The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear Friends,

It is, as you know, my dear friends, our intention to work things out here from their foundations, in order then to pass on afterwards to the practical side. I called your attention yesterday to the fact that the ordinary, superficial life of soul has to be regarded as a complex of symptoms, and no more. It follows from this that, if we want to get at the real state of affairs that lies behind a so-called mental illness or mental weakness in some child, modern methods of approach are quite inadequate, for they can only describe how things are in this superficial soul-life, without being able to lead on to what lies deeper—that is to say, to the region where, as we saw yesterday, the real life of soul is working. We cannot here enter into the question of how mental illnesses in grown-up people should be dealt with (there are indeed always, as you know, problems of many kinds connected with that), but we do want, in this course, to make a thorough study of what it is possible to do with children.

Before going further into the subject, I would like to read you an article from this newspaper that gives a crude example of how misleading an observation of the superficial life of soul can be. (I use the word “superficial” in the sense of locality, not in a derogatory sense.) It is an example that will have special significance for you, in view of the tasks that you are undertaking.

A man of the name of Wulffen,¹ who was once Public Prosecutor, has made a study, from the standpoint of criminal psychology, of all kinds of mental abnormalities, and has written big books on the subject. How does he reach his conclusions? For he obviously does not take his start from professional medicine. In his capacity as Public Prosecutor he naturally became familiar with a wide field of abnormalities in the life of soul, and afterwards at a more mature age, he set out to acquire a somewhat miscellaneous knowledge of medicine. He then combined his experience in his profession with his subsequent reading, and evolved a theory which is nothing else than the inevitable outcome of the so-called “scientific” hypotheses of today. For either we take this modern scientific point of view seriously, in which case we are bound eventually to come to the conclusions arrived at by Wulffen, or we do not take it seriously, and then nothing remains but to take our start from Anthroposophy. An intermediate way can never be anything but a questionable compromise.

Wulffen recently gave a lecture in Zürich dealing with the subject of criminal psychology, in which he spoke about abnormality in the life of the soul. It is important that we should pay attention to what is said in such a lecture, for we are in fact in these days continually coming up against the very same kind of thing. If you set out to think about any knowledge you have gained from looking into some modern scientific book, or into any book that is based on the scientific way of thinking, you will find it full of the forms and modes of thought which this man Wulffen voices in a particularly radical way. And you really ought to know whither modern science must inevitably lead when it begins to investigate the field of abnormal soul-life. Before I read the press notice let me tell you that Wulffen himself is a much more able man, and much more correct in his statements, than the journalist who is reporting his lecture. The journalist can only make fun of it, which he is free to do, since he has still the public behind him—thanks be!—in his prejudice against psychiatry and criminal psychology. The tone in which the report is written need not therefore concern you; the journalist, as I said, is not a man of much ability and can do no more than ridicule the whole thing. He has, however, no idea that his jests are a hit at modern science rather than at Wulffen! For if the science upon which Wulffen takes his stand were honestly adhered to, its representatives in other fields of knowledge would have to speak in the very same way as he does. And now let us read this press notice—for it really does concern us. It is entitled: “Schiller according to the Psycho-Analysis of the Public Prosecutor”. It should rather be called: “Friedrich Schiller, according to the Psycho-Analysis of present-day Psychology or Psycho-pedagogy”.

Last Friday, 29th February, I924, the Public Prosecutor Dr. E. W. Wulffen, a man known and respected far outside his immediate profession, took severely to task the penniless Swabian, Fritz Schiller (at one time Professor of History in Jena and the author of several revolutionary writings) in a brilliantly constructed lecture on “Criminal Psychology and Friedrich Schiller”. He achieved among the large number of listeners belonging to the Zürich Lawyers' Union a success all the more lasting because, on account of death, the accused was unable to be present at the meeting; the utmost he could do was perhaps to point with an invisible hand to what he had written during his lifetime.

Wullfen's arguments were most effective. The proofs adduced were irrefutable. The lecturer had even confiscated—I mean, had read—Schiller's private correspondence. And, lo and behold, thanks to Dr. Wulffen's help, scales fell from the eyes of the audience. Our people's love for Schiller, youth's adoration for him, were laid bare in all their ugly roots. Schiller is popular, it seems, on account of his innate cruelty which makes wallowing in the gloomy splendor of the horrible come natural to him, and causes him to write ballads like “Die Kindesmörderin”, etc., which are evidence enough of a cruelty that is continually intensified by Schiller's struggle with his own sick body. And then his tragedies, which stimulate fear and compassion in the spectators why are they so effective on the stage? Because they appeal to latent criminal qualities in the public and enable the audience to enjoy a safe outlet for dangerous propensities ...

It is true that in spite of this overwhelming load of proof Wulffen concedes to Schiller certain redeeming features. There is his feeling for freedom, which, nursed by the suppression he laboured under in earlier years (associated, as it was in him, with an inferiority complex) suddenly flares up in “The Robbers”, and is then gradually purified and ennobled, until finally in “Wilhelm Tell” we have the glorification of a revolution that is founded on order. For the rest, Schiller's attitude to good and evil is seen to be the outcome of aesthetic points of view.

Thus are the arteries which feed Schiller's poetry quickly detected by Dr. Wulffen and defined; they are—cruelty and the urge for freedom. The struggle with these impulses, which Schiller lived out in his poetry—this it was, so we are assured, that led him along the path to perfection.²

So there was, then, in Schiller an “inferiority complex”—in his childhood. It is quite important to realise what the outcome would be if modern science were to enter the realm of pedagogy, and teachers were then to give lessons in the manner of this science—let us say, in a school where some young Schiller was among the pupils. You must envisage quite exactly what this would mean.

If you think of what was said yesterday, you will see that, just as we have to take, in other illnesses, the symptoms, that help us to find the right orientation, and then lead back from these to the real facts of the illness, so we must start in our present investigation from the manifestations of the life of soul, from thinking, feeling and willing, and trace our way back until we can “behold” the real condition of the patient. We saw that the origin, for example, of an abnormality of soul, which showed itself in the patient's being unable to pass from intention to deed, had to be sought in some subtle abnormality of the liver, and that the knowledge of this connection must form the starting point for our treatment, both educational and therapeutic.

And now, before we can pass on to consider the practical side in detail, we must look back once again at the life of soul of the child. We have seen how during the first seven years the body presents a model, and the individuality works out in accordance with this model the second body, which functions between the change of teeth and puberty. If the individuality is stronger than the inherited qualities, the child will overcome these—more or less—in the course of changing his teeth; his individuality will then be apparent in his whole life of soul, and will manifest also externally in his bodily nature. If, however, the individuality of the child is weak, it will be overcome by the inherited characteristics; it will give, as it were, such close attention to the model that a slavish copy of the same will be visible in the body. And then one can rightly speak of inherited characteristics. For between the change of teeth and puberty everything is as it results from the individuality; the reason why it can happen that inherited characteristics show themselves at all during this period, is because the individuality has been to that extent too weak to overcome them and follow its own line of direction in accordance with karma. What works in the individuality as the real impulse of karma shows itself overpowered in such a case by the inherited characteristics.

Now at this point we must observe—and it will also provide us with what I may describe as a symptomatology of more general application—we must observe how thinking is related in its development to the development of will, in the child. We saw yesterday that there is a certain sense in which we have to look upon thinking, feeling and willing as no more than symptoms. We saw that thinking, as it expresses itself in the superficial soul-life, has behind it a synthesizing activity which operates in the construction and organisation of the brain; and then we saw how behind expressions of will is an analytical activity which underlies the organs—underlies indeed our whole metabolism-and-limbs man, keeping the organs separate and distinct one from another.

To begin with, let us consider thinking, with the synthesizing activity of the brain, that underlies it. We must understand clearly what thoughts really are. Thoughts, as we know, enter the organism of the child, as it were, in snatches, bit by bit. Even the grown person has around him only in scattered fragments, so to speak, all that man is capable of thinking. One person will have a great wealth of thoughts, another will have less. But now, what are thoughts?

The modern view, which tends to degenerate into the conclusions you find in people like Wulffen, imagines that thoughts come into existence gradually in the human being, as he progresses in his development, and that when he succeeds in having thoughts that “answer” in the world, that fit in all right with the world, then these thoughts he has evolved, of course, out of himself. But if we investigate, with anthroposophical understanding, the being of man, we shall never succeed in discovering in him anything from which thoughts can arise. All investigations which set out to discover where thoughts could originate in man are, in the eyes of Spiritual Science, no more sensible than if someone who had a jug of milk given him every morning were to begin one day to ponder, in his cleverness, how the china of which the jug is made produces the milk. It might conceivably happen that he had never observed how the milk does get into the jug; but if he could start wondering how the milk manages to ooze out of the china, we should take him for a simpleton indeed. To assume such a possibility in regard to a milk jug is obviously to adopt a hypothesis which leads to an absurdity. And yet, in regard to thinking, science makes this very hypothesis; science is just as stupid, every bit as stupid as the fellow we have imagined. For when we set out to investigate with all the means afforded by Spiritual Science (and we have been speaking of these now for more than twenty years), we find nothing at all in the human organisation that could possibly produce thoughts. There is simply nothing there capable of doing it. Just as the milk must be poured into the jug in order to be in the jug, so for thought to be in man, they must come into him. And whence do they come—for the life we are considering, between birth and death? Where are thoughts? We can investigate the question of where milk comes from; we ought also to be able to discover where thoughts are. Where then shall we look for these thoughts.

We are surrounded by the physical world. But we have around us also the etheric world, from which, as you know, our own etheric body is taken, immediately before we descend to physical incarnation. The etheric body of man comes from the cosmic ether, which is all around us in every direction. Now it is this cosmic ether, my dear friends, that is the bearer of the thoughts. The cosmic ether, which is common to all, carries within it the thoughts; there they are within it, those living thoughts of which I have repeatedly spoken in our anthroposophical lectures, telling you how the human being participates in them in pre-earthly life before he comes down to Earth. There, in the cosmic ether, are contained all the living thoughts there are; and never are they received from the cosmic ether during the life between birth and death. No; the whole store of living thought that man holds within him, he receives at the moment when he comes down from the spiritual world—when, that is, he leaves his own living element, his own element of living thought, and descends and forms his ether body. Within this ether body, within that which is the building and organising force in man, are the living thoughts; there they are, there they still are.

If we have here the symptomatic life of soul—thinking, feeling and willing—and here behind, the real life of soul, then the thoughts constitute a part of this real life of soul: and these thoughts which we take from the universal cosmic ether build up in us, first of all, our brain, and then in the wider sense, our whole nerves-and-senses system. For it is the living thinking that forms our brain—forming it into an organ of demolition, an organ that deals with matter in a way we might describe somewhat as follows.

When we look out upon our environment, we have around us the world of earthly substance, in all its various processes and ways of working. These processes, which in Nature are living processes, are gradually broken down by the activity of the living thinking, so that here—in the brain—a continual demolition is going on; the processes—which are, as I said, Nature processes—are arrested. Thus, in the brain, a beginning is actually made in the direction of a stoppage of Nature processes; matter is continually being secreted and then falling away. The matter that has fallen away, the matter that has been excreted and become useless, is the nerves. And the nerves, arising in this way as a product of living thinking but with the life in them being perpetually killed all the time, become in consequence endowed with a faculty that resembles the faculty possessed by a mirror. They acquire the faculty of enabling the thoughts of the surrounding ether to be reflected in them; and this is the origin of subjective thinking, the superficial thinking which consists in reflected pictures, the thinking we carry within us between birth and death. Through the fact, therefore, that living thinking is active within us, we are enabled to hold up our nerves-and-senses system to the world like a mirror, and can then produce there pictures of the impressions that are living in the surrounding ether, and throw them back into our consciousness. This means that the thinking, and the forming of mental pictures, which belongs to the superficial life of soul is nothing else than the reflection of the thoughts that live in the cosmic ether.

When you compare yourself with your reflection in a mirror, you realise at once that you are something altogether different from that reflected picture. Similarly, you can compare thoughts with their reflections, and you will find that the latter are “dead” thinking, just as the picture of you in the mirror is dead, whilst you yourself, standing in front of it, are alive. There cannot ever be in the cosmic ether a distorted, an illogical or a deranged thought. Yet the thoughts that are contained in the ordinary, superficial life of soul are, as we have seen, reflections of the thoughts in the cosmic ether; how, then, does a deranged or senseless thought come about? How can it ever arise? The answer is, through the mirror not being in order. The whole process that originated in the structure of the brain has not succeeded in producing a perfect mirror. In order, therefore, to explain the presence of distorted thoughts, we have to go back to what takes place in the brain and the nerves-and-senses system, which the human being constructed for himself from the real living life of thought. It is most important to be clear from the outset that it is not the thoughts themselves that we can in any way assail; for the thought-content as such, the thoughts themselves, are in the cosmic ether in their full validity and truth.

We must make every endeavour to enable the pupil with whom we are dealing, who has been given into our charge, to find his right relation to this cosmic ether. We shall never do so unless we, as teachers, are permeated through and through with the feeling that the thoughts in all their rightness and in all the power of their livingness are contained in the cosmic ether, are present all the time in the cosmic ether. Without having ourselves this religious feeling towards the cosmos, we cannot possibly develop a right attitude towards the child. And the attitude, the whole relation that we bear to him, is what matters most of all. Let me explain why this is so.

What is it that is influencing the child, and what is it that is living in the child, when he gets distorted thoughts? And what is able then to work from the teacher upon the child? What can the teacher do? From all that I have said, you will be able to see that in such a child the etheric body has not been formed in the right way. When the human being is descending from pre-earthly existence, there are of course, at that moment, as always, only right and true thoughts in the cosmic ether; but these right thoughts have to be received by the being who is providing himself, clothing himself, with an ether body. And now let us go back to our milk jug. We cannot accuse the milk of having a wrong form or shape: it is obliged to take on the form that the jug can give it. If we have a sensible vessel, then our milk will be properly and sensibly “housed” in it. But suppose it occurred to an eccentric person to make a milk jug like an hour glass with the waist stopped up. [A drawing was made.] He pours in the milk and it cannot get down to the bottom. And yet, in reckoning up the cubic content of the jug, he reckons in all this part down below! I have given you an extreme case. All sorts of mistakes are, in fact, possible. One could, for example, make a jug that very easily tips over, and more often than not, the milk is spilt. The point is, of course, that the way in which the milk will be in the jug, will depend upon what the jug is like. And the way in which the ether body with all its livingness will be in the human being, will depend upon how the human being—as he arrives from pre-earthly existence, bringing with him his karma—is able to receive into himself the ether body. It is important to recognise this and have it in our consciousness.

It can actually happen that a human being, owing to his karma, arrives from pre-earthly existence with something that is not at all unlike this very inadequate milk jug. For his karma may not enable him, for instance, to permeate the metabolism-and-limbs system properly. This system will then be poorly provided with etheric body. The child will have in the region of the head a properly developed etheric body, and in the region of the abdomen and limbs, a poorly developed etheric body. In these parts he will lack the formative thoughts. It is actually most important for you to know that in very many cases of backward children we have to do with an imperfectly developed etheric body. And we teachers must ask ourselves the question: What is it that can influence the etheric body of a growing child?

Here we encounter a law, of the working of which we have abundant evidence throughout all education. It is as follows. Any one member of the being of man is influenced by the next higher member (from whatever quarter it approaches) and only under such influence can that member develop satisfactorily. Thus, whatever is to be effective for the development of the physical body must be living in the etheric body—in an etheric body. Whatever is to be effective for the development of an etheric body must be living in an astral body. Whatever is to be effective for the development of an astral body must be living in an ego; and an ego can be influenced only by what is living in a spirit-self. I could continue, and go beyond the spirit-self, but there we should be entering the field of esoteric instruction.

What does this mean in practice? If you find that the etheric body of a child is in some way weakened or deficient, you must form, you must modify, your own astral body in such a way that it can work upon the etheric body of the child, correcting and amending it. We could, in fact, make a diagram to demonstrate how this principle works in education:

The teacher's etheric body (and this should follow quite naturally as a result of his training) must be able to influence the physical body of the child, and the teacher's astral body the etheric body of the child. The ego of the teacher must be able to influence the astral body of the child. And now you will be rather taken aback, for we come next to the spirit-self of the teacher, and you will be thinking that surely the spirit-self is not yet developed. Nevertheless, such is the law. The spirit-self of the teacher must work upon the ego of the child. And I will show you how, not only in the ideal teacher, but often in the very worst possible teacher, the teacher's spirit-self—of which he is himself not yet in the least conscious—influences the child's ego. Education is indeed veiled in many mysteries.

What concerns us at the moment is that the weakened etheric body of the child must receive the influence of the teacher's health-giving astral body. How is the astral body of the educator to be “educated” for this purpose? Self-educated too, as it needs must be today! For Anthroposophy can at present do no more than give suggestion and stimulus; we cannot right away establish colleges and arrange courses for all the necessary branches of training. The astral body of the teacher must be of such a character and quality that he is able to have an instinctive understanding for whatever debilities there may be in the child's etheric body. Say, the child's etheric body is weak and deficient in the region of the liver. As a result, we shall notice that the child stops short at intention, he cannot get beyond it; it constantly happens that he has an impulse of will, but the impulse comes to a standstill before the actual deed. If the teacher can feel his way right into this situation (where the child's will ought to push through to deed), if he is able himself to feel the stoppage that the child feels, and able at the same time out of his own energy to evoke in his soul a deep compassion with the child's experience, then he will develop in his own astral body an understanding for the situation the child is in, and will gradually succeed in eliminating in himself all subjective reaction of feeling when faced with this phenomenon in the child. By ridding himself of every trace of subjective reaction, the teacher educates his own astral body.

Let us say, the child wants to walk, has the will to walk, but cannot. This can become a pathological condition, can become quite conspicuous; it may even happen that at last the child comes to be described as “incapable of learning to walk”. But we will suppose that the condition shows itself in only a slight degree. So long as the teacher meets the situation with any kind of bias, so long as it can arouse in him irritation or excitement—so long will he remain incapable of making any real progress with the child. Not until the point has been reached where such a phenomenon becomes an objective picture and can be taken with a certain calm and composure as an objective picture for which nothing but compassion is felt—not until then is the necessary mood of soul present in the astral body of the teacher. Once this has come about, the teacher is there by the side of the child in a true relation and will do all else that is needful more or less rightly. For you have no idea how unimportant is all that the teacher says or does not say on the surface, and how important what he himself is, as teacher.

How may one set about acquiring this kind of understanding? By developing greater and greater interest in the mystery of the human organisation. All sense of its mystery—in fact, any real interest in the organisation of man—is completely lacking in present-day civilisation; consequently, one thing present-day civilisation does not know ...³

Suppose someone is suffering from severe mental disease. How is that regarded in our time? For obviously whatever is done in such a case has to be done within the civilisation of the present day; there is no alternative. This will mean that while we must do our best to come to an understanding of such illnesses, we cannot expect to be able at once in each single case to use methods and treatment that accord with the picture we have in our understanding. It is, on this account, very important that there shall be no fanatics among you. It will not do for you to set out on this work of Curative Education in a fanatical spirit, not knowing how to judge the scope and bearing of some truth, when it is a question of applying esoteric knowledge in practical life. For this reason the circles within which these truths are communicated cannot be too carefully restricted; for people of the present day have not the insight to see why, in very many cases, it is quite impossible to follow at once some particular guidance that has been given. We must know the truth, and then try to act wisely and sensibly, applying the guidance where it can be applied, as in the education of backward children, within the given limits. In dealing with adult mental patients you will not be able to apply the guidance in the same way; for something extraneous comes in there—namely, the law. And the moment you have to reckon with factors other than those that arise out of the nature of the case, the moment you have to do with hard and fast laws, the thing becomes unworkable. For what the law lays down is general; it cannot be individual in its application, it has to be general. So far as treatment of abnormal human beings is concerned, the law is a veritable poison. It is there in the world, however, and you have to reckon with it. The things of which we are speaking here cannot be applied fanatically; you have to let them percolate into life, in ways that are possible and practicable.

Let us suppose then that you have this person who is said to be suffering from grave mental illness. You can, as is generally done nowadays, describe the case psychographically—that is, describe the symptoms. According to the view of the case that is certain to be adopted in our present-day civilisation, the person does the maddest possible things. But people do not stop to consider what they may have before them in this mad person! As a matter of fact, it may quite well be that the person who is now passing his life in complete insanity has had in earlier ages a very significant incarnation, he may at one time have been a genius. But suppose this manifestation of genius came two incarnations ago and then, in the intermediate incarnation, the man was imprisoned when comparatively young, and had from that moment on no contact with the world. He passed then through the gate of death, and lived on further in the spiritual world. Then he appeared again on Earth—insane. Because what he took in during that incarnation remained completely outside the field of experience of the physical and the etheric body, he had not the opportunity of elaborating it, and therefore returns to incarnation in entire ignorance of the interior of the human body. He cannot get into the physical body and ether body, he remains outside them all the time; and so, being unable to make use of the physical body, he is, you see, insane. His manner of life is such that we shall not be able to see him as he really is, until we look right away from his physical and his etheric body and give our attention to his astral body and ego.

Let us now imagine, we have such a person before us in childhood. There will be a constant effort on the part of the child to come into the physical and into the etheric body, and then again, he will experience a resistance, he will be pushed back. It may very well be that owing to the predetermined conditions some of the organs are not in order. Imagine you have here physical body and etheric body.⁴ The astral body and ego want to come in. And they do come in, everywhere, but here they do not enter in a proper and orderly manner. They have to make a special effort. Every time, they want, let us say, to penetrate liver and stomach, the astral body and ego have to make an effort. And now this effort works itself out—regulates itself, as it were, in a curious way. A kind of rhythm is set up, an abnormal rhythm. At one moment the ego strengthens itself, then it become feeble again. So that we find in the child this alternation—first, a strong liver-stomach feeling, and then, before this has come to consciousness, a weakened liver-stomach feeling. The child oscillates continually between the two. And the consequence is, he has not, as it were, time to make use of his body in the so-called normal way. For he could make use of the body only if this rhythm were not present and astral body and ego were able to take possession of the several organs quietly.

How can we learn to recognise and understand such a condition? It will help us to do so, if we look at the whole process in somewhat the following way.

Imagine you have before you a clever man, an exceedingly clever man—but a man who is definitely not a watchmaker. It happens one day that he is in the predicament of having to mend his watch, which has stopped. Instead of mending it, he completely ruins it. That does not gainsay the fact that he is an exceedingly clever man. He fails, not from lack of cleverness, but because he has not sufficient mastery of the situation. Similarly genius may, under certain circumstances, fail and come to grief, when descending from pre-earthly to earthly existence. Only, in this case the failure is not so quickly finished with, but lasts for the whole of that earthly life.

There is a real call to us here to look with love upon the soul-and-spirit nature that descends from the spiritual world, to look with love upon it, even where it comes to expression in so-called insanity—yes, to look with love upon the very details of the insanity. And then we shall feel impelled to go beyond the symptomatology that can furnish a psychography of the case, and look rather at the karmic connections into which this insane human being comes. We shall have to observe his relation with the outer world, and note carefully the situations of life into which he comes, for these are incredibly interesting. And then, watching all this objectively, we shall find that insanity is really something that can arouse our deepest interest. We shall see in it a distorted image of the highest wisdom; it will be for us like the opening of a door from the direction of the spiritual world—though the spiritual world has then to come in through a rather twisted and contorted passage of entry! And as our interest in the whole process grows—without of course becoming sensational—the particular abnormalities will become deeply and inwardly interesting to us. Suppose an abnormality gets hold of the physical and the ether body and a rhythm such as I have described is set up: first, a powerful development of astral and ego activity, so that physical body and etheric body are taken hold of strongly; then, that is all reversed, and the activity of astral and ego becomes weak again. Suppose there is this rhythm, and we come to the point of being able to observe what happens, first in the moment when firm hold is taken of the physical and etheric bodies, and then again in the moment when this hold is weakened. If we are able also to enter into the experience the child goes through inwardly, entering into it with a great capacity of love, it can come about that, as time goes on, the rhythm is overcome, and that then as a result of it all, liver and stomach are gripped with quite unusual intensity—and behold, the child begins to do things that are a manifestation of genius! Otherwise the condition has to remain as it is until these things can be adjusted in the further life between death and a new birth. For it is indeed true, and we must be conscious of the fact: in educating backward children we are intervening in a process which in the normal course of development—were there no intervention, or were there misguided intervention—would find its fulfilment only when the child had passed through the gate of death and come to birth again in the next life. We are making, that is to say, a deep intervention in karma. Whenever we give treatment to a backward child, we are intervening in karma. And it goes without saying, we must intervene in karma in this way. For there is such a thing as right intervention. Certain prejudices in these matters need to be overcome. How necessary that is, let me demonstrate to you from another example.

In the Agricultural Course at Koberwitz,⁵ at which one or two of those here were also present, I indicated guiding lines for agriculture. An elderly farmer attended the course, who is also an old member of the Society. Throughout the whole of the course he could not rid himself of a feeling of misgiving; it kept coming out in the discussions. Again and again he would say: “But if we do that, we shall be using occult means for practical ends; won't that be steering too close to the sphere of ethics? Could not these truths be applied also in a wrong way?” He was never able to get rid of this scruple; he was always suspicious of black magic in the application. Needless to say, these things do become black magic when they are not handled as they ought to be handled. And it was for this reason that I said once on that occasion quite explicitly: “A high standard of morality is absolutely essential in dealing with these matters; therefore I assume at the outset that those who attend this course attend it on purely ethical grounds, desirous only to serve humanity and help agriculture. The Agricultural Experimental Circle has accordingly to be regarded also as an ethical circle, which definitely sets itself the task of seeing that the truths are applied in the right and proper way.” The Gods use magic, and the difference between white and black magic consists only in this: in white magic one intervenes in a moral, selfless way, and in black magic in an immoral, selfish way. There is no other difference. And so, in the nature of the case, since all talk about education of backward children is mere talk and leads to nothing, obviously this education can only be effective when it uses measures which are capable also of immoral application. And that brings us once again to the imperative need for a deep sense of responsibility.

If only one could count upon a more serious sense of responsibility, one could at this time do a great deal. I must, however, frankly admit that silence has to be maintained today about many things, just because conscientiousness is not sufficiently developed. When people hear that this can be done, and that can be done—they want to do it! An eagerness to be doing something—that they have. But that is not enough. As soon as it comes to the doing of a real deed, and no mere continuation of some old impulse, as soon as it is a question of bringing in new impulses from the spiritual world—and that is what is needed, new impulses from the spiritual world!—then it becomes imperative to demand a high standard of conscientiousness and responsibility. And there is only one way in which these can be awakened in us, namely, that we have knowledge of what is really involved. Thus, we must know that in the education of backward children it is a matter of deep intervention in karmic activities which would otherwise come to fulfilment between death and the next birth. It is actually so: what is done by us now, intervenes in the work of God which would otherwise be brought to fulfilment at a later time. If we are not satisfied for this to remain merely a piece of theoretical knowledge, if we are ready to let it work powerfully upon our minds and hearts, then we shall find ourselves continually faced with the alternative of doing what has to be done or of leaving it undone. Let us never forget that every step taken at the prompting of the spiritual world leads us into a situation where we have to look right and left, and make a new decision—and these decisions that are continually facing us have to be made with courage, with inner courage of life.

In ordinary life, man is protected from the necessity of this inner courage, for in ordinary life he can simply continue doing what he has been accustomed to do. He can jog on in conformity with the motives and standards that are so deeply rooted in him, taking for granted that these are correct, and feeling no necessity to adopt new ones. This answers quite well for the life that proceeds merely in the physical world. But when we come to working out of spiritual sources, we are inevitably confronted, daily and hourly, with decisions; in regard to each single action, we stand face to face with the possibility of either doing it or leaving it undone—or else maintaining an entirely neutral attitude. And the decisions require courage. This inner courage is the very first thing needed, if we want to accomplish anything in the domain of Curative Education. And it can be aroused in us if we hold continually before our minds the greatness of that which we have undertaken. We must be constantly thinking: “I am doing something which generally God does in the life between death and new birth.” The fact that you know this is of untold significance. Receive it as a meditation. To be able to think it, is most important. If we bring it before us every day in meditation—as one says a prayer every day—if we place it there before our soul day by day, it will endow our astral body with the character and tone that we need to give it if we are to deal in the right way with backward children.

It is really only possible for us to go on in these lectures and speak together of further things, if we are ready to acknowledge that we must in this way prepare ourselves for the task before us. Therefore, let us resolve to take what has been said as a necessary introduction, providing the groundwork for what follows; and let us ponder it with all earnestness. For in approaching tasks like those of which we are speaking here, it is indeed a matter of undergoing preparation of mind and heart.

• 1. Erich Wulffen, b. 1862, author and criminologist.
• 2. From Neue Züricher Zeitung, No. 342, 7th March, 1924.
• 3. A gap occurs here in the text.
• 4. A drawing was made.
• 5. A course held at the Estate of Count Carl Keyserlink near Breslau, 7th – 16th June, 1924.

Before I begin a new chapter, I will, as I said last time, insert something and add something to the Christmas reflection that I gave in the Monday lectures. You remember how I connected the meaning of Christmas with the whole development of our cultural epochs, and how it is precisely through this that Christmas acquires its meaning in the turn of an era, both backwards and forwards.

Today I would like to talk about a festival that seems to have less significance for newer peoples than Christmas, about the festival of the “Three Kings,” which is celebrated on January 6, about the festival of the Magi who come from the Orient and greet the newly born Jesus of Nazareth. This festival of epiphanies will become more and more important as people come to understand the true, actual symbolism of this festival as well. We are dealing here with something important. You can see this from the fact that a very developed symbolism underlies this festival of the three Magi from the Orient. This symbolism, like all mysteries, was kept very secret until the fifteenth century, and until then no special hints were given. From the fifteenth century onwards, however, some light is shed on this festival of the Magi from the Orient, in that exoteric illustrations have appeared depicting the Three Holy Kings as a Moor - an inhabitant of Africa - that is Balthasar; then a white man - a European - that is Melchior; and an Asian king who has the skin color of the inhabitants of India - that is Caspar. They bring gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Christ Child in Bethlehem as their offerings.

These are three very significant offerings, and that sounds together with the meaningful symbolism of this festival of January 6. Esoterically, however, the festival is a very important one. January 6 is the same date on which the so-called Osiris Festival was celebrated in ancient Egypt, the festival of the rediscovered Osiris. As is well known, Osiris is overcome by his opponent Typhon, he is sought and found by Isis. This rediscovery of Osiris, the son of God, is represented by the festival of January 6. The Feast of the Epiphany is the same festival, only it has become Christian. We also find this festival among the Assyrians, Armenians and Phoenicians. Everywhere it is a festival associated with a kind of general baptism, where rebirth takes place out of the water. This already indicates the connection with the rediscovered Osiris.

What is the missing Osiris anyway? The missing Osiris represents the transition that took place between the times before the middle of the Lemurian race and the times after the middle of the Lemurian race. Before the middle of the Lemurian race, there was no man endowed with Manas. It was only in the middle of the Lemurian period that Manas descended and fertilized man. In every single human being, a tomb is created for the Manas, which is divided into humanity, for Osiris, who is depicted as dismembered. So many graves are shown in Egypt - that is the manasic deity, which has been divided and dwells in man. “Tombs of Osiris are the human bodies in the Egyptian secret language. Manas is not liberated until the re-appearing love can liberate Manas.

What is the re-appearing love? That which came into being with the Manas fertilization in the middle of the Lemurian period - something before and something after - that was the drawing of the passion principle into humanity. Before that time, there was no actual principle of passion. The animals of the preceding times were cold-blooded. And man himself was not yet endowed with warm blood at that time. Comparatively speaking, the people on the moon were like fish, and the people of the third round were the same warmth with their surroundings.

“The Spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters,” says the Bible of this time. The principle of love was not yet within the beings, but outside as manifesting earthly Kama and earthly passion. That is selfish love. The first bringer of love free of selfishness is now Christ, who was to appear in Jesus of Nazareth.

Who then are the Magi? They are the Initiates of the three preceding races, the Initiates of Humanity up to the appearance of the Christ Being, of Love free from selfishness, of the resurrected Osiris. The Initiates were beings endowed with Manas, they are Magi. They offer gold, incense, and myrrh as a sacrifice. And why do they appear in the three colors black, white, and yellow? Black as Africans, white as Europeans, yellow as Indians. This is related to the root races. Blacks are the remnants of the Lemurian race, yellows are the remnants of the Atlantean race, and whites are the representatives of the fifth root race, the Aryans. Thus, in the three kings or magi, we have the representatives of the Lemurians, the Atlanteans and the Aryans. They bring three offerings: the European brings gold, the symbol of wisdom and intelligence, which was expressed primarily in the fifth root race. The initiates of the fourth root race, the Atlanteans, have as their offering that which is most important to them. They no longer had a direct connection with the deity, but rather a kind of suggestive influence, something like a universal hypnosis. This connection with the deity is maintained by sacrifice. The feeling must rise so that God also fertilizes the feeling. This finds its symbolic expression in the incense. This is the general symbol for sacrifice, which has something to do with intuition.

In esoteric language, myrrh is the symbol of self-denial. What does self-denial mean, what does resurrection mean, as in the example of the resurrected Osiris? I would refer you to Goethe, who says:

And as long as you do not have that,
this dying and becoming,
you are only a gloomy guest
on the dark earth.

Jakob Böhme expresses the same idea with the words:

He who does not die before he dies, perishes when he dies.

Myrrh is now the symbol of the dying away of the lower life and the resurrection of the higher life. It is therefore offered by the initiate of the third root race. There is a deep significance in this. Remember who Jesus of Nazareth is. A highly developed chela is born in him. In the thirtieth year of his life, he dedicated his life to the descending Christ, the descending Logos. The Magi foresaw all this. It is a great sacrifice of Jesus of Nazareth that he exchanges his ego with the ego of the Second Logos. This occurs for a very specific reason. Only when the sixth sub-race has been reached will the possibility gradually arise for the human being, the human body, to be ready from early childhood to receive something like the Christ principle. Only in the sixth root race will humanity be so fully mature that the bodies do not need to be prepared and prepared for years, but are capable of receiving the Christ principle from the very beginning. In the fourth sub-race of the fifth root race, the body still had to be prepared for thirty years. This is just as it was in the Nordic regions, where Sig's body was prepared so that Sig could and did make his body available to a higher being.

In the sixth root race, it will be possible for man to make his body available to such a high being as Jesus did when founding Christianity. When Christianity was founded, it was still necessary for a chela to sacrifice his ego, to mortify it, to send it up into the astral realm so that the Logos could dwell in the body. This is something that is also illuminated by the last moment on the cross, when you consider the last words: Who else could understand the words:

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? [Matthew 27:46]

You will find in this an expression of the fact that it has taken place. At the moment when Christ dies, God has left the body, and the body of Jesus of Nazareth utters those words - the body that was so highly developed that it could express this fact. Therefore, an incredibly great event is expressed in these words. And all this is expressed in the myrrh, which is the symbol of sacrifice, of self-denial, of the sacrifice of the earthly in order to bring forth the higher.

In the middle of the Lemurian period, Osiris had to find his grave, Manas had to enter into people. Under the guidance of the magicians, people had to be educated until the Budhi principle, the principle of love, shone forth in Christ Jesus. Budhi is heavenly love. The lower, sexual principle is ennobled by Christian love. Thus the Kama principle has been glorified and purified in the fire of divine love.

The fact that we are dealing with Melchior, with the principle of wisdom, the intelligence of the fifth root race, is symbolized by the gold – this expresses the sacrifice. The fact that we are dealing with a principle of cult sacrifice is expressed by the incense. This is the principle of the fourth root race, the Atlanteans. This will then be further developed until Christianity will have fulfilled its task in the sixth root race, which will again have a sacramentalism so that it will fulfill the sensual existence with cultic acts, with sacrificial acts. The sacraments have indeed lost most of their meaning today, the sense for them is no longer there. It will be there again for them through what is symbolized by the incense: the higher human being is born. In the Lemurian race, Osiris finds his death; in the seventh root race, he rises again.

So you see that the Feast of the Epiphany, through what it proclaims with its sacrifice, is the story of the third, fourth, fifth and sixth root races.

What guides the Magi and where are they led? They are led by a star and are led to a grotto in Bethlehem. This is something that only someone who is familiar with the so-called lower or astral mysteries can truly understand. To be guided by a star means nothing other than to see the soul itself as a star. But when do you see the soul as a star? You see the soul as a star when you can perceive it as a luminous aura. Then the soul is a star. What kind of aura glows in such a way that it can guide? First you have the aura that only glows, that only has a dull light. It cannot guide. Then you have the higher aura, the intelligence aura. It has a fluid light, a swelling light, but it is not yet guiding. But the bright aura, permeated by Budhi, is truly a star, something radiant and guiding. In Christ, the Budhi star, shining in racial development, rises in the progress of humanity. What shines for the Magi is none other than the soul of Christ Himself. The Second Logos Himself shines for them, and He shines above the grotto in Bethlehem.

The cave is nothing other than the dwelling of the soul: the body. The astral seer sees the body from the inside. For the astral seer, everything is reversed, and everything is seen in reverse. For example, one sees 365 instead of 563. Thus one sees the human body as a grotto, as a cave, and so the star of Christ, the soul of Christ, shines in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is to be imagined as a reality taking place in the astral. It is a process in the lower mysteries. There the Christ-soul actually shines as an auric star, and it leads the initiated of the three races to Jesus in Bethlehem.

This is a festival that has been celebrated every year on January 6th. It is one of those hinted at in “Light on the Path”. Each year, a number of festivals take place. This is one of them, in which the star of Bethlehem rises for the wise men. The first four sentences from “Light on the Path” are the center of the four celebrations:

Before the Masters can speak the voice, it must unlearn the wound.

This is the preparation for the fifth round. This sentence appears at the entrance to the temple. And then comes the great fact. The festival of the sixth of January will grow more and more. People will understand more and more what a magician is and what the masters are. Then, from the understanding of Christianity, we will arrive at the understanding of Theosophy. These days, on January 6, the festival of the great Magi, the masters, will also take place among the Theosophists. The New Year is the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus, because the Christ had not yet been born. The Jewish New Year is in October. But the festival of the circumcision of Jesus of Nazareth has been taken over into Christianity. The fact that Jesus was also a Jew before that is celebrated with the New Year festival in Christianity.

[Notes presumably from the answering of questions at the lecture on December 30, 1904]

On the next planet, man reaches psychic consciousness, on the following planet, super-psychic consciousness, and on the seventh planet, spiritual consciousness. The adept can artificially place himself in these states of consciousness.

The crucifixion caused pain to the Christ.

On the devachan plane, one does not feel only one's own pain and suffering, but one can perceive and feel the whole pain of humanity. All other suffering is felt, one is above one's own suffering. Of the levels of consciousness:

1. The daytime consciousness.
2. A duller, dream-filled consciousness.
3. Dreamless sleep consciousness, the sleep trance of mediums. 4. Deep trance or [induced] trance; can be achieved by mediums; chains of worlds. 5. Psychic consciousness – this is the consciousness one has when one sees life. 6. Superpsychic consciousness, in which one can make the astral body stand.

The physical body has passed through the seven stages. The astral body will pass through them in the future. Beyond spiritual consciousness stands mastery. Spiritual consciousness is equivalent to chelaship.

Esoterically, the conditions that preceded our development on earth are the old lunar and solar conditions.

What is now our inner life was once around us. The mystic has within himself what was once spread around him on the outside. The teaching that flowed out of Budhi is called esoteric Buddhism.

The consciousness that undergoes 343 stages corresponds to a Pitri development. The planetary chain

Physical states of consciousness.

Kama was first in the air, it was the passion for the good. Atavism is when one lags behind in earlier stages of development.

A distinction is made between states of consciousness, states of life and states of form.

An individuality is a being that is fertilized with manas.

States of consciousness in planetary development:

1. deep trance consciousness
2. dreamless sleep consciousness
3. psychic consciousness
4. waking state
5. archetypal state of consciousness

The states of consciousness in humans:

1. consciousness during a deep trance
2. consciousness during dreamless sleep
3. consciousness during dream-filled sleep
4. waking consciousness
5. psychic state of consciousness
6. super-psychic state of consciousness
7. spiritual state of consciousness

The beings have their form from the mineral kingdom. They are a center only in that life becomes conscious. The soul extends into the body. The lower has life only in that the higher is absorbed into it, spreads into it. Consciousness arises from the higher spreading over life and death. Consciousness means as much as Dhyanic. Substance means as much as balance. Beings of consciousness are something all-encompassing – angels of circulation – planetary Dhyanis. Our Earth also has its Dhyani.

At the end of the seventh round, the Earth will be so far advanced that plants and animals will be given to man. Consciousness and form are in balance when the form is directed by consciousness. The uncontrolled form strives up to consciousness.

Elemental spirits are beings that are more powerful in form than in consciousness and life. The opposite of this are the Dhyanis. The elemental spirits are the inhibiting forces. All parasitic beings are filled with elemental beings, for example mistletoe, then the spider, which spins its matter out of itself. Everything parasitic is an expression of the eighth sphere of the moon. - Nightmare. Sphinx.

In the Atlantean race, the Turanians became familiar with the elemental spirits.

Consciousness, life and form - every being must pass through these in many times - in seven stages each.

States of consciousness:

1. Trance consciousness is the all-consciousness, it is the dullest state of consciousness, it corresponds to the forms of crystals and stars, but not of humans.
2. Dreamless sleep is less dull, but narrower, a plant consciousness is present. It is an extraordinary sign of [...] no world systems are perceived there.
3. Dream-filled sleep – in this state, consciousness is not as comprehensive but it is already present in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms.
4. The waking state – it encompasses mineral, plant, animal and human.
5. Psychic consciousness – it is the consciousness of the astral world. Here one not only sees the sour face, but also has the sour feeling.
6. Superpsychic consciousness.
7. Spiritual consciousness – this is endowed with direct perception of the spiritual.

The seven kingdoms and what is established in them:

1. The first elemental kingdom – existence is established
2. The second elementary realm – life asserts itself
3. The third elementary realm – sensation or consciousness asserts itself outwardly
4. The mineral kingdom – being becomes objective
5. The plant kingdom – life becomes objective
6. The animal kingdom – sensation and consciousness become objective
7. The human kingdom - higher consciousness and the ego have become objective.

Form states:

1. The arupic form
2. The rupic form
3. The astral form
4. The physical form
5. The plastic form - it is not rigid, but from the inside outwards making itself valid.
6. The intellectual form
7. The archetypal form

Life, form and consciousness - the present waking state of the earth. The seven globes - the phase states. We are changing from physical-seeing beings into beings that can also see into the higher realms of being; we are entering the region of permeability. We can now see only a part of the cosmos. When someone says today that a celestial body is visible, it means that it is in the fourth state, in the state of the mineral kingdom. World year - world month - world day.

Consciousness corresponds to the sun, form to the moon, life to the earth.

There are 7 x 7 = 49 metamorphoses of life that give consciousness. These make up one world year. On the higher level, consciousness is form again.

The animals that have the skeleton on the outside belong to the lunar epoch - cancer development.

When the riddles of existence touch the human soul, they become not only great problems in life, but life itself. They become the happiness or sorrow of man's existence. And not a passing happiness or sorrow only, but one he must carry for a time through life, so that by this experience of happiness or sorrow he becomes fit or unfit for life.

Now, man's attitude to his own soul is such that the most important questions about it and about its spiritual essence do not arise from any actual doubts he has regarding the spiritual element within him. It is precisely because he is certain of his spiritual substance and because he cannot help seeing in it his human dignity and his true significance as a man, that the question of the fate of his soul becomes for him a tremendous riddle. To deny the mind in man himself does not, of course, occur to even the most rigid materialist. He acknowledges the mental as such, regarding it as a result of physical, material processes. Yet anyone who, with no such theory but simply from his deepest emotional needs, queries the fate of this soul of his, will find himself confronted by a plethora of phenomena and experiences. And these become riddles to him just because he is fully conscious of the mental or spiritual life, and must accordingly ask: Is this spiritual life a passing breath, rising from physical existence and returning with it once more into the generality of natural phenomena, or is it connected with a spiritual world within which it has eternal significance?

Of the many experiences in the realm of the psyche which present the riddles of the soul to our “mind's eye,” I will select only two.

There are, it may be objected, very few people on whom such experiences obtrude so much that they become even conscious, let alone theoretical, problems. But that is not the point. The point is that these experiences take hold of the subconscious or unconscious, establish themselves there, and flow up into consciousness only as a general temper or distemper of the soul, making us courageous and vigorous in life or making us dejected, so that at no point can we properly come to grips with life. As I have said, I want to pick out only two of these experiences.

The first appears before the “mind's eye” every evening when we fall asleep, when the mental and psychic experiences that have floated up and down during the day sink down into the unconscious as if extinguished. Now, when he looks at this experience or, as is most often the case, when the unconscious awareness of it affects his soul, man is overcome by a sense of the powerlessness of his mental life in face of the outside world. And just because man sees in this life his most valuable and dignified quality and cannot deny that he is in the true sense of the world a spiritual being, he is assaulted from within by this sensation of powerlessness, and has to ponder the question: Does the general process of nature overtake mental experiences when man passes through the gate of death, just as it always does at the onset of sleep? The first experience, if I may so put it, is a sense of the powerlessness of mental life.

The second experience is in a way a direct opposite of the first. We perceive it distinctly or indistinctly, consciously or unconsciously, when on waking, perhaps after passing through a fantastically chaotic dream world not attuned to reality, our spirit descends into our bodily existence. At such times we feel it informing our senses, feel too that our psychic experience is being permeated by the interplay between the outside world and our senses, which are of course physical and physiological. We feel the spiritual element descending further into our body; we inform our organs of will with it and become alert and self-possessed, able to make use of our body, our organism. On reflection, however, we cannot help realizing: Anatomy and physiology make a valiant attempt to penetrate and analyse the bodily functions from without; yet looking from within, we ourselves, by means of ordinary consciousness, do not know anything about the interrelationship between our spiritual element and our bodily functions. A glance at the simplest bodily function controlled by the will, the lifting of an arm or movement of a hand, tells us: First there exists in us the thought or concept of this arm-lifting or hand-movement. How this thought or concept flows down into our organism, however, how it informs our muscles, and how finally there comes about what again we know only through observation—what actually goes on inside remains hidden from ordinary consciousness. So, too, in that wonderful mechanism that physics and physiology show us, the human eye or some other sense-organ, there remains hidden the spiritual element that informs this wonderful mechanism.

We are thus faced with problems both by the powerlessness of our mental life and by the darkness into which we feel our spirit descending when it flows down into our own body. We are forced to conclude (most people certainly don't do so consciously, but it affects them as the temper of their soul): this spiritual element in its relationship with the organism is unknown to us just when it is creative; it is unknown to us at the very point in physical life where it manifests its outgoing function.

What every naive individual thus experiences extends, in a different form, to psychology itself. It would need a great many words to explain scientifically how these enigmas creep into the subject; but we can put it, rather superficially perhaps, as follows.

On the one hand, psychology looks at the mind and asks: What is the relation between this and the physical, the external and corporeal? In looking at the physical, on the other hand, and at what physical science has to say about it, some people—and in this respect psychology has a long history—believe that we must regard the mental as the really effective cause of the physical; others believe that we must regard the physical as the really empowering element, and the mental only as a kind of effect of it. The unsatisfactory nature of both views has been perceived by recent psychologists. They have therefore set up the curious theory of psycho-physical parallelism, according to which one cannot say that the body affects the mind or the mind the body, but only: corporeal processes are parallel to mental ones, and mental processes to bodily ones; one can only say what mental processes accompany the corporeal or what corporeal ones the mental.

Psychology itself, moreover, is conscious of this powerlessness of the mind! If we attempt to examine the mind, even as it presents itself to the psychologist, with ordinary consciousness, we find that it has something passive about it, so that we cannot see how it can penetrate dynamically the life of the body. Anyone who looks at the psychic characteristics of thinking and feeling (volition is impenetrable, so that for psychology much the same is true of will as of thinking and feeling)—anyone who looks at thinking and feeling with the tools of psychology finds them powerless, and cannot locate anything that would really be capable of effectively activating the physical. It is then that the psychologist experiences his sense of the powerlessness of mental life in the eyes of ordinary consciousness. The most varied attempts have certainly been made to overcome this feeling. But the disputes of philosophers and the changing philosophies that have succeeded one another provide the impartial observer of humanity with factual evidence of the impossibility for ordinary consciousness of approaching the mind's experience. Everywhere there obtrudes a sense of the powerlessness of the mind as it is perceived by ordinary consciousness.

With regard to this particular point, a series of works have appeared here in Vienna which represent milestones in the development of philosophy. Although I cannot associate myself in any way with their content, I believe that, from the standpoint of ordinary consciousness, these books are extraordinarily significant. They include Richard Wahle's The Whole of Philosophy and its End, which is designed to show that ordinary consciousness is incapable of reaching any significant conclusion about mental life, and that what philosophical investigation is here attempting ought to be handed over to theology, physiology, aesthetics and social science. And Richard Wahle went on to work out these ideas still more clearly in his Mechanism of Mental Life. We may say: here for once ordinary consciousness is revealed as basically incapable of saying anything about the problems of mental life. The ego, the psyche, everything that earlier psychology brought to light—all these collapse in face of the self-criticism of ordinary consciousness.

In recent years, however, psychology has, understandably and indeed of necessity, not attempted to deal directly with the things of the mind—in face of which, as we have seen, ordinary consciousness is powerless—but has sought to discover something about what are usually called mental phenomena indirectly, via the physical phenomena that spring from them. In this way, experimental psychology has come into being. This is a necessary product of our present attitude to life and methods of research. And anyone taking the philosophical standpoint that I do will never for one moment deny that experimental psychology is completely justified, though he may not perhaps agree entirely with this or that detail of its methods and results.

It is here that the other enigma of the soul comes in. However much we learn about what can be experienced by the human body in experimental psychology, the fact remains: everything that appears to be discovered in this way about purely psychic functions is, strictly speaking, only indirect knowledge, acquired via the body. It all belongs to a sphere which, at man's death, is given over to the general process of nature, so that through it can be learnt nothing about the soul, whose fate in the world is of such paramount concern to man. Thus we may say: for psychology, also, the great riddle of the soul reappears.

This point, too, has been made by a modern psychologist who for many years lived and worked here in Vienna, and who will never be forgotten by those who sat at his feet here, as I did. In the first volume of his unfinished work on psychology, he asks: What can any psychology ever achieve by establishing—whether experimentally or non-experimentally, I might add—how concepts combine and separate, how attention operates, how memory develops in life etc.?—if, precisely because of the scientific character of this psychology, with its emulation of natural science, we must renounce all claim to understand the fate of the human soul once the body crumbles into its elements? This was said not by some eccentric or other, but by that rigorous thinker Franz Brentano, who made psychology his central concern in life and who sought to apply to his work the strict scientific method of modern times. Yet he it was who presented the riddle of the soul to his contemporaries in the way I have just outlined, as something scientifically unavoidable.

From all this the impartial observer today must draw a conclusion. It is that, in the study of man, scientific methods will take us only to the point they have now reached; but that we cannot deal with the soul by means of ordinary consciousness, entirely adequate as this is for science and for ordinary life. And so, since for scientific reasons this fact must be apparent to the impartial observer today, I speak to you from the standpoint of a philosophy of life that concludes: it is impossible, with the soul-powers that manifest themselves to ordinary consciousness and operate in ordinary life and ordinary science, to investigate the life of the soul. There must be developed other powers, which to ordinary consciousness are more or less sleeping or, let us say, latent in the soul.

To adopt the right attitude to such a conception of life, we need something which, if I may say so, is found only rarely in people today. I would call it intellectual modesty. There must come a moment in life when we say to ourselves: When I was a little child, I developed a mental life that was so dim and dreamy that it has been forgotten like a dream. Only gradually did there arise from this dream-like mentality of the child something that enables me to orientate myself in life, to bring my thoughts, my impulses and my decisions into step with the world, and to become a capable being. Out of the vagueness and lack of differentiation of the child's mental life, interwoven with the body, has emerged that experience which derives from our inherited qualities, as these develop with the growth of the body, and which derives also from our customary education.

Anyone looking back, with intellectual modesty, on his development during his life on earth, will not be above saying to himself at a certain point: Why shouldn't this continue? The soul-powers which are the most important to me today, and by which I orientate myself in life and become a capable being, were dormant during my existence as a child. Why shouldn't there be dormant in my soul other powers that I can develop from it?

We cannot help reaching this conclusion, which springs from intellectual modesty. I call it intellectual modesty because men are inclined to say: the form of consciousness I have once attained as an adult is that of the normal person; any impulse in the life of the soul to be different from this so-called normal consciousness is eccentric or hallucinatory or visionary or something similar. The philosophical standpoint from which I speak definitely starts from a healthy psyche and attempts on this basis to develop powers dormant in the soul, cognitive powers, which then become clairvoyant powers in the sense in which I spoke yesterday of exact clairvoyance. What the soul has to undertake I indicated yesterday. I mentioned my books Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment, Occult Science, Riddles of the Soul and so on. There you will find details of those exercises which, starting from a healthy soul-life, lead upward to the development of the soul, which thus in fact attains a kind of spiritual vision with which it can see into a spiritual world, just as with the ordinary sense-organs it can perceive the physical and sensuous world. In each of these books there is a first part, which is accepted as something that can be definitely useful to man even by many opponents of the philosophy of life I am advocating. It shows that by certain exercises of an intellectual, emotional and moral kind man can produce in himself a state of soul and body that can be regarded as wholly healthy. They also enable him to be on his inner guard against anything which, deriving from an unhealthy life of the soul, leads to mediumism, hallucinations and visions. For everything brought about in this way is unacceptable to a true psychology. Visions arise not from the sphere of the soul, but because morbid structures exist in the organism; the same is true of mediumism. None of these have anything to do with sound psychology and sound psychic development, and indeed from the point of view of this sound psychology all must be condemned. Opponents today, however, find fantastic and harmful the exercises which follow these preparatory ones, and which are designed to draw from the soul those powers of thinking, feeling and volition which, once they are trained, introduce man into a spiritual world in such a way that he learns to orientate himself in it and can enter it at will.

I have already suggested how, as modern man, we manage by certain mental exercises to remove thinking from its ordinary state of passive surrender to the phenomena of the outside world, and to what appear inwardly as memories but are also connected with the outside world. We transcend this kind of thinking by carrying out exercises in meditation seriously, patiently and energetically, and by repeating them over and over again. Depending on predisposition, it may take one person years, another not so long; but each can note, as he arrives at the crucial point, how his thinking, from what I have previously called dead and abstract thinking, becomes inwardly vital thinking in tune with the rhythm of the world. A balanced view of the world and of life thus strives, not to conjure up visions or hallucinations from the soul, but to experience the life of thoughts and concepts with an intensity that we otherwise experience only through the outward senses.

You need only compare the vitality of our experience of the colours we perceive through the eye, and the sounds we hear through the ear, with the pallor of our experience of thought in ordinary consciousness. By energizing our mental life in the way I suggested yesterday, we can gradually give the mere life of thought and concept the same intensive quality as the life of the senses. Man today, seeking to know the spiritual, does not therefore, if he is a reasonable being, seek hallucinations and visions. He strives quite calmly to achieve the ideal of the life of the senses, with its intensity and plasticity, in his mental activity. And if you devote yourselves as students of the spirit to meditations such as I have described, you need not be in any way dependent on the unconscious or subconscious. You can refer to the exercises, they are all directed at what I am trying to describe—and you will find that everything that is carried out by way of exercises in the life of the soul is done as consciously, as reasonably, as precisely we may say, as are operations in mathematics or geometry.

To sum up: we are concerned here not with the old nebulous clairvoyance, but with a clairvoyance brought about by fully conscious and balanced experiences and exercises of the soul. The self-possession at each step is such that we can compare what a man experiences and makes of himself here with what we otherwise experience in the case of a geometrical problem. If not, the exercises have no value.

A conceptual life of this kind is energized; is independent of breathing; is set free of the body; is a spiritual function only; and in it, as we know by direct perception, thinking is carried out not by the body, but in the purely spiritual sphere. Only when modern man attains this kind of conceptual life does he feel his thinking, in contrast to abstract thinking, as something vital and not as something dead. Our sensation when we experience the transition from ordinary abstract thinking to vital thinking is exactly as if we found a dead organism suddenly come to life. And although this vital thinking is a spiritual process, it is not so linear, not so superficial as ordinary abstract thinking. It is full and plastic. And this plasticity is what counts.

Now, however, a very great deal depends on our carrying over the balanced attitude, required during the actual exercises, to the moment when this vitalized or plastic thinking appears in us. If at this moment we surrender ourselves to the images we have struggled to achieve, believing we find in them realities of a spiritual kind, then we are, not students of the spirit but simply fantasy-mongers. This is something we must certainly not become; for it could not provide us with a firmly based philosophy of life for modern man. Only when we say to ourselves: we have attained one component of spiritual life, but it is a semblance component; it merely tells us something about powers that operate within ourselves—about what we ourselves can do through our own human nature; only when we really say to ourselves: this imaginal knowledge cannot give us any information about any kind of outside world, not even about what we are in the outside world; only if we perceive ourselves in this semblance-making and know ourselves as a power living within it—only then do we have the right attitude to this experience and feel ourselves as spiritual beings outside the body, and yet feel ourselves only in ourselves, with an inner plasticity.

Only by having the courage to continue the exercises to the next stage do we attain true spiritual perception. This next stage not only involves developing the capacity to focus our consciousness upon certain concepts that are readily comprehended—as we comprehend geometrical concepts, which we know to contain no unconscious element—so as to increase our strength of soul; it must also, and more particularly, involve being able calmly and at will to banish these concepts from our consciousness. This is, in some circumstances, a difficult task! In ordinary life, forgetting is not particularly difficult, as our ordinary consciousness is only too well aware. But when one has just struggled, although without driving oneself into auto-suggestion—which cannot occur if we are self-possessed—to focus one's consciousness upon certain concepts, then unusual strength is required to banish them from consciousness again. However, one must develop this greater strength gradually; and just as at first we concentrated all our attention and inner strength of soul, so that we might dwell upon such a concept in a state of meditation, so now we must dispel these concepts, and all other concepts, calmly and voluntarily from consciousness. And there must be able to enter, from our will, what one might call “empty consciousness.” What “empty consciousness” (if only for a few moments) implies, can be judged by reflecting on what happens to ordinary consciousness when it has to forgo both sense-impressions and recollections—when for some reason or other man is deprived of external impressions and even memories: he falls asleep; that is, consciousness is depressed and dimmed. The opposite of this is what must happen: completely controlled, conscious wakefulness, despite the fact that the will has swept consciousness completely clear.

If we thus first strengthen the soul and then empty it, yet keep it conscious, there will appear before it, as colour to the eye and sounds to the ear, a spiritual environment. We can look into the spiritual world. And so we may say: to the spiritual investigation here intended, it is perfectly understandable that ordinary consciousness cannot reach the spirit and the soul, and indeed that it turns out, as Richard Wahle found for instance, that ordinary consciousness ought not to speak of an “I” at all! For in this sphere, ordinary experience can only indicate and label with words a dark element which is immersed in and contrasted with the clear light; and which will never emerge until we have developed powers that are usually lacking. It is a sober recognition of the limits of ordinary consciousness, tied to the body, that impels us to develop in ourselves those powers that alone are capable of really discovering the soul and the spirit.

There is another point to consider, however, if you seek to arrive by this path at a sound and not a morbid psychology. Taking the mediumistic, visionary and hallucinatory as morbid, the fact is that anyone who falls into this kind of morbid psychic activity is entirely absorbed into it. For the duration of his sickness of soul, at least, he becomes one with this activity. Quite the reverse with the exercises I have been proposing here. Anyone who explores the soul with their aid does, it is true, leave behind his physical body with its capacity for ordinary thinking and ordinary orientation in life. He steps out of this body and learns to see imaginally, free of body; he develops a visual thinking. Yet not for a moment is he completely subsumed in this higher man, if I may so call it without arrogance. He always remains capable of regaining his body and acting just as calmly as before: there always stands beside this more highly developed man that ordinary man with his healthy common sense who is a sober critic of everything to which in his vision this higher being attains.

By developing plastic, vital thinking and then creating an empty consciousness, we reach a view of our own psychic nature, one that embraces in a single image all we have encountered in this life since we entered it. Our past life does not stand before the soul as is usual in the memory, with isolated reminiscences emerging, independently or after some exertion. Instead, all at once our life is surveyed like a mighty tableau, not in space but in time. All at once, with a single glance of the soul, we survey our life; but we see it as it informs our growth and the energies of our physical body. We see ourselves as we have been here on this earth as thinking, feeling, willing beings, but in such a way that thinking, feeling and willing now densify and at the same time take their places organically within the human substance. We can see into our spiritual life in its direct association with the physical. We cease trying to establish by philosophical speculation how the soul affects the body. In seeing the soul, we also see how at every moment our physical life on earth has been informed by what the tableau shows us. This will be described more fully in the next few days.

The next step must now be to strengthen still further by removing them from our consciousness the energized concepts that we have introduced into ourselves. We do this by continually repeating the exercises, just as we strengthen muscles by repeated exercise. And by continuing with these energized concepts, we also manage to eliminate from our consciousness this whole newly achieved tableau of the life of the soul from birth to the present. This requires more effort than the simple elimination of images, but one does eventually achieve it. We succeed in removing from consciousness what in our earthly existence we call our inner life, so that now our consciousness is empty not only of current impressions, but also of all that we experience within as if in a second and finer body (which yet informs our growth and our memory), a finer being, an ethereal being as it were, a now for the first time super-sensible being. And when we do so, our consciousness, which though fully awake is now empty and yet has attained a greater inward power, will be able to see further in the spiritual world. It will now be able to look at the nature of its own soul before this descended from spiritual worlds to an earthly existence. Now, what we call the eternity of the human soul is taken out of the sphere of mere philosophical speculation and actually beheld. We learn to look at the purely spiritual that we were in a spiritual world, before we descended to clothe ourselves, through conception, foetal life and birth, in a physical earthly body.

Although attained by as exact a method as are mathematical concepts, this may seem fantastic to many people today. Still more paradoxical may appear what remains to be said, not only about the soul when it still had a spiritual existence, but also about the concrete nature of this experience. These things can only be suggested in this lecture; more will be said in subsequent lectures. The suggestions can perhaps be explained in the following terms.

Let us first ask ourselves: What do we actually see when, in ordinary life, as beings who recognize, understand and perceive, we enter into a relationship with our natural environment? We actually see only the external world. This is clear from what I mentioned at the beginning today. We actually see only the outside world, the cosmos. What takes place within us we see, too, but only by making it into something external through physiology and anatomy. Imposing as these sciences may be, we see what is within only by first externalizing it and then investigating it exactly as we are accustomed to do with external processes. Yet it remains dark down there in the region into which we descend, where we feel our spiritual element flowing into our body. In the last analysis, we see in ordinary life only what is outside ourselves; by direct observation we cannot look directly into man and see how the spiritual informs the bodily organs. Anyone, however, who can examine life impartially from the spiritual viewpoint I have established will conclude: noble and great is external appearance and the laws we discover in the external world of the stars and of the sun, which sends us light and warmth; noble and great is our experience when we either simply look—and we are complete men when we do so look—or when we investigate scientifically the laws by which the sun sends us light and warmth and conjures forth the green of plants; noble and mighty is all this—but if we could look into the structure of the human heart, its inner law would be even nobler and greater than what we perceive outside!

Man can sense this with his ordinary consciousness. But the science that rests on exact clairvoyance can raise it to the status of true research. It can say: far-reaching appear to us the changes in the atmosphere, and there exists an ideal of science which, here too, will discover greater and more potent laws; but greater still is what is present and goes on in the structure and functions of the human lung! It is not a question of size. Man is a microcosm in face of the macrocosm. But as Schiller said: “In space, my friend, dwells not the sublime.” He means the highest form of the sublime. This highest form can be experienced only in the human organism itself.

Between birth and death it is not investigated by man with his ordinary consciousness. Exactly the opposite is true, however, of our existence before we unite with the body—our spiritual existence, in a spiritual environment. In this life on earth, the inner world is dark and the outside world of the cosmos bright and full of sound; in the purely spiritual life before our earthly embodiment, the outer cosmic world is dark, and our world is then the inner world of man. We see this inner world! And truly, it seems to us no smaller and no less majestic than does the cosmos when we see it with our physical eyes during our earthly existence. As if it were our “outside world,” we come to understand the law of our spiritual inner world, and we prepare ourselves, in the spiritual realm, for dealing later with our bodily functions, with what we are between birth and death. For what we are between birth and death extends before us like a world, before we descend into this physical existence on earth.

This is not speculation. It is direct perception arising from exact clairvoyance. It is something which, starting from this exact clairvoyance, leads us some way into the connection between the eternal element in man and the life on earth—that eternal element which remains hidden from us between birth and death, and of which we see the first gleams when we are able to perceive it in the still unembodied state. And with this we explore a part of human eternity itself. We don't even have a word in our modern languages for this part of human eternity. We rightly speak of immortality; but we ought also to speak of “unborn-ness.” For this now confronts us as a direct experience.

This is one aspect of exact clairvoyance, one aspect of human eternity, of the great riddle of the human soul, and thus of the supreme problem of psychology in general. The other aspect arises from those other exercises, which I yesterday termed exercises of the will, through which we so take in hand our will that we learn to make use of it independently of the body I explained that these exercises induce us to overcome pain and suffering within the soul, in order to make it into a “sense-organ” (to speak loosely) or a spiritual organ (to speak exactly) of vision, so that we not only look at the spiritual, but see its authentic shape. And when we learn to experience in this way outside our body, not only with our thoughts but with our will itself—that is, with our entire human substance—there appears before the soul the image of death, in such a way that we now know the nature of experience without the body: both in thinking and in willing and in what lies between, feeling. In an imaginally creative way we learn to live without the body. And in doing so we gain an image of our passage through the gate of death; we learn how in reality, too, we can do without the body and how, passing through the gate of death, we enter once more that spiritual sphere from which we descended into this bodily existence. What is eternal and immortal in us becomes not only philosophical certainty, but direct perception. By training the will, we disclose for the soul's contemplation the other side of eternity—immortality—just as unborn-ness is disclosed by the training of thought.

When the soul becomes a spiritual organ in this way, however, it is as if, at a lower level, a man born blind had been operated on. What for those endowed with sight is a world of colours, the blind man has hitherto been accustomed to perceive by touch alone. Now, after the operation, he sees something quite new. The world in which he previously lived has changed. So too, anyone whose “mind's eye” is opened in the way I have described finds that his environment is changed. How far it is changed I wish to bring out today in only one respect.

Even with our unopened “mind's eye” we can see in life how, for example, a man takes his childish steps, then grows up and reaches a fateful moment in his life: he meets someone, and their souls link up so that the two people combine their fates and move on through life together. (As I said before, I want to single out just one event.) In ordinary consciousness we are drawn to regard what happens in life as a sum of chance occurrences; to regard it, too, as more or less chance that we are brought at last to this fateful meeting with the other person. Only a few individuals, like Goethe's friend Knebel, gain an inner wisdom of experience, simply in growing older. He once put this to Goethe in the following words: If at an advanced age one looks back on the course of one's steps in life, one finds that these steps seem to reveal a systematic arrangement, so that everything appears to have been present in embryo and to have developed in such a way that one was led by a kind of inner necessity to what we now see to have been a fateful event. Human existence as seen with the “mind's eye” unveiled is as different from the life observed by the unopened eyes as the world of colour is from the merely tactile one of the blind man.

Looking at the child's soul life and the interplay of sympathy and antipathy, we see how it develops from these first steps; how then, welling up out of his innermost being, the man himself, out of his innermost longings, directs his steps and brings himself to the fateful moment. This is sober observation of life. When we look at life in this way, however, we see it rather as we see the life of an old man. We should not say that an old man's life simply exists “in its own right;” by logical processes we know how to refer it to its infant beginnings; its very idiosyncrasies make us so refer it. What simple logic does for the old man's life is done for human life in general by exact clairvoyance, by true vision: if we are really to look at life as it develops from the innermost longings of the soul, we must follow it back. And when we do so, we come to earlier lives on earth, in which were prepared the longings that appear in the present and lead to our activities.

I have not been able to do more today than suggest that what leads to this comprehensive contemplation of life is not a tissue of fantasy, but an exact method. It is a contemplation which, by means of an advanced psychology, penetrates to the eternal in human nature. And on this foundation there now arises something that is a certainty, something that wells up out of the knowledge appropriate to us as modern men today and forms a basis for true inner piety and true inner religious life.

Anyone with an insight (and I may say that I am using the word “insight” in its literal sense) into the way the individual soul struggles free of the body, in order to enter a spiritual realm, will have a different way of looking at our social life too. Armed with this new attitude, he can see how friendships, relationships of love, and other associations are formed; how soul finds its way to soul, moving outside the family and other social groups; how physical proximity may be a means to the community of souls, the sympathy and togetherness of souls. He now knows that, just as the body falls away from the individual soul, so the physical element and all earthly events fall away from the friendships and from the relationships of love; and he sees how the soul-relationship that has come into being between men continues into a spiritual world, where it can also be spiritually experienced.

On a foundation of knowledge, not of faith, we can now say: as they stride through the gate of death, men find themselves once more together. And just as the body, which impedes our sight of the spirit, disappears in the spiritual world, so too in that world every impediment to friendship and love now disappears. Men are closer together there than in the flesh. A mode of knowledge that may still appear abstract in relation to true psychology culminates in this religious feeling and vision. Yet the philosophy of life I am here presenting does not seek to infringe religious faith. This philosophy can be tolerant; it can recognize fully the value of every individual religious faith, and even exercise it in practice; but at the same time, as a nurse to this religious life, it provides an epistemological basis for this religious life too.

I have sought today to say something basic about the relationship to psychology of a spiritually appropriate modern view of life. I know, better than many an opponent perhaps, the objections that can be raised to the beginnings of such a philosophy. But I believe I also know that, albeit entirely unconsciously, the longing for such a psychology is present today in countless souls. It therefore needs to be said over and over again: just as one does not need to be a painter to feel the beauty of a picture, so too one does not need to be a spiritual scientist oneself—although one can become one up to a point—to be able to test whether what I am saying here is true. Just as one can feel the beauty of a picture without being a painter oneself, so with ordinary common sense one can perceive what the spiritual scientist says about the soul. That one can see it, I think I have established all the more firmly in recognizing how souls thirst for a profounder approach to psychology and to the great riddles of existence in relation to the soul. The aim of a modern view of life such as has been outlined here today does in fact represent the desire of countless people, though they are not ordinarily aware of it; it forms the pain, the sorrow, the privation, the wish of countless people—of all those who are serious about what we must regard as constructive forces in face of the many forces of decline present in our age.

Anyone today who wishes to advocate a philosophy for the times must realize that he has to speak, think and will in harmony with what the souls in our serious age, if in many cases unconsciously, strive for. And I believe—if I may close on this note—that just such a philosophy as I have adumbrated does hold something of what countless souls strive for today, something of what they need as spiritual content and vital spiritual activity for the present and for the immediate future.

Every profound soul must repeatedly ask itself the question about the meaning of life and must always ask itself anew about the mystery of death. Not only when we look up at the starry heavens, at the far reaches of the world, but at every step of everyday life, questions arise about the essential riddles of life. When one person is born under such circumstances that we can already see at his cradle that hopelessness and hardship will accompany him through life, while another is born under the most favorable circumstances and with the most favorable disposition, so that it is known that he is destined for a happy life and will be able to bring many blessings to his fellow human beings, we ask: Why is that so? We ask: How is it that one person seems to be born and grows up in need and misery through no fault of their own, while the other seems to be able to lead a happy existence through no merit of their own?

Man is never able to answer the riddles of life by merely considering them physically. Theosophy seeks the answers in the spiritual realization of the background of existence, which leads beyond the sensual world. Not because idle curiosity plagues people, does Theosophy want to answer their questions about the riddles of life, but because humanity needs that confidence for its healthy existence, which comes from the sources that give us answers to the questions about the riddles of life.

If we want to explore the sources of life in the sense of the theosophical worldview, we must remember the structure of the human being. What the senses see in a person is only a part of the human being, which it shares with so-called mineral beings. Spiritual science shows us how the physical organism is kept alive by a second principle of human existence, the etheric or life body, which is a continuous fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. Furthermore, we have seen from the study of Theosophy how everything that lives in the soul in the way of pleasure and suffering, joy and pain, instincts, desires and passions, has a third link in the human being as a carrier – the astral body. While the physical body is shared with all mineral beings, the etheric body is shared with all living beings, but the astral body is shared only with animals. The sum of powers, that which the human being has at the center of his being, he is able to summarize with the words “I am”. The “I am” is proper only to man among all the living beings around him.

From this I, he becomes the master and transformer of his other three limbs. As the I works, it first transforms part of the astral body into the spirit self or manas. By working on itself through powerful impulses, the life body is transformed into the life spirit or budhi. When the ego works down into the physical principle, Atman or the spiritual man develops from it.

The ordinary human being has the four limbs up to the I. Large parts of Manas are also usually already developed. In the course of his development, the human being will achieve the ability to independently develop the seven limbs of his being. Actually, the seven parts are only four limbs, because Manas is the transformed astral body, Budhi is the transformed etheric body, and Atman is the transformed principle of the physical body.

When a person wakes up in the morning until the moment he falls asleep at night, we have the four limbs in front of us: physical body, etheric body, astral body and I.

In the state of sleep and in the state of death, these four members are present in different proportions. The state of sleep is also called the brother of death. When a person falls asleep in the evening, all the things that the astral body carries, such as desire and suffering, joy and pain, sink into an indeterminate darkness. The I also sinks into an indeterminate darkness when a person falls asleep in the evening. For those who view the human being from the standpoint of spiritual science, the state of the sleeping person is as follows: the physical body and the etheric body are lying in bed; the astral body and the ego are lifted out. In today's human beings, the astral being and the ego do not yet have spiritual organs of perception. In order to perceive the world, they still need the organs of the physical and etheric bodies. Otherwise, he cannot perceive consciously. Naively, man does not say, quite correctly, “My eye sees, my ear hears,” but “I see” and “I hear.” The sense organs of the physical body are the instruments of the astral body and the I.

Sleep thus presents itself as that state of man in which the astral body and the inner man, the I, are in a purely spiritual world. Is the astral body inactive during the night? It is not. During the night it is outside the physical and etheric bodies. For those who can explore these things, it can be observed that the astral body works on the physical and etheric bodies of the person throughout the night. Its actual home is where it is at night. There are the forces into which it immerses itself during the night. During the day, it absorbs all kinds of impressions through the external senses: form, color, light and so on. All of this surges back and forth in the astral body.

The astral body is not yet in complete harmony with the physical body; this is what causes fatigue. This has to be removed at night by the astral body immersing itself in the forces of its spiritual home and refreshing itself. Once complete harmony has been established between the astral body and the physical body, a very different state will have been reached. The surging and swaying of the impressions absorbed during the day from the physical environment manifests itself in the evening as fatigue. During the night, the astral body works off the fatigue. We feel the consequences of this work on the physical and etheric bodies early in the morning. We can see the manifestations of what the astral body does during the night in the refreshment we experience in the morning. Even when the physical and etheric bodies are ill, the astral body has a harmonizing effect on the disturbed etheric and physical bodies during sleep.

Physical science may object to some of these things, but spiritual processes at work behind the facts do not contradict the results of scientific research. If, time and again, physical research wants to object to the teachings of spiritual science about spiritual and psychological processes, the following example of a similar assessment can be pointed out. Let us assume: A person gives another a slap in the face. A has observed that the first person had a fit of anger and was therefore tempted to give the other a slap in the face. But B says: “I saw his hand rise and move towards the other person's face, and that's why he slapped him.” The part about the fit of anger is nonsense! This is the verdict of physical research when it insists on the truth of external facts in the face of the results of spiritual research. We only recognize a small part of the world when we only judge and observe external facts. Everything that happens in the world, that physics researches, that external observation shows us, these are only the gestures of the soul life of the world. The situation is quite different for a person in death than in sleep. Then not only the ego dissolves with the astral body, but the etheric body also goes with it and only the physical body remains behind. During life, the etheric body is a constant fighter against the decay of the physical body. But the physical body disintegrates the moment the etheric body leaves it. Immediately after death, the ego, the astral body and the etheric body are together – for a short while. Not all people experience this togetherness right after death; for each person, it lasts as long as that person has been able to exist without sleep.

The experiences that a person has during this time are very strange. They literally feel how they grow out of themselves, become greater. During this time, they see all the events of their past life around them as in a large memory tableau. This moment is extraordinary. Only in exceptional cases does a person experience something similar during their lifetime. It may be that in the event of a strong fright, when he is close to drowning or falling, he experiences a loosening of the etheric body from the physical body to such an extent that the memory of his entire past life then comes to him. However, this is only the case if the ego and the astral body do not lose consciousness. The astral body must remain within the etheric body.

Another example of the etheric body being disconnected from the physical body in places is when a limb, for example a hand, has fallen asleep. Children have a very telling expression for this; they say: “It feels like seltzer water.” The seer knows that at this moment the etheric body is protruding from the physical body at that point. The different blood circulation is only a consequence of the etheric body being partially released. Like the fingers of a glove, we can see the etheric body hanging out of the hand. When someone is hypnotized, you can see how the etheric body protrudes to the left and right, hanging down like rags.

Perhaps some will say that these explanations are nonsense and consider them foolishness. It is very good when we can cite examples from people who might otherwise laugh at theosophy to support our stories about the facts of the spiritual world. Criminal anthropologist Benedikt recounts the following experience: When he was once close to drowning while bathing, he suddenly saw his entire life before him.

We can explain this fact, that after death a person sees their entire previous life in front of them, and the similar experience of a tremendous shock, as follows: the etheric body is, among other things, also the carrier of memory. In ordinary life it is connected with the physical brain. At the moment when the vehicle of memory is freed from the physical brain, but while the astral body is still within the etheric body, the whole of life presents itself to the human soul as a great tableau of memories. Bit by bit it fades away into darkness, and a second corpse remains of the human being. From the etheric or life body, something remains for him like an essence, like an extract of the great memory picture, as if the content of a large book had been summarized in one page. So after death, the essence of earthly life remains for us from this memory tableau; this is incorporated into the astral body on its journey after death.

Now the human being still consists of his ego, the astral body and the imprinted essence of his last life. If we want to know what fate the astral body has after death, we must remember the experiences of ordinary life. Let us see who actually experiences the enjoyment of physical things. That is the astral body, which uses the physical organs only as tools. For example, in the case of a gourmet, it is also the astral body that uses the physical organs only as tools. But it is the astral body that craves the delicious food. Let us imagine ourselves in the astral body after death. It has the same desires and instincts as it had before, but now it lacks the instruments to satisfy them. The astral body is now in a special situation. It has desires but no tools to satisfy them. The human being is in a state of burning thirst. The more a person depends on everything that can only be satisfied by the physical body, the more burning the thirst. This thirst lasts until the astral body can recognize that it must get rid of these desires. The time of burning thirst is called the Kamaloka time; Kama - desire; Loka - place. It is the sum of experiences that can only be satisfied by the physical body and must be given up.

When man learns to seek the Divine-Spiritual in the world, he will lack nothing after death. It is a method of shortening the Kamaloka time if one frees oneself from the lower pleasures and learns to let one's inner being be satisfied by spiritual interests. The highest by which man can free himself from the sensual in the sensual is art, true art. The more idealistic and spiritual the art that affects a person, the shorter the Kamaloka period. Art that is directed towards the external, the sensual, is not suitable for the whole of the human being. For one person it is relatively longer, for another person it is relatively shorter, the time in which he must unlearn what connects him to the physical world.

Then there is the shedding of a third corpse. After a long time, the human being discards the astral corpse. The ego cannot take anything with it on the further pilgrimage through life that is not purified by the ego. The unpurified, unprocessed parts of the astral body remain in the astral world. These astral corpses are always around us. People who are or have been closely connected to the material world leave dense astral corpses behind.

Some influence on a person comes from the fact that he walks through spiritual entities, that his soul is permeated by such spiritual entities. These also include such astral corpses. Because if a person is not armed against it, he is open to such influences. A restlessness arises in him, perhaps also bad impulses. But a good person, full of character, will not succumb to these harmful influences.

We have now followed the human being to the point where only the ego remains, with the purified parts of the astral and etheric bodies. Now a purely spiritual state occurs, which is called devachan. The human being is stripped of his covers; he is a purely spiritual being. We now still have the I before us. It has sprung out of the bodily sheaths and has become spiritual in itself. The I in man is almost like a plant that has been enclosed in crevices and has been freed and unfolds freely. The I unfolds in all directions when the astral corpse has fallen away. It feels a bliss of the deepest kind.

If we want to get to know these feelings, we have to compare them with a feeling that is only a very weak echo of these feelings. When the hen on the egg uses her body heat to guide the developing being towards maturation, we have a small something in this feeling of bliss that the I experiences during this time.

Then comes the time when the fruit ripens, as an extract of the last life. It is not for nothing that the I has absorbed this extract of the last life. The I has absorbed the world in a thousand and one impressions. The I has faced life with the intellect and the mind. Everything it has absorbed is compressed into this small extract, and this extract has become a creator through the feeling of inner bliss.

The I is preparing to build a new human being. We have built ourselves as we are. Only the outer disposition and something of what is in the etheric body has been passed down to us by inheritance. What we have already seen developing in the child's body took this long time after death to utilize the fruits of the last life. Every time after death, the human being takes with them an extract of their last life. Each time, the human being builds a new life through what they have experienced. In addition to what we have brought with us from previous lives, after death we take with us the extract of our last life. The ego experiences this bringing in of the fruit of the last human life and its use as a blessing. So the ego works to use this fruit of the last life to build a new human being. Physical inheritance provides the building blocks. How they are put together comes from the last life. The extract of the last life contains the design of the new life.

But after death, people have more to do than just occupy themselves with themselves. If we look at the development of the earth, we have to realize that everything on earth is changing. People will not reappear on earth until they can have new experiences on earth. Imagine Europe a few centuries before Christ, when everything was covered with mighty forests, and how every corner of the earth has changed since then. The face of the earth is constantly changing, and so is the cultural face of the earth. Our children learn something completely different at school than the children of ancient Rome learned. The face of the earth has also changed in spiritual and mental terms. Where are the forces that bring about these changes?

The forces that transformed the Germany that existed in the first centuries after the birth of Christ lie in the spiritual world. The co-workers in this change are the people themselves. After death, they continue to work on the physiognomy of the earth. The seer sees how the earthly beings are surrounded and enveloped by the bodiless human beings who are preparing the soil into which they will be born into a new life. In the physical life, we build cities, construct instruments, machines, and so on. But after death we transform the face of the earth. We prepare the bed in which the human being will be embedded when he is ready to take on a new form. We see the human being creating in the spiritual world; he is one of the architects, one of the co-creators in the transformation of the earth.

It takes a long time for the earth to change in such a way that the soul returns to a completely different scene. Once man appeared for the first time in the earthly body. Before that he was in a purely spiritual world, in the bosom of the Godhead. What man experiences in the physical body in the physical world can only be experienced within the physical body. With each life he adds a new page to the previous one, so to speak. At the end of his incarnations, these earthly experiences are added to his soul, and he lays them down before the altar of the Deity.

As long as the human being can be enriched by special forms of earthly existence, he embodies himself. This is how the individual life is comprehensible. It is an effect of previous lives and is a preparation for a later life. This law was not created for brooding, for idle speculation and for looking back at the past without taking action. This law tells us: the experiences of this life are the consequences of previous lives and the preparations for later lives. If I am in need and misery, then this is the preparation for later experiences. This is a law of life that knows how to solve the riddles of life in a wonderful way.

If someone, invoking this law, were to object, as sometimes happens, that one could not then help someone who is in need, then that is completely nonsensical. Just as a merchant's balance is a specific one, but a new item can be entered on the debit and credit side every day, so you can take stock of all your good and bad deeds at any moment in your life, but a new item can also be added to either side at any moment. It is never out of the question for us to add completely new items. Through the law of karma, we are able to help people. It is a law that gives impetus to life and mobilizes all energy. The law of karma is often misunderstood from two sides: from theologians and from some theosophists. The theologians object that salvation was brought to all of humanity by Christ Jesus, and therefore people cannot do anything themselves for their salvation. On the other hand, many a theosophist believes that he must oppose the teaching of redemption through Christ Jesus because he believes in the law of karma. But if he understands the law of karma correctly, then he knows that you can always add a new item to your life account and that you can therefore always help another person. Thus, the more powerful a person is, the more he can help other people. A mighty being, such as Christ, can have an effect on an infinite number of people. The act of redemption is inscribed in the karma of all humanity. The law of karma is in beautiful harmony with the redemption of Christ Jesus.

The most beautiful instrument for comprehending the great religious truths is Theosophy. Through it, the modern human being receives the form that is right for his soul.

The meaning of life arises when we recognize that which is behind life and incorporate it into the impulses of our actions. Theosophy is for energetic people who want to create in this life. When we learn to recognize spiritual forces, we also learn to introduce them into life. The theosophist is indifferent to arguments for or against Theosophy based on the usual dialectical arguments. What matters for Theosophy is that it becomes an instrument for life, that it increasingly intervenes in life. In the next period of cultural development, it will become clear what people owe to Theosophy: that people become joyful in their work and hopeful through Theosophy.

Theosophy is a remedy for humanity. If it proves to be such, then it needs no other logical proof. If Theosophy has a healing effect on people, then it will be proven by the facts of life.

The greatest mysteries of life, which have universal human significance, are not presented to us through special scientific research, but we encounter them at every turn in life. And the greatest questioner is surely life itself, which constantly confronts us, a questioner who not only arouses our curiosity with his questions, but who, through his questions, can mean happiness and suffering, satisfaction or even despair for our soul. Spiritual science, as presented in these lectures, is intended primarily to answer these questions posed by life itself, to the extent that human cognitive ability is allowed to look into the secrets of existence. Even if this spiritual science appears to be something new and unusual compared to today's conventional science, this is understandable for anyone who takes just a glance at those branches of conventional science that deal with questions of the soul, with questions of spiritual life. What is today called psychology or soul science can, to a large extent, be researched to the extent that it presents itself, and it will be found that precisely the great existential questions, the great riddles of life, are very much neglected in this conventional science.

One of the greatest contemporary researchers of the soul, Franz Brentano, stated the following in his “Psychology”: How questions are actually answered in current research into the soul, or at least how they are attempted, how one idea follows another, how one sensation evokes another in the soul, how perhaps those soul forces within our consciousness , which we call memory, all this – Franz Brentano also believes – could not be a substitute for what soul research once sought to fathom as a certain solution to the mystery associated with the name of the immortality of the human being. Today, questions such as that of the immortality of the soul are sought in vain in the usual humanities or spiritual science, and the same applies to other questions. They cannot even be raised from this usual spiritual science, so to speak.

One might say that the most trivial words could be used to raise the most everyday great riddles of mental life, namely with the words: How can man come to terms with himself and the world when he experiences in himself how he becomes a different person at every age, how every age presents him with new tasks even in the time between birth and death? How can man answer the great riddle of existence that confronts him every day and that, as everyone can see, is intimately connected with the whole being of man? The great mystery: how is it that everything that flows in and out of us from morning till evening when we are awake, in the form of ideas, drives, desires, passions, affects and so on, sinks into an uncertain darkness when we fall asleep and is resurrected from this uncertain darkness when we begin the new day? — Sleep and waking, which are so intimately connected with the riddle of human existence, science itself must admit and admits more and more that it hardly knows how to answer these riddle questions. And then there is the enigma of death, as already mentioned, about which a significant researcher of the recent past, as already mentioned here, knows nothing to say except what, so to speak, observation of the external physical world reveals. Huxley cites them right at the beginning of his “Outlines of Physiology” the words of the melancholy Danish prince Hamlet:

The great Caesar, dead, and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole that lets the north wind through;
Oh that the earth, to which the world did bend,
Might fling a barrier to the wind and rain!

And further, he explains what he wants to say by showing that the individual material parts that make up a person, when he passes through the gate of death, gradually dissipate, as it were, into all winds, into the other matters that surround us, and how we would have to search there for what a person was, if we were to look for the material atoms where they can be found after some time, in the vastness of the world.

That this, what has become of the atoms of the great Caesar, is not at all the question that actually concerns the human soul, this is no longer felt, so to speak, by external scientific observation. That the question is this: Where are the soul forces that worked in Caesar? What has happened to them? How do they continue to work in the world? — that this is the great question, even an external science can no longer feel that. And then there is the question that is contained in the meaningful word destiny, the fateful question that really confronts us at every turn in life, that presents us with the great riddle that shows itself to us everywhere. We see a person entering into existence, born into poverty and misery, so that we can predict at his cradle that he will have a less than favorable destiny. Or we see him entering into life with seemingly insignificant talents, so that we can again predict that he will be of little advantage to himself and to others. In another we see how he enters life, born in happiness and abundance, surrounded by caring hands from the cradle, endowed with abilities that show from the outset that he could become a useful member of the world order for himself and his fellow human beings. How much of all that we call happiness and sorrow, and what daily, hourly befalls us, is included in this fateful question! One would like to say that the great questions of existence only begin where science, so to speak, must end. And anyone who today tries to familiarize himself with such a world view, which is shaped by purely scientific principles, will say to himself: What is offered to me as a summary, however beautifully formulated, of scientific truths, shows me only the beginning of the question, the question of how I must pose the great riddles of existence; there are not yet many answers to be found.

In the face of all this, however, it must be emphasized that in the broadest sense of today's education, there is no possibility of addressing the vital questions of the human soul, for the simple reason that, as a result of phenomena and facts that have taken place over the last few centuries – and which will be discussed in the next lectures will be addressed, human thought habits, the entire faculties of human thinking, have been directed more towards external material and only feel reassured when they can apply their judgment and their research to something that is apparent or accessible to the brain-bound intellect. These habits of thinking are often deprived of the possibility of looking only at what is soul life, at those events within which what takes place is not exhausted in the physical, but is specifically soul-based.

It is clear from the lectures already given this winter that the question is not so much whether man can look into those regions where the answers to the questions raised can be found by means of the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the paths into the supersensible life, which were indicated in the last lecture here, but rather whether he can do so through the It has been emphasized several times that certain things must be investigated in this way, but that then the unbiased human understanding, the unbiased judgment, is quite capable of grasping what supersensible research can give. If this is the case, then it will also be understandable that the path of supersensible knowledge described in the last lecture always offers the possibility of looking at what is present in life in any case, what presents itself everywhere in life, in the right way and of getting answers to the great riddles of existence through the right view.

The spiritual in man is present everywhere, it is always there, and in order for it to proclaim its immortality, it is not so much a direct glimpse into the supersensible world that is needed as a right contemplation - which, however, can be drawn upon and refined - a right contemplation of the immediate events of our soul life itself. This should be the main focus when judging what is referred to here as spiritual science: the way in which life is observed, the way in which the phenomena of direct soul life present themselves through the unique thinking brought about by spiritual science. If we observe carefully, we find that spiritual science regards the phenomena of the immediate life of the soul in connection with the outer life of matter in such a way that the great riddle of existence, as indicated, can be answered from the direct observation of life.

It has been suggested here several times that spiritual science today is in a similar situation to that of natural science in the days of the dawn of modern education, when, for example, Francesco Redi expressed the great truth that is now generally accepted and recognized: living things can only come from living things. This meant that a powerful prejudice had been combated, a prejudice that was not limited to lay circles at the time, but dominated all of science at that time – and this time is only a few centuries ago: three centuries ago, for example, when Francesco Redi appeared, it was still believed that lower animals, such as fish, earthworms and the like, could arise from river mud through mere combination of the external material. Francesco Redi showed that this was an inaccurate observation. He showed that nothing of living existence can arise without a germ of life, originating from a similar living being, being placed in the unorganized matter, and he established the proposition: Living things can only arise from living things. Within the limits of the application of this law, it is recognized by all, from Haeckel to Du Bois-Reymond. It was not recognized at the time of Francesco Redi. He first had to show how it is based only on an inaccurate observation when one believes that inanimate matter can form itself into a living being.

In the same situation is spiritual science today in relation to the spiritual, as it was in relation to living things for Francesco Redi. Today, spiritual science shows, through the way it is able to consider the phenomena of the soul, that it is based on inaccurate observation to believe that what enters into existence with a person in terms of inner soul life could, for example, come from inheritance, from parents or grandparents, etc., or could only come from what the soul of the person absorbs through external experience, through external experience of the environment. Spiritual science has to show that the belief that it could be so is based on inaccurate observation just as much as the belief that a formed living thing could be formed from inanimate substance. Just as inorganic matter can only be gathered together by a living germ, so everything that is formed in the human soul in the way of inherited traits and qualities, everything that it absorbs from the external world through the senses and the intellect, can only be joined together to that which lives and weaves in us as a living soul being, if there is a living spirit-germ, a spirit-germ that joins together within itself both the inherited traits and everything that is taken in from the external environment.

Spiritual science focuses on this spirit or soul germ, and in doing so it certainly confronts a very, very widespread prejudice of the present day. When we speak today of the character of the human soul, when we speak of everything that a person experiences, then we will - and this has been done through the most conscientious research, which should be fully recognized in its own right - point to this or that, which is “inherited” from one's ancestors. We shall always be tempted to see what lives in the human soul and what the human being develops, so to speak, assembles through these or those causes that lie within the line of inheritance, on which we only want to influence what once storms in from outside to the human being for the overall shaping of the human soul.

A certain harmony between natural science and spiritual science will come about in this field when consideration is given to a question that must always be in the mind of the spiritual scientist when speaking of the core of the human soul and inherited tendencies: the question that is linked to the preservation of the human species as a whole. Within the life of the species, within that which is inherited in the being of generations from grandfather and father to son and so on, we do see characteristics passing from generation to generation. But one thing confronts us as a question when we consider this succession of human existence over the course of generations: that man reaches, so to speak, the age of fertility, sexual maturity, at a certain time, and at the time when he has reached this, he is in a position, so to speak, to bring a complete human being into existence again in the generative sense. In other words, having attained sexual maturity, the human being is capable of producing his own kind, and thus has the abilities that are necessary to produce his own kind.

So human development up to sexual maturity is such that the human being develops within himself all the abilities that make it possible for him to produce a being of his own kind. But the human being continues to develop after sexual maturity. New formations, new soul content also arise after sexual maturity, and it is impossible to relate what the soul undergoes in its development after sexual maturity to the whole development of the human species in the same way as what the human being undergoes to establish the human species until sexual maturity. A sharp distinction must be made in man's whole attitude to the world in relation to his development up to sexual maturity, and in relation to the time after that. This is a question that, as we shall soon see, can only be properly addressed by spiritual science.

Another significant question arises from this, but it shows how what is meant by the term “inheritance” is to be understood, in contrast to what actually takes place in the human soul and belongs to human development. We can see what occurs in man and clearly shows itself to be a product of heredity within the human species in a radical case where heredity occurs under all circumstances, simply because man is human and descends from a being of the same kind, a being of his own kind. One such thing, for example, is the change of teeth at around the age of seven. This is something that lies within the powers that man has inherited, that occur under all circumstances, even if we remove the person from the human community and place him on a lonely island, where he would grow up wild.

This is the case with all characteristics that are actually only based within the line of inheritance. But let us take something that is as intimately connected with the human soul as language, and we immediately find that the concepts of inheritance let us down. Where it is justified to speak of inheritance, the inherited characteristics will appear as with the change of teeth. But if we take a person to a lonely island and let him grow up wild, so that he hears no human sound, then language does not develop. That is, we have something that shows us that there is something in the human soul that is not bound to inheritance in the same way as the forces that we have to address in the eminent sense as inherited.

We could cite many more examples that show how little we can get by with the forces of inheritance to explain the whole being of man. But when it comes to the spiritual side, where one starts out with a prejudiced approach, one makes mistake after mistake, mistakes that simply turn out to be logical mistakes. For example, it is repeatedly believed that spiritual science wants to rebel against something that natural science has to say, while it actually holds the achievements of natural science in the highest esteem.

For example, one might think this when spiritual science asserts that what we call the human soul core does not merely come from the parents, grandparents and so on, but as a spiritual and soul core goes back to a previous, far-distant life of the person, going back so far that spiritual science has to say: The life of man on earth is not a single occurrence but a repeated one. When we enter earthly existence through birth, a soul core comes into existence that has absorbed certain peculiarities and certain forces in previous lives. Because it has absorbed these forces in previous lives, so to speak, concentrated them within itself, it enters a new body and a new physical environment in a certain sense. Just as the living germ in the physical life places itself in its inorganic surroundings and absorbs the inorganic forces and substances from there, so the human soul nucleus, coming from previous earthly lives, approaches the inherited traits, binds them, concentrates them, takes what the external world can give, and thus forms and shapes the new life that we then live through the time from birth to death. The present life is again such a contraction of partly inherited traits and partly of what the outer life offers us. And when we pass through the gate of death, then this soul core is most concentrated. Then, in the time between death and a next birth, it passes through a purely spiritual existence and, if it has continued to mature in this, enters a new earthly life through a new birth or conception.

Unfortunately, it is only a popular prejudice that anything of what today are conscientious and well-researched scientific results should be opposed or even touched by such views of spiritual science. Spiritual science is fully understood - this has already been mentioned - when the natural scientist comes and shows how, through the mixing of the paternal and maternal germ in each individual case, a special individualization of the child's germ takes place, so to speak, and how the individualities of the individual children can be different simply by this mixing of the paternal and maternal elements. Spiritual science in its depth does not engage in the trivial assertion that it is proof of a special human individuality that in one and the same family the children are different from each other, because this individualization can be understood from the different mixing of the paternal and maternal elements. If, on the other hand, the natural scientist comes and points out how what man experiences in life could point to this or that organic constitution, to this or that formation of the brain, and so on, then spiritual science is in complete agreement with this, and it remains amateurish in spiritual science if one does not want to go into it. But if what natural science has to say in this field, and quite rightly so, is to be an objection to the results of spiritual research, then a logical mistake is made that can be characterized something like this: Despite all the results of natural science research, the human soul kernel first draws on the inherited characteristics to shape a life.

Let us assume that a person sees another person breathing healthily in front of him and says: “The fact that this person is alive and standing before me as a living being is due to the air and lungs that are present.” Who would dispute that this is completely true! Just as little as this can be disputed by any spiritual science, just as little can it be disputed when the natural scientist comes and considers the material conditions from the line of inheritance in order to explain the individual form of the soul's life. It is just as true as when the natural scientist says: There stands a man before me who lives at this moment because there is air outside him and lungs inside him.

Can the natural scientist therefore consider the spiritual scientist to be refuted when spiritual science says: Despite everything that has been said, what happens to your soul is determined, spiritually and mentally determined, in a purely spiritual way by what the soul has experienced in previous lives. Despite all this, is the whole destiny of man determined by the fact that man himself has prepared this destiny in previous lives? No, the naturalist must not consider the spiritual researcher who makes such an assertion to be refuted. The naturalist who says, “The man standing before me lives at this moment because there is air outside him and lungs within him,” must not consider the spiritual researcher to be refuted, just as he who says to him: No, that is not why he lives, but he lives in this moment through something quite different; this man once wanted to hang himself, and he would most certainly have died in his then attempt at hanging if I had not intervened. But I cut it short, and that is why he is now alive.

From this we see, then, how the objective truth that the other person only lives because there is air outside him and lungs inside him does not contradict the fact that he only lives at this moment because the other person cut his rope! Just as this latter irrefutable truth does not contradict the natural scientist's realization that a person lives because air and lungs are present, so what natural science has to say does not contradict what spiritual science has to offer: that the ultimate, spiritual reasons for a person's existence lie in repeated lives on earth.

The important thing here is to direct our attention to the right thing in the right way, and here we can look at language as a good example. Every spiritual researcher who penetrates into the depths of things and understands natural science can grasp that one can easily be tempted to say: Man can speak because he has a speech center in his brain. That is certainly true. But it is equally true that this speech center of the brain has only been formed into a living speech center by the fact that a language exists in the world at all. Language has created the speech center. Likewise, everything that exists in the formations of the brain and the entire organic apparatus of the human being has been created by the spiritual and soul life. It is the soul that has impressed upon the human material the reality of spiritual life. Therefore, we must seek the true creative power in the human soul, in the spiritual-soul. We must not regard the spiritual-soul as a product of the brain, but rather the reverse: the brain, with its delicate formation, as a product of the spiritual-soul.

When we consider human life, we find that this is the case in every respect, so that a healthy consideration of life confirms what has just been said. Let us consider for a moment what we can call human development, going beyond the generic, that is, what still develops in man even when, so to speak, the forces within the inheritance are fully developed, when he has become manly, in order to carry within him the forces that can produce his own kind. The soul forces that constitute human development present themselves to us in a completely different way when we contrast them with those forces that are present throughout human life and express themselves, for example, in the preservation of the species and in reproduction. Within the sphere of the powers of reproduction we see how everything unfolds from the inside outwards, so to speak, how man brings forth beings like himself beside him through the powers that play in this sphere, that is to say, how what is within him makes its way outwards. The forces that belong to inner human development take exactly the opposite path. One must be able to see the spiritual as real in the first place. Then one will accept the consideration that is to be given now as a justified one from the outset.

How do we live our lives when we consider the inner soul? We live our lives in the opposite way to how we live life within the species: in the species, all development takes place outwards, in the individual life, all development takes place inwards. This happens in such a way that we absorb what comes to us from the outside, process it within us, and do not push it outwards as in reproduction, but rather we concentrate what we live through in ourselves more and more intensely, stripping it more and more intensely, so to speak, of its character as the outside world and making it the content of our own ego.

Anyone who looks at human life impartially will find that it would be impossible, for example, for our soul life to ever have everything that the soul has lived through, everything it can remember, really in its memory at any given moment. Let us imagine that any one of the people sitting here at this moment should have alive in his soul everything that has ever lived in the soul in terms of concepts, ideas, sensations, affects, and so on. That would be a pure impossibility. But has what we have gone through in the past, what we have inwardly taken in soulfully, been lost because we cannot remember it at this moment? It is not lost. If we compare our soul life in successive moments of time, we will find that perhaps more important than what we remember is what we seem to have forgotten, but what has worked on us and made us a different person.

In the course of our development, we are always a different person, feeling imbued with ever-changing content. If we observe ourselves as we are now and compare ourselves with what we were, say, ten years ago, we will not be able to deny that we are a different person and that what has brought this about are the processed experiences, what has flowed into us, been absorbed by us and taken the opposite path to the forces that serve reproduction. We destroy, as it were, with our looking at things, with our remembering in our imagination, that which we experience, but we take it into our I instead. Our I is continually changing. Therefore, we can say: a precise observation of life shows us how this I changes throughout life, and how it has changed through the experiences it has taken in. We feel how the I becomes inwardly fuller, permeates itself more and more, becomes richer and richer than it was when we entered life as young people. This is based on a very significant phenomenon of life, which is usually not given enough attention.

Goethe, the profound connoisseur of life, who above all saw life as it presented itself to him in his own personality, uttered the sentence: In old age we become mystics. What did he mean by that? What does it mean to become a mystic in Goethe's sense? We must remove from this sentence what is unclear and nebulous about it. What Goethe meant was that as man becomes ever more mature and mature, he has less and less of what the world offers him externally, but draws the forces of experience from the wells of his own soul, into which he has let them descend. “Man becomes a mystic” means: his soul has become fuller and fuller, has contained more and more forces within itself.

If we take a closer look at what our soul core has united within us, how it has absorbed what it has experienced and what it has made of it, then those who have become mystics independently of any age can help us to understand a little better what actually happens in the human soul. Let us ask the mystics! What do the mystics talk about most of all? About a “second self”, about a “higher human being” in man, about the fact that in this human self, which grows up with us from youth, a second self can take hold, which many mystics interpret as a “divine” one. But that is not what matters, but how they felt that as a person grows up, something matures like a second person, which he holds fast, which is concentrated within him. We see the exact opposite of what happens in reproduction: that a second person is born alongside the first, that the second is rejected. What becomes the “second self” is not something that the person rejects, but something that he concentrates more and more within himself.

Thus we can indeed say: by living his life, man shapes something in his individuality that takes the opposite direction from that of reproduction. He does not give birth to anything out of himself; he concentrates something within himself, does not let something emerge from his ego, but imbues something within himself, which the mystic quite well describes as a second human being, which develops, as it were, within the skin of the first human being and acquires more and more spiritual and soul-like determination. This is more or less evident in one person or another; but the sense of the developing human being is based on the fact that we undergo an opposite germination process, where we do not unfold, but on the contrary concentrate something within us. If we call the direction of reproduction an evolution, a development, then we can call what the I undergoes an involution, a wrapping up, an inner shaping of the experiences. And it is self-evident that the inner resilience that the I, having grown up, carries within itself as a second I, is greatest when we are at the end of our physical life, when we pass through the gate of death.

If we examine this once and take a closer look at what has developed as a second self, then we have to say: the human being is not always inclined to take a closer look. Life takes up a lot of his time and he does not pay enough attention to the second being that he is developing. But if he pays sufficient attention to it, he will find that this second being has very definite qualities, and above all bears within itself a significant urge to be independent and free in relation to what we can take up in our further life. In our further life we live in a certain linguistic context. As a result, our concepts always have a certain coloring from this linguistic context. But what we have developed within strives to free itself from what only a particular linguistic context can give, and to shape an outlook on life that is free and independent of any linguistic context. We want to grow beyond what a particular linguistic context can give, and in doing so we also grow beyond what we have grown into from our youth. From our youth on, we have to develop a certain ear, for example. We notice that what we develop within our I is something that wants to become ever freer and freer from our outer physicality. We form a new human germ that is independent of the one that has formed out of our outer physicality when we are adults.

This is what spiritual science wants to direct the soul towards: that a second self develops out of the human self in the course of life, the essence of which consists precisely in feeling more and more fully and intensely, the more independently it can feel from what has grown since youth. And if we take a closer look at this second self that has been formed in our self, we will see that it has such inherent strength that we can characterize its whole nature by saying: this self contains the strength to form a new, different human being than the one through which it itself was formed.

It is not an analogy, but only a clarification, when we say: the I that we have within us can be compared to the plant germ that has developed from the root through the stem and green leaves to the flower. Then it is most capable of life and can provide the basis for a new plant. The whole nature of the plant is concentrated in the germ, and when the germ is ripe, what has grown in the way of stem, green leaves and blossom dies off. In this way, a spiritual-soul core matures in us. Just as the germ of the plant grows more and more, even when the leaves wither and the outer physical form of the plant is approaching death, so the spiritual-soul core in man matures, while the outer layer dies more and more, as the sheaths of the organs gradually wither and approach death. Hence, when we observe our soul properly, we see the remarkable fact that the inner powers of a new ego are strongest when we pass through the gate of death. Then we carry the systems of forces, the interrelationships of forces, through the gate of death into a world that cannot have anything to do with the world in our body.

Even if we do not want to pursue further — which the following lectures will show us — how the spiritual researcher can also show us what happens to these spiritual-soul cores, formed in the I, in a purely spiritual world, which the man experiences in the time between death and the next birth, we can still say: in the same way that the natural scientist goes about understanding the plant, we can go about understanding the human being. The natural scientist turns his gaze to the germ of the plant and sees how the germ can now bring a new plant life to flourish. In this way, he seeks to understand the new plant from the germ, how the remaining germ appears again in a new plant. In the same way, the spiritual researcher can also look at the human being as he enters into life through birth or conception. There we see how the human being initially shows nothing externally other than that his organs develop in a certain way. Then the soul life appears, which we have already characterized by saying that when it appears, the moment also comes for the human being to remember back to later. For he will say to himself: I was obviously already there before this point in time, but I can only remember back to a certain point. It is the point in time when the human being is able to feel himself as an ego; but there is no doubt that he already existed as a spiritual-soul being before that. Why, spiritual science may ask, does the possibility of remembering the past only arise from a certain point in time? Were the inner powers that bring about remembering the past not there before? It would be completely illogical to think that the soul and spirit only begin at the point in time to which man later remembers. Everyday sleep can teach us how the soul and spiritual forces live in us before remembering the past awakens.

Today, people have all kinds of strange ideas about sleep. The correct idea about it has already been partially brought to light in the lectures on waking and sleeping. For example, today people have the idea that sleep is only what can be called sleep if it is brought about by fatigue. I would ask the listeners to the earlier lectures to bear in mind that spiritual science wants to speak precisely. If someone wanted to say that spiritual science itself says that sleep comes from fatigue, that is not entirely correct, because it was said: sleep is there to remove fatigue. In spiritual science, it is always important to understand things very precisely, because the aim must also be to present things accurately.

Can fatigue be the cause of sleep? Anyone who claims this is refuted by life itself. Anyone who claims that people only need to sleep because they are tired is already refuted by looking at himself or considering how the often not at all tired pensioner falls asleep in his chair in the afternoon, even though he is not at all tired. And it is especially refuted when he considers when most sleep occurs: not when one is most tired, but in childhood one sleeps most. Things must only be considered correctly.

Spiritual science now shows that during the ordinary state of sleep as well as during the dull state of consciousness of the child, those forces that are used for conscious experience are sent into the organism and work there. The forces that we use from waking to sleeping to form perceptions, sensations and so on, these same forces work on us during our sleep, but in such a way that the used up bodily forces are replaced, restored. There they regenerate us, repair what is worn and used up, that is, they form, they shape. While they deform in the waking day life, dissolve the design, and while the waking day life consists precisely in the fact that we dissolve the design, sleep is there to restore the form, that is, to work directly on the human structure. Because we often use our powers of consciousness during sleep to build up certain decayed powers, these powers elude us and we sink into unconsciousness. Because at the beginning of life, before the moment occurs that we can later remember, we use the same forces that live in us and fill our consciousness to refine and shape the brain organization and blood circulation in the first years of childhood, they therefore elude the conscious ego. The self is present during childhood, and it is a strange thing today when the way the self first appears is considered decisive for the study of the human being. Again, a grandiose logical error! |

Today you can go through entire works in which it says: We see how self-consciousness arises, how it is formed in man. You cannot imagine anything more wrong than this, and in every other field you would strictly reject such a consideration, as you would, for example, reject someone who would only gain knowledge of a clock by paying attention to how the clock is created. This is not the case in any other field. In the same way, when it comes to self-awareness, one should show, when one wants to trace how representations arise, how grandiose mistakes are made in this regard. This can only be done by someone who engages with things in a more precise way, from a spiritual-scientific perspective. Otherwise, it cannot be recognized. The way we experience our sense of self and self-awareness is such that our gradual knowledge of the self and how it develops has nothing to do with the reality of the self itself. Rather, because the self, the human being, continuously develops from the times when it is not yet conscious in the child to the times when it is then consciously experienced, we cannot say: it is not there! It is there, shaping the human being in his finer structure. Yes, much more: it shapes the human being in his connection with the whole of human life, which we only notice when we enter into human life in a more or less selfless way.

In the usual way in which people look at life, they can say about their fate: this or that happens to me. One of them I find pleasant, the other unpleasant; one of them I regard as good luck, the other as bad luck; one of them as an acceleration, the other as a deceleration of my life. But that is only a superficial consideration, because a person could convince himself that at every moment of his life he is nothing other than his concentrated destiny. What is it that makes me speak to you now? It is my concentrated destiny. It is my life experiences that speak to you, and I am nothing but my life experiences, my destiny. If I wanted to extract my destiny, I would have to cut a piece out of myself. Man is what he has made of himself, what his destiny is, what he is at a given moment. We cannot separate our self from us, from our destiny, and see the self as something different in terms of content from destiny.

Now, however, we see that we are placed in a certain context of life as a child, and that we are not only determined by our abilities, by our self, even if we are not yet aware of it, by our self working on our blood circulation, and by developing very specific talents and so on, but we also see that we are placed in a specific national context, that we are children of a specific pair of parents, grow up in a specific climate and have to live together with these or those people. This is how we see ourselves as destined for our whole life. If we examine what we can consciously pursue and address as our destiny, it is self-evident that we must address this as the destiny connected with our ego, as we are placed in a life through our circumstances, which is either laborious and laden, or surrounded by caring hands. Not only our later destinies are connected with what we have done ourselves, but also the blows of fate that come to us from the unconscious, and which we cannot follow with our consciousness.

Thus we are led to the spiritual and soul essence of man, which contains within itself all the systems of forces that developed the brain, shaped the blood system and so on, and thereby determined us. But we are also determined by fate by the same I, which places itself in a particular context of life. In the field of nature observation, everyone admits this when they say, for example, “When I look at an Alpine plant, I know that it belongs to the whole Alpine nature, and that is why the Alpine plant cannot grow in the plains.” What everyone admits in the observation of nature need only be transferred to a spiritual-soul core of being. Then one will see that the spiritual-soul core of one's being, which provides its physicality with very specific abilities, is adapted to its physicality on the one hand, seeks out this physicality, enters into it, but on the other hand also seeks out its destiny.

If this destiny is perceived as hard and then one is told: you have created this yourself, you have brought it with you through your spiritual and soul essence. If you ascribe the blame for the hard fate you feel to the person as a whole, then this feeling is based on a short-sighted observation. A deeper principle judges differently, and we can understand how it judges if we take an example from life to illustrate it. Let us imagine a young man who, because his father was wealthy, lived in such a way that he lived out of his father's pocket and did not have much to worry about. Then his father loses all his wealth through some misfortune, and the son can no longer live as he did before. He may say: What a bitter fate has befallen me! How unhappy I am! But if he learns something, if he is huffed and puffed by life and has become an able person, will he say the same when he is fifty years old? No, but now he might say: That twist of fate was quite good for my personal life, because otherwise I might have become a good-for-nothing; my father's misfortune contributed to my happiness.

What can be said from the standpoint of eighteen years of age is not particularly far-sighted; at fifty years of age we shall see further. That which is the deeper principle of life in us seeks misfortune, seeks adversity and misery, because it is only by overcoming the obstacles in adversity and misery that we have developed ourselves further towards a happiness and have become something that we would not otherwise have become. Seen from a higher vantage point, and as soon as we admit that a deeper core of being lives in a person, which passes from life to life and makes it necessary for us to look at life from a higher vantage point, much immediately presents itself to us as understandable.

If we can look at a person in such a way that, as they age, they develop a system of forces within that is directed towards a new human being who is virtually independent of what the person has developed externally from their previous life or from the circumstances of his present life, and when we see how he carries an inner tension of forces through the gate of death, then we can say: This person cannot possibly enter into existence again immediately after death. Why not? What would happen if he did enter existence again immediately? He would still find the outer environment similar to the one he has just left and from which he wanted to free himself by developing the inner core of his soul. Just as the inner soul-core has no direct relationship to itself in the sense of immediately wanting to be “itself” again, so too man cannot embody himself again immediately after death, for he would grow into himself. But this means that the inner soul-core can only re-embody itself after a certain time. During this time it lives in a purely spiritual atmosphere, not in the physical world. What has developed as a spiritual core, in the same way that a plant germ develops within the stalk, leaves and blossom, lives in a spiritual world, and will only feel drawn to to outwardly embody that which it has developed only when different conditions have arisen; that is, when the earth has changed so that the human being grows into different conditions so that he can continue to develop.

That is why so much time passes between death and the next birth, so that, for example, we are not born again into the same language area and so that the other circumstances around us have also changed. We know that conditions on the outer earth change over the centuries and millennia. But what has happened in the meantime, purely externally in culture, we learn through teaching, through education. So we step out of a certain epoch with our spiritual and soul cores, with the forces that we wanted to free, and wait until new conditions on earth are brought about. But what we have not been able to participate in during the intervening period, we have to catch up on through education and teaching. Therefore, education and teaching must be added to what we have in the way of special aptitudes and abilities, which we bring up from the fruit of earlier lives.

In the relatively short time available to me, I was unable to develop anything other than what could be called a way of looking at the human soul in such a way that this observation is, on the one hand, strictly scientific, but, on the other hand, sees something real in these spiritual and soul experiences and that it is seen how, in fact, in the person as he lives before us, what occurs in a next life is already developing as a germ, which draws on the forces of heredity as well as the forces of the environment to develop further.

A world view such as that arising out of spiritual science can have an eminently healing influence, not only on the theoretical questions of life, but also on strength and security and on the power of life. Of course, anyone who does not want to familiarize themselves with spiritual science will not understand that a healthy outer life is in many essential respects conditioned by a healthy soul life, that the healthy soul life radiates its forces into the physical body, and that when the soul is desolate and cannot draw out of its own depths that which fills its consciousness with satisfaction, then the dissatisfaction, the incoherence, the mystery of the soul life is imprinted in nervousness and so on as an unhealthy influence right into the physical body. Those who do not understand this may experience it. Life poses the greatest riddles, and in cases that are meaningful to everyone, what can be expressed by asking: Where else do certain symptoms of a life that is not satisfied with itself come from, if not from the fact that the soul life is not healthy, not complete, and therefore does not radiate health to the body? But anyone who is willing to consider the healing influence of a healthy soul life on the body will also be able to say the following: If in our time we repeatedly point out the inherited characteristics and, for example, with regard to what we feel as a predisposition to illness in us, repeatedly say to this or that person: “We have inherited this from our ancestors, we cannot change it”, then this thought means something that must weigh heavily upon our innermost soul life and must mean a depression of the soul life, which will very soon exert an unfavorable influence on the outer life of the body and must be felt by the person concerned as something depressing that cannot be changed because it lies in the purely physical line of inheritance. But anyone who, on the basis of spiritual science, can gain the conviction that what lives in him is not just a combination of inherited traits and inherited powers, but something that goes from life to life as a spiritual-soul core, can, if spiritual science is not just a theory for him but something that can constantly remind himself that, in spite of all inherited traits and powers, his spiritual and mental core lives, from which he can draw the strength to become a victor, no matter how much the line of inheritance may point to decadence.

The consciousness that can be gained from spiritual science not only answers life's riddles that are theoretical, but answers all questions that reach the whole mind as riddles that we must have answered in order to live in our soul. If we know nothing of that spiritual-soul core that hurries from life to life, then we feel oppressed and weak under the yoke of heredity. We only feel strong and vigorous and live as spiritual-soul beings when we stand upright in the constitution of our spiritual-soul core and can say: The powers of our spiritual-soul core are inexhaustible, for they alone are the sum of what is given to us in the line of inheritance, and through them we can bring what appears to be doomed to decline, from the center of our soul, to ascend again. In this way, the solutions of spiritual science are written into life itself. Only then will spiritual science bear its true fruit, when it can be integrated in this way into the whole of the soul's attitude and mood, and when we become strong, not just clever, through spiritual science. But we also become more proficient in our thinking, especially with regard to certain finer distinctions in life, and we gain in strength and judgment for a finer conception of life.

Just one example of this! When those who like to attribute everything to heredity examine any significant person in relation to his line of ancestors, they may well say: “You can see that of what this person shows in himself, in one ancestor this quality is found, in another that quality.” And then it is said: This has added up and been inherited, and then the inherited traits have merged into a soul being. — One then coins the sentence: So you can see that genius stands at the end of a line of inheritance and has been inherited from one's ancestors.

Expressed in this way, a thought is, so to speak, crossed. For who would have proved anything by this line of thought? One would only have proved something if one could show that the genius was at the beginning of a line of inheritance, but not if it showed itself at the end of it. For if it occurs at the end of a line of ancestors, this proves nothing other than, if one may say so: if a man has fallen into water and comes out of it, he is wet. It only proves that he has passed through a certain element and has absorbed something from it, just as a person is wet when he is pulled out of the water. If one wanted to prove something through the line of inheritance, one would have to show that genius is at the beginning and not at the end of a line of inheritance. But one will leave that alone, because the world speaks against it.

To put the questions correctly and answer them everywhere, that is what follows from spiritual science. Then one will realize that spiritual science does not contradict natural science, but also that a scientific answer to the great riddles of life is not enough. The greatest wisdom will probably be drawn from spiritual science when one day all human education can be placed in the light of spiritual science, when man grows up in such a way that his growth means becoming aware of the spiritual-soul core.

Then the spiritual-soul core of the being will grow with the human being between birth and death in such a way that not only does the soul enter into reality with the full content of which was spoken earlier, but that the soul also becomes aware of the second I, that germ that concentrates more and more. Then the consciousness will pass into another form of life. Then man will indeed see the time approaching when the hair turns white, the face wrinkles and the strength of the bodily organs diminishes. But he will then look up at what he has seen growing from youth, which is the remainder and inheritance of a previous life, and will feel as one feels with a plant germ when the falling leaves announce the end of the plant's form, but the germ grows stronger and stronger. Thus man will feel himself as the germ of a new life and say to himself: What falls away from you must pass through death, for you cannot remain in that; for it must be something else that can be your covering, you must build yourself another body, for you have already prepared it within you. Man will feel the life ripening within him, which he will have to live through again in distant times.

That the repetitions of life are not without beginning or end, and how the question will be answered as to what extent these incarnations of the human essence have a beginning and an end, will be answered later.

When man thus regards life as the germ of a subsequent life, he will also see how this again develops a germ. Then he does not cling to a doctrine of immortality, which he examines philosophically, as it were, but then he puts life to life, which he sees flourish and thrive, and imbues himself with the consciousness of immortality, because he knows that a new germ of life must arise from every life. In the ever-growing and hope-inspiring spiritual and soul life germ, man answers the questions about the riddle of life and death. He answers them not only theoretically, but in a living inner experience he grasps, comprehends, and experiences immortality. He does not merely say, “I have grasped immortality,” but he grasps the soul in its essential nature as a being that cannot be other than immortal, because out of every life it develops a new germ of life. Man beholds inwardly the maturing of this new germ of life. Therefore we may say: spiritual science does not only answer the question about the riddle of life and death in theory, it does not only give a theoretical certainty, but it can inwardly transform our life in such a way that we gather strength and feel what goes from life to life by grasping immortality, and thus go through all lives.

In this way, theory is transformed into life practice, the immortality puzzle into an understanding of the question of immortality itself. This is always the best fruit of spiritual science when it transforms itself from mere contemplation into something that then lives within us. And it may be said that when spiritual science is grasped by man in this sense, then it is not only something that makes him understand something, but something that sinks into his own soul like a life force and lives in him.

Therefore, we may summarize today's reflection by saying that spiritual science teaches us by also vividly verifying for the human soul what a view of the whole rest of the world teaches us, the great contemplation of the perpetual transformation of life, but at the same time also of the permanence in all change that shows itself to us over and over again; it teaches us the eternal in all that is temporal. As if written in iron tablets, the great law of life is graven on our soul: Everything that lives in the universe lives only by creating the germ of new life within itself. And the soul surrenders only to aging and death in order to mature immortalized into ever new life!

[ 1 ] When considering the conditions of Saturn which are still transparent and less immersed in Maya, we glance back a little at what was said this morning, we shall be able to understand in what way the liberation or imprisonment of certain beings can be brought about — the liberation of those beings of which we spoke yesterday in relation to that most significant and incisive passage of the divine Gita. Remember it has been said that if the Spirits of Personality in ancient Saturn had each time absorbed those egg-shaped bodies of warmth without leaving anything behind, then at the end of its evolution the whole of Saturn would have been reabsorbed into the spiritual world. As was stated, this did not happen, but the Spirits of Personality impressed their mark on the whole of Saturn in a much more intense way than they would otherwise have done; they impressed it through those remnants they left on Saturn, for they did not take everything away with them; they left those outwardly perceptible bodies of warmth behind them.

[ 2 ] What is the power that rules in the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn? It is no other than that which we know in modern man as the power of thought. For in reality, the Spirits of Personality did nothing else on ancient Saturn but exercise the power of their thoughts. They brought about the formation of these eggs of warmth, because they conceived the idea of them. Thus it is the power of conception in the Spirits of Personality which has, however, a much stronger potentiality than is the case with modern humanity. What is the power behind the force of ideas, or concepts, in modern humanity? When one formulates an idea to-day, it is formed only in the astral; the conception penetrates only a far as the astral. And so the permanence of that form cannot be distinguished in the outer physical world. On ancient Saturn the Spirits of Personality were powerful magicians. They formed those eggs of warmth on Saturn by the force of their thoughts, and through that same force they also left them behind. So in reality it was the power of those Spirits of Personality which caused the residue of ancient Saturn to be left behind, and this appears again and again, and still appeared even during the Sun evolution.

[ 3 ] It is perfectly comprehensible that an entity, who is really human should take on form from his surroundings, (for the eggs that were formed there were constructed out of the surroundings of Saturn) and those eggs were bewitched, or chained to a further existence. To day, this is presented to you in a more general sense, for the conditions we spoke of yesterday had not as yet become so complicated.

[ 4 ] At this point we might say: Behold the Saturn fire, behold that which is always spiritualised anew by that ancient fire, that which is ever withdrawn again as inner soul's fire, as comfortable warmth which rises upwards into higher worlds. But if only this had been there, Saturn would have disappeared into higher worlds. That which is perceptible as outer warmth, which has condensed into external warmth must be born again, must appear again, and does appear next on the Sun, as has been described.

[ 5 ] Now let us glance at the other things we have described in the previous lecture. We have made it clear that those beings of the spiritual hierarchies whom we call Archangels, or Fire Spirits, passed through their human stage on the ancient Sun; that there the element of warmth condensed on the one side to smoke, or to gas, so that the sun became a ball of gas, and that on the other side the gas burned in such a way that light streamed out into the world; and it is the Archangels or Fire Spirits who lived in the outstreaming light, who inhaled it and poured it forth and had their being in the light. As I have already said, if you could have then taken a voyage through the universe to the Sun, you would have seen that ancient Sun shining before you in the distance. In the interior you would have seen various streams and currents of gas; you would have perceived it as the breathing process of the whole body of the Sun.

[ 6 ] Let us now call up once more before our minds this ancient Saturn and ancient Sun. We have seen that in both of these planetary bodies life and activity reigned, that something was happening there. We have been able to describe ancient Saturn, the egg formations, which were always built up there anew and again dissolved, with the exception of those remnants which remained behind. Anyone observing this inner activity of Saturn would have said to himself: ‘Saturn is really a living being. It is in truth exactly as if it were a living being. It lives: it lives in itself; it continually builds up forms out of its own life and so on.’ In a still higher degree is this the case with the ancient Sun. It presents itself as an unit, as a totality in the changing conditions of its Sun's night and Sun's day, of the inhalation and the exhalation of light. If it could have been observed it would have given the impression of a heavenly body which was not dead, but was full of life.

[ 7 ] Now everything that lives, that has that sort of activity, is inwardly living and inwardly in motion because spiritual beings govern and guide that motion. We have indeed said, that the Spirits of Personality built those egg forms through their thought power. Yes, but first something must exist, out of which the substance of those eggs can be taken. The Spirits of Personality, those primeval ‘beginners’ or Archai cannot produce that substance. That is the first, principle thing we must put before our minds, that something must be there which provides the substance, that is the undifferentiated warmth, the fire itself. The spirits of Personality are only those who mould that substance. But the warmth — they must receive from elsewhere. Whence does the total world of Saturn, and whence, before all others do the Spirits of Personality, get that warmth substance, that warmth or fire element?

It comes from Spirits essentially higher, Spiritual Beings who have passed through their human evolution so very long ago, that on the ancient Saturn they were already far beyond that stage.

In order to form an idea of such sublime Beings, and why they were necessary to the out-giving of the fiery warmth of ancient Saturn, we must by way of a comparison, recall to our minds the development of man himself, for man will also, some day, become a divine being.

[ 8 ] We know that the man of to-day, as he stands before us, consists in his human nature of four parts which are the key to all spiritual science — that the man consists of the physical, etheric and astral bodies, and of the ‘I.’ We know how a man develops these further, that the ‘I’ works from within outwards, that in the first place the astral body is changed in such a way as to bring it completely under the dominion of the ‘I.’ Now when the astral body is so far transmuted that the ‘I’ has complete power over it, we say: this astral body has become of such a nature that it can contain the Spirit-self or Manas. It is the same with the etheric body. When the work of the ‘I’ becomes still more effective, it masters also the resisting forces of the etheric body, and the transmuted etheric body is the Life-spirit or Budhi. And last of all, when the ‘I’ becomes ruler of the physical body, when it overcomes the strongest of the resisting forces, the forces of the physical body, then the man has in him the Spirit-man or Atma. So he should be a seven-membered man when he had transmuted his physical body to Atma or Spirit-man. Externally, the physical body is seen just as a physical body, but internally, it is completely dominated by the ‘I,’ it glows with the ‘I;’ such is the body which is physical body and Atma at the same time. The etheric body is at the same time etheric body and Life-Spirit or Budhi, the astral is astral body and Spirit-self or Manas; the ‘I’ has now become the general Ruler. Thus man pushes onwards to higher stages of development, thus he transforms himself, and works at his own godliness, at his deification, as is said by Dionysius, the Areopagite, the friend and pupil of the Apostle Paul. But arriving at this point, development is not yet finished. When the man is so far advanced that he has completely conquered and absolutely dominated the physical body, he has still higher stages of development before him. This rises ever higher and higher, and we gaze upwards into spiritual heights, to super-human beings, and these become ever mightier and mightier. In what really does the continual increase in the power of those Beings consist, how is it expressed? It consists in this, that in the first place they are in need of something, they want something, they demand something from the world, and that later on they develop to the point, when they themselves have something to give. Fundamentally, the whole meaning and spirit of evolution rests on the fact, that we pass from taking, to giving. You have an analogy for this in human evolution in our life here between birth and death: the child is helpless, it must receive the help of those about it. It grows more and more out of this helplessness, and at last itself become a helper in its turn. So too in the great universal evolution of the human race.

[ 9 ] On ancient Saturn, man existed only as the earliest human physical germ. There he had to content himself with receiving the first foundations of his humanity; and so it continued all through the Sun and Moon period. On the Earth he acquired his ego, and now he is gradually preparing himself to let his Ego act upon his astral and etheric bodies and his physical body. Through this he will gradually grow into a Being who will be able to give, cosmically. This Being grows gradually in cosmic, universal giving; from taking he grows to giving.

You have an example of this indeed in those beings of whom we have spoken already, in the Archangels or Archangeloi. In a certain sense they already developed on the Sun to the point when they could give out light to universal space.

Thus, evolution progresses from taking to giving. In the case of giving, the thing goes very far indeed. Let us take some being who can give only his thoughts; that speaking truly, is not as yet much to give; for he who gives thoughts — even if he has given ever so many thoughts, when he goes away things remain as they were. He has not given anything visible or tangible, in the higher sense. But a time comes when Beings do not only give thoughts and the like, a time when they are able to give much more, when for instance, they will be able to give just that which the Spirits of Personality had need of on ancient Saturn: the substance of the warmth-fire.

[ 10 ] Who was at such a high stage of development that they could then let that warmth of ancient Saturn stream out of their own bodies? They were the Beings whom we call Thrones or Spirits of Will.

[ 11 ] Thus we see that ancient Saturn took form through the fact, that from the surrounding universe the Thrones concentrated on one point in space. They did in great measure what in a lower sphere of existence is done by the silkworms, when they spin threads of silk out of their bodies. The Thrones spun the substance of warmth out of themselves, sacrificed themselves on the altar of Saturn.

We have to regard the life of the Spirits of Personality on Saturn in such a way, that these Spirits of Personality or Archai actually imparted personality, Ego-consciousness to the warmth. The substance of the fire-warmth streamed together from out [of] the universe, — the Cosmos, it streamed forth from highly exalted Beings — the Thrones.

We now know of what those eggs of warmth, that arose on Saturn, consisted. They were spun out of the bodies which the Thrones offered up as a sacrifice.

[ 12 ] But that would not have sufficed; the co operation of the Spirits of Personality had the power to give form to the substance of warmth, but they could not do it alone. To produce that inner life and activity, other spiritual beings were necessary who had also had to inhabit ancient Saturn, beings inferior to the Thrones, but higher than the Archai or Spirits of Personality. To their share fell the task of helping the Spirits of Personality. We can form an idea of that help if we think of the Angels who are the first immediately above us, then of the Archangels, then of the primeval Beginnings, or Spirits of Personality — Archai. These Beings belong to the Hierarchy which stands next above us. The Thrones do not come immediately above the Spirits of Personality. There are intermediate stages between the Spirits of Personality, and the Thrones, and it is there that those Beings stand, whom we call Powers or Exusiai, according to Dionysius the Areopagite; Powers is the name in English (also Spirits of Form). The Powers are one stage higher than the Spirits of Personality. They hold the same relation to the Spirits of Personality which the Angels do towards us. Yet a stage higher than these Powers are those Beings we call Mights — Spirits of Motion — Dynamis. These were related to the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn in the same way as the Archangels are to us to-day. A stage higher still than the Spirits of Motion are those beings we call Spirits of Wisdom — Dominions, Kyriotetes. They were to the Spirits of Personality on ancient Saturn, what the Spirits of Personality or Archai are to us now. Then, after these come the Thrones or Spirits of Will.

[ 13 ] Thus on ancient Saturn we have an ascending scale of Beings: the Spirits of Personality who awaken and bring about the ‘I’ consciousness; we have the Thrones, Spirits of Will, who stand four stages higher than the Spirits of Personality, and who give out the fire substance; and in between, to order and guide all the life on ancient Saturn, we have, naming them from below upwards: the Powers, or Spirits of Form; the Might or Spirits of Motion; the Dominions, or Spirits of Wisdom; in Greek Exusiai; Dynamis and Kyriotetes. These were, if one may so call them, the inhabitants of ancient Saturn.

[ 14 ] Whilst the ancient Saturn is evolving into the Sun — as we have described in the last lecture — those Beings who have just been named are also evolving each one stage higher, and the Archangels enter upon the human stage. Externally — we might say physically — the warmth condenses into gas. The Sun is a gaseous body. While ancient Saturn was a dark warmth-body, the Sun now begins to shine outwardly; but it alternates, so to speak, from Sun-days to Sun nights. It is particularly important to take notice of those interchanges from Sun-days to Sun-nights. For an enormous difference between the life of the days and the nights obtains on ancient Sun. If nothing else had intervened but what has been described in the Third Lecture, the Archangels, who are the men of the ancient Sun, would during the Sun-days hurry with the rays of light out into the Universe, would expand to the Universe and would have to return to the Sun during the Sun's nights. It would be an inhaling and exhaling of the light, together with all the creatures weaving their existence within it. But it is not so.

I should like once more to describe these Archangels, in a simple, I might also say trivial, way. It pleased them too much, when they soared out into the Universe; the flowing outwards, the soaring up to the Spirits of the universe, pleased them more than the contracting, or drawing of themselves together again. The latter seemed a narrowing, inferior existence. Life in the light-ether pleased them better. But they never could have extended this life in the light-ether further than a certain limit, if something had not come to their help. If those Beings on the ancient Sun had been left to themselves, it would have been quite impossible for them to do anything else than bravely to return to the Sun, in the Sun-night. Yet they did not do it, they lengthened the time of their stay outside in the Universe always more and more, they remained longer and longer in the Spiritual World. Who helped them to do this?

[ 15 ] Let us imagine that the small circle is the ball of the Ancient Sun; the Archangels strive to get out into the spaces of the world from all sides of that ancient Sun ball, they spread out their presence, spiritually into the Universe. The Archangels were helped in this out-spreading by the fact that there were Beings out in the Universe who came to meet them. Just as earlier, the fire elements of the Thrones, streamed towards ancient Saturn, so now other Beings come to meet the out-streaming Archangels, Beings who are still higher than the Thrones, and these help them to stay longer out in the Universe than they otherwise could have done.

[ 16 ] Those Beings who came out of spiritual space to meet the Archangels, we call Cherubim (The Spirits of Harmony). They are Beings of an exceptionally sublime nature; they have power to receive the Archangels, so to speak, with open arms. When the Archangels spread outwards, the Cherubim came to meet them, out of the Universal All. Thus, all round the globe of the ancient Sun, we have the approaching Cherubim. If I may use the comparison — just as our earth is surrounded by its atmosphere, so was the ancient Sun surrounded by the realm of the Cherubim, for the benefit of the Archangels. When the Archangels went out into the Universal spaces, they beheld their great helpers.

[ 17 ] In what way did those great helpers meet them, and what appearance had they? This can naturally only be stated by clairvoyant consciousness as read in the Akasha Chronicles. These great Universal Helpers revealed themselves in quite definite etheric shapes or figures. Our forefathers who, through their traditions, were still conscious of these most important facts, represented the Cherubim as those strangely winged animals with differently formed heads — the winged Lion, winged Eagle, winged Bull, winged Man. The fact is, that the Cherubim made their approach from four sides, in forms afterwards represented in the way the Cherubim are known to us. In the schools of the first post-Atlantean Initiates, these Cherubim, approaching the Ancient Sun on four sides, were given names, which later became the names, Bull, Lion, Eagle, Man.

[ 18 ] The aspect presented by the Ancient Sun, was that of its human inhabitants, otherwise called Archangels, passing out into Universal space, and the four kinds of Cherubim, coming from four sides to meet them. On account of this, the Archangels were enabled to stay in the spiritual region which surrounded the ancient Sun longer than they otherwise could have done. For the influence of those Cherubim upon the Archangels was vivifying in the highest degree, in the spiritual sense. But as the Cherubim came into the vicinity of the Sun, their influence was active also in another way. They acted in the way described, on those Sun-beings who had evolved up to the element of light, who knew how to live in that element. But this element of light could be influenced only during the Sun-days, when light streamed out into Universal space. But there were also the Sun-nights when light did not stream out. The Cherubim were then also in the skies. During this time, when the Sun-planet was darkened, only warmth-gas was there, the illuminated warm gases streamed within the Sun-ball. Round about it were the Cherubim sending down their influence, which was active now within the dark gas. When the Cherubim could not act in a normal way upon the Archangels, they sent their influence into the dark smoke and gas of the Sun. Whilst on ancient Saturn influences were exercised upon the warmth, influences were now exerted out of cosmic space on the condensed warmth, or gas, of the ancient Sun. To this action we must ascribe the fact, that out of that Sun-mist was built the first foundation or germ of what we call to-day the animal kingdom. Just as the earliest foundations of the human kingdom arose in the physical human body on Ancient Saturn, so on the Sun, out of its smoke and gas was formed the first germ of the animal kingdom. Out of the warmth of Ancient Saturn was formed the first germ of the human body; on the Ancient Sun was formed the first germ of the smoke-like changing animal bodies, created through the mirroring of the forms of the Cherubim in this Sun-gas.

[ 19 ] Thus, we find, spread abroad in space surrounding the Sun — that totality of exalted Beings, the Cherubim who receive the Archangels, as it were, with open arms — and we find also, evoked as by magic out of the Sun-gas during the Sun's nights, the earliest germinal beginnings of the animal kingdom. The animal kingdom in its first physical foundation grew out of the Sun mist. Therefore those of our forefathers who from the Mysteries had knowledge of these deeply important things out of spiritual Cosmology, called the Beings, who, acted upon the Ancient Sun, from all sides of Space: the Zodiac or Animal Circle. That is the primeval significance of the Zodiac. On Ancient Saturn the germinal beginnings of humanity were first laid down, and the substance which to-day is in the physical body was poured out, sacrificed, by the Thrones.

On the Sun was laid down the earliest beginnings of the Animal Kingdom, through the forms of the Cherubim being mirrored in, and conjured forth from, the gas which had condensed from the warmth substance of the earlier planet.

Thus the animals were in the first place reflected Sun-images of the Zodiac. There is a real inner relation between the Zodiac and the animals which were coming into existence upon the Sun. Truly it is not for nothing, that such names have been given to those things. One must never think that in those ancient times names were chosen at random. To-day, when a new planet is discovered out of the planetary chain, what does the Astronomer do who has had the luck to discover it? He opens a Lexicon, finds a Greek mythological name which is still unappropriated and sticks it upon the star. In the times when in names people looked for the expression of the things represented; in the times when the Mysteries were still powerful, names were not given in that way; but in the names then given you could always find the deeper meaning of the thing itself.

[ 20 ] The forms of our animals, even although to-day they are degenerated into caricatures, have been brought down from the encircling Universe, from the figures of the Zodiac, as they then existed.

It may strike you that we have mentioned only four names of the Zodiac. These are the principal expressions for the Cherubim; for in reality each of those Cherubic forms has to left and to right a sort of follower or companion. Think of the form of each Cherubim having two companions and you will have twelve forces and powers encircling the Sun, certain indications of which already existed on the Ancient Saturn. We have twelve such powers, belonging to the kingdom of the Cherubim, who have to perform their task in the Universe in the way we have just described.

[ 21 ] You may now ask: What relation has this to the ordinary names of the animal circle or Zodiac? We shall say a word about this during the next few days. For the sequence of the names has somewhat changed. One generally begins to count with Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo. Then comes Virgo the Virgin and Libra the Scales or Balance. The Eagle, through a later transformation, has had to be named Scorpio, for a definite reason. And then the two companions: Sagittarius, Capricornus. The Man, for reasons which we will hear later, is called Aquarius the Water-man. Then Pisces the Fishes. You still see the true form, out of which the Zodiac originated, in the Bull (Taurus), in the Lion and a little in the Man, which in the ordinary exoteric nomenclature is called the Waterman. We shall explain in the next few days why the Zodiac has passed through this transformation. [ 22 ] High spiritual Beings, high Hierarchies, the Thrones gave out of their own substance the fire of Ancient Saturn. Still higher Beings, whom we characterise as Cherubim, took into themselves the light which sprang from the fire and glorified its existence, uplifted it. But each time that an uplifting process happens in the Universe, a lowering process must also step in to create the relative balance or adjustment. In order that the Archangels should have the opportunity of extending their spiritual existence during daytime, the Cherubim were obliged to continue their activity by night, and bring forth the animal beings which are lower than humanity, forms evoked out of that warmth-substance which had condensed into mist, gas and smoke.

[ 23 ] You have thus been given the first idea, in the sense of the primeval wisdom, of the way in which certain Spiritual Beings of the Universe act in unison with our own planetary body; and at the same time you have been shown how in the outward, physical world everything can always be traced back to spiritual Beings. That which we call so materially the Zodiac to-day (from the Greek word which implies figures), animals, and living beings originated in the kingdoms of the Cherubim, who, from the encircling Universe, sent down their influence upon the Ancient Sun and allowed their forces to stream forth into this Universe as a force of light.

[ 24 ] With this we have introduced an important conception of the Animal circle or Zodiac, and we shall continue this study tomorrow; we shall gradually be able to rise to the comprehension of other universal bodies, and have more and more light thrown upon their relationship with the spiritual Hierarchies.

We have spoken of the nature of man from the point of view of the soul and spirit. We have at least thrown some light on these two aspects. We shall have to supplement the knowledge thus gained by uniting the point of view of the body with that of the spirit and of the soul so that we may get a complete survey of man, and may be able to pass on from this to an understanding of his external bodily nature also.

First we will recall—what must have struck us from various aspects—that the human being has different forms in the three members of his nature. We have pointed out that the head is essentially round; that the true nature of the bodily head is given in this spherical form. Next we pointed out how the chest part of man is a fragment of a sphere. Thus if we draw it diagrammatically we give the form of a sphere to the head, and a moon form to the breast—realising clearly that in this moon form a part of a sphere, a fragment of a sphere is contained. We must consequently, allow that the moon form of the chest can be completed. You will only rightly understand this central member of man's nature, the breast-form, when you regard it, too, as a sphere but as a sphere of which only one part, a moon, is visible, and the other part invisible.

From this it is perhaps apparent that in ancient times, when men had a greater capacity for seeing forms, they were not wrong in speaking of the sun as corresponding to the head, and of the moon as corresponding to the breast form. And just as when the moon is not full we see it only as a fragment of a sphere, so too we really only see in the breast form a fragment of the middle system of man. From this you can understand that the head form of man is a comparatively complete, self-enclosed thing. The head form reveals, physically, that it is a thing enclosed in itself. It is, so to speak, just what it appears. The head form is the one that conceals least of itself.

The breast part of the human being, on the other hand, conceals very much of itself. It leaves part of itself invisible. It is very important for a knowledge of man's nature to realise that a large part of the breast portion is invisible. We can say that the breast portion of man shows its bodily nature in one direction, that is, towards the back; but towards the front it passes over into the soul element. The head is altogether body; the breast portion of man is body towards the back, soul towards the front. Thus it is only in that we have our head resting on our shoulders that we carry about a real body. We consist of body and soul in so far as we separate out our breast from the visible part of the breast system and allow it to be worked upon and permeated by the soul.

Into these two members of the human being, head and breast (more obviously of course in the breast portion), the limbs are inserted. The third principle is the limb man. How can we understand the limb man? We can only understand this third member when we realise that certain parts of the spherical form remain visible, as with the breast portion, only in this case they are different parts. In the breast system a part of the periphery remains. In the limb system it is more an inner part consisting of the radii of a sphere that remains over; so that the inner parts of the sphere are inset as limbs.

We never arrive at the truth—as I have often said to you on other occasions—if we only analyse things and divide them, into parts. We must always interweave one thing with another; for this is the nature of living things. We can say: we have the limb man, which consists of the limbs. But the head also has its limbs. If you look carefully at the skull you find, for example, that attached to the skull are the bones of the upper and lower jaws. They are properly attached like limbs. Thus the skull, too, has its limbs: the upper and lower jaws which are joined to it. Only in the skull the limbs are stunted. In the other parts of man they have developed to their proper size, but in the skull they are stunted and are only a kind of bone structure. There is yet another difference:

if you observe the limbs of the skull, that is, the upper and lower jaws, you will see that the essential thing in them is that the bone should perform its function. If you examine the limbs which are attached to our whole body, namely, when you consider the limb man proper, you find the essential fact is that they are surrounded by muscles and blood vessels. In a certain way the bones of our arms and legs, hands and feet are only inserted into our muscle and blood system. But in the upper and lower jaws—the limbs of the head—the muscles and blood vessels have shrunken. What does this mean? Muscles and blood are the organic instrument of the will, as we have already heard. Hence it is arms and legs, hands and feet that are principally developed for the will. Blood and muscles, which pre-eminently serve the will, are withdrawn, in a measure, from the limbs of the head, because what has to be developed in them is what tends to intellect, to thinking-cognition. If, then, you want to study how the will reveals itself in the outer bodily forms of the world, you must study the arms and legs, hands and feet. If you want to study how the intelligence of the world is revealed, then you must study the head, or rather the skull, as skeleton; you must see how the upper and lower jaws are attached to the head, and you must examine other parts of the head which are of a limb nature. You can regard all outer forms as revelations of what is within. And indeed you can only understand the outer forms when you look upon them as revelation of what is within.

I have always found that for most men there is a great difficulty in understanding the connection between the tubular bones of the arms and the legs and the shell-like bones of the head. Here it is particularly good for the teacher to master a conception remote from common life. And this brings us to a very, very difficult chapter, to the hardest, perhaps, of all the conceptions we have to gain in these educational lectures.

You know that Goethe was the first to turn his attention to the vertebral theory of the skull, as it is termed. What is meant by this? It means the application of the idea of metamorphosis to man and to his form. When we consider the human spinal column we perceive that one vertebra lies above another. We can take out the single vertebra, with its projections through which the spinal cord passes. Now Goethe was the first to observe (in a sheep skull, in Venice) how all head bones are transformed vertebrae. Imagine some organs puffed out and others indrawn—then you get the shell-like head bones out of the vertebral forms. This made a great impression on Goethe. It drove him to a conclusion of profound importance, namely: that the skull is a transformed, a more highly developed spinal column.

It is comparatively easy to see that the skull bones arise out of the vertebrae of the spine through transformation, through metamorphosis. It is very much harder, very difficult indeed, to see the limb bones—even the limbs of the head, the upper and lower jaws—as a metamorphosis, a transforming of the vertebral bones, or of the head bones (Goethe attempted to do this, but in an external way). Now why is this so difficult? The reason is that a tubular bone, wherever it may be, is indeed also a metamorphosis, a remodeling of a head bone, but a remodeling of a quite special nature. It is comparatively easy to think of a spinal vertebra metamorphosed into a head bone when you think of some parts of it being enlarged and some diminished. But you cannot so easily get the shell-shaped head bones out of the tubular bones of the arms and legs. To do this you have to adopt a certain procedure. You have to deal with the tubular bone of the arm or the leg as you do with a glove or stocking when you turn it inside out to put it on. Now it is comparatively easy to imagine what a glove or a stocking looks like turned inside out. But a tubular bone is not equal in all its parts; it is not so thin as to have the same form inside and out. The inside and outside are differently formed. If your stocking were of malleable material and you could give it an artistic form with all sorts of projections and indentations, and if you then turned it inside out you would no longer have the same form outside as that which would now be inside. And it is like this with the tubular bone. You must turn the inside outwards and the outside inwards and then you get the form of the head bone. Thus human limbs are not merely head bones metamorphosed, they are even more, head bones turned inside out. How does this come about? It is because the head has its centre somewhere within. It has its centre centrically, if I may put it so. Not so the breast. Its centre does not lie within the sphere. The breast has its centre very far away. (In the drawing this is only partially indicated because it would be too large if the whole were shown.) Thus the breast has its centre far away. Now where is the centre of the limb system? This brings us to the second difficulty. The limb system has its centre in the whole circumference. The centre of the limb system is a sphere; namely, the opposite of a point, the surface of a sphere. The centre is really everywhere; hence you can turn in every direction and radii ray in from all sides. They unite themselves with you.

What is in the head takes its rise in the head. What passes through the limbs unites itself within you. This is why I had to say in the other lectures that you must think of the limbs as inserted into the rest of our body. We are really a whole world, only what wants to enter into us from outside condenses at its end and becomes visible. A very minute portion of what we are becomes visible in our limbs. So that the limbs themselves are physical body, but the physical limbs are only the minutest atom of what is really in the limb system of man. Body, soul and spirit are in the limb system of man. The body is only indicated in the limbs, But in the limbs there is also a soul part; and there is within them, too, the spirit part which embraces the whole world.

Now we could also make another drawing of the human being. It could be said that man is, firstly a gigantic sphere which embraces the whole world: then a smaller sphere: and then a smallest sphere. Only the smallest sphere would be completely visible. The somewhat larger sphere would be partially visible. The largest sphere is only visible here at the end of it, where it rays in: the rest is invisible. Thus is the human form wrought by the whole world.

And again, in the middle system, the breast system, we have the union of the head system and the limb system. When you consider the spine with the ribs attached to it you will see that it tries to close up in front. At the back the whole is enclosed; in front an attempt only is made, it does not quite succeed. The nearer the ribs are to the head the more they succeed in making the enclosure, but the further down they are the more they fail. The last ribs do not meet because here the force which comes into the limbs from the outside is working against them.

Now the Greeks still had a very clear consciousness of this connection of the human being with the macrocosm. And the Egyptians knew of it also, but in a somewhat abstract way. Hence, when you look at Egyptian or, indeed, any sculpture of antiquity you can see that this thought of the cosmos is expressed. You can only understand the works of the ancients if you know that their work was an expression of their belief: they saw the head as a small sphere, a heavenly body in miniature; and the limbs as part of a great heavenly body which presses its radii into the human form. The Greeks had a beautiful, harmonious and perfect conception of this, hence they were good sculptors. No sculptor of human form can be a master in his art to-day unless he is conscious of this connection of man with the universe. Lacking this he will only make a clumsy copy of the forms of nature.

You will know from what I have said to you that the limbs are more inclined towards the world, the head more to the individual man. To what then will the limbs especially incline? They will incline towards the world, to that world in which man moves and in which he is continually changing his position. They will be related to the movement of the world. Please understand this quite clearly: the limbs are related to the movement of the world.

In that we move about the world and perform actions we are limb men. Now what kind of task has the head with respect to the movement of the world? It rests on the shoulders, as I told you when speaking in another connection. And further, it has the task of bringing the movement of the world continuously to rest within itself. Place yourself with your spirit inside your own head; you can get a picture of how you are then placed by thinking of yourself, for a time, as sitting in a railway train; the train is moving forwards, but you are quietly sitting in it. In the same way your soul sits in your head, which quietly allows itself to be carried forwards by the limbs, and brings the movement to rest inwardly. If you have room you may even lie down in the railway carriage, you can rest—though this rest is really a deception, for you are rushing in the train (in a sleeper perhaps) across the earth. Nevertheless you have the sensation of rest. Thus the head brings to rest in you what the limbs perform in the world by way of movement. And the breast system stands betwixt them. It mediates between the movement of the outer world and what the head brings into rest.

Now, as men, our purpose is to imitate, to absorb the movement of the world into ourselves through our limbs. What do we do then? We dance. This is true dancing. Other dancing is only fragmentary dancing. All true dancing has arisen from imitating in the limbs the movement carried out by the planets, by other heavenly bodies or by the earth itself.

But now, what part do our head and breast play in this dancing, this imitation of cosmic movement in the movement of our limbs? The movements we perform in the world are stemmed or stopped, as it were, in the head and in the breast. The movements cannot continue through the breast into the head, for the head, lazy fellow, rests on the shoulders and does not let the movements reach the soul. The soul must participate in the movements while at rest, because the head rests on the shoulders. What then does the soul do? It begins to reflect from within itself the dancing movements of the limbs. When the limbs execute irregular movements the soul begins to mumble; when the limbs perform regular movements it begins to whisper: when the limbs carry out the harmonious cosmic movements of the universe, it even begins to sing. Thus the outward dancing movement is changed into song and into music within.

The physiology of the senses will never succeed in understanding sensation unless it can accept man as a cosmic being. It will always say that vibrations of the air are outside and that man perceives sounds within: how the vibrations of the air are connected with the sounds it is impossible to know. This is what you find in books on physiology and psychology—in one of them it comes at the end, in the other at the beginning, that is the only difference.

Now why is this? It comes about because those who practise psychology and physiology do not know that a man's external movements are brought to rest in the soul, and through this begin to pass over into tones. The same is also true with regard to all other sense impressions. As the organs of the head do not take part in the outer movements, they ray these outer movements back into the breast, and make them into sounds and into the other sense impressions. Here lies the origin of sensation. Here, moreover, lies the connection between the arts. The poetic, the musical arts, arise out of the plastic, the architectural arts: for what the plastic and architectural arts are without, the musical arts are within. A reflecting back of the world from within outwards—such is the nature of the musical arts. Thus does man stand amidst the universe. You experience colour as movement come to rest. You do not perceive the movement externally—just as when lying down in a train you may have the illusion of being at rest. You let the train move on its outward course. Similarly you let your body participate in the outer world in fine movements of the limbs of which you are unaware, while you perceive colours and tones inwardly. This you owe to the circumstance that you let your head, in its physical form, be carried at rest by your limb system.

I said that what I had to speak to you about to-day was indeed a difficult matter. It is particularly difficult because in this age nothing whatever is done to facilitate our understanding of these things. Care is taken that the accepted culture of our time should leave man in ignorance of such things as I have described to you to-day. What is it that comes about through our present-day education? Well, a man cannot altogether know what a stocking or a glove is like unless he turns it inside out, for otherwise he never knows the part which touches his skin. He only knows the part turned outwards. Similarly, as the result of present culture man only knows what is turned outwards. He has concepts for one half of man only; he will never understand the limbs. For the limbs have been turned inside out by the spirit.

Another way of describing our subject would be as follows: if we consider man in all his fullness, as we meet him in the world and consider him in the first place as limb man he reveals spirit, soul and body. If we consider him as breast man he reveals soul and body. If we consider him as head man he reveals body alone. The large sphere (see drawing): spirit, body, soul. The smaller sphere: body and soul. And the smallest sphere: body only.

At the council of A.D. 869 the bishops of the Catholic Church forbade humanity to know anything about the large sphere. At that time they declared it a dogma of the Catholic Church that the middle sphere and the smallest sphere alone had existence, that man consists of body and soul only, spiritual characteristics being merely a quality of the soul. One part of the soul, it was held, was of a spiritual nature. Since the year A.D. 869 for Western culture derived from Catholicism there has been no spirit. But when relationship to the spirit was abolished the relationship of man to the world was abolished also. Man has been more and more driven in upon his egotism. Hence religion itself has become more and more egotistic. And to-day we live in an age when once again, if I may say so, from a spiritual observation we must learn man's relationship to the spirit, and through it to the world.

Who is actually to blame for the materialism of natural science? It is the Roman Catholic Church which is chiefly to blame for our scientific materialism, because at the council of Constantinople in A.D. 869 it abolished the Spirit. What actually came about at that time? Consider the human head. Its development in the course of natural evolution shows to-day that it is the oldest of man's principles. The head is evolved immediately from the higher animals, and, further back again, from the lower animals. With respect to our head we are descended from the animal world. There is no denying it—the head is only a further evolved animal. If we look for the ancestry of our head we go back to the lower animals. Our breast was not joined to the head until later; it is not so animal as the head. We only received the breast in a later age. And the organs we human beings received last of all are the limbs.

These are the most human of all. They are not remodeled from animal organs, they are added later. The animal organs were formed independently from out of the cosmos and given over to the animal, and the human organs were later formed independently and united with the breast. The Catholic Church concealed the knowledge of man's relationship to the universe from him: that is to say, it concealed from him the knowledge of the true nature of his limbs; and in so doing it handed on to succeeding generations an incomplete knowledge of the breast and a complete knowledge only of the head, of the skull. Thus, materialism made the discovery that the skull is descended from the animals: and now it claims that the whole human being is descended from the animals, whereas actually the breast organs and the limb organisation were only added later. By hiding from man the nature of his limbs, and hence this relation with the world, the Catholic Church caused the later materialistic age to apply to the whole human being what only holds good for the head. The Catholic Church is really the creator of materialism in this domain of the doctrine of evolution. It is the duty of the present-day teacher of youth to know these things. For he should take an interest in all that has happened in the world. And he should know the true grounds of the things which have happened in the world.

We have tried to-day to see clearly how it is that our age has become materialistic, taking our start from something quite different, from the spherical form, the moon form and the radial form of the limbs. That is to say, we began with something seemingly quite remote in order to make clear to ourselves a tremendous fact in the history of civilisation. But a teacher above all, if he is to do anything with the human being, must be in a position to grasp the fundamentals of civilisation. These are essential to him if he is to educate rightly out of the depths of his own nature through his unconscious and subconscious relations with the child. For then he will have due regard for the structure of man; above all he will perceive in it relationships to the macrocosm. How different is the outlook which sees the human form merely as the development of some little animal or other, a more highly developed animal body. Nowadays, for the most part, though some teachers may not admit it, the teacher meets the child with the distinct idea that he is a little animal and that he has to develop this little animal just a little further than Nature has done hitherto. He will feel differently if he says to himself: here is a man, and he has connections with the whole universe; and what I do with every growing child, the way I work with him, has significance for the whole universe. We are together in the classroom: in each child is situated a centre for the whole world, for the macrocosm. This classroom is a centre—indeed many centres—for the macrocosm. Think what it means when this is felt in a living way. How the idea of the universe and its connections with the child passes into a feeling which hallows all the varied aspects of our educational work. Without such feeling about man and the universe we shall not learn to teach earnestly and truly. The moment we have such feelings they pass over to the children by underground ways.

In another connection I said how it must always fill us with wonder when we see how wires go into the earth to copper plates and how the earth carries the electricity further without wires. If you go into the school with egotistic feelings you need all kinds of wires—words—in order to make yourself understood by the children. If you have great feelings for the universe which arise from ideas such as we have discussed to-day, then an underground current will pass between you and the child. Then you will be one with the children. Herein lies something of the mysterious relationship between you and the children as a whole. Pedagogy in the true sense must be built on feelings such as this. Pedagogy must not be a science, it must be an art. And where is the art which can be learned without dwelling constantly in the feelings? But the feelings in which we must live in order to practise that great art of life, the art of education, are only kindled by contemplation of the great universe and its relationships with man.

Rudolf Steiner: Good morning, gentlemen! A number of questions have been handed in, which lead up in quite an interesting way to what we want to discuss today. Someone has asked:

“How did man's cultural development come about?” I will consider this in connection with a second question:

“Why did primitive man have such a strong belief in the spirit?”

It is certainly interesting to investigate how human beings lived in earlier times. As you know, even from a superficial view there are two opposing opinions about this. One is that man was originally at a high level of perfection, from which he has fallen to his present imperfect state. We don't need to take exception to this, or to be concerned with the way different peoples have interpreted this perfection—some talking of paradise, some of other things. But until a short time ago the belief existed that man was originally perfect and gradually degenerated to his present state of imperfection. The other view is the one you've probably come to know as supposedly the only true one, namely, that man was originally imperfect, like some kind of higher animal, and that he gradually evolved to greater and greater perfection. You know how people point to the primitive conditions prevailing among the savage peoples—the so-called savage peoples—in trying to form an idea of what man could have been like when he still resembled an animal. People say: We Europeans and the Americans are highly civilized, while in Africa, Australia, and so on, there still live uncivilized races at their original stage, or at least at a stage very near the original. From these one can study what humanity was like originally.

But, gentlemen, this is making far too simple a picture of human evolution. First of all, it is not true that all civilized peoples imagine man to have been a physically perfect being originally. The people of India are certainly not much in agreement with opinions of our modern materialists, and yet, even so, their conception is that the physical man who went about on the earth in primitive times looked like an animal. Indeed, when the Indians, the wise men of India, speak of man in his original state on earth, they speak of the ape-like Hanuman. So you see, it is not true that even people with a spiritual world view picture primeval man similarly to the way we imagine him in paradise. And in fact, it is not so.

We must rather have a clear knowledge that man is a being who bears within him body, soul, and spirit, with each of these three parts undergoing its own particular evolution. Naturally, if people have no thought of spirit, they can't speak of the evolution of spirit. But once we acknowledge that a human being consists of body, soul, and spirit, we can go on to ask how the body evolves, how the soul evolves, and how the spirit evolves. When we speak of the human body we will have to say: Man's body has gradually been perfected from lower stages. We must also say that the evidence we have for this provides us with living proof. As I have already pointed out, we find original man in the strata of the earth, exhibiting a very animal-like body—not indeed like any present animal but nevertheless animal-like, and this must have developed gradually to its present state of perfection. There is no question, therefore, of spiritual science as pursued here at the Goetheanum coming to loggerheads with natural science, for it simply accepts the truths of natural science.

On the other hand, gentlemen, we must be able to recognize that in the period of time of only three or four thousand years ago, views prevailed from which we can learn a great deal and which we also can't help but admire. When we are guided by genuine knowledge in seriously studying and understanding the writings that appeared in India, Asia, Egypt, and even Greece, we find that the people of those times were far ahead of us. What they knew, however, was acquired in quite a different way from the way we acquire knowledge today.

Today there are many things we know very little about. For instance, from what I have told you in connection with nutrition you will have seen how necessary it is for spiritual science to come to people's aid in the simplest nutritional matters. Natural science is unable to do so. But we have only to read what physicians of old had to say, and rightly understand it, to become aware that actually people up to the time of, for instance, Hippocrates¹² in Greece knew far more than is known by our modern materialistic physicians. We come to respect, deeply respect, the knowledge once possessed. The only thing is, gentlemen, that knowledge was not then imparted in the same form as it is today. Today we express our knowledge in concepts. This was not so with ancient peoples; they clothed their knowledge in poetical imaginations, so that what remained of it is now just taken figuratively as poetry. It was not poetry to those men of old; that was their way of expressing what they knew. Thus we find when we are able to test and thoroughly study the documents still existing, that there can no longer be any question of original humanity being undeveloped spiritually. They may once have gone about in animal-like bodies, but in spirit they were infinitely wiser than we are!

But there is something else to remember. You see, when man went about in primeval times, he acquired great wisdom spiritually. His face was more or less what we would certainly call animal-like, whereas today in man's face his spirit finds expression; now his spirit is, as it were, embodied in the physical substance of his face. This, gentlemen, is a necessity if man is to be free, if he is to be a free being. These clever men of ancient times were very wise; but they possessed wisdom in the way the animal today possesses instinct. They lived in a dazed condition, as if in a cloud. They wrote without guiding their own hand. They spoke with the feeling that it was not they who were speaking but the spirit speaking through them. In those primeval times, therefore, there was no question of man being free.

This is something in the history of culture that constitutes a real step forward for the human race: that man acquired consciousness, that he is a free being. He no longer feels the spirit driving him as instinct drives the animal. He feels the spirit actually within him, and this distinguishes him from the man of former times.

When from this point of view we consider the savages of today, it must strike us that the men of primeval times—called in the question here primitive men—were not like the modern savages, but that the latter have, of course, descended from the former, from the primeval men. You will get a better idea of this evolution if I tell you the following.

In certain regions there are people who have the idea that if they bury some small thing belonging to a sick person—for instance, bury a shirttail of his in the cemetery—that this can have the magical effect of healing him. I have even known such people personally. I knew one person who, at the time the Emperor Frederick¹³ was ill (when he was still Crown Prince—you know all about that), wrote to the Empress (as she was later), asking for the shirttails belonging to her husband. He would bury them in the cemetery and the Emperor would then be cured. You can imagine how this request was received. But the man had simply done what he thought would lead to the Emperor's recovery. He himself told me about it, adding that it would have been much less foolish to let him have that shirttail than to send for the English Doctor Mackenzie, and so on; that had been absurd—they should have given him the shirttail.

Now when this kind of thing comes to the notice of a materialist he says: That's a superstition which has sprung up somewhere. At some time or other someone got it into his head that burying the shirttails of a sick man in the cemetery and saying a little prayer over it would cure the man.

Gentlemen, nothing has ever arisen in that way. No superstition arises by being thought out. It comes about in an entirely different way. There was once a time when people had great reverence for their dead and said to themselves: So long as a man is going about on earth he is a sinful being; beside doing good things he does many bad things. But, they thought, the dead man lives on as soul and spirit, and death makes up for all deficiencies. Thus when they thought of the dead, they thought of what was good, and by thinking of the dead they tried to make themselves better.

Now it is characteristic of human beings to forget easily. Just think how quickly those who have left us—the dead—are forgotten today! In earlier times there were persons who would give their fellowman various signs to make them think of the dead and thus to improve them. Someone in a village would think that if a man was ill, the other villagers should look after him. It was certainly not the custom to collect sick pay; that kind of thing is a modern invention. In those days the villagers all helped one another out of kindness; everyone had to think of those who were ill. The leading man in the village might say: People are egoists, so they have no thought of the sick unless they are encouraged to get out of themselves and have thoughts, for instance, of the dead. So he would tell them they should take—well, perhaps the shirttail of the sick man by which to remember him, and they should bury this in the earth, then they would surely remember him. By thinking of the dead they would remember to take care of someone living. This outer deed was contrived simply to help people's memory.

Later, people forgot the reason for this and it was put down to magic, superstition. This happens with very much that lives on as superstition; it has arisen from something perfectly reasonable. What is perfect never arises from what is imperfect. The assertion that something perfect can come from what is not perfect appears to anyone with insight as if it were said: You're to make a table, but you must make it as clumsy and unfinished as you can to begin with, so that it may in time become a perfect table. But things don't happen that way. We never get a well-made table from one that is ill-made. The table begins by being a good one and becomes battered in the course of time. And that's the way it happens outside in nature too, anywhere in the world. You first have things in a perfect state, then out of them comes the imperfect. It is the same with the human being: his spirit in the beginning, though lacking freedom, was in a certain state of perfection. But his body—it is true—was imperfect. And yet precisely in this lay the body's perfection: it was soft and therefore capable of being formed by the spirit so that cultural progress could be made.

So you see, gentlemen, we are not justified in thinking that human beings were originally like the savages of today. The savages have developed into what they now are—with their superstitions, their magical practices and their unclean appearance-from states originally more perfect. The only superiority we have over them is that, while starting from the same conditions, we did not degenerate as they did. I might therefore say: The evolution of man has taken two paths. It is not true that the savages of today represent the original condition of mankind. Mankind, though to begin with it looked more animal-like, was highly civilized.

Now perhaps you will ask: But were those original animal-like men the descendants of apes or of other animals? That is a natural question. You look at the apes as they are today and say: We are descended from those apes. Ah! but when human beings had their animal form, there were no such animals as our present apes! Men have not descended, therefore, from the apes. On the contrary! Just as the present savages have fallen from the level of the human beings of primeval times, so the apes are beings who have fallen still lower.

On going back further in the evolution of the earth, we find human beings formed in the way I described here recently, out of a soft element-not out of our present animals. Human beings can never evolve out of the apes of today. On the other hand it could easily be possible that if conditions prevailing on earth today continue, conditions in which everything is based on violence and power, and wisdom counts for nothing—well, it could indeed happen that the men who want to found everything on power would gradually take on animal-like bodies again, and that two races would then appear. One race would be those who stand for peace, for the spirit, and for wisdom, while the other would be those who revert to an animal form. It might indeed be said that those who care nothing today for the progress of mankind, for spiritual realities, may be running the risk of degenerating into an ape species.

You see, all manner of strange things are experienced today. Of course, what newspapers report is largely untrue, but sometimes it shows the trend of people's thinking in a remarkable way. During our recent trip to Holland we bought an illustrated paper, and on the last page there was a curious picture: a child, a small child, really a baby—and as its nurse, taking care of it, bringing it up, an ape, an orangutan. There it was, holding the baby quite properly, and it was to be engaged, the paper said,—somewhere in America, of course—as a nursemaid.

Now it is possible that this may not yet be actual fact, but it shows what some people are fancying: they would like to use apes today as nursemaids. And if apes become nursemaids, gentlemen, what an outlook for mankind! Once it is discovered that apes can be employed to look after children—it is, of course, possible to train them to do many things; the child will have to suffer for it, but the ape could be so trained: in certain circumstances it could be trained to look after the physical needs of children—well, then people will carry the idea further and the social question will be on a new level. You will see far-reaching proposals for breeding apes and putting them to work in factories. Apes will be found to be cheaper than men, hence this will be looked upon as the solution of the social problem. If people really succeed in having apes look after their children—well, we'll be deluged by pamphlets on how to solve the social question by breeding apes!

It is indeed conceivable that this might easily happen. Only think: other animals beside apes can be trained to do many things. Dogs, for instance, are very teachable. But the question is whether this will be for the advance or the decline of civilization. Civilization will most definitely decline. It will deteriorate. The children brought up by ape-nurses will quite certainly become ape-like. Then indeed we shall have perfection changing into imperfection. We must realize clearly that it is indeed possible for certain human beings to have an ape-like nature in the future, but that the human race in the past was never such that mankind evolved from the ape. For when man still had an animal form—quite different indeed from that of the ape—the present apes were not yet in existence. The apes themselves are degenerate beings; they have fallen from a higher stage.

When we consider those primitive peoples who may be said to have been rich in spirit but animal-like in body, we find they were still undeveloped in reason, in intelligence—the faculty of which we are so proud. Those men of ancient times were not capable of thinking. Hence, when anyone today who prides himself particularly on his thinking comes across ancient documents, he looks for them to be based on thought—and looks in vain. He says, therefore: This is all very beautiful, but it's simply poetry. But, gentlemen, we can't judge everything by our own standards alone, for then we go astray. That ancient humanity had, above all, great powers of imagination, an imagination that worked like an instinct. When we today use our imagination we often pull ourselves up and think: Imagination has no place in what is real. This is quite right for us today, but the men of primeval times, primitive men, would never have been able to carry on without imagination.

Now it will seem strange to you how this lively imagination possessed by primitive men could have been applied to anything real. But here too we have wrong conceptions. In your history books at school you will have read about the tremendous importance for human evolution that is accorded to the invention of paper. The paper we write on—made of rags—has been in existence for only a few centuries. Before that, people had to write on parchment, which has a different origin. Only at the end of the Middle Ages did someone discover the possibility of making paper from the fibers of plants, fibers worn threadbare after having first been used for clothes. Human beings were late in acquiring the intellect that was needed for making this paper.

But the same thing (except that it is not as white as we like it for our black ink) was discovered long ago. The same stuff as is used for our present paper was discovered not just two or three thousand years ago but many, many thousands of years before our day. By whom, then? Not by human beings at all, but by wasps! Just look at any wasp's nest you find hanging in a tree. Look at the material it consists of—paper! Not white paper, not the kind you write on, for the wasps are not yet in the habit of writing, otherwise they would have made white paper, but such paper as you might use for a package. We do have a drab-colored paper for packages that is just what the wasps use for making their nests. The wasps found out how to make paper thousands and thousands of years ago, long before human beings arrived at it through their intellect.

The difference is that instinct works in animals while in the man of primeval times it was imagination; they would have been incapable of making anything if imagination had not enabled them to do so, for they lacked intelligence. We must therefore conclude that in outward appearance these primeval men were more like animals than are the men of today, but to a certain extent they were possessed by the spirit, the spirit worked in them. It was not they who possessed the spirit through their own powers, they were possessed by it and their souls had great power of imagination. With imagination they made their tools; imagination helped them in all they did, and enabled them to make everything they needed.

We, gentlemen, are terribly proud of all our inventions, but we should consider whether we really have cause to be so; for much of what constitutes the greatness of our culture has actually developed from quite simple ideas. Listen to this, for instance: When you read about the Trojan War, do you realize when it took place?—about 1200 years before the founding of Christianity. Now when we hear about wars like that—which didn't take place in Greece, but far away, over there in Asia—well, hearing the outcome the next day in Greece by telegram, as we would now do: that, gentlemen, didn't happen in those days! Today if we receive a telegram, the Post Office dispatches it to us. Naturally this didn't happen at that time in Greece, for the Greeks had no telegraph. What then could they do? Well, now look, the war was over here in one place; then there was the sea and an island, a mountain and again sea; over there another island, a mountain and then sea; and so on, till you came to Greece—here Asia, sea, and here in the midst, Greece. It was agreed that when the war was ended three fires would be kindled on the mountains. Whoever was posted on the nearest mountain was to give the first signal by running up and lighting three fires. The watch on the next mountain, upon seeing the three fires, lit three fires in his turn; the next watchman again three fires; and in this way the message arrived in Greece in quite a short time. This was their method of sending a telegram. It was done like that. It's a simple way of telegraphing. It worked fast—and before the days of the telegram people had to make do with this.

And how is it today? When you telephone—not telegraph but telephone—I will show you in the simplest possible way what happens. We have a kind of magnet which, it is true, is produced by electricity; and we have something called an armature. When the circuit is closed, this is pulled close; when the circuit is open, the armature is released, and thus it oscillates back and forth. It is connected by a wire with a plate, which vibrates with it and transmits what is generated by the armature—in just the same way as in those olden times the three fires conveyed messages to men. This is rather more complicated, and, of course, electricity has been used in applying it, but it is still the same idea.

When we hear such things we must surely respect what the human beings of those ancient times devised and organized out of their imaginative faculty. And when we read the old documents with this feeling we must surely say: Those men accomplished great things on a purely spiritual level and all out of imagination. To come to a thorough realization of this you need only to consider what people believe today. They believe they know something about the old Germanic gods—Wotan, Loki, for instance. You find pictures of them in human form in books: Wotan with a flowing beard; Loki looking like a devil, with red hair, and so on. It is thought that the men of old, the ancient Germans, had the same ideas about Wotan and Loki. But that is not true. The men of old had rather the following conception: When the wind blows, there is something spiritual in it—which is indeed true—and that is Wotan blowing in the wind. They never imagined that when they went into the woods, they would meet Wotan there in the guise of an ordinary man. To describe a meeting with Wotan they would have spoken of the wind blowing through the woods. This can still be felt in the very word Wotan by anyone who is sensitive to these things. And Loki—they had no image of Loki sitting quietly in a corner staring stupidly; Loki lived in the fire!

Indeed, in various ways the people were always talking about Wotan and Loki. Someone would say, for instance: When you go over the mountain, you may meet Wotan. He will make you either strong or weak, whichever you deserve. That is how people felt, how they understood these things. Today one says that's just superstition. But in those times they didn't understand it to be so. They knew: When you go up there to that corner so difficult to reach, you don't meet a man in a body like any ordinary man. But the very shape of the mountain gives rise to a special whirlwind in that place, and a special kind of air is wafted up to that corner from an abyss. If you withstand this and keep to your path, you may become well or you may become ill. In what way you become well or ill, the people were ready to tell; they were in harmony with nature and would speak not in an intellectual way but out of their imagination. Your modern doctor would try to express himself intellectually: If you have a tendency to tuberculosis, go up to a certain height on the mountain and sit there every day. Continue to do this for some time, for it will be most beneficial. That is the intellectual way of talking. But if you speak imaginatively you say: Wotan is always to be found in that high corner; if you visit him at a certain time every day for a couple of weeks, he will help you.

This is the way people coped with life out of their imagination. They worked in this way, too. Surely at some time or other you have all been far out in the country where threshing is not done by machine but is still being done by hand. You can hear the people threshing in perfect rhythm. They know that when they have to thresh for days at a time, if they go at their work without any order, just each one on his own, they will very soon be overcome by exhaustion. Threshing can't be done that way. If, however, they work rhythmically, all keeping time together, exhaustion is avoided—because their rhythm is then in harmony with the rhythm of their breathing and circulation. It even makes a difference whether they strike their flail on the out-breathing or the in-breathing or whether they do it as they are changing over from one to the other. Now why is this? You can see that it has nothing to do with intellect, for today this old way of threshing is almost unheard of. Everything of that kind is being wiped out. But in the past, all work was done rhythmically and out of imagination. The beginnings of human culture developed out of rhythm.

Now I don't suppose you really think that if you take a chunk of wood and some bits of string and fool about with them in some amateurish fashion, you'll suddenly have a violin. A violin comes about when mind, when spirit, is exerted, when the wood is carefully shaped in a particular way, when the string is put through a special process, and so forth. We have to say then: These primeval people, who were not yet thinking for themselves, could attribute the way machines were originally made only to the spirit that possessed them, that worked in them. Therefore, these people, working not out of the intellect, but out of their imagination, naturally tended to speak of the spirit everywhere.

When today someone constructs a machine by the work of his intellect, he does not say that the spirit helped him—and rightly so. But when a man of those early times who knew nothing about thinking, who had no capacity for, thinking, when that man constructed something, he felt immediately: the spirit is helping me.

It happened therefore that when the Europeans, those “superior” humans, first arrived in America and also later, in the nineteenth century, when they came to the regions where Indians such as belonged to ancient times were still living, these Indians spoke of (it was possible to find out what they were saying) the “Great Spirit” ruling everywhere. These primitive men have always continued to speak in this way of the Being ruling in everything. It was this “Great Spirit” that was venerated particularly by the human beings living in Atlantean times when there was still land between Europe and America; the Indians retained this veneration, and knew nothing as yet of intellect. They then came gradually to know the “superior” men before being exterminated by them. They came to know the Europeans' printed paper on which there were little signs which they took to be small devils. They abhorred the paper and the little signs, for these were intellectual in origin, and a man whose activities arise out of imagination abominates what comes from the intellect.

Now the European with his materialistic civilization knows how to construct a locomotive. The intellectual method by which he constructs his engine could never have been the way the ancient Greeks would have set about it, for the Greeks still lacked intellect. Intellect first came to man in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Greeks would have carried out their construction with the help of their imagination. Since the Greeks ascribed all natural forms to good spirits and all that is not nature, all that is artificially produced, to bad spirits, they would have said: An evil spirit lives in the locomotive. They would certainly have contrived their construction from imagination; nothing else would ever have occurred to them than that they were being aided by the spirit.

Therefore, gentlemen, you see that we have actually to ascribe a lofty spirit to the original, primitive human being; for imagination is of a far more spiritual nature in the human soul than the mere intellect that is prized so highly today.

Former conditions, however, can never come back. We have to go forward—but not with the idea that what exists today in the animal as pure instinct could ever have developed into spirit. We ought not, therefore, to picture primitive men as having been possessed of mere instinct. They knew that it was the spirit working in them. That is why they had, as we say nowadays, such a strong belief in the spirit.

Perhaps this contributes a little to our understanding of how human culture has evolved. Also, we must concede that the people are right who contend that human beings have arisen from animal forms, for so indeed they have—but not from such forms as the present animals, for these forms only came into being later when humanity was already in existence. The early animal-like forms of man which gradually developed in the course of human evolution into his present form, together with the faculties which he already had at that time, came about because man's spiritual entity was originally more perfect than it is today—not in terms of intellect but of imagination. We have to remember always that this original perfection was due to the fact that man was not free; man was, as it were, possessed by the spirit. Only intellect enables man to become free. By means of his intellect man can become free.

You see, anyone who works with his intellect can say: now at a certain hour I'm going to think out such and such a thing. This can't be done by a poet, for even today a poet still works out of his imagination. Goethe was a great poet. Sometimes when someone asked him to write a poem or when he himself felt inclined to do so, he sat himself down to write one at a certain time—and, well, the result was pitiful! That people are not aware of this today comes simply from their inability to distinguish good poetry from bad. Among Goethe's poems there are many bad ones. Imaginative work can be done only when the mood for it is there, and when the mood has seized a poet, he must write the poem down at once. And that's how it was in the case of primeval humans. They were never able to do things out of free will. Free will developed gradually-but not wisdom. Wisdom was originally greater than free will and it must now regain its greatness. That means, we have to come back to the spirit by way of the intellect.

And that, you see, is the task of anthroposophy. It has no wish to do what would please many people, that is, to bring primitive conditions back to humanity-ancient Indian wisdom, for example. It is nonsense when people harp on that. Anthroposophy, on the other hand, sets value on a return to the spirit, but a return to the spirit precisely in full possession of the intellect, with the intellect fully alive. It is important, gentlemen, and must be borne strictly in mind, that we have nothing at all against the intellect; rather, the point is that we have to go forward with it. Originally human beings had spirit without intellect; then the spirit gradually fell away and the intellect increased. Now, by means of the intellect, we have to regain the spirit. Culture is obliged to take this course.

If it does not do so—well, gentlemen, people are always saying that the World War was unlike anything ever experienced before, and it is indeed a fact that men have never before so viciously torn one another to pieces. But if men refuse to take the course of returning to the spirit and bringing their intellect with them, then still greater wars will come upon us, wars that will become more and more savage. Men will really destroy one another as the two rats did that, shut up together in a cage, gnawed at each other till there was nothing left of them but two tails. That is putting it rather brutally, but in fact mankind is on the way to total extermination. It is very important to know this.

• 12. Hippocrates of Cos, 460–377 BC. Greek physician, founder of ancient medicine.
• 13. Emperor Frederick III, 1831–1888. Suffered from a disease of the larynx. It is not known who wrote the request.

[ 1 ] Our study of the Michael Mystery was irradiated by thoughts of the Mystery of Golgotha. For, in effect, Michael is the Power who leads man towards the Christ along the true way of man's salvation.

[ 2 ] But the Michael Mission is one of those that are repeated again and again in rhythmical succession in the cosmic evolution of mankind. In its beneficial influence on earthly mankind it was repeated before the Mystery of Golgotha. It was connected in that time with all the active revelations which the Christ-Force—as yet external to the Earth—had to pour down to the Earth for the unfolding of mankind. After the Mystery of Golgotha, the Michael Mission enters the service of what must now be achieved in earthly humanity through Christ Himself. In its repetitions, the Michael Mission now appears in a changed and ever-progressing form. The point is that it appears in repetitions.

[ 3 ] The Mystery of Golgotha, on the other hand, is an all embracing World-event, taking place once only in the whole course of the cosmic evolution of mankind.

[ 4 ] It was only when humanity had reached the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul that the ever-continued danger which was there potentially from the beginning—the danger lest humanity's existence should become severed from the existence of the Divine-Spiritual—made itself fully felt.

[ 5 ] And in the same manner in which the soul of man loses the conscious experience in and with the Divine-Spiritual Beings, there emerges around him that which we today call ‘Nature.’ [ 6 ] Man no longer sees the essence and being of Humanity in the Divine-Spiritual Cosmos; he sees the accomplished work of the Divine-Spiritual in this earthly realm. To begin with, however, he sees it not in the abstract form in which it is seen today—not as physically sensible events and entities held together by those abstract ideal contents which we call ‘Natural Laws.’ To begin with, he sees it still as Divine-Spiritual Being—Divine-Spiritual Being surging up and down in all that he perceives around him, in the birth and decay of living animals, in the springing and sprouting of the plant-world, in the activity of water-wells and rivers, in cloud and wind and weather. All these processes of being around him represent to him the gestures, deeds and speech of the Divine Being at the foundation of ‘Nature.’

[ 7 ] Once upon a time, man had seen in the constellations and movements of the stars the deeds and gestures of the Divine Beings of the Cosmos, whose words he was thus able to read in the heavens. In like manner, the ‘facts of Nature’ now became for him an expression of the Goddess of the Earth. For the Divinity at work in Nature was conceived as feminine.

[ 8 ] Far down into the Middle Ages, the relics of this mode of conception were still at work in the souls of men, filling the Intellectual or Mind-Soul with an Imaginative content.

[ 9 ] When men of knowledge wanted to bring the ‘processes of Nature’ to the understanding of their pupils, they spoke of the deeds of the ‘Goddess.’ It was only with the gradual dawn of the Spiritual Soul that this living study of Nature, filled as it was with inner soul, grew unintelligible to mankind.

[ 10 ] The way in which men looked in this direction in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul is reminiscent of the Myth of Persephone and of the mystery that underlies it.

[ 11 ] Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, is compelled by the God of the Underworld to follow him into his kingdom. Eventually it is achieved that she spends one-half of the year only in the Nether world and dwells for the remainder of the year in the Upper world.

[ 12 ] This Myth of Persephone was still a great and wonderful expression of the way in which Man, in an age of immemorial antiquity, had perceived and known the evolutionary process of the Earth in dream-like clairvoyance.

[ 13 ] In primeval times all the world-creative activity had proceeded from the surroundings of the Earth. The Earth itself was only in process of becoming, and moulded its existence in cosmic evolution from out of the activities of the surrounding world. The Divine-Spiritual Beings of the Cosmos were the creators and moulders of the Earth's existence. But when the Earth was far enough advanced to become an independent heavenly body, Divine-Spiritual Being descended from the great Cosmos to the Earth and became the Earth-Divinity. This cosmic fact the dream-like clairvoyance of primeval mankind had seen and known; and of such knowledge the Myth of Persephone remained—but not only this. For indeed, far down even into the Middle Ages, the way in which men sought to know and penetrate into ‘Nature’ was still a relic of the same ancient knowledge. It was not yet as in these later times, when men only see according to their sense-impressions, i.e., according to that which appears on the surface of the Earth. They still saw according to the forces that work upwards to the surface from the depths of the Earth. And these ‘forces of the depths’—the ‘forces of the Nether world’—they saw in mutual interplay with the influences of the stars and elements working from the Earth's environment.

[ 14 ] The plants in their varied forms grow forth, revealing themselves in many-coloured glory. Therein are at work the forces of Sun and Moon and Stars, together with the forces of the Earth's depths. The ground and foundation for this is given in the minerals, whose existence is entirely conditioned by that part of the cosmic Beings which has become earthly. Through those heavenly forces alone, which have become earthly, rock and stone shoot forth out of the Nether world. The animal kingdom, on the other hand, has not assumed the forces of the earthly depths. It comes into being through those world-forces alone which are at work from the surroundings of the Earth. It owes its growth, development and surging life, its powers of nutrition, its possibilities of movement, to the Sun-forces streaming down to the Earth. And under the influence of the Moon-forces streaming down to the Earth it has the power to reproduce itself It appears in manifold forms and species because the starry constellations are working in manifold ways from the Cosmos, shaping and moulding this animal life. The animals are, as it were, only placed down here on Earth from out the Cosmos. It is only with their dim life of consciousness that they partake in the earthly realm; with their origin, development and growth, with all that they are in order to be able to perceive and move about, they are no earthly creatures.

[ 15 ] This mightily conceived idea of the evolution of the Earth lived once upon a time in mankind. The greatness of the conception is scarcely recognisable any longer in the relics of it which came down to the Middle Ages. To attain this knowledge one must go back, with the true vision of the seer, into very ancient times. For even the physical documents that are extant do not reveal what was really present there in the souls of men, save to those who are able to penetrate to it by a spiritual path.

[ 16 ] Now man is not in a position to hold himself so much aloof from the Earth as do the animals. In saying this, we are approaching the Mystery of Humanity as well as the Mystery of the Animal Kingdom. These Mysteries were reflected in the animal cults of the ancient peoples, and above all in that of the Egyptians. They saw the animals as beings who are but guests upon the Earth, and in whom one may perceive the nature and activity of the spiritual world immediately adjoining this earthly realm. And when in pictures they portrayed the human figure in connection with the animal, they were representing to themselves the forms of those elementary, intermediate beings who, though they are indeed in cosmic evolution on the way to humanity, yet purposely refrain from entering the earthly realm, in order not to become human. For there are such elementary, intermediate beings and in picturing them the Egyptians were but reproducing what they saw. Such beings, however, have not the full self-consciousness of man, to attain to which man had to enter this earthly world so completely as to receive something of this earthly nature into his very own.

[ 17 ] Man had to be exposed to the fact that in this earthly world, though the work of the Divine-Spiritual Beings with whom he is connected is indeed present here, yet it is only their accomplished work. And just because only the accomplished work, severed from its Divine origin, is present here, therefore the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings have access to it. Thus it becomes necessary for man to make this realm of the Divine-accomplished work, permeated as it is by Lucifer and Ahriman, the field of action for one part—namely, the earthly part—of his life's development.

[ 18 ] So long as man had not progressed to the unfolding of his Intellectual or Mind-Soul, this was possible, without man's nature becoming permanently severed from its original Divine-Spiritual foundation. But when this point was reached, a corruption took place in man—a corruption of the physical, the etheric and the astral bodies. To an ancient science, this corruption was known as something that was living in man's nature. It was known as a thing that was necessary in order that consciousness might advance to self-consciousness in man. In the stream of knowledge that was cultivated in the centres of learning founded by Alexander the Great, there lived an Aristotelianism which, rightly understood, contained this ‘corruption’ as an essential element in its psychology. It was only in a later time that these ideas were no longer penetrated in their inward essence.

[ 19 ] In the ages before the evolution of his Intellectual or Mind Soul, man was, however, interwoven still with the forces of his Divine-Spiritual origin, so much so that from their cosmic field of action these forces were able to balance and hold in check the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Powers that reach out to man on Earth. And from the human side enough was done by way of co-operation to maintain the balance, in those actions of Ritual and of the Mysteries, wherein the picture was unfolded of the Divine-Spiritual Being diving down into the realm of Lucifer and Ahriman and coming forth again triumphant. Hence in times prior to the Mystery of Golgotha we find in the religious rites of different peoples pictorial representations of that which afterwards, in the Mystery of Golgotha, became reality.

[ 20 ] When the Intellectual or Mind-Soul was unfolded, it was through the reality alone that man could continue to be preserved from being severed from the Divine-Spiritual Beings who belonged to him. The Divine had to enter inwardly as Being, even in the earthly life, into the Organisation of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul which, during earthly existence, has its life from what is earthly. This took place through the Divine-Spiritual Logos, Christ, uniting His cosmic destiny with the Earth for the sake of mankind.

[ 21 ] Persephone came down to the Earth in order to save the plant kingdom from being obliged to form itself from what belongs only to Earth. That is the descent of a Divine Spiritual Being into the Nature of the Earth. Persephone, too, has a kind of ‘resurrection.’ but this takes place annually, in rhythmical succession.

[ 22 ] Over against this event—which is also a cosmic event occurring on the Earth—we have for Humanity the descent of the Logos. Persephone descends to bring Nature into its original direction. In this case there must be rhythm at the foundation; for the events in Nature take place rhythmically. The Logos descends into humanity. This occurs once during human evolution. For the evolution of humanity is but one part in a gigantic cosmic rhythm, in which, before the stage of man's existence, humanity was something altogether different, and in which, after this stage is passed, it will be something altogether different again; whereas the plant life repeats itself as such in shorter rhythms.

[ 23 ] From the age of the Spiritual Soul onwards it is necessary for humanity to see the Mystery of Golgotha in this light. For already in the age of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul there would have been a danger of man being separated, if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place. In the age of the Spiritual Soul a complete darkening of the Spirit-world would needs come about for human consciousness, if the Spiritual Soul could not strengthen itself sufficiently to look back in inward vision to its Divine-Spiritual origin. If, however, it is able to do this, it finds the cosmic Logos, as the Being Who can lead it back. It fills itself with the mighty picture which reveals what took place on Golgotha.

[ 24 ] The beginning of this understanding is the loving comprehension of the cosmic Christmas, the cosmic Initiation-Night, the festive remembrance of which is celebrated each year. For the Spiritual Soul, which first receives the element of Intellectuality, is strengthened by allowing true love to enter into this, the coldest element of soul. And the warmth of true love is there in its highest form when it goes out to the Jesus child who appears on Earth during the cosmic Initiation-Night. In this way man has allowed the highest earthly Spirit-fact, which was at the same time a physical event, to work upon his soul; he has entered upon the path by which he receives Christ into himself.

[ 25 ] Nature must be recognised in such a way that in Persephone—or the Being who was still seen in the early Middle Ages when they spoke of ‘Nature’—it reveals the Divine Spiritual, original and eternal Force out of which it originated and continually originates, as the foundation of earthly human existence.

[ 26 ] The world of Man must be so recognised that in Christ it reveals the original and eternal Logos who works for the unfolding of the Spirit-being of man in the sphere of the Divine Spiritual Being bound up with man from the Beginning.

[ 27 ] To turn the human heart in love to these great cosmic facts: this is the true content of the festival of remembrance which approaches man each year when he contemplates the cosmic Initiation-Night of Christmas. If love such as this lives in human hearts, it permeates the cold light-element of the Spiritual Soul with warmth. Were the Spiritual Soul obliged to remain without such permeation, man would never become filled with the Spirit. He would die in the cold of the intellectual consciousness; or he would have to remain in a mental life that did not progress to the unfolding of the conscious Spiritual Soul. He would then come to a stop with the unfolding of the Intellectual or Mind-Soul.

[ 28 ] But in its essential nature the Spiritual Soul is not cold. It seems to be so only at the commencement of its unfolding, because at that stage it can only reveal the light-element in its nature, and not as yet the cosmic warmth in which it has indeed its origin.

[ 29 ] To feel and experience Christmas in this way will enable the soul to realise how the glory of the Divine-Spiritual Beings, whose images are revealed in the Stars, announces itself to man, and how man's liberation takes place, within the precincts of the Earth, from the Powers which wish to alienate him from his origin.

(Christmas, 1924)

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society (in connection with the foregoing Christmas Study)

[ 30 ] 137. The activity in the evolution of the World and Mankind which comes about through the forces of Michael, repeats itself rhythmically, though in ever-changing and progressing forms, before the Mystery of Golgotha and after.

[ 31 ] 138. The Mystery of Golgotha is the greatest event, occurring once and for all in the evolution of mankind. Here there can be no question of a rhythmic repetition. For while the evolution of mankind also stands within a mighty cosmic rhythm, still it is one—one vast member in a cosmic rhythm. Before it became this One, mankind was something altogether different from mankind; afterwards it will again be altogether different. Thus there are many Michael events in the evolution of mankind, but there is only one event of Golgotha.

[ 32 ] 139. In the quick rhythmic repetition of the seasons of the year, the Divine-Spiritual Being which descended into the depths of Earth to permeate Nature's process with the Spirit, accomplishes this process. It is the ensouling of Nature with the Forces of the Beginning and of Eternity which must remain at work; even as Christ's descent is the ensouling of Mankind with the Logos of the Beginning and of Eternity, whose working for the salvation of mankind shall never cease.

From what you have heard so far, you may have gotten the impression that the art of education based on anthroposophic knowledge of the human being is intended to nurture, above all, a healthy and harmonious development of the physical body of children. You may have noticed that certain questions could be seen as guidelines for our educational aims. For example, How can we help free the development of formative forces flowing from the head, affecting and shaping the young organism? How can we work in harmony with the child’s developing lungs and blood circulation during the middle years? What must we do to cultivate, in the broadest sense, the forces working throughout a child’s musculature? How do we properly support the processes of muscle growth in relation to the bones and tendons, so that young adolescents can attain the proper position in the outer world?

These questions imply that whatever we do to enhance the development of a child’s soul and spirit is directed first toward the best possible healthy and normal development of the physical body. And this is indeed the case. We consciously try to aid and foster healthy development of the physical body, because in this way the soul and spiritual nature is given the best means of unfolding freely through a child’s own resources. By doing as little harm as possible to the spiritual forces working through children, we give them the best possibility of developing in a healthy way. This is not to be done through any preconceived ideas of what a growing human being should be like. Everything we do in teaching is an attempt to create the most favorable conditions for the children’s physical health. And because we must pay attention to the soul and spiritual element as well, and because the physical must ultimately become its outer manifestation, we must also come to terms with the soul and spiritual aspect in the way best suited for the child’s healthy development.

You may ask which educational ideal such an attitude comes from; it arises from complete dedication to human freedom. And it springs from our ideal to place human beings in the world so that they can unfold individual freedom, or, at least, in such a way that physical hindrances do not prevent them from doing so.

When we emphasize the physical development of children in our education, we are especially trying to help them learn to use their physical powers and skills fully in later life. Waldorf education is based on the knowledge and confidence that life in general has the best chance of developing when allowed to develop freely and healthily. Naturally, all this has to be taken in a relative sense, which, I hope is understood.

Children who, through educational malpractice during the school years, have been prevented from breathing properly and from using their system of bones and connective tissue properly, will not grow up to become free individuals. Likewise, students whose heads have been crammed with fixed ideas and concepts deemed important for later life will not become inwardly free. Children will not grow into a free human beings unless their childhood needs, as imposed by physical development, were both understood and catered to through the appropriate educational principles and methods. Naturally, the soul and spiritual needs of children must also be recognized and met with the right educational methods. Far from leading to any kind of false or lofty idealism, anthroposophy wishes to prove itself by enabling its followers to deal with the practical problems of life between birth and death, the span of time in which we should develop the physical body in accord with the soul and spirit.

So you see that we have no influence over the development of what belongs to the realm of soul and spirit, even if we as educators wanted it. The soul and spiritual part of the human being exists in its true being only from the moment we fall asleep until the time of awaking. This means that, if we want to educate people’s soul and spirit, we must do so while they sleep. In fact, it is impossible for us to do this. Today, we encounter a strong belief that we must educate the soul and spirit and indoctrinate people with certain concepts. All we can really do is help people toward the free use of physical capabilities through the soul and spirit.

I have often said that it is impossible to deal with educational matters without fully considering the entire life situation of our time, taking into account the general milieu into which education is placed. I will refrain from introducing any extraneous matter into our considerations here, but what I want to say now definitely belongs to our theme.

News has come to us that in Eastern Europe a new pedagogy is being worked out for the benefit of those who are still recognized there, those who belong to the Radical Socialist Party. Because nothing that was acceptable prior to the Revolution is now considered correct, new educational methods are being worked out there. This is being done by purely outward means. We are told that one of the leaders in modern Russia has been commissioned to write the history of the Communist Party. The new government has given him one month to complete his task. During this month, he will also have to do some practical work at the Moscow Center. As a result of these activities, a book is to be published that will become the official model for reeducating all those being recognized as proper Russians. Another party member has been commissioned to write a history of the workers’ movement in the West and a history of international communism. While compiling his authoritative account, he, too, has been given other work to do, and after six weeks he is supposed to have this work completed. All true Soviet Russians are supposed to study this book. Forgive me, I believe that the second writer was actually given two months. A third person was commissioned to publish a theory of Marxism, and it was he who was given six weeks to deliver the book. With this book, every true Russian will become familiar with the new conditions in the East. According to these same methods, several other persons have been assigned to write new Russian literature. They have all been allotted a fixed time schedule in which to complete their orders. And they have all been told what other work they must do during the time of writing. The party member selected to write the book about Marxism has also been made coeditor of Pravda.

Why do I bring this up today? Because, basically, what is happening in Soviet Russia today is the ultimate consequence of what lives in all of us, insofar as we represent today’s civilization. People will not admit that events in Russia are merely the ultimate consequences of our own situation, taken to extremes in Eastern Europe. The absurdity of communist ideology is that it has determined and officially declared what a citizen must know; it does not ask what people can do to become real human beings who are properly integrated into the world’s fabric.

Teachers are called on to bring the utmost respect for soul and spirit to their lessons. Without this they will fail, as though they lacked the most fundamental artistic and scientific understanding. Therefore, the first prerequisite of Waldorf teachers is reverence for the soul and spiritual potential that children bring with them into the world. When facing the children, teachers must be filled with an awareness that they are dealing with innately free human beings. With this attitude, teachers can work out educational principles and methods that safeguard the children’s inborn freedom so that in later life, when they look back at their school days, they will not find any infringement on their personal freedom, not even in the later effects of their education.

To clarify the implications of these statements, we can ask ourselves, what becomes of those whose physical idiosyncrasies are not dealt with properly during childhood? Childish idiosyncrasies continue into later life, and if you wonder what sort of effect they will have when children become adults, I will answer by saying something that may seem rather odd and surprising. Peculiar physical habits in early childhood, if left untreated, degenerate and become the causes of illnesses later on. You must realize, in all seriousness, that characteristic physical tendencies in childhood, if allowed to continue unchanged, become causes of illness. Such knowledge will give you the right impulse for a proper care that in no way conflicts with the deepest respect for human freedom.

By comparison, imagine someone who, down to the deepest fibers of her being, is enthusiastic about the inner human freedom. Imagine she falls ill and must call a doctor. The doctor cures her by using the best means available today for the art of healing. Would such a person ever feel that her personal freedom had been interfered with? Never. What meets a person in this way would never impinge upon one’s inner freedom.

A similar feeling must be present in those who are engaged in the art of education. They should have the willingness and the ability to see the nature of their own calling as being similar to that of a doctor in relation to patients. Education naturally exists in its own right, and it certainly is not simply therapy in the true sense of the word. But there is a certain relationship and similarity between the work of a doctor and that of a teacher that justifies comparison.

When students leave school in their mid-teens, it is time for us to examine again whether, during their school years from the change of teeth to the coming of puberty, we have done our best to help and equip them for later life. (During the coming days, we will deal with the esthetic and moral aspects of education and look more closely at the stage of puberty. For now, we will consider the more general human aspects.) We must realize that, during their past school years, we have been dealing mainly with their ether body of formative forces, and that the soul life (of which more will be said later) was just beginning to manifest toward the approach of graduation.

We must consider the next stage, which begins with the fourteenth to fifteenth years and continues until the beginning of the twenties, a time when a young man or woman must face the task of fitting more and more into outer life. We have already seen how children gradually take hold of the body, finally incarnating right into the skeleton, and how, by doing so, they connect more and more with the external world and adapt to outer conditions. Fundamentally, this process continues until the early twenties, after which comes a very important period of life. Although, as teachers, we no longer have any direct influence over the young person at this stage, we have in fact already done a great deal in this way during the previous years, and this will become apparent during the early to the late twenties.

After leaving school, young people must train for a vocation. Now they no longer receive what come, mainly from human nature itself, but rather what has become part of the civilization we live in, at least in terms of the chosen trade or profession. Now the young person has to be adaptable to certain forms of specialization. In our Waldorf school, we try to prepare students to step into life by introducing practical crafts such as spinning and weaving to our students of fourteen and fifteen. Practical experience in such crafts is not important only for future spinners or weavers but for all those who want to be able to do whatever a situation may demand. It is nevertheless important to introduce the right activities at the right time.

What has been cultivated in a child’s ether body during early school years emerges again in the soul sphere of young people during their twenties, the time when they must enter a profession. The way they were treated at school will play a large role in whether they respond to outer conditions clumsily, reluctantly, full of inhibitions, or skillfully and with sufficient inner strength to overcome obstacles. During their twenties, young people become aware of how the experiences of their school years first went underground, as it were, while they trained for a trade or profession, only to surface again in form of capacities, such as being able to handle certain situations or fit oneself into life in the right way. Teachers who are aware of these facts will pay attention to the critical moments in their students’ lives between the change of teeth and puberty.

I have often spoken about the important turning point that appears during the ninth to tenth years. Toward the twelfth year, another important change takes place, which I have also mentioned. Children of six or seven, when entering school, are “one great sensory organ,” as I have called them. At this stage, much has already been absorbed through imitation. Children have also been occupied with the inner processes of molding and sculpting the organs, and they bring the results to school. Now, everything that teachers do with the children, until the turning point around nine, should have a formative effect, but in a way that stimulates them to participate freely and actively in this inner shaping. I indicated this with my strong appeal for an artistic approach during the introductions to reading, writing, and arithmetic. The artistic element is particularly important at this age.

All teaching during the early school years must begin with the child’s will sphere, and only gradually should it lead over toward the intellect. Those who recognize this will pay special attention to educating the child’s will. They will know that children must learn to drive out the will forces from their organism, but in the right way. To do this, their will activities must be tinged with the element of feeling. It is not enough for teachers to do different things with the children; they must also develop sympathy and antipathy according to what they are doing. And the musical element, apart from music per se, offers the best means for achieving this. Thus, as soon as children are brought to us, we ought to immerse them in the element of music, not just through singing but also by letting them make music with simple instruments. Thus, young students will not only nurture an esthetic sense, but most of all (though indirectly), they will learn how to use and control will forces in a harmonious way.

Children bring many inborn gifts to school. Inwardly they are natural sculptors, and we can draw on these gifts as well as their other hidden talents. For instance, we can let children do all kinds of things on paper with paints (even though this might be inconvenient for teachers), and in this way we introduce them to the secrets of color. It is really fascinating to observe how children relate to color when left alone to cover a white surface with various colors. What they produce in a seemingly haphazard way is not at all meaningless, but in all the blotches and smears we can detect a certain color harmony resulting from an inborn relationship to the world of color. We must be careful, however, not to let children use the solid blocks of color that are sold in children’s paint boxes, with which they are supposed to paint directly from the blocks onto paper. This has a damaging effect, even in the case of painting as art. One should paint with liquid colors already dissolved in water or some other suitable liquid. It is important, especially for children, to develop an intimate relationship with color. If we use thick paints from a palette, we do not have the same intimate relationship to color as we do when we use liquid colors from bottles.

In a painting lesson, you might say to a child, “What you have painted is really beautiful. You put red in the middle, and all the other colors around it go well with the red. Everything you painted fits well with the red in the middle. Now try to do it the other way round. Where you have red, paint blue, and then paint around it all the other colors so that they also go well with the blue in the middle.” Not only will this child be tremendously stimulated by such an exercise, but by working out a transposition of colors—possibly with help from the teacher—the child will gain a great deal toward establishing an inner relationship to the world in general.

However inconvenient it may be for the teachers, they should always encourage young students to form all sorts of shapes out of any suitable material they can lay their hands on. Of course, we should avoid letting them get unduly dirty and messy, since this can be a real nuisance. But children gain far more from these creative activities than they would by simply remaining clean and tidy. In other words, it is truly valuable for children, especially during the early years, to experience the artistic element.

Anything required of children must be induced first in a way that is appropriate to their nature. If artistic activities are introduced as described, learning other subjects becomes easier. Foreign languages, for example, will be learned with far greater ease if students have done artistic work beforehand. I already said that children should learn foreign languages at a very early age, if possible as soon as they enter school.

Nowadays, we often encounter somewhat fanatical attitudes; something that in itself is quite right and justifiable tends to become exaggerated to the point of fanatical extremism. And teaching foreign languages is no exception. Children learn their native tongue naturally, without any grammatical consciousness, and this is how it should be. And when they enter school, they should learn foreign languages in a similar way, without grammatical awareness, but now the process of learning a language is naturally more mature and conscious.

During the tenth year, at the turning point of life mentioned several times, a new situation calls for an introduction to the first fundamentals of grammar. These should be taught without any pedantry whatever. It is necessary to take this new step for the benefit of the children’s healthy development, because at this age they must make a transition from a predominantly feeling approach toward life to one in which they must develop their I-consciousness. Whatever young people do now must be done more consciously than before. Consequently, we introduce a more conscious and intellectual element into the language that students have already learned to speak, write, and read. But when doing this, we must avoid pedantic grammar exercises. Rather, we should give them stimulating practice in recognizing and applying fundamental rules. At this stage, children really need the logical support that grammar can give, so that they do not have to puzzle repeatedly over how to express themselves correctly.

We must realize that language contains two main elements that always interact with each other—an emotional, or feeling, element and an intellectual, thinking element. I would like to illustrate this with a quote from Goethe’s Faust:

Grey, dear friend, is every theory
And green the golden tree of life.

I do not expect that our you (who have come mainly from the West) should study all the commentaries on Goethe’s Faust, since there are enough to fill a library. But if you did, you would make a strange discovery. When coming to this sentence in Faust, you would most likely find a newly numbered remark at the bottom of the page (at least a four-digit number because of all the many explanations already given), and you would find a comment about the lack of logic in this sentence. Despite the poetic license granted to any reputable author (so the commentator might point out), the colors of the tree in this stanza do not make sense. A “golden tree”—could he mean an orange tree? But then, of course, it would not be green either. If it were an ordinary tree, it would not be golden. Perhaps Goethe was thinking of an artificial tree? In any case (a typical commentary would continue), a tree cannot be golden and green at the same time. Then there is the other problem of a grey theory. How can a theory be grey if it is invisible? In this way, many commentaries point out the lack of logic in this sentence.

Of course, there are other, more artistically inclined commentators who delight in the apparent lack of logic in this passage. But what is really at the bottom of it all? It is the fact that, on the one side, the emotional, feeling element of language predominates in this sentence, whereas on the other, it stresses a more thoughtful aspect of imagery. When Goethe speaks of a golden tree, he implies that we would love this tree as we love gold. The word gold here does not have an image quality but expresses the warm feeling engendered by the glow of gold. Only the feelings are portrayed. The adjective green, on the other hand, refers to an ordinary tree, such as we see in nature. This is the logic of it. With regard to the word theory, a theory is of course invisible. Yet, right or wrong, a mere word may conjure up certain feelings in some people that remind them of London fog. One can easily transfer such a feeling to theory as a concept. A pure feeling element of language is again expressed in the adjective grey.

The feeling and thinking qualities in language intermingle everywhere. In contemporary languages, much has already become crippled, but in their earlier stages, an active and creative element lived everywhere, through which the feeling and thinking qualities came into being.

As mentioned, before the age of nine, children have an entirely feeling relationship to language. Yet, unless we also introduce the thinking element in language, their self-awareness cannot develop properly, and this is why it is so important to bring them the intellectual aspect of language. This can be done by judiciously teaching grammatical rules, first in the mother tongue and then in foreign languages, whereby the rules are introduced only after children have begun to speak the language. So, according to these indications, teachers should arouse a feeling in students around the age of nine or ten that they are beginning to penetrate the language more consciously. This is how a proper grammatical sense could be cultivated in children.

By the time children reach the age of twelve, they should have developed a feeling for the beauty of language—an esthetic sense of the language. This should stimulate “beauty in speaking” in them, but without ever falling into mannerisms. After this, until the time of puberty, students should learn to appreciate the dialectical aspect of language; they should develop a faculty for convincing others through command of language. This third element of language should be introduced only when they are approaching graduation age.

To briefly summarize the aims of language teaching, children should first develop, step by step, a feeling for the correct use of language, then a sense of the beauty of language, and finally the power inherent in linguistic command. It is far more important for teachers to find their way into an approach to language teaching than to merely follow a fixed curriculum. In this way, teachers quickly discover how to introduce and deal with what is needed for the various ages. After a mostly artistic approach, in which students up to age nine are involved very actively, teachers should begin to dwell more on the descriptive element in language, but without neglecting the creative aspect. This is certainly possible if you choose the kind of syllabus I have tried to characterize during these past few days, in which the introduction of nature study leads to geography, and animals are seen in the context of humankind. The most effective way to include the descriptive element would be to appeal mainly to the children’s soul sphere rather than claiming their entire being. This should be done by clothing the lessons in a story told in a vivid, imaginative way. Likewise, at this stage of life, teachers should present historical content by giving lively accounts of human events that, in themselves, form a whole, as already indicated.

Having gone through the stage of spontaneous activity, followed by an appreciation of the descriptive element, students approaching the twelfth year are ready for what could be called an explanatory approach. Cause and effect now come into general considerations, and material can be given that stretches the powers of reasoning.

Throughout these stages, teachers should present mathematical elements in their manifold forms, in a way appropriate to the student’s age. Mathematics, as taught in arithmetic and geometry, is likely to cause particular difficulties for teachers. Before the ninth year, this is introduced in simpler forms and subsequently expanded, since children can take in a great deal if we know how to go about it. It is a fact that all mathematical material taught throughout the school years must be presented in a thoroughly artistic and imaginative way. Using all kinds of means teachers must contrive to introduce arithmetic and geometry artistically, and here, too, between the ninth and tenth years teachers must go to a descriptive method. Students must be taught how to observe angles, triangles, quadrilaterals, and so on through a descriptive method. Proofs should not be introduced before the twelfth year.

A boring math teacher will achieve very little if anything at all, whereas teachers who are inspired by this subject will succeed in making it stimulating and exhilarating. After all, it is by the grace of mathematics that, fundamentally, we can experience the harmonies of ideal space. If teachers can become enthusiastic about the Pythagorean theorem or the inner harmonies between planes and solids, they bring something into lessons that has immense importance for children, even in terms of soul development. In this way, teachers counteract the elements of confusion that life presents.

You see, language could not exist without the constantly intermingling elements of thought and feeling. Again I have made an extreme statement, but if you examine various languages, you will discover how feeling and thinking are interwoven everywhere. This in itself, as well as many other factors, could easily introduce chaos into our lives were it not for the inner firmness that mathematics can give us. Those who can look more deeply into life know that many people have been saved from neurasthenia, hysteria, and worse afflictions simply by learning how to observe triangles, quadrilaterals, tetrahedra, and other geometrical realities in the right way.

Perhaps you will allow me a more personal note at this point, because it may help clarify the point I am making. I have a special love for mechanics, not simply because of its objective value, but for personal reasons. I owe this love of mechanics to one of my teachers in the Vienna High School and the enthusiasm he showed for this subject; such things live on into later life. This teacher glowed with excitement when searching for the resultants from given components. It was interesting to see the joy with which he looked for the resultants and the joy with which he would take them apart again in order to fit them back into their components. While doing this, he almost jumped and danced from one end of the blackboard to the other until, full of glee, he would finally call out the formula he had found, such as \(c^2 = a^2+ b^2\). Captivated by his findings, which he had written on the board, he would look around at his audience with a benign smile, which in itself was enough to kindle enthusiasm for analytical mechanics, a subject that hardly ever evokes such feelings in people. It is very important that mathematics, which is taught in various forms right through school, should pour out, as it were, its own special substance over all the students.

And so we can speak of the two poles in human development: the rhythmic and artistic pole and the mathematical and conceptual one. If, as indicated, young souls are worked on from within outward, students will gradually grow into the world in the right way.

At the approach of the graduation age, or mid-teens, teachers will again feel an inner need to survey the most significant moments in the development of their students during the last few years, this time in retrospect. Students entered school in class one at the age of six or seven. A few years later they are sent out into the world again and—as I indicated at the beginning of today’s lecture—it is the teacher’s aim to enable them to adapt to life in the world. When we receive young students in class one, they are like one great sense organ. Inwardly, they carry a kind of a copy of their parents and others who surround them and of society as a whole. It is our task to transform these adopted and specialized features into more general human features. We can do this by appealing, above all, to children’s middle system of breathing and blood circulation, which is not connected so much with their more personal side.

Yet, apart from the adopted features that children have unconsciously copied from their environment, they also bear their very own individual characteristics when they enter school. They are less pronounced than similar characteristics found in adults, features that we associate with melancholic, sanguine, phlegmatic, or choleric temperaments. Nevertheless, the children’s nature, too, is definitely colored by what could be called their temperamental disposition, so we can speak of children with melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine, and choleric tendencies. It is essential for teachers to acquire a fine perception of the manifold symptoms and characteristics that arise from children’s temperamental dispositions and to find the right way of dealing with them.

Melancholic children are those who depend most strongly on the conditions of the physical body. Because of their special constitution, they tend to feel weighed down by their bodily nature. They easily become self-centered and, in general, show little interest in what is going on around them. Yet it would be wrong to think of melancholic children as simply inattentive, since this is true only with regard to their surroundings and what comes from their teachers. They are, on the other hand, very attentive to their own inner conditions, and this is the reason melancholic children tend to be so moody. Please note that what I am saying about the temperaments applies only to children whose symptoms cannot be automatically transferred to adults of the same temperament.

The relationship of phlegmatic children to their environment is one of complete, though entirely subconscious, surrender to the world at large. And since the world is so vast and full of things to which they have surrendered themselves, they show little interest in what is closer to them. Again, my remarks about this temperament refer only to children, otherwise they might be seen as a compliment to phlegmatic adults, and they are certainly not meant to be that. Making a rather sweeping statement, one could say that, if children with phlegmatic tendencies did not happen to live on earth but out in the heavenly world of the cosmos, such children would be full of the deepest interest in their surroundings. They feel at home in the periphery of the world. Phlegmatic children are open to immensity and anything that is vast and remote and does not make an immediate impact.

To a certain extent, sanguine children display the opposite characteristics of the melancholic or phlegmatic child. Young melancholics are immersed in bodily nature. Phlegmatic children are drawn outward to the spheres of infinity, because they are so strongly linked to their ether body. The ether body always inclines outward toward infinite totality; it disperses into the cosmos just a few days after death. Sanguine children live in what we call the astral, or soul, body. This member of the human being is different from the physical or ether bodies inasmuch as it is not concerned with anything temporal or spatial. It exists beyond the realm of time and space. Because of the astral body, during every moment of our lives we have an awareness of our entire life up to the present moment, although memories of earlier experiences are generally weaker than more recent ones. The astral body is instrumental mainly in directing our dreams. These, as you know, bear little relationship to the normal sequence of time. We may dream about something that happened only yesterday yet, mixed up in the dream, people may appear whom we met in early childhood. The astral body mixes up our life experiences and has no regard for the element of time and space, but in its chaotic ways it has its own dimension that is totally different from what is temporal and spatial.

Sanguine children surrender themselves to their astral body, and this becomes evident in their entire pattern of behavior. They respond to outer impressions as though what lies beyond time and space were directly transmitted to us through the outer world itself. They quickly respond to impressions without digesting them inwardly, because they do not care for the time element. They simply surrender to the astral body and make no effort to retain outer impressions. Or, again, they do not like to live in memories of earlier events. Because they pay so little attention to time, sanguine children live in and for the present moment. They express outwardly something that, in reality, is the task of the astral body in the higher worlds, and this gives sanguine children a certain superficiality.

Choleric children are most directly linked to their I-center. Their physical build shows a strong will that, permeated by the forces of their I-being, is likely to enter life aggressively.

It is truly important for teachers to cultivate a fine perception for these characteristic features of the temperaments in growing children. You must try to deal with them in a twofold way: first, by introducing a social element in the class, based on the various temperaments. When teachers get an idea of their students as a whole, they should place them in groups according to similarity of temperament. There are children of mixed temperaments, of course, and this has to be considered as well. In general, however, it has a salutary effect when children of the same temperament are seated together, for the simple reason that the temperaments rub up against each other. Melancholic children, for example, will have a neighbor who is also melancholic. They become aware of how this neighbor is suffering from all kinds of discomforts arising from the physical constitution. Melancholic students recognize similar symptoms in themselves, and the mere looks of their neighbors will have a healing effect on their own nature.

If phlegmatic children sit next to other phlegmatics, they become so bored with them that, in the end, their phlegmatic nature becomes stirred to the extent that they try to shake off their lethargy.

Sanguine children, when seated among other sanguines, recognize the way they flutter from one impression to the next, being momentarily interested in one thing and then in another, until they feel like brushing them away like flies. Experiencing their own traits in their neighbors, sanguine children become aware of the superficiality of their own temperament.

When choleric children are seated together, there will be such a constant exchange of blows that the resulting bruises they give each other will have an extraordinary healing effect on their temperament.

You must observe these things, and you will find that by introducing, through your choice of seating, a social element in the classroom, you will have a wholesome and balancing effect on each child. In this way, the teacher’s relationship to each of the temperaments will also find the appropriate expression. The second point to be kept in mind is that it would not be helpful to treat melancholic children—or any other temperament for that matter—by going against their inherent disposition. On the contrary, we should develop the habit of treating like with like. If, for instance, we forced a choleric to sit still and to be quiet, the result would be an accumulation of suppressed choler that would act like a poison in the child’s system. It simply would not work. On the other hand, if, for example, a teacher shows continued interest and understanding for the doleful moods of a melancholic child, this attitude will finally bring about a beneficial and healing effect. When dealing with phlegmatic children, outwardly we should also appear rather phlegmatic and somewhat indifferent, despite our real inner interest in the student. Sanguine children should be subjected to many quickly changing sense impressions. In this way, we increase the tendencies of their own temperament, with the result that they try to catch up with the many fleeting impressions. They will develop a stronger intensity. The sheer number of sense impressions will bring about an inner effort of self-intensification in the child.

By treating like with like, we can come to grips with the different temperaments. As for the choleric children, if conditions at school allow, it would be best to send them out into the garden during the afternoons and let them run about until they are exhausted. I would let them climb up and down the trees. When they reach a treetop, I would let them shout to a playmate sitting on top of another tree. I would let them shout at each other until they are tired. If we allow choleric children to free themselves in a natural way from pent-up choler, we exercise a healing influence on their temperament.

You will learn to work effectively as teachers by getting to know the qualities of the different temperaments. One thing is essential, however. It will do no good at all if teachers enter the classroom with a morose demeanor—one that, even in early life, leaves deep wrinkles carved on their faces. Teachers must know how to act with a tremendous sense of humor in the classroom. They must be able to become a part of everything they encounter in the classroom. Teachers must be able to let their own being flow into that of the children.