest respect for real scientific thinking, and for the great achievements of natural science. That these things are applied to life in such contradictory fashion must however be recognized.

After this digression let us return to our subject. Dessoir takes the opportunity to combine objective untruth with calumny in his remark regarding the little pamphlet Spiritual Guidance of Man. He feels it to be especially irritating that I have indicated important subconscious action of spiritual impulses by showing that a child while building its brain manifests greater wisdom than it is conscious of later. A healthy science ought to take its starting point from such normal effects of the subconscious, yet it needs something in addition. If you take up the book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds you will find mention of the Secret of the Threshold. In the explanation of this “secret” it is stated that in crossing the threshold into the spiritual world a kind of separation takes place, a sort of differentiation of the three fundamental powers of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing. Remember in the part dealing with the Guardian of the Threshold, the explanation that these three forces, which act together in ordinary consciousness in such a way that they can hardly be separated, become independent of each other. If I sketch them, this narrow middle section (see drawing) is the boundary between the ordinary consciousness and that region in which the soul lives in the spiritual world. Thinking, feeling, and willing must be so drawn as to show this as the range of will (red), but bordering upon the realm of feeling (green), and this in turn borders upon the realm of thinking (yellow). But if I were to indicate their direction after crossing the threshold into the spiritual world, I should have to show how thinking (yellow) becomes independent upon the one hand; feeling (green, right) separates itself from thinking, will becomes independent too (red, right), as I sketch it here diagrammatically, so that thinking, feeling, and willing spread out from one another like a fan.

You will find this described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. That these three activities, which before passing the threshold border upon each other but work separately, interact in the right way and do not come into confusion is due to the fact that the threshold has, so to speak, a certain breadth in which our

ego itself lives. If our ego acts normally, has perfect soul health, then the interaction of thinking, feeling, and willing is so regulated that they do not collide with one another, but mutually influence each other. It is the essential secret of our ego that it holds thinking, feeling, and willing beside each other, so that they can affect each other in the right way, but do not mix in any accidental fashion. Once across the threshold into the spiritual world there is no danger of this since the three faculties then separate.

Certain philosophers (such as Wundt, for example), insist that the soul must not be described as threefold because it is a unity. Wundt, too, confuses everything. The facts are that in the spiritual world thinking, feeling, and willing originate in a threefold manner, yet in the soul on earth they act as a unity. That must be taken into consideration, and if it be claimed, as recently reported, that Anthroposophy recognizes three souls though there exists but one, and that Anthroposophy has therefore no reasonable argument—then the answer must be that the unity of man is not impaired by the fact that he has two hands.

But now we are considering the relation of the ego to the soul-forces that work within it, and their action beyond the threshold of consciousness in the spiritual world. (Drawing, middle and right). An opposite condition may be brought about if the ego has been weakened in any way. Then the threshold is crossed, as it were, in the opposite direction (See drawing, left). Then thinking swerves aside (yellow, left), mingles with feeling (green, left), and willing (red, left), and confusion results. This happens if thinking is exposed in any way to the danger of not being properly confined, so that it asserts itself unwarrantably in the consciousness. Then, because the ego is not working as it should, thinking slides into the sphere of feeling or of will. Instead of working side by side, thinking mixes itself with feeling, or will, the ego being for some reason unable to exert its normal power.

This is what has happened in the cases described by the psychoanalysts as hysterical or nervous. Thinking, feeling, and willing have swung to the opposite side, away from the healthy direction that would lead them into the spiritual world. If you have any gift for testing and proving you may easily see how it comes about. Take the case of the girl sitting by the sickbed. Her strong ego-consciousness was reduced by loss of sleep and anxiety. The slightest thing might cause thinking to leave its track alongside of feeling and to run over into it. Then thought would be at once submerged in the waves of feeling, which are far stronger than the waves of thought, and the result in such a case is that the whole organism is seized by the tumult of feeling. This happens in the instant that thinking ceases to be strong enough to hold itself apart from feeling.

It is seriously demanded of the human being that he learn more and more to hold his thinking apart from the waves of feeling and will. If thinking takes hold subconsciously of the waves of feeling something abnormal results. (See drawing: at the right is the superconscious, in the middle the conscious, at the left the subconscious). This is extremely important.

Now you may readily imagine that in this modern life, when people are brought into contact with so much that they do not properly understand and cannot appraise, thoughts continually run over into feelings. But it must be remembered that thinking alone is oriented upon the physical plane; feeling is no longer confined to the physical plane, but stands in connection, by its very nature, with the spiritual plane as well. Feeling has really a connection with all the spiritual beings who must be spoken of as real. So that if a man with inadequate concepts sinks into his feeling-life, he comes into collision with the gods—if you wish to express it thus—but also with evil gods. And all these collisions occur because a man is submerged with no reliable means of knowledge. He must so submerge if he spends more time in the sphere of feeling than in the ordinary sphere of reason. In the sphere of feeling man cannot emancipate himself from his connection with the spiritual world. Even if, in this materialistic age, he does free himself in the realm of the intellect, he always enters the region of feeling with inadequate concepts, and so he must become ill.

What then is the real remedy, and how are men to be restored to health? They must be guided to concepts that reach out to include the world of feelings; that is to say that modern man must again be told of the spiritual world, and in the most comprehensive terms. Not the individually adapted therapeutic instructions of the psychoanalysts are meant, but the spiritual science which is applicable to all humanity. If the concepts of spiritual science are really accepted—for not everyone takes them in who only listens to lectures, or reads about them—but if they are really absorbed there will be no further possibility of the chaotic intermingling, in the subconscious, of the three spheres of the soul: thinking, feeling, and willing, which is the basis of all the hysteria and nervousness noted by the psychoanalysts.

For this, however, a man needs the courage to approach a direct experience of the operation of spiritual worlds, the courage to recognize that we are living now in a crisis that is connected with another (the established date being 1879), another crisis with painful consequences from which we are still suffering. I told you yesterday that many things must be considered from standpoints other than the materialistic ones of our own time, and I chose Nietzsche as an illustration.

Nietzsche was born in 1844. In 1841 the battle began in the spiritual world, of which I have already spoken, and Nietzsche was for three years in the midst of it, absorbing from it all possible impulses, and bringing them down with him to earth. Richard Wagner, born in 1813, took at first no part in it. Read Nietzsche's early writings, and notice the combative tone, almost every sentence showing the after-effects of what he experienced spiritually from 1841 to 1844. It gave a definite coloring to all the writings of Nietzsche's first period.

It is further of importance—as I have also explained—that he was a lad of sixteen when Schopenhauer died, and started at that time to read his works. A real relation ensued between the soul of Schopenhauer in the spiritual world and that of Nietzsche on earth. Nietzsche read every phrase of Schopenhauer so receptively that he was penetrated by every corresponding impulse of their author. What was Schopenhauer's object? He had ascended into the spiritual world in 1860 when the battle was still raging, and wanted nothing so much as to have the power of his thoughts continued through his works. Nietzsche did carry forward Schopenhauer's thoughts, but in a peculiar way. Schopenhauer saw when he went through the gate of death that he had written his books in an epoch threatened by the oncoming spirits of darkness, and with the struggle before him of these spirits against the spirits of light, he longed to have the effects of his work continued, and formed in Nietzsche's soul the impulse to continue his thoughts. What Nietzsche received from the spiritual world at this period contrasted strikingly with what was happening upon the physical plane in his personal relations with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's soul life was composed in this way, and his career as a writer.

The year 1879 arrived. The battle that had been going on in the spiritual realms began to be transferred to earth after the fall of the spirits of darkness. Nietzsche was exposed by his whole Karma (in which I include his relations with the spiritual world), to the danger of being driven by the spirits of darkness into evil paths. He had been inspired by the transcendent egoism of Schopenhauer to try to carry on his work. I do not mean to say that egoism is always bad. But when Wagner rose into the spiritual world in 1883 the spirits of darkness were below, so he came into an entirely different atmosphere, and he became Nietzsche's unselfish spiritual guide. He let him enter what was for him the proper channel, and allowed him to become mentally deranged at exactly the right moment, so that he never came consciously into dangerous regions. That sounds paradoxical, but it was really the unselfish way in which Wagner's soul affected Nietzsche from the purer realms above, rather than the manner in which Schopenhauer's soul acted, he being still in the midst of the battle, up in the spiritual world, between the spirits of darkness and the spirits of light. What Wagner wanted to do for Nietzsche was to protect him, so far as his Karma permitted, from the spirits of darkness, already descended upon earth.

And Nietzsche was protected to a great extent. If his last writings are read in the right spirit, eliminating the things that have sprung from strong oppositions, great thoughts will be discovered. I tried in my book Nietzsche, a Fighter against his Time, to show the mighty thought impulses, detached from all his resisting impulses.

Yes, “the world is deep.” There is really some truth in Nietzsche's own saying: “The world is deep, and deeper than the day divines.” So we must never try to criticize the wide regions of the spiritual life by means of our ordinary consciousness. The wise guidance of the worlds can be understood only if we can enter into that guidance, free from egoistic thoughts, even if we can fit the development of tragic happenings into the scheme of wisdom. If you wish to look into the heart of things you will come upon many uncomfortable places.

In future whoever wishes to evaluate a life like Nietzsche's will make no progress if he describes only what happened in Nietzsche's environment on earth. Our view of life will have to extend to the spiritual world, and we shall be pushed to this necessity by the kind of phenomena that the psychoanalyst today tries to master by such inadequate means of knowledge, but never will control. Therefore human society might be driven into regions of great difficulty if it yields to psychoanalysis, particularly in the field of pedagogy.

Why should this be? Consider the fact that thinking slips down into the sphere of feeling. Now as soon as a man lives with his soul in the sphere of feeling, he is no longer in the life that is bounded by birth and death or by conception and death, but lives in the whole world, the extended world. This represents the usual life span (See drawing, a); within the realm of feeling he lives also in the period from his last death to his birth into this present life (See drawing, b); and with his will he lives even in his previous incarnation (Drawing, c).

Think of the relation to pupil or patient of an instructor who wishes to proceed by the method of psychoanalysis. When he tries to deal with soul contents which have slipped down into the realm of feeling he lays hold, not only upon the man's individual life, but upon the all-inclusive life which extends far beyond the individual. For this all-encompassing life, however, there are between men no connections that may be handled by means of mere ideas. Such connections lead instead to genuine life-relationships. This is very important. Imagine the existence of such a connection between a psychoanalytic instructor and pupil. What takes place could not be confined to the realm of ideas which are conveyed to the pupil, but real karmic connections would have to be established because one is really encroaching upon life itself. It would be tearing the individual in question out of his karma, changing the course of his karma. It will not do to handle that which extends beyond the individual in a purely individual manner. It must be treated instead in a universally human way. We are all brought together in a definite epoch, so there must be a mutual element which acts as soon as we go beyond the individual. That is to say: a patient cannot be treated by psychoanalysis, either therapeutically or educationally, as between individuals. Something universal

must enter, must enter even the general culture of the period, something which directs the soul to that which would otherwise remain subconscious; and that which draws the subconsciousness upward must become the milieu—not a transaction between individuals.

Here, you see, lies the great mistake that is being made. It has a terrific range and is of immense importance. Instead of trying to lead them to the attainable knowledge of the spiritual world which is demanded by the times, the psychoanalysts shut all the souls who show any morbid symptoms into sanatoriums, and treat each one in the individual manner. It can lead only to the forming of confused karmic connections—what takes place does not bring to light the subconscious soul content, but simply forms a karmic tie between doctor and patient because it encroaches upon the individual.

You understand: we are dealing here with real, concrete life, with which it does not do to play, which can only be mastered if nothing is striven for in this field except what is humanly universal. These things must be learned by direct relations of human beings with the spiritual world. Therefore it would be useful if people were to stop talking abstractly as Jung does, saying that a man experiences subconsciously everything that mankind has been through, even all sorts of demons. He makes them into abstract demons, not realities, by saying that it is stupid to discuss their possible existence. He makes them into abstract demons, mere thought demons that could never make a man ill. They can exist only in consciousness, and can never be subconscious. That is the point: that people who give themselves up to such theories are themselves working with so many unconscious ideas that they can never happen upon the right thing. They come instead to regard certain concepts as absolute, infallible; and I must ever repeat that when ideas begin to become absolute, men get into a blind alley, or reach a pit into which they fall with their thinking.

A man like Dr. Freud is obliged to stretch the sexual domain over the entire human being in order to make it account for every soul phenomenon. I have said to various people with psychoanalytic tendencies, whom I have met: A theory, a world-concept must be able to hold its own when you turn it upon itself, otherwise it crumbles into nothingness. The simple fallacy, if you extend it far enough, is an example. A Cretan says: All Cretans are liars. If it is said by a Cretan, and it is true, then it would be a lie, which causes the saying to annul itself. It will not do for a Cretan to say “All Cretans are liars,” expecting the sentence to pass unchallenged. That is only a sample of absolutizing. But a theory should not crumble when turned upon itself. Just as the statement that all Cretans are liars would be a lie if made by a Cretan, so does the theory of universal sexuality crumble if you test it out by applying it to the subject itself. And it is the same with other things. You can understand such a principle for a long time without applying it vigorously, in accordance with reality. But it will be one of the particular achievements of anthroposophically oriented spiritual science, that it cannot be turned in this manner against itself.

• 1. Beyond the Limits of the Soul. (This book has not been translated into English. Ed.)

[ 1 ] The purpose of this book is to indicate germinal points in the world views of a series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling. The contemplation of these germinal points evokes a feeling that these thinkers drew from a source of spiritual experience from which much more can flow than they brought forth. What matters is not so much one's acceptance or rejection of what they expressed, but rather one's understanding of the character of their striving for knowledge and the direction of their path. One can then arrive at the view that there is something in this character and direction that is more promise than fulfillment. And yet it is a promise with innate power, bearing the guarantee of its fulfillment within itself.

Through this one gains a relationship to these thinkers that is not one of adherence to the dogmas of their world views, but rather one leading to the insight that: Upon the paths they took, there lie living powers for seeking knowledge that did not take effect in what they themselves recognized but that can lead out of and beyond it.

This need not mean returning to Fichte, Hegel, and the others in the hope that, by taking better paths from their starting points, one will thus arrive at better results.

No, that cannot be the point for us—to be “motivated” by these thinkers in this way—but rather to gain access to the sources from which they drew and to recognize what still lies hidden within these sources as motivating powers, in spite of the work of these thinkers.

[ 2 ] A look at the spirit of the modern, natural-scientific way of picturing things (Vorstellungsart) can make one feel how much the idealism in world views living in the above thinkers is a promise awaiting fulfillment.

Through its results in a certain direction, this natural scientific way of picturing things has demonstrated the efficacy of its cognitive means. One can already find this way of picturing things essentially prefigured in a thinker who was at work when its development began—in Galileo. (In his vice-chancellor's address to the Vienna University in 1894, the Austrian philosopher and Catholic priest Laurenz Müllner discussed the significance of Galileo in the most beautiful way.) What was already indicated by Galileo reappears, in an evolved state, in the directions taken by the research of the adherents of the modern natural-scientific way of thinking. This way of thinking has attained its significance by letting the world phenomena arising in the field of sens e observation speak purely for themselves, within their own lawful interconnections, and by wishing to allow nothing of what the human soul experiences from these phenomena to flow into what this way of thinking admits as knowledge. No matter what view one might hold about the natural-scientific picture of the world—whose fulfillment of the above cognitive demand is already possible or even achieved today—this cannot detract from one's recognition that this demand provides a sound basis for a valid picture of natural existence. If the adherent of an idealistic or spiritual-scientific world view takes a negative stance toward this demand today, he shows by this either that he does not understand the meanings of this demand, or that something of a natural-scientific way of picturing things are under the misconception that through such a world view something or other of the results of natural science is called into question.

[ 3 ] To anyone who penetrates into the true meaning of modern natural science, it is clear that this science does not undermine knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather supports and ensures it. One will not be able to arrive at this clarity, however, by imagining oneself, through all kinds of theoretical arguments, to be an opponent of a knowledge of the spiritual world, but rather by turning one's gaze upon what makes the natural-scientific picture of the world sensible and meaningful. The natural-scientific way of picturing things excludes everything from what it studies that is experienced through the inner being of the human soul. It investigates how things and processes relate to each other. What the soul, through its inner being, can experience about things serves only to reveal how things are, irrespective of these inner experiences. This is how the picture of purely natural occurrences comes about. This picture will in fact fulfill its task all the better, the more it succeeds in excluding this inner life. But one must now consider the characteristic traits of this picture. What one presents to oneself in this way as a picture of nature—precisely in the case where it fulfills the ideal of natural-scientific knowledge—cannot bear within itself anything that could ever be perceived by a human being nor any other soul being. The natural-scientific way of picturing things must provide a picture of the world that explains the relationship of natural facts but whose content would have to remain unperceivable. If the world actually were as pure natural science must picture it, then this world could never arise within a consciousness as a content of mental pictures. Hamerling is of the opinion: “Certain oscillations of the air produce sound in our ear. Sound, therefore, does not exist without an ear. A rifle shot, therefore, would not ring out if no one heard it.” Hamerling is wrong, because he has not grasped the determining factors of the natural-scientific picture of the world. If he did, he would say: When a sound arises, natural science must picture something that would not sound even if an ear were there ready to hear it sound. And natural science is acting correctly in this. In his lecture, “The Limits to Our Knowledge of Nature” (1872), the natural scientist, Du Bois-Reymond expresses himself quite aptly on this subject: “Silent and dark in itself, i.e., without any qualities” is the world for the view—gained by natural-scientific study—which, “instead of sound and light, knows only oscillations of a primal substance, without qualities, that has turned into weigh able matter here and into unweighable matter there”; but to this he adds the statement: “God's words in Moses' depiction—‘Let there be light’—are physiologically incorrect. Light first came into existence when the first red ‘eyespot’ of an infusorian [euglena] distinguished light from darkness for the first time. Without optical and aural substance this world around us, glowing with color and filled with sound, would be dark and silent.” No, this second statement cannot be made by someone who in fact understands the full implications of the first. For, this world, whose picture is correctly sketched out by natural science, would remain “silent and dark” even when confronted by optical and aural substance. One fools oneself about this only because the real world, from which one has gained the picture of a “silent and dark” world, does not actually remain silent and dark when one perceives in it. But I should no more expect this picture to correspond to the real world than I would expect the portrait of a friend to step out of his picture as a real person. Just look at the matter from all sides, without preconceptions, and you will certainly find that if the world were as natural science depicts it, no being would ever experience anything about it. To be sure, the world pictured by natural science is there, in a certain way, within the reality from which man perceives his sense world; but lacking in this picture is everything by which it could be perceived by some being. What this way of picturing things must posit as underlying light, sound, warmth does not shine, sound, or warm. Only by experience does one know that the pictures arrived at by this way of thinking were drawn from something shining, sounding, warming; one therefore lives in the belief that what one pictures is also something shining, sounding, and warming. This mistaken belief is the most difficult to penetrate when one is dealing with the sense of touch. There it seems to be enough that something material—precisely as something material—is spread out around us and, through its resistance, stimulates a tactile perception. But something material-spatial can also only exert pressure; the pressure, however, cannot be felt. What seems to be the case deceives us here the most. But one does have to do in fact only with what seems to be the case. What underlies tactile sensations also cannot be felt by touch. Let it be expressly stated here that we are not merely saying that the world lying behind sense impressions is in fact different from what our senses make out of it; we are emphasizing that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must think of this underlying world in such a way that our senses could make nothing out of it if it were in actuality as it was thought to be. From observation, natural science draws forth a world picture that through its own nature cannot be observed at all.¹

[ 4 ] What we are dealing with here came to light in a world historic moment of spiritual evolution: When Goethe, out of the world view of German idealism that lay in his whole nature, rejected Newton's color theory. (For nearly three decades, the present writer has sought in various writings to draw attention to this decisive point in the assessment of Goethe's color theory. But what he said in an 1893 lecture in Frankfurt's “Independent German Academy” still holds good today: “The time will come when even for this question the scientific prerequisites for an understanding among scientists will be present. Today, precisely the investigations of physics are heading in a direction that cannot lead to Goethean thinking.”)

Goethe understood that Newton's color theory could provide a picture representing only a world that is not luminous and does not shine forth in colors. Since Goethe did not involve himself in the demands of a purely natural-scientific world picture, his actual opposition to Newton went astray in many places. But the main thing is that he had a correct feeling for the fundamental issue. When a person, by means of light, observes colors, he is confronting a different world from the only one Newton is able to describe. And Goethe does observe the real world of colors. But if one enters a realm such as this—whether of colors or of other natural phenomena—one needs other ideas than those depicted in the “dark and silent world” imagined by the natural-scientific way of picturing things. In this picture, no reality is depicted that can be perceived. Real nature simply does in fact already contain within itself something that cannot be included in this picture. The “dark world” of the physicist could not be perceived by any eye; light is already spiritual. Within the sense-perceptible the spiritual holds sway.² To wish to grasp this spiritual with the means of natural science is committing the same error as someone who demands of himself as a painter that he paint a man who can walk around in the world. For Goethe, even as a physicist, the ground on which he moved was the spiritual. The world view for which he used the term “in accordance with the spirit” (geistgemäss) made it impossible for him to find in Newton's color theory anything in the way of ideas about real light and real colors. But with the natural scientific way of picturing things, one does not find the spirit in the sense world. That the world view of German idealism had a correct feeling about this is one of its essential characteristics. It may be that what one or another personality has said out of this feeling is only a first germ of a complete plant; but the germ is there and bears within itself the power to unfold. [ 5 ] But to this insight—that in the sense world there is spirit which cannot be grasped by the natural-scientific way of picturing things—another insight must be added: modern natural science has already demonstrated, or is on its way to demonstrating, the dependency of ordinary human soul life—running its course in the sense world—upon the instrument of the body. One enters a realm here in which, as though by entirely obvious objections, one can seemingly be refuted in a crushing way if one declares one's belief in the existence of an independent spiritual world. For what could be clearer than that man's soul life, from childhood on, unfolds as the physical organs develop and declines to the extent that the organs age? What is clearer than that the crippling of certain parts of the brain also causes the loss of certain spiritual abilities? What seems clearer, therefore, than that everything of a soul-spiritual nature is bound to matter and without it can have no continued existence, at least not one about which man knows? One does not even need to take counsel on this from the brilliant results of modern natural science; De la Mettrie, in his book Man: A Machine (L'homme Machine) written in 1746, has already expressed in a sufficiently correct way what is so self-evident in this assertion. This French thinker says: “Since a feebleminded person, as one can usually observe, does not lack brains, his problem must be due to the faulty nature of this organ, its excessive softness, for example. The same applies to imbeciles; the flaws in their brains do not always remain hidden to our investigation; but if the causes of feeble-mindedness, imbecility, and so on are not always recognizable, where should one seek the causes for differences between all human spirits? These causes would escape lynx and Argus eyes. A nothing, a tiny fiber, a thing that even the finest anatomy cannot discover would have turned Erasmus and Fontenelle into two fools—an observation that Fontenelle himself makes in one of his best dialogues.” Now, the adherent of a world view in accordance with the spirit would show little insight if he did not acknowledge the telling and obvious force of such an assertion. He can take this assertion even further and say: Would the world ever have received what Erasmus's spirit accomplished if someone had killed him when he was still a child?

If a world view in accordance with the spirit ever had to resort to denying such obvious facts or even to belittling their significance, it would be in a bad way. But such a world view can be rooted in ground that no materialistic objection can take away from it.

[ 6 ] Human soul experience, as it manifests in thinking, feeling, and willing, is at first bound to the bodily instruments. And this experience takes shape in ways determined by these instruments. If someone asserts, however, that when he observes the manifestations of the soul through the body he is seeing the real life of the soul, he is then caught up in the same error as someone who believes that his actual form is brought forth by the mirror in front of him just because the mirror possesses the necessary prerequisites through which his image appears. Within certain limits this image, as image, is indeed dependent upon the form of the mirror, etc; but what this image represents has nothing to do with the mirror. In order fully to fulfill its essential being within the sense world, human soul life must have an image of its being. It must have this image in consciousness; otherwise it would indeed have an existence, but no picture, no knowledge of it. This image, now, that lives in the ordinary consciousness of the soul is fully determined by the bodily instruments. Without these, the image would not be there, just as the mirror image would not be there without the mirror. But what appears through this image, the soul element itself, is—in its essential being—no more dependent upon the bodily instruments than the person standing before the mirror is dependent upon the mirror. The soul is not dependent upon the bodily instruments; only the ordinary consciousness of the soul is so. The materialistic view of the human soul succumbs to a deception caused by the fact that ordinary consciousness, which is only there through the bodily instruments, is mistaken for the soul itself. The essential being of the soul flows just as little into this ordinary consciousness as my essential being flows into my mirror image. This essential being of the soul, therefore, also cannot be found in ordinary consciousness; it must be experienced outside of this consciousness. And it can be experienced, for the human being can develop a different consciousness within himself than the one determined by the bodily instruments.

[ 7 ] Eduard von Hartmann, a thinker who has come forth from the world view of German idealism, has clearly recognized that ordinary consciousness is an outcome of the bodily instruments, and that the soul itself is not contained within this consciousness. But he did not recognize that the soul can develop a different consciousness, which is not dependent upon the bodily instruments, and through which the soul can experience itself. Therefore he believed that this soul-being lay within an unconscious element about which one can only make mental pictures by drawing conclusions, from ordinary consciousness, about a “thing-in-itself”—that itself actually remains unknown—of the soul. But in this, like many of his predecessors, Hartmann has stopped short before the threshold that must be crossed if a well-founded knowledge of the spiritual world is to be attained. One cannot cross this threshold, in fact, if one is afraid to give one's soul forces a completely different direction than they take under the influence of our ordinary consciousness. The soul experiences its own essential being within this consciousness only in the images produced for it by the bodily instruments. If the soul could experience only in this way, it would be in a situation comparable to that of a being who stands before a mirror and can see only its image, but can experience nothing about itself. The moment this being became livingly manifest to itself, however, it would enter into an entirely different relationship to its mirror image than before.

A person who cannot resolve to discover something different in his soul life than is offered him by ordinary consciousness will either deny that the essential being of the soul can be known, or will flatly declare that this being is produced by the body.

One stands here before another barrier that the natural-scientific way of picturing things must erect, out of its own thoroughly justified demands. The first barrier resulted from the fact that these demands must sketch the picture of a world that could never enter a consciousness through perception. The second barrier arises because natural-scientific thinking must rightly declare that the experiences of ordinary consciousness come about through the bodily instruments and therefore, in reality, contain nothing of any soul. It is entirely understandable that modern thinking feels itself placed between these two barriers, and out of scientific conscientiousness, doubts the possibility of arriving at a knowledge of a real spiritual world that can be attained neither through the picture of a “silent and dark” nature, nor through the phenomena of ordinary consciousness, which are dependent upon the body. And whoever—merely from some dim feeling or out of a hazy mysticism—believes himself able to be convinced of the existence of a spiritual world would do better to acquaint himself with the difficult situation of modern thinking than to rail against the “raw, crude” mental pictures of natural science.

[ 8 ] One gets beyond what the natural-scientific way of picturing things can give only when one experiences in the inner life of the soul that there is an awakening out of ordinary consciousness; an awakening to a soul experience of a kind and direction that relates to the world of ordinary consciousness the way the latter relates to the picture-world of dreams. Goethe speaks in his way about awakening out of ordinary consciousness and calls the soul faculty thus acquired “the power to judge in beholding”. (anschauende Urteilskraft)³ In Goethe's view, this power to judge in beholding grants the soul the ability to behold that which, as the higher reality of things, conceals itself from the cognition of ordinary consciousness. In his affirmation of this human ability, Goethe placed himself in opposition to Kant, who had denied to man any “power to judge in beholding,” Goethe knew from the experience of his own soul life, however, that an awakening of ordinary consciousness into one with the power to judge in beholding is possible. Kant believed he had to designate any such awakening as an “adventure of reason,” Goethe replied to this ironically: “Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more could keep me then from courageously undertaking the adventure of reason, as the old man of Konigsberg himself calls it,” (The “old man of Konigsberg” is Kant, For Goethe's view on this, see my edition of Goethe's natural-scientific works.) ⁴ In what follows now the awakened consciousness will be called a seeing consciousness (schauendes Bewusstsein). This kind of awakening can occur only when one develops a different relationship to the world of thoughts and will than is experienced in ordinary consciousness. It is entirely understandable today that the significance of such an awakening would be regarded with mistrust. For, what has made the natural-scientific way of picturing things great is the fact that it has opposed the claims of any dim mysticism. And although only that awakening in consciousness has validity as spiritual-scientific research which leads into realms of ideas of mathematical clarity and consistency, people who wish to arrive in an easy way at convictions about the greatest questions of world existence confuse this valid awakening with their own mystical muddle-headedness, which they claim is based on true spiritual research. Out of the fear that any pointing to an “awakening of the soul” could lead to such mystical muddle-headedness, and through seeing the knowledge often presented by such mystical illuminati, people acquainted with the demands of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things keep aloof from any research that wishes, by claiming an “awakened consciousness,” to enter the spiritual world.⁵ Now such an awakening is altogether possible, however, through one's developing, in inner (soul) experience, a certain activation differing from the usual—of the powers of one's soul being (thought and will experiences). The indication that with the idea of the awakened consciousness one is continuing in the direction taken by Goethe's world view can show that our study here wishes to have nothing to do with the mental pictures of any muddled mysticism. Through an inner strengthening, one can lift oneself out of the state of ordinary consciousness and in doing so experience something similar to the transition from dreaming into wakeful mental picturing. Whoever passes from dreaming into a waking state experiences how will penetrates into the course of his mental pictures, whereas in dreaming he is given over to the course of his dream pictures without his own will involvement. What occurs through unconscious processes when one awakens from sleep can be effected on a different level by conscious soul activity. The human being can bring a stronger exercise of will into his ordinary conscious thinking than is present there in his usual experience of the physical world. Through this he can pass over from thinking to an experience of thinking. In ordinary consciousness, thinking is not experienced; rather, through thinking, one experiences what is thought. But there is an inner work the soul can do that gradually brings one to the point of living, not in what is thought, but rather in the very activity of thinking itself. A thought that is not simply received from the ordinary course of life but rather is placed into one's consciousness with will in order that one experience it in its thought nature: such a thought releases different forces in the soul than one that is evoked by the presence of outer impressions or by the ordinary course of one's soul life. And when, ever anew within itself, the soul rouses that devotion ⁶ —practiced only to a small degree, in fact, in ordinary life—to thoughts as such, when the soul concentrates upon thoughts as thoughts: then it discovers within itself powers that are not employed in ordinary life but remain slumbering (latent), as it were. These are powers that are discovered only through conscious use. But they predispose the soul to an experience not present before their discovery. The thoughts fill themselves with a life all their own, which the thinking (meditating) person feels to be connected with his own soul being. (What is meant here by “seeing consciousness” does not arise from ordinary waking consciousness through bodily [physiological] processes the way ordinary waking consciousness arises from dream consciousness. In the awakening from this latter consciousness into day consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement [Einstellung] of the body relative to outer reality. In the awakening from ordinary consciousness into seeing consciousness, one has to do with a changing engagement of one's soul-spiritual way of picturing things relative to a spiritual world.)

[ 9 ] For this discovery of the life in thoughts, however, the expenditure of conscious will is necessary. But this cannot simply be that will which appears in ordinary consciousness. The will must also become engaged in a different way and in a different direction, so to speak, than for experience in mere sense-perceptible existence. In ordinary life one feels oneself to be at the center of what one wills or what one wants. For even in wanting, a kind of held-back will is at work. The will streams out from the “I” and down into desire, into bodily movement, into one's action. A will in this direction is ineffective for the soul's awakening out of ordinary consciousness. But there is also a direction of will that in a certain sense is the opposite of this. It is at work when, without any direct look at an outer result, a person seeks to direct his own “I.” This direction of the will manifests in a person's efforts to shape his thinking into something meaningful and to improve upon his feelings, and in all his impulses of self-education. In a gradual intensification of the will forces present in a person in this direction there lies what he needs in order to awaken out of his ordinary consciousness. One can particularly help oneself in pursuit of this goal by observing the life of nature with inner heart's (Gemüt) involvement. One seeks, for example, to look at a plant in such a way that one not only takes up its form into one's thoughts, but also, as it were, feels along with its inner life, which stretches upward in the stem, spreads out in the leaves, opens what is inside to what is outside with its blossom, and so on. In such thinking the will is also present in gentle resonance; and there, will is a will that is developed in devotion and that guides the soul; a will that does not originate from the soul, but rather directs its activity upon the soul. At first, one quite naturally believes that this will originates in the soul. In experiencing the process itself, however, one recognizes that through this reversal of the will, a spiritual element, existing outside the soul, is grasped by the soul.

[ 10 ] When will is strengthened in this direction and grasps a person's thought-life in the way indicated, then, in actual fact, out of the circumference of his ordinary consciousness, another consciousness arises that relates to his ordinary one like this ordinary consciousness relates to a weaving in dream pictures. And this kind of a seeing consciousness is in a position to experience and know the spiritual world. (In a series of earlier books, the author of this work has presented in a more detailed way what is only indicated here briefly, as it were. In such a short presentation, objections, misgivings, etc., cannot be taken up; this has been done in my other books; and there one can find many things presented that provide the deeper foundations for what is expressed here. The titles of the relevant books are listed at the end of this book.⁷

A will that does not tend in the direction just indicated, but rather toward everyday desiring, wishing, and so on, cannot—when this will is brought to bear upon one's thought-life in the way described—lead to the awakening of a seeing consciousness out of the ordinary one; it can lead only to a dimming down of this ordinary consciousness into waking dreams, phantasmagoria, visionary states, and such like.

The processes that lead to what is meant here by a seeing consciousness are entirely of a soul-spiritual nature; and their very description protects what is attained by them from being confused with pathological states (visions, mediumism, ecstasies, and so on). All these pathological states push consciousness down beneath the level it assumes in the waking human being who can fully employ his healthy physical soul organs.⁸

[ 11 ] It has often been indicated in this book how the science of the soul developed under the influence of the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things has moved away entirely from the significant questions of soul life. Eduard von Hartmann has written a book, Modern Psychology, in which he presents a history of the science of the soul in the second half of the nineteenth century. He states there: “Modern psychologists either leave aside the question of man's free will (Freiheit) entirely, or occupy themselves with it, in fact, only so far as is necessary to show that, on a strictly deterministic basis, just that amount of practical freedom arises which suffices for judicial and moral responsibility. Only in the first half of the period under discussion do a few theistic philosophers still adhere both to the immortality of a self-conscious soul substance and also to a residue of undeterministic freedom; but mostly they are content with wanting to found the scientific possibility of their heart's wish.” Now, from the point of view of the natural-scientific way of picturing things, one can actually speak neither about the true freedom of the human soul nor about the question of human immortality. With respect to this latter question, let us recall once more the words of the significant psychologist Franz Brentano: “The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body. ... And if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentous one for psychology:” Now for the natural-scientific way of thinking, only ordinary consciousness is present. This consciousness, however, in its entirety, is dependent upon the bodily organs. When these fall away at death, our ordinary kind of consciousness also falls away. But seeing consciousness, which has awakened out of this ordinary consciousness, can approach the question of immortality. Strange as this may seem to a way of picturing things that wishes to remain merely within natural science, this seeing consciousness experiences itself within a spiritual world in which the soul has an existence outside the body. Just as awakening from a dream gives one the consciousness that one is no longer given over to a stream of pictures without one's own will involvement, but now stands connected through one's senses with a real outer world, so the awakening into seeing consciousness gives one the direct and experienced certainty that one stands, with one's essential being, within a spiritual world, and that one experiences and knows oneself in something which is independent of the body, something which actually is the soul organism inferred by Immanuel Hermann Fichte, which belongs to a spiritual world and must still belong to it after the destruction of the body.

And since, ill seeing consciousness, one becomes familiar with a consciousness rooted in the spiritual world and therefore different from ordinary consciousness, one can no longer revert to the opinion—because our ordinary kind of consciousness must indeed fall away along with its bodily instruments—that with the destruction of the body all consciousness must cease. In a spiritual science that regards the seeing consciousness as a source of knowledge, something becomes reality of which—out of the idealism of German world views—the school director of Bloomberg, Johann Heinrich Reinhardt, had inklings (see pages 54ff. of this book): that it is possible to know how the soul, “in this life already, is elaborating the new body” that it will then carry over the threshold of death into the spiritual world. (To speak of a “body” in this connection sounds materialistic; for, what is meant of course is precisely the soul-spiritual element that is free of the body; but it is necessary in such cases to apply to something spiritual names taken from what is sense-perceptible, in order to indicate sharply that one means something spiritually real, not just a conceptual abstraction.)

[ 12 ] Relative to the question of human freedom,⁹ a particular conflict in our knowledge of the soul presents itself. Ordinary consciousness knows free human resolve as an inwardly experienced fact. Faced with this experience, ordinary consciousness cannot actually let any teaching take this freedom away from it. And yet it seems as though the natural-scientific way of picturing things could not acknowledge this experience. For every effect it seeks the causes. What I do in this moment seems to it dependent upon the impressions I have now, upon my memories, upon my inborn and acquired inclinations, and so on. Many things are working together; I cannot survey them all, therefore I appear free to myself. But the truth is that I am determined in my action by the working together of all these causes. Freedom would therefore appear to be an illusion. One does not escape this conflict as long as, from the standpoint of seeing consciousness, one does not regard ordinary consciousness as only a mirroring—effected by the bodily organization—of the true soul processes, and as long as one does not regard the soul as a being rooted in the spiritual world and independent of the body. Something that is merely a picture can, through itself, effect nothing. If something is effected by a picture, then this must occur through an entity that lets itself be determined by the picture. But the human soul is in this situation when it does something for which its only motivation is a thought present in ordinary consciousness. The image of myself that I see in a mirror effects nothing that I, with the image as motivation, do not effect. The matter is different when a person does not act according to a conscious thought but rather is driven, more or less unconsciously, by an emotion, or impulse of passion, while his conscious mental life only looks on, as it were, at the blind complex of driving forces.

Since it is therefore the conscious thoughts in man's ordinary consciousness that allow him to act freely, he could after all know nothing through ordinary consciousness about his freedom. He would only look at the picture that determines his action and would have to ascribe to it a causal power. He does not do this, because instinctively, in his experience of inner freedom, the true being of the soul shines into ordinary consciousness. (The author of this book, in his Philosophy of Spiritual Activity (Philosophie der Freiheit), has sought to shed light upon the question of human freedom in a detailed way out of the observation of human soul experiences.) Spiritual science seeks, from the point of view of seeing consciousness, to shed light into that realm of the true soul life from which the instinctive certainty of man's inner freedom streams into ordinary consciousness.

[ 13 ] Man experiences the picture-world of dreams through the fact that the level of life possessed by him in the sense world is toned down. A person with healthy thinking will not seek instruction from dreaming consciousness about waking consciousness; rather, he will make waking consciousness the judge over the world of his dream pictures. A spiritual science that takes the point of view of seeing consciousness thinks in a similar way about the relationship of seeing consciousness to ordinary consciousness. Through a spiritual science such as this, one recognizes that the material world and its processes are in truth only a part of a comprehensive spiritual world, of a spiritual world that lies behind the sense world in the same way the world of sense perceptible material processes and substances lies behind the picture-world of dreams. And one recognizes how the human being descends into sense existence out of a spiritual world; and how this sense existence itself is a manifestation of spiritual being and spiritual processes. It is understandable that many people, out of their habitual thinking, scorn a world view such as this because they consider it estranged from reality and because they believe it makes them less fit for life. It frightens such people to hear that, compared with a higher reality, ordinary reality has something dreamlike about it. But does anything about dream consciousness change through our seeking—from the vantage point of waking consciousness—to understand its nature in reality? A person with a superstitious relationship to his dream-pictures can cloud his judgment in waking consciousness thereby. But our waking judgment can never damage our dreams. In the same way, the adherent of a world view that does not wish to gain entry into the spiritual world can cloud his judgment about the spiritual world; but genuine insight into the spiritual world cannot adversely affect our true assessment of the physical world. Seeing consciousness, therefore, cannot reach disruptively into our life of ordinary consciousness; seeing consciousness will affect it only in a clarifying way.

[ 14 ] Only a world view that acknowledges the point of view of seeing consciousness will be able to bring the same understanding both to the modern natural-scientific way of picturing things and to the cognitive goals of modern idealism in world views that works toward knowing the essential being of the world as something spiritual. (Further elaborations on the subject of knowledge of the spiritual world are not possible within the limits of this book. The author must therefore refer the reader to his other works. His purpose here is only to present the basic character of a world view that acknowledges the viewpoint of seeing consciousness insofar as is necessary to indicate the value for life of German idealism in world views.)

[ 15 ] The natural-scientific way of picturing things is justified precisely through the fact that the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is valid. The natural scientist and thinker bases his cognitive work on the presupposition that this viewpoint is possible, even though, as a theoretical observer of his own world picture, he will not admit this. Only those theoreticians fail to see this who declare the world picture of the natural-scientific way of picturing things to be the only one justified in a world view. Theoretician and scientist can of course be combined in one person. For our seeing consciousness, sense-perceptions undergo something similar to what dream-pictures undergo when a person wakes up out of sleep. The working powers that bring about a world of pictures when he is dreaming must give way, when he wakes up, to those working powers by which he makes for himself pictures and mental pictures that he knows are conditional upon the reality surrounding him. When seeing consciousness awakens, a person ceases to think his mental pictures in terms of this reality; he knows now that he pictures things in terms of the spiritual world surrounding him. Just as dream consciousness regards its picture-world as reality and knows nothing of the environment of waking consciousness, so ordinary consciousness regards the material world as reality and knows nothing of the spiritual world. The natural scientist, however, seeks a picture of that world which manifests in the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. But this world cannot be contained in the mental pictures of ordinary consciousness. To seek it there would be like expecting one day to dream what a dream is in its essential nature. (Thinkers like Ernst Mach and others, in fact, foundered on the obstacle indicated here.) As soon as the natural scientist begins to understand his own way of research, he cannot believe that his ordinary consciousness can enter into a relationship with the world that he depicts. In actuality, seeing consciousness enters into this kind of a relationship. But this relationship is a spiritual one. And the sense perception of ordinary consciousness is the revelation of a spiritual relationship that plays itself out—beyond this ordinary consciousness—between the soul and the world the natural scientist depicts. This relationship can only first be seen by our seeing consciousness. If the world depicted by the natural-scientific way of picturing things is thought of as material, it remains incomprehensible; if it is thought of in such a way that something spiritual is living in it which, as something spiritual, speaks to the human spirit in a way that can be known only by our seeing consciousness, then this picture of the world becomes comprehensible in its full validity. Ancient Indian mysticism is a kind of counterpart to the natural-scientific way of picturing things. Whereas natural science depicts a world that is unperceivable, Indian mysticism depicts one in which the knower does indeed want to experience something spiritual, but does not want to intensify this experience to the point of having the power to perceive. The knower does not seek there, through the power of soul experiences, to awaken out of ordinary consciousness into a seeing consciousness; rather, he withdraws from all reality in order to be alone with his knowing activity. He believes, in this way, to have overcome the reality that disturbs him, whereas he has only withdrawn his consciousness from it, and, as it were, let it stand outside himself with its difficulties and riddles. He also believes himself to have become free of his “I” and, through selfless devotion to the spiritual world, to have become one with that world. The truth is that he has only darkened his consciousness of his “I” and is living unconsciously, in fact, altogether in his “I.” Instead of awakening out of ordinary consciousness, he falls back into a dreamlike consciousness. He believes himself to have solved the riddles of existence, whereas he is only holding his soul gaze averted from them. He has the contented feeling of knowledge, because he no longer feels the riddles of knowledge weighing upon him. What a knowing “perceiving” is can be experienced only in knowing the sense world. If it has been experienced there, then it can be further developed for spiritual perceiving. If a person withdraws from this kind of perceiving, he robs himself entirely of the experience of perception and takes himself back to a level of soul experience that is less real than sense perception. He regards not-knowing as a kind of deliverance from knowing and believes that, precisely through this, he is living in a higher spiritual state. He falls into merely living in the “I” and believes himself to have overcome the “I” because he has dimmed down his consciousness that he is weaving entirely within the “I.” Only the finding of his “I” can free the human being from ensnarement by his “I.” (See also the discussions on pages 117ff. of this book [Hamerling begins in an entirely Kantian way: ...]) One can truly have to say all this, and yet have no less understanding and admiration for the magnificent creation of the Bhagavad-Gita and similar productions of Indian mysticism than someone who regards what has been said here as proof that the speaker has “no organ, in fact,” for the sublimity of genuine mysticism. But one should not believe that only the unreserved adherents of a world view know how to value it. (I write this in spite of my awareness that I experience no less from Indian mysticism than any of its unreserved adherents.)

[ 16 ] What Johann Gottlieb Fichte brings to expression lies in the direction of a knowledge relating to the world in the way characterized here. This is clear from the way he has to use the image of human dreaming in order to characterize the world of ordinary consciousness. He says: “Pictures exist: they are all that there is, and they know about themselves in the manner of pictures—Pictures that float past; without anything there for them to float past; pictures that relate to each other through pictures of pictures ... All reality transforms itself into a strange dream, without a life that is dreamed about, and without a spirit who is dreaming; transforms itself into a dream that is connected with a dream about itself.” That is a description of the world of ordinary consciousness; and it is the starting point for a recognition of the seeing consciousness which brings an awakening out of the dream of the physical world into the reality of the spiritual world.

[ 17 ] Schelling wishes to regard nature as a stage in the evolution of the spirit. He demands that nature be known through an intellectual beholding, He therefore takes a direction whose goal can be seen only from the point of view of seeing consciousness. He takes note of the point where, in his consciousness of inner freedom (Freiheit), the seeing consciousness shines into ordinary consciousness. He seeks finally to go beyond the mere idealism in his Philosophy of Revelation by recognizing that ideas themselves can only be pictures of something, out of a spiritual world, that has a relationship with the human soul.

[ 18] Hegel senses that within man's thought-world there lies something through which man expresses not only what he experiences from nature, but also what the spirit of nature itself experiences in him and through him. Hegel feels that man can become the spiritual onlooker of a world process playing itself out within him. Lifting what he thus senses and feels up to the point of view of seeing consciousness also lifts man's world picture—which for Hegel is only a reflecting upon the processes that occur in the physical world—up to the beholding of a real spiritual world.

Karl Christian Planck recognizes that the thoughts of ordinary consciousness do not themselves participate in the working of the world, because, correctly viewed, they are pictures of a life; they themselves are not this life, Therefore, Planck is of the view that precisely the person who rightly understands this pictorial nature of thinking can find reality. Insofar as thinking wishes to be nothing itself but speaks about something that is, thinking points to a true reality.

[ 19 ] Thinkers like Troxler and Immanuel Hennarm Fichte take up into themselves the forces of German idealism in world views without limitlng themselves to the views that this idealism brought forth in Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. Troxler and I.H. Fichte point already to an “inner man” within the “outer man,” to a spirit-soul man, therefore, which the viewpoint of seeing consciousness recognizes as an experienceable reality.

[ 20 ] The significance of the viewpoint of seeing consciousness is particularly clear when one considers that tendency in world views which, as the modern teaching of evolution, stretches from Lamarck, through Lyell and others, to Darwin and the present-day view of life. This evolutionary teaching seeks to portray the ascent of the higher life forms out of the lower ones. It thereby fulfills a fundamentally valid task. But, in so doing, it must act the same way the human soul does, in dreaming consciousness, when dealing with dream experiences; it lets the later go forth from the earlier. In actuality, however, the motive forces that conjure a subsequent dream picture out of the previous one are to be sought within the dreamer and not within the dream pictures. Only seeing consciousness is in a position to sense this. Seeing consciousness, therefore, can no more consent to seeking in a lower life form the forces that cause a higher one to arise than waking consciousness can consider one dream really to emerge from the preceding one without considering the dreamer. While experiencing itself within true reality, man's soul being observes the soul-spiritual element that it sees working in present human nature as also working already in the evolutionary forms that led up to the present human being. This soul being will not anthropomorphically dream the present human entity into the phenomena of nature; but it will know that the soul-spiritual element that seeing consciousness experiences within present-day man is at work in all the natural happenings that have led up to man. Its knowledge will be such that the spiritual world becoming manifest to the human being also contains the origins of the natural configurations that preceded man. This represents a correct development of what Wilhelm Heinrich Preuss—out of the motive forces of German idealism—was striving for in his teaching which “rescues the concept of species insofar as is factually possible, but at the same time transfers the concept of evolution set up by Darwin into its realm and seeks to make it fruitful.” From the point of view of seeing consciousness, one cannot indeed say what Preuss said: “Now the center of this new teaching is man: the species homo sapiens that appears only once upon our planet”; rather, the center of a world view that encompasses human reality is the spiritual world that reveals itself within man. And seen in this way, what Preuss believes seems true: “Strange that earlier observers started with the objects of nature and then went so far astray that they did not find the path to man, which even Darwin in fact achieved only in a most sorry and thoroughly unsatisfactorily way by seeking the progenitor of the lord of creation among the animals,—whereas, the natural scientist would have to start with himself as human being in order, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, to return again to mankind. ...”

The viewpoint of seeing consciousness cannot lead to an anthropomorphical interpretation of natural phenomena, for it recognizes a spiritual reality of which what appears in man is just as much the revelation as what appears in nature. This anthropomorphic dreaming of the human entity into nature was a forbidding specter for Feuerbach and the Feuerbachians. This forbidding specter became for them the obstacle to their recognition of a spiritual reality.

[ 21 ] This forbidding specter worked on also in Carneri's activity as a thinker. It crept in disruptively when he sought the relationship of his ethical view of life, which was based upon the soul being of man, to the Darwinistically tinged view of nature. But the motive forces of German idealism in world views drowned out this disruption, and so it came about that he started with the soul-spiritual element in man, which is ethically predisposed, and, proceeding through the whole realm of existence and thinking, returned again to a mankind that is perfecting itself ethically.

[ 22 ] The direction taken by German idealism in world views cannot flow into any acknowledgment of a teaching that dreams unspiritual motive forces into the evolution of higher forms of existence out of lower ones. For this reason, Hegel already had to say: “Thinking observation must rid itself of these nebulous mental pictures, which are basically taken from perception,—especially such pictures as the so-called emergence of plants and animals from the water, for example, and then the emergence of more developed animal organizations out of lower ones, and so on.”

And the feelings with which Herman Grimm assigns the natural-scientific world picture its place in man's larger world view are born from this idealism in world views. Herman Grimm, the brilliant art historian, the stimulating portrayer of great interrelationships in the history of mankind, did not like to express himself on questions relative to world views; he preferred to leave this realm to others. But when he did speak about these things, he did so out of the direct sense of his own personality. With respect to his judgments, he felt secure in that field of judgment which encompassed the German idealistic world view and upon which he knew he stood. And from foundations of his soul like these there came the words he spoke in his twenty-third lecture on Goethe: “Long before, already in his (Goethe's) youth, the great Laplace-Kant fantasy about the rise and eventual downfall of our globe had taken effect. Out of the rotating world mist-children already get this in school—a central drop of gas takes shape from which the earth afterwards arises and, as a solidifying globe, through inconceivable ages of time, passes through all its phases—including the episode of its habitation by the I human race—in order finally, as burnt-out slag, to plunge back into the sun; a long process—but fully comprehensible to the public—needing for its realization no further I input from outside than the efforts of some external power or other to maintain the sun at the same temperature.—A more barren perspective for the future cannot be conceived than this expectation, supposedly forced upon us today by scientific necessity. A carrion bone, avoided even by a hungry dog, would be a refreshing and appetizing morsel compared to this final excrement of creation, the earth, as they picture it ultimately falling prey again to the sun; and the intellectual curiosity with which our generation takes up such things and professes to believe them is one sign of a sick imagination that scholars of future ages will one day have to expend much keen thought to explain as a historical phenomenon of our time.—Never did Goethe allow such bleak prospects to enter ... Goethe would have taken good care not to draw the conclusions of the Darwinian school from what he first discovered from nature in this direction and then expressed.” (With respect to Goethe's relationship to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, see my introductions to Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's “German National Literature” and my book Goethe's World View.¹⁰

[ 23 ] Robert Hamerling's reflections also move in a direction that finds its justification in the viewpoint of seeing consciousness. From the human “I” that thinks itself, he leads his observation over to the “I” that experiences itself in thinking; from the will that works in man, he leads his observation over to the world-will. But the “I” that experiences itself can only be seen when, in soul experience, an awakening within spiritual reality occurs; and the world-will penetrates into our knowledge only when the human “I,” in experience, grasps a willing in which the “I”, does not make itself a point of departure but rather an end point, a goal, in which it directs itself toward unfolding what occurs within the world of one's inner life. Then the soul lives into the spiritual reality in which the motive forces of nature's development can also be experienced in their actual being, Passages from his Atomism of Will like the following show how Hamerling's reflections lead to a sense that one is justified in speaking of this kind of awakening of the “I” that knows itself to be within the spiritual world: “In the half-light of bold mysticism and in the light of free speculation, this riddle, this wonder, this mysterious ‘I,’ interprets and grasps itself as one of the countless forms of manifestation in which infinite being (Sein) attains reality, and without which the ‘I’ would be only a nothing, a shadow,” And: “To want to trace a thought in the human brain back to the activity of thoroughly lifeless, material atoms remains for all time a vain and foolish undertaking. Material atoms could never become the bearers of a thought if there did not already lie within them something that is of the same nature as the thought. And this original something, which is related in nature to living thinking, is also without a doubt the atoms' true core, their true self, their true being (Sein),” With this thought, Hamerling does confront the viewpoint of seeing consciousness, but with mere inklings of it. Certainly, to want to trace the thoughts of the human brain back to the activity of material atoms does remain “for all time a vain and foolish undertaking,” For this is no better than wanting to trace back the mirror image of a person merely to the activity of the mirror. But in ordinary consciousness thoughts appear, after all, as the mirroring—determined by the material element of the brain—of something living and full of being that works with power in these thoughts. but unconsciously as far as ordinary consciousness is concerned. Only from the viewpoint of seeing consciousness does this “something” first become comprehensible. It is that real element in which seeing consciousness experiences itself, and to which also the material element of the brain relates like a picture does to the being that is pictured. On the one hand the viewpoint of seeing consciousness seeks to overcome the “half-light of bold mysticism” by the clarity of a thinking that is logically consistent in itself and that has full insight into itself; on the other hand, it seeks to overcome the unreal (abstract) thinking of philosophical “speculation” by a cognitive activity that in thinking is at the same time the experiencing of something real.

[ 24 ] Understanding for the experiences undergone by the human soul through the way of picturing things that manifests in the series of thinkers from Fichte to Hamerling will prevent a world view that regards the viewpoint of seeing consciousness as justified from falling back into attitudes of soul that, like the ancient Indian, seek an awakening into spiritual reality more through a dimming down of ordinary consciousness than through an intensification of it. (As the author of this book has indicated again and again in his books and lectures: that belief has gone astray which maintains that a modern person can gain anything for spiritual knowledge by reviving such older directions in world views as the Indian one; to be sure, this has not kept people from repeatedly confusing the spiritual-scientific world view advocated by him with such fruitless, anti-historical attempts at revival.)

German idealism in world views does not strive for a dimming down of consciousness, but rather, within this consciousness, seeks the roots of those soul powers that are strong enough to penetrate, with full experience of the “I,” into spiritual reality. In German idealism the spiritual evolution of mankind has taken up into itself the striving, through strengthening the powers of consciousness, to arrive at knowledge of the world riddles. But the natural-scientific way of picturing things, which has led many people into error about the carrying power of this idealistic stream, can also acquire enough freedom from bias to recognize the paths to knowledge of the real world that lie in the directions sought by this idealistic world view. One will misunderstand both the viewpoint of German idealism in world views and that of seeing consciousness if one hopes through them to acquire a so-called “knowledge” that, through a sum of mental pictures, will lift the soul up out of all further questions and riddles and lead it into possession of a “world view” in which it can rest from all further seeking. The viewpoint of seeing consciousness does not bring cognitive questions to a standstill; on the contrary, it brings them into further movement, and in a certain sense increases them, both in number and in liveliness. But it lifts these questions into a sphere of reality in which they receive that meaning which man's knowing activity is already seeking unconsciously before it has even discovered this meaning. And in this unconscious seeking is created what is unsatisfying about those standpoints in world views which do not want to grant validity to seeing consciousness. From this unconscious seeking there also arises the view—which thinks itself to be Socratic but in actuality is sophistic—that that knowledge is the highest which knows only one truth: that there is no truth.

There are people who worry when they think that man could lose his impulse for progress in knowledge as soon as he believes himself equipped with a solution to the riddles of the world. No one need have this concern with respect either to German idealism or to the viewpoint of seeing consciousness.¹¹

[ 25 ] There are also other ways for a rightful appreciation of modern idealism in world views to root out the misunderstandings that confront it. Of course, one cannot deny that many adherents of this idealism in world views, through their own misunderstanding of what they believe, have given cause for opposition, just as the adherents of the natural scientific way of picturing things, by overestimating the carrying power of their views for knowledge of reality, have evoked undeserved rejection of their views, The significant Austrian philosopher (and Catholic priest) Laurenz Müllner, in an essay about Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack, has expressed himself in a forceful manner, from the standpoint of Christianity, on modern natural science's thoughts about evolution. He rejects the assertions of Schack that culminate in the words: “The objections raised against the theory of evolution all stem from superficiality.” And after this repudiation he says: “Positive Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea of evolution as such, if natural processes are not conceived merely as a causal mechanism based from all eternity upon itself, and if man is not presented as a product of such a mechanism.” These words came from the same Christian spirit out of which Laurenz Müllner spoke in his significant inaugural address, on Galileo, as president of the Vienna University: “Thus the new world view (he means that of Copernicus and Galileo) often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious justification. to be descendants of Christian teachings, It was much more a matter of the antithesis between the wider world consciousness of a new age and the more narrowly limited consciousness of classical antiquity; it was a matter of antithesis toward the Greek world view and not toward the rightly understood Christian world view, which, in the newly discovered world of the stars, could only have seen new wonders of divine wisdom through which the wonders of divine love accomplished on the earth could only attain greater significance.” Just as in Müllner we are presented with a Christian thinker's beautiful freedom from bias relative to the natural-scientific way of picturing things, so a similar freedom from bias is certainly possible relative to German idealism in world views. Such a freedom from bias would say: Positive Christianity has no reason to act negatively toward the idea, as such, of a spiritual experience in the soul, if this spiritual experience does not lead to the death of the religious experience of devotion and moral edification, and if the soul is not deified.

And the other words of Laurenz Müllner, for an unbiased Christian thinker, could take the form: The world view of German idealism often came to appear as antithetical to beliefs declaring themselves, with very dubious justification, to be descendants of Christian teachings. It is far more a matter of the antithesis between a world view that acknowledges the spiritual being of the soul and a world view that can find no access to this spiritual being; it is a matter of antithesis to a misunderstood natural-scientific way of picturing things, and not toward the rightly understood Christian world view, which, in the genuine spiritual experiences of the human soul, could see only the revelations of divine power and wisdom, through which the experiences of religious devotion and moral edification—as well as the powers of human duty sustained by love—could only attain further strength.

[ 26 ] Robert Hamerling felt the impulse toward idealism in world views to be the basic impulse in the being of the German folk spirit (Volkstum). The way he presented his search for knowledge in his Atomism of Will shows that for his age he is not thinking of a revival of any ancient Indian stream in world views. But he does think of German idealism as striving—out of the being of his folk spirit, in the way demanded by a new age—toward the spiritual realities that were sought in bygone ages by the strongest soul forces of Asiatic humanity of that time. And he does not think of the cognitive striving of this idealism in world views, with its direction toward spiritual realities, as dimming man's gaze upward into divine heights, but rather as strengthening it; he is filled with this belief because he sees this cognitive striving itself to be merged with the roots of the religious attitude. As Robert Hamerling is writing his German Migration in 1864, he is filled with thoughts about his people's task, which is an expression of this essential characteristic. This poem is like the depiction of a vision. In primeval times, the Germans migrate from Asia into Europe. The Caucasus is a resting place for the wandering people.

The evening sinks away. Like golden landmarks
In twilight's final gleaming glow the summits
Of Caucasus, and as from distant worlds
They look down full of meaning on the groupings
Of people resting, filling up the valleys
With all their weapons, steeds, and canopies.
—
From out the glow of sun's self-sacrifice
At last like phoenix climbs the moon's full disk
And hovers high above the orient's plane.
—
But now the people rest. Yet Teut the youth,
Of kingly gaze and mien, has stayed awake,
His blond head deeply sunk in meditation.
—
And then, as from a brief dream wakening, upward
He turns his eye, a light, a clear one, falls
Like dew upon him. See! It seems to him
As though in heights above, the golden globes
Of heaven joined their shining rays together
Into a shimmering pair of starry eyes:
As though towards him a marvel,
A mild and earnest countenance inclined,
As though, before his proud and sun-like flights,
With noble features, primal mother Asia
Did eye to eye to her brave son appear.

[ 27 ] And primal mother Asia reveals to Teut his people's future; she does not speak only hymns of praise; she speaks earnestly about the people's shadow and light aspects. But she also speaks about that essential trait of the people that shows cognitive striving to be in complete unity with an upward gaze to the divine:

Your joy in dreams, divine inebriation,
Your ancient Asian homeland's blessed warmth
And heartiness will go on living in you.
Of peaceful permanence,
This holy ray will be a temple fire
Of mankind, free of smoke—with purest flame
Will glow on in your breast and will remain
Your soul nurse and the pilot at your helm!
Because you love, you strive: your boldest thinking
Will be the zeal to sink itself in God.

[ 28 ] The introduction of these words of Robert Hamerling is not meant to indicate that the idealism in world views characterized in this book nor the view put forward by the viewpoint of seeing consciousness could in any way vie with the religious world view, let alone supersede it. Both would misunderstand themselves entirely if they wished to create religions or sects, or wished to impinge upon anyone's religious beliefs.

• 1. Please see note on p. 164
• 2. What one now calls the “theory of relativity” must orient itself according to mental pictures of this sort; otherwise it does not escape from logical theories into ideas that are in accordance with reality in the sense that this concept of “accordance with reality” has been characterized in this book in describing Planck's views.
• 3. What you behold in this way is self-explanatory; i.e., seeing it and understanding (“judging”) it are synonymous. What you “see” is pure, self-evident meaning. – Ed.
• 4. Page 55ff., Rudolf Steiner's Goethean Science, Mercury Press, 1988. – Ed.
• 5. Someone whose concern is for a real knowledge of the spiritual world is very happy when a gifted artist like Hermann Bahr, in his brilliant comedy “The Master,” portrays the comedies of life that often attach themselves so insistently to endeavors seeking a science of the spirit.
• 6. Hingabe: literally "a giving oneself over to" something. – Ed.
• 7. Please see p. 167.
• 8. What is meant here should not be confused with the attitude of soul underlying ancient Indian striving for knowledge, as will be indicated in what follows. See page 72 above.
• 9. Freiheit. Please see footnote to page 35. – Ed.
• 10. Published in English as Goethean Science (1988) and Goethe's World View (1985) by the Mercury Press. – Ed.
• 11. Please see note on p. 166.

Translator Unknown

From the various discussions on our present-day stage of development you will have seen that, from a certain higher point of view, mankind is at the present time passing through a very important phase in its existence. If I say "at the present time" we must naturally be aware that what is in question is a very long period, and when we speak of the "present time" today we mean the epoch of the consciousness soul, into which mankind entered roughly at the middle of the 15th century and which extends over 2,000 years. We will, in turn, be succeeded by another epoch, in which an essential part of human nature, quite different from what has developed in the epoch which has just elapsed, will force its way to the surface.

We always divide up the whole evolution of mankind, you see, into sequences of seven phases, whether we are fixing our eyes on longer or shorter epochs. We are now standing in the fifth epoch, and we know that in the sixth epoch the spirit-self is to take possession of mankind. The development of the Ego belongs to our epoch, although it particularly brings the consciousness- soul to expression. In passing over from the fifth to the sixth post-Atlantean epoch man passes over a sort of Rubicon (see diagram), when the whole of mankind enters into a phase of development which leads up to higher spirituality. This is a very important, significant fact. Now when one is describing conditions of evolution on a great scale, for example those which concern the whole of mankind, it is always inadequate to do so by means of the conditions of development of individual men. If one does this, one is very liable to get mere comparisons. What I am about to quote is, of course, more than a mere comparison, but you must be on your guard against taking the matter pedantically. You must take it in a broad sense.

You know that when a human being enters into the supersensible world he has to pass what we call the Guardian of the Threshold. One comes into the supersensible would by passing this Threshold. You will find this passing- over depicted in my little booklet The Threshold of the Spiritual World. If you take what is depicted there, together with certain chapters of the work How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds?, you can get more precise representations of this. You know that when one passes over the Threshold the existing bonds in the human soul which connect thinking, feeling and willing become more loosened. Thinking, feeling and willing become in a certain sense more independent. On this side of the Threshold in a normal spiritual life, these three activities of Man are more interwoven.

Regard must be had to these facts, that one has to pass over the Threshold on entering into the supersensible world, and that, in a certain sense, a kind of splitting apart of the three principal activities of human soul-life takes place, which makes thinking, feeling and willing independent. What the individual man can consciously experience while passing over into the supersensible world is being experienced by the whole of mankind in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In this fifth post-Atlantean epoch lies the Threshold through which the whole of mankind must pass.

The fact that the whole of mankind is passing through the Threshold does not at all need to come directly to the consciousness of individual men. If, for example, men were to persevere in that disposition which the majority now has, in refusing all spiritual knowledge, the whole of mankind would pass over the Threshold just the same in the course of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, but men, for the greater part, would not be aware of the fact. That powerful soul-spiritual event which can be described as the Crossing of the Threshold can only be experienced consciously by men if they partake in that knowledge which is obtained through Spiritual Science. But event if not a single man were aware that the whole of mankind is passing over the Threshold, that in reality mankind is already, at this time, engaged in this passing, the passing would, nevertheless, take place. It does not in the least depend on whether mankind is aware of it or not. It can be that men are not aware of it. They can hinder the spreading of knowledge of this fact by their stubbornness. But the bringing to expression of the fact in the development of mankind is not thereby prevented.

If you first of all take this in its abstract aspect, you will be able to say to yourselves during this fifth post-Atlantean epoch of ours, during the development of the consciousness-soul, something significant and mighty is happening to mankind. To this belongs the fact that a certain separation is taking place of the life of thinking from those of feeling and willing. Please fix your attention clearly on this fact. A separation is taking place in mankind in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, which makes independent the life of thinking, that of feeling and that of willing. The three spheres of the soul-life of the whole of mankind are becoming more independent. And this will distinguish that mankind of the future from the mankind of the past, that in the past the soul was more centralised in itself, while in the future it will feel itself to be three-membered. If a human being is alone by himself, he will certainly be able to undergo his development in this sense in which we find it intimated in the work How Does One Attain Higher Worlds?: this concerns single, individual men. When men are taken together as a people, a state, and economic organisation and so forth, when men have intercourse with one another to get to know and to satisfy their common interests, this splitting of the whole soul-life into three spheres is developing because, as has been said, behind the scenes of existence of the whole of mankind is passing through a phase of development which one can compare with the passing of the individual man through the Threshold into the supersensible world.

Now there area actually men in our time who are aware of something of these events which are occurring behind the scenes of existence. But they are only aware of them, I should like to say, in the negative sense. I have often mentioned to you the name of Fritz Mauthner, who has written a Critique of Speech and a thick, two-volume Dictionary of Philosophy.¹ After I have recently said something substantial to you, just about the significance of speech in human life,² it will be interesting to you to hear how a man of the present day thinks about the soul-life of man, who, like Fritz Mauthner, directs his attention just to speech but in doing so has no inkling of the existence of Spiritual Science, who has no idea of what Spiritual Science can do for mankind. Just in the case of this kind of man of the present-day, who is entirely ignorant of spiritual-scientific matters but who has an acute brain, more intelligent than those of innumerable official learned men, one can find peculiar opinions uttered about human development when he turns his attention to the working of speech, to the human soul.

On the whole, as you know well, the mankind of today is still infinitely proud of what it calls its Science. Fritz Mauthner is not at all proud of this Science. He sets no store at all by this Science. For he believes that, while they think they have a Science, they are in fact, merely muddling about with words, that they are merely relying on words, and that while they think in words, come to an understanding with words and think that they have an inner soul-life, they are, nevertheless, fundamentally only moving about in the external words. Fritz Mauthner has made this clear.

Now call to mind that I recently said to you³: of the whole construction of our speech, the dead most clearly understand what we say to them in verbs, while they aware of almost nothing of what we want to say to them when wee speak to them in nouns. In this connection you can already have a feeling of what importance speech has in the real spiritual life of men. And if men cannot rid themselves of the speech-content of their so-called thinking then, when they think in nouns, they are in actual fact thinking something completely unspiritual, something which does not make its way into the Spiritual World at all. They cut themselves off from the Spiritual World as a result of thinking in terms of nouns. It is, indeed, very much the case at the present day that men are cutting themselves off from the Spiritual World by a kind of thinking in terms of nouns.

Peoples which have already fallen into decadence and which experience their verbs in a very substantive way [...] are thereby setting themselves completely off from the Spiritual World.

Now after Fritz Mauthner had found that, in everything which is carried on today as Science, there really exists nothing more than a sort of "making a fool of oneself" through speech, he comes to an opinion about the human soul which is remarkable in the highest degree for the present day. He says in the first place, men confront the world. While they are confronting the world and perceive it with their senses, they are really only becoming aware of those impressions which they denote by means of adjectives. People do not pay attention to this, but it is a good remark. If you see a bird flying, if you see a table standing, you are really only perceiving qualities through your senses—let us say, the colour of the bird. You are also only perceiving the qualities of the table. It is really only a self- deception, an illusion, that you still perceive a special table apart from these qualities, that you can perceive something else besides those impressions which you denote by adjectives, namely what you can denote by nouns. With his senses, man only perceives the qualities of things. When he puts these sensible qualities into words by means of adjectives, by means of the adjectives of speech, he is living sensually with the things, in an external way. And a man like Fritz Mauthner asks himself: but what can a man, who is living with the things in an external way, really receive into himself from the things? What can he reproduce about the things? He can only receive, thinks Fritz Mauthner, what is reproduced through Art, by which is understood the whole development of art from the most primitive stages of mankind to what can be indicated today as the highest stage of art. When man digests what he perceives with the senses, what he can uttered through adjectives, Art arises.

For people like Fritz Mauthner, who have stripped off much that is superstitious in the present time, especially the superstitions of our schools, artistic creation, even the most primitive of all, is the only thing which man achieves creatively in union with things. But man is not satisfied with merely expressing the qualities of things by means of adjectives: he forms nouns. But with the nouns he indicates nothing at all of what approaches men in the external sense-world.

Fritz Mauthner makes this especially clear, and for this reason he says in the second place: when Man arises to illusionary life by forming nouns, mysticism arises in his soul. Here he believes that he is penetrating into the essence of things, and is not aware that he really has nothing in the nouns. In this sphere—so Fritz Mauthner thinks—he can only dream. He therefore says: if you men really want to live, you must represent things artistically, for only then are you awake. If you have no mind for artistic representations, you really are not awake at all in your soul. You are dreaming if you think that you can penetrate into the essence of things further than can be done by the mere artistic forming of sensible quality- data. You fall into unreality with your mysticism, but you have a certain satisfaction in this mysticism. You dream of things by forming nouns in reference to them.

It is true that, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, this is a foolish assertion, but one which is extraordinarily acute and important for the present time, because in fact a man does only experience dream illusions if he develops only those qualities which people love today in the whole world of nouns, in which he can live mystically. But the majority of men do not make this clear to themselves.

However strangely it may sound, it is an extraordinarily important fact for the life of the present day that men work with the external, sensible qualities of things, with what they bring to expression in adjectives. They work on these external things by altering their qualities in some way. Then, disregarding the fact that they are working on these external things—let us say, in primitive art, people turn to the churches, to the schools, in order to learn something about the essence of things. But there they get only get an education expressed in nouns, really nothing but illusions. A man like Fritz Mauthner has a quite correct feeling for this. If one walks over a meadow and sees the green surface there, differentiated in the most varied way, interspersed with white, blue, yellow and reddish varieties of flowers, one has what is the true reality in the sensible world. But men believe that they can get hold of something beyond this. If they walk on the road, one beside the other, and the one stretches out his hand and picks something which looks yellow, he then asks the other: but what is the plant called? The other has, perhaps, learned at some time, from someone else or at school, what this plant is called, and he utters a noun. But this whole proceeding is an illusory one—it is a mere dream-activity. The true activity consists merely in seeing something yellow of a particular shape, but what is said about it in nouns is a dream-activity.

Men love this dream-activity today, but in fact it has no content. Many people, who are left unsatisfied by mere occupation with the external, qualitative impressions, listen to sermons and take part in divine-services. But all that lives in their souls as a result of the sermons and church services is also, at bottom, no more that a dream, a tissue of illusions, nothing real. Men who occupy themselves more accurately with the character of speech, as Fritz Mauthner did, notice this and draw attention to the fact that in the moment when one goes beyond what is artistic or artistically handled one at once enters the sphere of mystic dreaming.

Then Fritz Mauthner differentiates yet a third stage in the soul-life of men today, one which he calls Science. Today this is quite specially proud of the idea of development, of evolution. It prefers to express what it presents in verbs. But now take what I have said to you with reference to the experiencing of verbal activity, the activity of verbs. But how many people experience verbs eurhythmically today? How dry, insipid and abstract is what men experience in verbs! The German says Entwicklung. One says "evolution" if one is going to utter the same idea in speech in a different way. But one certainly has no idea at all of the reality of the words "evolution" or Entwicklung unless one is in the position concretely to carry one's feeling right through this word, inwardly to live through it.

But how many people, if they say: "the physical man of today has evolved (entwickelt) from lower organisms" think of a ball of thread is wound together and which is being unwound, which is "e-volved"! If you have a ball, the thread of which is wound up, and unwind it, you can say: "you are evolving this". This is evolution (Entwicklung). For you have the concrete representation.

Now consider Ernst Haeckel, who says that man has evolved from the apes. We do not wish to speak of the substance of the matter. Do you believe that he pictures to himself that there is a ball of thread and that something has been unwound from it by the changing of the ape into a man? Is it not the case that quite certainly nothing concrete like this lies in the word which is uttered when someone says that man has evolved from the ape—otherwise he would have had to think of the "unwinding of a thread from a ball!"

What does it mean when one utters the word "evolves" but really calls up no picture of it before oneself? This is the remarkable thing that men today, while they are thinking scientifically, prefer to express themselves in verbs, take refuge in verbs, but that they think nothing at all while using verbs. For if they were to make clear to themselves what they really are thinking, they would not get on at all with the object of their thoughts. Scientific concepts are really nothing else than scientific absence-of-thought. Today you can take the thickest text book, especially in political economy, and go through the concepts there—there are just as many absences-of-thought contained in them as there are concepts.

Now in this way somebody like Fritz Mauthner, who has no inkling of Spiritual Science, naturally cannot look into the reasons for the absences-of-thought into which we area now looking after we have just discussed how things are connected with speech. But Fritz Mauthner feels that, in the present day scientific way of thinking, this scientific talk is nothing more than an absence-of-thought, in consequence of the boundaries of thinking in terms of speech. It is, however, a hard fact if one has to confess: in the lower school grades, where, to be sure, plenty of sins are being committed against the children, the nature of the child demands that one gives it concrete thoughts, because it still wants to have something perceptible to the senses. But then, when people pass into the Gymnasium or become high school girls, one can already expect more from them in the way of absence-of-thought, for already the Conceptional is ceasing to have a content. And when one passes right on to the University, this is the summit of the absence-of-thought with is there traded-in as science, for the only reality today consists in handling things, what is artistic, what one brings out of the laboratory, the dissecting room and so on, the technical, the artistic. But what is "thought-out"—yes, I see, to be uttering a piece of nonsense—is nothing thought-out: it is an absence-of-thought.

Fritz Mauthner feels this. He therefore sets out this list of three steps, firstly Art, secondly Mysticism (which, however, is a state of dreaming), and thirdly Science, of which he says that in reality it is a learned ignorance a docta ignorantia.

I. Art
II. Mysticism: dreaming
III. Science: docta ignorantia

Thus one must take something uttered by a man like this as being a confession of a representative man of the present-day. Something of this kind is said by just the man who has stripped off those superstitions under the sway of which the majority of men live today, one who, as a result of his consideration of speech, has come to see what an emptiness is overflowing over present day mankind, while in the highest level of education pretended thoughts are taught which are, nevertheless, only absence-of-thought. Then this absence-of-thought overflows with a clutter of words into popular literature and comes at last, in journalism, to that terrible bog of words from which the majority of men nourish themselves spiritually today.

I could have quoted some other personage of the present day as an example: however, Fritz Mauthner brings this thing to expression in a uniquely precise, narrowly-systematised manner. Consider it well, what I have brought before you with regard to a representative man of the present day who has no inkling of Spiritual Science. If, intelligently and in an unprejudiced way, you take the conversation which the men of today carry on with one another, from the customary afternoon gossip to what is said in meetings of professional or territorial bodies, in the Reichstag or the Duma, there results a jumble of speech, of words, permeated by absence-of-thought.

But in this way one describes the real facts about what one must call "culture" today. I have depicted to you no more than the facts which just simply exist. And the task of the spiritual scientist is to look into this condition in a really unprejudiced way, courageously and without deceiving himself. You see, people who stand outside Spiritual Science are already coming to the view that it is a terrible superstition to consider Science, as it holds sway today, as anything but a docta ignoratntia. And it has gradually come to be this. Since it has been described by Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464) at the beginning of the 15th century by the words docta ignorantia, our science has become this to an ever greater extent.

Now, of course, simple people can come and say: "But what are you saying? You have surely as often told us that the present time has attained to something magnificent in respect of Natural Science, and that you fully acknowledge the triumph of Natural Science". Yes, my dear friends, but nature contains no thoughts! It is just in the age of absence-of-thought that Natural Science can develop to the greatest extent of all, because it needs no thoughts, but merely external formulae, in order to classify natural-scientific facts. Natural Science owes its greatness just to the circumstance that, in order to be correct Natural Science, it may be without thoughts and even ought to be so. But the thing to which I wanted particularly to draw your attention to is this: that already in the present day people are noticing how mankind is passing through something which is turning their inner soul-life into a state of dreaming and Science really into one of sleeping, a state of ignorance. This, again, is the comfort which people feel today in Science and scientific thinking, that it lets itself sleep so comfortably in their souls. People do not at all believe how deeply the men of today are sleeping while they consider that they know something, how obedient they are to authority, even to excess, when freed by what they call "science" and what is given to them as Science, but how, out of their deep sleep, they can nowhere apply this Science to their real surroundings. Yes, they look on the application of "something scientific" to external life as a fantastic thing.

Just put in a library—it must be a very big one—all the learned works about psychiatry, all the works on mental diseases. You would then have gathered together much that is ingenious, in the sense of the present time. But yet one must also assume that the psychiatrists who occupy themselves professionally with affairs know what is in the books at least, they must know the principal facts, and they do know them, but as though they were asleep. For if, for example, it is a matter of considering life, of considering the fact that a man, who has for years controlled events over a great part of Europe, was and is really mad, then their science of psychiatry is of no use to people, for they do not think of applying their Science to real life.

These things were not always like this in the development of mankind. If we go back into other epochs, this was not present in the same measure. And, the further back we go, so it is present to a smaller extent. When men had the old, atavistic clairvoyance in ancient times, their dreams were then no dreams as we understand the term today, but they had a psychic content, in which they perceived something real. And people examined human affairs out of their sleep. Today it has come about that if men want to remain men they must gather their a knowledge different from that before which Fritz Mauthner finds them standing as before a docta ignorantia or a dreamlike mysticism. Men must wake up, and they can only do so through spiritual-scientific knowledge. Therefore I refer to what must happen as a awakening. This awakening must be something very real, something encroaching very, very deeply into life. Today people speak, and think in speech as it is described by us, and they believe that by this means they have thoughts as well. But in reality they have no thoughts. For what are thoughts for the man of today, if he really grasps them as thoughts? They are, in fact, nothing real: they are reflections of something real. And just when the man of today soars up to thoughts, if he is sinking at the real life of ideas, he must be conscious of the fact that these ideas as such are phantoms of reality, but are not reality itself.

I recently brought you a chapter of Hegel (Vol. 1, Lecture 8). I told you that it would be difficult to understand, because Hegel always bestirs himself in thoughts. This, to be sure, is so terribly difficult for men today—to bestir themselves in thoughts. One even becomes offensive to people, offensive in the highest degree, if one bestirs oneself in thoughts. When first I began to speak about Anthroposophy in Berlin, all sorts of people came from the most diverse directions of so-called spiritual life and wanted to see really what was happening, people who had taken part in Spiritualism, who had tried by means of all sorts of questionable mediumistic methods to experience something of the Spiritual World—all of them came there. And then it often turned out that just this kind of person regularly went to sleep in my lectures, especially when they were themselves rather mediumistic. One could see many a person there, sound asleep. Then they stayed away for the future. And some of them said that they dared not continue to go these lectures, for the spirits had told them that they would be dealing with ideas there, with thoughts, and that they dared not go to them.

My dear friends, I still call to mind a lady—she appeared to have become unwell—who ran out the door at some speed but who laid herself down at full length as soon as she was outside. The giving of thoughts had made this impression on her! Today, people in general are not trained in real thoughts, because they consider that when they bestir themselves in the projection of speech they have thoughts. But just when one admits oneself to be thinking, one is aware that, in our fifth post-Atlantean epoch of today, one has shadow-pictures if one really thinks, that is to say if one lives in thoughts. If one rightly comprehends the character of the life of thought, one is aware that the soul, as it were, bestirs itself on the surface of the thoughts, while something remains behind in the unconscious. There is the soul. But it sees something which it sends forth like the shadow-pictures of that in which it lives. It must comprehend the shadow-pictures, thoughts, ideas, and must carry them over into something which still, in many cases, remains unconscious for the men of today. How can it do this? It can only do it when that is received into the life of thoughts about which we can give ourselves up to no deception of any kind when we receive it: that is, the will to think, the feeling of the will while we are thinking, the feeling that we are present, that we are really leading over one thought into another, that, while we are thinking, we always have a clear picture underlying our thoughts.

Men do not love this today. They sit, walk or stand today, and their thoughts are churning up in their heads as I have just described, which is really absence-of-thought, but it is playing through their heads. Men give themselves up to these so-called thoughts, passively give themselves up to them, even take in every so-called thought which rolls through their heads. And the result of this is that the will to think, that which works arbitrarily and actively in thoughts, is of the utmost rarity in the souls of men today.

The man who holds himself to be a leader of opinion today wishes to the smallest degree to sit down and bring his will into activity. He quickly takes up the newspaper, so that his thoughts may be unrolled from outside, or a book—but does not develop within himself that activity which now really leads to active thinking. The mankind of today lives in a state of social laziness with regard to this active thinking—one can call it nothing else.

All these things give the real form of that transition which a man like Fritz Mauthner feels when he thus utters what I have described to you above. But all these things are phenomena connected with the crossing of the Threshold by the whole of mankind. The whole of mankind must pass by the stern Guardian of the Threshold in this fifth post-Atlantean epoch. And just in the epoch of the development of consciousness, it ought to come to the consciousness that mankind is passing through this stage in its development. But then a sort of splitting-up of the life of the soul must take place. What was centralised as a unity in earlier times must be split asunder into a trinity, and every single member must be centralised on its own account.

Because this is a question effecting human beings in their community-life, not individual men, it can only come about if there are external points of support, on which this tendency towards inward threefoldness can go on developing. These external points of support must now be present in the social organism in which men live. It is not in my choice that I must speak about the threefold social organism today. It is this which must be made clear to mankind from the signs of the times, from those signs of the times which become clear when one considers that mankind must pass the stern Guardian of the Threshold. And if you seek for an inner characteristic of the reasons why the threefolding must come about in the social organism, then just re-read that chapter in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds which deals with the Guardian of the Threshold. It is all there already, from another point of view.

When one studies Spiritual Science, one is studying the most significant impulse of the present day development of mankind. Spiritual Science explains, from the most diverse points of view, the most intensively working life-necessities of the present time. And, while the splitting of the human soul into the three members of thinking, feeling and willing is pointed out in the chapter in How Does One Attain Knowledge of Higher Worlds about the Guardian of the Threshold, it is a result demanded of the whole of mankind that they give thought to the Threefold Social Organism.

This is how the things are connected. If you consider the individual human being who steps over the Threshold to the supersensible world, you can say to yourselves this man experiences in himself the separation into a life of thinking, a life of feeling and a life of willing. If you consider the mankind of today who, while they are going through the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, step over the Threshold behind the scenes of historical Becoming, then you must say: this mankind must find its life of thinking in an independent spiritual organism, its life of feeling—that is to say the relations of feeling which play between man and man—in the independent rights-organism, and the life of will in the economic circuit, in the economic organism.

If you consider these matters in this way you will have the right foundations for the necessity of such statements as are made with regard to the Threefold Social Organism. Then you will also rise above the mere babel of words which often rules the present time. Then you will have insight that at the present time one should not dispute in words but should realise that words only gain importance and point to thoughts if one brings them into the right direction, if one considers that everything which must develop itself as thought-life in the spiritual organism of mankind is the cultivation of the individual capabilities of mankind, i.e. that individualism must rule in the spiritual organism, democracy must rule in the rights- or state-organism because this has to do with what every man develops in the way of relations with every man; in the sphere of economics, associative life must rule which holds together the co-workers in a profession, or the association which also arises as a result of the connection of production with consumption—in other words, socialism must rule in the sphere of the economics organisation. But the three independent members must appear separated in their characteristic qualities.

Now we are still living in a time in which Ahriman plays ball with men, while he lulls them into illusion about what really is to come to pass. So he causes them, as he has been done in former times, to mix together the will-organism and the feeling-organism—namely, socialism and democracy—and causes them to say: we are striving for social-democracy. As a result, the individualistic momentum is entirely left out, for, you see, people do not love thoughts. For otherwise one would have to say: "we must strive for individual-social-democracy", and this would destroy the most significant ideas which doctrinal social-democracy has today. In the confusion which the harmonising-together of socialism and democracy brings to social-democracy, you see an activity which Ahriman is carrying on with men. And one will only feel the seriousness of this tendency if one keeps one's attention on the transition at the Threshold of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch and knows that, because the whole of mankind lives within the Social Organism must come about, just as a threefolding of the soul-life of the individual must come about in the passing of the individual man over the Threshold.

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• 1. Fritz Mauthner, Philosophisches Wörterbuch, Munich 1910.
• 2. The Social Question as a Question of the Soul: The Inner Experience of Speech.
• 3. R.S. The Social Question as a question of soul

I spoke yesterday of the great Polish drama “The Undivine Comedy” by Krasinski and of its very special significance. One can truly say that it was consciously brought into the world as the outcome of a dialogue with the Spirits working in the evolution of humanity, who in the middle of the 19th century spoke to those who were willing to listen to them.

Let us for a moment hold in our minds the thoughts that came to us from the realisation that what was astir in the inmost depths of the evolutionary process made its way into the external literary culture of the time. From Gutzkow's novel “The Mahaguru” as well as from “The Undivine Comedy”—I chose only two particularly striking examples from many that might be quoted—we see that as it were behind the scenes of external happenings, significant impulses are at work in the cultural life of mankind. From many sources we have gained knowledge that directs our minds and hearts to the great moment of world-evolution in which we are living, the moment when it is essential to be mindful of the new element that must be received into the evolution of humanity—but with the co-operation of human souls who are able to understand it. There are different ways of characterising the importance of the present time, but perhaps one thing only need be said and this will be sufficient to bring home the significance of the point of time at which we are standing.

In ages of antiquity men received a heritage consisting of wisdom yielded by atavistic clairvoyance and of knowledge gained atavistically. But this heritage petered away and the tide of materialism arose—particularly since the last three or four centuries and reaching a peak in the 19th century. This tide of materialism veiled all possibilities of vision into the spiritual world—and a new path, a new method, is now appearing in spiritual science. As I have often said, this development ultimately becomes a natural process in the souls of men. The situation today still is that the vast majority of souls have yet to learn that there are many earthly lives. But when the souls now living are re-incarnated, for the most part they will know, not merely as a theory, that there are many earthly lives; they will live on into an age when it will be known quite as a natural matter of course: there are many earthly lives. Just as human souls now remember back to a certain point in childhood, and thoughts from childhood constantly arise, so it will be natural one day for the living impression to well up from within: “We have been here many times.” Human souls will evolve to this stage just as they have evolved from primitive stages of life. This development will come about of itself but the following is inevitable.—

The souls who have learnt nothing from spiritual science today will die and return in new incarnations. Then, having learnt nothing from spiritual science, they will not know what to make of the impression that will rise up from within them of the truth of repeated earthly lives, and they may well be driven to despair. For this inner impression that will arise quite naturally in the soul must be grasped through thoughts, and the thoughts that are necessary before it can be understood are those yielded by spiritual science. These thoughts should make the whole history of the Ego and the fact of its existence in man intelligible to us; and he alone who has within him the force of these thoughts will be able to understand the impression that will come of itself, as a kind of remembrance.

But the foundation for understanding this remembrance will from now onwards have to be laid through spiritual science; knowledge of the continued existence of the Ego will have to be acquired. And those who have not acquired it will have to admit, when these remembrances well up in them: “I do not understand my own self.” This will be a terrible cry of despair in future times. It must be realised that only through knowledge and understanding of what will inevitably come in the future can human souls be kept from falling into despair. When the Ego which passes from incarnation to incarnation asserts itself in the future—and this means in our future incarnations—men must be able to understand this Ego. And they will do so if they have worked on their souls through the thoughts of spiritual science.

The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled in order that the Ego might be fully understood, and this can never happen if—as in the case of the Polish Count described yesterday—men preserve in their souls nothing but feelings of the Past—sacred though these feelings may be and connected with the events centred in the Mystery of Golgotha. Such feelings will enable these events to be grasped as matters of history, but that cannot lead to any true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. True understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha depends upon the fulfilment of the words; “Not I but Christ in me.” It will then be possible for Christ in His living activity within earth-evolution not to remain inaudible to men. He must be made audible through that which, under his inspiration, spiritual science has to say, no sentiments or feelings tied to remembrances, can lead mankind to future well-being. But neither can the interests of the future be furthered by one who lives only in and for the Present—the tyrant described in the lecture yesterday. The tyrant does indeed, assert the Ego, but not Christ within the Ego. A deep riddle is presented to us in this Polish drama: two personalities stand in contrast to one another, one of whom has the Christ of tradition, of history, but runs the risk of falling away from Him. And what comes to expression in the wife and in the child of the Count relapses into a purely atavistic connection with the spiritual world.

A great danger for our time is indicated here. It is that those who are not willing to assimilate in a new way the knowledge of mankind's connection with the spiritual worlds, although they feel that such connection exists, will cause part of their being to lose the requisite link with the spiritual world. Mankind would fall asunder into those who—like the old Count—must necessarily despair and die because they cling exclusively to the Past, and those who rise into the spiritual worlds in an atavistic way—like the Count's wife and child. Because they have not received the Christ into their inmost being in full reality, they pass into the spiritual world without finding in themselves a point of anchorage.

What is it that the members of the Count's family have not fully developed? They have not fully developed the Ego: they are remains from the age which in the regular course of the evolution of humanity has been at an end since the Mystery of Golgotha, but markedly so since the last few centuries. They are remains from an age of antiquity when the Ego had not yet completely taken root in man; they are Ego-less human beings who, because they cannot take the Christ into the Ego which has not developed into the necessary intensity, lose the Christ. And standing in contrast to them is the tyrant, who has developed the Ego and bears it in himself with all strength; without taking the Christ into the Ego, he desires to bring happiness to the world but is incapable of doing so. At the point of death—out of the vision which the tyrant understands as little as he understands how to resign himself to death—there breaks from his lips the cry: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”—This is an indication of the fact that for those human beings who have, it is true, acquired the Ego but have not taken Christ into this Ego, there is one moment only when it is possible for them to come into relationship with Christ: it is the moment when they pass from this world into the other world. But because Christ came from that other world into this world in order there to find the way to human hearts, men must inevitably lose Him when, after the moment of death, they arrive in that other world. All the deeper impulses at work in our time belong to a sphere where momentous issues are at stake—I can say no more than that they “are at stake.”

But now we must go rather more deeply into things that are already known to us but must be studied in a certain setting if we are to understand them in the light of the conditions prevailing in our time. We know that, properly speaking, the evolution of the earth must be divided into an epoch preceding the Mystery of Golgotha and an epoch following the Mystery of Golgotha. We know, too, that in the epoch before the Mystery of Golgotha, Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits also worked into the souls of men. Particularly in considering the ages before the Mystery of Golgotha it must be realised that foolish chatter about avoiding Ahriman and Lucifer at all costs will get us nowhere. For Ahriman and Lucifer were allowed by the normal, progressive spiritual Beings to work in the earthly evolution of men.

Now we know that there are spiritual Beings actually ranking higher than men but who during the Old Moon period of evolution did not reach the height that would have been possible for them; they did not reach it, but for all that they rank higher than men. So that bearing in mind the intervention of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings, we can now understand better what is called the ancient, primeval wisdom in earth-evolution. For example, the ancient wisdom that was misused in the Lemurian epoch and perished with the Lemurians; the wisdom that was then misused in the Atlantean epoch and brought about the destruction of Atlantis. What was it that was then among men? What was it, in reality? To say that the great wisdom then existing was misused, applied in practices of black magic and so forth, is a very abstract way of speaking and leads to no very definite idea. Let us think, for example, of the character of this wisdom in the last periods of the Lemurian epoch. Whence had it come? Spiritual Beings who had not completed their full development during the Old Moon epoch but who were nevertheless at a higher level than men, had mingled with the earthly evolution of humanity. Man was already there—but, as you can well imagine, in his most primitive state. What was subsequently developed by human beings during the Atlantean and Post-Atlantean epochs did not yet exist. In those Lemurian times, man was a being wholly devoid of intelligence, for intelligence was to develop only gradually during the course of earth-evolution. Man was primitive in his will, in his actions, in his soul-development—altogether like a child. Now had there existed only bodies of men with the higher members of those bodies that had been developed for them by the progressive spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies, men would not have been capable at that time of evolving any outstanding wisdom. But in that Lemurian age a very lofty altogether extraordinary wisdom existed. For example, among those primitive men there was widespread knowledge of how to handle a child during the period between birth and the seventh year so that as the result of a certain transformation of his etheric body which then worked back upon the brain, he could be made extremely clever. Radical educational methods have to be applied today if this result is desired—and everyone is aware how very often these efforts are unsuccessful. But in any case the art of affecting the brain itself by exercising a certain influence on the etheric body of the brain, so that the child in question becomes extremely clever, is entirely lost today. Furthermore—and I hasten to emphasise it—this art is in no circumstances whatever legitimate in our time, for if it became at all general, even in its most elementary form, it would lead to terrible abuses.

How is the existence of such an art in Lemurian times to be explained? It is explained by the fact that Beings who had not completed their development on the Old Moon, but had evolved only the first six of their seven members, incorporated in men who otherwise would have been utterly primitive. The spiritual Beings who on the Old Moon were at a higher level than men but had not attained the apex of their development, took on these primitive human bodies and went to work with arts which far transcended all earthly knowledge. You can imagine what such Beings in human bodies were capable of accomplishing,—Beings who at a level higher than the human had developed the sixth member—the Life-Spirit—entered into these primitive, flexible, pliant bodies. And they became terrible magicians, dread magicians!

And again, what kind of arts were general in the Atlantean epoch? First and foremost there was the wisdom which must be applied in order to cause talents in ancestors to be transmitted, purely through heredity, to their descendants and actually to be enhanced in these descendants. The Beings whose development had not been completed on the Moon but who for all that were of a higher rank than earthly man, were deeply versed in this art—with most significant effect. Let me put it like this: it was as if by methods connected with star-constellations and the like, one were to lead over the qualities of a genius to his descendants, but in such a way that these spiritual qualities were not merely inherited, but intensified, enhanced. These higher Beings working in human bodies were capable of mighty achievements. All this was swept out of existence. Very many things were connected with these particular arts. For example, it was possible by their means to observe the course of spiritual evolution and to guide the spiritual forces into the stream of heredity.

And so even superficial observation will show that there is a very great deal in world-evolution which in an earlier age had its justification but which in the form it now bears is no more than a relic that has been preserved. Both in unimportant and important domains it is so. In his novel “The Mahaguru” Gutzkow wanted to indicate something of the kind in an important domain. He wanted to give emphasis to the question: In what form does something that had great significance in ancient times—in the Atlantean epoch, when it was still possible for men to regulate the stream of heredity—in what form does it appear when it is carried over into an age and into a community where the traditions of it had indeed been preserved but where nothing more was known of the earlier art than an inferior form of it called in occultism “Occult Chemistry?” Gutzkow showed that something of the kind existed in Tibet. Naturally, the priesthood in Tibet had no knowledge of how through forces of heredity they could produce a body for the individuality whom they believed should pass from one body into another—but they preserved the old customs. So there we have an example of the external reality presenting an aspect utterly different from what it had been in conditions once prevailing in the evolution of humanity. Reading “The Mahaguru” makes one want to cry out: Oh, how reality itself can become a maya in face of the prevailing conditions!

And now think of something else.—You can well imagine that the men of Lemurian and Atlantean times did not resemble the men of today, for what developed, inwardly in the soul at that time also gave configuration to the outer form; the whole outer form of man was different—it was pliant and flexible. The human form in the times of Lemuria and Atlantis was not ape-like; the bodies of the actual ancestors of men were not ape-like.—It would seem, therefore, that world-evolution must have made an exception in the case of certain people who have written of themselves that they can remember having descended from apes!¹—But we will not go into that now.—Men did not resemble apes, but if you picture our children presenting a much, much more infantile appearance, with an elemental quality of being extending over the whole body, you may be able to get an idea of the character of the human body in those times. As you can read in the book “From the Akasha Chronicle,” because Beings surviving from the Old Moon evolution had incarnated in these pliant, flexible bodies, these bodies became animal-like rather than human. Distorted forms arose, with strangely contorted limbs.—And there you have the origin of the figures of gods to be found among certain peoples. These curious figures with non-human faces and huge limbs, originate from the knowledge that the incarnating Moon-Beings were united with human bodies.

If in the Atlantean epoch there had been painters and sculptors, they would have been able to portray or model these figures of Moon-Beings incarnated in human bodies. But in Tibet this was no longer possible. Hence the canon must be strictly obeyed, for the artists would otherwise have made figures with whatever terms they liked. If a man did not obey the canon but created something out of his own play of fancy, he incurred the death-penalty. Naturally, one may ask: Is there any justification for condemning to death someone who makes only one tiny change in the figure of a god? Is there really any justification for it? In Tibet, of course, there is no longer any justification, but once upon a time there was, for as you have heard, these Beings were actually present in bodies, and if they were not faithfully portrayed, any deviation amounted to a lie. In those ancient times a lie had infinitely greater power than it has nowadays. If at the present time everyone who tells a lie were to suffocate as the result—well, I prefer to leave it at that, for I think that the fear of suffocation would be too great to allow people to risk telling lies! I assume that nowadays people will not suffocate—but at that time a lie would have caused actual suffocation. For the thought expressed in the word contained a power to give form to the air in the larynx, and then suffocated the man—and anyone who had incorrectly portrayed on earth a Being who had not fully completed his development on the Old Moon would have suffocated, in other words, a process of nature would have caused his death.

The evolution of humanity is an exceedingly complicated matter and to understand it one must go deeply into spiritual science. To find the right approach to world-evolution it is essential to study what it is the mission of spiritual science to make known from spiritual worlds. For spiritual science is, as it were, a first impulse to which other impulses must increasingly be added, in order that humanity in the future may advance along the right path. You will have realised from what I have been saying recently² that a course must be steered between a Scylla and a Charybdis, that a very definite path must be laid down in spiritual science.—This must be taken with the deepest earnestness. Our modern natural science is developed by materialistic methods. During these last weeks I have tried to describe its characteristics to you. I have said that a materialistic method in natural science is fully justified. It can be characterized by saying that it is adapted to cloak the spiritual reality lying behind. Why, then, must this materialistic method be there in our present time?

In our present time an earlier knowledge of nature must be superseded by a new knowledge of nature. I have told you something about this earlier knowledge of nature. Just think what kind of knowledge it was! To be able to mould a human head into an instrument editable for genius, through specific measures applied scientifically in the old sense of the word—this signified colossal knowledge!—or again, so to regulate heredity that qualities of genius were transmitted to descendants—the knowledge required for this was even more penetrating and comprehensive, far, far surpassing all the theories of evolution, the physics, chemistry and so on, of today. But that ancient knowledge was to be veiled and obscured by the materialistic method employed in natural science today—which is fully justified in the purely physical domain. It must be remembered that at the time when that lofty knowledge of nature existed, man was not a free being; he was only at the beginning of the gradual evolution of freedom. He was led and guided and what came to pass in the process of his guidance was for the most part brought about by the higher Hierarchies. And it was single individuals who deviated from the regular course, who advanced too far along the path to freedom, who were responsible for the fall into the abyss and the inevitable destruction of Atlantis. But with the constantly increasing freedom of will, man would have been unfit for knowledge of this kind. To possess knowledge such as once existed on the earth is unthinkable today because man's will has attained freedom to an extent that would enable him still to misuse this knowledge. How, then, is this free will guided into the right channel?

From indications I have given recently you will have gathered that by adopting the method employed in natural science, with all its scrupulous exactitude, the free will is directed into the right channel; moreover, this method is a wonderfully effective pedagogical means for the development of the free will. We have therefore no cause whatever to quarrel with the method employed in natural science, the justification of which for our present time we fully acknowledge. You will find that what is contained in our lecture-courses and books completely refutes the allegations of individual opponents—to the effect, for example, that we repudiate natural science. It is sometimes necessary to take exception to the pretensions of certain investigators and so-called scientific authorities; but nothing derogatory to the achievements of natural science will ever be found in our literature. To say that anything in our literature is a repudiation of natural science would be sheer calumny, for among us there can be no question of such repudiation. But at the same time it must be realised that attacks upon us may well be made from the side of so-called natural science—and if necessary, we must then repel the attack. But true adherents of spiritual science must become more and more conscious of the necessity to understand the natural-scientific method and to protect this method from being tainted by all kinds of non-scientific concepts—for example concepts of the atom and movement of the atom, of which I have recently spoken. These are fantasies of natural science, and the difference must be clearly seen.

Efforts must be made to distinguish between genuine natural science and scientific fantasy. How often do we not hear it said today that one thing or another is scientifically established—whereas it is nothing of the kind, because words are simply accepted as facts. Never was blind belief in authority greater than it is at the present time in the domain of science, for everyone allows things to be determined entirely by those in whom they happen to believe. The purpose of the Mystery of Golgotha was that what came into the world through Lucifer might gradually be corrected in a certain way—it is indicated symbolically in the Bible: “Your eyes shall be opened and ye shall know good and evil”—that is to say, ye shall know good and evil from outside. But when in the sphere of perceptions one perceives from outside, it is impossible to receive from that world anything other than perceptions. As soon as one begins to reflect about the perceptions, to speculate about them and derive all kinds of ideas from them, one is on the way to finding what has been imbued into them by Ahriman and Lucifer. The ideas must come out of the spiritual world and be united with the perceptions: then these ideas are in the real sense divine! In human life there must be a marriage between the ideas which are given to men from out of the Spiritual and what he perceives in the outer world through his senses. But this union must first be achieved. How this principle applies in the scientific domain you can gather from my essay “Truth and Science.” The belief that in the scientific sense, ideas, thoughts, could also be found from outside, from the perceptions, is based on illusion, on illusion caused by Ahriman and Lucifer. But as long as the Powers associated with the words “Your eyes shall be opened and ye shall know good and evil” (which means to search for the ideas in the outer world) were sanctioned, that is to say, until the Mystery of Golgotha—as long as Lucifer and Ahriman were allowed to work in this sphere, there was no objection to be made. But that state of things is now over. Now, in the matter of the permeation of perceptions from outside, they are all the more unjustified.

This too was brought into evidence in the middle of the 19th century through a crisis of a particular kind. This crisis announced itself in great and outstanding achievements: spectral-analysis, for example, came on the scene, swept away the conception that when one looks upwards to the stars one has to do with spiritual Beings—and showed that substances to be found everywhere in the universe also exist on the earth. The old union between ideas and perceptions is no longer possible, for such discoveries make it essential that the ideas shall again find the spiritual path into our souls. The same applies to Darwinism. To reason entirely on the basis of what is found by outer perception—that is to say, to seek for the ideas in the outer world—can only lead to a purely materialistic conception and interpretation of the world. In short, the crisis is in evidence everywhere and there is also widespread rebellion against the fact that the ideas must flow out of the spirit-realm into the souls of men if humanity is to make progress. In other words: we must understand the nature of Ahriman and Lucifer and be on the alert when they try to make us continue the principle indicated in the words; “Your eyes shall be opened and ye shall know good and evil.” We must learn to observe both Ahriman and Lucifer. And we shall be able to do this if we permeate the Ego, as it has now unfolded, with Christ.

But something else too resounded through the world in primeval times, resounded from a different side, after man had acquired the power to distinguish good and evil, to direct his gaze outwards, that is to say, to use his senses and through them to acquire ideas based on sense-perceptions. The decree went forth: Man must be driven out of the spirit-realm in which he has hitherto been living, in order that he may not also eat “of the Tree of Life.” But Christ will forever give men to eat of the Tree of Life, and the ideas which stream directly out of the spirit-realm into human souls must be inwardly experienced. But they can be experienced in the real sense only when the human soul takes Christ into itself. Then we have something quite different from the concept of Knowledge; then we have the concept of Life. Just as a strict eye must be kept on Lucifer and Ahriman in order that when they allow knowledge derived from the outer world to penetrate into us we may perceive that this knowledge is coming from them, so we must realise that through the impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha, ideas were to flow into men to be the substance of life—the substance not of knowledge alone, but of life. And when from this standpoint of life we study the different religions of the world, it will be far, far from our minds to investigate these religions with the object of discovering whether they are or are not in keeping with our own view of the world. To apply only the concept of knowledge to these religions is not our task; we must apply the concept of life.

There are definite forms of religion in the world. We should not set out to discover whether we can consider these forms to be true, but whether through their ritual and ceremonies they are able to give nourishment and life to the souls of men, and—as the souls of men differ—it follows that their life can be sustained by different forms of nourishment. If we grasp this truth we shall realise that we can never lend ourselves to quarreling with any form of religion but that we must endeavour to understand it in so far as it is life-nourishment for human souls to whom it is given as life not as knowledge only, but as very life. Then we shall see that the standpoint from which a religion begins to quarrel with some branch of science is entirely misplaced. We shall also realise that religion will inevitably adopt a hostile attitude towards progress in natural science and spiritual science alike. For the religions are still unwilling to get away from the old Tempter, they still want to invoke only that God Who said to man that He will give them life, that they themselves are not to eat of the Tree of Life. The representatives of religions do not want to invoke God alone but also the Luciferic Spirit and the Ahrimanic Spirit; they want the eyes for distinguishing good and evil to be opened through religion. Religion wants to be “knowledge.” But it cannot be “knowledge” because it is life-substance. And under the sway of this temptation which still whispers in their ears, the representatives of the different religions believe they possess facts of knowledge in their religions, whereas the question of knowledge cannot, in reality, come into consideration between religion and science. We have no cause whatever to combat religious bodies, because we ask them about the sustenance they provide for life, not about what knowledge they possess. Religious communities will always be tempted to ask whether science as it advances is in keeping with what they regard as knowledge. But because life is in process of constant evolution, advancing science can never be in keeping with religions which invariably tend towards conservatism.

And now you can picture the whole conflict which in the nature of things will ever and again be urged. I should like you to think rightly about this conflict and to realize that as a matter of course the representatives of religious bodies, because they are under the sway of temptation, will always, from their standpoint, combat spiritual science, just as they combat natural science. But you must also realise that these opponents fight because they lack understanding. This does not excuse them at all, but it must none the less be realised that they fight because of lack of understanding; they cannot take the right standpoint. As a sign and symptom, let me bring to your notice words written by a man who perceived the inevitable approach of the natural-scientific age and the natural-scientific way of thinking, and who was told by a friend that one should not be concerned with knowledge that is not contained in the Bible or preserved in the traditions of the Church. Since the 14th century, of course, things have changed in this connection.—Dante's “Divine Comedy” is a great, world-embracing poem. But Dante lived at the time when the epoch during which men confined themselves to purely historical Christianity was passing away. For Dante, Virgil was simply the exile banished to hell. Dante did not know much about anything that differed from the Christianity confronting him as a great system and régime. But in the case of Petrarch it was different, 1 century later, in the 14th century, Petrarch read Virgil with far greater credence. He turned not only to Greek but also to Roman spiritual culture. When one of his friends wrote to Petrarch saying that there had appeared to him in a dream a spiritual Being who exhorted him to avoid all non-Christian literature, he (Petrarch) gave a very significant answer. I stress the importance of this incident because it shows how the friend—and through him, Petrarch—was enjoined from the spiritual world to concern himself only with what the Christianity of that time regarded as truly Christian. Petrarch wrote the following beautiful words which held good at that time for the approaching epoch and still hold good today. Petrarch replied to his friend Boccaccio in momentous words, affirming his standpoint, why he read this non-Christian literature, and what it meant to him (Petrarch: Letter to Boccaccio (“Epistolae seniles” I. 5):

“Why then should we shun the pagan poets and writers who do not use the name of Christ simply because they have never heard it? Surely there is greater danger in the books of sceptics who speak of Christ and at the same time dispute Him—but those who claim to be the defenders of the true faith read these writings with the greatest eagerness. Believe me: much that is simply the product of sloth and timidity is attributed to thoughtful deliberation. Men often cast scorn on what is out of their reach; it is characteristic of ignorance to condemn what it cannot comprehend and nobody will concede to it strivings of which it is incapable.

“Here lies the root of the misguided judgments of what is unknown; it is not so much the blindness of those who pass judgment as their laziness that is in evidence. We, however, should not allow ourselves to be frightened away from the sciences by any pious admonitions, or by indications of the near approach to death. If the sciences are imbibed with inner sincerity they quicken the love of morality and take from us, or at least diminish, the fear of death; if we abandon them, this will excite the suspicion that disbelief lays claim to be knowledge. The sciences are not a hindrance to one who has the right mastery of them, but they are a help to him; they level his path of life and do not thwart him.

“For a diseased or weak stomach, many a food may be unwholesome which a healthy, hungry man digests at once; so too, that which would ruin a feebler nature may be rich in blessing for a sound and vigorous mind. ...

“I know well that many have achieved great sanctity without culture, but I know too that nobody has been kept from sanctity by culture. ... If I am to tell you my own opinion, it is this: The path to holiness via ignorance may possibly be smooth, but it is faint-hearted. All good things have a single goal but many paths lead thither and fellow-travelers along these paths differ greatly; the one moves more slowly, the other more quickly, the one in obscurity, the other visibly, the one bowed with humility, the other buoyant with exultation. All journeying is blessed; but the noblest is that which proceeds freely and openly before the world. The knowledge that has wrestled through to belief is far superior to naive simplicity, be it never so pious; and not one of the fools who have ever entered the kingdom of heaven has as high a place as a man of knowledge who has won the crown of blessedness.”

The same could be said about our spiritual science! And not only to X³ but to all the others who fight against us, one could rejoin with the words written by Petrarch to his friend; “For a diseased or weak stomach, many a food may be unwholesome which a healthy, hungry man digests at once; so too, that which would ruin a feebler nature may be rich in blessing for a sound and vigorous mind.”

And when people harp on the “contradiction in the first and third Gospels” and refuse to admit that the contradiction disappears as soon as the existence of two Jesus boys is taken into account; when they insist upon “simplicity” and say that the fantastic statements of “the one up there” (on the Goetheanum hill) can well be ignored; when they will not admit that all the forms of life are incorporated in our Building, but talk about “distorted, fantastic forms,” one must quote the words of Petrarch: “The knowledge that has wrestled through to belief is far superior to naive simplicity; be it never so pious, and not one of the fools who have ever entered the kingdom of heaven has as high a place as a man of knowledge who has won the crown of blessedness.”

Such thoughts make us realise that it can never be our principle to combat any religious body and that it is sheer calumny when anyone accuses us of being an enemy of religious Movements. The very fact of such an accusation proves that there is no willingness even to try to understand us. This at least we must know; and we must resist every tendency to adopt an aggressive attitude to any religious community just as we must keep ourselves free from the same kind of attitude to natural science because that will soon disclose its attitude to spiritual science! There is no reason whatever for us to combat any religious body. Combat cannot be begun by us because it does not lie in our nature to attack. And it must be taken as an axiom that if peace is denied us, it is because the hostile neighbour is not inclined for peace. Let the principle of leaving us in peace be put to the test and then see whether peace is maintained! Let it be put to the test! But naturally, we ourselves must be permeated with the right feeling and attitude. For example, much wrong is also done when from our side, too, dogmas or rites of one kind or another are attacked, often without having been understood; but if we rightly understand them, the principle referred to holds good. I would therefore enjoin you to understand the principle of peace. Just as I was obliged to enjoin you to have forbearance with conditions prevailing at the present time, so must I enjoin you to be alert and watchful, in order that we may do what is necessary to guard the holy treasure entrusted to us. For more and more we shall have to wend our way through the world with an unwavering inner strength if we are to stand firmly on the ground where spiritual science would have us stand.

The Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ Principle are intimately connected with the need to see spiritual reality in the world. Mere looking will never suffice even to understand the Mystery of Golgotha purely as an historical event. The Mystery of Golgotha must be comprehended spiritually; and those who devote themselves to knowledge where everything is derived from outside and will not open their eyes to the new revelations of the Mystery of Golgotha which can ever and again flow to us, will not grasp the import of a poem sung by yet another voice in the middle of the 19th century concerning that which—ever changing yet ever present—holds good in earthly humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. Let me read you a section of this poem which describes how one who cannot grasp the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha confronts this Mystery:⁴

Here is another example of how a human soul feels impelled to give expression to what has come to pass. And now that we have let these pictures pass through our souls, let me remind you of something that I have already said here: that we must change our mode of perception if we are to look with true vision into the spiritual world. We must not believe that the spiritual world can be seen as we see the material world of sense. We must even accustom ourselves to different modes of expression,—In the physical world we see trees, rivers, mountains. But of spiritual being we must say: they see us, they perceive us. To understand the Mystery of Golgotha truly, it is necessary to know this, because the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood only in the Spiritual. But that is how we aspire to understand it.

The time must come when through a true understanding of the words “Not I, but Christ in me,” it will be possible to rise into the spiritual worlds with the right knowledge. This epic poem “Ahasver” by Julius Mosen was published in the year 1838, and the fact that he was able to put the legend into such a form also indicates that the tragic destiny by which Mosen was overtaken profoundly affected him. He was bedridden nearly all his life, for his physical body was almost totally paralysed; this was precisely what enabled him to grasp such lofty ideas. We are reminded of the sinner in the novel “The Mahaguru” who, when he was already out of his mind, discovered the true nature of his art; and we are reminded, too, of the Count's wife in the Polish drama, who had to fall into a pathological state in order to find the connection with the spiritual world. It is the task of spiritual science today to help human beings to rise into the spiritual world in the healthy, normal state of consciousness.—All these things are signs of the task and of the value to be attached to the task of the spiritual-scientific Movement. Compressed into a few brief words, this is the truth that can inspire us as a source of strength: “The Mystery of Golgotha itself reveals that it must be understood spiritually, that we must seek for Christ as Spirit.” And then we must also say: “Christ is seeing us, Christ is perceiving us.”

We will inscribe this deeply in our hearts, keep it constantly in our minds, and our conscience must be satisfied when, in presenting our spiritual-scientific knowledge, we are saying with inner sincerity: May Christ be a witness of what we promulgate as Spiritual Science. We believe that this may indeed be so—and it can inspire us as men were once inspired by the cry of Bernard of Clairvaux: “It is God's Will!” These words became deeds. May it be the same among us—for we may believe that we understand Christ truly when we live under the inspiration of the words: Christ knows us.—And if you understand it aright, to a soul that sees our spiritual science in the true light, to a heart that feels it in its true light, I can impart no more esoteric saying than this: Christ is seeing us.

May these words live in our souls: “Christ is seeing us”—for so we may believe if we rightly understand spiritual science.—Christ is seeing us.

• 1. Statements to this effect are made in the book “Man: How, Whence and Whither” by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. (Theosophical Publishing Company)
• 2. See “The Occult Movement In the 19th Century”—notably Lectures IX and X.
• 3. A newspaper article had been written by a priest living in the vicinity of the Goetheanum.
• 4. Dr. Steiner now read part of the epic poem on Ahasver, or Ahasueris, the Wandering Jew, by Julius Mosen. The Wandering Jew is the legendary figure of a Jerusalem shoemaker who, taunting Christ on the way to the Crucifixion, was told by Him to “go on forever till I return.”—Note by Translator.
  
  In a lecture entitled. “Elemental Beings” (Berlin, 16th May, 1908), Dr. Steiner speaks as follows of the legend of Ahasueris, the Wandering Jew: “An important legend sets before us what a man must experience who descends too deeply into the temporary, transitory nature of the one incarnation. If we think of an extreme case, we can imagine it like this: ‘What is it to me that I should carry over something to later incarnations? I live in this incarnation, I like it, it suits me very well. I am not concerned with what I am supposed to make of it.’ Where does this thought lead? It leads to a man who sits at the wayside when a great Leader of humanity passes by. He, however, rejects the ideas of the Leader of humanity; he repulses him and thinks: ‘I will know nothing of thee, who wouldst guide the kernel of my being into future incarnations where mankind will be outwardly more perfect. I wish to remain united with my present form.’—A man who thrusts from him such a Leader of mankind will appear again in the same form. And if this attitude hardens, then he shall also thrust from him the Leader in the next incarnation. He will appear again and again as the same figure. ... Those who listen to the great Leader of humanity will preserve the soul with its eternal life-kernel. Mankind will have gone forward but they too will appear in an ever-progressive form. He, however, who thrusts the Leader of humanity from him must reappear again and again in the same form. This is the legend of Ahasueris who has thrust from himself the Christ, the Leader of humanity. ...”

You will have realized, from what has gone before, that imaginative perception shows some similarity to the way memory works in the human mind. One way of defining imaginative perception is to compare it to the processes going on in our memory. It will, however, be necessary to take a more penetrating look at this life of memory than is normally done by psychologists today.

Memory is very often thought to consist of thoughts becoming attached to outer sensory perceptions. The idea seems to be that we have thoughts about what we perceive with the senses—while we do so, or perhaps a little while after—and those thoughts then subside gently into a subconscious sphere, rising up again from that subconscious when suitable efforts are made are taking the form of remembered ideas. One school of philosophy has referred to such thoughts or ideas as going down below the threshold of consciousness, as it were, to come up again, crossing the threshold, when the moment is right. It is of course exactly what the lazy thinker wants: to imagine a process where ideas are first of all stimulated by sensory perception, and then, when we no longer have those perceptions, they hang around somewhere or float about in a subconscious—which of course one has never seriously thought about—to pop up again when required. Even a very superficial look at what the human soul experiences will show that this certainly is not the case.

To begin with, direct observation will show no appreciable difference between an idea arising in connection with something we perceive with our senses and one held in the memory. In the first case, the outside world stimulates the idea or concept. Something outside is perceived, an idea follows. We do of course have awareness of the process of perception, and are able to follow the process leading to the evolution of an idea if we reflect on this. But that is not really the point. It is true that when a remembered idea comes up we have no immediate awareness of what it is inside us that stimulates this idea. Yet, as I have just indicated, the point is not that we know about sensory perception, but that from one side or another—now from without and now from within—an idea is brought to mind.

It could be said, taking care to use the words properly, that in either case it is something objective that drives us to form an idea. Pursuing the process of sensory perception and ideas arising from it further, the essential point will have to be that we go through certain motions when we want to make sure we remember something, that is, when it matters to us that something we have experienced does not simply fall into oblivion, and it is important to keep it in our memory. Just consider the machinations we used when we were young to help us memorize things when it was important to memorize them. Whatever brings about memory therefore clearly goes beyond what is needed merely to form an idea. If we consider memory as such, we shall find that the ability to remember is at times reduced or else enhanced merely by the physical condition we are in, and that our organism as a whole is involved when memories arise. We shall discover that when we are in the process of forming ideas based on sensory perceptions we carry out an activity that is organic by nature. This organic activity is partly or completely concealed from conscious awareness, yet it is in fact the function responsible for memory. This is so because a concept or idea formed on the basis of sensory perceptions does not simply swirl down into the subconscious. Something else is linked with the process of forming concepts on the basis of what we perceive. The concept or idea fades. Once we have gone past the process of sensory perception that has been in the forefront of our mind, the idea will have faded; but something else has also happened within us, and this will recall the idea when the occasion arises.

Anyone able to observe mental processes will find that a remembered idea is something completely new and that it forms in about the same way as an idea based on sensory perceptions is formed. The difference is that in the one case the process is going from without to within and in the other it goes from within to without. In the one case one is clearly aware of the triggering factor being something perceived by the senses, while in the other it remains hidden from awareness, being an inner process connected with the organism. Let us simply state this fact—I have only been able to give an outline—and return to our discussion of imaginative perception.

I have described how imaginative perception is developed first of all by doing exercises that enable us to form mental images in the same way we form mental images when remembering things. These exercises have been described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in my Occult Science. They enable us to experience in images. A point is reached where such inner experience of seeing concepts in the form of images has a content that does not recall personal experience but now bears the stamp of representing a reality, a truth, not initially accessible to ordinary consciousness—a truth we may call a spiritual truth.

When imaginative perception is applied to the action I have just described, this action will appear in quite a different light. It becomes apparent how perception linked with the forming of ideas and ideas based on memory appear in relation to the ability to form images. The ability to perceive in images will above all give a specific inner experience of the forming of ideas, of thinking as such. We do not get far when we use our ordinary consciousness for reflection. Philosophical training would be necessary if one wanted to arrive at anything at all when making the forming of ideas, thinking as such, the subject of one's reflections. Anyone without philosophical training will grow impatient when required to think about thinking as such. Even Goethe considered himself lucky for never having thought about thinking.¹ It is easy to see why if we consider Goethe's nature. He was always endeavouring to achieve a vivid, plastic image—I have already referred to this in these talks. He felt like a fish abandoning the water for the air when he moved from his concrete element into this element of pure thought; there his spirit could not breathe, it being utterly against his nature.

It is however possible, and indeed necessary, to understand thinking as such. Without this, no conclusive philosophical concept can be achieved. This may not be to everybody's taste, but it certainly is the philosopher's business. Our concept of thinking activity, of the forming of concepts, is extraordinarily abstract; it is a pale notion to our everyday consciousness and we do not like to dwell on it for long. Yet to imaginative perception it becomes more concrete, more vivid and graphic; indeed I would say that now the thinking process, the forming of ideas, that previously appeared an abstract, disembodied thing, comes close to being concrete and graphic.

A statement like that should not be misinterpreted. In the first place it must really come as a surprise that something usually regarded as having nothing to do with the material world becomes more concrete when looked at in the first stage of working towards knowledge of the non-physical world—supersensible knowledge. Indeed it approaches a form that, I would say, actually bears the stamp of the material world. The picture one forms of the thinking process—for Imagination consists in receiving pictures—bears the mark of processes to do with life coming to an end, with dying. Imaginative perception does indeed show the process of forming ideas, of thinking, as one in which the material world is dying. Comparing what I have just described with something perceived by the outer senses, I think I may say that the only thing to compare it with is the process to be observed when physical death ensues for a living creature. Basically, the transition from ordinary sensory perception to imaginative perception of the thinking process is an experience of the kind one gets when sharing in a death in the physical world.

The process of gaining insight comes more alive when approaching Imagination and Inspiration, than it is in its abstract form, in ordinary consciousness. This also is the reason why advancement to supersensible perception is combined with what yesterday I referred to as inner experiences of destiny. In ordinary consciousness, the acquisition of knowledge is gone through with a certain inner indifference. We know that life normally lifts us up in delight and takes us down into pain, that we move up and down with the waves of feeling and emotion. We also know that the processes involved in cognitive thinking have an icy coldness to them, a quality that leaves us cold, making few waves in our emotions.

This does indeed change when we advance to imaginative perception. Here, the processes of gaining insight come to resemble more the processes of ordinary life, although they are entirely in the sphere of mind and spirit and have nothing to do with the physical world. A more intimate relation to the processes of perception develops, for they now arouse greater personal interest. And now, in going through this process where thinking, the forming of ideas, becomes vivid, we experience a process so vivid it is almost concrete. Making ourselves really conscious of this process, we are able to use it to gain more of an understanding of the memory process. The human organism in a way becomes transparent if one visualizes it in this way. In the first place, the thinking process has been experienced in mind and spirit, in an Imagination. The same process becomes a material image when we come to study the memory process. The reason is that a remembered idea is preceded by a form of material process similar to the process which presents as a picture to the inner eye when we apply the process of Imagination to thinking, as I have just described. It can be said that imaginative perception offers the possibility of seeing through the memory process. Continuing in our efforts to gain insight in this way, we shall indeed come to realize that Imagination itself is a process in mind and spirit similar to the process of remembering at the level of the physical body. The memory process is however individualized into the human body—if I may put it like this, made individual for our personal experiences. The process of Imagination moves away from the human body, aligning itself with similar processes that occur in the cosmos, outside the human body.

A physical process of dying is active in the organism; in return, memory concepts arise in the conscious mind. A spirit and soul element is active in Imagination. There is an actual process in the outside world corresponding to this, but Imagination is as yet unable to grasp it, because the complete process of supersensible perception consists in Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition. But, as you can see, there are certain things in human life, such as memory, such as the processes occurring in body and soul altogether, that cannot be grasped by speculating, nor with philosophical arguments. They can only be approached by training faculties of the soul that initially are latent. That way we can get closer to them, as will be obvious also from the following.

When the life of our hearts and minds is within the sphere of ordinary thinking, the usual way of forming ideas, then our feeling with regard to such thinking processes is that it is we ourselves who let one idea follow the other. Indeed, we are clearly aware that if we do not use our minds to exercise a certain inner choice in letting one idea follow another, and if instead ideas impel one another, we should merely be the reflection of an automatic machine within us, and we should not be real human beings. In my Philosophy of Freedom I have tried to show how this feeling we have towards our ordinary thinking processes is the very source of our feeling of freedom altogether, and it is only through this that the phenomenon of freedom can in fact be grasped—in experience.

This feeling of deliberate inner choice will be lost for a time when we progress to Imagination. Imagination yields images that are experienced purely in soul and spirit and yet, as I said yesterday, have nothing to do with visions, hallucinations and the like. Exactly because they have content, these images show that they no longer permit the same freedom in linking or analysing them as the freedom we know when we put ideas together or separate them in our ordinary consciousness. Very gradually, we get the feeling that with imaginative perception we are not merely entering into pictures the way we enter into our ideas, into ideas that strictly speaking appear as individual concepts we must link up ourselves. The feeling we gradually develop is that the Imaginations are only broken up into individual detail by ourselves, and that in reality they form a whole, that a continuous force is always at work in them, as it were. We experience a presence in the imaginative sphere that only comes to conscious awareness in us through this imaginative perception. In our ordinary consciousness we really have no idea of it.

And again—if we consider ordinary life, and especially if we follow Goethe and observe how plant forms come about, noting the transition from one form to another—living metamorphosis—we shall find that this life of the plants in the material world holds within it the very thing of which the continuous force we experience evolving in the world of Imaginations is a picture. Gradually we find out that through entering into Imagination, we have worked our way through to a point where we are able to grasp the power of growth. We realize that we must reject a vital force arrived at through speculation, indeed, even more so than the mechanists.² Anything in the sphere of this vital force will never be understood by the usual thought processes, the usual philosophical speculation. It is accessible only to a higher power of understanding, and this has to be worked for. We come to realize that only the inorganic world is accessible to ordinary understanding, and that the entity alive in the growth process has to be grasped in a state of mind and soul that we shall achieve only by achieving Imagination. This power of growth lives in our organism. We are able to see through it by giving ourselves up to a life in Imagination.

It should be noted that it is really important to observe the rules I have given in my books when following the exercises that lead to imaginative perception. What is the purpose of all those rules? Their purpose is to make sure that everything done by someone working to achieve a capacity for higher understanding is done with the same inner clarity as that experienced in forming mathematical concepts. The conscious mind needs to be in the same state as when it is working with geometry, when it enters in a living way into everything that is needed to develop Imagination and also the next two stages of supersensible perception—Inspiration and Intuition. Just think of life in visions and hallucinations, which is pathological, or of our dream life, which is at least a shadow picture of something pathological, and you will see the tremendous difference between all this and a conscious mind proceeding with the clarity of mathematical thought. The steps taken to reach Imagination must never aim for a reduced level of conscious awareness. Our goal must be achieved purely in the sphere of mind and spirit and with the lucidity we know in mathematics, not with a dreamy, mystical attitude, in confusion and in darkness. Otherwise we would be unable to rise to higher powers of perception. We would sink down into forces we already possessed, the forces of growth, the inner reproductive forces of the human organism. These would be stimulated into growth, and the result would be a tendency to have visions, hallucinations, rather than imaginative perception. It is possible to see how things are related, but we must get a really clear idea of the path to imaginative perception, as it has been described.

In imaginative perception we live in a world of pictures, as I have described it. But it is in the very nature of those pictures that characteristically they are reflections of realities. We do not have the realities. Instead, we have an awareness of living in a world of pictures that are not real. And that is sound and healthy. A person who hallucinates, who has visions, takes his visions, his hallucinations, to be a reality. A person practising Imagination knows that everything he experiences in Imagination is an image—an image of reality, but still an image—and it is this knowledge that gives a person practising Imagination a state of conscious awareness that is not the usual one but has become enhanced. It is impossible for him to confuse this world of images with the reality. It will be Inspiration that carries us forward, as it were, into the reality of the world of images.

Imagination first presents a picture of supersensible reality. Inspiration shows the way beyond, to the reality. We achieve Inspiration by using a mental technique, just as meditation, concentration, is used to make Imagination possible. The new faculty acquired is one that would be anything but welcome in ordinary life, and rightly so. It will be necessary to use observation to help one get a reasonably clear awareness of what it is to forget, to throw out an idea from conscious awareness. Meditative exercises are required in artificially forgetting ideas, separating them out. This must lead to the ability to reject and, in the final instance, wipe out the imaginative life, the life in images, as we have acquired it. Anyone merely able to have Imaginations cannot yet penetrate into a spiritual reality, which can only be done by someone who has reached a point where he is able to erase these Imaginations again. These Imaginations only appear like a realization of imaginative faculties initially and have to be erased, for they are more or less something we have produced ourselves. It is a question of completely clearing the conscious mind, as it were, using the act of forgetting deliberately, applying it to the imaginative life. Then we shall come to know what it means to live in a state of fully awake consciousness, a state where no mental images are formed but where the Imagining that went before has created inner energy and has been cleared of its contents. We shall then come to know what it means to live in such a state of energized consciousness. This we must come to know, and then we progress from Imagination to knowledge through Inspiration. We shall then also know that we are touched by a spiritual reality that reveals itself in a process in soul and spirit that is comparable to breathing in and breathing out, to the rhythmical process of respiration altogether. That process consists in our taking in the outside air, working it through within ourselves, and then releasing it again in a different form, having in a way identified ourselves with it. In the same way we come to know a process in soul and spirit that consists in our being able to sense, to inhale, as it were, the inner conscious energy we have acquired into a conscious awareness strengthened through Imagination. As a result, the objective Imagination will shine forth in our strengthened conscious awareness. We inhale the spiritual world, we take it into ourselves. A rhythmical interaction with the spiritual world occurs.

In ancient India, instinctive efforts were made to attain higher perception. These instinctive efforts active in yoga made use of the breathing process, as you probably know, to make it possible to experience this actual breathing process as a process in soul and spirit, by using a physical method. In oriental yoga exercises, breathing—inhalation, holding the breath, exhalation—is controlled in a special way, and the person enters wholly into this breathing process. As a result, the soul and spirit is sucked out of the breathing process, as it were. The breathing process is removed from conscious awareness by the very fact that it is pushed in, leaving behind the soul and spirit aspect. The organization of our present culture is such that we cannot copy the process gone through in the yoga exercise, and we must not copy it. It would cast us down into the physical organization. It may be said that our soul life is no longer on the plane where the soul life of the Indian was in the past. His soul life tended more towards sensibility, ours tends towards intellectuality. And in the sphere of intellectuality, yoga breathing would present the risk of man destroying his physical organization. Living on the intellectual plane, it is necessary to use exercises of the kind that I have described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. These exercises are entirely in the sphere of soul and spirit. They may just have a hint of the physical breathing process—though even this only rarely and mostly not at all. The essential part of our exercises to achieve Imagination lies entirely in the sphere of mind and spirit, the sphere man has experience of when working with geometry and mathematics. The work which has to be done to achieve Inspiration also has to be in this sphere.

With Inspiration, it becomes possible to gain awareness of an outside world of soul and spirit, objectivity of soul and spirit. This is connected with conscious life itself undergoing an inner metamorphosis. Man simply has to let it happen that as a physical being he goes through external growth and metamorphosis as he passes through childhood, youth, old age and very old age. Where his conscious awareness is concerned, he feels a touch of fear, a hesitation, when it comes to going through something as alive as those metamorphoses in his innermost soul content. Yet this has to be gone through it supersensible perception is to be achieved. Goethe reached a certain perfection in his perception of metamorphosis, and such perception is particularly well able to move on the plane of imaginative life. The reason is that everything subject to Imagination presents itself in living, ever-changing forms. Some form or other comes to awareness. It changes into a completely different form through transitional changes or directly—yet it is possible somehow to transpose the contours of the first figure into those of the second. It is possible to transform one into the other without making too great a jump. This stops when we approach the essential aspect of the world that has to be understood through Inspiration; it stops as soon as we approach the animal organization.

Let me try and show you what it is we have to approach as we turn towards the animal organization. Anyone studying the process of thinking as a psychologist or logician and more or less reaching a point where this can be defined can evolve a certain idea of the thinking process. Logicians, experts in the theory of knowledge and psychologists will take pride in getting such a clear, lucid, definite idea of the thinking process. They will be pleased to have achieved this, to be able to say: The process of thinking is... and now predicates (or the second term of the proposition) will follow. But let us assume someone was really pleased to develop such an idea of the thinking process and then found himself in the situation I found myself in when I wrote my Philosophy of Freedom. He would need to trace the thinking process from the form in which it is active when it links up with external visual perceptions to the form in which it is active in free spirituality in the human individual, as an impulse of will, an impulse to act. In the latter case the thinking process certainly will still be recognized as pure, clarified thinking. We are able to move on from the type of thought we have studied through the sensory perceptions it linked up with, to the thoughts that are the motivation for our actions when we act as free human beings. Yet when we come to consider this particular type of thinking process, which indeed is a genuine process of thinking, it no longer agrees entirely with the definition we established for the thinking process linked to sensory perception. We are no longer able to do anything with the definition, for this form of thinking—and it definitely is thinking—no longer resembles the kind of thinking that is the motivation behind our actions; for now it is also out-and-out will force. It has metamorphosed, one might say, into its opposite, into will, has become will, is out-and-out substantive will, if I may put it like this. You see from this how flexible one has to become in one's mind when using ideas or concepts. Anyone who gets into the habit of forming concepts and then applying them can easily find himself in a situation where realities make his applied concepts utterly meaningless.

Let us assume—and this after all is actually the case where external reality is concerned—we have formed a concept of Joseph Miller in his seventh year. When we get to know him again in his fiftieth year, the concept will not help us to see through Joseph Miller properly. We have to expect a metamorphosis, something must have changed. The definition of young Miller at seven will not help us when face to face with fifty-year old Miller. Life makes a mock of definition, of sharply defined concepts full of content. It is this which causes all the misery in the many discussions and disputes that arise in life. We are really disputing from a point beyond reality, while reality makes a mock of rigid definitions and rigid descriptions. And in the same way we must also come to see how thought becomes will, and will becomes thought.

That was a case applicable to a person, and it is approximately also the case which applies when we simply want to get to know the animal organization through Inspiration. Here we cannot just speak of the type of metamorphosis Goethe spoke of in relation to the plant world, where in a way it is possible still to transform one shape into another. It will be necessary to speak of inner transitions, or—if I may be permitted to use the term Dr Unger and I were using yesterday—of inversion or involution, speaking not only of geometrical but also of qualitative involutions, to get from one thing to another. In short, we have to accept that the inner state of soul goes through a metamorphosis, that we go through a process in which our inner content of experience, content of knowledge gained, grows up, as it were.

And so it happens that, ascending from Imagination to Inspiration, we are not able to use the concepts that are quite rightly and properly used in ordinary consciousness. They will have to remain for purposes of orientation, but need to be modified when perception is addressed to the truly inner world, that is, to the spiritual nature of things. This then lifts the logical distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ out of the abstract as we advance form Imagination to Inspiration. In the world that now presents itself as a spiritual world outside us, we shall no longer be able to manage if we use the terms ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the same way as we have learned to use them, quite rightly, at an earlier level of perception. The ideas ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ now become something much more concrete, something we now experience in the radiant Imaginations that arise in us. Where they are concerned, we cannot say ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ the way we do with reference to ideas in the intellectual sphere. At this point, more concrete ideas arise specifically in the sphere of soul and spirit; one thing is ‘sound’ or ‘healthy’, another ‘sick’, one encourages life, the other kills it. The abstract notion of ‘right’ turns into a more concrete notion, and what we are tempted to call ‘right’ is something that brings life and health into the spiritual world, while the things we are tempted to call ‘wrong’ bring disease, paralysis and death into the spiritual world.

Ideas we are accustomed to apply in physical life thus arise in a new form when we have crossed the threshold of the spiritual world, and this is because we then experience the content of these ideas at the level of soul and spirit. You will find that someone with integrity towards perception of the spheres that lie beyond sensory perception will use different terms. He will no longer juggle with terms such as ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ but will of his own accord come to use such terms as ‘sound’ and ‘unsound’ and the like.

I have been attempting to describe—and in the lectures that follow I shall go into these things in much greater detail—how it is possible to progress from ordinary perception to Imagination and to Inspiration, and how access is gained step by step to the true nature, that is, the spiritual nature, of the part of the world that is not accessible to the physical senses.

Let me remind you how in order to describe human actions, to understand the phenomenon of freedom when writing my Philosophy of Freedom, I found it necessary on the one hand to achieve a sharp definition of the concept of purely sensory perception and the thinking process linked to this. On the other hand I pointed out that moral impulses are Intuitions taken from a spiritual world. In my efforts to establish a realistic moral philosophy, I thus found it necessary on the one hand to present a clear definition of how perception of the outside world accessible to the senses has to be penetrated with thought at one extreme of all that is human and, on the other hand, define moral Intuition at the other extreme—on the one hand perception and recognition of physical objects, on the other, intuitive perception. If we really want to understand man as he is in this physical world, with regard to the way he perceives things with his physical senses and with regard to the way he develops his impulses to act out of the very depth of his being, then it is necessary on the one hand to draw attention to sensory perception penetrated by thought-representing reality—and on the other hand to look for a reality existing at the opposite pole, a reality arising out of pure empiricism, pure observation and experience a reality rooted in the intuitive experience of moral impulses.

It is my purpose, in presenting these observations, to show you the different levels of perception that lead to the spiritual world, ‘spiritual world’ meaning nothing more than the world that makes up the whole of reality when combined with our sense-perceptible world. We have to start with object-based perception in the world of matter, which I placed at one pole in my Philosophy of Freedom, and advance to imaginative and inspired perception. There we are touched by the spiritual truth. Then we advance to Intuition, and in Intuition we are not merely touched by the spiritual truth that is outside the physical world—I shall describe this in the lectures that follow—but live into it, become one with it.

We live in Intuition when we are at one with spiritual reality. This means nothing else but that in man as he is today, in this period of world³ evolution, perception of physical things is at one pole and intuitive perception at the other. Between these two poles lie Imagination and Inspiration. Yet if we wish to describe man as he is in ordinary life, as someone who does things, someone who is morally active, it will be necessary to look for the moral Intuition relating to this clearly defined area, the area of ethical motivation, if for no other reason but to establish a philosophy of freedom. If the basis for human actions provided out of such a philosophy of freedom is then developed to apply to the whole cosmos, we shall find Intuition realized throughout the whole cosmos, whereas normally one finds it merely in the limited field of human actions. Here in the physical world, any moral person merely joins moral Intuition to everyday perception of material things, for the simple reason that it is part of man's natural constitution to do so. Yet if we wish to arrive at true perception of the universe, if we want to ‘land’ on cosmic Intuition—if I may put it like this—which in the cosmos corresponds to the moral Intuition for man's inner life, it is necessary to pass through the two stages of Imagination and Inspiration. In other words, it is possible to describe man in terms of a philosophy of freedom. This merely necessitates arriving at the limited field of intuitive experience for human actions. Looking for a cosmic philosophy to match this philosophy of freedom, it is necessary to expand what has previously been done with reference to a limited field, by evolving the different stages of perception: object-based perception. Imagination, Inspiration and Intuition.

In principle, therefore, what I mean by Imagination and Inspiration lies between the first part of my Philosophy of Freedom, where I establish the reality of object-based perception, and the second part of the book, where moral Intuition is defined in the chapter on moral imagination.⁴ At the time when the Philosophy of Freedom was in the process of being written, this could only be hinted at. It was hinted at when I wrote the words: ‘The individual human being is not truly separate from the world. He is part of the world, and there is a connection with the cosmos as a whole that is a reality and is broken only in our eyes, the way we perceive it. We see this part initially as something existing by itself because we do not see the “ropes and belts” used by the basic forces of the cosmos to move the wheel of our life.’* If we want to know man only in the terms of this world, we are not aware of the direct transition from physical perception to moral Intuition.

There is something this type of description only touches on—the ‘ropes and belts’ are of course mere metaphor—and that is that there is something within man that links his essential nature to the whole cosmos. This really needs further elucidation. It would be necessary to show that, just as man is able to skip the two middle stages by an empirical approach and get from object-based perception to moral Intuition, he is also able to progress from his perceptive experience as a human being to cosmic Intuition. In his human nature, he is linked to the cosmos through ‘ropes and belts,’ that is, through spiritual entities. Yet man is only able to perceive this connection if he now goes through the intermediate stages between object-based perception and Intuition, stages that are not required for ordinary reflection. He needs to ascend from object-based perception through Imagination and Inspiration to reach cosmic Intuition.

That is how the whole of the anthroposophical science which has been evolved relates to the seed that was given in my Philosophy of Freedom. It must of course be understood that anthroposophy is something alive. It had to be a seed before it could develop further into leaves and all that follows. This fact of being alive is what distinguishes anthroposophical science from the deadness many are aware of today in a ‘wisdom’ that still wants to reject anthroposophy, partly because it cannot, and partly because it will not, understand it.

• 1. ‘How did you get as far as that?
  They say you have done well indeed.’
  ‘Ah, child, I did a clever thing:
  I never gave a thought to thought.’

  Goethe, Works published posthumously (1833), Poems.

• 2. Mechanist—someone holding a mechanical view of the unviverse.
  See also notes on page 62.
• 3. ere, Rudolf Steiner used the German world for ‘imagination’ in the everyday sense. (Translator)
• 4. Page 245 of the 12th German edition.

This evening we want to use to reflect on the interaction between the spiritual and physical worlds. This has already been the subject of other reflections in recent days. It will be the main point on which we will depend to further develop the topic that we have raised. But I would like to start from a more general consideration, which will show us how, in the more abstract, in the more general, the interaction of the spiritual and the physical, the unearthly and the earthly, can be thought of, can be encompassed by a simple thought. And from this more general consideration, we will then move on to what is important: the relationship of the disembodied human being, who has passed through the gate of death, to those people who are embodied in this earthly life.

Let us look at our Earth as the scene of what is expressed to our senses first. I will begin quite hypothetically, will propose thoughts and ideas that are initially just thoughts, or at least appear to be just thoughts. Let us assume that all the forces of our Earth, from a certain point of view, are concentrated and compressed into a small image of the Earth, in some way shaped. So let us assume that we have a small Earth, a small, tiny body, but one that contains in miniature the same forces as the Earth in the large. Let us visualize this schematically. Let us imagine that we have a small Earth, that is, a small, tiny body that contains within itself the same power relationships that are otherwise distributed throughout the large volume of the Earth's body. Let us imagine that this small Earth body is somehow connected to the Earth.

Now, if we imagine the earth correctly, we do not have to think of it as just any inanimate being, as it presents itself to the geologist, the mineralogist, who only imagines this earth as an inanimate being. Because if the earth were only mineral, as the geologist imagines it, it would never be able to harbor plants, animals, human beings on it. Of course the geologist is right to isolate what is dead, but he should be aware that this is only one aspect of the earth's existence. If, however, we imagine the earth as a living being, then we must also imagine that its life undergoes changes over time. So that this earth in winter — we have discussed this often — is in a very different state than in summer, just as a person is in a different state when asleep than when awake. We must not imagine that winter and summer simply brush over the earth, but that they are something that takes hold of the state of the earth, that is, the living being, just as the states of waking and sleeping take hold of us. This temporal sequence is therefore part of our earthly existence if we regard this earthly existence as a living one. But with this we also say that every being that is connected with this earth – and that includes this small earth we are talking about here – is in this changing state with the whole earth, that it shares in it.

What does this change of conditions mean for our earth? Let us say, for example, that spring is coming. When spring comes, it means that the sun's effect on the earth is quite different from that during the winter. We could also say: When spring arrives, the earth is seized by the effects of the sun. During the winter, when our little earth with the great earth was, so to speak, dependent on itself, when the sun did not care about our little earth, now our little earth is also seized by the effects of the sun, by what is outside of our earth. The sum of forces in the little earth is snatched from the earth. Our little earth is, so to speak, no longer dependent on the earth alone; it is claimed by the sun, it is snatched from the earth. Yes, when our little earth is snatched from the earth in this way, then other forces than mere earthly forces play into our little earth, then the external forces communicate with our little earth.

Now we have to imagine this small earth lined with substances. What a substance is is not considered here. From autumn to spring, this small earth is alone with itself, and so it can develop its forces within itself. But then comes the sun, which draws out the forces, so that under the influence of the sun's effect, what was first enclosed in our little earth now comes into extra-terrestrial spheres of activity. It is torn out and comes into extra-terrestrial spheres of activity. That which was compressed can expand and also acquires a relationship to the surrounding cosmic space under the influence of the sun.

Now, after a certain time, towards autumn, the effects of the sun cease again. Then this development cannot take place, and the forces of the sun's effect withdraw from the forces of the earth's effect, that is to say, this combination of forces is restored. It gathers the substance together: the earth takes back, as it were, what it had to leave to the sun for a certain period of time. The effects of the sun now cease for a while, winter comes. If this were left to the earth, the sun would completely take possession of the small earth within the great earth. During the whole of the winter the system of earth forces must be active within. Otherwise the sun would take possession of this small earth entirely for itself. It must be ensured that when the sun reappears it can take hold of this small earth; otherwise it will simply become a tiny ball that is consumed by the great earth. A force must assert itself so that the sun, when it comes, can reach this small earth again. But precautions must be taken for this.

If the earth has its own power only in this one inside it (it is drawn), then that is just a small earth. The sun has retreated, now this small earth is alone with the large earth. When the sun comes again, what should it do now with what has become mere earth? In reality, the sun must be able to reach in again – there is no difference here, whether the sun goes around the earth or the earth around the sun – the sun, when it is in a new relationship to the earth, must be able to reach in. You can imagine it in the following way: Imagine a person standing firmly in one place and using all his strength to remain standing. You approach from the side and try to push him over. If he has enough strength within him to stand, you will not be able to move him. But when it begins to move, you will be able to intervene in its direction of movement. Suppose there were a force inside it that would cause the orbiting movement of the sun, or of the earth itself, like an inner momentum; let us assume that the sun would communicate this momentum to the small earth: then the sun could in turn intervene in this movement that it has imparted. In this way, it could snatch this small Earth from the Earth, and the process could take place as described. In other words, towards spring we would have a small Earth in which the Sun intervenes through impulses of motion that it had already imparted the previous fall. The Sun intervenes, snatches the small Earth from the mere forces of the Earth, and, in accordance with the effect of the Sun, unfolds on a larger scale that which is limited only to the small Earth. The forces must contract, and the small globe of the earth must be given the momentum of the sun. You already suspect what it is: I have described in sketchy terms what happens during the growth of plants, the unfolding of plants into leaves, flowers and fruits. I have described to you here the participation of the sun's momentum: that is fertilization; the seed is fertilized and remains so until the following year, when it is again seized by the sun. The little grain that carries out the fertilization in the plant is the being in which, through the sun's maturation, the possibility is laid to convey this momentum to the earthly part.

You see, we have here a living interaction between the earthly and the extra-terrestrial. We cannot imagine that the plant's growth continues to flourish without the sun leaving it a replica of its momentum, in which it can engage again the following year. In other words, when we look at the plant, we are really not just looking at something that is connected with the workings of the earth; rather, we see in the whole cycle of the plant process an interaction between the sun and the earth. There are other planetary conditions to be considered, but we will disregard these for now in order to grasp the meaning of the whole process. We want to visualize how what we see on earth is not just an earthly product, but also a product of the sun. The fact that human knowledge is usually limited to what goes on inside and outside on earth prevents us from gaining a real insight, from truly understanding things. For with mere earthly forces, only our minerals are formed. The moment we go beyond the merely mineral into the vegetable, we must say that in the earthly itself there are no longer any forces that shape things.

The materialists always hope that one day they will be able to produce a plant seed in the laboratory, just like any other chemical composition. The point of the opposition to materialism is not this production, but rather that, by advancing from the mineral to the plant, from the chemical product to the living, the production can only take place through a supernatural process. And before they will succeed in realizing this ideal of materialism, in producing plant seeds just as they do mineral products, chemical substances, the materialists will have to learn – if I may express myself grotesquely – to believe in astrology, to believe that they must place a process that they want to bring about under the influence of the stars. Laboratories will have to be set up that work with the changing seasons and that take into account the constellation of the stars in the same way that the constellation of the stars is taken into account in nature. One must rise from the earth when one rises from the dead to the living. For the etheric-physical must also be involved in the creation of the living. This, however, is never dependent on the merely earthly, but on that which is spread throughout the whole world. When we survey our earthly surroundings, we survey what is merely physical; from the earthly point of view, we survey the physical by surveying the earthly. That which is ethereal to our earth is still exposed to the entire universe.

If we now go further to the astral, we come to an element that is no longer exposed to the visible at all. And if I were to develop this for the animal kingdom in the way I developed it for the plant kingdom, it would turn out to be more complicated; but you would see that not only the extra-terrestrial and the still visible in the starry world come into consideration, but that the supersensible comes into consideration at all, which is not even concluded in the starry world. One must go out of the realm of the visible.

I wanted to make such a consideration before you, so that you gain insight into the really deep inner mystery of what is going on in the everyday, in the daily growth of plants, so that you gain insight into how it is in the fertilizing grains of the plant , which are distributed in a circle or in some other pattern around the ovary, it is essential that they contain extraterrestrial effects, and that the seed itself is essentially a reflection of the whole earth effect, that it is a small earth. The interaction that takes place in the plant blossom through fertilization is a reflection of the process that takes place between the earth and the entire starry world of the surrounding cosmic space.

We are fundamentally surrounded by secrets everywhere, and knowledge and the pursuit of knowledge always inspire the deepest humility. Just imagine how far it is from the general view of such a thing to the concrete view of the details of all that covers the

4419 earth. The field of knowledge thus truly opens up as an infinite one. We are confronted with infinity at every point of our existence, so to speak. And it is part of the right attitude that a person should develop towards the world to have a sense that one is actually looking into an infinite existence everywhere. But through this one also feels a certain bond between the individual finite human existence and the infinite, the whole world. And this mood should actually be poured out over everything that spiritual science can bring us, because without this reverent mood towards the infinite, nothing can actually be grasped with the right feeling in spiritual science. From time to time, one must renew such a mood within oneself, so that one ceases to regard knowledge as something that is sought after on the side, as it were, in the course of life, while in fact it must belong to the most sacred spiritual that intervenes in our lives.

If we give ourselves up to such moods, then we will also receive with the right attitude that which will increasingly have to be proclaimed in our time from the sources of spiritual science for the progress that must necessarily come into the world from our present time into the future. And when we have developed such an attitude, then this attitude is something effective in our soul. It is really not just something abstract, but it takes hold of our soul, it warms and illuminates our soul. And only when this happens can the right thing emerge from spiritual science, when our soul becomes, as it were, a different one, when what can be explored through spiritual science is felt through. When we bring such an attitude into our soul, then we can approach the riddles of life in the right way, which otherwise flow past us in life without us being able to relate to them in the right way.

There is really an inner connection between the soul and these general considerations, which I have now made, and what I now want to say with regard to human life. If you look at the plant, if you see it sprouting from the earth, you can tune your soul so that you feel: What is sprouting as greenery comes from such a complicated little creature, the seed, that this little being – from certain points of view – is a reflection of the whole earth, that in what I see sprouting from leaf to flower, from flower to fruit, the whole universe is involved. When I look at a green plant leaf on its stem, I realize that in this leaf, the way it is positioned, the way it greens, what was first enclosed in the small earth is enveloped by the effects of the sun, what has been wrested from the earth until the effects of the sun have taken hold of it. Then the effects of the sun, however, leave behind their vibrational impulses, after they have made it impossible for that which was in the small earth to spread when it must contract again. We see, as it were, in the sprouting, unfolding plant an image of certain effects of the whole great cosmos. We must regard what presents itself to our senses in this way as something that reveals to us in every point secrets that permeate and interweave the whole cosmos.

In this way, human life itself is also connected with the whole cosmos and now also with what is there in relation to us of the extraterrestrially visible bodies and processes. But what appears in earthly processes is particularly significant to us when we consider, I would say, the deviations from what we see as normal earthly life, normal human life. It is true that we constantly see many more deviations than what is actually normal in life, but ordinary cognition, which is limited to the sense world, does not engage with these deviations; one might say that it does not engage with the meaning of these deviations. We live in a time in which, crowded together, many deviations present themselves to us, which at the same time are real riddle questions. Do we not see in this time of severe trial for humanity numerous of our human brothers going prematurely through the gate of death? We see them going through the gate of death not through some kind of illness, something that is in their own organism, but we see them forcibly going

go through this gate of death. Because it is something else whether a human soul goes through the gate of death so that she dies of an illness in her youth or because her organism is hit by a bullet or is forcibly taken away from the soul-spiritual in any other way. But I already spoke about it yesterday: What takes place here between birth and death is all significant in the context of life as a whole; we have to accept it as karmic connections, we have to fit into the karma as it is given. But what happens is significant.

Now let us consider the case of the physical organism being taken away from the soul-spiritual by a bullet at a relatively young age. Compared to what we have become accustomed to — that the human being consumes his own organism — this is an abnormality. It is therefore a twofold mystery. If death alone is a mystery for direct contemplation, which is revealed through spiritual science, a twofold mystery arises when the course of life is not such that the organism is taken away from the spiritual soul through inner organic processes, but when this happens through a bullet.

Facing the universe, the cosmos, an inner mood arises in the soul that is created by such simple considerations, but which, grasped in all its depth, seizes us with an inner mood in relation to the secrets of the universe. And then, when the soul is so moved, we also approach the event that I have just hinted at with the necessary reverent mood and dignity and with the necessary seriousness: that the physical-bodily is forcibly taken away from the human spiritual-soul. And then this question arises before our soul like a riddle. Because how such a question arises determines whether or not one can contribute something to its solution. If a person has just had a banquet and then rested and now sits down to his spiritual work, then he will not solve the deep riddle, then he will not find the mood that matters. But when he faces the riddle and his soul is imbued with the right attitude towards the universe, then the riddles can be solved.

When the spiritual researcher, with such a mood of the soul, faces the riddle of death, which approaches us in such a way that the physical body is violently snatched from the soul-spiritual, then all kinds of things arise in the soul that can contribute to solving the riddle. Then the right impressions come, which are needed to clarify such a matter. These impressions cannot arise from every frame of mind, but only from the right one. In order to make this vividly clear to you, I have chosen this particular path today, by showing you, as it were, how such a task presents itself to the spiritual researcher. When the spiritual researcher is in the right frame of mind, the enigmatic question arises before him. But then something quite different arises: just as thoughts usually follow each other in a lawless manner, so now an impression arises before the soul in a law-governed manner, alongside the question. And then, if one has sensed this riddle, the riddle of death, one can sense the other question as something that belongs to it: Yes, how do people actually – depending on their particular nature – accept life? And all kinds of thoughts arise, thoughts that I now want to spread out before your soul itself.

Especially in our present time cycle, people only really accept something as reality if it is not a “mere thought”. For them, thought is not really something real. And they may be right from their point of view, but it is just a certain mood of the soul. That which is real must approach man much more strongly than a mere thought. A mere thought is just that — a mere thought! But for modern man, that which is designated as being must on no account be a mere thought. What presents itself as a mere thought, that is what man today calls non-existent. That which exists must place itself firmly in the world, must not speak merely to the thought. Out of this mood, people only believe that they are standing in reality when they can speak of this reality as an existing being, when they are forced to recognize this reality through being.

Now, when we ascend from this world in which we live to the spiritual world that man inhabits when he has passed through the gate of death, the most uncomfortable thought is, one might say, the thought of the being that formed here in the physical world. A being that is like the being in the physical world disturbs the disembodied person in the spiritual world. Precisely what is here in reality called the unreal in contrast to the existing is the real in the spiritual world. If something were to approach you there as it does here in the material world, you would reject it. It would startle you and be something that does not belong in the spiritual world. This is an extremely significant thought. If one were to talk as trivially in the spiritual world as one does here, a spirit might say, when something approaches it as it does here: What am I supposed to do with it? That's not it at all! — Because in the spiritual world I must have the opportunity to experience everything that comes to me as an imagination — it is at the lowest level of knowledge in the spiritual world — that is, to be able to translate it into intuition through my own activity. While in our time people only recognize as reality what they have done nothing for, one cannot

'recognize this in the spiritual world. Rather, in the spiritual world, one must do something to help bring about what is to appear there as reality. One must always work together.

It is the case that a disembodied person in the spiritual world sees the spiritual world around them to the extent that they are active in it. And what they see when they are not active is the world beyond, the world that is our world here. When the disembodied person looks at the earth, they see what is there without them being involved. Just as we on earth call our visible world, our real world, our existing world the here and now and what cannot be seen the hereafter, it is exactly the other way round from the point of view of the spiritual world. In the spiritual world there is absolutely nothing except what we create out of nothing into the present by participating: That is then the here and now. Otherwise, this world in the spiritual world is dark and silent and desolate if we do not act spiritually and mentally in it. But the hereafter is there without us working. While we look up here to the unknown, we look from the spiritual world at what is familiar to us here, but that is precisely the hereafter, which has no reality because it is, without one doing anything to it. — One must familiarize oneself with such ideas.

Now there is something within our physical world, our physical reality, that not everyone, but certain people, accept as something meaningful, despite the fact that it is not real. It is something that individual people bring into this reality, and in contrast to this, those who have an understanding of it behave in such a way that they accept it, despite the fact that it has no real existence: These are the ideals that people have. Idealists bring something valuable into our sensual reality: the ideals by which people live, which have no material reality, and which only the coarse materialist does not accept. But at the same time, these ideals are something of immense value in this life. They are the ideals that give us the impetus for our lives, they are what we desire so that we can hold to them. In a certain respect, these ideals make life valuable in that man lives up to them. Something unreal in the materialistic sense must be carried into our sensual reality with the ideals, so that what we must characterize in the sense does not arise: mere existence would be bleak if ideals were not there, if man did not find them in them. Among those who have no ideals, there must be idealists who, as it were, develop something in our reality that is an image of the reality beyond, that is not an existing thing, that does not claim the existing and yet is a valuable thing, indeed, has an absolute value.

After the spiritual researcher has developed this impression, which is natural to him, his research leads him back to the riddle of the human being hit by a bullet in his youth. And he must now ask: Is there something for the world beyond, in which the disembodied human beings and spiritual beings live, that corresponds to idealism here on earth? Is there something similar for the beings in the hereafter as the ideals here on earth? And lo and behold, the following emerges. Take a person who was shot at a young age: his etheric body separates from the physical body, the physical body has gone in a violent way. Of course, the violence must come from outside. What I have said can never apply when it is a matter of one's own decision. The process must come from outside. The etheric body, as I have already emphasized, has forces within it that could have continued to supply life for decades, perhaps even for decades, here on earth. These forces do not disappear, they remain. The person who now discards his etheric body in this way hands over the forces of his etheric body to the general world. But he has entered the spiritual world in the manner indicated, or rather, his body has been taken from him. So he now ascends into the spiritual world as a disembodied soul. Something of him remains in the physical world that he could have used up himself but did not use up. Consider what is at hand here! The human being in question ascends into the spiritual world without having used up anything that he could have used up.

We now turn our attention to the individuality of the human being itself. The human being ascends into the spiritual world without having consumed something that he could have consumed. Thus he ascends into the spiritual world with something that could have been real down here in the physical world, but did not become real in the external sense. Those people who entered the physical world with the potential for prolonged use of the etheric body here, but did not experience this use, come up to the spiritual world differently than those who have used up this etheric body by the end of their existence. They come up having incorporated into this earth something that could have been, but did not become. But this causes a mood in them, through which they become something similar for the spiritual world as the idealists here are for the physical world. So the one who passes through the gate of death in this way enters the spiritual world by bringing in something that is idealism there for the spiritual world, which is similar to the ideals that are brought into the physical world here by the idealists. A meaningful context of life!

So in such martyrdom times as the present one, souls enter the spiritual world that have passed through a shorter existence. They have lived here on earth in such a way that something that could have come into existence did not come into being for them, and they enter the spiritual world in such a way that they represent the connection with the earthly world there in the same way that idealists here represent the connection between the earthly world and the spiritual world in their ideals. In other words, these human beings who have passed through the gate of death in this way have the task of proclaiming in the spiritual world that not everything on earth is as coarse as that which is called reality here under ordinary circumstances, that the earth also harbors something that is indeed predisposed to being, but does not live out this being in a coarse way. The fact that such an inner attitude of the soul is also carried up into the spiritual world gives rise, in the time between death and a new birth, to something similar to the idealism that exists here on earth. And if we look at such an age as ours from the standpoint of the wisdom of the world, then we look into the world in such a way that we say to ourselves: Within the whole, wisdom-filled course of the world, we also accept this in such a way that we work our way up to its understanding with reverence. We then recognize that in such ages of martyrdom the spiritual worlds are given in a great, all-embracing sense that which must live with them, just as our idealism must live on earth, so that those who, as such, go up into the spiritual world at all and live through the life between death and a new birth may find something similar in this world to what we find here in idealism. Therefore, these ages must come into being. Whether they must always arise in the future is not a matter for discussion today, because that depends on the way in which the life of knowledge of mankind on earth is spiritualized, not only whether but in what way. No one should draw from what has been said that such ages should necessarily be defended forever; but if one examines their meaning, it becomes clear what has been said for the present time of mankind.

Then we look into the wisdom-filled context of the world and say to ourselves: How does fear and terror, suffering and pain, and what those who pass through the gate of death must necessarily find in the spiritual world fit together? — We see how suffering, pain, blood and martyrdom, which present themselves to us here from one side, look from the other side. One can well imagine that there are people who want to be wiser than the gods and who therefore raise the question: Would the gods not have brought about something in the spiritual world that corresponds to idealism on earth, without having imposed on earth what is imposed on earth in such a martyr age? — Such questions are raised only by those who want to be wiser than the gods. Those who look into the human age in the right way want to understand the world because they are convinced that it must be as it is, and that anything man dreams up about something that would be better for this world could only be worse for it.

We look at the idealists, perhaps at a truly idealistic person in this world; we are perhaps tempted, if we have a sense for ideals, to say: See this man, he brings heaven into the earth, because what is not in the material sense, he brings as something valuable for the existing, as a guiding principle to people! The souls that have normally passed through the gate of death and are going through the life between death and a new birth also see in this life souls that have in some way undergone a sacrificial death, from whom the physical body has been taken from the outside by earthly necessity. They look to these souls as to those who have to proclaim to them that down there on earth there is not only coarse existence, but that, connected with the earth, there are also human tendencies that could be existence and yet do not come to full existence, but instead of consuming this full existence, pass over at an earlier point in their lives between birth and death into the spiritual world.

A significant question arises here, namely, what is the difference between such a violent death and a death caused by an early illness? For what I have said now is nothing but a statement of facts. Precisely those who have ended their physical lives in this way, as described, are, as it were, the idealists of the spiritual world, and they are idealists for the reason that, as can be seen from further observation, the physical body has been taken from them by earthly events, by events that merely belong to earthly life.

When a person undergoes an illness, the body is taken from him by forces other than earthly ones. For consider, even in the growth of plants, not only earthly forces are at work, but extraterrestrial forces also collaborate. This is of course also the case with animals and even more so with human beings. Our illnesses do not come from the earth alone. Death comes to us only from the earth in no other way than when we die a violent death. However death may come, it is never a mere earthly event, unless it be a violent death in the sense indicated. Whether death comes to us through an illness – and suicide is not an earthly event either, since it comes about through a decision of the soul – there is no death that is merely brought about by earthly forces, except that which, through sacrificial deaths, through forces that play on earth, frees the body from the soul-spiritual. So that here earthly forces and relationships enter into reciprocal relationships with that which is spiritual. Otherwise, death is always something that completely transcends the earth; it is never a mere interaction between the earth and what is in the spiritual world. The etheric body, which was early deprived of its activity, is given over to purely earthly conditions, to something that is merely earthly, that is merely earthly events. For death is such — hold what I am about to say together with some of my thoughts these days — that when viewed from the physical side, it appears quite different than when viewed from the spiritual side. I have hinted at this in various ways. But always, when death does not occur in the way I have now indicated, it is something that can be understood from the other side. If one enters the other world through a death from illness, from old age, or through suicide, then one has what is needed to understand death there. If death is caused by a bullet on the battlefield, then one must look at purely earthly conditions to understand it. It is the same with accidents. One must look down from the spiritual world to have been earthly; death is to be explained from earthly conditions. And that makes that one must look down from the here and now of the spiritual world into the hereafter of the physical world in order to understand such a death.

Just as our ideals connect us to heaven, so the heavenly ideals connect these dead to the earth. Therefore, the one who thus passes through the gate of death, in the life between death and new birth, is one who weaves into all that takes place between the human souls that come to be embodied again, that which then results in our earth in spiritual things, which results in our earth in the earth itself also consisting of our thoughts, feelings and not merely of earthly things.

It must be admitted that the characteristics of these things, which I have discussed, are difficult. But it is understandable that this must be difficult, because one speaks with words that are coined for physical conditions about that which extends far, far beyond physical conditions. In any case, it is one thing to look, I would say, dull-witted and uncomprehendingly, at the mysterious nature of such events that emerge from the bosom of history into human life, such as our present difficult time of trial for humanity, and quite another to look at them and say to oneself: What gives meaning to such an event is not only significant for our Earth, but for all life! And in this feeling one is led into the deep meaning and the wisdom of the whole. One gradually learns to sense what must all be involved in order for the human being to be placed in this world in the course of his entire life.

This is what I wanted to suggest in the second mystery drama, from the mouth of Capesius, who speaks of the fact that the thinking of many gods and the cooperation of many gods is necessary to make man appear to all the worlds as their goal. That which in this drama emerges as a world-sentiment from the soul of Capesius, can perhaps become objective if one tries to appropriate such ideas, as we have tried to put them into our souls today. In such personalities as Capesius, such moods arise tragically because they can also arise without one immediately finding the full solution to the riddle. That is one thing to be noted in this connection; the other is that we must always bear in mind how much such study calls upon us to be modest and humble, not proud, not to have human delusions of grandeur.

To appropriate human self-awareness in the right sense means to consciously visualize it inwardly. And when we begin to sense what we can extend our consciousness to, how wide the horizon of the riddles of the world is, we will take care not to fall for the proud thought: O man, how you are actually a summary of the whole cosmos! — I believe that precisely such a thought must be very far from us. On the other hand, the other thought will be close to us: How little we know in our consciousness of what is knowable! — Infinity is necessary to put together the human being; but we have never gone further than knowing a very small piece of it. Modesty and humility are what descends into our soul precisely from knowledge as it expands. One can never learn more about the spiritual world than one already knows without also learning that what can be known is infinite. And the more one knows, the more vividly one senses this infinity. And one learns to understand how a part of life consists in allowing oneself to be seized by the great, mighty riddles and secrets that pulsate through existence.

Much of what humanity must now regain was known by people in ancient times within an ancient wisdom like a heritage. What people possess today has only been gained by this inheritance disappearing from the souls. In order for human souls to acquire this wisdom again, it first had to disappear. It had to disappear so that it could become acquired wisdom. We must work our way up again in order to gain in further earthly lives, in the further existence of the earth, what has disappeared from the souls as inherited wisdom. Thus, we must look into the perspective of the human future; then we will understand the necessity of spiritual science entering the world. It is precisely this living relationship with the infinite, as it has been characterized, that enables us to truly grasp esoteric science as something that is inwardly alive, that is also active and effective in us, and that can make us true co-workers in the shaping of the earth, which we must become if the earth is to develop further.

To reinforce this, I would like to mention one more thing. There are people we should certainly listen to, because they are saying the right thing from the point of view of the present. They say: In earlier times, people did not know what a criminal is, why a person develops as a criminal in the world. Today, however, we know. If you dissect the head of a criminal, you will find that it has a certain characteristic: the occipital lobe does not completely cover the cerebellum, as it does in normal people. It was a great and significant discovery made by Moritz Benedikt, the famous criminal anthropologist, which shows how a certain simple physiology of the occiput determines whether someone is a criminal. So consider: You are a criminal because the posterior lobe does not cover parts of the brain that should be covered! There is nothing to be said against this truth. It is there, and it would be quite foolish to rebel against it, because it is a truth. But think: If you are a materialist, what do you have to say? Well, some people are born with brain lobes that are too small; they are then predestined to become criminals. Consider – I need not elaborate further – the infinite bleakness of such a view of the world! Consider how all human feeling must be changed when one knows nothing but this, and when one must say to oneself: Why do people become criminals? Because that is how nature has placed them in life, so that they cannot help but become criminals. But if one begins to know that the human being has an etheric body, then one knows something else to say about the matter, one knows something else about it. One knows that this ether body encompasses all parts, and that in the case of a person who has a occipital lobe that is too short in the physical sense, the corresponding ether parts can still attain their full development. Whatever the physical condition may be, the correction can also be achieved with the ether body. If we succeed in having a form of education that draws on spiritual science as well as physical science, we can develop an insight into a child's behaviour that enables us to recognise what is needed for its education and what we need to provide so that the ether body develops in such a way that it counteracts the effect of the underdeveloped occipital lobes. Then a person can, even if their hindbrain is not normally formed in the etheric body, still become a good person, even if they are physically predestined to be a criminal. Here you can see how spiritual science can and must practically intervene in life. Because purely physical science must let the criminal brain be a criminal brain, because it is only a science of the physical. But if you take spiritual science into consideration, you paralyze the physical defects. From this you can see what must develop in the future.

And now imagine: this spiritual science did not exist! Then there would never be the possibility of developing the etheric body in the way I have described. That means that anyone born in the future with an atrophied brain will live out their life in a way that corresponds to this brain. There will be no possibility of pedagogically improving this. The consequence of this will be that people will become what their physical organization is capable of. And this will continue forever. And people will reach the state of Jupiter, and the materialists' current dreams will become true. If spiritual science does not overcome what follows from the merely material organization, then people will gradually develop in such a way that this material organization will be decisive; people would then merely be a result of their material development. Because spiritual science intervenes in life, this will not be the case on Jupiter; the etheric body will again transform the physical body. For if in a life in which the physical brain has atrophied due to the karma of earlier lives, the etheric body is properly developed, then in the next incarnation the physical brain will develop properly. These things are all connected. So that spiritual science really becomes a reality, that it transforms humanity again.

” If you summarize these thoughts, you will be able to say to yourself: What the materialists think of man today is not yet reality, because today man is still so predisposed that the spiritual can intervene. But it could become as the materialists think, if it were up to the materialists, if spiritual science could be eradicated by the materialists. If the materialists had their way, people on Jupiter would live as a result of their material organization alone. What are materialists, then? They have a world view that does not correspond to reality today, but which could correspond to reality for people one day. These materialists are prophets, only false prophets! They dream of a world that, if it were up to them, could be created in their image. The materialists are dreamers, but mari must work against their dreams. When people realize that the materialists are dreamers, that they should be told: You go through the world and do not see reality, you dream of an existence that could at best be brought about by your lack of insight into the world, you are false prophets, you make all kinds of fantasies! At that moment materialism will be correctly assessed. So the opposite judgment of what the materialists, well, let's say, dream of themselves, that's what you'll have to have. Then the time will have come when one can really understand spiritual science. In a certain sense, spiritual science will already transform the world from this point of view.

In the last few days, I have tried to give you a few hints about this or that in the context of the physical and spiritual worlds. I have said it out of impulses that arise from the momentous events of our time. At a time when death is so present before the soul, one might say a thousand times a day, such reflections, when offered as a possibility, are indeed close to the human soul. For how could one refrain from searching for the meaning and purpose of existence in such difficult times of trial as these? The fact that we are able to talk about such questions here gives me great satisfaction and allows me to be among you again even in these difficult times. I would just like to add the comment that in the present situation, some things have to be viewed in the context of this present situation. It is not as easy as in peacetime to travel everywhere. Therefore, our members must be aware, as indeed everyone must be aware, that war times are different from normal times, and that we cannot demand everything as we would in normal times. I say this especially with regard to the fact that this is often overlooked, especially by our members, while our members should have a great deal of understanding for our present situation, and should be aware of its context. It has often been shown that our members cannot understand that one must bear in mind the difficult times in which we live and that not everything can happen with the same regularity as usual. But we must hold on to that, so that we are also loyal to our cause. What each of us can do in this time, through the individual branches of our Society working very hard and very thoroughly on our cause, is really done not only for the good of our cause, but for the good of much more.

It is natural that the community must now be looser; the work in our branches must be all the more intensive, especially with regard to deepening our souls. This is what I would like to place especially in your soul and heart at this time and today. Let us each try to remain holy and true to our ideals, especially in this time, to remain holy and true to what has been able to develop as an attitude through spiritual science in the course of time. Spiritual science must prove itself not only in easy but also in difficult times. What can be stated as a truism, but is nevertheless the keynote of all our striving, must now connect itself particularly deeply with our soul: the attempt at a comprehensive grasp of life. In contrast to so much that is now given in the outer world, in the outer world tending towards materialism – often with such one-sidedness – we want to strive for the versatility of life. We want to know that we must guard against every comfortable one-sidedness in every moment, because we face an infinity in every moment.

Some of you may have heard that in a place where our spiritual science is cultivated, it is necessary to talk about all kinds of shortcomings that have arisen here or there. If certain words have been used to offend certain people, we must not fall into the opposite extreme of one-sidedness. I am not saying this now in order to go into these things in more detail, but only as an example. If, for example, people who spoke of all kinds of occult events and experiences did not speak about these experiences in the right way, it must not be concluded from this that in our Society, for example, occult experiences are not the main thing. Of course they are, for we are striving from the external into the internal. Nor was there any need to object to occult experiences as such. But it is important to realize that within our movement, what counts is the level at which these experiences occur. For it is one thing to speak in a certain light-hearted way about occult experiences, and it is quite another to say that one does not want to hear about them at all. We have been talking about the most intimate occult experiences for three days. What is being created in our circle cannot be a mere science of thought. That is not what our society is for. We must not go from one one-sidedness to another.

I would like to draw particular attention to the intimate, to the way our spiritual science is so closely connected to the innermost part of our soul. What matters is that we do not turn our soul into something other than what it was before when we go through spiritual science. And that must also prove itself in difficult times. That is why I wanted to make such observations, which may be suitable for putting us in that reverent mood towards the spiritual life that is appropriate for the true spiritual scientist. Because basically the greatest and the smallest event in life, everything in life, is something that fills us with deep reverence if we are only able to go deeply enough into the spiritual background of this particular event. And even the painful events of life, the smallest and the greatest, can be placed in such a light through spiritual science that their contemplation helps to bring our soul into the right relationship with the wisdom that flows and weaves through the world.

From the point of view of world wisdom, we wanted to look at events in life that are connected with what is happening today in our environment, which is so great, but also so full of trials. If we feel this way about our time, then we feel right about what we wanted to suggest with the words:

From the courage of the fighters,
From the blood of the battles,
From the suffering of the abandoned,
From the people's sacrificial deeds
Will grow spiritual fruit —
Guiding souls, spiritually aware
Their minds into the spiritual realm.

I have shown you a few characteristic examples of language development and believe that now you should be able to visualize the inner journeying of the language-forming genius. If you hope to find your way through the phenomena of language and its evolution, you will have to understand the guidelines such phenomena reveal. Of course, I have been able to show you only a few things; today I will point out only one important guideline, summarizing these basic thoughts. I hope we will be able very soon to continue this study.¹ Certainly the main thing you will have understood is how the human beings in a primitive stage of language development were receptive, inwardly alive, to the consonance of sound and object. Whether this object is an inner feeling, an external event, an external thing, or an external fact doesn't matter. Whenever it is essential to form sounds that will express inner feelings or perceptions about whatever is outside us, then the sounds will be of vowel quality in the broadest sense. Vowel character in language denotes everything formed inwardly, everything that is being felt inwardly and that presses itself into the sound out of what we are experiencing in our feeling and will. Hence we will find in all the vowels and vowel forms the feelings and will-impulses that are called forth in us by the outer world and in a way are thrust into our larynx. In everything to do with consonants we will find gestures modeled on what we perceive in the outer world.

Let us suppose we would like to speak about an angle. First, we have an image of a certain angle in mind. To describe the sides of the angle with our hand, we would do this [Rudolf Steiner makes a gesture]. What we do like this with our hand, we actually do with our organs of speech in forming certain consonants. Language is in this respect only the audible expression of gestures that are not being made externally with the limbs but with much finer parts of the human organism, our beneficent air-organism. If you think about these inner laws, you will gradually develop the insight that language imitates either the outer world directly or imitates what we experience in the outer world through our feelings and sense perceptions.

Let us imagine ourselves facing two possibilities: We could do either one thing or the other. Instinctively we begin to turn over in our thoughts whether we should do this or that. If we are still more or less an “imitating animal,” as of course everyone is on a primitive level of language development, relationship to the outer world still transmits itself into an external gesture; we do this [gesture to the right and to the left]. We have to decide between our right side and our left side. That is, we are expressing the phenomenon that internally we are split in two, because two different, external facts are confronting us. We split ourselves into two parts in order to determine toward which side the stronger weight in our thinking tends. So we do this [repeats the gesture]. We separate, we decide, and also divide. But of course, if we are to come to a favorable decision we have to go back to the past as far as possible. Hence we not only divide ourselves (teilen, ‘to divide’) but we divide ourselves far back to the beginning (ur-teilen); we make an archetypal, original division. [See Lecture 4, page 52,53.] The word Urteil ‘judgment’ should definitely be understood as a gesture transformed inwardly into sound. All consonant-forming is gestureforming that has simply been transformed into speech sounds.

When we search for the basis of this metamorphosis, we can trace it throughout the whole course of language development. At first human beings lived more fully outside themselves in their surroundings. Only gradually did they become inward beings. To begin with, they lived in the outer world, closely connected to the things around them, especially in the very ancient times when an original, primitive clairvoyance still existed. At this time human beings thought very little about themselves nor did they have any definite ideas about themselves. They knew, however, that there were all sorts of ghosts, all kinds of elemental spirits, which they perceived in what we now call external objects. Even in himself a person still saw an elemental being. “You,” he said to himself, “have come through your father and mother into this world.” He objectified himself. We find that on the first level of language-formation the language-forming genius, to begin with, brings about mainly consonant sounds. The primitive languages on the whole must have had consonantal character, because the primitive peoples were still without inwardness. Primitive peoples today, at least the ones who have remained at this original level, have rich consonant formations in their language; the consonant sounds show clearly the imitation of external events: for instance, Schnalzer [‘tongue-clickers’, both words good examples of an accumulation of consonants. Laurens van der Post, in The Lost World of the Kalahari, has described the Bushman’s language: “the sound of natural relish that the word ghwai Xkhwe makes on his lips is a joy to hear, and the click of the complex consonants flashes on his tongue as he utters them like a sparkle of sun on a burst of flower from our somber mountain gorse.”]. Certain African tribes are able to use the human organs of speech to produce sounds like the sharp snapping of a whip. “Tongue clicking' disappears when human beings begin to express more of their inner feelings through sound structure. Consonant formations must be considered the first step. Then the second step will be the vowel formations, but the inwardness found in vowel formations is actually a stage of transition. Finally signs of aging in the genius of language appear: the vowel-forming power recedes and the consonant-forming power comes to the fore again.

Our human language journey involving the development of language proceeds essentially from outward to inward and then from inward to outward. We can observe this procedure directly in the sound-structure; it is the intrinsic essential fact throughout the whole forming of language. It is the intrinsic, essential fact to such a degree that we encounter it in every aspect of language. That first step of language development we meet everywhere: human beings, still selfless, unaware of themselves, create language. We are continually impelled to bring a word designating one thing towards another word in an external manner [as in early English: sea-horse, meaning ‘ship’]. On this level, human beings are altogether very lively in themselves. Later, when they become more inward and spiritual, a bit of this primitive liveliness is lost to them. They become more enclosed, more rigid, more abstract, and no longer have the strength to pour into the word itself what they see externally; instead, they add onto it [that is, using combining forms: prefixes and suffixes].

To study such phenomena, we should find the following characteristic examples exceedingly interesting. There is, for instance, in Old High German the verb salbom, in modern German ich salbe ‘I am anointing’; cognate, salve). You can take this through first, second, and third person:

salbom, ‘I anoint’ salbomes, ‘we anoint’
salbos, ‘you anoint’ salbot, ‘you anoint’ (pl)
salbot, ‘he’ or ‘she anoints’ salbont, ‘they anoint’

In these six words conjugating the verb ‘to anoint’, you always have salbo as the verb proper, denoting the activity. What is added creates the designated person of the word, for I the m, for you in the singular the s for he or she the t for we the mes, for you in the plural the t for they the nt. The fact that these suffixal forms are still contained within the verb is understandable in the following sense: The contrasts of ‘I you, he we, you, they appear at this primitive step because human beings looked at them very much from the outside. They added the person-sounds directly to the sounds that express activity. They were still inwardly lively enough to connect the person-sounds in a living way with the verbal form for the action. We should consider this two-foldness: first, the early attention directed toward the outer world, and second, the addition of the main word itself to the inward, lively, transformative force. This I, you, he, she, it was not originally felt to be an organic part of the verb or to be something of inwardness. You can observe this in the related Sanskrit language where the person-designation is simply stuck onto the most important word; it is to be found as an independent designation for ‘I, you, he, she, it. The m in Old High German is simply the metamorphosis of mi ‘I' of Sanskrit; the s the metamorphosis of si ‘you’, singular, of Sanskrit; t the ti ‘he, she, it’; mes the masi ‘we’; t, the transformed tasi (‘you', plural); nt is the suffix -anti ‘they’, spoken somewhat hastily. You can still observe in Sanskrit that it is not at all a question of conjugating the central part of the main verb and then perceiving the change of form as a designation of person. No, at that time human beings were inwardly so alive that with their perception of the outer world, they were able to organize the grammar of personal pronouns into a sound-sequence expressing the main idea. That is an important difference. You might easily believe that at this primitive level there would be mainly an inward modulating of words. No, there is not. An inner aliveness in the people lets them connect the two components of a word together. This is a consonantal activity, not a vowel-forming one.

When later a language like Latin reaches the next level, with the perception that the personal pronouns should be within the inner organism of the sound sequence, the language has arrived at a level corresponding to a greater inwardness of that particular language genius. Toward inwardness it has worked its way from outwardness where it has simply attached to the end of a word what it perceived as an external element: salbom, ‘I anoint’, salbos, ‘you anoint’. Just as on a primitive level people don't say Karl Meyer but the Meyer-Karl [peasant dialect], so it is with such verbs; whatever makes them specific is added at the end. Here, too, the specific pronoun is put at the end of the word.

Repositioning the pronoun from the end of the word to the beginning and making it an independent word was the path to the greatest inwardness, the kind of inwardness that perceives how spiritually abstract our inner nature really is. Now the person is separated off and placed ahead of the verb. You can learn something important from this procedure if you go back to the primitive constructions of the language-forming genius that does not really know anything about an I or a you separated from external things, and that still presses into the word whatever has to be said about I or you. Later, the genius finds the pronouns within the word itself—Latin is a language at this level—and plucks them out, comes to a mirror image of itself, comes to ego consciousness, and then puts the I and the you up ahead of the verb. This growing sense of egoism, this arrival at self-visualization is reflected quite clearly in language development. One can say that becoming aware of oneself at a certain unconscious level has been achieved as the result of the ancient Apollonian precept “know thou thyself”; this was followed everywhere in the languages of the western world by taking the personal pronouns out of the verb forms. These forms could still express human inwardness; they had not yet separated themselves completely away from it. You really will not be able to study languages unless you do what I suggested yesterday: consider them as the expression of human soul development.

You see, from language that is still alive it is quite possible to trace the ‘remnants” of the vowel-forming and consonant-forming powers. There is a quality in the verbs, the words of action, that gives them a vowel-forming character and makes the vowel in them the main element. With a little reflection you will realize that the verbs in which the vowel element—expressing inner sensitivity—is more important than the consonants are those that describe an activity we can connect ourselves with inwardly and wholeheartedly.

Now observe that there is a difference between the state of your soul right now and how it was a little while ago. You are sitting here and you have been sitting quite a while. Whatever is expressed by this sitting is something you have connected yourself with; it is connected quite inwardly with you. You have come to sit here by setting yourself down. With the setting yourself down you are connected much less inwardly; it is more external. You can't continue to ‘set’ yourself down for any length of time because you cant connect yourself so closely with the act of dropping onto a chair, but you can sit for half an hour and even longer, because it is possible to connect yourself inwardly with sitting. It is really the case that you should experience the sound-sequence for sitting as vowel-articulated, and the one for setting as more external, more consonantal. If you are sensitive to vowel articulation, you will have the power—through the language-forming genius—to be creative with vowels; you will do this by adapting the word in various ways: sit, sat, sat [the German sitzen, sass, gesessen has one additional vowel change]. With the consonantal activity, expressed in setting, you keep the emphasis on the consonants instead of forming a vowel change to satting or something similar [the German setzen, setzte, gesetzt, ‘to set’, has no vowel change]. You are depicting something external with this by saying set. If you want to express the fact that this took place some time ago, you will say set-did (setzen tat). [The English verb to set is irregular and does not follow the German rule. We have substituted the verb to place in this discussion.] You will say place-did. You do place yourself, you did place yourself; in metamorphosis this becomes placed, for the -ed is the transformed did.

People who still today have kept something of this language-forming strength in themselves will emphasize consonants just as happened in earlier times. If they belong to a more primitive level of culture, they have an unusual capacity to imitate outer life and activity with their consonantal sound-structures, using as few vowels as possible. You can hear something of this joining together of sound and outer action in the words of a somewhat simple peasant who had considered it an honor to have his son study at the university. He was asked what his son was doing at the university. For the time being, the son was using his inheritance not so much for steeping himself in the abstract and mental side of academic life but rather for giving himself over to more external aspects. And so the father, when asked what his son was doing, said, “Strolling around he does, loafing around he does, beer guzzling he does, whooping it up he does, but doing something he doesn't do (aber fun tut er nichts!).”

A strong feeling of inwardness streams into the language-forming verb. In the sound structures that have retained their character, especially their conceptual character, you will always come to feel that the vowel change in verbal conjugations (an ablaut, as ‘come, came’) expresses something we are more inwardly connected with. On the other hand, we will not be able to develop the ablaut with verbs for which we have an inner mental image but with which we cannot connect ourselves inwardly, verbs that do not become something we feel but remain something merely observed. When you say, I sing, I sang, you have the ablaut. It is quite different when you say, I singe, ‘I burn something’. The word singe has its sound structure because fire sings. I singe = I am making something ‘sing’. If you are singing, you are connecting yourself inwardly with what you want to express through the sound-sequence. If you singe, you are not connecting yourself with it inwardly; you are looking at it by looking at yourself from outside—hence there is no vowel change: I singe, I singed [the corresponding words in German are singen, ‘sing’, and sengen, ‘singe’]. Whenever we fail to notice such things today it is because the words have changed so strongly that nothing of the kind is evident. We have to go back then to earlier forms of the sound structure. It is extremely important for us to follow these three steps: the connection of our life first with the outer world, then with growing inwardness, and finally the next step of inwardness where a human being explains his or her own inner world with words such as the personal pronouns. You will come to understand language formation much more easily for yourself if you follow this process. It seems that language is a flowing together of the thought element and the will element in the human being; it appears that on its first primitive level wherever the speech sound is still strongly connected with the mental image, it is even difficult to distinguish the thought element from the will element. Today our speaking, particularly in Modern German, is already bound to our will to an extraordinary degree. In German we speak with our will and learn to use our will as a matter of course when we learn to speak. We also accompany our speech with the ideas and images we have become used to bringing together with expressions of will.

It is totally different in English. For someone who is impartial and can observe such things, it is an entirely different human activity to speak German than it is to speak English, though low German dialects have remained closer to English. In speaking English it is much more the case that thinking goes into the speaking, that is, into the development of the sounds. In German, thinking does not take place in the unfolding of the sounds but proceeds as a parallel phenomenon to the sound development. In general, the western languages have preserved themselves much more from this instinctive bringing together of sound and mental image than have the Central European languages. Therefore, the western European languages have taken on such a rigid structure. In them hardly anything can be formulated without someone saying, “You can' say it like that, you have to change it around.” This doesn't happen in German, where it’s possible to say it in almost any way. You can put the subject anywhere, at the beginning or at the end, for the thought goes somewhat separately from the sound-structure, parallel with it, further removed than in the Western languages. Only by turning back to the earlier stages of our German language development do we arrive at an increasingly strict connection between mental image and sound. Therefore the quality still present in the western languages is an atavistic throwback that can be studied by means of the earlier steps in German and in our dialects.

If you feel your way vividly into language from this point of view, you will be led at the same time into the essential nature of the folk souls. Suppose you are looking at an object in front of you. As primitive people we have formed a sound sequence for this object out of consonant and vowel elements. So we say Wagen [‘wagon', ‘car’; Anglo-Saxon, wain] for something that can be put in motion. If we have in front of us the same object in the plural, that is, a number of such objects, we form the plural by saying die Wägen, by forming the ‘Umlaut’. It is true, die Wagen is also correct, but it belongs to literary language and was not really formed within the organism of the language. [The difference of pronunciation in English would be parallel to the vowels of far and vague.]

Why do we form the umlaut? It was for the singular object that we put the sounds together, and in doing so our consciousness was sparked, lit up, enlivened; at that moment we were awake and attentive. When we formed the plural, we had less overview and therefore had the need to express it in a more nebulous way. We dimmed the pure /a:/ sound [as in ‘ah’] to a murky /e:/ (as in care). The original sound sequence is always formed by consciously observing the actual facts or sensations. Whatever attracts less attention or cannot be closely observed reveals itself as dulled.² The important thing here is to see how something changes within the human being. The dialect of many German areas does not say der Wagen but der Wogn. Since the normal attention to sound sequence brought about an answering /o/, the dimming in the plural is expressed by die Woagen. You can follow this in many examples.³

One more thing I should like to call to your attention. As you know, lively mental images were the source of the consonantal forming of language in earlier times, and much of what was felt in the soul of ancient peoples flowed into this language forming; it can still be studied in what has been retained in primitive minds and feelings today. These perceptions, filled with an immense vitality at that time, were not only alive to the outer world through the senses but were also completely bound up with a kind of primitive clairvoyance. Otherwise there would not be all our sturdy, image-filled words that are happily still in existence. Here is an example: A person still living within the sphere of atavistic clairvoyance—no matter how weak—and possessing the ancient kind of perception was certainly able to perceive that the physical body of an ordinary human being contained something we call today the etheric body. Such a primitive person perceived the head [this and the following were illustrated on the blackboard] and, projecting beyond it, a second, etheric head. He felt that the head was the expression of thinking. Thus we can say that primitive human beings with their original clairvoyance named the human being from the standpoint of thinking—with a word very much related to ours—by the word Manas, for Mensch ‘human being, Man, person’. Mensch is the same as manas, of course, this is the human being we usually come across. But that early, atavistically clairvoyant person knew that it’s also possible to encounter other, somewhat different, people—here I'm joking about something one ought not to make too trivial—who do not have the supersensible ‘person’ closely connected to the physical person so snugly and prosaically. In cases where the supersensible does not quite fit into the rest of the human being, people felt: the etheric body is verrückt [‘shifted’, literally ‘moved off its place’, a word that means today ‘deranged’, ‘insane’, ‘crazy’]. This was then transferred to the whole person: Der Mensch ist verrückt ‘that person is shifted’, i.e., ‘crazy’. A purely external fact is described, the displacing of the etheric body. Just this sort of picturemaking, going back to the time when pictures of the spiritual world could still be observed, is exceedingly interesting. If people would only recognize this, if learned philologists were not so sound asleep, proceeding as they do quite superficially on their materialistic tracks! If they would enter instead into the inward soul element that finds its expression in external language-forming, philology would turn of itself into a science of the soul and then into spiritual science. For this reason it is a shame that philology has become so materialistic; young people actually have no opportunity to observe the effects of soul and spirit on the forming of language.

I believe that in some way now what I've wanted to give you in the way of guidelines and examples can be useful to those of you who are teachers at the Waldorf School. Take them into your mind and soul; they will serve as a stimulus to observe the many elements of language that you can make use of in your teaching. If you have taken into yourself the spirit of looking at things in this way, it will definitely benefit your classes; speech will always be the connecting link between you and your students. It would be of enormous help to try on your own to bring back into words some of the original strength of feeling and image-making in language. Through this you will train yourself to a more lively perception than one otherwise is able to develop. Actually we modern people walk around much like living corpses, largely because our language has plunged so drastically out of our hearts and has fallen down somewhere below. It has become an unconscious element of will. We can no longer feel how our soul qualities are alive within the spoken /e/ and /u/ and /a/ and /m/. We no longer train ourselves to imbue the words that sound alike with the very same inward feelings. We are abstract not only in our understanding, in our thinking, but abstract also in our speaking. For a person who really has a lively feeling for language, much of what we speak today sounds like a record on a record-player, but the record had already been produced in ancient times. We must try to make a connection with our language again. However, for this a kind of self-education will be necessary, so that we learn to listen inwardly.

Let us listen to the word rauh ‘rough’ and feel the sound combination inwardly. If we say on perceiving this figure [a four-sided figure is drawn on the board], “That is a Raute ‘rhomboid’,” then we can sense roughin such a way that we feel roughness in the perception of the corners. We can still make the effort today, when looking at such a figure, to experience the corners as related to rough, and the /t/ of Raute we will feel as tut ‘does. Whatever does rough is the Raufe. [We can approach this from many sides in English: even—evening; try triangle; hole-hold; flow-flower, etc.] Developing such imponderables would be an element of strength in teaching, if we tried not to allow sound-structure and mental image to diverge. I beg you to consider just what kind of a subtle background can we possibly sense when we talk to a child about this geometrical figure and say only, “This is a rhomboid”? We ourselves dont feel anything if we simply say, “This is a rhomboid.” How strong a foundation we could establish for the attentiveness of the students that we need in our class if we will re-educate ourselves through an understanding of the sounds of speech, and then feel the need to educate our children in the same direction!

You can gain ideas for your self-education from just this view of language I have been talking about. But I've also wanted to show you something of method, my dear friends. My aim has been to guide you toward important ideas by means of characteristic, concrete examples. I believe that a truly modern university professor would probably expound in three volumes what I have developed in this short time. He would of course try for completeness, but it would be less possible for him to develop the guidelines to stimulate our thinking, our mental pictures, and our perceptions. If you proceed in the elementary school as we have proceeded in this language course, you will evolve a good basic method of your own. You will try at every point to look for thoroughly characteristic examples for what you are going to present to your students, and you will be able to combine what you see and feel in these characteristic examples with the perception of their spiritual quality.

There is truly no better method of pushing children into materialism than by giving them abstract instruction. A spiritual way of teaching is through concrete examples, but you must not forget to allow qualities of soul and spirit to reveal themselves in these very concrete examples. Therefore I believe that what I have given you in this course can be a practical, methodological extension of the course I gave before the Waldorf School began.⁴ And 1 believe that you can accomplish a great deal by pondering, “How should I organize my class teaching, translating all this into what is right for children—for it is possible to adapt it in every subject—so that it follows this process of drawing in a spiritual quality by means of concrete examples?” If you do this, you will not easily run the risk almost all teaching does of not getting finished with the load of subject matter. It is only when subject matter is shredded into atoms and systematized that you don't get finished with it, because it is so tempting to take up the single, atomized parts that are uncharacteristic and pile them up, trying to show what is characteristic. Of course, there are uncharacteristic examples in all the school subjects; using these means that a great deal has to be strung together. If you make the effort, however, to choose characteristic examples and develop what is spiritual through your examples, you will achieve a certain necessary economy in your teaching.

I would be happy, my dear friends—and let it be said in all friendship, especially to those who are teachers here at the Waldorf School—I would be happy if two things have been noted in these improvised talks: First, the stimulus toward educating yourselves in a kind of brotherly-sisterly alliance with the language genius; on the other hand, that the method of teaching is influenced to some extent by what I have just pointed out to you.

It is to be hoped that when I come back, possibly very soon, we will continue this exploration into language.

• 1. While it never came to another course on language, there is much material given by Rudolf Steiner from 1920 to 1924 in the Conferences with the Teachers of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart (4 Vols). See also page 131.
• 2. See Rudolf Steiner, Eurythmy as Visible Speech, GA 279, lecture 7 (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1984).
• 3. Old English had many ways of forming noun plurals. The most common was the addition of -an, but -as (later -es -9 gained ground and finally carried the day. However, we still have oxen, children, kine, brethren. The mutation plural (changing the vowel) we find in geese, feet, mice, lice, men, and women. None of these are changes to a dipthong, as in German.
• 4. See Rudolf Steiner, The Study of Man (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1975); Practical Advice to Teachers (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1976); Discussions with Teachers (Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1992).