The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Although I already touched on Goethe's “Faust” in this space this winter, in a consideration of Goethe's world view in the context of German idealism, I will take the liberty today of coming back to you with a consideration of Goethe's “Faust” as a kind of introduction to the six lectures I have announced. I believe that in connection with Goethe's Faust, the world view that I am representing here yields so many insights that some light will fall on the following, which will be spoken here in the near future. Of course, today I will only be able to make aphoristic remarks about the topic I have set myself, because this topic is so extensive in itself that one can never get further than highlighting this or that point of view from a wealth of points of view. And of course it also follows that one must be one-sided with each such consideration of Goethe's “Faust”. But that is a risk one must be willing to take.

After a consideration of Goethe's “Faust” that lasted more than half a century, my old friend and teacher Karl Julius Schröer completed the third edition of his “Faust” edition 1892 with a preface in which the words are found: “Only the German way of thinking was able to solve the Faust problem.” And it is essentially on these words that I would like to base my reflections today.

According to a certainly justified opinion of Herman Grimm, who was so deeply involved in all that Goethe had striven for and experienced, the Faust problem will be the starting point for recurring reflections on Goethe's “Faust” through the centuries, even millennia, which will certainly differ considerably from one another in the succession of times. In this regard, Herman Grimm already spoke a very significant word in the 1870s, which I would now also like to mention in my introduction. Herman Grimm said at the time: “We are still too deeply immersed in the world that Goethe wanted to depict allegorically and symbolically in the second part of the play; here, too, only later times will gain the right point of view.” It may be said that the standpoint which Herman Grimm assumes here is as modest as it is lofty, for he speaks from a deep consciousness of all that has been poured into this Faustic poetry, which was given to the world through Goethe. And Herman Grimm continues: “We would do an injustice to Goethe's Faust if we took it only for what his many-colored experiences make it appear, and the time will yet come when the interpreters of this poem will occupy themselves more with what lies in it than with what merely clings to it.”

Of course, such statements must still apply in many respects today. Nevertheless, decades have passed since Herman Grimm wrote these words, and today, we may perhaps already entertain the hope, from the many insights that spiritual life has experienced, that we can get more into what lies in Faust than what hangs on Faust, as Herman Grimm puts it.

And so today I would like to draw your attention to how the world wandering that Faust undertakes from his study to the world, in which people more or less live, came about, and how through this world wandering, he gradually rises to the point of view of a worldview in the broadest sense of the word, which represents a kind of rebirth of Faust out of German intellectual life, insofar as Goethe himself participated in this German intellectual life. I believe that we shall only be able to arrive at a full understanding of the figure of Faust and its significance for life if we seek from the outset to delve into what is actually living in Faust's soul at that moment when we have him before us as a poetic figure at the beginning of the Faustic poetry, as it has now been completed by Goethe. What lives in Faust, as expressed in the opening monologue, “Have now, alas, philosophy...” and so on, speaks in a deeply significant way. But a kind of light must also be cast on what lives in Faust's soul at the moment that the poetry presents to us at its beginning, from a deepening into all that takes place later in the course of the events that the Faust epic represents. Faust stands there in opposition to the sciences that he lists as the sciences of the four faculties, and we see quite clearly from what he expresses how unsatisfied he is with the sciences that have affected his soul. We may ask: What does Faust really want? And perhaps this question can only be answered adequately if we bear in mind in the further course of the first monologue that Faust, despite having absorbed the sciences of the four faculties, has devoted himself to magic, that is, to what he has been able to learn as traditional, conventional historical magic from the various writings about this magic.

I would like to point out right away that a misunderstanding of the first Faust monologue can easily arise from the fact that one might believe that the moment in which Faust surrenders to magic coincides with the moment in which he speaks this monologue, and that Faust had not yet surrendered to magic before those feelings that live in this monologue go through his soul. That would be a misunderstanding and would make understanding the whole state of Faust's soul extremely difficult. Rather, we must assume that Faust, at the very moment when he expresses his feelings in that monologue, is already deeply immersed in what he addresses as magic; that he has done a great deal of study on this magic. And we can prove this from the Faustian legend itself. When the poodle that accompanies Faust on his Easter walk later takes on different forms and Faust does not know what is in this poodle, Faust reaches for a magical-occult book and now knows exactly, at least in his opinion, how he can use all sorts of incantations from these books to get to the bottom of the secret of this poodle and how he should behave towards this spiritual manifestation that he believes he has before him. We must therefore assume that Faust has already, to a certain extent, familiarized himself with these things.

Now we learn that Faust takes a book of magic and that he wants to assuage his dissatisfaction by first turning to the spirit of the great world, to the spirit of the macrocosm, as he puts it. What does he actually want? Perhaps we shall only be able to see what he wants if we delve a little into Goethe's soul itself, which indeed placed its feelings in the Faust character, at least during the time when the first Faust monologue and the first parts of “Faust” were created.

What world and worldview did Goethe actually face? Goethe was confronted with a worldview that could be built on the basis of what had been recognized about natural and spiritual life. He was in the midst of a worldview that fully took into account the scientific revelations made by Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and so on. Goethe was confronted with what, in the spirit of Kant, could be called the world view of the Enlightenment, the penetration into the secrets of nature by means of the mind, which synthesizes the experiences of the senses and the experiences of history. What presents itself to the human soul in the way of ideas, which, as we would say today, are grasped in a healthy way by the normal mind and which arise above and beyond what can be investigated by the normal experience of the outer senses, it was such a world view that surrounded Goethe. How could he and his needs live into the world view that could give such a world view? He could not completely live himself into such a world view; for what Goethe constantly wanted, and what he now lets his Faust want, is a direct growing together of the innermost soul with what weaves and lives through the world outside, a growing together of the soul itself with the world secrets present in the world, with the deeper revelations and the revealing powers and entities of the world.

Now Goethe's Faust faced the view of the Enlightenment of nature and the spirit of the world in such a way that what could result in the way just characterized a world view seemed far removed from being able to grasp the entities that pervade the world and that he wanted to grasp with the innermost powers of the soul, with which he wanted to live together. For what this world view, based on the science of the time, could give him, at most it gave him knowledge, something that filled his head, his mind, but which could not identify so closely with human inner experience that one could really have entered with this inner experience into the forces that live and weave in nature and the spirit world. “Thus must I seek,” says Goethe's Faust, ”to get at the inmost powers and entities of the world in such wise that, by grasping them, my soul may be partaking in the spiritual-natural weaving and living of the world. But if I grasp only that which can be grasped from the present standpoint of a scientific world-view, then I grasp only in a dry, sober way with the knowledge these mysterious connections of the world, that which moves the world in its inmost being. And this knowledge can never give me that fullness which lies in grasping that which lets me live together with the secrets of the world.

And so Goethe's Faust wants to delve into what permeates and gives life to the world, into the world of nature and the spirit, in a different way. And since Goethe was certainly never of the opinion held by many people today and in the past, that what is current and has been achieved in their own time is necessarily right — in contrast to which one can say how gloriously far we have come — Goethe wants to tie in with what has gone before, from which the present has developed. And so he also lets his Faust tie in with the world view from which the world picture surrounding him has developed, with a world view that certainly had the belief that with what it gained, it entered into an experience of the secrets of existence. What kind of world view was that?

Well, you only need to pick up something like the works of Agrippa von Nettesheim or some other similar medieval philosopher, and you will be able to gain an insight into what Goethe's Faust actually means when it invokes the spirit of the macrocosm. Such concepts, such ideas, as surrounded Faust in the philosophy of the Enlightenment — I am referring to Goethe's Faust, not the sixteenth-century Faust — did not yet exist at the time when Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote. At that time, people did not yet form a picture of the world in such abstract terms as in the Age of Enlightenment. Instead, by developing philosophical worldviews, they lived, I would say, in images, in imaginations. But one also lived in the belief that one could bring about something through which nature and the spiritual world would express themselves intimately about what they actually are. And what one now got as a world view was at the same time interwoven with the feelings and perceptions of the soul, was in a certain way the same as what the soul experienced within itself. Today one would say: it was very anthropomorphic. That is certainly true; it was the case that in what he abstracted from the world, man felt forces that were related to the forces of his own soul. One spoke of sympathies and antipathies of things and similar forces in the natural world, as one experienced them in one's own soul existence. But further: In the time in which Agrippa von Nettesheim wrote, little was believed that could be attained by man through himself, that man could simply achieve by developing the powers of his soul life, by developing those powers of cognition in order to give them a higher form than that which man has by nature. They did not believe in the power of research of the human soul itself; they rather believed that through all kinds of external activities, these or those experiments — but not experiments in our present sense — they would, so to speak, give the spiritual that lives in nature the opportunity to show how it lives in natural facts. Through all kinds of events, it was thought that the secrets of nature could be discovered. It was not believed that consciousness can directly penetrate nature through the powers it acquires. It was believed that one had to perform certain actions or events in order to, as it were, by means of magic, make nature speak and express its spirit. Man's consciousness itself was to seek this separately. They wanted to do something in the external world that would cause nature to reveal its secrets and finally express how the forces in nature are arranged, from which man himself then builds himself out of nature and the spiritual world. So they wanted just what Goethe's Faust craves: to live together with the weaving and essence of nature itself; and they believed they could achieve it.

What stood before man as nature and spiritual world had been thoroughly permeated by spirit. And the development necessitated by the world had to set in place an outer image of nature, precisely the image of nature of a Copernicus, a Kepler, a Galileo, or what has come from that, an image of nature from which precisely that which these medieval philosophers wanted to seek out of nature has been removed. In this world view of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo, and in what has been created from it, it was precisely these ideas that were the decisive, the decisive, the justified ones, which Goethe's Faust did not perceive closely enough, were not inwardly full enough to face the world with them in such a way that one can fully experience this world in one's own soul.

And so, in the moment in which the first monologue transports us, there lives in Faust's soul the urge to experience the secrets of the world through that ancient magic, to connect the laws and essence of the world with the experiences of his own soul. And he believed that he could achieve this by devoting himself to the formulas and images that were supposed to represent the macrocosm from the book he picked up.

But Faust – I emphasize this expressly – Goethe's Faust, not the sixteenth-century one – is precisely the human being, the personality of his time. Humanity advances precisely in its organization, even if it is not visible to a rough observation. In this time, one could no longer get behind the secrets of existence in the same way as Agrippa von Nettesheim, for example. One could no longer indulge in the belief that what one attains, whether through imagination or external influence, through magical experimentation, really has something to do with the innermost workings of the world. And so Faust is finally faced with the realization: Yes, I try it the way these ancients did, to connect with the spiritual, with the natural forces of existence - but what does it give me? Does it really lead me into what lives and moves in nature and the spiritual world? No, it gives me a spectacle - what a spectacle! But alas, only a spectacle!

And in this sense, Goethe's Faust is truly representative of the Goethean period. It has become impossible to reach the sources of existence in this way, to grasp infinite nature, not merely to penetrate it with ideas or with laws of nature, but to experience it. He cannot succeed because the time when one could believe that real knowledge of nature and the spiritual world could be attained in this way is past. What a spectacle! And he turns away from what the contemplation of the signs of the macrocosm can give him. He turns to the microcosm, to the earth spirit.

What is this earth spirit? Well, if you take the whole of what is presented in Goethe's “Faust” in connection with the appearance of the earth spirit, you find that this earth spirit is the representative of everything that, in the course of historical development, flows over the earth in the broadest sense flows over the earth, which works in such a way that what lies in our deepest drives, what, as it were, orbits the earth and places us human beings with our innermost selves into its currents, comes out of it into our soul, into our heart, into our very innermost being. In a sketch that he later made for his 'Faust', Goethe himself summarized the idea of this earth spirit, as it were, as a world and deed genius. This reminds us that what Goethe actually addresses in his poetry as the earth spirit is something that lives in the course of historical development, that has an effect on our soul, insofar as we are children of a particular age, insofar as certain impulses live in us, a certain form of that which can be achieved in existence in one way or another lives in us. But this depends on how we are placed in a particular epoch in relation to what flows out of the earth spirit that has been ruling over the earth throughout the ages. So this earth spirit, as it is written in Faust, may say:

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

Now, I would like to say, a word is uttered in “Faust” that is often misleading when given a slightly exaggerated explanation. I do not want to fall into the trap that many all too easily fall into, of reading all kinds of things into a poem like the Faust poem. And I know very well that almost every explanation that one can dream up fits, if one twists it skillfully, almost everything. I would like to try to derive everything I have to say from the Faust legend itself. I now mean at this moment the word:

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast,
The one seeks separation from the other...

One of these characterizes Faust as if it lived in all the impulses of this earthly life. He explicitly says of the other soul that it wants to rise from the dust of earthly life to the realms of the high ancestors. Now, I think it is an oversimplified explanation when one simply says that this is the lower and that the higher nature of man. Of course, with such abstractions one always comes close to the truth. One cannot go wrong, because the more abstract one is, the more correctly one will express oneself as a rule. But with a work of fiction such as Faust, it is important to accurately and specifically capture the feelings that are embodied in the work of fiction. And it seems to me, in fact, when Faust speaks of his two souls, that one soul is the one that experiences, above all, what the human inner being is, that experiences the influx of the forces, the impulses of the earth spirit, the one soul that perceives how impulses rise up from the deep foundations of human existence of the individual human individuality and fill the soul life. The other soul seems to me to be the one that has been active in striving for what the spirit of the macrocosm is to reveal, that wants to rise from the mere dust of earthly existence to the realms of high ancestors, that is, to all the spiritual that lives in the natural and spiritual world and from which the human being not only as a historical being, but from which he has emerged as a complete, as a whole being, as a natural and historical being, to the universe as it has gradually developed over the centuries, millennia, millions of years, into which the spirits of the centuries, millennia and millions of years have laid their impulses. It is to this universe, then, to the spiritual ancestors from whom this human being on earth has developed, that this soul wants to rise. Of course, as soon as one expresses such things in such sharply defined words as I have just done, one again makes the meaning somewhat one-sided. That too should certainly not be denied. But nevertheless, I believe that the two directions of feeling that live in Faust's soul and that he describes as his two souls are these: one of them goes out into the macrocosm, into the universe, and encompasses spiritual beings, as a whole, as a great thing, and nature at the same time, the whole cosmos, insofar as man is grounded in this cosmos as a microcosm. And in the other direction of feeling, I believe I must recognize that which flows from the current of historical becoming into the human soul and makes man a member, a child of a very specific time; so that we are Earth Spirit, as the opposite of the spirit of the great world, we are led to that which stirs in our own soul as the striving to embrace the full human being, in contrast to the individual expressions, which must always remain in the individual human life. Faust believes he can feel at one with this spirit, which makes man a whole human being, and indeed now as a historical being, by confronting the Earth Spirit. But the Earth Spirit rejects him. He refers him to the spirit that he understands. And at the same time he makes it clear to him how he, Faust, is not the same as the Earth Spirit itself. What is the underlying reason for this?

Now, we can perhaps recognize what is at the root of this if we consider the further progress of Goethe's Faustian poetry. Where does Faust feel he is placed immediately after he is rejected by the Earth Spirit? Wagner is the one he feels himself confronted with! And one may look for so much of the most noble humor in Goethe's world literature that one can, to a certain extent, be of the opinion: By the Earth Spirit rejecting Faust and pointing to the spirit that he understands, he is actually pointing him in a certain respect to the spirit of Wagner, whom Faust will face in the very next moment. Thus the Earth Spirit is actually saying to Faust: First become aware of how similar what lives in your inner being, what you have been given out of the spirit of the earth, is to the whole formation of Wagner's soul! And what emerges from this Wagnerian soul in the course of Goethe's poem? Yes, we see how Wagner lives on in the poem up to a certain point in time, which is precisely indicated to us in the second part of Goethe's “Faust” in the classical Walpurgis Night, where that which Wagner has brought forth out of his world view, the homunculus, must dissolve in the weaving and ruling of the whole world, as Goethe characterizes it in the various figures of the classical Walpurgis Night. And so we are led, I would say, to the ideal, to the ultimate goal of Wagner's striving. We may well call this the creation of the homunculus.

What then is this homunculus? Certainly, Goethe's Faustian poetry - and this is the incomparably great thing about it - presents in a magnificent, dramatic way these things that are otherwise often only the subject of abstract philosophical consideration. But that is precisely the great thing, that for once in the world it has been possible to bring that which other people can only approach in philosophical ideas to a truly poetic, genuinely artistic form. What then is this homunculus, this homunculus idea, when we present Goethe's world view, interwoven with his artistic sensibilities? Wagner is steeped in the world view that had developed by the time the young Goethe felt he was stepping into it, a world view that, so to speak, only takes into account the mechanistic view of nature and history, which emerged as the first product of what Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler - certainly out of necessity - had to make of the old world view. In place of the living, organic element, which in the pre-Copernican world view was interwoven into the human world view, into the world view of the philosophers, there now arises a world view that is more and more interwoven only with concepts and ideas that represent the world as a mechanical one. And so Wagner was still able to cling to the habit of deriving an understanding of the human being from the world as a whole, from the cosmos as a whole. Thus he was able to come to the view that man, too, could be created through a correspondingly complicated mechanistic juxtaposition of the mechanical laws that permeate and animate the world. And this creation of man, which brings only that into the image, into the conception of man, into that which one can feel and prove and experience about man, which flows from the mechanistic world view, we see this in what the ideal of Wagner represents, in the Homunculus.

Thus, the Earth Spirit clearly shows Faust the direction in which he would actually end up if he remained at the level of the world view at which he is currently standing. He points the way clearly, and one is tempted to say: Don't we see, when we want to dig deeper into the feelings and emotions that underlie the Faustian legend, that if Faust stops where he is before his world wandering, he would come to where Wagner comes: to grasp the human being as a mechanism that is only capable of life, even as an idea, if it can merge with what the world itself lives through and surges through, and where Faust's soul in particular wants to pour out into a higher, experienced knowledge, in contrast to the knowledge that Wagner can achieve, who is completely immersed in the world view of the Enlightenment.

Now we have to look a little into Goethe's soul itself if we want to discover what the role of Homunculus actually is in the whole of “Faust”. We know, if we have explored Goethe's world view a little, how Goethe sought knowledge in his own way, how he wanted to get behind the appearances of nature. Over many years, I have tried to show how Goethe worked in this direction in the introductions to my edition of Goethe's scientific writings and also in my book “Goethe's World View”. Goethe tried to find out for himself what lives in the processes and beings of external nature. And in a certain contrast to what surrounded him as science, he developed his metamorphosis doctrine, his ideas of the primal plant, the primal animal, of the primal phenomenon. What did he actually want with that? What he wanted with it is closely related to what he wanted to pour into his Faust, and what really shows how Goethe strove from a completely different attitude to knowledge than the science around him. In a passage in which Goethe seeks to describe what became clear to him during his travels through Italy, his idea of the archetypal plant, the mental image he sought to see in every plant and which would explain all plant life and every individual plant , he says: If you have this original plant, if you have truly grasped what this original plant should be, then you have something from which you can even invent individual plant forms that could live quite well. This goes to the very heart of Goethe's scientific endeavour. Through his scientific endeavour, Goethe did not want to arrive at ideas such as the world view of the Enlightenment around him. Goethe wanted to arrive at ideas that, so to speak, only represent in the soul, but activate the same forces that we have outside in plants, in animals, in all of nature itself. Goethe wanted to unite what grows and happens in the plant, and he did not want to have an idea that appears as an abstraction compared to what lives and weaves out there in nature; he wanted to have an idea that one can say lives in the imagination as something that is of the same nature as what lives out there in the plant. Goethe did not want to gain ideas that could be said to represent what is out there in the world, but in reality what is out there in the world is quite different. Goethe wanted to gain ideas through which what lives outside in a natural way would come to life in the soul in a way that is appropriate to the soul. That was his whole endeavour. Goethe wanted a kind of knowledge that can be described as living knowledge, as living together with nature. That is to say, he wanted to be able to walk through nature and its formations with the ideas he had in such a way that these ideas relate to the inner life of nature and its formation. As the forms of nature change, so should what lives in the soul change. There should be nothing living in the soul that the soul has merely abstracted from nature, but the soul should have merged with nature, lived together with it. Goethe strove for a knowledge that he really presents in a wonderful and artistic way in the fate of the homunculus in the classical Walpurgis Night. Homunculus is an idea derived from the human being, which must therefore remain with mere mechanism, with mere abstraction. Just as Goethe's ideas, Goethe's metamorphosic ideas, are not supposed to be such ideas, but rather represent the forces and living essence of nature itself, so this homunculus, instructed by a view of nature , which was even closer to nature than that which surrounded Goethe, taught by the natural philosophy of the ancient Greek philosophers, Thales, Anaxagoras, but also taught by the transformative being Proteus, must dissolve. Just as Goethe's metamorphic ideas should unite with nature itself, so should the homunculus unite with world events. He cannot live as he has emerged from Wagner's views. He is a mere idea, a mere thought. He must connect with existence. When the homunculus is seized by the living, the role of Wagner is played out.

Faust must begin a world wandering that takes him beyond what he could have achieved, but which must play out in this way, as the role of Wagner played out with the creation of the homunculus. And to this end, Goethe shows us how Faust now develops not those powers as his powers of knowledge that lead him to the macrocosm in the sense in which the macrocosm can only be grasped in the Copernican, Keplerian, Galilean way; but Goethe shows us how Faust now wills just that which the Earth Spirit can give out of the realm of the innermost, one might also say, the lowest forces of soul existence. With the forces that can come from this, Faust is to begin his journey through the world. And now we see Faust going through this journey through the events that are first presented in the first part of Goethe's “Faust”. There we see how Mephistopheles confronts Faust. I do not want to get involved here in all possible explanations of what this Mephistopheles actually is; but I want to go into what necessity shows us, that Goethe must go beyond what is presented in the first part of “Faust”. According to what we have just considered, Goethe has, to a certain extent, initially presented Faust as powerless in the face of the spirit of the macrocosm. But he does not immediately present him as powerless in the same way in relation to the spirit of the earth. But Faust – and this must certainly be emphasized – initially still stands by what a bygone age, from which humanity had in turn come to a more developed world view, still regarded as something right or at least as something possible. I will not go into what Mephistopheles becomes in his relationship with Faust in terms of the soul, nor into how Mephistopheles is more or less a realistic, more or less a mythological figure. I just want to draw attention to what happens to Faust under the influence of Mephistopheles.

On the one hand, in ancient times, magic, imagination or external actions were used to uncover the secrets of nature. Faust cannot be associated with this, as we will see. On the other hand, however, there was something else connected with the search for the secrets of the world in ancient times, something that has been preserved to our times: the belief that something could be learned about the secrets that prevail in man by, as it were, — we shall speak about this healthy power of the soul in particular tomorrow in connection with spiritual research — and that one exposes something in man that is less than this healthy power of the soul, which one can perhaps call, improperly but with a word that is understandable to us at this moment, the normal power of the soul. We need only recall words such as hypnotism, somnambulism, all the forms of superstitious clairvoyance, and we have the whole wide area into which we are led, perhaps in a not immediately transparent way, by the events of the first part of Goethe's Faust. And Mephistopheles is simply, I might say, such an emissary of the Earth Spirit, who for a while brings Faust to become really similar to the medieval Faust, be it the real historical Faust, who received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1509, who is really an historical personality, be it the Faust of the folk book or one of the other numerous figures, or the Faust of the puppet show that Goethe got to know. This Faust of the puppet theater, this Faust of the sixteenth century, as he then continued to live on through the centuries, cannot be understood without taking into account unhealthy, morbid forces of the human soul, as we must call them today, forces of the human soul that are achieved by a damping down, a paralyzing of the human consciousness, as it is present in normal life. Whether one reads the life story of Faust — the Faust who received his doctorate in Heidelberg in 1509 — or delves into the book Faust, which appeared in 1589, one encounters on the one hand a real personality on the one hand and on the other a poetic personality, who is to the highest degree what today, with a more or less apt word, is called “medial”, “medial” with all the morbid, abnormal phenomena associated with it.

Now it is not immediately apparent that Goethe wanted to show Faust, for example, the mediality of the appearance of the earth spirit until the end of the first part of his “Faust”, but what happens really leads us into this realm. And one would like to describe Mephistopheles as the spirit who, in Faust's nature, evokes such a world view that people can believe that it solves deeper secrets of existence, namely, people who do not really trust in human full consciousness and therefore believe that one must first paralyze and cloud this consciousness in order to get behind the secrets of existence. In a book that is certainly one-sided but by no means undeserving, Kiesewetter has portrayed Mephistopheles as a kind of second ego of Faust, not as a higher ego, but as the ego that one recognizes if one disregards the part that expresses itself in a person's normal higher mental life and descends into the regions of the soul, where the instinctive nature, where, I might say, the sub-sensible — by no means the supersensible! — comes to expression. In a way that is not immediately apparent, but which becomes quite clear to anyone who follows the events in the first part of “Faust” with understanding, it now becomes apparent that Faust, in his wanderings through the world, really can be believed to be attained by the path of such an abnormal, subdued, somnambulant consciousness, or in the ordinary, trivial sense, by one who is not clear-minded. But something else is also made clear to us, something that is extraordinarily important for understanding both the human soul and the “Faust” poem. While Faust is becoming familiarized with everything that can be recognized with deeper, but only sub-sensuous, driving forces, which then expresses itself in the witches' kitchen, in Walpurgis Night and so on, he is at the same time becoming familiarized, we may say, with tragic-moral aberrations, with the rule of impetuous drives. Of course, what we encounter, for example, in the “Gretchen” poem is one of the perfect flowers of world literature. But it is perhaps one of the perfect flowers of world literature precisely because the poet has succeeded in depicting the tragedy that flows from human drives that are not clarified by what one can call higher human nature in the true sense of the word. And Mephisto throws together for Faust a certain world knowledge, a satisfaction of knowledge, with this emergence of blind instinct from the depths of the soul, where man abandons himself to his nature without accompanying his life with a moral judgment of the world. This is portrayed in Goethe's poetry in a grandiose and tragically manner. But at the same time it shows us how everything that is realized in the field of what is so often referred to as clairvoyance - we will talk about these things again in more detail tomorrow - what could be called somnambulistic clairvoyance, which arises from the consciousness being , that in addition to the powers of cognition, the corporeality of the human being is altered and used in this, even if it is a subtle change; how all that is achieved in this area is on exactly the same level of human nature as the blind nature of drives and passions. This result, which for many people is a terrible one, emerges from the way in which Goethe presents the aforementioned clairvoyance, somnambulism, as arising when one transforms into powers of knowledge what lives in the drives of the human being, in those instincts that have not yet been clarified into normal human cognitive ability, in the blind, unconscious instincts that follow impulses, but impulses not interwoven with the realm of moral judgment. And Goethe wants to show that such a view of the world, as expressed in the witches' kitchen on Walpurgis Night, is only the opposite of the blind rule of the drives, where man rules with his morbid soul life. This intimate connection between the lower human instinctual life and what is often seen as clairvoyance and which is believed to lead to higher knowledge of human nature, because one has no trust in normal human nature, is dramatically characterized in the first part of Faust. And it is stated with sufficient clarity that the person who attains such clairvoyance does not rise above normal people, but sinks below what are ordinary scientific powers of knowledge, into the same regions of human existence where blind drives prevail. If one wishes to study the physiology of blind instincts in greater detail, one can delve into the revelations of somnambulists, hypnotized subjects, and mediums. But if one wants to penetrate to the real higher secrets of existence (and we will talk about this in more detail tomorrow), one must realize that with such clairvoyance one does not rise above normal people, but sinks below them human being, — a clairvoyance that Goethe, not preaching morality but artistically depicting, dramatically interweaves into the aberrations of the human subconscious being. This is what Faust had to go through during that world wandering, which is presented to us in the first part.

And now we see how Goethe, in a remarkable way, at the very beginning of the second part, has Faust face both natural and spiritual life. He interprets this very clearly, I might say magnificently clearly, not, of course, with philosophically abstract words, but through the power of creation. We shall not concern ourselves today with the question, which has also been raised by some commentators on Faust, as to whether a personality such as Faust can really recover from the serious crimes he has committed in the events depicted in the first part when, as has been said, he goes out into the wide expanse of nature and experiences what is depicted at the beginning of the second part. To what extent the guilt that he has incurred continues to prevail in Faust's soul is not something we want to dwell on today. It can continue to prevail. What Goethe wants to show, however, is how Faust rises out of his entanglement in the sub-sensible humanity. And there we see Faust at the beginning of the second part, I might say, placed in the healthiest way in nature and see the spiritual world working on him in the healthiest way. For what Goethe presents by having the chorus of spirits act on Faust is really only an external dramatic representation of a process that can be described, more or less accurately, as an internal process that takes place in exactly the same way as it does when the genius seizes the poet, when it is not something in the external sense that has a magical effect on the person, when it is not human consciousness is dulled, as in some kind of somnambulistic vision, but rather where something flows into human consciousness, which is indeed a spiritual influence, but which does not flow into a consciousness that is tuned down, into a consciousness that is dulled, but into the consciousness that is most healthily immersed in the natural and historical life of humanity. And has Faust progressed on his journey through the world since he beheld the sign of the Macrocosm and addressed the world as a spectacle? Yes, Faust is further along, quite considerably further! And Goethe wants to show that Faust's healthy nature has withstood the temptations that Mephistopheles has brought upon him so far, and which have consisted in his wanting to push him down into the sub-sensible, into that which lives in man when instinctive forces and not elevated powers of knowledge are brought to some world-view. At the moment depicted at the beginning of Part One, Faust has opened the book of Nostradamus. The sign of the macrocosm appears before his soul. He tries to put himself in the place of that which can be represented to him through the words and signs of this macrocosm. “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” At this moment, one might say, Faust aspires to a kind of morbid mental life, in which he then also remains, although the word “morbid” should not be understood here in a philistine sense.

Now that Faust has been placed in the midst of a healthy experience of nature and spirit, and the spirit has had its effect on his normal consciousness, he utters another word, a parallel word, I would say, to the word “What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” Faust confronts the phenomena caused by the sunshine; but he turns away and turns to the waterfall, which reflects in colors what the sun can do. “So let the sun remain behind me,” says Faust. He wants to look at the reflection of what the sun causes. ‘We have life in the colored reflection’ – a wonderful intensification compared to the first word: ”What a spectacle! But alas! Only a spectacle!” Now Faust can grasp how what appears to him as nature is truly spiritual, because he knows how to relate to what lives in nature in the sense of the word with which the second part of Faust concludes: “All that is transitory is but a parable” - grasping in the parable what lives spiritually in nature. And so we see how, at the beginning of the second part of Faust, through an effect of the spiritual world on normal consciousness, Faust is brought to a healthy position in relation to the world; how he is now really no longer, I would like to say, in the belief that one can achieve something by going back to the old magic, and how he has now also learned that one can achieve nothing with all that is false clairvoyance, that is somnambulism. Now he faces the world as a healthy person. He can nevertheless attain life in a colorful reflection, that is, attain what lies behind the world of nature and history.

And truly, we now see how Faust develops more and more into what Goethe himself wanted to develop into. Of course, when we look at Goethe's development of world view, everything appears to us, I might say, more in an abstract, philosophical form. But that is precisely, as I said, the great thing that Goethe has succeeded in doing, to shape it dramatically on the outside, which other people can only rise to in philosophy. And so we see that Faust is now able to place himself in the world of historical development, that he is able to find the eternal-meaningful, the spiritual-real in this historical development. But for this it is necessary that Faust now really experiences in his soul an increase of his powers of knowledge. Through what he has experienced with Mephistopheles, he has not experienced an increase, but a damping down of his power of knowledge; he is not seeing, he has been blinded. Now, out of historical becoming, he longs to have a figure like Helen of Troy brought to life before him again. How can he achieve this? Precisely by developing something within himself, which is so beautifully and profoundly portrayed in the scene that represents the “walk to the mothers”. Goethe himself confessed to Eckermann that he got the inspiration to include this mother scene in the second part of “Faust” from reading Plutarch, where it is described how a personality of ancient times, who went around in a difficult situation as if he were insane and spoke of the “mothers,” of those mothers who were referred to as goddesses, who were deeply revered in the secrecy of ancient mysteries. Why should Faust descend to these mothers? Goethe speaks to Eckermann in a strangely mysterious way. He says that with regard to this scene, he betrayed himself the least. We may well assume that Goethe did not express this in full, clear, abstract terms, but that which really lived in his soul as his path to the mothers in full, clear realization. I have often spoken about this path to the mothers, but today I would just like to hint: When we immerse ourselves in the ancient world view into which Goethe places Faust, into the classical age of Greek civilization, into which he has already placed us when he encounters Helen, when we immerse ourselves in this ancient world, into which Faust is now also supposed to plunge, we find that this ancient world brought forth something out of itself with the powers that were still peculiar to ancient man: powers of knowledge that, one might say, penetrate more deeply into the workings of the world because they were even more deeply connected to the nature of existence than the powers of knowledge of the souls of the time in which Goethe lived, which had already become more separated from the direct life with the natural existence and had to find the way back into the natural existence. But it has already been indicated that when man delves into the life of his soul, he can find something that is not the same as what was indicated earlier as the sub-sensible driving forces, as those impulses that leave a person blind, but still work as impulses; but that a person can dive down into the depths of their soul life with full consciousness, with nothing other than their normal consciousness, which only dives deeper into their soul. Then, through this immersion in his deeper soul powers, he attains something quite different from the sub-sensible soul powers of somnambulism or hypnotism or similar phenomena of human life, as just described. He has the possibility of descending so deeply into his soul that he really brings up powers that are just as conscious and that he masters just as much as the powers of normal consciousness, to which he is not a slave as in somnambulism or in ordinary mediumship. And that Faust descends to the mothers, after he has recovered as far as it has been indicated, that is precisely the dramatic representation of this descent to those powers of the soul, which, when we grasp them in our soul, bring an inner higher man to the outer world, so that we can also see more in the outer world than what the mere senses or the mind bound to the senses see.

And now we see how Faust can continue his journey through the world by consciously descending into the depths of the soul; and how, in contrast to this, Wagner is presented with his Homunculus , who only arrives at the abstract idea of humanity, which must merge with life, which cannot sustain itself, which, before an insight, if it merely remains mechanistic, is scattered. This is contrasted with what Faust achieves in the ascent of his world wanderings. But there is something else! We are also clearly shown how Mephistopheles really brought those forces to Faust that are below the senses, in that Mephistopheles, one might say, morally ends, if the word may be applied here in the classical Walpurgis Night, when he unites with the Phorcys, with those entities that are born out of the darkness and the abyss, out of that abyss that represents the lower human nature. If we really go into what Goethe, in his own words, has incorporated into 'Faust', it is presented to us quite clearly and distinctly. The forces that Mephistopheles now feels are with him on the classical Walpurgis Night are not superhuman, they are subhuman. One cannot arrive at a different view of the world with those powers of perception that go beyond the ordinary powers of perception, except by enhancing and enriching what one has in the ordinary powers of perception. But with the supersensible powers of perception, one arrives at something that is fundamentally poorer than normal human life. And it cannot be emphasized often enough that it was also said in Faust that the life that is attained through a dimming of human consciousness, whether through somnambulism or mediumship, is poorer than what man attains with his normal consciousness of the world. When man looks at the world with his normal consciousness, he has his two eyes through which he looks out into the world. This is a certain richness in the sensory world. Where Mephistopheles is with the spirits of darkness, they have only one eye between them and have to pass it from one to the other. They are poorer. Mephistopheles belongs to a world — at least he feels a kinship with this world — that is poorer than the normal human world. This world has nothing more to offer Faust, now that he has begun the descent to the mothers, that is, to the deeper forces of the human soul, to which Mephistopheles can still pass the key, but to which Mephistopheles himself cannot lead him.

And now we see how Goethe, at a higher level of his world wanderings, is able to place Faust in the right way in relation to the real, truly surviving spirit of the past. Indeed, Goethe has the following written next to the title of the third act of the second part: Classical-Romantic Phantasmagoria. This is not presented as reality, but he has life “in a colorful reflection”. He grasps it with the deeper but conscious powers of the human soul and then strips it away again, as we are shown in the fourth act of part two. And so, if time allowed, we could still teach many more things that would make it clear to us how Goethe lets his Faust undergo a world journey, out of the aberrations that arise when one has no faith in normal human consciousness. The old magic that Faust first falls prey to and surrenders to has no trust in what consciousness is able to give, and separates the events that are supposed to take place magically out there in all kinds of ceremonies from consciousness. What takes place in the weaving and working of the spirits outside of full consciousness is supposed to reveal the spiritual world; but not what takes place in normal consciousness, but what takes place in the subconscious, in the dark drives, is supposed to explain what flows through the world as a secret. From this Goethe had to lead his Faust to that which can be recognized as the spiritual world without any impairment of normal consciousness, through a further development of normal consciousness. This is, it seems to me, very clear, if not as an idea - Goethe himself said this - but as an impulse that is shaped entirely artistically, in Goethe's “Faust” among many others, it is also embodied. From this point of view, if I may use the trivial word, it really appears to be entirely in the role of Goethe's Faust when, after he has found the deepening of normal consciousness, he has really come to has really come to the point of rejecting all false seeking along false, magical, somnambulistic paths, and wants to face the world as a human being who seeks to know the higher only through an elevation of the soul forces.

Thus we read in the second part of “Faust”:

Unhappy phantoms! Thus you treat
The human race a thousand times over;
Even indifferent days you transform
Into hideous confusion of web-enmeshed torments.
Demons, I know, are hard to get rid of,
The spiritual bond cannot be severed...

And further: I have not yet fought my way into the open.
If I could remove magic from my path,
Unlearn the spells altogether,
I would be a man alone in front of you,
Then it would be worth the effort to be human.

Faust wants to be a person who, through neither outer magic nor inner clouding of consciousness, faces the world of the spirit and is also able to introduce this world of the spiritual from this consciousness into social human life, into the life of 'deed'. And this is portrayed towards the end of the second part of 'Faust' in such a wonderful, in such a grandiose way. So Goethe has tried in his own way to show how man, through a development of the powers within him, can truly penetrate to the secrets of existence, by also clearly and dramatically portraying the aberrations that stand in man's way.

One would like to say that the human being who wants to come out of human forces themselves to a coexistence with the spiritual world really stood in a Faustian form - not by being called Faust, but really in a Faustian form - already opposite Augustine, who indeed attributes to the Manichean bishop Faustus the possibility of coming close to the secrets of the world through an inner elevation of human powers of knowledge. Goethe, in allowing the medieval Faust to have an effect on him, found himself in a world that had already passed judgment on this kind of Faust. The judgment was that a person who wanted to come to the secrets of existence out of his own powers in such a way must fall away from the stream of humanity as an evil element. Goethe could not agree with this view. Goethe was clear about the fact that a human being can only be a complete human being when he is capable of realizing the striving of Faust, even if not in the old way in which the Faust of the folk tale or that of the sixteenth century wanted to realize it. And Goethe was able to arrive at this view because he was deeply imbued with what, as I have often said here, can be called idealism, world-view idealism in the development of German thought.

In these lectures, I have tried to present figures such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in their - albeit only philosophical - striving to grasp the spiritual world. I have also sufficiently emphasized that one need not be a dogmatic adherent of any one of the Fichtean, Schellingian, or Hegelian schools in order to be truly impressed by the greatness of these figures, who stand at the center of German idealism. One should take them as seekers of knowledge, as human beings with a certain kind of inner life. Disregarding the details of their specific world-view, But they do stand there in a striving for a world-picture that is closely akin to Goethe's striving for a world-picture and that, when it is seen in its deeper inter-connections, shows itself to be fundamentally the same as the striving for a world-picture in Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. This striving is destined to continue to work within the process of German evolution.

We know that Kant developed a world view that was not related to Goethe's. I have often pointed this out. It cannot be justified here, I just want to mention it. Kant came to the view that, fundamentally, man cannot see into the deeper sources of nature and spirit. And he stated that if man really wanted to delve into the workings of the world with his ideas, he would need a completely different faculty of perception than he actually has. Then, not only concepts and ideas that depict things would have to flow into his knowledge, but the living stream of existence itself. We can see that Goethe felt this, for example, in his idea of metamorphosis with the primal plant, the primal animal, which Kant excluded from human cognition. And Kant said: “The one who wanted to embrace faith – I am quoting inaccurately, but it roughly corresponds to the wording – that he really looks into the sources of existence, would have to embark on an adventure of reason, to a kind of contemplative judgment; he would have to not only comprehend, but inwardly experience and contemplatively experience the stream of world existence itself.

In the beautiful little essay on “Contemplative Judgment,” Goethe expounds on this Kantian idea, and explicitly says: If one can rise to a higher region with regard to the ideas of freedom and immortality, why should one not also dare to take on the adventure of reason with what the human soul can otherwise experience in nature, in itself? What does Goethe actually want? That means nothing other than: Goethe wants to stir up such knowledge in himself that makes it possible for him, with what he has in his soul, to truly immerse himself in the living world, not just to know the world, but to experience it. Goethe himself strove for such knowledge and for such a position in relation to world phenomena, as he dramatically embodies them in his “Faust”. And Goethe had developed within himself the conviction that man can not only acquire knowledge that reflects a world outside of him, but that he can also awaken within himself a world of ideas that experiences the stream of the existence of the world; but that this is possible only by undertaking what Kant still calls an adventure of reason: to draw up from the depths of the soul the powers that can cognize more than the senses and the understanding limited to the senses. And that is the great thing, that Goethe, who regarded what he did as the nerve of his own cognitive faculty, at the same time understood as a vital impulse, that he felt compelled to solve the problem of knowledge not only philosophically, but as a living man; that for him the question of what can be known of the world and how one can work within the world of deeds, what one can hold in one's soul as the content of knowledge and as an impulse for action in the world of deeds, becomes a life problem. That is the great and significant thing, that for him the happiness and ruin of man depends on it; that for him the satisfaction of a longing depends on it, which concerns the whole person. But it is through this that the problem of knowledge could become for Goethe an artistic, a dramatic, a vital problem in the widest sense of the word. And because Goethe conceived knowledge as something that really leads to life, Faust, in his presentation, was truly satisfied in what he sought by growing together, as it were, with Goethe's world-view itself. For has not his soul, from the very beginning, sought to live in communion with what is spread out spiritually in nature? In Faust it is a quest from the very beginning. In order to realize it to some extent within himself, he needed his wanderings in the world. While he is still in his world, in the “cursed, dull wall-hole,” what kind of longing does he have there?

Oh, would you, full of moonlight,
For the last time on my pain,
Which I so many a midnight
At this desk herangewacht:
Then, over books and paper,
Trübsel'ger friend, you appeared to me!
Ah! could I but on mountain heights
In thy dear light go,
Around mountain caves with spirits hover,
On meadows in thy dawn weave,
From all knowledge smoke unburden,
In thy dew healthy me bathe!

He wants to get out with his soul, to unite with what lives in nature. He has come there, he has been reborn after his world wandering in that which Goethe has imbued with his soul and lives through as what can be called: the highest, most beautiful flowering of German intellectual life.

Therefore, it can be said that Goethe really did incorporate into his “Faust” what he had gained for himself in a struggling life of knowledge and the world throughout his entire life, for “Faust” accompanied him throughout his entire life. Many secrets are still contained in this “Faust”. But it also contains the fact that Faust's journey through the world has brought him to the point where, through the experiences of his own life, he has matured to take in what Goethe had acquired for himself, not as an adventure of reason, but as something that can be attained by descending to the 'Mothers', that is, by attempting in a healthy way to develop the normal spiritual powers already present in one's soul. In this way one finds not something below the soul nor something outside of it, but something truly super-sensuous. And the fact that within the development of the German soul a work like Faust has become possible characterizes the whole of this development, and determines the position which it must hold in the evolution of the world.

There was always an awareness that more is given with “Faust” than merely that which lived in Goethe. Of course, there were always Mephistopheles-like natures in the outer world as well; they cannot comprehend anything like that which lives in Goethe's Faust. And finally, I would like to point out to you just such an external Mephistophelean nature. I would like to read a critique of Goethe's “Faust” that was written in 1822, from which you can see that “Faust” was also judged differently from the way it is judged by those who try to immerse themselves in it selflessly. One would like to say, a criticism that comforts one that so very often the Mephisto natures in the world confront that which honestly and convincingly seeks the sources and reasons for existence. For such natures as that which wrote on Faust in 1822 are not so rare in the present day either. Now that I have tried to lead you on a journey through Faust's experiences, let us also hear something of the echo that Faust has found in a Mephistophelean nature. I shall omit those passages that are not suitable for a public lecture because they are too cynical. The prologue in heaven, where the Lord discusses Faust's nature with Mephisto, shows this man, after he has established “that Mr. von Goethe is a very bad versifier,” the following:

“This prologue is a true model of how one should not write in verse.”

And now the critic continues – in 1822, ladies and gentlemen! –:

"The ages that have passed have nothing to show that could be compared to this prologue in terms of presumptuous wretchedness... But I must be brief because I have taken on a long and unfortunately also boring piece of work. I shall show the reader that the infamous Faust enjoys an usurped and undeserved celebrity only due to the corruptive collective mind of an associatio obscurorum vivorum... I am not motivated by any rivalry for fame to pour out the lye of strict criticism on Mr. von Goethe's Faust. I do not walk in his footsteps to Parnassus and would be glad if he had enriched our German language with a masterpiece... Among the crowd of bravos, my voice may indeed fade away, but it is enough for me to have done my best; and if I manage to convert even one reader and bring him back from worship of this monster, then my thankless effort will not be regretted... Poor Faust speaks a completely incomprehensible gibberish, in the worst rhyming nonsense ever written in Quinta by any student. My preceptor would have beaten me if I had made verses as bad as the following:

Oh, full moon, thou that dost sow
On me my punishment,
For many a midnight
At this desk I have watched.

I will not dwell on the inferiority of the diction or the wretchedness of the versification; the reader has enough evidence from what he has seen that the author cannot compete with the mediocre poets of the old school when it comes to verse construction.

Mephistopheles himself recognizes that Faust was already possessed by a devil before the contract. But we believe that he does not belong in hell, but in the madhouse, with all that is his, namely hands and feet, head and so on. Many poets have given us examples of sublime gibberish, nonsense in grandiose words, but I would call Goethe's gallimathias a genre nouveau of popular gallimathias, because it is presented in the most vulgar and bad language...

The more I think about this long litany of nonsense, the more likely it seems to me that it is a bet that if a famous man comes up with the shallowest, most boring nonsense, , there will still be a legion of silly writers and gullible readers who will find and exegize profound wisdom and great beauties in this flat-footed nonsense.

And so it goes on. Finally, he says:

"In short, a miserable devil who could learn from Marinelli in Lessing. After him, I, in the name of common sense, reverse the judgment of Mrs. von Staël in favor of the aforementioned Faust and do not condemn him to hell, which could cool this frosty product, since even the devil feels wintery inside, but to be hurled into Cloaca Paranassus. By rights.

The world ignores such judgments. And the world sees in Faust one of the deepest attempts of the human spirit, not only in a philosophical way, but in a dramatic, very lively way, to present the problem of knowledge and humanity in the broadest sense to people, to fathom it at all. And there was always an awareness that Goethe succeeded not only in expressing the Goethean world view and Goethean sentiments in his Faust, but, as Herman Grimm says so beautifully, the entire world view of the entire century. And Herman Grimm was right to use this word. “We have,” he says, “a literature of our own, the purpose of which is not only to prove Goethe's credo, but also the credo of his entire century in Faust.”

I could also point out how deeply rooted the rebirth of Faust is in the entire German intellectual life after his world wandering. The depth to which this German spiritual life itself has sunk is shown by the fact that the whole wealth of this spiritual striving could find expression in a work such as Goethe's Faust, and Herman Grimm's words will certainly prove true: not only Goethe's Weltanschhauung, but the Weltanschhauung of the whole century. And a Weltanschhauung such as will live on in the coming centuries in the very broadest sense has been expressed in Goethe's Faust. That German intellectual life was able to produce this work will be a fact for all future times, which, despite all prejudices about German intellectual life, will be recognized by those who can grasp this German intellectual life impartially and objectively. By expressing the deepest striving of the German spirit through Goethe in Faust in such a great way, this German spirit has spoken for all time to all people of the development of the earth an imperishable word of knowledge of human life in being and in free will and in work, a word that will remain, just as will remain that which is the true, deep fruits of German spiritual life. Among these deepest, truest, most imperishable fruits will be found what we can find in Faust. And so we may say: by immersing ourselves in Goethe's Faust, we become acquainted with a part of the imperishable nature of the German spirit itself. And this German spirit has spoken to the whole world by being able to express such things as are hidden in an obvious secret in Faust, to use another of Goethe's words – obvious if one only seeks it. In the face of Faust, we may apply Goethe's own saying: “All that is transitory is but a parable.” But we may also expand on this saying: in works that, out of the transitory, incline towards the eternal, as Goethe's Faust does, the immortal speaks at the same time in an eternal way to the eternity of human existence.

In my last lecture I tried to show how it is due to misunderstandings if there is so little understanding between those who direct their research and attention to the soul and its processes and those who direct their attention to the material processes in the human organism, which proceed — well, as one will call it — as accompanying phenomena or also, as materialism maintains, as necessary causes for the psychic events. And I tried to show what the reasons for such misunderstandings are. Today I would like to draw attention to the fact that wherever real, true knowledge is sought, such misunderstandings, and also misunderstandings in a different direction, must necessarily arise if one does not take into account in the process of knowledge itself, which, in the course of more intimate, especially longer research, imposes itself more and more on the spiritual researcher as a direct experience, as an inner experience. It is something that at first seems very strange when it is expressed: In the field of world-views, that is to say in the field of knowledge of the spiritual-real or in general the knowledge of the sources of existence, if one, I might say, is too entangled in certain conceptions, in certain concepts, then one must of necessity enter upon such a view of the human soul that can absolutely be refuted, and just as well be proved.

Therefore, the spiritual researcher will increasingly deviate from what is otherwise customary in matters of world view, namely, to present this or that in support of one or the other view, which would be similar to what is called proof or even refutation in ordinary life. For in this field, as I said, everything can be proved with certain reasons, everything can be refuted with certain reasons. Materialism can be rigorously proven in its entirety, and it can be rigorously proven when it engages in individual questions of life or existence. And one will not be able to simply knock out of the field that which a materialist can cite in support of his views, if one simply wants to refute his view from opposite points of view. It is the same for someone who represents a spiritual existence. Therefore, anyone who really wants to research spiritual matters must not only know the arguments in favor of a particular worldview, but must also know all the arguments against it. For the remarkable result emerges that the actual truth only emerges when one allows what speaks for a matter and what speaks against a matter to take effect on the soul. And anyone who allows his mind to be fixed, I might say, on any web of concepts or images of a one-sided world view will always close his mind to the fact that the opposite can also assert itself in the soul, that the opposite must even appear right to a certain degree. And so he will be in a situation, like someone who wanted to claim that human life could only be sustained by inhalation. Inhalation presupposes exhalation; the two belong together. But this is always the case with our concepts and ideas that relate to questions of world view. We can put forward a concept that affirms something, we can put forward a concept that denies it; the one demands the other, like inhalation demands exhalation, and vice versa. And just as real life can only appear, can only reveal itself through exhalation and inhalation, when both are present, so can the spiritual only come to life in the soul when one is able to respond in an equally positive way to both the pros and cons of a matter. The affirmative concept, the affirmative idea, is within the living whole of the soul, so to speak, like an exhalation; the negative concept, like an inhalation; and it is only in their living interaction that that which relates to spiritual reality is revealed. Therefore, it is not at all appropriate for spiritual science to apply the usual methods that one is so accustomed to in everyday literature, where this or that is proved or refuted. The spiritual scientist realizes that what is presented in a positive way can always have a certain justification when it relates to questions of world view, but so can the opposite phenomenon. But when one advances in matters of world-conception to that direct life which lives in positive and negative concepts, just as physical life lives in inhalation and exhalation, then one comes to concepts which really take in the spirit directly, to concepts which are equal to reality. One must then, however, often express oneself differently than one expresses oneself according to the habits of thinking in ordinary life. But the way in which one expresses oneself arises out of the living, active inner experiencing of the spirit. And the spirit can only be inwardly experienced, not outwardly perceived in the way of material existence.

Now you know that one of the most important questions of our world view, and one that was also treated in the first lectures I gave here this winter, is the question of substance, of matter. And I would like to touch on this question today from the point of view I have just hinted at, as an introduction.

We cannot come to terms with the question of substance or matter if we keep trying to form ideas or concepts of what matter actually is; if we want to understand, in other words, what matter is. Anyone who has really wrestled with such questions, which are remote for many people, knows what such questions are all about. For if he has wrestled with it for a time, without yielding to any prejudice, then he comes to a completely different point of view regarding such a question. He comes to a point of view that makes him consider more important the way one behaves in one's soul when forming such a concept as that of matter. This wrestling of the soul itself is raised into consciousness. And then one arrives at a view precisely on these riddle-questions, which I could express in the following way.

He who wants to understand matter, substance, in the way it is usually understood, is like a person who says: I now want to get an impression of darkness, of a dark room. What does he do? He lights a light and regards this as the right method to get the impression of the dark room. It is, in fact, the most absurd thing one could do. And it is equally absurd — but one must become aware of this through a marked struggle — to believe that one will ever be able to cognize matter by setting the spirit in motion to illuminate matter with the spirit, as it were. Only where the spirit can be silent in our body itself, in the sensation of the senses, where the life of representation ends, only there does an external process penetrate into our inner being. There we can - by letting the spirit be silent and experiencing this silence of the spirit - have matter, substance, truly represented in our soul, so to speak.

One does not arrive at such concepts through ordinary logic; or if one does arrive at them through ordinary logic, then they turn out, I might say, to be much too thin to evoke real conviction. Only when one wrestles in the indicated way in one's soul with certain concepts, then they lead one to such a result as I have indicated.

Now the opposite is also the case. Let us assume that someone wants to grasp the spirit. If he seeks it, for example, in the purely external material form of the human body, he is like someone who, in order to grasp the light, extinguishes it. For the secret of the matter is that the external sensual nature itself is the refutation of the spirit, the extinguishing of the spirit. It reproduces the spirit just as illuminated objects reflect light. But nowhere can we, if we do not grasp the spirit in living activity, ever find it from any material processes. For that is precisely the essence of material processes: that the spirit has transformed itself into them, that the spirit has been transformed into them. And if we then try to recognize the spirit from them, then we misunderstand ourselves.

I wanted to say this by way of introduction so that more and more clarity can come about what the cognitive attitude of the spiritual researcher actually is, and how the spiritual researcher needs a certain breadth and mobility of the life of ideas in order to penetrate the things that are to be penetrated. With such concepts it is then possible to illuminate the important questions, which I also touched on last time here, and which I will only briefly mention in order to move on to our considerations today.

I said: As things have developed in the newer formation of the spirit, a one-sided view of the relationship between the soul-spiritual and the bodily-physical has increasingly come about, which is expressed by the fact that today the soul-spiritual is actually only sought within that part of the human body that lies in the nervous system or in the brain. In a sense, the soul-spiritual is assigned to the brain and nervous system alone, and one regards the rest of the organism more or less as an adjunct to the brain and nervous system when speaking of the soul-spiritual. Now I have tried to explain the results of spiritual research in this field by pointing out that one can only arrive at a true understanding of the relationship between the human soul and the human body if one places the whole human soul in relation to the whole physical body. But then it becomes clear that there is a deeper background to the structure of the human soul as a whole, into the actual life of perception, into the life of feeling and into the life of will. For only the actual life of perception of the soul is bound to the nervous organism in the way that modern physiological psychology assumes. On the other hand, the life of feeling — and here I must make it clear that I do not speak of it as it is presented to us, but as it arises — is related to the breathing organism of the human being, to everything that is breathing and is connected with breathing, in the same way as the life of presentation is related to the nervous system. So we must allot to the breathing organism the life of feeling of the soul. Then further: that which we call the life of will is in an equal relationship to that which we must call metabolism in the body; naturally right down into its finest ramifications. And by taking into account the fact that the individual systems in the organism are intertwined — metabolism naturally also takes place in the nerves —, I would like to say that at these outermost ends things interpenetrate. But a true understanding is only possible if we look at things in this way, if we know that the impulses of will can be attributed to metabolic processes in the same way as imaginative experiences can be attributed to processes in the human nervous system or in the brain.

Of course, such things can only be hinted at at first. And for the very reason that they can only be hinted at, objections are possible over and over again. But I do know one thing for certain: if we approach the subject with the whole range of anatomical and physiological research, that is, if we consider everything that anatomical and physiological research is, then there will be complete harmony between the spiritual scientific assertions I have made and the natural scientific assertions. On a superficial examination — let me just put forward the objection as a particularly characteristic one — objections can, of course, be raised against such a comprehensive truth. Someone might say: Let us first agree that certain feelings are connected with the respiratory organism; for the fact that this can be shown very plausibly for certain feelings cannot actually be doubted by anyone. But someone might say: Yes, but what about the fact that we perceive melodies, for example, that melodies arise in our consciousness? The feeling of aesthetic pleasure is connected with melodies. Can we speak here of some kind of relationship between the respiratory organism and that which quite obviously arises in the head and which, according to physiological findings, is so clearly connected with the nervous organism? As soon as we look at the matter properly, the correctness of my assertion immediately becomes completely clear. Namely, one must then take into consideration that with every exhalation an important process in the brain occurs in parallel: that the brain would rise during exhalation if it were not held down by the skullcap – breathing propagates into the brain – and vice versa; during inhalation the brain sinks. And since it cannot rise and fall because the skullcap is there, what is known to physiology occurs: the change in the blood flow occurs, what is known to physiology as brain breathing takes place, that is, certain processes that occur in parallel with the breathing process in the nerve environment. And in this encounter of the breathing process with what lives in us as sounds through our ear, what happens is that feeling is also connected to the respiratory organism in this area in the same way as the mere life of thinking is connected to the nervous organism.

I will only hint at this because it is something particularly remote and therefore provides a close objection. If one could agree with someone on all the details of the physiological results, no such details would contradict what was presented here last time and what has been presented again today.

Now it is my task to continue our discussion in a similar way to the last lecture. And for that I must go into a little more detail about the way in which the human being develops sensory perception in order to show what the actual relationship is between the sensory perception that leads to representations and the life of feeling and will, and indeed the life of the human being as soul, as body and as spirit.

Through our sensory life, we come into contact with our sensory environment. Within this sensory environment, natural science distinguishes certain substances, or, to be more precise, forms of substance, for it is these that are important here. If I wanted to speak in terms of physics, I would have to say aggregate states: solid, liquid, gaseous. But now, as you all know, physical and scientific research adds something else to these material forms. When science wants to explain light, it is not satisfied with just accepting the material forms that I have just mentioned. Instead, it reaches for what appears to it to be more subtle than these types of matter; it reaches for what is usually called ether. The concept of ether is, of course, an extraordinarily difficult one, and it can be said that the various thoughts that have been formed about what should be said about ether are conceivably diverse and manifold. Naturally, all these details cannot be discussed here. It should only be noted that natural science feels compelled to establish the concept of ether, that is, to think of the world not only as filled with the denser substances that can be perceived directly by the senses, but as filled with ether. The characteristic feature is that natural science cannot use its methods to determine what ether actually is. This is because natural science always needs material foundations for its actual work. But the ether itself always eludes material foundations, so to speak. It appears in connection with material processes, it causes material processes; but it cannot be grasped, so to speak, by the means that are tied to the material foundations. Therefore, a peculiar concept of ether has emerged, especially in recent times, which is actually extraordinarily interesting. The concept of ether that can be found among physicists today tends to say: ether must be that which, whatever else it may be, in any case has none of the properties that ordinary matter has. Thus, natural science points beyond its own material foundations by saying of the ether that it has what it cannot find with its methods. Natural science comes precisely to the assumption of an ether, but not to filling this ether concept with any content with its methods.

Now, spiritual research yields the following. Natural science starts from the material basis, spiritual research starts from the basis of soul and spirit. The spiritual researcher, if he does not arbitrarily stop at a certain boundary, is driven to the concept of ether in the same way as the natural scientist, only from the other side. The spiritual researcher attempts to include in his knowledge that which is active and effective within the soul. If he were to stop at what he can experience inwardly in ordinary soul life, then in this field he would not even go as far as the natural scientist who accepts the concept of ether. For the natural scientist at least formulates the concept of ether and accepts it. The student of the soul who does not arrive at a concept of ether on his own initiative is like a natural scientist who says: What do I care about what else is alive there! I assume the three basic forms: solid, liquid, gaseous bodies; I do not concern myself with what is supposed to be even thinner. This is indeed how the science of the soul usually proceeds.

But not everyone who has worked in the field of soul research does it this way; and particularly within that extraordinarily significant scientific development, which is based on German idealism that became established in the first third of the nineteenth century, — not in this idealism itself, but in what then developed out of it —, we find attempts to approach the ether concept from the other side, from the spiritual-soul side, just as natural science ascends from the material side to the ether. And if you really want to have the ether concept, you have to approach it from two sides. Otherwise you will not be able to come to terms with it. Now, the interesting thing is that the great German philosophical idealists, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, despite their insistent thinking and conceptualizing, which I have often characterized here, still did not have the ether concept. They could not, so to speak, strengthen their inner soul life, could not so energize it that the ether concept would have presented itself to them. On the other hand, in those who allowed themselves to be fertilized by this idealism, who, so to speak, allowed the thoughts that were generated at that time to continue to work in their souls, although they were not as great geniuses as their idealist predecessors, this ether concept arose out of this soul research. We find this concept of ether first in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was also a disciple of his father, in that he allowed what Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his successors, Schelling and Hegel, had done in their souls to continue to work within him. But by condensing it, as it were, to greater inner effectiveness, he came to say to himself: When one looks at the soul-spiritual life, when one, I might say, measures it on all sides, then one comes to say to oneself: This soul-spiritual life must run down into the ether, just as solid, liquid, and gaseous matter runs up into the ether. The lowest part of the soul must, as it were, open into the ether in the same way that the highest part of the material opens into the ether at the top. And Immanuel Hermann Fichte formed certain characteristic ideas about this, through which he really did come from the spiritual-soul to the boundary of the ether. We read in his “Anthropology” 1860 - you will find the passage quoted in my last book “Vom Menschenrätsel” -:

“In the material elements....the truly enduring, that unifying form principle of the body cannot be found, which proves effective throughout our entire life.” “So we are pointed to a second, essentially different cause in the body.” “In that it contains that which is actually enduring in metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible body, but one that is present in all visible materiality. The other, the outer appearance of the same, formed from incessant metabolism, may henceforth be called 'body', which is truly not enduring and not one, but the mere effect or afterimage of that inner corporeality, which throws it into the changing material world, just as, for example, the magnetic force prepares a seemingly dense body from the parts of iron filings, but which atomizes in all directions when the binding force is withdrawn.

Now, for I. H. Fichte, an invisible body lived in the ordinary body, which consists of external matter, and we could also call this invisible body the etheric body; an etheric body that brings the individual particles of matter of this visible body into their forms, shapes them, and develops them. And I. H. Fichte is so clear that this etheric body, to which he descends from the soul, is not subject to the processes of the physical body, that for him it is enough to have insight into the existence of such an etheric body to get beyond the riddle of death. For I. H. Fichte says in his “Anthropology”:

I have shown with I. H. Fichte how he advances to such an invisible body of the soul. It is interesting that in many places in the heyday of German idealistic intellectual life, the same thing emerged. Some time ago I pointed out a solitary thinker who was a school director in Bromberg and who dealt with the question of immortality: Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in the 1860s. He initially approached the question of immortality like the others, by trying to get behind this question of immortality through ideas and concepts. But for him, more emerged than for those who merely live in concepts. And so the editor of that treatise on immortality written by J. H. Deinhardt was able to cite a passage from a letter that the author wrote to him in which Deinhardt says that although he had not yet communicate the matter in a book, but that his inner research had clearly shown him that during his life between birth and death, man works on the development of an invisible body, which is released into the spiritual world at death.

And so many other phenomena of German intellectual life could be cited in favor of such a direction of research and contemplation. They would all prove that in this direction of research there was a desire not to stop at what mere philosophizing speculation, mere living in concepts can yield, but to strengthen the inner soul life in such a way that it reaches the density that reaches the ether.

Of course, the real mystery of the ether will not yet be solved from within by following the paths these researchers have taken, but it can be said, so to speak, that these researchers are on the path to spiritual science. For this mystery of the ether will be solved as the human soul undergoes those inner processes through practice, which I have often characterized here and which are described in more detail in my book “How to Know Higher Worlds”. Man does, however, gradually attain to really reaching the ether from within by going through these inner soul processes. Then the ether will be directly there for him. But only then is he capable of grasping what a sense perception actually is, what is actually present in sensory perception.

In order to present this today, I must, so to speak, approach the question from a different angle. Let us approach what actually takes place in metabolic processes for humans. Roughly speaking, we can think of the metabolic processes in the human organism as taking place in such a way that they essentially have to do with the liquid element of substance. This will be easy to see if one is even slightly familiar with the most viable scientific ideas in this field. What is a metabolic process lives, so to speak, in the liquid element. What breathing is, lives in the airy element; in breathing we have an interaction between inner and outer air processes, just as in metabolism we have an interaction between material processes that have taken place outside our body and those that take place inside our body. What happens when we perceive with our senses and follow it with our imagination? What does that actually correspond to? In the same way that fluid processes correspond to metabolism and airy processes to breathing, what corresponds to perception? Perceptual processes correspond to etheric processes. Just as we live, as it were, with metabolism in the liquid, we live with breathing in the air, we live with perception in the ether. And inner etheric processes, inner etheric processes that take place in the invisible body, of which has just been spoken, touch with external etheric processes in sensory perception. If one objects: Yes, but certain sensory perceptions are obvious metabolic processes! — it is particularly striking for those sensory perceptions that correspond to the so-called lower senses, smell, taste — a closer look would show that what is material belongs to the metabolism itself, and that in every such process, even in tasting for example, an etheric process takes place through which we enter into relationship with the outer ether, just as we enter into relationship with the air with our physical body when we breathe. Without an understanding of the etheric world, an understanding of the sensations is not possible. |

And what actually happens? Well, what happens there can basically only be understood when one has brought the inner soul process so far that the inner etheric-physical has become a reality. This will be the case when what I have recently called imaginative visualization in my lectures here has been achieved. When the images have been strengthened by the exercises that you can find in the book mentioned above, so that they are no longer abstract images, which we otherwise have, but are images full of life, then they can be called imaginations. When these images have become so full of life that they are imaginations, then they live directly in the etheric, whereas when they are abstract images, they only live in the soul. They spread into the etheric. And then, when one has so far brought it in one's inner experimentation that one experiences the ether as a living reality within oneself, then one can experience what happens in the sense perception. The sensation consists in this – I can only present this today as a result – that, as the external environment sends the etheric from the material into our sense organs, it creates those gulfs of which I spoke the day before yesterday, so that what is outside also becomes internal within our sense realm; for example, we have a sound, so to speak, between the sense life and the external world. Then, as a result of the outer ether penetrating our sense organs, this outer ether is killed. And as the outer ether enters our sense organs in a deadened state, it is revived by the inner ether of the etheric body counteracting it. This is the essence of sensory perception. Just as in the breathing process, death and life come into being when we inhale oxygen and exhale carbonic acid, so there is an interaction between the quasi-dead ether and the living ether in the sense of feeling.

This is an extraordinarily important fact for spiritual science. For that which cannot be found through philosophical speculation, on which the philosophical speculation of the last centuries has so often failed, can only be found through spiritual science. Sensory perception can thus be recognized as a fine interaction between external and internal ether; as the animation of the ether killed in the sensory organ from the inner etheric body. So that what the senses kill in us from the environment is inwardly revived by the etheric body, and we thereby come to what is precisely perception of the external world.

This is extraordinarily important, for it shows how, even when he is giving himself up to sense perception, man lives not only in the physical organism but also in the ethereal supersensible, and how the whole life of the senses is a

life and weaving in the invisible etheric. This is what the deeper researchers have always suspected in the characterized time, but it will be raised to certainty through spiritual science. Among those who recognized this significant truth, I will mention the almost completely forgotten J.P.V. Troxler. I have already mentioned him in earlier lectures here in earlier years. In his Lectures on Philosophy, he said:

"Even in the past, philosophers distinguished a fine, noble soul body from the coarser body... a soul that has an image of the body, which they called a schema, and which was the higher inner human being... In more recent times, even Kant in Dreams of a Spirit-Seer seriously dreams, in jest, of an entire inner spiritual human being who carries all the limbs of the outer one on his spirit body; Lavater also writes and thinks in the same way... ."

These researchers were also aware that the moment one ascends from mere material observation to the observation of this supersensible organism within us, one has to pass from ordinary anthropology to a kind of knowledge that comes to its results by way of inner observation. It is therefore interesting that both I. H. Fichte and Troxler are clear about the fact that anthropology must be elevated to something else if it is to grasp the whole human being. I. H. Fichte says in his 'Anthropology':

"Sensual consciousness... with the entire, also human, life of the senses, has no other significance than to be the site in which the supersensible life of the spirit is realized, in that through free conscious deed it introduces the otherworldly spiritual content of the ideas into the world of the senses... This thorough grasp of the human being now elevates “anthropology in its final result to ‘anthroposophy’.”

We see from this current of German intellectual life, which, I would say, drives idealism from its abstractness to reality, the inkling of an anthroposophy. And Troxler says that one must assume a super-spiritual sense in conjunction with a super-sensible spirit, and that one can thus grasp the human being in such a way that one no longer has to deal with an ordinary anthropology, but with something higher:

"If it is now highly gratifying that the latest philosophy, which... . in every anthroposophy.. . must reveal itself in every anthroposophy, it cannot be overlooked that this idea cannot be a fruit of speculation, and that the true individuality of man must not be confused either with what it sets up as subjective spirit or finite ego, nor with what it juxtaposes to it as absolute spirit or absolute personality.

With Anthroposophy, something is not presented that emerges, as it were, out of arbitrariness, but something that inevitably leads to that spiritual life, which once it is engaged in, experiences concepts and ideas not only as concepts and ideas, but condenses them to such an extent - and I would like to use the expression again - that they lead into reality, that they become saturated with reality.

But, and this is the defect of this research, if one merely rises from the physical to the etheric body, one still does not get along; but one only comes to a certain limit, which must be exceeded, however, because beyond the etheric only the soul-spiritual lies. And the essential thing is that this soul-spiritual can only enter into a relationship with the physical through the mediation of the etheric. Thus, we have to look for the actual soul of the human being in that which now works completely super-etherically in the etheric, so that the etheric in turn shapes the physical as it is itself shaped, permeated, and lived through by the soul.

Let us now try to grasp the human being at the other pole, the will pole: We have said that the life of the will is connected with the metabolism. Inasmuch as the impulse of the will expresses itself in the metabolism, it lives, not merely in the external physical metabolism, but, since the whole human being is within the boundaries of his being, the etheric also lives in what develops as metabolism when a will impulse proceeds. Spiritual science shows that the opposite of sensory perception is present in the will impulse. While in sensory perception the outer ether is, as it were, animated by the inner ether, so that the inner ether pours into the dead ether, in the case of the will impulse, when it arises from the soul spiritual, then through metabolism and everything connected with it, the etheric body is loosened and driven out of the physical body in those areas where the metabolism takes place. So here we have the opposite: the etheric body, as it were, withdraws from physical processes. And therein lies the essence of acts of will, in that the etheric body withdraws from the physical body.

Now those revered listeners who have heard the earlier lectures will remember that, in addition to imaginative knowledge, I have distinguished between inspired knowledge and the actual intuitive knowledge. And just as imaginative knowledge is the result of such a strengthening of the soul life that one comes to the etheric life in the way indicated earlier, so intuitive knowledge is given by the fact that one learns, so to speak, in one's soul life to participate through powerful impulses of will, even to evoke what one can call withdrawal of the etheric body from physical processes. Thus in this area the soul-spiritual extends into the physical-bodily. When a volitional impulse originally emanates from the soul-spiritual, it finds the etheric, and the consequence is that this etheric is withdrawn from some metabolic area of the physical body. And from this working of the soul-spiritual through the etheric upon the bodily, there arises what may be called the transmission of a volitional impulse to some bodily movement, to some bodily activity. But it is only when we consider the human being as a whole in this way that we arrive at his actual immortal part. For as soon as we learn to recognize how the spiritual-soul element weaves in the ether, it also becomes clear to us that this weaving of the spiritual-soul element in the ether is independent of those processes of the physical body that are included in birth, conception and death. And in this way it is possible to truly rise to the immortal in the human being, to that which connects with the body that one receives through the hereditary current and which is maintained when the human being passes through the gate of death again. For the eternal spiritual is connected with that which is born and dies here, indirectly through the etheric.

It has become clear that the concepts presented by spiritual science are very much at odds with today's thinking habits and that it is difficult for people to find their way into these concepts. It may be said that one of the obstacles to this finding one's way in, besides others, is that so little effort is made to seek the real connection between the spiritual and soul life and the bodily in the way suggested today. Most people long for something quite different from what spiritual research can actually provide. What is it actually that takes place in man when he imagines? An etheric process that only interacts with an external etheric process. But in order for a person to be in this direction in a healthy mental and physical way, it is necessary for that person to become aware of where the boundary is where the inner and outer ether touch. This mostly happens unconsciously. It becomes conscious when the human being rises to imaginative knowledge, when he experiences inwardly the rain and movement of the ether, and his coming together with the outer ether, which dies in the sense organ. In this interaction between the inner and outer ether, we have, so to speak, the outermost limit of the effectiveness of the ether in general on the human organism. For that which is in our etheric body, for example, primarily affects the organism in terms of growth. There it is still active within the organism, forming it. It gradually organizes our organism so that it adapts to the outside world, as we see when a child grows up. But this inwardly formative grasp of the physical body by the ether must reach a certain limit. If it goes beyond this limit through some morbid process, then what lives and moves in the ether, but which should maintain itself in the etheric, encroaches upon the physical organism, so that what should remain as ether movement is, as it were, interwoven into the physical organism. What then happens? That which should actually only be experienced inwardly as an image, occurs as a process in the physical body. Then it is what is called a hallucination. When the ether process crosses its boundary into the physical, because the body, through its disease, does not offer the right resistance, then what is called a hallucination arises. Now, many people who want to enter the spiritual world actually desire hallucinations above all. Of course, the spiritual researcher cannot offer them that, because hallucination is nothing more than the reproduction of a purely material process, a process that takes place in relation to the soul beyond the boundaries of the body, that is, in the body. On the other hand, what leads to the spiritual world is that one goes from this boundary back into the soul and instead of hallucinations, one comes to imagination, and imagination is a purely mental experience. And because it is a purely mental experience, the soul lives in the spiritual world in the imagination. But in this way the soul also lives in fully conscious penetration of the imagination. And it is important to realize that imagination, that is, the right way to gain spiritual knowledge, and hallucination, are opposites and also destroy each other. He who hallucinates through a diseased organism blocks the path to true imagination; and he who has true imagination is most safely guarded from all hallucination. Hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive and mutually destructive.

But the same is true at the other pole of the human being. Just as the etheric body can encroach upon the physical body, can sink its formative power into the physical body, and thereby cause hallucinations, that is, purely physical processes, so on the other side, through certain morbid formations of the organism or through induced fatigue or other conditions of the organism, the etheric, as it was characterized in the act of will, can emerge in an irregular manner. Then it may happen that instead of the etheric really being withdrawn from the physical metabolic region in a correct act of will, it remains within, and the purely physical activity of the physical metabolic region encroaches upon the etheric , so that the etheric becomes dependent on the physical, whereas in normal will-manifestation the physical is dependent on the etheric, which in turn is determined by the soul-spiritual. When this happens through such processes as I have indicated, then, I might say, the compulsive act, which consists in the physical body with its metabolic processes forcing its way into the etheric, so to speak pushing itself into the etheric body, gives rise to the morbid counter-image of hallucination. And if the compulsive act is evoked as a pathological phenomenon, then one can again say: it excludes what is called intuition in spiritual scientific knowledge. Intuition and compulsive behavior are mutually exclusive, just as hallucination and imagination are mutually exclusive. This is why there is nothing more soulless than, on the one hand, hallucinators, because hallucinations are just hints at bodily conditions that should not be; and, on the other hand, for example, the whirling dervishes. The dance of the dervish comes about through the physical body pushing into the etheric, so that it is not the etheric that brings about the effect from the spiritual-soul, but basically only regular compulsive actions occur. And anyone who believes that they can find revelations of the soul in the dancing dervish should first of all study spiritual science in order to realize that the dancing dervish is proof that the spirit, the spiritual-soul, has left its body; that is why he dances in this way.

And, I would like to say, only a little more extensive is that which is not dancing, but which, for example, is automatic writing, mediumistic writing. This also consists in nothing more than first driving the spiritual-soul out of the human being completely, and allowing the physical body, which has been pushed into the etheric body, to unfold as it does when it has become empty, as it were, of the inner ether and now comes under the control of the surrounding outer ether. All these subjects lead away from spiritual science, not toward it, although nothing should be objected to them from the standpoint of those from whom they usually meet with so much opposition. In the dancing dervish one can study what a danced art, a truly artistic dance, should be. The artistic dance should consist precisely in the fact that each individual movement corresponds to a volitional impulse, which can also become conscious to the person concerned, so that one is never dealing with a mere intrusion of physical processes into ethereal processes. Only spiritualized dance is artistic dance. The dancing of the dervish is only the denial of spirituality. Some will object: But it does show the spirit! It does, but how? You can study a shell if you take in and look at the living shell; but you can also study it when the living shell is gone, by looking at the shell: the shape of the shell is reproduced in the shell, the shape born out of life. But in a similar way, we also have a reproduction of the spiritual, a dead reproduction of the spiritual, when we are dealing with automatic writing or with a whirling dervish. That is why it resembles the spiritual as much as the shell resembles the mussel, and why it can be so easily confused. But only when we truly penetrate into the spiritual can we have the right understanding of these things.

If we start from the bodily, through the sensation of the senses, and ascend to the realm of the imagination, which then transfers itself into the soul-spiritual, we come to recognize in this way, in a spiritual-scientific way, that what is aroused by the sensations of the senses is, as it were, deposited at a certain point and becomes memory. Memory arises from the fact that the sensory impression continues in the body, so that not only can the etheric work from within in the sensory impressions themselves, but the etheric can now also be active in what the sensory impression has left behind in the body. Then what has gone into memory is brought up again from remembrance.

Of course, it is not possible to go into these things in more detail in the short time of a one-hour lecture. But one will never come to a real understanding of what imagination and memory are, and how they relate to the soul and spirit, if one does not advance in the spiritual-scientific sense on the path that has been indicated.

At the other pole, there is the whole current that flows from the spiritual-soul of the will impulses down into the physical body, through which the actions are effected. In the ordinary life of man, the sense life comes to remembrance and remains, as it were, in the act of remembering. Remembrance is placed before the soul-spiritual, so that the latter is not aware of itself, of how it creates and is active through the sensations of the senses. Only a vague, confused notion arises that the soul lives and weaves in the etheric, when this soul, living and weaving in the etheric, is not yet so strengthened in this etheric weaving that all etheric weaving breaks at the boundary of the physical. When the soul-spiritual interweaves the etheric body in such a way that what it expresses in the etheric body does not immediately break at the physical body, but is so sustained in the etheric that it reaches the boundaries of the physical body, but is still noticed in the etheric, then the dream arises. And the life of dreams, when it is really studied, will become proof of the lowest form of supersensible experience of man. For in dreams man experiences that he cannot unfold his soul-spiritual, because it seems too powerless, in will impulses within that which is present in the dream images. And because the will impulses are lacking, because the spirit and soul intervene so little in the etheric in the dream that the soul itself becomes aware of these will impulses, the chaotic fabric that the dream represents arises.

What dreams are on the one hand, on the other hand there are those phenomena in which the will, coming from the soul-spiritual, intervenes in the outer world through the etheric-physical , but is just as little aware of what is actually happening there as he is able to become aware in the dream, due to the weak activity of the spiritual-soul, that the human being is living and breathing in the spiritual. Just as the dream so to speak represents the attenuated sense perception, so something else represents the intensified effect of the spiritual-soul, the intensified effect of the will impulses; and that is what we call fate.

We do not see the connections in fate, just as we do not see in the dream what is actually weaving and living there as the real thing. Just as material processes always underlie the dream, surging into the ether, so the soul and spiritual anchored in the will surge towards the outer world. But in ordinary life the soul and spiritual are not organized in such a way that the spirit itself can be seen in its activity in what happens to us as the succession of so-called fateful experiences. At the moment we grasp this succession, we learn to recognize the fabric of fate, we learn to recognize that just as in ordinary life the soul obscures the spiritual through ideas, in fate it obscures the spiritual through affect, through sympathy and antipathy, with which it takes in the events that come to it as life events. In the moment when one sees through sympathy and antipathy in a spiritual-scientific way, when one really grasps the course of life's events objectively and calmly, one notices how everything that happens in our lives between birth and death is either the after-effect of previous lives on earth or the preparation for later lives on earth. Just as, on the one hand, natural science does not penetrate to the spiritual and soul, not even to the etheric, when it seeks the relationships between the material world and the imagination, so at the other pole, natural science cannot cope with its efforts today. Just as it clings to material processes in the nervous organism in the life of the imagination, so at the other pole it clings to something unclear, which, I might say, hovers nebulously between the physical and the soul.

These are precisely the areas where one must become fully aware of how world-view concepts can be both proven and refuted. And for those who insist on proof, the positive has much to recommend it; but one must also be able to experience the negative inwardly, in keeping with one's insights, as with exhalation one inhales. Recently, what is called analytical psychology has emerged. This analytical psychology is, I would say, inspired by good intuitions. For what does it want? This analytical psychology, or as it is usually called today, psychoanalysis, wants to descend from the ordinary soul life to that which is no longer contained in the ordinary present soul life, but is a remnant of earlier soul experience. The psychoanalyst assumes that mental life is not exhausted in the present mental experience, in the conscious mental experience, but that consciousness dips down into the subconscious. And in much of what appears in the mental life as a disturbance, as confusion, as this or that defect, the psychoanalyst sees an effect of what surges down in the subconscious. But what the psychoanalyst sees in this subconscious is interesting. When you hear what he lists in this subconscious, it is first of all deceived hopes in life. The psychoanalyst finds some person who suffers from this or that depression. This depression does not have to originate in the present conscious mental life, but in the past. Something occurred in mental experience in this life. The person has since emerged from it, but not completely; a residue remains in the subconscious. He has experienced disappointments, for example. Through education and other processes, he has come to terms with these disappointments in his conscious mental life, but in the subconscious they live on. There they surge, as it were, to the very edge of consciousness. There it then produces the unclear mental depression. The psychoanalyst thus searches in all kinds of disappointments, in deceived hopes of life that have been drawn down into the subconscious, for that which determines the conscious life in a dark way. He also searches for this in what colors the soul life as temperament. In what the soul life colors out of certain rational impulses, the psychoanalyst seeks a subconscious that, as it were, only strikes against consciousness. But then he comes to a broad area — I am only reporting here — which the psychoanalyst grasps by saying: 'The animalistic mud of the soul is playing up into conscious life'. Now, it is not at all denied that this basic sludge is present. In these lectures I myself have already pointed out how certain mystics have experiences in that something, be it for example the erotic, is subtly brought up and plays into consciousness, so that one believes to have particularly exalted experiences, while only the erotic, “the animalistic basic mud of the soul,” is brought up and sometimes interpreted in a deeply mystical sense. One can still see in such a poetically delicate mystic as Mechthild of Magdeburg how erotic feeling goes into the details of the images. These things must be clearly grasped so that no errors are made in the spiritual-scientific field. For anyone who wants to penetrate the spirit must be particularly aware of all the paths of error, not to avoid them, but to avoid them. But anyone who speaks of this animalistic basic mud of the soul, who only speaks of disappointed hopes in life and the like, does not go deep enough into the life of the soul: he is like a person walking across a field in which nothing can yet be seen and who believes that it contains only the soil or even the manure, whereas in fact this field already contains all the fruits that will soon come up as grain or other things. When speaking of the basic mud of the soul, one should also speak of what is embedded in it. Certainly, there are disappointed hopes contained in this basic mud; but at the same time, what is embedded in it contains a germinating power that represents what – when the human being has passed through the gate of death into the life that between death and a new birth, and then enters into a new earth-life, makes something quite different out of the deceived hopes than a depression, that makes out of them that which then in a next life leads to disillusionment, to hardening. What the psychoanalyst seeks in the disappointed hopes of life in the depths of the soul, if he delves deeply enough, is what is being prepared in the present life in order to intervene fatefully in the next life.

Thus, if we dig around and search through the animalistic mud of the ground without dirtying our hands, as is unfortunately so often the case with psychoanalysts, we find the spiritual and mental weaving of fate that extends beyond birth and death with the spiritual and mental life of the soul. Analytical psychology is precisely the kind of psychology that can be used to learn how everything is right and everything is wrong when it comes to questions of world view, namely from one side or the other. Nevertheless, there is an enormous amount that can be said in support of the one-sided assertions of the psychoanalysts; therefore a refutation will not greatly impress those who are sworn to these concepts. But if one learns to recognize what speaks for and against with the attitude of knowledge that was characterized at the beginning of this lecture, then it is precisely from the pros and cons of the soul that one will experience what really works. For, I might say, between what can be observed in the soul, as psychologists do, who only go to the level of consciousness, and what the psychoanalyst finds down in the animalistic mud of the soul, lies the realm that belongs to the spiritual-soul-eternal, which goes through births and deaths.

The exploration of the human soul also leads to a correct relationship with the external world. Modern science has not only spoken about the ether in an indeterminate way, but it is also spoken about in such a way that the greatest mysteries of the world are actually attributed to it: what then took on solid forms, became planets, suns and moons, and so on. In this view, the soul and spiritual processes at work in man are regarded as no more than a mere episode. There is only dead ether, back and front. If one gets to know the ether only from one side, then one can come to such a construction of the becoming of the world, to which the subtle Herman Grimm — I have quoted his saying before, but it is so significant that it can always be brought before the soul again — says the following words. By familiarizing himself with how one thinks that the dead etheric mist of the cosmos has given rise to that out of which life and spirit are now developing, and by measuring it against Goethe's world view, he comes to the following saying:

What appears here again within German intellectual life as a feeling born out of a healthy soul life is shown in a true light by spiritual science. For, as one learns to recognize, how the animation of the dead ether through the soul, through the living ether, comes about, then through inner experience one comes away from the possibility that our world building could ever have arisen from a dead etheric. And this riddle of the world takes on a quite different form when we become acquainted with the corresponding riddle of the soul. We now recognize the ether itself in its living form, we recognize how the dead ether must first arise out of the living. So that by going back to the beginning of the world, we must come back to the soul and see in the spiritual-soul the origin of that which is developing today. But while this spiritual-soul substance remains a mere hypothesis, a mere figment of the imagination, in relation to the outer riddles of the world, so long as one does not learn about the whole life and weaving of the etheric through spiritual science in the encounter of the living ether from within with the dead ether from without, it is precisely through spiritual science that the cosmic fog itself becomes a living, spiritual-soul substance.

As you can see, the riddles of the soul also open up a significant perspective for the riddles of the world. I must pause on this perspective today. You can see that a true contemplation of outer and inner life from the point of view of spiritual science leads across the ether into the spiritual-soul realm, both in the soul itself and in the outer world.

On the other hand, there is the attitude of knowledge such as I have described in the case of a man whom I mentioned last time. Today we can at least surmise that from the corporeal as conceived by spiritual science, the bridge leads directly up to the spiritual-soul, in which ethics, morality, and morals are rooted, which originate in the spirit, just as the sensual leads into the spiritual. But in its study of purely external material things, science has arrived at a point of view that denies that ethics is rooted in the spiritual at all. Today, people are still too embarrassed to deny ethics itself, but they say the following about ethics, which is at the end of Jacques Loeb's lecture, which I presented last time with reference to the beginning. There he says, who comes to a brutal denial of ethics through scientific research:

“If our existence is based on the play of blind forces and is only a work of chance, if we ourselves are only chemical mechanisms, how can there be an ethic for us?” The answer to this is that our instincts form the root of our ethics, and that instincts are just as hereditary as the formative components of our body. We eat and drink and reproduce, not because metaphysicians have come to the conclusion that this is desirable, but because we are mechanically induced to do so. We are active because we are mechanically compelled to do so by the processes in our nervous system, and, if people are not economic slaves, the instinct of “successful triggering or successful work determines the direction of their activity. The mother loves her children and takes care of them, not because metaphysicians had the idea that this was beautiful, but because the instinct of brood care, presumably through the two sex chromosomes, is just as firmly determined as the morphological characters of the female body. We enjoy the company of other people because we are forced to do so by hereditary conditions. We fight for justice and truth and are willing to make sacrifices for them because we instinctively want to see our fellow human beings happy. That we have an ethic is due solely to our instincts, which are chemically and hereditarily laid down in us in the same way as the shape of our body."

Moral action leads back to instincts! Instincts lead back to physical-chemical action! The logic is, however, very threadbare. Of course, one can say that one should not wait for the metaphysicians to work out some metaphysical principles before acting ethically, but that is the same as saying: should one wait for the metaphysicians or the physiologists to discover the laws of digestion before digesting? I would therefore recommend to Professor Loeb not to investigate the physiological laws of digestion in the same brutal way as he attacks the metaphysical laws of ethical life. But one can say: one can be an important natural scientist today – but the habits of thought are such that they cut you off, as it were, from all spiritual life, that you no longer have an eye for this spiritual life at all. But this always goes hand in hand with the fact that you can, as it were, prove a defect in thinking, so that you never really have everything that goes into a thought.

One can indeed have strange experiences in this regard. I have already presented such an experience here some time ago; but I would like to present it again because it ties in with the ideas of a very important contemporary natural scientist, who is also one of those whom I attack precisely because I hold him in high esteem in one field. This naturalist has made great contributions in the field of astrophysics and also in certain other fields of natural science. But when he wrote a book summarizing the world view of the present and the development of this world view, he makes a remarkable statement in the preface. He is, so to speak, enchanted by how wonderfully far we have come in being able to interpret everything scientifically, and with a certain arrogance, as is common in such circles, he points to earlier times when this was not the case. Goethe, saying: “Whether one can really say that we live in the best of times is not clear; but that, in terms of scientific knowledge, we live in the best of times for knowledge compared to earlier times, we can refer to Goethe, who says:

It is a great delight
to place oneself in the spirit of the times,
to see how a wise man thought before us,
and how we have then finally come so gloriously far.

With this, a great naturalist of the present day concludes, that is, with a confession that he takes from Goethe. He has only forgotten that it is Wagner who makes this confession and that Faust says to this confession when Wagner has left:

How can the mind not lose all hope,
When it is always stuck with stale evidence,
Digging for treasure with a greedy hand
And happy when it finds earthworms!

This great researcher forgot to reflect on what Goethe actually says the moment he refers to Wagner to express how wonderfully far we have come. One can, I would say, see where thinking leaves off in the pursuit of reality.

And we could cite many more examples if we were to delve a little deeper into contemporary scientific literature. Since I hold the aforementioned natural scientist in high regard, as I have said, it will certainly not be taken amiss if I were to assert the true Goethean attitude in the face of such natural science, which puffs itself up by also claiming to be able to provide information about the spirit. For although we can forgive many a monist for being unable to grasp the spirit due to the weakness of his thinking, it is dangerous when the attitude that appears in Jacques Loeb and in the characterized natural scientist, who characterizes himself as Wagner but believes he is characterizing himself as Goethe, spreads more and more into the widest circles through the belief in authority. And it does. Those who penetrate into what spiritual science can give in terms of attitude may, if they follow the example of the natural scientist, even if it may not seem reverent enough to some, come to the genuine Goethean attitude by taking up Goethe's words, with which I would like to conclude this lecture:

It is a great horror
to put oneself in the shoes of souls like that,
how greedily they touch the material
and rush past the spirit!

Dear attendees! Today I will speak about a very difficult, I would almost say, concerning topic: the evolution of a planet, especially in relation to the evolution of our own planet in the theosophical sense. And perhaps more than in any other of these lectures, it will be necessary today to appeal to the full impartiality of the audience. For such a way of looking at things, as one is currently almost solely accustomed to – that is, to deal with such a question as that of planetary development in a material, purely physical sense – what Theosophy has to say will, of course, have to appear quite fantastic.

Furthermore, the scope of what we have to discuss today is very broad. And the field of research involved is so remote that it is of course quite impossible for me to speak to you today in detail – in a short lecture – about the way in which such insights are gained. It is quite impossible for me to give you a derivation of what I have to say. I will only be able to relate and point out what would require many, many lectures, or even books, to be discussed in detail. I will not even be able to present the subject to you as it presents itself to the so-called occultist or secret researcher, but I will have to resort to comparisons and analogies.

I would ask you to bear in mind that the way in which I will treat the subject today is not the same way in which the secret researcher or occultist arrives at these results. Today, if any simile is used, it is only to make it possible to make oneself understood at all. The insights themselves are gained from quite different sources. And when we discuss inner development in detail in one of the next lectures, we will also learn something about the sources from which such insights as today's are drawn.

In the sense of the theosophical world view, man is – and I was able to mention this to you just now, also in connection with lectures from the last few weeks – an evolving being, a being in the process of development.

He sees a future perspective that entitles him to say that there is something spiritual, a spark of divinity, or better said, a resting place, a divine seed, in his breast. The human being of the future will be quite different from what he is today. Now the objection may be raised: How can man know what he will be in the future? He can know because he already carries the potential, the germ of the future within himself. The purpose of self-knowledge is none other than to study the potential and germs that still lie deeply hidden in the human breast today, in order to see what man can become in the future. In this way, man can see into his own future.

On the other hand, all higher beings – you know from earlier lectures that Theosophy speaks of higher beings than human beings – all divine beings are, for the theosophical worldview, entities that are similar to human beings, who have gone through their development at a similar level, albeit on different planes. One could say that the gods also served their time in humanity in earlier epochs. They were human and have already become what man will become in the future. Thus, in the theosophical world view, divine spiritual beings have advanced beyond the stage of humanity.

Man has not yet risen to the level of divinity. In this sense, we must place man in a whole sequence of entities. Then we will have created the conditions for being able to observe planetary development in the sense of spiritual research. It should be emphasized that this spiritual research, when understood in the right sense, in no way contradicts the sensual scientific research of our days, just as it does not contradict when an anatomist anatomically examines the corpse of a great artist and registers his anatomical results . Neither does it contradict what an art historian has to say about these artists, nor does what the materialist has to say about the moon, sun and earth contradict what Theosophy has to say about these heavenly bodies. The two things can coexist quite harmoniously. And even if the materially oriented researcher, from the standpoint of his conceit of infallibility, confronts the results of spiritual research with brusqueness, we must still say that such opposition is no less possible than the opposition of the anatomist who dissects a corpse and finds something to object to in what an art historian says about this person.

This said, if we look up at the heavenly bodies, where we see not only material things but also, in these things, the expression of spiritual beings, we will also find the expression for man in the thought that Goethe hinted at in “Faust” when he characterized the earth spirit:

In the flood of life, in the storm of action
I surge up and down
Weaving back and forth!
Birth and grave,
An eternal sea,
A changing weaving,
A glowing life.
So I create at the whirling loom of time
and weave the living garment of the Godhead.

Those who cannot rise to the realization that it is a reality to speak of the spirit of Mercury and the spirit of the Sun, and that what the eye sees and what we can explore with our instruments to what is spoken in theosophy is exactly the same as the external bodies of man to his soul, for such people the theosophical results will be spoken in vain.

When there was more conscious spiritual research in scholarship than there is today, the names given to our celestial bodies, especially those belonging to our solar system, were meant in a completely different sense. The old names Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, etc. did not just refer to the material bodies; in these material bodies they saw the bodies of spiritual beings. And the names applied to the spiritual entities, so that originally Mercury was the name for the planetary spirit of Mercury. The same applies to the Moon, Sun, Mars, Venus, etc. This is a prerequisite that we must adhere to if we want to understand what I have just said.

First of all, let me describe the meaning of the earth's development in a comparison. Imagine going back to an earlier point in our Earth's development, to the point in time that our natural science must also assume: namely, to the point in time before man set foot on Earth. Our natural science certainly indicates such a point in time when the various other lower beings were present in manifold forms, and a point in time when man essentially entered this Earthly development in his present form, as a sensual-real being. Don't get worked up about the form. It should mean nothing other than that if we go back in scientific research, we will find a point in time when man was not yet there.

Let us look at the earth as it presents itself at this point in time. We have the point in time when man could not have changed anything about this earth in any way. Nothing at all had been worked on by man on this earth. Because he was not there at all yet. So we have to say: the point in time we are talking about now presents us with the earth as it was prepared by the forces of nature. But for man to be able to intervene with his own cultural work – spiritually and religiously speaking – it would be as if I had to say: the earth has been handed over to man out of the hand of the gods, without human intervention.

Now, human beings are beginning to work on the earth step by step. If we follow purely historical research, we learn that this teaches us how man first began to work the earth with primitive tools. We imagine how he carried stones to both sides of the Nile and how the pyramids were formed. We look back even further, to the time when people created the first cultural works using simple flint tools. As we move forward, we see how humans increasingly came to control the forces of nature. It is then clear to us that the things we see today would not be there if human minds and hands had not worked. Let us try to imagine a time when no human hand or mind had yet worked. Try to understand what the things around you are. They are the result of natural forces, but also the result of human labor. So we look back to the point in time when human labor began.

Now let us look up to our time, when human labor has changed this planet. Let us compare the surface of our earth with the surface of yore. We put ourselves in the place of an observer who is outside our earth and compares these two points in time and can then say: This is the earth without human intervention, and then on the other hand, this is what human labor has done. This human work can continue. It will increasingly transform the Earth planet. In your mind, you can at least imagine the later stage of Earth's development, where again an unbiased observer looks at this Earth planet, but now in such a way that, when he looks at it from the outside, it would seem to him as if you were looking at this room. There is nothing here that is merely a natural phenomenon. You will find nothing of the original forces, such as they are a flowing in the open. It is all artificially constructed. So you could imagine a point in the earth's development where everything that can be transformed by human hands has actually been transformed by human hands in such a way that the observer would see an earth transformed into a work of art. Of course, nature would have to be transformed even more by human labor and conquered by humans.

But there is no reason why we should not think that electricity and other forces of nature that have been put at the service of humans, and indeed much more significant forces of the earth, can be put at the service of human culture. In the present development, we see the earth as having arrived at a goal. We do our work in such a way that man does it with this goal in mind. If we could not intervene in the growth of plants, if it were not as it has happened, we could not become master of the forces of the origin of higher living beings, but only the inanimate, mineral nature could be completely transformed, so that the form of the planet would be the result of its work at the final goal of the earth planet.

Now let us look back again to the point in time when human work had not yet begun. The theosophical worldview does not view anything that already existed or was already developed in any other way. Everything that has come into being and developed has come about in a similar way to these processes, which I have been able to hint at comparatively. The beings, of whom I have said that they have ascended from men to gods, and whom men regard as the higher ones, they did their work at that time. Just as a younger being will receive the earth planet from the hands of men when the earth has reached its goal and will then be able to continue working on it, so man received this planet from the hands of the gods. What he found, the gods had brought into being, exactly in the same way and form as man brought the earth into being. Such was the mere development of nature before there was any culture on this earth, before a simple man, with simple tools or, let us say, with his hands, somehow touched the earth, the earth was the work of the gods. From that point on, man has taken over the work of the gods in his own way.

Let us look at the matter from a different point of view, from the point of view of knowledge. Man seeks to explore what is around him, he seeks to think about what is in the world in terms of thought. I have often used the comparison: if there were no water in this glass, I could not scoop any out. All our thoughts, when we reflect on the world, have their meaning. If they are to have a meaning for the world, then they must be within the world. Of course, it would be quite ridiculous to want to think about a world in which no thoughts are embodied. When man reflects on the world and arrives at thoughts about the world, the world must have been built according to these thoughts. When man now investigates the laws and arrives at natural laws, what are these natural laws for him, which express themselves in thoughts? Nothing other than what man draws from them, similar to how he draws water from a glass. And just as the watchmaker has formed the watch according to his thoughts, and another, without knowing the watchmaker, can disassemble the watch better afterwards, so man comes and dissects the world afterwards. He does not need to know the one who put the thoughts into it. And it would be strange to say: No watchmaker put the thoughts into the watch mechanism.

More recent science has so often said: We do not need any spiritual authors of the world. Science has finally led us to understand this world in a purely mechanical way and to understand how the individual parts interlock. So we don't need a creator. — That's just as clever as claiming that because you understand how to take a watch apart, you don't need to assume a watchmaker. The fact that the world can be explained mechanically is no proof that it was not originally built according to thoughts. When we see nature in its natural forces and deduce the laws from them, for philosophy these natural forces are the expression of the original thoughts of the gods and the work of men in art, these are thoughts of a later work of the same kind as the work of the gods in nature outside. When the theosophist contemplates a rock, a crystal, or even a plant — although this is more difficult — he says to himself: All these have been created in the same way in spirit, like a machine, a work of art, like a work of art by a painter or musician. Only the latter are more recent products of the human spirit, which is a God in the making, while the former are the product of the mature spirit of God, which has long since surpassed the level of man. This is the spirit.

Now let us look at the matter in more detail. If we look at man as he is and lives today, and if we go back only a little in history, we learn that everything around us has been created relatively recently and that centuries ago man worked with very different, more primitive means of culture. And if we go further back, these means of culture become more and more primitive, and cultural history shows us that people living in the earliest times made knives and tools out of stone. So we come to a primitive man on earth who, in relation to everything that is the result of intellectual culture today, was still very far behind. The mind of the human being whom today's science likes to call prehistoric man was very primitive. We can see, then, that the ability to understand developed and took shape during this time. In this way, we ourselves trace the development of the mind. Further research into humanity in cultural history does not go any further.

But now spiritual research begins, theosophical research. It speaks in the most serious sense of the development, of the development of everything that exists in our environment. Just as the intellect has gradually developed, which at the beginning could only create very primitive means of culture such as flint knives and so on, grinding grain between two millstones, so the intellect was not only primitive, but it was not there at all. The intellect, this intellectuality has developed. Based on spiritual facts, just as our science is based on material facts, intellectuality begins to follow the things that cultural history speaks of. Cultural history extracts from the layers of the earth what it finds. Man evidently had a completely different facial expression. His brain was the tool of the spirit, which was not yet as developed as it later became. But from there we go back to even more distant primeval times. And what I have mentioned before, I have to bring up again here to make everything a whole. We come back to human ancestors who, however, cannot be shown in geology, who did not yet make tools, who did not yet have what we call intellectual power, but who had other mental abilities instead. From material natural science you know that the Earth has not always looked the same as it does today, that it has undergone continuous changes in its shape, that where there is land today there used to be sea, and where there is sea today there used to be land. The theosophical worldview speaks of facts that even the scientist at least hypothetically admits. The part of the earth's surface that is now occupied by the Atlantic Ocean, which lies between Europe, Africa and America, was once land. This is a fact for spiritual research. Arldt's treatise on Atlantis only provides information about the animal and plant world. Theosophical research, however, speaks of the human form. The intellect had not yet developed at that time; other spiritual abilities were decisive then.

You can get a rough idea of how this came about. When seeing animals migrate into dark caves, they lose their faces. Other powers develop. Strength declines. Thus, in general, in the course of development, we find that with the development of one faculty, the other must gradually recede. Thus, with the development of the mind, of intellectuality, other spiritual powers that man had in times gone by recede.

A certain kind of clairvoyance, a dim, dark clairvoyance, was an outstanding spiritual power among the population of ancient Atlantis. These were people whose forebrain was not yet developed. That was the case with the Atlantic people, whose forebrains were not developed; they were not intellectual, but they were endowed with a certain clairvoyance. They had not yet developed reflection. Therefore, [the Atlantic man] could not have any culture. He could not make knives and axes for himself, he simply lived in a completely different way, but he was clairvoyant in a certain respect. His consciousness was so developed that he could not only perceive in his surroundings that which the senses convey, that which enters the human soul through the gates of the senses, but his soul was able to perceive even more of the soul, albeit in a very shadowed way. When he came near another person, he not only perceived what the person looked like, not only perceived what the person saw, but he could vividly perceive what moral qualities the other person had. He could perceive the soul, the inner being, the instincts, the passions and desires with a completely different kind of mind. If he came near a person who had wild desires, he had something else; today we would call it hallucinations. Colorful images arose in him of what lived in that being. So a completely different perception was present in those times. This is roughly how we have characterized the Atlantean population.

Another practical activity was also linked to this cognitive activity. You can read more about these things in my magazine “Lucifer - Gnosis”, in the essays of “13”. There it is described how people worked in those days. They had no tools, but just as they were clairvoyant, they were also endowed with a certain magical power. They were able to do what people today can no longer do. They were able to promote the growth of a plant, to make it grow faster. I could tell you many other things, but I think that is enough, for it could be taken in the most serious way. You see, however, that we are looking back here to a point in our earth's development that had a very different human being. But you must bear in mind that a different being, at the center of such a development, also requires a very different environment.

If we explore the Earth itself in these ancient times, then this Earth is also quite different. The distribution of water, fog, clouds, and air that we have around the Earth today did not yet exist in ancient Atlantis. It was quite different. The air was, so to speak, almost saturated with water. We did not have to deal with such a distribution of water in the air as we do today, but with a perpetual misty air. When Germanic mythology speaks of a 'fog home', it is a memory of ancient Atlantis with its foggy air. It was only in the later process of our earth's formation that what we have in our environment today emerged. Only with this environment was the progression of sensory and intellectual development possible. Thus we look back on a different formation of man and the earth planet. In certain respects, we can regard man as divine in a spiritual sense, but he differs considerably from the spirituality of our time. The spirituality of that time has receded. But the recognition that built the mind has emerged in our time. It has pushed the other back.

There will indeed come a time when people will unite the two: self-aware intellectual knowledge with withdrawn clairvoyance. This is what is already emerging in clairvoyance as a prophecy of later epochs. The Atlanteans were not so significantly different from people today, but they were different in some ways. If I may express myself crudely and trivially, I would say that they were not yet embodied in such dense matter, they were not yet as hardened in their matter as they have been since that time. Just as you follow the animals and come up to the cartilaginous fish and bony fish, as you come to beings that are embodied in less dense matter, we also had people who had a finer organism that they then knew how to control more.

The naturalist [Lord Kelvin] takes us back to such times – albeit hypothetically. The naturalist has calculated when the earth must have been in a state that did not yet allow for life on earth. According to the amount of heat that it still loses today and that it must have possessed in the past, it must once have been so warm that creatures such as plants, animals and humans that live on it today could not have lived then. Whether this hypothesis is more or less well-founded, it is certainly ingenious and based on good foundations. It is calculated that 30 million years ago the Earth was in a state in which there was no plant kingdom, no animal kingdom and no human kingdom. These were in a completely different state from planetary beings.

Let us trace them back to a state that is more and more fluid and more and more finely material. So, what man carries as a physical body was not yet present at that time. If you hold on to the idea that I have put before you, then you will be able to visualize and imagine how the human spiritual part could have lived at that time, as well as how what is spiritual and soulful in the animal and plant world could have lived on this planet before it emerged in plants, animals and humans. We follow man from the stage when he was physically softer and then even softer, to states that appear gelatinous compared to our present flesh and further back ethereal and even earlier spiritual, so that we find him, by looking into the past, always spiritualized. This is how we have to look at all beings.

We come back to an Earth planet that in its form does not yet represent a solid skeleton for our Earth, but a soft mass of mist. If you now look further at the beings that we have traced back, we find the Earth planet by no means as material as science presents it. We find it still fluid where plant, animal and human forms have appeared. But we also find it already populated by beings in a spiritual state. Thus we see how the earth continues to develop.

I would like to make clear by means of a comparison what is of course somewhat difficult to grasp. Consider today's hard coal. You dig it out of the earth. Today it is lifeless. If you look back millions of years into the past, this coal was still within extensive forests. These forests with their undergrowth perished, were covered by the earth and transformed over millions of years into what we dig out as coal. This is the dead body of former plant formations. The plant has become stone.

So much for the external material point of view. For spiritual research, something else arises. The spiritual researcher sees how the living becomes dead, how a stone has become from the living. But spiritual research says: every stone - whether you take a rock crystal or any other rock - everything has come into being in a similar way to coal. Nothing living has come from something dead. Just as a plant would not grow out of coal, something living has never come from something dead. It is the other way around: the dead has come from the living. But what we have around us in the way of stones and rocks and crystals is nothing other than fossilized life. The inanimate emerged from the animate. Thus the earth was once a body that had nothing inanimate about it. The inanimate, the rock, is only a later phase, a precipitation from the animate. And the question is already wrongly posed if someone wants to explore how the animate arises from the inanimate, because only the inanimate arises from the animate.

When you look at a gelatinous lower animal, as we think of them in terms of materialistic science, when you imagine how their individual limbs are differentiated and how man, however, has developed out of an undifferentiated, uniform body, and how then from such a being, beings with cartilage and beings with bones arose, whose skeleton is a kind of petrification – so the whole skeleton of the earth is petrified, crystallized, it is what life has left behind. If we follow this in relation to another form of our earth, with ever thinner and thinner matter, we find: everything changes, the inanimate ceases. This thin matter is at the same time a living one. And finally – continue the same thought, I only need to hint at it – then you come back even further to times when you can find the even higher truth that just as the inanimate later arose from the animate, the material-animate arose from the spiritual in the first place. Just as the inanimate is not the origin of life, so too is mere life not the origin of spirit, but spirit is the origin of life.

However, in a remotely similar way, we have to imagine that our earth was once a spiritual being, and that life developed out of this spiritual being through a kind of hardening, just as the living later developed out of the lifeless. And so we trace the earth back to the state where it was a spiritual being. Man's soul was present in a completely different way. As we trace man further and further back, it becomes apparent that he had very different abilities, clairvoyant abilities. However, the further back we trace him, the more his independence disappears. We find him in absolute dependence as a part of the divine beings that form this earth in its original state. Thus we look back to an original state of the earth, in which man was a member of the gods, had not yet separated himself from the general divine existence, is a member of their organism, as your hand is a member of your organism.

Thus man forms a part of this spiritually conceived state of the earth; we have traced back the earth planet. Now go through again with me what is happening now in this planet Earth. We must now imagine that first the spiritual separates and leaves behind a living thing, hardens into a living thing and animates a spiritual, so that we now have an Earth that consists of spirit and matter. And the living thing is linked to a mineral and dead thing. Man is a true dual being; when we follow him, we must follow how, on the one hand, the physical organism has developed and, on the other hand, a spiritual element has developed. This spirit was originally contained in the spirit-earth. However, the spirit must be thought of in a completely different direction of development than the body. Compare: When you see the body, it appears, according to its external structure, as the perfect embodiment of this external sensual being. In terms of its spirit, it appears in such a way that we see a magnificent, powerful future. Our mental and spiritual qualities appear to us only as an inclination. This will make the idea plausible that we are dealing with two directions of development on our earth.

First of all, we have to observe the initial state of our earth. It develops in such a way that, up to a certain point in time, minerals, plants and animals and the human form, this being of sense, have separated out. This leads us to the point in time when they become the bearers of spirit. Then they are fertilized by a part that has not been absorbed into the matter that was formed earlier. Let us make a comparison. If someone comes to you and says: Here I have water. That is a certain substance, and I will cool this water in one part, so that ice floes arise. — If someone said: The ice is also water, only in a different form, so we would have to admit that. But if someone would come and wanted to say: It is ice and not water, that would be nonsense. So we can also say: Matter is nothing else but spirit. It is to spirit as ice is to water; it is spirit condensed, hardened, crystallized, if you will.

Let us follow the spiritual state of the earth up to a certain point in time. Then the spirit transforms itself into this material form. People, animals, plants and minerals arise. That is the point in time that I characterized earlier, the point in time when no human being has yet worked on this earth out of inner impulse. The being of feeling was there, just as the ice is in the water. Imagine the ice in the middle, but there is still water around it. As soon as man had reached the necessary perfection as a being of sense, he was given the opportunity to receive the spiritual spark and to be enlivened by it. He received the divine spark from the spiritual. Man had reached a certain level of development in terms of the senses. He is a real witness of the spirit and begins as a small god to continue the work of the earlier gods as his cultural work.

So you can imagine the development of a planet from the spirit to life and from there to the inanimate. The highest living being is fertilized by the spirit and the further work of the spiritual up to its peculiarity through matter. There we have a planet before us. Now you will ask: This Earth planet, where did it get the possibility to crystallize out of itself precisely this mineral kingdom with crystals formed in such a way, with plants, animals and human beings formed in such a way? — If something is to crystallize in the glass, then the forces that can accomplish the crystallization must prevail in this form.

Within the theosophical worldview, we know that every person has an eternal, imperishable core of being that did not come into being at the moment of birth. We know the doctrine of repeated lives on earth. We know that people have certain destinies for the simple reason that in past lives on earth, each person has prepared everything for himself. We have been given an account of the development of the soul in various earthly lives in various lectures, and we have seen that this life comes between two incarnations. Man is nothing other than the re-embodiment of a previous human being. We know this from the doctrine of re-embodiment and karma.

In a universal sense, we are dealing with an incarnation of the planets themselves. Just as the person who does not believe in spiritual miracles, but in spiritual natural facts, does not allow the soul of the person to arise out of nothing, just as little did the scholars of the 17th century allow earthworms to arise out of the river mud. So it is nothing more than the spiritual-soul developing only out of the spiritual-soul. This is certain from the experience of earlier developmental facts. Likewise, we have to consider the fact that the earth is now excavating such plants, animals and human forms out of itself. We have to look for the cause in earlier embodiments of our earth. Just as there is an interim period between two human incarnations, there is an interim period between two planetary incarnations. Just as we speak of people, of incarnations, so we speak of planets, of “Manvantars”. Thus we see that the earth is a re-incarnated planet from the past, and between two such planets there is an interval, a “Pralaya”. So we look back to a different state in which this earth was not yet such a planet as it is today, but we look back to an imperfect state of our earth. Just as a person in today's incarnation has abilities and powers that he has acquired from events and experiences in life, so the Earth as a whole has evolved from previous incarnations in order to get to know the regular formations of minerals, plants and animals. So we have our present planet and a predecessor. A few more words about this predecessor. What were the obvious characteristics of this predecessor? Spiritual research can trace them exactly, but I do not want to present them to you today because they seem to be plucked out of thin air. What abilities did it acquire to bring people so far that they could be fertilized by a spirit? Up to that point, man had been a kind of higher animal, he had come close to the point where development begins. I can only hint at the rest. To understand the progress that has taken place from an earlier planet to our present one, we have to realize the real meaning of the development of the earth. Occultism tells us that this meaning is as follows. The occultist knows that the spirit of the earth's development is love, and the spirit of the previous one is wisdom. In our stages of development, love is expressed, and in the earlier ones, wisdom. You can also understand this comparatively. If you understand it, you will find that our entire material earthly structure is embodied wisdom. Look at the rock crystal. You have to study, apply reason, to understand, you have to calculate. The spirit that you draw out must have been put in. Natural scientists have not yet come to understand these forms. The further we penetrate, the more we will understand that we are not dealing with unwisdom, but with wisdom. If you see a human thigh bone, look at it through a microscope. You will not find a compact mass. You will find fine beams, more beautiful than the best house. Because everything is stretched out there so that the greatest load can be carried with the least expenditure of energy. If a beam is placed at a certain angle, material can be saved. Here the miracle is performed.

The anatomist knows how the miracle of the human heart moves us, and that it is more perfect than what man develops in his soul today. These are passions, desires. No matter how he purifies them, they are not like the miracle of the heart. Man drinks coffee, tea, beer and thereby inhibits or stimulates the activity of the heart. You can trace a structure full of wisdom through the entire development of the earth. This is what has developed as a material framework. We look back on a framework that was nothing more than the basis for a new incarnation. Everything that was built as a framework was determined at that time. What is happening on earth now is the result of the passions, instincts and desires that were aroused and caused then. Look at an uncivilized 'Negro'; his soul blindly follows instincts, passions. There are no moral concepts. Man devours his fellow man. Gradually, the soul purifies itself. But wise is the basic structure, which is so imperfect in its passions. When the earth's development began again, it shaped the previously acquired basic structure again. What should happen on this earth is the purification of instincts, passions and instincts. Everything has been created, including the wise structure of how instincts and drives, moral concepts and so on, religious creativity and the sense of a soul arise from our earth. Thus, piece by piece, they originate from the earlier elementary states, like the wisdom of the structure of our basic framework.

Do not believe that out of nothing, this or that, the thigh or the heart, is formed out of nothing and thus becomes the bearer of passions and morals. To come from blind drives and instincts to the purity of moral wisdom, this wisdom of the basic structure had to grow out of long experience. This heart had to develop out of the experiences of the earlier planetary spirit. So the wisdom that underlies the basic structure of our earth is the experience of an earlier planetary incarnation of the earth spirit. On earth we have a different purpose. Here, wisdom is not experienced, here what has been wisely built up is instilled, instilled - the ennobling of drives, desires and passions. The beings ennoble themselves by living in an external relationship to each other. This external relationship of the earthly world is egoism, as it exists in all beings. It is love. This tendency of the development of love is just as much the meaning of the development of the earth as the development towards wisdom was the meaning of the predecessor of the development of the earth. When the development of the earth has reached its goal, then everything that is still egoism in man and in other beings today will have been transformed into love.

And the next incarnation will carry love within it, just as the earth carried wisdom within it. Thus an original planet that acquires wisdom passes into everything that people accomplish here in the development of the earth into an embodied love. When we look into the future, it means a perspective view, a view to the fact that man deifies himself and makes himself the bearer of love, in order to then give it back to his successor, and to whom he will belong again as a higher being, like the higher developed beings who presided over the development of the earth and still preside over it today.

Now I can only add what real occultism has to say about the outer presentation of this meaning of development. Just as something always has to be discarded when a higher development takes place, so it is with today's plants. Originally they did not exist in this form. They can only flourish on soil that is mineral; they can grow out of it. If we are talking about a life that was originally mere and about the fact that the mineral aspect has only gradually emerged, then our present-day plants were not present in the original life, but other plant forms were. These plant forms have, on the one hand, developed in relation to the mineral kingdom and, on the other hand, further developed into the present-day plant kingdom, which will not live without the mineral kingdom. That is the meaning of higher development: it is based on something. The plant has pressed down part of the mineral kingdom on which it stands. The animal kingdom has excreted the plant kingdom and feeds on it. The plant kingdom assimilates the carbon dioxide that humans exhale and exhale oxygen, which humans need. If you look into the human world itself, you can see that man, as master of the outer world, can only live on the basis of the 13th chapter of the Gospel of John, where Christ Jesus shows that he is aware that a higher being can only rise on the basis of a lower one, just as a plant can only rise on mineral soil, an animal on vegetable soil. Everything is helpful and healing on the soil of the apostles. Hence the great gratitude expressed in the parable of the washing of the feet. The spirit is at the same time the origin of this soil, but the substantiality of the soil must always be withdrawn so that something finer and younger can develop on it.

Thus the later form that spirituality took could only develop by excluding matter. Just as the original life expelled the mineral kingdom, so the moon was also expelled. Thus the matter of the moon is to be regarded as the rejected brother of the development of the earth, which was united with it in its earlier planetary existence. The moon has been cast off and still has a spiritual connection to the earth. It is necessary for this earth as the mineral kingdom is for the plant kingdom, as the plant kingdom is for the animal kingdom.

If we go further back, we will not only see the earth united with the moon, with what the secret researchers have called the moon, today's moon is only the cast-out corpse. It is similar with the sun. I have been able to show you a perspective of how the theosophical view looks at planetary development. The planets as they appear to us in the sky today present themselves in a certain relationship for the theosophical research. What is the sun today, what is the moon today, has emerged in the course of development. They represent other phases of development. If you look back to your own origin and source, you will be able to say to the child: This represents my own development. In a sense, the occultists see the planets in this way, so that they appear as childhood stages compared to the development of the earth. Other planets appear as those that have reached the stage in which the earth is today much earlier.

Thus, occultists present this development in such a way that they place the seven planets in a series that has a relationship in its individual links, as it is expressed in the successive stages of human development. Just as this represents that which can also stand side by side, so for the secret researcher this side by side is represented in that which each individual can also go through, namely: this development through forms that are preserved in the planets neighboring the earth. This is expressed by the science of secret in mnemonic signs. These are the names of the days of the week. “Cheap philosophy” — many will object. In the seven days of the week, the planets represent their own development on Earth. We have to start from Saturday. The development of Mars takes place on Earth. Secret research calls the development of Mercury the development in which man intervenes and which will persist until the end of the development. So this is how it corresponds:

Saturday: Saturn,
Sunday: the Sun
Monday: the Moon
Tuesday: Mars
Wednesday: Mercury
Thursday: Jupiter
Friday: Venus

Thus, in the names of the days of the week in the most diverse languages, you have a marker for planetary development everywhere.

I was only able to follow this development for a short distance, namely from the Earth to the Moon. So you can see that and how meaning and significance is added to this development through theosophical research. Those who not only have a feeling for our research, but also for the deeper forces, for the forces in development, have always understood that the earth comes from a development and progresses to a further development, that it is the planet that represents the stage of development of love, and that wisdom develops through love into a higher form. The next thing that surrounds us is the floods of the development of the earth planet, which present themselves as a tendency towards love.

One of the great minds sensed this in a poem when he wanted to express the meaning of the earth's development, when he looked up at the next goal of the earth's development, when he looked up at what man cannot look beyond. Then it appeared to him like a glance of the divine spirit, like a circle in which the infinity of the divine spirit can express itself. It seems as if the development of humanity, the whole meaning of planetary development, can express itself in the small spirit of the earth. But the spirit of the earth reveals to him what its essence is, what has become of earlier forces, and what will be transformed into later forces. And if I speak from the human point of view, the meaning of planetary development appears to us as development towards love. This is also expressed by Dante, the great thinker and poet, in the words:

The orbiting that was received in you
showed itself, like reflected light,
when I observed it for a while all around,
seemed to me in itself, in its own coloring
painted with our image,
which is why my gaze was completely absorbed in it.
Just as the geometrician becomes completely absorbed
in measuring out the compass and, pondering,
cannot find the principle he needs:
so it was with me at that new sight.
I wanted to see how the image related to the circle
and how it fitted into it;
but for this, not only my own wings were not enough,
my spirit was not struck by lightning,
which brought it what it longed for.
Here the power of the lofty imagination broke,
but already my desire and will moved,
like a wheel that drives the same revolution,
love that moves the sun and stars.

Compiled by

PAUL M. ALLEN

1.David Friedrich Strauss, Der alte und neue Glaube, The Old and New Faith, publ. 1872. Born in 1808, appointed professor at the University of Zurich, Strauss became a center of controversy, the intensity of which has been likened to that of the Thirty Years' War. This began with the appearance of his Life of Jesus (1835), in which he questioned the sources of the New Testament, and continued with his Doctrine of the Christian Faith (1840). From this time until his death in 1874, Strauss became world-famous as one of the most frank critics of Christianity.

2.Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Psychology, Part IV, Chapter ix, par. 219. Rudolf Steiner consulted the German edition, translated by Dr. B. Vetter and published at Stuttgart, 1882. Spencer, born 1820, an engineer by training, sought to explain “the phenomena of life, mind, and society in terms of matter, motion, and force.” At first strongly influenced by Coleridge, Spencer placed evolution as the first and most universal principle, influencing all the sciences. To him, evolution was synonymous with progress. In his later development, Spencer championed rugged individualism, and became an outspoken opponent of socialism, upholding what he considered the absolute rights of private enterprise against any form of governmental control. Before his death in 1903, Spencer's optimistic view of human progress collapsed, and he fell prey to marked pessimism regarding the future of mankind.

3.Benedictus de Spinoza (Baruch de Spinoza), born 1632 in Holland of a Jewish family that had been exiled from Spain and Portugal. He early showed great powers as a student, and in 1656 was banned by the Jewish community at Amsterdam because of his views. His chief work, which had a lasting influence upon future generations of thinkers, long after the author's death in 1677, is The Ethics, which has recently appeared in a new edition titled The Road to Inner Freedom, New York, 1957.

4.Eduard von Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, German ed. p. 451. Born 1842, von Hartmann was originally an officer in the Prussian army. Because of an illness, he retired from military service and took up an intensive study of philosophy. In 1869 his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious) appeared, and made him famous almost overnight. Of the many other works he wrote, this book remained his most famous. Rudolf Steiner describes a personal impression of von Hartmann, whom he visited in Berlin in 1888 following a philosophical correspondence with him over some years. This account may be found in Chapter IX of Steiner's autobiography. Steiner's Wahrheit und Wissenschaft (Truth and Knowledge), published in this present volume, was dedicated to von Hartmann. The latter died in 1906.

5.In his Atomistik des Willens, Atomic Theory of Will, Ger. ed., Hamburg, 1891, 2 vols. p. 213. Robert Hamerling, the Austrian poet-philosopher was born March 24, 1830. He early showed ability in poetry, and although from poor parentage, the generosity of friends enabled him to attend the gymnasium in Vienna, and afterward the University there. In the revolutionary movements which swept Europe in 1848, Hamerling joined the student legion in the Vienna revolt. The collapse of the uprising in 1849 made it necessary for him to hide for a long time in order to escape arrest. Later he studied natural science and philosophy. In 1855 he was appointed master at the gymnasium in Trieste. Many years of ill health caused him finally to retire on a government pension in 1866. In comparatively comfortable circumstances, Hamerling spent the remainder of his life in his home near Gratz, devoting himself to writing until his death on July 13, 1889. He is referred to as “one of the most remarkable poets of the Austrian school; his poems are full of life and color.” His most popular work was Ahasver in Rom, Ahasver in Rome (1866), with Nero as principal character. Der König von Sion, The King of Zion, (1869) is generally considered to be his masterpiece. In 1888 his Homunculus appeared, and was reviewed with extensive comment by Rudolf Steiner. His Amor und Psyche was published in 1882; his novel Aspasia (1876), described Greek life in the age of Pericles. In 1870 his drama concerning the French Revolution, Danton und Robespierre, was published. Rudolf Steiner commented on this drama in his Speech and Drama Course given in 1924, and in fact, many references to Hamerling and his work appear in books and lectures by Rudolf Steiner, including the latter's autobiography.

6.Die Illusion der Willensfreiheit, The Illusion of the Freedom of the Will, by Paul Rée, publ. 1885, p. 5. Paul Rée (1849–1901) was a German positivist philosopher, known widely as an editor of the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Rée met Nietzsche in 1876, as Rudolf Steiner relates in his Friedrich Nietzsche, Fighter for Freedom, p. 159–60. Steiner refers to Rée in the preface to this book, written in Weimar, 1895: “Such an average brain as that of Paul Rée could make no important impression on Nietzsche.” (op. cit. p. 40).

7.Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). A voluminous literature on Hegel and Hegelian thought exists in English, including biographical studies, translations, and commentaries on his writings. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details.

8.Goethe's Faust, Part I,—

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Burst,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine halt, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt mit klammernden Organen;
Die andere hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust
Zul den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.

(Lines 1112–1117)

The translation is that by George Madison Priest: Faust, Parts One and Two, publ. Alfred Knopf, New York, 1941, one of the best of all English translations of this work.

9.monism: the teaching of one ultimate substance or principle, as mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), or of something which is neither of these, but is the foundation of both; the point of view that there is but one reality.

10.dualism: from a philosophical point of view, the theory which maintains that there are but two fundamental and irreducible principles, for example, mind and body.

11.Here Rudolf Steiner speaks of spiritualism in a philosophical sense, and not in the sense of any relationship or communication with the dead as in mediumism, etc.

12.materialism: the philosophical teaching which sees the entire universe, all creation and its activities, including the human mind, as the result of material causes and powers.

13.Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Born in 1762, Fichte studied at Meissen, Pforta, Jena, and Leipzig with the intention of becoming a clergyman. After a teaching position in Switzerland, and enroute to another in Poland, he met Kant, under whose influence he wrote his Study for a Critique of All Revelation. The printer neglected to place his name on the title-page, and people thought the work had been written by Kant. When the true identity of the author became known, Fichte was hailed as a philosopher of outstanding merit. He lectured at Jena, Berlin and Erlangen. In 1807 he was made Rector of the University of Berlin. His death in 1814 occurred when he was at the height of his fame. Rudolf Steiner made extensive reference to Fichte, basing his doctoral thesis (published in enlarged form in the present volume as Truth and Knowledge) on Fichte's scientific teachings, but perhaps his most memorable study of Fichte's life and thought was contained in a public lecture given in Berlin on December 16, 1915: The Spirit of Fichte Present in Our Midst. See also note 77, below.

14.Friedrich Albert Lange (1828–1875), author of Geschichte des Materialismus, History of Materialism, publ. Iserlohn, 1873–5. When professor at the University of Marburg, 1865, Lange issued his study on the workers' question. This made him famous in the circle of students of social problems in Germany at that time. A friend of the working classes, Lange strove for social justice, betterment of labor conditions, and for universal education. His life, marked by his utter sincerity and devotion to his ideals, is an outstanding example of selfless dedication to the well-being of mankind.

15.Karl Friedrich Hieronymous, Baron von Münchhausen (1720–97). In 1785 a little book of 49 pages appeared in London, titled Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvelous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, and an enlarged edition appeared in 1786. A translation into German by G. A. Bürger was published at Göttingen, 1786. Many editions followed in English, and the book was published in numerous languages, illustrated by a number of famous artists. For some time the identity of the author was unknown, but finally it was established that the book was written by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737–1794), traveler, scholar and professor at Cassel. While at Göttingen, where he was secretary of the university library (1764–7) he made the acquaintance of Freiherr von Münchhausen of Bodenwerder in Hanover. The latter had been in the Russian service, had fought against the Turks, and finally had retired to his estate in 1760, where he became famous for his “tall stories.” Later, Raspe, in poverty in London, recalled the Baron's tales, and wrote the book in English, which appeared in 1785. Tall tales from other sources were added by publishers of later editions, so that the stories as we have them today are really a composite work, for which, however, Raspe provided the original nucleus from his memory of the evenings spent with his erstwhile friend.

16.Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, born Frankfurt a.M., August 28, 1749. Poet, dramatist, scientist, traveler, state minister, etc., author of Faust, Wilhelm Meister, and many other works. Died in Weimar, March 22, 1832. In August 1781 the Grand Duchess Amalia of Saxe-Weimar founded the Tiefurter Journal, the Journal of Tiefurt, to which Goethe contributed at her invitation. When Rudolf Steiner was active as editor of the natural scientific writings of Goethe at the Goethe-Schiller Archives in Weimar, he published proof that the Fragment über die Natur, The Fragment concerning Nature, which had appeared in the Journal of Tiefurt was definitely to be attributed to Goethe (Schriften der Goethe-Gesellschaft, Publications of the Goethe Society, ed. by Bernhard Suphan, Weimar, Vol. VII, 1892, article by Rudolf Steiner). Thus, just 110 years after the Fragment had appeared, Rudolf Steiner showed its importance and its relationship to Goethe's work. In the edition of Goethe's works published by Prof. Joseph Kürschner (1853–1902) (the volumes of Goethe's natural scientific writings edited by Rudolf Steiner), the Fragment appears at the beginning of the essays “On Natural Science in General,” Vol. XXXIV, p. 1. The Fragment appeared in an English translation with notes by George Adams under the title, Nature—An Essay in Aphorisms, Anthroposophical Quarterly, London, Vol. VII, No. 1, Easter, 1932, pp. 2–5. In his Goethe's Conception of the World, Rudolf Steiner describes this Fragment as “the essay in which the seeds of the later Goethean world-conception are already to be found. What is here expressed as dim feeling, later developed into clear, definite thought.” In similar vein, George Witkowski in his well-known biography of Goethe (Leipzig, 1899) describes this Fragment as “the seed from which came all of Goethe's great thoughts about nature.”

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.

23.See note 2, above.

24.Spencer, First Principles, Part I, Par. 23.

25.Note by the Translator: Just as in English one generally means by “perception” not only the perceived object but also the act of perceiving it, so too, in German the word Wahrnehmung covers both these meanings. Rudolf Steiner, however, as stated in the text, uses this word in the specific sense of meaning the object that has been perceived, and NOT the process of perceiving it. When he refers to the activity, the word used in the original is Wahrnehmen, here translated as perceiving.

25a.Johann Christoph August Franz, M.D., eye surgeon, born 1807, took his medical training at the University of Leipzig. From Germany he emigrated to England, establishing his practice at Brighton, where he worked for some 30 years. He was the author of writings on medicine, particularly on the use of baths in treatment of illness. Two of his works were written for the public: The Eye and a Critique on the Art of Preserving the Organ, London, 1839, and Memoirs of the Case of a Gentleman Born Blind and Successfully Operated at the Eighteenth Year of His Age. Physiological Observations and Experiments. The latter appeared in Philosophical Transactions, Vol. VI, 1841, pp. 59–68. It is probable that Rudolf Steiner's reference to the man who had been born blind is taken from this second work of Dr. Franz.

26.George Berkeley, (1685–1753), Irish bishop and philosopher. Made a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, 1707, he was strongly influenced by the philosophical writings of Descartes, Newton, and Locke. In 1709 his New Theory of Vision appeared, and in 1710 his great work. The Principles of Human Knowledge, was published. In 1712 he visited England and the following year was presented at court by Dean Swift, shortly before the publication of his most popular work, The Dialogues of Hylas and Philonous. Berkeley's literary fame rests upon this latter work, which has been described as “among the finest philosophical writings in the English language” on the basis of its “exquisite facility of style.” In 1728 he emigrated to America, where he lived in Rhode Island for three years, hoping for a government grant of funds for the establishment of a college in Bermuda. His hopes disappointed, he returned to Ireland and shortly afterward was raised to the bishopric of Cloyne. In 1752 he moved with his family to Oxford, where he died suddenly in January of the following year, and was buried in Christ Church.

The reference quoted by Steiner is from Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, sec. 6.

27.Immanuel Kant, German philosopher, was born in Königsburg April 22, 1724. He entered the university there in 1740, enrolled for the study of mathematics and physics. His studies were interrupted by the death of his father, which left him in poverty. After he supported himself by tutoring for 9 years, the kindness of a friend enabled him to resume his studies, to graduate as a doctor and to qualify as a privatdocent. He occupied this position for 15 years. His lectures widened from physics to include much philosophy. Finally, after unsuccessful attempts, in 1770 he was given the chair of logic and metaphysics at Königsburg. In 1781 his Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Critique of Pure Reason appeared, and in 1783, his Prolegomena. After the appearance of the 2nd edition of the Kritik in 1787, Kant became famous everywhere in German intellectual circles, and his views were regarded as those of an oracle. From 1792–97 he was engaged in a struggle with the government concerning his religious views. In 1794 he withdrew from society, and gave up all teaching except for one public lecture course on logic. In 1797 Kant terminated a teaching activity that had extended over 42 years. He died in Königsburg on February 12, 1804 near the end of his 80th year. Little more than five feet tall, deformed in his right shoulder, his chest almost concave, Kant had a weak constitution. He never married, and followed an unchanging program of activities from youth to old age. For example, he never failed to rise at 5 o'clock, studied for 2 hours, lectured for 2 more, and spent the rest of the morning at his desk. He dined at a restaurant and spent the afternoon in conversation with friends. He then walked for about an hour—a walk which for years followed exactly the same course—studied for 2 hours more, and retired between 9 and 10. He was a prolific reader, especially in history, science, travel, and philosophy. He knew English history and literature intimately, especially in the period of Queen Anne. He read little of Goethe or Schiller, but often re-read Voltaire and Rousseau. He had little interest in nature, and in 80 years never traveled more than 40 miles from his native Königsburg. For further biographical details, works and translations, consult any standard encyclopedia.

28.Otto Liebmann, Zur Analysis der Wirklichkeit, Contribution to the Analysis of Reality, Strassburg, 1880, p. 28. Otto Liebmann (1840–1912) was well known for his writings on Kant's philosophical world-view.

29.Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930), Immanuel Kant’s Erkenntnistheorie, Immanuel Kant's Theory of Cognition, Hamburg, 1879.

30.See note 4, above.

31.Hartmann, Das Grundproblem der Erkenntnistheorie, The Fundamental Problem of a Theory of Cognition, Leipzig, 1889, p. 16–40.

32.Johannes Peter Müller, German physiologist and comparative anatomist, born in Coblentz, July 14, 1801. He studied at the University of Bonn, and was appointed to a professorship in physiology there in 1826. In 1843 he accepted the call to the chair of anatomy and physiology at Berlin University, which position he held with great honor until his death, April 28, 1858. He did much research in physiology, particularly in relation to human speech and hearing. His great work was the Handbuch der Physiologie des Menschen, 1833–40. (The English translation was made by Dr. William Baly, publ. London 1842). This work opened a new period in the study of physiology, and Müller is considered the main figure in the developments in this field in the mid-19th century. In his Handbuch Müller developed an entirely new principle which he called “the law of specific energy of sense substances.” This he expressed as follows: “The kind of sensation following stimulation of a sensory nerve does not depend on the mode of stimulation, but upon the nature of the sense organ. Thus, light, pressure, or mechanical stimulation acting on the retina and optic nerve invariably produces luminous impressions.” It is to this law that Steiner refers at this point.

33.Hartmann, Das Grundproblem, p. 37.

34.Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung The World as Will and Representation, Four Books, publ. 1819 by Brockhaus, Leipzig. (English translation by Haldane & Kemp, 1883) Ref. Book I, par. 1, Ger. ed. Biographical data and translations of Schopenhauer's works, as well as extensive commentaries on his ideas have been published in English translation. Consult any standard encyclopedia for details. Rudolf Steiner edited a collected edition of the writings of Schopenhauer, 12 vols. with introduction by Steiner, publ. 1894.

35.J. G. Fichte, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, The Vocation of Man, Berlin, 1800, “a book which for richness of content, beauty of style, elevation of thought reminds one of Descartes' Meditations.” (For data on Fichte, see note 13, above.)

36.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Transcendental knowledge, in the sense of this world-view, is a knowledge by means of which—although no direct insight into the thing-in-itself is believed to be attainable—indirect inferences are drawn from the subjective which is known, to the unknown which lies beyond the subjective (Transcendental). The thing-in-itself, according to this view, is beyond the sphere of the directly recognizable world, that is, it is transcendent. However, our world can be transcendentally related to the transcendent. Hartmann's view is called realism because it goes beyond the subjective, the ideal, to the transcendent, the real.

37.See Weygandt, Entstehung der Träume, Appearance of Dreams, 1893. (Reference given by Rudolf Steiner.)

38.See note 34, above.

39.Schopenhauer, op. cit. supra, Book II, par. 18.

40.Note by Translator: The reader's attention is called to the fact that the word Erfahrung is in this context translated as “practical experience” to emphasize the activity of thinking implicit in it, as distinct from the word erleben which also is usually rendered as “experience.”

41.See note 27, above, on Kant.

42.Emil DuBois-Reymond, German physiologist and educator. Born Berlin, November 7th, 1818, in 1836 he entered the University of Berlin, where his teacher was Johannes Müller, above). In 1840 he became the latter's assistant in physiology. His great work was the study of animal electricity, and his famous book was Researches on Animal Electricity, 1848–84. For many years he exerted great influence as a teacher. In 1858, upon the death of Müller, he was appointed to the latter's chair in physiology. In 1851 he had been admitted to the Academy of Sciences in Berlin; in 1867 he became its permanent secretary. His closest friend after Müller's death was von Helmholtz, who also had been a student of Müller. DuBois-Reymond died in Berlin on November 26, 1896. Rudolf Steiner makes many references to his work in lectures and writings.

43.Note by Translator: The reader's attention is drawn to the fact that the word experience, in relation to the kind of mysticism and philosophy of will referred to in this chapter, is translated from the word erleben (as distinct from Erfahrung, see note 40, above) Therefore, what the mystic experiences in feeling and the philosopher of will in the will-element, are experiences which have not been formed into clear representations by the activity of thinking.

44.Thelism—Voluntarism, i.e., any theory which conceives will to be the dominant factor in experience or in the constitution of the world.

44a.Ger. Erlebnisse.—Tr.

44b.Note by Rudolf Steiner: The passage from page 161 to this point was added, or rewritten for the Revised Edition, 1918.

45.See note 4—on von Hartmann.

46.The German text here reads Faktor der Erfahrungen.—Tr.

46a.Note by Rudolf Steiner: A complete catalogue of the principles of morality (from the point of view of metaphysical realism) may be found in Eduard von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness.

47.Ger. Welterfahrung.—Tr.

48.Immanuel Kant: Theory of Ethics, transl. by Abbott, p. 180. The Critique of Practical Reason, Ch. III. On Kant, see note 27, above.

49.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Ziehen, Theodore, Leitfaden der Physiologischen Psychologie, Guide to Physiological Psychology, 1st ed., p. 207 f.

Concerning the way “materialism” is spoken of here, and the justification for doing so, see the Addition at the end of the chapter.

50.Hartmann, Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins, Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 871.

50a.Hamerling, Atomistik des Willens, Atomic Theory of Will, Vol. II, p. 201. On Hamerling, see note 5, above.

51.Paulsen, System der Ethik, System of Ethics, 1889, partial English transl. 1899. Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908), German philosopher and educator. Educated at Erlangen, Bonn, and Berlin, where he was made extraordinary professor of philosophy and pedagogy, 1878. In 1896 he followed Zeller as professor of moral philosophy at Berlin. He was a pupil of G. T. Fechner, developing his teaching of panpsychism in his Einleitung in die Philosophie, Introduction to Philosophy, 1892, English transl. 1895. His German Education, Past and Present (English transl. 1907) is well known, as are his writings relative to the philosophy of Kant.

51a.Note by Rudolf Steiner: When Paulsen (p. 15 of his System of Ethics) says, “Different natural dispositions and different conditions of life demand not only different bodily diet but also a different spiritual-moral diet,” he is very near recognition of the truth, but misses the decisive point. Insofar as I am an individual, I need no diet. Dietetic means the art of bringing a particular example of the species into harmony with the general laws. But as an individual I am not an example of a species.

52.proto-amniotes: The original form of the innermost of the embryonic or fetal membranes of reptiles, insects, birds, and mammals. This membrane forms a closed sac surrounding the embryo and contains the amniotic fluid.

53.The Kant-Laplace primordial nebula. Pierre Simon Marquis de Laplace (1749–1827), was a French mathematician and astronomer who, at the age of 24 was named “the Newton of France” for certain of his discoveries. In the years 1799–1825 his great work, the Mécanique céleste, which, as its author stated, “offers a complete solution of the great mechanical problem presented by the solar system,” appeared in 5 volumes, published in Paris. In his second great work, the Exposition du système du monde, Paris, 1796, appeared his statement of his famous “nebular hypothesis,” the origins of which he seems to attribute to Buffon, apparently unaware that Immanuel Kant had at least partially anticipated him in his Allgemeine Naturgeschichte, General History of Nature, published in 1755. Rudolf Steiner's criticism of the Kant-Laplace theory of the primordial nebula may be found in various places in his lectures and writings.

54.Ernst Heinrich Haeckel (1834–1919), German biologist, originally a physician in Berlin, became Privatdozent at Jena, afterward extraordinary professor of comparative anatomy, later professor of zoology, a chair established for him at Jena. This position he occupied for 43 years with intervals for zoological travels to various parts of the world. When Darwin's Origin of the Species appeared in 1859, Haeckel was deeply influenced by it, so that he became “the apostle of Darwinism in Germany.” Among Haeckel's famous books are his General Morphology (1866), Natural History of Creation (1867) and Die Weltraetsel (1899), English title, The Riddle of the Universe, publ. 1901. By his 60th birthday Haeckel had published 42 works of some 13,000 pages, plus many monographs. Rudolf Steiner knew Haeckel personally, and in his autobiography. Chapter 15, Steiner recorded a very interesting and perceptive impression of the great scientist. The “genealogical tree” of Haeckel to which Steiner refers is set forth in its original form in Haeckel's General Morphology and developed in his later writings.

55.Charles Robert Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist, whose voyage on the Beagle to the Southern Seas, recorded in his Journal of a Naturalist (1837) prepared the way for his famous work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life, published November 24, 1859. Next in importance among his books. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, appeared in 1868. The Descent of Man, published in 1871, dealt with “the origin of man and his history” in the light of The Origin of the Species.

56.Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646–1716). For data on their lives and philosophical ideas, consult any standard encyclopedia.

57.For data on Schopenhauer, see note 34, above; on von Hartmann, see note 4, above.

58.See von Hartmann's Phänomenologie des sittlichen Bewusstseins. The Phenomenology of Moral Consciousness, p. 866 f. of the German edition.

59.See von Hartmann's Philosophie des Unbewussten, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 7th German ed., Vol. II, p. 290.

60.Hartmann, op. cit. supra. Vol. II, p. 332.

61.Eudaemonism, derived from a Greek word which indicates the condition of being under the protection of a benign spirit, or a “good genius.” In ethics, this name is applied to those theories of morality according to which the main good of man is to be found in some form of happiness. Eudaemonia was one of the keywords in the ethical teachings of Aristotle.

62.German, Erfahrung.

63.Die letzten Fragen der Erkenntnistheorie und Metaphysik, Ultimate Problems of Epistemology and Metaphysics, publ. in Vol. 108, pp. 55 seq. of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik, the Periodical for Philosophy and Philosophical Criticism.

64.For data on Hegel's “universal panlogism,” see any standard encyclopedia.

65.David Hume (1711–1776), Scottish philosopher and historian. Albert Einstein wrote, “If one reads Hume's books, one is amazed that many sometimes highly esteemed philosophers after him have been able to write so much obscure stuff and even to find grateful readers for it. Hume has permanently influenced the development of the best philosophers who came after him.” Among those influenced by Hume may be numbered Immanuel Kant, William James, George Santayana, and Bertrand Russell. Hume's writings and biographical and critical works concerning him and his ideas can be located by consulting any standard encyclopedia.

66.A note on page 71 of the Zeitschrift für Philosophie (Periodical for Philosophy) Vol. 108.

67.Johannes Rehmke, 1848–1930, philosopher. His principal works are Logik oder Philosophie als Wissenslehre (Logic or Philosophy as Theory of Knowledge) and Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff (The World as Percept and Concept), Berlin, 1880.

68.Karl Julius Schröer was born in Pressburg in 1825. In 1867 he was made professor of Literature in the Technical College of Vienna. In addition to his lectures on the history of German poetry as such, he lectured on Goethe and Schiller, on Walther von der Vogelweide, on German Grammar and Speech, etc. Rudolf Steiner was a pupil of Schröer, and refers to him in detail in his autobiography and in lectures. It was Schröer who recommended Steiner to Prof. Kürschner for the position of editor of Goethe's natural scientific writings. (See note 16, above) Schröer died in Vienna in 1900, and Rudolf Steiner has left an unforgettable word portrait and estimate of him in his Vom Menschenrätsel, Riddles of Man, publ. Berlin, 1916.

69.From July 1884 to September 1890, Rudolf Steiner was active as tutor in the home of Ladislaus (1834–1905) and Pauline (1846–1916) Specht at Kolingasse 19, Vienna IX. He taught their four sons, Richard, Arthur, Otto, and Ernst. Richard Specht (1870–1932) became a well-known author of many works including biographical studies of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Franz Werfel, Brahms, and Beethoven. Steiner gives details of this pedagogical activity in his autobiography. Chapter VI.

70.Rosa Mayreder (1858–1938), Austrian writer, also known as a painter. Her entire life was passed in Vienna and surroundings. She was the author of a number of popular novels. In addition, she was active in the movement for woman suffrage in Austria, at one time sharing in the direction of the movement itself, and editing its periodical. She wrote the libretto for Hugo Wolf's only opera, Der Corregidor (1896). Rudolf Steiner refers to Rosa Mayreder in his autobiography. Chapter IX.

71.See Johannes Volkelt's Erfahrung und Denken. Kritische Grundlegung der Erkenntnistheorie, Experience and Thinking. Critical Foundation for a Theory of Cognition. Hamburg and Leipzig, 1886. (Johannes Volkelt 1848–1930, philosopher, professor at Leipzig.) See also note 29, above.

72.Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Schiller, publ. in English translation by Olin D. Wannamaker, New York, 1950, under the title, “The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World Conception—Fundamental Outlines with Special Reference to Schiller.” The first German edition published Berlin and Stuttgart, 1886, revised ed., Stuttgart, 1924, with new Foreword by the author. Other editions: Dornach, 1924; Dresden, 1936; Freiburg i. Br., 1949; Dornach, 1960.

73.Aristotle (384–322 B.C.): Physica Auscultatio, On Nature as Cause and Change, and the General Principles of Natural Science.

74.Raimon Lull (Raymond Lully), (0.1235–1315) Catalan author, mystic and missionary. Born Majorca. In 1266 a series of visions led to a marked change in his life and purpose. Spent 9 years studying Arabic in order to refute the heretical teachings current in his time. At Ronda he wrote his famous Ars Major and Ars Generalis. He made many journeys in France, Italy, North Africa in a burning crusade against the teachings of Mohammedanism. At Bougie, North Africa he was stoned outside the city walls and died on June 29, 1315.

75.biogenesis, the teaching that living organisms come from other living organisms, as opposed to abiogenesis. The author of the modern formulation of “the fundamental law of biogenesis” was Fritz Müller (1864). Haeckel (see note 54, above) called Müller's formulation “the biogenetic fundamental law,” which can be stated briefly as the teaching that in its development from the egg to adult stage, the animal tends to pass through a series of stages which recapitulate the stages through which its ancestry passed in the development of the species from a primitive form. In other words, the development of the individual is a condensed expression of the development of the race.

76.The earliest statement of the law of mechanical theory of heat was formulated by the French physicist, Sadi Nicholas Lèonhard Carnot (1796–1832) in notes written about 1830, published by his brother in the latter's Life of Sadi Carnot, Paris, 1878. Further work in this direction was done by Ségun, Paris, 1839, by Julius Robert Mayer, c. 1842, and by J. P. Joule, who (1840–43) placed the mechanical theory of heat on a sound experimental basis.

Julius Robert Mayer (1814–1878), German physician and physicist, is the discoverer of the law of conservation of energy, which—within limits of the data he obtained from experiments and reasoning—he applied “with great power and insight to the explanation of numerous physical phenomena.”

77.On Fichte, see note 13, above. Rudolf Steiner's Inaugural Dissertation for his doctoral degree before the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Rostock (Defense, beginning of May, 1891; Promotion, October 26, 1891) was titled Die Grundfrage der Erkenntnistheorie mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, usw., The Fundamentals of a Theory of Cognition with Special Reference to Fichte's Scientific Teaching. When the thesis was published in book form, as it appears here in English translation, a Foreword and one chapter were added to the original by Rudolf Steiner. These latter are included in the present translation.

78.John Locke (1632–1704), English philosopher, scholar, chemist, student of meteorology, practicing physician, political advisor, traveler, and author. For details on his life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

79.see reference to Volkelt's book in note 71, above, (p. 20)

80.see note 27, on Kant, above.

81.p. 61 ff. of Kirchmann's German edition of Kant's Kritik. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Introd. to 2nd edition. Sec. vi.

82.Kant, Prolegomena, Sec. v.

83.Kant, Kritik, p. 53 f. of the German ed. Introduction, Sec. iv.

84.Rehmke, Johannes: Die Welt als Wahrnehmung und Begriff, usw., The World as Percept and Concept, etc., Berlin, 1880, p. 161 ff. of the German ed.

85.Refer to title given in note 28, above.

86.Note by Rudolf Steiner: This attempt, incidentally, is one which the objections of Robert Zimmermann (Uber Kant's mathematisches Vorurteil und dessen Folgen, On Kant's Mathematical Notions and their Results) show to be, if not altogether in error, at least highly questionable. (Robert Zimmermann, 1824–1898, was Professor of Philosophy in the University of Vienna, 1861–95. His book on Aesthetics was published in 2 volumes, Vienna, 1870. Rudolf Steiner attended lectures by Zimmermann on fundamentals of ethics at the University of Vienna. Steiner's impressions of this great interpreter of Herbart's aesthetics are contained in the 3rd chapter of the former's autobiography.)

87.Kant, Kritik, Introduction to 2nd edition. Sec. ii.

88.See Kant's Theorie der Erfahrung, Theory of Experience, pp. 90, ff. of the German ed.

89.Kant, Kritik, p. 58, Sec. v.

90.Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, Kant's Theory of Experience, Berlin, 1871, pp. 90 ff. of the German ed.

91.August Stadler (1850–1910), Die Grundsätze der reinen Erkenntnistheorie in der Kantschen Philosophie, The Principles of the Pure Theory of Cognition in the Philosophy of Kant, Leipzig, 1876, p. 76 f. of the German ed.

92.Volkelt, op. cit., p. 21, see note 71, above.

93.Otto Liebmann (1840–1912), Analysis, 1880, p. an ff. (see note 28, above); A. Holder, Kantischen Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, Tübingen, 1874, p. 14 ff.; Wilhelm Windelband (1848–1915) Phasen der Kantschen Lehre, Phases of Kant's Theory, p. 239; F. Ueberweg, System der Logik, System of Logic, p. 380 f.; Eduard v. Hartmann (1842–1906), Kritische Grundlegung, Berlin, 1875, p. 142–172 of the 2nd German ed. (see note 4, above).

94.Note by Rudolf Steiner: Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, History of More Recent Philosophy, 1860, Vol. 5, p. 60. Volkelt is mistaken about Fischer when he says (Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Kant's Theory of Cognition, p. 198 f.) that “it is not clear from the account by K. Fischer whether, in his opinion, Kant takes for granted only the psychological fact of the occurrence of universal and necessary judgments, but also their objective validity and truth.” For, in the passage cited above, Fischer says that the main difficulty of the Critique of Pure Reason is to be found in the fact that “its basic points rest on certain presuppositions,” which “must be allowed if the remainder is to be valid.” For Fischer, these presuppositions consist in that “first the fact of knowledge is affirmed,” and then analysis reveals the cognitive faculties “by means of which the fact itself is explained.”

95.Gottlob Ernst Schulze (1761–1833), Aenesidemus, Helmstädt, 1792.

96.On Schopenhauer, see note 34, above.

97.On von Hartmann, see note 4, above.

98.Kritische Grundlegung, by Hartmann, Berlin 1875, Foreword, p. 10 of the German ed.

99.Liebmann, Zur Analysis, p. 28 ff. of the German ed. See note 28, above.

100.Kant's Erkenntnistheorie, Theory of Knowledge, Sec. 1.

101.A. Dorner, Das menschliche Erkennen, usw., Human Cognition, Berlin, 1887.

102.Julius Heinrich v. Kirchmann (1802–1884), Die Lehre vom Wissen, The Theory of Knowledge, Berlin, 1868.

103.E. L. Fischer, Die Grundfragen der Erkenntnistheorie, Basic Questions of the Theory of Cognition, Mainz 1887, p. 385.

104.C. Göring, System der kritischen Philosophie, System of Critical Philosophy, Leipzig, 1874, Part I, p. 257.

105.Johannes Müller (1801–1858), see note 32, above.

106.Hartmann's Grundproblem, p. 37 (see note 4, above).

107.A. Döring, article in Philosophische Monatshefte, Vol. XXVI, 1890, p. 390. publ. Heidelberg. Philosophical Monthly.

108.Hartmann, Grundproblem, p. 1. See note 4, above.

109.John Stewart Mill (1806–1873). A stern parent, James Mill taught his son Greek at the age of three, and at seven he studied Plato's dialogues. When he was eight he had to teach his sister Latin. His introduction to the utilitarian teachings of Bentham (the greatest happiness to the greatest number) at the age of fifteen was decisive for his life. His great work, System of Logic, 1843, is the analysis of inductive proof. He was a great champion of human rights, and in the second half of the i9th century his influence throughout Europe was very great. Today it is recognized that—to use Mill's description of Bentham—“He was not a great philosopher but a great reformer in philosophy.” For details on Mill's life and thought, consult any standard encyclopedia.

110.Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, P. 71.

111.For fundamentals of the scientific teaching of Fichte, see his Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 97.

112.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.

113.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 178.

114.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 91.

115.Eduard Zeller (1814–1908), Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibnitz, History of German Philosophy Since Leibnitz, Munich, 1871–75, p. 605. Eduard Zeller studied and taught at Tübingen, later (1847) becoming professor of Theology at Bern, later (1849) professor of Theology, afterward of Philosophy at Marburg. In 1862 he was made professor of Philosophy at Heidelberg, afterward at Berlin to his retirement in 1895. His masterwork is the Philosophie der Greichen, Philosophy of the Greeks, 1844–52. He was recognized throughout the academic world for his learning and contributions to scholarship, and received many distinctions and honors. His Philosophie der Greichen has been transl. into English by S. F. Alleyne, 2 vols. 1881. In addition, an abridged version prepared by Zeller (1883) also appeared in English in 1896, as did a number of his other writings.

116.Fichte, Sämtliche Werke, Collected Works, Berlin, 1845, Vol. I, p. 94.

117.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 98.

118.Ibid. Vol. I, p. 422.

119.J. G. Fichtes nachgelassene Werke, J. G. Fichte's Posthumous Works, Edited by J. H. Fichte, Vol. I, Bonn, 1834, p. 4 and 16. (Einleitungsvorlesungen in die Wissenschaftslehre, Introductory Studies in the Scientific Teachings.)

120.Note by Rudolf Steiner: See his Christliche Dogmatik, Christian Dogmatics, and edition, 1884–85, the epistemological arguments, Vol. 1. A complete discussion of his point of view has been provided by Eduard von Hartmann; see Kritische Wanderungen durch die Philosophie der Gegenwart, Critical Survey of Contemporary Philosophy, p. 200 ff.

121.opus cit., see note 120, above.

We have been busy getting acquainted with the way man's life processes and the sense-zones locate him in the cosmos, and we have tried to look at some of the consequences that follow from the facts on which this knowledge is based. Above all, we have to some extent cured ourselves of the trivial notion, held by many who want to befriend the spirit, that everything that can be referred to as ‘material’ or ‘perceptible to the senses’ is to be despised. For we have seen that here in the physical world it is precisely the lower organs and functions that reflect higher activities and relationships in the human being. In their present state, we can only view the senses of touch and life as being very dependent on the physical world—equally so the ego sense, the sense of thought and the sense of speech. But we must accustom ourselves to seeing those senses that in the Earth sphere only serve the inner being of the organism as the shadowy reflections of something that is immense and significant for the spiritual world once we have passed through death: the sense of movement, the sense of balance, the sense of smell, the sense of taste and, to a certain degree, the sense of sight. We have emphasised the fact that in the spiritual world the sense of movement enables us to move among the beings of the various hierarchies in accordance with the way they attract or repel us. After death we experience our connection with the hierarchies as spiritual sympathy or antipathy. Physical balance, as we know it here in our physical bodies, is not the only thing the sense of balance provides for us; it also holds us in balance between the beings and influences of the spiritual world. It is similar with the other senses: taste, smell, sight. And, in so far as a hidden spirituality plays into the physical world, it is of no use to turn to the higher senses for clarification. Rather we must enter the realms of the so-called lower senses. Mind you, these days it is not possible to speak about many of the highly significant things that lie in this direction. For today there are such strong prejudices that all one has to do to be misunderstood and accused of all kinds of things is to speak out about precisely those things that are interesting and significant in a higher spiritual sense. So, for the time being, I must forgo speaking about some of the interesting things that go on in the realm of the senses.

In this respect, the situation was much more favourable in earlier times. In those times, however, there were not the same possibilities of disseminating information, either. Aristotle could discuss certain truths much more unguardedly than they can be discussed today, when such things are immediately taken personally and awaken personal sympathies and antipathies. In Aristotle's works, for example, you can find profound truths about the human being which one simply could not explain to a large audience of today. I was referring to some of these in the last lecture when I said that the Greeks did not fall prey to materialism even though they knew more than we do of how our soul-spiritual nature is related to our physical, bodily nature. In Aristotle's writings, for example, you can find wonderful descriptions of the external appearance of a brave person, or a coward, or an indignant person, or of someone who is addicted to sleep. There, in a manner that from a certain point of view is correct, you find described what kind of hair and complexion and wrinkles cowardly people have, what sort of bodies drowsy people have, and so on. To say even this much would create problems these days; other things would be even more problematic. People of today take these things much more personally. In many respects they positively want to use the personal to keep themselves in the fog about the truth. That is why some circumstances today compel one to speak in more general terms if one wants to speak truthfully.

Specific insights about every kind of human being and every human activity await those who, in the right spirit, turn to our preceding considerations with the necessary questions. We have said, for example, that the human senses are presently located in more or less separate, static regions. They are just like the constellations, each of which remains motionless in its own region of the cosmos—in contrast to the planets, which appear, circling, wandering, changing their location in a relatively short time. Moreover, the boundaries of each sense region are fixed, whereas the life processes pulse through the whole organism and circulate through the individual sense-zones, permeating them with their influence.

Now we also have said that our sense organs were more like vital organs during Old Moon. There they functioned more as vital organs, whereas the organs that are now vital organs were essentially more related to the soul. Consider, then, something that has been emphasised more than once: that sometimes people will regress to, or return to, an atavistic state that was a natural and usual state in an earlier time—in this case, during the Old Moon period. We have noted that there is a form of regression that revives the dreamlike imaginative vision of Old Moon. Today, such an atavistic regression into the visionary state of Old Moon is a form of illness.

Now I ask you please not to lose sight of something: namely, that the visions themselves are not pathological. If that were so, we would have to say that everything mankind experienced on Old Moon was the product of illness, for there one lived entirely in such visions. And we would have to say that Old Moon was an illness that humanity had to go through—an illness of soul, at that—so that the humanity of Old Moon was necessarily insane. Naturally, one cannot say this; it is utter nonsense. The pathological aspect does not lie in the visions themselves, but rather in the fact that they cannot be sustained by the human organisation in its present, earthly form. The earthly, human organisation adapts to such visions in a way that is not appropriate to them. Just consider: when someone has the kind of vision one had on Old Moon, this vision is only adapted for engendering the kind of feelings, activities and acts that were appropriate to Old Moon. The illness consists in someone having such a vision here on Earth and responding to it in ways that only an earthly organisation can respond. This only happens because the earthly organisation cannot tolerate this vision with which it is more or less impregnated.

Take the most obvious, concrete kind of case: circumstances arise in which someone has a vision. Then, instead of remaining in quiet contemplation of the vision and relating it to the spiritual world, which is the only world to which it can rightly be related, the person applies it to the physical world and behaves accordingly. In other words, he starts to go berserk because the vision is doing what it should not do—permeating his body and bringing it into action. This is the most obvious kind of case. Today, when an atavistic vision arises that the body cannot tolerate, it does not remain in the domain which has brought it to life, which is where it should remain. A person becomes powerless if, his physical body is too weak to stand up against the vision. If the physical body is strong enough to stand up against it, the vision is weakened. Then the objects and events in it cease to appear—falsely—as if they really belonged to the world of the senses, for that is how they seem to someone who is made ill by them. Thus, if the physical body is strong enough to counter the falsifying tendencies of an atavistic vision, the following occurs: in such cases, a person relates to the world in a fashion that is similar to that of Old Moon, and yet he is strong enough to reconcile this Moon mode of experience with the earthly organism in its present state.

What does this imply? It implies that this person has somewhat altered his inner zodiac with its twelve sense-zones. It is changed in such a way that what happens in this zodiac of the twelve senses is more like a life process than a sense process. Or, better expressed, one could say that events in the regions of the senses, events which actually do impinge on the sense processes, are transformed into life processes—so that the sense processes are lifted out of their present, dead state and transformed into something living: you still see, but something lives in that seeing; you hear, but simultaneously there is something living in that hearing. Something lives in the eyes or in the ears which otherwise only lives in your stomach or on your tongue. The sense processes are truly brought into movement. And it is quite in order for that to happen. For then our modern sense organs acquire qualities that could otherwise only be possessed in the same degree by our vital organs. The forces of sympathy and antipathy flow strongly through our vital organs. Now just consider how much of our whole life depends on sympathy and antipathy—on which things we accept and take up and which we reject! And now those very powers of sympathy and antipathy, powers that are otherwise developed in the life organs, once more begin to pour into the sense organs. The eye not only sees red, it experiences sympathy or antipathy along with the colour. The sense organs regain the capacity to receive and be permeated by the life forces. So we can say: in this way the sense organs are brought once more into the sphere of life.

For this to happen, there must be changes in the life processes. Through these changes, the life processes become more ensouled than they otherwise would be in earthly life. The ensouling takes place in such a way that the three life processes—breathing, warming and nourishing—are more or less united. Then they begin to manifest themselves more in the sphere of the soul. With normal breathing, one breathes the prosaic, earthly air; the normal process of warming involves earthly warmth; and so on. But when they are ensouled, the life processes are united by a kind of symbiosis. They cease to be separated in the way they are usually separated in the present-day human organism; they establish connections with each other. Breathing, warming and nourishing unite to form an inner association with one another. And this is not nourishing in the coarse, material sense, but is rather the process of nourishing. The process occurs without it being necessary for anything to be eaten, and it does not occur on its own, as when we eat, but in conjunction with the other processes.

The four remaining life processes are united in a similar fashion. Secretion, growth, maintenance and reproduction are united to form a single, more ensouled process, a life process that has more to do with the soul. And then these two parts can unite yet again-not just gathering all the life processes together so that they function as one, but by combining three of the processes in one group and the other four processes in another so that these two groups, in turn, can function in concert.

In this way three new soul faculties arise. In character they resemble—but are not identical with—the earthly faculties of thinking, feeling and willing: here is another triad of soul faculties. The new faculties differ from thinking, feeling and willing as they normally present themselves on Earth. They are more like life processes, but not so differentiated as the life processes otherwise are on Earth. When someone is able to sustain this sinking-back into Moon without lapsing into visions, a very intimate, subtle process takes place. The sense-zones are transformed into regions of life, the life processes are ensouled, and there arises a kind of understanding that is faintly suggestive of the Old Moon visions. Nor can a person remain constantly in this state, for then one would cease to be fit for life on Earth. To be fit for Earth one needs the kind of senses and vital organs we have described previously. But in special circumstances a person can enter into this other state. Then, if the state tends more towards the will, it leads to aesthetic creation; if the state tends more towards perception, it leads to aesthetic enjoyment. Truly aesthetic human behaviour consists in the enlivening of the sense organs and the ensouling of the life processes. This is an extremely important truth about humanity; it explains much. This enlivening of the sense organs and this new life in the regions of the senses is to be found in the arts and the enjoyment of art. Something similar occurs with the vital processes, which are more ensouled in the enjoyment of art than they are in normal life. These days, it is impossible to understand the full significance of the changes a person undergoes when he enters the artistic sphere, because a materialistic approach is incapable of grasping the facts in their full reality. Today a human being is seen as concrete and fixed. But, within certain limits, people actually are variable. This is demonstrated by the sort of variability we have just been observing.

Elucidations such as those that have just been presented contain far, far-reaching truths. To mention only one such truth: there is the fact that precisely those senses that are most adapted to the physical plane of existence are the senses that must undergo the most radical changes when they are led halfway back into a quasi-Moon existence. In order to serve someone who follows this road halfway back into the time of Old Moon, the sense of the I, the sense of thought and the sense of physical touch must be wholly transformed, for these senses are robustly adapted to Earth existence.

It is of no use to art, for example, to confront the I or the world of thoughts the way we normally do. At the very most, you might find the usual relationship to the I and to thought in some minor arts. No art describes or portrays a person's I directly, in the way the person actually lives, standing within the real world. The artist must go through a process whereby the I is lifted out of the specialisation it has acquired on earth; it must give him a generalised sense of meaning, a sense for the typical. An artist does this as a matter of course. Similarly, an artist cannot directly express the world of thoughts in the way in which it is usually expressed here on earth. Otherwise he would not be able to produce any poetry or works of art at all, but at the very most only didactic things, things that contain some lesson and are not artistic in the true sense of the word. The changes that the artist makes in the world that confronts him enliven the senses by leading them back to a previous condition in the way I have been explaining.

But, regarding this change in the senses, there is something else that must still be considered. I said that the life processes intermingle. Just as the planets come into conjunction, and just as their mutual relations are significant—in contrast to the immobile stars—the sense-zones can also come into motion; once they have been transposed to the planetary dimension of human life, they can come to life and attain to relationships with one another. This is the reason why artistic perception is never as restricted to specific sense-zones in the way in which our usual perception is. The particular senses also develop certain relationships with one another. Let us consider an example—say, painting.

A consideration that is based on true spiritual science would discover the following things. Sight, the sense of warmth, the sense of taste, the sense of smell—these have their discrete zones as far as normal sense observation goes. Their respective areas are separate. In painting, however, these sense regions merge in a remarkable fashion, not only in the concrete organs, but also in their spheres of influence as I have described them in preceding lectures.

A painter, or someone who is enjoying a painting, does not merely see the content as colours: the red or the blue or the violet. Instead, he actually tastes the colours, although of course not with the actual organ, or else he would have to lick the painting with his tongue, which he does not do. But a subtle process that is similar to the process of tasting nevertheless takes place in all those areas allied to the sphere of the tongue. When you use the processes of sensory perception to see a green parrot, your eyes see the green colour. But when you enjoy a painting, other subtle, imaginative processes also participate in the act of seeing. These processes are associated with your tongue and belong to your tongue's sense of taste. They are similar to the subtle processes that occur when you taste something, when you eat your food. Now, the act of seeing simultaneously involves other processes—not the processes that actually happen on the tongue, but rather fine, physiological processes associated with these—so that in the deeper sense of the word the painter really does taste the colours.

And he smells the nuances of the colours—not with his nose but rather with the more soul-allied things that accompany the act of smelling from deeper in the organism. Therefore, the individual sense-zones begin to merge as they become areas more given over to the life process.

When we read a description intended for instructing us as to how something looks or how something happened, we employ the sense of speech, or the sense of word. Through it, we obtain information about one thing and another. But if we listen to a poem in the same way as we listen to straightforward information, we will not be able to understand it. The poem does manifest itself to the sense of speech, of course, but it cannot be understood solely through the sense of speech. In addition to the sense of speech, the ensouled senses of balance and movement must also be focused on the poem—not just the usual senses of balance and movement, but the ensouled senses. So we again see that the senses merge. The regions of the senses have become life regions and the sense organs function in combination. Furthermore, this whole process must be accompanied by life processes that relate to the soul instead of functioning like the usual life processes in the physical world.

Someone who engages the fourth life process so intensely that he sweats when he listens to a piece of music has gone too far; that is no longer appropriate to the aesthetic realm, for secretion has been taken as far as physical secretion. The first point is that the process should remain on the soul level and not lead to physical secretion, even though physical secretion is based on exactly the same process. The second point to note is that secretion should not emerge as a discrete process, but rather in an association of four processes—all of them on a soul level: secretion, growth, maintenance and reproduction.

On the one hand, spiritual science has the task of linking the development of Earth to the spiritual worlds. From many points of view we have seen that mankind is headed for disaster unless this link is established. On the other hand, however, spiritual science must also revive the capacity for grasping and understanding the physical world in terms of the spiritual. Not only has materialism led to an inability to rise to the spirit, it also has led to an inability to understand the physical. The spirit is alive in everything physical. If it is lost sight of, it becomes impossible to understand the physical. Just ask yourselves, what could someone who knows nothing of spiritual realities know about the way an entire sense-zone can become a life-zone, and about the way vital processes can manifest as soul processes? What do contemporary physiologists know about these subtle processes that occur in us? Materialism has gradually brought us to such a pass that we have lost all contact with concrete reality. We live only in abstractions, and now we are abandoning the abstractions, too. At the beginning of the nineteenth century people still spoke of vital energy, or of life energy. Naturally, one cannot do anything with such an abstraction, for matters can only be grasped when one enters into the concrete. Once you have a full grasp of the seven life processes you are involved with the realities, and what matters is to re-establish a connection with reality. People try to put new life into all sorts of greyish abstractions, abstractions like elan vital. Even though they may intend exactly the opposite, they are only leading mankind deeper into the crudest materialism, materialism that stoops to mysticism. These abstractions say nothing; they simply testify to an inability to understand. The development of humanity in the immediate future depends on a knowledge of things that can only be discovered in the spiritual worlds. We must make real progress in our spiritual understanding of the world.

In this regard, we ought to go back to the good Aristotle, who was closer to the ancient vision than people are today. I only want to remind you of one characteristic thing about old Aristotle. A whole library has been written about the notion of catharsis, by which he attempted to show what is at the root of tragedy. He said: Tragedy is a unified presentation of events from human life, events which arouse fear and pity as they unfold; furthermore, the soul is purified because of the way this fear and pity unfold, and so the effects of the fear and pity are also purified. The age of materialism has written so much about this passage because it does not possess the organ for apprehending Aristotle. The only ones on the right track were those who saw that Aristotle's expression ‘catharsis’ is medical, or quasi-medical, and not so in the sense of today's materialistic medicine. The aesthetic experience of tragedy really does engender processes that reach right into the physical body and are the organic events that normally accompany fear and pity. It does this because vital processes are changed to processes of soul. A tragedy purifies these vital effects because they are simultaneously elevated to processes of soul. And if you read further in Aristotle's Poetics you will find a hint of this deep understanding of the aesthetic man—not understanding in the modern style, but out of the ancient traditions of the Mysteries. You will find yourself much more in the grips of immediate life reading Aristotle's Poetics than you ever will by reading the tract of some modern aesthetician who can only sniff around and dialecticize, but is unable to get hold of realities.

Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man marks another high point in the understanding of aesthetic man. He lived in a more abstract time, however. Today we need to add the spiritual—the spiritually concrete—to the idealism of that time. But when we look at the more materialistic time of Goethe and Schiller, we see that the abstractions of Schiller's letters on aesthetics nevertheless contain something of what we have been talking about. It is only that the process has descended nearer to the physical plane—but only so that the material may be all the more thoroughly penetrated by an intensively grasped spirituality. What does Schiller say? He says: Humanity, as it lives on earth has two basic drives: it has rational impulses and natural impulses. The logic of the impulse to reason functions as a natural necessity. One is forced to think in a certain way; thinking is not at all free. What avails it to speak of freedom as regards this sphere of natural necessity where one is forced to think that three times three is nine, and not ten? Logic implies a strict rational necessity. For this reason, Schiller says that the person who conforms to the necessities of pure reason is subject to spiritual compulsion.

Schiller contrasts the necessity of reason with the necessities of the world of the senses—of everything that lives in the drives and emotions. There, also, a person must follow a natural necessity rather than his own free impulses. Then Schiller looks for a middle condition between the necessities of reason and the necessities of nature. He finds it in what occurs when a person forms something aesthetically—when rational necessity inclines towards what the person loves or does not love, and when his thinking follows or avoids inner impulses and pictures instead of being bound by rigid, logical necessity. But this state also suspends natural necessity. For one ceases to follow, as through compulsion, the necessities of the natural senses. These necessities are ensouled and spiritualised. A person ceases simply to want what the body wants; instead, sensual pleasures are spiritualised. In this way, the necessity of reason and the necessity of nature approach one another.

Naturally, you must read Schiller's letters on aesthetics for yourselves; they are among the most significant philosophical productions of world history. There, living in Schiller's analyses, you will discover the very things you have just been hearing, only there they are described in metaphysical abstractions. The way vital forces are returned to the sense-zones is contained in what Schiller calls the freeing of natural necessity from rigidity. And what Schiller calls the spiritualisation of natural necessity—he might more aptly have called it ‘ensouling’—contains what we referred to as the functioning of the life processes as soul processes. The life processes become more ensouled, the sense processes come more to life—that is the true process that you will find described in Schiller's letters on aesthetics. There it is put more in abstract, rather ghostly concepts, because that was how it had to be in that era. At that time thinking was not yet spiritually strong enough, not strong enough to descend with the spirit into the regions sought by the seer. In those regions there is no opposition between matter and spirit; rather there is an experience of how the spirit everywhere saturates matter so that there is no possibility of ever bumping into spiritless matter. Contemplation that is merely mental is merely mental only because the person is not able to make his thoughts as strong and as spiritual—as concretely spiritual—that the thoughts can cope with matter. In other words, he is not able to penetrate to what is truly material. Schiller is not yet able to see that the vital processes can function as soul processes. He is not yet able to go as far as to be able to see how the processes that work physically as nourishing, warming and breathing can be formed into something that ceases to be material and instead lives and bubbles in the soul. When this happens, the material particles are scattered by the force of the concepts with which one grasps the physical process. And Schiller is equally unable to look up to the realm of the logical in such a way that he ceases to experience it as merely conceptual. He is not able to come to that stage of development, which can be reached through initiation, whereby the spiritual processes are experienced in their own right and whereby a living spirituality enters into what would otherwise be mere knowing. Thus the attitude that lives in Schiller's aesthetic letters is that ‘I do not quite trust myself to directly approach concrete experience.’ Nevertheless, that which one grasps more exactly when one tries to approach the realm of life through the spirit, and the realm of material through the living, is already stirring in these letters.

Thus we can see all areas of life struggling to move towards the goals of spiritual science. At the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century there arose a philosophy which expressed a longing for greater concreteness. This philosophy had a more or less conceptual form, however, and the longing could not be satisfied. And, because its initial vitality ebbed, this longing for greater concreteness gradually degenerated into the coarse materialism that has lasted from the second half of the nineteenth century into our own time. But something else must also be understood: For spiritualism to establish links only with the spirit is not enough; the material world must be conquered—we must learn to recognise the spirit in matter. That happens through such knowledge as we have been discussing. It leads one to discover new connections, such as the unique place of aesthetic man in Earth evolution. To a certain extent, aesthetic man lifts himself above the stream of development and enters a different world. And that is important. The aesthetically inclined person and the person who works in an aesthetic field do not act in a way that is entirely appropriate to someone on earth, but rather their sphere of activity is in a certain way lifted out of the Earth sphere. With this discovery, aesthetics leads us to some profound secrets of human existence.

On the one hand, anyone who expresses such things as these is touching on the highest truths; on the other hand, what he says can sound virtually nonsensical—mad and distorted. But we will never understand life as long as we timidly hold ourselves back from the real truths. Take any work of art that you wish—the Sistine Madonna or the Venus of Milo: if it really is a work of art, it is not entirely of this earth. It has been lifted out of the stream of earthly events. That is self-evident. And what lives in a Sistine Madonna or a Venus of Milo? That which lives in them also lives in the human being. It is a power that is not entirely adapted to Earth. If everything in humanity were adapted to the earth, mankind would not be able to live on any other level. But not everything in the human being is adapted to the earth and, for occult vision, not everything in humanity is attuned to being earthly man. There are mysterious forces that some day will provide mankind with the impetus to lift itself out of the sphere of earth existence. Nor will we ever understand art as such until we see that its task is to point beyond the merely earthly and beyond what is solely adapted to the earth—to point to the sphere where that which lives in the Venus de Milo truly does exist.

The more you cast your gaze towards the humanity of the future and towards the spiritual challenges of the future, the more you must take certain facts into account, certain facts that are necessary to any truthful picture of the world. Today we still are living with many versions of the assumption that anyone who states something logical and who logically substantiates what he says is necessarily saying something significant about life. But being logical—logicism—is not enough on its own. And because people are always so satisfied when they can produce something logical, they maintain the truth of all imaginable kinds of world view and philosophical system. And of course, all of these can be supported logically: no one who is acquainted with logic would question that they are supportable by logic. But mere logical demonstration does nothing for life. What is thought, what is held in the light of consciousness, needs to be more than just logical, it needs to measure up to reality. What is merely logical is not necessarily valid; only what measures up to reality is valid. I will use just one example to show you what I mean. Suppose you are describing a tree trunk that is lying here before you. You can describe it quite systematically and demonstrate to someone that something really is there because you are describing it just as it is. All the same, your description is a lie. For what you describe does not exist in its own right and cannot possible be a tree trunk in the state in which it is now lying there, cut off from it roots and branches and twigs. It is only a part of existence when seen along with its branches, blossoms and roots, and it is nonsense to think of the trunk as existing in its own right. It is not a reality when it is only seen as it is, lying there. It must be seen with all its shoots and with everything in it that enables it to come into being. One must become convinced that the trunk lying before one is a lie because the truth is before one only when the whole tree is there. Logic does not require us to see a tree trunk as a lie, but it accords with reality that we see it so and that we only accept the whole tree as the reality. A crystal is a truth. In a certain respect it exists in its own right, although only in a certain respect, mind you, for all is relative here, too. A crystal is a reality, but a rosebud is a lie if it is seen only as a rosebud.

So you see how all manner of things occur today because the concept of being in accordance with reality is lacking. Crystallography and, at a pinch, mineralogy are still sciences that accord with reality. But when you get to geology, it no longer accords with reality, for it is an abstraction in the way the tree trunk is an abstraction. It is an abstraction, not a reality, even though it is lying there before you. Things contained in the earth's crust came into being along with what grows out of the earth's crust and thus cannot be conceived without it. We need philosophers who are not satisfied to limit themselves to their powers of abstraction, thinking up new abstractions. More, and increasingly more, there must arise a thinking that accords with reality and is not merely logical. Thinking alters the whole course of world evolution. For what is a Venus de Milo or a Sistine Madonna from the standpoint of thinking that accords with reality? If you take them just as they are before you, you are not in contact with reality. You must be enraptured. To see a work of art truly, you must be lifted out of the earth's sphere and removed from it. To really encounter the Venus de Milo, your soul must be different from the soul that responds to earthly things; precisely the things that do not exist on this earthly plane are what transport the soul to the plane where they really do exist—to the realm of the elemental world, which is where what is in the Venus de Milo really exists. One is able to stand before the Venus de Milo in a way that accords with reality precisely because she possesses the power to tear us away from mere sense-bound vision.

I have not the slightest desire to promote teleology in the negative sense of the word. Nor shall I say anything about the uses of art, for that would be adding pedantry and philistinism to teleology. I shall say nothing about the uses of art. But we can well speak of the sources of art and how art comes to be a part of our lives. We do not have time to cover the whole subject today, so I will just make a start with a few preparatory words. A counter-question leads us to part of the answer: What would happen if there were no art in the world? If that were so, all the forces that are now devoted to art and the enjoyment of art would be used to produce a life that runs counter to reality. If you were to remove art from the development of humanity, then human development would contain just as many lies as it now contains works of art! Here art displays that unique and dangerous relationship that arises when one nears the threshold of the spiritual world. Just listen yonder, where things always have two sides! If a person has a sense for being in accord with reality, then an aesthetic attitude gives him access to higher realities. An aesthetic attitude leads someone who lacks the sense for being in accord with reality directly into a world of lies. There is always a dividing of the ways and it is very important to be aware of this fork in the road. This does not just apply to occultism; it already applies when you come to the realm of art. To bring about a way of seeing the world that accords with its reality is an aim of spiritual science. Materialism has given us a way of seeing things that goes directly against reality.

As contradictory as this all seems, it is only contradictory for those who judge the world according to their preconceptions, rather than in accordance with what is really there. We really do live in a phase of development in which the direct influence of materialism is putting more and more distance between us and the ability to comprehend what even a normal object of the senses is—an ordinary thing of the physical world. There have been some very interesting experiments that shed light on this problem.¹³ They conform exactly to a materialistic way of thinking but, like so many things produced by materialistic thought, they support the development of precisely those abilities that mankind needs for developing a spiritual world-view. The following experiment has been carried out—I am taking just one example from among the many such experiments. A whole event was planned ahead of time: A person is to give a lecture in the course of which he says something injurious and upsetting about someone present in the audience. All of it is planned. The lecture is given word for word as planned beforehand. The person against whom the insult is directed is supposed to jump up and a real scuffle is to develop—this is how events are supposed to develop. During the course of the argument, the man who has jumped up is to reach into his pocket and draw out a revolver. Other details of the incident are planned out exactly. In other words, you must imagine the unfolding of a fully programmed, detailed scene. Thirty people were in the invited audience—not just any people, but advanced students of law, and lawyers who had already completed their studies. After the scuffle is over, each of the thirty was asked to describe what happened. Others who were privy to what was going on were there to ensure that protocol was followed and that the whole event went exactly according to plan. So each of the thirty is questioned. Each has seen the event. None of them is thick-headed. They are all educated people, the very ones who later will go out into life and investigate what really has occurred in the case of such a fracas or of other incidents. Yet of these thirty, twenty-six falsely described what they saw and only four could produce an acceptably accurate account—only four tolerably accurate accounts! Such experiments have been going on for years in order to demonstrate how the truthfulness of witnesses should be weighed in a court of law. Every one of the twenty-six sat there and could say, ‘I saw it with my own two eyes.’—One forgets to consider what is required in order to be able to correctly describe something that has occurred before one's very eyes!

We need to consider the art of maintaining a true perspective on what happens before our very eyes. Someone who is not conscientious towards events in the world of the senses will never be able to develop the feeling of responsibility and the conscientiousness necessary for viewing spiritual facts. Just look at this world of ours that is presently so under the influence of materialism and ask yourselves how many are aware that it is possible for twenty-six people out of the thirty who have witnessed an event to be unable to describe it without committing falsehoods, with only four who are able to give even tolerably accurate accounts. In view of something like this, you can begin to feel what immeasurable significance the results of a spiritual world-view have for ordinary life.

Now you might ask yourself whether things were different in earlier times. Our current mode of thought has not always been current. The Greeks did not yet possess the abstract manner of thinking that we have, and need to have, in order to get about the world in a way appropriate for today. But the manner of thinking is not the important thing; the truth is what matters. In his own way, Aristotle tried to use more concrete concepts to describe the inner aesthetic mood and the aesthetic attitude. But the aesthetic constitution was understood in an even more concrete, imaginatively clairvoyant fashion by the early Greeks, who were still connected with the Mysteries and who experienced pictures instead of concepts. In those times, one looked back to the age of Uranus, who embodied everything that we can take in through our heads and through the powers that now are manifest in the outer world through the sense-zones. Uranus—the twelve senses—is wounded. Drops of his blood fall, foaming, into the ocean called Maya. Here you see the senses beginning to come to life and sending something down into the ocean of the life processes, and there below you see how the blood of the senses pulses through the life processes which begin to foam up and become processes of soul. And the ancient Greeks' understanding of this led them to see how Aphrodite¹⁴—Aphrogenea, the goddess of beauty—is created out of the foam that arises when the blood of the wounded Uranus drips into the ocean of Maya. This, the more ancient of the myths about the creation of Aphrodite, expresses the condition of the aesthetic man and is one of the most significant imaginations and one of the most significant thoughts in the whole of mankind's spiritual evolution. But still another thought needs to be placed beside the thought of this ancient myth which shows Aphrodite being born from the drops of blood of the wounded Uranus that fall into the sea—rather than as the child of Zeus and Dione. We need a further imagination—one that penetrates even more deeply into reality and goes beyond the realities of the elemental world into the physical realities. We need an imagination from a later age—one that approaches the physical-sensory world. Alongside the myth that shows how Aphrodite, beauty, was born into the world of mankind, we need to place the great truth about how original goodness entered into humanity. We need to show how the spirit descended into Maya-Maria, just as the drops of Uranus' blood trickled into the ocean whose name also was Maya—and how, out of the beautiful foam that arises [*The German for foam—Schaum—has many suggestive echoes. For example, there is the word schauen, ‘show’ or ‘spectacle’, and also ‘Schema’, which means ‘perceptible manifestation, semblance, or appearance’, and which refers to a concept that is central to Schiller's account of aesthetic man. (Tr. note.)], the herald who announces the approaching dawn of a new age is born. The sunrise that announces the eternal regency of the Good ... of understanding of the Good, The True-and-the-Good, the spirit. This is the truth Schiller intended when he wrote the words:

Only through beauty's dawn-lit gate
Can you pass into the realms of knowledge.¹⁵

The knowledge he refers to is primarily moral knowledge.

You can see how the tasks of spiritual science are growing—not mere theoretical ones, but real life tasks. In our day it is no wonder that the misunderstandings about spiritual science multiply among those who are not devoted to the truth. We have to accept that as an inevitable side-effect.

Many people have been caught in the grip of a most peculiar attitude towards the truth, especially in our materialistic age. And if I had to tell you about the letters I receive, then today I would have to make yet another addition to that part of our collection where the enemies of the truth are exhibited. I do not even like to mention the latest incredible nonsense, which came in a letter I received yesterday. Yes, my dear friends, this is something we must feel; just reflecting a little on it is not enough. For although our time demands it, bringing spiritual science to mankind in a form that is appropriate to our time is not such a simple task. One must speak out in spite of thereby being exposed to the dangers involved in telling numbers of people—and it truly is more than a few—about truths that not only touch upon what is highest and most holy, but that also go most deeply, affecting heart and soul. Think of the times when there were not a few sitting in the auditorium who later became thorough-going enemies and falsified what was being said! Those who, at any rate, still take the Society seriously, must go through this experience of speaking to many people who, like yourselves, are supposedly friends, while knowing that in the past there have been some who turned out to be enemies—people who later falsified the truths they heard and used what they received here to attack the truth. One must always reckon—sometimes while watching it happen—on the possibility that the person who is listening to what is being said may turn against us in the way others have turned in the past. Today this must colour our work in the realm of spiritual science: knowledge of the human soul takes on special significance.

Such things are not to be taken too lightly. Let us try to refresh our memory for a moment, our memory of truth's path as it has appeared in cosmic development, in the evolution of humanity, and remind ourselves of how much was involved in the progress of truth! I will not say any more about it today. But we have touched on an area that is closely related to the direct connections between this life and the spiritual world. Only by understanding it can we shed lights on such things. One must take such opportunities as this to touch on what today's representatives of the truth must undergo. And I hope that there are at least a few of you who know why every now and then I have something bitter to say about the way people relate to the truth, and that there are some who know that it is not quite truthful to say that I am the guilty one. Perhaps I might characterise our contemporaries' much-loved illogicality with an anecdote that would seem silly in other circumstances. But this false logic is used, not in the service of the truth, but in the service of lies.

Once there was a man who took another man's estate away from him. After he had taken it, the former owner did not possess it as before, but instead had to begin all over again to work for what he already had earned once. A trial was conducted. The former possessor of the estate was there and also the man who had taken it away. Each had his own advocate. Now, advocates are not always there to present the unconditional, absolute truth, but rather to say what is useful to the person they represent. In this case, the advocate who was lodging the complaint was the first to speak, the one representing the man from whom something had been taken. And, indeed, to begin with he seemed on the way to convincing the court. But then the advocate of the man who had taken the estate away took the floor and said to the judge, ‘Your Honour, you have heard that my client confesses to having done everything that he has done. You have asked my client, “Do you plead guilty, or not guilty?” To that my client answered, “I took all those things, but I do not feel that I am guilty.” And my client is entirely correct in saying this. He will concede that he took all those things; but he need not feel guilty about it. Nor can Your Honour find him guilty, for in order to establish the guilt one must go back to the original cause of the matter. Just consider, Your Honour, this man has become a thief. But he never would have become a thief if the other man had not possessed these things he took away from him! The original owner is the one who has trespassed! If he had never had the possessions, my client could never have become a thief! So he is truly the guilty one! It was only when my client saw that this man had these possessions that he was tempted to become a thief.’ And this advocate spoke so eloquently that the court finally declared, ‘Yes, until today we have always believed that the thief is the guilty one. But all those who have believed that the person who takes something is guilty have been mistaken, for when one examines the real, original cause, one sees that the person from whom the things were taken, the original possessor, is the guilty one.’

Everyone will see that what I am telling you is utter nonsense. But this is exactly the sort of logic that is used today against spiritual science. Spiritual science makes its way into the world and accomplishes certain things. Then these things are distorted by people who say they only do so because they see the truth in spiritual science. They are using the same logic as someone who says that the person from whom something is taken is the guilty one because he has tempted the other to take it from him. Such is the logic abroad today and, if you will only take care to observe the life around you, you will see instances of this kind of logic.

Yesterday I was blamed—among other things—for everything that happens in the world when someone or other lies about spiritual science and commits certain acts. This is the same logic as that followed by one who says: ‘The real guilt does not lie with the person who takes, but with the person from whom something is taken, for he is the one who created the original cause of the theft.’

• 13. The experiment referred to was carried out by Franz von List, a professor of criminal law.
• 14. The birth of Aphrodite: Compare lines 188 ff. of Hesiod's Theogony:
  
  But the members themselves, when Kronos
  had lopped them with the flint,
  he threw from the mainland
  into the great wash of the sea water
  and they drifted a great while
  on the open sea, and there spread
  a circle of white foam
  from the immortal flesh, and in it
  grew a girl, whose course first took her
  to holy Kythera
  and from there she afterward made her way
  to sea-washed Cyprus
  and stepped ashore, a modest lovely goddess,
  and about her
  light and slender feet the grass grew,
  and the gods call her
  Aphrodite, and men do too,
  and the Aphro-foam-born
  goddess, and garlanded Kythereia,
  because from the seafoam
  she grew, and Kythereia, because she came forth
  from wave-washed Cyprus,
  and Philommedea, because she appeared
  from medea, members ...
  
  (Hesiod, translated by Richmond Lattimore. The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1959.)
• 15. Schiller, when he wrote the words: The words in question are to be found in the poem, Die Kunstler (The Artist).

In the last lecture I sought to show how in the spiritual culture of the present day, it is due to misunderstandings when there is so little understanding between those who direct their research to the soul and to the processes within the soul's realm and those who direct their attention to the material processes in the human organism which run their course—however one wishes to call it—as accompanying phenomena, or also, as materialism maintains, as the necessary causes of soul phenomena. And I sought to show what the causes are of such misunderstandings. Today I should, above all, like to draw attention to the fact that such misunderstandings—as well as misunderstandings in other regards—necessarily arise in the search for real, for genuine insight when one fails to take one aspect into consideration, in the cognitive process itself, an aspect which forcefully reveals itself to the spiritual investigator. This aspect reveals itself more and more as an immediate perception during the course of further, extensive spiritual-scientific research. This is something which at first appears very odd when one expresses it: In the sphere in which world conceptions arise, that is in the sphere of insight into spiritual reality, when, I would like to say, one ties oneself down to certain points of view, there necessarily arises a way of regarding the human soul which can both be unequivocally refuted and can just as well be proven correct.

Therefore, the spiritual-scientific researcher more and more tends to abandon the habit of reinforcing one or the other conception by bringing to bear what, in ordinary life would be called a proof, or a refutation. For, in this sphere, as has been said, everything can be proved with certain reasons and everything can, also with certain reasons, be contradicted. Materialism, in its totality, can indeed be strictly proved correct, and, when it addresses itself to single questions about life or about existence can also equally well be shown to be correct. And one will not necessarily find it easy to refute this or that argument which the materialist brings forward in support of his views by merely seeking to refute his conclusion by bringing forward opposing points of view. The same thing holds true for the one whose point of view is a spiritual view of existence. Therefore, the one who truly wishes to conduct research in spiritual fields must, in regard to any world conception know not only all that which speaks for the point of view, but also all that speaks against it. For the remarkable fact arises that the actual truth only becomes evident when one allows to work upon the soul that which speaks for a certain thing, as well as that which speaks against it. And the one who allows his spirit to stare in fixation upon any constellation of concepts or mental representations of a one-sided world view, such a one will always be closed to the fact that just the opposite can appear to be valid to the soul, indeed the opposite must appear to be correct up to a certain point. And such a person can be compared with someone who might insist that human life can only be sustained by breathing in. Breathing in assumes breathing out, both belong together. So also, our concepts, our representations, relate to one another in questions concerning world conceptions. We are able to put forward, in regard to any matter, a concept which confirms it and we are able to put forward a concept which refutes it; one way demands the other, just as inbreathing requires outbreathing, and vice versa. And thus, just as real life can only reveal itself through breathing out and breathing in—when both are present—so, also, the spiritual can only manifest itself within the soul when one is able to enter in an equally positive manner into the pro as well as the con of a particular matter. The supportive, confirming concept is like a breathing out, within the living wholeness of the soul, the reflecting, denying concept like a breathing in, and only in their living working together does that element reveal itself which is rooted in the spiritual reality. It is for this reason that spiritual science is not concerned to apply the methods, to which one is so accustomed in current literature, where this or that is proved or is refuted. The spiritual scientist realizes that that which is brought forward in a positive form concerning world conceptions, can always in a certain sense be justified, but, equally so, what appears to contradict it. When one moves forward in world conception questions to that immediate life which is present in positive and negative concepts, just as bodily life lives in outbreathing and breathing in, then one comes to concepts which truly are able to take in the spirit; one comes to concepts which are equal to reality. However, in doing so, one must often express oneself quite differently than when one expresses oneself according to the habits of thought of ordinary life. But the way in which one expresses oneself arises from the livingly active inner experience of the spirit. And the spirit can only be inwardly experienced, not, in the manner of material existence, be outwardly perceived.

Now, you know, that one of the principal world conception questions is that which I dealt with in the first lectures which I held here this winter, namely, the question concerning matter, concerning physical substance. And I shall touch on this question by way of introduction from the points of view which I have indicated.

One cannot come successfully to terms with the question about substance or about matter if one attempts, again and again, to form mental images or concepts about what matter actually is; when one tries to understand—in other words—what actually is matter, what is substance. One who has truly wrestled in his soul with such riddles—which are very far from the beaten track for many people—such a one knows what is involved in questions of this kind. For, if he has wrestled for a time without yielding to this or that prejudice, he comes to a very different point of view in relation to such a question. He comes to a point of view which allows him to consider as more important the inner attitude of the soul when one forms such a concept as the concept of matter. It is this wrestling of the soul itself which is raised to consciousness. And one then comes to a way of looking at these riddles, which I might characterize in the following way.

He who wishes to understand matter in the way in which it is usually conceived resembles a person who says; I now wish to form an impression of darkness, of a dark room. What does he do? He turns on the light and regards this as the correct method to gain an impression of a dark room. Now, you will agree, this is just the opposite of the right way to go about it. And, it is in the same way, the opposite of the right way—only one has to come to realize this through the inner wrestling which I have pointed to—if one believes that one will ever come to know the nature of matter in setting the spirit into motion in order to illuminate matter, to illuminate substance, by means of spirit. The one and only place where the spirit within the body can silence itself is where an outer process penetrates into our inner life, that is in sense perception, in sensation, where the life of representation, of forming mental images, ceases. It is just by letting the spirit come to silence and by our experiencing this silence of the spirit that we can allow matter, substance, truly to represent itself within our soul.

One does not come to such concepts through ordinary logic; or, I would say, if one does come to them through ordinary logic, then the concepts are much too thin to call forth a genuine power of conviction. Only when one wrestles within the soul with certain concepts, in the way which has been indicated, will they lead to the kind of result which I have pointed toward.

Now, the opposite is also the case. Let us assume, someone wants to comprehend spirit. If he seeks it, for example, in the purely material outward formation of the human body, he is similar to someone who extinguishes the light in order to comprehend it. For it is the secret in this matter, that outer, sense-perceptible nature contradicts the spirit, extinguishes the spirit. Nature builds the reflected image of the spirit, in the same way that an illuminated object throws back, reflects, the light. But nowhere can we find the spirit, in whatever material processes, if we do not grasp the spirit in living activity. Because that is just the essential nature of material processes that the spirit has transformed itself into them; that spirit has incorporated itself into them. And if we then try to come to know the spirit out of them, we misunderstand ourselves.

I wanted to give this as a preface, in order that ever greater clarity can be brought to bear on what the actual cognitive attitude of heart and mind of the spiritual researcher is, and how it is that he needs a certain width and mobility in his life of forming mental images, to be able to penetrate into those things which require penetration. With such concepts it then becomes possible to illuminate the important questions on which I touched last time and which I will briefly indicate in order to move on to our considerations for today.

I said: as things have developed in recent spiritual education and culture, one has come ever more and more to a one-sided way of looking at the relationships of the soul-spiritual to the bodily-physical; a way of looking which expresses itself in the fact that one actually only seeks for the soul- spiritual within that part of the human bodily constitution which lies in the nervous system, that is to say within the brain. One assigns the soul- spiritual exclusively to the brain and nervous system, and one regards the remaining organism, when one speaks of the soul-spiritual, more or less as a kind of incidental supplement to the brain and nervous system. Now, I tried to make clear the results of spiritual research in this field by drawing attention to the fact that one only comes to a true insight about the relationship of the human soul with the human body when one sees the relationship of the entire human soul to the entire bodily constitution. But there it became clear that the matter has yet a deeper background, that is the membering of the entirety of the human soul into the actual representational thought life, into the life of feeling and the life of will. For only the actual representational life of the soul is bound to the nervous organism in the way in which it is assumed by more recent physiological psychology. In contrast, the life of feeling—let it be rightly noted, not in so far as it is represented mentally, but in so far as it arises—is related with the human breathing organism, with everything which is breathing, and which is connected with breathing, as the life of mental representation is related with the nervous system. Thus, one must assign the life of feeling of the soul to the breathing organism. Then further: that which we designate as the life of will, is in a similar relationship with that which in the physical body we must designate as the metabolism, of course into its finest ramifications. And in as much as one takes into consideration that the single systems within the organism interact and interweave—metabolism, of course, also occurs in the nerves—they interpenetrate, I would say, the three systems interpenetrate at the outermost periphery. But a correct understanding, however, is only possible when one regards matters in such a way that one knows: will impulses belong with the metabolism in the same way that the experiences of forming mental images belong with the human nervous system, that is to say, with the brain.

Matters of this kind can, of course, only be indicated to begin with. And just for this reason, objection after objection is possible. But I know quite definitely: when one no longer approaches that which has just been presented out of merely partial aspects of today's natural scientific research but rather out of the whole spectrum of anatomical, physiological research, then the result will be a complete harmony between the assertions which I have made from the spiritual scientific point of view and the assertions of natural science. Regarded superficially—allow me to cite the following objection only as a characteristic example—objection after objection can be brought forward against so comprehensive a truth. Someone could say: Let us agree that certain feelings are connected with the breathing organism; for no one can really doubt that for certain feelings this can be very convincingly demonstrated. But someone could also say: Yes, but what do you have to say to the fact that we perceive certain melodies, that melodies arise in our consciousness; and the feeling of an aesthetic pleasure connects itself with melodies. Can one, in this case, speak of any kind of connection of the breathing organism to this which quite evidently arises in the head, and so obviously is connected with the nervous organism according to the results of physiological research? The moment one considers the matter rightly, the correctness of my assertion becomes evident with complete clarity. Namely, one must take into consideration that with every outbreath an important parallel process occurs in the brain: the brain would rise with the outbreath if it were not prevented from rising by top of the skull—the breathing carries forward into the brain—and in reverse, the brain sinks with the inbreath. And since it cannot rise or fall because of the skull, there arises, what is well known to physiology: there arises the change in the blood stream, there occurs what physiology knows as brain-breathing, that is to say, certain processes which occur in the surrounding of the nerves run parallel with the process of breathing. And in the meeting of the breathing process with that which lives in us as tone through the ear there occurs what points to the fact that feeling, also in this realm, is connected with the breathing organism, just as the life of mental representations is connected with the nervous organism.

I want to indicate this because it is a relatively remote example and can, therefore, provide a ready objection. If one could come to an understanding with someone concerning all the details given by physiological research, one would find that none of these details contradicts what was presented here last time and has been brought forward again today.

It should now be my task to extend our considerations in a similar way as was done in the last lecture. And, to do so, I must enter more closely into the manner in which the human being unfolds the life of sense perception, in order to show the actual relationship between the capacity for sense perception, which leads to representations, and the life of feeling and of will, indeed, altogether, the life of the human being as soul, as body, and as spirit.

Through our sense life we come into connection with the sense- perceptible environment. Within this sense-perceptible environment natural science distinguishes certain substances, let us rather say, substance-forms - - because it is on these that the matter depends; if I wished to discuss this with the physicist I would have to say aggregate-conditions—solid, fluid, gaseous. Now, however, as you all know, natural scientific research comes to assume—in addition to the above-mentioned form in which physical substance appears—also another condition. When natural science wants to explain light, it is not satisfied only to recognize the existence of these substance- forms, which I have just mentioned, but science reaches out to include that which at first appears to be finer than these sorts of substance; it reaches out to that which one usually calls ether. The idea of ether is an extraordinarily difficult one, and one can say: the various thoughts which have been developed about the ether, what can be said about it, are as different, as manifold as one can imagine. It is, of course, not possible to go into all these details. Attention should only be drawn to the fact that natural science feels impelled to postulate the concept of the ether, which means thinking about the world not only as filled with the immediate sense perception of the more solid substances, but to think of it as filled with ether. What is characteristic is that natural science with its current methods fails to ascend to an understanding of what the ether actually is. Natural research for its real activity always requires material bases. But the ether itself always escapes, in a certain sense, from the material foundations. The ether appears in union with material processes, it calls forth material processes; but it is not to be grasped, so to speak, with those means which are bound to the material foundations. There has, therefore, developed in recent times a strange ether-concept, which, basically, is extraordinarily interesting. The concept of the ether which one can already find today among physicists, goes in the direction of saying: the ether must be—whatever else it may be—something which at any rate has no attributes such as ordinary matter has. And in this way, natural scientific research points toward the recognition of something beyond its own material basis, when it says of the ether, it possesses aspects which research, with its methods, cannot find. Natural scientific research comes to the acceptance of an ether, but with its methods is unable to come to fill out this representation of the ether with any content.

Spiritual science yields the following. Natural scientific research proceeds from the material foundation; spiritual research from the spirit-soul basis. The spiritual researcher—if he does not arbitrarily remain within a certain limit—is also, like the natural scientist, driven to the concept of ether, only from the other side. The spiritual investigator attempts to come to know what is active and effective within the interior of the soul. If he were to remain standing at the point where he is able to experience inwardly only what takes place in the ordinary life of the soul, he would actually in this field not even advance as far as the natural scientist who postulates the concept of an ether. For the natural scientist at least forms the concept of an ether; he accepts it for consideration. The soul researcher, if he fails to come to a concept of ether, resembles a natural scientist who says: Why should I trouble myself about what else lives? I accept the three basic forms: solid, fluid, gaseous bodies; what is finer than that, about that I do not concern myself. This is, for the most part, just what the teachings of psychology in fact do.

However, not everyone who has been active in the realm of soul research acts in this way; and one finds especially within that extraordinarily significant scientific development which is based on the foundation laid in the first third of the nineteenth century by German Idealism—not in this Idealism itself, but in that which then evolved out of this Idealism—one finds the first beginnings leading toward the concept of the ether from the other side, from the spiritual-soul side, just as nature research ascends to the idea of ether from the material side. And, if one truly wishes to have the concept of the ether, one must approach it from two sides. Otherwise, one will not come rightly to terms with this concept. What is interesting is that the great German philosophical Idealists, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, despite their penetrating power of thinking—an ability which I have often characterized here—despite this, they did not form the concept of the ether. They were unable to so enstrengthen, to empower, their inner soul life in order to conceive of the ether. Instead, there arose within those who allowed themselves to be fructified by this Idealism, who, in a sense, allowed the thoughts which had been brought forth to work further within their souls - - despite the fact that they were not as great geniuses as their Idealist predecessors—this concept of the ether arose out of their research into the soul's realm. We first find this ether concept in the work of Immanuel Hermann Fichte, the son of the great Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who was also his father's pupil. He allowed that to continue to work within his soul which Johann Gottlieb Fichte and his successors, Schelling and Hegel, had accomplished. Immanuel Hermann Fichte, allowing this thought to become condensed to an even greater effectiveness within him, came to say: When one contemplates the life of soul and spirit, when one so to speak, traverses it in all directions, one comes to say: This soul-spiritual life must flow down into the ether, just as the solid, fluid, gaseous states flow up into the ether. So must, in a sense, the lowest element of the soul flow into the ether, just as the highest element of matter flows into the ether above. Characteristic also are certain thoughts which Immanuel Hermann Fichte formed about this matter, by means of which he, indeed, penetrated from the spirit- soul realm and came to the boundary of the ether. You will find this passage from his book Anthropology, 1860, quoted in my most recent book, Of the Human Riddle:

“One cannot find, within the material elements of substance ... that which truly endures, that uniting formative principle of the body, which reveals itself as operative during our entire life.” “Thus, we are directed to a second, essentially different causative principle in the body.” “Inasmuch” as this “contains that which actually persists, endures in the metabolism, it is the true, inner, invisible, but in all visible substantiality present body. That other, the outward manifestation of it, built up out of incessantly active metabolism, may from now on be designated ‘body,’ which is, in fact, not that which persists and is not the enduring whole, and which is the mere result or the after-image of that inner bodily presence, which casts him into the constantly changing world of substance, in a way similar to the way the magnetic force prepares an apparently solid body out of the particles of the iron filings, but which dissolves in all directions when the force which unites them is withdrawn.”

For I. H. Fichte there lived within the ordinary body, consisting of outer material substance, an invisible body, and this invisible body we might also call the etheric body; an etheric body which brings the single substantial particles of this visible body into their form, which sculpts them, forms them. And I. H. Fichte is so clear about the fact that this ether body, to which he descends out of the soul realm, is not subject to the processes of the physical body, that the insight into the existence of such an etheric body suffices to enable him to transcend the riddle of death. In this context I. H. Fichte says in his Anthropology:

“It is hardly necessary still to ask, how the human being finds himself in the process of death. The human being remains after this last, for us still visible act of the living process, he remains in his essential being entirely the same in spirit and in organizing power as he formerly was. His integrity is preserved; for he has indeed lost nothing of that which was his and belonged to his substance during his visible life. He only returns in death into the invisible world, or better said, as he never left this world, as it is that which actually endures within all that is visible—he has simply stripped off a particular form of the visible. ‘To be dead’ only signifies, to be no longer perceptible to the usual comprehension by the senses, just as in the same way, that which is actually real, the final ground of bodily manifestation is imperceptible to the senses.”

I have shown in the case of I. H. Fichte how he advances from the soul realm to such an invisible body. It is interesting to note that in a number of instances in the after-glow of the spiritual life of German Idealism, the same thing appears. Some time ago I also drew attention to a lonely thinker, who was a school director in Bromberg, who had occupied himself with the question of immortality, Johann Heinrich Deinhardt, who died in the sixties of the nineteenth century. At first, he concerned himself with the question of immortality as others had also done, seeking to penetrate the question of immortality through thoughts and concepts. But more resulted for him than for those who merely live in concepts. And it was there possible for the publisher of the treatise about immortality which J. H. Deinhardt had written to quote a passage from a letter which the author had written him, in which J. H. Deinhardt says, that, although he had not come so far as to publish it in a book, his inner research had, nevertheless, resulted clearly in the recognition that the human being, during his entire life between birth and death, works on the formation of an invisible body which is released into the spiritual world at death.

Thus, one could draw attention to a variety of other instances within German spiritual life of such a direction of research and of a way of seeing and comprehending the world. They would all show that in this direction of research there lay an urge not to remain limited by mere philosophical speculation, which results in a mere life in concepts, but rather to so enstrengthen the inner life of the soul that it presses forward to that degree of concentration that reaches through to the etheric.

Along the paths on which these researchers entered, the real riddle of the etheric cannot yet be resolved from within, but one can, in a certain sense say: these researchers are on the way to spiritual science. For this riddle concerning the etheric will be resolved when the human soul undergoes those inner processes of practical exercise which I have frequently characterized here, and which are described more exactly in my book How to Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds. The human being, when he undergoes these inner soul processes, does indeed gradually attain to the etheric from within. Then the etheric will be directly present for him. Only then, however, is he really in the position to understand what a sense perception is, to understand what actually occurs in the perception by the senses.

In order to characterize this today, I must seek access to this question, in a certain sense, from another side. Let us approach that which actually occurs in the metabolic processes for the human being. Simply expressed, we can think of the metabolic processes in the human organism as occurring in such a way that, essentially, they have to do with the fluid material element. This can be easily understood if one acquaints oneself, even only to a limited extent, with the most easily accessible natural scientific ideas in this field. What constitutes a metabolic process lives, one can say, in the fluid element. That which is breathing lives in the airy, gaseous element; in breathing we have an interchange between inner and outer processes in the air, just as in the metabolism we have an interchange between substance processes which have occurred outside of our body, and such which occur within our body. What happens then when we perceive with our senses and then proceed to form mental representations? What corresponds to this actually? In just the same way that the fluid processes correspond to the metabolism, and the airy processes correspond to breathing—what corresponds to perception? What corresponds to perception are etheric processes. Just as we in a sense live with our metabolism in the fluid, and live with our breathing in the air, we live with our perceiving in the ether. And inner ether processes, inner etheric processes, which occur in the invisible body, about which we have just been speaking, occur, come into contact with external etheric processes in sense perception. When it is objected: Yes, but certain sense perceptions are self-evidently metabolic processes!—this is especially obvious for those sense perceptions which correspond with the so- called lower senses, smell, taste. A more accurate consideration shows that along with that which is substantial, that belongs directly to the metabolism, along with every such process, also with tasting, for example, an etheric process occurs, by means of which we enter into relation with the external ether, just as we enter into relation with the air with our physical body when we breathe. Without the understanding of the etheric world, an understanding of sense perception and sensation is impossible.

What is it that actually happens? Well, one can only really know what happens there when one has gone far enough in the inner soul process that the inner etheric-bodily element has become a reality for one. This will happen when one has achieved what I called imaginative thinking in lectures which I recently gave here. When one's thinking has been so strengthened, by means of the exercises given in the book already mentioned, that they are no longer abstract concepts, such as we normally have, but are thoughts and mental representations filled with life, then one can call them imaginations. When these representations have become so alive that they are, in fact, imaginations, then they live directly in the etheric, whereas, if they are abstract representations, they live only in the soul. They grasp the etheric. And then, if one has progressed far enough, one might say, in an inward experimentation that one experiences within oneself the ether as living reality, then one can know, through experience, what happens in sense perception, in sensation. Sensation as it arises through sense perception—1 can only present this today in the form of results—consists in the fact that the outer environment sends the etheric from the material surroundings into our sense organs, thus making those gulfs, about which I spoke the day before yesterday, so that that which is outside also becomes inward within the sphere of our senses. We have, for instance, a tone between the life of the senses and the outer world. As a result of the fact that the external ether penetrates into our sense organs, this external ether is deadened. And as the outer deadened ether enters our sense organs, it is brought to life again through the fact that the inner ether from the etheric body works towards the deadened etheric coming from outside. Herein we have the essential being of sense perception and sensation. Just as the death process and enlivening arise in the breathing process, when we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide, so also a process of exchange takes place between the dead ether and enlivened ether in our sense experience.

This is an extraordinarily important fact which can be found through spiritual science. For that which no philosophical speculations can find, and on which the philosophical speculation of the last centuries has ship-wrecked countless times, can only be found along the path of spiritual scientific research. Sense perception can thus be recognized to be a fine process of exchange between the outer and the inner ether; to be the enlivening of the ether that is deadened in the sense organ by the forces of the inner etheric body. So that that which the senses kill for us out of the environment, is inwardly made alive again through the etheric body, and we come, thereby, to that which is indeed the perception of the outer world.

This is extraordinarily important, because it shows how the human being when he devotes himself to the sensations arising from sense perception, does not only live in the physical organism, but rather in the supersensible etheric, and shows how the entire life within the senses is a living and weaving in the invisible etheric. It is this which, in the time mentioned above, the more deeply insightful researchers have always sensed, have inwardly divined, but which will be raised to certainty through spiritual science. Among those who recognized this significant truth, I would like still to mention the almost totally forgotten J. P. V. Troxler. I have mentioned him here in earlier lectures, in earlier years. He said in his Lectures about Philosophy:

“Already in earlier times the philosophers have differentiated a finer, purer soul organism from the coarser body. ... a soul, carrying a picture of the bodily organism, which they called Schema, and which was for them the higher, inner human being. ... In recent times, even Kant in his Dreams of a Spiritual Seer, dreams earnestly, but jokingly, a whole inward soul man, who bears all the limbs of the outer body in his spirit body; Lavater composes poetically and thinks in a similar vein. …”

These investigators were also clear, however, that in the moment when one ascends out of the usual materialistic way of seeing things to the perception of this supersensible organism in us, one has to move from the usual anthropology to a way of recognition of such a kind that it achieves its results through an intensification of our inner capacities. It is, therefore, interesting how, for example, both I. H. Fichte as well as Troxler are clear that anthropology must ascend to something different, if it wishes to comprehend the whole human being. I. H. Fichte says in his Anthropology:

“Consciousness based in sense perception ... together with the whole, human life of the senses, has no other significance than to provide a place in which that supersensible life of the spirit occurs, by introducing—through a free, conscious deed of one's own—the spiritual content of the ideas (which lives beyond ordinary consciousness) into the world of the senses ... The fundamental comprehension of the being of man in this way thus raises ‘Anthropology’ in its final result to ‘Anthroposophy.’”

We see within this stream of German spiritual life which tends to drive idealism out of its abstraction toward reality, the premonition of Anthroposophy. And Troxler says, that one must assume a super-spiritual sense in union with a super-sensible spirit, and that, thereby, one can grasp the human being in such a way that one no longer has to do with a usual anthropology, but with something higher:

“If it is indeed highly welcome that the most recent philosophy, which ... in every Anthroposophy ... must reveal itself, climbs upward, it is, nevertheless, not to be overlooked that this idea cannot be the fruit of speculation, and the true ... individuality of the human being may not be confused, either with that which it postulates as subjective spirit or as finite I, nor confused also with that which it places in opposition with it as absolute spirit or as absolute personality.”

What is brought forward as Anthroposophy in no sense arises arbitrarily. Spiritual life leads to it with necessity, when concepts and mental pictures are not experienced as mere concepts and mental pictures, but rather are—I once again wish to use the expression—condensed to the point where they lead into reality, where they become saturated with reality.

One does not, however—and this is the weakness, the lack, in this research—if one merely raises oneself from the physical to the etheric body, one does not really find one's way; rather one comes to a certain boundary, which must, however, be transcended; for only beyond the etheric lies the soul-spiritual. And the essential thing is, that this soul-spiritual can only come into a relationship with the physical through the mediation of the etheric. We thus have to seek the actual soul element of the human being, working and impulsating within the etheric in a fully super-etheric way; working in such a way that the etheric, in its turn, forms the physical, just as it (the etheric) is itself formed, impulsated, enlivened by the element of the soul.

Let us now try to understand the human being from the other pole, the pole of will. We have said that the will-life is directly connected with the metabolism. In as much as the will impulse lives in the metabolism, it not only lives in the external, physical metabolic processes, but as the entire human being is everywhere present within the limits of his being, so the etheric also lives in that which is active as metabolism when an impulse of will occurs. Spiritual science shows that what lives in the will impulse is exactly the opposite of that which is present in sense perception. In the case of sense perception, the etheric outside of us is, in a certain sense, enlivened by the etheric within us. That is to say, the inner etheric pours itself into the dead etheric from outside. In the case of an impulse of will the situation is such that when the will impulse arises from the soul- spiritual, the etheric body is loosened, is expelled out of the physical body in those areas in which the metabolism occurs, through the activity of the metabolism and everything which is connected with it. As a result, we have here the exact opposite: the etheric body in a certain sense pulls back from the physical processes. And it is just in this that the essential element in will actions lies. In such actions of the will the etheric body draws back from the physical body.

Those among my audience who have heard the earlier lectures will remember that, in addition to imaginative cognition, I have also distinguished inspiration and, finally, actual intuitive cognition. Just as imaginative cognition is an intensification and a strengthening of the soul's life, which enables one to attain to the life of the etheric, in the way I have indicated, so is intuitive cognition achieved through the soul's learning by mighty impulses of will to participate—indeed, actually herself to call forth—what one can call: the pulling back, the withdrawing, of the etheric body from the physical processes. Thus, in this realm, the soul-spiritual penetrates into the bodily-physical. If an impulse of will arises originally from the soul-spiritual, it unites itself wit^h the etheric and the consequence is that this etheric is withdrawn, pulled back, from one or the other area of metabolic activity of the physical-bodily organism. And by means of this working of the soul-spiritual, through the etheric, upon the bodily organism, there arises that which one can designate as the transition of a will impulse into a bodily movement, into a bodily action. But it is just here, when in this way, one takes the whole human being into consideration, that one attains to one's actual immortal part. For as soon as one learns how the spirit-soul weaves in the etheric it becomes clear to one that this weaving of the spirit- soul in the etheric is independent also of those processes of the physical organism that are encompassed by birth, conception and death. Thus, along this path it becomes possible to truly raise oneself to the immortal in the human being, to raise oneself to that which unites itself with the body, received through the stream of inheritance, and which continues when one passes through the portal of death. For the eternal spirit is connected through the mediation of the etheric with that which is here born and dies.

The mental pictures, the ideas, to which spiritual science comes, are powerfully rejected by the habits of thought of the present day and human beings, as a result, have great difficulty in finding their way into an understanding of them. One can say that one of the hindrances which make it difficult to find one's way into this understanding—along with other difficulties—is that one makes so little effort to seek the real connection of the soul-spiritual with the bodily organism in the way which has been indicated. Most people long for something quite different from that which spiritual science can offer. What actually happens in the human being when he or she forms mental pictures, forms representations? An etheric process occurs, which only interacts with an external etheric process. What is necessary, however, in order that the human being remains healthy in soul and body in this regard, is that he or she becomes aware where the boundary lies in which the inner etheric and the outer etheric come into contact with each other. This occurs in most cases unconsciously. It becomes conscious when the human being ascends to imaginative cognition, when he inwardly experiences the stirring and the motion of the etheric and its encounter with the external ether, which dies into the sense organ. In this interaction between the inner and outer etheric, we have, in a sense, the furthest boundary of the effectiveness of the etheric on the human organism. For that which is at work in our etheric body affects the organism primarily, for example, in its growth. In growth it forms the organism from within. It gradually organizes our organism so that the organism adapts itself to the outer world, in the way in which we see it, as the child develops. But this inner formative grasping of the physical body by the etheric must come up against a certain limit or boundary. When it passes this boundary, as a result of some process of illness, the following occurs: that which lives and weaves within the etheric and which should remain contained within the etheric, overreaches and lays hold on the organism so that, as a result, the organism is permeated by that which ought to remain a movement within the etheric. What happens as a result? That which should only be experienced inwardly as mental representation now occurs as a process within the physical body. This is what one calls a hallucination. When the etheric activity crosses its boundary towards the bodily—because the body is unable to resist it in the right way, due to a condition of illness—then there arises what one calls a hallucination. Very many people who want to penetrate into the spiritual world wish, above all, to have hallucinations. This is, of course, something which the spiritual researcher cannot offer them; for a hallucination is nothing other than a reflection of a purely material process, of a process which from the viewpoint of the soul occurs beyond the boundary of the physical body, that is it occurs within the body. In contrast, what leads into the spiritual world consists in the fact that one turns back from this boundary, returning into the realm of the soul, attaining to imagination instead of to hallucination, and imagination is a pure soul experience. And inasmuch as it is a pure soul experience, the soul lives in imagination within the spiritual world. Thus, the soul penetrates the imagination in the fully conscious way. And it is important that one understands that imagination—that is the justified way to achieve spiritual cognition—and hallucinations are the direct opposite of each other, and, indeed destroy each other. He who experiences hallucinations, due to a condition of organic illness, puts obstacles in the way to achieving genuine imagination, and he who attains true imagination protects himself in the surest way from all hallucination. Hallucinations and imagination are mutually exclusive, destroy each other mutually.

The situation is similar also at the other pole of the human being. Just as the etheric body can overreach into the bodily organism, sinking its formative forces into the body, thereby calling forth hallucinations, that is calling forth purely organic processes, so, on the other side the etheric can be drawn out of the organism—as was characterized in relation with the action of the will—in an irregular way. This can happen as the result of certain pathological formations of the organism or also as a result of exhaustion or similar bodily conditions. Instead of the etheric being drawn out of the physical metabolism in a certain area of the body, as in a normal, healthy action of the will, it remains stuck within it and the physical metabolic activity in that area—as a purely physical activity—reaches into the etheric. In this case, the etheric becomes dependent on the physical, whereas in the normal unfolding of the will the physical is dependent on the etheric, which, in its turn, is determined by the soul- spiritual. Should this occur, as a result of such processes as I have indicated, there then arises—I would say, like the pathological counter picture of a hallucination—a compulsive action; which consists in the fact that the physical body, with its metabolic activities, penetrates into the etheric, more or less forces its way into the etheric. And if a compulsive action is called forth as a pathological manifestation, one can say: compulsive action excludes that which, in spiritual science, one calls intuition. Intuition and compulsive action are mutually exclusive, just as hallucination and imagination exclude each other. Therefore, there is nothing more empty of soul than—on the one hand—a hallucinating human being, for hallucinations are indications of bodily conditions which should not be; and, on the other hand, for instance, one can have the whirling dervishes. The dance of the dervish arises through the fact that the bodily-physical forces itself into the etheric so that the etheric is not effective out of its connection with the spiritual-soul element, but rather those characteristic compulsive actions occur. And he who believes that revelations of a soul nature manifest in the dance of the whirling dervish, such an one should consult spiritual science in order to become clear that the whirling dervish is evidence that the spirit, the spirit-soul, has left the body and he, therefore, dances in this way.

And, I should like to say, that for instance automatic writing, mediumistic writing, is only a somewhat more comprehensive example of the same phenomenon as that of the dervish dance. Mediumistic writing consists in nothing else than that the spirit-soul nature has been completely driven out of the human organism and that the physical body has been forced into the etheric body and has there been allowed to unfold; to unfold itself after being emptied of the inner etheric under the sway of the outer etheric which surrounds it. These realms lead away from spiritual science, they do not lead towards the science of the spirit, although no objection should certainly be raised from those points of view from which generally so many objections are raised against these things. Just in relation to the whirling dervish one can study what a truly artistic dance should be. The art of dance should consist just in the fact that every single movement corresponds to an impulse of will which can fully rise into the consciousness of the individual involved, so that she or he never is engaged in a mere intrusion of physical processes into processes of the etheric. Artistic dance is only achieved when it is spiritually permeated by mental pictures. The dance of the dervish is a denial of spirituality. Many, however, may object: But it just reveals the spirit!—That it does, but how? Well, you can study a mussel shell by taking up the living mussel and observing it; but you can also study it when the living mussel has left, and you study its shell: the form of the mussel is reproduced in the mussel shell, this form is born out of the life of the organism. Thus, one might say, one also has an after-image of the spirit, a dead after-image of the spirit, when one has to do with automatic writing or with the whirling dervish. For this reason, it resembles the spirit as closely as the mussel shell resembles the living mussel, and, therefore, can also so easily be confused with it. But only when one really penetrates inwardly into the genuine spirit, can one achieve a true understanding for these matters.

When we take our start from the bodily, ascend through sense perception and sensation to the activity of forming representations, to thinking, which then carries over into the soul-spiritual, we come along this path to the spiritual-scientific recognition that that which is stimulated through sense perception and sensation, at a certain point is brought to an end and becomes memory. Memory arises as the sense impression continues on its way into the body, so that the etheric is not only effective within the sense impressions themselves, but also engages itself with what is left behind in the body by the sense impression. Thus, that which has entered into memory is again called up out of memory.

It is of course not possible to go into more detail concerning these matters in an hour's lecture. But one will never come to a true understanding of the reality of mental representation and of memory and how they are related to the soul-spiritual if one does not proceed along the spiritual-scientific path here indicated.

At the other pole there is the whole stream which flows from the spirit- soul life of our will impulses into the bodily physical, as the result of which outer actions are brought about. In ordinary human life the situation is that the life of the senses goes as far as memory and comes to a halt with memory. Memory places itself, so to speak, in front of the spirit-soul so that spirit-soul is not aware of itself and how it works when it receives sense impressions. Only an indication, a confused indication that the soul weaves and lives in the etheric, arises when the soul—living and weaving in the etheric—is not yet so strongly impelled in its etheric weaving that all of this ether weaving breaks against the boundary of the bodily-physical. When the soul-spiritual weaves within the etheric in such a way that that which it forms within the etheric does not immediately break against the physical body, but rather so restrains itself in the etheric that it is as if it came to the boundary of the physical body, but remains perceptible in the etheric, there dream arises. When dream life is really studied it will prove itself to be the lowest form of supersensible experience for the human being. For the human being experiences in his dreams that his soul-spiritual cannot unfold itself as will impulses within that which appears as dream pictures because, within the dream life, it lacks strength and forcefulness in its working. And inasmuch as the will impulses are lacking, inasmuch as dreaming spirit and soul do not penetrate the etheric sufficiently for the soul herself to become aware of these will impulses, there arises this chaotic tapestry of dreams.

What on one hand the dreams are, on the other hand are those phenomena in which the will—which comes out of the spirit-soul realm—takes hold of the outer world through the etheric-bodily nature. But, in doing so, the will is as little aware of what actually is going on, as one is aware in the dream—because of the weak effect of the spirit-soul—that the human being weaves and lives in the spirit. Just as the dream is in a way the weakened sense perception, so something else occurs as the intensified effect of the spirit-soul element, the strengthened effect of the will impulses; and this is what we call destiny.

In destiny we have no insight into the connections, just as in the dream we have no insight into what actually weaves and lives there as reality. Just as material processes which flow up into the etheric are always present as the underlying ground in dreams so there storms up against the outer world the spirit-soul element which is anchored in the will. But the spirit-soul element in ordinary life is not so organized that it is possible to perceive the spirit in its effective working in what unfolds before us as the sequence of the so-called experiences of destiny. In the moment in which we grasp this sequence, we learn to know the fabric of destiny, we learn to know how, just as in ordinary life the soul conceals for itself the spirit through the mental representations, so also it conceals for itself the spirit active in destiny through the feelings, through the sympathy and antipathy with which it receives the events which approach it as the experiences of life. In the moment when one—with the help of spiritual scientific insight—sees through the veil of sympathy and antipathy, when one objectively takes hold of the course of life experiences with inner equanimity—in this moment one notices that everything which occurs as a matter of destiny in our life between birth and death is either the effect of earlier lives on earth or is the preparation for later earth lives. Just as, on one hand, outer natural science does not penetrate to spirit and soul, not even to the etheric, when it seeks for the connections between the material world and our mental representations, so also, in regard to the other pole, natural science today fails in its cognitive efforts. Just as, on one side, science remains bound to the material processes in the nervous organism in its attempts to explain the life of mental representations, so also, science remains caught at the other pole in unclarity, that, is, I would say, science teeters in a nebulous way between the physical and the realm of soul.

These are just the realms where one must become aware how concepts within world conceptions allow themselves to be proved as well as to be contradicted. And for the one who clings rigidly to the proof, the positive position has much to be said for it; but one must also—just as breathing in belongs necessarily with breathing out—be able to think one's way through to the experience of the negative. In recent times there arose what has come to be known as analytical psychology. This analytical psychology is, I would say, inspired by good intimations. For, what does she seek? This analytical psychology, or as it is generally known, psychoanalysis, seeks to descend from the ordinary level of the soul to that which is no longer contained in the generally present life of the soul, but which remains from the soul's earlier experiences. The psychoanalyst assumes that the soul's life is not exhausted with its present soul experiences, with that which is consciously experienced by the soul, but rather can dive down with consciousness into the subconscious. And in much that appears in the soul's life as disturbance, as confusion, as this or that one-sided lack, the psychoanalyst sees an effect of that which surges in the subconscious. But it is interesting to note what it is that the psychoanalyst sees in the subconscious. When one hears what he enumerates in this subconscious it is, to begin with, disappointed life expectations. The psychoanalyst encounters one or another human being who suffers from this or that depression. This depression need not have its origin in the current consciousness of the soul's life but may originate in the past. Something occurred in the soul's experience in this life. The human being has overcome the experience, but not completely; in the subconscious something is left over. For example, he or she has experienced disappointments. Through his education, or through other processes, he has transcended these disappointments in his conscious life of soul, but they live on in his subconsciousness. There these disappointments surge up, in a sense, to the boundary of consciousness. And there they then bring forth the indefinite soul depression. The psychoanalyst seeks, therefore, in all kinds of disappointments, in disappointed life hopes and expectations which have been drawn down into the subconsciousness, what determines conscious life in a dim, unclear way. He seeks this also in what colors the soul's life as temperament. In all of that which colors the soul's life out of certain rational impulses, the psychoanalyst seeks a subconsciousness which, in a certain sense, only strikes up against consciousness. But then he comes to a yet further realm—I am only reporting here—which the psychoanalyst seeks to grasp by saying: That which plays up into conscious life is the fundamental substratum, the primeval animalistic residual mud, of the soul. One can certainly not deny that this primeval mud is there. In these lectures I have already drawn attention to the fact that certain mystics have had experiences which result from the fact that certain things, for example, eroticism, are subtly refined and play up into consciousness in such a way that one believes that one has had especially lofty experiences, whereas actually only the erotic, “the primeval animalistic mud of the soul,” has surged up and has sometimes been interpreted in the sense of profound mysticism. One can document, even in the case of such a fine, poetic mystic as Mechthild von Magdeburg, how erotic sensibilities penetrate into even the single details of her mental representations, of her thoughts. One must grasp just these matters clearly, in order that one does not fall prey to errors in the sphere of spiritual scientific investigation. For it is just the one who wants to enter into the realm of the spirit for whom it is a special obligation to know all the possible paths of error—not in order to pursue them—but rather just in order to avoid them. But the one who speaks about this animalistic primeval mud of the soul, who only speaks about life's disappointed hopes and other similar matters, such a one does not go deep enough into the life of the soul; such a one is like a person who walks across a field in which there is nothing yet to be seen and believes that only the earth, or perhaps also the fertilizer is present in it, whereas this field already contains all the fruits which will soon spring forth from it as grain or as some other crop. When one speaks of the primeval mud of the soul, one should also speak of everything which is embedded in it. Certainly, there are disappointed hopes in this primeval mud; but in that which is embedded there is hidden also a germinating force which represents, at the same time, that which—when the human being will have passed through the gates of death into the life which runs its course between death and a new birth, and which then enters into a new life on earth—makes something very different out of the disappointed hopes than merely a depression. It makes something in the next life which leads, one might say, to an “appointment,” not to a “disappointment,” which leads to a strengthening of soul initiative. There lies in that which the psychoanalyst seeks in the disappointed life-hopes in the soul's deepest levels, there lies—if he only goes deeply enough into it—that which prepares itself in the present life to take hold in the next life according to the laws of destiny.

One thus finds everywhere, when one digs over the animalistic primeval mud—without thereby dirtying one's hands, as, regrettably so often happens with the psychoanalysts—the spiritual-soul weaving of destiny which extends beyond birth and death within the spiritual and psychic life of the soul. It is just in analytic psychology that we have a realm in which one can so well learn how everything can be right and everything can be wrong when it comes to questions of world conceptions, looked at from one point of view or from another. But there is a tremendous amount which can be brought forward in support of the one-sided assertions of the psychoanalysts, and, therefore, the disproving of these assertions will not greatly impress those who swear by these concepts. But if one learns to form one's judgments in accordance with the method of gaining knowledge which was characterized at the outset of this lecture, in which one recognizes both what speaks for a point of view and what speaks against it, then just out of this for and against the soul will experience what is truly at work. For, I would like to say, between that which one can only observe in the soul realm, as the psychologists do who only concern themselves with the conscious realm, and that which the psychoanalyst finds down below in the animalistic primeval mud of the soul, just between these two realms of research lies the sphere which belongs to the eternal spirit and soul and which goes through births and deaths.

The penetration of the whole human inner realm leads also to a right relationship with the outer world. More recent natural science not only speaks in vague, indefinite ways about the etheric, but also speaks about it in such a way that just the greatest world riddles lead one back to it. Out of etheric conditions there is thought to have formed itself what then took on fixed shapes and became planets, suns and moons, etc. That which occurs as the soul-spiritual in the human being is regarded, more or less, as a mere episode. Before and behind is dead ether. If one learns to know the ether only from one side then one can come to a hypothetical construction of world evolution about which the sensitive thinker Herman Grimm—I have frequently quoted his statement, but it is so significant that it may well be brought before the soul again and again—says the following. As he became acquainted with the train of thought which asserts that out of the dead cosmic etheric mist arose that wherein now life and spirit are unfolding, and as he measures this against Goethe's world conception, he comes to the following expression:

“Already in his (Goethe's) youth, the great Laplace-Kantian phantasy of the origin and the eventual destruction of the earth planet, had for a long time asserted itself. From the rotating cosmic mist—with which children already become familiar in school—the central gaseous drop forms itself, out of which the earth emerges, and undergoes, as a rigidifying sphere, in the course of unimaginable epochs of time, all those phases—including the episode of its habitation by the human race—in order, finally, to plunge back into the sun as a burned-out slag: a lengthy, but for the public in our (Goethe's) time an entirely comprehensible process, for whose origin no other outer intervention is needed than the effort of some external force, to maintain the sun at a steady temperature of heat. No more fruitless perspective for the future can be imagined than this which is to be forced upon us today in the expectation of its scientific inevitability. A bone of a carcass, around which even a hungry dog makes a detour, would be a refreshing, appetizing object in comparison with this ultimate excrement of creation, as which our earth would finally plunge back into the sun. The intellectual appetite with which our generation takes up something of this kind and feels impelled to believe it, is a sign of the sick phantasy, which learned scholars in future ages will need much cleverness to explain as an historical phenomenon of our time.”

What arises here once again within German spiritual life as a feeling born out of a healthy life of soul, just this is shown in a true light by spiritual science. For, if one learns to know how the dead etheric is enlivened through the soul element, through the living ether, then, through inner experience one distances oneself from the possibility that our universal structure could ever have arisen out of the dead etheric. And this world riddle takes quite another aspect if one becomes acquainted with the corresponding riddle of the soul. One comes to know the ether itself in its living form, one comes to know how the dead ether must first originate out of the living. Thus, as one returns to the origins of world evolution, one must return to the soul, and to the recognition that one must seek the origin of all that develops today in the realm of the spirit and the soul. The spiritual-soul will remain a mere hypothesis, something merely thought out, in relation with the outer world riddles as long as through spiritual science one does not learn to know the whole living and weaving of the etheric by experiencing how the living ether from within meets with the dead ether from without; only along the path of spiritual science the world mist itself will be recognized as being alive, as being of the nature of spirit and of soul.

So you see, also for the world riddles, a significant perspective is gained just through an understanding of the riddles of the soul. I must close today with this perspective. It is, you see, just through a genuine consideration of external and of inner life from the viewpoint of spiritual science that one is led by way of the etheric into the spirit and the soul, as well within the soul as within the outer world.

There stands in opposition to such a cognitive attitude of soul, indeed, the point of view expressed by a man to whom I referred last time and whom I named on that occasion. We can today at least have the feeling that from the way in which spiritual science thinks about the bodily nature of man, the bridge leads directly to the spirit-soul realm, in which ethics and morality are rooted and which stem from the spirit—just as the sense perceptible leads into the spirit. But in its preoccupation with the purely external material world, science has developed an attitude of mind which completely denies that ethics is anchored in the spirit. One still is embarrassed to deny ethics as such, but one today speaks about ethics in the following way, as it is expressed in the conclusion of the lecture by Jacques Loeb, which in reference to its beginning I brought forward last time. There he who comes through natural scientific research to a brutal disavowal of ethics says:

“If our existence depends on the blind play of forces and is only the work of chance; if we ourselves are only chemical mechanisms—how can there be for us an ethical reality? The answer to this is that our instincts form the roots of our ethical being, and our instincts are as subject to heredity as the constituent forms of our body. We eat and drink and reproduce ourselves, not because metaphysicians have attained the insight that this is desirable, but rather because we are mechanically predisposed to do so. We are active because we are forced mechanically to be so through the processes in our nervous system, and if human beings are not economic slaves, nevertheless it is instinct which determines the direction of their activity in regard to their successful triggering, or to their successful work. A mother loves her children and cares for them not because metaphysicians had the bright idea that this would be a lovely thing to do, but rather because the instinct to care for the offspring is as firmly implanted, presumably through the two sexual chromosomes, as is the morphological character of the female body. We enjoy the company of other human beings because we are compelled to do so by the conditions of our human inheritance. We fight for justice and truth, and are ready to make sacrifices for them, because, instinctively, we desire to see our fellow human beings happy. That we possess an ethical trait, for this we have solely to thank our instincts, which are determined for us chemically and through heredity in the same way as the form of our body.”

Ethical action leads us back to instinct! Instincts lead back to the effects of physical-chemical activity! This logic is indeed most threadbare. For, certainly as a matter of course, one can say, that one should not wait with ethical action for the metaphysicians, until they have spun out some metaphysical principles, but that is the same as if someone were to say: Should one wait with digestion until the metaphysicians or the physiologists have discovered the laws of digestion? I should once like to recommend to Professor Loeb that he not investigate the physiological laws of digestion as he storms with brutality against the metaphysical laws of ethical life. But one can say: One can be a significant investigator of nature today—but the habits of thought tend in the direction of cutting one off from all spiritual life, tend to prevent even a glance in the direction of the life of the spirit. But parallel with this there is always the fact that one can document a defect in thinking, so that one never has the full effectiveness which belongs to a thought.

One can have peculiar experiences in this regard. I recently brought forward such an experience; but I would like to present it once again because it links with the statements of a very significant natural scientist of the present time, who belongs with those whom I attack just because in one sphere I value them very highly. This natural scientist has earned great achievements in the field of astrophysics, as well as in certain other fields of natural scientific research. When, however, he came to write a comprehensive book about the present-day view of the universe and about the evolution of this world view, he comes, in his foreword, to a curious statement. He is, in a certain sense, delighted how wonderfully advanced we are in that we can now interpret all phenomena from a natural scientific perspective, and he points with a certain arrogance, as is customary in such circles, to earlier times, which had not yet advanced so far. And, in this regard, he calls upon Goethe, by saying: Whether one can truly say that we live in the best of times, that we cannot determine, but that we live in the best of times in regard to natural scientific knowledge in comparison with earlier times, in this regard we can call upon Goethe, who says:

Forgive! It does seem so sublime,
Entering into the spirit of the time
To see what wise men, who lived long ago, believed
Till we at last have all the highest aims achieved.
Faust, translated by Walter Kaufman

Therewith a distinguished natural scientist of the present day concludes his exposition by calling Goethe to witness. Only he forgot, in doing so, that it is Wagner who makes this assertion, and that Faust remarks to this assertion, after Wagner has left:

Hope never seems to leave those who affirm,
The shallow minds that stick to must and mold—
They dig with greedy hands for gold
And yet are happy if they find a worm.

To reflect on what Goethe actually says, the distinguished researcher neglected to do in the moment in which he called upon Wagner in order to lend expression to the thought of how splendidly advanced we are. In this, I should like to say, we can catch a glimpse of where it is that thinking fails in its pursuit of reality.

And we could cite many such examples if we were to explore, even a little, the scientific literature of the present day. It will surely not be held against me—as I have said that I greatly value the natural scientist whom I have just quoted—if, in relation with such natural scientific research, which prides itself on being able to impart information about the spirit, I seek to bring to expression the true Goethean attitude of mind and of heart. For, we can forgive one or another monistic thinker, when, out of the weakness of his thinking he fails to come to the spirit; it is dangerous, however, when the attitude of soul, which arises in Jacques Loeb and in the natural scientist just quoted, who presents himself as Wagner, while believing to characterize himself as Goethe, when this attitude of soul gains authority more and more in the uncritical acceptance of the widest circles. And this is what is happening. The one who penetrates into that which can arise as an attitude of mind and heart out of spiritual science, such a one, perhaps—even though it may not appear sufficiently respectful in the face of such a statement as that natural scientist made, in connection with Goethe—may come to the genuinely Goethean attitude, when he connects himself with those words of Goethe's which I would like to paraphrase in closing this lecture

Forgive! It is a shock indeed
Entering souls that in their greed
Cling to matter with all their might
And for the spirit have no sight.

Let me begin by repeating yet again my urgent request that you do not take notes during these lectures. It is mystifying that my wish in this respect seems to meet with absolutely no compliance. Yet I must make this request particularly with regard to these lectures. Firstly, the current situation gives no opportunity for someone who is seriously concerned with human evolution to give properly rounded-off lectures; at best only isolated remarks are possible. Secondly, we all know what misunderstandings came about at the beginning of this painful time because parts of my lectures were taken down and disseminated in every direction, in some cases with the praiseworthy intention of saying: Look, the things he says aren't as bad as all that—but in others with the less praiseworthy aim of raising people's hackles so that they might build up all sorts of resentments.

Isolated sentences quoted out of context, especially when taken from a series of lectures, can never mean anything and can be interpreted in all manner of ways. I am concerned solely with the quest for the truth, in this case particularly because a number of our friends have requested discussions of this sort and have a real desire for them. I am not concerned that it might be possible to report here or there that what I have to say is really not so bad after all. What I am concerned with is the truth. Surely all those of us who take spiritual science seriously, and who are concerned with the findings of spiritual science with regard to human evolution in our time, should be concerned with the truth.

I shall continue today to give you some more of the viewpoints which furnish a basis on which to form a judgement fitting for today—that is, not for the next few days or weeks, or even for the next year, but for the present time in the wider sense. Let us remember above all that spiritual science is a serious matter and that to understand it in the proper way we must take it more seriously than anything else. If, on the other hand—as is so frequently the case when there is a society which serves as an instrument for the endeavours of spiritual science—if spiritual science is approached with all sorts of prejudices and premature feelings which lead to a state of furious zeal over all manner of things, then this proves a lack of readiness for spiritual science. Yet it is perfectly possible to understand today that spiritual science alone is suitable for the development of that earnestness which is so needed in these tragic times.

Each individual must set aside his preferences for one direction or another and endeavour to accept things without any prejudice. It is impossible to say certain things without making one person or another feel uncomfortable. There are plenty of people today who regard it as a sin even to hint at certain facts, because they imagine that the mere mention of some fact or other is tantamount to taking sides—which is, of course, not the case at all. Some facts must be looked calmly and squarely in the face because only then can a valid judgement be reached. Of course, perhaps a person does not want to reach such a judgement, but he could reach it if he wanted to stand on the foundation of spiritual science.

I shall now present you with a number of preparatory remarks in order to bring forward, at the end of today's discussion, some points which may awaken an understanding for the manner in which certain—shall we say—occult knowledge is forcing its way into the present-day spiritual development of mankind. Actually, this knowledge is forcing its way to the surface of its own accord as a result of the process of human evolution, so that it is not necessary to make any extra effort to place it within the development of mankind. I shall take my departure from certain details, which I beg you will simply accept as the groundwork, so that later the main emphasis can be placed on what I shall put forward as the outcome of these considerations.

At the beginning of these discussions I said: If, as a good European, one makes every effort to go thoroughly through all the events and facts that have been taking place over decades and have also come to be known recently, if one makes the effort to go thoroughly into them without prejudice, and if one then examines the judgements made on the periphery as a matter of course—and I mean as a matter of course—by people who have rightly borne famous names during the period leading up to today's painful events, then one cannot but reach a certain conclusion. This conclusion is that certain judgements are such that, whatever one might say or assert, the answer is always the same: Never mind, the German will be burnt-after the old pattern: ‘Never mind, the Jew will be burnt.’ Many, many judgements contain nothing but a certain aversion—whether justified or not is open to question—against anything in the world that might be called German. I am weighing my words carefully.

This aversion has recently intensified into a burning hatred which has no inclination whatsoever to scrutinize anything carefully, nor to accept anything that has been carefully scrutinized, but which finds its total justification simply in hating. Yet advantage is not necessarily taken of this justification. If someone says: I hate—and if he really wants to do so and announces that he intends to do so, then why not? Everyone has the right to hate as much as he likes; no objection can be made to it. But very many people are most concerned not to admit to their feelings of hatred in such a situation. They try to lull themselves into forgetting about them by saying all sorts of things which are supposed to wipe away the hatred and put in its place a supposedly objective and just judgement. But this puts everything into a false light. If someone admits honestly: I hate this or that person—then you can talk with him, or perhaps not, depending on the intensity of his hatred. Truthfulness, absolute truthfulness towards oneself and the world in all things is necessary, and if we fail to comprehend that truthfulness is necessary in all things, then we shall be unable to make what spiritual science ought to be for mankind into the most intimate impulse of our own heart and of our own soul. We then say: Certainly, we want a part of spiritual science, that part which is not concerned with our sympathies or antipathies, that part which is useful for us; but we shall reject those parts which do not suit us. It is possible to take this stance, but it is not a standpoint that is beneficial today for human evolution. What I have to say is based on certain remarks, but truly without anger!

It is a well-known fact that very many people see a connection between today's events and the foundation of the German Reich which lies in the centre of Europe. It is not my task to speak about the politics of the German Reich or about any other politics, and I shall not do so. I simply want to give you certain isolated facts as a foundation. It is possible to form an opinion about the events which led to the foundation of this German Reich. It is also possible to form the opinion—whether justified or not—that it is a calamity for mankind that Germans exist at all. Even this is open to discussion. Why not, if someone is open and honest enough to admit that he holds these views? But this is not our concern at the moment.

Let us look at the fact that this German nation led to the founding of the German Reich during the final third of the nineteenth century. There are people who challenge the founding of the German Reich from quite another point of view. They consider that the founding of this empire was not good for human evolution. But people who share the standpoint of the western empires have no right to form a judgement of this kind. For let us not forget that these very nations of the West are exceedingly attached to the concept of empire, the concept of the state, and that their way of thinking with regard to nationality is very much linked to the various ideas about the state. Therefore, those who unite patriotism with the idea of the state, as do the western nations, have no right to question the idea of an empire at all. If they did they would be quite illogical, for they would be stating that another nation has no right to do what their own nation has done. In a discussion you have to take up a standpoint which provides a basis for discussion and also makes it possible to remain logical. It would be easy to have a discussion with Bakunin about whether a German Reich in Central Europe is something beneficial. But the basis for such a discussion would differ greatly if it were held, not with statesmen but with almost any member of a western nation, because they are so immersed in the idea of the state. So there must be one presupposition, namely, that the idea of empire as such is not rejected out of hand, otherwise there is no basis for discussion. But one's presuppositions must be known if one wants to arrive at valid judgements.

People today no longer think of the historical impulses out of which this empire in Central Europe arose. They do not consider, for instance, that the soil on which this empire has been founded was for many centuries a kind of reservoir, a kind of fountain-head for the rest of Europe. You see, something Roman, in the sense of a continuation of what used to be Roman, no longer exists today. What used to be Roman has, if I may say so, evaporated and has only entered into other folk elements in the form of isolated impulses. Take the soil of Italy. During the course of the Middle Ages all sorts of Germanic elements kept migrating to Italy. I might have an opportunity to define this more closely later on. In today's Italian population, even in their very blood, there flows a tremendous amount of what can be called Germanic. This was instilled into them by the Roman element, but not in any way which might make it possible today to call the people of present-day Italy a continuation of the old Roman people. It was always the case that from Central Europe, as from a reservoir of peoples, all sorts of tribes migrated to the periphery, to Spain, North Africa, Italy, France, Britain. And as the peoples rayed out in this way, something not of these peoples came to meet them: the Roman element. In the middle, as it were, was the reservoir:

A man such as Dante, about whom I spoke to you yesterday, is simply a characteristic expression of a general phenomenon. Who are today's French people? Not merely descendants of the Latin element. Franks, in other words former Germanic tribes, spread out over this land. Their make-up became mingled with folk elements no longer their own, elements containing Latin aspects, via Roman civic attitudes, mixed with ancient Celtic aspects; the result of all this being something in which many more Germanic impulses live than might be imagined. A great many Germanic impulses live in today's Italian population as well. If we wanted to, we could study the migration of the Lombards into northern Italy, a Germanic element which simply absorbed the Roman. Britain was originally inhabited by elements which were then pushed back into Wales and Brittany and even as far as Caledonia, but not before they had sent out messengers to draw the Jutes, Angles and Saxons over to the island so that they might deter the predatory Picts and Scots. Out of all this an element emerged in which the Germanic obviously predominates.

This spreading out took place in all directions. In Central Europe the reservoir remained behind. Connected with the fact that the centre had to develop differently is that jump—which I do not want to brag about as a jump forward—which is expressed in Grimm's law of sound shifts. This law need not be measured with the yardstick of sympathy or antipathy, for it is simply a fact. Anyone can imagine what led to it, but this need not be confused with sympathy or antipathy.

When the Roman Caesars were carrying out their campaigns against the Germanic tribes, those who were first conquered formed by far the greater part of the army, so the Romans fought the Germanic tribes with Germanic tribesmen. Even in later times the massed peoples of the periphery stood by what was to be found in the centre to the extent that it became necessary to form the empire which, in its final phase, was the Holy Roman Empire. You know the passage in Faust where the students are glad that they need not worry about the Holy Roman Empire. But, on the other hand, it also came about that the periphery made terrible war on the middle element, it was constantly rebelling against the middle element. One must also take into account that much of what is present in the consciousness of Central Europe is linked with the way the soil of this empire in Central Europe has constantly been chosen as the scene of battle for all the quarrelling nations. This was particularly the case in the seventeenth century, during the Thirty Years' War, in which Central Europe lost up to one third of its population through the fault of the surrounding peoples. Not only towns and villages but whole tracts of countryside were destroyed. The peoples of Central Europe were utterly flayed by those of the periphery. These are historical facts which must simply be looked at squarely.

Now it is not surprising that in Central Europe the inclination arose to want something other peoples had already achieved, namely an empire. But the population of this soil has far less of a relationship to the idea of empire than has that of western Europe, which clings particularly strongly to it, regardless of whether it is a republic or a monarchy. This is irrelevant. You have to look beyond the mere words and see how the individual, whether in a republic or some other form, stands in relation to the state he belongs to, whether his feeling for the way he belongs to it is of this kind or that. I said it is not surprising that the impulse arose in Central Europe to want an empire, a state which makes it possible, on the one side, to build up some protection against the centuries of attack from the West and, on the other, to put up a barrier against what comes from the East—which is something that is still necessary for Central Europe though not, of course, for the East. These things are, I believe, comprehensible.

The Central European population has a different relationship to what might be called the idea of a state; that is it differs from that of the Western European, especially the French, population. In Central Europe the idea of a state has not been living for centuries as it has, for instance, in France, and furthermore the idea of a state as it exists in France is not suitable for what has remained in Central Europe. On the other hand, in what has remained in Central Europe something developed around the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century which is of such spiritual stature that it will even be admired in the West when one day the hatred will have abated somewhat. And this spiritual stature, which mankind will continue to savour for centuries to come, was achieved in Central Europe at a time when the West was making it utterly impossible for Central Europe to build a coherent state structure. Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Herder and all the others who are connected with this stream did not become great within a coherent state structure. They became great despite the absence of a proper state structure. It is hardly possible to imagine how different it was for Goethe, who became great without any coherent state structure, compared with Corneille, or Racine, who can scarcely be imagined without the background of that state structure which was given its brilliance and eminence by Louis XIV, the king who said: ‘L'état, c'est moi!’ These things should be looked at together.

However, during the course of the nineteenth century impulses arose among the inhabitants of Central Europe which were at first entirely inward, impulses which gave birth to the inclination to want some form of state structure also. This inclination first came into being in an intensely idealistic way, and those who are familiar with the development of the nineteenth century know that the idea of a state which moved the inhabitants of Central Europe was at first anchored, above all, in the heads of all sorts of idealists, people who were more idealistic than practical, who were most unpractical with regard to the idea of a state, compared with the practical westerners.

So we follow the development of the endeavours to form a German Reich which could encompass the German peoples of Central Europe. We see, particularly in the year 1848, how the idea takes on certain forms which have a definite idealistic stamp. But because the nineteenth century was the age of materialism, anything of an idealistic stamp was not favoured with much luck. The blame for this bad luck lay not so much with the nation as with the materialism of the nineteenth century. So then it became necessary to achieve in a practical way what could not be achieved in an idealistic way; in other words it had to be achieved just as it had always been achieved during the course of European history. For how did states come into being? States came into being through wars, and through all the other things which also led to the German Reich between the years 1864 and 1870.

Those who experienced the days when the new German Reich was being founded know how pain-filled were the hearts of the ones who were still imbued with the ideas of 1848, when the aim was to found this Reich out of feelings and ideals. There were, in the sixties and seventies, those who favoured a ‘great German’ arrangement, while others favoured a ‘little German’ arrangement. Those who favoured a ‘greater’ Germany stood by the old idealistic principles and hoped to found the Reich on idealistic foundations and impulses. They did not want to make any conquests; they simply wanted to unite everything that was German, including Austria, in a common Reich or state. Anyone who imagines that these people desired to make even the smallest conquest has failed to grasp the degree of national idealism that lived in them. For a long period they were in bitter opposition to those who favoured a ‘little’ Germany, and who, under Bismarck, founded the present German Reich-that is, the German Reich under the leadership of Prussia. But in the end the ‘greater German’ party made their peace with the others because they came to understand that in Central Europe in the nineteenth century things had to go the way they did. They came to terms with this and realized that in the end Germany had to be founded in the same way as had been France and England. In this way those who favoured a ‘greater’ Germany gradually came to terms with something that went utterly against their ideals. These things have to be taken into consideration.

Consider further: Whatever opinion one might have about the events that took place between 1866 and 1870/71, whomsoever one might blame or not blame for the war of 1870, one must not forget that on the side of France efforts were made to prevent the foundation of the German Reich, that French politics were aimed at preventing the creation of a German Reich. Of course this can be denied, but things which are denied nevertheless remain true. When I speak of the French side, or the English side, I never mean the people themselves. I mean the cohesion of those who are at the helm at any given time, those who cause the external events to happen. People may think what they like about the Spanish succession, or about a French or a German party in favour of war. But there is no disputing the fact that there were people in France who made every effort to implement their judgement: namely, that the creation of an independent German Reich in Central Europe was not in keeping with the ‘gloire’ of the French state. This was one of the causes of the war of 1870/71. As a counter-stroke another impulse developed, about which once again one may think what one likes. This was the opinion that the German Reich might just as well be founded in the same manner as the French Empire, namely, by making war on a neighbour. These things must be looked at in cold blood.

So this German Reich was founded in the manner with which you are familiar, though there is little inclination today to examine the historical facts minutely. However, most of you know them, at least in outline. So we can say: The German Reich was founded, while France and Germany were at war with one another, in such a way that the forces generated by this war were those that brought the German Reich into being.

Let us look at the moment when Paris was not yet under siege but when the German victories were already making the founding of the German Reich seem a possibility. There was cause to view the resistance to the founding of this German Reich as broken, and so in Central Europe the idea arose to set in motion the founding of the Reich favoured by the ‘little’ German party. We are looking approximately at November 1870. In doing this we come up against the fact that, out of all that took place in what later became Germany—that is, the German Reich—there arose the feeling that this way of founding the German Reich has done great damage to Europe, the feeling that the structure of this Reich is a structure of menace. To speak of ‘Germany’ is no more than a want of tact on the part of those who live in the periphery. There is no Germany today, any more than there is a Kaiser of Germany. There are individual German states and the one who has been chosen to represent these states before the rest of the world is expressly not called ‘Kaiser of Germany’ but ‘German Kaiser’, which is something quite different. This has come about out of certain characteristics of the nature of Central Europe. I might point out that when the new Romanian state was recently formed there was much discussion on whether the king should be entitled ‘King of the Romanians’ or ‘King of Romania’. Such things come to mean a great deal the moment one starts to look at realities and not only illusions. The title ‘King of Romania’ was chosen for quite specific historical reasons in place of the originally intended ‘Romanian King’ or ‘King of the Romanians.’

Now if we allow judgements which have been in the making for some time to work on us, judgements which have recently in some cases reached new peaks of folly—again, we are not discussing what is justified, for everything is, of course, always either justifiable or unjustifiable in its separate parts—if we summarize these judgements we find that there has come into a being a feeling that great damage has been done to Europe by the founding of the German Reich, a feeling that the structure of this Reich in Central Europe is, in a way, a structure of menace. In order to make this clear I should like to read to you a text which, in addition, contains a number of other things I am also concerned with at present. It has been said: Germany, or the Germans, feel themselves to be threatened in some way, and yet in fact it is Germany that poses a threat to the whole of Europe. A judgement has been expressed which is rather significant in connection with this. It was printed in the journal Matin dated 8 October 1905. Do not forget that when we are concerned with realities we need to know that behind the opinion of one person there always stand the judgements of countless others, and also that realities always proceed from realities. In Matin of 8 October 1905 we read:

‘If Herr von Bülow wants to complain that Germany is being isolated, he ought first to ask himself whether perhaps Germany has not isolated herself from the rest of Europe by her actions. The authors of the mistrust and the suspicious hatred which are squeezing the German Reich ever more tightly by the day are not called Delcassé, Lansdowne, Edward VII or Roosevelt, but Bismarck and Moltke, Wilhelm II and von Bülow. These are the ones who have created and developed this prickly, irritable and provoking Reich, bristling with weaponry, which has been casting challenging glances at Europe for the past quarter century and which Europe in the end cannot help looking at with envy. By making her ever more Prussian, they are the ones who are turning away the sympathy which she was guaranteed in earlier days by her active scientific ways and her sober modesty. They are the ones who are sending out sparks of barbaric menace or brutal passion in this time of weariness. Europe is afraid of the fire that never stops smouldering in Berlin; Europe is taking precautionary measures.’

So where do we stand with this judgement that the German Reich poses a threat for the whole of Europe?

Among those in the West who express opinions today there are unlikely to be any who do not see Germany as a threat for the whole of Europe, or who do not consider that the worst thing that could possibly have happened was to turn this people, who formerly shone through their sciences and their sober modesty—as is so aptly expressed here—into a threat for the whole of Europe. For that this is what it has become is repeated over and over again by countless voices and in rivers of printers' ink.

It is easy to say what is often said, namely that this Reich was not created out of a historical necessity but out of ‘Germanic arrogance’—a misuse, incidentally, of the word ‘Germanic’—and further that it is filled with people who never cease stressing that Germans lead the world, Germans are the saviours of the world, and so on. Countless times we have heard it said: The Germans have grown arrogant, they think they have been called to rule the world, they consider the Reich they have founded to be something urgently needed in modern times, and so on; the pride, the arrogance of the Germans has become utterly insufferable. Such are the judgements which one hears in ever-changing forms.

I have no intention of glossing over anything, but I now want to read to you a judgement which was made at the time the Reich was founded, a time I have already mentioned. I said: Let us return to November 1870. What I want to read to you might make some people jump up and down with impatience—pardon the flippant expression—and say: There you have it! This is the kind of idea people have about the importance of this German Reich! It had hardly come into being, indeed was still in the process of being founded, and already it was being presented as something beneficial, not only for Germans but for the whole of Europe, indeed for the whole world—even for the French themselves! To show you that I am not glossing over anything I shall read to you a judgement expressed in the year 1870:

‘No nation ever had so bad a neighbour as Germany has had in France for the last four hundred years; bad in all manner of ways; insolent, rapacious, insatiable, unappeasable, continually aggressive ... Germany, I do clearly believe, would be a foolish nation not to think of raising up some secure boundary-fence between herself and such a neighbour now that she has the chance. There is no law of nature that I know of, no Heaven's Act of Parliament, whereby France, alone of terrestrial beings, shall not restore any portion of her plundered goods when the owners they were wrenched from have an opportunity upon them ... The French complain dreadfully of threatened “loss of honour” ... But will it save the honour of France to refuse paying for the glass she has voluntarily broken in her neighbour's windows? For the present, I must say, France looks more and more delirious, miserable, blameable, pitiable, and even contemptible. She refuses to see the facts that are lying palpable before her face, and the penalties she has brought upon herself ... Ministers flying up in balloons ballasted with nothing but outrageous public lies, proclamations of victories that were creatures of the fancy; a Government subsisting altogether on mendacity, willing that horrid bloodshed should continue and increase rather than that they, beautiful Republican creatures, should cease to have the guidance of it: I know not when or where there was seen a nation so covering itself with dishonour ... The quantity of conscious mendacity that France, official and other, has perpetrated latterly, is something wonderful and fearful ... It is evidently their belief that new celestial wisdom is radiating out of France upon all the other overshadowed nations; that France is the new Mount Zion of the universe ... I believe Bismarck will get his Alsace and what he wants of Lorraine; and likewise that it will do him, and us, and all the world, and even France itself by and by, a great deal of good ... Bismarck seems to me to be striving with strong faculty, by patient, grand, and successful steps, towards an object beneficial to Germans and to all other men. That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should be at length welded into a nation and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless and oversensitive France, seems to me the hopefullest public fact that has occurred in my time ... The appearance of a strong German Reich brings about a new situation. If the military states of France and Russia were to join forces, they could crush a splintered Germany lying between them. But now their arbitrary actions are faced with a considerable restraint ...’

Now I am going to omit a phrase for a reason which you will understand in a moment:

‘What every English statesman has longed for has left the realm of ideas and become reality ...’

You could ask, is this megalomania? Dear friends, I have just read to you a leading article which appeared in The Times in November 1870, but I omitted one word in the final sentence. The complete sentence reads:

‘But now their arbitrary actions are faced with a considerable restraint. The strong Central Power every English statesman has longed for has left the realm of ideas and become reality.’

As you see, it is necessary to look at things as they really are. Those who read The Times today should to some extent take into account the opinion of The Times of November 1870. They might even attain to an unusual view of that most ghastly phrase ever coined, that of ‘German militarism’, if they were to think a little about what was said from the English side at that time: that the appearance of a strong German Reich brings about a new situation. If the military states of France and Russia joined forces, they could crush a splintered Germany lying between them.

Times change, as you see. But people still believe they can make absolute judgements, and they are so happy in their absolute judgements. It is truly not enmity towards the English being and the English people if one passes a judgement which may seem wrong to many people from England, such as the one I passed yesterday about Sir Edward Grey. Those English who think it is enmity are, in fact, their own worst enemy. But I am not in the habit of passing judgement without any support from what can be regarded as a reliable source. You could say that whoever said what I said about Sir Edward Grey was no Englishman and cannot have known him. So now let me read to you a judgement about him by an Englishman who knew him well because he was a fellow minister. During the winter of 1912/13 this man said about Sir Edward Grey:

‘It is amusing for those of us who have known Grey since the beginning of his career to note how much he impresses his Continental colleagues. They seem to assume there is something in him which is, in fact, not there. He is one of the foremost sporting anglers of the kingdom and also quite a good tennis player. He does not, however, possess any political or diplomatic capacities, unless a certain wearisome tediousness in his manner of speaking and also an extraordinary tenacity, were to be seen as such. Earl Rosebery once said of him that the impression he gives of great concentration stems from the fact that there is never a thought in his head which might distract him from whatever paper he is studying. When recently a somewhat more lively diplomat expressed admiration for Grey's modest bearing, which never reveals what might be going on in his head, a rather pert secretary said: “A money box filled to the brim with gold sovereigns does not rattle when you shake it. Neither is there a sound if it contains not so much as a single penny. In the case of Winston Churchill, a few coppers rattle so loudly that it gets on your nerves. In the case of Grey there is not a sound. Only the one who holds the money box in his hand can tell whether it is full to the brim or completely empty!” Though impertinent, this is well put. I believe that Grey has the most decent character, though he does sometimes allow a rather unfortunate vanity to mislead him into getting involved with affairs which it would be better to leave alone in the interest of keeping his hands clean. He is always excused by the fact that on his own he is unable to comprehend or think anything through properly. On his own he is no kind of schemer, but the moment a skillful schemer takes possession of him he can appear as the most accomplished schemer. This is why political schemers have always been tempted to choose precisely him for their tool, and to this alone he owes his position.’

We must take note of these things so that we are not tempted to believe that the peace of Europe in July 1914 was in particularly good hands. By using a number of documents referred to in various books anything can be proved. What matters is whether these things were used in the right way in the handling of those forces which are important.

Another thing you must note is that historical processes grow out of one another, they gradually take shape. What led to the events of 1914 had been in preparation for a long time, a very long time. Much has been said about this preparation, for instance, that the countries of the Triple Entente did not have any agreement which was against Central Europe; that the only purpose of the Triple Entente was to cultivate peace in Europe. All sorts of facts have been paraded as ostensible proof for this supposition. I would have to tell you some very long stories if I wanted to prove fully what I have to say. This is not possible, but I want to give you a few points of reference. For instance, I should like to read you some passages from a speech made in France in October 1905, because in the future this will have a certain part to play in history. Such speeches are always one-sided, of course, but if one bears everything in mind—and here there are a number of important points to bear in mind—a judgement can be made. A number of important things may be taken from this speech by Jaurès from the year 1905. I am able to choose this example because I have recently spoken about Jaurès in quite another context. As you know, Jaurès was a democrat, indeed a social-democrat and, whatever else one might think of him, he was certainly a man who was seriously concerned not only with peace which would have been so necessary for Europe, or at least western Europe, but with calling together all those people in the world who seriously longed to keep peace. So in a way Jaurès had a right to speak as he did. In October 1905, shortly after the French democratic government had ditched Delcassé—pardon the flippant expression—when it had become apparent during a session of the chamber that he was capable of endangering peace in Europe in the near future, Jaurès commented as follows:

‘England has recognized Delcassé's dream and is quietly preparing to make use of it. The threat posed by German industry and German commerce, in all markets of the world, to English trade and English profits, is increasing daily.

It would by cynical, it would be scandalous, if England were to declare war on Germany merely in order to annihilate her military might, destroy her fleet and send her trade to the bottom of the ocean.

But if one day a conflict were to arise between France and Germany in which France brought forward legal reasons and the demand for the restoration of her national integrity, then behind these splendid pretexts the calculations of the English capitalists, who want to remove German competition by force, could creep in and use this as a means of achieving their aim.

So when difficulties arose in the Moroccan affair between France and Germany, and the latter, suspecting a coalition between France and England, made a brusque intervention in order to force the two to make declarations, it turned out that England—I have to say this I'm afraid—was all too inclined to fan the flames. It is a fact that, at the very moment when events were reaching a climax, England offered France an offensive-defensive pact in which she guaranteed us the fullest support and committed herself not only to sink the German fleet but also to occupy the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and land one hundred thousand troops in Schleswig-Holstein. If this pact had been signed—and Monsieur Delcassé wanted to do so—this would have meant immediate war. This is the reason why we socialists demanded the resignation of Monsieur Delcassé, and by doing so we have rendered a service to France, Europe and mankind in general.’

Above all, Jaurès knew those things which many people do not know when they arrive at judgements—most essential and important things. He was even careless enough to express these essential and important things in such a way as to hint that he might say more in the future. It is well known to occultists that in the last third of the nineteenth century a member of a certain brotherhood made known to the world certain things which, in the opinion of the brotherhood, should not have been made public. One day soon after he had done this he disappeared; he had been murdered. Jaurès was not an occultist, but we may be excused for being curious as to whether the world will ever hear what led to his death on the eve of the war.

The things which Jaurès said go back to the session of the chamber during which Delcassé, the creature of Edward VII, as well as other creatures who worked behind the scenes, was ditched by the government, perhaps not so much because he wanted to smooth the way for war as for quite another reason.

We are in the year 1905. Russia is still engaged over in the East and it is, therefore, to be hoped that if the flames being fanned by Delcassé in the West really start to flare up the outcome will not be what it would be if Russia were no longer busy in the East. But Delcassé is not a person who takes things lying down. When those who did not want a war accused him of driving matters to the brink of war, he replied that England had let it be known to France that she was prepared to occupy the Kaiser Wilhelm Canal and attack Schleswig-Holstein with 100,000 troops and, if France so wished, this offer would be repeated in writing. This piece of news, which Delcassé presented to his ministerial colleagues who were about to turn him out was, of course, the upshot of negotiations he had been conducting behind their backs and in which King Edward VII had also been heavily involved.

I could quote many items which would verify this fact, which was published in Matin, and later also in other journals. But I only want to draw your attention to the fact that at least there was someone, even at the time, who looked at the matter more closely and found it suspicious. This was a personality who is possibly not at all liked by people, particularly in France. He was the clerical senator Gaudain de Villaine who, on 20 November 1906, when Clemenceau's ministry had already begun, asked what was the situation between France and England about which so much was being heard. Clemenceau answered that so far as the idea of revenge was concerned, he was indignant that a French senator could have set such a trap for him, obliging him either to disappoint the Orange Lodge or make a declaration of war, and he would therefore refuse to reply. So Clemenceau responded to the question from a senator as to whether anything existed in the way of a coalition between France and England, which could lead to a European war, by refusing to reply. For if he were to reply he would either have to disappoint the Orange Lodge with regard to the idea of revenge, or he would have to make a declaration of war. So you see: If Clemenceau had been open about the relationship at that time between France and England he would have had to make a declaration of war—not a declaration of peace but a declaration of war. He said this himself in 1906.

We must not forget that what works in every case in the world is what one person hears from another. Can you imagine that it was possible in Central Europe to believe in the ‘peaceful’ intentions of western Europe, while at the same time having to listen to not one, but to countless such facts? To judge such things a number of factors must be taken into account. One of these is the utter absurdity of speaking of Central European militarism in the context of Central Europe in its widest sense. For any such militarism is an obvious consequence of being sandwiched between two military states.

People with absolutely no sense of reality might ask: Were not all sorts of proposals made about disarmament? You need only look at these suggestions for disarmament! A particular goal can be achieved by quite a number of different routes. Of course some people—I do not say nations, I say people—in western Europe would have preferred to achieve what they wanted, and still want, without a war which would spill the blood of hundreds of thousands on all sides. They would have preferred to gloat gleefully and say: Look, we have created peace!

One of the means preferred by western European politicians of a certain calibre was the disarmament proposal, for this was simply a different means of achieving the goal. When it turned out that no headway was made with disarmament proposals, this particular route had to be abandoned as impassable. If it had been possible to fetter Central Europe by means of disarmament this would, of course, have been preferred. But this was only one of several possible methods.

One must not be misled by words or by illusions; one must be clear about what people want. So ever and again it is necessary to stand up for people with a healthy way of thinking, people who really want what they say they want, even if, under the influence of hate and all sorts of other feelings, they are identified as those who are to blame for something. One must stand up for them and be clear about how unfair it is to say: The English did this or that, the English are to blame for this or that. This is not a sensible judgement. But neither is it sensible if an English person feels hurt when facts such as the one just discussed are revealed. One must sit up and take notice when, on a basis of good sense, fingers are pointed to certain factors in the great complex of causes. Thus we find under the heading ‘The German Scene’ in the Daily News of 13 October 1905 a declaration that says the following about the British government of the time, which bears so much of the blame for what is still going on today. I must add that Sir Edward Grey's predecessor was not a nought. Lord Lansdowne knew much more about what was what. But from a certain point onwards, those who stood behind the scenes needed a nought, in order to be able to operate more easily:

‘And it is high time that Lord Lansdowne should explain and defend this chapter in the diplomacy for which he and his colleagues are constitutionally responsible. There has been a tendency of late to place Lord Lansdowne upon a pinnacle, but the country will have little reason to thank him if it be found that he has permitted this country to drift into entanglements directly involving a risk of European war ... The best of courts will sometimes harbour fleeting family feuds, but what have the people of Great Britain or the people of Germany to do with these things? ... The anti-German hotheads in this country and the anti-British hotheads in Germany alone stand in the way of such a consummation [of friendly and stable relations] and for their tempestuous fads vast populations may one day have to suffer dearly.’

You have to take into account the essential things in the right places. But never mind all the facts; good sense alone could prove that the two Central European states had not the least cause to bring about a war. How would the prospect of war have seemed to those who thought about it? France would have had to say that in the event of a European war, unless certain conditions came about, she would be likely to suffer a great deal. However, this was not believed in France because there was still such a strong faith in the France which had ruled Europe for centuries. In Italy the conditions are rather special. Perhaps if we have time we shall discuss them further in another connection. But Italy also, under certain conditions, could not imagine that any great advantages would come of a war which would throw everything in Europe into chaos. In Russia, too, conditions are rather special, as I have already told you in connection with Russia's relationship to the Slav peoples, the Slav race.

This gives me an opportunity, by the way, to quote you an example of the depths of Sir Edward Grey's thoughts. What did his colleague Rosebery say? That the impression he gave of great concentration stemmed from the fact that he never had a thought in his head to distract him? Well, once a thought was infiltrated into his meditating mind by those who worked by infiltrating thoughts into his mind, the upshot was that he suddenly said: The Russian race has a great future and is destined to accomplish great things. He had forgotten that it was the Slav peoples who had been meant and that there is no such thing as a Russian race. When speaking of realities it is absolutely necessary to distinguish between Russianism and the Slav peoples.

In Russia only those who represented Russianism could imagine any great outcome for a European war, namely, the realization, at least partially, of the testament of Peter the Great. Apart from that, a great deal of suffering was expected, but not that suffering on which the representatives of Russianism would have placed any value.

England was able to say to herself that she would lose and risk the least. Now that the sorrowful events of war have been going on for many months, if an assessment were to be made of who had suffered least, or indeed hardly at all—at least in regard to the opinion of world history—the answer would be: England. England will be able to continue waging war for a long time without suffering to any great degree.

But the so-called Central Powers would most certainly have had nothing to gain from a war and they had no desire for such a war. They always displayed two tendencies. On the one hand there was a certain carefree air which arose, not out of a knowledge of what was going on but out of a basic characteristic; for the Austrian character is fundamentally carefree. On the other hand emphasis was always placed on the statement that all they wanted was to keep what they already had, and that any other suggestion was nonsense. There is no question, for instance, that any part of Serbia was to be annexed, if those who attempted to do so had succeeded in localizing the war between Austria and Serbia.

If England had been led by a statesman who had not said as early as 23 July: If Austria makes war on Serbia, this could lead to a European war; if England had been led by one who had said: We shall do everything possible to make sure that the war is localized; then events would have taken quite a different turn. But this would have had to be someone who formed his judgements in a different way from Sir Edward Grey, who was hypnotized from the start by the thought: If Austria makes war on Serbia, there will be a European war. He never asked what Russia had to do with the whole matter of war between Austria and Serbia. This never occurred to him and the suspicion cannot be detected in anything he said. All he ever saw was the justification for Russia's influence in Serbia, a justification for an influence which had been prepared in a remarkable way and was borne on remarkable currents, as I have shown you.

Nothing that has taken place in this connection, including the 364 assassinations between the years 1883 and 1887, has anything whatever to do with any kind of judgement about the Serbian people. All they have done is to fight bravely, and in their present condition they are still doing so. To them alone is owed the only success achieved in recent weeks down there by the Entente. No one who understands these matters will judge against any people, let alone one who, right into its most tragic days, has shown that it is not only willing—to the extent of sacrificing its own blood—but also able to stand up for its true nature, always present and at the ready in grave times, if only it is allowed to be. But we must remember also that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was only the last great blow in a whole series of assassination attempts against Austrian government officials to have taken place within the space of a few months. This was in fact a particular campaign, which was even quite comprehensible and in keeping with certain people. You remember what I told you about the occult background of this individuality, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. You also remember that it is a fact, a paradoxical fact, that this couple, kindly disposed towards the Slavs in the highest sense, were slain by Slavs—or seemingly so. The deeper connections are made more approachable by a certain understanding of the heart. We see a human being, kindly disposed in the highest sense towards the Slavs, slain—together with his wife—by Slav bullets. At the last moment the Duchess espies from her carriage a young female standing quite near; smiles at her, seconds before the bullets strike, because she notices she is a Slav woman, and exclaims: ‘Look, a Slavka!’ Then the bullets strike. What a strange karma this reveals! Before the bullets strike her down, the Duchess exclaims in delight, because her eye has fallen on one of her beloved Slav people.

I described earlier the far-reaching connection existing between machinations in the Balkan countries and a number of well-prepared situations on the Apennine peninsula. And I now want to ask once again a question I have already put to you: Why was it written in a rather inferior Paris journal in January 1913 that it was necessary for the good of mankind for Archduke Franz Ferdinand to be killed? Why was it said twice in this so-called ‘Occult Almanac’ that he would be killed? It is necessary to look at all the facts at once. We will find that the alchemy of the bullets which were used for this assassination was exceedingly complicated and that, although they stemmed from a Serbian arsenal, they had been ‘anointed’ from quite another quarter—if I may put it symbolically.

These are things which expressed themselves in what could be seen, for instance, in Austria. Imagine Switzerland surrounded only by those who hate her. I doubt whether this would have a particularly reassuring influence, especially if the hatred were expressed in sayings such as those which have become current in Romania: Jos Austria perfida!—That is: Down with perfidious Austria!; or: Rather Russian than Austrian!—and so on. If this is how things stand, and if you consider all the things that were written in Italy quite a long time before the war against Austria broke out, then you will understand that the situation was far from reassuring. In this way an extensive campaign was organized which spread far and wide in the countries surrounding Austria. I am not defending any particular state, but merely mentioning facts.

Consider, for instance, also the following: At the Berlin Congress, Austria received, through the significant influence of Lord Salisbury, a mandate to occupy Bosnia and Herzegovina. When England gave Austria the mandate to undertake this action in the Balkans during the seventies, it turned out that in Austria there was passionate opposition to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina because the Germans in Austria said: We have enough Slavs already; we cannot possibly absorb any more Slavs. If the idea had arisen in Austria to seize some fragment of Serbia by an act of war it would have met with the sharpest opposition in the interests of Austria, which were well understood, for nothing would have been more stupid than to covet some fragment of Serbian territory. The only desire was to hold the empire together in order to counteract the campaign. This was perfectly honest, though it may have been careless. Seen objectively, it becomes perfectly obvious that the war would not have started as a consequence of the ultimatum of Austria to Serbia if Russia had not taken up the stance we all know about, despite knowing perfectly well that Austria was not bent on any form of conquest. In all this, however, we must remember the moods. The consequence of everything we have been discussing was that moods arose, not only in the periphery but also in Central Europe.

Now I want to give you a small example to show you how, despite everything, it is possible to form a judgement about these things if one really sets out in earnest to achieve a valid judgement. It is interesting to look at certain points at definite times, for only in this way can one recognize something. For example, we might ask: What must it have looked like in the soul of someone who felt responsible for Austria, let us say round about the time of the assassination of the heir to the throne—I mean immediately before and immediately after this?

In order to reach a valid judgement with regard to the mood amongst honest people in Austria, the best moment to choose would be that which immediately preceded the assassination, for people were not then influenced by what happened in the aftermath of the assassination. You see how cautious I am trying to be. I am not going to consider the nervous and anxious souls as they were immediately after the assassination. Instead, let us look at what lived in the soul of the honest Austrian under all the influences which, since Delcassé, had made themselves felt coming from western Europe and connecting up with eastern Europe, with Russia. Now, I can place before your souls such a judgement by reading to you a passage from an essay which was written just at the moment in question. Though it appeared after the assassination it was already in the process of being printed when it happened. So it was written by an Austrian in the weeks immediately preceding the assassination:

[Gap in the shorthand report.]

Here you have the judgement of a man whose thoughts are based on common sense, someone who saw all the factors at work in Europe just before the final event, the assassination, took place. Everyone knew that at the instigation of Russia the Balkan states would be forced to declare war on Austria. Therefore, the right thing to do in order to avoid war would have been to start just at this point with attempts to localize the situation, for externally the prospects looked quite good.

It is necessary when making judgements according to one's own feelings—for us, judgements are facts—to look at the facts themselves and use them as the foundation. Today I have only been able to give you a few isolated facts in order to explain what I mean. But I gave them to you expressly for the purpose of developing the facts; nothing more. Let us be clear about the purpose of introducing such facts: the purpose is to promote the truth. The truth, even if, paradoxically, it may be damaging, can never be as damaging as an untruth.

Those who understand the facts know what unending lies were fabricated, from the moment it became possible to lie, unhindered, as a result of the possibility of making oneself heard above the other side—that is, of drowning out the other side by means of the various methods which came to the fore in such a grievous way. But we are concerned with truth and with the admission of the truth. It is quite definitely not the truth to maintain that this war was provoked by Central Europe. Perhaps people cannot speak the truth because they do not know it. Obviously, when something like this war comes about, both parties are usually partly to blame, but in different ways. But I am not talking about blame, I am talking about the uselessness of judgements which have been made, which take no account of the actual truth of the matter. Of course, I do not expect that these judgements will cease to be made, for obviously I know what happens in the course of human evolution and that, especially in our time, there is no inclination to base judgements on valid foundations; for there is so much in our time that prevents judgements being based on valid foundations. But one really ought to state properly what one is talking about.

Those who are connected with certain sources of these grievous world events, which from sheer negligence of thought still tend to be called ‘war’, those who therefore feel connected with what is emanating in the periphery from certain centres, should admit quite openly: Yes, we want what certain centres in the periphery want, we want the people of Central Europe to be partly exterminated and partly condemned to serfdom.

Certain people in these centres, however, do not want the cultural life of Central Europe to perish. They talk of the wonderful science and culture and of the sober modesty which used to exist. In other words, they would be happy to lord it over these territories of culture and modesty by acting in the way the Romans behaved towards the Greeks. Obviously, Greek culture was higher; and the Romans did not destroy it. Similarly, no one in the Entente wants to destroy German culture. On the contrary, these people will be only too pleased if German culture continues to flourish vigorously, but they want a relationship similar to that of the Romans to the Greeks: that is, they want to make a kind of cultural helotry out of what exists in Central Europe. All right, then let them say so! Why deck it out with something so utterly ridiculous! For German militarism—which is not to be denied—has its true origin in French and Russian militarism. Without French and Russian militarism there would be no German militarism.

Let them say that what they want is to helotize Central Europe! Let them say they would be quite content if this could be the outcome! Let them admit that they hate the presence of such a people in the middle of Europe who want to do what all the other surrounding peoples are doing! If someone says: I hate everything German; I do not want the Germans to have what other peoples have—well and good. You can then talk with him about it, or not if he does not want to, but he is nevertheless telling the truth. But if he keeps repeating: I want to destroy German militarism, I don't want the Germans to oppress other peoples, I want the Germans to do this or that—as is said today and has been constantly repeated for years—then he is lying. Perhaps he does not know that he is lying—but he is lying, he really is lying. Objectively he is lying, even though perhaps subjectively he is not.

What matters is to stand on the foundation of truth, even if this truth is perhaps harmful, even if it is embarrassing. It is necessary to admit these things and not anaesthetize oneself with empty phrases about German militarism for which one has a hatred to which one does not want to admit, even to oneself. One must admit that one wants to helotize the German people, yet cannot face up to wanting this. Perhaps an anaesthetic is needed; but it is not the truth! It is most important to stand on the foundation of truth. To have the courage to face the truth always leads one a little step further. But one must have the courage to stand by the truth.

It is a fact that every people, as a people, has a mission within the total evolution of mankind. Every people has a mission, and all these various missions together create a whole, namely, the evolution of mankind. But it is equally true that certain individuals, especially those who come to be familiar with the mission of mankind, have the arrogance to set in train certain things which are in the interest of a limited group, and for this they make use of what lies in human evolution.

Let us take the English people. If what is necessarily meant to come about in the fifth post-Atlantean period through the English people really does come about, then it will never be possible, through the very nature of this English people, for England to start a war. For the true being of the English people in their mission in world history is opposed to any kind of warlike impulse. The real nature of the English people makes them the least warlike nation possible. And yet for centuries there have never been ten consecutive years during which England has not been involved in war. We are living, after all, in the realm of maya. But despite this, truth is truth. In the nature of the English people lies the exclusion of any kind of war, just as for centuries it has been in the nature of the French people—not any longer; now it has to be artificially incited—to conduct war over and over again. It is not in the nature of the English people to wage war, and the reason for this is that the special configuration of the English folk spirit means that its purpose is to evolve what is to be incorporated into the consciousness soul of the fifth post-Atlantean period. This in turn is achieved through all those connections between people arising from logical and scientific thinking on the one hand, and on the other, from commercial and industrial thinking. And when Brooks Adams placed before the world the ideas I mentioned to you earlier, this was an advance thrust, coming from America, pointing towards what the English people must recognize as their mission in world history, based on their deeper nature which contains none of those warlike and imaginative characteristics such as those present, for instance, in the nature of the Russian people.

Now much will depend on whether this deeper nature of the English people will one day come to be understood in a deeper, spiritual scientific sense. In a more external way some individuals have understood it. The work of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill shows that the most inspired spirits have fully understood it, though from their more materialistic standpoint and not, as yet, from a spiritual scientific standpoint. I can recommend that you read with some enthusiasm the political essays of Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill, for you can learn a very great deal from them. This spirit of peace which, among other things, makes possible in a special way a certain kind of political thinking, in the manner I have already described, has indeed overflowed to Europe from England. Someone who has entered into European life, from as many and varied points of view as I can really claim to have done, knows, for instance, that all the political sciences of Central Europe have certainly been influenced from the direction of England. And it is no coincidence that the founders of German socialism, Marx and Engels, founded this German socialism from England.

It happens very easily that the nature of Central Europe is misunderstood. The true nature of Central Europe is still almost always misunderstood in western Europe. How might it be otherwise? The culture of Central Europe was so permeated by the French element that one of the greatest, most important works of German literature, one which set the tone at the zenith of German culture, Lessing's Laokoon, had a peculiar destiny: Lessing considered seriously whether he should write it in German or French. Educated people in Central Europe in the eighteenth century wrote German badly and French well. This must not be forgotten. And in the nineteenth century Central Europe was in danger of becoming totally anglicized, of being fully taken over by Englishness. It is no wonder that the nature of Central Europe is so little known, since it is constantly being submerged from all sides, even spiritually and culturally. Think, for instance, of Goethe's theory of evolution in respect of animals and plants. This is truly a stage in advance of Darwin's materialism just as, in respect of Grimm's law, the German language is a stage ahead of Gothic-English. Yet in Germany herself materialistic Darwinism was favoured by fortune, and not her own German Goetheanism. So it is not surprising that the German spirit is poorly understood and that little effort is made to really understand it as it should be understood, if justice is to be done to it.

As I said, the political sciences, in particular, were strongly influenced by the English way of thinking. But what is urgently needed now is that the different peoples should come to a certain degree of self-knowledge. Without this self-knowledge, for which Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill are not adequate—but which must be based on spiritual science and on a sense for what spiritual science can give—without this, no healing can come.

Just consider how difficult it is, for example, to grasp the following—whereby no arid theory is meant, but something at the basis of life: There exists in the soul a certain relationship between the thought and the word. This is a fact. Let us imagine that in the structure of the soul the word lies in this field, and the thought in this one:

The French people have the tendency to push the thought right down to the word; thus, when they speak, the thought is pushed right into what they are saying. That is why, especially in this field, there is so easily an intoxication with words, with phrases—and I mean phrases in the best sense:

The English people press the thought down below the word, so that the thought mingles with the word and seeks reality beyond the word:

The German language has the peculiarity of not taking the thought as far as the word. Only because of this was it possible for philosophers such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel—who it would be impossible to imagine anywhere else in the world—to do their work. The German language does not take the thought as far as the word, it retains the thought in the thought. Because of this, however, people will very easily misunderstand one another. For a true translation in this situation is impossible, it is always only a substitute. It is not possible to say what Hegel said, in English or French. It is impossible; such translations can only ever be a substitute. The fact that some understanding is possible comes about solely because certain basic Latin elements are common to more than one language, for it is the same whether you say ‘association’ in French, or ‘association’ in English; both go back to the Latin element. Such things build bridges. But every people has its own special mission and it is only possible to approach this through a longing to attain such an understanding.

The Slav people push the thought inwards so that it is here:

There, the word is quite far away from the thought. It floats, separately.

The strongest coincidence of thought with word, so that the thought disappears over against the word, is in French. The strongest independent life of the thought is in German. Therefore, a saying formulated by Hegel and the Hegelians: ‘The self-consciousness of thought’, is meaningful only in German. Something that is an abstraction for non-Germans is, for a German, the greatest experience it is possible to have, if he understands it in a living sense. The German language sets out to found a marriage between what is of itself spiritual and what is spiritual in the thought. Nowhere in the world, by no other people, can this be achieved except by the German people.

This has nothing to do with any kind of a Reich, but it will be endangered for centuries to come if people reject what is at present going through the world as the thought of peace. For then not only will a Reich in Central Europe be endangered but also the whole essence of what is German. That is why these times are heavily pregnant with destiny for those who understand these things. Let us at least hope that things will be judged differently this time, differently from the previous time when an impulse of destiny came into play, an impulse of destiny to which much thought should have been given—but was not—when Austria voluntarily declared her willingness to give to Italy what she needed to help her extricate herself from Irredentist ideas and the Grand Orient. But there was no thought in the periphery for what it meant at that time to think little of what Italy, or rather those three people, were doing. Let us hope that, whatever happens, the world will be more inclined this time to take these things seriously.

The German element has its particular task because of the special situation of German thought. If this independently living thought is not brought into play it will never be possible to accomplish the spiritual evolution which must be accomplished. Things must be seen as they really are. The English folk element makes it to a certain extent necessary to materialize what is spiritual. This is not something to be held against the English people; it is simply a fact. Within the English folk element things that are spiritual have to be made material to a certain degree. That is why there will be a greater understanding there for what comes from the folk element as opposed to the element of mankind as a whole, namely mediumistic and other atavistic activities. It is just there that ancient things have their source: the ancient Rosicrucians, the ancient Indians, and so on. This must always be revered there in a certain way, just as the language itself has remained behind at the Gothic stage, where ‘remained behind’ is not a moral judgement, nor one involving sympathy or antipathy, but simply an indication of a position in relation to others. It is a question of how things are arranged, not of getting left behind in evolution.

Let us take things as they are. Obviously every nation today can understand everything. Yet it is true to say that all really fruitful English spiritualism, in the best sense of the word, stems from Central Europe and has been imported. Its origin is in Central Europe, or else it is taken from elsewhere. Since intellectuality is so well-developed in England, this is where spirituality can be systemized, organized. A mind such as that of Jakob Böhme would be impossible, for instance, in France. But while Jakob Böhme was born entirely out of the spiritual thought of Central Europe, he gained a great following through Saint-Martin, the so-called philosophe inconnu, the unknown philosopher, the follower of Jakob Böhme.

Thus, these things have to work together, so there is no point in making judgements on the basis of national feelings. One has to take what is presented to mankind at face value. The moment one takes into account that karma is something serious, that one is connected to one's nation through karma in the way I described yesterday, the moment one sees these things from the point of view of karma and not of passions, one will find the proper attitude. I can imagine a time when even a people as passionate about national matters as the French will come to understand the fact of nationality as something karmic. I can even imagine that with their great talent for spirituality the English nation will come, through a certain science of the spirit, to recognize that there exist other nations who might be accorded some degree of equal status, something for which at present there is not the slightest understanding. This is not a reproach; least of all is it a reproach! But one never knows how often one keeps on saying things which one understands perfectly well oneself, while others think them curious beyond belief. That attitude is surpassed by that of the Americans. With them the total lack of awareness, that there might be others who intend to evolve in accordance with their own characteristics, is even more paradoxical; of course, only for those who do not share the same standpoint.

Because of the great talent possessed particularly by the English people for spirituality, a good deal could be expected to enter this people via the detour of spirituality, especially taking into account that in them there also lies the greatest talent for purely logical, that is, unspiritual thinking, as well as for systemizing everything. Nothing could be a better expression of this organizational talent than the writings of Herbert Spencer. In regard to everything scientific the English people have the greatest organizational talent. That is why they have such a flair for instituting systems for everything all over the world. Only those who prefer empty phrases can say that the Germans have a particular talent for organization. Such people leave unconsidered the fact that the talent for organization is most removed of all from the true nature of the German people.

It must not be forgotten that what has seemingly been achieved recently by Germans in certain directions, both territorially and culturally, has come about as a result of the way Germany is wedged between East and West. Because of this, during the course of the nineteenth century certain characteristics came to be developed more precisely in Germany than among those peoples to whom they really belong. This is eminently understandable. Self-knowledge has not penetrated to every corner yet, and since the Germans are so capable of assimilation and are able to take in and absorb so much in certain respects, the peoples of the West—not the East—have had an opportunity to discover, in certain respects, much about themselves through what the Germans have absorbed from them. Such characteristics, when seen in oneself, are always found to be excellent and obvious—naturally enough! But when they are met in another, one notices for the first time what they really are. You have no idea how much of what the West finds objectionable in Central Europe is no more than a reflection of what has been absorbed from there by Central Europe.

People have no idea what mystery lies hidden here. Looking at the matter objectively, it is most remarkable to discover how some members in particular of the French nation are quite incapable of seeing in themselves things which they find terribly objectionable in others who had absorbed them under French influence in the first place. Perhaps it is not all that nice if it comes to meet you as an imitation. But if mankind is to progress at all then, as I described it in my recent book Vom Menschenrätsel, it will be essential for this collaboration of Central European thought to take place. This is necessary and it cannot be eliminated; and it must not be brutally destroyed either.

Mankind is now faced with having to solve certain quite specific problems. This applies, above all, to something I have already spoken about, which is connected with today's much-admired technology—a consequence of natural science—which is also much admired by spiritual science. In the comparatively near future, this much-admired modern technology will reach a final stage where it will, in a certain way, cancel itself out. In contrast, something will come into being—I have mentioned it in passing here—which will enable people to make use of the delicate vibrations in their etheric bodies as a driving force with which to run machines. Machines will exist which are dependent on people and people will transfer their own vibrations to the machines. People alone will be capable of setting these machines in motion by means of certain vibrations stimulated by themselves. People who today see themselves as practitioners of science will, in the not too distant future, find themselves faced with a complete transformation of what they today call the practical application of science; for the human being is to be tuned in with his will to the objective sphere of feeling in the universe. This is one of the problems.

The second is, that people will, in a certain way, understand what we call the forces of coming-into-being and dying-away, the forces of birth and death. First of all they will have to make themselves morally ready for this. And to this will belong the gaining of insight into things about which nothing but nonsense is talked today. I have pointed this out before in connection with the questions people ask about how to improve the birthrate when it is declining. But they talk utter nonsense because they know nothing about the matter, and because the methods they suggest will certainly not achieve what they are talking about.

The third matter I want to mention is, that in the not too distant future a total reversal in the whole way people think about sickness and health will become apparent. Medicine will become filled with what can be understood spiritually when one learns to see illness as the consequence of spiritual causes.

I have already said it is not as yet fair to say to the spiritual scientist: Show us what you can do with regard to sickness and ill health! First his shackles must be removed! So long as the field is still totally occupied by materialistic medicine it is impossible to do anything, even in individual cases. In this field it is indeed necessary to be truly Christian—that is Pauline—and to know that sin comes from the law and not, conversely, the law from sin.

But none of these things which are supposed to come to mankind within the fifth post-Atlantean period will, in fact, come unless an effort is made to allow the spiritual thinking to work with us on human evolution. We need this spiritual thinking. But for it to be possible it will have to cease being the preserve of the few and become common knowledge. Thus it is necessary, particularly in the English folk element, that a basic reversal in a definite direction should take place. To show you that what I am saying is founded in reality, I want to quote to you a judgement by Lord Acton which you will find very revealing. Lord Acton says: The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. We see how, in the nineties of the last century Lord Acton was thinking in a healthy way by combining most beautifully English rationalism with the English capacity for what is spiritual—even though he himself does not yet possess anything spiritual: he sees the mystic element that underlies English imperialism. Imperialism is a product of recent times; but it has received its stamp from the mystic appearance it gains from English imperialism. And this mystical element—strange though it may seem that I call it ‘mystical’, nevertheless it is correct to do so—has also found expression in external events.

Right up to the nineties, England was the perfect example of honest and upright parliamentarianism, since it was the task of Parliament to give its impulses to external politics. Through the various parliamentary institutions in England the people were able to play a genuine part in external politics. During the time when the things I have hinted at were beginning to take a hold it became necessary to create a special institution, for it was not possible to pull all sorts of strings if everything had to come before Parliament. For this reason the conduct of foreign affairs was taken away from Parliament and also from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and made the preserve of a committee whose members consisted exclusively of the Cabinet and certain officials in the Foreign Ministry. In such a committee far more goes on than what seems to be presided over by someone like Grey. In the nineties the place where all the threads came together was separated from ‘external’ politics, which became nothing much more than a kind of shadow politics, no longer having anything much to say and revealing only what was really going on if one happened to look at it at the right moment. So, at the moment when it became necessary to commence pulling threads, the scene of action was transferred from external view to a hidden place, to a so-called committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lord Acton said:

‘The foreigner has no mystic fabric in his government, and no arcanum imperii. For him, the foundations have been laid bare; every motive and function of the mechanism is accounted for as distinctly as the works of a watch. But with our indigenous constitution, not made with hands or written upon paper, but claiming to develop by a law of organic growth; with our disbelief in the virtue of definitions and general principles and our reliance on relative truths, we can have nothing equivalent to the vivid and prolonged debates in which other communities have displayed their inmost secrets of political science to every man who can read. And the discussions of constituent assemblies, at Philadelphia, Versailles and Paris, at Cadiz and Brussels, at Geneva, Frankfort and Berlin, above nearly all, those of the most enlightened States in the American Union, when they have recast their institutions, are paramount in the literature of politics, and proffer treasures which at home we have never enjoyed ...’

And, despite this, it is the country with the perfect example of parliamentarianism, the country with the perfect example of political life, because none of this is actually necessary, since it could be mystical if only it were devoted to the people themselves, the people who, since the nineties, have been left out of account.

Because England has a quite specific task with regard to the consciousness soul of the fifth post-Atlantean period, certain ways of thinking belong to the people as a whole; they need not be the way of thinking of individuals, they belong to the whole people. This is something for which there is no place at all in Central Europe. Let me give you an example.

One of the greatest spirits of all time is Faraday. Michael Faraday expressed how he, as a natural historian, related to matters of religion and his sentences are, I really must say, monumental:

‘Before entering upon this subject, I must make one distinction which, however it may appear to others, is to me of the utmost importance. High as man is placed above the creatures around him, there is a higher and far more exalted position within his view; and the ways are infinite in which he occupies his thoughts about the fears, or hopes, or expectations of a future life. I believe that the truth of that future cannot be brought to his knowledge by any exertion of his mental powers, however exalted they may be; that it is made known to him by any other teaching than his own, and is received through simple belief of the testimony given. Let no one suppose for a moment that the self-education I am about to commend, in respect of the things of this life, extends to any considerations of the hope set before us, as if man by reasoning could find out God. It would be improper here to enter upon this subject further than to claim an absolute distinction between religious and ordinary belief. I shall be reproached with the weakness of refusing to apply those mental operations which I think good in respect of high things to the very highest. I am content to bear the reproach. Yet even in earthly matters I believe that “the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead,” and I have never seen anything incompatible between those things of man which can be known by the spirit of man which is within him, and those higher things concerning his future, which he cannot know by that spirit.’

With convictions similar to these, Darwin, too, was able to found his materialistic Darwinism and yet remain a pious man in quite a bigoted sense. Newton was the most bigoted man in the world in a dogmatic sense. When Darwinism had been carried to Central Europe and taken up by Haeckel it could no longer be separated from religious feelings. This was because of the characteristic nature of thought in German. In the thinking of Haeckel, Darwinism became a religious system. All these things have the deepest foundations. They show us how people can work together without differentiating between religions, nationalities and so forth, if they are able to distinguish between the missions of the different peoples. Mankind as a whole will have to come to an understanding of this. When this has been achieved, on the one hand justice will be done to the deeper natures of the different peoples and, on the other hand, sad times such as those of today will no longer occur: times which are sad, not only because of all the blood that is being spilt but also because they prove how little sense for truth there is in mankind quite generally. This is why we are allowed to speak about such things here. For our motto is: ‘Wisdom lies solely in truth’. Especially in times as grave as these is it permitted to draw attention to such things, times in which our hearts bleed terribly. Instead of passing time with all sorts of things people do under the influence of journalism, it would be more useful to make a start on a great many other things.

One positive thought on which to found a judgement is, for instance, the terrible fact that this war is not only being waged from the periphery but is being waged in such a way that it is lasting longer than it need, not because of unavoidable circumstances but because of culpable actions. This is utterly scandalous when you consider how much it matters that the war should not last too long, if it has to be waged in the first place. The war is being conducted from the periphery, not merely conducted, but conducted in a way that would never be possible if only people would see that, under the influence of their own dilettantism and incapacity, they keep avoiding any useful action, and by the very fact of doing nothing they are causing it to drag on so endlessly.

But a time has now come which could reveal whether those who matter—not the people themselves, who will only show whether or not they have learnt anything in all these months of war—whether those who matter are expressing even the semblance of a spark of truth when they say that they, too, want some kind of peace. I say a semblance, for in reality it is something else. For if peace does not come very soon, every child will be able to see who does not want peace! Indeed every child can already see how laughable are the excuses being made at this moment. There is no need to go so far as to set any store by a report in a journal in one of the Entente countries—and the story seems to be true—that, among others, the sentence was printed: To all the missiles Germany has sent us is now added the worst missile of all—peace.

There was no need for it to come to such excesses of madness as are expressed in the saying that peace is the worst missile of all. It would be enough to say that the Germans have invented this or that refinement, have this or that intention. Briand or Lloyd George would be quite capable of thinking up all sorts of motives the Germans might have, but it is not a question of these motives; indeed, they might just as well be presumed to exist. If you were to take the trouble to analyse all the different motives which have so far been mentioned, you could not fail to reach the conclusion: If things really are as Monsieur Briand, or whoever else, presumes them to be, then any true friend of peace must be longing to achieve peace as soon as possible! If only, my dear friends, far from influencing people's judgements, it were possible at least to clear away the huge mountains of rubble piled on top of people's ability to judge!

You cannot imagine how the hearts of those who see what is going on bleed when they see people still capable of listening to or reading, without any kind of holy indignation, what is written so paradoxically today. For if these things were not rooted in something that exists, they could not be written. So merely to complain about the journalists will not get us very far either. It is perfectly possible, perhaps not exactly to throw sand in certain people's eyes, but certainly to obscure the eye of their soul by saying: Watch out, they are about to scatter poison amongst us! It is child's play to convince oneself what nonsense this is, for even if one assumes it is true—why not assume it?—it is still no reason for not doing what must be done for the good of mankind, namely, bringing the bloodshed to an end! None of the allegations that have been made so far have been sufficient reason for not doing this.

I can only think of one category of people who, as a result of their delusions, would not come to their senses, namely, those who still exist even now and who say: We want absolutely permanent, totally perfect peace, and until we can have that we cannot end the war. There are many such people; quite often they call themselves pacifists. Some have just begun to be ashamed of their extreme views and are starting to express more sensible judgements. But it really has happened during all these terrible events that people have said: We are fighting for permanent peace. They do not notice that this is rubbish, for it is quite possible to talk rubbish while giving the impression of proclaiming the highest ideals.

No, my dear friends! The ideal of perfect peace can never be achieved if even the smallest drop of blood is shed by means of an instrument of war. Perfect peace must come into the world in quite another way! And whoever says he is fighting for peace, and must continue to make war till the enemy is annihilated in order to achieve peace, is lying, even if he does not realize it, and regardless of who he may be!

These are things which are hardly considered today. What we all need is spiritual science to be our teacher in forming judgements. Therefore, I do not hesitate from time to time to call a spade a spade and express a judgement that has truly not been arrived at lightly. However, we had better not go on till midnight today, so let us draw to a close for the moment.

The more we study the Mystery of Golgotha in the light of Spiritual Science, the more we realize that future generations will have to penetrate ever more deeply into this Mystery. In fact, what we have known of this Mystery hitherto and what we know of it today is but a preparation for a future understanding and especially for what will be experienced by mankind through this Mystery. A time will come when it will be possible to reveal to mankind in a few simple words what Spiritual Science, by exploring the widest fields of knowledge, is obliged to expound in a somewhat involved way, a way that some would perhaps say is “difficult to comprehend”. We can safely anticipate that this possibility will be realized. But the nature of spiritual development is such that the understanding of the greatest and simplest truths must be earned by patient effort, that the most profound truths cannot be reduced to simplest terms in every epoch. And therefore we must accept it as the karma of our epoch that we have much to learn before we can grasp the full import and the full gravity of the Mystery of Golgotha.

I should like to open our lecture today by emphasizing that we must attach great importance to the idea of faith, or trust, as an active and positive force.

We have to realize that both academic and popular thinking are at pains to exclude morality from their view of world evolution. Today scientists are interested only in the physical and chemical laws which determined the emergence of the Earth out of an original nebula and their aim is to discover how the end of the world will be determined by these same laws. To a certain extent we acquire our moral ideas in conjunction with these physical conceptions and I have already pointed out that they are not powerful enough to act as a positive force. Such is the position today. And in the future our moral ideas will become increasingly impotent. The idea that a deed or an occurrence, such as the “Fall”, which stands at the beginning of terrestrial existence, must be judged by moral laws is regarded by the scientific mind as sheer superstition. Our present understanding is not sufficient of itself to conceive of a moral evolution at the end of terrestrial existence whereby the physical and chemical processes of the Earth would be raised by a moral impulse to the Jupiter condition. Conceptions about what is physical and what is moral co-exist, but cannot, so to speak, “tolerate” each other; the two spheres are strictly delimited. Whilst natural science excludes morality entirely from its ideology, morality is resigned to the fact that it is without effective life, that it has no place in the physical world. Indeed certain religious confessions seek to accentuate this cleavage between the physical and the moral, which permits them to reach a kind of compromise with natural science in that the scientist emphasizes that a clear line of demarcation must be drawn between the sphere of morality and what belongs to the sphere of chemistry, physics and geology, etc.

I propose to begin my lecture today with something that is seemingly wholly unrelated to our subject but which leads directly into it. First, let me say that not all who have devoted themselves to cosmology excluded moral judgements from their study of external nature and natural phenomena. It would never occur to the modern botanist to apply moral ideas to the laws of plant growth. He would consider it childish to apply moral standards to the plant kingdom or to enquire into plant morality. Imagine the reception that would be accorded to anyone who took such an idea seriously. But people did not always share this attitude. I should like to quote the example of Goethe whom many did not regard as a Christian, but whose “Weltanschauung” was more Christian than that of many others. If you refer to critical studies on Goethe, especially those by Catholic authors, you will find that they are of the opinion that Goethe—as a man of stature he was sometimes treated indulgently—did not take Christianity seriously. Goethe, however, was by temperament and disposition inherently Christian, more profoundly Christian than those who forever have “Lord, Lord” upon their lips. Goethe certainly did not wear Christianity on his sleeve, but his view of the world was profoundly Christian in character. And here I would like to draw your attention to an aspect of Goethe's thought which is often neglected.

In his theory of metamorphosis Goethe attempted, as we know, to gain insight into plant growth. I have often had occasion to refer to a conversation between Goethe and Schiller on this subject after they had attended a lecture by Professor Batsch in Jena. Schiller did not approve of the way in which Batsch classified plants. He said that the method of dividing and classifying was unnecessary and that a totally different approach was possible. Thereupon Goethe illustrated with a simple sketch his idea of the metamorphosis of plants, in order to show how the spiritual link common to the individual plant forms could be envisaged. Schiller shook his head and replied: “That is not an experience; that is an idea.” Goethe did not really understand this objection and said: “I am glad to hear that I have ideas without knowing it and that I can even perceive them with my own eyes.”—Goethe could not understand how that which was derived from reality, like a tune or a colour, could be described as an idea. He maintained that he actually saw his ideas. Goethe, therefore, strove to discover the spiritual behind phenomena, to find the spiritual element underlying plant growth.

Now Goethe realized that he could not fully communicate his ideas to his contemporaries, for the time was not yet ripe to receive them. Meanwhile other naturalists, amongst them the botanists Schelver and Henschel, had been stimulated by Goethe's theory of metamorphosis. They wrote the most remarkable things about plant growth which met with Goethe's approbation. But the modern botanist regards this whole subject as dealt with by Goethe, Schelver and Henschel as midsummer madness. In cases such as this we must adapt the words of Paul and say: “What is foolishness to man may be wisdom in the sight of God.” And Goethe then jotted down his impressions of Schelver's method of presentation.

I will now outline briefly what Schelver wished to establish. The existing approach to botanical studies was anathema to him. At this time the generally accepted view was that plants are divided into plants with female flowers and plants with male flowers, that the ovule is fertilized by the pollen from the stamens and so a new individual arises. Schelver firmly rejected this view since it did not accord with the nature of the plant kingdom. The fact is, he said, that every plant, by virtue of its nature, can reproduce its kind. He looked upon fertilization as a more or less secondary phenomenon, as a mistake, an aberration of nature. If nature followed the right course, Schelver believed, then each plant would reproduce its kind without fertilization; there would be no need for pollination in order to ensure the continuity of the plant species (note 1).

Goethe who had made a close study of such phenomena as the metamorphosis of the leaf into the flower, regarded it as self-evident that the whole plant would reproduce its kind through metamorphosis. He was attracted by Schelver's idea and in all seriousness he recorded his reflections on the subject in a series of aphorisms which are extremely interesting, but which modern botanists regard as pure nonsense. In his article on Schelver he wrote amongst other things:

“This new theory of pollination would doubtless be most welcome and most seemly when lecturing to young people and ladies, for, with the existing theories the teacher finds himself in considerable embarrassment. Moreover whenever innocent young minds, desirous of perfecting their knowledge, consulted botanical textbooks, they could not conceal the fact that their moral feelings were outraged. These perpetual “nuptials” which reduce monogamy, on which morals, law and religion are founded, into a vague and undefined lasciviousness are wholly intolerable to the pure in heart.”

Thus Goethe, surveying the plant kingdom, finds it intolerable that there is no escape from these perpetual “nuptials”. He finds it—as he so delicately puts it—more seemly not to have to mention them; it is far better (in his view) to teach the a-sexual reproduction of plants. He then elaborated further on this and wrote:

“People have often reproached scholars—and not without justification—for having shown undue interest in the slightly improper and frivolous passages of ancient authors in order to compensate to some extent for the tedium and aridity of their own writings. In the same way certain naturalists, seeing Mother Nature partly in the buff, went so far as to crack ribald jokes at her expense, as they never failed to do about old Baubo (note 2). We recall having seen arabesques which depicted most realistically, in the style of antique art, the sexual relationships within the calix.”

Goethe therefore thought it highly desirable that the study of sexual behaviour in the plant kingdom should be abolished. But, of course, this was considered to be an absurd idea even in Goethe's time. And today in the age of psychoanalysis which seeks a sexual explanation for everything, it would seem more foolish still to say that it would he a good thing if we could dispense with this immoral notion of sexuality in our study of nature. Goethe expressly says: “Just as we find everywhere today ultras (note 3)—liberal as well as royalist—so Schelver was an ultra on the question of metamorphosis. He broke through the narrow limitations of the earlier theory.” Goethe does not say that he found an ultra such as Schelver in any way antipathetic; on the contrary he warmly welcomed his appearance.

We shall the better understand what lies behind all this if we enter more deeply into the soul of Goethe, I mean, into his Christian soul. Those who study nature as it is from the standpoint of modern science can of course make nothing of such ideas, for certain assumptions are necessary before these ideas can be understood. It must first be assumed that the plants, as they are at present, belie their original design. Those who make a detailed study of the plant kingdom are compelled to acknowledge that, when they reflect upon the original design of plant growth, they find that fertilization by wind-blown pollen does not accord with the original intention of nature. Fertilization should take a different form. The only course open to us therefore is to recognize that the whole flora around us shows a deterioration from its original form and that a view of nature such as that of Goethe still discovered in the form of plants as they are today an intimation of what they had been before the Fall. Indeed we cannot understand Goethe's theory of metamorphosis unless we appreciate its child-like innocence, unless we realize that Goethe wished to indicate by this theory that the present mode of reproduction in the plant kingdom is not what was originally intended; it arose only after the Earth had fallen from a higher sphere to its present level.

It follows from this—I cannot enter into precise details at the moment, but we shall have an opportunity to discuss these matters later—that the same applies to the mineral kingdom; that it too is not as originally constituted. And those who make a careful scientific study of these problems will also realize that what I have said is applicable to the animal kingdom, to the so-called cold-blooded animals, but not to the warm-blooded animals. The mineral kingdom, the plant kingdom and the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals, whose blood temperature is permanently below that of the environment in which they live, these three kingdoms are not such as they were originally intended to be. They have fallen from a higher sphere, with the result that they are of necessity subject to the sexual principle which governs them today. These three kingdoms are unable to develop their potentialities to the full; they must be given assistance in order to fulfil their development. Originally, plants possessed a natural capacity, peculiar to themselves, not only to metamorphose leaf into blossom, but also to bring forth an entirely new plant. But they now lack the vital energies to do this; they require a new stimulus from without, because they have forsaken the realm to which they originally belonged. And the mineral kingdom and the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals too were intended to be different from what they are now; they have stopped short midway in their evolution.

Let us now turn to the other realms of nature: to the kingdom of the warm-blooded animals, to the human kingdom and to the kingdom of the ligneous plants, i.e. trees (note 4). The plants I have already mentioned which follow normal metamorphosis are those which develop green leaves and stems, the herbaceous plants. I pointed out in my previous lecture that physical man, as at present constituted, does not answer to his inherent potentialities; his physical body was originally destined for immortality. This idea has further implications. Not only has physical man who was destined for immortality forfeited his claim to immortality, but also the other living beings, the ligneous plants and the warm-blooded animals bear the seeds of death in them. They are not as originally created; not that they were created immortal, but they have deteriorated. In consequence a new situation has arisen for them. I stated that the kingdom of the herbaceous plants, and the kingdom of the cold-blooded animals are unable to fulfil their potentialities; they are in need of an external stimulus. The warm-blooded animals, the ligneous plants and man do not betray their origin in their present form. Thus the first group do not develop to the full their potentialities and need some external influence to further their development. The second group, the ligneous plants, the warm-blooded animals, and man as at present constituted, do not betray their origin. The former fail to fulfil their development; the latter do not immediately disclose their origin in their present form.

If we accept this point of view we can predict to a certain extent the direction which the study of nature must take in the future. We must make a clear distinction between what the beings were destined to become and what they are at the present moment.

The question then is: how are we to account for this deterioration? Virtually the whole of nature around us, even when investigated scientifically, is not such as it was intended to be. Who is responsible for this? The blame lies with man because he succumbed to the Luciferic temptation, to what is called in the opening chapter of Genesis, the “Fall”, or original sin. To Spiritual Science this is a real and genuine drama in which man was not only involved, but which was first played out in the soul of man. At that time man was still so powerful that he involved the whole of nature in his fall. He involved in his fall the plants. Consequently they were unable to complete their development and required a stimulus from without. It was his responsibility that, alongside the cold-blooded animals, there are also warm-blooded animals, that is, animals capable of suffering pain, as he does. Man therefore has dragged the animals down with him because he succumbed to the Luciferic temptation.

People often imagine that man's relation to the universe has always been the same as it is today, that he is powerless in the face of nature, that he has no apparent influence upon the creation of the animals and plants around him. But this has not always been the case. Before the present order of nature arose man was a powerful being who not only succumbed to the Luciferic temptation, but involved the rest of creation in his fall, with the result that the moral order was completely divorced from the natural order.

Whoever expresses the view I have expressed today will not meet with the slightest understanding from those who think along the lines of natural science. None the less it is imperative that such views should be understood in the future. Despite all the services it has rendered to mankind, despite its great achievements, modern science is but an interlude. It will be replaced by another science which will recognize once more that there is a higher vision of the world in which the natural law and the moral law are two aspects of a single whole. But this higher vision will not be reached through a vague pantheism, but from a concrete insight into reality. We must recognize, as external nature unmistakably shows, that it was originally designed for something other than is disclosed in the existing order of nature today. We must have the courage to measure external nature also by the yardstick of morality. The materialistic monism of today which prides itself on excluding moral principles does so from intellectural cowardice, because it has not the courage to probe deeply enough to a point where, as was the case with Goethe, it becomes imperative to apply moral standards, just as it is necessary to apply scientific standards to the study of external nature.

Mankind would have found it impossible to think of the world as once again imbued with morality if the Mystery of Golgotha had not supervened at the beginning of our present era. We have seen that everything pertaining to the natural order has, in a certain sense, been corrupted, has fallen from a higher sphere and must recover once again its former high estate. And our “Weltanschauung” likewise must rise above its present level. Our thinking also is an integral part of this natural order. And when Du-Bois Reymond and other scholars maintain that our thinking cannot attain to reality, when they assert that we can never know the ultimates (ignorabimus) this is to some extent true. And why? Because our thinking has forsaken the realm for which it was originally predestined and must find its way back once again. Thinking has declined everywhere and those who maintain that thinking cannot attain to reality are right to some extent. This thinking, together with the rest of creation, has been corrupted and must lift itself to a higher level. The necessary impulse through which this thinking can be raised to a higher level is found in the Mystery of Golgotha, that is, in the new stimulus which the Mystery of Golgotha brought to mankind. Even our thinking is subject to some extent to original sin and must be redeemed before it can again participate in reality. And our present natural science with its necessarily a-moral outlook is simply the outcome of this deterioration of thought. If we have not the courage to admit this, we have completely lost touch with reality.

The new spiritual impulse that was brought by the Mystery of Golgotha and whose purpose was to raise up the fallen kingdom of nature becomes abundantly clear to us if we bear in mind certain concrete facts, if we ask ourselves the question: What then would have been the fate of Earth evolution after its involvement in the Fall through the action of men—I say this not as an expression of opinion but as the result of spiritual investigation, just as the findings of natural science are the result of scientific investigation—what, I repeat, would have been the fate of Earth evolution if the Mystery of Golgotha had not brought a new spiritual impulse? Just as the plant cannot fulfil its development if the ovary is removed, so the Earth could not have fulfilled its evolution if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place.

Today we have just entered the Fifth post-Atlantean epoch. The Mystery of Golgotha took place during the first third of the Fourth epoch. Everywhere we find evidence of a progressive decline; this is patent to all. Thinking that is capable of penetrating into the essential nature of things has suffered a catastrophic decline. The Copernican theory and allied theories are valuable contributions to knowledge at a superficial level, but they do not probe deeply enough. They are the outcome of man's failure over the years to go to the heart of things, a failure that will become progressively more pronounced. Today, we can cite instances, fantastic as they may seem, of the situation that must arise if this trend of thought, which is already to some extent endemic, were to continue unimpeded. This trend of thought will have to be abandoned because the impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha will gather increasing strength.

I ask you to look with me for a moment through a window into the possibilities of future evolution and not to discuss what I have said in public lest you lay yourselves open to ridicule for stating a plain truth, for today such ideas will only meet with derision. If the present outlook of academic science persists, if it should spread further afield and become increasingly pervasive—we are now living at the beginning of the Fifth postAtlantean epoch which will be followed by a Sixth and a Seventh epoch—then, unless the Mystery of Golgotha is understood at a deeper level, the situation can only grow worse. Today, if one were to speak, as I have done, of a new conception of the “Fall”, outside an esoteric circle, a circle that for years has been accustomed to ideas which provide evidence that this new conception can be scientifically demonstrated, he would of course be laughed to scorn. The materialistic, non-Christian world would have precious little confidence in him, if he were known to hold such views. But in the Sixth post-Atlantean epoch things will be totally different and there will be a different attitude amongst a certain section of mankind. There will be a bitter struggle before the Christ Impulse can be realized.

People imagine that those who strive to arrive at the truth by means of Spiritual Science can be met with the weapons of scorn and ridicule that often pass for criticism. In the Sixth epoch they will be treated medically! By that time medicaments will have been discovered which will be administered compulsorily to those who believe in a recognized canon of good and evil independent of social sanctions. A time will come when people will say: “What is all this talk about good and evil? Good and evil are determined by the State. What the State declares to be good is good; what it declares to be evil is evil. When you speak of good and evil as moral values, you are obviously ill.” And medicaments will be administered to such people in order to cure them. It is no exaggeration to say that this is the direction in which our epoch is moving; it is a pointer to the future. For the moment I will not disclose what will follow in the Seventh epoch. A time will come—for human nature cannot be changed—when people will be adjudged ill according to the concepts of natural science and the necessary steps will be taken to cure them. This is no flight of fancy. Even the most sober observation of the world around confirms what I have said. And those who have eyes to see and ears to hear see on every side the first steps in this direction.

Now the etheric body is not such as it was originally designed to be and this is the determining factor in all development subsequent to the “Fall”. It is of paramount importance to be alive to this fact and gradually to turn it to account in our life. Amongst the various etheric formative forces which our etheric body originally possessed—and originally it possessed all etheric formative forces in their full and vigorous vitality—is the warmth ether that is still active within it. This explains why man and the animals which he dragged down with him in his Fall both have warm blood. It was therefore possible for man to transform the warmth ether in a special way. This he could not do with the light ether. Admittedly he assimilates light ether, but he simply radiates it again so that a lower form of clairvoyance is enabled to perceive the etheric colours in the human aura. They are actually present there. But in addition, man was also designed for a particular tone; he was endowed with his own specific tone in the whole Harmony of the Spheres, and also with an original vitality, so that it would always have been possible for the etheric body, if it had retained its original vitality, to have preserved the immortality of the physical body. And man would have been spared the consequences. For had the etheric body preserved its original form man would have continued to dwell in those higher realms from which he has fallen. He would not have succumbed to the Luciferic temptation, for in those higher realms totally different conditions would have prevailed. And in former times those conditions really did exist. Great souls like Saint-Martin were to some extent still aware that such conditions had once existed and therefore they spoke of these conditions as a former reality.

Let us recall for a moment one of these conditions. Man could not have spoken at that time as he does today, for speech had not yet been differentiated into separate languages (note 5). This differentiation was due to the fact that speech became static. It was never intended originally that language should remain static. You must have a clear picture of what was originally intended for man. If ever a fraction of Goethe's world-conception is realized in the life of man—I do not mean theoretically, but in actual practice—then people will realize what are the implications of this statement. Suppose for a moment that man still had the potentialities with which he was originally endowed. He would have looked out upon a world from which he received external impressions; he would be aware not only of colours and tones, not only of external impressions, but also of spirit emanating from things on every hand—from the colour red the spirit of red, from the colour green the spirit of green, and so on. At all times he would have been aware of the spirit. This was anticipated by Goethe when he said: if the Urpflanze, the archetypal plant, is nothing more than an idea, then I can see my ideas with my own eyes and they are realities in the external world like colours. This is prescient of the future. I beg you to accept as a solid, concrete fact that the spirit is an active force that streams into us. If, however, the external impressions were to stream into us with the same vital energy as the spirit, we would respond to each of these impressions in our breathing process—for our breathing always responds to the impressions we receive through our brain and our senses. For example, an impression of red invades us from without; from within, our breathing responds to this impression with tone. Tone issues from man with every impression he receives from without. There was no such thing as a static language; each object each impression was immediately answered by tone from within. There was complete correspondence between the word and the external impression. Speech in its later development is simply the external projection, the residuum of that original, living and flexible language which was once common to all. And the expression “the lost word” which is so little understood today is a reminder of this original language. The opening words of the Gospel of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God” recall living “at-one-ment” with the spirit—this primal spirit, when man not only had eyes to see the external world, but also to perceive the spirit, when, through the breathing process he responded to visual impressions with a tone. It is to this communion with the divine that the opening words of St. John's Gospel refer.

So much for the one aspect. On the other hand, in respiration (in so far as it extends to the head), as we inhale or exhale there is not only an interaction with the external world, but a pulsation is set up within our whole organism. The respiration that extends to the head responds to the impressions we receive from without. But in the lower organism our respiration responds to the metabolic process. If man still possessed the original vitality of his etheric body, then something totally different would be associated with his respiration than is associated with it today. For the metabolic process is not wholly independent of respiration; its dependence is simply concealed, it lies beneath the threshold of consciousness. But man would be conscious of it if he had preserved the original vitality of his etheric body, if in the course of his life he had not lost this vitality to some extent, for it is this loss of vitality, not only through the physical body, but from within, that is the cause of death. If man had retained his original potentialities, it would have been possible for him, via his metabolism, not only to secrete waste products, but to produce something of a material nature. So much for the one possibility. On the other hand, the exhalations of man would have contained formative forces and the formative forces of his exhalations would have laid hold of the material substance and thus he would have created in his environment the animal kingdom as it was originally intended to be. For the animal kingdom is a secretion of man and was intended to be so, in order that man could extend his dominion over the kingdom of nature. It is in this way that we should think of the animal kingdom. All this is the conclusion drawn from the investigations I have laid down before you.

Today natural science is inclined to think that originally the animals were much more closely related to man. The truth is not that man has ascended the ladder of evolution as the crude theory of Darwin imagines but that today we can no longer grasp the real relationship of man to the animal kingdom. The vegetable kingdom does not fulfil its development on the terrestrial plane, and the animal kingdom likewise does not develop its origin on this plane. Naturalists speculate on how animals which co-exist with man have evolved. The reason for their co-existence must be sought in the sphere from which man has descended. It cannot be found where Darwin and his materialistic commentators expected to find it; it will be found in the mighty events of prehistoric times.

And bear in mind also what I mentioned recently: that spiritual investigation shows that in the sixth and seventh millennium there will be a decline in fertility. Women will become increasingly sterile. The present method of reproduction will no longer be possible; it must be transposed to a higher plane. In order that the world may not fall into a state of decadence, when opinions as to what is good and evil will be treated medically, in order that good and evil, all personal determination of what is good and evil, should not be recorded merely as a matter to be decided by State regulation or human conventions in order that this should not arise at a time when the natural order that at present prevails in the human species will of necessity have ceased to maintain the race—for just as in women fertility ceases at a certain age, so too the present method of reproduction in the human species will cease at a certain stage of Earth evolution—in order to forestall this, the Christ Impulse was bestowed upon mankind.

Thus the Christ Impulse was implanted in the whole of Earth evolution. I doubt if there is a single person who imagines that the Christ Impulse loses anything of its majesty or sublimity when it is incorporated in this way in the whole world order; when, in other words, it is restored to its cosmic rank, and when men really acknowledge that at the beginning of Earth evolution there existed, and at the end of Earth evolution there will exist, an order different from the present natural order, and a moral order that transcends the physical. The Christ Impulse was necessary in order that the end of Earth evolution should be worthy of the beginning. It was for this purpose that the Christ Impulse entered our Earth evolution and it is in this sense that we must understand it. And those who accept the words of the Gospels, not in an external sense, but with the true faith demanded by Christ, can find in them the necessary attributes whereby an increasing understanding of the Christ Impulse can gradually be developed, an understanding that can meet the demands of external investigation and once again relate the Christ Impulse to the cosmic world order.

There are certain passages in the Bible that can only be understood with the help of Spiritual Science. It is written in the Bible: “One jot or tittle shall in no wise pass from the law.” Many expositors interpret these words as implying that Christ wished to preserve the Mosaic law intact and simply added to it His own contribution. They claimed that this was the real meaning of the passage. Now the passage has no such meaning. A passage should not be torn from its context, for everything in the Gospels is closely interrelated. When we study this interrelation—at the moment I cannot enter into the details which would provide convincing proof of what I am about to say—we find the following.—On the occasion when He spoke of the “jot or tittle”, Christ implied that, in olden times, when the law was first framed, man still possessed his ancient inheritance of wisdom. He had not declined to the extent he has at the present day, when the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, when he must change his mental attitude. In olden times there were still prophets, or seers who were able to discover the law through the power of the spirit within them. “You who are now living in the kingdom of this world are no longer capable of adding to the law or of changing the law. If the law is to remain just, not a jot or tittle must be changed. The time is now past when the law can be changed after the ancient fashion; it must remain as it is. (But at the same time we must endeavour to rediscover its original meaning with the new powers that the Christ Impulse has brought.) You, the Scribes, are incapable of understanding the Scriptures. You must recover the spirit in which they were originally written. You are without, in the kingdom of the world; no new laws can originate there. But to those who are within the kingdom is granted the impulse of that living Force”—which, as I said recently, had to be transmitted orally, for it was not recorded in writing by Christ. “It cannot be codified, cannot be written into the law. It is something that is totally different from the Mosaic law, something that must be grasped spiritually. You, the Scribes, must approach the world in a new light, as something more than a purely phenomenal world.”

Thus the first powerful influence was given to mankind to see the world as something more than a world perceptible to the senses alone. It is only slowly and gradually that we can accommodate ourselves to this new outlook. Occasionally one feels impelled to speak from a Christian standpoint and then one becomes the butt of ridicule. So too Schelling and Hegel, although not regarded as orthodox Christians especially by the Catholics, sometimes allowed themselves to express genuine Christian sentiments. And they have been sharply criticized for it. The objection levelled against them was: “Nature is not as you describe it.” To which they were so misguided as to reply: “So much the worse for Nature!” This reply, it is true, is not “scientific” as we understand the word today, but it is Christian in spirit, the spirit in which Christ Himself spoke when He said: However much the Scribes may speak of laws, they do not speak of the real Law. Not only has a jot or tittle passed from the Mosaic law, but the law itself has changed in many respects. The Scribes speak from the kingdom of this world and not from the Kingdom of Heaven. He who speaks from the Kingdom of Heaven speaks of a cosmic order of which the natural order is only a subordinate part. To this one must reply: So much the worse for nature! To those who objected to Goethe's claim—that plant propagation was not determined by sexual reproduction—on the grounds that scientific observation shows that the ovaries are fertilized by windblown pollen—he too would have replied, if he had given his honest opinion: So much the worse for the plant kingdom if it is so deeply committed to the natural order.

On the other hand, minds such as Goethe's will always insist that man's understanding must be enlarged, that man must become sensitively aware so that he will be able to think, feel and experience that up to the sixth and seventh millennium the spoken word will once again become a reality and will have the same creative power in the external world as the power of fecundation in the seeds of the plant kingdom today. The word which has become abstract today must regain the original creative power it once possessed “in the beginning”. Those who, in the light of Spiritual Science are reluctant to amplify the opening words of the Gospel of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was a God”, by adding “and the Word one day will live again”, have not fully grasped the Christian message. For Christ Jesus has set forth His teaching in a form that conflicts with the external world. It is to Him that we owe the impulse to regeneration. The world meanwhile has declined rapidly and the Christ Impulse must be increasingly reinforced before this decline can be arrested. To a certain extent we have gone some way towards reversing this doctrine since the Mystery of Golgotha, but for the most part without being consciously aware of it. Man must learn once again to participate consciously in cosmic events. He must begin to realize not merely: “when I think, something takes place in my brain”, but “when I think, something takes place in the Cosmos”! And he must learn to think in such a way that just as he can entrust his thinking to the Cosmos, so too he can once again unite his being with the Cosmos.

The necessary changes that will have to be effected in our external life in order that our social life may be invested with the Christ Impulse are ignored by those who are already aware of this need. There are reasons for their reticence. One can only speak of them when certain prior conditions have been met; only brief indications can be given here. You will recall that earlier in this lecture I opened a window on to the future when I pointed out that those who recognize other laws than those decreed by the State will be treated medically. Before this time arrives, however, a reaction will have set in. One section of mankind will adopt the measures referred to above, but another section will be the bearer of the future Christ Impulse. A battle will ensue between the two groups between the past and the future. And the Christ Impulse will win the day. When the etheric Christ appears in the present century the Impulse that streams from Him will be able to awaken such a response in the souls of men that governments based on ambition, vanity, prejudice or error, will gradually become an impossibility. It will be possible to discover principles of government free from these human frailties but only if they are founded on a true and concrete acceptance of the Christ Impulse. Christian impulses will not be determined by parliamentary decrees; they will enter the world in a different way.

This tendency exists already. Alongside the incorporation of the Christ Impulse into world evolution there is a longing to incorporate the Christ Impulse into social evolution. In order to achieve this goal a considerable reorientation of thinking is called for. And great strength of mind will be necessary before people can accept seriously what I have said about the Christ. When Jesus had delivered His message to the multitude they were filled with wrath and sought to cast Him from the mountain top. The course of world evolution is not so simple as one imagines. We must realize that those who have some truth to impart may already have encountered an attitude of mind such as Christ encountered in those who sought to cast Him from the mountain.

In an age whose motto is—moderation at all costs, never give offence, avoid a reputation for iconoclasm—in such an age the ground is being prepared for the entry of Christ into the social evolution of mankind and perhaps with good reason in this particular age. It is being prepared in the subconscious; little evidence of it is to be seen on the surface where the unchristian principle of opportunism prevails, that unchristian principle that dare not openly declare like Christ: “The Kingdom of Heaven is not for you, ye Scribes and Pharisees.”—I ask you to pause and consider what has replaced the Scribes and Pharisees today. Gospel commentators are wont to excuse or explain away many of Christ's statements. And recently a priest, certainly not of the orthodox persuasion, who has uttered many fine statements about Christ Jesus, went so far as to say that Christ was obviously not a practical person for He advised people to live like the fowls of the air, “for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns”. Such advice would not take us very far today. This preacher did not make very serious efforts to grasp the impulse which permeates the Gospels. People find it difficult to cope with precepts such as “whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also; if any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. Give to him that asketh of thee and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away.” (Matt. V, 39-42.) [The book says this passage is in Matt. II, 40-42 – e.Ed.] When we read all that has been said in extenuation of this rather unpopular passage we have to admit that mankind today has gone half way towards excusing Christ for the strange sentiments He sometimes expressed. They are prepared to excuse much if they can only retain the Gospels—after their own fashion. But in matters such as this it is far more important to understand what is implied. And this is difficult because these things are closely interrelated. But at least we can have an intimation of this interrelationship if we read on from the passage: “and of him that taketh away thy goods ask thou not again” (which occurs in the Gospel of St. Luke) to the more explicit statement in the Gospel of St. Matthew (VII, 12): “Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even to them.” These words, of course, refer to what has gone before. Christ is here appealing to faith and trust.

If Christ had shared only the current superficial ideas He could never have said: “If any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.” He is speaking here of laws that govern social life and conduct—such are for the Scribes and High Priests—He is speaking of the Kingdom of Heaven. In this passage He wishes to emphasize that in the Kingdom of Heaven other laws prevail than those of the external world. And if you compare the passage in the Gospel of St. Luke with that of St. Matthew—and much depends upon the correct translation—you will realize that He wished to say that a faith must be awakened in man which would dispense with the laws and statutes concerning the stealing of another's coat and cloak. Christ wished to show that it was pointless simply to teach, “Thou shalt not steal”. You will recall that He said: “a jot shall in no wise pass from the law”. But as they were originally understood those words no longer provide any impulse for the present epoch. We must really develop within ourselves the power, under the present circumstances, to offer our cloak to whomsoever has taken our coat. If we follow the precept that “whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”, and especially if this principle can be adopted by all, it would be impossible for anyone to steal another's cloak. No one will steal another's cloak if the victim has the strength of mind to say: whoever takes my coat, to him I will give my cloak also.

In a social order where this attitude of mind prevails there will be an end to stealing. This was the implication of Christ's words. The Kingdom of Heaven is contrasted with the kingdom of the world. We must develop the power of faith. Morality must be founded upon this inner power. Every moral act must be a miracle, not merely a fact of nature. Man must be capable of performing miracles. Since the original world order has descended from its former high estate, the purely natural order must be replaced by a supernatural moral order which transcends the natural order. It is not sufficient merely to keep to the old commandments which had been given to the world under totally different conditions, nor is it sufficient to change them; man must adapt himself to a supernatural moral order, so that if someone steals my coat I shall be prepared to give him my cloak also, and not proceed against him. The Gospel of St. Matthew clearly states that Christ wished to debar judicial proceedings. In that event there would have been no point in adding to the passage about the coat and cloak the injunction: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” unless Christ had intended to refer to another kingdom, to a kingdom in which miracles take place. For Christ performed signs and wonders through His sovereign, supernal power of faith. No one can do what Christ has done as part of the natural order, if he cannot bring himself to see in man something more than a nature being. Now what Christ demands of us is that, in the moral sphere at least, our ideas should transcend the limitations of external reality. In external life we act on the principle: if someone takes your coat, then get it back again! But on this basis it is impossible to establish a social order that complies with the Christ Impulse. In Christ's kingdom there must be something more in our moral concepts than a mere concern with, or the satisfaction of material interests. Otherwise the following passages would be strange bedfellows. First, “whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. If any man take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also. Give to every man that asketh of thee and of him that taketh away thy goods ask not again. Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” And then contrast with these precepts the words: “If you smite someone on the right cheek, then see to it that he offers the other also, so that you can experience the satisfaction a second time. If you steal a man's coat, do not hesitate to take his cloak also. If you want anything from anyone, see that he gives it you, etc.” This negates the principle: Whatever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.

From the point of view of the practical world these injunctions of Christ are meaningless, a mere sequence of empty phrases. They first take on meaning if we presuppose that those who would take an active part in the salvation of the world which shall be initiated by the Christ Impulse through which the world will be raised once again to higher realms, must start from principles which do not apply to the external world only. It will then be possible to give practical effect to moral ideas and conceptions once again.

To understand the Gospels in the light of the Mystery of Golgotha demands spiritual courage, a courage which mankind sorely needs today. And this implies that we must take seriously all that Christ said about the opposition between the kingdom of this world, the consequence of the progressive decline of mankind, and the Kingdom of Heaven. Those who in times such as the present (1917) are celebrating the Easter Festival, may already feel a growing desire to find the courage to understand once again the Mystery of Golgotha and to be united with the Impulse of Golgotha. Everywhere the Gospels speak of courage; they insistently call for courage to follow that Impulse which Christ Jesus has implanted in the evolution of the Earth.

In this lecture I have endeavoured to give you a clearer insight into the Mystery of Golgotha in order to impress upon you that aspect which shows how this Mystery must again be incorporated in the whole Cosmic order and can be understood only when we recognize that the Gospels speak with the tongues of Angels and not with the tongues of men. In the course of its development the academic theology of the nineteenth century has tried to reduce the Gospels to the level of human speech. Our immediate task is to learn to read the Gospels once more as the Word of God. In this connection Spiritual Science will contribute to a better understanding of the Gospels.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. In sexual reproduction of plants fertilization takes place by means of pollination (windblown pollen, transference of pollen by insects, etc.). Asexual reproduction is of a vegetative nature by means of bulbs, bulbules, tubers and runners. The fern shows alternate sexual and asexual reproduction. The spores fall to the ground where a new plant is formed. The plant which develops from a spore is attached to the ground by the prothallus (root-like hairs) which bears a number of male and female organs.

Note 2. Baubo tried to divert the sorrowing Demeter by cynical jests or obscene antics. Goethe applies the name elsewhere to an immodest merry-maker in the Roman carnival, in Faust. She appears in the Walpurgis Night scene.

Note 3. Ultra—one holding extreme views of the ultra royalist party in France, 1827. (The party of ultras split into parties of the “right” and the “left”.)

Note 4. Ligneous plants are wood-forming plants, e.g. trees, shrubs, etc. Non-ligneous plants are herbaceous plants, e.g. annuals, herbs, etc.

Note 5. On this subject see: Dr. Arnold Wadler, Der Turm von Babel. Urgemeingeschaft der Sprachen. Rudolf Geering Verlag, Stuttgart, 1935. Translated as One Language: American Press for Art and Science, 1948.

When it comes to ideas that are intended to be realized in practical life, complete fallacies are basically less harmful than half-truths and three-quarters truths. For complete fallacies can be refuted relatively easily and are unlikely to last long in public life. Half-truths and three-quarters truths are extraordinarily strong temptations in view of the complexity of life. They are carried through life by various passions, by the emotions of the mind, until perhaps, after severe struggles or perhaps after severe suffering, one comes to the conclusion that such half-truths and quarter-truths are just that and cannot be applied to life as they are conceived.

Anyone who looks at modern life with an unbiased eye, especially after the hard years of trial that civilized humanity has now gone through, will have to make such a confession, as I have just made, especially to what has long been called the social question in the present day. For basically, a whole bunch of half-truths and quarter-truths are being bundled together in this social question from all sides.

Now, the attempt has been made in my book “The Key Points of the social question in the necessities of life of the present and the future”, to look at what this modern social work, this modern social question, actually contains, apart from the half-truths and quarter-truths of the programs, and what it can realistically steer towards. What is set out in these “key issues” should then be further developed for Switzerland, for example in the “Social Future” published by Dr. Boos.

Before I go into my actual task for this evening, please allow me to make a very brief personal comment that is, however, related to the topic. What I have attempted is a conscious attempt that is aware of its imperfections. What I have attempted in my book “The Crux of the Social Question” did not arise from any given political direction, does not want to take any given political position, and does not want to directly interfere in the given political life of the present. It has arisen out of a very long observation of life and does not want to be any kind of program, any kind of abstract social idea, but wants to be a result of practical life itself, as it has presented itself to me since I had the opportunity - through the fate of my life it has come about that I have had the opportunity to really get to know, I may say, all, may I say, classes and categories of people in the contemporary world, to get to know them in their mutual demands, in their mutual misunderstandings, in their cooperation and non-cooperation. And since in my earlier years, whenever I had the opportunity to touch on subjects such as today's, I basically had to deal mainly with spiritual science as such, I may say that nothing whatever is influenced by any party affiliation in what I will have to express before you. My life has led me through many things, but in any case never through any party. And what has been the result of decades of social observation, always undertaken from the point of view of spiritual science, will, ladies and gentlemen, also prevent me from ever being able to participate in any given party program.

So it is suggestions for real practical implementation that are at issue. It is only natural that such proposals, when discussed, must be couched in more or less seemingly abstract sentences; but these abstract sentences are only intended to express what is life experience, which can certainly serve as a basis for practical life organization.

If we look at social life from such a non-programmatic but practical point of view, as it has developed for more for more than half a century, especially in the civilized world as it concerns us, we look at this social life, we will find that the perception of this social life is fundamentally different, and has been fundamentally different for decades, for more than half a century, between the leading classes of humanity on the one hand and the broad, broad masses of the proletarian people on the other.

From living together – I was a teacher at a Berlin workers' education school for many years – I was able to get to know the way of thinking of the broad proletarian masses, and not only the way of thinking, but also the way of feeling and emotion, as it expresses itself in what then crystallizes into the social demands of the present and also of the near future.

What then emerged in my “Key Points of the Social Question” is a condensation of what is based on the insights that I believed I always had to gain from observation and from the insights that showed me that, with what underlies the demands of the broad proletarian masses as a conscious idea, as a conscious party program, we cannot make any progress in the social question, , that this proletarian mass has surrendered itself to half-truths and quarter-truths in a fateful sense, and that precisely the one who is serious and honest in the social question cannot stop at what is formulated under the influence of the work of Karl Marx and his followers, more than half a century ago – the beginning was more than half a century ago. As I said, my “Key Points of the Social Question” were written under the impression of this realization, at a moment when one might believe that such truths, such insights, can be understood through the confirmation they have received from the world of facts. They were written when the disaster that had been brought about by the war, the so-called World War, had been raging for years. I do not mean the outcome of the war, I mean the fact that this disaster, this terrible killing, could happen to modern civilized humanity at all.

In the early spring of 1914, I had to express in Vienna that who, from the spiritual-scientific point of view, looks at the development of modern humanity, has the idea that modern social development resembles an illness, a kind of ulcer formation, which could break out in a terrible way in the near future. This book was written at a time when a current that had developed out of programmatic Marxism should have led to a practical result in Russia. What must be called the terrible failure of Marxism in Russia, which is obvious to anyone who is not biased, could have been the first confirmation of the ideas expressed in The Essential Points of the Social Question. Since then, further confirmations have occurred. I need only point to the failure of the Hungarian Revolution, which had to crush so many hopes. And finally, I need only point out that the German Revolution of November 9, 1918, has not yet been completed, but is certainly in prospect.

Those who are familiar with the circumstances can know today that this German Revolution is a terribly loudly proclaimed experiment in world history, an experiment which shows, as never before, how incapable the ideas are, which the 19th century produced in many circles in the social field, of bringing about any practical organization of life. Let us look at these ideas from one side. Let us look at them as they are felt by the modern proletariat under the influence of those impulses that stem from so-called Marxism, as founded by Karl Marx and Engels, which is truly not a mere theory, but is alive in the feelings and perceptions of the broad masses.

This Marxism was the first to create in wide circles of the proletarian population what might be called disbelief in a spiritual world. To the discerning, this disbelief in the spiritual world on the part of the proletariat appears more important than anything else. Ideology is the word that one encounters when one is accustomed not to think about the proletariat, but to feel and live with it. Ideology means, or at least should mean, the whole spiritual life. Law, custom, morality, art, science, religion, all this is basically only like a smoke that rises as something merely imagined from the economy, imagined, that rises from the only true reality, which consists in the economic relations of production, in the economic processes.

Under the influence of the personalities mentioned, this proletariat saw the true reality in what the economic system is. The way people organize their economic lives, the way they participate in economic life, and the way they relate to the means of production in economic life – as they are taught – comes from mere material labor. What arises in them as ideas, what arises in them as moral ideals, what is ultimately religion, what is science, what is art: none of this has any inner spiritual reality, so they say, but all of it is like a mirror image of pure economic reality.

And if you look at what this view has been formed from, you have to say: This view is the legacy of the world view that has emerged over the last three to four centuries under the influence of the leading, guiding circles of humanity. It is not true that modern social life has come about solely through capitalism and through what has been associated with this capitalism in modern times through modern technology. No, it is the case that, at the same time as modern capitalism and modern technology emerged, a certain world view emerged that only wants to deal with chemical, mechanical, and physical facts and does not want to rise to an independent understanding of spiritual life. The technical complexity of modern economic life has succeeded in flooding everything, as it were, with the influences and impulses of this economic life. Just as economic life was separated from technology, and technology from modern science, so a purely scientific worldview emerged, a worldview that consisted only of ideas, concepts, and thoughts related to the external mechanical, chemical, and physical life. This modern life had no power to grasp any other ideas, other world-view thoughts, than those that broadly relate to the inauguration of economic life, to the inauguration of modern technical operations. This scientific direction, this whole modern thinking, was incapable of other ideas. Through this modern thinking one could answer the question of how external mechanical processes take place and how to set them in motion in practical life; one could communicate chemically and physically through this science, but one thing remained absent from these ideas, from these thoughts of science, that which is closest to man: man himself. Rather, it was better said, one only understood the human being insofar as he was composed of material substances, mechanical, physical and chemical forces. But since the human being is also spirit and soul, one did not really understand the human being in this way. And one had a world view from which thoughts about the human being were actually excluded. No one answered in this modern way the question of how physical processes arise, as this modern science answered in an incomparably perfect way. No one answered this modern man in a modern way the question so perfectly: How do mental processes arise? What is man in his innermost being?

And you see, the leading and guiding circles kept as heirlooms, as traditions, what had been handed down from religion, from art, from old worldviews, from old customs. This filled the soul of the modern ruling circles. They cultivated this as something that meant something to them alongside the scientific world view, alongside what was incorporated into technology and economics as science. And so a dual trend arose in the inner life of the leading and guiding circles: one trend, which, so to speak, far removed from life, posed religious questions, formulated moral principles, and formed art and certain world views. Ask yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, how far removed from the practical side of life, for example, the modern merchant, or the modern industrialist or the modern civil servant, is from what he feels and experiences as a religious person, from what he his sense of goodness as a human being, his aesthetic feelings, how far removed that is from what happens in his life and is expressed in his office and in his bookkeeping. There are two very different currents of life. And the one, the spiritual current of life, which is basically an heirloom from ancient times, has no power to penetrate into the outer life. In what is the outer practice of life, the contingencies of the day live, that which, I might say, lives in the practice of life by itself. Then one likes to withdraw from life and regards the religious, the spiritual-moral, the artistic life as something that floats above life. But it was only by cultivating this inner spiritual life, separate from the practical outer life, that the leading and governing circles of modern civilization were able to give their souls any content at all.

The proletarian, who was removed from the old crafts and put at the machine, at the abstract machine, which has so little in common with in the human soul, the proletarian could not, because his feelings, which he could only develop while standing at the machine, did not correspond to them, he could not take over the old traditions, customs, law, art, religion, the world view that had been handed down from older times and in which the leading classes lived despite the modern soulless and spiritless technical economy. What emerged from this economy itself remained for him. And so he formed a world view, so his leaders formed a world view for him, which is spiritless and soulless, an ideology.

An ideology can be theoretically represented. An ideology can be thought up. With an ideology, one can even appear very clever. But you cannot live with an ideology, because it hollows out the soul. The human soul can only truly live when it does not believe that its thoughts are mere unreal thoughts; but when it can be aware that what lives in it connects to a living, real, spiritual world.

And so much is talked about in the socialist program; one does not even need to look at what is being said, because what happens in people's minds in this way is very different from what really lives in their souls. But what really lives in the souls of the broad masses of the intellectual population today is spiritual desolation. This is proof that one can think with what is modern world view, but one cannot live with it. That is the first part of the social question.

I know very well how many people, from their point of view, from their conscious point of view, rightly say: You are talking about the social question as a spiritual question. For us, it is about balancing social differences, social differentiations. For us, it is about ensuring that bread is distributed equally among people. Yes, that is a superficial view which only those can hold who do not penetrate beneath the surface of things. For the social question is present in the feelings, in the subconscious life of the modern proletariat. Try as much as you like to satisfy the purely material needs of this proletariat, if you could - you will not be able to - you would see: the social question will have to arise in a new form. It will not go away as long as intellectual life has the same relationship to the proletarian soul as I have just described. For people only believe that it comes from material interests. In truth, it comes from the hollowed-out souls, from the meaningless lives.

This must be recognized as the true basis of those social sentiments and of that widespread yearning which are found among the proletariat.

The second aspect is revealed to those who, as I said before, have not only learned to think and feel like the proletariat, but can actually think and feel with the proletariat. He comes to realize what it means for the modern proletarian when it is repeatedly made clear to him, with reference to Marxism, that he stands at the machine, he works, but he receives only wages for his work. You pay for his labor with his wages, just as you pay for goods on the market.

The modern proletarian feels that human labor cannot be a commodity, that it should not be sold and bought on the market like a commodity! From this arises what the modern proletarian calls his class consciousness. Out of this class consciousness he wants to create the possibility that human labor power will no longer be a commodity; for he has the feeling that what he works at not only produces the values that play a role in economic life as justified values, but that it produces surplus value, which is taken from him by those who are the leading, leading circles, as he believes, the capitalist circles.

And so the connection between surplus value and the inhumane buying and selling of human labor as a commodity is what moves the proletarian as a second point.

And the third point, what is it? You get to know it when you observe how, basically, the leading and guiding circles have developed a significantly different inclination for social issues than those that were imposed on them by the proletariat making demands. It must be said that few people in the leading and ruling circles are inclined, of their own accord, to really engage with the core issues of the social question, simply because those who are in a position are always much less inclined to think about the development of that position than those who are just trying to gain a position. But as a result, more in the subconscious, in the instinctive, than in the clear consciousness, in the broad circles of the proletariat, the view had to arise that it could expect nothing at all from the leading, guiding circles, that it had to rely on itself alone for a solution to the social question. And so something arose that is one of the most disastrous things in recent historical development. What I am about to say is based on a word that is often spoken and often heard, but whose deeper meaning is little understood. You probably know that the Communist Manifesto, which in 1848 initiated the Marxist social movement, concludes with the words: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” It is understandable for those who get to know the modern proletarian movement that this word has come. And the effect of this word is fateful in the most terrible sense, for it points from the outset to what is to happen, to struggle. And this struggle is still to be relied upon today. It relies on struggle. It does not rely on the fact that people come together under the momentum and thrust of an idea that is to be realized in practical life; it does not rely on faith in the power of the spirit. This word, it relies on the external material connection of a class of people, on the unspiritual. And it expresses itself in this word clearly and unmistakably the disbelief in the spiritual in the most disastrous way, the more this word inculcates the souls. And it may also be said that the more thoughtlessly it is listened to, without grasping its fateful significance in world history, the more humanity must sail into unbelief in the spiritual, and cannot, because material interests unite, as they belong to a class, to what life must move in its inmost depths: to belief in the power of spiritual impulses.

This is how the so-called modern social question presents itself from the point of view of the proletariat. And this proletariat has seen that certain social ills, which it feels in its own body, have developed under the influence of capital and modern technology. What does it mean? It means that these damages will cease when private property is converted into common property, when what is now managed and administered by individuals is managed and administered by the community.

And so we see how the proletarian demand repeatedly sounds in the call that is already taking on a catastrophic form today: conversion of the means of production, conversion of private ownership of the means of production into common ownership and common administration of the means of production. Only then, the proletarian believes, will salvation come to him, when no longer the individual administers the means of production according to the profit interest, but when the human community, in which everyone can participate in a democratic way, administers these means of production. And because the proletariat believes itself betrayed by the people who belong to the leading, guiding circles, because it believes that these leading, guiding circles are not at all interested in what a shaping of social life is from their interests, so what has developed over the course of many decades is heard together in the call for a kind of dictatorship of the proletariat itself in the replacement of old administrative and social conditions with new ones.

But these things must be seen clearly, not from a party point of view, these things must be seen completely impartially. Perhaps one can only see clearly if one also considers the opposite point of view. Whether the proletarian demands, as they are formulated today in a large number of newspapers and books, and how they consciously live in the souls of the proletarians, whether they are right or not, that is the question. For real movements are not about ideas, but about what lives in the will of men. It must be borne in mind that millions of people believe these things, and that it is not a matter of refuting these things in the abstract, be it in this way or that, but rather of getting to the point where their practical application is really understood in terms of life and reality. Precisely because the leading and guiding circles, I might say, had as a by-product of their economic activity the fact that they did not have to struggle with life, or at least did not have to struggle in such a way as the proletariat, precisely for this reason, the social question has not developed to the same extent as it did for the proletariat, where all the questions I have mentioned now, I would say, merge into a kind of stomach or bread or money question. The social question has not developed in such a way as to become an immediate question of practical life, of the personal interest of each individual, because personal interests are promoted like a by-product under the influence of modern life. Therefore, the leading, guiding circles have not experienced in the same field what the proletarian world has had. You can take it however you like, the great tempter or seducer Karl Marx or the ingenious, pioneering Karl Marx, it depends on your point of view, but there was no similar Karl Marx for the leading, guiding circles. Therefore, it seems today that basically the right light is not falling on the proletarian demands. They can be proved, they can be refuted; but other views are also possible, which can be proved or refuted just as well, and which represent the opposite view.

You see, the proletarian interprets everything that develops as a human world of ideas in art, custom, science and so on as a kind of mirror image of the purely economic conditions, which only he can see. For him, human thoughts are only that which is triggered in man like a mirror image of economic interests, of the conditions of production. Everything that people think and feel arises from the economic conditions of production – so says the proletarian.

The opposite could easily be proven by the other side with exactly the same right to prove it. And let us take just one example: it is child's play, I might say, to prove that this whole modern economic life, as we have it especially in the civilization of the Occident and its offshoot, America, that this whole human economic life, as it dominates the modern world, is a result of human thoughts, which in turn are born out of the spiritual world. This can be proven quite concretely. There is no need to get stuck in abstract ideas. Take the following.

If we consider the conditions before the war, it can be said that in the Western world about four to five hundred million tons of coal are produced annually. For the mechanical work among people, through industry and other things, these four hundred to five hundred million tons of coal are processed in modern economic life. I am calculating by putting this number, four to five hundred million tons, in front of you, everything that is necessary for private property and so on. That which flows into modern life through these millions of tons of coal, which are processed in the machines, in the form of power and technology that then becomes economic power, can be calculated, one can calculate what it does for humanity. What matters is that the comparison must be made with horsepower and with human power. If we now assume that a person works about eight hours a day, a simple calculation shows how many people would have to apply how much manpower if they were to achieve the same thing by applying human power that is achieved in a technical way in the further technical processing by these millions of tons of coal. The strange thing is that the calculation shows that seven to eight hundred million people would have to work, would have to give their labor, if they wanted to achieve the same thing through human labor that is achieved with the energy derived from these coals.

You see, this possibility of incorporating coal energy into economic life comes solely from the thoughts that have developed under the influence of the spiritual development of the West. A comparison with the economic conditions of the Orient shows this. There are, let us say, 250 million people who have the strength to carry out the ideas that have arisen from their minds, and who have provided everything needed to set this modern economic life in motion; there remain about 1,250 million people who have not participated in this life. If we calculate what these people achieve in the same daily working hours, we get a figure that is far lower than that which indicates how much is achieved through coal mining and coal processing in the mechanical field. But that means nothing other than that what is specifically modern economic life is a result of human thoughts. And these human thoughts truly did not arise out of matter; they are the result of the development of Western culture. And it can be proved that through these thoughts, through this way of working, human forces of a further 700 to 800 million are added to our 1500 million people on earth. So that in reality we are working on the earth today as if not only 1500 million were working, but as if well over 2000 million people were working. It can easily be proved that all this, which is the actual structure, the actual character of this modern economic life, from which the social questions have arisen, that this is a result of the development of the mind, that this mind is by no means an ideology, but that this spirit is the creator of economic life.

That is, on the one hand, there is the proletarian view, and on the other hand, the usual opposing view, which can be proven just as well as the other view. And just as one can calculate in a Marxist way how people work to create added value, which is the value that prevails in legitimate economic life, one can prove, just as scientifically and rigorously as Marxism does, that all of modern economic life stems from the ideas of the leading, guiding circles of people, and that what is paid out as wages is worked out of what the guiding, leading circles achieve for humanity socially. Just as one can calculate the surplus value that accrues from labor on the one hand, one can just as easily calculate the total of all wages as that which accrues from what the leading, guiding circles, from the bearers of human thought, achieve .

But that has not happened, and I am convinced that it has not happened for the sole reason that, on the other side, out of carelessness, a “Karl Marx” did not work who would have proved this just as well as the real Karl Marx proved his theory for the proletariat. What I am going to tell you now is truly not some abstract invention. Just as I have demonstrated it from the extraction of coal, so you can demonstrate it from the facts of economic life that the opposite of what Marx demonstrated is true, only to a limited extent for surplus value.

If we consider the structure that modern technology has economic life, it should be borne in mind that this modern technology arises from human thought and that this in turn arises from intellectual life, and that a certain concentration of the means of production is necessary for special times, which, simply because of advanced technology, must be concentrated and managed by individuals. If you put forward the abstract demand for surplus value, which can be gained from means of production that are to be managed communally, in opposition to what modern economic life and modern production conditions have developed – concentrations of the means of production that are now in the hands of individuals – then you will see what happens! Of course, one can raise the abstract demand that what has been achieved so far by the leading and guiding circles, who have provided the ideas for the structure of the modern economy, be taken from them and managed by the community. But to those who do not look into the workings of life from the point of view of human feeling and emotion, but observe them impartially, this appears as a threatening thought for the near future of humanity: If it could really happen that the takeover of what has been achieved so far by individuals [...] - even if it has caused damage in its wake - if that were to be achieved by the community, then it would probably happen to this community as it happened to the Japanese in the mid-seventies of the last century, who, out of a certain national pride, took over the first warships from the English. The English also offered them instructors for these warships, but they sent the English instructors away and wanted to do it themselves. And now one could see from the shore the beautiful spectacle of how the gunboats continually turned in circles; they could not move forward because the Japanese had not learned how to do it. It had been forgotten to show how to close and open the valve that releases the excess steam. And so they could do nothing but wait until the steam power was completely used up.

Thus, if we look at how things are really going in social life today, we fear that what the individuals in the leading and guiding circles achieve, albeit with damage, out of expertise and skill, could be taken over by the abstract community, which judges democratically, how what is to be produced, with the technical administrations and so on, is to be arranged.

These are all things that do not depend on party programs, that do not result from a party template, but that do result for the person who in a practical and unbiased way, and really has the will to respond to this life in a practical and unbiased way.

And the first thing that will result from this is also the first thing I had to conclude in my “Key Points of the Social Question in the Necessities of Life in the Present and Future”. What is needed above all for humanity is, in addition to knowledge of nature, which is truly the creator of modern technology and thus of modern economic life, a true knowledge of the human being, in addition to this natural knowledge.

You see, you are also told from many other sides about that complicated world view that is supposed to be incorporated into what is now being built in Dornach as a monumental building, a kind of “School of Spiritual Science, anthroposophically oriented spiritual science” is what the thing calls itself. You would do well to assume from the outset, as it were, as an axiom, that what I call anthroposophical spiritual science is the very opposite of what is usually said by those who do not know it in the world. For this spiritual science is about finding our way to natural science as the spiritual foundation of modern economic life, about finding our way to a real knowledge of human nature. That is why this spiritual science is called anthroposophy, human wisdom, a real knowledge of the human being. Modern natural science is quite right not to concern itself with the knowledge of nature and everything that is connected with mechanical, chemical, physical, technical life and economics, and not to concern itself with the human being, but to leave the human being in the background, so to speak, like a spectator. But that is the disastrous thing, that in recent times everything that is in the way of ideas in natural science is also applied to social thinking, that one believes that one can permeate social life with those thoughts that are extraordinarily useful for natural science, that have raised natural science to a pure height; but in social thinking, one must live in them. There must prevail a consciousness that truly penetrates to the human being.

This consciousness is what spiritual science wants to add to what in modern times is merely natural science thinking and, depending on it, social thinking. And this spiritual science wants to penetrate deeper into the human being than one can with anatomy, with physiology, with biology, through which one only gets to know the outer human being. This spiritual science wants to penetrate into the depths of human nature, where something takes place that is not mere thoughts, where realities take place that are the same as the realities of outer life, and the same as the realities of outer nature.

On the one hand, this spiritual science wants to truly rise to the knowledge of the spiritual. But on the other hand, it does not stop at the facts of the most practical everyday life. For this spiritual science, it is inconceivable that such a duality should exist in human consciousness as I have described for the modern merchant, for the modern astronomer, for the modern civil servant, who have their separate religious and aesthetic lives, far removed from everyday life, and also far removed from what everyday life is. This life, which develops as a spiritual life, appears to be very spiritual. In truth, however, it is alien to life. Therefore, it has also created a certain disbelief in life.

This is why it has never been possible for the broad masses of the people to develop a belief in this spiritual life, to look at this spiritual life as if something socially beneficial could come from it. Here serious and honest personalities have been at work. Those who are seriously concerned with social life look upon the spiritual life as utopian. Here Fourier and similar spirits have lived who have worked out such beautiful programs for themselves as to how they want to shape their lives. But from what kind of thinking, from what kind of soul-disposition have all these social and socialist ideas arisen? They have arisen out of a mental life which sets itself up as something alien to life, just as the religious life is to the merchant in his account book. It is natural that beautiful ideas, genuinely meant, well-meant ideas, can arise out of such a mental state, but not ideas that intervene in real practical life.

Spiritual science aims to reach the highest heights of the spirit. But by descending into the deepest inner being of the human being, where there are not thoughts that are alien to life, but thoughts that penetrate into the realities of the external world, these should be able, when they reach up to the highest spiritual heights on the one hand, to grasp at the same time what we encounter in the account book in the relationship between employer and employee, what lives everywhere in direct life. The thoughts of that intellectual life that has dominated human souls in the last three to four centuries were weak and impotent; for these thoughts were beautiful aesthetic, religious, scientific and secular thoughts, but they were not thoughts that reached down into reality and

Take something that works like a modern moral code, let's say, like an ethic. You see what it says about humanity, goodness, benevolence, charity, human brotherhood. This is foreign to life, it does not intervenes in this immediate life, any more than modern philosophy, which lives in abstract ideas, does so, nor does modern spiritual life in general.

Only spiritual science can actually reach down into what philosophy, what real, external real science, brings to light. Read about this subject in my numerous books. You will find that spiritual science has nothing to do with those abstractions, with what is handed down today as a philosophical worldview and the like, but you will see that this spiritual science relies on really delving into the spirit in which the human being his soul lives, in order to gain real insights into the human being; because the human being is most spiritual, a knowledge can be established that ascends to the highest level of the spirit and at the same time descends into the directly practical life. For if one only penetrates deeply enough into the knowledge, this life in knowledge proves to be a unity, not a duality.

This spiritual life will also be able to penetrate into the life that we call social. The abstract intellectualism and scientific method that the modern proletarian perceives as ideology is incapable of penetrating into the real social structure of life. Their thoughts and ideas are too weak to penetrate and descend; they are abstractions and remain in the unreal realm of thought. They are truly ideologies. But the spirit need not stop at ideology. The spirit can penetrate so deeply into ideas that these ideas are at the same time forces contained in reality. With such ideas alone is it possible to delve into social life.

But for that a certain social structure is necessary. And this social structure I have tried to indicate, to sketch out at least, in my “Gist of the Social Question.” I have tried to show how it is necessary that the administration of spiritual life should be separated from economic life and from the life of the state, to which the administration of justice must be left; from everything political and economic the spiritual must be separated. As long as economic life develops out of spiritual life, in that the economically powerful are also best able to advance with regard to their spiritual education, as long as there is any connection at all, an inner connection between spiritual life and economic life, it is impossible for spiritual life to develop completely freely.

But anyone who is familiar with the spiritual life I have just spoken of knows that it can only develop on completely free soil. For the spiritual life of which I have spoken is a product of the human soul. This human soul must be cultivated in complete freedom. Schools and education must be administered independently in their own administration, independently of economic life and of the rest of state life, of political and legal life.

It is quite a different matter when the teacher of the lowest school class does not have to conform to what is supplied to him by economic life, does not have to be guided by the demands that a state makes in order to fill its positions; but when it follows what is taking place in the spiritual life, in the most important part, in the educational and teaching system, when it follows purely from what people should experience in the spiritual realm. If I were to characterize it in concrete terms, I would have to say: in the future, the entire spiritual life, including the life of teaching and schooling, must be shaped in such a way that those who teach and educate, from the lowest to the highest levels, are only so burdened with teaching and education that they still have the possibility of administering this spiritual life in which they work and in which they are active. Spiritual life forms an independent link in the social organism. It is self-governing and placed in its own administration.

If this is the case, then one will not experience what comes so strongly before the soul's eye when one is in the following situation. We have tried to establish a school in Stuttgart that is at least so shaped in its inner spiritual constitution that it is taken from the spirit just characterized. First of all, the teachers were prepared in such a way that they could at least work in the spirit of a completely free spiritual life. This was the starting point, because many paths are blocked today and because what is meant here is truly meant in a very practical way and is only really understood when it is approached with an instinct for practical life, not with some kind of theoretical ideas and the like. It is an eight-class elementary school that, in a free educational setting, is intended to achieve the same in terms of teaching as ordinary elementary schools and as ordinary secondary modern schools and grammar schools do for boys and girls up to the age of fourteen or fifteen, but which at the same time at the same time develop human individuality in a completely free way, so that individuality is placed in social life and will shape it, in which social life, from its economic and state points of view, does not provide the templates according to which individualities must develop. But then you see that you get your hands on the decrees on how teaching should be carried out from class to class, and today the decrees already contain prescriptions as to what should be done. But for those who can think straight and look at life independently, it seems the only possibility that what underlies education, the teaching system, and what determines what happens day after day, hour after hour in school, is that the decisive factor is not some kind of democratic will - that would be tantamount to pedagogical short-sightedness - but the specialized and factual knowledge of those who work from within the spiritual life itself and are also able to administer the spiritual.

These things must be approached practically. Only in this way can much of what is called practical today, and which cannot be imagined in any other way, be transformed into something other than what it has become for today. Only in this way can we look at it with complete impartiality and see it as it should be, and then follow the real inner laws of human development.

The other thing that must be added to this free spiritual life, which has its own administration - I can only sketch this today - is the independent constitutional state, the independent state political element, which, on the one hand, has separated out the independence of all spiritual life, but on the other hand, has also separated out economic life. In the last few centuries, there has only really been a legal life to the extent that this legal life has developed out of the economic life. And this was most clearly evident in those states that were drawn into this terrible war by their state economies. It became most evident that their entire political constitution was a consequence of their economic life, that, so to speak, the state was also an economic community to such a high degree. It would be an act of supreme folly to develop a large cooperative out of the state, according to the Marxist program, where the means of production would be administered and worked in common. Nothing new would be created; only that which has already caused great damage would be exaggerated to an enormous extent. But in an independent legal life, legal creation can only arise from an independent sense of right and wrong. That is to say, an independent state or legal element of the social organism must develop alongside economic life. This link will embrace everything in which all mature people have become capable of judgment.

One will never be able to administer intellectual life democratically; intellectual life must be administered by individuals with expert knowledge and expertise. But that which economic life is as such cannot be administered democratically either. It must be administered in such a way that what corresponds to the economic sphere is the underlying basis. This economic life must be administered in such a way that the person who manages in a particular sphere is spiritually mature and firmly grounded in that economic sphere. This sense of belonging, of being grounded, of being firmly grounded, of being able to act independently within an economic area, is undermined when decisions about how work should be organized in individual companies, what should be produced in individual companies, and so on, are made in a democratic way.

If the forces that are there are to be made fruitful for the social community, this can only be achieved if the individual representative, on the basis of their expertise and professional ability, stands in their rightful position and produces for the community what they can produce according to their abilities. But there still remains that over which he is not the sole arbiter, but over which every mature person who represents the democratic element has the ability to judge, whereby every person is equal, stands equally, and in which every person should develop a relationship from person to person.

On socialist soil, the following is constantly emphasized today: the worker is separated from the product of his labor, he works for the product, which he hardly gets to know, or only gets to know part of it. That is certainly all true. The product goes to the market, he is separated from it, he is separated from his field of labor, he simply performs his work, his human labor, on something he does not even know. But this is only the case as long as we do not have an independent link, an independent life, alongside the economic life in which the individual is involved, where one develops from person to person because one is the same as another person. This independent life, in which decisions are made only on the basis of what is right, this actual political life, is the content of state life. This is where democracy can truly develop. But it must be cultivated in the concrete. You cannot say: those who have excelled in a particular area of economic life will also excel in the field of law, so that this field of law can best be cultivated by them. No, that is not the case, because a person can only cultivate and develop judgment in that which actually develops in life. The life of the law must not be linked in a chaotic way with economic life, but the life of the law must stand alongside economic life. And the human being must enter into a relationship, a concrete relationship on the basis of the law, with the other human being. Interests must develop in him for the other people with whom he lives together in economic life, when economic life develops needs that have to be satisfied. On the basis of the law, every person will know: you are a member of the rest of humanity, you take part in something that determines your relationship and no other thing your relationship among others. You stand in all of humanity, you now learn to recognize yourself as a member of the state built on the equality of people, on democracy. This state becomes a reality for you. Because it becomes a reality by dealing with your labor law before all things. Labor law will no longer be established in economic life; the worker will no longer be dependent on the economic power of the person with whom he can work and undertake work together, but rather what applies is that in which every person is equal. In the separate legal sphere, it will be necessary to decide what makes every person equal. And other relationships will have to be regulated in the corresponding sphere. Today I can only characterize all this in very general terms; you will find more details in my “Key Points of the Social Question”.

Then there remains economic life, the actual, unified economic life. And then, in this economic life, we will not have what is in it today, but we will have associations in this economic life that are formed from consumers and producers together. And these associations will have to deal with matters closely connected with the ascertainment of economic needs, with the determination of prices, the value of goods, with everything that depends only on the human labor that goes into the goods. Economic life will not have to decide on the raising of human labor; the legal life decides on that. In the sphere of economic life, the corporations will have to deal only with fair prices. Such that, based on real expertise and professional skill, such prices will result from being in the economic life that the individual actually receives on average, for what he contributes, so many corresponding goods that serve his needs, until he has produced something has produced the same as that which he exchanges.

I will soon arrive at the primal cell of economic life; when it is presented as I must now present it, it looks somewhat paradoxical, yet in the last analysis everything is based on it. Above all, it is the basis for the emergence of fair prices; for it is not through some kind of joint administration, not through some kind of transfer of the areas into the administration of the whole, or into the ownership of the whole, that social balance can be achieved , but only through the value of the goods, which is determined not by the accident of the market, but by the value of the goods, which is determined by human reason, so that it flows from the actual management of economic life as such.

To put it dryly and paradoxically, and actually trivially: if I have made a pair of boots today, then in the social organism this pair of boots must be worth so much that I can exchange goods for it until I have again fabricated a pair of boots, including everything that has to be provided for the unemployed, the sick, the disabled, and so on. This is the original cell of economic life.

This can actually be achieved if economic life is completely detached from the other two elements of social life: from independent spiritual life and independent legal life

As I said, I could only sketch these things for you, but they have been developed from a real life practice, from a conception of life as it is, as it wants to shape itself. That was also the reason why I said to many a person during the raging of that terrible world war: The only way to cope with this raging is through ideas that have grown on spiritual soil. You have the choice, I said to many, either to speak now of such ideas to humanity that this humanity can take as a starting point for a real improvement on earth, or you will experience social cataclysms and revolutions.

People did not agree to accept reason. So the revolution came. But these revolutions have their peculiarities. Revolutions have been taking place in the world since the emergence of Christianity. What kind of revolution was that? It was a spiritual revolution. What was transformed was the conditions in spiritual life. What can truly arise in humanity in this way, through a metamorphosis in development, can only be spiritual impulses in the first instance.

The Christian revolution was a spiritual one. And the legal and economic life that it brought in its wake was a consequence of the spiritual revolution that took place through Christianity. That is why it was a great upheaval, and anyone who is familiar with the development of Christianity knows how profoundly Christianity has affected the world as a spiritual upheaval.

But if we now consider a revolution in legal and political relations, We find such upheavals in the French Revolution or in the continental revolution of 1848. Study these revolutions and you will find that They have achieved something, they have replaced something of the old order; but much has been left behind that was not at all a solution to previously raised demands, but a solution to previously raised demands, leftovers that were left behind by these political revolutions, by the three elements of human life. One can trace them, the upheavals in the spiritual realm, in the political-legal realm; an upheaval in the spiritual realm, that brought Christianity; an upheaval in the political-legal realm, the upheaval of the French Revolution and the revolution of 1848. Now they want an upheaval in the economic realm. Economic life cannot mechanize or transform itself out of itself. Those who are familiar with world-historical interrelations know that there can be intellectual revolutions because everything else in life can be fertilized by the spirit. But if the external itself, formed purely out of itself, is to be transformed, then this is an illusion. It is simply a law of world-historical development that where a purely economic revolution is to be carried out, as in present-day Russia, this economic revolution must be the gravedigger of modern civilization before it does not take up something truly spiritual.

It is true that Lenin and Trotsky are the last consistent educators of what has been living in the Darwinism of the masses for decades. But in trying to realize what could be developed in the ideas as mere economic ideas, and in what one could believe as long as it did not become practical, one becomes the gravedigger of civilization at the same moment as one wants to introduce it into life. And death could only spread in the European East under the influence of such ideas if it were not realized that we need something completely different in our time: a renewal of spiritual life.

That is what I wanted to emphasize particularly strongly today, that we need to develop a free spiritual life in an independent spiritual part of the social organism, which in turn is based on real spirit. From this spirit a real social future will arise. One must not hope for a new revolution. This new revolution should be an economic one. An economic revolution can only destroy, it cannot build up. Today the world is ripe for a new spirituality, so that it can be rebuilt.

That is what must be said by someone who does not base their views on party demands or party programs, but who looks at life impartially and honestly, and is serious and sincere about what is usually, but poorly understood, called the social question. This is what must be done first in the course of human development: to spread enlightenment about it, to educate the broad masses, on the part of those who have been able to develop this enlightenment through their previous education, which they have inherited, to educate the broad masses about what is necessary. Otherwise, the broad masses know what they demand out of their passions, but they cannot see through what can really be demanded in the interest of humanity and in the interest of a social future.

What has been attempted in my “Key Points of the Social Question” does not follow some party line, it follows what has been attempted to be recognized from the world-historical development of humanity itself, what has been attempted to be recognized from the world-historical moment. Anyone who assumes a commonality of the means of production is already unaware of development. Because even if it were possible for the common ownership of the means of production to occur today, to be introduced today, which cannot be, because it is of course impossible, because it would destroy all initiative of the individual, but even if it were possible to assume the common ownership of the means of production, then the current generation would have these means of production at a certain age, and the next generation would not have them again until later. And the protest of the next generation would once again result in what is to be made good today.

Only a thought like this, which is taken from full reality, not from one-sided reality, only such a thought is really from the outset today. And the thought that I have presented to you about the threefold social organism also takes into account the development over time, not just the coexistence of people in space. This thought can therefore much more likely shape spiritual life in its most important parts, in its most essential areas, in the school and educational system, and also with regard to the social organism, so that it can supply the social organism with forces in an appropriate way. Today, the Socialist side keeps telling us: if we introduce a common distribution of the means of production, if we introduce compulsory labor and so on, then we will educate people through these social structures so that they will work by themselves and so on. Yes, that is to say, humanity will achieve nothing, it will achieve nothing, and will only be willing and eager to work if a spiritual life really kindles the individual abilities of the human being, as they can only be kindled if we educate the human being during his upbringing in such a way that we take full account of his individuality.

Just as in this field, so in all fields the social idea of the threefold social organism is that which most comprehensively underlies the practical; it can only underlie the practical because it is built on the ground of a real spiritual science, where not only nature must be recognized, but where man must be recognized, but thereby also man man into consciousness.

I would just like to emphasize in conclusion that what you can read in detail about capital formation, labor organization, economic organization and so on in the future, is explained in more detail in my “Key Points of the Social Question”, as already mentioned, is still a weak attempt today. It is only a weak attempt because it is not some kind of contrived program, but because it is derived from practical life. Those people who today say that they cannot understand what is written in the “Key Points of the Social Question” lack the instinct for reality that is necessary today if one is to really understand practical matters in their fundamentals. It is not merely a matter of professing one's faith in a sociological doctrine; it is a matter of professing one's faith in those doctrines that can be supported by an instinct for the things to be realized. In attempting to present such thoughts, one will not claim that they should be perfect from the outset. One will emphasize again and again that they are an attempt. And so everything that is presented on the basis of the threefold social order should be seen as an experiment. For what it should ultimately be will become clear as it is transformed and introduced into practice.

I have often said to people: It is possible that not a single one of the details that I have given will be carried out, but the ideas that I have put forward are conceived in such a way that they can be applied to reality at one of its many points of contact. If you take hold of it there, then something completely different may result, but you will really be working. That is what matters, not programs, not preconceived ideas, no matter how clever they are, not to work from them, no matter how old they are, but to work from the reality of practical life! But not working from the randomness of everyday life, but from the great, overarching ideas from which all great, including social, designs have actually emerged. I believe that everyone who talks about such questions in this way thinks that way. I would like to express how I mean it by means of a comparison. Recently, in a studio where they usually work only with three-dimensional objects, a chair model was developed. The idea was that this chair should, on the one hand, satisfy our sense of beauty, which we apply to the Dornach building; on the other hand, however, it should be as inexpensive as possible. The most economical price is necessary in addition to the appropriate design in the overall treatment. Now we had made a model. When we handed this model over to the worker, we said to ourselves: There is the model, but now the practical design begins, and possibly what comes out as a chair at the end will look quite different from the model. But what comes out will be practical because the model was thought of practically.

This is how I would like to see the matter of the 'key points of the social question' understood. Everything that you will find as suggestions for the social question, for example in “Social Future” here for Switzerland, this book and our other ideas are only meant to be a kind of model, so to speak; but it should be a practically conceived model. If you take up the work with this in mind, the result will be practice. Perhaps it will look quite different, but it will only be truly practical if it is approached on the basis of a practical impulse.

Such a threefold social organism could, I think, most easily - pardon me for saying all these things, especially for those who are not completely familiar with these things, but I would still like to express it - it could be realized particularly strongly here in this country, which is justly proud of its old democracy. Because the democratic element has been developed here, it is easiest to see here how the path should be found to replace the spiritual and economic life on both sides in a corresponding way. In a further development, the idea of threefold social order emerged. If one is serious about these ideas, then I believe that, especially if one lives in a democratic community, one will understand and find it easier to understand what can necessarily be done for the threefold social order. Otherwise, this threefold social order will be attacked from left and right, from all sides. And while it is precisely the intention to be serious and honest about the social question, it has come about that I, for example, am personally attacked in the most obscene way by the leaders of socialist parties of all shades. But the point at issue is precisely that three great ideas, which should only be meant seriously and honestly, have emerged in the development of humanity. One is that of liberalism, the other that of democracy, and the third is that of socialism. If one is sincere about these three ideas, one will not be able to mix all three up or have one eliminate the other. Rather, one will have to say: something must radiate from the independent intellectual life, flowing into capitalism and into the whole organism. That is the free human development, that is the liberal element. In the political state, in the legal life, something must live in which all people are equal. That is the democratic element. And in economic life, the fraternal element must prevail. That must provide the true basis for a social structure. That is what it is about. We should not fight one-sidedly against and also not represent one-sidedly that which has emerged beneficially in the course of the newer development of humanity as the consequence of liberalism, democracy, socialism; we should see how in the independent spiritual life, liberalism grows, illuminating all the rest of social life ; how in the actual state under the rule of law democracy is growing, again overshadowing all other areas of life; how in that economic life, which is concerned only with the production, circulation, and consumption of goods and the determination of fair prices, socialism is again prevailing, permeating everything. Then, when one sees through this, one will correctly penetrate one's view of life today with the realization that complete errors in external life are less harmful because they can be more easily seen through than half or quarter truths.

But what exists today in many people as a social movement is flooded with quarter and third truths. And by adhering to a partial truth, people believe that they have grasped life in its entirety. But one should only want to embrace life in its entirety with a living interaction of truths. The whole full truth cannot be revealed in an abstract idea or in an abstract reality. It can only be grasped in the living interaction of ideas. Then, from half-truths and quarter-truths, the whole truth of life will be able to emerge, including in the social sphere, and the necessary social order will be established. And it will be recognized that it is less necessary to fight against complete errors than to correct half-truths and quarter-truths.

This is what I wanted to emphasize today with regard to the ideas of the necessities of life in the social question in the present of humanity and its immediate future.

Dr. Dr. Roman Boos points out that here in Switzerland, too, the danger is enormous in the economic field, and that we should therefore be able to extract something creative, which will be absolutely necessary, and that what Dr. Steiner could only hint at in his remarks today must be fully understood. (No discussion seems to have taken place.)

Rudolf Steiner: Regarding the closing remarks, I will be able to be very brief. I would like to emphasize that someone might say that in this lecture a great deal has been said about every link of the social organism: the spiritual, the legal and the economic life. But all this is not at all what matters to a large proportion of those who speak of the social question today , but that the social question is above all an economic question.

Now consider the whole attitude of both the lecture and what is meant by the impulse for the threefold order of the social organism. You can see this at least to some extent from the lecture: it does not present a finished program, but rather it starts from the premise that the social organism itself, that is, human social life, should be structured in a certain way, structured in such a way that separate administrations exist for economic life , for democratic, political or legal life and an independent administration for spiritual life.

Now, of course, it is easy to say: You are actually separating what must be a unity, the whole of human society, the human social organization into three areas. But it is precisely through the independent administration of the three areas that it becomes possible to achieve the proper unity of these areas. It is not a matter of renewing, as some have believed, what was demanded in the pre-Christian, in the Platonic world view, as the teaching, military and nutritional estates. No, in those days humanity as such was divided into three estates; so that one belonged to one, the other to the second, the third to the third estate. It is precisely this that is to be avoided, that people cannot be people as a whole, but are divided into estates. It is not humanity as such that is divided, but human life. And the person who is in life, in a certain way, stands on all three grounds: in the spiritual life, insofar as he has a living part in the spiritual life in one way or another; he stands in it in the legal life, in the entire legal issues, because he is a mature person in this part, either directly through some referendum or indirectly through representation and the like and he stands in that, in which he has credit through his person, or has factual and specialized knowledge in a certain economic area, in which he is incorporated through an association; the whole economic life is incorporated in itself.

And now it is precisely the various objections that have been raised that show how little the basic idea has been understood today. For example, a long review of this threefold social order appeared in a magazine, and it was said: Yes, he wants to replace the one parliament with three parliaments - a spiritual parliament, a legal parliament and an economic parliament. What matters, however, is that in a democratic parliament only that can be decided on which every human being has become capable of judging, which does not require any knowledge of the subject or field, and that precisely that should be eliminated which requires knowledge of the subject and field. Therefore, if there must be no parliament in the realm of intellectual life and in the realm of economic life, it is because the situation is precisely the opposite there. It is therefore a matter of honestly applying parliamentarianism by limiting it to the area in which it can truly flourish.

From this, however, it can be seen that the nerve has actually been little understood to date. But if one understands the nerve of the matter, then one will see how this idea is actually conceived out of the fundamentals. Anyone who believes that they can organize economic life, for example, according to a certain structure by means of some program, no matter how beautifully conceived, may think very cleverly of themselves, but they are not thinking from reality. But the person who says: Humanity must live in a social organism that is administered from three sides; then what is social structure will come. People will shape this through what they will experience through this threefolding of social life. That is what matters, not saying: Now there is a social question that needs to be solved. Today it cannot be solved, tomorrow it will be possible - one says it in one way, the other in another, but very many think that way.

No, he who believes that is thinking unrealistically. The point is this: the social question has come to the surface in humanity, and now a social structure must be brought about in such a way that this social question must be solved continuously. Today the conditions are there, today it will be solved one way or another, not tomorrow will it be solved. And if other questions arise tomorrow, the conditions for tomorrow will have to be solved again; then other things will arise again, and people must be included in the social structure. It will be an ongoing process. The solution is to be tackled anew from day to day. It is not the case that one can say, today it is there and will continue to be there, but one must ask: How must society be shaped so that what is shaped by society can be shaped in a social sense. Those who do not take human matters in this sense, who do not think in real terms, cannot see what is really going on.

Today people think they are thinking, but they think in a highly unrealistic way. For example, they think that social life will acquire a social structure through a certain reorganization of economic life. Well, that would be just as if one wanted to believe that the individual human organism acquires its structure from what it eats and drinks. No, the human organism has an inner lawfulness. It has such a lawfulness that it undergoes a very definite transformation at the age of changing teeth, and another transformation at the age of sexual maturity. The processes in the human organism come from transformations within the human organization; but ideas also arise in the course of historical development. Today this has reached a point where it is necessary to tackle the threefold social order!

Now, in conclusion, I just want to say the following to show you how things are meant. Those who really follow my writings know that when I experience something like this, I am not at all concerned with ridiculing anyone. I know best how worthy of consideration the simplest mind can be. But let us take the following example. In a discussion, I was replied to – actually, the replies are often where one believes today to be particularly revolutionary, according to a certain template, one does not need to go into the reply itself – but such a responder said something that did not directly have to do with the matter, he said: “Look here, esteemed attendees, we certainly do not want – he spoke from the standpoint of the most most radical orator of the Socialist Party – we certainly don't want, he said, to abolish intellectual labor, we want to keep it; because, you see, he said, I'm a cobbler, for example, I know very well that I can't do the work of a registrar; so we have to hire people who can take over this office once we have gained leadership. A glorious thought! The good man believed that he could not do the work of a registrar, but what he did believe was that he could be a minister who then determined the whole structure. That was a matter of course for him.

Such simple errors, in which one lives, are the essence of real life today, they are absolutely fundamental. These are things that show where approaches are that cannot lead to anything fruitful.

On the other hand, I had recently learned the following from a different angle. After writing an article that roundly condemned the entire threefold social order, an American came to me during one of my lectures a few weeks ago and said: I read this article; it is written in such a way that it insults everything. Yes, there must be something in it! And so I got hold of the matter, he said. You see, sometimes the abusive articles also have their good effects. The man was now, when he came to me, completely absorbed in the idea of threefolding. He said to me: Do you believe that with this idea of threefolding there will now be something that can apply to the whole of human future in the most absolute sense? I said, “No.” We have gone through a phase of historical development which has led to the fact that we have concluded everything in this unitary state. In this unitary state, we have concluded, let us say in Austria, economic life, legal life, spiritual life, namely in the form of cultural life. I have often spoken about this. In the 20th century, nothing else was possible than what led to the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was the subject of the negotiations. What emerged from that was linked to the construction of the Thessaloniki railway, which was a purely economic matter. And out of that arose a chaotic mixture, to which was added a purely spiritual element, namely the antagonism between the Slavs and the Magyars. And out of the terrible tangle of nations in the East, something was brewing from the three areas being mixed together. But they were so constituted that they were drawn to the unified state. Now it is ripe to disintegrate into the three elements. And in turn, a completely different necessity will arise in a relatively not too distant time. Life is vibrant, it is not something closed. We want something that applies forever and everywhere!

The inconvenience of such ideas is that they cannot be conceived out of abstract ideas, like programs; you introduce the programs and then that's it. No, it is not like that; but such ideas, spiritual ideas, take into account the spiritual life, the legal life and the economic life in the threefold social organism. And therefore they can only ever find that which is valid for a particular epoch. And they are aware that, in turn, this must be replaced by something else in a certain period of time. They also take evolution seriously by seeking in evolution what they themselves can find for their age.

So, I just wanted to show a practical result in this sense and say that it is not about something something absolute, as in other contemporary programs, but something that is thought out of the present in the most eminent sense.

Thus, that which wants to enter the world today is judged in the most diverse ways. It may meet with the most diverse judgments, if only these judgments, this judging, finally comes to the point of studying things in a way that is full of life. What matters in such matters is not that what is indicated on one side or another is pedantically carried out, but rather that reality is grasped in a practical way. In such a case no stone may be left unturned in the details, but out of such a life-filled approach that which can serve the common good will be effective and will come into being.

In this sense, these things are meant to be said out of reality for reality. The threefold social order is not meant to be a one-sided political development, nor is it meant to be a one-sided development at all. And so it should be taken up without any emotional attitude.

On the other hand, it should be viewed in such a way that it is understood without prejudice, as it is meant without prejudice. From many sides today we hear: Yes, this threefold social order would be all very well, but it must come into being at the very end; before that everything must go haywire, before that there must be dictatorship and so on. If one thinks in this way, then in reality one does not want the practical, but rather that which arises only from abstract demands, which arise directly only from this or that mood of the soul. In that case, one does not want the social threefolding as it is meant here, but rather one wants that which one has fallen in love with.

But if one seriously wants to achieve something in life, one must struggle to the point of view that sees through and overviews this life impartially.

[ 1 ] At the present stage of evolution there are three possible conditions of soul in which man ordinarily lives his life between birth and death: waking, sleeping and, between the two, dreaming. The last-mentioned will be briefly dealt with in a later part of this book; for the moment we shall consider life simply as it alternates between its two main conditions—waking and sleeping. Before he can “know” for himself in higher worlds, man has to add to these two a third condition of soul.

During waking life he is given up to the impressions of the senses, and to the thoughts and pictures that these evoke in him. During sleep the senses cease to make any impression, and the soul loses consciousness. The whole of the day's experience sinks down into the sea of unconsciousness. Let us now consider how it would be if man were able to become conscious during sleep, notwithstanding that all impressions of the senses were completely obliterated, as they are in deep sleep. Now would any memory remain to him of what had happened while he was awake. Would he find himself in an empty nothingness? Would he now be unable to have any experience at all? An answer to this question is only possible if a condition resembling the description can actually be brought about in man, where his senses remain completely inactive and he has no memory of their activity in his waking hours, and is yet not asleep but awake to another world, a world of reality, even while in relation to the external world around him he is just as he is in sleep.

As a matter of fact, such a state of consciousness can be induced in man if he is prepared to evoke within him the kind of inner experience that spiritual science enables him to develop. And all that is here related about the worlds that lie beyond the world of the senses has been investigated in such a condition of consciousness. In the preceding chapters some information has been given concerning these higher worlds. The present chapter will tell—in so far as lies within the scope of this book—of the means whereby man may achieve the state of consciousness required for such research.

[ 2 ] It is in this one aspect alone that the higher state of consciousness resembles sleep: the sense receive no impressions from without, and the thoughts too which have been evoked by sense-impressions are obliterated. Whereas however in sleep man if bereft of the power to have conscious experience, in this new state of consciousness he retains the power. A capacity for conscious experience is aroused in him, which in ordinary life requires to be stimulated by sense-impressions. The awakening of the soul to this higher state of consciousness may be termed Initiation.

[ 3 ] The path that leads to Initiation takes man out of ordinary day-time consciousness and brings him into a new activity of soul whereas he makes use of spiritual organs of perception. These organs are present in man all the time, in a germinal condition; they require only to be developed.

Now it can happen that at some particular time in his life, without making any special preparation for it, a person discovers that higher organs of this nature have been developing within him. This will mean that a kind of involuntary self-awakening has taken place. He will find that he has through this become a completely changed man. His whole inner experience is no vastly enriched. And he will be fully persuaded that no knowledge of the physical world could ever afford him such bliss, such serene satisfaction, such inner warmth, as can the knowledge that opens up before him now that he has a faculty of cognition that is independent of physical impressions. Strength and confidence will stream into his will from a spiritual world.

Such instances of self-initiation do occur. They should however not lead one to imagine that the right thing to do is simply to wait for it and make no effort towards obtaining Initiation by means of a properly ordered training. We have no need to speak here any further of self-initiation, since it can come about without the person's following any rules or precepts. What we are concerned with is how the organs of perception that are latent in man's soul may be developed by spiritual training. If people do not feel any particular urge to take steps for their own inner development, it is easy for them to think that since the life of man goes forward under the guidance of spiritual Powers, he ought not to interfere in their leadership but should wait quietly for the moment when these Powers shall deem it right to open to him another world. They will feel that any desire to intermeddle in this way with the wisdom of spiritual guidance is quite unjustified, and bespeaks a kind of presumption. One who takes this view will only be persuaded to modify it when a certain line of thought begins to make a strong impression on him—namely when he is ready to say: “The wise guidance of spiritual Powers has given me certain faculties. It has not bestowed these faculties on me for me to leave them unemployed, but rather that I may put them to use. The wisdom of the guidance is to be seen in the fact that seeds have been planted in me of a higher state of consciousness; and I fail to understand the guidance aright if I do not regard it as a duty to set before me the high ideal: that whatever can become manifest to man through the development of his spiritual powers shall become so manifest.” When such a thought has taken strong enough hold, then the mistrust that was felt of any training for the attainment of a higher state of consciousness shall disappear.

[ 4 ] Misgiving can however arise on another account. The development of inner faculties of the soul, someone might feel, implies an intrusion into man's most hidden holy of holies. It involves a change in his whole nature and character, and the method by which the change is to be wrought can obviously not be thought out by the person concerned. Only one who knows the path from actual experience can tell him how he is to reach a higher world; and in applying to such a person for help, he is permitting that person to exercise an influence over the innermost holy of holies of his soul. Nor will this scruple be met if the means whereby the higher state of consciousness is to be attained are set forth in a book. For it makes little difference whether one receives instruction by word of mouth or whether someone who has knowledge of these means has written them in a book and one reads them there. There are moreover among those who possess the requisite knowledge some who think it inadmissible ever to entrust the knowledge to a book. These persons will generally also regard with disapproval all communications to others of truths concerning the spiritual world. To hold such a view in the present epoch of mankind's evolution must, however, be described as out of date. Only up to appoint, it is true, can the means to be employed for higher development be communicated. But if the pupil will apply himself diligently to what is given, he will be able to reach a stage in development whence he can find the way for himself. From all that he has gone through so far, he will obtain a right idea of his further path—and indeed he can do so in no other way.

On all these various grounds misgivings may arise in relation to the path of spiritual knowledge. They disappear, however, when one begins to grasp the true nature of the path of development which is set forth in the school of spiritual training appropriate to our age. Of this path we will now proceed to tell, hinting only briefly, as occasion arises, at other methods.

[ 5 ] The training in question provides one who has the will to seek higher development with instructions that he can follow and so bring about the necessary changes in his soul. Anything like an unwarranted intrusion into the individuality of the pupil could only come into question if the teacher were himself to effect the change by methods of which the pupil was quite unconscious. But a training for spiritual development that is rightly adapted for our times will never employ such methods, turning the pupil into a blind instrument for his own development. It offers him instructions, and the pupil carries them out. As and when there is occasion to do so, it explains to him why this or that instruction is given. The acceptance of the instructions, and their observance, have no need to rest on blind faith. Blind faith should indeed be altogether excluded. If we have studied the nature of the human soul, in so far as it shows itself to ordinary self-observation unassisted by spiritual training, then on learning of the measures recommended we can ask ourselves: What effect will these have on the life of the soul? Before any training is begun, this question, if approached with a healthy and unbiased mind, can receive adequate answer. For it is perfectly possible, before setting out to follow the recommendations, to form a clear and true conception of how they work. Naturally, we cannot have actual experience of their working until we have embarked on the training. But here too we shall find we can accompany the experience all the time with understanding, provided only we are free from preconceived ideas and bring healthy good sense to bear on each step we take. And a genuine spiritual science will in these days recommend for development only such means as will stand that test. Whoever is prepared to enter upon such a training and will not allow himself to be led away by any mistaken prepossession into an attitude of mere blind credulity, will soon find that all misgivings disappear. Objections he may hear others raise against a systematic training for the attainment of a higher state of consciousness will not disturb him in the least.

[ 6 ] Even for those who are endowed with the inner ripeness of soul which can lead them sooner or later to a self-awakening of the organs of spiritual perception—even for such, training is not superfluous; on the contrary, they have particular need for it. For there are few instances where such a person does not have to go down many a dubious by-path before he arrives at self-initiation. The training will spare him this. It will lead him straight forward on the right path. Where self-initiation occurs, it is due to the fact that the soul reached the necessary maturity in former lives. It may easily happen that the person has a dim feeling of his own ripeness, and this makes him disinclined to submit to training. The feeling may give rise to a kind of unconscious pride which hinders him from putting his trust even in a properly ordered school for spiritual training. Or it may be that the more advanced stage of soul may remain hidden in him until a certain age of life and only then begin to manifest. A training could in such an instance be the very means of bringing the ripeness to manifestation, and were the person to debar himself altogether from such training, it might well be that at the time when it should manifest, the faculty he possesses would still remain hidden and emerge again only in one of his later incarnations.

[ 7 ] In this matter of spiritual training, it is important not to let certain fairly obvious misunderstandings gain ground. People may, for instance, have the idea that the training is going to make a great difference to a person's whole conduct and behavior. But there is no question of giving the pupil general precepts on how to lead his life; he will be told of things he can do, inwardly in his soul, which, if he carries them out, will give him the possibility of beholding the supersensible. As for his other activities in life—activities that have nothing to do with observation of the supersensible—these are not directly influenced at all by what he undertakes in the course of training. What happens is simply that the pupil acquires, in addition to them, the gift of supersensible perception. This new activity is as different from the ordinary avocations of life as waking is from sleeping. The one cannot be allowed to disturb the other in the very least. Should anyone be inclined, for instance, to intersperse the ordinary course of his life with impressions that reached him from the supersensible, he would be like a sick person whose sleep was continually being interrupted by unwholesome periods of wakefulness. The trained observer will have it in his own control to evoke at will the state of consciousness wherein he can behold supersensible reality. Indirectly, the training is of course not unrelated to the general conduct and habit of life, inasmuch as anyone lacking in ethical stability and good feeling will either be unable to see into the supersensible, or if he can, it will do him harm. Very much therefore of the instruction that is given to lead the pupil to vision of the supersensible, contributes at the same time to the ennobling of his daily life. And besides this, through being able to see into the supersensible world, the pupil learns to recognize higher moral impulses that hold good also for the physical world. For there are ethical laws that can only be learned in higher worlds.

Another misunderstanding is possible. It might be imagined that some activity of the soul, intended to lead to supersensible cognition, were in some way connected with changes in the physical organism. As a matter of fact, such activities have nothing whatever to do with anything in man that belongs to the province of physiology, or to other aspects of natural science. They are processes purely of soul and spirit, as far removed from the physical as are ordinary healthy thinking and perceiving. The way in which they take place in the soul is no different from the way in which we think our thoughts or come to our decisions. As much or as little as healthy thinking has to do with the body, just so much and so little have the activities of a genuine training for supersensible knowledge. Any kind of training that affects man in a different way is no true spiritual training, but a caricature of it.

It may be assumed that the training now to be described fulfills the conditions we have seen to be necessary. It is only because supersensible knowledge is something that engages all man's faculties of soul that it might seem to demand overwhelming changes in him. Yet in reality it simply amounts to this: instructions are given which, if followed, will enable the pupil to have moments in his life when he can behold the supersensible.

[ 8 ] The ascent to a supersensible state of consciousness has necessarily to take its start from ordinary waking consciousness. The pupil is living in this consciousness before he sets out on the ascent, and the school of spiritual training holds out to him means whereby he may be led forth from it. Among the first of the means put forward in the school which concerns us here, are activities that are already familiar to the pupil in his everyday consciousness. The most significant of them are in fact those that consist in still and silent activities of the soul. The pupil has to give himself up entirely to certain thought-pictures. These are of such a kind as to have in them an awakening power; they awaken hidden faculties of the soul. They differ therefore from the thought-pictures that belong to everyday life, whose purpose it is to portray some external object. Indeed the more faithfully these do so, the truer they are; it belongs to their very nature to be true in this sense. The thought-pictures to which the soul has to devote itself for the purpose of spiritual training have no such part to play. Their function is not to depict an external object; they are formed in such a way as to have in themselves the property of awakening the soul. The best for the purpose are symbolic pictures. Others, however, can also be used. For the actual content is, in fact, of little importance, the main point being that the pupil shall direct the whole power of his soul upon the thought-picture and have nothing else whatever in his consciousness. Whereas in everyday life the soul's powers are distributed among many things, and thought-pictures are continually coming and going, in spiritual training everything depends on the entire concentration of the soul upon one idea of thought-picture, placed, by an act of will, in the very center of consciousness. It is for this reason that symbolic thought-pictures do better than those that depict external objects or activities; for the latter have their point of support in the external world, so that the soul is not driven to rely upon itself alone, as is the case with the symbolic thought-pictures which have been built up by the soul's own exertions. The essential thing is, not what the picture represents, but that it is formed and imagined in such a way as to set the soul entirely free from dependence on the physical.

[ 9 ] It will help us to form a clear conception of what this absorption in a thought-picture implies, if we call up before us the concept of memory. Say we have been looking at a tree and have then turned away so that we no longer see it. We can call up before our mind's eye the thought -picture or mental image of the tree. This thought-picture that we have when the tree is not in view is a memory of the tree. Suppose we hold on to this memory; we let our soul, as it were, come to rest in the memory-picture and try to shut out every other thought. Our soul is now immersed in the memory-picture of the tree. There you have an instance of absorption in a thought-picture—one that reproduces an outer object perceived by the senses. If we now do the same with a thought-picture we ourselves have placed into the field of consciousness, entirely of our will, we shall in time become able to achieve the desired end.

[ 10 ] In order to make this quite clear, let us take an example of absorption of the soul in a symbolic thought-picture. The first thing to be done is to build it up, and this we may do in the following way. We think of a plant, how it has its roots in the soil, how it sends out leaves one after another, and blossoms at length into flower. Now we imagine a man standing beside the plant. The thought lights up in our mind that the man has characteristics and capabilities which can truthfully be called more perfect than are those of the plant. He can move about at will, he can go this way or that way as he feels inclined; whereas the plant is rooted to the spot where it is growing. We may, however, then go on to think to ourselves: Yes, that is so, the human being is more perfect than the plant; but I also find qualities in him, the absence of which in the plant makes it appear to me more perfect in other respects than the human being. For he is filled with desires and passions, and these he sometimes follows in his behavior, with the result that he goes astray, falls into error. When I look at the plant, I see how it follows the pure laws of growth from leaf to leaf, how it opens its blossom, calmly and tranquilly, to the chaste rays of the sun. I perceive therefore that while man is in some respects more perfect than the plant, he buys this comparative perfection at the price of letting impulses and desires and passions have their seat within him, instead of what appear to be the pure forces at work in the plant. Then we can go on to picture to ourselves how the green sap flows right through the plant, and how this green sap is the expression of the pure, unimpassioned laws of growth. And if we then think of the red blood as it flows through the veins and arteries of man, we find in this red blood the expression of impulses and desires and passions.

We then let this whole thought live in our soul. Carrying it a little farther, we call to mind how man is after all capable of development; he possesses higher faculties of soul, by means of which he can refine and purify his impulses and passions. We recognize that thereby the baser element in them is purged away, and they are re-born on a higher level. The blood can then be thought of as the expression of these purified and chastened impulses and passions. And now we turn our thought, let us say, to a rose. We look in spirit at the rose and say to ourselves: In the red sap of the rose, I see the green color of the plant-sap changed to red; and the red rose follows still, no less than the green leaf, the pure, unimpassioned laws of growth. I can let the red of the rose be for me a symbol of a blood that is the expression of chastened impulses and passions which have thrown off their baser part and resemble in their purity the forces that are at work in the rose. And then we try, not merely to go on turning such thoughts over and over in our mind, but to let them come to life in our heart and feeling. A sensation of bliss can come over us as we contemplate the pure and dispassionate nature of the growing plant; and we feel obliged to admit that certain higher perfections have to be purchased by the acquisition at the same time of impulses and desires. This thought can change the bliss that we experienced before into a solemn feeling; and then a sense of liberation can come over us, a feeling of true happiness when we give ourselves up to the thought of the red blood that can become the bearer--even as the red sap in the rose—of experiences that are inwardly pure. In pursuing thus a train of thought that serves to build up such a symbolic picture, it is important to accompany the thought all the time with feeling. Then, having entered right into the experience of the thoughts and feelings, we can re-cast them in the following symbolic picture.

Imagine you see before you a black cross. Let this black cross be for you a symbol for the baser elements that have been case out of man's impulses and passions; and at the point where the beams of the cross meet, picture to yourself seven resplendent bright red roses arranged in a circle. Let these roses symbolize for you a blood that is the expression of passions and impulses that have undergone purification.¹ Some such symbolic thought-picture shall the pupil of spiritual training call up before his soul, and he can do this in the same way as was explained above for a memory-picture. Devoting himself to it in deep, inner contemplation, he will find that the picture has power to call his soul awake. He must try to banish for the time being everything else from his mind. The symbol in question, and that alone, should now hover before him in spirit, as livingly as ever possible.

There is meaning in the fact that the symbolic picture has not simply been put forward as a picture that has in itself as an awakening power, but that it was first built up by a sequence of thoughts concerning plant and man. What such a picture can do for the pupil depends, before he uses it as an object of meditation. Were he to picture it without having gone through the construction of it in his own soul, it would remain cold and would have far less effect, for it is the preparation that endows it with power to enlighten the soul. The pupil should however not be recalling the preparatory steps while engaged in the meditation, but have then merely the symbolic picture hovering before him in spirit, quick with life—letting only the feelings that were aroused by the preparatory chain of thought echo on within him. In this way does the symbolic picture come to be a sign, appropriate to and accompanying the inner experience.

The efficacy if the experience depends upon how long the pupil is able to continue in it . The longer he can do so, without allowing any other idea to disturb the meditation, the greater its value for him. It is, however, also good if, apart from the times that he devotes to the meditation as such, he will frequently build up the picture all over again, letting the thoughts and feelings rise up in him in the way we have described, that the mood of the experience may not pale. The more ready the pupil is patiently to continue renewing the picture in this way, the greater significance will it have for his soul. (In my book Knowledge in the Higher Worlds and its Attainment, other subjects are suggested for meditations on the coming-into-being and passing-away of a plant, on the forces of growth that lie dormant in the seed, on the forms of crystals, etc. In the present book, the intention has been merely to illustrate, by means of an example, the nature of meditation.)

[ 11 ] A symbolic picture such as we have here described does not represent some external object that Nature has produced; and to this very fact it owes its power to awaken capabilities that belong entirely to the soul. Some persons may beg to differ! They may, for instance, say: Agreed, the symbolic picture as a whole is not to be found in Nature, but all its details are borrowed from Nature—the black color, the roses, and so forth; these have every one of them been first perceived by the senses. If any reader be disturbed in his mind by such an objection, let him reflect that these component parts of the picture, which are undoubtedly derived from sense-perception, do not in themselves lead to the awakening of higher faculties in the soul; the awakening is brought about solely by the way in which the single details have been put together to form the picture. For that, no prototype is to be found in the outer world.

[ 12 ] The endeavor has here been made, taking a particular symbolic picture as an example, to give a clear account of how meditation can take its course. For the purpose of spiritual training, a great variety of pictures of this kind can be used, and they can be built up in many different ways. Sentences, formulae, even single words, may also be given as subjects for meditation. In every instance the aim will be to wrest the soul free from sense-perception and rouse it to an activity for which the outer impressions of the physical senses are without significance, the whole import and aim of the activity being to unfold dormant faculties of the soul. Meditations that are directed wholly to certain feelings or emotions are also possible; they are indeed particularly valuable for the soul. Take the feeling of joy. In the ordinary course of life we can rejoice over something we see taking place. Suppose a man who has a healthily developed life of feeling observes someone performing an action that is inspired by real goodness of heart. He will be pleased, he will rejoice in the kind deed. And it may be, he will then to on to ponder over a deed of this nature in somewhat the following way. A deed that proceeded from kindness of heart, he may think to himself, is one in which the doer follows, not his own interests, but the interests of his fellow-man; I may therefore call it a “good” deed. But now he can go further. He can turn right away form the particular action that he observed and that gave him such pleasure, and create for himself the comprehensive idea of loving-kindness, “goodness of heart.” He can picture to himself how it arises in the soul, namely through the person's absorbing, as it were, the interest of his fellow, making them his own. And he can rejoice in this moral conception of kindness. The joy that he now has is no longer over this or that event in the physical world, it is joy in an idea as such. If we try to let joy of this kind live on in our soul for a considerable time we shall actually be practicing meditation upon a feeling. It is not the mere idea that will awaken the inner faculties, but he prolonged surrender of the soul to a feeling that is not just due to a particular external impression.

Supersensible cognition being able to penetrate more deeply into the real nature of things, feelings evoked by spiritual knowledge can be imparted and used for meditation. These will be all the more efficacious in unfolding the inner faculties of the soul. Necessary as this enhanced development will be for the higher stages of the pupil's training, he should nevertheless understand that meditations upon simple feelings and emotions such as the one concerning goodness of heart, if diligently carried out, can take him very far. Since people differ in nature and character, the means that prove most useful for individual pupils will naturally vary. As to the length of time that should be given to meditation, the thing of prime importance is that while engaged in it, the pupil shall remain calm and collected; its efficacy indeed depends on this. In the matter of time he should also be careful not to overshoot the mark. The exercises themselves will help him to acquire a certain inner tact which will teach him how far he may rightly go in this respect.

[ 13 ] The pupil will as a rule have to carry out such exercises for quite a long while before he himself is able to notice any result. Patience and perseverance are absolute essentials in spiritual training. Unless the pupil evokes these qualities within him, going through his exercises so quietly and so regularly that patience and perseverance may be said to constitute the fundamental mood of his soul, he will make little progress.

[ 14 ] It will be clear, from what has been said so far, that deep inner contemplation—meditation—is a means for the attainment of knowledge of higher worlds, and moreover that not just any thought-picture can be taken for meditation, but only one that has been built up in the way described.

[ 15 ] The path that has been indicated leads in the fist place to what may be called “Imaginative cognition”—the first stage, that is, of higher cognition. The cognition that depends upon sense-perception and upon the elaboration of sense-perceptions by an intellect that is bound to the senses—“objective cognition.” Above it are the various stages of higher cognition, the Imaginative being the first. The word Imagination may well raise distrust in the minds of those who take it to mean some idea that is engendered by mere fancy—some “imaginary” idea or mental picture unrelated to reality. In spiritual science however, Imaginative cognition is to be understood as a cognition that results from the soul's having attained to a supersensible state of consciousness. What is perceived in this condition of consciousness are spiritual facts and spiritual beings whereto the senses have no access. Since this first supersensible consciousness is awakened in the pupil by his giving himself up in meditation to symbolic pictures or “imaginations,” it may be termed “Imaginative consciousness” and the cognition connected with it “Imaginative cognition”—meaning by this a cognition that is able to have knowledge of what is real in another sense than are the facts and objects perceived with the physical senses. The content of the thought-picture in the imaginative meditation is not the important thing; what is important is the faculty of soul that is thereby developed.

[ 16 ] Another very understandable objection may be put forward to the employment of symbolic mental pictures. The building up of such pictures, it may be alleged, is carried out by a dreamlike thinking that makes use of arbitrary fancy, and the result can only be of questionable value. There is, however, no occasion to harbor any such misgiving in regard to the thought-pictures which form the basis of a right and sound spiritual training. Such thought-pictures are expressly chosen with this end in view—namely, that the relation they may have to external reality can be disregarded and their value sought purely in the power with which they work upon the soul when attention has been withdrawn from the outer world, when all sense-impressions and even all the thoughts the mind can entertain in response to sense-impressions have been eliminated.

If we want to form a clear and true picture of the process of meditation, we shall find it helpful to compare it with sleep. On the one hand it resembles sleep, while on the other hand it is the very opposite. For it is a sleep which in comparison with ordinary day-consciousness gives signs of a higher awakeness. The truth of the matter is that, having to concentrate upon one particular symbolic or other thought-picture, the soul is obliged to summon up from its depths much stronger forces than it is accustomed to employ in ordinary life or for the ordinary process of cognition. Its inner activity is enhanced thereby. The soul liberates itself from the body, even as it does in sleep. Only, instead of going over into unconsciousness, it now has living experience of a world it did not know before. Thus, the soul is in a condition which, although in its liberation from the body it may be likened to sleep, has nevertheless to be described as an enhanced awakeness in comparison with ordinary consciousness. The soul comes in this way to a living experience of itself in its inmost, true and independent being, whereas in ordinary waking life, when its forces are less strongly developed, it is only with the help of the body that the soul attains consciousness at all. It does not under these conditions have any conscious experience of itself, becoming conscious only in the picture which, like a reflection from a mirror, the body—or, one should rather say, the bodily processes conjure up before it.

[ 17 ] The symbolic pictures that are built upon in the way described cannot of course be said to have relation as yet to anything real in the spiritual world. Their purpose is to detach the soul from sense-perception, and from the instrument of the brain with which in ordinary life the intellect is bound up. This detachment cannot be effected until man feels; Now I am forming a thought-picture by the use of forces that need not assistance from the senses or from the brain. The very first experience that befalls the pupil on his path is this liberation from the physical organs. He can then say to himself, My consciousness is not extinguished when I abandon sense-perceptions and abandon also my ordinary intellectual thinking; I can lift myself right out of this thinking, and I then feel myself a living spiritual being, side by side with what I was before. Here then we have the first purely spiritual experience: the pupil becomes aware of himself as an I, an Ego, purely in the soul and spirit. A new self has arisen out of the self that is bound up with the physical senses and the physical intellect. Had the pupil freed himself from the world of the senses and the intellect without deep inner meditation, he would have fallen into the void of unconsciousness. Naturally, he already had in him this being of pure soul and spirit before he practiced meditation, but it had then no instruments whereby it could observe in the spiritual world. It was not unlike a physical body that has no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with. The force that has been expended in achieving meditation has created organs of soul and spirit, has called them forth out of what was hitherto unorganized soul-and-spirit being.

What the pupil has in this way himself created, is also what he first perceives. Therefore his first experience is a kind of self-perception. It is in accord with the whole nature of spiritual training that, thanks to the self-education that he is undergoing, man is at this stage fully conscious that he is perceiving himself in the picture-worlds (Imaginations) which appear as a result of the exercises. These pictures seem to the pupil to be alive, and in a new world; yet he must recognize that, to begin with, they are nothing else than the reflection of his own being, strengthened as this now is by reason of the exercises he has carried out. Moreover not only has the pupil to come to a right conclusion on this point; he must in addition develop such a strong will that he is able at any moment to wipe out the pictures, to dismiss them altogether from consciousness. He must have it in his power to exercise authority over them in perfect freedom and confidence. And he will be able to do this, provided the training has been on sound lines. Otherwise, the pupil would be in the same plight in the realm of spiritual experience, as a man would be in the physical world if, when he turned to look at some object, his eye were to remain fettered to that object so that he was quite unable to look away from it. There is however one exception. One group of inner picture-experiences must not be blotted out at this stage of spiritual training. It is a group that relates to the heart and kernel of the pupil's own being; in the Imaginations of this group he is made acquainted with the very ground of his being, with that within him which passes through repeated earth lives. At this moment in his development he begins to feel—as a direct experience—the reality of repeated earth lives. In respect of everything else that he experiences in this realm there must be the freedom of which we spoke.

Only after the pupil has acquired the faculty of wiping out the Imaginations, does he approach the real external world of the spirit. In place of the pictures that have been wiped out, something else appears, and in this the pupil begins to attain knowledge of spiritual reality. His feeling of himself, from being dim and vague, reaches a clarity and definition hitherto unknown. And he has now to go further; he has to advance from this perception of himself to observation of the world of soul and spirit that surrounds him. This he will be able to do when he directs his inner experience in a way that will now be indicated.

[ 18 ] To begin with, the soul is weak over against all that offers itself for perception in the world of soul and spirit. The pupil will already have had to expend considerable energy of soul in order to hold fast in meditation the symbolic or other pictures which he built up out of the data of the world of sense. But if he wants in addition to attain to actual observation in a higher world, he will have to do more than this. He must be able to abide in a condition wherein not only the stimuli of the external world no longer influence his soul, but even the Imaginative thought-pictures are completely obliterated from his consciousness. For the moment has now arrived when that which has been formed and fashioned within him by dint of deep inner concentration of soul can come to view. Everything now depends upon the pupil's having sufficient inner energy of soul to allow it to be actually seen by him spiritually; it must not escape his notice, as invariably happens when the forces of the soul are too little developed. The soul-and-spirit organism that has come to development within him and that the pupil has now to apprehend in self-perception is frail and evanescent. Many and serious are the disturbances that come from the outer world of sense and from memories of the same, and that persist in the mind even when the pupil does his utmost to shut them out. Nor is it only the disturbances of which we can be aware that come into question; still more serious are those of which we are totally unaware in ordinary life.

The very conditions however under which the life of man takes its course make possible here a transition stage. What the soul is unable to achieve when awake on account of these disturbances from the physical world, it can achieve in sleep. One who devotes himself to meditation will, if sufficiently attentive, begin to notice something new about his sleep. He will be aware that he is not always fully asleep the whole time, but that there are moments when his soul, although he is asleep, is nevertheless active in some way. At such times, the natural processes of sleep keep away the influences of the external world which he is not yet strong enough to keep away by his own efforts while awake. And now that the exercises in concentration and meditation have begun to take effect, the soul is released from complete unconsciousness during sleep and is able to eel the world of soul and spirit. This can come home to the pupil in either of two ways. He may be well aware during his sleep: “I am now in another world,” or he may have the memory when he wakes up: “I have been in another world.” A greater inner energy is of course required for the first way than for the second, which will accordingly for a beginner be the more frequent of the two. And it may be that gradually the point is reached when the pupil, on awakening, has the impression: During the whole time that I have been asleep I have been in another world; I emerged from it only when I awoke. Moreover his memory of the beings and facts of this outer world will grow more and more definite. This will mean that the pupil has attained in one or another form what may be called “continuity of consciousness” (the persistence of consciousness during sleep.) There is no implication that he will always retain consciousness during sleep. He will have made good progress in this direction if, while in general he sleeps as others do, there are times when during sleep he can be consciously giving into a world of soul and spirit; or again if, when awake, he can look back upon short periods of such consciousness.

It must not be forgotten that this is only a transition state. It is good for his spiritual training that the pupil should go through this stage, but he must not imagine that it can afford him conclusive evidence in regard to the world of soul and spirit. He is, in this condition, still uncertain and cannot yet rely on his perceptions. Thanks however to experiences of this nature he does gradually gather power to attain the like result also in waking life—that is, to hold off the disturbing influences of the physical world upon his senses and upon his inner life, and so attain that “observing” in soul and spirit where no impressions enter by way of the senses, where the brain-bound intellect is silent, and where even those thought-pictures are banished from consciousness, upon which he had been meditating in preparing for seeing in the spirit. (Things published in the name of spiritual science should invariably be the outcome of spiritual observations made in a fully wide-awake condition.)

[ 19 ] There are two inner experiences, important in the course of spiritual training. The one enables the pupil to say to himself: If I now turn aside from every impression that can reach me from the surrounding physical world, I do not, when I look within, behold there a being that is totally inactive, but a being that is conscious of itself in a world of which I can know nothing as long as I only lay myself open to impressions that come to me through sense-perception and through everyday thinking. At this moment, the pupil can have the feeling that he has himself given birth to a new being that is there within him as the very heart and kernel of his soul, a being possessed moreover of entirely different qualities from those that have been his up to now.

The second experience is as follows. The pupil discovers that he can now have beside him the self he has been hitherto, as if it were another and distinct self. He is in a sense confronted by the being within which he has until now been confined. He feels he is temporarily outside what he has hitherto been accustomed to call his very own self, his I. It is as if he were living, with perfect calm and composure, in two selves. The first of them he knew before; the second self now confronts the first as a new-born entity. Moreover he feels the first becoming in a way self-subsistent, independent of the second, rather as man's body has an independent existence of its own apart from this first self. This is an experience of very great moment; for the pupil knows now what it means to live in that higher world which, with the help of his training, he has been endeavoring to reach.

[ 20 ] The second, the new-born self, can now be brought to perceive in the spiritual world. Within it there can unfold for the spiritual world what the sense-organs are for the physical. When this development has reached the required stage, the pupil will be able to do more than feel himself as a new-born I. Just as he perceives the physical world by means of his senses, so will he now begin to perceive around him spiritual facts and spiritual beings. Here we have then a third significant experience. In order to pass through this stage successfully, the pupil will have to reckon with the fact that along with the strengthening of the soul's forces, self-love and self-conceit begin to assume proportions that are quite unknown in ordinary life. It would argue a complete lack of understanding, were we to imagine that this was no more than the ordinary kind of selfishness and self-love. Self-love grows so strong at this stage of the pupil's development, that it can actually seem to him like a force of Nature working within him, and a strenuous disciple of the will is required to et the better of this prodigious self-conceit. The latter does not come as a result of spiritual training. This self-conceit is always there in man, but only when the pupil comes to have real experience of the Spirit is it raised up into consciousness. Hand in hand therefore with spiritual training must always go the training of the will. The pupil is conscious of a tremendous urge to feel blissfully happy in the world which he has created within him. What he must now be able to do is to wipe out, as described above, the very thing he has taken such pains to achieve. Having reached the Imaginative world, he must there contrive to extinguish self. In opposition to this self-effacement are ranged within him the excessively strong impulses of self-opinion and self-conceit. It might easily be imagined that exercises for spiritual training were something quite apart and had nothing whatever to do with moral development. To this one can only reply that the moral force needed to overcome this self-conceit cannot possibly be acquired unless the whole ethical tone and disposition of the pupil be raised to a proportionate level. Progress in spiritual training is out of the question, unless progress be made at the same time in the ethical sphere. Lack of moral strength makes conquest of self-conceit impossible . The allegation that genuine spiritual training is not ipso facto moral training is entirely mistaken

Only one who has no personal knowledge of such experience could here interpose the question: How are we to know, when we think we have spiritual perceptions, that we are facing realities and not the mere creations of our fancy—visions, hallucinations and the like? As a matter of ace, a pupil who has reached the above stage in proper spiritual training can distinguish between the figments of his own fancy and spiritual reality, just as a person of normal intelligence is able to distinguish between the mental picture of a hot iron and a real one he touches with his hand; he knows the difference by virtue of a sound and healthy experience of life. So too in the spiritual world, life itself provides the touchstone. In the world of the senses, we know that if we imagine a hot iron, then however hot we picture it, it will not burn our fingers; so does the pupil of Spirit know whether he is only imagining that he confronts a spiritual fact or whether real facts and real beings are making their impressions on the organs of spiritual perception that have been awakened in him. The instructions he will need to follow during his training to save him from falling a victim to illusion in this regard will be set forth in the following pages.

[ 21 ] It is of the utmost importance that by the time the pupil becomes conscious of a new-born self within him, his whole character and morale shall have reached a high level. For it is like this. It belongs to man's I or Ego, to control his sensations and feelings and ideas, also his impulses, desires and passions. Perceptions, mental pictures and ideas cannot be simply let loose in the soul; they must e regulated by the exercise of a thoughtful discretion. The I, the self, administers the laws of thought, thereby bringing order into man's thinking and ideation. It is the same with his desires and impulses, his inclinations and passions. These are guided and controlled by his moral principles. Thus the self, by the exercise of ethically sound judgment and discretion, becomes man's guide in this domain. When now we have succeeded in drawing out of our ordinary self a higher self, the former will become to some extent independent. But it will at the same time be deprived of the energies now devoted to the higher self. Let us see what will happen if a pupil wants to give birth to his higher self, when he has not yet developed adequate ability or certainty in his application of the laws of thought nor in his power of judgment and discretion. He cannot leave to his ordinary self any more ability in the field of thought than he has hitherto developed. Should this not suffice, then his everyday self, continuing on its own, will exhibit a thinking that is disordered, confused and fantastic. Since for such a person the new-born self can only be weak, the lower self, confused as it is, will gain control over his beholding in the supersensible, and he will fail to show discrimination in regard to what he observes there. Had he developed sufficiently his faculty for logical thinking, there would have been no difficulty in allowing his everyday self to assume independence.

The same applies in the realm of ethics. If a pupil has not acquired firmness in moral judgment, if he is not sufficiently master of his inclinations, his impulses and passions, he will be conferring independence on his everyday self when it is still in a condition of relative subjection to them. It can happen that such a person will not recognize in reference to his supersensible experience the same need to conform to a high standard of truth as he does in respect of what the outer physical world presents to his consciousness. Should he thus have a lax regard or truth, he could easily take for spiritual reality all manner of things that are nothing but figments of his own fancy. What is needed is that, before the higher self begins to be active in its quest for knowledge of the supersensible, the pupil's sense of truth be infused with a firmness of moral judgment and with a stability of character and of conscience, that have been developed in the self now left behind. This is not by any means said with intention to frighten people away from spiritual training; it is nevertheless a consideration that needs to be taken very seriously.

[ 22 ] If the pupil is firmly resolved to leave nothing undone that will help to make his first self reliable in the strict performance of its functions, then he has no need to be afraid of this event that comes as a result of spiritual training—the liberation, that is, of a second self for attainment of knowledge in the supersensible. He must however not forget that self-deception is apt to be particularly strong when one is deeming oneself “ripe” for some new step. In the school of spiritual training we have here described, the pupil's life of thought undergoes a development which precludes the danger, so very often alleged, of being led astray. Thanks to the development of the life of thought, the pupil is able to undergo all necessary experiences of the inner life in such a way that there is no fear of their being accompanied by delusive and mischievous creations of the fancy. Where adequate development of the life of thought has been lacking, the experiences can well evoke serious uncertainty in the soul of the pupil. If the pupil is prepared in the way here recommended, he will acquire knowledge of the new experiences in much the same way as a man of healthy mind gets to know the objects he perceives in the physical world. Development of the life of thought tends rather to make him an observer of what he himself is experiencing, whereas without it he is absorbed in the experience—as it were, unreflective and unheeding.

[ 23 ] In a proper school of spiritual training certain qualities are set forth that require to be cultivated by one who desires to find the path to the higher worlds. First and foremost, the pupil must have control over his thoughts (in their course and sequence.) over his will, and over his feelings. The control has to be acquired by means of exercises , and these are planned with two ends in view. On the one hand, the soul has to become so firm, so secure and balanced that it will retain these qualities when a second self is born. And on the other hand, the pupil has to endow this second self, from the start, with strength and steadfastness.

[ 24 ] The quality that thinking needs above all is objectivity. In the world of the physical senses life itself is our great teacher in this respect. Let a man fling his thoughts hither and thither in a purely arbitrary manner, he will find himself obliged to suffer life to correct him if he does not want to come into conflict with it. He must of necessity bring his thinking into correspondence with the facts. But when he turns his attention away from the physical world, this compulsory correction fails him; and if his thinking has not then the ability to be its own corrector, it will inevitably follow will-o'-the-wisps. The pupil of the spirit must therefore undertake exercises in thinking in order that his thinking may be able to mark out its own path and goal. Stability, and the capacity to adhere firmly to a once chosen subject, are what the pupil's thinking has to acquire. There is therefore no occasion for the exercises to deal with remote or complicated objects, much rather should they have reference to simple objects that are ready to hand. Whoever succeeds in directing his thought, for at least five minutes daily, and for months on end, to some quite commonplace object—say, for example, a needle or a pencil—and in shutting out during those five minutes all thoughts that have no connection with the object, will have made very good progress in this direction. (A fresh object may be chosen each day, or one may be continued for several days.) Even a person who considers himself a trained intellectual thinker should not be too proud to qualify for spiritual training by an exercise of this simple nature. For when we are riveting our thought for a considerable time upon something that is entirely familiar, we may be quite sure that our thinking is in accord with reality. If we ask ourselves: what is a lead pencil made of? How are the different materials prepared? How are they put together? When were lead pencils invented? And so on, we can be more sure of our thoughts being consistent with reality than if we were to ponder the question of the descent of man—or, let us say, of the meaning of life. Simple exercises in thinking are a far better preparation for forming commensurate conceptions of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution than are complicated and learned ideas. As to our thinking, what is important at this stage is not the object or event to which it is directed, but that it should be strong and vigorous and to the point. If it has been educated to be so in reference so simple physical realities that lie open to view, it will acquire the tendency to be so even when it finds itself no longer under the control of the physical world and its laws. The pupil will find he gets rid in this way of any tendency he had before to loose and extravagant thinking.

[ 25 ] As if in the world of thought, so also in the sphere of the will, the self has to become master. Here too, as long as we remain in the world of the physical senses, life itself may be said to be our master. Some vital need asserts itself and the will feels impelled to satisfy the need. But one who undergoes a higher training has to acquire the habit of strict obedience to what he tells himself to do on his own initiative. In learning this he will be less and less inclined to cherish pointless desires. Dissatisfaction and instability in the life of will come from setting one's heart on some aim, of the realization of which one has formed no clear notion. Dissatisfaction of this kind can bring the whole inner life into disorder at the moment when a higher self is ready to come forth from the soul. A good exercise for the will is, every day for months on end, to give oneself the command: Today you are to do this, at this particular hour. One will gradually manage to fix the hour and the nature of the task so as to render the command perfectly possible to carry out. In this way we rise above that deplorable state of mind which finds expression in words such as: I would like to do this, I wish I could do that—when all the time there is no real expectation of fulfillment. A great poet made a prophetess say: “Him I love who craves for the impossible”² And the same poet says in his own name: “To live in the Idea is to treat the impossible as thought it were possible.”³ Such words should however not be quoted as refuting the above recommendation. For the demand that Goethe and his prophetess (Manto) are making can only be met by one who has first educated himself in the achievement of desires that are possible of fulfillment—in order then, by dint of his strengthened will, to be able to treat the “impossible” in such a way as to change it by his will into the possible.

[ 26 ] Passing on now to the world of feeling, the pupil must succeed in reaching a certain equanimity of soul. For this he will need to have under his control all outward expression of pleasure or pain, of joy or sorrow. Such advice will be certain to meet with prejudice. Surely, if he is not to rejoice over what is joyful, not to sorrow over what is sorrowful, the pupil will become utterly indifferent to the life that is going on around him! But this is not at all what is meant. The pupil shall by all means rejoice over what if joyful and sorrow over what is sorrowful. It is the outward expression of joy and sorrow, of pleasure and pain that he must learn to control. If he honestly tries to attain this, he will soon discover that he does not grow less, but actually more sensitive than before to everything in his environment that can arouse emotions of joy or of pain. If the pupil is really to succeed in cultivating this control it will undoubtedly involve keeping close watch upon himself for a long time. He must not be slow to enter with fullness of feeling into pleasure and pain, but must be able to do so without losing self-control and giving involuntary expression to it. What he has to suppress is not the pain—that is justified—but the involuntary weeping; not the horror at a base action, but the outburst of blind fury; not the caution in face of danger, but the giving way to panic—which does no good whatever.

Only by the practice of an exercise of this kind can the pupil attain the inner poise and quiet that he will have need of when the time comes for the higher self to be born in the soul, and more especially when this higher self becomes active there. Otherwise the soul may lead an unhealthy lie of its own alongside the higher self—like a kind of double. It is important not to fall a victim to self-deception in this manner. It may seem to many a pupil that he already possesses a good measure of equanimity in ordinary life and will not therefore need this exercise. In point of fact, such a one is doubly in need of it. A man may remain perfectly calm and composed in relation to the exigencies of everyday life, and then, when he rises into a higher world, exhibit a sad lack of poise—all the more so indeed, since the tendency to let himself go was there all the time, only suppressed. It must be clearly understood that what a pupil appears to have already of some attribute of the soul is a little account for spiritual training; what is far more important is that he should practice regularly and systematically the exercises he needs. Contradictory as such a statement may sound, it is true nevertheless. Say that life has endowed us with this or that virtue; for spiritual training it is the virtues we ourselves have cultivated that are of value. Are we by nature easily excitable, it is for us to rid ourselves of this excitability; are we by nature calm and imperturbable, we must bestir ourselves to bring it about through our own self-education that the impressions we receive from without awake in us the right response. A man who cannot laugh has just ad little control over his life as a man who without self-control is perpetually giving way to laughter.

[ 27 ] It will be a further help to the education of his thinking and feeling, if the pupil acquire a virtue that I will call positiveness. A lovely legend is related of Christ Jesus. It tells how He is walking with a few other persons, and they pass by a dead dog. The other turn away from the revolting sight. Christ Jesus speaks admiringly of the beautiful teeth of the animal. One can train oneself to meet the world with the disposition of soul that this legend displays. The spurious, the bad and the ugly should not hinder us from finding, wherever they are present, the true, the good and the beautiful. Positiveness must not be confused lack of discrimination, or with an arbitrary shutting of one's eyes to what is bad, or false, or “good for nothing.” He who admires the “beautiful teeth” of a dead animal sees also the decaying body. The unsightly corpse does not, however, prevent him from seeing the beautiful teeth. We cannot deem a bad thing good or an error true; but we can take care not to be put off by the bad from seeing the good, nor by the false from seeing the true.

[ 28 ] The thinking, and together with it the willing, reaches a certain maturity if one tries never to let past experiences rob one of open-minded receptivity for new ones. To declare in the face of some new experience: “I never heard of such a thing, I don't believe it!” should make no sense at all to a pupil of the Spirit. Rather let him make the deliberate resolve, during a certain period of time to let every thing or being he encounters tell him something new. A breath of wind, a leaf falling from a tree, the prattle of a little child, can all teach us something, are we but ready to adopt a point of view to which we have perhaps not hitherto been accustomed. One can, it is true, carry this too far. We must not, at whatever age we have reached, put right out of our minds everything we have experienced hitherto. We have most decidedly to base our judgment of what confronts us now upon past experience. That is on the one side of the balance, but on the other there is the need for the pupil of the Spirit to be ready all the time for entirely new experiences; above all, to admit to himself the possibility that the new may contradict the old.

[ 29 ] These then are five qualities of soul the pupil has to acquire n the coursed of a right and proper training: control over the direction of his thoughts, control of his impulses of will, equanimity in the face of pleasure and pain, positiveness in his attitude to the world around him, readiness to meet life with an open mind. Lastly, when he has spent consecutive periods of time in training himself for the acquisition of these five qualities, the pupil will need to bring them into harmony in his soul. He will have to practice them in manifold combinations—two by two, three and one at a time, and so on, in order to establish harmony among them.²

[ 30 ] These exercises have been assigned a place in spiritual training, because when thoroughly and effectually carried out they have not only their more immediate result in the cultivation of the desired qualities, but indirectly a great deal more will follow from them that is of no less importance for the pupil on his path to the spiritual worlds. Whoever gives sufficient time and care to their practice will, while he is doing them, come up against many blemishes and shortcomings in his soul, and will moreover find in the exercises themselves the means of strengthening and stabilizing his thought life, as well as his life of feeling and indeed his whole character. He will undoubtedly need many more exercises, adapted to his own individual faculties, to his particular character and temperament. These will emerge when the above have been practiced in all thoroughness. One will indeed discover, as time goes on, that these six exercises give one indirectly more than at first appears to be contained in them. Suppose the pupil is lacking in self-confidence. He will after a time begin to notice that, thanks to the exercises, he is gaining the self-confidence of which he stands in need. And it will be the same with other qualities of soul wherein he may be deficient. (Several exercises, described in more detail, will be found in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment.)

It is important that the pupil shall find it possible to go on developing the said six qualities in ever increasing measure. His control over this thoughts and sensations must become great enough to enable him to set aside times of complete inner quiet, when all the joys and sorrows, all the satisfactions and anxieties of everyday life—nay more, even all its tasks and demands are banished from mind and heart. In such times that alone which he himself wills to admit shall be allowed entry to his soul. Here again it is possible that some reader may feel misgiving. Will not the pupil become estranged from daily life and its tasks, if he withdraws from it in this way, banishing it from mind and heart for certain stated times during the day? In reality, however, this is far from being so. One who devotes himself in this way to periods of inner quiet, will find that he grows stronger in many respects for the tasks of daily life, and fulfils them, not only no less well, but decidedly better than before.

Such periods will have special value for the pupil if during them he refrains entirely from thinking of his own personal affairs and rises to the contemplation of the concerns of mankind at large. Should he be able at such times to fill his soul with communications that come from higher spiritual worlds, letting these take no less firm hold upon his interest than do his personal cares and concerns in ordinary life, he will be richly rewarded.

One who makes serious endeavor to gain this mastery over his life of soul will also find his way to a self-observation by means of which he will be able to regard his own concerns as coolly and quietly as if they had no connection with himself. To be able to look upon all experiences that come to one in life, all joys and sorrows, in the very same way as one looks upon those of others is a good preparation for spiritual training. The pupil will find he can gradually attain the necessary ability in this direction, if every evening when the day's work is done, he lets pass before his mind's eye pictures of the day's experiences, watching himself go through them. This will mean that he is looking at himself as he is in daily life—from without. To begin with, let him take small sections of the day. That will give him practice; and he will find that he grows more and more skilful in this “looking backward” until at last he is able to picture the whole day through in quite a short span of time. This beholding of our experiences in backward direction has a special value for spiritual training: it helps us disengage our thinking from its accustomed habit of holding on to the outer, material and sense-perceptible events. When we think backwards, we picture the events correctly, but we are no longer sustained by the obvious external sequence. The pupil needs this liberation if he is to make his way into the supersensible world. He will find too that by this freedom his thinking and ideation are strengthened, and in a thoroughly healthy manner. It is accordingly good also to review other things in backward order—a play, for example, a story, a melody, and so on.

A pupil of the Spirit will have it increasingly as his ideal to meet the events of life with inner quiet and confidence, forming his judgment on them, not as to how they accord with his own particular disposition but on the basis of their inherent meaning and inner value. By holding this ideal ever before him, he will be laying in his soul the foundation for that deep inner contemplation—of symbolic and other thoughts and also of feelings—of which we have been hearing.

[ 31 ] It is essential for the pupil to fulfill the above conditions, for supersensible experience has to be built upon the ground on which he stands in ordinary life before he enters the supersensible world. His experience there is dependent in two ways on the point he reached before setting out. If he has not taken special care to see that an ability for sound judgment is at the very foundation of his spiritual training, he will develop supersensible faculties which perceive the spiritual world inaccurately and falsely. His organs of spiritual perception will evolve in a wrong way. As in the world of the senses we cannot see correctly with imperfect or diseased eyes, so in the spiritual world we cannot perceive correctly with organs lacking the foundation of sound judgment and discrimination.

Should it happen that a pupil sets out on the path with an immoral character, his power of vision, when he mounts up into the spiritual worlds, will be dim and clouded. He will be like a man in the world of the senses who gazes at it in a condition of stupor. With this difference, however: whereas the latter will have little of any consequence to tell, the observer in the spiritual world—even in his stupor—is more awake than man is in ordinary consciousness, and will accordingly give information of what he sees there. The information will however be erroneous.

[ 32 ] The trustworthiness of the Imaginative stage of cognition can be assured if the pupil will lend support to his meditation by acquiring the habit of what may be called “sense-free” thinking. When we form a thought, basing it on something we have observed in the physical world, the thought is dependent on the physical senses. This is, however, not the only kind of thought we are able to entertain. There is no need for our thinking to be empty of content when it is no longer being filled with the data of sense-observation. The surest way to attain sense-free thinking, the way too that lies nearest at hand for the pupil, is to let his thinking lay hold of the facts of the higher world, communicated in spiritual science. These facts cannot be observed with the physical senses. Yet the pupil will find that with sufficient patience and perseverance he can grasp them. It is impossible to undertake research in the higher world, impossible to observe there for oneself, without spiritual training; one can however without higher training understand what is communicated by those who have carried out such research. If someone asks: But how can I take on trust what spiritual researchers say, when I cannot see it for myself?—the question is in reality unjustified. For it is perfectly possible, by simple reflection, to arrive at the sure conviction that the communications are true. If anyone finds himself unable to do so, it is not because it is impossible to “believe” something one does not see; it is due to the fact that the thought he has given to it has not been sufficiently free from prejudice, not comprehensive or deep enough. To be quite clear on this point, we must be ready to recognize that man's thinking can, if he applies it with energy and determination, grasp more than is generally supposed. For this thinking has within it an inner reality of being which has connection with the supersensible world. Man is, as a rule, unconscious of the connection, since he is accustomed to apply his thinking faculty to the sense-world alone; hence, when he hears of communications from the supersensible world, he sets them down as incomprehensible. They are however thoroughly comprehensible—and not alone to those whose thinking has been educated through spiritual training, but to every thinking person who is conscious of the full power of his thinking and ready to apply it.

By continuously apprising ourselves of what spiritual science tells, we grow accustomed to a thinking that does not take its start from outer observation by the senses. We learn now within our mind thought weaves on thought, thought seeks out thought, even when the connections have not been suggested by sensory observation. We make the significant discovery that the world of thought is inherently alive, and that when we are really and truly thinking we are already in the realm of a supersensible and living world. We say to ourselves: There is something in me that is developing a living organism of thought; moreover I myself am at one with it. As we continue to devote ourselves to sense-free thinking, we actually come to feel that there is something of real being—real inner substance—flowing into our inner life, even as when we observe with the senses there flow into us by way of our physical organs the properties of the things of sense.

[ 33 ] Out there in space, says the observer of the sense-world, is a rose. I do not feel it in any way strange or remote, for it makes itself known to me by means of its color and its scent. We need only be sufficiently free from preconceived ideas to be able also to say, when sense-free thinking is at work in us: Something quite real is making itself known to me, uniting thought with thought, forming within me a living body of thought. Yet there is an essential difference between the feeling we have towards the things we see in the external world of sense and on the other hand towards the reality of being that communicates itself to us in sense-free thinking. The observer of the external world of the senses will feel that he himself is outside the rose he is seeing with his eyes, while one who is devoting himself to sense-free thinking will feel within him the reality that is making itself known to him. He feels himself at one with it. And anyone who (whether quite consciously or less so) is only prepared to attribute reality to what confronts him as an external object, will naturally not entertain the idea that something inherently real can also become known to him through his being inwardly united and at one with it. There is an inner experience we need, to see the matter rightly. We have to learn to distinguish between the associations of thought which we ourselves produce more or less arbitrarily, and those we experience within us when we have silenced our own arbitrary will. In the latter instance we can say: I remain perfectly still, I myself bring about no association of thought with thought; I give myself up to that which “thinks in me.” We are then perfectly justified in saying: Something real is at work in me—no less justified than when on seeing the rose color and perceiving its scent, we say: A rose is there making an impression on me.

The fact that we receive the content of the thoughts from communications made by the researcher in the Spirit does not contradict this. True, the thoughts are already there; but it is not possible for us to think them without creating them anew every time in our soul. That is really the whole point. The researcher in the Spirit awakens in his hearers and readers thoughts that they have to evoke out of themselves, whereas one who is describing a “real” object—real in the world of the senses—is calling attention to what his hearers and readers can observe in the external world.

[ 34 ] (The path that leads to sense-free thinking by way of the communications of spiritual science is thoroughly reliable and sure. There is however another that is even more sure, and above all more exact; at the same time, it is for many people also more difficult. The path in question is set forth in my books The Theory of Knowledge implicit in Goethe's World-Conception and The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity. These books tell of what man's thinking can achieve when directed, not to impressions that come from the outer world of the physical senses, but solely upon itself. When this is so, we have within us no longer the kind of thinking that concerns itself merely with memories of the things of sense; we have instead pure thinking which is like a being that has life within itself. In the above-mentioned books you will find nothing at all that is derived from communications of spiritual science. They testify to the fact that pure thinking, working within itself alone, can throw light on the great questions of life—questions concerning the universe and man. The books thus occupy a significant intermediate position between knowledge of the sense world and knowledge of the spiritual world. What they offer is what thinking can attain, when it rises above sense-observation, yet still holds back from entering upon spiritual, supersensible research. One who wholeheartedly pursues the train of thought indicated in these books is already in the spiritual world; only it makes itself known to him as a thought-world. Whoever feels ready to enter upon this intermediate path of development will be taking a safe and sure road, and it will leave him a feeling in regard to the higher world that will bear rich fruit through all time to come.)

[ 35 ] The end in view for which the pupil engages in meditation upon symbolic thought-pictures or upon certain feelings, is neither more nor less than the development, within the astral body, of higher organs of perception. These organs are created out of the substance of the astral body itself; they bring the pupil into contact with a new world, and in this new world he learns to know himself as a new I or Ego. They differ from the organs with which we observe the world of the physical senses in that they are active. Eye and ear remain passive, allowing light and sound to act upon them; of the organs of perception that belong to the soul and spirit it can truly be said that while they are perceiving they are in continual activity, and furthermore that they comprehend, quite consciously, the objects and facts that they perceive. This gives us the feeling that when we “know” with our soul and spirit, the very knowing is at the same time a blending with the facts we come to know; we feel we are living within them.

The several organs of soul and spirit that develop in this manner may be called, by way of comparison, lotus-flowers; the name accords with the form in which supersensible consciousness has to picture them—picture them, that is Imaginatively. (It need hardly be said that such a designation has no more direct relation to reality than has the expression “Flügel” or “wing” in the word “Lungenflügel” meaning “Lobe of the lung.”) Specific kinds of meditation work upon the astral body in such a way as to lead to the development of one or other of these “lotus flowers.” After all that has been given in this book, it should be quite unnecessary to stress the fact that we have not to think of these organs of perception as though the symbolic picture of them which the name suggests were a direct imprint of their real nature. They are supersensible and consist in a definite activity of the soul; indeed they only exist in so far and for so long s the activity continues. We could as little speak, in connection with them, of anything observable by the senses, as we could of seeing a mist or cloud around a man when he is thinking! Those who insist on picturing the supersensible in sensual terms will inevitably be involved in misunderstandings. Superfluous as this remark should be, I let it stand, since one is constantly meeting with people who believe in the supersensible and yet want to picture it in far too sensual a way; also there are opponents of supersensible knowledge who imagine that when the scientist of the Spirit speaks of “lotus flowers” he thinks of them as tangible objects howsoever refined—objects perceptible to the outer senses.

Every meditation undertaken for the attainment of Imaginative cognition has its influence, if rightly carried out, upon one or other of these organs. (In my book Knowledge of the Higher Words and its Attainment meditations and exercises are given that take effect on this or that particular organ.) A proper spiritual training will arrange the several exercises in such order as to enable these organs of the soul to develop singly, together, or in due succession, as the case may be. This development asks for great patience and perseverance on the part of the pupil. The degree of patience a man gains in the ordinary course of life will not suffice. For it will be a long time—in many instances a very long time indeed—before the organs are so far developed that the pupil can make use of them for perceiving in the higher world. The moment he does become able to do this, he enters upon the stage of Enlightenment, so-called in contradistinction to the stage of Preparation, Probation or Purification, where the pupil is engaged upon the exercises that are given for the development of the organs. (The word “Purification” is used, because by means of the exercises he undergoes, the pupil “cleanses” a certain region of his inner life, casting out from it everything that has its source in the external world of the senses.) It may well happen that even before he reaches the stage of Enlightenment, a man will frequently experience sudden flashes that come from a higher world. These he should receive with thankfulness. The fact that he has them enables him already to bear witness to the spiritual world. He must however not weaken in his resolve if no such moments come during the time of Preparation—which may perhaps seem to him to be lasting all too long. Anyone who allows himself to grow impatient because he can still “see nothing” has not yet succeeded in finding his right relation to a higher world. He alone has done so who can look upon the exercises he undertakes in his training as an end in themselves. With these he is in very truth doing work upon something in him that is of the nature of soul and spirit, namely, upon his astral body. And even when as yet he “sees nothing,” he can feel: I am really working and functioning in soul and spirit. If however he has made up his mind beforehand as to what he is going to “see,” he will not have this feeling. He will in that case be disregarding what is in truth of incalculable significance. He should on the contrary be paying careful attention to all that he experiences while doing the exercises. For this is radically different from anything he meets with in the world of sense. Already at this stage he will remark that in working upon his astral body he is not working into some indifferent substance, but that in his astral body lives a world of quite another kind—a world of which his life amid the outer senses tells him nothing. Even as the external world of the senses works upon the physical body, so are the higher Beings working upon the astral body. The pupil will “impinge” upon the higher life in his own astral body, provided he himself does not stand in the way. If he is continually saying to himself: “I can perceive nothing at all,” it will generally mean that he has formed his own idea of what the spiritual percept has to look like, and since he does not see it in the form he has imagined, he says: “I see nothing at all.”

[ 36 ] The pupil who has the right attitude to his exercises will find increasingly that the very doing of them is something he can love for its own sake. He knows moreover that the doing of them places him already in a world of soul and spirit, and he waits with patience and above all with devotion for what is to come. This mood in the pupil can be best lifted into consciousness in the following words: “I am resolved to carry out whatever exercises are right for me, and I know that I shall meantime be receiving as much as is important for me to receive. I do not demand it, I am not impatient; I simply hold myself ready all the time to receive it.” It is quite wrong to contend: “So then the pupil is to grope his way on in the dark, perhaps for an incredibly long time, with no means of knowing that he is on the right path until success prove it to him!” For it is simply not true that the pupil has to wait for the exercises to achieve their end before he can be assured of their validity. If he undertakes them in the right spirit he need not wait for their eventual outcome; the satisfaction that he has in doing them will of itself make it clear to him that he is on the true path. Proper practice of exercises belonging to a path of spiritual training brings with it a sense of satisfaction that is no mere satisfaction but certain knowledge. The pupil knows: I am engaging in an activity which I can see is taking me forward in the right direction. Every pupil of the Spirit can have this certainty at every moment, if only he observes his experiences with sensitive discernment. If he is crudely inattentive, he is letting them go past him like a person out walking who is so deeply absorbed in his own reflections that he does not see the trees on either side of his path—although he could quite well be seeing them if he would only turn his eyes in their direction.

It is indeed undesirable that any other result than this one, which always attends the doing of the exercises, should be induced before the time is due. For it may well be that a seemingly successful result is no more than the smallest fraction of what should ensue in right and proper course. In spiritual development a partial success will often lead to a prolonged postponement of complete success. Moving familiarly among such forms of spiritual life as disclose themselves at an imperfect stage renders one insusceptible to influences that lead to higher levels of development. The seeming boon—namely the fact that one has after all had sight of the spiritual world—is not really a boon at all; this kind of “beholding” cannot impart objective truth but only delusive pictures.

[ 37 ] The organs of soul and spirit, the lotus flowers, that are in course of development in one who is undergoing training, reveal themselves to supersensible consciousness in the neighborhood, as it were, of particular bodily organs. From among the number of these organs of the soul, mention will here be made of the following. There is, first, the organ that is perceived as though about midway between the eyebrows (the so-called two-petalled lotus-flower;) then, the organ in the region of the larynx (the sixteen-petalled lotus-flower;) thirdly, the organ in the region of the heart (the twelve-petalled lotus-flower;) and then a fourth in the neighborhood of the pit of the stomach. Others come to view near other parts of the physical body. (The appellation two-or sixteen-petalled is not inappropriate, for the organs in question are in appearance comparable to flowers with these numbers of petals.)

[ 38 ] The lotus-flowers become manifest to the consciousness of the pupil in his astral body. As soon as he has developed one or other of them, he knows that he has it. He feels he can make use of it and that in doing so he does actually enter a higher world. The impressions he receives there still resemble in many respects those of the physical world. One who has attained Imaginative cognition will thus be able, in speaking of this new higher world, to describe his impressions by reference to sensations, for example, of warmth or of cold; or he may compare them to hearing music or speech, or to the effect upon him of light or color. For this is the kind of feeling he has of them. He is however conscious that perceptions acquired in the Imaginative world tell of something altogether different from those acquired in the world of sense. He knows that what gives rise to them is not physical or material, but of the nature of soul and spirit. Suppose he receives an impression resembling the sensation of warmth. He will not ascribe it, for example, to a piece of hot iron, but will consider it as emanating from some soul situation or event of a kind that he has hitherto been aware of only in his inner life of soul. He knows that his Imaginative perceptions are due to things and happenings of the nature of pure soul and spirit, even as his physical perceptions are due to facts and entities of a material, physical nature.

Along with this resemblance of the Imaginative to the physical world there is at the same time a significant difference between them. One ever-present feature of the physical world shows itself in the Imaginative world in a totally different way. In the physical world we can observe a continual coming into being and passing away again, a constant alternation of birth with death. In the Imaginative world we find instead perpetual transformation taking place—one thing changing into another. For instance, in the physical world we see a plant droop and die. In the Imaginative world, as the plant fades away, another form—invisible to the physical senses—is all the time seen to be arising, into which the dying plant gradually changes. When the plant has quite disappeared, before us in its place is this new form, fully developed. Birth and death are conceptions which lose their meaning in the Imaginative world. In their place we have the concept of transformation or metamorphosis—one thing changing into another.

This is how it is that the truths concerning the being of man which have been communicated in the chapters on “the Nature of Humanity” become accessible to Imaginative cognition. With the physical senses, only the processes of the physical body can be perceived, and these take place in the “realm of birth and death.” The other members of man's nature—the life-body, the sentient body and the I—are subject to the law of transformation; Imaginative cognition is therefore able to perceive them. One who has progressed to this stage can see how at death something as it were releases itself from the physical body and lives on further in a different kind of existence.

[ 39 ] But spiritual development does not come to an end in the Imaginative world. If we wanted to remain in that world and go no farther, we would be unable to give any explanation for the changes that were taking place; we could not find our bearings in the world to which we had gained access. The Imaginative world is a restless place. Everywhere in it there is movement, nothing but movement and change; nowhere does it come to rest. Only when we develop beyond the stage of Imaginative cognition and reach what may be called “cognition through Inspiration” do we find a resting-place.

It is not essential that one who sets out to attain knowledge of the supersensible world shall first acquire Imaginative knowledge in full measure and only then proceed to Inspiration. A pupil's training may be so regulated that exercises leading to Imagination are continued side by side with exercises for the development of Inspiration. He will then, in due time, come into a higher world where he does not merely perceive but can also orientate himself—a world in which he can begin to see meaning. In point of fact, it will indeed generally happen that as the pupil progresses, glimpses of the Imaginative world are first of all vouchsafed him, and that then, after a time, he has the feeling: Now I am beginning also to find my bearings.

Yet it must also be realized that the world if Inspiration is something different and new, compared to that of Imagination. With Imaginative cognition we perceive events and processes in mutual transformation. With Inspiration we come to know the inner qualities of the beings who are undergoing transformation. With Imagination we see the manifestation of these beings in the realm of soul. With Inspiration we penetrate to their inner spiritual nature; above all, we come to know a multiplicity of beings and learn of the connections between them. In the physical world we also have to do with a multiplicity of beings or entities of various kinds, but in the world of Inspiration this multiplicity is of quite another character. There each single being has its distinctive connections with other beings, connections that are determined, not as in the physical world by some outward impressions that the beings make upon one another, but by their inner character and spiritual nature. When we perceive a being in the world of Inspiration, we are not looking at some external influence that the being is exerting upon another being, comparable with the influence exerted by one physical being upon another; what confronts us there is a relationship between two beings that comes about solely through the inner character both of the one and of the other. There is in the physical world one kind of relationship to which this may bear comparison—such a relationship as obtains between the several sounds or letters of a word. Say we have before us the word “bold.” The word comes about through the sounding together of the sounds b-o-l-d. The sounds b and o, for example, do not collide or react on one another in some external way; they act together and each fulfils it part within the whole by virtue of its inner character. The activity of “observing” in the world of Inspiration can therefore be compared with reading. The beings in that world present themselves to the observer like letters that he must first learn and that will then be revealed to him in their several relationships, forming as it were a spiritual script or supersensible writing. Spiritual science may therefore avail itself of this comparison and call the knowledge acquired through Inspiration: the Reading of the Hidden Script.

[ 40 ] How the Reading of the Hidden Script is done, and how what is read may be communicated shall now be explained with reference to the earlier chapters of the present book. A description was given in the first place of the being of man, telling of how it is built up of several members. Then it was shown how the world in which man is evolving has itself passed through various stages of evolution—the Saturn condition, then the Sun, the Moon and now the Earth condition. Imaginative cognition brings within our reach perceptions that make us acquainted, on the one hand with the members of man's being, on the other hand with the successive conditions of our Earth and the changes it has undergone up to the present time. We then had to go further and learn of the relationship that exists between the Saturn condition of our Earth and the physical body of man, between the Sun condition and his ether-body and so on. We were shown how the seed for the physical body came into being as long ago as the Saturn condition, and has continued developing throughout Sun, Moon and Earth conditions right up to its present form. It became necessary also to show, for example, what changes came about in the being of man owing to the separation of the Sun from the Earth, and again what further changes were wrought in him by the parallel event in respect of the Moon; and then what kind of co-operation was needed to bring about those still later changes in mankind that found expression during the Atlantean time and the epochs that followed it—the Indian, Persian, Egyptian and so on. The picture that was given of these connections was derived not from Imaginative perception, but from knowledge attained through Inspiration, from Reading in the Hidden Script. In relation to this “reading” the perceptions of Imagination are like the individual letters or sounds. Nor is it only explanations of this kind for which the reading is required. The course of man's life could not be understood if we were to study it with the help of Imaginative knowledge alone. We would, it is true, perceive how at death the soul-and-spirit members disengage themselves from what remains behind in the physical world; but we would not understand how the events that happen to man after death are related to past and future conditions, unless we already know our way about the world we perceived Imaginatively. Without the knowledge acquired through Inspiration, the Imaginative world is like a script at which we merely stare, without being able to read it.

[ 41 ] When the pupil of the Spirit goes forward from Imagination to Inspiration, he very quickly realizes what a mistake it would be to neglect to cultivate an understanding for the great events and phenomena of the Universe and to want to restrict his attention to the facts that bear upon his more immediate human interests. It can easily happen that one who has not been initiated into these matters will say: “The one thing of importance for me is to learn about the destiny of the soul of man after death. If I can receive information upon that, then I am satisfied. Why does spiritual science set before me such remote matters as the Saturn and Sun conditions of our Earth, the separation of the Sun—and later of the Moon—from the Earth, and so on? Whoever has been introduced in the right way to the whole subject of higher knowledge will come to see that he cannot attain authentic information about man's destiny after death, until he has first learned about those greater themes that might have seemed unnecessary. A picture of the condition into which man is brought after death will remain for him quite unintelligible and therefore worthless, if he cannot bring it together with conceptions that have grown out of these more remote themes. The very simplest observation that can be made by means of supersensible cognition requires him to be acquainted with them. When, for instance, a plant passes from the flowering stage and begins to bear fruit, then if we are watching it with supersensible powers of observation, we see a change taking place in an astral entity which in the flowering time has been enveloping the plant from above like a cloud. But for the “fertilization” as it is called (leading from flower to fruit,) this astral entity would have passed on into an altogether different form from the one it has assumed in consequence of fertilization. And we can only comprehend the whole process when seen with supersensible perception if we have prepared our understanding by studying the great cosmic event which the Earth and all her inhabitants experienced at the time of the separation of the Sun. Before fertilization the plant it is in a similar condition to that of the whole Earth before the Sun went out from her. After fertilization, the flower of the plant is like the Earth was when the Sun had left and the Moon forces were still within her. If we have mastered the conceptions that can be acquired by studying the separation of the Sun from the Earth, then the significance of the “fertilization” of a flowering plant will present itself to us in a way we can express by saying that before it the plant is in a Sun-like, and after it in a Moon-like condition. It is not too much to say that the smallest event in the world can only be rightly comprehended when we recognize in it an image of the great cosmic events. Without this recognition we are as far from understanding its real nature as we would be from understanding a Raphael Madonna that was all covered over except for one little patch of blue.

Everything that happens to man is in this way an image, having its prototype amid those great events of cosmic evolution with which his existence is bound up. If we would understand what supersensible consciousness perceives in human life—whether in the life between birth and death, or in the life between death and a new birth—we shall find we are able to do so if we take to our help the sublime conceptions that can be gained from dwelling on the great events of cosmic evolution. These will furnish us with the key to an understanding of the life of man. From the point of view of spiritual science, study of Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution is thus at the same time study of man.

[ 42 ] Through Inspiration we learn how the Beings of the higher world are related to one another. A still further stage of knowledge opens up the possibility of coming to know these Beings in their innermost nature. This stage may be given the name of Intuitive cognition. (the words “intuitive” and “intuition” are sometimes used for a kind of vague insight or sudden notion that may or may not quite accord with truth. What is here meant by “Intuition” is altogether different. It means a kind of cognition that is of the utmost light-filled clarity, a cognition that carries with it absolute assurance of its validity.) To have knowledge of an object perceived by the senses is to be outside the object and judge it in accordance with the impression it makes upon us from without. To know a Spirit-Being through Intuition is to become one with that Being, to be inwardly united with him. Stage by stage the pupil of the Spirit rises to a knowledge of this kind. With Imagination, he is already beyond feeling that his perceptions reveal the mere external characteristics of the Beings he perceives. Imagination leads him to recognize, in his perceptions, emanations of a living reality of soul and spirit. Inspiration takes him a step further into the inner essence of the spiritual Beings: he learns to understand what they are to one another. In Intuition, he penetrates right into their inner being.

Once again we can refer to the account of evolution that has been given in this book, in order to demonstrate the significance of Intuition. The foregoing chapters do not only relate how Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution took their course, they also tell of Beings who took part in this progress in many different ways. Allusion was made to the Thrones or Spirits of Will, to the Spirits of Wisdom, Spirits of Movement and so forth. And in connection with Earth evolution itself, the Spirits of Lucifer and of Ahriman were mentioned. The whole edifice of the Universe was traced back to Beings who all had their share in bringing it into existence. What can be learned concerning these Beings is acquired by Intuitive cognition. And the Intuitive cognition is likewise needed if we want to understand the course of human life. What is released from the physical body after death passes through various stages, as time goes on. The situation in which man finds himself immediately after death is, up to a point, capable of description by the exercise of Imaginative cognition. What happens later, however, when man is further on in the time between death and a new birth, would have to remain totally incomprehensible if Inspiration did not supervene. Inspiration is required to discover what can be said about the life of man in Spirit-land when the time of purification is over. Then comes a state where even Inspiration no longer suffices, where it loses the way and fails to understand. In the course of man's development between death and a new birth, he enters upon a time where Intuition alone can follow him. The part of man that undergoes this experience is however always in him, and if we would understand it in its true inwardness, then we must look for it also—again by means of Intuition—during the time between birth and death. Whoever is content with a knowledge of man acquired by Imagination and Inspiration will find himself without means of access to what goes on in man's very innermost being from one incarnation to the next. It is therefore only with Intuitive cognition that adequate research can be made into repeated lives on Earth and into the workings of Karma. Everything that claims to be true information concerning these must be derived from research that is made by means of Intuitive cognition. And if man desires knowledge of himself in his inmost being, this too he can attain only through Intuition. By means of Intuition he perceives that within him which goes forward from one Earth-life to another.

[ 43 ] The faculties of cognition that belong to Inspiration and Intuition—these too can only be attained by means of exercises in the realm of soul and spirit. The exercises are akin to those given for the attainment of Imagination, described above ads deep inner contemplation (meditation.) Whereas however the exercises leading to Imagination are still associated with sense-impressions, in those that lead to Inspiration all such association must be increasingly eliminated. In order to make quite clear what has now to happen, let us return once more to the symbol of the Rose Cross. When we meditate upon the Rose Cross we have before us a picture, the component parts of which are derived from the sense-world—the black color of the cross, the roses, and so forth. But the assembling of the parts to form the Rose Cross is a deed the origin of which is no longer in the sense-world. If now the pupil of the Spirit will try to let the black cross and also the red roses—pictures, both of them, of objects real in the world of the senses—disappear completely from his consciousness, retaining there nothing but the spiritual activity which brought the parts together, in this activity he has the substance of the kind of meditation that can lead him, in course of time, to Inspiration. He should look into his own soul and ask himself: What was I doing when I brought cross and roses together to form a symbolic picture? What I was doing—the process I was bringing about in my soul—that will I now hold fast; the picture itself I will let disappear from consciousness. And now, without letting the picture rise up before me, I will feel what my soul was doing to produce the picture. I will for the time being live a completely inward life, living solely in my own activity that created the picture. I will enter, that is, into deep contemplation, not of any picture, but of my own picture-creating activity.

Meditation of this kind has to be undertaken by the pupil in connection with many different thought-pictures. It will in time lead him to knowledge through Inspiration. To take another example. We meditate the thought-picture of a sprouting, and then again of a dying plant. First, we let the picture rise up in our mind of a plant that is gradually coming into being; we see it sprouting from the seed, we see how it unfolds leaf after leaf and finally brings forth blossom and fruit. Then we see it begin gradually to wither, until at last it died right away. Meditating upon such a picture, we begin to acquire a feeling of the process as such—the process of coming-into-being and dying-away. If we want to go further and reach the corresponding Inspiration, we shall have to do the exercise in another way. We shall have to concentrate our attention on the activity of soul that we ourselves engaged in, in order for the picture of the plant to arrive at the idea of the coming-into-being and dying-away. The plant has now to disappear entirely from consciousness, and we then left meditating upon what we have been doing in our own soul. Only by means of such exercises is the ascent to Inspiration possible.

To begin with, the pupil will not find it altogether easy to be quite clear in his mind as to how he is to set about an exercise of this nature. If he has been accustomed to let his inner life be determined by external impressions, then, when he wants to develop in his soul an inner life that has broken loose from all connection with external impressions, then, when he wants to develop in his soul an inner life that has broken loose from all connection with external impressions, then, he will be at a loss how to proceed. Hence on the path to Inspiration it will be still more essential than before to accompany the given exercises with all those precautionary measures that were recommended to him when setting out to attain Imagination—measures for ensuring stability and confidence, alike in his powers of discrimination, in his life of feeling and in his conduct and character. If he succeeds with these, the pupil will find they have a twofold effect upon him. He will not run the risk of losing his balance when he attains to vision of the supersensible; and he will also become capable of fulfilling quite exactly and faithfully the demands made upon him by the new exercises. The pupil will need to develop here a specific mood and disposition of soul, with the feelings that rightly belong to it; till he has done so, he may well find the exercises difficult. If however he will patiently and perseveringly cultivate within him the qualities of soul that are favorable to the birth of supersensible cognition, it will not be long before he finds himself able to understand the exercises and also to carry them out. Let him make a habit of communing often with his own soul—but not with a view to musing upon himself! Rather should he set out before his mind's eye the successive experiences he has met with in life and consider them quietly. The effort will be well rewarded. He will find that his thought and ideas, and also his feelings, are enriched by bringing these experiences into relation with one another. He will come to realize how true it is that we gain new experience not only by having new impressions or undergoing new events in life; but also by letting the old work on within us. The pupil who really succeeds in letting his experiences—yes, and even the opinions he had gained—play upon one another, as though he himself, with his sympathies and antipathies, his personal interests and feelings, were in no way concerned, will be preparing within him particularly good ground for the growth of the faculty of supersensible cognition. He will in very truth develop what one may call a rich inner life.

What is throughout of the very first importance is that balance and harmony should reign among the various qualities and inclinations of the soul. When man devotes himself to some particular activity of soul, he tends all too easily to become one-sided. Having realized how beneficial is the habit of inner reflection, of sojourning now and again in the world of one's own thoughts, he may grow so fond of doing this that he tends increasingly to shut himself off from the impressions of the world around him. Such a habit could only lead to a bare and arid inner lie. He will advance farthest who retains, along with the ability to withdraw into his own soul, an open-minded receptiveness for all that the external world offers for his perception. And here we should not have in mind merely such objects and events as are commonly considered important; everyone—be his situation in life never so mean and never so circumscribed—can find experience enough within its walls, provided he foster in mind and heart a sensitiveness to all that goes on around him. He has no occasion to go out in search of experiences; they are around him on every hand.

Emphasis has also to be laid on the way in which we receive and reflect upon our experiences. You may, for instance, happen to discover one day that a person whom you revere has some feature in his character which you cannot but regard as a blemish. As you think it over, the discovery may affect you in either of two ways. You may simply say to yourself: Knowing what I now know, I can no longer revere him as I did. Or, you may ask yourself the question: How can it have come about that this person, for whom I have such veneration, has to labor under a defect of this kind? Ought I not perhaps to look upon the fault, not just as a fault, but as a result of the life he has led, perhaps even consequent upon his qualities of greatness? Having seriously faced this question, you may perhaps find that your reverence for him is, after all, undiminished by the discover of a flaw in his character. Every such experience will have taught you something: your understanding of lie will be the truer for it. You would of course be making a bad mistake if you let your appreciation of this way of meeting life mislead you into excusing anything and everything in people or in things to whom or to which you are partial; or if you allowed yourself to drift into a habit of shutting your eyes to whatever is blameworthy, imagining that you were thereby furthering your own inner development. For this you will certainly not be doing, if it is to satisfy your own inclinations that you refrain from blaming faults and try instead to understand and condone them. It will e helpful only if this attitude is called for by the nature of the case, irrespective of whether you yourself are to gain or lose by its adoption. It is undoubtedly true that one can never learn by passing judgment on a fault but only by coming to understand it. Anyone however who in his desire to understand the fault proceeds to banish from his mind all sense of displeasure at it, will be making little headway in his development. So here we have again an instance where what is required is not one-sidedness in one or other direction, but balance and harmony between the several virtues of the soul.

This is true in quite a special degree of on property of the soul that is of outstanding significance for higher development—I mean, the feeling of reverent devotion. One who cultivates this feeling or who has always possessed it as a kind of gift of Nature, has a good foundation upon which to build the faculties of supersensible cognition. Has he been able in childhood to look up with devotion and admiration to persons who stood for him as lofty ideals, then his soul will provide good ground whereon new powers of cognition can grow and flourish. And whoever in later life, in years of riper judgment, gazes up at the starry heavens, filled with wonder and boundless devotion at the revelation he there divines of sublime spiritual powers, will be well on the way to grow ripe for knowledge of supersensible worlds. The same holds true of one who is able to feel wonder and admiration at the powers that are active in the life of man. And of no less significance is also that reverence which a person of maturer years may continue to cherish in full measure for other human beings whose worth he divines or recognizes. Indeed only where such reverence is present, is it possible to come within sight of the higher worlds. A man who is incapable of reverence will not progress very far on the path of knowledge. To one for whom there is nothing in all the world that he deems worthy of his esteem, the real nature of things will ever remain a closed book.

Should anyone on the other hand allow himself to be misled by feelings of reverence and devotion to the complete annulment of his own healthy self-assertion and self-confidence, he too will be sinning against the law of harmony and balance. The pupil of the Spirit will work continuously at his development, that he may grow ever more and more mature; and if he is doing this, then it is only right that he should have confidence in himself and feel assured that his powers are growing all the time. Would he see the whole matter in its true light, let him say to himself: Hidden within me are spiritual powers, and I can call them forth out of my inner life. Hence when I see something that commands my respect because is higher than I, not only should I feel reverence for it, but I may be confident that I myself shall in time come to the stage of development where I am like it.

[ 44 ] The more a man is able to be attentive to happenings or situations in his life which in the ordinary course are unfamiliar to him and would elude his judgment, the greater ability will he have to lay the foundation for right development on the path into the spiritual worlds. An example can help make this clear. A person comes into a situation where it is open to him to carry out some particular action—or to leave it undone. His judgment says to him: Do it! But he has in his soul an unaccountable feeling that draws him back. It may happen that he pays no heed to this feeling but simply goes ahead in accordance with the verdict of his judgment. Or again, it may happen that he yields to this inexplicable urge within him, and refrains. If then he follows up the matter to see what happens later, it may turn out that had he obeyed his judgment, harm would have come of it, but that good has resulted from his leaving the action undone. Such an experience can set going in the pupil a train of thought that may run as follows. Within me, he may say to himself, lives something which guides me better than can my faculty of judgment at its present stage of development. I must keep an open mind for this “something” which is on a much higher level than I can reach with my present powers. If we pay careful heed to situations of this kind as we meet them in life, we shall receive considerable benefit from doing so. We shall begin to sense (and this itself is already a sign of health in our inner life) that there is more in man than comes within the range of his ordinary judgment. The very recognition of such a fact widens the soul. Here again, however, we might be led into highly questionable byways. Should we acquire the habit of constantly shutting down our faculty of judgment because some dim feeling impels us to take another course, we might well become the plaything of all manner of undefined motives. And from such a habit the way leads all too quickly into weak-mindedness and superstition.

Fatal for the pupil of the Spirit is superstition of every sort. He can only hope ever to find the right and true path to the realm of Spirit-life by carefully guarding himself from superstition, from flights of fancy, and from all day-dreaming. A person who feels glad when he is brought up against something in life which is “beyond human understanding” will not be the one to enter the spiritual world in the right way. Fondness for the “inexplicable” is emphatically not a qualification for discipleship of the Spirit. Indeed the pupil should utterly discard the notion that a true mystic is one who is always ready to surmise the presence of what cannot be explained or explored. The right way is to be prepared to recognize on all hands hidden forces and hidden beings, yet at the same time to assume that what is “unexplored” today will be able to be explored when the requisite ability has been developed.

[ 45 ] There is a certain mood of soul which it is important for the pupil to maintain at every stage of his development. He should not let his urge for higher knowledge lead him to keep on aiming to get answers to particular questions. Rather should he continually be asking: How am I to develop the needed faculties within myself? For when by dint of patient inner work some faculty develops in him, he will receive the answer to some of his questions. Genuine pupils of the Spirit will always take pains to cultivate this attitude of soul. They will thereby be encouraged to work upon themselves, that they may become ever more and more mature in spirit, and they will abjure the desire to extort answers to particular questions. They will wait until such time as the answers come.

Here again, however, there is the possibility of a one-sidedness, which may prevent the pupil from going forward in the way he should. For at some moment he may quite rightly feel that—according to the measure of his powers—he can answer for himself even questions of the highest order. Thus at every turn moderation and balance play an essential part in the life of the soul.

[ 46 ] Many more qualities of soul could be cited that may with advantage be fostered and developed, if the pupil is seriously wanting to work through a training for Inspiration; and in connection with every one of them we should find that emphasis is laid on the supreme importance of moderation and balance. These attributes of soul help the pupil to understand the exercises that are given for the attainment of Inspiration, and also make him capable of carrying them out.

[ 47 ] The exercises for Intuition demand from the pupil that he let disappear from consciousness not only the pictures to which he gave himself up in contemplation in order to arrive at Imaginative cognition, but also that meditating upon his own activity of soul, which he practiced for the attainment of Inspiration. This means that he is now to have in his soul literally nothing of what he has experienced hitherto, whether outwardly or inwardly. If, after discarding all outward and inward experience, nothing whatever is left in his consciousness—that is to say, if consciousness simply slips away from him and he sinks into unconsciousness—then that will tell him that he is not yet ripe to undertake the exercises for Intuition and must continue working with those for Imagination and Inspiration. A time will come however when, after all experiences, inner and outer, have been banished from it, consciousness is not left empty, but something remains in it to which the pupil can now give himself up in deep contemplation even as he formerly gave himself up to what came to him from outer or inner impressions. This “something” is of a very special nature. In relation to all that the pupil has hitherto experienced and learned it is entirely new. When he feels it there in his consciousness, he knows: This is something of which up to now I have had no knowledge at all. It is a clear perception and I perceive it, just as I should perceive a note of music that my ear was hearing; yet it can only enter my consciousness through Intuition, even as the music can only enter there by way of the ear. In Intuition the impressions man receives are stripped bare of the last remnant of connection with the physical senses. The spiritual world now begins to lie open for his cognition in a form that has nothing in common with the properties of the sense-world.

[ 48 ] Imaginative cognition is attained when the lotus-flowers unfold from the astral body. As a result of the exercises undertaken for the attainment of Inspiration and Intuition, movements and currents make their appearance of man's ether- or life-body, which were not there before. These movements are the organs that enable man to add to his faculties the “Reading of the Hidden Script” and yet further powers that lie beyond. The changes that are wrought in his ether-body when a pupil has attained Inspiration and Intuition, reveal themselves to supersensible cognition in the following way. Somewhere as if in the neighborhood of the physical heart one becomes conscious of a new center in the ether-body, which forms itself into an etheric organ. From this center all manner of movings and streamings run out to the various parts of the physical body. The most important of these go to the lotus-flowers, flow right through them and through their several petals, then turn outwards and pour themselves into outer space like rays of light. The more highly developed a pupil is, the larger is the circle around him in which these currents are perceptible. Under a properly regulated training this center in the neighborhood of the heart does not however develop right at the beginning. Preparation has to be made for it. A preliminary center appears first in the head, is then transplanted into the region of the larynx and finally comes to rest in the neighborhood of the physical heart. If development is irregular, it may be that this organ is formed in the region of the heart form the outset. There will then be a danger that instead of attaining calm and objective supersensible perception, the pupil might develop into a fantastic dreamer.

As he progresses further, the pupil comes to the point where he can release these currents and memberings of his ether-body from dependence on the physical body, and make use of them directly, without reference to the physical body. The lotus-flowers serve him then as instruments by means of which he moves his ether-body. Before this can happen, certain special streams and rays must have been forming in the whole circumference of the ether-body, enclosing it as though with a fine network, rendering it a distinct, self-contained entity. Then there is nothing to hinder the movements and streamings that are going on in the ether-body from making contact with the external world of soul and spirit and from uniting with it, so that what is happening without and what is happening within—that is to say, within the human ether-body—are able to come when the human being can perceive consciously the world of Inspiration. This kind of cognition shows itself from the first to be of quite a different character from the cognition that relates to the physical world. Here, we receive impressions through our senses and then proceed to entertain ideas and concepts about these impressions. The acquisition of knowledge by means of Inspiration is not like that. The “knowing” is achieved in one single act; there is no thought-process following the perception. What in the act of cognition by means of the physical senses is acquired only subsequently in the concept, is in the Inspirational cognition given simultaneously with the percept. This being so, the pupil would flow right into the surrounding world of soul and spirit, would merge with it and be unable to distinguish himself from it, had he not formed before in his ether-body the network that has just been described.

[ 49 ] The exercises that are given for Intuition influence not only the ether-body; they also leave their mark on the supersensible forces that are at work in the physical body. This must not be taken to mean that changes are effected there, perceptible to ordinary sense-observations. Supersensible cognition alone can form any true idea of them; they are right outside the scope of a cognition that is concerned with externals. The changes come about as a result of the pupil's consciousness being so far matured that, notwithstanding his having banished from it all that he has experienced in the past, whether outwardly or inwardly, he is nevertheless able to have conscious experience in Intuition.

Yet the experiences that come with Intuition are intimate, are tender and delicate. Man's physical body, at its present stage, is quite coarse in comparison; consequently, it offers stubborn resistance to these results of the exercises for Intuition. If however the exercises are preserved in with energy and patience, and with the necessary inner quiet, they will at length overcome the formidable hindrances that the physical body presents. The pupil will begin to notice that he is gradually bringing under his control certain activities of his physical body that formerly took their course without his being in the least conscious of them. He will become aware also of a change of another kind. He may observe that for a short while he feels a need so to order his breathing—or some other bodily process—as to bring it into harmony with what his soul is doing in the exercises or whatever else he is undertaking in inner, meditative life. The ultimate ideal is that no exercises of any kind should be done with the physical body as such, not even breathing exercises; so that whatever happens in the physical will occur simply and solely as an outcome of the exercises for Intuition.

[ 50 ] When the pupil is making his way upwards on the path that leads to higher worlds, he will remark at a certain stage that the interconnection of the activities of his personality is beginning to assume a new form. In the world of the physical senses the I sees to it that the various faculties of the soul co-operate in an orderly manner. In the affairs of everyday life these faculties—we refer here especially to Thinking, Feeling and Willing—always stand in a certain recognized relation to one another. Let us say we are looking at some object. It pleases us, or perhaps we dislike it. That is to say, a feeling associates itself, almost inevitably, with our mental picture, our idea of the object. Very possibly we may also wish we could possess it or we may feel impelled to alter it in this or that particular. That is to say, desire and will unite themselves with the thought and the feeling. That this association comes about is due to the fact that the I unites ideation (thinking,) feeling and willing into a harmonious whole, thus bringing order into the forces of our personality. This healthy harmony would be broken if the I were to show itself powerless in the matter—if desire, for example, were to branch off in another direction than feeling or thinking. If someone thought that a particular course was right, and yet his will were set on following another course—one that did not comment itself to him—his soul would certainly not be in a healthy condition. The same could be said of a person who was bent on having, not what he liked, but rather what he disliked.

[ 51 ] The pupil will, however, find that on the way to the attainment of higher powers of cognition, thinking, feeling and willing do definitely separate one from another, each of them assuming a kind of independent existence. A thought, for instance, will not now of its own accord stir up a particular feeling and evoke a particular volition. The situation will be that while in our thinking we can perceive a thing objectively and truly, yet before we can have any feeling about it or come to any resolve in the matter, we shall need to develop within us a distinct and independent impulse. While engaged in supersensible observation, our thinking, feeling and willing do not continue to simply three powers of the soul raying out, as if were, from the I, as a single center of our personality; they become independent beings. It is as though they were three separate personalities. The implication is that our I or Ego needs to be made all the stronger, for it has no longer merely to ensure that order reigns among three faculties of soul; it has to guide and lead three beings. This partition into three distinct beings must, however, only be allowed to subsist during the time of supersensible observation. Here again we see how important it is to include among the exercises for more advanced training those that give stability and firmness to the faculty of thoughtful judgment, to the feeling life and to the life of will. For if we fail to bring with us into the higher world the necessary stability and firmness of soul, then we shall very soon find how weak the I will prove itself to be—not fit guide for the thinking, feeling and willing! Should such weakness manifest in the I, it will be as though the soul were being pulled in different ways by distinct personalities; its inner integrity will inevitably be destroyed. If, however, development has taken its right course, the change will signify a genuine advance. The Ego does not lose control but remains in command even of the independent beings that now constitute the soul.

As development proceeds, a further step is taken. The thinking that has become independent evokes a fourth being of soul and spirit, a being that may be described as a direct inpouring of spiritual streams that are of the nature of Thought. The whole Universe now confronts the human being as a mighty edifice of Thought even as the plant or animal world confronts him in the realm of the physical senses; he beholds it before him like a mighty edifice built of thought. The Feeling too and the Will, that have become independent, evoke powers in the soul which become active there as independent beings. And there appears in addition yet a seventh power, a seventh entity which bears resemblance to one's own I—to the I as such.

[ 52 ] With this whole experience another is united. Before reaching the supersensible world man wads familiar with thinking, feeling and willing purely as inner experiences of the soul. No sooner has he entered the supersensible world than he begins to perceive things that are the expression, not of anything physical, but of soul and spirit. Underlying what he is able to perceive in the new world are beings of soul and spirit. These beings present themselves to him as an external spiritual world, just as stones and plants and animals present themselves to the senses in the physical world. The pupil can however perceive a significant difference between the world of soul and spirit that is now unfolding before him and the world he has been accustomed to observe with the help of the physical senses. A plant in the latter remains as it is, whatever man may feel or think about it. It is not so with the pictures of the soul-and-spirit world. These change according as man has this or that thought or feeling towards them. Man himself stamps them in this way with a character that is derived from his own being. Suppose a certain picture appears before him in the Imaginative world. To begin with, he may perhaps be quite indifferent to it; in that case, it will manifest in a certain form. But the moment he begins to feel pleased with it or to take a dislike to it, it will change its form. This is what is so striking about the pictures of the supersensible world: they are not only the expression of something outside of man and independent of him, they also reflect what the man is himself. They are, in fact, thoroughly permeated with his being. His being overlays them as with a veil. And what man sees when he is faced with a real spiritual being, is not that being at all, but something he himself has produced. He may thus have before him something true in itself, yet what he sees may still be false. Nor is it only what he is ware of in himself that works in this way; there is nothing in him that does not leave its mark on the Imaginative world. Someone may, for instance, have deeply hidden inclinations, held in check by dint of education or force of character; they will nevertheless be making their impression on the world of soul and spirit. That world receives its coloring according to the entire being of the man, irrespective of how much or how little he himself may know of his own nature and character.

If the pupil is to be capable of going forward from this stage of development, he must learn to make a clear distinction between himself and the surrounding spiritual world. To this end he has to learn to put a stop to any kind of influence that he himself might exert upon the world of soul and spirit that is around him. The only way to ensure this is to be fully cognizant of what it is that he is taking with him into the new world. In other words, it is a matter of acquiring, first and foremost, genuine and searching self-knowledge. Once he has that, he will be able to see with clear, unclouded vision that world of soul and spirit by which he is surrounded. Now thanks to certain facts in the whole development of man, self-knowledge of this kind cannot but arise—as it were, quite naturally—when a man enter the higher world. In the everyday physical world man develops, as we know, his I or Ego, his consciousness of self; and this his I acts as a center of attraction for his whole personality. All his inclinations, his sympathies and antipathies, his passions and propensities, his views and opinions group themselves around his Ego. A man's Ego too is the center of attraction for what we call his Karma. If we were able to see this our Ego naked and undisguised, we would at the same time be perceiving that we have yet to undergo such and such strokes of destiny in our present and future incarnations, owing to the way we lived and the tendencies we acquired in past incarnations. Therefore this Ego, with all its encumbrances, must necessarily be the first picture that confronts the human soul on ascending into the world of soul and spirit. According to a certain law of the spiritual world, this—the man's “Double”—is bound to be the very first impression man receives on entering the spiritual world.

We can well understand the law when we reflect how in his life on the physical plane man perceives himself only in so far as he experiences himself in thinking, feeling and willing. In other words, he perceives himself only from within; his “self” does not confront him from without, as do the stones and plants and animals. Moreover, the knowledge he thus gains of himself is very partial and incomplete.

For there is that in human nature which hinders him from attaining deeper self-knowledge. It is the urge, wherever dawning self-knowledge compels him to admit some imperfection in his character, and he does not want to deceive himself about it—the urge to set to work to alter the unpleasant trait.

[ 53 ] If he is not obedient to the urge, but turns his attention away from himself and remains as he is, then it need hardly be said that he robs himself of the possibility of attaining self-knowledge in that direction. If on the other hand he examines himself intently and, refusing to give way to self-deception, boldly faces the trait he has observed in his own character, then either he will find he can improve it, or it may be that—such as he is at present—he is unable to do so. In the latter instance, a feeling will steal over him that one can only call a kind of shame. This is, in fact, how healthy human nature works: self-knowledge gives rise to a sense of shame—a feeling that may show itself in many ways. Now as we know, in everyday life the sense of shame has a particular effect upon us. A man of healthy feeling will take care that those aspects of his character which make him eel ashamed shall not take effect in the world at large—shall not find expression in his deeds. Shame is thus a power that impels man to shut something up inside him and not allow it to be seen.

Thinking this over carefully, we shall have little difficulty in understanding that spiritual science ascribes even more far-reaching effects to an experience of the soul that is very nearly akin to the familiar one of a sense of shame. Spiritual research discovers in the depths of the human soul a kind of hidden sense of shame of which in physical life man is unconscious. This hidden feeling is none the less active in the soul. It works there in much the same way as does the sense of shame of which a man is normally conscious. It prevents his having before him in a clearly perceptible picture his real and inmost being. If this feeling were not there, man would see displayed before him what he is in very truth. He would no longer experience his thoughts and ideas, his feelings and his will in a merely inward way, but would perceive them even as he perceives the stones and animals and plants. Thus does a hidden sense of shame conceal man from himself. Nor is that all; it hides from him at the same time the entire soul-and-spirit world. For since his own inner being is hidden from him, he cannot get sight of that domain within him where he should now be endeavoring to develop the organs that will enable him to attain knowledge of the world of soul and spirit. He misses the opportunity of so transforming his inner being that it may acquire organs of spiritual perception.

When however in the pursuit of a right spiritual training man labors to promote the development within him of these organs of perception, the very first impression that confronts him is his own self. He perceives what he truly is, he perceives his Double. This perception of oneself is inseparable from perception of the world of soul and spirit. In ordinary life in the physical world, the hidden sense of shame is continually shutting for man the door into the world of soul and spirit. Is he about to take one step into that world, at once an unconscious sense of shame comes in the way and hides from him that corner of the soul-and-spirit world which was on the point of coming into view. The exercises, however, that have been described open the way to yonder world. In effect, the sense of shame which he bears hidden within him is a great benefactor to man. For the measure of intelligent discrimination and of right feeling and strength of character we can acquire in ordinary lie without special training will not suffice us when we have to face our very inmost being in its true form. We would not be able to endure it; we would lose our self-confidence, we would even lose all consciousness of self. That this may not happen, we have yet again to have recourse to those precautionary measures that need to be taken alongside of the exercises for the attainment of higher powers of cognition—namely the special exercises for the cultivation of sound judgment, good feeling and strength of character. In the course of a right and healthy spiritual training, the pupil learns incidentally enough of the truths of spiritual science and also of the measure he requires to take in order to attain self-knowledge and self-observation, for him to be able to face his own Double with courage and with strength. What it will mean for him then is simply that he sees in another form, as a picture belonging to the world of Imagination, what he has already made acquaintance with here in the physical world. If in the physical world we have grasped the law of Karma with our understanding, we shall have no occasion to be horror-struck when we behold the seeds of our future destiny visibly before us in the picture of our Double. If we have made an intelligent study of the evolution of the world and of man, and have learned how at a particular moment in this evolution the forces of Lucifer penetrated into the human soul, we shall not be unduly disturbed when we become conscious of the presence, in the picture of our own being, of the Luciferic beings and their activities.

We can however see from this how necessary it is that man should not demand entry into the spiritual world until he has learned and understood certain essential truths of that world by the simple exercise of his everyday intelligence, developed in the physical world. If spiritual development follows the right and normal path, then before he aspires to enter the supersensible world the pupil will already have mastered with his ordinary intelligence the whole of the earlier contents of this book.

[ 54 ] In a training where care is not taken to develop in the pupil certainty and stability in his powers of judgment and discrimination as well as in his emotions and his moral character, it may happen that the higher world presents itself to him before he has the inner faculties with which to fact it. The encounter with his Double, will in that event cause him great distress and lead him astray. If on the other hand—as would also be possible—he were completely to elude the meeting with the Double, he would still be just as incapable of coming to any true knowledge of the higher world. For he would then be unable to distinguish between what the things around him really are and what he himself is seeing into them. To be able to do this, he must first have seen the distinct picture of his own being; then he can separate and distinguish from his environment whatever has flowed over into it from his own inner life.

As far as his life in the physical world is concerned, the moment man begins to draw near to the world of soul and spirit, the Double immediately makes himself invisible and therewith also conceals from him the whole soul-and-spirit world. The Double stands in front of it like a Guardian, forbidding entrance to those who are not yet competent to enter. He may therefore rightly be called “The Guardian of the Threshold of the World of Soul and Spirit.”

Besides meeting with him when approaching the supersensible world by the method that has been described, man also meets this Guardian of the Threshold when he passes through physical death. And in the course of the time between death and a new birth, while man's soul and spirit are undergoing development, the Guardian progressively reveals himself to him. There, however, the encounter cannot disquiet man unduly, since he now has knowledge of the higher worlds which between birth and death were not within his ken.

[ 55 ] Were man to enter the world of soul and spirit without encountering the Guardian of the Threshold, he would be liable to succumb to one delusion after another. For he would never be able to distinguish between what he himself brings into that world and what rightly belongs to it. A sound and proper training, however should lead the pupil only into the realm of truth, never into the realm of illusion. The training itself should ensure that the meeting with the Guardian will follow as a necessary consequence. For this meeting with his Double is one of the testing experiences that are indispensable to the pupil aspiring to conscious perception in supersensible worlds, and that protect him from the possibility of illusion or false fantasy.

It is of urgent importance that every pupil of the Spirit should take himself in hand and see to it that he does not become a visionary and a dreamer, for then he would all too easily fall a victim to delusion and self-deception (suggestion and auto-suggestion.) Where the instructions for training are faithfully carried out, the very sources of delusion are destroyed in the process. It is naturally not possible to enter here in detail into all the steps that have to be taken by the pupil in this connection. We can only indicate wherein their main import lies.

There are two chief sources for delusions of this kind. They may, in the first place, be due to the fact that reality receives a coloring from the nature an disposition of the pupil himself. In ordinary life in the physical world there is comparatively little danger of delusion arising from such a source; the external world impresses its true form upon the observer in all distinctness, however, much he would like to color it in conformity with his own wishes and interests. No sooner, however, does he enter the world of Imagination that its pictures change under the influence of these desires and interests of his, and he has then before him, giving every appearance of reality, what are in effect merely his own creations, or forms that he has at least helped to create. But in meeting the Guardian of the Threshold the pupil learns to know what he has within him; thus he knows well what he may be bringing with him into the world of soul and spirit, and so this first source of delusion is eliminated. Thanks to the preparation he undergoes before entering the world of soul and spirit, the pupil has already grown accustomed to eliminate self in his observation of the physical world and to let its objects and events speak to him purely by virtue of their own inherent nature. If the preparation has been sufficiently thorough, he can await unperturbed the meeting with the Guardian. This meeting will put him to the final test as to whether, when he confronts the world of soul and spirit, he will be able there too to eliminate himself.

[ 56 ] Besides this, there is another source of delusion. It shows itself when we interpret incorrectly some impression we receive. A simple example of this in everyday life is the illusion we fall into when we are sitting in a train and think that the trees are moving in the opposite direction to that of the train, whereas it is really we ourselves who are moving with the train. There are of course countless instances where an illusion of this nature is more difficult to dispel than in the simple example of the moving train; nevertheless it will easily be seen that in the physical world ways and means can always be found of correcting such illusion, if with sound judgment we avail ourselves of every circumstance that can serve to make the matter clear. No sooner, however, have we penetrated into supersensible realms than we find a different state of affairs. In the world of the senses the facts are not altered by our misconception of them; thus the way is left open for unprejudiced observation to correct the delusion by reference to the facts. In the supersensible world this cannot so easily be done. Suppose we are wanting to observe some supersensible fact, and as we approach it we come to a wrong conclusion about its nature. The correct conception we have formed, this we now carry into the fact itself, and it becomes so closely interwoven with the latter that the one cannot readily be distinguished from the other. What we then have is not the mistake within ourselves, and the true fact in the object observed; the mistake has been incorporated in the outer fact—has become part of it. It is therefore no longer possible simply to correct the illusion by looking at the fact again with open mind.

We have here been describing an all too frequent source of deception and false fantasy for one who approaches the supersensible world without due preparation.

Yet even as the pupil becomes able to rid himself of delusions that arise form the phenomena of the supersensible world being colored by his own character and inclinations, so must he now also find the way to render powerless this second source of delusion. He is able to obliterate what comes from himself if he has first made acquaintance with his own Double; he will be able to get rid of this second source of delusion when he has learned to recognize from its very nature and character whether a fact of the supersensible world is reality or mere delusion. If delusions looked exactly like realities, there would naturally be no possibility of distinguishing them. But it is not so. In the supersensible world delusions have properties peculiar to themselves by which they can be distinguished from realities. And it is important for the pupil to know what are the properties by which he may recognize realities. One who is unacquainted with spiritual training will very naturally doubt the possibility of ever being safe from delusion, when the sources of it are so numerous. How, he will say, is any pupil of the Spirit ever to be sure that all the higher knowledge he imagines himself to have gained does not rest on delusion and self-delusion? The one who argues in this way has failed to observe that in every genuine spiritual training the sources of delusion are dispelled—dried up as it were, through the whole way the training proceeds.

In the first place, the genuine pupil of the Spirit will in the course of his preparation have learned a great deal about all the things that can give rise to illusion and self-deception, and will thus be one his guard against them. In this respect he has far more opportunity than his fellow-men of learning to lead his life with calm detachment and sound judgment. All that he learns and experiences is calculated to save him from having anything to do with vague premonitions and uncontrolled fancies. His training makes him very careful. Moreover, every right and true training introduces the pupil from the start to grand and sublime conceptions, teaching him of events in the great Universe; he has to put forth his best powers of discernment to grasp the great cosmic facts, and will find these his powers growing ever finer and keener in the process. Only one who shrinks from venturing into realms so remote, preferring to cling to “revelations” that are nearer home, will be in danger of missing that sharpening of his mental faculties which can ensure for him the ability to distinguish clearly between deception and reality.

With all this, however, we have not yet touched on the most important factor of all—namely, what is latent in the exercises themselves. The exercises that belong to a right and proper spiritual training have necessarily to be so regulated and arranged that the pupil, while engaged in meditation, is fully conscious of all that is taking place in his soul. As he sets out on the road to Imagination, he forms, to begin with, a symbolic picture. In this picture are still contained mental images that owe their origin to what he has perceived in the outer world. He is not the sole creator of the picture; something besides himself has shared in the creation of its content. This means that he may still be under an illusion as to how the content of the picture has come about; he may ascribe it to a mistaken source. When the pupil progresses further and embarks on exercises for Inspiration, he banishes this content from consciousness and gives himself up entirely to the contemplation of his own activity of soul, which formed the picture. Here again, error may still creep in. For the particular character of his soul's activity he is indebted to his education—in the widest sense of the word. It is impossible for him to be fully informed of its origin. But now there comes the time when even the pupil's own activity of soul has to be expelled from consciousness. If there is still anything left, this remaining content is fully exposed to view. Nothing can intrude here that cannot be perceived and appraised in all its parts and aspects. The pupil has in his Intuition something that reveals to him the essential character of pure reality in the world of soul and spirit. From now onward, in everything that enters his field of observation he can look for what he has learned to recognize as the characteristic marks of soul-and spirit reality, and will thus be able to discern between what is real and what is only apparent. And he can be assured that in applying this test he will be just as safe from the risk of delusion in the supersensible world as in the physical world—where it would be quite impossible for him to mistake an imaginary bar of hot iron for one that could really burn him.

It will of course be understood that the pupil can have this relation only to facts of the supersensible worlds that he has seen for himself—that have thus become for him a matter of actual experience—and not to those communicated by others, which he comprehends with his ordinary powers of understanding, aided by a natural and healthy feeling for the truth. He will indeed be at pains to draw a sharp dividing line between the spiritual knowledge he has acquired in the one and in the other way. He will be ready and willing to receive communications about the higher worlds and will summon up his beset powers of judgment to comprehend them. On the other hand, when he describes something as the fruit of his own experience and spiritual observation, he will always first have tested whether it showed itself to him with the qualities he has learned to recognize in a genuine Intuition.

[ 57 ] The pupil of the Spirit having now undergone the meeting with the Guardian of the Threshold, further experiences await him as he ascends into supersensible worlds. In the first place, he will notice that there is an inner connection between this Guardian of the Threshold and what was described above as a seventh power in the soul, which took on the form of an independent being. In truth, this seventh being is, from a certain point of view, none other than the Double, than the Guardian himself, whose presence sets the pupil a specific task. He has to place what he is in his ordinary self—which he has now before him in picture—under the leadership and guidance of his new-born Self. A kind of struggle will ensue, the Double striving continually to gain the upper hand. If the pupil can succeed in establishing a right relation to the Double, not allowing him to do anything that is not inspired by the new-born I, he will find that his true human powers gain in strength and in stability.

In the matter of self-knowledge the situation is somewhat different in the higher world from what it is in the physical. In the physical world self-knowledge is a purely inward experience, whereas in the higher world from the very outset the new-born Self manifests as an external phenomenon of Soul. The pupil sees it there before him as a distinct being. He is not however able to have a complete perception of this new-born Self. For no matter how many stages he may have reached on the path into supersensible worlds, there are always higher stages ahead; and at every one of them the pupil will perceive more of his Higher Self. At any particular stage, it can be only partially revealed to him. When the pupil first begins to be aware of the Higher Self, he is strongly tempted, as it were, to regard it from the vantage-point he has gained in the physical world. Indeed it is good that he should feel thus tempted; it is even necessary if his development is to proceed in the right way. For he has to contemplate what appears to him as his Double, the “Guardian of the Threshold,” he has to see all this in face of the Higher Self, and so perceive the vast disparity between what he is now and what he is meant to become. Once the pupil enters upon this comparison, the Guardian of the Threshold begins to assume another form, presenting himself as a picture of all the hindrances that stand in the way of the development of the Higher Self. The pupil now sees what a burden he is dragging about with him all the time in the ordinary self. And should the preparation he has undergone have failed to give him the strength to say at this point: I am not going to stand still, but shall make ceaseless effort to carry my development ever on and on in the direction of the Higher Self—should he not be strong enough to say this, he will falter and shrink from what is yet in store for him. He will indeed have entered into the world of soul and spirit, but as one who has relinquished all idea of making further efforts for his development. He then becomes a prisoner of the form that stands before him in the Guardian of the Threshold. The significant thing, however, is that he does not eel himself a prisoner; he imagines he is passing through an entirely different experience. The form that is evoked by the Guardian of the Threshold may even give rise in his soul to the impression that in the pictures he beholds at this stage of his development he already has a complete survey of the possible Worlds; that he has arrived at the very summit of knowledge and has no need to exert himself any further. Far indeed from seeing himself as a prisoner, he feels he is now the possessor of inexhaustible riches, even of all the secrets of the Universe. That such an experience—the complete reversal of the true state of affairs—should be possible will not astonish us, when we remember that the man undergoing it is in the world of soul and spirit, a world where thing are apt to show themselves in their opposites. Attention was called to this characteristic of the soul-and-spirit world in an earlier chapter, when studying the life after death.

[ 58 ] In the figure that the pupil is perceiving at this stage of this development, there is more than in the form in which the Guardian of the Threshold first presented himself to him. At that time he could perceive in the Double all the qualities that the ordinary self possesses in consequence of the influence of the Luciferic powers. In the course of evolution, however, owing to the influence of Lucifer, another power has found its way into the human soul; we called it in earlier sections of this book the power of Ahriman. This s the power that hinders man, so long as he is living in physical existence, from having sight of the soul-and-spirit Being who underlie what the senses perceive at the surface of the outer world. What the soul has become under the influence of this power, the pupil now beholds—as in a picture—in the figure that confronts him in the experience we are now describing. If he is duly prepared for this experience, he will assign to it its true meaning; and then, quite soon, yet another figure will be revealed to him. It is the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold,” so called to distinguish Him from the “Lesser Guardian,” hitherto described. The Greater Guardian tells the pupil that he must not remain at this stage but must press forward with untiring energy. He calls upon him to realized that the world into which he has won his way can only become truth for him if he perseveres in his efforts. Otherwise it will change for him into illusion. Were a pupil to submit himself to a wrong kind of training and come to this experience unprepared, he would, on approaching the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold,” find himself completely overwhelmed—overwhelmed with a feeling that can only be compared with boundless fear and terror.

[ 59 ] The meeting with the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold afforded the pupil the opportunity of testing whether he is proof against the delusions that may arise through carrying his own being into the supersensible world; and the experiences that lead him at long last to the Greater Guardian of the Threshold will now enable him to discover whether he can stand up to the delusions that spring from the second source above mentioned. If he is proof against the captivating delusion which makes the picture-world he has attained seem to him like a rich possession—when all the time he is but a prisoner thereof—he will be protected from taking appearance for reality in the further course of his spiritual evolution.

[ 60 ] The “Guardian of the Threshold” will to some extent assume an individual and different form for every single person. For the meeting with him is the very experience by means of which the personal character of supersensible perceptions is eventually overcome and the way opened into a region of experience that is free from all personal coloring—a region universally valid, to which every human being has equal access.

[ 61 ] Having come thus far in his experience, the aspirant is now able to make distinction in the surrounding world of soul and spirit between what is himself and what is outside him. He will now be in a position to appreciate how necessary it was to study the evolution of the world as described in this book, in order to arrive at a true understanding of man and of his life. For we can only understand man's physical body if we know how it has been built up right through the Saturn, Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. So too for the other members of man's being. To understand the ether-body, we need to follow its development through Sun, Moon and Earth evolutions. And if we are to understand all that has to do with the Earth's own evolution at the present time, we shall need to know how it has gradually unfolded, stage by stage. One who has undergone spiritual training will be in a position to recognize the relationship between what is contained in man and the corresponding facts and beings of the world around him. For it is so indeed: there is no member or part of man that does not stand in some relation to the rest of the world—the world in its entirety. In this book it has hardly been possible to do more than give indications in barest outline of this universal correspondence. But we must not forget that the physical body, for example, was, during Saturn evolution, only in its very first beginnings. Its organs—heart, lung, brain and so on—developed out of these first beginnings, during the Sun, Moon and Earth periods. They therefore are connected with Sun, Moon and Earth evolution. The like must be said of man's other members—the ether-body, the sentient body, the sentient soul and so on. The whole of the immediately surrounding world has gone to the forming of man; no single part or feature of him that has not its corresponding process or being in the world without. And when he has reached the above-described stage in his development, the pupil of the Spirit learns to recognize this relationship of his own being to the great world. Such is the characteristic experience at this stage: he becomes conscious of the correspondence that exists between the “little world,” the Microcosm—the world, that is, of man himself—and the “great world,” the Macrocosm.

When the pupil has worked his way through to this perception, a new experience awaits him. He begins to feel as though he has grown together with the whole vast structure of the Universe, retaining, however, at the same time the consciousness of himself as a fully independent being. A feeling nevertheless comes over him, as if he were being merged into the whole vast Universe, were becoming one with it—yet without losing his individuality. This stage of development may be described as the “becoming one with the Macrocosm.” It is essential not to think of it as though implying that separate consciousness should cease and the human individuality be poured out into the All. Such an idea could arise only from an inexact and untrained way of thinking.

We may now set down in order the stages on the way to higher powers of cognition, attained in the training for Initiation that has here been described:

1. Study of spiritual science. To begin with, the pupil applies himself to this study with the powers of thought and sound judgment acquired in the physical world.
2. Attainment of Imaginative Cognition.
3. Reading of the Hidden Script. (This stage is equivalent to Inspiration.)
4. Living one's way into the Spiritual World that is around one (equivalent to Intuition.)
5. Knowledge of the relationships between Microcosm and Macrocosm.
6. Becoming one with the Macrocosm.
7. A fundamental mood of soul determined by the simultaneous and integral experience of the foregoing stages.

[ 62 ] The reader is not however to imagine that the seven stages necessarily follow one another in precise order. Much will depend on the individual character of the pupil. If can be that an earlier stage has only partially been reached when a pupil begins to undertake exercises belonging to the next. For example, it may be perfectly right, when he has had but a few genuine Imaginations, for him already to be doing exercises designed to bring Inspiration or Intuition, or even knowledge of the relationship of Microcosm to Macrocosm, within the reach of his own personal experience.

[ 63 ] When the pupil has got so far as to have an experience of Intuition, then in addition to having knowledge of the pictures that belong to the world of soul and spirit, and being able to read from the Hidden Script how these pictures are interrelated, he also comes to know the Beings through whose co-operation the world to which man belongs has been called into existence. Then too he learns to know himself in his own archetypal form as a soul-and-spirit being in the world of soul and spirit. He has wrestled his way through to a perception of his Higher Self, and now sees clearly what he has still to achieve in order to gain control over his Double, the “Guardian of the Threshold” who stands there before him, continually calling upon him to work on further at his development. This “Greater Guardian of the Threshold” now becomes for him the Ideal, the Example that he will do his utmost to follow. Having once come to this resolve, the pupil will be enabled to recognize who it is that is there before him as the “Greater Guardian of the Threshold.” For now this Greater Guardian changes for the eyes of the pupil into the figure of Christ, whose nature and whose part in the evolution of Earth have been explained in the earlier chapters of this book. Through this experience the pupil is initiated into the sublime Mystery that is connected with the name of Christ. Christ shows himself to him as the great human Prototype and Example, united with the Earth's true evolution.

Having thus come through Intuition to a knowledge of Christ in the spiritual world, the aspirant will find that he is able also to understand what took place historically on Earth in the fourth post-Atlantean period—the time of the Greek and Roman civilization. How the great Sun Being, even the Christ, intervened in Earth evolution, and how He is still working in it now and on into the future, the pupil of the Spirit knows henceforth from his own experience. This then is what he attains through Intuition: the very meaning and significance of Earth evolution are communicated to him.

[ 64 ] The path to knowledge of the supersensible worlds that has here been described is one that everyone can tread, no matter what his situation or circumstances in life. When speaking of such a path, we must not forget that the goal of knowledge and truth has been and is the same throughout all epochs of Earth evolution, but that the starting-point has been different in different epochs. Man cannot set out today from the same starting-point as did, for example, the candidate for Initiation in ancient Egypt. Neither can the exercises that were given to a pupil in ancient Egypt be simply taken over by a man of the present age. Since that epoch men's souls have been through sundry incarnations, and this moving on from incarnation to incarnation is not without meaning and purpose. The capabilities and qualities of the soul change from one incarnation to the next. Even a superficial study of history will convince us that since the twelfth and thirteenth centuries of our era the conditions of life have been very different from what they were before; men's opinions and feelings, even their capacities, have quite altered from what they were in earlier times. The path to higher knowledge that has here been described is one that is adopted for souls who are incarnated in the immediate present. It takes for its starting-point the situation of a human being of today, living under any of the typical conditions of the present age. As evolution progresses, the outer forms of man's life on Earth undergo change; so too in the paths of higher development every succeeding epoch calls for new ways and new methods. It is of vital importance that at every stage harmony should reign between man's life in the world at large and the Way of Initiation.

• 1. It is of no consequence how far the above thoughts can be justified from the side of Natural Science, the whole point being to evolve thoughts in regard to plant and man, which can be arrived at without reference to any theory, by simple and direct observation. Thoughts of this kind concerning objects in the world around us have their significance, alongside of the theoretical ideas of science which are, in their right place, no less significant. Here we are not putting forward thoughts for the purpose of presenting facts in scientific terms; what we ant to do is to create a symbolic picture that shall prove capable of influencing the soul, irrespective of any criticisms that could be leveled at the composition of the picture.
• 2. Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act II.
• 3. Goethe: Proverbs in Prose.
• 2. Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act II.