The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends,

Once again there comes to life in our hearts the verse that has resounded through the centuries, of the Divine Mysteries manifesting in the Heights and of the peace on Earth for men of good-will. And at this moment I imagine, especially in our time, the question will arise within our hearts: What then does mankind need, over the whole Earth's round, for the prospering of earthly evolution and of that peace of which the Gospel tells? Well, my dear friends, we have been speaking for weeks past of what is needful to mankind all the Earth over, especially in this our time—questionable as it is and so fraught with questions. And if we would gather up into a single sentence what has been passing through our souls in recent weeks—then we may say: It is necessary for men to strive ever more and more for a full mutual understanding.

This quest of a true mutual understanding among men coincides with what we explained yesterday as to the fundamental impulse underlying what we here call Anthroposophical Spiritual Science. Anthroposophical Spiritual Science strives for an insight into those things which can only be seen by spiritual vision in the world and in the evolution of the world. What is it that shall come to birth in human souls through this cosmic understanding? It is the true—not the apparent and illusory, but the true content of the social demands of the present time, and it consists in calling forth mutual understanding among men. We must strive for this understanding of humanity over the whole Earth—strive for it on the one hand with sincerity and on the other hand with strength. And this can only be done today with an active spiritual life, I mean a spiritual life which does not merely wish to devote itself to the world passively, but seeks to be inwardly active, partaking in the inner impulses of all existence and so arriving at an understanding of the world and man. Yesterday I told you, we are living in an age when new revelations of the Spirit are penetrating through the veil of outward phenomena. We cannot take this truth too earnestly. For he alone who takes it in full earnest will prove equal to the task which our age requires, of every single human being who claims to be awake in life.

If you will think back over many things which we have considered in the last few weeks, you will realize that this understanding of man over the whole Earth cannot be attained so easily as many people think. We have tried to throw light on the peculiarities of the groupings of peoples in the Western and Eastern regions of the Earth and in the Middle. Without letting sympathies or antipathies come into play in the very least, we have tried to understand what are the deepest characteristics of the peoples of the West, the Middle and the East respectively. Why did we do so? To take an example, we pointed out that our age is characterized especially by the development of intellectuality, and that in the Western—especially the English-speaking—peoples, this intellectuality comes to expression in such a way that it acts, as it were, instinctively. Whereas in the Middle peoples, intellect does not work instinctively—in fact, to begin with, it is not innate in them at all; they must acquire it by education. This, we showed, is a very significant difference between the peoples of the West and of the Middle. Thereafter we pointed to the peoples of the East and we said: There, the evolution of intellect comes to expression in such a way that, to begin with, the Eastern peoples actually recoil from it. They are loath to awaken this intellectuality to life within them; they want to preserve it for the knowledge of the Spirit-Self in the future. We pointed to other differentiations also, over the earth. Today let us ask ourselves: Why do we indicate these differentiations? Why do we seek from our point of view to characterize the different groups of people over the Earth? We do so, my dear friends, because in future the mere “Love one-another” will no longer suffice. In future, men will only attain mutual understanding as to their several tasks over the whole Earth if they know what is working in one or in another territory of the Earth. They must be able to look consciously at the several characteristics of the different groups of people. Once we can rise to the inner feeling, which is indeed essential to such understanding, this understanding will indeed be brought about. The feeling to which I refer, my dear friends, is this; the moment we begin to characterize human beings all the Earth over in this way, we must rid ourselves of the impulse to judge and value in the way we judge and value an individual human being as to his moral qualities. In seeking to characterize the nations it simply will not do to judge of their worth as we do in the case of a single human being. It is the very essence of the evolution of the individual human beings on Earth, that man develops the moral qualities as an individual being. Morality can only be evolved by the individual, not by groups of human beings. It would be the worst of illusions if we continued to believe that groups of human beings—or, as one likes to call them nowadays, nations—can enter into a like relationship to one another as man to man. One who can understand concretely what groups of human beings (nations, too, therefore) are in reality, will see the nations guided, as you know from our lecture cycle on the Folk Souls, by those Beings of the Hierarchies whom we call Archangels. He will never ascribe to the mutual relationship of nations that which he must see in the relation of one human being to another. What the nations are, they are in face of the Divine Beings. Here there arises a very different valuation from that which obtains as between man and man. It is for this very reason that man becomes an individual in the course of his evolution. He wrests himself free from the mere folk or nation, so that he may enter fully into what we call the moral order of the world. This moral order of the world is a concern of the individual man.

Such things must be understood by real spiritual knowledge. The true progress of Christianity itself in our time consists in this. I said the other day: We are living in a time when the Spirits of Personality rise in a sense to creative activity. They become Creators. This is exceedingly important, for inasmuch as they become Creator-Spirits there penetrates through the veil of phenomena what we described yesterday as a new revelation. The Spirits of Personality, therefore, are taking on the character of Creators. They become different in a sense from what they were before. They in their being take on a character like that which certain other Spirits (the Spirits of Form) possessed, for earthly evolution, since Lemurian times. This means that in a certain sense man will henceforth confront an altogether changed world-picture. We must become conscious of this, for this is the great thing in our time. Man is beginning to confront an altogether changed world picture, one that comes forth—to use a Goethean expression—out of the gray depths of the Spirit. If we look back with Spiritual Science into the historic evolution of mankind—we may look back into pre-Christian times—the farther we go back, the more we find that men possessed in an old instinctive way an extensive cosmic knowledge, which inspires us with all the greater reverence the more we learn to know it. For the seer it becomes a fact that at the outset of earthly evolution an immense Wisdom was poured out as it were over the earthly life of man. In course of time this Wisdom gradually filtered away. And strange as it may sound, my dear friends, yet it is true, it had reached a kind of zero level at the time when the Mystery of Golgotha came with a blessing to mankind. During that time all that humanity had known in former ages fell into a kind of chaos in the consciousness of man. Those who have understanding of these matters express themselves with perfect agreement on this fact. During that time, they say, the evolution into which man is woven had reached once more the point of utter ignorance. Yet into this gray ignorance which overlay mankind there fell the greatest earthly revelation—the Mystery of Golgotha—the starting point of new knowledge, new revelations for humanity.

Nevertheless, through many centuries, as concerns man himself, the dark gray ignorance persisted in a sense. It does enlighten us, my dear friends, in the deepest sense, if, looking back on the last two thousand years, we ask ourselves with understanding: What, after all, did men produce out of themselves during these last two thousand years? All they possessed by way of Wisdom (independent of the Mystery of Golgotha) was old tradition—inheritance from old traditions. Let us understand one another aright. Needless to say, I will not say humanity has had no Wisdom at all during the last two thousand years, nor will I cast aspersions on the Wisdom which they had. The point is this: The Wisdom that was present in the old pre-Christian times—whose relics are still observable in the last centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha—this Wisdom was seen, albeit instinctively, seen in the Spirit of the olden times. Now however they had lost the power of relating themselves, with independent spiritual vision, to the content of the cosmic Wisdom. What had existed in olden times was preserved, as it were, in a historic memory. Even the Mystery of Golgotha, as I said yesterday, was clothed in the old Wisdom, expressed in the conceptions of the old-remembered Wisdom.

All this went on through many centuries. An advance-guard—albeit only an advance guard—for a renewed penetration of man into Cosmic Wisdom emerged in the mode of thought of modern Natural Science. True, to begin with it emerges in an apparently godless form; yet it is so. It is something which man seeks to acquire by his own activity of soul. Have I not often emphasized that for the future men must learn to regard the spiritual world anthroposophically, even [as], since Copernicus, they have regarded the purely mechanical, external order of Nature? To learn to behold the Divine just as men learned to behold the outer mechanical aspect of the universe since Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno—this is the task that must permeate us if we would come to a true understanding of our time.

Of course there are many things against this true understanding of our time. Towards such understanding, as you know, such things are necessary as are said for instance in my book on Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment where we have shown what ways the soul must take to penetrate into the spiritual world even as Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno sought to penetrate the outward mechanical order of Nature. Those who have no deeper understanding for human aspirations may well be astonished that the most vigorous opposition arises out of the spirit of the old religious faiths (if we may call them so) against this endeavor to show what ways the human soul must take to find the spiritual world. It is especially so when the old spirit appears in the form of Jesuitism.

Among the many stupid accusations which have appeared in three articles in the Stimmen der Zeit this year, the following also occurs: “The Church,” they say, “forbids this treatment of the human soul to find the paths into the spiritual world.” My dear friends, for many a modern believer in authority this may sound like something new; but they fail to remember that the very same Church also forbade the researches of Copernicus and Galileo! The Church dealt with external scientific research in exactly the same way. We need not therefore wonder if it metes out the same treatment to the inner researches of spiritual science. It is only remaining true to its old habits. Even as the Catholic Church rebelled until 1827 against the Copernican doctrine, so it rebels against the conscious penetration into the spiritual world. This penetration into the spiritual worlds is no mere talking in abstractions; it is something real and concrete. It means that we transcend in fact once more the state of dark, gray ignorance and penetrate with knowledge into the underlying spiritual content of the world. Was it not also part of this gray ignorance that man looked out upon the world and saw the nations—the groups of human beings—and spoke of them as of a formless chaos. They spoke of the peoples of the West, of the Middle and of the East, but they did not distinguish nor characterize them. At best they knew that the leaders of the nations were Archangeloi, but they did not strive really to know the specific characters of the several nations—of the Archangeloi themselves. This belongs to the new revelation:—we must now observe and understand how the several Archangeloi are working over the face of the Earth. And this will be a real enrichment of man's consciousness all the Earth over. Through the very inability to rise from the dead level of gray ignorance to real differentiation, the gulf has been brought about which I described yesterday, between the subject of the Sunday sermons and what is regarded as the business of everyday life in the outer world. Within the sphere of the religious faiths they talk about the Divine World and its relation to mankind, but all this talking proves too feeble to penetrate the life and business of men on Earth. It can say no more to them than “Love one another,” which is about as sensible as if I were to say to the stove: Warm the room, that is your duty as a stove. Such teaching has not power really to take hold of the hearts of man. They cannot unite their knowledge of everyday affairs with what is brought down to them in this way as abstract precepts, customs, dogmas about the spiritual world. This gulf is there, my dear friends, and the religious faiths would only like to hold it fast.

The strangest flowers spring from the presence of this gulf and from the conscious desire to maintain it. The Jesuits, for instance, object to anthroposophical Spiritual Science because it looks for something in the human being which is capable of inner evolution so as to lead man to the Divine. To do so, they say, is heretical, for the Church teaches us and forbids us to say anything different from this—that God in His Being has nothing to do with the world, nay more, that in substantial identity He has nothing to do with the soul of man. He who declares that the soul of man bears something of the Divine Being within it in any respect whatever, is for the Catholic Church—as conceived by the Jesuits—a heretic.

Into such statements is instilled the inmost tendency of that Church, which is not to let the human beings reach to the Divine but to shut them off from it. Dogma itself assumes a form such as to prevent man from reaching the Divine. No wonder, therefore, since they have not been permitted to reach to the Divine, if in the fifth Post-Atlantean age (which had to bring the Spiritual Soul, once and for all) World-knowledge has become not a Divine but a pure Ahrimanic knowledge. For that which is recognized as Natural Science today is a purely Ahrimanic achievement. We have often characterized it thus. Strange, that the Catholic Church should prefer the Ahrimanic Natural Science to the anthroposophical; for the Ahrimanic Natural Science is no longer considered heretical today, while the anthroposophical Natural Science is anathematized.

A truly enlightened man of today needs to be clear about these things. He must recognize that the same thing must now need to be undertaken on the path of the Spirit as has hitherto been undertaken on the path of Nature. Only so can the path of Nature be saved from its aberration into a purely Ahrimanic realm. It has already suffered this aberration, because in fact the path of the Spirit could only be added to it at a later stage. But from now onwards and for the future of mankind, the path of the Spirit must be added to it, so that Natural Science may be lifted again to its Divine Spiritual height; so that the life in which we live between birth and death be reunited with the life of which the science of the Spirit has to tell, namely that life in which we live in the time between death and a new birth. Yet this will only happen in our time if we have the will really to understand this life all the Earth over, to understand it as it works in man himself.

Moreover we can only understand the single human being if we understand the character of human groupings. Only so shall we be enabled to see into the true reality.

Not long ago I drew your attention to a strange fact which may well surprise many people. I will repeat it briefly. You know that here in Switzerland there lived a worthy philosopher, Avenarius, who undoubtedly regarded himself as a good, law-abiding bourgeois citizen; who did not think himself in the remotest degree a revolutionary. He founded a school of thought written in so difficult a language that very few people can read it. Moreover, writing a rather more popular language, but in a similar sense, there lived a philosopher in Vienna and in Prague—Ernst Mach, who equally regarded himself as a good law-abiding citizen. Truly, neither of them has a vein of revolution in them. Yet the fact is, these two philosophers have become the official philosophers of the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks have adopted them as their State Philosophers—so we may put it, if we do not misunderstand the expression. True, Avenarius and Mach would turn in their graves if they were to discover that they are now looked up to by the Bolsheviks as their State Philosophers. As I said on the former occasion, we only do not understand such a phenomenon because we confine ourselves to abstract logic instead of holding fast to the logic of realities, the logic of facts, the logic of things seen. Though you may think that this lies far afield from your point of view, I will nevertheless refer to it again from another aspect. In particular, I will mention one point in the philosophy of Avenarius which may help us to answer the interesting questions: How could it be that Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks? The very fact is after all significant enough of the utter confusion of our time.

Avenarius, you see, raises various questions. If we spoke in his technical language—of “introjections” and the like, of all the purely epistemological concepts he evolved—we should be speaking a pretty unintelligible language for most people. Yet in this unintelligible language he raises a question which is after all very interesting from the point of view of Spiritual Science. Avenarius asks: If a man were all alone in the world, would he still speak of the distinction between that which is in his own soul and that which is outside in the world? Would he still distinguish the subjective and the objective? Richard Avenarius is clever enough to declare: We are only tempted to speak of the difference between “subjective” and “objective” through the fact that we are not alone in the world. When we stand face to face with another man, we assume that that which we carry in our brains—of a table or of any other object—is in him too. By projecting into his brain the same picture which we carry in ourselves, the whole thing acquires a picture-like character, and this leads us to distinguish the things in our soul from the things outside—the things that we confront. Avenarius opines that if there were not other people outside us in the world we should not speak of the differences between that which is in our own soul and that which is outside us. We should regard ourselves as one with the things, merged with the things of the world. We should not distinguish ourselves from the world.

We may truly say, my dear friends, from a certain point of view Avenarius is right in his assertion, but from another point of view appallingly mistaken. It is indeed of some importance that in the course of our earliest childhood (though in our conscious memory we know nothing of that time) we came into touch with human beings. Our whole ideation—our whole way of thinking—was influenced by this. It is quite true, things would be very different if we had not come into touch with others; but they would not be as Avenarius supposes. He who can apprehend the underlying facts by spiritual vision arrives at the real truth. Our whole world-picture would indeed be different if at the time in life when we cannot yet think consciously we did not meet with other human beings. But this is the curious thing, my dear friends. The different world-picture which we then should have would contain the spiritual Beings who underlie the world. It would not be as Avenarius supposes. Incidentally, what a dreadful abstraction! We should not fail to distinguish ourselves from the world if we were alone in the world and there were no other human beings. Behind the minerals and plants (for there would have to be no animals, they too would disturb the world-picture by their presence) we should perceive the Divine-Spiritual World. In other words, my dear friends, our living-together with other men is the reason why, in the ordinary way of life, we do not perceive the spiritual world behind the plants and minerals. Our fellow-men place themselves before this spiritual world and hide it from us. Think what this means! At the cost of not perceiving the Divine world of the Hierarchies, we acquire all that comes to us through our living together with other men on the physical Earth. Our fellow-men place themselves before the world of the Gods and hide it from us, as it were. Naturally, Avenarius was unaware of this, hence he carried the question in an entirely wrong direction. He imagined that if no human being were there we should see ourselves unseparated from the world—should not distinguish ourselves from the world. The truth is we should distinguish ourselves—not indeed from other men or from plants and minerals—but from the Gods whom we should then have all round us. That is the truth.

If you consider this you will realize what is very important to realize in our time. Strange to say, it is in many respects our destiny today! Precisely the most penetrating spirits of our time will often touch on the most vital questions—yet always so as to lead them in the most wrong direction, so as to lead away from the perception of the Spirit. It would indeed be difficult to lead away from the perception of the Spirit more radically than Avenarius does. His philosophy is extremely sharp-witted—written with all the refinement of professorial language—and it is therefore well-adapted to lead men away from the Spirit in a state of sleep. And when men are led asleep away from the Spirit they regard this leading away from the Spirit as a necessity—a kind of mathematical necessity. So long as they do not observe that they are being led away from the Spirit, they take it all as scientifically proven. That is the one thing, my dear friends.

Here we have a philosopher (and much the same could be said of Mach) the inmost nerve of whose thought is to found a system which shall lead man radically away from the Spirit. In Bolshevism, my dear friends, the intention is to found a social order to the exclusion of all things spiritual—to group mankind in their social life so that the Spiritual plays no part in it at all. That is the real inner connection of the two, and it makes itself connection of the two, and it makes itself felt in the logic of facts. Not for a mere external reason but by a deep inner kinship, Avenarius and Mach became the State Philosophers of the Bolsheviks.

You see, it is quite possible—with judgments that are prevalent today—to stand more or less fixedly before these things in blank astonishment. How do the Bolsheviks come to have Avenarius and Mach as State Philosophers? For us however it is possible even now to see the real inner connections. Only to do so, we must look for the underlying spiritual facts, as we have done in this instance, where we perceive how it would be in reality if man [were] alone on the physical Earth without any other men. There are many facts and phenomena entering into our life today—especially in the mutual relationships of men—which paralyze men's minds to contemplate, because they can gain no understanding of them without Spiritual Science. I have just given an instance from the spiritual life; quite everyday facts, however, might also be mentioned in this way.

Do not imagine that it was so in all ages. Such phenomena also existed in ancient times, but they were instinctively intelligible to men—intelligible by the old instinctive clairvoyance. Then, through the long gray period of ignorance, such phenomena were absent from the mutual intercourse of men. Now they are making their appearance once more. Not that the souls of men are evolving; the world is evolving. The world itself is changing, and it reveals its change to begin with in the mutual intercourse of men. In the next epoch it will also reveal the change in the relation of man to the other kingdoms of Nature. Life will remain unintelligible to men, in the present and in the immediate future, so long as they are unwilling to consider it through Spiritual Science. Illusion after illusion will take hold of the soul, if man will not have recourse to the spiritual-scientific concepts. There are some here present to whom at the outbreak of the present War-catastrophe I repeated one thing again and again. It is quite possible, I said, to write of the so-called world-historic facts of the last few centuries according to the records in the archives—by looking up the records and writing histories in the style of Ranks of the rest. But of the outbreak of this War-catastrophe it is impossible to write so. However much they delve into the archives, if they do not observe what was the mood of soul of those who were concerned in the outbreak of this War, and how this mood of soul gave entry for the Ahrimanic powers into the Earth's affairs, and how thereby the causes of this War-catastrophe came from an Ahrimanic side—if, in a word, they are willing to observe the starting-point of this catastrophe with Spiritual Science, it will remain forever dark. This War-catastrophe, my dear friends, is a real challenge to mankind, to learn from it. Much can be learned from what happened during the last four or five years as a consequence of the preceding events. Above all things, we should learn to put certain questions, not so one-sidedly as heretofore, but in keeping with the real needs of the time.

As I have often said, we have no reason to comfort ourselves too lightly about the misfortunes of our time, still less to shut our eyes to them. But we have also no reason to be pessimistic. Only consider the following. We can say to ourselves: immense and terrible events have taken place in the last four or five years over the Earth. And yet, what is the essential thing in all these terrors? It is what human souls have experienced through them. That is the essential thing—what human souls have experienced through these events, with respect to their soul's evolution, needless to say throughout all Earth-existence. Seen in this light, a question fraught with deep significance emerges. The question is strange and paradoxical, but so only because it is fraught with such deep meaning, unaccustomed to our everyday thought. Could we really desire that mankind should have lived on without any such catastrophe, in the way they had grown accustomed to live until the year 1914? Can we really say that that would have been desirable? In putting this question I may be permitted once again to point to what I said before the outbreak of this War, in my lecture cycle at Vienna (April 1914, Cycle XXXII). I said: If we really see what is living in the world of man today, the mutual relationship of men, their social life, appears to us like a social carcinoma—a cancerous growth—eating its way through mankind. Men had only shut their eyes to this carcinoma of the social commonweal. They were unwilling to look the real facts in the face. No one who sees things at their deepest could say that it would have been good for mankind to go on in that way. For on the lines which I have indicated they would have gone more and more downhill, farther and farther from the Spirit. And as to those to whom we look with souls full of pain—the millions who have been swept away from the physical plane by this dread catastrophe and who are now living on as souls—they it is who ponder most of all how different now their situation is, inasmuch as they are spending the rest of their life in the spiritual world; how different it would have been if their Karma had still kept them on the physical Earth.

Sub specie aeterni—from the aspect of eternity—things after all appear quite different, and this must not be left unsaid. Only on the other hand we must not take these things lightly or superficially. True as it is, it is infinitely sad that this catastrophe has taken place, yet it is no less true, my dear friends; by this very catastrophe man has been preserved from an appalling downfall into materialism and utilitarianism. And though it does not yet show itself today, yet it will show itself—above all in the Middle Countries and the East, where, in place of an order that had been imbued with materialism, a state of chaos is now developing. Truly we cannot refer to this chaos without an undertone of pain and suffering. I mean the social chaos which has overcome the Middle and Eastern countries, and that shows outwardly little prospect of transforming into any kind of harmony. And yet there is another aspect. Wherever this chaos exists, the world in the near future will give men very, very little through the purely physical plane. The blessings of the physical plane will truly not be great in the Middle and the Eastern countries. Of all that can be given to man so that he feels his life sustained by external powers—of this there will be precious little. Man will have to take hold of himself in his own soul in order to stand fast, and in the very act of doing so he will be able to set forth along the path into the spiritual world. He will resolve to go towards the Spirit, whence alone the salvation of the future can come. This, my dear friends, will be the essential thing for the future. Our outer bodily existence will, as it were, be slipping away from us. The outer bodily nature, as I said yesterday, will no longer be so sound and healthy as in times past; it has more death in it than it had in bygone ages. The content of the World-riddle is not to be found with that with which our bodily nature is connected; no, we must rise into the spiritual world to find the necessary impulse, and also the impulse which we need for the social order. This insight will arise when men are able to find as little as possible in the physical world. For the physical world itself will only be able to assume a form of harmony when it seeks for this form out of the spiritual life.

The Bible, my dear friends, in its first pages, does not tell us that is was Lucifer or Ahriman who drove man out of Paradise; it was the Jahve—God Himself who did so. And as we know, this very expulsion from paradise signifies man's becoming free—the conscious experience of freedom by mankind. The possibility, the seed of freedom, was given by the expulsion from Paradise. Is it then contrary to the Biblical wisdom if we say: Once more, it was Divine Wisdom which drove men out of the present age that was leading them down into materialism and utilitarianism, thus planting seeds, which, spiritually taken hold of, can really help the world. It sounds to us out of the painful depths of the last four-and-a-half years: “Spiritual life is wishing to reveal itself through the veil of the outward phenomena; men shall learn through misfortune to turn their eyes to these revelations of the Spirit, and it will be for their salvation.”

This too is a language which will seem paradoxical to many a modern man and yet, it is the language which Christ Himself is guiding us to speak. Today it lies inherent in the very progress of Christianity to grasp the Christian truths in a new way. This can only be done if they are taken hold of spiritually. The Mystery of Golgotha, my dear friends, is a spiritual event which has entered into the evolution of the Earth. It can only be fully understood by a spiritual way of knowledge. As in the last resort it was through misfortune that mankind found the Christ, we too shall have to seek through our misfortune for the Christ through the new way of comprehension.

I admit, my dear friends, this is no ordinary comfort. Yet if we are ready to put all trivialities aside in the deeper sense of the word it is after all no little comfort, nay perhaps, it is the only comfort in our time, worthy of the dignity of man. It is not the kind of comfort which says to man: Only wait, and without your cooperation all the divine things will be vouchsafed to you! Rather does it say: Make use of your own forces, and you will find that the God is speaking and abounding in your souls. Then, through this God, you will also find the God in the great Universe, and—which is the most important—you yourselves will be able to work in communion with Him. We must depart from the mere passive attitude to super-sensible knowledge. Man must bestir himself within to find himself, and as he does so, recognize himself as part of the World-Order. Let the religious faiths rebel, which want to make things nice and comfortable for lulling a man's spirit to sleep in clouds of incense (I speak figuratively) so that he may then find his way to the Divine passively and without active cooperation on his part. Let them rebel however much against the call that now springs forth out of the spiritual worlds!—“Man shall now look for his true worth in inner spiritual activity—in the active inner development of spiritual life!”

This, my dear friends, must be; and it must be so especially if we are to reckon with the social demands of our time. I have said so already in these weeks. We are living—at any rate, a great part of our educated humanity are living—from the achievements of Greek culture; but we do not always remember how these achievements, by which we live, were created. Greek civilization was unfolded on a basis of slavery. A great proportion of mankind had to live as slaves in order to bring about at all what we now feel as the blessings of Greek culture. Let us face the fact fully and clearly. All that Greek Art, Greek learning signifies—all this and many other things arose on the foundation of slavery. Then, my dear friends, we shall ask ourselves with renewed intensity: What is it that has brought about the inner change? We today no longer think as did the great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, who took slavery as an absolute matter of course. At that time it went without saying, even for the wisest of men, that nine-tenths of mankind must live as slaves. For us today it no longer goes without saying. On the contrary, we regard it as an offence against the dignity of man that anyone should think so. What was it then that brought it about for Western humanity—this radical change in men's way of thought? It was Christianity which freed men from slavery and led them to recognize, at least in principle, that all men are equal before God, as to their soul. For this was the principle which uprooted slavery out of the social order of mankind. But as we know—for we must refer to it again and again from many points of view—one thing has been left behind until our day. It is that of which I told you that it is the salient point in the consciousness of the modern working man. One thing has been left behind, namely the possibility—in our social order—for a part of the human being to be bought as a commodity and sold by himself as a commodity. Moreover it is a part of man that takes its course in his very body. The salient point of the social question—the perpetual irritant, the thing that continually incites—is the fact that human labor-power can be paid for. This too creates at the very foundations of all our social order the character of Egoism. For egoism cannot but prevail in the social (I say once more, in the social order—please understand me aright) if to obtain what he requires for his own needs a man must get his labor paid for. He is obliged to earn for himself.

This is the next and necessary stage—after the overcoming of slavery—it must be made impossible for any man's labor to be a commodity. This is the true salient point of the social question, and it is this which the new Christianity will solve. In recent lectures I have told you something of the solving of the social question. For that three-folding of the social order, of which I told you there, sets free the commodity from the labor-power of man. In future, men will only buy and sell commodities—outer objects, things separate from man himself—which (as I wrote already in my essay on Theosophy and the Social Question which appeared in 1905) one man will work for another from motives of brotherly love.

It may be a long way to go to attain this end. Yet this and this alone will solve the social question. Whoever will not believe today that this must come about in the world-order is like a man who would have said, at the time of the origin of Christianity: “Slaves there must always be.” Even as he would have been wrong at that time, so likewise today the man is wrong who says: “Labor must always be paid for.” At that time it seems unimaginable that a certain number of men should not be slaves. Not even Plato or Aristotle could conceive it. Today the cleverest of men cannot conceive a social order wherein Labor would have quite another value—quite another meaning than of being paid for. Needless to say, even then the product will proceed from the labor, but the product alone will be able to be bought and sold. Socially, this very fact will be the salvation of men.

To realize these things it is indeed necessary to have the knowledge of spiritual vision, the logic of things seen. Without it humanity will not go forward. The logic of spiritual vision is the fuel to create what must arise among mankind in future, namely that human love which springs from the understanding between man and man. Strange as it sounds, my dear friends, today, when all manner of atavistic remnants are still there in men in one way or another—today everything is still regarded with sympathies and antipathies. So it is, for instance, when we explain such distinctions as I here did a little while ago. I said that of the three members of human nature the Western peoples are called especially to develop the abdominal nature, the Middle peoples the heart-nature and the Eastern peoples the head nature. Nowadays, such things are nearly always treated as judgments of relative value, in one way or another. At least, somewhere inside him every man still has a little pigeon-hole where he does so. Such valuation must absolutely cease, for this very vision of the differentiations of mankind over the whole Earth's sphere will become the basis of sympathetic, understanding love. From understanding, not from ignorance, true human love—reaching over the whole Earth—will spring, during this age of the Spiritual Soul. Then will men know, over the whole Earth, how to find themselves in Christ. Christ is no concern of one nation or another. He concerns all mankind; but to recognize this, many an illusion must first give way.

Men must be able to raise themselves, to look without illusions into the true nature of things. Today, in many spheres of life, they are unwilling to do so. And yet, I know I am speaking in the spirit of the true Christmas peace in placing the following paradox before you. My dear friends, you know well that I am not speaking of the individual human beings but of the nations as a whole when I refer to these differentiations. It is so easy to misunderstand these things unless one has good will. As I have pointed out so often, the single human individuality who grows out of the nation is not intended; only nations as such. I beg you to bear this in mind when I now say the following:—

You see, my dear friends, let us consider the one or other of the judgments which have been passed during the last four years on the countries, or States, of the Middle of Europe. I can thoroughly understand such feelings. I do not want to say anything in the least against those who are filled with enthusiasm for the Entente. Far be it from me—everyone has his opinion, and that is justified from a certain point of view. But, my dear friends, suppose we now look away from the opinion which prevailed in the past few years and consider its prolongation in the present time. Then after all, perhaps we may find something rather hard for understanding. For we may ask ourselves: Is it necessary for the judgments which were passed, while the potentates of the middle countries held the reins of power, to be continued now? Nay is it necessary to do all that one can—and by the most refined of methods—so as to be able to prolong these judgments? Is it necessary? Is it equally explicable? Superficially considered, it is certainly not so easy to explain as many such things were before. More deeply considered however, it is still explicable, my dear friends. More deeply considered we can understand it—albeit not out of the character of the individuals (for the individuals themselves in Western countries will want to bring about a healing of these matters). Those, however, whose judgments merely spring from their respective nationalities, or rather, national prejudices—they have in their subconsciousness something which we may characterize as follows:—

Some weeks ago I explained that in our conception of the world and notably our way of thinking at the present time much that belongs to the Old Testament is still alive, while the essential nerve of Christianity has only entered to a slight extent as yet. Now it is characteristic of Jahve-worship that it concerns all those things to which we do not bring ourselves up between our birth and death, but which are given to us as an inheritance—i.e., the things which lie inherent in our blood, which in the normal course only have influence on us while we sleep, while we ourselves are outside the body. This Jahve-conception still lives and throbs in our time to a very large extent, and it can only rise into the Christ-conception if we turn in this intellectualistic age with all our power to the conquest of the spiritual world, not through birth, not through what is inspired into us with our birth, but through our own self-education in this life. Now by nature the West is not predestined to pass from the service of Jahve to that of Christ. Such predestination only begins in the Middle of Europe and goes towards the East. This applies once more, needless to say, not to the individual but to the nation. Hence, my dear friends, the characteristic form of Wilsonian thought, steeped as it is entirely in Old Testament conceptions. However much it may deny the fact, the form of thought stands out as though it would fain exterminate what is trying spiritually to emerge in the Middle Countries and in the East. Hence it is outwardly so hard to understand. Under all manner of pretexts, these people still prolong the same hostile spirit, though they have swept away what they professed they wanted to sweep away, and only the peoples themselves are left, against whom—so they assured us—they had no ill intentions. They do so because in reality they are resisting what has arisen in spiritual evolution in the Middle Countries and in the East during the last few centuries, which, nonetheless, is necessary to mankind. Subconsciously, they want to expunge it. They do not want to enter into these things.

We are now living in a most important crisis of the world. I have often heard people ask; how is it that the men of the West especially the English and the French—have such a dreadful hatred of the Germans? There is a very simple answer, my dear friends, and yet it is an exhaustive answer. Man always sees himself differently (especially himself as member of a nationality) than he sees his fellow men. I can assure you, my dear friends, such thoughts as Mach had when he got into the bus or walked along the street are very often there in the subconscious lives of men. You know how Mach himself relates the story. Once, very tired, he got into a bus and did not notice that there was a mirror on the side opposite the door. Someone else, he thought, got in at the same time from the other side, and he said to himself: What a horrid old schoolmaster that is! He knew himself very little in his outward person and when he saw himself he did not like it at all.

Now, my dear friends, observe the spiritual history of Middle Europe—not in its more intimate features but as a whole. Down to Lessing, far down into the last third of the 18th century, the Germans took pains to be like the French. You could see it in everything. From a certain moment onward (approximately in the 12th century) till far beyond the middle of the 18th century, the Germans endeavored to be like the French—to behave in such a way that they also might become Frenchmen. What the French could not see in themselves—or, if they saw it, were inclined to rate it highly—all this they hated with a dreadful hatred when they saw it in the imitation. Unconsciously, man does indeed practice a strange form of self-knowledge. At bottom, in their deepest being, the Germans were never hated by the French. The French only hated themselves when they saw their mirrored image in the German soul.

Since then a very remarkable English influence has arisen, the extent of which is by no means adequately realized. The English naturally see themselves just as little as Mach did; but they notice themselves well enough when they see themselves in this mirrored image which has entered so strongly into the German soul since the 18th century. It is the Englishman whom they now judge in the German. There is the simple psychological solution, my dear friends. If the world-crisis had not arisen, this state of affairs would have gone on for a long time, and we should have a great mixture, as it were a broth, out of which single individualities would nevertheless have arisen, possessing the intimate qualities of the true German. Now, however, out of the world-crisis, chaos and misfortune will cause to arise what must arise: that which was always present, though under the power of the West it was unable to unfold. These are the real facts. There is no ground for pessimism, even in Middle Europe. We must only dive to the deeper foundations which underlie the process of evolution.

My dear friends, what the Entente Powers are doing today may appear thus, or thus. It matters very little how it appears, for at the bottom of their hearts they are wanting what is quite impossible. They are wanting to prevent the rise of something which absolutely must unfold in the Middle of Europe and in the East, for it is connected with the spiritual progress of mankind; it cannot be prevented. But it must also call forth this, my dear friends:—If man is to take the future of the Earth in earnest he must truly have faith in the Spirit; only out of the power of the Spirit will there come what must come, even for the solving of the burning social needs of our time. In the machine age it was necessary for these 50 million invisible human beings—that is to say, human beings visible as machines—to arise, so that men might gradually learn to feel that they must not be paid like machines are paid. And it was also necessary for this appalling catastrophe to arise, wherein the machine age has celebrated its greatest triumphs. Out of this catastrophe man will begin to unfold his real strength, and as he does so, he will gain a certain power once more to unite himself with the Divine and Spiritual. If we may now compare what many people have rightly called the most appalling event in the Earth's history with the beginning of Earth-evolution we may say: just as it was no mere misfortune for men to be driven out of Paradise, so too it is no mere misfortune that such a catastrophe has overtaken mankind.

In the end, my dear friends, the most valuable truths are paradoxes today, as I have often pointed out, we may well say: Men were so infamous as to nail to the Cross the greatest Being Who ever appeared on the Earth—Jesus Christ. They killed Him. We may well say that it was infamous of them. And yet this Death, my dear friends, is the very content of Christianity; for through this Death there took place what we call the Mystery of Golgotha. Without it there would be no Christianity. This Death is the good fortune of men; this Death is the abounding strength of earthly man. So paradoxical are things in their reality. For on the one hand we may say: how infamous it was of men to nail Christ to the Cross; and yet, with this Death—this nailing to the Cross—the greatest event on Earth is brought about. A misfortune is not always merely a misfortune; often it is the starting-point for the achievement of human greatness and of human strength.

In the two lectures following the performance of the later Walpurgis-night scene, from the second part of Faust, I hoped to evoke the feeling that, in the whole of his inner life, Goethe was in reality on the path to the supersensible world. I wanted you to feel that he succeeded, as perhaps no other artist, no other poet, has ever done, in developing an artistic creation out of this spiritual life, so that in this creation neither the art not the wisdom falls short and, in its own place, each of the spheres—of striving and wisdom—achieves harmonic expression.

I should not like you to think that in what has been said I have been wishing to give an interpretation of this poem; that was not at all my aim. For in this sphere I consider interpretation to be utterly useless. All that was attempted in these studies was to create the possibility for you to absorb and enjoy a poem, a work of art, in the same element in which it was created. Such studies should simply teach the language, as it were, the spiritual language, in which such a work is written, and should not expound or interpret, for as a rule that too often results in misconstruction and misinterpretation.

Now, if we keep to this mood in the matter, the following may perhaps be of use. You see, there are two fundamental feelings at the base of all striving for knowledge, of every kind of striving towards spiritual experience. One of these feelings comes from man having to think, having to form ideas, as he lives his life between birth and death in the physical body. I think you will agree that we should not be complete human beings, were we not to think about things and about ourselves. Then, too, if we wish to make our lives fuller in the physical body, between birth and death, we have not only to think but also to will. And feeling lies midway between thinking and willing; sometimes it partakes more of thinking and forming ideas, sometimes more of willing. Hence, for the purpose of our proposed study, we may ignore feeling, and consider the one pole of forming ideas, thinking, and then turn to the other pole of human activity, the willing. Man is a thinking and a willing being. But there are special features about this thinking and willing. The trivially-minded, average man looks upon what can be attained as the attainment of a goal if, on the one hand, he thinks as clearly and forcibly as possible, in his own opinion, at least, and if he wills in accordance with his needs. What distinguishes the man of learning who is fundamentally honest, is that he finally admits, when he tries to advance on the path of thinking, that with his thinking in the physical body he still only goes a certain distance towards his goal.

With this thinking, my dear friends, it is exactly as if a man were striving towards a goal; he cannot see it though knowing in what direction it lies. He wants to hasten towards it, but although he knows where the goal must be, it is wrapped in darkness. He imagines it will only become clear when he reaches it. And while he is feeling that he is still nowhere near the goal but a considerable distance from it, some being seems to seize from from behind, and to stop him going farther. And he says: Thinking, the forming of ideas, drives me in a certain direction, then I am stopped; were I to pursue the path of thought in this direction, I should never be able to reach the goal thinking itself has indicated.—Thus he comes to one of the boundaries to which he is by nature subject in the life between birth and death. And it may be said that whoever has never experienced the suffering and blows of fate arising from the goal of thought, has certainly no very deep cognitional life. If, by the inner constitution of his soul, a man can fancy he is able to reach the goal of thought by thinking, he is doomed to superficiality. We can be preserved from superficiality only when by trying to think as deeply and clearly as possible, we begin to feel harassed by the hindrances to thought. This feeling of being frustrated in thought is a profound human experience, without which we cannot pass beyond superficiality into a really deep comprehension of life.

And this is not the only boundary set to the human being's full experience between birth and death; the other is encountered where the will is unfolded. This is the sphere in which there germinate men's desires arising out of the life of instinct. Man is driven to willing in the crudest sense through hunger and thirst and other instincts; and there is then a rising scale from instinct up to the purest spiritual ideals. In all these impulses, from grossest instincts up to spiritual ideals, willing is deployed. But now, if we are to try and establish ourselves in life with our will that passes over into action, we again come to a boundary. Fundamentally, Goethe's aim in Faust was to establish Faust in life by means of his will, so that he should be able to experience all that makes life happy, all that shatters life, all that gives freedom and all that is sinful. And if we try to take our stand in life with the will that passes over into action, the will translated into deed, we again find ourselves up against a boundary. But now it is a different feeling that arises. It is not so much that in our thinking we are stopped and hindered from reaching our goal, but rather that, while we are willing, we are seized upon, and our willing goes on no longer in accordance with our own wishes. In the act of willing one is snatched away. Someone else arises in our willing, who carries us off.

This then is the second feeling which, when experienced by man, leads him out of superficiality into a profound conception of life. Self-satisfied philistines, it is true, are of the opinion that a man reaches his goal by sufficiently developing his thinking and willing. But it is on these paths of complacency and self-satisfaction that the superficiality of life lies. There does not lie here what makes it possible in life's testing, after suitable probation and the crossing of an abyss, to enter another world, a world that cannot be lived through with the consciousness developed in the life between birth and death. A man is tested when, with suitable intensity, he realises in his soul the two boundary lines already referred to. Men must understand precisely from what Goethe has given, that it is not merely the bliss of endeavor—often imaginary and based on pure illusion—that can be experienced, but rather what leads a man to his goal over all hindrances, disappointments and disillusions. And whoever strives to avoid disillusionment, and refuses to transform, to metamorphose, the whole human being in certain moments of life, cannot press forward to knowledge of man, to the understanding of man.

We need not realise, my dear friends, that in this connection the Christ-permeated conception of the world and of life must, in the near future, experience a significant change. Hitherto, Christianity through the way it has developed in the different religious denominations is, usually, only at its initial stage. If we want to describe this development, we might say that it has created the feeling in man that Christ did once exist. And even this feeling that Christ once existed has been lost again in the materialistic research of the nineteenth century. What Christ brought into the world, Christ's connection with the striving of the human soul, into all this life will first pour in future through the researches of Spiritual Science, and through a spiritual kind of cosmic feeling—a supersensible experience. This will be seen if, to begin with, in this intellectual age, the majority of mankind can only have the experience in Imaginations, in imaginative pictures.

But these two basic feelings of which I have just spoken as arising from the two boundaries of self-knowledge and self-comprehension, these two feelings must find a crossing-point from a passive to an active Christianity. Just think how, for many people in the past, Christ has been nothing more than a helper in straits where a man is unable to help himself. Think of the strange way in which the Roman Catholic Church took on, at a certain time, the forgiveness of sins; anyone might sin as much as he liked, provided he repented and did due penance afterwards, he was forgiven. In short, Christ was there to help in time of need, to make good what men as a whole had no intention themselves of making good. And then look at the other, more Protestant error, where a man remains passive too, arranging his worldly life, his worldly activities, to suit himself, and then perhaps expecting that merely by belief in Christ, by a passive feeling of being united with Christ, he will be saved. This twofold passive relation to Christ belongs, and must belong, to the past. And what is to take its place must be a relation to Christ that is an active force, a going to meet Him, so that Christ does not do for a man what the man does not want to do, but gives him power through His being to do it himself. An active Christianity—or rather a Christianity that comes to activity—is what must take the place of passive Christianity in which actually (forgive the trivial mode of expression) a man does what he pleases on the physical plane, making God into a kindly friend who pardons everything if only man turns to Him at the right moment.

This my dear friends, will at the same time mark the dividing line between the age which must now belong to the past, the age that has led to so terrible a human catastrophe, and the age that must come. It is only when this coming age has passed over from a Christianity that is passive to one that is active, that it will be qualified to heal those evils that have already shown themselves and will continue to do so increasingly so long as the principles of the past prevail. These evils are rooted deep in human hearts and souls; and they must be healed if earth-evolution is to proceed.

The two basic feelings of the boundaries to thinking and willing may also be described by saying: The one boundary makes it clear that a man cannot arrive at knowledge of his own nature. As human beings we are so constituted that we cannot, on the one hand, arrive at our own human nature, cannot with our thinking reach ourselves. In willing we do this, for willing actually proceeds form ourselves; in willing we lose ourselves; but here another seizes us—another cosmic being is formed simply according to the principle of this duality. He is a dual being, not a monad, but a dual being. The one member of this twofold being cannot reach itself, the other loses itself.

Hence man is never correctly represented when shown as a mere monad, but only when an effort is made to show him as standing midway between being unable to reach himself, and losing himself. And when it is possible for men to feel both at the same time with all intensity, then he feels himself rightly as a man on earth. When he feels a kind of oscillation between the two, then he feels himself man on earth. In spite of this oscillation, what must be arrived at is repose of being. This repose of being is attained in the physical sphere by the pendulum, the balance; in the spiritual, moral sphere, man must be able to attain the condition of repose reached by the balance and the pendulum. He must not aspire to a position of absolute rest; that would make him indolent and corrupt. He should strive for the state of repose midway between the beats, midway between the not-reaching and the losing himself.

In order to develop these feelings correctly it is essential that other feelings be added concerning life and reality.

You know, my dear friends, I have often called your attention to the one-sided way in which evolution is understood today. Think how the whole of evolution is now conceived as if what comes after were always the result of what went before. Actually, the man of today thinks of the successive stages of evolution almost like a set of cardboard boxes fitting into one another. And then, as for development, one box represents the human being between birth and the seventh year; then the second is taken out, and that is the human being from seven to fourteen; the third from fourteen to one-and twenty, and so on—one always coming out of another. To modern man the most acceptable idea is evolutionary advance in a straight line.

This is really at the bottom of all the grotesque notions that are learnt at school nowadays, notions which in future will be regarded as scientific lunacy of the enlighted period of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To imagine thus that there was once a nebular condition (the Kant-Laplace theory) and that then, one after another, cardboard box out of cardboard box, the successive stages always proceeded out of the earlier—this is an abnormal idea of present-day science. For things are not like that. Just think how evolution in the individual man between birth and death appears, to even a moderately unprejudiced observation! The actual limit of the first period in life is the change of teeth, as we know—the cutting of the second teeth. I have often drawn attention to this. How what is this second cutting of teeth at about the seventh year, at the close of the first life-period? It is a consolidation, a hardening, of the human being, when a hardening process takes place in men. It is like a drawing together of all the life-forces, so that eventually the densest, most mineralised part, the second teeth, can appear. It is a real concentration and densification of all the forces of life.

The second period in life ends at puberty. And the case here is exactly the reverse. Here there is no concentration of life-forces but, on the contrary, a rarefication of them all, a dispersal, an overflowing. An opposite condition pulses in the organism. And then again, only in a more refined way, in the twenty-first year when the third life-period ends, consolidation takes place in man, the forces of life are once more drawn together. With the twenty-eighth year there is again expansion. The twenty-first year has more to do with the placing of what is within man,the twenty-eighth more with his attitude to the whole wide universe. Approximately at the thirty-fifth year there is again a kind of contraction. That is the middle life—the thirty-fifth year.

Thus, evolution does not go in a straight line but, rather, in waves: contraction, hardening; softening, expansion. That is essentially the life of man as a whole. By being born here in the physical world, we contract into our individual skins; while we are living our life between death and a new birth, we are increasingly expanding.

What follows from all this, my dear friends? It follows that the idea of evolution going in a straight line is of no help at all; it leads mankind astray, and we must reject it. All evolution proceeds rhythmically; all evolution goes with the rise and fall of waves—expanding, contracting.

Contraction, expansion. Goethe sensed this in its elementary stages. Read his Metamorphosis of Plants; read his poem The Metamorphosis of Plants, and you will see how he follows the particular formation from foliage leaf to foliage leaf, then to petal, stamen, on to pistil; how he describes it as a continuous expansion, contraction, not only in external forms, the saps also expand with their forces and again contract—expand, concentrate; expand, concentrate. When in the eighties of the last century I wrote my first introduction to Goethe's scientific works, I tried to reconstruct his archetypal plant, tried to bring into a picture this expansion, contraction, expansion, contraction—on and on right up to the blossom. No one can really understand life who does not picture it in rhythm, as a progressive rhythmic process. It must be repeatedly emphasised that to imagine evolution as proceeding in a straight line does not help us to a true understanding of life.

The same applies to the understanding of man's historical life. In the most recent number of the periodical Das Reich (October 1918) where I dealt with Lucifer and Ahriman in life, I pointed out how luciferic and ahrimanic periods alternate rhythmically in historic evolution. Life never proceeds in a straight line; it goes in waves. But while this is so, it is associated also with an external change. And only by looking clear-sightedly into these relations can we arrive at a deeper comprehension of life. Those who think of evolution as proceeding in a straight line, say: First there existed the most undeveloped animals, then more and more perfect ones, up to the apes, and out of these developed man.—If we apply this to what is moral—I have often called your attention to this—if we extend this further, it follows that the genuine, thorough-going Darwinian says: We already see in the human kindliness, and so on. This again is a worthless idea, for it takes no account at all of the rhythm of life. According to this idea evolution goes on in a straight line, one cardboard box coming out of another. In reality the matter is like this. Imagine the most highly developed animals with their proclivities further developed in a straight line—this way you do not arrive at man, you would never come to man. But the more highly developed animals would evolve those very qualities you find attractive in the animal kingdom, in a most unattractive way. What you admire in animals as companionableness, as incipient good-will and social behaviour, when further developed turns to its rhythmic opposite—to the principle of evil. Mad man developed according to Haeckel's idea, then, my dear friends, there would have evolved from the anthropoid apes a human society inevitably destined to develop the war of all against all. For in all these aptitudes, good as they may be in animals, there lies the further evolutionary impulse to clash together in violent and most bloody conflict. That is rhythm, a wave-like rise and fall, and no one finds what is hidden in nature who does not see the possibilities of evolution in rhythm. To look only on the outside of events can never teach us to realise what in reality is there. Man was able to develop only because, in the higher animals, their evolutionary possibilities did not come to anything, for these were met by another wave of cosmic becoming which subdued the tendency to evil, in a way overcame it, by what men were meant to be in the very beginning. So that we have to picture it thus: The animal kingdom rises to a certain height; then comes the other wave to meet it, and this deadens the evil development.

My dear friends, reincarnation can also be regarded from the moral point of view. What would man have become had he just been born, over and over again on the physical plane, and being thus born physically on the physical plane, he had not been met by all that is constantly being taken up into the spiritual world and again sent down; were man not thus ensouled after birth then he would live always at war on earth. They would only with to live in conflict and would develop the most terrible fighting instincts. These fighting instincts rest on the foundation of the human soul; they are rooted in the human organism. But they are paralysed, if I may so express it, by what comes from above out of the supersensible, from those human beings who are constantly taken up into the spiritual world. This is expressed also in the outward form, my dear friends. It is altogether grotesque for those with inner sight when the human head is represented as having gradually evolved from the animal head. It is indeed complete nonsense. The truth is that, were the animal head to develop further, a fearsome monster would emerge in what, in the present incarnation, you evolve out of the lower part of your body. Were that alone to form the head, were it to form the head out of itself, the result would be a real abortion of a head—a horrible animal-monster. For that is where the possibility of such a monstrosity lies. Only because the spiritual comes from above and, as it were, washes up against it, is the human head able to arise. It springs from the relationship of two forces, the one pressing upward from the body, the other coming to meet it from the cosmos. This human head is constructed in a state of equilibrium; and it is because of its equilibrium that we are not able to deal freely with what we bring with us from the spiritual world. We slip into our physical head and cannot there clearly express what we actually are, when we hurry into existence through birth. If we could think as we did before birth, we should not think a Homunculus, we should think a man, a Homo.

You remember in my Christmas lecture at Basle (December 22, 1918) not long ago, I mentioned in passing that, before his birth, Nikolaus von der Flüe saw scenes that he lived through as a man after his birth. But when a man is born, and does not overcome being asleep in his cognition—that is, when he cannot develop waking existence outside his body, but thinks only with his body—then he never thinks a man but only a Homunculus. A man never reaches the real man by seeking to enter into himself through the head. It is really a fact thgat he seeks to enter in but is held back; somewhere in the middle of man there exists what his is unable to reach. This is within man himself, yet he remains Homunculus and does not come to Homo.

Actually were we in possession of every technical resource, we should put into the phial that represents Homunculus on the stage, only a horrible little monstrosity, small, and therefore not unattractive; and this is really what would come into being were it left to the human body alone, out of itself, to produce something. There would come forth a sort of animal that nevertheless would be no animal but a human abortion; something on the way to becoming human yet not quite succeeding. Neither do we succeed if we do not make the approach by way of this path to becoming men, this path that does not reach man. We do not then succeed for we do not thus enter inside ourselves.

And again, if man grasps himself through his will, he is immediately seized upon by another being. Then he loses himself, then all kinds of strange motives and impulses surge up into his willing. Only when a man endeavours to bring the inner forces into equilibrium does he succeed in becoming complete man.

Now, my dear friends, with what I have said compare three different passages in the second part of Goethe's Faust that you can now have the opportunity on witnessing. Think of the sublime moment when Faust appears before Manto. Goethe is trying here to shed over the whole incident the inner repose of the human soul called forth by experiencing equilibrium. Faust would like, on the one hand, to avoid the sentimentality of the abstract mystic, and one of his last speeches is “O, could I from my path all magic ban”. He did not want external magic, he wanted to find the inner path to the supersensible world. He is near it, and then again far from it. As I explained yesterday Goethe is perfectly honest when Faust is standing before Manto. But Faust, my dear friends, does not hold to this abstract repose; he is tossed from pillar to post. Hence from the one side he is continually thrown to the opposite, where man loses himself through the will. Compare all this with what happens to Faust in the scenes where he is developing his life with Mephistopheles. There you have always the Faust of will, who, however is continually losing himself by his impulses being seized by Mephistopheles. This is where a man goes astray in his willing, where he will lose himself; here you have all the dangers that threaten man's moral impulses. And this is expressed with tremendous depth in Goethe's Faust.

Then take the moment when Mephistopheles joins the Phorkyads, when he himself takes on the form of a Phorkyad, and in all his ugliness goes as far as admitting it. Previously he was lying, but when the Phorkyads surround him he is obliged to admit his ugliness. Read the speech of the Phorkyads again; they too acknowledge their ugliness, and are in a certain way honest in their ugliness. In this moment you have a contrast to that sacred and sublime moment when Faust stands before Manto. What makes us lose ourselves in motives of will is clearly seen when Mephistopheles appears for the last time in the Classical Walpurgis-Night. Faust appears for the last time visibly, in the external drama, precisely in this scene with Manto—Mephistopheles in the scene with the Phorkyads. Goethe wished to indicate from the depths of his profound experience that, fundamentally, what makes us lose ourselves in the motives of will can only be set right if we not merely abhor it morally, but also experience it as something offending our taste. This was at the root of Schiller's feeling too, when he placed what is moral in such close connection with the aesthetic in his Aesthetic Letters.

This is just what is so distressing, my dear friends, that in the recent development of mankind culture has been brought to such a high pitch as, for instance, we see in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters, and this has all been forgotten. Imagine how Schiller believed that in these letters, written in the first place to the Duke of Augustonburg, he had brought about a deed of political significance. Whoever grasps the following two facts in their true depth learns much concerning the evolution of mankind. First he learns that Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were the outcome of his conception of Goethe's urge towards becoming; and, secondly, that this could be forgotten, that this forgetting has largely contributed to the present human catastrophe. Those who keep these two facts before them indeed learn much about the evolution of humanity.

And, from the point of view of drama, how great is the moment when in the terrible scene where Mephistopheles is among the Phorkyads we are shown how what is morally impermissible lives in man like a feeling that is aesthetically offensive. There, shown in all its atrocity, is the impulse, the essential impulse, that drives man to lose himself in the pole of will. Should a man fail to recognise this it will prove his ruin; only by realising it is one freed from it. You will find this expressed in the last scene of my first Mystery Play, The Portal of Initiation. There it is shown how only knowledge, a clear conception of who it is who tempts and seduces us, can save us from being led astray. It is therefore essential in the age of the consciousness-soul now entered that, in order to overcome temptation, we should strive in the right way to come to know the tempter, not allowing ourselves to sink down into a merely external knowledge of nature and a merely abstract mysticism.

In short, my dear friends, abstract mysticism, the ‘easy understanding of the divine within’, from which nothing results but a terrible egotistical abstraction—this abstract mysticism is just as bad as materialism.

As I said, take three moments in Goethe's Faust. Take purely artistically what you can feel as Faust stands before Manto; what you feel when Mephistopheles becomes a Phorkyad among the Phorkyads. And take the third moment when Homunculus crashes against Galatea's shell-chariot—feel what this Homunculus is. We come from the spiritual world seeking through conception and birth for physical existence. In this physical existence we meet with what, out of this physical existence, is given us as our physical body. Every evening we go back into the world that we leave at birth; every morning we, as it were, repeat our birth when we plunge again into our physical body. Then we can feel how, coming in from without, we do not arrive at what man is; we meet only with Homunculus, the manikin, the human being in embryo, and we realise how difficult it is to come to the real man. We might arrive at the real man could we contrive to have a perfectly clear conception just before waking, when all the evolutionary possibilities of the night are exhausted. This clear conception, my dear friends, would be a world-conception, it would be such that we should no longer feel ourselves hemmed in by any boundary, but feel as if poured out over the whole universe, over all cosmic light, all cosmic sound, all cosmic life, and in front of us a kind of abyss. One the far side of this would be a continuation of what we were feeling before we met the abyss on waking—namely, warmth. Warmth flows out over the abyss. Now, however, we cross the abyss by waking, into air, water and earth of which our organism is composed. Certainly we are approaching man, and by letting Homunculus fructify in the spiritual world, we have prepared ourselves to understand man. But in the ordinary course of life we do not do what I have just mentioned. The living conception we develop when sleep should have had its effect upon us before we wake, would have to be brought with us into waking life. This conception would be an experiencing ourselves in light, in cosmic sound, in cosmic life, a meeting with the beings of the higher hierarchies, just as here the physical body comes into connection with the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms. This conception, developed concisely just before waking when sleep has done its work upon us, we should have to bring deep down into our physical body; then we should be able to understand what this human body is. But alas “the Gods will not suffer it”. We plunge down; it flashes, flames up, and we hardly notice it. Instead of looking into ourselves, we hear with our external ears; instead of feeling ourselves within our skin, we feel what is outside with our sense of touch. If we did not sink down into what we are able to reach only by the physical eye, the physical ear, through physical sound and physical touch, Homunculus would receive new life and become man, but against the resistance of the elements he is dashed to pieces. The light of the eye flames up instead of cosmic light, we begin to hear physical sound in the ear instead of cosmic sound, the life of the body is aroused instead of cosmic life—Homunculus is shattered. If we experience this consciously, we experience the end of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Thus, this end scene is taken from actual, true life.

These things are not there merely to be spoken of on Sunday afternoons in the Anthroposophical Society. They are there as truth, to become gradually known to mankind, so that as impulses they may with their being penetrate what must be accepted in the future evolution of man, if he is to advance to what can save and not destroy. For men will really find the correct connection with reality only if they adopt new concepts and from now onwards they begin to see what has always been extolled as the great achievement of the nineteenth century is at an end.

You see, my dear friends, it is not surprising that, from a certain point of view, this achievement of the nineteenth century, that continued into the twentieth, should be felt to be perfect. It is not to be wondered at all. Is it not true that before the tree becomes bare in autumn, it is in its fruiting in its most perfect stage of development. This natural science of the nineteenth century, that still haunts the twentieth, al these technical perfections that have reached a certain height, are the tree before it yields its fruit. All from which it has grown has to wither, and it is not enough that the tree should go on growing, a fresh seed must be sown in the field of human culture, a new tree must be planted. It does not suffice to think we understand the evolution of animals, to think of them as having advanced to the stage of man. It is not enough that frequently some spirit arises, who first writs articles of genius about animals, and later, to follow these, a book about the origin of man. Rather is it essential that men should discard the idea of a straight line in evolution, that they should learn to understand the rhythm of life, flowing like the waves of the sea, that they should learn how, in the inner being of man, the way does not go straight on, but across two boundaries. At the one boundary we feel almost suffocated, for someone seizes us and will not allow us to go where our thinking would take us. On the other side we feel as if the powers of Mephistopheles were dragging us to destruction. We must find the balance between what belongs to Homunculus and what belongs to Mephistopheles, between not being able to reach ourselves in Homunculus, and grasping the self only to lose it in Mephistopheles. The understanding of this equilibrium is what modern man must gain. And Goethe, foreseeing this in feeling, lived himself into this understanding when with absolute honesty he tried in his Faust to speak as he did of the riddle of humanity.

Mankind must strive to grow out of what today is the typical point of view of the crowd. Nothing is more resented at present than this striving, and nothing is more injurious to mankind than this hostility against any effort to rise above the commonplace. On the other hand, as long as this resistance is not definitely opposed by those who recognise the necessity of penetrating into the supersensible, there can be no sure human evolution. At the end of the nineteenth century Hamerling, in his Homunculus sought to make what we might call a last appeal to mankind out of the past, by presenting all that is decadent in modern humanity as Homunculism.

We might picture this to ourselves, my dear friends; suppose someone were now to read this Homunculus of Hamerling's which appeared at the end of the eighties of the nineteenth century. I have given many lectures about it, even before the war I actually spoke of it, not without a certain significance. Let us suppose then that someone reads Hamerling's Homunculus and lets work upon him what Hamerling imagines as the evolutionary progress of his Homunculus. He thought it out at that time, when men had already broken away from Goethe and all that he gave, and wished to hear no more of it. Hamerling represented the evolution of his Homunculus, how he was completely under the sway of materialistic thinking, how he lived in a world where people did not enrich themselves with spiritual treasure but became millionaires instead. Homunculus was a millionaire. He pictured the world where men treat even spiritual matters with frivolity, the world in which journalism—with respect be it mentioned—that was already developing, has since sunk yet deeper into the slough. We assume then that someone reads this Homunculus, and he might say: Why, yes, this Hamerling who died in 1889, had, when he wrote his Homunculus, with his physical eyes actually only seen mankind as it then was, hurrying on its chosen path. He might continue: Had people then taken seriously what Hamerling emphasises in his Homunculus, had they let it work upon them a little more deeply and not just as a literary production, but as something to be taken in earnest, then indeed they would not have been surprised to learn that, because of men being as they then were, our present world-catastrophe had of necessity to arise. This is what anyone reading Homunculus today might say to himself. What is there in the development of this world-catastrophe to astonish us, when a writer in the eighties of the last century was able to represent the man Homunculus in this way? But, underlying this representation of man, of Homunculus, is at the same time the appeal not to stop short at the life that can give us only Homunculism, but to cross the abyss where Spiritual Science speaks of the supersensible knowledge that alone can change Homunculus into Homo. And so it might be said: Mankind is placed in the Homunculism which, in the scent we are today presenting, finds itself in a world the man of today is not very eager to enter—in a world leading to the region of the Phorkyads, between Homunculism and Mephistophelianism. Goethe divined this and represented it in his Faust; he also divined that a path must be made that will avoid the crags of fantastic, abstract mysticism, as it avoids the other crags of a phantom-like conception of nature, remote from all reality,a path that leads to supersensible knowledge where fresh social impulses will be found.

This is a very deep layer of consciousness. Let us penetrate it, let us permeate our feeling with it, let us learn to understand the language of this sphere of consciousness, coming as it does from the region where we feel: Through thinking, a man cannot reach himself; through willing he loses himself. To be unable to reach oneself in thinking is Homunculism; losing oneself in willing is Mephistophelianism. And when we feel this then we enter into such profound scenes with a language that makes intelligible what forms the conclusion of the Classical Walpurgis-night. Ultimately, everyone views the universe according to how the forces he has received enable him to represent it. But the present task of mankind consists in raising those forces, so that much of the universe may be seen that, to man's hurt, has not been seen during the last decades.

Thus, going deeply into such a profound scene as the one we are now producing, is a way for men to advance in the direction which mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind at this time should take. What lies in true Goetheanism is what mankind must seek. This is not the Goetheanism of the professors, not the Goetheanism of the Goethe Society at the head of which is not a Goethe enthusiast at all but a former finance minister bearing the significant name of Kreuzwendedich; neither is it all that men thought they must make out of Goethe's teaching at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. What must be sought will become something good and a good impulse towards man's advancement in the direction he must go—if in the coming age he is to find salvation and not destruction.

My dear friends,

I must again in my introduction burden you with a small piece of news, and, since this is perhaps the last of our lectures before my departure, (although my absence will not be very long this time) I have to make this rather distasteful announcement. It is one of the results of those numerous attacks which are now occurring and is distinguished from the others which I have already imparted to you, by being perhaps of an even more vulgar nature than the others. In a publication which I believe comes from not very far away, and calls itself The Suisse-Beizique Outremer, there appears an article concerning the kernel of the social question, and begins with the words:

“What an abyss there is, when we pass from an Emile Waxweiler ¹ to a Rudolf Steiner! The first seems, at first obscure in his terminology, but his thought is of great clearness. The other develops his thoughts at a length which may perhaps prove clear to his intimate disciples but his thoughts seem to us eminently obscure. The German writer is a theosophist. It is said that he was the intimate councillor, confidant and inspirer of Wilhelm II. Out of deference we will not repeat the expression used by the ‘Rasputin’ of Wilhelm II, an expression which we have heard quoted of him.”

Now, my dear friends, first the logic, which in this case pretends to morality. Now as I have had in recent times to say many things about morality, this quotation does not fit in badly. First as to the logic which is a piece of morality. A man spreads a very vulgar rumour and says at the same time that he will not contribute to this spreading. He says he will not assert something and yet asserts it! That is the logic of many persons of the present day!

Now I should just like to bring the facts before you. Our friends will remember that, in the course of the decades since the 80’s of the previous century — of course there are some here whose memories do not extend to all these decades, but that does not matter. Some of those sitting here know that I have held many lectures, and you will know that all through that time, my only relationship to Wilhelm II was to ignore him altogether. Anything else would have been impossible. In face of the attitude which indeed not only existed in what was formerly Germany or in other countries, as far as I was concerned, it is obvious that here in this land, the subject was entirely avoided. I may just say here, because I have thought about the matter since yesterday evening, when I got the article. I have considered what my relations to this Wilhelm II really are. I have seen him once when I sat in the second row of a Berlin Theatre and he sat in one of the boxes. I was as far away from him as I am here from those sitting in the last rows. Another time I was walking down Friedrich Strasse and he was riding with his generals, with the Staff-Marshall. And then I saw him once again walking in a procession, behind the coffin of the Grand-Duchess Sophie of Saxe-Weimar. I have never spoken a single word to him, and have never been in his presence.

That is the truth, my dear friends; but today the possibility exists that the truth is not only distorted by card-players at their beer-parties and by gossips at tea-parties. That indeed has been done for a long time, but it is now done by journalists, whose papers are read today without anyone bothering as to their attitude concerning the truth. So we must put forward the question: What chance in the face of such baseless corruption, has a spiritual movement which indeed finds it necessary to say, “Wisdom lies only in the truth”, and this not from any external bragging, but feeling it as the innermost nerve of its existence. In the course of our observations of the last few weeks, my dear friends, we had again and again to point out that, if what I here call spiritual science is really to press forward into the world, it is absolutely necessary that there should be a basis of honourable, upright truthfulness, as regards what it has to say to the world. I have often drawn attention to this — that it is necessary for anyone implicated in such a spiritual scientific movement, to see that even in his most insignificant words and in the most insignificant impartations of everyday facts there prevails an absolute, literal truth. Because the present inexactitude as regards the truth in everyday life, has an inner force of growth. It grows and has a vitality of its own, and it extends to these things which can really no longer be characterised, because they transcend all measure of what is common to man, for in those human beings who in such a way multiply their culminations on paper by means of the art of printing, there is that which makes our civilisation corrupt. It is indeed true that as long as the conflict is not taken up in an earnest and upright way against everything which comes from such holes and corners, humanity will simply involve itself more deeply into those things which can be so clearly perceived today.

My dear friends, we must behold in such symptoms, what is now happening in the world; therefore it is here necessary that in small things as well as in great, all that opposes a sense of truth must be fought again and again. Anyone who has the smallest idea of what is really connected today with the personality of Rasputin, knows from what baseless, vulgar quarter such calumny comes. You see, my dear friends, it is not merely from the clerical side that the attacks become more and more numerous; but also from the side of the laity, many things threaten the spiritual scientific impulse which seeks to make itself felt in civilisation. I should really like to find words that have more power than mine have had hitherto, for this reveals itself at every turn. I really want words which have more carrying-powers than mine have had hitherto, in order to fight that which opposes the spreading today of truth in the world. One would like to find more force, because unfortunately the souls of most men today are really asleep concerning what is here meant by truth, and they forget the infinite earnestness behind these matters as soon as it has been placed before them.

I want to say the following to you today, as the principal thing. I want you to try, during the next few weeks in which I shall not be able to hold lectures here, to meditate on the feeling for truth, on the attitude towards truth, on the carrying-power, momentous sense of truth, and upon the dreadfully corruptive influence of the tendency to untruth which permeates the world so intensely today. Believe me, human thoughts are real powers; and untruths, even if they prevail in tiny things, are deathly for what must be designated as the spirit furthering earthly development. In the long run one cannot help in spreading what is most to further the earth, if one has again and again, to encounter pure untruth. So I had again to say this as introduction, in order that you might be clear that this might result even perhaps in esotericism having gradually to abandon what is passing among our ranks as a spiritual scientific movement. Do not think that these words are without importance. It is necessary that each should take council earnestly with himself, and should meditate on his own attitude to the question of the carrying power of truth, as seen in small things in everyday communications — and to untruth, which may appear as a corrupt, immoral, illogical statement, as in this article. These things differ only in quantity; in quality they are fundamentally the same.

You see, what I have said in these weeks culminates in the fact that we are facing the breaking-in of a spiritual world into our present world, which is the result of that cultural development which began about the middle of the 15th century. About that time everything became different in the civilised world. That which men before that time, had brought into their consciousness, dealt more with the inner being of man’s organism. You can find in old writings, in so far as they are to be had today, expressions which are very similar to our physical, chemical expressions, as I mentioned in the last lecture. But modern chemists and physicists will not really understand the things written in such books, for the simple reason that they believe that these terms refer to external processes. These external processes are not therein described, but inner processes of man’s physical or other bodies only. Only since the time of Galileo or Giordano Bruno has man begin to turn his attention more to the external world, and today we are so far advanced that we have a natural science, which has already influenced popular thinking, and even now popular feeling. We have a natural science which speaks of man, things in the mineral, plant and animal kingdoms, but can in no way give explanations of the being of man himself; not even as regards his physical, bodily nature. Today man must already put this question: “How am I, as a human being, related to what is in the external kingdoms around me, to that which surrounds me in the animal, plant, mineral, in the external physical human kingdom, in the kingdom of air and water, fire, of clouds, sun, moon and stars, how am I, as man related to all that?” Now we cannot rationally answer this, unless we recapitulate some things which we have had to observe concerning man. When we consider man as he stands before us, as a being of sense and intellect we can say: “We perceive through our eyes, through our ears, through the other sense organs which, although scattered over the rest of the body, are really Head-organs; through these senses we perceive the external world. We then elaborate our perceptions of the external world through those ideas and concepts which are united with our brain as an instrument. We retain something of what we thus experience through our senses, and this is necessary to us, to our inner integrity as human beings; we retain something of what we have conceived through our so-called reasoning intelligence, we keep back our Memory-concept.”

That, my dear friends, is in short, what we have taken out of the external world; something which was brought about in us by the external world through our senses; that which we have made out of this external reception through our intelligence we retain as our Memory-concept. What then are we, with reference to the way we as human beings face the world in the manner described?

Let us start from the simple phenomenon connected with the susceptibility of our senses, which I have already pointed out a few days ago. First of all you look at a flame, then shut your eyes, and you have an after image of the flame. This after image of the flame which you carry in your eye, disappears gradually. Goethe, who always utters these things imaginatively, says that the after-image re-echoes. It re-instates the original constitution of the eye and the nerves bound up therewith, after they have been changed through the light-impression which has fallen on the eye. What transpires in this way in your sense-organs is only a simplified form of what transpires in your memory when you receive external impressions in general, when you think them over and they remain in you as Memory-concepts. The difference is only this: If you see an impression with your eyes, let us say a flame — then you have an idea, a concept of the flame, and that resounds in you, but does not last very long. But now, if you take up something with the whole man, and think it over, you can always recall it later; and this greater after-image, this memory, lasts much longer; under certain conditions it lasts throughout your whole life. Now what is the cause of that? You see, if you keep that simple after-image which you have in the eye, and which only lasts perhaps a couple of minutes or perhaps even for only part of a minute, and then sinks down into nothingness, that is only because it does not travel through your entire organism, but simply remains in one part of it. That which becomes a memory-concept, goes through a far greater part — I will tell you in a minute what part — of your total organism; it then comes into contact with your etheric body, and passes through the etheric body into the surrounding cosmic ether. When a picture not only remains as a sense image, in a single organ, but goes through a great part of your entire organism, when it inserts itself into the etheric body, going outwards into the cosmic ether, you can retain it as a memory for the entire life. It is only a question of whether the impression goes deep enough, and grasps the etheric body, which does not retain it, but carries it out into the cosmic ether, inscribes it there, engraves it therein. Do not think that when you remember a thing that this is merely a process in your inner being. When you experience something, you cannot simply write it, as it were, in your notebook, although many people do this with their experiences today, and then simply take the notebook and read them off. But that which you remember, that you inscribe in the cosmic ether; and it is the cosmic ether which evokes it again in you, like the impression of a seal on sealing-wax, when you ought to remember it. Recollection is no mere personal affair, my dear friends, it implies an understanding with the cosmos. You cannot be alone when, as an inwardly collected man, you seek to recall your experiences; for remembering or failing to remember one’s experiences creates a disturbance in the being of man.

I have often given you the following example, just think what it signifies. A man whom I knew very well and who held an important position, suddenly got the impulse to go to a railway station without any reason, and buy a ticket to distant places unknown to him, in which he had nothing whatever to do. He did all this in quite a different condition of consciousness. During that time he knew nothing of what he really was, and only came back to himself when he was in Berlin, in a workhouse. The whole intermediate time was blotted out of his consciousness, from the moment he got into the train in Darmstadt, till he found himself in Berlin. It was afterwards discovered, from the accounts of different people, that he had been in Budapest and Lemberg; and from Lemberg had travelled to Berlin, where he came back to consciousness in a workhouse. Remember his mind was in perfect order, nothing was wrong there; he knew perfectly well during the time from his start in Darmstadt to his reception in Berlin, all that has to be done, to buy railway tickets, and how to look after himself in the intervening time, and so on. But, all the time he did these things, he had no recollection of his former life; and afterwards he had no memory of his experience after leaving Darmstadt; and no recollection of the whole journey. What happened during that time could only be ascertained by outside information.

That is one instance; I could give you many such. This is merely to draw your attention to what our life would be if there were not a continuous stream of memory going through all your experiences. Just think, if there were any time, (excluding that spent in sleep which you naturally do not remember) when you as human beings would have to think of your ego as if no memory were there. That which belongs to our sense-receptivity, to our intellect, is our own personal affair; but as soon as a thing becomes memory, it is something which, although a man experiences it in his soul-life, it is also an affair of the universe, it is an arrangement with the cosmos.

Now, present day man does not know, as intensely as he should, what I have just explained as a fact; but it will have to be one of the constituent parts of the future education of man; not to regard as a personal matter thoughts which in the etheric man lead to memory, but as something for which he is responsible to the whole cosmos.

My dear friends, when I began this series of lectures (GA 194), I told you there was once a time, to which we can go back is history when, as for instance with the Greeks, there was a land-consciousness, which did not go very far. This consciousness was then transformed into an Earth-consciousness in modern times; but in the future there must enter into humanity a cosmic and universal consciousness, where man must again realise himself as a citizen of the entire cosmos, as was the case in pre-historic times. The way to this cosmic consciousness, will be to feel quite clearly and distinctly within one, the personal responsibility for the thought which can lead to recollection, to memory. What I have described to you so far belongs, as I have told you to a great part of man’s organism, but not actually to the entire man. Now in order to characterise to you what is here the case, I must indicate it in diagram [see below].

Suppose this to be the region of the senses [white], in which I include all the senses; this is also the region of the intellect. We should then come to that part of the human organism [red] which reflects — throws back the thoughts we cherish [red arrows], so that they can become memories; that part of man which contacts the objectivity of the cosmos. I have already indicated to you the parts of the human body in which man comes thus into contact with the cosmos. For instance if you follow a nerve which starts from any part of the body and goes to the spinal cord — I will draw this diagrammatically — you will find that for each such nerve there is another also (or approximately so), which again comes back, and leads somewhere else. I have often told you that the idea of there being sensory and motor nerves is nonsense.

But the important thing is this: — that, in reality, the course of each nerve springs from the circumference, and goes back to it again. But that nerve-path is somewhere broken, just like an electric wire when a spark bridges the gap. There is a kind of springing-over, a sensitive fluid from the so-called sensory nerve to the so-called motor-nerve. Now there are many such places in our spine, for instance, and other parts of the human body; and they are the places in space where man does not simply belong to himself, but belongs to the cosmos. If you connect all those places together, taking the ganglia of the sympathetic nerve-system as well, you reach the boundary. You can say that if, as it were, you divide man into halves — (this is more than the half, but let us suppose it to be) — you can halve man and observe him as a great sense-organ; regarding the taking in through the senses as a sense-receptivity, and the working-over through the intellect as a further, finer sense-activity. Further, you may consider the arising of Memory-Pictures as after-images which, however, remain permanently during the life between birth and death because memory is created by contact with the cosmic ether. Our own ether comes in contact with the cosmic ether and so there occurs transactions between us and the cosmic ether. (That is the one half of man).

The other half of man, is that which, in a sense, has the limbs as its end-organs; everything which comprises the limb-system. And as the one half ends in the sphere of the senses [plate 13, white], so the other half ends in the limbs, to which of course the feet, hands, and arms are attached. This is naturally a very rough sketch.

Now, just as I have drawn as belonging to the senses, everything which is of the nature of intelligence, so I have now to add the inner aspect of the limb-system, and that is of the nature of Will. This Will-nature is the other pole of man’s being [orange]; and between those two lie the inner boundaries which you get if you unite all the nerve-endings, and all the ganglia as I have described. Now you go somewhat beyond this boundary on the one side, regarding it as a sieve through the holes of which on the one side presses the Will, on the other the intelligence [yellow], then in the middle you get the sphere of feeling; because everything which belongs to feeling is, in reality, half Will and half intelligence. The Will wells up from below, the intelligence descends from above, and the result is feeling. In feeling there is always existing dreamily, on the one side intelligence and sleeping on the other side Will.

After we have prepared ourselves in this way, when we have seen on the one side the pole of intelligence and on the other the pole of Will, after we have seen that the physical organs above are the expression of intelligence, we can now ask: “With what in the external world does that which is now man agree?” We have learnt to know two poles, two aspects of the human being — what is there in the external world with which that harmonises; which is there in man? The answer is — nothing, nothing at all in reality. We have in the outer world a mineral, plant and animal kingdom. With none of these kingdoms does that which we find in man inwardly, and which also pertains to the body harmonise.

Now, my dear friends, you will be able here to raise a mighty objection, which is naturally very pertinent to the matter, you will say: We must consist of the same substance as this external world, for we eat these substances and thus unite ourselves with the substances of the mineral kingdom, while we salt our food, and take to ourselves other substances, in eating plants. There are also meat eaters, as you know; and they unite themselves with the substances of animals, and so on. You see, my dear friends, the belief that we really have something to do with the substances of the external world in our own body, is a terrible error. That which our body, our corporeality really does is this. It has continually to arm itself against those influences from the outer world, even against those which come through the food we eat. Of course it is terribly difficult to make this fact comprehensible to our fellowmen, for the important part of our body does not lie in our consuming nourishing foods, but in excreting them. Many things we excrete quickly, but others only in the course of seven, eight years. But nothing of what you have eaten today will be within you in eight years time. By that time everything will have been transmuted; the activity of your body consists in throwing off and not in taking in.

The fact that you have to take in food has in reality no more significance for your body, than the ground for your walking; if you had no ground under your feet you could not walk, but you, as human beings have nothing to do with the ground; it is only there to support you. Your bodily activity must encounter resistance, it must constantly push against something, and so you must continually eat, so that your bodily activity should meet resistance. Just as we would sink into the soil if the ground did not support us, so would the body’s activity sink into nothingness unless it were met by that basis which is prepared and which permeates the whole body. You do not eat in order to unite yourself with the food, but in order to be able to mediate that activity which is necessary in the excretion of the food. For our human life consists in this activity, of excreting the nourishment; and just as little as you may reckon the soil as belonging to the sole of your foot, so little should you reckon as belonging to your human nature what exists in your food, in so far as it exists in the external world — that is, if you want to think the truth. Man in his entirety is nothing but a reaction against his environment, because fundamentally he is activity through and through.

Of course, what I have now explained takes place in an altogether different way for the organs of the Senses and the Intellect, to what it does for the organs of the Will-sphere. To this extent man is a polaric being; but what exists in the outer world has not much to do with what transpires in these two poles of man’s polaric being.

We have in the outer world the plant and mineral kingdoms. Well, this mineral and plant kingdom is not in strong relationship with our own being. If we want to investigate with what this Mineral and Plant kingdom is allied, we must look into that world which we pass through before birth, before conception; that spiritual world through which we descend into the physical. If we let our gaze roam over the Plants and Minerals, we must really say: “Before my birth I was in the spiritual world. I cannot see this spiritual world through my senses; I cannot think it through my physical intellect; but this spiritual world which conceals itself from me through a kind of veil as long as I am a sense-being, reveals itself externally to me in the Plant-world and in the basis of the latter, the mineral world.” That Mineral and Plant world have far more to do with our life in the spiritual world than with our life between birth and death. Of course, not those Plants we see in our environment through our senses, which reveal themselves to us; they are the effects of those forces with which we are connected between death and rebirth. The Animal world, too, has not much to do with what we are as human beings, but has more to do with the time immediately following death, of which it manifests as external polar-opposite.

So we can say: We do not know what exists in man if we only learn the environment of man in natural science. That Science which our present-day possesses, and which it especially values, is a Science which contains nothing of man’s nature in reality. You may thoroughly know everything which is investigated according to scientific methods, yet thereby learn nothing about the being of man, because in natural science today there is contained nothing of the being of man.

Since the last four centuries popular ideas have sprung up from the popularising of the methods of natural science. Even the peasant on the land thinks along the lines of natural science, although he may clothe his thoughts in his own words. Catholicism with its dogmatic materialism today thinks in the sense of natural science; natural scientific thought dominates everything. But we have now reached the point when it has become necessary to build up the social order. Over a great part of the civilised world today — which part will grow gradually until finally it embraces the whole world — there forces its way up the desire for the construction of a new social order. Men think of a new social reconstruction.

Where do the social demands that live today in civilised humanity spring from? From the absolutely subconscious impulses of human nature. What is there to satisfy them? The results of Natural scientific thought! Today in the widest circles, this is called “social thinking”, because these results are applied to the social life of man.

So it has come about that in the East of Europe, from the result of a purely scientific materialistic thinking, a new social order is to be erected by the state. Those men whom Dr. Helphand, who calls himself Parvus,² has — following the instructions of Ludendorf and Hindenburg ³ — imported into Russia, so that they could form Bolshevism there, are the incarnation of these scientific methods. We may even say that the practical proof of what these natural scientific methods will become if put into the heads of certain social revolutionaries through the services of Helphand — for it was he who conducted that sealed wagon through Germany, under the protection of Ludendorf and Hindenburg to take these men to Bolshevism in Russia — is the incarnated method of natural science which is at home today in Russia.

My dear friends, one should not overlook the scope of these methods, I have already pointed out certain facts. There are two philosophers – very common, ordinary philosophers. The one, Avenarius,⁴ taught at the University of Zurich, a man who certainly developed an extraordinarily narrow-minded thought. The other is Ernest Mach ⁵ who taught in Prague and Vienna. I myself heard him lecture at Vienna in 1882 in the Academy of Science. He always appeared to me as the very incarnation of narrow-mindedness and rectitude. If you ask today concerning the “state philosophy” of Bolshevism, it is not an accident but an inner necessity that it should be that of Avenarius and Mach, for these things belong together; the most extreme consequences of Natural scientific methods transformed into social thinking. Therefore one must take the matter earnestly. The scientific thought first blossomed as a social flower in the East, and it will blossom further, unless the root of the matter is attacked, in the scientific materialistic life itself.

The question is this, my dear friends. A certain wave of Thinking and feeling goes through the world; this wave is stimulated by the social scientific materialistic Thinking. While this wave spreads today, it lays hold of the necessary social thinking, but there it becomes a destructive power for humanity, an absolutely destructive force in humanity. The guiding, leading circles have not had the force and power to push into human thinking a real productive spiritual wave; and therefore the materialistic wave has arisen in the social thinking of the great masses of the proletariat. And Marxism which has expressed itself so grotesquely in the last four to five years, is the social blossom and fruit of a materialistic, scientific method in social Thought. We must not fail to recognise that this is the configuration of the present civilised world, otherwise we shall sleep through the most important phenomena and symptoms of life. One is not a full human being at the present time, if one sleeps through this phenomenon.

Certain humans beings, here and there, transcend the general judgment; they already feel today to a certain extent that, if we go Thinking and feeling as we have done we cannot progress, but shall only come more and more into Chaos. Therefore cries of the following kind though they are indeed rare today, do exist. Permit me to read to you one of these appeals.

In the 31st number of the socialistic weekly paper: The New Earth in Vienna there appears an interesting article under the title Crisis in World Views by Karl Polanyi.⁶ Therein it is said that a general opposition has arisen against the capitalist economic order, together with a deviation from Marxian socialism. There still prevails today an amalgamation of socialism, and Marxism which is the vexation of all modern thinking, each step in the intellectual solution of the most burning social problems of the times is shipwrecked in the swamp of this spiritual decay. The outbreak of the World-War was the turning point for all capitalistic and therewith Marxian thought.

“The leaders of men felt clearly and the masses felt dimly, that no longer do the so-called life-interests dominate the world, but forces of quite a different kind. The general economic interests, which the imperialists followed and against which the socialists fought wind-mill battles, really showed themselves not merely as unreal, and abstract and even to empty phraseology, but also as mere economic superstition, and empty brain-spinning. It appeared clearly that it was not the actual situation itself, but the mere idea of the situation which is the real power — no matter how false an idea is — it is that and not the situation which dominates the masses. Even the concepts of material interests, however concrete and real, will only become historically effective, when raised into a belief, when the sacrifices made are not counted, and in all the irrational things done in its name the personal value alone serves as a standard for reward and justification. Our time of incredible paradoxes believes in egoism. This is to longer denied, nor whitewashed in an idealistic way. On the contrary, humanity is entering on its death in the holy name of economic life interests, which it surrounds with a halo of glory, and of a sacred egoism which it has elevated to Heaven itself. The material is elevated to the rank of the sole ideal, and therewith the materialistic world has ended its course. The capitalists have already called this idealism of the material — as the sole reality and essential — the fatherland; and the Marxists have openly called it: Socialism!”

“Utilitarian ethics, materialistic understanding of history, positivistic theory of knowledge, deterministic philosophy, in our modern atmosphere are no longer capable of life. And Marxism, as a view of life, is built upon these pillars; but its time is past!”

This is, you see, the cry of a soul, who can only see the negative side, of what is leading our time into chaos. And now comes the question, the terrible fateful question: “What is to appear in its place?” That question is put but the author quoted, and he goes on to say: “The answer to this question is not clear as regards the fate of Marxism. To upright spirits striving towards clearness, this is a disorganised Thinking. If the Sun is extinguished, one would rather find oneself in darkness than regard a will-of-the-wisp as the Sun.

“Now what is darkening the Sun for our race is a new Sun, a more radiant Sun, rising on the horizon. Freed from the nightmare of the theory of evolution, in the treadmill of which we were condemned to eternal compulsory labour, without rest or home, to pass our senseless existence in the hallucination of a distorted apprehension of history which sees in world-events not even the echo of a town-crier grown out of the idea of a clown-like determination which regards our free-will as the chance-play of force, working behind the scenes; until finally reborn from the belief in a dead mass to a belief in ourselves, we will at last find the force in ourselves to found a socialism according to ‘Justice, Freedom and Love’, and to make this a reality for mankind”.

Indeed, my dear friends, a yearning soul who realises:”We are steering towards chaos”, who even puts that fateful question: “What is to appear in its place?” and who then continues with the answer by dishing up the old phrases Justice, Freedom, Love that have become word-husks. Long enough indeed have these been preached; but the concrete path is not contained in these phrases.

“The Marxian socialism merely darkens that question of fate before which humanity stands today. It binds down the free forces of a radical solution, holds thought in the half-darkness of an out-lived world of Dogma, confuses one’s actions with dim prophecies, obscure authorities and mystic symbols. It takes away from man his free outlook.”

Agreed, “It does take away from man his free outlook,” but this is not made free through phrases. The author proceeds:

“The Church has outlived its calling by a thousand years. Marxism might outlive us, but the new spirit which is to be born to humanity out of the sorrows of this World-War, will outlive Marxism”.

“But where is this new spirit?” asks the author, who, it seems has a feeling for the nullity of our time, for that which leads to chaos. Only one of our friends, one of those who has been in our world-view for years, adds to what I have just read, a few lines. What I have just read to you comes from one who sees something new must come, but concludes by remaining with the old phrases. But our friend adds: “Herewith we see a view of the world which perceives that Marxism, as it appears today in its most logical form as Bolshevism, belongs to an old Thinking. It is only the reflection of the old Capitalistic world; it suffers just as much in its spiritual life. If it is an opponent to the latter in economic life, yet in its spiritual basis it is one with it. But in its place and in place of the modern natural scientific view, there must appear a new concept of the world, which proceeds from an Anthroposophical view of a Philosophy of Freedom.”

These are, of course, a few lines which a friend of our movement has added but it is clear to one who looks with the affairs of modern man that because things are as they are, this Anthroposophical spiritual science will seek its way, and unless one admits that the process of the disease which is going though our present life can only be healed by anthroposophical spiritual investigation, nothing can come out of the chaos. In all humility we must therefore say:”If only a few persons could be found who, to the question: What must appear in its place?” would give the answer Dr. Kolisko gave in Vienna to this Karl Polany. As long as people believe the health of our movement is to be sought in any sectarianism, they will never realise the meaning of our movement. They must first see we have to do with something which concerns the World, a cosmic affair, then they will understand the sense of our movement. Only he can be a real bearer of this World-View, who in this way not only realises its meaning but can make it the innermost impulse of his own will.

I do not want to adorn with many words what I have said in these lectures. We have not long to wait before we can continue similar discussions, but I must just say that it would satisfy a deep need of my heart, if only many of you would take those words which I said at the beginning of this lecture, in which I wanted to indicate one of the most important things of our present world-position, and during the next few weeks would lay them to heart.

We have spoken of many of the evil influences coming from the elementary world at the present time. You know that an old true perception which we can only understand aright through anthroposophy, says that at the end of the ordinary year, when Christmas time draws near, these days come in which the spiritual influences which work on man within the earthly sphere are most intense in their working. Let us seek, just at this time — a time which for centuries was so important and essential to human beings, but which in our age is only a time for bestowing suitable gifts — let us seek something corresponding to the old psychic custom. Let us seek refuge in those good spiritual powers, who still seek to gain influence on our human destiny, but can only do so if we allow the full earnestness to work in our souls, which consists of the relationship of the spiritual world with the world of man.

• 1. Emile Waxweiler (1867–1916) was a Belgian engineer and sociologist.
• 2. Alexander Helphand (1867-1924), who called himself Parvus-Helphand, was a Russian socialist and Marxist theoretician, publicist, and controversial activist in the Social Democratic Party of Germany. After World War I he played an important part in the Bolshevik revolution and in bringing about the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (1918).
• 3. Erich Friedrich Wilhelm Ludendorff (1865-1937) was a German general, politician and military theorist. Paul von Hindenburg (1847-1934) was a German field marshal and statesman who led the Imperial German Army during World War I. He later became President of Germany from 1925 until his death.
• 4. Richard Avenarius (1843-1896) was a German-Swiss philosopher. He formulated the radical positivist doctrine of ‘empirical criticism’.
• 5. Ernst Mach (1838 -1916) was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, who contributed to the physics of shock waves. As a philosopher of science, he was a major influence on logical positivism and American pragmatism.
• 6. Karl Paul Polanyi (1886-1964), was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets.

It might seem unusual to speak about practical questions in education from the standpoint of a particular philosophy—that is, anthroposophy. In this case, however, the reason for speaking about education arises from the practice of teaching itself.

As you know, I will speak tonight of the way of teaching being practiced at the Waldorf school in Stuttgart. The pedagogical ideas and goals proposed through anthroposophy have been, for the most part, established at the Waldorf school. A few years ago everyone was talking about problems in education, and industrialist Emil Molt decided to create a school for the children of the workers in his factory. He turned to me to provide the pedagogical content and direction for that school.

At first, we dealt only with a particular group of children who came from a particular class—proletarian children connected with the Waldorf Company and with some children whose parents were members of the Anthroposophical Society. However, we soon extended the task of the school. We began originally with about 150 children in eight classes, but we now have eleven classes and over 700 children. Before that, a group of friends within the circle of anthroposophy made a trip to Dornach, Switzerland to attend a conference on education at the Goetheanum at Christmas. As a result, I was invited to lecture at Oxford this past August. Following the Oxford lectures, the Educational Union formed in order to bring the educational principles I will discuss today to a greater application in England.

I need to mention these circumstances so you will not think our discussion this evening is to be theoretical. You should realize that I want to speak about a genuinely practical manner of educating. I need to emphasize this also because this evening we will, of course, be able to mention only a few things. Those things I can bring up will also be rather incomplete compared to the reality of those principles of education, since they are not about “programs” but about practice. When we speak of practice, we can only speak in terms of examples taken from that practice. It is much easier to talk about a program, since you can speak in generalities and about general principles. We cannot do that when speaking of the Waldorf school education due to its own distinctive characteristics. As I mentioned before, our concern is to begin pedagogy and education derived from a spiritual-scientific perspective, a perspective that can lead us to a true comprehension of the human being, and thus to a true comprehension of the nature of a child.

Painters or other artists must learn two things in order to practice their art. In the case of painters, they must first learn a particular skill for observing form and color. The artist must be able to create from the nature of form and color and cannot begin with some theoretical comprehension of them. The artist can begin only by living within the nature of form and color. Only then can the artist learn the second thing, namely, technique. Spiritual science does not comprehend education as an academic or theoretical field. Spiritual science sees it as a genuine art, as an art that uses the most noble material found in the world—human beings. Education is concerned with children who reveal so marvelously to us the deepest riddles of the cosmos. Children allow us to observe from year to year, even from week to week, how physiognomy, gestures, and everything else they express reveal spirit and soul as a divine gift of the spiritual worlds hidden deep within them. The perspective I am speaking of assumes that, just as the painter must learn to properly observe how form and color—the activity arising through the hands, soul, and spirit—result from that understanding, so the artist in teaching must be able to follow the essence of the human being revealed in the child. However, this is not possible if you do not elevate your capacity to observe above the level of common consciousness—that is, if you cannot gain a true observation of soul and spiritual activities in life. That is precisely the objective of anthroposophy. What contemporary people typically call “cognition” addresses only the corporeal—that is, what speaks to the senses. If people have not risen to a genuine comprehension of the spirit, how can they learn to understand the soul? They can gain understanding of the soul only by understanding the expressions and activities of their own soul. Through self-observation, they learn about their own thinking, about their own feeling and willing. Those are aspects of the soul. They comprehend the soul only through reasoning. The senses perceive the sense perceptible. However, such people can understand the soul only by forming a judgment about those characteristics within themselves and then concluding that they have something like a soul.

Anthroposophy does not begin with that ordinary way of thinking. Instead, it seeks to systematically develop those forces sleeping within the human soul so that (don’t be surprised by my expression) a kind of precise clairvoyance results. With precise clairvoyance, you can penetrate the characteristics of the soul to see what is truly the soul. You can perceive the soul through that spiritual vision just as you can recognize colors through the eyes or tones through the ears. Through normal consciousness we can comprehend the spirit active in the world only as a conclusion. If we insist on remaining within normal consciousness, then we can say that we see only the phenomena of nature or of the soul. From that, we conclude that a spiritual foundation exists. Our thinking concludes that spirit and soul are at the foundation of what exists physically. Anthroposophy develops forces sleeping in the soul, organs of spiritual perception through which we can experience the spirit through living thinking, not merely as a conclusion.

You can have a genuine understanding of the human being only when you have seen the soul, and when you can experience the spirit in living thought. A living understanding of the human being arises that can permeate you through spiritual science, so that you can see in every moment of the developing child’s life how the spirit and soul act in the child. You do not see the child only from outside through the senses; you see also the sense perceptible expression of the soul. You do not work with just a revelation of the soul, but with the actual substance of the soul that you can see, just as your eyes see colors. You can begin with how spirit works within the child because, through anthroposophy, you can understand how to comprehend spirit with living thought.

Thus, the art of teaching I am speaking of here begins with a living comprehension of the human being, along with a comprehension of the development taking place in the child at every moment of life. When you understand in that way how the material we work with in teaching is the most noble, when you recognize how your teaching can affect the human being, then you can see many things differently than possible through ordinary consciousness. You can then teach and give educational guidance based on that knowledge. You can, through direct practical interaction with the child, develop what you can see in the soul and experience in the spirit.

Observation that is truly alive shows that spirit exists within the child no less than in the adult. However, that spirit lies hidden deep within the child and must first conquer the body. If we can see that spirit before it speaks to us through language or reveals itself through intellectual thought, we can receive an impression of the marvelous way spirit’s divine gift affects the child’s organism. You will then get an impression of why we certainly cannot say that the physical nature of the human being is one thing, and spirit another. In children you can see how spirit, much more so than with adults, works directly on the physical—that is, how spirit completely permeates the physical. As adults, we have spirit to the extent that we need to think about the world. Children, on the other hand, have spirit to the extent that they need to form their organism through spiritual sculpting. Much more than people believe, the human physical organism throughout all of earthly life is the result of how that spirit hidden within the child develops the physical organism. To avoid speaking abstractly, I would like to present some concrete examples.

If you look at a child only as conventional science does, so that you only perceive what ordinary physiology presents through dissection—that is, if you do not have a spiritual view of the child—you will not see the effect of all the different events on the child’s physical organism. For instance, the child does something and is shouted at by an adult. That makes a very different impression on the child than it would on an adult, if one were to shout at the adult. We must remember that a child functions very differently than an adult. The adult’s sense organs exist on the surface of the body. Adults can control with their intellect what comes through the sense organs. Adults can form fully developed will from within when confronted with sense impressions. However, the child is completely surrendered to the external world. If I may express it pictorially (but I mean this to a certain degree in a literal sense), the child is entirely a sense organ. Allow me to be very clear about this. Look at an infant. If we look with an external understanding at an infant, it appears that the baby feels and sees the world just as an adult does, except that the infant’s intellect and will are not as well developed as in adults. That is, however, not the case at all. Adults feel taste only on their tongue and gums. What takes place only at the surface in adults permeates the child’s organism right into the innermost depths. In a way, children perceive taste throughout their bodies when they eat. They perceive light throughout themselves when light and colors enter their eyes. That is not simply pictorial; this is actually how it is. When light shines on children, the light vibrates not only in their nervous system, it also vibrates in their breathing and throughout their circulatory system. Light vibrates throughout the entirety of the child’s organism in just the same way light acts within the adult’s eye only. The child is, throughout the entire body, a sensing organ. Just as the eye is completely occupied with the world and lives entirely in light, children live entirely in their surroundings. Children carry spirit within themselves in order to absorb everything that lives in their physical surroundings into their entire organism. Because of this, when we yell at a child, our yelling places the entire body into a particular kind of activity. When we yell at a child, a certain inner vibration occurs that is much stronger than that in an adult, who can make certain inner counteractions. What happens then is a kind of stopping short of the spiritual and soul life, which affects the child’s physical body directly. Thus, when we often yell at and frighten a child, we affect not only the child’s soul, but the child’s entire physical body. Depending on how we act around children, we can affect the health of human beings all the way into the final years of old age.

The most important means of teaching a very young child is through the way we, as adults, act when in the child’s presence. If children experience a continuous hustle and bustle, a continuous hastiness in their environment, then they will take up an inner tendency toward haste within their physical body. If you truly understand human beings so that you can observe their spirit and soul, you can see in children of eleven or twelve whether they were brought up in a restless or hurried environment, in a more appropriate environment, or in one where everything moved too slowly. We can see it in the way they walk. If the child was brought up in a hurried environment, one where everything proceeded with extreme restlessness, one where impressions continually changed, then the child will walk with a light step. The kind of environment the child had makes an impression on the child, even in the way of walking, in the step. If a child had insufficient stimulus in the surroundings so that continuous boredom was experienced, we see the reverse in how the child walks in later life with a heavy step. I mention these examples because they are particularly visible, and because they show how we can observe people better. Through this example, you can see what we are able to give to children when we see them properly in early childhood. During early childhood, children imitate their surroundings. They are particularly imitative in learning what they should do in their souls—that is, what is moral. I would like to give an example of this as well.

Those who have had to deal with such things can also experience them. For example, a father once came to me and said that his son had always been a good boy and had always done what the parents had found morally pleasing. But, now he had stolen money. Well, in such a case, anyone who truly understands human nature would ask where the child had taken the money. The father replied, “from the cupboard.” I then asked further whether someone removed money from the cupboard every day. “The child’s mother,” was the reply; thus, the child had seen the mother remove money from the cupboard every day. Young children are imitative beings who dedicate the entire soul to their surroundings, and, therefore, they do what they see happening in the surroundings. The young child does not respond to reprimands, does not respond to “do” and “don’t.” Such things are not strongly connected with a child’s soul. Children do only what they see happening in their surroundings. However, children see things much more exactly than adults do, even though they are unconscious of what it is they see. What children see in their surroundings leaves an imprint on their organism. The entire organism of the child is an imprint of what occurs in the surroundings.

Contemporary understanding overvalues way too much what is called “heredity.” When people see the characteristics of some adult, they often say such traits are inherited by purely physical transfer from one generation to another. Those who truly understand human beings, however, see that children’s muscles develop according to the impressions from their surroundings. They can see that, depending on whether or not we treat a child with tenderness and care, with love or in some other manner, the child’s breathing and circulation develop according to the feelings experienced. If a child often experiences someone approaching with love, who instinctively falls into step with the child and moves at the tempo required by the child’s inner nature, then the child will, in subtle ways, develop healthy lungs. If you want to know where the traits for a healthy adult physical body arise from, you must look back to when the child was affected as one great sense organ. You must look at the words, the gestures, and the entire relationship of the child to the surroundings, and how these things affected the child’s muscles, circulation, and breathing. You will see that a child imitates not just in learning to speak—which depends entirely on imitation, even into the bodily organization that makes speech possible—but you will see that the child’s whole body, particularly in the more subtle aspects of the physical body, reflects what we do in the child’s presence.

To the extent that a person’s physical body is strong or weak, that the physical body can be depended upon, gratitude or blame for the way one walks through life, even in old age, is due to the impressions made on a person as a small child.

What I just said about growing children being imitative beings applies throughout the first period of childhood, that is, from birth until the change of teeth at approximately age seven. At that time, the child goes through many more changes than is generally thought. In order to build a secure foundation for a genuine art of education and teaching, we need to fully penetrate what occurs in the child’s development; that is what I want to discuss in the second part of the lecture after this first part has been translated.

(Rudolf Steiner paused at this point while George Adams delivered the first part of this lecture in English.)

At around age seven, the change of teeth is not just a physical symptom of transformation in human physical nature, but also indicates the complete transformation of the child’s soul. The child is primarily an imitative being until the change of teeth. It is in the child’s nature to depend on the forces that arise from imitation for the physical body’s development. After approximately age seven and the change of teeth, children no longer need to be physically devoted to their environment, but instead need to be able to be devoted with the soul. Everything that occurs in the child’s presence before the change of teeth penetrates the depths of that child’s being. What penetrates the child during the second period of life is due to an acceptance of the authority of the child’s teachers. The child’s desire to learn such adult arts as reading and writing does not arise out of the child’s own nature, but expresses the acceptance of that natural authority. It is a tragic pedagogical error if you believe children have any desire to learn those things, things that serve as communication for adults! What actually acts developmentally on a child are the things that arise from the child’s loving devotion toward an accepted authority. Children do not learn what they learn for any reason found in the instruction itself. Children learn because they see what an adult knows and is able to do, and because an adult who is the child’s accepted educational authority says this or that is something appropriate to be learned. That goes right to the child’s moral foundation.

I would remind you that the child learns morality through imitation until the change of teeth. From the age of seven until about fourteen—that is, from the change of teeth until puberty—the child learns everything through loving acceptance of authority. We cannot achieve anything with children through the intellect, that is, with commandments such as “this is good” or “that is evil.” Instead, a feeling must grow within the child to discover what is good based on what the accepted authority indicates as good. The child must also learn to feel displeasure with what that accepted authority presents as evil. Children may not have any reason for finding pleasure or displeasure in good or evil things other than those revealed by the authority standing beside them. It is not important that things appear good or evil to the child’s intellect, but that they are so for the teacher. This is necessary for true education.

It is important during that period for all morality, including religion, to be presented to the child by other human beings; the human relationship with the teachers is important. Whenever we think we teach children by approaching them through intellectual reasoning, we really teach in a way that merely brings inner death to much within them. Although children at that age are no longer entirely a sense organ, and their sense organs have now risen to the surface of the body, they still have their entire soul within. Children gain nothing through intellectualization, which brings a kind of systemization to the senses, but they can accept what the recognized authority of the teacher brings to them as an ensouled picture.

From the change of teeth until puberty, we must form all our teaching artistically; we must begin everywhere from an artistic perspective. If we teach children letters, from which they are to learn to read and write as is now commonly done, then they will have absolutely no relationship to those characters. We know, of course, that the letters of the alphabet arose in earlier civilizations from a pictorial imitation of external processes in things. Writing began with pictograms. When we teach the letters of the alphabet to the child, we must also begin with pictures. Thus, in our Waldorf school in Stuttgart, we do not begin with letters; we begin with instruction in painting and drawing. That is difficult for a child of six or seven years, just entering school, but we soon overcome the difficulties. We can overcome those difficulties by standing alongside the child with a proper attitude, carried within our authority in such a way that the child does indeed want to imitate what the teacher creates with form and color. The child wants to do the same as the teacher does. Children must learn everything along that indirect path. That is possible only, however, when both an external and an internal relationship exists between the teacher and pupil, which occurs when we fill all our teaching with artistic content. An unfathomable, impenetrable relationship exists between the teacher and child. Mere educational techniques and the sort of things teachers learn are not effective; the teacher’s attitude, along with its effect on the feelings of the child, is most effective; the attitude carried within the teacher’s soul is effective. You will have the proper attitude in your soul when you as a teacher can perceive the spiritual in the world.

I would like to give you another example to illustrate what I mean. This is an example I particularly like to use. Suppose we want to stimulate the child in a moral-religious way. This would be the proper way to do so for the nine- or ten-year-old. In the kind of education I am describing, you can read from the child’s development what you need to teach each year, even each month. Suppose I want to give a child of about nine an idea of the immortality of the human soul. I could tiptoe around it intellectually, but that would not leave a lasting impression on the child. It might even harm the child’s soul, because when I give an intellectual presentation about moralreligious issues nothing enters the child’s soul. What remains in the child’s soul results from intangible things between the teacher and child. However, I can give the child an experience of the immortality of the soul through artistically formed pictures. I could say, “Look at a butterfly’s cocoon and how the butterfly breaks through the cocoon. It flies away and moves about in the sunlight. The human soul in the human body is the same as the butterfly in the cocoon. When a human being passes through the gates of death, the soul leaves the body and then moves about in the spiritual world.”

Now, you can teach that to children in two ways. You can feel yourself to be above children and think that you are wise and children are dumb. You might feel that children cannot understand what you, in your wisdom, can understand about the immortality of the soul, so you will create a picture for them.

If I make up such a picture for the children while feeling myself to be superior to them, that will make an impression on the children that soon passes, but it leaves a withered place within them. However, I can also approach the child differently, with the attitude that I believe in this picture myself. I can see that I do not simply fabricate the picture, but that divine spiritual powers have placed the butterfly and cocoon into nature. The fluttering of the butterfly out of the cocoon is a real picture within nature and the world of what I should understand as the immortality of the soul. The emergence of the butterfly confronts me with the idea of immortality in a simple and primitive way. It was God Himself who wanted to show me something through that emerging butterfly. Only when I can develop such a belief in my pictures is the invisible and supersensible relationship between the child and myself effective. If I develop my own comprehension with that depth of soul and then give it to the child, that picture takes root in the child and develops further throughout life. If we transform everything into a pictorial form between the change of teeth and puberty, we do not teach the child static concepts that the child will retain unchanged. If we teach children static concepts, it would be the same as if we were to clamp their hands in machines so that they could no longer freely grow. It is important that we teach children inwardly flexible concepts. Such concepts can grow just as our limbs do, so that what we develop within the child can become something very different when the child matures.

Such things can be judged only by those who do not merely look at children and ask what their needs are or what their developmental capacities are. Only those who can survey all of human life can judge these things, which then become a rather intuitive way of teaching. I could give you an example of this. Suppose we have a school-age child that has inner devotion toward the teacher. I would like to illustrate the strength that could develop through an example. Those with insight into such things know how fortunate it is for later life when, during childhood, they heard about a respected relative they had not yet seen. Then, one day, they had the opportunity to visit that person. They went to visit that relative with a shyness and with everything that was contained in the picture developed within them. They stood there shyly as the door was opened. That first encounter with a highly respected person is certainly memorable. To have had the opportunity to respect someone in that way is something that takes deep root in the human soul, and it can still bear fruit in later life.

It is the same with all truly living concepts taught to children and not simply stuffed into them. If you can get a child to look up with true respect to you as a teacher, as an accepted authority, you then create something for the child’s later life. We could describe it as follows. We know that there are people who, when they have reached a certain age, spread goodness in their environment. They do not need to say much, but their words act as a kind of blessing; it is contained in their voice, not in the content of their words. It is certainly a blessing for people when, during their childhood, they met such people. If we look back on the life of such a person of fifty or sixty and see what occurred during childhood between the change of teeth and puberty, if we look at what that person learned, we realize that person learned respect, a respect for morality. We realize that such a person learned to look up to things properly, to look up to the higher forces in the world. We might say that such a person learned how to pray properly. When someone learns to pray in the right way, the respect they learn is transformed into powers of blessing in old age, powers that act like a good deed for others in their presence. To express it pictorially, someone who never learned to fold their hands in prayer as a child will never develop the strength later in life to spread their hands in blessing.

It is important that we do not simply stuff abstract ideas into children, but that we know how to proceed with children when we want to create within their souls something fruitful for all of life. Therefore, we do not abstractly teach children to read and write, but begin artistically with writing and allow all the abstraction within letters to arise from pictures. In that way, we teach children to write in a way appropriate to the child’s needs. We do not simply appeal to the child’s capacity to observe, to the head alone, but to the entire human being. First, we teach children to write. When the child has learned to write in this way—so that the child’s entire being, and not simply the head, participates in the picture—then what we give the child is appropriate. After children learn to write, they can learn to read. Anyone caught up in today’s school system might say that such children would learn to read and write more slowly than otherwise. However, it is important that the tempo of learning is proper. Basically, children should learn to read only after the age of eight, so that we can develop reading and writing pictorially and artistically.

Those who have genuine knowledge of human beings through true vision of soul and spirit can observe subtle details and then bring those observations into teaching. Suppose we have a child who walks too heavily. That comes about because the child’s soul was improperly affected before the change of teeth. We can improve the situation by enlivening what previously formed the child by teaching through artistically presented pictures. Thus, someone who truly understands the human being will teach a child who walks too heavily about painting and drawing. By contrast, a child whose step is too light, too dancing, should be guided more toward music. That has a tremendous moral effect on the child’s later character development. Thus, in each case, if we can truly see the human being, we will understand what we need to bring into our pictures.

Until the change of teeth the child’s closest and most appropriate place is within the circle of the family and the parents. Nursery school and play groups follow. We can appropriately develop games and activities when we understand how they affect the child’s physical organism. We need only imagine what happens when a child receives a store-bought doll, a “beautiful” doll with a beautifully painted face. We can see that such a child develops thick blood (these things are not visible in the normal anatomy) and that this disturbs the child’s physical body. We simply do not realize how much we sin in that way, how it affects the child. If we make for the child a doll from a few rags, and if this is done with the child—simply painting the eyes on the rags so that the child sees this and sees how we create the doll—then the child will take that activity into its body. It enters into the child’s blood and respiratory system.

Suppose we have a melancholic girl. Anyone who looks at such a child externally, without any view of the soul, would simply say, “Oh, a melancholic child; inwardly dark. We need to put very bright colors around her and make toys red and yellow for her wherever possible. We must dress the child brightly, so that she awakens in bright colors, so that she will be awakened.” No, she won’t! That would only be an inner shock for the child, and it would force all her life forces in the opposite direction. We should give a melancholic and withdrawn child blue or blue violet colors and toys. Otherwise, the bright colors would overstimulate such an inwardly active child. We can thus bring the child’s organism into harmony with her surroundings and cure what is perhaps too flighty and nervous because of being surrounded by bright colors. From a genuine understanding of the human being, we can gain an idea of what we should teach and do with children, right down to the finest details, and thus gain direct help for our work. You can see that this way of teaching might seem to support current ideas about what children should learn at a particular age—that we should stuff such things into them and about how we should occupy them. However, if you realize that children can take from their environment only what already exists within their bodies, then you might say the following. Suppose we have a child who does not tend to be robustly active, but always works in details—that is, tends to work rather artistically. If you insist that the child be very active outwardly, then just those tendencies within the child that are for detailed work will wither. The tendencies toward activity that you want to develop because you have deluded yourself into thinking that they are common to all humanity, that everyone should develop them, will also certainly wither. The child has no interest in that; the work assigned between the change of teeth and puberty is done, and nothing sticks, nothing grows within the child through forcing things. Throughout the kind of education we are discussing, it is always important that the teacher have a good sense of what lives within the child and can, from what is observed within the child’s body, soul, and spirit, practice every moment what is right through the teacher’s own instinct for teaching.

In this way, the teacher can see the pedagogy needed for the children. In the Waldorf school, we discover the curriculum in each child. We read from the children everything we are to do from year to year and month to month and week to week so that we can bring them what is appropriate and what their inner natures require. The teaching profession demands a tremendous amount of selflessness, and because of this it cannot in any way accept a preconceived program. We need to direct our teaching entirely toward working with the children so that the teacher, through the relationship to the children developed by standing alongside them, provides nothing but an opportunity for the children to develop themselves.

You can best accomplish this between the ages of seven and fourteen—that is, during elementary school—by refraining completely from appealing to the intellect, focusing instead on the artistic. Then, you can develop through pictures what the body, soul, and spirit need. Therefore, we should present morality as pictures when the child is about nine or ten years old. We should not provide moral commandments; we should not say that this or that is good or evil. Instead, we should present good people to the children so that they can acquire sympathy for what is good, or perhaps, present the children with evil people so that they can acquire antipathy toward what is evil. Through pictures we can awaken a feeling for the nature of morality. All of those things are, of course, only suggestions that I wanted to present concerning the second stage of childhood. In the third part of my lecture today, I want to show how we can bring it all together as a foundation for education—not merely education for a particular time in childhood, but for all of human life. We will continue with that after the second part has been translated.

(George Adams delivered the second part of the lecture.)

We can best see how this way of educating can achieve the proper effects for all of human life if we look specifically at eurythmy in education. The eurythmy we have performed publicly in London during the past days has a pedagogical side, also.

Eurythmy is an art in which people or groups of people express the movements in the depths of human nature. Everything expressed in those movements arises systematically from the activity within the human organism, just as human speech or song does. In eurythmy, no gesture or movement is haphazard. What we have is a kind of visible speech. We can express anything we can sing or speak just as well through the visible movements of eurythmy. The capacity of the entire human being for movement is repressed in speech, it undergoes a metamorphosis in the audible tones and is formed as visible speech in eurythmy.

We have brought eurythmy into the Waldorf school for the lowest grades all the way to the highest. The children, in fact, enter into this visible speech just as the soul makes a corresponding expression for the sounds of audible speech. Every movement of the fingers or hands, every movement of the entire body is thus a sound of speech made visible. We have seen that children between the change of teeth and puberty live just as naturally into this form of speech as a young child lives into normal audible speech. We have seen that the children’s entire organism—that is, body, soul, and spirit (since eurythmy is also a spirit and soul exercise) find their way just as naturally into eurythmy speech as they do into oral speech. Children feel they have been given something consistent with their whole organism. Thus, along with gymnastics derived from an observation of the physical body, we have eurythmy arising from an observation of the child’s spirit and soul. Children feel fulfilled in eurythmy movements, not only in their physical body or in an ensouled body, but in a spiritually permeated soul within a body formed by that soul. To say it differently, what people experience through eurythmy acts in a tremendously living manner on everything living within them as tendencies and, on the other side, has just as fruitful an effect on all of life.

Regardless of how well children do in gymnastics, if they perform these exercises only according to the laws of the physical body, these exercises will not protect the children from all kinds of metabolic illnesses later in life. For instance, you cannot protect them from illnesses such as rheumatism, which may cause metabolic illnesses later. What you gain through gymnastics results in a kind of thickening of the physical body. However, what you can effect by developing movements that arise from the spirit and soul makes the spirit and soul ruler of the bodies of the soul and physical for all of life. You cannot keep a sixty-year-old body from becoming fragile through gymnastics. If you educate a child properly, however, so that the child’s movements in gymnastics arise from the soul, you can keep the child’s body from becoming fragile in later life. You can inhibit such things if you teach pictorially during elementary school so that the picture that would otherwise occupy the soul can move into the body.

Thus, this pictorial language, eurythmy, is nothing but gymnastics permeated with soul and spirit. You can see that gymnastics permeated by soul and spirit is directed only toward a balanced development of the child’s body, soul, and spirit; and you can see that what can be ingrained during childhood can be fruitful throughout life. We can do that only when we feel like gardeners tending plants. The gardener will not, for example, artificially affect the plant’s sap flow, but will provide from outside only opportunities for the plant to develop itself. A gardener has a kind of natural reluctance to artificially alter plant growth. We must also have a respectfulness about what children need to develop within their own lives. We will, therefore, always be careful not to teach children in an unbalanced way. The principle of authority I discussed before must live deeply within the child’s soul. Children must have the possibility of learning things they cannot yet intellectually comprehend, but learn anyway because they love the teacher. Thus, we do not take away from children the possibility of experiencing things later in life.

If I have already comprehended everything as a child, then I could never have the following kind of experience. Suppose something happens to me around age thirty-five that reminds me of something I learned from a beloved teacher or a loved authority, something I had learned from that authority through my desire to believe. However, now I am more mature and slowly a new understanding arises within me. Returning in maturity to things we learned earlier, but did not fully comprehend, has an enlivening effect. It gives an inner satisfaction and strengthens the will. We cannot take that away from children if we respect their freedom and if we want to educate them as free human beings. The foundation of the educational principle I am referring to is the desire to educate people as free beings. That is why we should not develop the child’s will through intellectual moral reasoning. We need to be clear that when we develop moral views in the child’s feeling between the ages of seven and fourteen, the child can, after maturing and moving into life, then comprehend intellectual and moral feelings and the will. What permeates the will, and what arises out of the will from the esthetic feeling developed earlier, enlivens morality and, insofar as it arises from freedom, gives people strength and inner certitude.

You see, if you want to use the kind of education we are discussing properly, you will not simply look at childhood, but will also look at people later in life. You will want what you give to children to act just as the natural growth and development of the plant acts to produce a flower that blooms. If we want a blossoming, we do not dare to want the plant to develop too quickly. Instead, we await the slow development from the root to the stem to the leaf to the flower and, finally, to the fruit, unfolding and developing freely in the sunlight. That is the picture we need to keep before us as the goal of education. Our desire is to nurture the root of life in children. However, we want to develop this root so that life slowly and flexibly forms physically, soulfully, and spiritually from our care during childhood. We can be certain that, if we respect human freedom, our teaching will place people in the world as free beings. We can be certain that the root of education can develop freely if we do not enslave children to a dogmatic curriculum. Later in life, under the most varied circumstances, children can develop appropriately as free human beings.

Of course, this kind of education puts tremendous demands on the teacher. However, do we dare presume that the most complete being here on Earth—the human being—can be taught at all if we do not penetrate fully the characteristics of that being? Shouldn’t we believe—concerning human beings and what we do with them—that they hold a place of honor, and that much of what we do is a kind of religious service? We must believe that. We must be aware that education demands of us the greatest level of selflessness. We must be able to forget ourselves completely and plunge into the nature of the child in order to see what will blossom in the world as an adult human being. Selflessness and a true desire to deepen your understanding of human nature, and gaining a true understanding of humanity—these are the basic elements of genuine teaching.

Why shouldn’t we recognize the necessity of devotion to such teaching, since we must certainly admit that teaching is the most noble activity of human life? Teaching is the most noble thing in all human life on the Earth.

That is progress. The progress we achieve through teaching is this: the younger generations, given to us from the divine worlds, develop through what we, the older generations, have developed in ourselves; and these younger generations move a step beyond us in human progress. Isn’t it obvious to every right-thinking person that, in bringing such service to humanity—that is, in bringing the best and most beautiful things of previous generations as an offering to the younger generations—we teach in the most beautiful and humane way?

(George Adams concluded the English translation.)

Before the lecture begins, Dr. Steiner will finish reciting the “Choir of Primordial Instincts”, the part that has not yet been recited by her. I would like to say a few words in advance, which I ask you, please, not to take suggestively; they are meant to be quite factual. We have organized things so that the lecture begins in such a way that our friends in Zurich can hopefully hear it to the end or at least to a point where they will not miss anything important. And I would like to make a comment in connection with the various requests, more or less justified requests, that have come in from here and there. This is that I would not consider it in the spirit of our movement if the opinion were to prevail that, considering the content of the lectures given here, the most important thing in our movement has already been done. Our movement should be in step with the times and take into account the things that arise from the demands of the time. And you can be quite sure that we will not achieve what you believe can be achieved by taking up the content of the lectures if we do not show ourselves to be accommodating and understanding, especially towards newer artistic endeavors that are taken up within our movement. This applies particularly to eurythmy, which is meant to be a new art in a certain sense and is meant to be felt as a new art, and to be felt as a new art in relation to all similar arts. But I myself would like it to be noted that it also applies to recitation. What one actually experiences in terms of recitation when one wants to develop artistic feeling in the world is something tremendously great, something terribly sorrowful that happens to one. We have, after all, developed a certain method that lies within the spirit of our spiritual-scientific movement, especially with regard to the art of recitation. And, no, I would not want it to be seen as if it were given, well, out of a hobby of this or that person, as an addition to our cause; no, it is one of the most important things for us to find our way into a new artistic way of feeling. As for recitation, most people have the most primitive ideas. Actually, one would think that anyone can recite and that reciting is not a special art. In a way, reciting is one of the most difficult arts, because you have to work on the material very slowly and gradually. And since we are striving to emphasize the artistically shaped word, and this is essential in the future social order of humanity for such things, that this interest is not lost, that the general bourgeois morass does not gradually take hold, which is particularly evident in as it is the recitative, which everyone thinks is just a reading, we strive for that, and I ask that this not be considered a minor matter, which, because the trains go one way or the other, can be moved to any random day or night hour.

As I said, what I said was not meant to be offensive; but I just wanted to express my opinion on our cause with regard to what is otherwise often seen only as a tendril.

Now the conclusion of “Choir of Primordial Drives” by Fercher von Steinwand is to be recited.

What I started out from in these reflections – the necessity of sensing the truth at work in the facts of the world – I could also say sensing the active reason or the active spirit – must apply particularly to the understanding that one must acquire in the age of the consciousness soul, to the understanding of this catastrophic event in which we are immersed. For basically this event originated, one would like to say, in an illusion in which people lived. I have hinted at it to you in many different ways; it could be further explained. But you have already seen that the people who were involved in the outbreak, in the last outbreak of this catastrophic event, actually moved in appearances, that they were full of phantasms and illusions, that they were far from being in reality. But it must be said that over the years, more and more of what was wrongly named, because people lived in illusions and appearances, and what was wrongly scolded, because people lived in illusions and appearances, gradually and slowly developed into that which contained the truth of the matter itself. This has already emerged to some extent and will emerge even more over the next few years. I have often pointed out that this was not a war in the old sense between one group of powers and another, which in the ordinary sense can also be ended by a peace treaty; that it was much more a matter of what will happen as a surge in the social struggles, which will take on the most diverse forms. What we have to bear in mind is that the social struggles, which will gradually emerge as the truth, have, I might say, seized the superficial appearance and are initially acting out entirely in the superficial appearance, in the illusions and phantasms that have become deeds. And we should consider what is actually alive in the final conflicts of the present, what is actually hidden in these conflicts of the present. One cannot do so without repeatedly pointing out how human thinking and imagining, even the whole conception of life, has distanced itself from what is necessary for human beings in terms of understanding the world, but which has been lost precisely under the influence of the newer development of humanity. Our spiritual science has, in the most eminent sense, the task of again accessing this lost knowledge in the modern sense and making it accessible to people for whom it is so necessary in the present and for the future.

I have often pointed out the threefold nature of man and the threefold world from different points of view, and that it is necessary to distinguish at least two other divisions in man, in addition to what is usually called man, and to distinguish other divisions in what is called the world. In all these things it is immaterial whether, as I have done for certain reasons, one calls one thing so or so out of the demands of spiritual science, or whether one calls it out of hunches, as Fercher von Steinwand does in his book Der Geisterzögling (The Spiritual Pupil). Where he speaks of what you find in my 'Theosophy' as the soul world, he speaks of 'Sinnheim'; for reasons that would lead us too far afield to discuss now, he speaks of what I have called the spirit world as 'Wahnheim', but he doesn't just mean a home where the madness is, but by speaking of 'Wahnheim' he actually means the spirit world. What matters is to really immerse oneself in these things in some way and take them seriously for one's life. One can say: With the gradual dying out of Greek culture, humanity in its development from the third to the fifth post-Atlantic period actually lost a great deal, which must be awakened again in a different form, from the point of view of the new spiritual science, if order is to be brought into the social chaos that will now develop. For it must be emphasized again and again: the most important thing today is that economic continuity is not disrupted, but that, as it were, an interim arrangement is created in the field of economic life and is also perceived as such. At the same time, however, general education must be tackled in all areas where it is so urgently needed by humanity. A new social order cannot be founded on the concepts that already exist today. It is best to try to come to terms with what is emerging as the most pressing demands, to create a provisional arrangement so that economic continuity is not lost, and to ensure that a start be made at the end where the beginning is so necessary: on the way of education, of teaching in the broadest sense, on the way of creating thoughts that start from an understanding of man and into the minds of men. Because you can only start something by creating thoughts in people's minds. If only these thoughts are already there in people's minds! You are not dealing with porcelain figures, which you can place here or there as you please and impose on them any order you like. You are dealing with human beings who must first acquire the ability to understand what is necessary in the development and evolution of mankind. The starting point of the human being must lead to a gradual enlightenment in people's minds about what people are together – call it a realm, call it a state, call it a democracy, call it what you will, all these things are much less important than the matter at hand. In the minds of men, the pure porridge has arisen in the ideas of this living together, of this form of living together, so that people can no longer form really concrete, plastic ideas of why one thing is there and why another thing is there.

Plato's tripartite division of the human being is based on the primal wisdom that has been acquired by humanity in an atavistic way, as I have often explained to you, but which must be regained in a fully conscious way by the age of the consciousness soul. Today, this is seen as something childish. But it is based on a very deep wisdom, a wisdom that is truly deeper than what is taught about man today at our universities, whether it be from the natural sciences, from economics or from other sciences.

Plato divided the human being into three parts. Today we structure things somewhat differently, but an awareness of this threefold nature was still present well into the eighteenth century. Only then did it disappear completely. And these nineteenth-century people, so clever and enlightened, only laughed at this threefold nature in its concrete form, and continue to laugh at it today. Plato first divided man, whom one must understand if one wants to understand the social structure, into the human being who unfolds wisdom, knowledge, the logical part of the soul, that which we attach to the head organism as its knowledge to its sense and nerve organism. Plato then distinguished the so-called active, irascible part of the soul, the courageous, brave part of the soul, everything that we associate with rhythmic life. You only need to read my book 'Von Seelenrätseln' (Soul Riddles). Then he distinguished the man of desire, the human being, insofar as he is the source of the capacity for desire, everything that we now know in a much more perfect form; Plato was able to link this physically to metabolism, spiritually to intuition, as we understand it in our threefold structure of the higher faculty of knowledge: imagination, inspiration, intuition. It is impossible to understand what is going on in the social structure of humanity and how social structures express themselves if we do not get to know the human being according to this threefold nature. For man is not so in the world, in which he is as a member of the physical plan, that he develops these three members equally in relation to their inner, intimate formations and qualities, but he develops them in different ways; one develops one part more, the other develops the other part more. And it is on the basis of the different ways in which the parts are developed that the classes are formed, as they have emerged in the course of the development of European humanity with its American appendix.

It can be said that the part that mainly considered the rhythmic life and organized education, living together, and social views in such a way that the rhythmic life was what was primarily felt as human, is the estate or class that developed as the old nobility. If you imagine a social structure that arose from the fact that people mainly felt themselves to be chest people, then you have what constitutes the group of the nobility, the nobility class. If you imagine those people who preferably develop the head, the wise part – now I am also saying something that may reconcile you with some of what I have said – those people who were united in the class , who mainly develop the brain, the wise part, the part of the senses and nerves, that is the group that gradually united in the bourgeoisie. Those human beings who today form by far the greatest number, who have preferably united in all this – but you know that intuition is spiritually connected with metabolism – that has its source in will, in metabolism, that is the proletariat. So that in fact human beings are socially structured in the same way as the human being is structured in detail.

Now, of course, one must recognize the special nature of the human association. And in this respect, everything still remains to be done for the consciousness, for the conceptualization of human beings, because in relation to what I mean now, modern humanity in particular has the most distorted ideas. This modern humanity has even gone so far as to imagine that the human being is less perfect as an individual than as a member of a state, that the human being gains something by becoming a member of a state, and it will be very difficult to get the idea into people's heads that the human being gains nothing by integrating himself into a state organism, but loses. He also loses by integrating himself into estates, into classes. That which the individual develops is not promoted by the fact that it lives in the social structure in the majority, but is instead paralyzed and suppressed.

Thus the traditions and ideas of the aristocratic caste suppress the highly individual powers of the chest man. Not that they promote them, but they suppress them, they paralyze them. That is the point. It is important to realize that, although the group of noble human beings includes those whose souls primarily long to embody themselves as chest people, the external association on the physical plane paralyzes what would come out of the chest person. It would take us too far afield to show you this in detail. But just suppose, for example, that what is honor is developed in a very individual way out of the chest man; but the external concept of honor is precisely there to create the exterior so that the interior can sleep. All aggregation is actually there to constitute something externally so that the internal, original, elementary can sleep. I need not remind you of Rosegger's saying, which I have often quoted: One is a human being, more are leaders and the many are animals. Man is indeed what he is, out of the elementary forces as an individuality. I tried to show this in a scientific way in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

All that the modern proletariat strives for is not suited to bring to perfection that which is elementary in it, but to suppress it, to push it into the background, to paralyze it. And today is the time to recognize this, when you can only get ahead if you see through things. Because the instinctive forces - I have often said this - no longer work. And the bourgeoisie - now comes the other side of the coin - its union has mainly existed to paralyze wisdom. People have already come together in the bourgeoisie whose souls have striven to educate the head people; but especially the so-called science of the social bourgeoisie has brought about a structure that has made the head person as headless as possible. And he proves himself more and more in the face of the onslaught of modern times as a truly headless creature.

Now, on the one hand, this human structure has developed in a pronounced and significant way. But the connection of understanding had been missed; one could no longer form ideas about the way one lives among people because one had lost the understanding of the threefold human being. It would be necessary, for example, and something like this would have to happen before one can set about founding a new social order somewhere or at some time: it will be necessary, for example, to study everything that is connected with the impulses of the chest-man. And only when we study this in a way that corresponds to reality, not in the way that theosophists think, only then will we have a true science of how labor, the fruits of labor, wages, rents, capital, means of production, and so on, must be arranged in the world to meet the instinctive demands of modern times. As far removed as possible from that which is officially called political economy, which is actually only a game with concepts and words and which will hopefully soon disappear from the scientific scene, as far removed as possible is that from what comes out when you really study the human being as a chest of drawers, where it comes out what must be demanded with regard to the distribution of labor, the means of production, the land and so on, as a requirement in the development of mankind. Likewise, we must study what is connected with the head, the sense and nerve man in the broadest sense, again not as abstractly as the theosophists imagine, but we must study in all concreteness what man is in the sense world as a spiritual creature with other people together in society, with other people together in any structure, be it state or other. It must be studied from the nature of the nervous and sensory human being. The study of the nervous and sensory human being gives a real social science. And finally, the study of the metabolic human being, which is connected with intuition, only this gives a real view of the development, of the becoming of the human being, only this gives a historical view of the development of humanity.

Now you can easily understand that it was impossible to have a historical conception of the development of humanity without really understanding the microcosmic human being, nor a real view of the distribution of economic values, because one does not study the chest human being; nor could one understand how the individual human being stands within human society, because the head human being, the human being of nerves and senses, is not studied in his reality, in his complete connection with the cosmos and his historical development; for all these things had actually been lost from view. For centuries no conception of these things has been formed, or if so, it has only been laughed at. Therefore, above all, chaos arose in people's imaginations and then in reality.

Now demands arose from that class of people who had been shaped by modern life, which was no longer based on outdated ideas but was moving forward. The modern proletariat has emerged from the modern machine, industrial system, from the mechanization of the world. Demands developed from this because this modern proletariat came into conflict with those who could provide the machines as means of production.

You see, the impulses for the world view of this proletariat came from the metabolic human being. But of course the human being is in contact with the other links. From this, views were formed that radiated from the other links impulses of the threefold human being; views were formed that were a necessity on the basis of the proletarian human caste. Views were formed with the help of what the bourgeoisie had established as science. For the proletarians had inherited only the science of the four or, what do I know, six faculties, to which they had now grown, that the bourgeoisie had created. With purely bourgeois science, the proletarians gradually tried to form ideas in the age of the consciousness soul about the social structure in which they lived. Of course, that could not suffice. Out of all the astute and other fundamentals, but again, because he was a child of his time and had no idea of the existence of a spiritual science as we think of it, the proletarians created a science precisely as an expression of what the instincts of the proletariat develop out of themselves in an elementary way, the Karl Marx mentioned yesterday.

The proletarians treated this Karl Marx differently than the so-called greats were treated by the bourgeoisie in the last centuries. He really penetrated the entire thinking of the proletariat throughout the civilized and industrialized world. He dominated the thoughts of the proletarians and developed these thoughts into a doctrine. Yes, for the first time thoughts have become facts, because the thoughts of the bourgeoisie are not facts, they have grown out of illusions, even if people believe that they are based on real positive science. But the thoughts of Karl Marx have become facts in the proletariat and live as facts and have an effect as facts, just as facts have an effect, with all the contradictions of life, with all the contradictions that arise in life, with all disharmony, with all that is fertilizing and destructive and paralyzing, with which life arises. In the instincts, in the subconscious of people, more is at work, especially in our age, than in their consciousness. The tripartite human being was not included in consciousness; but from instincts, and therefore insufficiently and, while fertilizing reality, converting thoughts into deeds, but insufficiently converting them into deeds, is how Karl Marx founded his doctrine of “political economy”. It was already expressed in 1848 in the “Communist Manifesto”, of which I spoke yesterday, and then in his book on “Political Economy”, which appeared in 1859, a year that was so endlessly fruitful for all kinds of achievements, at least at the end of the 1850s. Another of the many innovations of the late 1850s was Karl Marx's book “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.” To mention other things: it appeared at the same time – and there is an inner connection – Bunsen's spectral analysis. In the same year, more was also known about what is called Darwinism, as well as about what, on the one hand, had an endlessly stimulating effect but, on the other hand, also led to confusion in psychology: Gustav Theodor Fechner's Vorschule der Asthetik (Aesthetics: An Esthetic Primer), which then led to a psychophysics. This also belongs to this year; many other things could be mentioned. There are inner reasons that this occurred out of bourgeois science. For Hegel is also bourgeois science, profound bourgeois science. But out of bourgeois science, Karl Marx tried to understand the social structure of human beings. The way he understood it made sense to the proletariat. But they had forgotten the most important thing: the knowledge of the threefold human being. This must above all enter into people's heads before any kind of fruitful progress can be made, not theoretically, but by really living into the situation that the present has brought about. You see, one can say: the world also confronted Marx in three parts. This physical-sensual world also confronted Karl Marx in three parts, and so he sought to unravel it in three ways: firstly, through his theory of value, the theory of surplus value — I have already mentioned some of this to you — secondly, through his materialistic conception of history, and thirdly, through his view of the socialization of man. It is remarkable how, in the minds of millions of proletarians, the tripartite social structure is reflected in the mind of Karl Marx and in the minds of millions of people in the way I have explained it, , it is interesting to see how the three-part social structure is emerging, without people having any real, solid, fundamental ideas about what a human being lives as an entity and how he enters the world as a spiritual being.

Insufficiently, instinctively, the impulses of the human being at the heart of the human being, the rhythmic human being, in whom the actual reservoir of what then becomes work in social life is, insufficiently incorporated into the ideas of Karl Marx and thus into proletarian ideas, the so-called surplus value theory developed. Let us look at this surplus value theory from a different point of view than we have done recently. The main question for Karl Marx was: How is value, be it in the form of use-value or exchange-value, actually created in the modern economy? — It is, of course, not true — as Karl Marx pointed out — that in the modern economy what a person receives as remuneration, for example, is really related to what he achieves. Such illusions can only be entertained by those who do not understand economic life, who believe that a person acquires what corresponds to his work, his performance. That is not the case. What a person can acquire in modern economic life, as it has developed over the last four centuries, especially in the civilized world, is not tied to any relationship between acquisition and work, but to the circulation of goods. What a person can acquire depends to a large extent on how values are produced by bringing goods to market, selling them and receiving a certain amount in return. That is what creates economic value. Not labor as such directly creates value today, in economic terms, but what one gets for it on the goods market when it is completed and put into circulation by the most diverse factors. So that in the modern world, when it comes to the creation of economic value, the only question that can be asked is: What is the constellation on the goods market for one thing or another? – This must be thought of in the broadest possible terms; but if it is thought of in this way, it is like that.

Now Karl Marx came to express what was instinctively felt by those people who were pushed into the proletariat by their life circumstances, by their karma. If the market value of the commodity alone really produces the value ratio for everything that exists today and is the basis of every acquisition, it cannot be true that a worker is in any way actually remunerated for what he does as work. For what one does as work has no value in circulation in the national economy, but only what has become a commodity has value. And here Marx arrived at the formulation of what the proletarians felt out of their instincts: the formulation that what matters in the modern economy is not valued as a service, as an activity, as a creation, but that this too is valued as a commodity, as the commodity “labor power”. One buys, as Karl Marx put it, one buys cherries, one buys shirts, trousers and so on, but one also buys the commodity of labor power. The person who has the means of production, who owns the land, sells cherries, sells grain, sells trousers or skirts, sells machines; the person who does not have the means of production, who is without property in modern economic life, can only bring what his labor power is to the market. He must go there himself. But only that has a real economic value, which comes into consideration as the commodity value of his labor.

What does that mean? It means that one must think about how to pay for goods. You pay for goods first according to what is necessary for their production. What happens to the goods on the market afterwards is something completely different. You pay for goods first after they have been produced. Right, you go to the cherry tree owner, and he sells the goods to you; then you ship them and so on, and it is only in the circulation process that the value of the goods is determined. But the commodity labor power must, so to speak, be bought at its source. The person themselves must carry it to the person who wants to buy it. The person must always be present. So what can the compensation, the purchase price of the commodity labor power consist of? Yes, according to what the production costs are. One has to think about how many hours of daily labor are necessary to maintain a worker with regard to his labor power, that is, to maintain him so that he is nourished, clothed, and so on. Then one must consider how many different other people have to work, how much time they have to work; let us say, for example, that five or six hours have to be worked to procure so much food, so much clothing and other necessities to equip a worker with labor power so that it can be bought and put on the labor market. The bourgeois pays compensation for what is necessary to maintain the worker, to produce the commodity of labor power. He pays for what is necessary to enable the worker to eat, clothe himself, and so on, to meet his family needs and the like, if any. For example, five to six hours of work are necessary for this. However, the worker sells himself, and by selling himself, he enters into the necessity of working longer than, say, five to six hours, through the general process of circulation. There he works for the one who is the entrepreneur. That is where the surplus value is generated. Only because labor power is a commodity in the modern circulation process and because you pay for the commodity according to the production costs, then the worker is made to work longer than he would if he only worked to earn what he needs, only then is the surplus value generated in modern economic life.

This is something that Karl Marx used Hegelian dialectics to process in his books. This is something that made a lot of sense to the proletariat because it is a science that takes the human being as a whole, so to speak, because it not only takes the theoretical mind, it also takes the moral sensations, in that the worker knows that, politically speaking, he is being told: You are a free man – but because only commodities have value in the modern economy and only commodities are paid for, his labor power is made into a commodity in the modern circulation process. This makes him look at the surplus value that is generated not only through labor, but also through mere speculation, through entrepreneurial spirit, whatever.

But something else is emerging as a result. This leads

to the development of an awareness on the part of the worker, entirely in the sense of Marx: All the talk that something can be achieved through fraternity, through charity, through a sense of benevolence, these are always empty words, they must be social phrases. For he sees what has emerged: that labor, his labor, has become a commodity, he sees this as a necessity in modern development, and he says: Now, no matter how charitable, however fraternal, however philanthropic his attitude, he cannot help himself – historical development compels him to – but buy the commodity labor power at its production costs and then supply the other thing, in its own way, to the circulation process. Therefore, it is of no value for any social thinking to preach morality, to speculate on impulses of fraternity, of philanthropy, because none of that matters. The entrepreneur cannot do otherwise than to reap the added value.

These are the things that are extremely important: that the proletarian has been drilled, so to speak, that it does not depend on the morality or immorality of entrepreneurship that he is in a subhuman existence, but that this is an historical necessity, but that it must also lead to class struggle with historical necessity; that is to say, there is no other way than for those who belong to the proletarian caste to fight those who belong to the owner caste, because they are opponents by the historical process itself. Therefore, it cannot happen otherwise than that a different order will come about through the powerful social struggle of the proletariat than the one that the last four centuries or the previous historical development has brought to the fore. What the proletarian wants is so infinitely important, it is making history, making history out of ideas, by saying to himself: Since it has come to this in modern economic development that only commodities are paid for, and I as a proletarian must sell my labor power as a commodity, but the others have something that does not come from the labor power , but comes from the surplus value, so I want to participate in the surplus value myself, I do not want to abolish the entrepreneur – because the entrepreneur has been brought about by the necessary historical process – but I want to become an entrepreneur myself, I want to take possession of the means of production as a proletarian, as a partner, in a communist way; then I myself am an entrepreneur as a partner. Only in this way can the class struggle be eliminated, when I no longer have the entrepreneur next to me, but am an entrepreneur myself. Moving on to the next historical phase, that is what follows from Marxist doctrine for the proletarian, making history, even if it can be presented more or less Kautsky or more Lenin or Trotsky, which are different shades. But what I said about the one thing that is recognized in its correct basis is true: namely, to build everything on the human being, on the human being who is in rhythm, it is the basis of the consciousness of the modern proletariat. It is something that should be seen differently, seen with enormous power and become action. And there is no other remedy than to see through the matter; there is no other remedy, since the bourgeois education with all its university system has failed to shed light on these things, since it does not even have the scientific methods to shed light on them, there is no other possibility than to create a provisional arrangement so that economic continuity is not lost, and to work for enlightenment from below. That is the starting point. Education from below can only happen if the knowledge of the threefold human being is brought into the present-day human being.

But of course, if you speak to the modern proletarian today as I speak to you now after eighteen years of preparation, you will not be understood by him, but laughed at. You have to speak to him in his own language. To do that, you must, of course, first have a command of the subject matter and then have the good will to respond to the language that is understood there. You see, this theory of surplus value is constructed in such a way that it is truly, I would say, a closed Hegelian dialectic. The curious thing about it is that when Karl Marx died in 1883, in the 1880s, bourgeois economists, as they later called themselves, social scientists and so on, were very much inclined to say: Well, socialist agitator has no scientific value; scientific socialist! — They usually say it with a certain buttery mouth, with the buttery mouth of the expert who has mastered the subject. Well, that was the case back then. But this bourgeois science did not go into the subject in depth, at most people like Sombart and similar people, they took up some of it, they let themselves be infected. The actual bourgeois public was not interested in the feelings and thoughts of the proletariat; at most, they allowed it to be presented in plays, as I told you. But the university professors, who are barren themselves, accepted some of it and then took it over lock, stock, and barrel. And so you find in many books that come from university professors all kinds of Marxist ideas, sometimes criticized, but all unfruitful, because the things are not seen through, because above all, one did not have the will to evoke a real knowledge, a real understanding of the threefold human being. If one had this understanding, then one would come to the fundamentals, which are necessary to understand, and what I can only hint at to you, but of which an understanding must be evoked. For only when this fundamental understanding sets in with regard to two points will the greatness of Karl Marx's theory of surplus value and the proletarians appear, but only then will it also become clear where the correction has to be made, where that has to be made that is based on reality, not on Marxist illusion. But it is still difficult to find understanding for this.

There are, of course, the most diverse offshoots – even if they are sometimes opponents – of the modern proletarian ethos. One such offshoot, from a completely different background – forgive the expression – came up against me in the 1890s in Berlin in the person of Adolf Damaschke, in the land reform. This Adolf Damaschke had followers, and a number of them were also our members, members of the Theosophical Society. They wanted me to enter into some kind of discussion with this Damaschke in front of them. They were our followers who had formed a group of land reformers at the same time, and Damaschke was supposed to present his thoughts on one issue or another. I then said, after Damaschke had presented his views: “You see, the situation is as follows. What you have said will certainly appeal to people, because it is presented with a certain economic clarity – I didn't say crystal clear, but that was the idea – and it sometimes seems to point in the direction I indicated yesterday. You do not want the means of production, like the Social Democrats, but you do want the land, and specifically the land on which houses stand, and thus, to a certain extent, nationalize the entire land communally, creating a sense of community in land ownership, in order to bring about a solution to the social question. Some of what you have said is correct, but the whole thing suffers from a capital error, which of course must escape you if you proceed merely theoretically and not realistically. What you say is not right, but it would be right under certain conditions. For example, if you could expand the soil elastically where two houses adjoin in a city, and a third house was to be built, so that one house stands there and the other house there, and in between you would create space for the third house – if the soil were elastic, then everything would be right. But since the earth has a certain area and is not elastic, does not grow, the whole land reform theory is in fact wrong.

This is the most important objection from this point of view. I can only hint at it. Damaschke told me at the time that he had never noticed this before, but he promised me that he would think deeply about the matter. I have not heard anything further, and I do not know how deeply he has thought about it. In his subsequent writings, nothing of this could be seen. He continued in his old way and developed all his land reform ideas in this direction. There were always people who said: Yes, the Social Democratic idea does not work, but land reform is something that can certainly be realized.

On the one hand, it must be studied in its broader scope; for social democracy also regards land as a means of production. It would only be that if it were elastic. The means of production that can be regarded in an elastic way, which is not taken into account, can be regarded in the way that Marxism does, as means of production that can also be produced, or created, if necessary. If you need machines, you can make them to produce this or that, and if you want to make more machines, you can put more workers in place; there is elasticity there. The moment you apply the same way of thinking – and it is the way of thinking that matters – to land, it fails because of the inelasticity of the land.

That is one point where one must intervene. The other point where one must intervene is that social Marxist thinking must necessarily fail because it is formed entirely out of the economic process and only thinks of the means of production, which it thus wants to administer communally, in the economic process as they are as real means of production, as means of production for manual labor. This eliminates the infinitely important position that the spiritual has in the whole process of development, including the social process of humanity. For the spiritual has the peculiarity of having a minimum of means of production. For example, the only means of production for me is the pen. You can't even say that paper is a means of production, because that is an object of circulation. Only the pen is a means of production in the Marxist sense. But through this, the whole impulse that must come from the spiritual, and which would be paralyzed if the world were arranged in a social Marxist way, this spiritual process must be eliminated by Marxist thinking. That is the other pole.

The Marxist way of thinking fails at two poles. In the middle, it is firmly established. In the middle, it is dialectically extremely astutely developed; at two poles it fails. And it fails in the most radical sense: it fails radically at these two poles. First, the surplus value theory. It fails because of the inelasticity of the land. It fails because of the inelasticity of land, in a much stronger sense than one might think. Because the entire population statistics in a limited territory do not come into their own economically, because the land remains the same, even if, for example, there is a population increase. This causes changes in the scale of values that cannot be taken into account by mere Marxist thinking. Furthermore, what cannot be taken into account in mere Marxist thinking is that which, in turn, cannot be increased or decreased in the economic process itself. It is strange that the two things are at the extreme ends of the economic process: what is in your head, excuse me for saying so, and what is on the ground. What lies in between is actually subject to the thinking of the means of production, as it is in Marxist thinking. But the soil depends on the weather, on all sorts of other things, it depends on its extent – so, as I said, it is not elastic. That is at one pole.

I can only hint at it as a kind of result. If I were now to talk to you about it, to prove in all its details that Marxism must fail precisely because it must fail at these two poles, I would have to talk a lot first. That might be so, but it would lead too far for the moment. But it can be proved. And that is the most dangerous thing in the present social and economic experiment, that no account is taken of these two poles, that everything that arises from them corresponds merely to the industrially conceived Marxist-dialectical thought-images and only reckons with industrial concepts, with that which leaves out of account, on the left and on the right, land and that over which there can be just as little arbitrariness: talents and ideas. Consider what depends on them! The economic process comes to a standstill if you do not integrate the land into the right social structure and if you do not integrate human inventiveness, in the broadest sense, into the right social structure. Everything comes to a standstill. You can only overexploit what already exists for so long. You can exploit what is already there in terms of existing economic values. But one day there will be a standstill in what is already there if one does not really think realistically, does not develop what I always call realistic thinking, if one does not think realistically but only illusively, namely, again, only considers what is in the middle and does not consider the total, the full total again.

From this, however, you can see that it is necessary above all to provide clarification. And I can assure you: the function of land and the function of intellectual activity are more difficult to understand in the economic process than what Marxism has contributed in a beautiful and astute way to the economic process in terms of insight. But for the rest, everything still remains to be done. Go peddling, and see how many people you can interest in these things today! But there is no salvation in the future without an interest in these things. And they can only be properly studied if one has the principles of spiritual science. Just as today bridges can only be built if one is a mathematician and has studied mathematics, so social structures can only be understood if one forms the elementary concepts from spiritual science. That is what must be borne in mind. Do not forget that it is necessary, above all, to create schools and educational opportunities everywhere, so that what people need to understand in this area in order to live together can enter their minds. you create only illusionary structures with all the best will in the world, with all the possible Lenins and Trotskys and Scheidemanns and all the more obvious ones that perhaps are not allowed to be named here, structures that can be plundered, but which are not real structures. It is better to create with the awareness that it is a provisional arrangement, a continuity of economic life, to regard it as a provisional arrangement and, above all, to work towards the disappearance of the bourgeois education system with its lack of understanding.

You may consider this to be somewhat difficult and inconvenient, but it is a necessity. You can either want humanity to descend into chaos or you can want this to really happen – you cannot consider it inconvenient – and now we really have to start at the right end, namely first with the radical enlightenment of people. That is where the effort must be directed. Above all, it must be clearly understood that, since Karl Marx basically only took up bourgeois thinking and developed it very astutely dialectically, Karl Marx also evokes inadequate ideas about the other two areas. One can only gain an understanding of the way in which people come together with other people – coming together arises from interest, from feeling – and one can only gain an understanding of how the social structure must form in this sense by studying the nerve or head man. But the bourgeoisie, which is particularly organized around the nervous-mental type, has so paralyzed him that all real, enlightened spiritual concepts in this area have actually disappeared. Well, they have actually disappeared quite visibly, one can say, they have disappeared so vividly: you can still see pictures today from the eighteenth century – the attitude has carried over into the nineteenth century, albeit in a less obvious form – where people delight in how man is originally a social being, pictures: princesses, queens, in short, all sorts of people who hardly exist today, they dance in shepherd's costume, indulge in the warmth and fraternity that the original elementary human being develops in social life. You cannot imagine anything more false than all these things, which only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries then took on different forms. But the lie and illusion and fantasy dominated thinking to such an extent that what I discussed from this side, the theory of surplus value, asserted by Marxism as an expression of the proletarian mood, really strikes like a bolt of lightning: oh what, wishy-washy all the talk of brotherhood , of man's standing within society, of one person belonging to another; look at how, precisely in relation to industrial life, sociability has developed, which prevails between the mine owner and those who work in the coal mines in continuous labor and have to work so and so much. Consider the human and convivial relationship between the entrepreneurs and owners of sulfur mines in Sicily and the people who work in them in this life-destroying labor, and whose surplus value they possess. — In this peculiar way in which man works for man, in which man needs man in human life, Karl Marx has truly worked in a way that the proletariat can understand. And this was understood in turn: that the effect of person to person works above all in the differentiation into classes of the propertied and the propertyless. And programs emerged with the consequence: if this is to change, it can only change through the struggle of the proletarian class against the bourgeoisie, because that is a necessity.

Of course there will be many who are mine owners, and when the sufferings of the miners are presented to them in the 'I' theater, their hearts will be full of compassion, full of sympathy, perhaps even their eyes will fill with tears. But that's not worth anything, says the proletarian, because this compassion does not help these people; they can't help it, they are not personally, individually to blame for it. Man is not an individual being; man is, through historical necessity, placed in a certain socialization - not sociability, as the idealistic conceptions of the eighteenth century were, but in a socialization that cannot be other than through a struggle. It is a necessity to understand this. There is no question of personal responsibility, because it is a necessity to promote a historical process. This is what Karl Marx drummed into his proletarians and what was so little understood in the bourgeoisie.

And the third was the materialistic science of history. But before we consider this third point, we can ask: What is important if we want to understand socialization? — For Karl Marx did not grasp what man is as a nervous and sensory being: that he is an individuality, that he is more than any society can give him, as an individuality. This is what I had to counter in my Philosophy of Freedom, which touches on the fundamental nerve of the social question precisely on this point; and this is again what must be countered to Karl Marx's theory of socialization, where the individual disappears completely, just as the function of land and spiritual labor in socializing the means of production must be countered. For again, it can be shown that all social process must come to a standstill if it is not supplied with the sources that come from human individuality.

This is important, but it will only be possible if we know the source of human impulses, human sensory and nervous beings. Again, it is necessary to start with the social work. We can only deduce what is fact from the other thoughts. Karl Marx, with a beautiful instinct, coined the wonderful word: “The philosophers have so far only interpreted the facts differently; but we want to create facts, change the facts.” And he wanted to change the facts from his thoughts, wanted to create thoughts that could become facts, and he achieved it; but he only achieved that the proletariat itself, the way of thinking, the way of feeling of the proletariat is there. But what lives in it? The thought-offspring of the bourgeoisie live in the proletariat, the inheritance of the thoughts of the bourgeoisie. This is what the proletarian must understand above all, that he cannot make progress on his way with his demands without a real spiritual-scientific knowledge of man, and that this can never come to him if he retains bourgeois science. He will understand if he is enlightened in the right way and has the opportunity to be enlightened in the right way. This possibility must be created.

And finally, the third thing is to recognize the extent to which the human being is the being that he is from his metabolic process, which is precisely connected with his most spiritual being. This is where a real conception of history arises. But because Karl Marx had no idea about the threefold human being, because he was forgotten, the conception of history became a mere materialistic conception of history. He correctly recognized that what people carry within them as their instincts is more important than what they delude themselves about as their illusions. This comes from the classes. He said to people: Look at him, the bourgeois! Don't condemn him, he hasn't become that way because of anything he can be blamed for, but in the historical process the class of the bourgeoisie has simply been formed; as a result, he lives in his class in a very certain way. This life in his class determines the direction of his thoughts. Different thoughts are produced in you. You cannot help what you think; he cannot help what he thinks, because all these thoughts arise from the subconscious, namely from the class structure, from the social structure. Do not judge the matter morally, but recognize the necessity that he cannot help but oppress you, that he cannot help but be your opponent. Therefore become his opponent. Through class struggle, create for yourselves what is necessary.

All three points culminate in the class struggle, which was presented as the great demand of the new era. Karl Marx took up the dialectic in a truly Hegelian way. He said: “As proletarians, we do not want anything that we invent, but rather what development itself teaches us; we just want to get the wheel rolling a little, so that it rolls on consciously. All that we want would come by itself, as entrepreneurship increasingly comes together in societies, trusts and so on. By putting state impulses at its service, the business community is already ensuring that it increasingly sets itself apart as a class from the proletariat, that the haves and have-nots are increasingly sharply opposed to each other , but in such a way that all this becomes more and more uniformed, that there are fewer and fewer individual property owners, but larger and larger property-owning societies, which would necessarily be brought about in this way by the proletariat. Property is organizing itself. Above all, it was the spirit of struggle that dawned on the proletariat from Marxist dialectics, from Marxist science. And this fighting spirit had been alive for decades in the antagonism between the proletariat, which felt itself to be merely the proletariat across all national and other borders, and between the entrepreneurial class, which increasingly socialized and finally grew into imperialism. So that gradually modern life more and more lost the old political form and that, of which one still confusingly had the illusion that they were old state structures, became the new imperialisms, which are actually nothing more than the embodiment of that which confronts the proletariat as entrepreneurship. And in the most eminent sense, those imperialisms include the one that imagines itself to be an old political entity, but which has gradually become entirely an entrepreneurial organization: the British Empire; and the United States belongs to that. You can read about this in the older writings and lectures of Wilson, who proved all this to be true, because in this area, in terms of perception – I have already shown it from a different perspective – Woodrow Wilson is truly an insightful man.

So that is what, one could say, actually underlies this war, so-called war; that is what lurked and disguised itself in the so-called antagonism between the Central Powers and the Entente. This has been developing for decades. It had to come to expression in some way and will continue to do so. More and more the struggle will take on the form of expressing the antagonism that has emerged between the entrepreneurs and the proletariat of millions in some disguise. In the sense that the Western states want to remain states, one can only be called a state if one is used in some way as a framework for entrepreneurial endeavors, capitalist endeavors; and opponents and opposition will emerge where the consciousness of the proletariat prevails. This smoldered, glowed, glowed, glowed - what does not quite glow glows - glowed under what extended over the world as a great lie, as the lie of the so-called world war; it used all that now sounded like a catchphrase: “Freedom of nations, right of self-determination for every nation”. “Freedom of nations” sounds nicer than saying, ”We need a market in Eastern Europe, because where there is production, there must be consumption.” Perhaps it is only said if one belongs to a very secret lodge that rules the whole situation from the rear power realms. On the outside, the whole thing is embellished with beautiful-sounding phrases, dressed up by coining words that people can be outraged by, about all sorts of monstrous deeds and so on. But what is behind things as truth will show itself to people; it will show itself that what springs forth from the sum of untruthfulness is what is behind it and what can only be cured through such a deep understanding of reality as is possible only in spiritual science.

For that which has organized itself in the old way, whether consciously or unconsciously, and that which organizes itself in a new way out of the spiritual, participates in the process in a peculiar way. We live in the age of the consciousness soul. The consciousness soul is the primary agent in all that is being united in the British Empire community in the English-speaking population. You know that I have developed in detail at other times; so that is the main contemporary issue. But this contemporary issue must actually be clothed in entrepreneurship, in imperialism. It must become world domination in terms of external material. If this is now carried out by such means, as I have also discussed here in the Christmas lectures of 1916, then it must lead to the same results as before and as it will continue to do in the future. That is what is the real driving force behind the scenes of history, the other is something that is easy to talk about. But the spread of world domination, and specifically materialistic, material world domination, that is what is actually going on — it is being promoted by one side, while people are revolting against it on the other. Everything else is just a cover. For that which has formed itself in a different order, which is less in keeping with the times in the process of human development, must also find its development in a different way. Thus it comes about that the Romance element, the most excellent bearers of which, if we disregard Spanish, which is corrupt, we see Italian and French, the Romance element, which has come from quite different conditions, inherited from the earlier cultural period, from the fourth post-Atlantic cultural period, into the fifth, will come to its decline, to its downfall, precisely through the victories it has now won. But you can also see this from certain things that can show you just how spiritual science is derived from reality.

You see, I have explained to you what French unity is in the form of a state. I am not talking, of course, about the individual Frenchman, but about the Frenchman who feels French insofar as he belongs to the state of France, that state of France that attaches importance to possessing Alsace-Lorraine and so on. There is a great difference here. Nothing that is said is directed against the individual person. It is not directed against anything at all, but only characterizes. But it is directed against the extent to which a person belongs to this or that group, which always makes one worse: “Oaner is a Mensch...” (a person is a person...) because there are usually many nations. Well! So keep in mind that we are in the midst of a threefold development. French is particularly there to develop, at the stage at which it is now possible, what we call the mind or emotional soul; we have already spoken about this. This mind or emotional soul, in its particular development, falls within the years of a human being from 28 to 35, as you know: astral body until the age of 21, sentient soul until the age of 28, mind soul until the age of 35, from the age of 35 to 42 consciousness soul, then comes the spiritual self.

But now developmental currents are running through each other. You know that the individual human being is today in the process of developing the consciousness soul, that is, he is only really introduced to the forces that his age can give him when he lives beyond the age of 35. Before that, he must learn, must be educated in it, but one can never learn even that which one's age then gives one unless one lives beyond the age of 35. This is unpleasant for those who want to postpone the voting age, but it is simply a developmental fact. So one can say: this development is particularly favorable for participation between the ages of 35 and 42. It is at this time that the forces that can really consolidate develop for that which is most in keeping with the times in the age of the consciousness soul. This could naturally lead to an understanding of how the consolidation of that which makes the British Empire great can come from English-speaking men and women between the ages of 35 and 42 – even if Lloyd George remained a twenty-seven-year-old, but Lloyd George is not a typical person for that, but a typical person for the humanity of the present, not for Britishness.

In contrast, the whole of humanity is developing in such a way that people, as they become younger and younger, are currently in the process of developing the period from 21 to 28 years, the sentient soul. These two currents now run into each other in the forward development of humanity. You see, the period from 28 to 35 years remains fallow, barren. But this is precisely the period allotted to the development of France: the years from 28 to 35. What you can investigate spiritually is so strongly expressed that even the infertility of the French population is expressed in it, the outer physical infertility. At the same time, this is a perspective indication of what could otherwise be shown in numerous occult researches: that the French people are no longer able to maintain what is the inheritance of Romanism out of the confusion. Only that which flows to Italianism from the fact that Italianism is currently in the process of developing the sentient soul, 21st to 28th year, that precisely through this renewal Italianism acquires the hegemony of the Romance peoples, insofar as they still have a task in the future. This is so important that we have to keep such big things in mind in the European process, so that we know, for example, that something that has emerged from impulses that are completely different from the present ones, such as the after-effects of Romanism in European culture, is indeed in a state of decadence, but that the Italian people are coming to hegemony.

Perhaps someone will not grant me the right to speak about this 'tragedy'. But that is also the one thing that can be said with a certain tragedy: that the French have not committed themselves to the French cause either way, but have done everything possible to promote that which will make the French essence disappear from the process of development of modern humanity.

In the East, Russian Slavdom awaits; it can wait because it is destined for the future, all that will emerge from the confused chaos of what is developing here and there. Such things are the other thing that must emerge from a spiritual-scientific penetration of the facts. What I would like to point out again and again through such considerations, which in the near future can again be increased if possibilities are still opened to us, is to decide to see things in their truth, to really go out a little, not to stop at the illusions and phantasms, but to see things in their truth. Spiritual science is something that not only gives abstract concepts, but can also familiarize us with reality. Then, when we become familiar with reality through spiritual science, we will not overestimate all the strange concepts with which the spiritual life, and also humanity, has nourished itself in recent times. These concepts have been formed in many cases, I might say, in a Luciferic-Ahrimanic way, in that people have nourished themselves in their thinking and imagining with feelings from the most ancient times, which they have carried forward in time. People cling so tenaciously to inherited concepts, and one can feel deep sorrow when one observes this clinging, this rigid clinging to inherited concepts in people. Even in this time people have spoken of “great generals”. In a certain field, a real idolatry has been nourished for people like Hindenburg and Ludendorff, a real idolatry, as if this old hero worship could still have any meaning in the whole context of the catastrophe that has taken place! All the abilities that won battles in the past, or the inabilities that led to battles being lost in the past, no longer had any significance in this war process. You either won or you didn't, depending on the material, material in the form of cannons, material in the form of ammunition, material in the form of people, that was available at a particular place and if you had it or the other side had it; depending on that you won; or depending on whether one or the other had a more or less effective or ineffective gas. Victory or defeat depended on these factors. To that extent, the personal skill of the strategist was no longer a consideration, as it had been in the past. And here, too, we come upon a terrible untruth in the judgment of one man or another. You cannot believe where it is necessary today to correct the concepts of truth and untruth. Our time is so deeply entangled in empty phrases and untruthfulness, in illusions and phantasms. Therefore, it must be emphasized again and again that we must escape from this entanglement in these ideas. And these ideas are present especially in the field of education. Starting at the top and going down to the lowest level of schooling, it is necessary everywhere: medicine and theology and jurisprudence and philosophy, and all the other subjects that have been added at these universities, then the intermediate school system and everything else, that is what was suitable to undermine the ground of truth and what has lulled people most of all with regard to this undermining of the ground for truth.

It is indeed extremely difficult to find understanding on this point, and there is no salvation if one does not find understanding on this point. Perhaps it is easier for me to have gained understanding on this point than for many others. For I do believe that it has done much, much harm in the present time, that that way of thinking has prevailed for so long and has really taken hold of broad masses of the human population, that way of thinking which consists in the parents already taking care of the young person – I will now leave out how they take care of their daughters , because that would be a chapter in itself. He just has to get a government job, where he, even if he gets it late – well, the old man has to help out there – then he rises from one five-year period to the next without having to do anything, rises from one five-year period to the next in his salary. He is provided for life because he is entitled to a pension. This lulls him into a certain carelessness. It is only a minor matter compared to the fact that you also know how to do a wide range of things: if you sit in one place long enough, you will receive the Red Eagle Order, 4th class, then 3rd class – that's in addition. That's what happens when you're at the first gate of life, the thing that can make you so carefree because it takes you out of the struggle for survival. Proletarian theory, Marxism would say: That is quite natural; anyone who subconsciously generates the ideas that arise from this sense of security of being entitled to a pension in a bourgeois way cannot understand the person who, no matter how much he destroys what is present, as a proletarian destroys nothing but his chains. — That is a constant saying in proletarian circles. But you can feel how ideas are really formed in their forms through the way you are involved in the social process. You stop taking an intense, interested part in the struggle for life, on which the only thing that depends is a prosperous, fruitful life, when you know that you will get a raise every five years and a pension of so and so much, and will be provided for for life. As I said, I don't want to talk about the daughters. But the way of thinking is by no means different in the social process with regard to the placing of daughters and women in social life.

But I believe that a great deal depends on it. The facts are now such that they are beginning, perhaps precisely by shaking up many things that were firm, that were firmly believed, to hammer other ideas into people's heads. Some who have been able to wait patiently for the changes that have been taking place year by year may look into the future with some uneasiness when the next quinquennium comes around. Perhaps the experience, as I said, that I have never consciously sought any professional or other connection with anything to do with government employment or even just in any way with the state, has helped me to gain understanding for these events. It always disgusted me to have anything to do with anything smacking of the state. I do not boast of it, for it is of course a great failing; one is then a Bohemian. Now, how did Harlan call me for the nineties in the feature pages of the Vossische Zeitung? “An unsalaried, free-thinking scholar of God.” Someone I was friends with back then and who described me in such a way that his description still fits in the present day; he described many things, and he meant that I didn't fit into the then society of bohemians any more than he did. He called me an unpaid freethinking scholar of God, which I already was at the time, and which did not really fit into the circle of that time. But the whole of society at that time – I am now putting this in parentheses, don't be offended, we know each other too well for you to misunderstand me – the whole of society called itself the “Verbrechertisch” (the “Crooks' Table”), and under this title a number of people were grouped together who set themselves the harmless program, if one can speak of a program, of annoying the philistines. Jokes are there to conceal seriousness, and yet they are often only the expression of seriousness in a self-educating way of dealing with life.

But the day before yesterday I spoke at the end about how, out of current events, Germanness must come to Judaism and Greekness in a certain way, that Germanness which will initially be eradicated, at least as a German essence, through brutalization, right? But it will play a role. Greece was also eradicated, Judaism was eradicated in a certain way. It will play its role. And it is just right for me that through the recitation of the “Choir of Primitive Instincts” one of the most pronounced minds of modern times, Fercher von Steinwand, who speaks so truly from German folk tradition, and also from that German folk tradition that thrives particularly in German-Austrian areas, has now has presented itself before your soul in those concrete, vivid ideas that will show you that a certain task has been given precisely for this Germanness, which never had a real talent for an external state structure; that this Germanness has certain possibilities of good self-knowledge precisely in such excellent individuals as Fercher von Steinwand was.

Today, one feels compelled to say so many different things to the Germans. Especially in the last four and a half years, one has always felt compelled to say this and that to the Germans from the outside. We have experienced it again in these days, haven't we? I believe it was Lloyd George, I mean his Excellency himself, of course, who, after so many other speeches, has once again spoken about all that is depraved and immoral about Germanism, as if there were no possibility that precisely within this nationality the things that this nationality needs in terms of self-knowledge could arise. In this respect, Fercher von Steinwand is an extremely good example. You see, I told you about the lecture that he, Fercher von Steinwand, gave in 1859 about the Gypsies to the future King of Saxony, then Crown Prince Georg, to ministers and many generals – remember that: to many generals, because that is militarism, isn't it –; to many generals he gave this lecture. He said various things about the gypsies, because the gypsies seemed to him to be somehow related to the role that the German people will play in the future. 1859, isn't it, it's a strong piece of self-knowledge how he imagines it on the one hand, I read it to you the day before yesterday, but I will characterize it for you from another side. And to do that, allow me to read you another small piece from this Gypsy lecture by Ferchers von Steinwand. So imagine that Fercher von Steinwand speaks, speaks about what is favorable and unfavorable for the further development of the German people, before a crown prince, before ministers and before generals, imagine that he speaks in the following way:

"In our mountainous country, there is a custom, which is otherwise praiseworthy, that immediately before bedtime, the head of the household kneels at the table and recites a prayer known as the rosary. This prayer is said aloud by the entire family, including the servants, in the present paragraphs, and its duration fills an hour, which is not to be doubted. Yes, it can be considerably extended by a pious housewife with the addition of Our Fathers. For this reason, it is not unnatural for the longed-for sleep, but postponed by continued holy “prayer for us”, to sometimes hastily take hold, interrupting the tired worker in the middle of the loud “Ave Maria” and repeatedly shakes the kneeling position of the same, and so on, until the eloquently begun piety has dragged on in a stammering manner to the end. This time, the master of the house himself was seized by the gentle hand of nature, and his “Lord, have mercy on us” had gradually lost all its usual emphasis. I myself knelt in a corner of the room, nodding more to the sleeping place than to God.

Outside the open door of the room stood silently the black-browed horde” – there were gypsy visitors, in fact – ”sometimes revealing crystal-white teeth. The prematurely-withered face of a young woman, who was quietly turned towards the entrance, was shimmeringly illuminated by the glow of the fireplace. The white in her eye seemed to fade away in increasing drowsiness. The pale yellow enamel at the glazed, circular edge of the eyeball stood out all the more clearly, a delicate pale yellow enamel that characterizes every gypsy eye and is sometimes only discoverable to the painter.

All our annoyance with the strangers had vanished, for tiredness dominated the house. Nobody except the gypsy mother we already knew, who had planted her knees in the middle of the floor, had followed the prayer with a brave voice, and piety was about to suffer a general defeat.

Suddenly, the old woman, twitching like a viper, rose up with terrible force from the floorboard, stormed with rapid-fire superiority on the flagging prayer leader and tore the beaded symbol of the rosary from his limp hand, spraying up in cherubic rage. All devout mumbling stopped as if before the blare of the Last Judgment, and the room seemed to tremble, struck by the holy earthquake. Then the pythically inspired woman leaped or sprang into the middle of the circle of worshippers; her face had taken on a Gorgon-like transfiguration, her voice intensified to a thunderclap. Stretching both arms towards the sky, she cried: “But Lord, you will spew out of your mouth those who are lukewarm.” The dim light fluttered on her coppery, black-ringed forehead, and from beneath it, like the lightning of the archangel Michael, a fiery blaze flared up. Never before had I been told with such fiery urgency that wavering and undecided people are the worst and most worthless of the Creator's creations.

What immense religious wealth this woman possessed, I thought, and how enviable!

Poor student that I was, I had not yet learned

what a difference there is between possessing spiritual content and expressing it. I did not yet know that it is enough to feel a few rudiments of content within oneself to possibly make an excellent interpreter of serious spiritual content.

I once sat under a maple tree that was growing. But it did not make that clear with any drumming. However, it cannot be denied that inner nobility is necessary to be a good drummer. If it were not so, then the greatest noisemakers and braggarts, the most skillful gesticulators, would have to be the greatest creative spirits among mortals, and boldly expansive actors would have to be the most profound playwrights and modern Germany would have no lack of excellent tragedies.

Where would such a reflection be more appropriate than in a history of the Gypsies?

That is the nature of such self-awareness, which does not need to be preached to by the world, which could judge for itself that what existed in 1870 has come into decadence. But if one understood the issues, one did it as I did in my book on Friedrich Nietzsche, where I quoted Nietzsche's words: “Exstirpation of the German spirit in favor of the ‘German Reich’.” I could not have the book on Friedrich Nietzsche reprinted during the war because of what it says. Fercher von Steinwand continues:

“The air is heavy and sulphurous from the oaths that have been sworn on constitutions for eight decades. How many states are there in which these oaths have not been broken many times over? Our minds are deaf from the blasts of the trumpets, the cries of jubilation with which we welcomed the heavenly benefactress, freedom.”

You would think that Fercher von Steinwand was talking about Wilsonianism and Entente views!

"But count the mortals who are man enough to be free! Where are there still four walls that do not resound with quotations from Schiller's writings? But where, in which hut, in which palace, under which star of the German zone, does something of the poet's energetic soul, of his fiery vein, of his stubborn urge for a great goal, still live? Who would have the courage and the gift to make his mistakes? The 'tribunes of all European empires totter under the burden of eloquence and science, through which order and happiness are to be introduced into human society.

That is why I said yesterday: At least in Central Europe it will have come to pass that some contribution will have been made to breaking through the lie. Where it has triumphed, it will continue to live.

"You of little heart! What is the thought that you have thought? Who among you is a Mirabeau? How ardent is your image of the happy state, if it is not already cold as a corpse before you announce it? Tell me, which of you is greater than the moment? How many scoundrels have you intimidated, how many noble-minded people have you encouraged? How many silent praises do you not hear in the complaints? Does misfortune not speak louder than ever? Is it really so terribly difficult to grasp the idea that every human being, without exception, must be educated from childhood for freedom, order and happiness, and even for the art of educating themselves, educated far less through reasoning than through love, patience, strictness and painful sacrifices? Is it really so terribly difficult, instead of paying for making a noise, to pay for a fruitful activity? Is it really so terribly difficult, instead of obeying the bayonets, to serve the mild, all-equalizing reason?“

”Imagine a state” — please, there are the generals! -, ”imagine a state of the first or second order. Imagine, in addition, an insightful minister” — the ministers are sitting there too — ”who does not count as his own glory what harms or dishonors a neighbor; in a word, a minister who uses two-thirds of his enormous military coffers for the education of the lowest classes of the people — what do you think? Would not such a minister, within a few years, bring about the most tremendous change in all conditions, for his own benefit, for the benefit of his people, for the benefit of his lord and king? Would such a minister not change the character of world history in less than half a generation? I would have the heart to say “Yes” again, for it matters little to me whether some polished war hero or corpulent model official calls me a foolish ideologue.

Meanwhile, take comfort, you Gypsies! You are not alone in your kind; you are not threatened with extinction: new reinforcements are flowing to you daily from all directions of life!

It is a view of life that has taken firm root in the impulses in which it is based on real nationality, which in a certain sense justifies one to make such assertions as I have done and as I do not want to make them out of some mere impulse, but as they can be proven piece by piece.

We will meet again next Friday at 7 p.m., and then we will continue our discussion.

In one of his works Tolstoi expressed surprise—one might almost say disapproval—that in exploring modern science he found every kind of investigation concerning the evolution of the insect world, concerning what seemed to him insignificant things in the organic body or elsewhere in the world, whereas he found nothing in science itself concerning the important, the essential things, concerning the questions which stir every heart. Tolstoi said that above all he found nothing whatever concerning the nature of death. From a certain point of view one cannot entirely disagree with such an objection to the modern scientific spirit, coming from so distinguished a source. Nevertheless from another aspect one may stress the point that, if such an utterance is meant as a reproach, it is indeed to a certain extent unjust towards modern science, and this for the very simple reason that modern science has long owed its magnitude and importance to that very sphere in which answers to questions connected with the nature of death have been sought in the main without success. On the basis of the conception of the world represented here, it is certainly not necessary to inveigh against deficiencies in modern science. We can admire in the very highest degree the splendid achievements, the truly significant successes, both in their own sphere and also with respect to their application in practical life and in human society; here the opinion has repeatedly been expressed that Spiritual Science has certainly no need to lag behind in any kind of admiration pointing in this direction. At the same time, however, the most important achievements of the modern scientific world stand on a footing that gives no foundation for those points of contact which must definitely be reached, when questions concerning death, immortality and the like, are to be examined. Modern science cannot do this, because from her starting point she has in the first place set herself the task of investigating material life. But wherever death intervenes in existence, we find, when we look more closely, the point of contact which draws the spiritual and the material together. Certainly, when these subjects are under discussion, there is no need to agree with the many cheap attacks on the efforts of modern science. Indeed, we may even say (and this, too, has been often emphasized here) that when the great questions of conscience are to be examined, we may—even as spiritual scientists—find ourselves with reference to the feeling of scientific responsibility and scientific conscience, more drawn to the procedure adopted today by external natural science—although it is unable to penetrate to the most weighty problems lying behind life—than to many facile explanations springing from dilettante theosophical or other spiritual-scientific sources. These often give—especially with regard to method—too easy answers to such questions as we are dealing with today.

Recently, indeed, some approach has been made from the standpoint of science, to the problem of the death of created beings. This has come about in a peculiar way. Apart from many separate attempts which have been made, analyses of which would carry us too far today, one investigator at least may be mentioned, who has handled the question of the nature of death in a significant book. This writer has adopted a strange attitude towards the question, so strange that we are obliged to say again, as we did in a similar case, concerning the explanations of the origin of man: as spiritual scientist one feels peculiarly placed with regard to modern natural science; for whenever one is faced with a fact, we find that precisely from the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we can fully accept this fact and can see in it strong proofs of that which Spiritual Science represents. Faced, however, with the theories and hypotheses advanced by the adherents of the present-day world conception, in a more or less materialistic or, as it is considered more elegant to say, in a monistic way, then indeed it is a different matter. Here, one feels that, sincerely as we may agree concerning the facts brought forward in modern times, we cannot always declare ourselves in agreement with the theories and hypotheses, which those who believe they are on the sure ground of natural science feel bound to construct on what is produced as natural-scientific fact.

The research worker who has written on the nature of death from the standpoint of his natural science has called attention to something very interesting, precisely in connection with Spiritual Science. This is Metschnikoff, the man who for long was Director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He seeks clarity—so far as it is possible to obtain it today—concerning the data, the actualities, which bring about the death of the living being. In the first place, when considering such a question, we must not take into account what are called violent deaths, though we may perhaps have occasion later to refer to these violent deaths brought about by accidents or otherwise. When, however, we discuss the question of the nature of death—Metschnikoff, too, draws attention to this—we must see it as established in natural existence, must study it as appertaining, so to speak, to the phenomena of life, must be able to bring the phenomena of life before our eyes in such a way that death belongs among them. So, then, the riddle of death can be solved only in the case of so-called natural death, which is brought about at the end of life, just as other natural processes are brought about in the course of a life. Since this is only an introduction to what is to be said about natural science, it is impossible to go into the interesting details of the arguments of the above-mentioned investigator and thinker. It must, however, be pointed out that in studying the actualities of life he calls attention to the fact that in the processes of life itself, in that whereby life is to some extent evolved and perfected, the naturalist really meets with nothing which could give a real reason why death, the annihilation of the being, encroaches upon life. By numerous examples, Metschnikoff seeks to show how whoever follows the course of life sees everywhere that death makes its appearance without our being able to give the ready explanation people are prone to give, when the span of life is drawing towards death; that this is brought about by exhaustion. This investigator calls attention to numerous facts which prove that although the processes of life continue, and continue in an unenfeebled condition so that there can be no question of exhaustion in life itself, yet at a certain point of time death intervenes; so that this investigator arrives at the—it must be admitted—extremely remarkable position in which fundamentally every death, every ending of life in the animal, vegetable or human kingdom is to be attributed to external influences—the action of certain enemies of life which, in the course of a lifetime, obtain the upper hand and which finally, fighting against life, work as a poison on it, and at last destroy it. Whereas, then, for this investigator, the organism itself everywhere shows signs that it does not actually come to an end through its own exhaustion, this individual expects to see—when death approaches—such enemies of life appearing in one form or another, as poison phenomena making an end of life. Here, then, we have before us a hypothesis of natural science—it is indeed no more than this—which, as it stands, traces every natural death to external influences, to the action of poison phenomena brought about by external living beings of the plant or animal kingdom which make their appearance as enemies of life and at certain moments destroy the organism.

Such an interpretation employs all means to come to some kind of understanding of the nature of death within the actual material phenomena. In pursuing such a course, the reasoner strives to ignore as far as possible the fact that the spiritual element may intervene actively and effectively in organic life, and that perhaps this spiritual element as such may have something to do with death as we meet it in the outside world. It is not unthinkable—although at first sight this must appear absurd to those who maintain a more or less materialistic or monistic attitude—that those very enemies which appear as poisonous forces in relation to the organism might be enlisted as necessary accompanying phenomena of the spiritual forces which permeate organic beings, strengthening and stimulating them on their path towards death. It would not be unthinkable that the powerful spirit which, on the one hand, is directed to use the organism as its instrument in the physical world, might, on the other hand, make it possible through its operations for those hostile forces to seize upon the organism and destroy it.—In any case, if we allow ourselves to be influenced by such an explanation as that just quoted, there is one thing we must not disregard; namely, that modern natural science with its interest in merely material phenomena actually makes the investigation of the death of the organism an easy matter. But in reality it should not make light of it. And this leads me to emphasize that it will not be easy for Spiritual Science—which, from our own day onwards, must make the effort to take its place in the evolution of mankind—to carry out investigations concerning certain questions so simply as those world conceptions often do which expect to be able to determine something about the great riddles of existence merely out of external material facts.

Hence, from the very outset attention must be drawn to the fact that from the way in which modern natural science observes phenomena, no real distinction is made by those who feel they are standing on its firm ground between death in the plant world, the animal world, and the human world. But what have these three in common except the destruction of an external phenomenon? This, however, they share, to all intents and purposes, with the destruction of a machine: the cessation of the connection of the parts. Looking only at the external phenomena it is easy to speak of death, insofar as this death may then be spoken of as uniformly similar in plant, animal, and man. We may see where this leads, by a case which I have often quoted to a number of the audience sitting here, but which is always interesting when the relation of science to such a question is being considered. I do not wish on an occasion like this to refer to the ordinary popular writings which make it their business to carry into wider circles the results natural science is supposed to have obtained; on the contrary, if the connection with natural science is to be established, I should wish always to point to the arguments of this kind accepted as the best. Here, then, with reference to this question, we have always the opportunity to point to a distinguished book which is at the same time easy to understand; namely, the “Physiology” of no less a writer than the great English scientist, Huxley, translated into German by Professor J. Rosenthal. In the first pages of this work the subject of death is dealt with in few words but in a very remarkable way, which shows us immediately how inadequate on the whole is the thinking—the judgment on such questions, not the research—of present-day science. T.H. Huxley writing on Physiology says something to this effect: The life of man is dependent on three things, and when they are destroyed death must supervene. Then he continues: If, in the first place, the brain is destroyed, or, secondly, the pulmonary breathing is stifled, or thirdly if the action of the heart is inhibited, man's death must ensue; yet, strangely enough (though one cannot be sure nowadays that this strangeness will be felt in those wide circles in which the habits of thought have allowed themselves to be influenced by materialistic wisdom), strangely enough, Huxley says that it cannot be stated without reserve that, if the three above-named functions of the human organism are inhibited, the death of the living human being must ensue. One might rather think that supposing the brain no longer functioned, if the activity of the lungs and heart could be artificially maintained, life might still continue for a time, even without the action of the brain. Whether this is felt to be strange is only a question of habits of thought; for, actually, we should say: The life of a man when he cannot use his brain in the physical world cannot for a human being really be called a continuance of life. It must be admitted that life is ended for a man when that for which he needs the instrument of his brain can no longer play its part. And then if by some means the activities of heart and lungs could be maintained, that might be approximately a continuance of life, perhaps in the sense of a plant existence, and, if one wished to preserve a completely open mind, one might speak of that death which must still take place when the action of the heart and lungs ceases, as of a plant death added to the former death.

To speak, then, of human death so open-mindedly can only be justified when death is imminent because the man can no longer make use of the most important instrument whereby he carries on his life in the physical world—in his actual consciousness. And the ceasing of his consciousness in the physical world, insofar as it is bound up with the indispensability of a brain, must, for the human being alone, be designated as death. How superficially such things are studied is amply shown by Huxley himself when, in those pages where he speaks of death, he draws attention to natural science having not yet succeeded in progressing in the same way as, in his opinion, what he calls “an old doctrine” progresses; namely, by following the spiritual, essential actualities of the soul, through its journeying in the further course of existence, after the passage through the gate of death. Not yet, remarks Huxley, can modern natural science follow up what it has to follow: the oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and so on which compose the human organism, and which fall asunder when the man has passed through the gate of death.—Hence, this investigator considered that natural science could contribute something towards the problem of the meaning of death: that is, if the path could be followed which is taken after death by the materials composing the human organism during lifetime. And it is interesting and significant that, at the end of this first treatise on physiology by an important scientist, we find a reference to words which we can understand when spoken by the gloomy, melancholic Prince of Denmark, Hamlet—but which we should not have expected to find quoted when so serious a question is raised as the nature of death in the world. If we inquire into the nature of death in man, it is exclusively the destiny of the being of man that interests us. We can never be content with knowing the relation to one another of the various materials, the individual components, which have combined to form the exterior corporeality, so long as the essential soul and spirit of man made use of the external instruments. Out of his gloomy melancholy, Hamlet may say:

“Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,
O that that earth which kept the world in awe,
Should patch a hole t'expel the winter's flaw.”

This the melancholic may say, and we understand it in its dramatic connection; but when the naturalist calls attention to the way the molecules and atoms once in the body of Caesar might go on living in some other being, it may be, as Huxley suggests, in a dog or in a hole in the wall; whoever is in real earnest feels in the depths of his thinking how impossible it is that such a thought should approach the great problems of the world riddles.—And this is no disparagement of natural science which has to accomplish its achievements on the material plane. It is only to point out how, on the one hand, natural science should perceive and observe its limitations, and should answer the questions about material processes and the destiny of substances, while, on the other hand, those students who wish—on what they can learn by conscientious research concerning the destiny of substance—to build up a world conception of such a problem as death, in essentials far overstep the boundaries of which they should be conscious, if they want to remain on the ground of external, material facts. As I have said, it is not so easy for Spiritual Science, because from its point of view it is necessary to examine separately the phenomena of what may be called death in plants, of what is called death in animals, and also, apart from these, what in particular constitutes death in the human kingdom.

No conception of death in the plant world can be obtained by studying plants as they are very often studied now; that is, by observing each individual plant as a separate entity. It would, of course, lead us much too far today to explain again in detail what has been already indicated in former lectures; namely, that Spiritual Science must regard the earth as a vast living being, of which the life principle has indeed altered in the course of evolution. Were we to examine the life principle of the earth throughout the ages, we should find that in the far-distant past, the earth was a completely different entity, that it has been through a process which has now led to the increased suppression of the life of the earth as a whole in favor of the individual life kingdom, in favor of the vegetable, animal and human kingdoms. But even in our present time, Spiritual Science cannot think of the earth as the merely physical combination of external substances, as it is regarded from the standpoint of modern physics, geology, and mineralogy. On the contrary, in all that is presented as the mineral basis of our existence, the ground which we tread, Spiritual Science must see something which, as the solid foundation of the whole earth organism, stands out just like, or similar to, the solid skeleton as it is differentiated from the soft parts of the human organism. As in the human being the solid skeleton inclines to become a kind of merely physical system, a merely physical aggregation of organs, so, in the vast earth organism we must regard what confronts us as physical and chemical in its action, as a kind of skeleton of the earth. It is merely separated off from the whole life of the earth, and everything which happens on the earth, everything carried out in the earth processes, must in the sense of Spiritual Science be considered as a unity. Thus, when we study plants individually, we are just as wrong if we ascribe to each plant the possibility of an individual existence as we should be if we looked at a single human hair or nail and tried to study it as an individuality. The hair or the nail has significance only, and its inner principle can only be recognized when it is studied not as an individual by itself but in conjunction with the whole organism to which it belongs. In this sense the single plant and everything vegetable upon the earth belongs primarily to the earth organism.

I must add this remark: The assertions thus maintained by Spiritual Science are to be recognized in the ways already specified in these lectures; so that we are not applying to the world around us the conclusions reached in the study of man himself. It is true it is often said that Spiritual Science presents occurrences in the universe after the analogy of processes taking place in man. We may indeed sometimes feel obliged for the sake of the presentation to make use of such analogies, because what the research of Spiritual Science perceives in the universe is illustrated and symbolized in the human organism; for the human organism primarily represents the connection of the bodily with the spiritual, and man is best understood when the connection between human and spiritual is made clear. That the earth, however, is an organism, and that what exists as a plant is embedded in the vast organism of the earth, belonging to it as hair and nails belong to the human organism, this, for Spiritual Science, is something not inferred by analogy, not at all the result of a mere deduction. On the contrary, it is the result of investigations by the spiritual scientist, along the lines described or indicated here, which can be pursued in detail in the book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds.”—The essential in such research is that by it the investigator himself widens his consciousness, ceasing to live in himself alone, and that he is no longer influenced only by what the senses can perceive and the reason bound to the instrument of the brain can apprehend. The result of such research is that the man frees himself from the bodily instrument, that he becomes a participator in a spiritual world; then, in his own circle, in his spiritual horizon, he possesses not only what is presented to the external senses and the reason, but perceives the spiritual beings and spiritual forces. Thus, for the spiritual investigator, there exists what may be called the soul of the earth, a soul element giving life to the whole earth, just as the soul existing in man gives life to the human organism. The spiritual investigator widens his consciousness to a horizon where the soul element giving life to the whole earth comes directly under his notice. And then, for him the plant world is no longer merely the sum of the individual plants, for then he knows that what may be called the earth soul has to do with everything living and growing as a plant on the earth.

Yet the question is still: How are we to conceive that the plants begin and end their existence? How are we to picture, so to speak, the birth and death of a plant? We shall see at once that these words applied to the plant kingdom have, fundamentally, no more real significance than if we were to say, when a man's hair falls out that the hair is dead. Once a man rises to the thought that with regard to the earth he is dealing with an ensouled organism, he acquires a completely new outlook on the beginning and end of life in the plant world. To anyone not merely following the single plant individual purely externally, from seed to seed again, but rather bearing in mind the sum total of plant life on the earth, it will be obvious that here something different is at work from what may be called the beginning and end of life in the animal, or the human, kingdom. We see that the play of the elements in the course of the year is closely connected with the rise and decay of plants, with the exception of those which we count as perennials; but it is quite a different connection from that which exists, for instance, in animals. In animals we seldom find death so closely bound up with the external phenomena, as we see the withering of the plants bound up with certain phenomena of the whole earth nature when, for instance, autumn is coming on. In reality, people regard the life of a plant abstractly, detached from the fact that it is embedded in the whole earth existence; this is because they study only the single plant and do not consider the rhythmic, up and down undulation, of the life of the year, which at a definite time impels the germinating plants to sprout, brings them to a certain maturity, and, again at a definite time, causes them to wither. If we contemplate this whole process, externally sound observation, even if it has not penetrated the nature of Spiritual Science, may say: Here we are not dealing merely with the rise and decay of individual plants, but with the whole earth process, with something living and weaving in the whole existence of the earth. Where, however, do we find anything of which we can say that what it shows in its own phenomena explains how the invisible, spiritual element that we must think of as ensouling the earth is connected with the sprouting and withering of the plant? Where do we find anything at all which meets our spiritual eye so as to make this outer process intelligible to us?

Here it becomes evident to the spiritual scientist that he has something within himself to explain this living and weaving in the plant world, something which, if only it is studied in the right light, will account for the rise and decay of life in the plant world. We find in human nature what we call the ordinary phenomena of our consciousness. We know very well, however, that these phenomena can be experienced by the human being only during his waking day life, from waking up to falling asleep. The process of falling asleep, the process of waking up, are noteworthy incidents in human life. For what do we perceive? In falling asleep we become aware of a plunging of the whole inner processes of the soul into an indeterminate darkness; we are aware of the fading of our thoughts and ideas, our feelings and the impulses of our will into the darkness of sleep; at waking we become aware of the emerging of the whole of this soul content. Of this, man is conscious. Now it would doubtless be absurd to think that sleep has nothing to do with what exists as evolution of the consciousness in the whole human organism. We know how important regular, periodical sleep is for our physical life, insofar as spirit and soul live in it. We know what we owe to regular sleep. We have only to be reminded of what is constantly experienced by a man who needs a retentive memory. We say: If a man wants to avoid wearing his memory out, so that it becomes unserviceable, if he wants to keep his memory in good order, he must constantly sleep on the things to be remembered. If he has something very long to learn by heart it is clearly noticeable how much in the whole activity of remembering he owes to regular sleep. Apart from this, however, it appears quite natural that the weariness or exhaustion we notice as the result of our waking life is brought about by the life of our consciousness. By allowing the processes of our soul—our life of ideas, of feeling and of willing—to be overworked, we do violence to the delicate construction of our organism, as regards our will processes, even to the coarser parts. Quite superficial observation can teach us that tiredness of nerves, muscles and other organs is brought about solely by the encroachment into our organism of the conscious manifestations of our ideas, feeling, and will. We know quite well that if we give ourselves up to the ordinary musing of the day, where one thought gives place to another, the brain becomes less tired than if we set our thoughts to work under the compulsion of some method or doctrine. We know, too, that the muscles of the heart and lungs work throughout the whole of life without requiring sleep or rest, because weariness does not enter into this, since as a rule the organism evokes, in the unconscious or the subconscious, only appropriate activities. Only when we consciously encroach upon the organism do we produce weariness.—Hence we may say: We see the processes of the soul encroaching upon the life of the body—we see how what is active in the soul works itself out in our bodily life—in that which is evoked by the processes of the body which may be called normal—the activities of the heart and lungs and the other continuous processes of life. Here no weariness, no exhaustion, enters in. It is when conscious processes intrude that weariness enters. We become aware of a deterioration, a destruction of the organism through the encroachment of consciousness.

Here we have reached the point at which we can see the significance and function of sleep. What is worn out in the organism during the day, what is destroyed by conscious activities must, when the conscious activities are discontinued, be restored again in sleep. Here the organism must be left to itself to follow the processes inborn, inherent in it. Here we stand at the point where we can say: Again Spiritual Science coincides remarkably with what the facts of natural science tell us—even in the form adduced by the already-mentioned Russian scientist who was for many years Director of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Now, can we not say that consciousness itself, man's spiritual life itself, causes—in order that it may subsist, that it may indeed be there at all—the exhaustion and weariness of the organism? And so, in order to throw a little light on this investigator's hypothesis, we might answer the question: Why, then, do the enemies of life described by him come into our organism? By saying: Because, fundamentally, the consciousness process always confronts what is merely organic life in man as a kind of poisoning process, and we could not rise to our higher spiritual life at all if we did not destroy the organism. In the very processes hostile to the organism lies the whole potentiality of our consciousness. When we speak of the effect of poison with reference to organic activity, we are bound to say: What we must regard as the blessing, the salvation of our life—namely, that we can be a conscious being in a physical body and can develop conscious activity—we owe to the circumstance that, with our conscious life, we encroach destructively, poisonously, upon our organism. Only, for the ordinary conscious life, this process of poisoning and destruction is by no means irreparable; on the contrary, the organism has been attacked in such a way that when the process of destruction has reached a certain point the conscious spiritual life withdraws, leaving the organism to its own activity. So then sleep intervenes; and in it, while the organism is left to its own activity, what has been destroyed through the conscious phenomena of the soul life, is restored again. The spiritual scientist is well aware of the many ingenious, more or less significant hypotheses which have been advanced concerning sleep and fatigue; one would have to speak at great length to analyze these hypotheses. Here, however, it is not our concern to explain these purely materialistic hypotheses, but to establish the fact that consciousness with its content must itself intrude destructively into the organism which contains the external instrument of the consciousness, and that the sleep condition compensates for the destructive process which is thus really repaired. Hence we may say: Sleep is the healer of those conditions which, as processes of ill health, consciousness is obliged to bring about in the organism.

Now when the spiritual scientist has come so far as not only to see what the normal, external consciousness sees—namely, that on falling asleep the conscious ideas and so on sink into indeterminate darkness—when he comes to the point of actually observing what goes on around him, even when this normal, ordinary consciousness disappears, then he also reaches the point of being able to follow the process of falling asleep and waking. It is self-knowledge in the widest sense that a man makes his own through spiritual research. And then he comes to a true conception of those processes which accompany falling asleep, and which are processes of building up, of the bourgeoning of life in the organism. Actually, through spiritual research, through all reasoning and thinking in the light of Spiritual Science, we experience something of this bourgeoning life in the mere bodily organism, every time we fall asleep; but—as it goes no farther than the mere organism—it has only the value of plant life.—What can be experienced every evening on falling asleep may be described thus: You see your own organism with the whole of your soul life; you see what has filled your consciousness during your day life sink out of sight; but as compensation you see, springing up in your own organism, processes which are restorative, not destructive—which, nevertheless, within you are only like the sprouting of plant life. Thus during sleep we have in our organism something like the experience of spontaneous vegetation. The experience of falling asleep, with the fading away of conscious ideas, is something like a springtime experience in which we see what is only plant-like in our organism emerging out of the unconscious. The moment of falling asleep may in this sense be regarded as completely parallel with the emerging of the sprouting, growing plant world in spring.

When we look at plant life in this way, we give up the idea of comparing this sprouting forth of the plants in spring with a human birth or, in general, with what can be called birth in man or in any living animal being; we come to understand that the great earth mother is a complete organism in herself experiencing in spring—in that part of the earth where it is springtime—what man for his part experiences when he falls asleep. The mistake most often made in such comparisons in usually the result of things not being viewed in their reality, but rather considered in connection with external circumstances. It will satisfy the imagination of many to be able to compare the sprouting of plants in the spring with something in the human being periodically repeated, which does not actually represent death and birth; but if a man is following his imagination only he may wish to compare the germinating of the plant world in spring with man's moment of waking. This is wrong. It is not the waking, the return of the soul content, with which the springtime is comparable; it is with the falling asleep, the fading away of the inner spiritual life, the actualities of the soul, and the germination of the merely organic, the merely vegetable in man. If, through the clairvoyant faculty, man can follow consciously at the moment of waking how his ideas and all that he remembers emerge from indeterminate darkness, then there is present again something bringing about the necessary destruction of the whole germinated inner vegetation. It is actually as if with the rising of our ideas on waking in the morning, autumn conditions had blown over everything which had grown up overnight: an inner process comparable for the whole earth with the withering of the plants towards autumn. Only, the earth is not represented as man is by two states of consciousness—waking and sleeping; while one half of the earth is asleep the other half is always awake, so that sleep always follows the sun's journey from one hemisphere to the other. Thus, then, with the earth we are dealing with a vast organism which lives its sleep life from spring to autumn, the sleep life which we are shown in the external organs, in what sprouts and grows in the plant kingdom, and in autumn withdraws into its spiritual sphere, into what is the soul of the earth; for the life of the earth is in the season from autumn to spring. Hence, we cannot speak of a real death or a real birth in plants at all, only of a sleeping and waking of the whole earth organism. As in human beings sleeping and waking is repeated rhythmically in the course of twenty-four hours, and as we do not speak in this connection of the death and birth of our thought world either, if we wish to speak correctly, should we speak of the life and death of plants. We should keep the whole earth organism in view, regarding the plant process belonging to the whole earth organism as a waking up and falling asleep of the earth. When we are feeling most pleasure in what is springing out of the earth, when we remember how men of earlier times, out of their joy in the sprouting life, kept the Feast of St. John, that is precisely the time for the earth which is midnight for man, with respect to his organism and external bodily nature. And when men prepare to celebrate the Christmas festival, when life without is dead, then we are dealing with the spiritual processes of earth. At this time man best finds his connection with the whole spiritual life of the earth; he realizes what he has indicated (from a correct instinct) by fixing mankind's spiritual festivals in winter. I know what objections external natural science can raise against this, but natural science does not consider man's correct instincts.

Now let us try to investigate what we can call death in the animal kingdom, not indeed by making judgments through analogy but rather, by expressing once more, through a process in the human being, what Spiritual Science has to give.

Now we must notice that our soul life, if we study it carefully, certainly shows a different course from that which consists in its furtherance and fructifying through the alternation of waking and sleeping. It should be pointed out that through the whole of a man's life—from his childhood, for as long as he can consciously remember—he is experiencing a kind of maturing process. Ever more and more mature does a man become through what he can absorb of life's experience. This maturing process is accomplished in a strange way. We remember—and through this alone is it possible for an ego to speak within us—all that we have experienced back to a certain point in our childhood; but we remember only the things connected with our ideas, with our thoughts. This is a very remarkable fact, but everyone in himself can follow up the statement. When you remember a painful or a pleasurable occurrence which took place perhaps thirty years ago, you will say: I can quite well recall all the details of the ideas which came into my mind, so that I can reconstruct them in my conception of the incident; but the pain or the pleasure connected with the occurrence at that time does not remain in my soul so vividly as objects of thought generally do. They have faded, severed themselves from the idea, and sunk into indeterminate darkness. We might say: We can always retrieve the ideas from the deep strata of our soul life, but—apart from exceptions—we must leave submerged our memories of what we have experienced as feelings, impulses, or passions. What we have experienced in the way of feeling remains submerged, detached from the bare ideas. Is it entirely lost? Does it lapse into nothingness? Emphatically No. For one who has not studied human life really conscientiously and in detail, it may seem to be so; but a conscientious observer studying from every point of view, will find the following: If we observe a human being at a definite juncture of his life; for example, in his fortieth year, we find him in a certain condition, a condition of soul but also of bodily health or sickness. The man appears to us as gloomily melancholic, easily depressed, or cheerful, or in some way of a phlegmatic or other temperament, easily grasping at the actualities of the world, easily absorbing what pleasure and joy can give him, and so on. The soul condition should not always be separated from the bodily; for the condition of soul appearing in a man is dependent on the way the bodily functions work. If we thus observe the soul mood and the whole disposition of a man at any age of his life, we shall soon find out what has become of the feeling experiences separated from the ideas which could only be remembered later as mental images. We shall find that what became detached as the mood of heart and soul has united itself with our deeper organization; it cannot be remembered in our inner life, but it expresses itself in the inner life, expresses itself, indeed, even as far as in health and sickness. Where are these moods lingering since we cannot remember them? They are submerged in the life of body and soul, and constitute a definite disposition in the man's whole life. Thus it appears to us that as we need memory for the whole course of our conscious life, as in sleep memory always plunges into indeterminate darkness, so our experiences of heart and soul sink down into the darkness of our own being and work upon our whole disposition.

So we have a second element at work in man. And now if we direct our gaze away from man to the whole earth organism, which we are studying as an ensouled being, we do not indeed study it as if the forces of soul and spirit at work in it are organized in the same way as the soul of man. For Spiritual Science shows us that many such beings as man dwell in the soul sphere of the earth; so that the soul of the earth presents a multiplicity, whereas that of man is a unity. Nevertheless, with respect to what has just been described, what is of a soul nature in the earth can quite well be compared with the soul experiences in man himself.—When we see how our moods of heart and soul sink down into our own organism, work on our body and come to expression in our whole disposition, we recognize a parallel to this in the sum total of processes carried out on earth, and indeed in all that finds expression in the origin of the living animal being. In ourselves, a process of body and soul is only set free through what is forced down into the darkness of our bodily disposition by the experiences of our heart and soul. For the earth, the corresponding experiences of soul and spirit are, as it were, crystallized in the birth and death of an animal being.—I know very well that a man who thinks out of hypotheses he can form a world conception which apparently stands firmly on the ground of natural science, may be disgusted by this explanation. I can sympathize with such a man. But the time will come when the direction of human thought and judgment leading to the elucidation of the processes of earthly death and birth will in the next spiritual evolution take the path indicated here; for all that we see as fact in natural science leads us to this conclusion.—Just as a man sees the moods of his soul which shape his organic disposition sinking into his bodily organism, so does he see externally in the earth organism the corresponding process of the rise of the animal world.

So, then, we find in the human being still another process: we see how out of the whole organism the so-called higher feelings and emotions emerge again in the soul. What is the characteristic of these? Whoever deals with this question without prejudice, but also without false asceticism, without false piety and hypocrisy, will say: What we may call the higher moral feelings and those moods in a man which develop into enthusiasm for all that is good, beautiful and true, for all that brings about the progress of the world, this is alive in us only because we are able, by the disposition of our heart and soul, to rise above everything originally implanted in us by instinct; so that, in our spiritual feelings, in our spiritual enthusiasm, we raise ourselves above all that the bodily organism alone can arouse. This can go so far that he whose enthusiasm is in his spiritual life sets so much store by the object of it, that it is a light thing for him even to give his physical life for the sake of what has inspired his higher moral and aesthetic feelings. Here we see that which lives as the spiritual element in this enthusiasm rise, with the suppression of our merely organic nature, in a mood which primarily has nothing to do with the course of the organic life. Thus an element in man also runs its course; that element which he sends down into the depths of his being and which there carries out its organic processes; but from the depths of his being also raise his moral and spiritual feelings, and with them the disposition of his heart and soul. These conquer, in ever-progressing evolution, what belongs merely to the organic, to the physically instinctive constitution of man.

This process, which we find in the human being divided into two elements, we find also in the world of living animals. If in our own case we let our disposition of heart and soul sink down into the life of the body, allowing ourselves to be influenced to the extent of health or sickness by our moods of heart and soul, we see, on the other hand, in all that is lived out in animal life, what constitutes a sinking down of such disposition for the whole earth. All that is feeling and passion in the whole earth organism is lived out in the animal kingdom just as our passions and impulses are lived out in our whole organization. As we look at the animal world we see in each separate form the result of the disposition of the soul of our earth. And if we consider the attraction which the earth exercises over the life of the animal world, allowing itself to be most closely linked with the external physical body, we see that this is no other than the victory of the spiritual—of what, with regard to animals we call the group soul. It is the super-sensible element which finds its representative only in externals, and conquers the external, as in man the spiritual feelings conquer what is merely instinctive. That the external processes of the earth organization always acquiesce in the power of death over the individual animal is in no way different from the victory always achieved in us by the spiritual over what is merely connected with the organic. Seeing the spiritual element in the animal from this point of view, we cannot apply the expressions birth and death to the beginning and end of an animal's existence in the same way as we apply them to man. It is certainly in animals a process of the whole earth, already more individualized than in the plant world. Nevertheless, if we bear in mind the different group souls assigned to the various animal species, we must see how, in each death which overtakes the individual animal, the external, bodily part perishes, but the group soul, which is the spiritual element in the animal, is always triumphant over the external form; just as in man the spiritual triumphs over the merely instinctive, represented not in the separate form but certainly in the organization.

Thus we see, as it were, a vast living being composed of the individual group souls of the animals, and we see the birth and death of the living animal appear in such a way that what forms the foundation of the spiritual in the individual animal has always to fight for its victory over the individuality. Hence we have death in animals presented as that which, as the group soul, moves above the wasting and decay of the individual animal form. We could only speak of a real death in connection with an animal if we failed to bear in mind what remains after the death of an animal; namely, the spiritual, as in man the spiritual, rising above itself, triumphs over the disposition of soul as well as over what is doomed to wither away.—If Darwinism ever advances beyond its present stage, it will see how, throughout the animal kingdom, from the earliest ages, a thread of evolution runs through the apparent births and deaths into the distant future; so that the whole evolution of the animal kingdom will lead at last to a victory of what the lower, the individual animal form being overcome—will issue from the entire spiritual world, leaving behind the lower part living in the individual animals, and will one day triumph over the instinctive element apparent in the whole of animal nature.

And when in man we come to what we call the human will nature—if we then do not speak only of the ideas he has had, which can be recalled again and again, and do not fix our attention only on the soul disposition which sinks in the way described into the deeper organization—if we, rather, look to the impulses of the will, we shall see that they represent above all the most enigmatic part of human nature. How the impulses of a man's will are determined depends upon the experiences life has brought him. If we look back from any point in our life, we find a continuous path, a movement, in which each soul event is linked with one before it. We find, however, that what we have experienced flows mainly into our will in such a way that if we look at ourselves thus, we may say that we have actually become richer in ideas, and riper with respect to the impulses of our will. Indeed, we develop a very special ripeness with respect to our will. This is experienced by everyone looking back upon his life. We do something in life; how we ought to have done it we actually learn only when we have done it. And everyone knows how little chance there is of finding himself in the same situation again later, so that he may apply, at a later opportunity, what he has gained as maturity in life—what he has, perhaps, won through experience of trial and error. One thing, however, he knows; namely, that all his experiences are fitted together in the whole composition of his will, in what we may call the wisdom of his willing; this makes for the maturity to which we gradually attain. It is our will life which becomes increasingly mature; the whole of our feelings, ideas, and so on, combine together to make our will, even with regard to external concerns, increasingly mature. For, when our thinking becomes riper through the experiences of life, this is indeed only a growing ripeness in the will expressed in the fitting together of thought with thought. So we see how our whole soul life as we survey it in retrospect leads us, as it were, to the center of our being, which forms the background to our will impulses and in which this constant ripening is expressed. If we bear this in mind, we have the third element of human evolution, of which we can say that in life we cultivate it in our physical body—we grow up in this element—in it we grow beyond and above what we were when we came into this existence through birth. As in this existence we are clothed in a physical body, and this physical body is the instrument we have to use for our soul—because the soul employs the reasoning power, employs the brain—the being of our soul acquires experience and maturity in life which crystallizes, as it were, in the whole structure of the mature will.

In this life, however, we are not as a rule in a position to work out, to carry through, what is now present in the impulses of our will. This is the question before mankind: What is it in these will impulses which we cultivate as the dearest possession of our souls, which we have made our own, perhaps just on account of our imperfection, that makes us never able to bring them to expression? What we send down into the depths of our being as the content of the experiences of our soul (we have observed this in the second part of our study) leads to the whole disposition of our body and soul. It leads to the way our character is determined, to what life has made of us with regard to health and sickness, whether we are more melancholic, or cheerful, and so on. But what we have made of ourselves with respect to the disposition of our will, this is our inmost being; this is what we have become. Through this, however, we have outgrown what we were. And in the second half of our life, when we are going downhill, we notice how our body refuses to carry out what we have become through the impulses of our will. In short, we see that through our life as perceiving, feeling and willing beings we become something completely at variance with what we already are, something which recoils from what we already are. As our life ripens we feel inwardly in our souls how we clash with what, through our elements, through our bodily aptitudes, through our soul life, we have become. We feel inwardly the conflict between the whole structure of our will and mature life, on the one hand, and on the other the whole structure of our organization; fundamentally we also feel this clash in every single impulse of the will leading to action. This is because our thoughts are to a certain extent transparent, and our feelings, too; but the way in which will power becomes action is inscrutable. The will clashes, so to speak, with external life, and becomes conscious of itself only when this clash takes place. And here we may follow, in the whole of life, even in the bodily organization, what already appears in the life of the soul; namely, that what a man has become, what has given him the aptitude for his talents, must be broken and destroyed by the will, which only appears in this life; otherwise this will power will never be able to make itself felt.

Just as man can become conscious of himself only through the clash with reality, so can he only experience himself as a progressive process by his whole physical life being destroyed through the will, in the same way as the brain is destroyed by the life of ideas. But whereas the brain can be restored through sleep, a new growth of the will cannot be promoted; in fact, through the impulses of the will a continuous process of destruction enters into every life. Thus we see that man must destroy his organism; we realize the necessity of real death for man. Just as we understand the necessity of sleep for the life of ideas, so we now understand the necessity of death for the life of the will. For it is only because man's physical organization is in opposition to his will that the will is aware of itself, that it is strengthened in itself, and thus goes through the gate of death into a life in the spiritual world where it appropriates to itself the forces to build up, in a future incarnation, all that man has not attained in this bodily life. This could be developed for him only by a consciousness ripe for the next move, for something which gives opportunity for a further advance that has not been fully carried out in this life; for this he could only have a consciousness ripe for the next stage which gave him the aptitude for something further that could not be lived out in this life. This will be lived out in a coming earth life, in which the man will work at his new destiny, his new earth life, in an appropriate way.

Whereas, then, with reference to death we could only speak in the plant world of a waking and falling asleep of the whole earth nature, and in the animal world could only compare death with the ebb and flow, and the conquest of our lower life of instinct, it is only with human death that we find what points us, through the destruction of this one life, to ever-recurring lives. It is only through the destruction of this one life that we can attain to what enters into the new earth life and alone leads to the true consummation of the whole human existence. Through this it is also established that the will of man, to become conscious of itself in its entirety, needs the dying away of the physical body; and that, fundamentally, the experience it requires for the correct will impulse is only present when we pass through the gate of death, when this will impulse shares the gradual decline and dying of the external organization. For the will grows by means of the opposition it perceives in the external organization; through this it grows ever stronger and prepares itself to become that which lives throughout eternity. Hence, apart from all that you find explained in Spiritual Science about an unnatural death, it is easy to see that a death brought about by an accident, or suicide, or anything of the kind, is quite different from a natural death, which gives the guarantee for resurrection to a new life. Unnatural death in any form can indeed also be something which signifies an advance in man's total destiny. But what the will, in its general nature, would have had to experience in its victory over the bodily nature, remains in a certain sense present as an inner force, and has to follow a different path when man goes through the gate of death in an unnatural way, from the one it would take if he lived to the natural end of his life.

Thus we see that we may really speak of death only when we are referring to what we may call the development of a new type of will for a new life, and that for this reason we cannot speak of a true death with reference to other beings. As regards man, however, we must speak in such a way that not only are Goethe's words true: “Nature has invented death in order to have more life”, but also in such a way that we say: If there were no death, we should have to wish that it existed, for it makes it possible that through the opposition and withering away of the external organization, the will grows increasingly—growing, indeed, for the new life. And this makes it possible for evolution to advance to greater heights through the different incarnations, so that the life also assumes a more exalted form—even though this does not occur immediately in the next lives, even though retrogression may take place. In the whole course of repeated earth lives the advance will, however, be recognized.

Thus death is the great strengthener of the will for the spiritual life. And we see—as has already been indicated—that recent natural science, although with faltering voice, agrees with Spiritual Science in pointing out that death represents a kind of poisoning process.—Yes, indeed, all spiritual evolution goes its own independent way in devastation, destruction, of the external bodily life. What the world of ideas lays waste in man is repaired by sleep. What is destroyed by the instincts of man is restored by the higher moral and aesthetic feelings and emotions; the destruction of the bodily organization brought about through the activity of the will is restored in the whole life of man through that ripeness of will which persists through death and is able to build up a new life. Thus death acquires a meaning: the meaning whereby man is able, not only to think of immortality, but actually to experience it. Whoever considers death in this way sees it approach as the power leading the external bodily life to its dissolution; but in opposition to this dissolution, he sees the dawn of a new human soul life, the life which man maintains from incarnation to incarnation throughout eternity. Not until we understand the meaning of death for man's eternity have we grasped the meaning of death for the whole of nature. Then, however, we must also give up the widespread, foolish conception which speaks of death in relation to animals and plants; then we must know that actually there can only be a question of real death when those destinies are taken into consideration which the spirit experiences in passing through bodily existence, and when we look at the realities which the spirit must develop in the bodily sphere in order to perfect its own consummation. The spirit must abandon the body to death, so that the spirit may raise itself to an ever higher level of perfection. Keeping this point of view in mind and looking upon death in the human kingdom, our soul may tell us that through death man's spirit and soul can rise to a higher perfection. Even when looking at death in the kingdoms of animal and plant we see the spirit shining through to the ground of all phenomena—and the soul may show itself at one with these words which arouse us, not only bringing us comfort but every hope of life:

Out of the spirit all being has sprung,
Deep in the spirit are the roots of all life,
The aim of all striving is spirit.

Today it seems appropriate to mention certain thoughts on the meaning and nature of our spiritual Movement—anthroposophical spiritual science, as we call it. To do so will necessitate references to some events which have occurred over a period of time and which have contributed to the preparation and unfolding of this Movement. If, in the course of these remarks, one or another of them should seem somewhat more personal—it would, at any rate, only seem to be so—this will not be for personal reasons but because what is more personal can be a starting point for something more objective. The need for a spiritual movement which makes known to people the deeper sources of existence, especially human existence, can be easily recognized by the way in which today's civilization has developed along lines which are becoming increasingly absurd. No one, after serious thought, will describe today's events as anything other than an absurd exaggeration of what has been living in more recent evolution.

From what you have come to know in spiritual science, you will have gained the feeling that everything, even what is apparently only external, has its foundation in the thoughts of human beings. Deeds which are done, events which take place in material life—all these are the consequence of what human beings think and imagine. And the view of the external world, which is gaining ground among human beings today, gives us an indication of some very inadequate thought forces. I have already put into words the fact that events have grown beyond human beings, have got out of hand, because their thinking has become attenuated and is no longer strong enough to govern reality. Concepts such as that of maya, the external semblance which governs the things of the physical plane, ought to be taken far more seriously by those familiar with them than they, in fact, often are. They ought to be profoundly imprinted on current consciousness as a whole. This alone might lead to the healing of the damage which—with a certain amount of justification—has come upon mankind. Those who strive to understand the functioning of man's deeds—that is, the way the reflections of man's thoughts function—will recognize the inner need for a comprehension of the human soul which can be brought about by stronger, more realistic thoughts.

In fact, our whole Movement is founded on the task of giving human souls thoughts more appropriate to reality, thoughts more immersed in reality, than are the abstract concept patterns of today. It cannot be pointed out often enough how very much mankind today is in love with the abstract, having no desire to realize that shadowy concepts cannot, in reality, make any impact on the fabric of existence. This has been most clearly expressed in the fourteen-, fifteen-year history of our Anthroposophical Movement. Now it is becoming all the more important for our friends to take into themselves what specifically belongs to this Anthroposophical Movement. You know how often people stressed that they would so much like to give the beautiful word ‘theosophy’ the honour it deserves, and how much they resisted having to give it up as the key word of the Movement. But you also know the situation which made this necessary.

It is good to be thoroughly aware in one's soul about this. You know—indeed, many of you shared—the goodwill with which we linked our work with that of the Theosophical Movement in the way it had been founded by Blavatsky, and how this then continued with Besant's and Sinnett's efforts, and so on. It is indeed not unnecessary for our members, in face of all the ill-meant misrepresentations heaped upon us from outside, to persist in pointing out that our Anthroposophical Movement had an independent starting-point and that what now exists has grown out of the seeds of those lectures I gave in Berlin which were later published in the book on the mysticism of the Middle Ages. We must stress ever and again that in connection with this book it was the Theosophical Movement who approached us, not vice versa. This Theosophical Movement, in whose wake it was our destiny to ride during those early years, was not without its connections to other occult streams of the nineteenth century, and in lectures given here I have pointed to these connections. But we should look at what is characteristic for that Movement.

If I were asked to point factually to one rather characteristic feature, I would choose one I have mentioned a number of times, which is connected with the period when I was writing in the journal Lucifer-Gnosis what was later given the title Cosmic Memory. A representative of the Theosophical Society, who read this, asked me by what method these things were garnered from the spiritual world. Further conversation made it obvious that he wanted to know what more-or-less mediumistic methods were used for this. Members of those circles find it impossible to imagine any method other than that of people with mediumistic gifts, who lower their consciousness and write down what comes from the subconscious.

What underlies this attitude? Even though he is a very competent and exceptionally cultured representative of the Theosophical Movement, the man who spoke to me on this was incapable of imagining that it is possible to investigate such things in full consciousness. Many members of that Movement had the same problem because they shared something which is present to the highest degree in today's spiritual life, namely, a certain mistrust in the individual's capacity for knowledge. People do not trust the inherent capacity for knowledge, they do not believe that the individual can have the strength to penetrate truly to the essential core of things. They consider that the human capacity for knowledge is limited; they find that intellectual understanding gets in the way if one wants to penetrate to the core of things and that it is therefore better to damp it down and push forward to the core of things without bringing it into play. This is indeed what mediums do; for them, to mistrust human understanding is a basic impulse. They endeavour, purely experimentally, to let the spirit speak while excluding active understanding.

It can be said that this mood was particularly prevalent in the Theosophical Movement as it existed at the beginning of the century. It could be felt when one tried to penetrate certain things, certain opinions and views, which had come to live in the Theosophical Movement. You know that in the nineties of the nineteenth century and subsequently in the twentieth century, Mrs Besant played an important part in the Theosophical Movement. Her opinion counted. Her lectures formed the centrepiece of theosophical work both in London and in India. And yet it was strange to hear what people around Mrs Besant said about her. I noticed this strongly as early as 1902. In many ways, especially among the scholarly men around her, she was regarded as a quite unacademic woman. Yet, while on the one hand people stressed how unacademic she was, on the other hand they regarded the partly mediumistic method she was famous for, untrammelled as it was by scientific ideas, as a channel for achieving knowledge. I could say that these people did not themselves have the courage to aim for knowledge. Neither had they any confidence in Mrs Besant's waking consciousness. But because she had not been made fully awake as a result of any scientific training, they saw her to some extent as a means by which knowledge from the spiritual world could be brought into the physical world. This attitude was extraordinarily prevalent among those immediately surrounding her. People spoke about her at the beginning of the twentieth century as if she were some kind of modern sibyl. Those closest to her formed derogatory opinions about her academic aptitude and maintained that she had no critical ability to judge her inner experiences. This was certainly the mood around her, though it was carefully hidden—I will not say kept secret—from the wider circle of theosophical leaders.

In addition to what came to light in a sibylline way through Mrs Besant, and through Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine, the Theosophical Movement at the end of the nineteenth century also had Sinnett's book or, rather, books. The manner in which people spoke about these in private was, equally, hardly an appeal to man's own power of knowledge. Much was made in private about the fact that in what Sinnett had published there was nothing which he had contributed out of his own experience. The value of a book such as his Esoteric Buddhism was seen to lie particularly in the fact that the whole of the content had come to him in the form of ‘magical letters’, precipitated—no one knew whence—into the physical plane—one could almost say, thrown down to the physical plane—which he then worked into the book Esoteric Buddhism.

All these things led to a mood among the wider circles of the theosophical leaders which was sentimental and devotional in the highest degree. They looked up, in a way, to a wisdom which had fallen from heaven, and—humanly, quite understandable—this devotion was transferred to individual personalities. However, this became the incentive for a high level of insincerity which was easy to discern in a number of phenomena.

Thus, for instance, even in 1902 I heard in the more private gatherings in London that Sinnett was, in fact, an inferior spirit. One of the leading personalities said to me at that time: Sinnett could be compared with a journalist—say, of the Frankfurter Zeitung—who has been dispatched to India; he is a journalistic spirit who simply had the good fortune to receive the ‘Master's letters’ and make use of them in his book in a journalistic way which is in keeping with modern mankind!

You know, though, that all this is only one aspect of a wide spectrum of literature. For in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, there appeared—if not a Biblical deluge, then certainly a flood of—written material which was intended to lead mankind in one way or another to the spiritual world. Some of this material harked back directly to ancient traditions which have been preserved by all kinds of secret brotherhoods. It is most interesting to follow the development of this tradition.

I have often pointed out how, in the second half of the eighteenth century, old traditions could be found in the circle led by Saint-Martin, the philosophe inconnu. In Saint-Martin's writings, especially Des erreurs et de la vérité, there is a very great deal of what came from ancient traditions, clothed in a more recent form. If we follow these traditions further back, we do indeed come to ideas which can conquer concrete situations, which can influence reality. By the time they had come down to Saint-Martin, these concepts had already become exceedingly shadowy, but they were nevertheless shadows of concepts which had once been very much alive; ancient traditions were living one last time in a shadowy form. So in Saint-Martin's work we find the healthiest concepts clothed in a form which is a final glimmer. It is particularly interesting to see how Saint-Martin fights against the concept of matter, which had already come to the fore. What did this concept of matter gradually become? It became a view in which the world is seen as a fog made up of atoms moving about and bumping into one another and forming configurations which are at the root of all things taking shape around us. In theory materialism reached its zenith at the point when the existence of everything except the atom was denied. Saint-Martin still maintained the view that the whole science of atoms, and indeed the whole belief that matter was something real, was nonsense; which indeed it is. If we delve into all that is around us, chemically, physically, we come in the final analysis not to atoms, not to anything material, but to spiritual beings. The concept of matter is an aid; but it corresponds to nothing that is real. Wherever—to use a phrase coined by du Bois-Reymond—‘matter floats about in space like a ghost’: there may be found the spirit. The only way to speak of an atom is to speak of a little thrust of spirit, albeit ahrimanic spirit. It was a healthy idea of Saint-Martin to do battle against the concept of matter.

Another immensely healthy idea of Saint-Martin was the living way in which he pointed to the fact that all separate, concrete human languages are founded on a single universal language. This was easier to do in his day than it is now, because in his time there was still a more living relationship to the Hebrew language which, among all modern languages, is the one closest to the archetypal universal language. It was still possible to feel at that time the way in which spirit flowed through the Hebrew language, giving the very words something genuinely ideal and spiritual. So we find in Saint-Martin's work an indication, concrete and spiritual, of the meaning of the word ‘the Hebrew’. In the whole way he conceived of this we find a living consciousness of a relationship of the human being with the spiritual world. This word ‘the Hebrew’ is connected with ‘to journey’. A Hebrew is one who makes a journey through life, one who gathers experiences as on a journey. Standing in the world in a living way—this is the foundation of this word and of all other words in the Hebrew language if they are sensed in their reality.

However, in his own time Saint-Martin was no longer able to find ideas which could point more precisely, more strongly, to what belonged to the archetypal language. These will have to be rediscovered by spiritual science. But he had before his soul a profound notion of what the archetypal language had been. Because of this his concept of the unity of the human race was more concrete and less abstract than that which the nineteenth century made for itself. This concrete concept of the unity of the human race made it possible for him, at least within his own circle, to bring fully to life certain spiritual truths, for instance, the truth that the human being, if only he so desires, really can enter into a relationship with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. It is one of his cardinal principles, which states that every human being is capable of entering into a relationship with spiritual beings of higher hierarchies. Because of this there still lived in him something of that ancient, genuine mystic mood which knew that knowledge, if it is to be true knowledge, cannot be absorbed in a conceptual form only, but must be absorbed in a particular mood of soul—that is after a certain preparation of the soul. Then it becomes part of the soul's spiritual life.

Hand in hand with this, however, went a certain sum of expectations, of evolutionary expectations directed to those human souls who desired to claim a right to participate in some way in evolution. From this point of view it is most interesting to see how Saint-Martin makes the transition from what he has won through knowledge, through science—which is spiritual in his case—to politics, how he arrives at political concepts. For here he states a precise requirement, saying that every ruler ought to be a kind of Melchizedek, a kind of priest-king.

Just imagine if this requirement, put forward in a relatively small circle before the outbreak of the French Revolution, had been a dawn instead of a dusk; just imagine if this idea—that those whose concepts and forces were to influence human destiny must fundamentally have the characteristics of a Melchizedek—had been absorbed, even partially, into the consciousness of the time, how much would have been different in the nineteenth century! For the nineteenth century was, in truth, as distant as it could possibly be from this concept. The demand that politicians should first undertake to study at the school of Melchizedek would, of course, have been dismissed with a shrug.

Saint-Martin has to be pointed out because he bears within him something which is a last glimmer of the wisdom that has come down from ancient times. It has had to die away because mankind in the future must ascend to spirituat life in a new way. Mankind must ascend in a new way because a merely traditional continuation of old ideas never has been in keeping with the germinating forces of the human soul. These underdeveloped forces of the human soul will tend, during the course of the twentieth century, in a considerable number of individuals—this has been said often enough—to lead to true insight into etheric processes. The first third of the twentieth century can be seen as a critical period during which a goodly number of human beings ought to be made aware of the fact that events must be observed in the etheric world which lives all around us, just as much as does the air. We have pointed emphatically to one particular event which must be seen in the etheric world if mankind is not to fall into decadence, and that is the appearance of the Etheric Christ. This is a necessity. Mankind must definitely prepare not to let wither those forces which are already sprouting.

These forces must not be allowed to wither for, if they did, what would happen? In the forties and fifties of the twentieth century the human soul would assume exceedingly odd characteristics in the widest circles. Concepts would arise in the human soul which would have an oppressive effect. If materialism were the only thing to continue, concepts which exist in the human soul would arise, but they would rise up out of the unconscious in a way which people would not understand. A waking nightmare, a kind of general state of neurasthenia, would afflict a huge number of people. They would find themselves having to think things without understanding why they were thinking them.

The only antidote to this is to plant, in human souls, concepts which stem from spiritual science. Without these, the forces of insight into those concepts which will rise up, into those ideas which will make their appearance, will be paralysed. Then, not the Christ alone, but also other phenomena in the etheric world, which human beings ought to see, will withdraw from man, will go past unnoticed. Not only will this be a great loss, but human beings will also have to develop pathological substitute forces for those which ought to have developed in a healthy way.

It was out of an instinctive need in wide circles of mankind that the endeavours arose which expressed themselves in that flood of literature and written material mentioned earlier. Now, because of a peculiar phenomenon, the Anthroposophical Movement of Central Europe was in a peculiar position relative to the Theosophical Movement—particularly to the Theosophical Society—as well as to that other flood of written material about spiritual matters. Because of the evolutionary situation in the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, it was possible for a great number of people to find spiritual nourishment in all this literature; and it was also possible for a great number of people to be utterly astounded by what came to light through Sinnett and Blavatsky. However, all this was not quite in harmony with Central European consciousness. Those who are familiar with Central European literature are in no doubt that it is not necessarily possible to live in the element of this Central European literature while at the same time taking up the attitude of so many others to that flood. This is because Central European literature encompasses immeasurably much of what the seeker for the spirit longs for—only it is hidden behind the peculiar language which so many people would rather have nothing to do with.

We have often spoken about one of those spirits who prove that spiritual life works and weaves in artistic literature, in belletristic literature: Novalis. For more prosaic moods we might equally well have mentioned Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote about the wisdom of ancient India in a way which did not merely reproduce that wisdom but brought it to a fresh birth out of the western cultural spirit. There is much we could have pointed to that has nothing to do with that flood of written material, but which I have sketched historically in my book Vom Menschenrätsel. People like Steffens, like Schubert, like Troxler, wrote about all these things far more precisely and at a much more modern level than anything found in that flood of literature which welled up during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. You have to admit that, compared with the profundity of Goethe, Schlegel, Schelling, those things which are held to be so marvellously wise are nothing more than trivia, utter trivia. Someone who has absorbed the spirit of Goethe can regard even a work like such as Light on the Path as no more than commonplace. This ought not to be forgotten. To those who have absorbed the inspiration of Novalis or Friedrich Schlegel, or enjoyed Schelling's Bruno, all this theosophical literature can seem no more than vulgar and ordinary. Hence the peculiar phenomenon that there were many people who had the earnest, honest desire to reach a spiritual life but who, because of their mental make-up were, in the end, to some degree satisfied with the superficial literature described.

On the other hand, the nineteenth century had developed in such a way that those who were scientifically educated had become—for reasons I have often discussed—materialistic thinkers about whom nothing could be done. However, in order to work one's way competently through what came to light at the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century through Schelling, Schlegel, Fichte, one does need at least some scientific concepts. There is no way of proceeding without them. The consequence was this peculiar phenomenon: It was not possible to bring about a situation—which would have been desirable—in which a number of scientifically educated people, however small, could have worked out their scientific concepts in such a way that they could have made a bridge to spiritual science. No such people were to be found. This is a difficulty that still exists and of which we must be very much aware.

Supposing we were to approach those who have undergone a scientific education, with the intention of introducing them to Anthroposophy: lawyers, doctors, philologists—not to mention theologians—when they have finished their academic education and reached a certain stage in life at which it is necessary for them, in accordance with life's demands, to make use of what they have absorbed, not to say, have learnt. They then no longer have either the inclination or the mobility to extricate themselves from their concepts and to seek for others. That is why scientifically-educated people are the most inclined to reject Anthroposophy, although it would only be a small step for a modern scientist to build a bridge. But he does not want to do so. It confuses him. What does he need it for? He has learnt what life demands of him and, so he believes, he does not want things which only serve to confuse him and undermine his confidence. It is going to take some considerable time before these people who have gone through the education of their day start to build bridges in any great numbers. We shall have to be patient. It will not come about easily, especially in certain fields. And when the building of bridges is seriously tackled in a particular field, great obstacles and hindrances will be encountered. It will be necessary above all to build bridges in the fields encompassed by the various faculties, with the exception of theology.

In the field of law the concepts being worked out are becoming more and more stereotyped and quite unsuitable for the regulation of real life. But they do regulate it because life on the physical plane is maya; if it were not maya, they would be incapable of regulating it. As it is, their application is bringing more and more confusion into the world. The application of today's jurisprudence, especially in civil law, does nothing but bring confusion into the situation. But this is not clearly seen. Indeed, how should it be seen? No one follows up the consequences of applying stereotyped concepts to reality. People study law, they become solicitors or judges, they absorb the concepts and apply them. What happens as a consequence of their application is of no interest. Or life is seen as it is—despite the existence of the law, which is a very difficult subject to study for many reasons, not least because law students tend to waste the first few terms—life is seen as it is; we see that everything is in a muddle and do no more than complain.

In the field of medicine the situation is more serious. If medicine continues to develop in the wake of materialism as it has been doing since the second third of the nineteenth century, it will eventually reach an utterly nonsensical situation, for it will end up in absurd medical specializations. The situation is more serious here because this tendency was, in fact, necessary and a good thing. But now it is time for it to be overcome. The materialistic tendency in medicine meant that surgery has reached a high degree of specialization, which was only possible because of this one-sided tendency. But medicine as such has suffered as a result. So now it needs to turn around completely and look towards a real spirituality—but the resistance to this is enormous.

Education is the field which, more than any other, needs to be permeated with spirituality, as we have said often enough. Bridges need to be built everywhere.

In technology—although it may appear to be furthest away from the spirit—it is above all necessary that bridges should be built to the life of the spirit, out of direct practical life. The fifth post-Atlantean period is the one which is concerned with the development of the material world, and if the human being is not to degenerate totally into a mere accomplice of machines—which would make him into nothing more than an animal—then a path must be found which leads from these very machines to the life of the spirit. The priority for those working practically with machines is that they take spiritual impulses into their own soul. This will come about the moment students of technology are taught to think just a little more than is the case at present; the moment they are taught to think in such a way that they see the connections between the different things they learn. As yet they are unable to do this. They attend lectures on mathematics, on descriptive geometry, even on topology sometimes; on pure mechanics, analytical mechanics, industrial mechanics, and also all the various more practical subjects. But it does not even occur to them to look for a connection between all these different things. As soon as people are obliged to apply their own common sense to things, they will be forced—simply on account of the stage of development these various subjects have reached—to push forward into the nature of these things and then on into the spiritual realm. From machines, in particular, a path will truly have to be found into the spiritual world.

I am saying all this in order to point out what difficulties today face the spiritual-scientific Movement, because so far there are no individuals to be found who might be capable of generating an atmosphere of taking things seriously. This Movement suffers most of all from a lack of being taken seriously. It is remarkable how this comes to the fore in all kinds of details. Much of what we have published would have been taken seriously, would have been seen in quite a different light, if it had not been made known that it stemmed from someone belonging to the Theosophical Movement. Simply because the person concerned was in the Theosophical Movement, his work was stamped as something not to be taken seriously. It is most important to realize this, and it is just these trifling details which make it plain. Not out of any foolish vanity but just so that you know what I mean, let me give you an example of one of these trifles which I came across only the other day.

In my book Vom Menschenrätsel I wrote about Karl Christian Planck as one of those spirits who, out of certain inner foundations, worked towards the spiritual realm, even though only in an abstract way. I have not only written about him in this book, but also—over the past few winters—spoken about him in some detail in a number of cities, showing how he went unrecognized, or was misunderstood, and referring especially to ane particular circumstance. This was the fact that, in the eighties, seventies, sixties, fifties, this man had ideas and thoughts in connection with industrial and social life which ought to have been put into practice. If only there had been someone at that time with the capacity of employing in social life the great ideas this man had, ideas truly compatible with reality, then—and I am not exaggerating—mankind would probably not now be suffering all that is going on today which, for the greater part, is a consequence of the totally wrong social structure in which we are living.

I have told you that it is a real duty not to let human beings come to a pass such as that reached by Karl Christian Planck, who finally came to be utterly devoid of any love for the world of external physical reality. He was a Swabian living in Stuttgart. He was refused a place in the philosophy department of Tübingen University, where he would have had the opportunity to put forward some of his ideas. I entirely intentionally mentioned the fact that, when he wrote the foreword to his book Testament of a German, he felt moved to say, ‘Not even my bones shall rest in the soil of my ungrateful fatherland’. Hard words. Words such as people today can be driven to utter when faced with the stupidity of their fellow human beings, who refuse to see the point about what is really compatible with reality. In Stuttgart I purposely quoted these words about his bones, for Stuttgart is Planck's fatherland in the narrower sense. There was little reaction, despite the fact that events had already reached a stage when there would have been every reason to understand the things he had said.

Now, however, a year-and-a-half later, the following notice may be found in the Swabian newspapers:

‘Karl Christian Planck. More than one far-seeing spirit foretold the present World War. But none anticipated its scale nor understood its causes and effects as clearly as did our Swabian countryman Planck.’

I said in my lecture that Karl Christian Planck had foreseen the present World War, and that he even expressly stated that Italy would not be on the side of the Central Powers, even though he was speaking at the time when the alliance had not yet been concluded, but was only in the making.

‘To him this war seemed to be the unavoidable goal toward which political and economic developments had been inexorably moving for the last fifty years.’

This is indeed the case!

‘Just as he revealed the damage being done in his day, so he also pointed the way which can lead us to other situations.’

This is the important point. But nobody listened!

‘By him we are told the deeper reasons underlying war profiteering and other black marks which mar so many good and pleasing aspects of the life of the nation today. He knows where the deeper, more inward forces of the nation lie and can tell us how to release them so that the moral and social renewal longed for by the best amongst us can come about. Despite all the painful disappointments meted out to him by his contemporaries, he continued to believe in these forces and their triumphant emergence.’

Nevertheless, he was driven to utter the words I have quoted!

‘The news will therefore be widely welcomed that the philosopher's daughter is about to give an introduction to Planck's social and political thinking in a number of public lectures.’

It is interesting that a year-and-a-half later his daughter should be putting in an appearance. This notice appeared in a Stuttgart newspaper. But a year-and-a-half ago, when I drew attention as plainly as possible in Stuttgart to the the philosopher Karl Christian Planck, no one took the slightest notice, and no one felt moved to make known what I had said. Now his daughter puts in an appearance. Her father died in 1880, and presumably she had been born by then. Yet she has waited all this time before standing up for him by giving public lectures.

This example could be multiplied not tenfold, but a hundredfold. It shows once again how difficult it is to bring together the all-embracing aspect of spiritual science with everyday practical details, despite the fact that it is absolutely essential that this should be done. Only through the all-embracing nature of spiritual science—this must be understood—can healing come about for what lives in the culture of today.

That is why it has been essential to keep steering what we call anthroposophical spiritual science, in whatever way possible, along the more serious channels which have been increasingly deserted by the Theosophical Movement. The spirit that was even known to the ancient Greek philosophers had to be allowed to come through, although this has led to the opinion that what is written in consequence is difficult to read. It has often not been easy. Especially within the Movement it met with the greatest difficulties. And one of the greatest difficulties has been the fact that it really has taken well over a decade to overcome one fundamental abstraction. Laborious and patient work has been necessary to overcome this fundamental abstraction which has been one of the most damaging things for our Movement. This basic abstraction consisted simply in the insistence on clinging to the word ‘theosophy’, regardless of whether whatever was said to be ‘theosophical’ referred to something filled with the spirituality of modern life, or to no more than some rubbish published by Rohm or anyone else. Anything ‘theosophical’ had equal justification, for this prompted ‘theosophical tolerance’.

Only very gradually has it been possible to work against these things. They could not be pointed out directly at the beginning, because that would have seemed arrogant. Only gradually has it been possible to awaken a feeling for the fact that differences do exist, and that tolerance used in this connection is nothing more than an expression of a total lack of character on which to base judgements. What matters now is to work towards knowledge of a kind which can cope with reality, which can tackle the demands of reality. Only a spiritual science that works with the concepts of our time can tackle the demands of reality. Not living in comfortable theosophical ideas but wrestling for spiritual reality—this must be the direction of our endeavour.

Some people still have no idea what is meant by wrestling for reality, for they are fighting shy of understanding clearly how threadbare are the concepts with which they work today. Let me give you a small example, from a seemingly unrelated subject, of what it means to wrestle for reality in concepts. I shall be brief, so please be patient while I explain something that might seem rather far-fetched.

There were always isolated individuals in the nineteenth century who were prepared to take up the question of reality. For reality was then supposed to burst in on mankind with entirely fresh ideas about life, not only the unimportant aspects but especially the basic practical aspects of life. Thus at a certain point in the nineteenth century Euclid's postulate of parallels was challenged. When are two lines parallel? Who could have failed to agree that two lines are parallel if they never meet, however long they are! For that is the definition: That two straight lines are parallel if they never meet, whatever the distance to which they are extended. In the nineteenth century there were individuals who devoted their whole life to achieving clarity about this concept, for it does not stand up to exact thinking. In order to show you what it means to wrestle for concepts, let me read you a letter written by Wolfgang Bolyai. The mathematician Gauss had begun to realize that the definition of two straight lines being parallel if they meet at infinity, or not at all, was no more than empty words and meant nothing. The older Bolyai, the father, was a friend and pupil of Gauss, who also stimulated the younger Bolyai, the son. And the father wrote to the son:

‘Do not look for the parallels in that direction. I have trodden that path to its end; I have traversed bottomless night in which every light, every joy of my life has been extinguished. By God I implore you to leave the postulate of the parallels alone! Shun it as you would a dissolute association, for it can rob you of all your leisure, your health, your peace of mind and every pleasure in life. It will never grow light on earth and the unfortunate human race will never gain anything perfectly pure, not even geometry itself. In my soul there is a deep and eternal wound. May God save you from being eaten away by another such. It robs me of my delight in geometry, and indeed of life on earth. I had resolved to sacrifice myself for the truth. I would have been prepared for martyrdom if only I could have handed geometry back to mankind purified of this blemish. I have accomplished awful, gigantic works, have achieved far more than ever before, but never found total satisfaction. Si paullum a summo discessit, vergit ad imum. When I saw that the foundation of this night cannot be reached from the earth I returned, comfortless, sorrowing for my self and the human race. Learn from my example. Desiring to know the parallels, I have remained without knowledge. And they have robbed me of all the flowers of my life and time. They have become the root of all my subsequent failures, and much rain has fallen on them from our lowering domestic clouds. If I could have discovered the parallels I would have become an angel, even if none had ever known of my discovery.

... Do not attempt it ... It is a labyrinth that forever blocks your path. If you enter you will grow poor, like a treasure hunter, and your ignorance will not cease. Should you arrive at whatever absurd discovery, it will be for naught, untenable as an axiom ...

... The pillars of Hercules are situated in this region. Go not a step further, or you will be lost.’

Nevertheless, the younger Bolyai did go further, even more so than his father, and devoted his whole life to the search for a concrete concept in a field where such a concept seemed to exist, but which was, however, empty words. He wanted to discover whether there really was such a thing as two straight lines which did not meet, even in infinity. No one has ever paced out this infinite distance, for that would take an infinite time, but this time has not yet run its course. It is nothing more than words. Such empty words, such conceptual shadows, are to be found behind all kinds of concepts. I simply wanted to point out to you how even the most thorough spirits of the nineteenth century suffered because of the abstractness of these concepts! It is interesting to see that while children are taught in every school that parallel lines are those which never meet, however long they are, there have been individual spirits for whom working with such concepts became a hell, because they were seeking to push through to a real concept instead of a stereotyped concept.

Wrestling with reality—this is what matters, yet this is the very thing our contemporaries shun, more or less, because they ‘realize’, or imagine they realize, that they have ‘high ideals’! It is not ideals that matter, but impulses which work with reality. Imagine someone were to make a beautiful statement such as: At long last a time must come when those who are most capable are accorded the consideration due to them. What a lovely programme! Whole societies could be established in accordance with this programme. Even political sciences could be founded on this basis. But it is not the statement that counts. What counts is the degree to which it is permeated by reality. For what is the use—however valid the statement, and however many societies choose it for the prime point in their programmes—if those in power happen to see only their nephews as being the most capable? It is not a matter of establishing the validity of the statement that the most capable should be given their due. The important thing is to have the capacity to find those who are the most capable, whether they are one's nephews or not! We must learn to understand that abstract concepts always fall through the cracks of life, and that they never mean anything, and that all our time is wasted on all these beautiful concepts. I have no objection to their beauty, but what matters is our grasp and knowledge of reality.

Suppose the lion were to found a social order for the animals, dividing up the kingdom of the earth in a just way. What would he do? I do not believe it would occur to him to push for a situation in which the small animals of the desert, usually eaten by the lion, would have the possibility of not being eaten by the lion! He would consider it his lion's right to eat the small animals he meets in the desert. It is conceivable, though, that for the ocean he would find it just and proper to forbid the sharks to eat the little fishes. This might very well happen. The lion might establish a tremendously just social order in the oceans, at the North Pole or wherever else he himself is not at home, giving all the animals their freedom. But whether he would be pleased to establish such an order in his own region is a question indeed. He knows very well what justice is in the social order, and he will put it into practice efficiently in the kingdom of the sharks.

Let us now turn from lions to Hungaricus. I told you two days ago about his small pamphlet Conditions de Paix de l'Allemagne. This pamphlet swims entirely with the stream of that map of Europe which was first mentioned in the famous note from the Entente to Wilson about the partition of Austria. We have spoken about it. With the exception of Switzerland, Hungaricus is quite satisfied with this map. He begins by talking very wisely—just as most people today talk very wisely—about the rights of nations, even the rights of small nations, and about the right of the state to be coincident with the power of the nation, and so on. This is all very nice, in the same way that the statement, about the most capable being given his due, is nice. As long as the concepts remain shadowy we can, if we are idealists, be delighted when we read Hungaricus. For the Swiss, the pamphlet is even nicer than the map, for rather than wiping Switzerland off the map, Hungaricus adds the Vorarlberg and the Tyrol. So I recommend the Swiss to read the pamphlet rather than look at the map. But now Hungaricus proceeds to divide up the rest of the world. In his own way he accords to every nation, even the smallest, the absolute right to develop freely—as long as he considers he is not causing offence to the Entente. He trims his words a little, of course, saying ‘independence’ when referring to Bohemia, and obviously ‘autonomy’ with regard to Ireland. Well, this is the done thing, is it not! It is quite acceptable to dress things up a little. He divides up the world of Europe quite nicely, so that apart from the things I have mentioned—which are to avoid causing offence—he really endeavours to apportion the smallest nations to those states to which the representatives of the Entente believe they belong. It is not so much a question of whether these small territories are really inhabited by those nationalities, but of whether the Entente actually believes this to be the case. He makes every effort to divide up the world nicely, with the exception of the desert—oh, pardon me—with the exception of Hungary, which is where he practises his lion's right! Perfect freedom is laid down for the kingdom of the sharks. But the Magyar nation is his nation, and this is to comprise not only what it comprises today—though without it only a minority of the population would be Magyar, the majority being others—but other territories as well. Here he well and truly acts the part of the lion.

Here we see how concepts are formulated nowadays and how people think nowadays. It gives us an opportunity to study how urgent it is to find the transition to a thinking which is permeated with reality. For this, concepts such as those I have been giving you are necessary. I want to show you—indeed, I must show you—how spiritual thinking leads to ideas which are compatible with reality. One must always combine the correct thought with the object; then one can recognize whether that object corresponds to reality or not.

Take Wilson's note to the Senate. As a sample it could even have certain effects in some respects. But this is not what matters. What matters is that it contains ‘shadowy concepts’. If it nevertheless has an effect, this is due to the vexatious nature of our time which can be influenced by vexatious means. Look at this matter objectively and try to form a concept against which you can measure the reality, the real content with which this shadowy concept could be linked. You need only ask one question: Could this note not just as well have been written in 1913? The idealistic nothings it contains could just as easily have been expressed in 1913! You see, a thinking which believes in the absolute is not based on reality. It is unrealistic to think that something ‘absolute’ will result every time. The present age has no talent for seeing through the lack of reality in thinking because it is always out for what is ‘right’ rather than for what is in keeping with reality.

That is why in my book Vom Menschenrätsel I emphasized so heavily the importance not only of what is logical but also of what is in keeping with reality. A single decision that took account of the facts as they are at this precise moment would be worth more than all the empty phrases put together. Historical documents are perhaps the best means of showing that what I am saying has to do with reality, for as time has gone on the only people to come to the surface are those who want to rule the world with abstractions, and this is what has led to the plight of the world today. Proper thinking, which takes account of things as they are, will discover the realities wherever they are. Indeed, they are so close at hand! Take the real concept which I introduced from another point of view the other day: Out of what later became Italy in the South there arose the priestly cultic element which created as its opposition the Protestantism of Central Europe; from the West was formed the diplomatic, political element which also created an opposition for itself; and from the North-west was formed the mercantile element which again created for itself an opposition; and in Central Europe an opposition coming out of the general, human element will of necessity arise. Let us look once more at the way these things stream outwards. (See diagram.)

Even for the fourth post-Atlantean period—proceeding on from the old fourfold classification in which one spoke of castes—we can begin to describe this structure in a somewhat different way: Plato spoke of ‘guardian-rulers’; this is the realm for which Rome—priestly, papal Rome—seized the monopoly, achieving a situation in which she alone was allowed to establish doctrinal truths. She was to be the only source of all doctrine, even the highest.

In a different realm, the political, diplomatic element is nothing other than Plato's ‘guardian-auxiliaries’. I have shown you that, regardless of what people call Prussian militarism, the real military element was formed with France as its starting point, after the first foundations had been laid in Switzerland. That is where the military element began, but of course it created an opposition for itself by withholding from others what it considered to be its own prerogative. It wants to dominate the world in a soldierly way, so that when something soldierly comes to meet it from elsewhere it finds this quite unjustified, just as Rome finds it unjustified if something comes towards her which is to do with the great truths of the universe.

And here, instead of mercantilism, we might just as well write ‘the industrial and agricultural class’. Think on this, meditate on it, and you will come to understand that this third factor corresponds to the provision of material needs. So what is being withheld? Foodstuffs, of course!

If you apply Plato's concepts appropriately, in accordance with reality, then you will find reality everywhere, for with these concepts you will be able fully to enter into reality. Starting from the concept, you must find the way to reality, and the concept will be able to plunge down into the most concrete parts of reality. Shadowy concepts, on the other hand, never find reality, but they do lend themselves exceptionally well to idealistic chatter. With real concepts, though, you can work you way through to an understanding of reality in every detail. Here lies the task of spiritual science. Spiritual science leads to concepts through which you can really discover life, which of course is created by the spirit, and through which you will be able to join in a constructive way at working on the formation of this life.

One concept, in particular, requires realistic thinking, owing to the terrible destiny at present weighing down on mankind, for the corresponding unreal concept is especially persistent in this connection. Those who speak in the most unrealistic way of all, these days, are the clergymen. What they express about Christianity or the awareness of God, apropos of the war, is enough to send anyone up the wall, as they say. They distort things so frightfully. Of course things in other connections are distorted too, but in this realm the degree of absurdity is even greater.

Look at the sermons or tracts at present stemming from that source; apply your good common sense to them. Of course it is understandable that they should ask: Does mankind have to be subjected to this terrible, painful destiny? Could not the divine forces of God intervene on behalf of mankind to bring about salvation? The justification for speaking in this way does indeed seem absolute. But there is no real concept behind it. It does not apply to the reality of the situation. Let me use a comparison to show you what I mean.

Human beings have a certain physical constitution. They take in food which is of a kind which enables them to go on living. If they were to refuse food, they would grow thin, become ill, and finally starve to death. Now is it natural to complain that if human beings refuse to eat it is a weakness or malevolence on the part of God to let them starve? Indeed it is not a weakness on the part of God. He created the food; human beings only need to eat it. The wisdom of God is revealed in the way the food maintains the human beings. If they refuse to eat it, they cannot turn round and accuse God of letting them starve.

Now apply this to what I was saying. Mankind must regard spiritual life as a food. It is given by the gods, but it has to be taken in by man. To say that the gods ought to intervene directly is tantamount to saying that if I refuse to eat God ought to satisfy my hunger in some other way. The wisdom-filled order of the universe ensures that what is needed for salvation is always available, but it is up to human beings to make a relationship with it. So the spiritual life necessary for the twentieth century will not enter human beings of itself. They must strive for it and take it into themselves. If they fail to take it in, times will grow more and more dismal. What takes place on the surface is only maya. What is happening inwardly, is that an older age is wrestling with a new one. The general, human element is rising up everywhere in opposition to the specialized elements. It is maya to believe that nation is fighting against nation—and I have spoken about this maya in other connections too. The battle of nation with nation only comes about because things group themselves in certain ways but, in reality, the inward forces opposing one another are something quite different. The opposition is between the old and the new. The laws now fighting to come into play are quite different from those which have traditionally ruled over the world.

And again it was maya—that is, something appearing under a false guise—to say that those other laws were rising up on behalf of socialism. Socialism is not something connected with truth; above all it is not connected with spiritual life, for what it wants is to connect itself with materialism. What really wants to wrestle its way into existence is the many-sided, harmonious element of mankind, in opposition to the one-sided priestly, political or mercantile elements. This battle will rage for a long time, but it can be conducted in all kinds of different ways. If a healthy way of leading life, such as that described by Planck in the nineteenth century, had been adopted, then the bloody conduct of the first third of the twentieth century would, at least, have been ameliorated. Idealisms do not lead to amelioration, but realistic thinking does, and realistic thinking also always means spiritual thinking.

Equally, we can say that whatever has to happen will happen. Whatever it is that is wrestling its way out, must needs go through all these experiences in order to reach a stage at which spirituality can be united with the soul, so that man can grow up spiritually. Today's tragic destiny of mankind is that in striving upwards today, human beings are endeavouring to do so not under the sign of spirituality but under the sign of materialism. This in the first instance is what brought them into conflict with those brotherhoods who want to develop the impulses of the mercantile element, commerce and industry, in a materialistic way on a grand scale. This is today's main conflict. All other things are side issues, often terrible side issues. This shows us how terrible maya can be. But it is possible to strive for things in different ways. If others had been in power instead of the agents of those brotherhoods, then we would, today, be busy with peace negotiations, and the Christmas call for peace would not have been shouted down!

It is going to be immensely difficult to find clear and realistic concepts and ideas in respect of certain things; but we must all seek to find them in our own areas. Those who enter a little into the meaning of spiritual science, and compare this spiritual science with other things making an appearance just now, will see that this spiritual science is the only path that can lead to concepts which are filled with reality.

I wanted to say this very seriously to you at this time. Despite the fact that the task of spiritual science can only be comprehended out of the spirit itself, out of knowledge, and not out of what we have been discussing today, I wanted to show you the significance, the essential nature, of spiritual science for the present time. I wanted to show you how urgent it is for everything possible to be done to make spiritual science more widely known. It is so necessary in these difficult times for us to take spiritual science not only into our heads but really into our warm hearts. Only if we take it into the warmth of our hearts will we be capable of generating the strength needed by the present time.

None of us should allow ourselves to think that we are perhaps not in a suitable position, or not strong enough, to do what it is essential for us to do. Karma is sure to give every one of us, whatever our position, the opportunity to put the right questions to destiny at the right moment. Even if this right moment is neither today nor tomorrow, it is sure to come eventually. So once we have understood the impulses of this spiritual Movement we must stand firmly and steadfastly behind them. Today it is particularly necessary to set ourselves the aim of firmness and steadfastness. For either something important must come from one side or another—although this cannot be counted upon—in the very near future, or all conditions of life will become increasingly difficult. It would be utterly thoughtless to refuse to be clear about this. For two-and-a-half years it has been possible for what we now call war to carry on, while conditions remained as bearable as they now are. But this cannot go on for another year. Movements such as ours will be put te a severe test. There will be no question of asking when we shall next meet, or why do we not meet, or why this or that is not being published. No, indeed. It will be a question of bearing in our hearts, even through long periods of danger, a steadfast sense of belonging.

I wanted to say this to you today because it could be possible in the not too distant future that there will be no means of transport which will enable us to come together again; I am not speaking only of travel permits but of actual means of transport. In the long run, it will not be possible to keep the things going which constitute our modern civilization, if something breaks in on this civilization which, although it has arisen out of it, is nevertheless in absolute opposition to it. This is how absurd the situation is: Life itself is bringing forth things which are absolutely opposed to it.

So we must accept that difficult times may be in store for our Movement too. But we shall not be led astray if we have taken into ourselves the inner steadfastness, clarity and right feeling for the importance and nature of our Movement, and if in these serious times we can see beyond our petty differences. This, our Movement ought to be able to achieve; we ought to be able to look beyond our petty differences to the greater affairs of mankind, which are now at stake. The greatest of these is to reach an understanding of what it means to base thinking on reality. Wherever we look we are confronted with the impossibility of finding a thinking which accords with reality. We shall have to enter heart and soul into this search in order not to be led astray by all kinds of egoistic distractions.

This is what I wanted to say to you as my farewell today, since we are about to take leave of one another for some time. Make yourselves so strong—even if it should turn out to be unnecessary—that, even in loneliness of soul, your hearts will carry the pulse of spiritual science with which we are here concerned. Even the thought that we shall be steadfast will help a very great deal; for thoughts are realities. Many potential difficulties can still be swept away if we maintain an honest, serious quest in the direction we have here discussed so often.

Now that we have to depart for a while we shall not allow ourselves to flag, but shall make sure that we return if it is possible. But even if it should take a long time as a result of circumstances outside our control, we shall never lose the thought from our hearts and souls that this is the place—where our Movement has even brought forth a visible building—where the most intense requirement exists to bear this Movement so positively, so concretely, so energetically, that together we can carry it through, come what may. So wherever we are, let us stand together in thought, faithfully, energetically, cordially, and let us hear one another, even though this will not be possible with our physical ears. But we shall only hear one another if we listen with strong thoughts and without sentimentality, for the times are now unsuitable for sentimentality.

In this sense, I say farewell to you. My words are also a greeting, for in the days to come we shall meet again, though more in the spirit than on the physical plane. Let us hope that the latter, too, will be possible once more in the not too distant future.

On The Fate of The Lower "Principles"

Enq. You spoke of Kama-loka, what is it?

Theo. When the man dies, his lower three principles leave him for ever; i. e., body, life, and the vehicle of the latter, the astral body or the double of the living man. And then, his four principles — the central or middle principle, the animal soul or Kama-rupa, with what it has assimilated from the lower Manas, and the higher triad find themselves in Kama-loka. The latter is an astral locality, the limbus of scholastic theology, the Hades of the ancients, and, strictly speaking, a locality only in a relative sense. It has neither a definite area nor boundary, but exists within subjective space; i. e., is beyond our sensuous perceptions. Still it exists, and it is there that the astral eidolons of all the beings that have lived, animals included, await their second death. For the animals it comes with the disintegration and the entire fading out of their astral particles to the last. For the human eidolon it begins when the Atma-Buddhi-Manasic triad is said to "separate" itself from its lower principles, or the reflection of the ex-personality, by falling into the Devachanic state.

Enq. And what happens after this?

Theo. Then the Kama-rupic phantom, remaining bereft of its informing thinking principle, the higher Manas, and the lower aspect of the latter, the animal intelligence, no longer receiving light from the higher mind, and no longer having a physical brain to work through, collapses.

Enq. In what way?

Theo. Well, it falls into the state of the frog when certain portions of its brain are taken out by the vivisector. It can think no more, even on the lowest animal plane. Henceforth it is no longer even the lower Manas, since this "lower" is nothing without the "higher."

Enq. And is it this nonentity which we find materializing in Seance rooms with Mediums?

Theo. It is this nonentity. A true nonentity, however, only as to reasoning or cogitating powers, still an Entity, however astral and fluidic, as shown in certain cases when, having been magnetically and unconsciously drawn toward a medium, it is revived for a time and lives in him by proxy, so to speak. This "spook," or the Kama-rupa, may be compared with the jelly-fish, which has an ethereal gelatinous appearance so long as it is in its own element, or water (the medium's specific AURA), but which, no sooner is it thrown out of it, than it dissolves in the hand or on the sand, especially in sunlight. In the medium's Aura, it lives a kind of vicarious life and reasons and speaks either through the medium's brain or those of other persons present. But this would lead us too far, and upon other people's grounds, whereon I have no desire to trespass. Let us keep to the subject of reincarnation.

Enq. What of the latter? How long does the incarnating Ego remain in the Devachanic state?

Theo. This, we are taught, depends on the degree of spirituality and the merit or demerit of the last incarnation. The average time is from ten to fifteen centuries, as I already told you.

Enq. But why could not this Ego manifest and communicate with mortals as Spiritualists will have it? What is there to prevent a mother from communicating with the children she left on earth, a husband with his wife, and so on? It is a most consoling belief, I must confess; nor do I wonder that those who believe in it are so averse to give it up.

Theo. Nor are they forced to, unless they happen to prefer truth to fiction, however "consoling." Uncongenial our doctrines may be to Spiritualists; yet, nothing of what we believe in and teach is half as selfish and cruel as what they preach.

Enq. I do not understand you. What is selfish?

Theo. Their doctrine of the return of Spirits, the real "personalities" as they say; and I will tell you why. If Devachan — call it "paradise" if you like, a "place of bliss and of supreme felicity," if it is anything — is such a place (or say state), logic tells us that no sorrow or even a shade of pain can be experienced therein. "God shall wipe away all the tears from the eyes" of those in paradise, we read in the book of many promises. And if the "Spirits of the dead" are enabled to return and see all that is going on on earth, and especially in their homes, what kind of bliss can be in store for them?

WHY THEOSOPHISTS DO NOT BELIEVE IN THE RETURN OF PURE "SPIRITS"

Enq. What do you mean? Why should this interfere with their bliss?

Theo. Simply this; and here is an instance. A mother dies, leaving behind her little helpless children — orphans whom she adores — perhaps a beloved husband also. We say that her "Spirit" or Ego — that individuality which is now all impregnated, for the entire Devachanic period, with the noblest feelings held by its late personality, i.e., love for her children, pity for those who suffer, and so on — we say that it is now entirely separated from the "vale of tears," that its future bliss consists in that blessed ignorance of all the woes it left behind. Spiritualists say, on the contrary, that it is as vividly aware of them, and more so than before, for "Spirits see more than mortals in the flesh do." We say that the bliss of the Devachanee consists in its complete conviction that it has never left the earth, and that there is no such thing as death at all; that the post-mortem spiritual consciousness of the mother will represent to her that she lives surrounded by her children and all those whom she loved; that no gap, no link, will be missing to make her disembodied state the most perfect and absolute happiness. The Spiritualists deny this point blank. According to their doctrine, unfortunate man is not liberated even by death from the sorrows of this life. Not a drop from the life-cup of pain and suffering will miss his lips; and nolens volens, since he sees everything now, shall he drink it to the bitter dregs. Thus, the loving wife, who during her lifetime was ready to save her husband sorrow at the price of her heart's blood, is now doomed to see, in utter helplessness, his despair, and to register every hot tear he sheds for her loss. Worse than that, she may see the tears dry too soon, and another beloved face shine on him, the father of her children; find another woman replacing her in his affections; doomed to hear her orphans giving the holy name of "mother" to one indifferent to them, and to see those little children neglected, if not ill-treated. According to this doctrine the "gentle wafting to immortal life" becomes without any transition the way into a new path of mental suffering! And yet, the columns of the "Banner of Light," the veteran journal of the American Spiritualists, are filled with messages from the dead, the "dear departed ones," who all write to say how very happy they are! Is such a state of knowledge consistent with bliss? Then "bliss" stands in such a case for the greatest curse, and orthodox damnation must be a relief in comparison to it!

Enq. But how does your theory avoid this? How can you reconcile the theory of Soul's omniscience with its blindness to that which is taking place on earth?

Theo. Because such is the law of love and mercy. During every Devachanic period the Ego, omniscient as it is per se, clothes itself, so to say, with the reflection of the "personality" that was. I have just told you that the ideal efflorescence of all the abstract, therefore undying and eternal qualities or attributes, such as love and mercy, the love of the good, the true and the beautiful, that ever spoke in the heart of the living "personality," clung after death to the Ego, and therefore followed it to Devachan. For the time being, then, the Ego becomes the ideal reflection of the human being it was when last on earth, and that is not omniscient. Were it that, it would never be in the state we call Devachan at all.

Enq. What are your reasons for it?

Theo. If you want an answer on the strict lines of our philosophy, then I will say that it is because everything is illusion (Maya) outside of eternal truth, which has neither form, colour, nor limitation. He who has placed himself beyond the veil of maya — and such are the highest Adepts and Initiates — can have no Devachan. As to the ordinary mortal, his bliss in it is complete. It is an absolute oblivion of all that gave it pain or sorrow in the past incarnation, and even oblivion of the fact that such things as pain or sorrow exist at all. The Devachanee lives its intermediate cycle between two incarnations surrounded by everything it had aspired to in vain, and in the companionship of everyone it loved on earth. It has reached the fulfilment of all its soul-yearnings. And thus it lives throughout long centuries an existence of unalloyed happiness, which is the reward for its sufferings in earth-life. In short, it bathes in a sea of uninterrupted felicity spanned only by events of still greater felicity in degree.

Enq. But this is more than simple delusion, it is an existence of insane hallucinations!

Theo. From your standpoint it may be, not so from that of philosophy. Besides which, is not our whole terrestrial life filled with such delusions? Have you never met men and women living for years in a fool's paradise? And because you should happen to learn that the husband of a wife, whom she adores and believes herself as beloved by him, is untrue to her, would you go and break her heart and beautiful dream by rudely awakening her to the reality? I think not. I say it again, such oblivion and hallucination — if you call it so — are only a merciful law of nature and strict justice. At any rate, it is a far more fascinating prospect than the orthodox golden harp with a pair of wings. The assurance that "the soul that lives ascends frequently and runs familiarly through the streets of the heavenly Jerusalem, visiting the patriarchs and prophets, saluting the apostles, and admiring the army of martyrs" may seem of a more pious character to some. Nevertheless, it is a hallucination of a far more delusive character, since mothers love their children with an immortal love, we all know, while the personages mentioned in the "heavenly Jerusalem" are still of a rather doubtful nature. But I would, still, rather accept the "new Jerusalem," with its streets paved like the show windows of a jeweller's shop, than find consolation in the heartless doctrine of the Spiritualists. The idea alone that the intellectual conscious souls of one's father, mother, daughter or brother find their bliss in a "Summer land" — only a little more natural, but just as ridiculous as the "New Jerusalem" in its description — would be enough to make one lose every respect for one's "departed ones." To believe that a pure spirit can feel happy while doomed to witness the sins, mistakes, treachery, and, above all, the sufferings of those from whom it is severed by death and whom it loves best, without being able to help them, would be a maddening thought.

Enq. There is something in your argument. I confess to having never seen it in this light.

Theo. Just so, and one must be selfish to the core and utterly devoid of the sense of retributive justice, to have ever imagined such a thing. We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and far, far nearer to them now, than when they were alive. And it is not only in the fancy of the Devachanee, as some may imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity. Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual affection to incarnate once more in the same family group. Again we say that love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it, has a magic and divine potency which reacts on the living. A mother's Ego filled with love for the imaginary children it sees near itself, living a life of happiness, as real to it as when on earth — that love will always be felt by the children in flesh. It will manifest in their dreams, and often in various events — in providential protections and escapes, for love is a strong shield, and is not limited by space or time. As with this Devachanic "mother," so with the rest of human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish or material. Analogy will suggest to you the rest.

Enq. In no case, then, do you admit the possibility of the communication of the living with the disembodied spirit?

Theo. Yes, there is a case, and even two exceptions to the rule. The first exception is during the few days that follow immediately the death of a person and before the Ego passes into the Devachanic state. Whether any living mortal, save a few exceptional cases — (when the intensity of the desire in the dying person to return for some purpose forced the higher consciousness to remain awake, and therefore it was really the individuality, the "Spirit" that communicated) — has derived much benefit from the return of the spirit into the objective plane is another question. The spirit is dazed after death and falls very soon into what we call "pre-devachanic unconsciousness." The second exception is found in the Nirmanakayas.

Enq. What about them? And what does the name mean for you?

Theo. It is the name given to those who, though they have won the right to Nirvana and cyclic rest — (not "Devachan," as the latter is an illusion of our consciousness, a happy dream, and as those who are fit for Nirvana must have lost entirely every desire or possibility of the world's illusions) — have out of pity for mankind and those they left on earth renounced the Nirvanic state. Such an adept, or Saint, or whatever you may call him, believing it a selfish act to rest in bliss while mankind groans under the burden of misery produced by ignorance, renounces Nirvana, and determines to remain invisible in spirit on this earth. They have no material body, as they have left it behind; but otherwise they remain with all their principles even in astral life in our sphere. And such can and do communicate with a few elect ones, only surely not with ordinary mediums.

Enq. I have put you the question about Nirmanakayas because I read in some German and other works that it was the name given to the terrestrial appearances or bodies assumed by Buddhas in the Northern Buddhistic teachings.

Theo. So they are, only the Orientalists have confused this terrestrial body by understanding it to be objective and physical instead of purely astral and subjective.

Enq. And what good can they do on earth?

Theo. Not much, as regards individuals, as they have no right to interfere with Karma, and can only advise and inspire mortals for the general good. Yet they do more beneficent actions than you imagine.

Enq. To this Science would never subscribe, not even modern psychology. For them, no portion of intelligence can survive the physical brain. What would you answer them?

Theo. I would not even go to the trouble of answering, but would simply say, in the words given to "M. A. Oxon," "Intelligence is perpetuated after the body is dead. Though it is not a question of the brain only. . . . It is reasonable to propound the indestructibility of the human spirit from what we know" (Spirit Identity, p. 69).

Enq. But "M. A. Oxon" is a Spiritualist?

Theo. Quite so, and the only true Spiritualist I know of, though we may still disagree with him on many a minor question. Apart from this, no Spiritualist comes nearer to the occult truths than he does. Like any one of us he speaks incessantly "of the surface dangers that beset the ill-equipped, feather-headed muddler with the occult, who crosses the threshold without counting the cost." ¹ Our only disagreement rests in the question of "Spirit Identity." Otherwise, I, for one, coincide almost entirely with him, and accept the three propositions he embodied in his address of July, 1884. It is this eminent Spiritualist, rather, who disagrees with us, not we with him.

Enq. What are these propositions?

Theo. "l. That there is a life coincident with, and independent of the physical life of the body."

"2. That, as a necessary corollary, this life extends beyond the life of the body" (we say it extends throughout Devachan).

"3. That there is communication between the denizens of that state of existence and those of the world in which we now live."

All depend, you see, on the minor and secondary aspects of these fundamental propositions. Everything depends on the views we take of Spirit and Soul, or Individuality and Personality. Spiritualists confuse the two "into one"; we separate them, and say that, with the exceptions above enumerated, no Spirit will revisit the earth, though the animal Soul may. But let us return once more to our direct subject, the Skandhas.

Enq. I begin to understand better now. It is the Spirit, so to say, of those Skandhas which are the most ennobling, which, attaching themselves to the incarnating Ego, survive, and are added to the stock of its angelic experiences. And it is the attributes connected with the material Skandhas, with selfish and personal motives, which, disappearing from the field of action between two incarnations, reappear at the subsequent incarnation as Karmic results to be atoned for; and therefore the Spirit will not leave Devachan. Is it so?

Theo. Very nearly so. If you add to this that the law of retribution, or Karma, rewarding the highest and most spiritual in Devachan, never fails to reward them again on earth by giving them a further development, and furnishing the Ego with a body fitted for it, then you will be quite correct.

A Few Words About the Skandhas

Enq. What becomes of the other, the lower Skandhas of the personality, after the death of the body? Are they quite destroyed?

Theo. They are and yet they are not — a fresh metaphysical and occult mystery for you. They are destroyed as the working stock in hand of the personality; they remain as Karmic effects, as germs, hanging in the atmosphere of the terrestrial plane, ready to come to life, as so many avenging fiends, to attach themselves to the new personality of the Ego when it reincarnates.

Enq. This really passes my comprehension, and is very difficult to understand.

Theo. Not once that you have assimilated all the details. For then you will see that for logic, consistency, profound philosophy, divine mercy and equity, this doctrine of Reincarnation has not its equal on earth. It is a belief in a perpetual progress for each incarnating Ego, or divine soul, in an evolution from the outward into the inward, from the material to the Spiritual, arriving at the end of each stage at absolute unity with the divine Principle. From strength to strength, from the beauty and perfection of one plane to the greater beauty and perfection of another, with accessions of new glory, of fresh knowledge and power in each cycle, such is the destiny of every Ego, which thus becomes its own Saviour in each world and incarnation.

Enq. But Christianity teaches the same. It also preaches progression.

Theo. Yes, only with the addition of something else. It tells us of the impossibility of attaining Salvation without the aid of a miraculous Saviour, and therefore dooms to perdition all those who will not accept the dogma. This is just the difference between Christian theology and Theosophy. The former enforces belief in the Descent of the Spiritual Ego into the Lower Self; the latter inculcates the necessity of endeavouring to elevate oneself to the Christos, or Buddhi state.

Enq. By teaching the annihilation of consciousness in case of failure, however, don't you think that it amounts to the annihilation of Self, in the opinion of the non-metaphysical?

Theo. From the standpoint of those who believe in the resurrection of the body literally, and insist that every bone, every artery and atom of flesh will be raised bodily on the Judgment Day — of course it does. If you still insist that it is the perishable form and finite qualities that make up immortal man, then we shall hardly understand each other. And if you do not understand that, by limiting the existence of every Ego to one life on earth, you make of Deity an ever-drunken Indra of the Puranic dead letter, a cruel Moloch, a god who makes an inextricable mess on Earth, and yet claims thanks for it, then the sooner we drop the conversation the better.

Enq. But let us return, now that the subject of the Skandhas is disposed of, to the question of the consciousness which survives death. This is the point which interests most people. Do we possess more knowledge in Devachan than we do in Earth life?

Theo. In one sense, we can acquire more knowledge; that is, we can develop further any faculty which we loved and strove after during life, provided it is concerned with abstract and ideal things, such as music, painting, poetry, etc., since Devachan is merely an idealized and subjective continuation of earth-life.

Enq. But if in Devachan the Spirit is free from matter, why should it not possess all knowledge?

Theo. Because, as I told you, the Ego is, so to say, wedded to the memory of its last incarnation. Thus, if you think over what I have said, and string all the facts together, you will realize that the Devachanic state is not one of omniscience, but a transcendental continuation of the personal life just terminated. It is the rest of the soul from the toils of life.

Enq. But the scientific materialists assert that after the death of man nothing remains; that the human body simply disintegrates into its component elements; and that what we call soul is merely a temporary self-consciousness produced as a bye-product of organic action, which will evaporate like steam. Is not theirs a strange state of mind?

Theo. Not strange at all, that I see. If they say that self-consciousness ceases with the body, then in their case they simply utter an unconscious prophecy, for once they are firmly convinced of what they assert, no conscious after-life is possible for them. For there are exceptions to every rule.

On post-Mortem and post-Natal Consciousness

Enq. But if human self-consciousness survives death as a rule, why should there be exceptions? ²

Theo. In the fundamental principles of the spiritual world no exception is possible. But there are rules for those who see, and rules for those who prefer to remain blind.

Enq. Quite so, I understand. This is but an aberration of the blind man, who denies the existence of the sun because he does not see it. But after death his spiritual eyes will certainly compel him to see. Is this what you mean?

Theo. He will not be compelled, nor will he see anything. Having persistently denied during life the continuance of existence after death, he will be unable to see it, because his spiritual capacity having been stunted in life, it cannot develop after death, and he will remain blind. By insisting that he must see it, you evidently mean one thing and I another. You speak of the spirit from the spirit, or the flame from the flame — of Atma, in short — and you confuse it with the human soul — Manas. . . . You do not understand me; let me try to make it clear. The whole gist of your question is to know whether, in the case of a downright materialist, the complete loss of self-consciousness and self-perception after death is possible? Isn't it so? I answer, It is possible. Because, believing firmly in our Esoteric Doctrine, which refers to the post-mortem period, or the interval between two lives or births, as merely a transitory state, I say, whether that interval between two acts of the illusionary drama of life lasts one year or a million, that post-mortem state may, without any breach of the fundamental law, prove to be just the same state as that of a man who is in a dead faint.

Enq. But since you have just said that the fundamental laws of the after death state admit of no exceptions, how can this be?

Theo. Nor do I say that it does admit of an exception. But the spiritual law of continuity applies only to things which are truly real. To one who has read and understood Mandukya Upanishad and Vedanta-Sara all this becomes very clear. I will say more: it is sufficient to understand what we mean by Buddhi and the duality of Manas to gain a clear perception why the materialist may fail to have a self-conscious survival after death. Since Manas, in its lower aspect, is the seat of the terrestrial mind, it can, therefore, give only that perception of the Universe which is based on the evidence of that mind; it cannot give spiritual vision. It is said in the Eastern school, that between Buddhi and Manas (the Ego), or Iswara and Pragna ³ there is in reality no more difference than between a forest and its trees, a lake and its waters, as the Mandukya teaches. One or hundreds of trees dead from loss of vitality, or uprooted, are yet incapable of preventing the forest from being still a forest.

Enq. But, as I understand it, Buddhi represents in this simile the forest, and Manas-taijasi ⁴ the trees. And if Buddha is immortal, how can that which is similar to it, i. e., Manas-taijasi, entirely lose its consciousness till the day of its new incarnation? I cannot understand it.

Theo. You cannot, because you will mix up an abstract representation of the whole with its casual changes of form. Remember that if it can be said of Buddhi-Manas that it is unconditionally immortal, the same cannot be said of the lower Manas, still less of Taijasi, which is merely an attribute. Neither of these, neither Manas nor Taijasi, can exist apart from Buddhi, the divine soul, because the first (Manas) is, in its lower aspect, a qualificative attribute of the terrestrial personality, and the second (Taijasi) is identical with the first, because it is the same Manas only with the light of Buddhi reflected on it. In its turn, Buddhi would remain only an impersonal spirit without this element which it borrows from the human soul, which conditions and makes of it, in this illusive Universe, as it were something separate from the universal soul for the whole period of the cycle of incarnation. Say rather that Buddhi-Manas can neither die nor lose its compound self-consciousness in Eternity, nor the recollection of its previous incarnations in which the two — i.e., the spiritual and the human soul — had been closely linked together. But it is not so in the case of a materialist, whose human soul not only receives nothing from the divine soul, but even refuses to recognise its existence. You can hardly apply this axiom to the attributes and qualifications of the human soul, for it would be like saying that because your divine soul is immortal, therefore the bloom on your cheek must also be immortal; whereas this bloom, like Taijasi, is simply a transitory phenomenon.

Enq. Do I understand you to say that we must not mix in our minds the noumenon with the phenomenon, the cause with its effect?

Theo. I do say so, and repeat that, limited to Manas or the human soul alone, the radiance of Taijasi itself becomes a mere question of time; because both immortality and consciousness after death become, for the terrestrial personality of man, simply conditioned attributes, as they depend entirely on conditions and beliefs created by the human soul itself during the life of its body. Karma acts incessantly: we reap in our after-life only the fruit of that which we have ourselves sown in this.

Enq. But if my Ego can, after the destruction of my body, become plunged in a state of entire unconsciousness, then where can be the punishment for the sins of my past life?

Theo. Our philosophy teaches that Karmic punishment reaches the Ego only in its next incarnation. After death it receives only the reward for the unmerited sufferings endured during its past incarnation.⁵ The whole punishment after death, even for the materialist, consists, therefore, in the absence of any reward, and the utter loss of the consciousness of one's bliss and rest. Karma is the child of the terrestrial Ego, the fruit of the actions of the tree which is the objective personality visible to all, as much as the fruit of all the thoughts and even motives of the spiritual "I"; but Karma is also the tender mother, who heals the wounds inflicted by her during the preceding life, before she will begin to torture this Ego by inflicting upon him new ones. If it may be said that there is not a mental or physical suffering in the life of a mortal which is not the direct fruit and consequence of some sin in a preceding existence; on the other hand, since he does not preserve the slightest recollection of it in his actual life, and feels himself not deserving of such punishment, and therefore thinks he suffers for no guilt of his own, this alone is sufficient to entitle the human soul to the fullest consolation, rest, and bliss in his post-mortem existence. Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend. For the materialist, who, notwithstanding his materialism, was not a bad man, the interval between the two lives will be like the unbroken and placid sleep of a child, either entirely dreamless, or filled with pictures of which he will have no definite perception; while for the average mortal it will be a dream as vivid as life, and full of realistic bliss and visions.

Enq. Then the personal man must always go on suffering blindly the Karmic penalties which the Ego has incurred?

Theo. Not quite so. At the solemn moment of death every man, even when death is sudden, sees the whole of his past life marshalled before him, in its minutest details. For one short instant the personal becomes one with the individual and all-knowing Ego. But this instant is enough to show to him the whole chain of causes which have been at work during his life. He sees and now understands himself as he is, unadorned by flattery or self-deception. He reads his life, remaining as a spectator looking down into the arena he is quitting; he feels and knows the justice of all the suffering that has overtaken him.

Enq. Does this happen to everyone?

Theo. Without any exception. Very good and holy men see, we are taught, not only the life they are leaving, but even several preceding lives in which were produced the causes that made them what they were in the life just closing. They recognise the law of Karma in all its majesty and justice.

Enq. Is there anything corresponding to this before re-birth?

Theo. There is. As the man at the moment of death has a retrospective insight into the life he has led, so, at the moment he is reborn on to earth, the Ego, awaking from the state of Devachan, has a prospective vision of the life which awaits him, and realizes all the causes that have led to it. He realizes them and sees futurity, because it is between Devachan and re-birth that the Ego regains his full manasic consciousness, and rebecomes for a short time the god he was, before, in compliance with Karmic law, he first descended into matter and incarnated in the first man of flesh. The "golden thread" sees all its "pearls" and misses not one of them.

What is Really Meant by Annihilation

Enq. I have heard some Theosophists speak of a golden thread on which their lives were strung. What do they mean by this?

Theo. In the Hindu Sacred books it is said that that which undergoes periodical incarnation is the Sutratma, which means literally the "Thread Soul." It is a synonym of the reincarnating Ego — Manas conjoined with Buddhi — which absorbs the Manasic recollections of all our preceding lives. It is so called, because, like the pearls on a thread, so is the long series of human lives strung together on that one thread. In some Upanishad these recurrent re-births are likened to the life of a mortal which oscillates periodically between sleep and waking.

Enq. This, I must say, does not seem very clear, and I will tell you why. For the man who awakes, another day commences, but that man is the same in soul and body as he was the day before; whereas at every incarnation a full change takes place not only of the external envelope, sex, and personality, but even of the mental and psychic capacities. The simile does not seem to me quite correct. The man who arises from sleep remembers quite clearly what he has done yesterday, the day before, and even months and years ago. But none of us has the slightest recollection of a preceding life or of any fact or event concerning it. . . . I may forget in the morning what I have dreamt during the night, still I know that I have slept and have the certainty that I lived during sleep; but what recollection can I have of my past incarnation until the moment of death? How do you reconcile this?

Theo. Some people do recollect their past incarnations during life; but these are Buddhas and Initiates. This is what the Yogis call Samma-Sambuddha, or the knowledge of the whole series of one's past incarnations.

Enq. But we ordinary mortals who have not reached Samma-Sambuddha, how are we to understand this simile?

Theo. By studying it and trying to understand more correctly the characteristics and the three kinds of sleep. Sleep is a general and immutable law for man as for beast, but there are different kinds of sleep and still more different dreams and visions.

Enq. But this takes us to another subject. Let us return to the materialist who, while not denying dreams, which he could hardly do, yet denies immortality in general and the survival of his own individuality.

Theo. And the materialist, without knowing it, is right. One who has no inner perception of, and faith in, the immortality of his soul, in that man the soul can never become Buddhi-taijasi, but will remain simply Manas, and for Manas alone there is no immortality possible. In order to live in the world to come a conscious life, one has to believe first of all in that life during the terrestrial existence. On these two aphorisms of the Secret Science all the philosophy about the post-mortem consciousness and the immortality of the soul is built. The Ego receives always according to its deserts. After the dissolution of the body, there commences for it a period of full awakened consciousness, or a state of chaotic dreams, or an utterly dreamless sleep undistinguishable from annihilation, and these are the three kinds of sleep. If our physiologists find the cause of dreams and visions in an unconscious preparation for them during the waking hours, why cannot the same be admitted for the post-mortem dreams? I repeat it: death is sleep. After death, before the spiritual eyes of the soul, begins a performance according to a programme learnt and very often unconsciously composed by ourselves: the practical carrying out of correct beliefs or of illusions which have been created by ourselves. The Methodist will be Methodist, the Mussulman a Mussulman, at least for some time — in a perfect fool's paradise of each man's creation and making. These are the post-mortem fruits of the tree of life. Naturally, our belief or unbelief in the fact of conscious immortality is unable to influence the unconditioned reality of the fact itself, once that it exists; but the belief or unbelief in that immortality as the property of independent or separate entities, cannot fail to give colour to that fact in its application to each of these entities. Now do you begin to understand it?

Enq. I think I do. The materialist, disbelieving in everything that cannot be proven to him by his five senses, or by scientific reasoning, based exclusively on the data furnished by these senses in spite of their inadequacy, and rejecting every spiritual manifestation, accepts life as the only conscious existence. Therefore according to their beliefs so will it be unto them. They will lose their personal Ego, and will plunge into a dreamless sleep until a new awakening. Is it so?

Theo. Almost so. Remember the practically universal teaching of the two kinds of conscious existence: the terrestrial and the spiritual. The latter must be considered real from the very fact that it is inhabited by the eternal, changeless and immortal Monad; whereas the incarnating Ego dresses itself up in new garments entirely different from those of its previous incarnations, and in which all except its spiritual prototype is doomed to a change so radical as to leave no trace behind.

Enq. How so? Can my conscious terrestrial "I" perish not only for a time, like the consciousness of the materialist, but so entirely as to leave no trace behind?

Theo. According to the teaching, it must so perish and in its fulness, all except the principle which, having united itself with the Monad, has thereby become a purely spiritual and indestructible essence, one with it in the Eternity. But in the case of an out-and-out materialist, in whose personal no Buddhi has ever reflected itself, how can the latter carry away into the Eternity one particle of that terrestrial personality? Your spiritual "I" is immortal; but from your present self it can carry away into Eternity that only which has become worthy of immortality, namely, the aroma alone of the flower that has been mown by death.

Enq. Well, and the flower, the terrestrial "I"?

Theo. The flower, as all past and future flowers which have blossomed and will have to blossom on the mother bough, the Sutratma, all children of one root or Buddhi — will return to dust. Your present "I," as you yourself know, is not the body now sitting before me, nor yet is it what I would call Manas-Sutratma, but Sutratma-Buddhi.

Enq. But this does not explain to me, at all, why you call life after death immortal, infinite and real, and the terrestrial life a simple phantom or illusion; since even that post-mortem life has limits, however much wider they may be than those of terrestrial life.

Theo. No doubt. The spiritual Ego of man moves in eternity like a pendulum between the hours of birth and death. But if these hours, marking the periods of life terrestrial and life spiritual, are limited in their duration, and if the very number of such stages in Eternity between sleep and awakening, illusion and reality, has its beginning and its end, on the other hand, the spiritual pilgrim is eternal. Therefore are the hours of his post-mortem life, when, disembodied, he stands face to face with truth and not the mirages of his transitory earthly existences, during the period of that pilgrimage which we call "the cycle of re-births" — the only reality in our conception. Such intervals, their limitation notwithstanding, do not prevent the Ego, while ever perfecting itself, from following undeviatingly, though gradually and slowly, the path to its last transformation, when that Ego, having reached its goal, becomes a divine being. These intervals and stages help towards this final result instead of hindering it; and without such limited intervals the divine Ego could never reach its ultimate goal. I have given you once already a familiar illustration by comparing the Ego, or the individuality, to an actor, and its numerous and various incarnations to the parts it plays. Will you call these parts or their costumes the individuality of the actor himself? Like that actor, the Ego is forced to play during the cycle of necessity, up to the very threshold of Paranirvana, many parts such as may be unpleasant to it. But as the bee collects its honey from every flower, leaving the rest as food for the earthly worms, so does our spiritual individuality, whether we call it Sutratma or Ego. Collecting from every terrestrial personality, into which Karma forces it to incarnate, the nectar alone of the spiritual qualities and self-consciousness, it unites all these into one whole and emerges from its chrysalis as the glorified Dhyan Chohan. So much the worse for those terrestrial personalities from which it could collect nothing. Such personalities cannot assuredly outlive consciously their terrestrial existence.

Enq. Thus, then, it seems that, for the terrestrial personality, immortality is still conditional. Is, then, immortality itself not unconditional?

Theo. Not at all. But immortality cannot touch the non-existent: for all that which exists as SAT, or emanates from SAT, immortality and Eternity are absolute. Matter is the opposite pole of spirit, and yet the two are one. The essence of all this, i.e., Spirit, Force and Matter, or the three in one, is as endless as it is beginningless; but the form acquired by this triple unity during its incarnations, its externality, is certainly only the illusion of our personal conceptions. Therefore do we call Nirvana and the Universal life alone a reality, while relegating the terrestrial life, its terrestrial personality included, and even its Devachanic existence, to the phantom realm of illusion.

Enq. But why in such a case call sleep the reality, and waking the illusion?

Theo. It is simply a comparison made to facilitate the grasping of the subject, and from the standpoint of terrestrial conceptions it is a very correct one.

Enq. And still I cannot understand, if the life to come is based on justice and the merited retribution for all our terrestrial suffering, how in the case of materialists, many of whom are really honest and charitable men, there should remain of their personality nothing but the refuse of a faded flower.

Theo. No one ever said such a thing. No materialist, however unbelieving, can die for ever in the fulness of his spiritual individuality. What was said is that consciousness can disappear either fully or partially in the case of a materialist, so that no conscious remains of his personality survive.

Enq. But surely this is annihilation?

Theo. Certainly not. One can sleep a dead sleep and miss several stations during a long railway journey, without the slightest recollection or consciousness, and awake at another station and continue the journey past innumerable other halting-places till the end of the journey or the goal is reached. Three kinds of sleep were mentioned to you: the dreamless, the chaotic, and the one which is so real, that to the sleeping man his dreams become full realities. If you believe in the latter why can't you believe in the former; according to the after life a man has believed in and expected, such is the life he will have. He who expected no life to come will have an absolute blank, amounting to annihilation, in the interval between the two re-births. This is just the carrying out of the programme we spoke of, a programme created by the materialists themselves. But there are various kinds of materialists, as you say. A selfish, wicked Egoist, one who never shed a tear for anyone but himself, thus adding entire indifference to the whole world to his unbelief, must, at the threshold of death, drop his personality for ever. This personality having no tendrils of sympathy for the world around and hence nothing to hook on to Sutratma, it follows that with the last breath every connection between the two is broken. There being no Devachan for such a materialist, the Sutratma will re-incarnate almost immediately. But those materialists who erred in nothing but their disbelief will oversleep but one station. And the time will come when that ex-materialist will perceive himself in the Eternity and perhaps repent that he lost even one day, one station, from the life eternal.

Enq. Still, would it not be more correct to say that death is birth into a new life, or a return once more into eternity?

Theo. You may if you like. Only remember that births differ, and that there are births of "still-born" beings, which are failures of nature. Moreover, with your Western fixed ideas about material life, the words "living" and "being" are quite inapplicable to the pure subjective state of post-mortem existence. It is just because, save in a few philosophers who are not read by the many, and who themselves are too confused to present a distinct picture of it, it is just because your Western ideas of life and death have finally become so narrow, that on the one hand they have led to crass materialism, and on the other, to the still more material conception of the other life, which the spiritualists have formulated in their Summer-land. There the souls of men eat, drink, marry, and live in a paradise quite as sensual as that of Mohammed, but even less philosophical. Nor are the average conceptions of the uneducated Christians any better, being if possible still more material. What between truncated angels, brass trumpets, golden harps, and material hell-fires, the Christian heaven seems like a fairy scene at a Christmas pantomime.

It is because of these narrow conceptions that you find such difficulty in understanding. It is just because the life of the disembodied soul, while possessing all the vividness of reality, as in certain dreams, is devoid of every grossly objective form of terrestrial life, that the Eastern philosophers have compared it with visions during sleep.

Definite Words for Definite Things

Enq. Don't you think it is because there are no definite and fixed terms to indicate each "Principle" in man, that such a confusion of ideas arises in our minds with respect to the respective functions of these "Principles"?

Theo. I have thought of it myself. The whole trouble has arisen from this: we have started our expositions of, and discussion about, the "Principles," using their Sanskrit names instead of coining immediately, for the use of Theosophists, their equivalents in English. We must try and remedy this now.

Enq. You will do well, as it may avoid further confusion; no two theosophical writers, it seems to me, have hitherto agreed to call the same "Principle" by the same name.

Theo. The confusion is more apparent than real, however. I have heard some of our Theosophists express surprise at, and criticize several essays speaking of these "principles"; but, when examined, there was no worse mistake in them than that of using the word "Soul" to cover the three principles without specifying the distinctions. The first, as positively the clearest of our Theosophical writers, Mr. A. P. Sinnett, has some comprehensive and admirably-written passages on the "Higher Self." (Vide Transactions of the "LONDON LODGE of the Theos. Soc.," No. 7, Oct., 1885.) His real idea has also been misconceived by some, owing to his using the word "Soul" in a general sense. Yet here are a few passages which will show to you how clear and comprehensive is all that he writes on the subject: —

... "The human soul, once launched on the streams of evolution as a human individuality,⁶ passes through alternate periods of physical and relatively spiritual existence. It passes from the one plane, or stratum, or condition of nature to the other under the guidance of its Karmic affinities; living in incarnations the life which its Karma has pre-ordained; modifying its progress within the limitations of circumstances, and, — developing fresh Karma by its use or abuse of opportunities, — it returns to spiritual existence (Devachan) after each physical life, — through the intervening region of Kamaloca — for rest and refreshment and for the gradual absorption into its essence, as so much cosmic progress, of the life's experience gained "on earth" or during physical existence. This view of the matter will, moreover, have suggested many collateral inferences to anyone thinking over the subject; for instance, that the transfer of consciousness from the Kamaloka to the Devachanic stage of this progression would necessarily be gradual; ⁷ that in truth, no hard-and-fast line separates the varieties of spiritual conditions, that even the spiritual and physical planes, as psychic faculties in living people show, are not so hopelessly walled off from one another as materialistic theories would suggest; that all states of nature are all around us simultaneously, and appeal to different perceptive faculties; and so on. . . . It is clear that during physical existence people who possess psychic faculties remain in connection with the planes of superphysical consciousness; and although most people may not be endowed with such faculties, we all, as the phenomena of sleep, even, and especially . . . those of somnambulism or mesmerism, show, are capable of entering into conditions of consciousness that the five physical senses have nothing to do with. We — the souls within us — are not as it were altogether adrift in the ocean of matter. We clearly retain some surviving interest or rights in the shore from which, for a time, we have floated off. The process of incarnation, therefore, is not fully described when we speak of an alternate existence on the physical and spiritual planes, and thus picture the soul as a complete entity slipping entirely from the one state of existence to the other. The more correct definitions of the process would probably represent incarnation as taking place on this physical plane of nature by reason of an efflux emanating from the soul. The Spiritual realm would all the while be the proper habitat of the Soul, which would never entirely quit it; and that non-materializable portion of the Soul which abides permanently on the spiritual plane may fitly, perhaps, be spoken of as the HIGHER SELF."

This "Higher Self" is ATMA, and of course it is "non-materializable," as Mr. Sinnett says. Even more, it can never be "objective" under any circumstances, even to the highest spiritual perception. For Atman or the "Higher Self" is really Brahma, the ABSOLUTE, and indistinguishable from it. In hours of Samadhi, the higher spiritual consciousness of the Initiate is entirely absorbed in the ONE essence, which is Atman, and therefore, being one with the whole, there can be nothing objective for it. Now some of our Theosophists have got into the habit of using the words "Self" and "Ego" as synonymous, of associating the term "Self" with only man's higher individual or even personal "Self" or Ego, whereas this term ought never to be applied except to the One universal Self. Hence the confusion. Speaking of Manas, the "causal body," we may call it — when connecting it with the Buddhic radiance — the "HIGHER EGO," never the "Higher Self." For even Buddhi, the "Spiritual Soul," is not the SELF, but the vehicle only of SELF. All the other "Selves" — such as the "Individual" self and "personal" self — ought never to be spoken or written of without their qualifying and characteristic adjectives.

Thus in this most excellent essay on the "Higher Self," this term is applied to the sixth principle or Buddhi (of course in conjunction with Manas, as without such union there would be no thinking principle or element in the spiritual soul); and has in consequence given rise to just such misunderstandings. The statement that "a child does not acquire its sixth principle — or become a morally responsible being capable of generating Karma — until seven years old," proves what is meant therein by the HIGHER SELF. Therefore, the able author is quite justified in explaining that after the "Higher Self" has passed into the human being and saturated the personality — in some of the finer organizations only — with its consciousness "people with psychic faculties may indeed perceive this Higher Self through their finer senses from time to time." But so are those, who limit the term "Higher Self" to the Universal Divine Principle, "justified" in misunderstanding him. For, when we read, without being prepared for this shifting of metaphysical terms,⁸ that while "fully manifesting on the physical plane . . . the Higher Self still remains a conscious spiritual Ego on the corresponding plane of Nature" — we are apt to see in the "Higher Self" of this sentence, "Atma," and in the spiritual Ego, "Manas," or rather Buddhi-Manas, and forthwith to criticise the whole thing as incorrect.

To avoid henceforth such misapprehensions, I propose to translate literally from the Occult Eastern terms their equivalents in English, and offer these for future use.

THE HIGHER SELF is Atma the inseparable ray of the Universal and ONE SELF. It is the God above, more than within, us. Happy the man who succeeds in saturating his inner Ego with it!

THE SPIRITUAL divine EGO is the Spiritual soul or Buddhi, in close union with Manas, the mind-principle, without which it is no EGO at all, but only the Atmic Vehicle.

THE INNER, or HIGHER "EGO" is Manas, the "Fifth" Principle, so called, independently of Buddhi. The Mind-Principle is only the Spiritual Ego when merged into one with Buddhi, — no materialist being supposed to have in him such an Ego, however great his intellectual capacities. It is the permanent Individuality or the "Re-incarnating Ego."

THE LOWER, or PERSONAL "EGO" is the physical man in conjunction with his lower Self, i. e., animal instincts, passions, desires, etc. It is called the "false personality," and consists of the lower Manas combined with Kama-rupa, and operating through the Physical body and its phantom or "double."

The remaining "Principle" "Prana," or "Life," is, strictly speaking, the radiating force or Energy of Atma — as the Universal Life and the ONE SELF, — ITS lower or rather (in its effects) more physical, because manifesting, aspect. Prana or Life permeates the whole being of the objective Universe; and is called a "principle" only because it is an indispensable factor and the deus ex machina of the living man.

Enq. This division being so much simplified in its combinations will answer better, I believe. The other is much too metaphysical.

Theo. If outsiders as well as Theosophists would agree to it, it would certainly make matters much more comprehensible.

• 1. "Some things that I do know of Spiritualism and some that I do not."
• 2. A few portions of this chapter and of the preceding were published in Lucifer in the shape of a "Dialogue on the Mysteries of After Life," in the January number, 1889. The article was unsigned, as if it were written by the editor, but it came from the pen of the author of the present volume.
• 3. Iswara is the collective consciousness of the manifested deity, Brahma, i. e., the collective consciousness of the Host of Dhyan Chohans (vide SECRET DOCTRINE); and Pragna is their individual wisdom.
• 4. Taijasi means the radiant in consequence of its union with Buddhi; i. e., Manas, the human soul, illuminated by the radiance of the divine soul. Therefore, Manas-taijasi may be described as radiant mind; the human reason lit by the light of the spirit; and Buddhi-Manas is the revelation of the divine plus human intellect and self-consciousness.
• 5. Some Theosophists have taken exception to this phrase, but the words are those of Master, and the meaning attached to the word "unmerited" is that given above. In the T. P. S. pamphlet No. 6, a phrase, criticised subsequently in LUCIFER, was used which was intended to convey the same idea. In form, however, it was awkward and open to the criticism directed against it; but the essential idea was that men often suffer from the effects of the actions done by others, effects which thus do not strictly belong to their own Karma — and for these sufferings they of course deserve compensation.
• 6. The "re-incarnating Ego," or "Human Soul," as he called it, the Causal Body with the Hindus.
• 7. The length of this "transfer" depends, however, on the degree of spirituality in the ex-personality of the disembodied Ego. For those whose lives were very spiritual this transfer, though gradual, is very rapid. The time becomes longer with the materialistically inclined.
• 8. "Shifting of Metaphysical terms" applies here only to the shifting of their translated equivalents from the Eastern expressions; for to this day there never existed any such terms in English, every Theosophist having to coin his own terms to render his thought. It is nigh time, then, to settle on some definite nomenclature.

Translated by Gertrude Teutsch

The concepts concerning the super-sensible world and its relationship with the world of the senses have been discussed here in a long series of lectures. It is only natural that, again and again, the question should arise, “What is the origin of knowledge concerning the super-sensible world?” With this question or, in other words, with the question of the inner development of man, we wish to occupy ourselves today.

The phrase “inner development of man” here refers to the ascent of the human being to capacities which must be acquired if he wishes to make super-sensible insights his own. Now do not misunderstand the intent of this lecture. This lecture will by no means postulate rules or laws concerning general human morality, nor will it challenge the general religion of the age. I must stress this because when occultism is discussed the misunderstanding often arises that some sort of general demands or fundamental moral laws, valid without variation, are being established. This is not the case. This point requires particular clarification in our age of standardization, when differences between human beings are not at all acknowledged. Neither should today's lecture be mistaken for a lecture concerning the general fundamentals of the anthroposophic movement. Occultism is not the same as anthroposophy. The Anthroposophical Society is not alone in cultivating occultism, nor is this its only task. It could even be possible for a person to join the Anthroposophical Society and to avoid occultism altogether.

Among the inquiries which are pursued within the Anthroposophical Society, in addition to the field of general ethics, is also this field of occultism, which includes those laws of existence which are hidden from the usual sense observation in everyday human experience. By no means, however, are these laws unrelated to everyday experience. “Occult” means “hidden,” or “mysterious.” But it must be stressed over and over that occultism is a matter in which certain preconditions are truly necessary. Just as higher mathematics would be incomprehensible to the simple peasant who had never before encountered it, so is occultism incomprehensible to many people today. Occultism ceases to be “occult,” however, when one has mastered it. In this way, I have strictly defined the boundaries of today's lecture. Therefore, no one can object—this must be stressed in the light of the most manifold endeavors and of the experience of millennia—that the demands of occultism cannot be fulfilled, and that they contradict the general culture. No one is expected to fulfill these demands. But if someone requests that he be given convictions provided by occultism and yet refuses to occupy himself with it, he is like a schoolboy who wishes to create electricity in a glass rod, yet refuses to rub it. Without friction, it will not become charged. This is similar to the objection raised against the practice of occultism.

No one is exhorted to become an occultist; one must come to occultism of one's own volition. Whoever says that we do not need occultism will not need to occupy himself with it. At this time, occultism does not appeal to mankind in general. In fact, it is extremely difficult in the present culture to submit to those rules of conduct which will open the spiritual world.

Two prerequisites are totally lacking in our culture. One is isolation, what spiritual science calls “higher human solitude.” The other is overcoming the egotism which, though largely unconscious, has become a dominant characteristic of our time.

The absence of these two prerequisites renders the path of inner development simply unattainable. Isolation, or spiritual solitude, is very difficult to achieve because life conditions tend to distract and disperse, in brief to demand sense-involvement in the external. There has been no previous culture in which people have lived with such an involvement in the external. I beg you not to take what I am saying as criticism, but simply as an objective characterization.

Of course, he who speaks as I do knows that this situation cannot be different, and that it forms the basis for the greatest advantages and greatest achievements of our time. But this is the reason that our time is so devoid of super-sensible insight and that our culture is so devoid of super-sensible influence. In other cultures—and they do exist—the human being is in a position to cultivate the inner life more and to withdraw from the influences of external life. Such cultures offer a soil where inner life in the higher sense can thrive. In the Oriental culture there exists what is called Yoga. Those who live according to the rules of this teaching are called yogis. A yogi is one who strives for higher spiritual knowledge, but only after he has sought for himself a master of the super-sensible. No one is able to proceed without the guidance of a master, or guru. When the yogi has found such a guru, he must spend a considerable part of the day, regularly, not irregularly, living totally within his soul. All the forces that the yogi needs to develop are already within his soul. They exist there as truly as electricity exists in the glass rod before it is brought forth through friction. In order to call forth the forces of the soul, methods of spiritual science must be used which are the results of observations made over millennia. This is very difficult in our time, which demands a certain splintering of each individual struggling for existence. One cannot arrive at a total inward composure; one cannot even arrive at the concept of such composure. People are not sufficiently aware of the deep solitude the yogi must seek. One must repeat the same matter rhythmically with immense regularity, if only for a brief time each day, in total separation from all usual concerns. It is indispensable that all life usually surrounding the yogi cease to exist and that his senses become unreceptive to all impressions of the world around him. He must be able to make himself deaf and dumb to his surroundings during the time which he prescribes for himself. He must be able to concentrate to such a degree—and he must acquire practice in this concentration—that a cannon could be fired next to him without disturbing his attention to his inner life. He must also become free of all memory impressions, particularly those of everyday life.

Just think how exceedingly difficult it is to bring about these conditions in our culture, how even the concept of such isolation is lacking. This spiritual solitude must be reached in such a way that the harmony, the total equilibrium with the surrounding world, is never lost. But this harmony can be lost exceedingly easily during such deep immersion in one's inner life. Whoever goes more and more deeply inward must at the same time be able to establish harmony with the external world all the more clearly.

No hint of estrangement, of distancing from external practical life, may arise in him lest he stray from the right course. To a degree, then, it might be impossible to distinguish his higher life from insanity. It truly is a kind of insanity when the inner life loses its proper relationship to the outer. Just imagine, for example, that you were knowledgeable concerning our conditions on earth and that you had all the experience and wisdom which may be gathered here. You fall asleep in the evening, and in the morning you do not wake up on Earth but on Mars. The conditions on Mars are totally different from those on Earth; the knowledge that you have gathered on Earth is of no use to you whatsoever. There is no longer harmony between life within you and external life. You probably would find yourself in a Martian insane asylum within an hour. A similar situation might easily arise if the development of the internal life severs one's connection with the external world. One must take strict care that this does not happen. These are great difficulties in our culture.

Egotism in relation to inward soul properties is the first obstacle. Present humanity usually takes no account of this. This egotism is closely connected with the spiritual development of man. An important prerequisite for spiritual development is not to seek it out of egotism. Whoever is motivated by egotism cannot get very far. But egotism in our time reaches deep into the innermost soul. Again and again the objection is heard, “What use are all the teachings of occultism, if I cannot experience them myself?” Whoever starts from this presumption and cannot change has little chance of arriving at higher development. One aspect of higher development is a most intimate awareness of human community, so that it is immaterial whether it is I or someone else having the experience. Hence I must meet one who has a higher development than I with unlimited love and trust. First, I must acquire this consciousness, the consciousness of infinite trust toward my fellow man when he says that he has experienced one thing or the other. Such trust is a precondition for working together. Wherever occult capacities are strongly brought into play, there exists unlimited trust; there exists the awareness that a human being is a personality in which a higher individuality lives. The first basis, therefore, is trust and faith, because we do not seek the higher self only in ourselves but also in our fellow men. Everyone living around one exists in undivided unity in the inner kernel of one's being.

On the basis of my lower self I am separated from other humans. But as far as my higher self is concerned—and that alone can ascend to the spiritual world—I am no longer separated from my fellow men; I am united with my fellow men; the one speaking to me out of higher truths is actually my own self. I must get away completely from the notion of difference between him and me. I must overcome totally the feeling that he has an advantage over me. Try to live your way into this feeling until it penetrates the most intimate fiber of your soul and causes every vestige of egotism to disappear. Do this so that the one further along the path than you truly stands before you like your own self; then you have attained one of the prerequisites for awakening higher spiritual life.

In situations where one receives guidance for the occult life, sometimes quite erroneously and confusedly, one may often hear that the higher self lives in the human being, that he need only allow his inner man to speak and the highest truth will thereby become manifest. Nothing is more correct and, at the same time, less productive than this assertion. Just try to let your inner self speak, and you will see that, as a rule, no matter how much you fancy that your higher self is making an appearance, it is the lower self that speaks. The higher self is not found within us for the time being. We must seek it outside of ourselves. We can learn a good deal from the person who is further along than we are, since there the higher self is visible. One's higher self can gain nothing from one's own egotistic “I.” There where he now stands who is further along than I am, there will I stand sometime in the future. I am truly constituted to carry within myself the seed for what he already is. But the paths to Olympus must first be illuminated before one can follow them.

A feeling which may seem unbelievable is the fundamental condition for all occult development. It is mentioned in the various religions, and every practical occultist with experience will confirm it. The Christian religion describes it with the well-known sentence, , which an occultist must understand completely, “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the kingdom of heaven.” This sentence can be understood only by he who has learned to revere in the highest sense. Suppose that in your earliest youth you had heard about a venerable person, an individual of whom you held the highest opinion, and now you are offered the opportunity to meet this person. A sense of awe prevails in you when the moment approaches that you will see this person for the first time. There, standing at the gateway of this personality, you might feel hesitant to touch the door handle and open it. When you look up in this way to such a venerable personality, then you have begun to grasp the feeling that Christianity intends by the statement that one should become like little children in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. Whether or not the subject of this veneration is truly worthy of it is not really important. What matters is the capacity to look up to something with a veneration that comes from the innermost heart.

This feeling of veneration is the elevating force, raising us to higher spheres of super-sensible life. Everyone seeking the higher life must write into his soul with golden letters this law of the occult world. Development must start from this basic soul-mood; without this feeling, nothing can be achieved. Next, a person seeking inner development must understand clearly that he is doing something of immense importance to the human being. What he seeks is no more nor less than a new birth, and that needs to be taken in a literal sense. The higher soul of man is to be born. Just as man in his first birth was born out of the deep inner foundations of existence, and as he emerged into the light of the sun, so does he who seeks inner development step forth from the physical light of the sun into a higher spiritual light. Something is being born in him which rests as deeply in most human beings as the unborn child rests in the mother.

Without being aware of the full significance of this fact, one cannot understand what occult development means. The higher soul, resting deep within human nature and interwoven with it, is brought forth. As man stands before us in everyday life, his higher and lower natures are intermingled, and that is fortunate for everyday life. Many persons among us would exhibit evil, negative qualities except that there lives along with the lower nature a higher one which exerts a balancing influence. This intermingling can be compared with mixing a yellow with a blue liquid in a glass. The result is a green liquid in which blue and yellow can no longer be distinguished. So also is the lower nature in man mingled with the higher, and the two cannot be distinguished. Just as you might extract the blue liquid from the green by a chemical process, so that only the yellow remains and the unified green is separated into a complete duality, so the lower and higher natures separate in occult development. One draws the lower nature out of the body like a sword from the scabbard, which then remains alone. The lower nature comes forth appearing almost gruesome. When it was still mingled with the higher nature, nothing was noticeable. But once separated, all evil, negative properties come into view. People who previously appeared benevolent often become argumentative and jealous. This characteristic had existed earlier in the lower nature, but was guided by the higher. You can observe this in many who have been guided along an abnormal path. A person may readily become a liar when he is introduced into the spiritual world, because the capacity to distinguish between the true and the false is lost especially easily. Therefore, strictest training of the personal character is a necessary parallel to occult training. What history tells us about the saints and their temptations is not legend but literal truth.

He who wants to develop towards the higher world on any path is readily prone to such temptations unless he can subdue everything that meets him with a powerful strength of character and the highest morality. Not only do lust and passions grow—that is not even the case so much—but opportunities also increase. This seems miraculous. As through a miracle, the person ascending into the higher worlds finds previously hidden opportunities for evil lurking around him. In every aspect of life a demon lies in wait for him, ready to lead him astray. He now sees what he has not seen before. As through a spell, the division within his own being charms forth such opportunities from the hidden areas of life. Therefore, a very determined shaping of the character is an indispensable foundation for the so-called white magic, the school of occult development which leads man into the higher worlds in a good, true, and genuine way. Every practical occultist will tell you that no one should dare to step through the narrow portal, as the entrance to occult development is called, without practicing these properties again and again. They build the necessary foundation for occult life.

First man must develop the ability to distinguish in every situation throughout his life what is unimportant from what is important, that is, what is perishable from the imperishable. This requirement is easy to indicate but difficult to carry out. As Goethe says, it is easy, but what is easy is hard. Look, for instance, at a plant or an object. You will learn to understand that everything has an important and an unimportant side, and that man usually takes interest in the unimportant, in the relationship of the matter to himself, or in some other subordinate aspect. He who wishes to become an occultist must gradually develop the habit of seeing and seeking in each thing its essence. For instance, when he sees a clock he must have an interest in its laws. He must be able to take it apart into its smallest detail and to develop a feeling for the laws of the clock. A mineralogist will arrive at considerable knowledge about a quartz-crystal simply by looking at it. The occultist, however, must be able to take the stone in his hand and to feel in a living way something akin to the following monologue: “In a certain sense you, the crystal, are beneath humanity, but in a certain sense you are far above humanity. You are beneath humanity because you cannot make for yourself a picture of man by means of concepts, and because you do not feel. You cannot explain or think, you do not live, but you have an advantage over mankind. You are pure within yourself, have no desire, no wishes, no lust. Every human, every living being has wishes, desires, lusts. You do not have them. You are complete and without wishes, satisfied with what has come to you, an example for man, with which he will have to unite his other qualities.”

If the occultist can feel this in all its depth, then he has grasped what the stone can tell him. In this way man can draw out of everything something full of meaning. When this has become a habit for him, when he separates the important from the unimportant, he has acquired another feeling essential to the occultist. Then he must connect his own life with that which is important. In this people err particularly easily in our time. They believe that their place in life is not proper for them. How often people are inclined to say, “My lot has put me in the wrong place. I am,” let us say, “a postal clerk. If I were put in a different place, I could give people high ideas, great teaching,” and so on. The mistake which these people make is that they do not enter into the significant aspect of their occupation. If you see in me something of importance because I can talk to the people here, then you do not see the importance of your own life and work. If the mail-carriers did not carry the mail, the whole postal traffic would stop, and much work already achieved by others would be in vain.

Hence everyone in his place is of exceeding importance for the whole, and none is higher than the other. Christ has attempted to demonstrate this most beautifully in the thirteenth chapter of the Gospel of John, with the words, “The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him.” These words were spoken after the Master had washed the feet of the Apostles. He wanted to say, “What would I be without my Apostles? They must be there so that I can be there in the world, and I must pay them tribute by lowering myself before them and washing their feet.” This is one of the most significant allusions to the feeling that the occultist must have for what is important. What is important in the inward sense must not be confused with the externally important. This must be strictly observed.

In addition, we must develop a series of qualities.¹ To begin with, we must become masters over our thoughts, and particularly our train of thought. This is called control of thoughts. Just think how thoughts whirl about in the soul of man, how they flit about like will-o'-the wisps. Here one impression arises, there another, and each one changes one's thoughts. It is not true that we govern our thoughts; rather our thoughts govern us totally. We must advance to the ability of steeping ourselves in one specific thought at a certain time of the day and not allow any other thought to enter and disturb our soul. In this way we ourselves hold the reins of thought life for a time.

The second quality is to find a similar relationship to our actions, that is, to exercise control over our actions. Here it is necessary to undertake actions, at least occasionally, which are not initiated by anything external. That which is initiated by our station in life, our profession, or our situation does not lead us more deeply into higher life. Higher life depends on personal matters, such as resolving to do something springing totally from one's own initiative even if it is an absolutely insignificant matter. All other actions contribute nothing to the higher life.

The third quality to be striven for is even-temperedness. People fluctuate back and forth between joy and sorrow. One moment they are beside themselves with joy, the next they are unbearably sad. Thus, people allow themselves to be rocked on the waves of life, on joy or sorrow. But they must reach equanimity and steadiness. Neither the greatest sorrow nor the greatest joy must unsettle their composure. They must become steadfast and even-tempered.

Fourth is the understanding for every being. Nothing expresses more beautifully what it means to understand every being than the legend which is handed down to us, not by the Gospel, but by a Persian story. Jesus was walking across a field with his disciples, and on the way they found a decaying dog. The animal looked horrible. Jesus stopped and cast an admiring look upon it, saying, “What beautiful teeth the animal has!” Jesus found within the ugly the one beautiful aspect. Strive at all times to approach what is wonderful in every object of outer reality, and you will see that everything contains an aspect that can be affirmed. Do as Christ did when he admired the beautiful teeth on the dead dog. This course will lead you to the great ability to tolerate, and to an understanding of every thing and of every being.

The fifth quality is complete openness towards everything new that meets us. Most people judge new things which meet them by the old which they already know. If anyone comes to tell them something new, they immediately respond with an opposing opinion. But we must not confront a new communication immediately with our own opinion. We must rather be on the alert for possibilities of learning something new. And learn we can, even from a small child. Even if one were the wisest person, one must be willing to hold back one's own judgment, and to listen to others. We must develop this ability to listen, for it will enable us to meet matters with the greatest possible openness. In occultism, this is called faith. It is the power not to weaken through opposition the impression made by the new.

The sixth quality is that which everyone receives once he has developed the first five. It is inner harmony. The person who has the other qualities also has inner harmony. In addition, it is necessary for a person seeking occult development to develop his feeling for freedom to the highest degree. That feeling for freedom enables him to seek within himself the center of his own being, to stand on his own two feet, so that he will not have to ask everyone what he should do and so that he can stand upright and act freely. This also is a quality which one needs to acquire.

If man has developed these qualities within himself, then he stands above all the dangers arising from the division within his nature. Then the properties of his lower nature can no longer affect him; he can no longer stray from the path. Therefore, these qualities must be formed with the greatest precision. Then comes the occult life, whose expression depends on a steady rhythm being carried into life.

The phrase “carrying rhythm into life” expresses the unfolding of this faculty. If you observe nature, you will find in it a certain rhythm. You will, of course, expect that the violet blooms every year at the same time in spring, that the crops in the field and the grapes on the vine will ripen at the same time each year. This rhythmical sequence of phenomena exists everywhere in nature. Everywhere there is rhythm, everywhere repetition in regular sequence. As you ascend from the plant to beings with higher development, you see the rhythmic sequence decreasing. Yet even in the higher stages of animal development one sees how all functions are ordered rhythmically. At a certain time of the year, animals acquire certain functions and capabilities. The higher a being evolves, the more life is given over into the hands of the being itself, and the more these rhythms cease. You must know that the human body is only one member of man's being. There is also the etheric body, then the astral body, and, finally, the higher members which form the basis for the others.

The physical body is highly subject to the same rhythm that governs outer nature. Just as plant and animal life, in its external form, takes its course rhythmically, so does the life of the physical body. The heart beats rhythmically, the lungs breathe rhythmically, and so forth. All this proceeds so rhythmically because it is set in order by higher powers, by the wisdom of the world, by that which the scriptures call the Holy Spirit. The higher bodies, particularly the astral body, have been, I would like to say, abandoned by these higher spiritual forces, and have lost their rhythm. Can you deny that your activity relating to wishes, desires, and passions is irregular, that it can in no way compare with the regularity ruling the physical body? He who learns to know the rhythm inherent in physical nature increasingly finds in it an example for spirituality. If you consider the heart, this wonderful organ with the regular beat and innate wisdom, and you compare it with the desires and passions of the astral body which unleash all sorts of actions against the heart, you will recognize how its regular course is influenced detrimentally by passion. However, the functions of the astral body must become as rhythmical as those of the physical body.

I want to mention something here which will seem grotesque to most people. This is the matter of fasting. Awareness of the significance of fasting has been totally lost. Fasting is enormously significant, however, for creating rhythm in our astral body. What does it mean to fast? It means to restrain the desire to eat and to block the astral body in relation to this desire. He who fasts blocks the astral body and develops no desire to eat. This is like blocking a force in a machine. The astral body becomes inactive then, and the whole rhythm of the physical body with its innate wisdom works upward into the astral body to rhythmicize it. Like the imprint of a seal, the harmony of the physical body impresses itself upon the astral body. It would transfer much more permanently if the astral body were not continuously being made irregular by desires, passions, and wishes, including spiritual desires and wishes.

It is more necessary for the man of today to carry rhythm into all spheres of higher life than it was in earlier times. Just as rhythm is implanted in the physical body by God, so man must make his astral body rhythmical. Man must order his day for himself. He must arrange it for his astral body as the spirit of nature arranges it for the lower realms. In the morning, at a definite time, one must undertake one spiritual action; a different one must be undertaken at another time, again to be adhered to regularly, and yet another one in the evening. These spiritual exercises must not be chosen arbitrarily, but must be suitable for the development of the higher life. This is one method for taking life in hand and for keeping it in hand. So set a time for yourself in the morning when you concentrate. You must adhere to this hour. You must establish a kind of calm so that the occult master in you may awaken. You must meditate about a great thought content that has nothing to do with the external world, and let this thought content come to life completely. A short time is enough, perhaps a quarter of an hour. Even five minutes are sufficient if more time is not available. But it is worthless to do these exercises irregularly. Do them regularly so that the activity of the astral body becomes as regular as a clock. Only then do they have value. The astral body will appear completely different if you do these exercises regularly. Sit down in the morning and do these exercises, and the forces I described will develop. But, as I said, it must be done regularly, for the astral body expects that the same process will take place at the same time each day, and it falls into disorder if this does not happen. At least the intent towards order must exist. If you rhythmicize your life in this manner, you will see success in not too long a time; that is, the spiritual life hidden from man for the time being will become manifest to a certain degree.

As a rule, human life alternates among four states. The first state is the perception of the external world. You look around with your senses and perceive the external world. The second is what we may call imagination or the life of mental images which is related to, or even part of, dream life. There man does not have his roots in his surroundings, but is separated from them. There he has no realities within himself, but at the most reminiscences. The third state is dreamless sleep, in which man has no consciousness of his ego at all. In the fourth state he lives in memory. This is different from perception. It is already something remote, spiritual. If man had no memory, he could uphold no spiritual development.

The inner life begins to develop by means of inner contemplation and meditation. Thus, the human being sooner or later perceives that he no longer dreams in a chaotic manner; he begins to dream in the most significant way, and remarkable things reveal themselves in his dreams, which he gradually begins to recognize as manifestations of spiritual beings. Naturally the trivial objection might easily be raised that this is nothing but a dream and therefore of no consequence. However, should someone discover the dirigible in his dream and then proceed to build it, the dream would simply have shown the truth. Thus an idea can be grasped in an other-than-usual manner. Its truthfulness must then be judged by the fact that it can be realized. We must become convinced of its inner truth from outside.

The next step in spiritual life is to comprehend truth by means of our own qualities and of guiding our dreams consciously. When we begin to guide our dreams in a regular manner, then we are at the stage where truth becomes transparent for us. The first stage is called “material cognition.” For this, the object must lie before us. The next stage is “imaginative cognition.” It is developed through meditation, that is through shaping life rhythmically. Achieving this is laborious. But once it is achieved, the time arrives when there is no longer a difference between perception in the usual life and perception in the super-sensible. When we are among the things of our usual life, that is, in the sense world, and we change our spiritual state, then we experience continuously the spiritual, the super-sensible world, but only if we have sufficiently trained ourselves. This happens as soon as we are able to be deaf and dumb to the sense world, to remember nothing of the everyday world, and still to retain a spiritual life within us. Then our dream-life begins to take on a conscious form. If we are able to pour some of this into our everyday life, then the next capacity arises, rendering the soul-qualities of the beings around us perceptible. Then we see not only the external aspect of things, but also the inner, hidden essential kernel of things, of plants, of animals, and of man. I know that most people will say that these are actually different things. True, these are always different things from those a person sees who does not have such senses. The third stage is that in which a consciousness, which is as a rule completely empty, begins to be enlivened by continuity of consciousness. The continuity appears on its own. The person is then no longer unconscious during sleep. During the time in which he used to sleep, he now experiences the spiritual world.

Of what does sleep usually consist? The physical body lies in bed, and the astral body lives in the super-sensible world. In this super-sensible world, you are taking a walk. As a rule, a person with the type of disposition which is typical today cannot withdraw very far from his body. If one applies the rules of spiritual science, organs can be developed in the astral body as it wanders during sleep—just as the physical body has organs—which allow one to become conscious during sleep. The physical body would be blind and deaf if it had no eyes or ears, and the astral body walking at night is blind and deaf for the same reason, because it does not yet have eyes and ears. But these organs are developed through meditation which provides the means for training these organs. This meditation must then be guided in a regular way. It is being led so that the human body is the mother and the spirit of man is the father. The physical human body, as we see it before us, is a mystery in every one of its parts and, in fact, each member is related in a definite but mysterious way to a part of the astral body. These are matters which the occultist knows. For instance, the point in the physical body lying between the eyebrows belongs to a certain organ in the astral organism. When the occultist indicates how one must direct thoughts, feelings, and sensations to this point between the eyebrows through connecting something formed in the physical body with the corresponding part of the astral body, the result will be a certain sensation in the astral body. But this must be practiced regularly, and one must know how to do it. Then the astral body begins to form its members. From a lump, it grows to be an organism in which organs are formed. I have described the astral sense organs in the periodical, Lucifer Gnosis. They are also called Lotus flowers. By means of special word sequences, these Lotus flowers are cultivated. Once this has occurred, the human being is able to perceive the spiritual world. This is the same world he enters when passing through the portal of death, a final contradiction to Hamlet's “The undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

So it is possible to go, or rather to slip, from the sense world into the super-sensible world and to live there as well as here. That does not mean life in never-never land, but life in a realm that clarifies and explains life in our realm. Just as the usual person who has not studied electricity would not understand all the wonderful workings in a factory powered by electricity, so the average person does not understand the occurrences in the spiritual world. The visitor at the factory will lack understanding as long as he remains ignorant of the laws of electricity. So also will man lack understanding in the realm of the spirit as long as he does not know the laws of the spiritual. There is nothing in our world that is not dependent on the spiritual world at every moment. Everything surrounding us is the external expression of the spiritual world. There is no materiality. Everything material is condensed spirit. For the person looking into the spiritual world, the whole material, sense-perceptible world, the world in general, becomes spiritualized. As ice melts into water through the effect of the sun, so everything sense-perceptible melts into something spiritual within the soul which looks into the spiritual world. Thus, the fundament of the world gradually manifests before the spiritual eye and the spiritual ear.

The life that man learns to know in this manner is actually the spiritual life he carries within himself all along. But he knows nothing of it because he does not know himself before developing organs for the higher world. Imagine possessing the characteristics you have at this time, yet being without sense-organs. You would know nothing of the world around you, would have no understanding of the physical body, and yet you would belong to the physical world. So the soul of man belongs to the spiritual world, but does not know it because it does not hear or see. Just as our body is drawn out of the forces and materials of the physical world, so is our soul drawn out of the forces and materials of the spiritual world. We do not recognize ourselves within ourselves, but only within our surroundings. As we cannot perceive a heart or a brain—even by means of X-ray—without seeing it in other people through our sense organs (it is only the eyes that can see the heart), so we truly cannot see or hear our own soul without perceiving it with spiritual organs in the surrounding world. You can recognize yourself only by means of your surroundings. In truth there exists no inner knowledge, no self-examination; there is only one knowledge, one revelation of the life around us through the organs of the physical as well as the spiritual. We are a part of the worlds around us, of the physical, the soul, and the spiritual worlds. We learn from the physical if we have physical organs, from the spiritual world and from all souls if we have spiritual and soul organs. There is no knowledge but knowledge of the world.

It is vain and empty idleness for man to “brood” within himself, believing that it is possible to progress simply by looking into himself. Man will find the God in himself if he awakens the divine organs within himself and finds his higher divine self in his surroundings, just as he finds his lower self solely by means of using his eyes and ears. We perceive ourselves clearly as physical beings by means of intercourse with the sense world, and we perceive ourselves clearly in relation to the spiritual world by developing spiritual senses. Development of the inner man means opening oneself to the divine life around us.

Now you will understand that it is essential that he who ascends to the higher world undergoes, to begin with, an immense strengthening of his character. Man can experience on his own the characteristics of the sense world because his senses are already opened. This is possible because a benevolent divine spirit, who has seen and heard in the physical world, stood by man in the most ancient times, before man could see and hear, and opened man's eyes and ears. It is from just such beings that man must learn at this time to see spiritually, from beings already able to do what he still has to learn. We must have a guru who can tell us how we should develop our organs, who will tell us what he has done in order to develop these organs. He who wishes to guide must have acquired one fundamental quality. This is unconditional truthfulness. This same quality is also a main requirement for the student. No one may train to become an occultist unless this fundamental quality of unconditional truthfulness has been previously cultivated.

When facing sense experience, one can test what is being said. When I tell you something about the spiritual world, however, you must have trust because you are not far enough to be able to confirm the information. He who wishes to be a guru must have become so truthful that it is impossible for him to take lightly such statements concerning the spiritual world or the spiritual life. The sense world corrects errors immediately by its own nature, but in the spiritual world we must have these guidelines within ourselves. We must be strictly trained, so that we are not forced to use the outer world for controls, but only our inner self. We are only able to gain this control by acquiring already in this world the strictest truthfulness. Therefore, when the Anthroposophical Society began to present some of the basic teachings of occultism to the world, it had to adopt the principle: there is no law higher than truth. Very few people understand this principle. Most are satisfied if they can say they have the conviction that something is true, and then if it is wrong, they will simply say that they were mistaken. The occultist cannot rely on his subjective honesty. There he is on the wrong track. He must always be in consonance with the facts of the external world, and any experience that contradicts these facts must be seen as an error or a mistake. The question of who is at fault for the error ceases to be important to the occultist. He must be in absolute harmony with the facts in life. He must begin to feel responsible in the strictest sense for every one of his assertions. Thus he trains himself in the unconditional certainty that he must have for himself and for others if he wishes to be a spiritual guide.

So you see that I needed to indicate to you today a series of qualities and methods. We will have to speak about these again in order to add the higher concepts. It may seem to you that these things are too intimate to discuss with others, that each soul has to come to grips with them on its own terms, and that they are possibly unsuitable for reaching the great destination which should be reached, namely the entrance into the spiritual world. This entrance will definitely be achieved by those who tread the path I have characterized.

When? One of the most outstanding participants in the theosophical movement, Subba Row, who died some time ago, has spoken fittingly about this. Replying to the question of how long it would take, he said, “Seven years, perhaps also seven times seven years, perhaps even seven incarnations, perhaps only seven hours.” It all depends on what the human being brings with himself into life. We may meet a person who seems to be very stupid, but who has brought with himself a concealed higher life that needs only to be brought out. Most human beings these days are much further than it seems, and more people would know about this if the materialism of our conditions and of our time would not drive them back into the inner life of the soul. A large percentage of today's human beings was previously much further advanced. Whether that which is within them will come forth depends on many factors. But it is possible to give some help. Suppose you have before you a person who was highly developed in his earlier incarnation, but now has an undeveloped brain. An undeveloped brain may at times conceal great spiritual faculties. But if he can be taught the usual everyday abilities, it may happen that the inner spirituality also comes forth.

Another important factor is the environment in which a person lives. The human being is a mirror-image of his surroundings in a most significant way. Suppose that a person is a highly developed personality, but lives in surroundings that awaken and develop certain prejudices with such a strong effect that the higher talents cannot come forth. Unless such a person finds someone who can draw out these abilities, they will remain hidden.

I have been able to give only a few indications to you about this matter. After Christmas, however, we will speak again about further and deeper things. I especially wanted to awaken in you this one understanding, that the higher life is not schooled in a tumultuous way, but rather quite intimately, in the deepest soul, and that the great day when the soul awakens and enters into the higher life actually arrives like the thief in the night. The development towards the higher life leads man into a new world, and when he has entered this new world, then he sees the other side of existence, so to speak; then what has previously been hidden for him reveals itself. Maybe not everyone can do this; maybe only a few can do it, one might say to oneself. But that must not keep one from at least starting on the way that is open to everyone, namely to hear about the higher worlds. The human being is called to live in community, and he who secludes himself cannot arrive at a spiritual life. But it is a seclusion in a stronger sense if he says, “I do not believe this, this does not relate to me; this may be valid for the after-life.” For the occultist this has no validity. It is an important principle for the occultist to consider other human beings as true manifestations of his own higher self, because he knows then that he must find the others in himself. There is a delicate distinction between these two sentences: “To find the others in oneself,” and “To find oneself in the others.” In the higher sense it means, “This is you.” And in the highest sense it means to recognize oneself in the world and to understand that saying of the poet which I cited some weeks ago in a different connection: “One was successful. He lifted the veil of the goddess at Sais. But what did he see? Miracle of miracles! He saw himself.” To find oneself—not in egotistical inwardness, but selflessly in the world without—that is true recognition of the self.

• 1. For another description of these exercises, see Occult Science, an Outline (Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, New York, 1972) Chapter 5, p. 283.

The matters which we are now discussing are connected with a fact that sounds strange at first hearing but which corresponds to a deep and significant truth—namely, man wanders over the earth but has in reality no true understanding of himself. One could say that this statement applies particularly to our own time. We know that once in ancient Greece the great and significant inscription ‘Know thyself’ stood on Apollo's temple as a challenge to those who sought for spiritual things. Nor was this inscription on the Delphic temple ‘Know thyself’ merely a phrase at that time, as we know from our various studies. For even in this Grecian age it was still possible to bring about a deeper knowledge of man than is possible at the present time. This present time, however, is also a challenge to us to strive again for a real knowledge of man, for a knowledge of what man on the earth actually is.

Now it seems as if the things that must be said in connection with this question are difficult to understand. In reality they are not, in spite of the fact that they sound as if they were difficult. They are only so for the present day because people are not accustomed to let their thinking and feeling flow into such currents as are necessary for a right understanding of something of this nature. The point is, that what we call understanding at the present day is actually the result of our always seeking to understand through abstract concepts. But one cannot understand everything through abstract concepts. Above all one cannot understand the human being through abstract concepts; one requires something different for the understanding of man. One must put oneself in the position of taking man as he wanders about over the earth, as a picture, as a picture which expresses something, which discloses something, which wants to reveal something to us. One must revive the consciousness that the human being is a riddle that wants to be solved. We shall not, however, solve the riddle of man if we are content to continue to be so indolent, so theoretic in our thinking as we now prefer. For you see, the human being is—this we have stressed again and again—a complicated being. Man is more, vastly more than the physical form that wanders about before our eyes as man—far, far more is man. But this physical structure that wanders round before our eyes as man, and all that belongs to it, is none the less an expression for the whole comprehensive being of man. And one can say: Not only can one recognize in the human form, in the physical man that goes about among us, what man is between birth and death here in the physical word, but, if one only will, one can also recognize in the human being what he is as immortal, as eternal being of soul. One must only develop a feeling that this human form is a complexity. Our modern science, which is made popular and so can reach everyone, is not fitted to call forth a feeling of what a miraculous structure this human being actually is, who wanders about on earth. One must regard man quite differently.

You have assuredly all seen a human skeleton—remember then that the human skeleton is actually twofold, if one disregards everything else. One could speak much more exactly, but if one disregards all the rest, the skeleton is a duality. You can easily lift up the skull from the skeleton; it is really only set upon it, and then the rest of the human being remains skull-less. The skull is very easily lifted off. The rest of the man without the skull is still a very complicated being, but we will now grasp it as a unit and leave aside its complexity. But we will first consider the duality which we see when we look at a human being, as, let us say, head-man, and for the rest trunk-man. And so too is the complete flesh and blood man a duality, though it is there less clearly shown.

Now in spiritual science we need not be so fond of comparisons as to treat them as absolute, develop them metaphysically—that we will not do. But by employing comparisons we wish to make various things clear. And so it is very natural, since it actually corresponds to what we see, to say: man in respect of his head is above all ruled by the spherical form. If one desires to express in a diagram what the human head is, we can say: man is ruled by the spherical form (see diagram).

If we wish to have a diagrammatic picture for the rest of man, we should naturally have to pay attention to the complications, only we will not do that today. You will, however, easily see that disregarding certain complications, just as schematically one can picture the human head as a sphere, so one can picture the rest of man in such a form as this (see diagram: moon form), only, of course, the two circles must be placed in varied positions according to the corpulence of each individual.

But we can, as it were, really conceive of man so—as spherical form and as moon-form. This has a deep inner justification; however we will not discuss this, but only think of the fact that the human being falls into these two members.

Now, man's head is in the first place a true apparatus for spiritual activity, for all that man can produce by way of human thoughts, human feelings. The head, the apparatus ... but, if we were committed to the thoughts, the feelings, that the head as apparatus can supply, we should never be in the position of really understanding the being of man. If we were committed to use the head alone as an instrument of our spiritual life, we should never be in the position of really saying ‘I’ to ourselves. For what is this head? This head is in truth, as it meets us in its globular form, an image of the whole cosmos, as the cosmos appears to you with all its stars, fixed stars, planets and comets; even meteors—irregularities, as we know—make their appearance in many heads. The human head is an image of the macrocosm, an image of the whole world. And only the prejudice of our time—I have indicated this in another connection—knows nothing of the fact that the whole world has a share in the coming about of a human head. But now, if through heredity, through birth, this human head is transposed to the earth, it can be no apparatus for comprehending the being of man himself. We have been given in our head an apparatus, as it were, which is like an extract of the whole world, but which is not competent to comprehend man. Why? Well, by reason of the fact that man is more than all that we can see and can think through our head. Many people say nowadays ‘there are limits to human knowledge, one cannot get beyond these limits!’ But this is only because they merely reckon with the wisdom of the head, and the wisdom of the head, it is true, does not get beyond certain limits. This wisdom of the head, my dear friends, has also made what a few days ago we described as the Greek Gods. The Greek Gods have proceeded from the wisdom of the head. They are the upper Gods; they are therefore only Gods for all that the head of man can encompass with its wisdom.

Now I have often brought to your attention that besides this external mythology the Greeks had their Mysteries. The Greeks revered in the Mysteries other Gods as well as the celestial Gods, namely, the Chthonic Gods. And of one who was initiated in the Mysteries one could say with truth: he learns to know the upper and the lower Gods, the Upper and the Lower Gods. The upper Gods were those of the Zeus-circle; but they only have rulership over what is spread out before the senses, and what the intellect can understand. The human being is more than this. Man is rooted with his being in the kingdom of the lower Gods, in the kingdom of the Chthonic Gods.

But it is no good, my dear friends, if one only looks at the part of man which I have drawn here in the sketch. If one is to turn one's mind to the rooting of man in the kingdom of the lower Gods then one must complete this drawing and make it so: one must also, as it were, include the unillumined moon. (See drawing below.) In other words, one must regard the head of man differently from the rest of the organism. With the rest of the organism one must far more have in mind what is spiritual, what is super-sensible and invisible. The head of man as it confronts us is externally complete. All that is spiritual has formed for itself an image in the head. In the rest of man that is not the case; the remaining part is only a fragment as physical man, and it is not enough for the rest of man if one takes this bodily fragment which wanders visibly about on earth.

Now this already shows us that we must accept man as complicated. But, does what I have just said ever come before us in life? What I have just said seems to be abstract, it seems paradoxical and hard to understand, but yet the question

must arise: does it ever come before us in life? That is the important thing: it appears in life quite clearly. The head is the instrument of our wisdom; it is so strongly the instrument of our wisdom, that our immediate wisdom is connected with its development. But even external anatomical physiological observation—look how a head develops, how a man grows up—shows that the head goes through a quite different development from the rest of the organism. The head develops quickly, the remaining organism slowly. The head in a child is relatively already quite finished, it develops very little further. The rest of the organism is still little perfected and goes slowly through its stages. This is connected with the fact that in life as well we are really a duplex being. Not only does our skeleton show the head and the remaining organism, but life itself shows this twofold nature: our head develops quickly, the rest of our organism slowly. At our present time the head develops practically up to our twenty-eighth or twenty-seventh year, the rest of the organism needs the whole of life up to death to do this. One can in fact only experience in a whole lifetime what the head acquires in a relatively short time. This is connected with many mysteries.

The spiritual investigator has a special knowledge of these things if he is able to observe a fatal accident... again it sounds strange but it expresses the full truth, in a fatal accident. Imagine that a person is struck down, dies by an accident. Let us suppose that a man is struck dead in his thirtieth year. To outer physical observation such a sudden death is a kind of accident: but from a spiritual science outlook it is simply absurd to regard such an affair as accidental. For in the moment when from outside, from any external cause, a man suddenly meets with death, an immense amount rapidly takes place. Think to yourselves: this same man who has been killed at the age of thirty would have become in the ordinary course of things perhaps seventy, eighty, ninety years old. If he had still lived from thirty to ninety years he would slowly have gone through, one after another, many life experiences. What he would thus have experienced during sixty years of life, he now goes through rapidly, it might even be in half-a-minute, if he is killed at the age of thirty. When it is a matter of the spiritual world, time relationships are different from what they seem to us here on the physical plane. A sudden death caused by external circumstances—one must treat the matter quite exactly—can cause the experience, I say the experience, the life-wisdom of the whole life that might still have been lived, to be passed through under certain circumstances very rapidly.

One is in this way enabled to see how a man assimilates life-wisdom, life-experience all his life through. And one can study through it the relation between what the head can provide with its short development, and what the rest of the human being can furnish with its long development in the social life. It is really true that during his young days a man takes in certain ideas and concepts that he learns; but he then only learns them. They are then head-knowledge. The rest of life that runs more slowly, is destined to transform the head-knowledge gradually into heart-knowledge—I now call the other man not the head-man, I call him the heart-man—to transform head-knowledge into heart-knowledge, knowledge in which the whole man shares, not only the head.

We need much longer to transform head-knowledge into heart-knowledge than to assimilate the head-knowledge. Even if the head-knowledge is an especially clever knowledge, one needs today the time into the twenties, is it not so? then one is a quite clever person, academically quite clever. But in order to unite this knowledge fully with the whole man, one must keep flexible one's whole life through. And one needs just as much longer to change head-knowledge into heart-knowledge as one lives longer than to the twenty-seventh or twenty-sixth year. In so far is the human being also of a twofold nature. One quickly acquires the head-knowledge and can then in the course of life change it into heart-knowledge.

It is not quite easy to know what this actually signifies. And, perhaps I may venture to instance an experience of the spiritual investigator through which something may be more easily known concerning these things than through other results of spiritual research. If one makes oneself acquainted with the speech which the human souls speak who have gone through the gate of death, who live in the spiritual world after death, one understands to some degree the speech of the dead, the so-called dead, one can then make the experience that the dead express themselves in a very special way upon many things connected with human life. The dead have a speech today that we who are living cannot yet quite understand. The comprehensions of the dead and the living lie somewhat far apart from one another today. The dead have a thorough consciousness of how man develops quickly as headman and slowly as heart-man. And if the dead wish to express what really happens when the quickly gained head-knowledge lives itself into the slower course of the heart-knowledge, they say there wisdom-knowledge is transformed through what ascends from man as heart-warmth or love. Wisdom is fructified in man by love. So say the dead.¹

And that is in fact a profound and significant law of life. One can acquire head-knowledge rapidly, one can know a tremendous amount precisely in our age, for natural science—not the natural-scientist—natural science has made very great advances in our time and has a rich content. But this content has remained head-knowledge, it has not been transformed into heart-knowledge because people—I pointed this out yesterday—no longer pay attention to what approaches in life after the twenty-seventh year, because people do not understand how to become old—or I could say, to remain young in growing old. Because men do not keep the inner livingness their heart grows cold; the heart warmth does not stream up to the head; love, which comes from the rest of the organism, does not fructify the head. The head-knowledge remains cold theory. There is no necessity for it to remain cold theory, all head-knowledge can be transformed into heart-knowledge. And that is precisely the task of the future; that head-knowledge shall gradually be transformed into heart-knowledge. A real miracle will happen if head-knowledge is transformed into heart-knowledge! One is completely right if one vigorously declaims today against the materialistic natural science, or, really, natural-philosophy—one is completely right, but all the same, something else is true. If this natural science which has remained mere head-knowledge in Haeckel, Spencer, Huxley, etc. and is therefore materialism, became heart-knowledge, if it were absorbed by the whole man, if humanity were to understand how to become old, or younger in old age as I showed yesterday, this science of today would become really spiritual, the true pursuit for the spirit and its existence. There is no better foundation than the natural science of the present day, if it is transformed into what can flow to the head from the rest of man's organism, that is to say from the spiritual part of the organism. The miracle will be accomplished when men also learn to feel the rejuvenation of their etheric body so that the materialistic natural science of today will become spirituality. It will the sooner become spirituality the greater the number of people who reproach it with its present materialism, its materialistic folly.

But together with this will be linked a complete transforming which can be felt by one who has but a slight feeling for what is taking place at the present time: linked with it will be a complete transforming of the nature of education and instruction. Who could deny, if he has an open eye for the social, moral, historical conditions of the present, who could deny that mankind as a whole is not in a position—though it sounds grotesque—to give children an adequate education, especially an adequate instruction? We can, to be sure, make children officials, industrialists, we can even make them pastors, etc. etc., but we are but little in a position to make children today into complete human beings, into all-round developed men. For it is a deep demand of the time that if man is to be a complete all-round developed organism of soul and spirit, he must be in the position to transform all his life through what he took in quickly, rapidly as a child. The whole life through must the human being remain fresh in order to transform what he has absorbed.

For what do we really do today in later life? (These things are not looked on unprejudicedly [?] enough). We have learnt a certain amount in youth, the one more, the other less; we are proud, are we not, that we have no more illiterates in Western Europe? One learns much, another less, but all have learnt something in youth. And what do we do in later life with what we learnt, no matter whether it was much or little? It is all of such a nature that one only remembers what one has learnt, it is present in man in such a way that one can remember it. But what do men work on there? It is not conveyed to the human soul so as to work in the soul, so that heart-contents may arise from head-knowledge. It is in no way fitted for that. Much water must still flow down the Rhine, if what we can give to youth today—(let us observe it only in one field, but it is applicable in all fields) is to be something that is fitted really to be transformed into heart-knowledge. What must that be? We have in fact today no possibility at all of giving our children anything that could really become heart-knowledge. For that we lack two conditions, and only Spiritual Science rightly understood can bring about these two conditions.

Two conditions are lacking for really giving to children today something that refreshes life, something which throughout life can be a source of joy in life and a supporting of life. Two things are lacking. The one is that, from all the current ideas that we have today, that modern culture can give us, man can gain no conception of how he stands in relation to the universe. Just think of all that is conveyed to one in school. It is imparted even to the smallest children—at least, what they are told is put into such words as contain what I am now expressing to you. Reflect that the human being grows up today under these ideas: there is the earth, it swings with such and such a velocity through universal space, and beyond the earth there are the sun, planets, fixed stars. And then what is said of the sun, the planets, the fixed stars, is at most a kind of cosmic physics—it is no more—cosmic mechanics, cosmic physics. What the astronomer says today, what our general culture today says about the structure of the universe, has that anything to do with this human being who walks about here below upon the earth? Most certainly not! Is it not true that for the natural scientific idea of the world, man goes about as a somewhat more highly developed animal; he is born, dies, is buried, another comes, is born, dies, is buried, etc. etc. and so it goes from generation to generation. Out in the great cosmic space events take place which are calculated purely mathematically as in a great world machine. But for the modern clever men what has all that takes place out there in the universe to do with the fact that here on earth this somewhat more highly evolved animal is born and dies? Priests, pastors, know no other wisdom to put in place of this comfortless wisdom. And since they do not know that, they say that they do not occupy themselves in any way with science, but that faith must have an entirely different origin.

Well, we need not enlarge on this. But they are two utterly different things that are spoken of by atheistic science and by the so-called religious faith of this or that Confession at Church, feebly upholding the theistic element. It was essential that for a certain time in humanity's evolution the present world conception should take the place of the earlier ideas. We need not go back very far—only people don't think of it today—and men were then still aware that they did not wander on the earth as higher animals who were just born and buried. Rather did they bring themselves into connection with the star-world, with the whole universe, and knew in their own way, in a different way from that in which it must be striven for now, of the connection with the universe. But one must therefore also conceive of the universe differently.

You see, such a world conception as is imparted even to children today would be unthinkable in the twelfth, thirteenth centuries; they could not in the least imagine having such an opinion of the world of the stars. They looked up to the stars, to the planets as we do today, but they did not merely calculate, as the modern mathematical astronomer does, the orbits of the planets, and believe that up there is a globe which passes through world space—the science of the Middle Ages saw in each globe the body of a spiritual being. It would have been simply a piece of folly to represent a planet as a mere material globe. Read about it in Thomas Aquinas.² You will find everywhere that in each planet he sees an Angelic Intelligence. And so in the other stars. Such a universe as modern astronomy fabricates was not imagined. But for a certain length of time, in order to progress, one must drive the soul, as it were, out of the universe, in order to conceive the skeleton, the pure machinery of the universe. The Copernicus, the Galileo, the Kepler world conceptions had to come. But only the foolish see them as something valid for all time. They are a beginning, but a beginning that must evolve further.

Many things are known already to Spiritual Science which official astronomy does not yet know. But it is important that just these things which Spiritual Science knows and official astronomy does not yet know, should pass over into the general consciousness of humanity. And although these concepts may seem difficult today they will become something that one can impart to the children, they will be an important possession for the children, to keep the soul full of life. We still have to speak of these things, however, in difficult concepts. For as long as Spiritual Science is received, as it is at present by the external world, it has no opportunity of pouring things into such concepts and such pictures as are needed if they are to become the subject of children's education.

There is something, for instance, of which modern astronomy knows nothing. It knows nothing of the fact that the earth speeding through the universe, speeds too fast. She rushes too fast, the earth! And since she rushes too fast, since the earth moves quickly, we also have our head-development quicker than we should have if the earth were to move as slowly as to correspond with our whole life's duration. The rapidity of our head-development simply depends on the fact that the earth races too quickly through universal space. Our head takes part in this speed of the earth, the rest of our organism takes no part in it, the rest of our organism withdraws itself from cosmic events. Our head which, as a sphere, is an image of the heavens, must also participate in what the earth performs in celestial space. Our remaining organism which is not formed on the model of the whole universe, does not participate, it makes its development more slowly. Were our whole organism to participate today in the speed of the earth, were it to develop in correspondence to the speed of the earth, then none of us could ever be older than twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years would be the average life of man. For in fact our head is finished when we are twenty-seven years old; if it depended on the head, man would die at the age of twenty-seven. Only because the rest of man is planned for a longer life time, and continually sends its forces to the head after the twenty-seventh year, do we live as long as we do. It is the spiritual part of the remaining organism which sends its forces to the head. It is the heart portion that exchanges its forces with the head.

If humanity knows some day that it has a twofold nature, a head-nature and a heart-nature, then it will know too that the head obeys quite other cosmic laws than the rest of the organism. Then the human being takes his place again within the whole macrocosm, then man can do no other than form concepts that lead him to say ‘I do not stand here upon earth as merely a higher animal, to be born and to die, but I am a being formed from out the whole universe. My head is built up for me out of the whole universe, the earth has attached to me the rest of my organization, and this does not follow the movements of the cosmos as my head does.’ Thus, when we do not look at man abstractly, as modern science does, but regard him as picture in his duality, as head-man and heart-man in connection with the universe, then the human being is placed again into the cosmos. And I know, my dear friends, and others who can judge such things know it also: if man can make heart-warm concepts of the fact that when one looks at the human head it is seen to be an image of the whole star-strewn space of the world with its wonders, then there will enter the human soul all the pictures of the connection of man with the wide, wide universe. And these pictures become forms of narrative which we have not yet got, and which will bring to expression, not abstractly, but linked with feeling, what we can pour into the hearts of the youngest children. Then these hearts of young children will feel: here upon earth I stand as human being, but as man I am the expression of the whole star-strewn universal space: the whole world expresses itself in me. It will be possible to train the human being to feel himself a member of the whole cosmos. That is the one condition.

The other condition is the following: when we are able to arrange the whole of education and instruction so that man knows that he is an image of the universe in his head, and in the remaining organism is withdrawn from the universe, that with his remaining organism he must so work upon what falls down like a rain of the soul—the whole universe—that it becomes independent in man here upon earth, then this will be a particular inner experience. Think of this two-fold human being, whom I will now draw in this curious fashion.

When he comes to know that from the whole universe there flow unconsciously into his head, stimulating its forces, the secrets of the stars, but that all this must be worked upon his whole life through by the rest of his organism, so that he may conserve it on earth, carry it through death back again into the spiritual world—when this becomes a living experience, then man will know his twofold nature, he will know himself as head-man and heart-man. For what I am now saying means that man will learn to solve his own riddle, to say to himself: inasmuch as I become more and more heart-man, inasmuch as I remain young, I view in later years through what my heart gives me, that which in childhood and youth I learnt through my head. The heart gazes

up to the head and will see there an image of the whole starry heavens. The head however will look to the heart and will find there the mysteries of the human riddle, will learn to fathom in the heart the actual being of man. The human being will feel as regards his education: To be sure, I can learn all sorts of things with my head. But as I go on living, as I live on towards death that is to bear me into the spiritual world, what I learn through the head is fructified in the future through the love ascending from the rest of the organism and becomes something quite different. There is something in me as man that is only to be found in me as man; I have to await something. Very much lies in these words and it means very much when man is so educated that he says: I have something to await. I shall be thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years old, and as I grow older from decade to decade, there comes towards me through growing older something of the mystery of man. I have something to await from the fact that I live on.

Imagine if that were not mere theory, if it were life-wisdom, social life-wisdom. Then the child is educated in such a way that he knows ‘I can learn something; but he who teaches me possesses something that I cannot learn; I must first be as old as he before I can find it in myself. If he relates it to me, he gives me something which must be a sacred mystery for me, since I can hear it from his mouth, but cannot find it in myself.’ Just think what a relationship is created again between children and their elders, which is entirely lost in our age—if man knows that age offers something that is to be awaited. If I am not yet forty years old, that sum of mysteries cannot lie in me that can lie in one who is already forty years old. And if he imparts it to me, I receive it just as information, I cannot know it through myself. What a bond of human fellowship would be formed, if in this way a new earnestness, a new profundity came into life!

This earnestness, this depth, is precisely what is lacking to our life, what our life does not possess. Our present life only values head-knowledge. But true social life will in this way die out, approach dissolution, for here on earth men wander about who have no idea what they are, who really only take seriously what there is up to the age of twenty-seven, and then employ the remainder of life in carrying about the corpse in them, but not in transforming the whole man into something which can still carry youthfulness through death.

Because people do not understand this, my dear friends, because an age has come that could not understand this, everything that refers to spiritual things remains so unsatisfying, as I had to say yesterday concerning Friedrich Schlegel. He was a gifted man, he had understood much, but he did not know that a new revelation of the spirit was necessary, he thought that one could simply take the old Christianity. In many respects he could even express right ideas with ringing words—I will read you a passage from the last lecture by Friedrich Schlegel in the year 1828. He sought to prove, as he said, ‘that in the course of world-history a divine guiding hand and disposition is to be recognized, that not merely earthly visible forces are co-operating in this evolution, or opposing and hindering it, but that the conflict is in part directed under divine assistance against invisible powers. I hope to have established a conviction of this, even I though it is not proved mathematically, which would here be neither proper nor applicable, and that it will nevertheless remain active and vigorous.’

He had a presentiment, but not a living consciousness that man, by living through history, has to become familiar in history with divine forces, and together with these divine forces fights against opposing spiritual powers—he says expressly, ‘opposing spiritual powers’. For in certain respects people flee from the real science of the spirit. Since the third century of our era, when in the West the prejudice as it was called, arose against the persuasion of the false gnosis (so they called it: the persuasion of the false gnosis!) people have gradually begun to turn aside from all that can be known of the spiritual worlds. And so it came about that even religious impulses prepared materialism, and that these religious impulses could not prevent the fact that we have really nothing to give to youth. Our science does not serve the young; in later life one can only remember it, it cannot become heart-wisdom.

In the religious field it is just the same. Man has finally come, one might say, to two extremes. He seems to have forgotten how to conceive of the super-sensible Christ and desires to know nothing of that cosmic power of which spiritual science must speak again as the power of Christ-Jesus. On the other hand there is the quite delightful, really lovely and charming picture which developed in the course of the Middle Ages and modern times through poets and musicians—a charming poetic picture which has developed round the Infant-Jesus. But pictures and ideas related to the dear Jesus-Babe cannot satisfy a man religiously his whole life through! It is in fact characteristic that a really paradoxical love for the sweet little Jesus is expressed in countless songs and so on. There is nothing to be objected to in this, but it cannot remain the only thing.

That is the one aspect, where man, in order to have at least something, has clung to the smallest, since he cannot raise himself to the great. But it cannot fill up life. And on the other hand the ‘bon Dieu citoyen’, as at Christmas we learnt to know him in Heinrich Heine's words, the ‘bon citoyen’ Jesus, who is divested of all divinity, the God of the liberal pastors and liberal priests. Now do you believe that he can really grip life? Do you believe in particular that he can take youth captive? He is from the outset a dead theology-product, not even a theology-product, but a theology-history-product. In this sphere, however, mankind is far removed from directing its gaze to what is spiritual power in history.

Why is this so? Simply because for a time mankind must go through a stage of gazing into the world purely from a materialistic standpoint. The time has also come when modern natural science which is so fitted for spirituality must be transformed into heart-knowledge. Our natural science is either execrable, if it remains as it is, or it is something quite extraordinarily grand, if it changes into heart-knowledge. For then it becomes spiritual science. The older science which is involved in all sorts of traditions had already transformed head-science into heart-science; the modern age has had no gift for transforming into heart-science the science it has acquired up to the present, and so it has come about that head-science, especially in the social field, has performed the only real work, and has thus brought about the most one-sided product it is possible to have.

You see, man's head can know nothing at all of the being of man. Hence when man's head ponders over the being of man and his connection with the social life, it has to bring something quite foreign into the social common life. And that is the modern socialism, expressed as social-democratic theory. There is nothing that is such pure head-knowledge as the Marxist social-democracy. This is only because the rest of mankind has shirked any concern in world problems, and in the Marxist circles they have only occupied themselves with social theories. The others have only—no, I will be polite—let themselves be prompted by professorial-thoughts, which are purely traditional. But head-wisdom has become social theory. That is to say, people have tried to establish a social theory with an instrument which is least of all capable of knowing anything about the human being. This is a fundamental error of present-day mankind, which can only be fully disclosed when people know about head-knowledge and heart-knowledge. The head will never be able to refute socialism, Marxist socialism, because in our times the head's task is to think out and devise. It will only be refuted through Spiritual Science, since Spiritual Science is head wisdom transformed through the heart.

It is extraordinarily important that one should realize these things. You see why even such a man as Schlegel suggested unsuitable means—since he was willing to accept the old, although he realized that man must re-acquire vision for the invisible that goes about amongst us. But our age is a challenge to direct the gaze to what is thus invisible. Invisible powers were always at hand as Schlegel divined: unseen powers have taken part in working upon what is being accomplished in mankind. Humanity, however, must evolve. Up to a certain degree it did not matter so much if people in the last few centuries gave no thought to the super-sensible, invisible forces, for instance, in social life. That will not do in the future. In the future, in face of the real conditions, that won't do! I could quote many examples to show this; I will bring forward one.

In the course of the last decade and a half I have spoken of this from other points of view. Anyone who observes the social state of Europe, as it has developed since the 8th, 9th centuries, knows that many different things have worked into the structure of European life, into this complicated European life. In the West it has retained the Athanasian Christianity, it has thrust back eastwards (as I said here a few weeks ago) an older Christianity, originally linked with Asiatic traditions, the Russian Christianity, the Orthodox Christianity. It has developed in the West the various European members of this European social totality—inasmuch as it has gradually created a member out of the preserved Roman element with the newly revived German and Slav elements in Europe—altogether a complicated organism. One could find one's way about in it up to now, if one disregarded what lives there unseen; for the configuration of Europe has much force in its structure. But an essential and important force in this structure is, among others, the relation in which France has stood to the rest of Europe. I do not now mean merely the political relation, I mean the whole relation of France to the rest of Europe, and by this I mean all that any European could feel in the course of centuries, since the 8th, 9th centuries, with regard to anyone belonging to the French nation. There is this peculiarity, my dear friends, that, so far as the relation of the rest of Europe to France is concerned, it comes to expression in feelings of sympathy and antipathy. We have to do with sympathy and antipathy, and hence purely with a phenomenon of the physical plane. One can understand the human relationship coming into play between France and the rest of Europe if one studies what hearts, what human souls live out on the physical plane. What has developed for France, at any rate outside France, is to be understood through physical plane conditions. Hence it did no harm—there were similar relationships in Europe in the last centuries—it did no harm if people neglected to see the super-sensible powers playing into things, since the sympathies and antipathies were caused by relations of the physical plane.

Much of what has thus played its part for centuries will become different. We are standing before mighty revolutions, even in regard to innermost relations that are coming over the European social structure. One need not believe it to have been lightly spoken if I have once again stressed the fact that things are to be taken more earnestly than men nowadays are inclined to take them. We are standing before mighty revolutions—and it will be necessary in the future for men to turn their eyes—the eyes of the mind—to spiritual relationships; for it will no longer be possible merely from physical plane relations to understand what is going on. It can only be understood if one can take spiritual relations into consideration.

What took place in March—the fall of the Czar—has a metaphysical character. One can only understand it if one has in mind its metaphysical character. Why then was there a Czar at all? The question can be grasped in a higher sense than in the external trivial-historical sense. Why was there a Czar at all? If one disregards individual pacifist cranks who have seen something serious in the tomfoolery of the Czar's Peace-Manifesto, then one must say: even those who from all sorts of reasons have ranged themselves with the Russian realm have not loved Czardom. And in those who loved it, the love was certainly not very genuine. But why was there a Czardom? There was a Czardom—my dear friends, I will now express it paradoxically, somewhat extremely:—so that Europe had something to hate. It was necessary to provoke those forces of hatred. There was a Czardom, and the Czardom behaved as it did, so that Europe had something to hate. Europe needed this hate as a sort of fresh impetus to something else. The Czar must be there in order in the first place to serve as the point on which the hatred concentrated; for a wave of hatred was prepared, as may now even be seen externally. What is now taking place will be transformed into powerful feelings of hatred. It will no longer be possible to understand these, as the sympathy and antipathy of former times were to be understood—from the aspect of the physical plane. For, my dear friends, not mere human beings will hate. Central and Eastern Europe will be hated, not by men, but by certain demons which will dwell in men. The time will certainly come when Eastern Europe will perhaps be hated even more than Central Europe.

These things must be understood and they must not be taken lightly. They can only be understood if men lift themselves to seek a connection with the spiritual world. For what has already been to some extent divined by such spirits as Friedrich Schlegel, will certainly come to pass, though they have not seen the foundations and the roots. Things must be grasped without prejudice in the eye of the soul, so that man can look back over the last centuries and what they have brought ... and then they will be able to co-operate in what must be founded.

Among the fine passages that occur from time to time in Schlegel's addresses there is this: ‘In the evolution of mankind all depends on the inner being of the soul and on the sincerity in the soul, and harmful above all is every kind of political idolatry.’ That is a fine passage of Friedrich Schlegel's. This political idolatry, how it has laid hold of our time! How it rules our time! And the political idolatry has created a fine symptom for itself, by which one is able to recognize what is there.

But one must look through circumstances! Yes, my dear friends, one must perceive what is living in our times. We have no possibility today, if we do not deepen knowledge through the heart, of giving children what they need in order to keep young and fitted for life all their life through. We have not yet this possibility³—and we understand that as soon as we look at the true nature of the head-man and heart-man. It must be established, it must come. If we want to put things in a few words we can say: Schoolmastering is utterly and entirely unable to fulfil its mission today. What ranks as Schoolmastering is completely foreign to the true being of man. But the world threatens to be ruled by a schoolmaster,⁴ revered through political idolatry. Schoolmastering, the least of all fitted for guiding men in the modern epoch, is supposed to be high politics.

At least some few people ought to realize these things. For they are things which are profoundly connected with the deep knowledge which man can only gain if he seeks a little to penetrate the secrets of humanity. The world today can neither be grasped nor in any way governed through desires and instincts, through Chauvinism and nationalism, but solely through the good will which tries to penetrate into true reality.

• 1. See also ‘The Inner Nature of Man and Life between Death and Rebirth’.
• 2. Compare ‘The Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas’.
• 3. The first of over eighty Waldorf Schools was not founded until 1919.
• 4. Woodrow Wilson.