The Rudolf Steiner Archive

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 others ⁸

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.

This lecture is the third lecture in the lecture series entitled, The Karma of Human Vocation as related to Goethe's Life. It was later published in the lecture series, The Karma of Human Vocation.

All of these lectures are tending more or less to the central question of man's calling or profession. Some people may think that the study of this question from the spiritual-scientific point of view is one of the least interesting subjects. But it is not so,—especially not in this present period, the 5th post-Atlantean. For in this period all the conditions in which men live will very largely be changed, as against the conditions that obtained in former periods on Earth. And for this change, man himself, out of his freedom, will have to bring with him more than he brought with him in former times, when his allotted task in earthly evolution worked itself out more or less instinctively, and the direction he had to take in one respect or another was suggested to him, as it were, from a higher source.

Let us look back for instance to the Egypto-Chaldean civilization, or any other civilization of former times. As to the forming of his outer destiny, not nearly so much was left in man's own hands as is the case to-day (and it will be more and more so in the future). In the Egypto-Chaldean epoch each man had his station—his rank in life—and was fastened in it (albeit not so firmly), much like an animal is fixed within its species. Thus many things that come within the scope of human freedom to-day did not do so in the past. There was, however, a certain counterpoise to this restriction of man's freedom in olden times. Our external historians think in a very short-sighted way. People often imagine that it was in olden times as it is to-day; that the leaders of human affairs were inspired by mere human impulses like the leading personalities of our day and generation. But you must remember that in the Mysteries of olden time there were quite definite procedures whereby the leaders informed themselves of the will and intention—not of earthly Beings, but of the Beings who guide this earthly life from realms beyond the Earth. I have told you how the high priest's conducted certain ceremonies of the Mysteries at certain seasons—we need not describe them again in detail now. The purport of the ceremony was, as it were, to place into connection with the Cosmos—with processes beyond the Earth—chosen individuals within the temple-service. For then, into the consciousness of these chosen individuals—who were especially suited to receive Their influence—Beings who guided the Earth from regions far beyond, could work. What the priests thus received of the will of the guiding spiritual Beings, this they accepted as instruction for the measures which they had to take. We may illustrate it by a hypothetical assumption,—though of cour.se in our time things are not done in this way. Let us suppose that our Christmas festival did not take its course as it does to-day, where it remains for most people a more or less external festivity. Let us suppose we were aware throughout the Christmas festival: ‘During the Christmas Season, our Earth as a living Being is peculiarly adapted to receive into its aura Ideas which cannot enter the Earth's aura at other seasons—in summer time for instance.’ I have explained how the Earth is awake during the winter season. One of the brightest points of this awakeness is the time of Christmas. At this time the aura of the Earth is woven through and through with Thoughts. At this time the Earth is meditating on the surrounding Universe, just as we human beings in our day-waking Life meditate in thought upon the things that surround us. In summer the Earth is asleep. In summer, therefore, certain Thoughts cannot be found in the Earth. In winter it is awake,—and most radiantly of all at the time of Christmas. For then the aura of the Earth is woven through and through with Thoughts, and in these Thoughts we may read what the Cosmos requires of our earthly happenings.

Certain human beings had to undergo an individual training, so as to become sensitive and receptive to what was living in the Earth's aura. The priests of the sacrifice who trained them were then able, as it were, at certain moments to connect them in the temples with these Thoughts of the Earth, which voiced the cosmic Will. So were the priests enabled to find out the cosmic Will. According to what they thus discovered as the ‘Will of Heaven,’ they could then determine who was to remain within a certain tribe, or who should be received within the Mysteries, thereafter to assume a leading place in statecraft or priesthood.

Mankind has grown out of all these things. Mankind, in a certain sense, is handed over to chaos in this respect. Of that we must be well aware. The transition from these old and definite conditions, when men discovered from the Will of Gods what should take place here on the Earth, took place throughout the fourth post-Atlantean period. For in that period the human individuality was emancipating itself, so to speak, from the cosmic Will, and the old customs gradually passed over into our present, somewhat chaotic conditions. Everything is tending to be placed more into the hands of man. But it is all the more necessary for the Will of the Cosmos to enter into our earthly conditions in a new way. Even in the Egyptian and Babylonian period of civilization (the 3rd post-Atlantean), that which works and weaves into the earthly realm out of the several human trades and callings was to a high degree an image of the cosmic will. It would take us a long time to explain this, but we might well do so. It was brought about in the way above described. But in the course of the 4th post-Atlantean time, all this was growing vague and confused, and it became utterly so during the present time (the 5th post-Atlantean) which, as you know, began about the 15th century. It is a pity the people of to-day do not observe what really happens. It is a pity they dish up a fable convenue in place of real History. If they were more observant they would recognize, even from the outer facts, to how large an extent everything has changed since the 14th and 15th centuries in the living-together of men in their several callings. And from the present conditions they would then perceive how increasingly different these things will become in future. Truly a kind of anarchy would overwhelm the human race if there were no-one to perceive these deeper relationships, and communicate to the spiritual life of man on Earth ideas which can reckon with these changes. For the changes are inherent in the very course of evolution.

Anyone who has a real feeling for human life would be astonished to discover all that is observable even in outer History, in the rise of the modern life of callings and vocations, since the 15th century. Anyone who really let work upon him what is quite recognisable even in this way, would assuredly reproach himself with having lived so sleepily, without giving a thought to what is connected so profoundly with the evolving destinies of mankind.

Now as I pointed out in our last lecture, the life of human callings and professions is by no means without meaning for the cosmic whole, though at first sight if might appear so. We human beings, as I said, have undergone successively the Saturn evolution (when the first plan of the physical human body was prepared), the Sun epoch (when the etheric man was prepared), the Moon epoch (when the astral man was prepared), and we are now undergoing the Earth epoch, during which the Ego is growing and developing. These will be followed by others—the Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan epochs. And we may say: As the Earth is the fourth stage from Saturn, so is Vulcan the fourth stage from Earth. Earth is, in a manner speaking, the Saturn of Vulcan. The processes that took place on old Saturn are intimately connected with our evolution, for we owe to them the first plan and beginning of our physical body, which is still working in us. So likewise on the present Earth, something must take place, which, working on in evolution, will attain on Vulcan a fourth stage of development, even as the processes on Saturn have attained a fourth stage of development during the Earth epoch. Moreover, as I showed you, these processes which will correspond on Vulcan to what we have on Earth from Saturn evolution, are none other than what lives and works in the varied callings which men take up upon Earth. Men upon Earth are working at their several callings, and as they do so there evolves on Earth, within their work, something which is a first beginning for Vulcan, just as the Saturn activity was a first beginning for the physical human body of to-day.

Consider now in this connection the tremendous change which the life of callings and professions has undergone since the fifth post-Atlantean age began. Then you will realise how increasingly necessary it will be to place the life of human callings into the whole course of cosmic evolution, thinking of it from the points of view which spiritual science can evolve. We must first acquaint ourselves with the objective aspects of the vocational life of man. Only then can we arrive at true conceptions of the Karma of vocation. And we must be still more interested in the present tendencies of evolution in this respect. For the tendencies which are at work will give us a clearer idea than the actual conditions which prevail to-day.

Further developments in this respect will lead to the several callings growing more and more specialised and differentiated. This we can easily recognise, if only we look out into the world to-day with common sense. People to-day sometimes speak critically of this increasing specialisation of callings and occupations in modern time. But there is little wisdom in such criticism. ‘Not many centuries ago,’ they say, ‘man at his daily work was still able to see the connection of the thing he made with its use and meaning for the world. He had an intimate vision of what would become of his product in the lives of men.’ So indeed it was in former times, while to-day, for the majority of men, it is no longer so.

Take a radical instance. Destiny places a man into a factory. Maybe he does not even make a nail, but only part of a nail, which another man will then piece together with a different part. He cannot develop any real interest in the way in which, what he has manufactured from early morning till late evening, will place itself into the whole nexus of human life. Compare the former handicrafts with the present factory system. There is a radical difference between what now obtains and what existed not so very long ago. Moreover, what has already taken place to a high degree in certain branches of work will take place more and more. Increasing specialization and differentiation will inevitably come into the life and work of men. Really it is not very wise to criticise the fact. It is a necessity of evolution and it will come about, more and more. There is no escaping it.

What sort of a prospect does this open up? This prospect, we might imagine: Men would increasingly lose interest in that which occupies the greater part of their lives. They would be more or less mechanically given up to their work in the external world. And yet, that is not even the most important aspect. For it goes without saying that the outer habit of man's life must affect his inner being—and that is far more important. Study once more the historic evolution of mankind and you will find to what a degree men have become the impress of their several occupations during the 5th post-Atlantean age. Man's occupation works its way down into his inner soul. The human beings themselves grow specialised. You must not adopt as your standard the majority of those who are now living in the Anthroposophical Society. For many of these are in the happy position to be able to sever themselves from the whole complex of modern life. In the happy position, did I say? ... I might equally well have said, in the unhappy position. For to a large extent it is happiness only for our subjective, selfish human feeling; not for the World at large. The World will more and more require men to do good work in special spheres. The World itself will require men to specialise. More and more, therefore, this will be the question: What is to happen alongside of the specialising of men? They will specialize; the necessities of World-evolution will see to that, quickly enough. But what must happen in addition?

In a none too distant future this will become one of the most important ‘family questions,’ and people will need an understanding of it if they want to educate their children. They will need to place themselves intelligently into the whole course and trend of human evolution when the question comes before them: How shall I place my child into this human evolution? It will depend on their large-minded understanding of this question. Today, out of a certain sloppiness of thought, it may still be possible to adhere to the old phrases which are a mere relic of former times and will soon reveal their emptiness—pretty phrases, which so many people still admire: ‘Observe the child's predisposition. Let him take up what accords with his native talents.’ This above all will soon be proved—an empty phrase. For in the first place, as we shall presently see, those who are born into the world henceforth will be related to their former incarnations in a far more complicated way than in the fourth post-Atlantean epoch. The whole system of predispositions will be of a complexity hitherto unknown.

Predispositions were simpler in former times. We shall live and learn, ... and as to those who think themselves peculiarly wise in examining the talents and predispositions of adolescent children and declaring them fit for this or that calling, we shall soon discover that such insight is often no more than the fantastic imaginings of men who think themselves too clever. And apart from that, the life of men will in the none too distant future grow so complicated that the word ‘calling’ will assume quite another meaning. To-day, when we speak of ‘calling,’ or ‘vocation,’ we still often think of something inwardly determined; But in reality most people's ‘calling’ is no longer so. We speak of ‘calling’; we imagine: ‘That to which the man is called by virtue of his inner qualities.’ Well, let us inquire objectively, especially in the towns and cities. How many people will answer, I am in my calling because I recognise that this is the only one which answers to my talents and predispositions from a child. Of the town populations, at any rate, a very small proportion will reply that they are in the very calling which answers to their talents. I think, from your own observations of life, you will scarcely believe that it is otherwise. To-day already, in a high degree, our ‘calling’ is that to which we are called by the objective course of evolution of the World. It will be more and more so in future. Outside, in the outer World, is the organism, the complex, or if you will, the machine,—it matters not how you name it—which makes its demands on man, i.e., which ‘calls’ him.

All this will become more and more intensified. Nevertheless, in this very process, what mankind achieves in vocational work is loosed from the man himself and grows more objective. And precisely inasmuch as it is thus severed from man, it will increasingly become what in the further development through Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan will undergo a similar process to what was undergone for the Earth through Saturn, Sun and Moon.

It is strange. When as a spiritual scientist one speaks of things that touch the life of man so nearly, one cannot generally speak so as to please. Spiritual Science will be less and less exposed to the danger of speaking after the pattern of that ‘wisdom’ which is expressed in the quotation: ‘At most a deed of State with excellent pragmatic maxims, suitable for puppets to declaim.’ On the contrary, Spiritual Science will often be obliged to declare great and fraught with meaning for World-evolution, precisely the things which human beings would not gladly have. Many a person of today—who thinks himself a man of genius because his head is filled with modern, Philistine ideas,—may say of these things, ‘How prosaic and external!’ To a true Spiritual Science the vocational life of man appears in quite a different light. Spiritual Science must say: The vocational life is necessary for the development of relationships which have a cosmic meaning, precisely inasmuch as it is in a certain measure loosed and separated from human interest.

Some will say, perhaps: ‘What a sad perspective for the future! Man is having to enter the treadmill of life more and more; and not even Spiritual Science can give him comfort at this prospect.’ But to draw this conclusion would again be a great mistake. For in the Universe it is so: things work themselves out through a balancing of polar opposites. You need only think how it forces itself on your attention everywhere. Positive and negative electricity produce their effects in the balancing-out of their mutual relation; they are necessary one to another. The male and female are necessary for the propagation of the human race. In World-evolution the totality evolves out of one-sidednesses.

And this, too, underlies the matter we have just explained. In the vocational work which is severed from the human being, we have to create the first cosmic beginnings of a far-reaching World-evolution. All that happens in World-evolution stands in relation to the spiritual; and in all that we do in trades and callings and professions—whether by manual or by so-called mental work—there lies as it were the starting-point for the incorporation of spiritual beings. Now, during earthly time, the.se beings are still of an elemental kind—we might call them elemental of the fourth degree. But when the Jupiter evolution has arrived, they will be elementals of the third degree, ... and so on. The work we do, precisely in the objective process of our callings, is severed from us and becomes the outer garment, the outer vehicle, for elemental beings who will develop on through cosmic evolution. Yet this will happen only under one condition. On the one hand we must say: We are only beginning to understand the meaning of what is so often maligned as the mere prosaic life. Yet at the same time we must realise that the meaning of it will not be fully unveiled till we understand it as a whole, in the great World-connection. What we create in our daily occupations can indeed gain significance for Vulcan evolution. But to this end another thing is necessary. As positive electricity is needed for negative, and male for female, so, too, an opposite pole is needed, to add to these occupational activities which will more and more be loosed and severed from mankind. Such polarity, depending upon contrasts, existed already in former evolutionary epochs of mankind. It is not altogether new, needless to say; something not unlike it was already there before. But as you look back on former periods of culture—even a few centuries ago—you will find things very different. For with his feelings, even his passions—his whole emotional life, in a word,—man was far more engaged in his daily occupation than he can be to-day. Compare the many joys a man could have in his calling-, even a hundred years ago, with all the unhappy drudgery which many a one to-day already has to undergo if he has nothing else in life beside his calling. Then you will gain an idea of what I mean. Such things are far too little considered nowadays, and for a simple reason: Those who do most of the talking about vocations—about the different kinds and characters and choices of vocation—are generally people for whom it is easy enough to talk: schoolmasters, litterateurs and parsons, people who experience least of all the disadvantages of modern vocational life. To hear people talk in the usual literature of to-day (not excluding that on education) one generally feels, they are like blind people talking about colours. For a man of to-day, who with a certain social background went to public school, and then, maybe, looked around him a little at some University, it is easy enough to¹ feel very clever when he sets himself up as a reformer of mankind and knows how all things should be done. For he has absorbed all manner of ideas. There are many such reformers; but to anyone who sees through life, these people who tell us how things should be done generally appear the most foolish of all. Their foolishness only passes unobserved, because, for the moment, there is still a great respect for those who have undergone such education. The time is yet to come, when it will rather be the prevailing feeling that a litterateur, a journalist, a schoolmaster—trained in the way schoolmasters generally are nowadays—understands least of all of the real facts of life. This, too, must gradually become the prevailing judgment.

The point is now, that we should see more clearly: The vocational life of former times was connected with the emotional life of men, and it is of the very essence of evolution in this respect that the vocational life has grown out of the human life of emotions and will do so more and more in future. Hence, too, the opposite pole, which the vocational life requires, must become different from what it was before. What was it in former times? You have it before you still when you observe with sympathy what has to-day become a more or less outer husk of culture (and will inevitably become so more and more). There are the houses in the village, wherein the several trades and callings are pursued, gathered around the Church. The Church in the centre. Six days of the week are devoted to trade and craft and calling, and Sunday to what the human being shall receive only for his soul. Such were the two poles before: the vocational life and the life in religious thoughts.

It would be the greatest possible mistake to suppose that this other pole can remain to-day as the religious societies and sects imagine. It cannot remain as it now is, for it is altogether adapted to a kind of vocational life which is bound up with the human emotions. All human life would be parched and stunted if an insight into these matters did not now arise. The old religious ideas were to some extent sufficient so long as the elemental spirituality which man created at his calling—for he did create elemental spirituality in the above-described sense—did not sever itself from man. To-day, they are no longer sufficient, and they will be less and less so the farther we go on into the future. What is necessary now is the very thing which is most attacked in certain quarters. There must now enter into human evolution the other pole which will consist in this: Men must be able to form clear and detailed ideas about the Spiritual Worlds.

The existing representatives of religious faiths will often say, ‘There goes Spiritual Science, talking of many Spirits, many Gods. One God is all that matters. Is not one God enough?’ To-day one can still make a certain impression by telling people of the great advantage of reaching out to the one God—especially if one does so at the family tea party, pouring derision on ‘these modern movements,’ and putting the thing forward in a more than usually Philistine and self-sufficient way. Nevertheless, it is essential that the points of view of men grow wider. Humanity must learn to know not only that everything is permeated by one Divine Spirituality (conceived as vaguely as possible), but that Spirituality is everywhere—concrete, detailed Spirituality. The workman who stands at the lathe will have to know: As the sparks fly out, so too are the elemental spirits created, who then pass out into the World-process and have their significance in the World-process. Some who believe themselves unduly clever may reply: ‘That is unwise; the elemental spirits will arise, even if one who has no notion of it is standing at the lathe.’ They will arise, no doubt. But the point is, that they should arise in the right way. The point is not that they must arise at all, but that they should arise in the right way. For there may either arise elemental spirits who disturb the cosmic process, or who serve it.

You will best see what I mean if you consider it in one especial sphere. In all these matters, we are now at the beginning of an evolution which stands directly at our doors. Many a man is beginning already now to divine something of it. If it were translated into reality without passing over at once into spiritual-scientific strivings, it would be the worst thing that could happen to the Earth. For what has chiefly happened during the fourth post-Atlantean epoch is this: Man has been loosed, to begin with, from the outer inorganic world which he embodies in his tools. He will be brought together again with what he embodies in his tools. Nowadays, many machines are constructed. It goes without saying, the machines today are objective. There is little of the human element in them as yet. But it will not always be so. The tendency of World-evolution is for a connection to arise between what a man is and what he creates—what he produces. This connection will become more and more intimate. It will emerge to begin with in those spheres on which a closer relationship between man and man is founded—in the treatment of chemical substances for instance, when they are worked up into medicines. People today may still believe that a substance consists of sulphur and oxygen and hydrogen and what-not besides; and that the product of combination will only contain the effects that proceed from the several substances combined. To-day, to a large extent, this is still true; but the tendency of World-evolution is in another direction altogether. Intimate pulsations which are inherent in man's life of will and feeling, will more and more be woven and incorporated in that which he produces. It will no longer be a matter of indifference whether we receive a preparation from one man or another.

Even the coldest and most external technical developments are tending in a very definite direction. He to-day who can divine with his imagination future technical developments, is well aware that in the time to come whole factories will work in an individual way according to the manager. The spirit, the mood and outlook of the man will go into the factory and be transmitted to the way in which the machines work. Thus man will grow together with the objective things. All that we touch will by and by bear the impress of human being. Humanity will learn, however foolish it may yet appear to the clever people. (Did not St. Paul already say, What men hold wise is often foolish before God?) The times are coming when a machine will stand there and remain at rest. A human being will approach it, knowing that he must make one movement of the hand in this way, another in a definite relation to it, and a third again; and through the pulsations in the air which thus arise out of a certain sign, the motor, being attuned to this particular sign, will be set in motion.

Then the development of economic life will assume an aspect such that external patents and the like will be out of the question; for the effect of these things will be replaced by what I have just explained. Moreover, anything that has no relation at all to human nature will be excluded, and a quite definite result will be made possible. Imagine at some future time a really good man, highly evolved in his whole mood and outlook. He will be able to construct machines and to determine signs for them—signs which can only be made by men of a like spirit, men who are also good like himself. While all who are evilly disposed will, if they try to use the sign, create a quite different pulsation and the machine will not work.

It was not for nothing that I told you how certain people can see flames dance under the influence of certain notes. If further researches are made in this direction, the way will presently be found to what I have just indicated. Or, as we might also put it, the way will be found again to those old times when the one alchemist, who only wanted money for his purse, could attain nothing, where, with the very same process, another one who did not want to put money in his purse but desired to enact a sacrament in honour of the Gods and for the healing of Mankind, succeeded.

So long as the product of the daily work of men carried the aura of their emotions—of the joy and gladness which they put into their work—it was inaccessible to the kind of influence which I have just described. But now that the work done by the labour of men at their several vocations can no longer be produced with special enthusiasm, what thus goes out from men will be able to become a motive force—and in like measure. In a certain sense, man is giving back, to the world of machines which proceed from his labour or which serve his labour, its chastity and purity, inasmuch as he can no longer connect it with his emotions. In future it will no longer be possible, so to speak, from the glowing hearth of joyful work at one's vocation to endow the things one makes with one's own human warmth. But on the other hand one will place them into the world more chastely, and thereby also make them more receptive to the motor force, which, as above described—proceeding from man himself—will be destined by man for the several objects. But to give human evolution this direction, detailed knowledge is necessary of the spiritual forces which can be investigated only by Spiritual Science. Only in this way can it come about. For such a thing to happen as we have just described, depends upon a larger number of people in the world finding increasingly the other pole. For in this they will find their way to one another—from man to man—in those interests which, though they go beyond our daily work, our callings, can nevertheless illumine and penetrate them through and through. Life in the spiritual-scientific movement can lay the foundations of a united human life which will lead all the vocations together. Purely external progress in the development of the vocations would soon lead to the dissolution of all bonds of humanity. Men would understand one another less and less; they could unfold less and less of those relations that accord with the true human nature. Increasingly, they would pass one another by, seeking no longer any more than their advantage. They would come into no other relation to one another than that of competition. This must not be allowed to happen, for otherwise the human race would fall into utter decadence. Spiritual Science must be spread in order that this may not be so.

But there is the possibility to describe in the right way what many people—though they may deny it—are striving for unconsciously to-day. You know how many there are nowadays who say, ‘To talk of the spiritual—what antiquated nonsense! We will develop the purely physical sciences in all domains. That is the real advancement of mankind. Once men grow beyond the stage of talking antiquated nonsense about spiritual things, then there will be as it were the Paradise on Earth.’ But it would not be Paradise, it would be Hell on Earth if the human race were dominated by no more than competition and the acquisitive impulse, with this as the balancing and equalising principle. After all, if things are to go on at all, there must be another pole; and if people refuse to look for the spiritual pole, then perforce they must have an Ahrimanic one. When human occupations grow more and more specialised, we might, after all, still have this unifying principle. We could say, ‘The one man is this, the other that, but they all have this much in common; each one desires through his calling to earn, to gain as much as possible. That is what makes all people equal.’ No doubt! But it is purely Ahrimanic principle.

To imagine that the world can manage with a one-sided development, advancing purely on external lines as we have here described it, would be precisely the same in this sphere as if someone were to declare (for let us assume that there was such a queer crank—or shall we say, for politeness, ‘lady-crank’): ‘Men have become worse and worse and worse; they are quite impossible people; they ought to be exterminated. Then only shall we have the right kind of evolution on the physical plane.’ She would be a queer crank, would she not, who imagined this, for nothing at all would be the result if all the men were exterminated. Because it is in the world of the senses, people understand this. In the Spiritual World they fail to understand the corresponding ‘crankiness.’ And yet, for spiritual things it is precisely the same when anyone imagines that external evolution can go forward by itself. It cannot.

Just as the former periods of evolution demanded the abstract religions, so does the evolution of modern time demand the more concrete spiritual knowledge which we are striving after in the spiritual-scientific movement. Born of the occupational work of man which is now severed from the man himself, the elemental spirits will have to be fertilised by the human soul, through what the human soul receives from the impulses that rise to spiritual regions. Not that this is the only task of Spiritual Science. But it is its task in face of the developing and changing life of human callings. Demanded as it is by World-evolution itself upon the Earth, this insight must come into the hearts of men, in like measure as their occupations mechanise the human being. This counter-pole must become more and more active, precisely for the human beings of to-day who are becoming specialised and mechanised. The counter-pole is this: Man must be able to fill his soul with that which brings him near to every other human soul, no matter in what direction specialised.

And this will lead us to far more ... Our time, with the indifference and solitude and separation which it often involves for specialists and workers, must give way to quite another age, when men will work inspired once more by very different impulses. These will truly be no worse than the good old impulses of trade and craft and calling; but the latter cannot ever be renewed. They must be replaced by others. In this respect, we to-day can no longer merely indicate in abstract terms a human ideal which Spiritual Science wishes to unfold. In all detail, we must point to an ideal which will shew what the callings and professions too can become for man when he has the understanding rightly to perceive the signs of the time.

Of all these things, and their significance for human individuality and karma, we shall continue to speak in the next lecture.

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

Spiritual science that wants to live into the modern cultural current does not want to be something new and precisely in this way differs from the many world views and other schools of thought that come forward and believe that they can prove their right to exist by claiming to bring something new to this or that question of spiritual life. In contrast to this, the subject that is called spiritual science should emphasize that the sources of its knowledge and its life have been present in the same way at all times when people have thought and striven for the highest questions and riddles of existence. I have often been able to emphasize this, also in this city, when I had the honor of speaking in previous lectures.

It must now be particularly appealing to consider not only the various religious beliefs and world views that have emerged in the development of humanity from this point of view, but also to look at personalities who are close to us from this perspective. For if something is to be true in spiritual science, then at least a kernel of this truth must be found in all those who have honestly and energetically striven for knowledge and for a dignified human existence.

Now when spiritual science is discussed today, the most diverse judgments are asserted from one side or the other, and those who have not penetrated deeper into the corresponding field, who have gained a superficial knowledge from these or those lectures or pamphlets, will, depending on his point of view, regard this spiritual science as the fantasy or reverie of a few unworldly people who have strange ideas about life and its foundations. It must be fully admitted that, if one does not look more closely, such a judgment may seem understandable, because although today we are not talking about a specific topic, it should be pointed out that some of the main insights of this spiritual science are based on a special theme. And as soon as these are mentioned and characterized, our contemporaries may well feel, in all honesty, “What curious stuff is this?”

On the whole, spiritual science, if taken seriously, is based on the premise that what surrounds us in the sensual world, what we can perceive with our senses, what we can grasp with the mind that is bound to our senses, is not the whole world, but that behind everything that is sensual lies a spiritual world. And this spiritual world is not in an indefinite hereafter, but is always around us, just as the phenomena of color and light are also around the blind. But in order for us to know about something that is around us, we need to have an organ to perceive it. And just as the blind man cannot see color and light, so too, as a rule, people in our age with normal abilities cannot perceive the spiritual facts and beings that are around us. But when we have the good fortune to operate on a blind person, then there comes for him the moment of the awakening of the eye, and what was not there for him, light and colors, now floods into his inner being. From the moment of his operation, this is a perceptible world for him. In the spiritual realm, there is a higher awakening, the awakening through which a person becomes initiated into the spiritual world. To speak with Goethe, there are spiritual eyes and ears, but as a rule, human souls are not ready to use them. But when we apply the means and methods by which these powers come into existence, then something happens in us on a higher plane, as when a blind person is operated on and is then flooded with the world of colors and light. When a person's eyes and ears are opened, he becomes awakened. A new world is around him, a world that was always there, but which he can only perceive from the moment of awakening. But then, when a person is ready, he learns to make various insights his own, insights that brighten life, insights that can give us strength and security for our work, that enable us to see into the essence of human destiny and the secrets of fate.

And only one of these insights will be discussed here, one of those insights that, if not crazy, must often seem strange and dreamy to today's people. It is an insight that is nothing more than the revival of an ancient process of knowledge, its continuation in a higher realm, a truth that was only recently attained for a lower realm. In general, humanity has a short memory for great events in the spiritual world, and that is why so few people today remember that in the 17th century not only laymen but even scholars believed that lower animals, even worms and fish, would develop from river mud. It was the great naturalist Francesco Redi who first pointed out that no earthworm or fish grows out of dead river mud unless an earthworm or fish germ is present in it beforehand. He stated that life can only come from life, and from this it can be seen that it is only an inaccurate way of looking at things to believe that a fish or worm can grow out of lifeless river mud. A closer examination shows that we have to go back to the living germ, and that this living germ can only draw from its environment the forces that are there to bring to the greatest development what is alive in the germ.

What Redi said, that living things develop only from living things, is taken for granted by science today. When Redi uttered these words, he only just escaped the fate of Giordano Bruno. Such is the way of the development of humanity. First, a truth must be so hard won that those who first express it are branded as heretics. Then it becomes a matter of course, the common property of humanity. What Redi did for natural science should be done for the spirit through spiritual science today, by transferring the sentence that Redi pronounced for natural science from the knowledge of the awakened spiritual eye and spiritual ear to the soul realm. And there this sentence means: The spiritual and soul can only arise from the spiritual and soul. This means that it is an inaccurate way of looking at it when we see a human being come into existence, to believe that everything that comes into life comes only from the father and mother and the ancestors. Just as we have to go back from the developing earthworm to the living earthworm germ, so we have to go back from the human being, who develops from the germ into a specific being, to an earlier spiritual existence, and we have to realize that this being, which comes into existence through birth, draws from its bodily ancestors only the strength for its development, just as the earthworm germ draws strength from its inanimate surroundings. And in a corresponding extension, this sentence: Living things can only come from living things, leads to the other sentence: The present life, which comes into existence through birth, not only leads back to physical ancestors, but through the centuries back to an earlier spiritual-soul. And if you delve deeper into it, you will see that it is scientifically shown that there is not just one, but repeated lives on earth, that what is in us now between birth and death is the repetition of a spiritual soul that was already there in earlier stages of existence, and that our present life is in turn the starting point for subsequent lives. Spiritual-soul-like comes from spiritual-soul-like, goes back to spiritual-soul-like, which was there before birth, which descends from the spiritual world and lives in physical embodiments. We now see something completely different when, for example, we as educators are confronted with a child who gradually develops his powers. At birth we see something indeterminate on his face, how something unfolds from within, ever more distinctly and distinctly, which does not come from heredity but from previous lives. We see how this center of the spiritual soul unfolds more and more from birth through talents.

Today, spiritual science has something to say about repeated lives on earth. Today it may be a mere reverie, as what Francesco Redi said in the 17th century was considered a mere reverie. But what is considered a mere reverie today will become a matter of course in the not too distant future, and the sentence: spiritual-mental comes from spiritual-mental, will become common knowledge for humanity.

Today, heretics are no longer treated as they were in the past. They are no longer burned at the stake, but they are considered fools and dreamers who speak out of random fantasy. They are ridiculed, and those in the know sit in the high chair of science and say that this is not compatible with real science, not knowing that it is true, genuine science that demands this truth. And now we can cite a hundred and a hundred such truths that would show us how spiritual science can illuminate life by showing that there is an immortal essence in man that passes through death into the spiritual world and, when it has fulfilled its destiny there, returns to physical existence to gain new experiences, which it then carries up through death into the spiritual worlds. We would see how the ties that are woven from person to person, from soul to soul in all areas of life, those traits of the heart that go from soul to soul and cannot otherwise be explained, can be explained by the fact that they were formed in previous life circumstances. And just as the spiritual bonds we weave today do not cease when death draws over existence, but just as what passes from soul to soul as bonds of life is immortal like the human soul itself, how it lives on through the spiritual world and will revive again in other, future earthly conditions and new embodiments. And it is only a matter of development that people will also remember their earlier experiences on earth, what they have gone through spiritually and soul-wise in earlier lives and states of existence.

Such truths will become established in human life in the not too distant future as necessary things, and people will gain strength and hope and confidence from such conditions. Today we can only see that a few individuals in the world are drawn by their healthy sense of truth to what spiritual researchers have to proclaim from their experiences in the spiritual world. But spiritual-scientific knowledge will become the common property of mankind and will be assimilated by those who earnestly seek the truth. And those who have trodden the paths of earnest seekers after truth have always, in all that they have offered to mankind, developed the great wisdom and knowledge that spiritual science brings again today.

An example should arise before our soul in a personality that is close to our modern life: the example of Goethe, and with him again that which occupied him as his most comprehensive and greatest work throughout his life: his “Faust”.

If we approach Goethe and try to illuminate his striving with what spiritual science can give, we can actually start quite early on. One can say that from his entire disposition, one recognizes in Goethe how there was soul and spirit in him. Everything that pushes one to seek a spiritual element behind the phenomena of the sensual world was an early predisposition in him. There we see the seven-year-old Goethe, who could have absorbed ordinary ideas from his surroundings, as a boy can absorb them, for his first soul perception. That does not satisfy him; he recounts it himself in 'Poetry and Truth'. There we see how the seven-year-old boy begins something quite remarkable to express his yearning for the divine. He takes a music stand from his father's collection and makes an altar out of it, placing all kinds of minerals and plants and other products of nature on it, from which the spirit of nature speaks. The boy's soul builds an altar, puts a little incense on it, takes a burning glass, waits for the morning sun to rise, collects the first rays of the rising sun with the burning glass, lets them fall on the little incense, so that the smoke rises. And in his later years, Goethe remembers how, as a boy, he wanted to send his pious feelings up to the great god of nature, who speaks through minerals and plants, who sends us his fire in the rays of the sun. This grows with Goethe. We see how, at a more mature stage – but still out of a yearning soul, as it lives in Goethe – after he comes to Weimar and is appointed by the duke as his advisor, how this feeling for the spirit that speaks through all of nature is expressed in the beautiful prose hymn. There he says: “Nature, we are surrounded and embraced by it, unable to step out of it and unable to get deeper into it. Unwarned and uninvited, it takes us into the cycle of its dance and carries on with us until we are tired and fall into its arms. We have not done what we do, she has done everything; she is constantly thinking and pondering, looking at the world with a thousand eyes.” And again later, in the beautiful book about Winckelmann, ‘Antiquities’: ”When man's healthy nature works as a whole, when he feels in the world as in a great, beautiful, dignified and valuable whole, when the harmony of pleasure gives him pure, free delight: then the universe, if it could feel itself, would exult in reaching its goal and admire the summit of its own becoming and being. Thus Goethe felt, like everything that lives and moves outside in nature, a resurrection celebrating from the human soul, and like a higher nature, a spiritual nature is brought forth from the spirit and soul of man. But it took Goethe a long time to fully grasp the spiritual realization of nature. And there is no clearer or more obvious example of how Goethe was a lifelong seeker who never rested or paused, always striving to reshape his knowledge and reach higher levels, than his life's poem, “Faust.”

From his earliest youth, he had begun to put everything that filled his yearning and intuitive soul into his poem; and as an old man in his later years, shortly before his death, he completed this poem, on which he had worked for over fifty years and into which he had put the best of his life. The second part was sealed at his death, like the great testament he had to give to humanity. It is a momentous document. We can only understand this document if we follow Goethe a little, as he himself sought to struggle towards knowledge.

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For example, there is the student Goethe at the University of Leipzig. He is supposed to become a lawyer, but that is of secondary concern to him. Even then, the young student was possessed by an invincible urge to fathom the secrets of the world, to seek the spiritual. He therefore immerses himself in everything Leipzig has to offer in the way of knowledge about nature. He seeks to eavesdrop on what nature has to say to us in its phenomena, to eavesdrop on the world's riddles of existence. But Goethe needed, in order to rework what natural science could offer him, to re-melt it in his soul to that all-powerful urge of his inner being, which does not seek abstract knowledge but warm hearted a great experience, an experience that really leads the human being to that knowledge which is the gate toward which we intuitively look, the gate that closes for today's normal human being, the invisible, the supersensible: the gate of death. At the end of his student days in Leipzig, he experienced death. A serious illness had prostrated him, brought him close to death. For hours and days he had to face the fact that at any moment he could pass through that mysterious portal. And the mysterious, impetuous urge to understand demanded the utmost seriousness in the pursuit of knowledge. With this newly formed attitude of knowledge, Goethe returned to his native city of Frankfurt. There he found a circle of people, headed by a woman of great and profound talent: Susanne von Klettenberg. Goethe created a wonderful monument to her in his “Confessions of a Beautiful Soul”. He showed how this personality, to whose spiritual world he had such close access at the time, contained something that can only be described as a soul. In Susanne von Klettenberg, there lived a soul that sought to grasp the divine within itself in order to find, through the divine within itself, the spiritual that lives through the world. Goethe was introduced at that time by the circle to which this lady belonged, to studies that, if you, as a truly modern person, let them have an effect on you today, seem crazy. Goethe immersed himself in medieval writings. Those who pick them up today cannot do anything with them. When you see the strange signs in them, you ask yourself: what is the point of this in the face of science's modern quest for truth? — There was a book called “Aurea catena Homeri”, “The Golden Chain of Homer”. When you open it, you find a strange symbolic illustration: a dragon at the top in a semicircle, a dragon full of life, bordering on another dragon, a withering dragon dying within itself. All kinds of signs are linked to it: symbolic keys, two interlocking triangles and the planetary signs. To our contemporaries this is fantasy, to today's science it is fantasy, because one does not know what to do with these signs. Goethe senses in his intuition that they express something, that one can do something with them when one looks at them. They do not immediately express something that can be found here or there in the world. But if you let these signs take effect on you, by memorizing them so that you become deaf and blind to your physical surroundings, only letting these signs take effect on you, then you experience something very peculiar, then you experience that the soul within itself senses something that was dormant before, like a spiritual eye that opens. And if you have enough stamina, you will grasp what you can call meditation, concentration, which will develop your soul to such an extent that you will actually undergo something like an operation of the spiritual eye, through which a new world will open up. At that time, a new world could not yet be opened up for Goethe; he was not yet that far. But what came to life in his soul was the inkling that there are keys to this spiritual world, that one can penetrate into this spiritual world. One must visualize this mood; the vivid sensation, the vivid feeling: something is being stirred in me, something is coming to life; there must be something that leads into the spiritual world. But at the same time he senses: he cannot yet enter it. If Goethe had ever been identical with Faust in his life, we would say: Goethe was in the same situation in which Faust appears at the beginning of the first part, when Faust, after having studied the most diverse fields of human science, opens books in which there are such signs and feels surrounded by a spiritual world, but cannot enter into the spiritual world. Goethe never felt identical with Faust. Faust was a part of him, but he outgrew what was only a part of himself. And so, what went beyond Faust in Goethe grew because he, fearing no discomfort, always strove further and further, saying to himself: “One does not get behind the secrets of existence in a flash , not by incantations and formulas, but by patiently and energetically penetrating, step by step, in a truly spiritual and soulful way, whatever comes our way in the physical world. — It is easy to say: “What is higher knowledge must be absorbed by the soul.” This higher knowledge must penetrate the soul, but it only takes on its true form when we strive with patience and perseverance to get to know the real phenomena of the physical world step by step and then to seek the spiritual behind these phenomena of the physical world. But with what Goethe took with him from his time in Frankfurt, he was able to summarize everything else, he was able to see everything in a different light.

Goethe came from Frankfurt to this city, Strasbourg. We could cite many things that led him higher here. But what is particularly characteristic is how that which has such great significance in this city came before his soul: the cathedral, the minster. At that time, the idea of this wonderful building presented itself before Goethe's soul, and he understood why every single line is as it is. He saw with spiritual vision, with the vision gained through his immersion in Frankfurt, every triangle, every single angle of this significant building as belonging to the whole, and in his soul the great idea of the master builder celebrated a resurrection, and Goethe believed he recognized what had flowed into this building as a thought, as an idea. And so we could cite many instances of what had entered this soul as an inner vision and what it had taken up from external world processes entering into a marriage in Goethe's soul. Therefore it is not surprising that when he later came to Weimar, he took up natural science from a new angle, botany, zoology, bone theory and so on, in order to consider everything like letters that together make up the book of nature, leading into the secrets of existence. This is how his studies of plant development and the animal world came about, which he later continued as a student, only that he sought the spirit behind the sensual phenomena of existence everywhere. Thus we see how, during his Italian journey, he regarded art on the one hand and natural objects on the other, and how he observed the world of plants in order to recognize the spirit that reigns in them. The words he wrote to his friends, while he was engaged in this kind of spiritual natural science, are great and beautiful. He said: Oh, here everything presents itself to me in a new way; I would like to travel to India to look at what has already been discovered in my own way. — That is to say, as his development demanded, according to the indications we were able to give. And so we see how he also looks at the works of art that come to him. He writes in a letter: “This much is certain: the ancient artists had just as great a knowledge of nature and an equally sure concept of what can be imagined and how it must be imagined as Homer. Unfortunately, the number of works of art in the first class is all too small. But if one also sees these, one has nothing to wish for but to recognize them correctly and then to go there in peace. These lofty works of art are at the same time the highest works of nature, produced by man according to true and natural laws. All that is arbitrary and imaginary collapses; there is necessity, there is God.” Just as the great spirit of nature spoke to the seven-year-old boy from the altar he had erected, so the great spirit of the existence of the spiritual world spoke to him from these works of art, which he regarded as a unity. Thus Goethe gradually arrived at the contemplation of the individual in energetic, devoted work. Then he could calmly await the moment when a real insight into the spiritual world leaped out of his observations, a true spiritual science, which then confronts us, artistically transformed and reworked, in his “Faust”.

Thus the first sections of Faust that were written have all the atmosphere of a man who senses the secrets of existence but is unable to penetrate these secrets. We see how Faust allows the signs to take effect that surround him with spiritual reality, but we also see how he is not yet mature enough to really feel this spiritual reality. These are the sentences where Faust, as the Nostradamus aura, allows the signs of the macrocosm and the earth spirit to take effect on him, where the spirit of the earth appears before him. Faust characterizes the earth spirit in wonderfully beautiful words. We see how he senses that what the planet Earth is, is not simply the physical sphere that natural science regards it as, but rather, just as the body contains a soul, so the Earth body contains a spirit.

In the tides of life, in the storm of action,
I surge up and down,
I weave to and fro!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life,
So I create at the whirling loom of time
And work the living garment of divinity.

That is what lives in the earth as the spirit of the earth, just as our spirit lives in us. But Goethe characterizes Faust as not yet mature, his spirit as still unfinished. He must turn away from the terrible sign like a timid worm curled up. The earth spirit answers him: “You resemble the spirit you comprehend, not me.” In Goethe's soul there lived the realization, even if at first only a presentiment, that we cannot declare ourselves satisfied at any stage, but must strive from each stage to higher and higher stages, that we cannot say at any stage that we have achieved something, but must always strive higher from each stage. Goethe was led into these secrets by his diligent studies from phenomenon to phenomenon. And now we see him grow.

The same spirit that he first summoned, and of whom he could only say, “Terrible face!” is addressed by Goethe through Faust, after Goethe himself had reached a higher level after his trip to Italy, after his journey, which I have characterized as one in which he wanted to permeate all of nature and art with his vision. Now Faust is attuned to the same spirit that Goethe himself was attuned to. Now Faust stands before the same spirit, which he thus addresses:

Eminent Spirit, thou gavest me, gave me everything,
Why I asked. Thou didst not in vain
Turn thy face to me in fire.
Gavest me the glorious Nature's kingdom,
Strength to feel it, to enjoy it. Not
You only allow cold, amazed visitors,
Grant me into their deep chests
To look as into the bosom of a friend.
You lead the line of the living
Before me, and teach me my brothers
In the silent bush, in air and water.
And when the storm roars and creaks in the forest,
The giant spruce topples, brushing neighboring branches
And squashing neighboring trunks,
And the hill thunders hollowly hollow;
Then you lead me to the secure cave,
Then you show me myself, and my own breast,
Secret, deep wonders open up.
And when the pure moon rises before my gaze,
Soothingly across: silver figures of primeval times,
and ease the strict desire of contemplation.

There Goethe has arrived, and with him Faust, to the heights, no longer turning away from the spirit that he had wanted to reach by leaping. Now the spirit presents itself as such that he no longer needs to turn away from it. Now he recognizes it in all living things, in all realms of nature: in forest and water, in the silent bush, in the giant spruce, in storm and thunder. And not only there. After it has appeared to him in the great outdoors, he also recognizes it in his own heart: its secret, deep wonders open up.

This is a step forward in Goethe's knowledge of the spirit, and Goethe did not rest on his laurels. We then see how, spurred on by Schiller, he sought to deepen his knowledge, particularly in the 1890s. This knowledge enabled him to go beyond the vague characterization of spiritual consciousness that a spirit lives in everything. He succeeded in grasping this spirit in a concrete way. But Goethe needed much preparation before he was able to depict the life of the human spirit in the sense that spiritual and psychological things can only come from spiritual and psychological things. However, the fact that Goethe never failed to attempt to get deeper is shown by some of the works he created before the second part of Faust was completed. The second part of Faust shows the heights to which he has risen. Some have already turned away from him when they got to know the introspective Goethe in Pandora. Even today we hear people say: the first part of Faust is full of life, it breathes direct naturalness, but the second part is a product of Goethe's old age, full of symbols and contrivances. Such people have no idea what is in it, what infinite wisdom is in this second part of “Faust”, which only the Goethe of his rich life could have produced in his old age, leaving it as a testament. Therefore, we also understand when Goethe writes the lines about some works that already breathe the spirit of “Faust”, and we know that he presents Faust as a struggling soul, a soul that has been overtaken by something new. We recognize it in the anger he poured out on those who called “Faust” an inferior work of old age. He says of them:

They praise Faust,
And what else
In my writings roars
In their favor;

The old Mick and Mack,
That pleases them very much;
They think the riffraff,
It would no longer be!

Goethe once put into words his feelings towards those who believe that only what Goethe achieved in his younger years has validity, who do not want to ascend to what he achieved in his more mature years.

After Goethe has introduced Faust into the life that directly surrounds us, and has allowed him to experience that wonderful tragedy of Gretchen, he leads him out into the world that is outwardly the great world, first of all into the world that is outwardly the great world: the world of the imperial court. There Goethe now wants to show that Faust should now really penetrate spiritually into the secrets of this world. But then Faust should be introduced to the real spiritual world, to the supersensible world.

Right at the beginning of the second part, we see how Goethe has Faust surrounded by all kinds of spiritual beings. This is to express that Faust is not only to be led into an external physical world, but that he is also to experience what can be experienced by someone whose spiritual eye is open, whose spiritual ear is learning to perceive. Therefore, in the second part, Goethe shows us step by step the nature of the human soul, human development. What is Faust to experience? He is to experience the knowledge of the supersensible world. He is to be initiated into the secrets of the supersensible world. Where is this supersensible world?

When we consider the spiritual content of “Faust”, we can only begin to address the question of Mephistopheles, the spirit that surrounds Faust from the very beginning and plays a part in everything Faust undertakes. But it is only in the second part, where Faust is to be led into the spiritual world, that we see what role Mephistopheles plays. After Faust has gone through the events at the “imperial court”, he begins to see what is no longer there in the sensual world: the spirit of Helen, who lived centuries and centuries ago. She is to be found for Faust. She cannot be found in the physical world. Faust must descend into the spiritual world. Mephistopheles has the key to this world, but he cannot enter this spiritual world himself; he can describe it intellectually. He can say: You will descend. One could also say: You will ascend. He then actually describes the spiritual world into which Faust is to descend in order to get to know it supersensibly, to find in it the spirit, the immortal, the eternal that has been left behind from Helena. A word is spoken, a wonderful word: Faust is to descend to the Mothers. What are the “Mothers”? One could talk for hours if one wanted to characterize exactly what the Mothers are. Here we need only say that the Mothers were for spiritual science at all times what man gets to know when his spiritual eye is opened. When he looks into the physical world, he sees all things limited. When he enters the spiritual world, he comes into something from which all physical things come out as ice comes out of a water pond. As one who could not see the water would say: Nothing is there but ice, it piles up out of nothing — so says he who knows not the spirit: Only physical things are there. He sees not the spirit that is between and behind physical things, out of which all physical things are formed as ice is formed out of water. There, where the source of physical things is, which is no longer visible to the physical eye, are the Mothers. Mephistopheles is the being that is to represent that intellect which only knows what is outwardly formed in space, which knows that there is a spiritual world but cannot penetrate into it. Mephistopheles stands there beside Faust, as the materialistic thinker stands today beside the spiritual researcher, and says: “Ah, you spiritual scientist, you theosophist, you want to see into a spiritual world? There is nothing in there, it is all a dream. It is all nothing. To the materialist, who wants to build firmly on what the microscope and the telescope reveal, but who wants to deny everything that lies behind physical phenomena, the spiritual researcher cries out: “In your nothingness I hope to find the All.” Thus the materialistic thinker stands opposed to the spiritual man, who hopes to find the spirit precisely where the other sees nothing. These two powers will confront each other forever. And from the very beginning, Mephisto confronts Faust as the spirit that can lead to the door, but cannot cross that threshold. The theosophist or spiritual scientist does not say: material science is nothing, is unnecessary. — He says: we must take this science seriously, study it, but it only has the key, it leads us to where the true spiritual life is to be found.

Faust then descends into the realm of the mothers, into the spiritual world; he succeeds in bringing up the spirit of Helen. But he is not yet mature enough to truly connect this spirit with his own soul. Hence the scene where passion stirs in Faust, where he wants to embrace the image of Helen with sensual passion. That is why he is repulsed. This is the fate of everyone who wants to approach the spiritual world from personal, selfish feelings. He is repulsed, as Faust is repulsed when he has brought up from the realm of the mothers the spirit of Helen. Faust must first mature, learn to recognize how the three members of human nature really come together: the immortal spirit that goes from life to life, from embodiment to embodiment; the body that lives between birth and death; and the soul that stands between the two. Faust is to learn how body, soul and spirit are connected and how they belong together. Faust has already sought the archetype of Helen, the immortal, the eternal that passes from embodiment to embodiment, from life to life, but in an immature state. Now he is to mature in order to become worthy of truly entering the spiritual world. To do this, Faust must learn how this immortality first approaches the human being when he can embody himself again in a new life between birth and death in his physical existence. Therefore, Goethe must show how the soul lives between spirit and body, how it places itself between the immortal spirit and the body that stands between birth and death. This is what Goethe shows us in the second part of “Faust”.

In Goethe, the soul is hidden in that wondrous structure about which Goethe researchers do not know much to say, in which spiritual researchers who are well-versed recognize the archetype of the soul. This is nothing other than the wonderful structure of the homunculus, the little human being. This is an image of the human soul. What does this soul do? It is the mediator between body and spirit; it must draw the elements of the body from all realms of nature in order to connect with them. Only then can it be united with the immortal spirit. Thus we see how Faust is led by this homunculus into the realm of the natural philosophers Anaxagoras and Thales, who have been reflecting on the origin of nature and life.

Therein is shown the true doctrine of evolution, which goes back to the fact that not only an animalistic element underlies human development, but also a soul that gathers the elements from nature to gradually build up the body. Hence the advice given to the homunculus: you must start from the lowest realm in order to ascend to higher and higher ones. The human soul is first referred to the mineral kingdom. Then it is told: “You have to go through the plant kingdom.” There is a wonderful expression here: “It grunts so” to describe the passage through the plant world, the juicy green. There the soul gathers all the elements of the natural kingdoms in order to ascend. It is explicitly said: “And you have time until you reach the human being.” Then we see how the spirit of love, Eros, approaches after the soul has formed the body out of all the realms of nature. There it unites with the spirit. Body, soul and spirit are united. Here that which is the soul of the homunculus, that which it organizes into the body, unites with the spirit of Helen. That is why Helen can appear to us in the third act of the second part in the flesh. We see the doctrine of re-embodiment poetically and artistically enshrined in the second part of Faust. One does not unite with Helena by drawing her to oneself in stormy passion, but by truly living through the secrets of existence, truly living through the re-embodiment.

Goethe was not yet able to express the idea of repeated lives on earth in the way we can today, but he did include it in the second part of his “Faust”. That is why he was able to say to Eckermann: “I have written my ‘Faust’ in such a way that it is suitable for the theater; that the images it presents are outwardly sensually interesting for those who only want to see outwardly sensually. But for those who are initiated, it will be evident that the deepest things have been woven into the second part of “Faust”. - Goethe expressly pointed out that one can find his view of life, his spiritual view, in this poetry. And so we now also understand that Goethe was able to illustrate to us in this reconnection of Faust with Helena what true mysticism is.

Faust unites with the spiritual world. Not an ordinary child is born, but Euphorion, who is as true as he is poetic. He represents for us what comes to life in our soul when it unites with the spiritual world. When the soul penetrates into the secrets of the spiritual world, there comes a moment of development in the soul that is of tremendously deep significance for that soul. Before the soul can go further, it must first, for brief moments, gain connection with the spiritual world, to know for a very short time what the spiritual world is. Then it is as if a spiritual child were born out of spiritual knowledge. But then come the moments of life again, when this spiritual child seems to have disappeared into the spiritual world. One must grasp this with the heart, full of life, then one feels, like Euphorion, the mystic's spiritual child, despite all the poetic truth of life, sinks down into the spiritual world, cannot yet fully enter Faust, but as he passes over, something else does. That is an experience of the spiritual researcher, the spiritual seeker, when our soul has the hour when it truly senses its relationship to the spiritual world, and when knowledge appears as a child of a marriage with the spiritual world. Then it experiences it deeply when it sinks into the everyday, and it is as if it takes with it the best that we have. It is as if our own soul were to escape and go with it into the spiritual world. When one has felt this, one feels the spiritual words of Euphorion, who has sunk down, and who cries out from the dark depths: “Let me not alone in the gloomy realm, mother, let me not alone.” The true mystic knows this voice, the voice that calls from the spiritual child to our soul as its mother.

But this soul must go further. It must break away from that which is only personal passion. We must be able to devote ourselves to the spiritual world impersonally. As long as there is still self-interest, self-will, we cannot grasp the spiritual world. Only then can we grasp this spiritual world when all that is personal has been erased before the higher things of the spiritual world; only then can we truly enter the spiritual world permanently. But there are still many moments when we have already experienced that moment that pushes us back into the physical world, moments that take away all mysticism for a long time. These are the moments when we have to say to ourselves: Yes, even if we have overcome all selfishness and self-will, there still remains this or that, as it is left behind in Faust, even after he has said: “I stand here in the open, I only want to work, to gain everything from nature, to do something only for others.” But he has not yet come that far. As he looks at the hut of Philemon and Baucis, something disturbs his view, he shows: he has not yet overcome the selfishness that wants to be pleased by the sight. He wanted to create a possession, selflessly, but he cannot yet bear what disfigures him: the hut of Philemon and Baucis. Then the spirit of evil approaches him once more. The hut is burnt down. Then that appears to him which appears to everyone who undergoes development: the worry that approaches everyone who still has selfish aspirations within them and which does not allow them to ascend into the spiritual world. Here it is, worry, and we learn to recognize it in its true form; then it is something that can lead us to the last of real spiritual knowledge. It is not intended to show that man should become unworldly, hostile to the world, but how man in the world should get to know that which does not let him go from the world. In wise self-knowledge, we should let worry take a back seat so that we can become free from the selfishness of worry, not from worry itself, which is illustrated by the fact that worry says it creeps in through a keyhole. When we get to know this worry, not just feel it, but learn to bear it, then we attain that degree of human development that opens the spiritual eye to us. This is illustrated by the fact that Faust goes blind in old age, can no longer see with his physical senses, but can look into the spiritual world. “The night seems to penetrate deeper and deeper.” It is dark on the outside, but inner bright light, the light that can illuminate the world, shines, the light in which the soul is between death and birth: the realm of the mothers. Only now can Faust begin his journey into the spiritual world, where his ascension is so beautifully described.

Then Goethe can summarize what has become of Faust, from the intuitive striving of that person who despairs of science and turns away, to what he has become from that stage to the highest spiritual knowledge. He can summarize it in the Chorus mysticus, which, as its name indicates, is intended to signify something deeper. In this Chorus mysticus, it is intended to summarize paradigmatically in a few words what holds the key to all the secrets of the world, how everything that is transitory is only a parable for the immortal. That which the physical eye can see is only a parable for the spiritual, the immortal, of which Goethe showed that he even attained the knowledge of re-embodiment when he entered into this spiritual. It shall finally be shown that when man enters into the spiritual kingdom, then all that is present in the physical world as presentiment, as hope, is there a truth. What is striven for in the physical world becomes a presentiment in the spiritual world.

It may appear pedantic when I state here something that one must know to understand the final words.

Goethe spoke somewhat unclearly in his old age because he was toothless. He dictated the second part of his “Faust” to a scribe. Since he still had some of the Frankfurt dialect, some words and sounds came out a bit unclear. So for some words, the scribe used g's where there should have been ch's. For example, “Erreichnis” was written as “Ereignis”. When dictating the final words of Faust, Goethe spoke “Erreichnis”. The inadequate becomes here something that can be achieved, an “Erreichnis”, that is, with two r's and two ch's. Everywhere, in all editions of Goethe's works, you will find “Ereignis” written. Goethe researchers know so little about penetrating into the sense. That which is inadequate in the physical world becomes “achievement” in the spiritual world. What cannot be described in the physical world is done in the spiritual world. There it becomes a living deed.

And finally, we experience the great thing that Goethe is allowed to express in the closing words of the second part of “Faust”: “The eternal feminine”. Oh, it is a sin against Goethe to say that Goethe means the female sex by this. Goethe means that depth which the human soul represents in relation to the mystery of the world, that which longs as the eternal in man: the eternal feminine, that draws the soul up to the eternal immortal, the eternal wisdom, and that gives itself to the eternal masculine. The eternal feminine draws us up to that which is the eternal masculine. It does not refer to something feminine in the ordinary sense. Therefore, we may well seek this eternal feminine in man and woman: the eternal feminine that strives towards the eternal masculine in the cosmos in order to unite, to become one with the divine-spiritual that permeates and interweaves the world, towards which Faust strives. This secret of men of all times, towards which Faust has been striving from the very beginning, this secret to which spiritual science in a modern sense is to lead us, is expressed by Goethe in a paradigmatic and monumental way in those beautiful words at the end of the second part of Faust, which he presents as a mystical spirit-choir, that all physical things which surround us in the world of sense, Maja, illusion, deception, are a parable of the spiritual. But we see this spiritual when we penetrate to what covers it like a veil. In this spiritual we see what cannot be achieved here on earth. We see that which is indescribable for the mind bound to the senses, transformed into real action when the spirit of man unites with the spiritual world. “The indescribable, here it is done.” And we see that which is significant, where the soul unites, lives together with the eternal masculine of the great world, which lives through and weaves through this world. That is the great secret that Goethe expresses with the words:

All that is transitory
Is but a parable;
The inadequate,
Here it becomes reality;
The indescribable,
Here it is done;
The eternal feminine
draws us on.

Goethe was able to say to himself: Now I have done my life's work. It does not really matter now what I accomplish on earth during the rest of the time I have left to live.

Goethe sealed up the second part of his “Faust”. And this second part was not given to mankind until after his death, and mankind will have to draw on all of its spiritual science to penetrate the secrets of this mighty work.

Today, only sketches could be given. One could spend hours and weeks using all the means of wisdom to illuminate what Goethe gave to mankind as a testament. May humanity open up this testament more and more! Seal after seal will fall, the more people will have the will to penetrate the secrets of the second part. The voices of those who say, “You are seeking to find something in there that Goethe never intended to put in his work,” will fall silent. Those who speak thus do not know the depths of Goethe's soul. Only those who see the highest in this work and in what Goethe condenses into the mystical chorus, which can conclude so many reflections that are intended to lead to the spirit, recognize this.

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.

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. ...”

Translator Unknown, revised

It may well be said that the anthroposophical conception of the world is distinguished from any other we may meet because it can satisfy to such a great extent the desire for knowledge. In the present time we so often hear that it is impossible to gain knowledge of certain things—that our capacity for knowledge has limits and cannot rise above a certain height. On becoming acquainted with modern philosophical research we constantly hear of such limits to knowledge, especially among those schools of philosophy which owe their origin to Kant. The understanding of anthroposophists and of those who practice mysticism is distinguished from all such doctrines through never setting limits to man's capacity for knowledge, but rather looking upon it as capable of being both widened and uplifted. Is it not, to a certain extent, the greatest arrogance for anyone to regard his own capacity for knowledge, from the point at which it stands, as something decisive, and then to say that with our capacities we cannot go beyond definite limits of knowledge? The anthroposophist says: “I stand today at a certain point in human knowledge, from which I am able to know certain things and not others. But it is possible to cultivate the human capacity for knowledge, to heighten it.” What is called a school of initiation has as its essential aim to raise to a higher stage this human capacity for knowledge. So it is quite correct if one from a lower stage of knowledge says that there are limits to his knowledge and that certain things cannot be known. One can, however, raise oneself above this stage of knowledge and press on to a higher stage, so that it becomes possible to know what at a lower stage was impossible. This is the essence of initiation, and this deepening or heightening of knowledge is the task of the initiation schools. This means raising man to a stage of knowledge to which nature has not brought him, but which he must acquire for himself through long years of patient exercise.

In all ages there have been these initiation schools. Among all peoples, those having a higher kind of knowledge have arisen from these initiation schools. And the essential nature of such schools—and of the great Initiates themselves, who have soared above the lower stages of the human capacity for knowledge and, through their inspirations, have been acquainted with the highest knowledge accessible to us in this world—finds expression in Initiates giving to the various peoples on earth their various religions and world-conceptions.

Today we wish with a few strokes to illuminate the essential being of these great Initiates. As in every science, in every spiritual process one must first learn the method through which one penetrates to knowledge. This is also the case in the initiation schools. And here too it is a matter of our being led through certain methods to the higher stages of knowledge, about which we have spoken precisely. I shall now briefly refer to the stages that here concern us. Certain stages of knowledge can only be attained in the intimate schools of initiation where there are teachers who have themselves in their own experience gone through each school, have devoted themselves to every exercise, and have really pondered every single step, every single stage. And one must entrust oneself only to such teachers in the initiation schools.

In these schools there is, it is true, no hint of authority, nothing that smacks of dogmatism; the governing principle is entirely that of counsel, the imparting of advice. Whoever has gone through a certain stage of learning, and has himself acquired experiences of the higher, super-sensible life, knows the inner way that leads to this higher knowledge. And it is only one such as this who is qualified to say what one must do. What is necessary is simply that there be trust between pupil and teacher in this sphere. Whoever lacks this trust can learn nothing; but whoever has it will very soon perceive that nothing is recommended by any occult, mystic, or mystery teacher other than what the teacher has himself gone through. What concerns us here is that, of the whole being of man as he stands before us today, it is essentially only the outward visible part already within human nature that is today complete. This must be made clear to anyone aspiring to become a student of the mysteries—that man as he stands before us today is by no means a completed being, but is in the process of developing so that in the future he will reach many higher stages.

That which today has attained to an image of God, that which has arrived at the highest stage in man, is the human physical body, that which we can see with our eyes and perceive in any way with our senses. That is not, however, the only thing that man has. He has still higher members of his nature. To begin with, he further possesses a member that we call his etheric body. This etheric body can be seen by anyone who has cultivated his soul organs. Through this etheric body man is not simply a creation in which work chemical and physical forces, but a living creation, a creation that lives and is endowed with capacities for growth, life, and propagation. One can see this etheric body, which represents a kind of archetype of man, if, with the methods of the art of clairvoyance—which will be characterized still further—one suggests away the ordinary physical body. You know how, by the ordinary methods of hypnotism and suggestion, the point can be reached when, if you say to anyone that there is no lamp here, he actually sees no lamp. So you can also, if you develop in yourself sufficiently strong willpower—a willpower that shuts out, entirely shuts out, all observation of the physical body—so you can, in spite of seeing into space, completely suggest away physical space. Then you see space not empty but filled by a kind of archetype. This archetype has practically the same form as the physical body. It is, however, not of the same nature through and through, but is fully organized. It is not only interlaced with fine veins and streams but it also has organs. This creation, this etheric body, produces man's essential life. Its color can only be compared with the color of the young peach blossom. It is no color that is contained in the sun spectrum; but it is something between a violet and a reddish tinge. This is then the second body.

The third body is the aura, which I have often described—that cloud-like formation of which I spoke last time when describing man's origin, in which man is as if in an egg-shaped cloud. In this is expressed all that lives in man as lust, passion, and feeling. Joyful self-sacrificing feelings express themselves in this aura in luminous streams of color. Feelings of hate, physical feelings, express themselves in dark color tones. Sharp, logical thoughts express themselves in sharply outlined forms. Illogical, confused thoughts come to expression in figures with blurred outline. Thus, we have in this aura an image of what is living in man's soul as feeling, passion, and impulse.

As man has now been described, so he was set down on the earth—from the hand of nature, so to speak—at the point of time that lies approximately at the beginning of the Atlantean race. Last time I described what is to be understood by “the Atlantean race.” At the moment when the fertilization by the eternal spirit had already taken place, man confronts us with the three members—body, soul, and spirit. Today this threefold nature of man has taken a somewhat different form, as since that time, since nature has released him, since he has become a being with self-consciousness, man has worked on his own being. This work on himself means the refining of his aura; it also means sending light into the aura out of this self-consciousness. A man who stands at a very low stage of development and has never worked on himself—let us say a savage—has the aura which nature has provided him. But all those within our civilization, our cultural world, have auras on which they themselves have helped to work, for in so far as man is a self-conscious being he works upon himself and this work comes into expression first through changing his aura. All that man has learned through nature, all that he has absorbed since he was able to speak and think self-consciously, is a recent acquisition in his aura brought about by his own activity.

If you put yourself back into the Lemurian age, in which man had already had warm blood flowing in his veins for some time, and in which, in the middle of this Lemurian age, his fertilization with the spirit had taken place, man then was not yet a being capable of clear thinking. All this occurred at the beginning of evolution when the spirit had just taken possession of the corporeality. At that time the aura was still completely a consequence of forces of nature. One could then perceive—as one still can with men at a very low stage of development—how at a certain place in the interior of the head (that is to say, a place that we have to seek in the interior of the head) there exists a smaller aura of a bluish color. This smaller aura is the outer auric expression of the self-consciousness. And the more a man has developed this self-consciousness through his thought and through his work, the more this smaller aura spreads itself over the other, so that often in a short time both become totally different. A man who lives in outer culture, a refined man of culture, works on his aura in the particular way that this culture impels him. Our ordinary knowledge, which they offer in our schools, our experiences that life brings us, are absorbed by us and they are perpetually transforming our aura. But this transformation must be continuous if a man wishes to enter into practical mysticism. Then he must make a special effort to work upon himself. For then he must not incorporate into his aura only what culture offers him, but must exercise an influence upon it in a definite, orderly manner. And this happens through so-called meditation. This meditation, this inner immersion, is the first stage which a student of initiation must undergo.

Now in what does this meditation take an interest? Just try to bring to mind and reflect upon the thoughts that you shelter from morning to night, and upon how these thoughts are influenced by the time and the place in which you live. See whether you can hinder your thoughts, and ask yourself whether you would have them if you did not happen by chance to be living in Berlin at the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, men did not think in the same way as men do today. If you consider how the world has changed in the course of the last century, and what kind of changes time has brought about, you will see that what passes through your soul from morning to night is dependent upon time and space. It is different when we give ourselves up to thoughts that have an eternal worth. Actually it is only certain abstract, scientific thoughts to which men have given themselves up, the highest thoughts of mathematics and geometry, that have an eternal worth. Twice two is four holds good at all times and in all places. It is the same with the geometrical truths that we accept. But leaving aside a certain fundamental stock of such truths, we may say that the average man has very few thoughts that are not dependent on time and space. What is thus dependent unites us with the world, and only exerts a trifling influence upon that essence which is in itself enduring.

Meditation means nothing other than surrendering oneself to thoughts which have eternal worth, in order to raise oneself up in a conscious way to what lies above both space and time. Such thoughts are contained in the great religious writings: the Vedanta, the Bhagavad Gita, the Gospel of John from the thirteenth chapter to the end, and the “Imitation of Christ,” by Thomas a Kempis. He who sinks himself with patience and perseverance so that he lives in such writings; he who deepens himself anew every day—perhaps working for weeks on one single sentence, thinking it through, feeling it through—will gain unlimited benefit. Just as each day one learns more nearly to know and love a child with all its individual characteristics, so one can daily draw into one's soul an eternal truth of the kind that flows from the great Initiates, or from inspired men. This has the effect of filling us with new life. Very significant also are the sayings in the “Light on the Path” that have been written down by Mabel Collins, under the instruction of higher powers. Actually in the first four sentences there is something that, when applied with patience in the appropriate way, is capable of so seizing upon man's aura that this aura is completely shot through with new light. One can see this light in the human aura shining and glistening. Bluish shades arise in the place of the reddish or of the reddishbrown shimmering shades of color, and, in the place of yellow, clear reddish ones arise, and so on. The whole coloring of the aura transforms itself under the influence of such eternal thoughts. The student cannot yet perceive this in the beginning, but he gradually begins to notice the deep influence that emanates from the greatly transformed aura.

If a man, in addition to these meditations, consciously and in a most scrupulous way practices certain virtues, certain achievements of the soul, then, within this aura, his sense-organs of the soul develop. We must have these if we want to see into the soul-world, just as we must have physical sense-organs to be able to see into the material world. As the outer senses were planted into the body by nature, so must man, in a regular way, implant the higher sense-organs of the soul into his aura. Meditation leads man to become ripe from within outwards, forming, developing, and interweaving the available capacities of the soul's senses.

But if we wish to cultivate these sense organs we must turn our attention to quite definite accomplishments of the soul. You see, man has a series of such organs in his organization. We call these sense organs the so-called Lotus flowers because the astral image, which man begins to evolve in his aura when he is developing himself in the way described, takes on a form that may be compared with that of a Lotus flower. It goes without saying that this is only a comparison, just as one can speak of the wings of the lung, which also bear only a resemblance to wings. The two-petalled Lotus flower is found in the middle of the head above the root of the nose, between the eyes. Near the larynx is the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower, while in the region of the heart there is the twelve-petalled one, and in the region of the pit of the stomach the one with ten petals. Still farther down are found the six-petalled and four-petalled Lotus flowers. Today I want to talk only about the Lotus flowers that have sixteen petals and twelve petals.

In Buddha's teachings you are given an account of the so-called eightfold path. Now ask yourselves once why Buddha offered precisely this eightfold path as particularly important in the attainment of the higher stages of man's development. This eightfold path is: right resolve, right thinking, right speech, right action, right living, right striving, right memory, right self-immersion, or meditation. A great Initiate such as Buddha does not speak out of a vaguely felt ideal, but out of knowledge of human nature. He knows what influence the practice of such exercises of the soul will have on the future development of the body. If we look at the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower in the average man of today we actually see very little. If I can so express it, it is in the process of flaring up again. In the far-distant past this Lotus flower was once present; it has gone backward in its development. Today it is appearing again, partly through man's cultural activity. In the future, however, this sixteen-petalled Lotus flower will come again to full development. It will glisten vividly with its sixteen spokes or petals, each petal appearing in a different shade of color; and finally, it will move from left to right. What everyone in the future will possess and experience is today being cultivated by those who seek in a conscious way their development in the school of initiation, in order to become leaders of mankind. Now eight of these sixteen petals have already been formed in the far-distant past; today eight have still to be developed, if the mystery pupil wishes to have the use of these sense-organs. These will be developed if man treads the eightfold path in a conscious way, observantly and clearly, if he consciously practices these eight soul activities given by Buddha, and if he arranges his whole life of soul so that he takes himself in hand, practicing these eight virtues as vigorously as he can only do when sustained by his meditation work, thus bringing the sixteen-petalled Lotus flower not only into bloom but also into movement, into actual perception.

I will now speak of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower in the region of the heart. Six petals of this flower were already developed in the far-distant past, and six must be developed by all men in the future, by present-day Initiates and their pupils. In all anthroposophical handbooks you can find reference to certain virtues in the forefront of those that should be acquired by anyone aspiring to the stage of Chela, or pupil. These six virtues which you find mentioned in every anthroposophical handbook concerned with man's development are: control of thought, control of action, tolerance, steadfastness, impartiality, and equilibrium, or what Angelus Silesius calls composure. These six virtues, which one must practice consciously and attentively in conjunction with meditation, bring to unfolding the six further petals of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And these are not gathered blindly in the anthroposophical textbooks, nor are they stamped by haphazard or individual inner feeling, but they are spoken out of the great Initiates' deepest knowledge. Initiates know that whoever really wishes to evolve to the higher super-sensible stages of development must bring about the unfolding of the twelve-petalled Lotus flower. And to this end he must today develop, through these six virtues, the six petals that were undeveloped in the past. Thus you see how the great Initiates essentially gave their directions for life out of their own deeper knowledge of the human being. I could extend these remarks to still other organs of knowledge and observation, but I only wish to give you a brief sketch of the process of initiation, and for that these indications should suffice.

When the pupil has progressed so far that he begins to form the astral sense-organs, when he has progressed so far that he is capable of perceiving not only the physical impressions in his surroundings but also what belongs to the soul—in other words, to see what is in the aura of man himself as well as what is in the aura of animals and plants—he then begins a completely new stage of instruction. No one can see in his environment that which has to do with his soul before his Lotus flowers revolve, just as one without eyes can see no color and no light. But when the barrier is pierced, when the pupil has gone beyond the preliminary stages of knowledge so that he has insight into the soul-world, then true “pupil-ship” first begins for him. This leads through four stages of knowledge. Now what happens in this moment, when man has passed beyond the first steps and has become a Chela? We have seen how all that we have just described related to the astral body. This is organized throughout by the human body. Whoever has undergone such a development has a totally different aura. When man out of his self-consciousness has illuminated his astral body, when he himself has become the luminous organization of his astral body, then we say that this pupil has illuminated his astral body with Manas. Manas is nothing other than an astral body dominated by self-consciousness. Manas and astral body are one and the same, but at different stages of development.

One must understand this if, in the practice of mysticism, one wishes to apply in a practical way what is given in anthroposophical handbooks as the seven principles. Everyone acquainted with the mystic path of development, everyone who knows something about initiation, will say that these have a theoretical value for study but for the practicing mystic they have value only if the relation existing between the lower and the higher principles is known. No practicing mystic recognizes more than four members: the physical body, in which work chemical and physical laws, the etheric body, the astral body, and finally the self- or Ego-consciousness, called at the present stage of development Kama-Manas, the self-conscious thinking principle. Manas is nothing other than that which has been worked into the body by the self-consciousness. The etheric body in its present form is deprived of any influence of the self-consciousness. We can indirectly influence our growth and nourishment, but not in the same way as we cause our wishes, our thoughts and ideas to proceed from self-consciousness. We cannot ourselves influence our nourishment, digestion, and growth. In men, these are without connection to the self-consciousness. The etheric body has to be brought under the influence of the astral body, the so-called aura. The self-consciousness of the astral body has to penetrate the etheric body—to be able to work out of itself upon the etheric body—as man, in the way already shown, works upon his astral body, his aura. Then, when man through meditation, through inner immersion, and through practicing activities of the soul, which I have described, has come so far that the astral body has organized itself, then the work extends to the etheric body, and the etheric body receives the inner word. Then man not only hears what lives in the world around him, but there resounds in him his etheric body, the inner meaning of things.

I have often said here before that the essentially spiritual in things is a resounding. I have drawn your attention to how the practicing mystic, when speaking in a correct sense, talks of a sound in the spiritual world in the same way as of a light in the astral world, or world of desire. Not for nothing does Goethe say, when guiding his Faust to heaven: “Die Sonne tönt nach alten Weise im Bruderspharen Wettgesang ...” (“The sun resounds in ancient fashion, contending with his brother spheres”). Nor are the words of Ariel empty when Faust is being escorted by the spirits into the spiritual world: “Tönend wird für Geistesohren schon der neue Tag geboren” (“Hear the new day being born, Spirit ears can hear its ringing”).

This inner sounding which, of course, is not at all a sound perceptible to the outer physical ear, this inner word through which things can express their own nature, is an experience that man has when he becomes able to influence his etheric body from his astral body. Then he has become a Chela, a real student of the great Initiates. Then he can be led further upon this path. A man who has thus ascended this step is called a homeless man, because fundamentally he has found the connection with a new world, because it rings to him out of the spiritual world, and because he thereby no longer has his home, so to speak, in this physical world. One must not misunderstand this. The Chela who has reached this stage is just as good a citizen and family man, just as good a friend, as he was before he had reached the stage of Chela. He need not be torn away from anything. What he has experienced is an evolution of the soul, thus acquiring a new home in a world lying behind this physical one.

What then has happened? The spiritual world sounds within man, and through this sounding of the spiritual world man overcomes an illusion, the illusion which takes in all men before they begin this stage of development. This is the illusion of the personal self. Man believes himself to be a personality separate from the rest of the world. Mere reflection could teach him that even physically he himself is not an independent being. Bear in mind that if the temperature in this room were 200 degrees higher than it now is, none of us would be able to survive as we now survive. As soon as the outer situation changes, the conditions for our physical existence are no longer there. We are simply a continuation of the external world, and are as separate beings absolutely inconceivable. This is still more the case in the world of the soul and of the spirit. Thus we see that man conceived of as a self is only an illusion—that he is a member of the universal divine spirituality. Here man overcomes the personal self. Here arises what in the mystic chorus of Faust Goethe has expressed in the words: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis.” (“All that is transitory is but a likeness.”) What we see is only a picture of an eternal being. We ourselves are only a picture of an eternal being. When we have surrendered our separate being—for we live a separate life through our etheric body—then we have overcome our outer, separate life, we have become part of universal life.

There arises in man something which we have called Buddhi. Buddhi is now practically reached as a stage in the development of the etheric body, that etheric body which no longer occasions a separate existence but enters into universal life. The man who has attained this has arrived at the second state of Chela-ship. Then all doubts and reservations fall away from his soul; he can no longer be superstitious any more than he can be a doubter. Then he has no more need to secure the truth in order to compare his ideas with the outer environment; then he lives in tone, in the word of things; then what it is sounds and resounds out of its being. And there is no more superstition, no more doubt. This is called the surrendering of the keys of knowledge to the Chela. When he has reached this stage, within it there sounds a word from the spiritual world. Then his own words no longer proclaim an echo of what is in this world, but his words are an echo of what stems from another world, which works into this world, but which cannot be perceived with our outer senses. These words are messengers of the Godhead.

When this stage is passed beyond, a new one comes. This is entered by man gaining influence over what is done directly by his physical body. Before this, his influence only extended to his etheric body, but now it extends to his physical body. His actions must set the physical body in motion. What man does is incorporated into what we call his karma. Man, however, does not work on this consciously; he does not know how each of his deeds causes a consequence. It is only now that he begins in a conscious way so to fulfill his actions in the physical world that he consciously works on his karma. Thus, through his physical actions, he wins influence over his karma. And now there is not only a sounding from the objects in his environment, but he has come far enough to be able to utter the name of all things. Man lives in our present stage of culture in such a way that he is only able to utter one single name. That is the name he gives himself: “I.” That is the only name man can really give to himself. (Whoever immerses himself in deeper knowledge can arrive at depths of which psychology does not dream.) It is the only instance in which you yourself can give the name in question. No one else can say “I” to you, only you yourself. To everyone else you must say “you,” and they in return must say the same. There is something in everyone to which only they themselves can apply the name “I.” On this account the Jewish mystery teachings speak also of an inexpressible name of God. That is something which is immediately a proclamation of God in man. It was forbidden to utter this name unworthily, sacrilegiously; hence the sacred awe, the significance and reality when the Jewish mystery teachers uttered this name. “I” is the one word that says something to you that can never approach you from the outer world. So now, as the average man alone names his “I,” so the Chela in the third stage gives to all things in the world names which he has received out of intuition. That means he has passed into the world “I.” He speaks out of the world “I” itself. He may call everything by its most profound name, whereas the man today standing at the average stage can only say “I” to himself. When the Chela has arrived at this stage, he is called a Swan. The Chela who has been able to raise himself to the point of naming all things is called Swan because he is the messenger of all things.

What lies beyond these three stages cannot be expressed in ordinary language. It demands knowledge of a special script only taught in mystery schools. The next stage is the stage of what is veiled. And beyond this lie the stages which belong to the great Initiates, those Initiates who at all times have given the great impulses to our culture. They were Chelas to begin with. To begin with they acquired the keys of knowledge. Next they were led further to the regions where were disclosed to them the universal and the names of things. Then they raised themselves to the stage of the universal, where they could have the deep experiences through which they were qualified to found the great religions of the world.

But it was not only the great religions that came forth from the great Initiates; it was every mighty impulse, all that is important in the world. Let us take just two examples that show the kind of influence that has been exercised on the world by the great Initiates who have gone through the schooling. Let us go back to everyday life at the time when the pupils of the initiation schools were guided under the leadership of Hermes. This guidance was in the end an ordinary, so-called esoteric, scientific instruction. I can sketch for you in only a few strokes what such instruction contained. It was shown how the Cosmic Spirit descended into the physical world, incarnated himself here, and how he began afresh a material existence, how he then reached the highest stage of man and celebrated his resurrection. Paracelsus in particular has expressed this very beautifully in the following words: “The individual beings we meet in the outer world are the single letters, and the word that is formed from them is MAN.” Outwardly we have all contributed human virtues or failings to this creation. Man, however, is the fusion of all this. It was taught as esoteric instruction in the Egyptian mystery schools, in all detail and with great richness of spirit, how there lives in man, as microcosm, the fusion of the rest of the macrocosm.

After this instruction came the Hermetic instruction. What I have said one can grasp with the senses and the understanding. But what is offered in the Hermetic instruction can only be grasped if one has attained the first stage of Chelaship. Then one can learn that special script which is neither arbitrary nor a matter of chance, but which gives us the great laws of the spiritual world. This script is not, like ours, an external picture arbitrarily fixed in single letters and parts; it is born out of the spiritual law of nature itself, because the man who becomes versed in this script is in possession of this natural law. All his conception of soul and astral space itself thus becomes regulated by law. What he conceives is conceived in the sense of the great signs of this script. He is capable of this when he has renounced his self. He unites himself with primal everlasting law. Now he has his Hermetic instruction behind him. Henceforward he himself can be admitted to the first stage of a still deeper initiation. Now, as the next stage, he should experience something in the astral world, the essential soul world, that has a significance reaching beyond the cosmic cycles. After he has acquired the capacity for the astral senses to be fully effective, so that they work right down into the etheric body, then for three days he is ushered into a deep mystery of the astral world. In that astral world he then experiences what last time I described to you as the primal origin of the Earth and man. He has before him and he experiences this descent of the spirit, this separation of Sun, Moon, and Earth, and the coming forth of man—this whole series of phenomena. And at the same time they form themselves into a picture before him. And then he emerges. After he has this great experience in the mystery school behind him, he goes among the people and relates what he has experienced in the soul and astral world. And what he relates runs approximately like this:

“There was once a divine couple who were united with the earth, Osiris and Isis. This divine pair were regents of everything that happens on earth. But Osiris was pursued by Typhon and cut into pieces, and Isis had to search for the corpse. She did not bring it home, but graves of Osiris were distributed among the various parts of the earth. So he was brought completely down into the earth and buried there. But a ray from the spiritual world fell upon Isis, fertilizing her through immaculate conception with the new Horns.”

This picture is nothing other than a mighty representation of what we have come to know as the exit of Sun and Moon, as the separation of Sun and Moon and as the dawning of mankind. Isis is the image of the Moon; Horns stands for earthly mankind, the earth itself. Before man was endowed with warm blood, before he was clothed with his physical body, he felt in mighty pictures what proceeded in the soul world. In the beginning of the Lemurian, of the Atlantean and the Arian evolutions, man was always prepared by the great Initiates to receive the mighty truths contained in such pictures. For this reason, the truths were not simply represented but were given in the pictures of Osiris and Isis. All the great religions we meet in antiquity are from what the great Initiates experienced in astral space. And the great Initiates emerged from these experiences and spoke to each particular people in the way they could understand, that is to say in pictures of what the Initiates themselves had experienced in the mystery schools. This was so in ancient times. Only through being in such a school of initiation could one rise to higher astral experience.

All this was changed with the coming of Christianity. It cut into evolution with great significance. And since the appearance of Christ it has been possible for man to be initiated as an initiate of nature, just as one speaks of a poet of nature. There have been Christian mystics who by grace have received initiation. The first who was called to carry Christianity into all the world under the influence of the words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,” was Paul. The appearance on the road to Damascus was an initiation outside the mysteries. I cannot go into further detail here.

It was the great Initiates who gave the impulse to all great movements and founding's of culture. From medieval times there comes a beautiful myth that may be said to show us this in a time when one did not yet demand materialistic foundations. The myth arose in Bavaria and has, therefore, assumed the garb of Catholicism. What then happened we will make clear as follows. There arose at that time in Europe the so-called civic culture—modern citizenship. The onward development of man, the progress of each soul to a higher stage, was understood by the mystic as the advancing of the soul, of the womanly element in man. The mystic sees in the soul something womanly that was fertilized by the lower sense impressions of nature and by the eternal truths. In every historical process the mystic sees such a process of fertilization. For those who see more deeply into man's path of development, for those who see the spiritual forces behind physical appearances, the great and deep impulses for the progress of mankind are given by the great Initiates. Thus the man with a medieval world outlook ascribed to the great Initiates the raising up of the soul to higher stages during the new period of culture that was brought about by means of cities. This city-development was attained by souls making a sudden move forward in history. And it was an Initiate who brought about this move. All mighty impulses were ascribed to the great lodge of Initiates surrounding the Holy Grail. From there came the great Initiates who are not visible to ordinary men. And the Initiate who at that time provided the civic culture with its impulse was called, in the Middle Ages, Lohengrin. It is he who was the missionary of the Holy Grail, of the great lodge; and Elsa of Brabant stands for the soul of the city, the womanly element that was to be fructified through the great Initiate. The mediator is the swan. Lohengrin was brought by the swan into this physical world. The Initiate must not be asked his name. He belongs to a higher world. The Chela, the Swan, has been the mediator of this influence.

I have merely been able to indicate how this great event has again been symbolized for the people in a myth. It is in this way that the great Initiates have worked and have put into their teachings what they have to make known. And in this way worked all those who have founded man's early culture—Hermes in Egypt, Krishna in India, Zarathustra in Persia, Moses among the Jewish people. Orpheus continued the work—then Pythagoras, and finally the Initiate of all Initiates, Jesus, who bore within Him the Christ.

Here only the greatest of Initiates are mentioned. We have tried in these descriptions to characterize their connection with the world. What has been described here will still remain remote to many people's thoughts. But those who have become aware of something of the higher worlds in their own souls have always raised their eyes not only to the spiritual world but also to the leaders of mankind. It was only from this standpoint that they have been able to speak in as inspired a way as Goethe. But you find among others, too, something of the divine spark leading towards the point to which spiritual science should again bring us. You find it in the case of a German, a young, intelligent German poet and thinker, whose life has all the appearance of a blessed memory of some former existence as a great Initiate. Those who read Novalis will notice something of the breath that guides us into the higher world. There is something in him that also contains the magic word, though not expressed as explicitly as usual. Thus he has written the beautiful words about the relation of our planet to mankind that convey as much to the lowly and undeveloped as they do to the Initiate:

“Mankind is the sense of our earth-planet, mankind is the nerve that binds the earth-planet with the higher worlds; mankind is the eye through which this earth-planet lifts its gaze to the heavenly Kingdoms of the Cosmos.”

A basic quality of anthroposophy is the pursuit for ideas, for mental pictures, for concepts of the world that are rooted in reality in a much deeper sense than the concepts, mental pictures and ideas of the scientific worldview are. Indeed, this could seem very weird at first, because many people believe that these scientific mental pictures are rooted very deeply in reality.

However, even if one disregards what I have brought forward in the three talks I held here this year and only looks at that which reasonable naturalists have brought forward concerning what natural sciences have to say about the being of the events of nature, one will get the insight that also such natural scientists are clear to themselves that with the usual scientific ideas one cannot penetrate into the being of reality. How much just natural scientists have spoken about the limits of the scientific knowledge! I have brought forward the typical fact in the first talk that one of the most significant disciples of Haeckel, Oscar Hertwig (1849-1922), published a basic book during these years where he shows that one cannot come close anyhow to the being of the life phenomena just with the scientific concepts, which celebrated the greatest triumphs in the second half of the nineteenth century.

As long as it concerns penetrating only into the being of nature, these limitations of the scientific images do not at all appear. Nevertheless, they appear if the human being wants to apply the soul forces that he uses to scientific cognition also to the moral-social life. What is maybe a mere error or a mere one-sidedness in natural sciences—if it is taken as a basis of the moral-social life—becomes injurious, causes minor or major disasters. One of the biggest disasters is that, in which we live during these years.

As peculiar as it will appear to somebody: someone who is able to grasp the things in their deeper coherence gets clear about that what happens now as such tragic events is associated with the inadequate moral-social ideas which prepared themselves since centuries and which showed to advantage in particular in the nineteenth century. The mere science, the mere knowledge, the mere theory corrects in painless way if inadequate concepts are inserted in it. Reality corrects at pains and disasters if actions are inserted in it, which arise from inadequate knowledge and penetrating reality.

Now we will get to apparently remote mental pictures if we want to apply the anthroposophic spiritual science to the moral-social life, remote only because they still appear very strange to the present habitual ways of thinking because of the prejudices with which one is coming up to meet them. I must take the starting point from calling attention to the fact that the consideration of the human being has become relatively one-sided just under the influence of the modern world view, so that, actually, also far-sighted naturalists attempt to penetrate not only into the pure physical side of the human being but into his whole nature.

Since only if his whole nature is considered, it can become reality in the social-moral life, can any influencing control work salutarily on the social-moral life.

It could now seem weird if anybody says, for the whole consideration of the human life it is necessary that one not only considers how the human being is active in the wake day life but that one has also to regard the other side of life, the dream life, to take the whole human being into account.

Reasonable naturalists even attempt today to come close to this dream life, while they want to consider the subconscious. However, already in case of the consideration of dreams it becomes obvious that such attempts work with inadequate cognitive means because they want to refrain from anthroposophy.

What spiritual science can show with its means leads us to the cognition that this sleep-dream life flows into the whole life of the human being much more intensely than one believes in the one-sided scientific consideration. I have to foreground a sentence which seems paradoxical even today to most people which will been corroborated, however, more and more if one goes over from abstractions to realistic concepts.

I could give a comparative psychology of the sleep of plants, of animals, of the human beings, it would turn out that it is more difficult to spiritual science than to the one-sided scientific consideration because it cannot take simple concepts as starting point and cannot encompass the whole world with them. As death of the plants, animals, and human beings is something else to the spiritual researcher, the sleep, the dream life of animals and that of human beings is different to spiritual science.

Spiritual science finds out for itself with its means that we can have our ego-consciousness only because we experience the sleep and the wake consciousness alternating in such a way as we experience the sleep as human beings. It is a trivial view that the human being must sleep because he is tired. However, already the consideration of a pensioner who visits a talk or a concert and who is most certainly not tired, but falls asleep after the first five minutes, proves adequately by experience that the theory of tiredness is most certainly not true. Only that will understand sleep who understands it as an internal rhythm as it must penetrate life and as we got to know such a life rhythm yesterday as one of the members which correspond as bodily tools to the soul being.

The human being has to spend his life as it were,—as well as the single tone can never be music but only in the interaction with other tones the impression of a melody or harmony can originate—in such a way that life condition interacts with life condition and an interaction takes place in time. Rhythmical events must form the basis of the soul life. Rhythmical events are also that which in the alternating conditions of sleeping, dreaming, and waking takes place fact.

One normally believes to understand this sleeping and dreaming condition if one considers it in such a way as it presents itself to the usual observation. However, just if one considers it in such a way, one will never get a real view of the nature of dream or sleep. Only if one can envisage the everlasting essence of the human being, one will also be able to recognise that—if the human being withdraws from the wake day life if he falls asleep and dreams—that then in him that is even more active which belongs to his everlasting being, than while awake. Save that the human being, as he is in the present world period, has developed little of this everlasting. If this everlasting does not have the basis of the bodily life as in the wake day life, if this everlasting is on its own as in sleep, that appears in this everlasting which points, indeed, to conditions that are different from those which proceed between birth and death, but points to them in such a way that the immediate perception, the immediate consideration cannot prove its nature at all.

Hence, spiritual science shows that the nature of dream, for example, is misunderstood in manifold way. One misunderstands it; one interprets dreams in the old way superstitiously if one considers the contents of a dream and is of the opinion that the dream may be prophetic. However, one also misunderstands the nature of the dream if one as an enlightened person smiles only at those who regarded something as prophetic in a dream.

Spiritual science shows that it is true that something prophetic is in the dream. In the dream that being works in us which is associated with our future in such a way that it still encloses that in us what we carry through the gate of death. The forces of our everlasting soul work prophetically in the dreams. The pictures of the dreams are memories of the past. One may say, the nature of the dream is falsified because the human being is not able to work really with that what works in the dream as his being. He dresses what he cannot realise in the pictures, which his body, certain sensory reminiscences, certain memories give him from the past life.

All that falsifies the dream and is a mask of the dream. As well as it is superstitious to think of the pictures, which appear in the dream, a healthy kernel is contained in the superstition that the dream has something prophetic. However, this prophetic cannot appear in the usual observation of the dream. The dream is just something exceptionally significant, considered spiritual-scientifically.

However, the important is something else; it is that one is of the trivial opinion that the human being lives and dreams at a certain time and at another time he is awake, fully awake. Spiritual science shows that this is a wrong opinion. The state of dreaming, of sleeping does not stop if we awake; these states continue into our wake day life; the wake day life drowns them only. This wake day life, the imagining, is as it were a bright light that outshines what remains subconscious. However, while we feel our wake day consciousness flowing in our soul, a continual dream life and sleep life penetrating the whole awake life flows subconsciously in us. We dream if we add feelings, affects, or passions to the clear mental pictures. I have pointed out in the first talk that that which spiritual science searches as coherent, was always found by single outstanding persons like with flashes and I have pointed to the great aesthetician and philosopher Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807-1887). When he wrote his article about Volkelt's book The Dream Fantasies, he pointed out that nobody who does not understand the emotions, passions, and affects understands the nature of dream. However, one called Vischer a spiritist because of this assertion. Thus, we keep on dreaming in the usual life. Save that the pictures of the dream if we have awoken do no longer appear but that what proceeds now as feelings, affects and passions appears with the same degree of reality in us as the dream does.

In the feelings, affects, and passions lives also what lives in the imagining. Nevertheless, it lives in it in such a way as the mental pictures live in the dream. However, if we develop a feeling, a passion, we do not become aware of the pictures that form the basis as they form the basis of the dreams, but we become dreamily aware of the feeling, of the passion.

Similarly, the sleep in the wake consciousness forms the basis of the will. Why were there discussions repeatedly in the course of the spiritual human development about the nature of the will, about the free will? Why have the philosophers never agreed how actually the will lives in the human being, whether as a free or as a not free one? Because the usual wake day consciousness oversleeps that which happens in the will.

Although our mental pictures are clear during the wake day consciousness, we oversleep the real process of willing. In this will, something deepest of the human being lives, but one is not immediately aware of it.

Spiritual science now shows that it sees with the beholding consciousness into the supersensible world. With the levels of Imaginative and Inspired knowledge, it penetrates into that world which exists for the usual consciousness only in the chaotic dream world. To the human being with the usual consciousness that only emerges as distorted dreams from the world of the everlasting which works beneath the outer sense-perceptible. With the Imaginative knowledge, with the Inspired knowledge spiritual science fetches the true figure of that which lives and weaves in these undergrounds. With the Intuitive knowledge it fetches what one oversleeps otherwise, what the darkness of the consciousness covers completely.

However, you learn from it that in the human life not only that prevails what one can overview with the usual wake consciousness, but that in the human life—because dream and sleep also penetrate the wake day life—that prevails what is real, what for the usual wake consciousness is not accessible what one can only grasp with the beholding consciousness as concepts, as mental pictures. Hence, let us look at the social human life as it should be enclosed with the social, moral, political concepts and we discover that something lives in the human life that is only dreamt that is even overslept.

This is the secret of the social life and of the historical life; this is the secret of the moral-social existence. With the concepts, which come up from the habitual ways of scientific thinking and which belong completely only to the usual wake consciousness, one cannot grasp history, with these mental pictures one cannot grasp the moral-social life.

Yesterday I have pointed to the fact that spiritual science should bring back something to the human being that he has lost. For centuries, for millennia there were instinctive impulses the awareness of which spiritual science has to generate. It is interesting to envisage the intervention of modern natural sciences from this viewpoint of the human development. If one asks for these modern natural sciences and their significance only in such a way as one often does today, one gets to a completely wrong concept. One always assumes that these natural sciences have originated in such a way because just the concepts that they give correspond to reality. Someone who has insight in the matters knows that the following view is true: anybody who stands firmly on scientific ground must be a sceptic at the same time because he knows that these scientific concepts correspond to truth only superficially. These scientific concepts did not appear in the human evolution because the human being was silly and childish for millennia, as many people believe, but they have originated for a quite different reason.

If one looks back in time where one recognised nature and spirit more instinctively, the human being had concepts on one side that he applied to nature in such a way that he spoke of events of nature, of the being of nature, as if these were also something mental; and if he spoke of his soul, materialist mental pictures interacted.

Even in our words “spirit” and “soul” are still materialist mental pictures if we know these concepts historically to a T. The human being has still grown together with nature so that he did not distinguish his mental exactly from nature. The recent historical development means that the human being has gone adrift from the natural existence. Just, therefore, he has formed such concepts of nature as they show the contents of the modern scientific thinking that do no longer contain anything mental. To attain such a developmental level, the human being has developed these scientific concepts for his sake. Not because this is the only saving truth to which one got finally, but because the human being could get to a certain level of freedom, of self-determination only because he has got free from nature and has formed concepts which should enclose nature and which can give the soul nothing.

If the human being has such concepts of nature, one has to draw his attention all the more to own forces of his inside to which we have pointed yesterday. Then his self-consciousness can only awake in right way. We live in a transitional condition. Natural sciences will generate a spiritualistic conception of the soul life.

The scientific materialism has the big merit, because it divests nature of any mental to lead the human being to a high level of self-reflection.

If one looks at the development of modern natural sciences in such a way, they seem to be created for an “education of the human race” in the sense of Lessing. Then the scientific concepts have been developed so that the human being has no longer to ensoul nature mystically, as in former times, but that he gets free from any mental in the view of nature, but that he has to fetch that from the depths of his being which spiritualises this mental. Then one may regard the entitled materialism of natural sciences as something great.

One only defames anthroposophy if one says that it is anyhow in conflict with natural sciences. On the contrary, it points to the big, significant role that the scientific development has in the educational process of the human race. However, what appears as scientific mental pictures is just not adapted to grasp the moral-social life, it is not adapted to form concepts, mental pictures, or ideas from which actions can arise in the moral-social life. That which the human being overviews as nature, he overviews it in the wake consciousness.

Not such impulses form the basis of the moral-social life, of the historical experience as the wake day consciousness has them for seizing nature, but such ideal impulses form the basis of it as they appear, otherwise, only in the dreams.

Thus, spiritual science gets to the weird result that the historical life, the social life of humanity cannot be encompassed by a soul being which has built up itself with natural sciences and wants to write history after the pattern of natural sciences, wants to consider sociology after the pattern of natural sciences. Which inadequate concepts has one attempted to understand the social life with the cognitive means of natural sciences!

One needs only to remember the English philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) who wanted to enclose anything actual in which the human being lives, also the sociological configuration of humanity. He wanted to apply the concepts of embryology to the social life, to the configuration of the moral-social life: The embryo develops in such a way that one has to distinguish in its early state the ectoderm from which the nervous system evolves, the endoderm from which other subordinate organs evolve, and the mesoderm. From these three parts, the human embryo develops gradually. In the moral-social development, Spencer also distinguishes three impulses. He says, as in the natural development ectoderm, mesoderm, and endoderm exist, three parts exist in the social becoming of the human being. He wants to show: as the embryo has the ectoderm, the human being develops what is militarily and politically strong from the social ectoderm; that what works and practises agriculture from the endoderm; and the commercial class from the social mesoderm. There one has a parallelism between the ranks of the social-moral life and the layers of the embryo. It forms the basis of this view that because from the ectoderm the nervous system develops also from that what corresponds to the ectoderm in the social-moral life the most valuable must develop in the state. Hence, Spencer's worldview depends on considering the actually valuable class as the military one. In it the political higher life should develop. As the nervous life originates from the ectoderm, the political, the leading class should originate from the military. I do not keep characterising this strange view of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, I only want to point to it. I could still bring in many examples how one has tried to apply scientific mental pictures to the social life and to understand it with them.

However, the peculiar is that the old instinctive cognition that enclosed mind and body, matter and spirit at the same time was a not fully conscious cognition that bit by bit changed via the scientific purely external cognition of the dead into the higher levels of cognition to which spiritual science points today: to the Imaginative cognition of the beholding consciousness, to the Inspired cognition, to the Intuitive cognition. Scientific knowledge is only an intermediate stage between the instinctive cognition and the higher cognition that I have characterised in my books The Riddle of Man and The Riddles of the Soul. The beholding consciousness just disintegrates into the Imaginative consciousness that is the lowest level, the Inspired consciousness, a higher level, and the Intuitive consciousness, the highest level. It is typical only that for the consideration of the outer world the instinctive old cognition had to change into the scientific mental pictures. After this transition the other ways of spiritual knowledge will come. The social-moral life cannot have this transition. One has attempted it; but it cannot have it.

While skipping the scientific way of thinking the instinctive cognition of social-political ideas has directly to change into the conscious cognition of the same world, which is dreamt in the history and the social life of humanity. That which humanity dreams in history and in the social life can be only consciously recognised with the Imaginative, Inspired, and Intuitive consciousness. In this area is no transition from the instinctive consciousness via the scientific one to the Imaginative consciousness. It must become catastrophic if one wants to do this transition if one wants to insert such concepts that are formed after the pattern of scientific concepts into the social order. This happened in particular in the nineteenth century up to now. Scientific mental pictures work catastrophically if they transition into actions.

The transition from the old instinctive experience that used myths to the Imaginative cognition must be direct.

Thus somebody may ask mockingly: hence, one is not allowed to believe that one can master the social, moral life with the scientifically oriented concepts, but one can penetrate this social-moral life only salutarily if one realises that one has to deepen the concepts spiritual-scientifically?

Somebody may mock; he may close his eyes to the big signs of our disastrous time. However, it is in such a way. As well as already some people begin to take notice of spiritual science, which has a say if it concerns the configuration of reality, there will be more and more people who realise that one has to turn to spiritual science if one needs lively concepts for the moral-social existence. That is why, spiritual science has not appeared in our time from arbitrary agitation in favour of single people but because of deeper historical necessities.

We do not need to point to less significant personalities if we want to envisage that which we consider here. History as the science of the moral-social life is not yet very old. One believes that it is an old science. In reality it is, as well as it is practised today, hardly hundred years old. Everybody can convince himself of it. When history appeared, Schiller (Friedrich S., 1759-1805, German poet and writer) wanted to be one of the first teachers of history. Perhaps it may be good just to bring in a great personality as an example of that what is so often said that one can learn from history for the moral-social life of the human beings. How often does one hear from people, where every judgement is demanded about this and that what one has to feel under the influence of the tragic events: history teaches this, history teaches that.

Well, let us consider these teachings of history with one of the greatest: when Schiller started his professorship in Jena in 1789, he characterised a teaching of history that had arisen to him in the following way. Schiller said in his famous inaugural speech, it was the prelude of his historical lectures: “The community of European states seems to have changed into a big family. Their members may be hostile to each other, but do no longer tear each other to pieces, I hope.”

This is the lesson that even such a great man like Schiller drew from history! One has to consider that he spoke the words that should be prophetic in 1789!

How have the European peoples tortured themselves shortly after, and what does happen today again in this Europe! What a prophet was this historian, this genius Schiller?

Why is this that way? One could bring in many examples of the fact that a conception of history of such kind, as it is usual even today, gives nothing for life. Plainly and simply because one works in such a conception of history with mental pictures which are taken from the outer reality, the object of natural sciences. These concepts are not suitable to enclose history and the moral-social effectiveness what the human beings, as well as they are in life, only dream.

History is only dreamt. If we want to have concepts that can really intervene in history, in the moral-social life, they have to be scientifically clear, but the essentials should be that they grasp that clearly which appears from the usual consciousness only in the dreams of history and of the moral-social life.

I know that it is a paradoxical truth even today that people do not experience the historical development so that this experience works in concepts of the wake day life. Nevertheless, one has to acknowledge that truth. Then one will recognise of which kind the concepts, the mental pictures, the ideas and ideals must be which can master this life.

The art historian Herman Grimm (1828-1901) said more often to me in conversations, if one wants to have a historical consideration that really encloses the historical, then one cannot work with such concepts as the naturalist applies them, then one has to understand history with the creative imagination of the people. He said this because he still had no concepts of Imaginative cognition.—One has to take his starting point from that what remains in the subconscious as it were; one has to bring up this only into consciousness, but into a consciousness that is different from the usual one. A notion of that what is true in this area formed the basis of Grimm's intuition.

That is why someone is very much wrong who believes to be able to encompass history or the social-political life with the concepts that developed with the scientific thinking. Since someone who figures the things out knows, for example, that the most sure means to ruin a community in relatively short time is a parliament, in which you put nothing but theorists, professors who think scientifically. Let it legislate, and then you will cause the decline of the community with such parliament. Since they will put nothing but concepts, nothing but ideas into reality that can have no reality in the historical, in the social-moral life, but must destroy this social-moral life.

Hence, the remark of Herman Grimm is very fine when he said, it is strange that the excellent historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) describing the first Christian centuries did not describe the advancing, growing Christian life but that he could only describe the decline of the old life with his concepts.—One cannot encompass the growing life with mental pictures of the wake day life but with mental pictures only which originate from the dreaming consciousness.

In recent time, these things have become particularly important because just in the nineteenth century the scientific approach tried to start its campaign of conquest also in the historical, in the social-ethical life. Only few people braced themselves against it. In particular, socialism, which wanted to be scientific, supported the emergence of this thinking most consciously.

Socialism tried to put the social-moral ideas completely into the waters of scientific consideration. Just in the recent time this extreme way appeared to consider the social-moral life only from the viewpoint of material interests, class conflicts, impulses of surplus value et cetera as it happened with Marxism.

Spiritual science does not take the view that one has to deal with either—or everywhere, but that concepts show one-sidedness as a rule. I have often enough used the comparison: if the spiritual researcher advances to concepts, so that he regards them as images of the real from different sides like four photographs of a tree from four sides, one can describe the world from a pantheistic, theistic, monotheistic, or polytheistic viewpoint.

One realises the true meaning of these things only if one looks at them as one-sided images of reality that can never enter into abstractions, but only into the living oneness with itself. Hence, you must not understand what I want to say now in such a way, as if I wanted to condemn everything lock, stock and barrel that has come up under the influence of the socialist thinking. I would not dream of that. Since this view has brought much valuable things, and it has fought its way through hard enough.

Those who are the significant official bearers of the cultural life who have to keep watch that right concepts and images originate have simply rejected for decades what has come from this side until not only the scanty concepts of the older academic socialism, but the much more voluminous concepts of modern socialism have become socially acceptable.

Such things are beyond the spiritual-scientific consideration that does not advocate anything which wants only to face up objectively to the facts. However, one has to say that this approach of the recent socialism, in particular the materialist historical view, is scientifically oriented. What are they in truth?

To the spiritual researcher is that which, for example, Karl Marx (1818-1883) has shown with urgent logic an expression of that what humanity has dreamt in social-moral impulses during four centuries up to the middle of the nineteenth century. Karl Marx described the impulses of the last three to four centuries. However, these impulses did not live in the wake day images, but humanity dreamt in its impulses, in its social, moral ideas. When actually the dream was already over when actually already a social-moral order had appeared as it was in the sense of the dreams of the last four centuries, Karl Marx wrote his books about what had already become a corpse from which one should awake. That what Karl Marx wanted to put as a program, lived in the time that was before, actually, even before he was there with his thoughts. However, reality demands that now—skipping the scientific way of thinking—the social-moral ideas are filled with the higher supersensible consciousness.

Once one could grasp this instinctively. Even that about which Karl Marx wrote was still dreamt instinctively. The new time can no longer venture to dream only to experience the social-moral ideas only instinctively; it must be able to immerse them into the Imaginative cognition.

One can say of any time if one wants to be trivial that it is a “transition period.” However, it concerns what transitions. In our time, the old instinctive cognition transitions into the conscious cognition.

In the area of the view of nature, our time has entered into the intermediate stage of natural sciences.

In the social it has to find the immediate transition from the instinctive social-political feeling of the old time as it existed, for example, in the Roman Law, it has to find the transition to the creative also where the moral-social ideas intervene immediately: in the area of education. With pure knowledge concepts, one can be neither a pedagogue nor a politician, nor anybody who participates in the creation of the social life at this or that place. A time will come where one will smile at the economics, at the sociopolitical theories as one smiles today if any theorist who is called an aesthetician writes how a right opera or symphony must be, a theorist who cannot compose who can only consider a symphony or an opera aesthetic-academically who cannot create out of Imagination. One would laugh if he put that as classic example.

As weird as it sounds even today: one will consider this way what appears as economics from mere concepts of the wake day consciousness, which turned out to be so inadequate. One will smile at it as an error that was comprehensible in the scientific age. However, one will overcome it if the consideration of the social-moral life is associated livingly with the supersensible reality that brings the supersensible into the legal life, into the spiritual life, which is penetrated by social love.

One can even give in detail that someone who wants to participate in the state-social design of a community can obtain a picture of a scientific consideration only which has something artistic which itself is artistic-creative. Not aestheticians, but composers have to create operas and symphonies. Not scientifically thinking theorists can find social concepts, but those who are penetrated with concepts that are out of this living that emerges, otherwise, only in the dream impulses, in the feelings, in the affects, and passions, and in the will itself.

The social design of any community can only arise from the Imaginative knowledge. That life which penetrates the social communities, that dream life, which flows from the human being in the love of a human being to his fellow man, where love becomes duty, can experience its outer configuration only in the community under the influence of Inspired concepts of the beholding consciousness.

The legal life is still the echo of old legal concepts even today and remains so dark to the scientific view about which one messes while one looks for all possible and impossible scientific psychological concepts of the recent time,. It will be able to become creative again if it is penetrated with Intuitive knowledge.

Really, it does not concern a few anthroposophic dreamers but human beings who should become able to put themselves powerfully into life. It does not concern the foundation of single colonies of a few people who want to have a good time or to be vegetarians somewhere in a mountain area and lark about there, but this is why it concerns understanding the signs of time knowing what is really historically inevitable in the developmental course of humanity. Anthroposophy is not the hobby of single groups; anthroposophy is something that the spirit of our time demands.

Many educational rules will give way to the knowledge that one can find spiritual-scientifically from nature, from the being of the human being. The future pedagogues will have no preconceived rules. However, an understanding changing into immediate, recognising love with the growing human being will penetrate the pedagogue. He will learn things quite different from theoretical education; he will learn to stand in the full life. Hence, he will also cope with any individual being. One will understand how freedom and necessity penetrate each other in life.

One understands that the moral-social life, considered scientifically, would be in such a way, as if I had three objects here. I light up the first object; then I light up the second object, the first one gets dark; now I let the second object getting dark and light up the third one. I pursue this. While I pursue this and say, the first object was lighted up, that is the cause of the light of the second one; the second one is the cause of the light of the third one. Such an illusion, as if the first body which is lighted up from the outside worked as a cause of the illumination of the second one and the second as a cause of the illumination of the third. Such an illusion forms the basis of that historical approach which looks at the consecutive facts always as effects of the preceding facts. Thus, there is no causal coherence in the consecutive historical events as in nature. However, there is the fact that a common light illuminates the consecutive facts. One has to penetrate into this light with higher, supersensible knowledge.

What is good in natural sciences: to seize the things in detail, does not apply to spiritual. However, it does also not apply to the social-political life. To spiritual science, a description of the social-political life in detail would be as if a chess player just wanted to consider which moves he wants to do. He cannot carry out them, because this depends on the moves of the opponent. Nevertheless, one can still be a good chess player if he masters the rules of chess. One can stand his ground as a chess player. The same holds true if one wants to master life. Only in the realms of nature are defined laws. If one faces life, one has to have a skill that copes with this life. Then one must be always ready that anything of the wealth of life faces you as the opponent of chess faces the player.

Any child is like an opponent of chess to the teacher. Education will accept forms by which it makes the human being capable of life, able to penetrate into the nature of any single human being.

However, such a life in the social-political can arise only from a real cognition of that what is contained in the human lives and human beings what is dreamt there as history what is dreamt as social-political impulses. How much does one miss in this direction even today!

In spiritual science one has started studying since many years what is the nature of the Western European peoples, of the Central European peoples, of the East European peoples, which impulses really exist, how the different soul expressions are distributed geographically and historically, which impulses really exist. Only by the knowledge of the available impulses that Imagination, that Inspiration can originate which can enjoy life in the moral-social ideas, as they become prominent in the social life, in the legal life. I would like to point to a very promising start just here in Switzerland. Your fellow-countryman Roman Boos (1889-1952) has published a book about The Over-all Work Contract under Swiss Law, a book that grasps the nature of certain institutions and concepts available in the legal life for the first time.

However, one has done various attempts in the recent time to recognise from the mental-social being how the laws, how the impulses gradually take place. Thus, an American has written a very interesting book in which he wants to show that the peoples split up into two groups: One group are the ambitious, the progressive peoples, the others are the descending peoples. The American, Brooks Adams (Peter Chardon B. A., 1848-1927) describes the soul life of the ascending peoples in the following way: it arises from a basic soul quality, from the imaginative-warlike; so that the peoples who have future are gifted with Imaginative fantasy life and with warlike impulses. That is not my opinion but that of the American Brooks Adams. Those peoples who become decadent are the peoples with industry and science.

This is one-sided, of course. However, even these one-sided considerations show that one has already done the attempt to master life with really moral-social ideas. However, one cannot survey life with the concepts that are formed only after the pattern of natural sciences. One can survey it only if one penetrates into the supersensible depths of life. One can do this only with the beholding consciousness.

I could only give scanty indications. In single talks, I can only give suggestions, which is why one can easily disprove spiritual science. However, today spiritual science is not so happy to have countless chairs at disposal as the other sciences have. This will also come. Spiritual science can only give suggestions also concerning the social-moral ideas.

If one surveys everything at last that I have brought forward sketchily today, I would let culminate it, while I show that the community must develop under the influence of vivid moral-social ideas also in such a way that the human being can develop as a whole in this community. However, to his whole being belongs what I have explained yesterday: the independent, everlasting being about which I have said yesterday that in it the idea of freedom lives.

The highest social-moral idea is the idea of freedom. No community will realise it in itself, which does not take its starting point from supersensible ideas. Since the supersensible can only prosper where the creation of the community originates from supersensible impulses, sensations, concepts, mental pictures. The mental pictures of the usual day consciousness do not work in that life in which the social-moral ideas work. If the human being wants to work in this life, he must work into this moral-social life with another member of his being.

One may say that the great persons of the past already realised with single light flashes what it concerned. As I have pointed to Goethe in another way at the end of the last talk I would like to point again to him today at the end. He did not yet have spiritual science. However, if he looked at the historical life and wanted to figure out what this social-moral life is, which embodies itself in history, he found strange words saying, the best we can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites.

How wonderful is such remark! I said that Friedrich Theodor Vischer stated that one could not understand the emotional life if one did not understand the dream.—Goethe looks at the history of humanity, at the historical dream. He knows instinctively, intuitively that humanity is dreaming, while it lives history that the historical impulses do not enjoy life in the mental pictures but in that which enjoys life in the dream sphere of the historical experience. That is why, the best we have from history is not that “fable convenue” which you read in the history books and which we regard usually as history which gives, however, nothing but the corpse of that which develops as the stream of humanity in the social-political development.

Goethe knows: not that which you read in the history books is that which the human being has as best from history, but that which can be associated with this dream of history, as a creative quality: enthusiasm. With it, he pronounced a big truth from one side apprehensively, which must work reforming if humanity wants to overcome the catastrophic events of the present.

However, this truth can be complemented on the other side, while one points out that one cannot intervene with sophisticated concepts after the pattern of scientific mental pictures anyhow fruitfully in the social-moral life, but with concepts which are connected with life much more intimately, as the anthroposophically oriented spiritual science intends them.

One needs something stronger than the not creative ideas in history: one needs enthusiasm. Everything that should cause that the social-moral life can develop must arise from enthusiasm. However, from a right enthusiasm which originates if one can recognise by the connection of the single human being with the supersensible human by Imagination, by Inspiration, and by Intuition.

As Goethe could say on one side that the best we have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites, the spiritual researcher would like to add that anthroposophy attempts to penetrate into the supersensible; it tries to recognise the everlasting, the immortal, and the elements of freedom in the human life. However, the best it wants to give humanity will be that it gives enthusiasm that can develop the moral-social life.

In this direction, I wanted to give some indications and suggestions with this last talk to show that spiritual science does not want to be only a theory, but a force that co-operates from the innermost impulses of life with the energetic human life that we need in this catastrophic time.

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.

[ 1 ] When I see how a billiard ball, when struck, communicates its motion to another ball, I remain entirely without influence on the course of this event which I observe. The direction and velocity of the second ball is determined by the direction and velocity of the first. As long as I do no more than observe, I cannot say anything about the motion of the second ball until it actually moves. The situation alters if I begin to reflect on the content of my observation. The purpose of my reflection is to form concepts of the event. I bring the concept of an elastic ball into connection with certain other concepts of mechanics, and take into consideration the special circumstances prevailing in this particular instance. In other words, to the action taking place without my doing, I try to add a second action which unfolds in the conceptual sphere. The latter is dependent on me. This is shown by the fact that I could rest content with the observation and forgo all search for concepts if I had no need of them. If, however, this need is present, then I am not satisfied until I have brought the concepts ball, elasticity, motion, impact, velocity, etc., into a certain connection, to which the observed process is related in a definite way. As certain as it is that the event takes place independently of me, so certain is it also that the conceptual process cannot take place without my doing it.

[ 2 ] We shall consider later whether this activity of mine is really a product of my own independent being or whether the modern physiologists are right who say that we cannot think as we will, but that we must think exactly as the thoughts and thought-connections present in our consciousness determine.¹⁷ For the time being we wish merely to establish the fact that we constantly feel compelled to seek for concepts and connections of concepts standing in a certain relation to objects and events given independently of us. Whether this activity is really ours, or whether we accomplish it according to an unalterable necessity, we shall leave aside for the moment. That at first sight it appears to be our activity is beyond doubt. We know with absolute certainty that we are not given the concepts together with the objects. That I myself am the doer may be illusion, but to immediate observation this certainly appears to be the case. The question here is: What do we gain by finding a conceptual counterpart to an event?

[ 3 ] There is a profound difference between the ways in which, for me, the parts of an event are related to one another before and after the discovery of the corresponding concepts. Mere observation can follow the parts of a given event as they occur, but their connection remains obscure without the help of concepts. I see the first billiard ball move toward the second in a certain direction and with a definite velocity. I must wait for what will happen after the impact, and again I can follow what happens only with my eyes. Let us assume that at the moment the impact occurs someone obstructs my view of the field where the event takes place: then—as mere onlooker—I have no knowledge of what happens afterward. The situation is different if before my view was obstructed I had discovered the concepts corresponding to the nexus of events. In that case I can estimate what occurs, even when I am no longer able to observe. An object or event which has only been observed does not of itself reveal anything about its connection with other objects or events. This connection comes to light only when observation combines with thinking.

[ 4 ] Observation and thinking are the two points of departure for all spiritual striving of man insofar as he is conscious of such striving. What is accomplished by ordinary human reason as well as by the most complicated scientific investigations rests on these two fundamental pillars of our spirit. Philosophers have started from various primary antitheses: idea and reality, subject and object, appearance and thing-in-itself, ego and non-ego, idea and will, concept and matter, force and substance, the conscious and the unconscious. It is easy to show, however, that all these antitheses must be preceded by that of observation and thinking, as the one the most important for man.

[ 5 ] Whatever principle we wish to advance, we must prove that somewhere we have observed it, or express it in the form of a clear thought which can be re-thought by others. Every philosopher who begins to speak about his fundamental principles must make use of the conceptual form, and thereby makes use of thinking. He therefore indirectly admits that for his activity he presupposes thinking. Whether thinking or something else is the main element in the evolution of the world, we shall not decide as yet. But that without thinking the philosopher can gain no knowledge of the evolution of the world, is immediately clear. Thinking may play a minor part in the coming into being of world phenomena, but thinking certainly plays a major part in the coming into being of a view about them.

[ 6 ] As regards observation, it is due to our organization that we need it. For us, our thinking about a horse and the object horse are two separate things. But we have access to the object only through observation. As little as we can form a concept of a horse by merely staring at it, just as little are we able to produce a corresponding object by mere thinking.

[ 7 ] In sequence of time, observation even precedes thinking. For even thinking we learn to know first by means of observation. It was essentially a description of an observation when, at the opening of this chapter, we gave an account of how thinking is kindled by an event and of how it goes beyond what is given without its activity. Whatever enters the circle of our experiences we first become aware of through observation. The contents of sensation, of perception, of contemplation, of feelings, of acts of will, of the pictures of dreams and fantasy, of representations, of concepts and ideas, of all illusions and hallucinations are given us through observation.

[ 8 ] However, as object of observation, thinking differs essentially from all other objects. The observation of a table or a tree occurs in me as soon as these objects appear within the range of my experience. But my thinking that goes on about these things, I do not observe at the same time. I observe the table; the thinking about the table I carry out, but I do not observe it at the same moment. I would first have to transport myself to a place outside my own activity if, besides observing the table, I wanted also to observe my thinking about the table. Whereas observation of things and events, and thinking about them, are but ordinary occurrences filling daily life, the observation of thinking itself is a sort of exceptional situation. This fact must be taken into account sufficiently when we come to determine the relation of thinking to all other contents of observation. It is essential to be clear about the fact that when thinking is observed the same procedure is applied to it as the one we normally apply to the rest of the world-content, only in ordinary life we do not apply it to thinking.

[ 9 ] Someone might object that what I have said here about thinking also holds good for feeling and for all other soul activities. When, for example, we feel pleasure, the feeling is also kindled by an object, and it is this object I observe, and not the feeling of pleasure. This objection, however, is based upon an error. Pleasure does not have at all the same relationship to its object has has the concept which thinking builds up. I am absolutely conscious of the fact that the concept of a thing is built up by my activity, whereas pleasure is produced in me by an object in the same way as, for instance, a change is caused in an object by a stone which falls upon it. For observation, a pleasure is given in exactly the same way as that is given which causes it. The same is not true of concepts. I can ask: Why does a particular event arouse in me a feeling of pleasure? But it is never possible to ask: Why does an event produce in me a certain number of concepts? That simply has no sense. When I reflect about an event there is no question of an effect on me. I learn nothing about myself by knowing the concepts which correspond to the change observed in a pane of glass when a stone is thrown against it. But I very definitely do learn something about my personality when I know the feeling which a certain event arouses in me. When I say of an observed object: This is a rose, I say absolutely nothing about myself; but when I say of the same thing: It gives me a feeling of pleasure, I characterize not only the rose but also myself in my relation to the rose.

[ 10 ] There can, therefore, be no question of comparing thinking and feeling as objects of observation. And the same could easily be shown concerning other activities of the human soul. Unlike thinking, they belong in the same sphere as other observed objects and events. It is characteristic of the nature of thinking that it is an activity directed solely upon the observed object and not upon the thinking personality. This can already be seen from the way we express our thoughts, as distinct from the way we express our feelings or acts of will in relation to objects. When I see an object and recognize it as a table, generally I would not say: I am thinking of a table, but: This is a table. But I would say: I am pleased with the table. In the first instance I am not at all interested in pointing out that I have entered into any relationship with the table, whereas in the second it is just this relationship that matters. In saying: I am thinking of a table, I already enter the exceptional situation characterized above, where something is made an object of observation which is always contained within our soul's activity, only normally it is not made an object of observation.

[ 11 ] It is characteristic of thinking that the thinker forgets thinking while doing it. What occupies him is not thinking, but the object of thinking which he observes.

[ 12 ] The first thing then, that we observe about thinking is that it is the unobserved element in our ordinary life of thought.

[ 13 ] The reason we do not observe thinking in our daily life of thought is because it depends upon our own activity. What I myself do not bring about, enters my field of observation as something objective. I find myself confronted by it as by something that has come about independently of me; it comes to meet me; I must take it as the presupposition of my thinking process. While I reflect on the object, I am occupied with it, my attention is turned to it. This activity is, in fact, thinking contemplation. My attention is directed not to my activity but to the object of this activity. In other words: while I think, I do not look at my thinking which I produce, but at the object of thinking which I do not produce.

[ 14 ] I am even in the same position when I let the exceptional situation come about and think about my own thinking. I can never observe my present thinking, but only afterward can I make into an object of thinking the experience I have had of my thinking-process. If I wanted to observe my present thinking, I would have to split myself into two persons: one to do the thinking, the other to observe this thinking. This I cannot do. I can only accomplish it in two separate acts. The thinking to be observed is never the one actually being produced, but another one. Whether for this purpose I observe my own earlier thinking, or follow the thinking process of another person, or else, as in the above example of the movements of the billiard balls, presuppose an imaginary thinking process, makes no difference.

[ 15 ] Two things that do not go together are actively producing something and confronting this in contemplation. This is already shown in the First Book of Moses. The latter represents God as creating the world in the first six days, and only when the world is there is the possibility of contemplating it also present: “And God saw everything that he had made and, behold, it was very good.” So it is also with our thinking. It must first be present before we can observe it.

[ 16 ] The reason it is impossible for us to observe thinking when it is actually taking place, is also the reason it is possible for us to know it more directly and more intimately than any other process in the world. It is just because we ourselves bring it forth that we know the characteristic features of its course, the manner in which the process takes place. What in the other spheres of observation can be found only indirectly: the relevant context and the connection between the individual objects—in the case of thinking is known to us in an absolutely direct way. Off-hand, I do not know why, for my observation, thunder follows lightning, but from the content of the two concepts I know immediately why my thinking connects the concept of thunder with the concept of lightning. Naturally here it does not matter whether I have correct concepts of thunder and lightning. The connection between those concepts I have is clear to me, and indeed this is the case through the concepts themselves.

[ 17 ] This transparent clarity of the process of thinking is quite independent of our knowledge of the physiological basis of thinking. I speak here of thinking insofar as it presents itself to observation of our spiritual activity. How one material process in my brain causes or influences another while I carry out a line of thought, does not come into consideration at all. What I see when I observe thinking is not what process in my brain connects the concept of lightning with the concept of thunder, but I see what motivates me to bring the two concepts into a particular relationship. My observation of thinking shows me that there is nothing that directs me in my connecting one thought with another, except the content of my thoughts; I am not directed by the material processes in my brain. In a less materialistic age than ours this remark would of course be entirely superfluous. Today however, when there are people who believe: When we know what matter is, we shall also know how matter thinks,—it has to be said that it is possible to speak about thinking without entering the domain of brain physiology at the same time. Today many people find it difficult to grasp the concept of thinking in its purity. Anyone who wants to contrast the representation of thinking I have here developed, with Cabanis ¹⁸ statement, “The brain secretes thoughts as the liver does gall or the spittle-glands spittle, etc.,” simply does not know what I am talking about. He tries to find thinking by means of a mere process of observation such as we apply to other objects that make up the content of the world. He cannot find it in this manner because as I have shown, it eludes normal observation. Whoever cannot overcome materialism lacks the ability to bring about in himself the exceptional situation described above, which brings to his consciousness what remains unconscious in all other spiritual activities. If a person does not have the good will to place himself in this situation, then one can no more speak to him about thinking than one can speak about color to a person who is blind. However, he must not believe that we consider physiological processes to be thinking. He cannot explain thinking because he simply does not see it.

[ 18 ] However, one possessing the ability to observe thinking,—and with goodwill every normally organized person has this ability,—this observation is the most important he can make. For he observes something which he himself brings to existence; he finds himself confronted not by a foreign object, to begin with, but by his own activity. He knows how what he observes comes to be. He sees through the connections and relations. A firm point is attained from which, with well-founded hope, one can seek for the explanation of the rest of the world's phenomena.

[ 19 ] The feeling of possessing such a firm point caused the founder of modern philosophy, Renatus Cartesius,¹⁹ to base the whole of human knowledge on the principle, I think, therefore I am. All other things, all other events are present independent of me. Whether they are there as truth or illusion or dream I know not. Only one thing do I know with absolute certainty, for I myself bring it to its sure existence: my thinking. Perhaps it also has some other origin as well, perhaps it comes from God or from elsewhere, but that it is present in the sense that I myself bring it forth, of that I am certain. Cartesius had, to begin with, no justification for giving his statement any other meaning. He could maintain only that within the whole world content it is in my thinking that I grasp myself within that activity which is most essentially my own. What is meant by the attached therefore I am, has been much debated. It can have a meaning in one sense only. The simplest assertion I can make about something is that it is, that it exists. How this existence can be further defined I cannot say straight away about anything that comes to meet me. Each thing must first be studied in its relation to others before it can be determined in what sense it can be said to exist. An event that comes to meet me may be a set of perceptions, but it could also be a dream, a hallucination, and so forth. In short, I am unable to say in what sense it exists. I cannot gather this from the event in itself, but I shall learn it when I consider the event in its relation to other things. From this, however, I can, again, learn no more than how it is related to these other things. My search only reaches solid ground if I find an object which exists in a sense which I can derive from the object itself. As thinker I am such an object, for I give my existence the definite, self-dependent content of the activity of thinking. Having reached this, I can go on from here and ask: Do the other objects exist in the same or in some other sense?

[ 20 ] When thinking is made the object of observation, to the rest of the elements to be observed is added something which usually escapes attention; but the manner in which the other things are approached by man is not altered. One increases the number of observed objects, but not the number of methods of observation. While we are observing the other things, there mingles in the universal process—in which I now include observation—one process which is overlooked. Something different from all other processes is present, but is not noticed. But when I observe my thinking, no such unnoticed element is present. For what now hovers in the background is, again, nothing but thinking. The observed object is qualitatively the same as the activity directed upon it. And that is another characteristic feature of thinking. When we observe it, we do not find ourselves compelled to do so with the help of something qualitatively different, but can remain within the same element.

[ 21 ] When I weave an object, given independently of me, into my thinking, then I go beyond my observation, and the question is: Have I any right to do so? Why do I not simply let the object act upon me? In what way is it possible that my thinking could be related to the object? These are questions which everyone who reflects on his own thought processes must put to himself. They cease to exist when one thinks about thinking. We do not add anything foreign to thinking, and consequently do not have to justify such an addition.

[ 22 ] Schelling ²⁰ says: “To gain knowledge of nature means to create nature.” If these words of the bold nature-philosopher are taken literally, we should have to renounce forever all knowledge of nature. For after all, nature is there already, and in order to create it a second time, one must know the principles according to which it originated. From the nature already in existence one would have to learn the conditions of its existence in order to apply them to the nature one wanted to create. But this learning, which would have to precede the creating, would, however, be knowing nature, and would remain this even if, after the learning, no creation took place. Only a nature not yet in existence could be created without knowing it beforehand.

[ 23 ] What is impossible with regard to nature: creating before knowing, we achieve in the case of thinking. If we wanted to wait and not think until we had first learned to know thinking, then we would never think at all. We have to plunge straight into thinking in order to be able, afterward, to know thinking by observing what we ourselves have done. We ourselves first create an object when we observe thinking. All other objects have been created without our help.

[ 24 ] Against my sentence, We must think before we can contemplate thinking, someone might easily set another sentence as being equally valid: We cannot wait with digesting, either, until we have observed the process of digestion. This objection would be similar to the one made by Pascal ²¹ against Cartesius, when he maintained that one could also say: I go for a walk, therefore I am. Certainly I must resolutely get on with digesting before I have studied the physiological process of digestion. But this could only be compared with the contemplation of thinking if, after having digested, I were not to contemplate it with thinking, but were to eat and digest it. It is, after all, not without significance that whereas digestion cannot become the object of digestion, thinking can very well become the object of thinking.

[ 25 ] This, then, is beyond doubt: In thinking we are grasping a corner of the universal process, where our presence is required if anything is to come about. And, after all, this is just the point. The reason things are so enigmatical to me is that I do not participate in their creation. I simply find them there, whereas in the case of thinking I know how it is made. This is why a more basic starting point than thinking, from which to consider all else in the world, does not exist.

[ 26 ] Here I should mention another widely current error which prevails with regard to thinking. It consists in this, that it is said: Thinking, as it is in itself, we never encounter. That thinking which connects the observations we make of our experiences and weaves them into a network of concepts, is not at all the same as that thinking which later we extract from the objects we have observed and then make the object of our consideration. What we first unconsciously weave into things is something quite different from what we consciously extract from them afterward.

[ 27 ] To draw such conclusions is not to see that in this way it is impossible to escape from thinking. It is absolutely impossible to come out of thinking if one wants to consider it. When one distinguishes an unconscious thinking from a later conscious thinking, then one must not forget that this distinction is quite external and has nothing to do with thinking as such. I do not in the least alter a thing by considering it with my thinking. I can well imagine that a being with quite differently organized sense organs and with a differently functioning intelligence would have a quite different representation of a horse from mine, but I cannot imagine that my own thinking becomes something different because I observe it. What I observe is what I myself bring about. What my thinking looks like to an intelligence different from mine is not what we are speaking about now; we are speaking about what it looks like to me. In any case, the picture of my thinking in another intelligence cannot be truer than my own picture of it. Only if I were not myself the thinking being, but thinking confronted me as the activity of a being foreign to me, could I say that my picture of thinking appeared in quite a definite way, and that I could not know what in itself the thinking of the being was like.

[ 28 ] So far there is not the slightest reason to view my own thinking from a standpoint different from the one applied to other things. After all, I consider the rest of the world by means of thinking. How should I make of my thinking an exception?

[ 29 ] With this I consider that I have sufficiently justified making thinking my starting point in my approach to an understanding of the world. When Archimedes ²² had discovered the lever, he thought that with its help he could lift the whole cosmos from its hinges if only he could find a point upon which he could support his instrument. He needed something that was supported by itself, that was not carried by anything else. In thinking we have a principle which exists by means of itself. From this principle let us attempt to understand the world. Thinking we can understand through itself. So the question is only whether we can also understand other things through it.

[ 30 ] I have so far spoken of thinking without considering its vehicle, man's consciousness. Most present-day philosophers would object: Before there can be thinking, there must be consciousness. Therefore, one should begin, not from thinking, but from consciousness. No thinking can exist without consciousness. To them I must reply: If I want to have an explanation of what relation exists between thinking and consciousness, I must think about it. In doing so I presuppose thinking. To this could be said: When the philosopher wants to understand consciousness he makes use of thinking, and to that extent presupposes it, but in the ordinary course of life thinking does arise within consciousness and, therefore, presupposes this. If this answer were given to the World Creator who wished to create thinking, it would no doubt be justified. One naturally cannot let thinking arise without first having brought about consciousness. However, the philosopher is not concerned with the creation of the world, but with the understanding of it. Therefore he has to find the starting point, not for the creation, but for the understanding of the world. I consider it most extraordinary that a philosopher should be reproached for being concerned first and foremost about the correctness of his principles, rather than turning straight to the objects he wants to understand. The World Creator had to know, above all, how to find a vehicle for thinking; the philosopher has to find a secure foundation for his understanding of what already exists. How can it help us to start from consciousness and apply thinking to it, if first we do not know whether it is possible to reach any explanation of things by means of thinking?

[ 31 ] We must first consider thinking quite impartially, without reference to a thinking subject or a thought object. For in subject and object we already have concepts formed by thinking. There is no denying: Before anything else can be understood, thinking must be understood. To deny this is to fail to realize that man is not a first link in creation, but the last. Therefore, for an explanation of the world by means of concepts, one cannot start from the first elements of existence, but must begin with what is nearest to us and is most intimately ours. We cannot at one bound transport ourselves to the beginning of the world, in order to begin our investigations there; we must start from the present moment and see whether we cannot ascend from the later to the earlier. As long as geology spoke in terms of assumed revolutions in order to explain the present condition of the earth, it groped in darkness. It was only when it made its beginnings from the investigations of those processes at present at work on the earth, and from these drew conclusions about the past, that it gained a secure foundation. As long as philosophy assumes all sorts of principles such as atom, motion, matter, will, the unconscious, it will get nowhere. Only when the philosopher recognizes as his absolute first that which came as the absolute last, can he reach his goal. But this absolute last in world evolution is Thinking.

[ 32 ] There are people who say: Whether or not our thinking is right in itself cannot be established with certainty, after all. And to this extent the point of departure is still a doubtful one. It would be just as sensible to raise doubts as to whether in itself a tree is right or wrong. Thinking is a fact, and to speak of the rightness or wrongness of a fact has no sense. At most, I can have doubts as to whether thinking is being rightly applied, just as I can doubt whether a certain tree supplies a wood suitable for making tools for a particular purpose. To show to what extent the application of thinking to the world is right or wrong, is just the task of this book. I can understand anyone doubting whether we can ascertain anything about the world by means of thinking, but it is incomprehensible to me how anyone can doubt the rightness of thinking in itself.

Addition to the Revised Edition (1918):

[ 33 ] In the preceding discussion, the significant difference between thinking and all other activities of the soul has been referred to as a fact which reveals itself to a really unprejudiced observation. Unless this unprejudiced observation is achieved, against this discussion one is tempted to raise objections such as these: When I think about a rose, then, after all, this also is only an expression of a relation of my “I” to the rose, just as when I feel the beauty of the rose. In the case of thinking, a relation between “I” and object exists in the same way as in the case of feeling or perceiving. To make this objection is to fail to realize that it is only in the activity of thinking that the “I” knows itself to be completely at one with that which is active-going into all the ramifications of the activity. In the case of no other soul activity is this completely so. When, for example, a pleasure is felt, a more sensitive observation can quite easily detect to what extent the “I” knows itself to be one with something active, and to what extent there is something passive in it so that the pleasure merely happens to the “I.” And this is the case with the other soul activities. But one should not confuse “having thought-images” with the working through of thought by means of thinking. Thought-images can arise in the soul in the same way as dreams or vague intimations. This is not thinking.—To this could be said: If this is what is meant by thinking, then the element of will is within thinking, and so we have to do not merely with thinking, but also with the will within thinking. However, this would only justify one in saying: Real thinking must always be willed. But this has nothing to do with the characterization of thinking as given in this discussion. The nature of thinking may be such that it must necessarily always be willed; the point is that everything that is willed is—while being willed—surveyed by the “I” as an activity entirely its own. Indeed it must be said that just because this is the nature of thinking, it appears to the observer as willed through and through. Anyone who really takes the trouble to understand all that has to be considered in order to reach a judgment about thinking, cannot fail to recognize that this soul activity does have the unique character we have described here.

[ 34 ] A personality highly appreciated as a thinker by the author of this book, has objected that it is impossible to speak about thinking as is done here, because what one believes one is observing as active thinking only appears to be so. In reality one is observing only the results of an unconscious activity, which is the foundation of thinking. Only because this unconscious activity is not observed does the illusion arise that the observed thinking exists through itself, just as when in an illumination made by a rapid succession of electric sparks one believes one is seeing a continuous movement. This objection, too, rests on an inaccurate examination of the facts. To make it means that one has not taken into consideration that it is the “I” itself, standing within thinking, that observes its own activity. The “I” would have to stand outside thinking to be deluded as in the case of an illumination with a rapid succession of electric sparks. Indeed one could say: To make such a comparison is to deceive oneself forcibly, like someone who, seeing a moving light, insisted that it was being freshly lit by an unknown hand at every point where it appeared.—No, whoever wants to see in thinking anything other than a surveyable activity brought about within the “I,” must first make himself blind to the plain facts that are there for the seeing, in order to be able to set up a hypothetical activity as the basis of thinking. He who does not so blind himself cannot fail to recognize that everything he “thinks into” thinking in this manner takes him away from the essence of thinking. Unprejudiced observation shows that nothing belongs to thinking's own nature that is not found in thinking itself. If one leaves the realm of thinking, one cannot come to what causes it.

• 17. See Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, Jena, 1893, p. 171 of the Ger. ed.
• 18. Pierre Jean George Cabanis (1757–1808), French physiologist. A precocious child, Cabanis was enrolled at the age of 10 in the College of Brives. Later studied in Paris, afterward traveled widely in Poland and Germany. In 1789 he was appointed administrator of hospitals for Paris, and in 1795 became professor of hygiene and history of medicine in the medical school of that city. In 1799 he was made professor of legal medicine and history of medicine. He was an intimate friend of Mirabeau, and attended him as physician in his last illness. He had a deep interest in medical and psychological problems. Active in the cause of the French Revolution, Cabanis was a member of the Council of Five Hundred. Though Napoleon Bonaparte repeatedly offered him governmental positions, Cabanis declined them, since he was a foe of the former's policies. Cabanis died at Meulan on May 5, 1808, principally honored for his contributions to medical science, and especially for his main work, Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, a series of papers read to the Institute in 1796–97. The sentence quoted is probably from Cabanis' book, written in 1802, translated into German, 2 vols., 1808, under the title, Verhältnis der Seele zum Körper, Relationship of the Soul to the Body. The thought has also been paraphrased: “Just as the stomach and intestines receive food and digest it, so the brain receives impressions, digests them, and has as its organic secretion, thought.”
• 19. Renatus Cartesius, Rene Descartes (1596–1650). The father of modern rationalism, soldier of fortune, scholar, pilgrim, traveler, and firm adherent of the Roman Catholic faith. His philosophical work, which has often been summed up in his words, J pense, donc je suis (Cogito ergo sum), “I think, therefore I am,” was given significant impulse by a dream he had on November 10, 1619. This revealed to him the method of philosophical speculation he was to follow, and his subsequent work is said to have stemmed from this experience. An extensive literature on Descartes and his teachings exists in English translation. See any standard encyclopedia for further details.
• 20. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854). Often referred to as the Proteus among philosophers, Schelling was noted for his ever-changing alertness and brightness of mind and expression. Goethe (see note 16, above) had a very high regard for him, and spoke of him as “the most congenial philosopher I know.” Schelling had a profound influence among the thinkers of his time, including philosophers of France and England. His last years were dedicated to what he termed “positive philosophy,” radically different from the philosophy of identity, the transcendental idealism, and the pantheistic tendencies of his earlier time. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Schelling in his writings and lectures, on various occasions praising that philosopher's “important inspirations and suggestions for what must afterwards be said by Anthroposophy, directly out of spiritual vision, on many points of Christianity.” Steiner further spoke of Schelling, “who really always made a significant impression whenever he appeared in public—the short, thick-set man, with the extremely impressive head, and eyes which even in extreme old age were sparkling with fire, for from his eyes there spoke the fire of Truth, the fire of Knowledge.” (From a lecture given at Dornach, Switzerland, Sept. 16, 1924) Perhaps Steiner's greatest study of Schelling is to be found in his Die Rätsel der Philosophie, The Riddles of Philosophy, Vol. I, Ch. 7. For English translations of Schelling and further details on his life, see any standard encyclopedia.
• 21. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662). Known as one of the greatest of mathematicians and physicists, Pascal's tame long ago spread far beyond the confines of his native France. His contributions to the establishment of the mathematical theory of probability, to the science of hydrodynamics, to the study of gravity and the vacuum, and his elaboration of the theory of conic sections have given Pascal a lasting place among the great men of science. As a Christian thinker, his devotion to truth and piety, and his acceptance of mystical experience have made his name revered. His philosophical speculations and deep psychological insight, as well as his remarkable gifts as a writer of French prose have secured him a leading position among philosophers and literary historians. Pascal's Pensées, Thoughts, is one of the great books of the world. For details on Pascal's very eventful and highly interesting life, as well as an account of his fundamental ideas, see any standard encyclopedia.
• 22. Archimedes (c 287–212 B.C.) Greek mathematician and inventor. He was born at Syracuse in Sicily, and studied at the famous university in Alexandria. Archimedes spent the remainder of his life at Syracuse, where he engaged in constant mathematical research. He is noted for his many mechanical inventions, but his first love was mathematics. His work as a pioneer in mechanics is illustrated by his famous remark, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the earth!” During the sack of Syracuse by the army of the Roman general, Marcellus, Archimedes was discovered drawing a mathematical figure in the sand beside his garden bench. Deep in meditation upon the problem before him, Archimedes was instantly killed when he was run through the body by a sword in the hand of a Roman infantryman. For details on the life of Archimedes, see Plutarch's Life of Marcellus. A complete, standard edition of the Works of Archimedes with valuable notes by T. L. Heath was issued by Cambridge University Press, 1897.