The Rudolf Steiner Archive

[ 1 ] "No people shall be compelled to live under a rule to which it objects. Change of possession and return to former sovereignty shall be permitted only in those countries where the people themselves demand change and return in order to secure their freedom, comfort and future happiness ... The liberated peoples of the whole earth must unite in a sincere sense of community ... to form a firm union which, with the united forces of all, will be able to protect peace and justice in the intercourse of nations. Fraternity must no longer be an empty word: it must become a universally recognized concept that rests on the rock of reality."

[ 2 ] This is how Mr. W. Wilson describes what America's participation in this war should make a reality. They are captivating words, to which one can say that every sensible man of sound mind must subscribe. If they were written down by a philanthropist for the edification of a readership, one could stop at the recognition of their self-evidence. One could also assert, with the gesture of a moralist, that anyone who objects to them cannot be a friend of progress and freedom. You can even hear voices today emphasizing that this war has taught us a lesson: Only those are currently pursuing higher, contemporary politics who profess such an ideal or a similar one and act accordingly.

[ 3 ] Talking about "views" and that this or that view must be held because one believes in it never leads to a basis for practical action. The only way to do this is to take a close look at reality. For the citizens of the Central European states, no debate about the "general human" justification of the Entente's goals, in a sense about their "beauty", can be of value, but only the realization of their real balance of power in the life of nations. For this reason, the following will focus on the real form of the Entente goals for Europe, regardless of the fact that what is said here may not sound pleasant to the Entente leaders. Only by thinking in this way can one arrive at practical impulses. Things will be formulated somewhat sharply because they have to be for the reasons given. It should be expressly noted that existing moods should not play a role in this formulation, but only the sober observations of the facts in recent decades. What the Entente wants to say must be the basis for the guidelines to be found in Central Europe; allowing oneself to be blinded by what it says will lead one astray in the worst possible way.

[ 4 ] In any case, it is a thankless task to be forced to turn against ideas that seem to have a high degree of appeal to people's reason and hearts. Moreover, they seem to be the result of the "true historical development of mankind towards the noblest democracy". And yet the following must be built on the basis that the commitment to Wilson's will must not only be a logical vice for the members of the Central and Eastern European peoples, but also that within this war and after it, every single action and measure must be taken in such a way that this Wilsonian and Entente will must be broken by the health and fruitfulness of these measures and actions.

[ 5 ] The war aims of the Entente, which strive to obscure their true form, are questionably concealed in the expression which Mr. Wilson has given to his will. One has to deal with the latter at the same time as one deals with the former. No matter how ingenious a conceptual refutation of Wilson's "program" may be, it should not matter at this time. We are not currently dealing with disputes that are supposed to decide who is right or wrong. In the field we are dealing with here, only what happens or what carries the seeds of what happens has value. And thoughts that are thought and discussed in Central Europe as seeds for the actions of today and tomorrow only have value if they are held in this sense.

[ 6 ] Wilson's words are not spoken by a writerly philanthropist. They are the banner for "deeds which the Americans are arming themselves for, and which the Entente has been carrying out against Central Europe for three years. The facts are that Central Europe has to fight against that which claims behind this flag to be fighting for the salvation of mankind, for the liberation of the peoples. The Entente and Wilson say what they claim to be fighting for. Their words have advertising power. Their advertising power is becoming more and more alarming. There are people in Central Europe who certainly do not want to admit that they are imitating Wilson, but whose ideas sound not dissimilar to his words.

[ 7 ] Those who know the origins of this war in a deeper sense cannot but emphasize the necessity that the Entente-Wilson programme be subjected to the sharpest rejection by Central Europe through facts. For the real prospect of this program - apart from its moral blindness - lies in the fact that it wants to use the instincts of the Central and Eastern European peoples to bring these peoples into economic dependence on Anglo-Americanism through moral and political overpowering. Spiritual dependence would then only be the necessary real consequence. Anyone who knows that since the last century the "coming world war" has been spoken of in initiated English circles as the event that must bring world domination to the Anglo-American race cannot attach any particular importance to the fact that the leaders of the Entente peoples say that they were surprised by this war or that they wanted to prevent it, even if these assurances should have subjective truth among those who utter them at the moment. For those who spoke of the "coming world war" as an inevitable event were reckoning with the real historical and national forces of Europe. They reckoned with the instincts of the European, especially the Slavic peoples. And they wanted to direct the ideals of these Slavic peoples and use them in such a way that they would serve the national egoism of Anglo-Americanism. They were also counting on the downfall of Romanism, on whose ruins they wanted to spread themselves. They therefore reckoned with generous historical-ethnic points of view, which they wanted to put at the service of their own goals. And these goals, however strongly denied by the entente side, lead to the intention of crushing the Central European state formations.

[ 8 ] The right thing is to emphasize quite soberly that the goal of the Entente leaders is the crushing of Central Europe, because only the emphasis of this goal can be the answer to the Entente statements that are so effective. But an answer that is in a sense negative, because it seeks to refute what is said on the Entente side, has no value. Therefore, the following answer should be positive, that is, point out the facts that confront the Entente from Central Europe.

[ 9 ] Only the realization that this is the case can provide Central Europe with the impetus that will lead it out of the chaos of the present. The Central European states can only take the position of rendering the Entente program ineffective through their own measures. This Entente program is based - whether more or less pronounced or unspoken - on three preconditions:

[ 10 ] 1. that the Central European state formations which have become historical must not be recognized - from the point of view of the Entente - as those which are responsible for solving the problems of European peoples;

[ 11 ] 2. that these Central European states must be economically dependent on Anglo-Americanism rather than in competition with it;

[ 12 ] 3. that the cultural (intellectual) relations of Central and Eastern Europe be organized in a way that is in line with the popular egoism of Anglo-Americanism.

[ 13 ] Only those who are able to recognize that the translation of these three points into the Wilson-Entente language is the one Wilson used in his missive to the Russians will see through what is at stake.

[ 14 ] It may also be that we shall obtain a peace in the near future through the compelling situation of facts. Perhaps, if England sees that she can no longer hold out for the moment without giving her consent to end the war. None of this changes the essentials on the Anglo-American side. If this Anglo-Americanism finds it possible to continue the war, then it will continue to put the above three points into the formula of Wilson's epistle: "We have always striven for this goal, and if we were now stingy with blood and money, we might never achieve the unity and strength that are necessary in the struggle for the great cause of human liberation." If the leading powers of England are forced to bring the war to an end in the near future, then the future policy, which would continue to be oriented along the lines of the above three points, will be expressed in the formula: "We have wanted to sacrifice money and blood for the liberation of mankind, we have done so to a great extent, while the Central European powers were only concerned with the opposite. For the time being, we have only been able to achieve partial results against violence. Our goal remains undiminished before our eyes, because it is the goal of humanity itself."

[ 15 ] What actually lies in these intentions will only really be achieved if people in Central Europe act practically according to the realization: In the West, the rule of Anglo-Americanism is called human liberation and democracy. And because we do this, we create the appearance that we really want to be a liberator of humanity.

[ 16 ] The only thing that can be effective against the consequences of this monstrous deception, against the consequences of a self-evident racial egoism in the guise of an impossible morality, is Central Europe's own attitude towards the full truth of the "facts. And this truth is:

[ 17 ] 1. With the achievement of the Entente goals with regard to the Central European state formations, real European freedom is lost. For these state entities can realize it, because it is in the interests of these state entities themselves, and states cannot act otherwise than by having their interests in mind. Anglo-Americanism cannot realize this freedom of nations because, as soon as it exists, it is against the interest of the Anglo-American state entities, as long as this interest is as it is now, and as it has given this war its character with actual necessity. The Anglo-American states must realize that they must respect the interests of the Central European states next to them, and that they must leave the ordering of Central European international freedoms to the Central European states, which alone can see their real national interest in the promotion of these freedoms.

[ 18 ] 2 From the Central European point of view, this war is a people's war to the east, and an economic war to the west - against England-America. The war of revenge against France only became possible through the combination of the idea of revenge with Anglo-American economic interests and the Russian-Slavic ideals of nations.

[ 19 ] 3. The liberation of peoples is possible; but it can only be the result, not the basis of the liberation of humanity. If the people are liberated, the peoples will be liberated through them.

[ 20 ] Central Europe can, if it wants to, act in the spirit of these three foundations. And its actions will be a factual program. It will act in this way if it opposes a factual program of human liberation to the Entente-Wilsonian program, which, without any knowledge of the Central European ethnic forces, speaks of something that does not exist in the world of facts, only in the aspirations of Anglo-American racial egoism. The program considered correct here for Central Europe is not radical in the sense in which radicalism is shied away from in many circles. Rather, it is merely an expression of the facts that want to be realized by their own power in Central Europe. They should be realized with full consciousness, not kept hidden, only to strive towards their realization through their own nature in the fog of the Entente-Wilson goals and thus be corrupted and become the impetus and pretext for warlike entanglements.

[ 21 ] The right realization will never happen if what Central Europe must want remains obscured by the unnatural mixture of political, economic and general human interests.

[ 22 ] Because political conditions, if they are to flourish, demand healthy conservatism in the sense of preserving and expanding the state structures that have developed historically. Economic and general human interests only resist this conservatism, which is a condition of life for Central Europe, for as long as they have to suffer by mixing with it. And political conservatism, if it remembers its true interest, has not the slightest reason to allow its legitimate circles to be continually disturbed by being thrown together with economic and general human interests. If the mixing ceases, then economic and general human conditions will be reconciled with political conservatism, and the latter can calmly develop according to its own nature.

[ 23 ] Economic conditions demand opportunism for their prosperity, which brings about their order only according to their own nature. It must lead to conflicts if the economic measures stand in a different connection with political and general human requirements than that which results from the natural context of life in the case of their own legislation and administration. What is meant here are not merely internal conflicts, but primarily those that are discharged outwardly in political difficulties and warlike explosions.

[ 24 ] The general human conditions and the questions of international freedom connected with them demand individual human freedom as their basis for the present and the future. On this point, one will not even make a start with proper views as long as one believes that one can speak of a freedom or liberation of peoples without building it on the basis of the individual freedom of the individual human being, and as long as one does not realize that with real individual freedom the liberation of peoples is also necessarily given, because it must occur as a consequence of the former through a natural connection. Man must be able to profess his allegiance to a nation, to a religious community, to any context that arises from his general human aspirations, without being kept from his political or economic context by the structure of the state. It is important to recognize that all forms of state structure, as something that has historically evolved, are capable of carrying out the liberation of humanity if they are directed towards it by their own interests, which is the case in an eminent sense with the Central European states. A parliamentary organization of these states may be regarded as necessary today for reasons of the development of the times and the feeling of the people. The questions that must now be raised in the face of the turmoil of war in the world only have to do with the characterized tripartite structure of the state. The mere question of parliamentarism does not change the conditions that have led to the present chaos. Western nations talk so much about it because they understand nothing about Central European conditions and believe that what they consider to be right for their interests must serve as a universal template. For Central Europe, even if parliamentarism is to prevail, it should be one in which political, economic and general human conditions develop independently of each other in legislation and administration, thus supporting each other instead of becoming entangled in their effects on the outside and discharging themselves in conflict. Central Europe frees itself and the world from such substances of conflict when it excludes the implied mutual interference of the three forms of human life in its state structures. No Entente goals and no Wilsonian goals can arise in the face of the power demonstrated by Central Europe when it presents to the world what it alone can do and what no one else can accomplish. The liberation of mankind and thus the liberation of peoples is presented to the world as a necessary part of the Central European instincts of the state and peoples when they are thrown into the events of the present as a fact-guaranteeing impulse, as indicated here.

[ 25 ] What is set out here is not intended to present a utopian program. It is not intended to abolish historical rights and legal structures. For those who look at it carefully, it represents something that can grow out of the current state structures without any reservations if all historical rights are fully respected and the actual circumstances are recognized. It is therefore self-evident that what is to be explained here refrains from going into any details. In the case of truly practical impulses, such details only emerge in the implementation. Only the utopian can go into detail, but his constellations, which arise from abstract thinking, are not feasible. What is said here may only appear in general guidelines. These guidelines, however, have not been devised, but observed in Central European living conditions. This guarantees that they will prove their worth precisely when practice begins to use them as guidelines. What we are talking about here is already there, so to speak, as a vital need. It is only a matter of serving this need for life. And that is another reason why there is no need to talk about the individual now, because this is an internal matter for the Central European states. At this moment it is only necessary to assert as much of the matter before the world as has external significance. What is important is to show from within Central European life the impulses that really lie within it, and to show this in such a way that Western opponents see that they will have to face these indestructible impulses if the war continues. The Entente leaders are thereby confronted with something, not merely held up to them, which they have not yet been confronted with, and which they cannot overcome by any war program on their part. Such language before the world as is meant here, which carries within it the germ of fact, must have consequences. There is no need at the present moment to seek a settlement with Russia for what is stated here, for this settlement must arise of its own accord in the pursuit of the cause. And the realization that such a result must come about will provide the Russian leaders with impulses that can only have favourable consequences. In all this, it must always be borne in mind what what has been indicated does not initially mean as an internal state affair, but what it means as an external manifestation within the present world conflict to end it, especially in the political struggle with the manifestations of the Entente leaders and Wilson. The inner comes into consideration in this case in a similar sense to the way in which the effects of a man's thinking are a reality for other men, even though the way he thinks is only an inner matter of his organization. However, he only needs to argue with others about the effect of his thinking, not about the state of his inner being.

[ 26 ] Recognizing and accepting in legislation, administration and social structure the separation of the political, the economic and the generally human as the goal of Central European [aspirations] paralyzes the forces of the Western powers. This forces them to think of themselves alongside the European Central Powers and the Eastern Powers, which are united with the latter under such conditions, in a relationship in which the Western Powers limit themselves to giving themselves the structure appropriate to them (as state entities) in the area of their national instincts, and to allow the Central and Eastern European peoples to live out their commonalities in the sense of real human liberation within the natural space allotted to them without disturbance, as was the cause of this war, while they now believe they alone can present their will as the decisive one in the world conflict.

[ 27 ] It is all a question of seeing how differently the relations between states and peoples, and also between individuals, take place when these relations are based on that external effect which results from the separation of the three factors of life, than when the conflicts which result from their mixture are involved in this external effect. In future the history of this war will be written in such a way as to show how it arose from the unfortunate mutual disturbance of the three circles of life in the intercourse of peoples. When they are separated, the power of one circle of life acts outwardly in the sense of harmonizing the others; in particular, the economic forces of interest balance out conflicts that arise on political ground, and the general human circles of interest can unfold their power to unite peoples, while precisely this power is driven into complete ineffectiveness when it has to appear outwardly burdened with political and economic conflicts. Nothing in the recent past has been more deceptive than the latter point. It was not recognized that general human relations can only develop their true power externally if they are built internally on the basis of a free corporation. They then work in connection with economic interests in such a way that, in the pursuit of these effects, those things naturally develop in the living process which one wants to give a dubious future existence by creating utopian, supranational organizations: utopian arbitration courts, a Wilsonian "League of Nations" and so on, which can lead to nothing other than the continuing majorization of Central Europe by the other states. Such things suffer from the error from which everything suffers that is imposed on the facts out of wishful abstractions, while what is meant here creates a free path for a development that strives for its realization out of the facts themselves, and which can therefore also be realized.

[ 28 ] If one recognizes this, then it becomes clear above all why we have this war and why it is a war for the oppression of the German people under the false flag of the liberation of nations. In a broader sense, for the suppression of all independent national life in Central Europe. If one strips the Wilsonian program, which emerged as the latest paraphrase of the Entente's cover programs, one comes to the conclusion that its execution would mean nothing other than the destruction of this Central European freedom. This is not hindered by the fact that Wilson speaks of the freedom of nations; for the world is never judged by words, but by the facts that follow from the realization of these words. Central Europe needs real freedom. But Wilson is not talking about real freedom at all. The entire Western world has no concept at all of this freedom that is really necessary for Central Europe. They talk about the freedom of nations and they do not mean the real freedom of the people, but a chimerical collective freedom of human associations, as they have developed in the Western European states and in America. According to the particular circumstances of Central Europe, this collective freedom cannot arise from international circumstances, so it can never be the subject of an international agreement such as can form the basis of a peace treaty. In Central Europe, the collective freedom of the peoples must result from general human freedom, and it will result if a clear path is created for it by the separation of all circles of life that do not belong to purely political, military and economic life. It is quite natural that those who only ever reckon with their ideas, not with reality, should raise objections to such a separation, as can be found in a recently published book, namely in Krieck's "Die deutsche Staatsidee" on page 167: "Occasionally the demand for an economic parliament alongside the representation of the people was raised in the past, among others by E. von Hartmann: the idea lies entirely in the direction of economic and social development. But apart from the fact that a new large wheel would increase the already abundant awkwardness and friction of the machine, it would be impossible to delimit the responsibilities of two parliaments against each other." With this idea, it should be noted that it must be admitted here that it arises from the real conditions of development, must therefore be implemented and must not be rejected against development because its realization is difficult to find. For if one stops short of such difficulties in reality, one creates entanglements for oneself which later discharge violently; and ultimately this war, in the peculiarity in which it is lived out, is the discharge of difficulties which one has neglected to clear away by the right, different path while there was still time to do so.

[ 29 ] The Wilsonian program is based on making impossible in the world that which is the legitimate task and the condition of life of the Central European states. It must be countered by what will happen in Central Europe if this event is not disrupted by the violent destruction of Central European life. He must be shown what only Central Europe can do on the basis of what has happened here historically, if it does not join forces with the Entente, which can have no interest in leading Central Europe towards its natural development.

[ 30 ] As things stand today, Germany and Austria only have the choice between the following three things:

[ 31 ] 1. to wait under all circumstances for a victory of their weapons, and to hope from it the possibility of being able to carry out their Central European task.

[ 32 ] 2. to enter into peace with the Entente on the basis of its present program and thus approach its certain destruction.

[ 33 ] 3. to say what it will regard as the result of peace in terms of real conditions, and thus to present the world with the opportunity, after clear insight into the conditions and the will of Central Europe, to let the peoples choose between a real program that brings the European people real freedom and thus quite naturally the freedom of the peoples, or the sham programs of the West and America, which speak of freedom but in reality bring the impossibility of life for all of Europe. For the time being, we in Central Europe give the impression that we are afraid to tell the West what we must want, while the West simply showers us with the manifestations of its will. In this way the West creates the impression that it alone wants something for the salvation of mankind and that we are only striving to disrupt these laudable endeavors with all sorts of things like militarism, while in truth it is the creator of our militarism, because it has long set out to make us into shadow people and wants to do so even more. Certainly such and similar things have often been said, but it is not important that they are said by this or that person, but that they really become the leitmotif of Central European action and that the world learns to recognize that it has no other action to expect from Central Europe than one that must take up the sword when the others force this sword into its hands. What the Western nations now call German militarism, they have forged over centuries of development, and only they, not Germany, can take away its meaning for Central Europe. But it is up to Central Europe to make its will for freedom clear, a will that cannot be built on programs in the Wilsonian manner, but on the reality of human existence.

[ 34 ] There is therefore only one peace program for Central Europe, and that is: to let the world know that peace is immediately possible if the Entente replaces its present, untrue peace program with one that is true, because in its realization it does not bring about the downfall but the possibility of life for Central Europe. All other questions that can become the subject of peace efforts will be resolved if they are tackled on the basis of these premises. Peace is impossible on the basis now offered to us by the Entente and accepted by Wilson: if no other is put in its place, the German people could only be brought to accept this program by force, and the further course of European history would prove the correctness of what has been said here, for if Wilson's program is realized, the European peoples will perish. In Central Europe we must face without illusion what those personalities have believed for many years, which they regard from their point of view as the law of world development: that the future of world development belongs to the Anglo-American race, and that it must take over the inheritance of the Latin-Roman race and the education of Russianness. When this world-political formula is invoked by an Englishman or American who thinks himself initiated, it is always pointed out that the German element has no say in the ordering of the world because of its insignificance in world-political matters, that the Romanic element need not be taken into account because it is dying out anyway, and that the Russian element has the one who makes himself its world-historical educator. One might think little of such a creed if it lived in the minds of some people who were susceptible to political fantasies or utopias, but English politics uses innumerable ways to make this program the practical content of its real world policy, and from England's point of view the present coalition in which she finds herself could not be more favorable than it is when it comes to the realization of this program. But there is nothing that Central Europe can oppose to it but a truly human liberating program, which can become a reality at any moment if human will is committed to its realization. One can perhaps think that peace will be a long time coming, even if the program meant here is put before the European peoples, since it cannot be carried out during the war and, moreover, it would be put there by the Entente peoples, as if it had been put forward by the leaders of Central Europe only to deceive the peoples, while after the war what the Entente leaders put forward as the terrible thing they had to eliminate from the world for moral reasons in a "struggle for freedom and justice of the peoples" would simply happen again. But anyone who judges the world correctly according to the facts, and not according to his favorite opinions, can know that everything that corresponds to reality has a completely different persuasive value than that which comes from mere arbitrariness. And we can wait and see what will become apparent to those who realize that the Central European program will only deprive the peoples of the Entente of the possibility of destroying Central Europe, but not of anything that would be incompatible with any real vital impulse of the Entente peoples. As long as we remain in the realm of masked aspirations, understanding will be impossible; as soon as the realities behind the masks are revealed, not only militarily but also politically, a completely different form of current events will begin. The world has come to know the weapons of Central Europe for the salvation of this Central Europe; the political will, as far as Central Europe is concerned, is a closed book to the world. Instead, every day the world is presented with a horror picture of what a terrible thing this Central Europe actually is, worthy of destruction, and it looks to the world as if Central Europe only has to remain silent about this horror picture, which of course must appear to the world like a yes to it.

[ 35 ] It is quite natural that many will have countless misgivings about what is being said here. However, such reservations would only come into consideration if what is presented here were intended as a program that an individual or a society should set out to realize. But that is not how it is conceived; indeed, it would refute itself if it were conceived that way. It is intended as an expression of what the peoples of Central Europe will do when governments set themselves the task of recognizing and releasing the forces of the people. What will happen in detail will always become apparent when such things are put into practice. For they are not prescriptions about what has to happen, but predictions of what will happen if things are allowed to take the course demanded by their own reality. And this own reality prescribes with regard to all religious and spiritual-cultural matters, to which the national also belongs: administration by corporations, to which the individual person professes of his own free will and which are administered in their parliaments as corporations, so that this parliament only has to do with the corporation in question, but never with the relationship of this corporation to the individual person. And a corporation may never deal with a person belonging to another corporation from the same point of view. Such corporations are admitted to the circle of parliament when they unite a certain number of persons. Until then, they remain a private matter in which no authority or representative body has the right to interfere. For those for whom it is a sour apple that from such points of view all intellectual cultural matters must in future be deprived of privileges, they will have to bite into this sour apple for the salvation of the people's existence. As people become more and more accustomed to this privileged status, it will be difficult to accept in wide circles that we must return from the privileged status of intellectual professions in particular to the good old, ancient principle of free corporatization, and that the corporation should indeed make a person capable in his profession, but that the exercise of this profession should not be privileged, but left to free competition and [free] human choice, that will be difficult to understand by all [those] who like to talk about [people] not being ready for this or that. In reality, this objection will not come into consideration anyway, because with the exception of the necessarily free professions, the choice of the petitioners will be decided by the corporations.

[ 36 ] Neither can difficulties arise with regard to the political and the economic that could not actually be resolved in the realization of what is intended. How, for example, pedagogical institutions must come about, which in their guidelines touch on the two representations that do not include the actual pedagogy in themselves, is a matter for the higher [Senate]. All individual institutions, as they are conceived here, can be achieved by expanding the historically given factors, which need not be eliminated or radically replaced by others in any country in Central Europe. The points can be found everywhere in the existing, which, pursued in the direction indicated, result in the liberation of peoples on the basis of the liberation of man. To "prove" here that what has been said is "correct" would be absurd; for this correctness must result from the fact of realization. The next realization would be the confession of these impulses in an authoritative place. There is no need to worry about the fact that this open commitment alone must have a tremendous effect that is beneficial for the Central European states. On the contrary, we can wait and see what the Entente leaders will do (not say) if they are confronted with this open declaration. They must reckon with it differently than they have reckoned with everything that has emanated from Central Europe so far. Until now, they only had to count on Central Europe's success in arms; they should also count on its political will.

[ 37 ] Those who think of what has been outlined here in a truly practical sense, that is, in harmony with the actual circumstances, will find that a basis has been created on which even such complicated questions as the Austrian language question - including the language of the state and the lingua franca - and the German colonial question can rest. This is because what is being considered here avoids the mistake that has always been made in the past, namely that a solution to such questions was thought of before the factual foundations had been laid on which a solution could be built. Up to now, the idea has always been to build a first floor without thinking about the first floor. For the Central European states, however, this first floor is the recognition of their naturally necessary structure in conservative-historical-political representation and administration, separated from the organization of the opportunistic-economic and intellectual-cultural element. If one stands firmly on this ground, then only on this basis can one speak of parliamentarism, democratism and the like. For these things do not become different in themselves, whether they are the expression of a combination of political, economic and intellectual-cultural elements that is impossible in Central Europe in the long run or of the natural organization of these elements. - It is precisely the effect that an open confession in this sense would have on the leaders of the Entente that would show, when this effect occurs, how one stands with this confession on the real ground of facts.

[ 38 ] No one who thinks in terms of the actual conditions in Central Europe will doubt the feasibility of what is stated here. For nothing is demanded here "as a program", but it is only shown what wants to be carried out and what succeeds at the same moment in which it is given free rein.

[ 39 ] If the Entente-Wilsonian peace formula were to be replaced by that which is the essence of this formula without a mask, the following would emerge: "We Anglo-Americans want the world to become what we want it to be. Central Europe must submit to this wish." This unmasked peace formula shows that Central Europe had to be driven into war. If the Entente won, Central Europe's development would be wiped out. If Central Europe adds to the invincibility of its weapons as a peace offer to the world the most unconditional intention to realize what only Central Europe can realize in Europe, the liberation of peoples through the liberation of people, then this Central Europe can counter the talk of "the rights and freedom of peoples" with the actual, true word: "We are fighting for our right and our freedom and the realization of these human goods, which we cannot and will not allow to be taken from us, does not by its very nature affect any real right or freedom of another. For what we will want will carry the guarantee of it within itself. If you Western peoples can come to an understanding with us on this basis and if you Eastern peoples realize that we want nothing other than yourselves, if you understand yourselves first, then peace will be possible tomorrow."

Dear attendees! If you advance in the course of the development of today's science, you can make your way from this or that branch of knowledge to the other, to which you are led by certain external or internal necessities. But basically, all this comes from a deeper human essence. You have to say: this path is traversed with a certain inner indifference. Of course, there are exam nerves, and these can lead to inner psychological catastrophes. But these psychological catastrophes – especially those who have gone through them will be able to testify to this – are not really connected with the content of what one is approaching, let us say in mathematics, in medicine, in biology. A researcher can also experience inner joy when he has discovered something. But what is experienced inwardly by the soul is outwardly linked to the content of what has come before the soul in knowledge.

This is certainly a radical way of expressing a phenomenon that does not always occur so radically; but if we contrast it with the opposite that arises when studying, that is, at the same time as inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, the validity of what has been said will emerge.

When studying and inwardly experiencing anthroposophical spiritual science, one really does experience inner fateful events. One experiences psychological catastrophes and peripeteia. On the one hand, these experiences are closely and intensely connected with the content of the person approached in knowledge. On the other hand, we experience something that takes hold of human nature in many ways, transforms it, brings it to other levels of soul development, and so on. This fact, which at first glance might appear to be an external one, is in fact intrinsically connected with the nature of anthroposophical spiritual science; it is connected with the fact that, while one rises objectively out of today's scientific spirit into a world picture in a justified way, one does not actually find the human being in this world picture. Of course, one can also construct him out of it; but the human being who can be constructed out of the present evolutionary doctrine, who can be constructed out of present-day biology or physiology, does not present himself in an image that evokes inner tremors and liberations in the soul; he presents himself in an image that leaves the soul cold.

But, dear attendees, is not the essence of the human soul in everyday life that we go through inner turmoil, pain, suffering, joy and satisfaction? Do we not go through catastrophes and peripeteia through our external lives? Can we therefore hope that we can grasp this human being, who is internally changeable and so close to us in his changeability, through a science that, on the one hand, provides us with an image of the human being that must actually leave us indifferent, yes, that must see its perfection in a certain relationship precisely in the fact that it leaves us indifferent? Anyone who sees this fact in the right light will initially be emotionally drawn to the essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man. This essence of anthroposophical knowledge of man — I have tried to describe it in part according to its method in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds?” I have tried to describe it by name in my book “Theosophy” and then in the ” Secret Science. I have tried to show how the striving for knowledge must ascend if it is to arrive at genuine anthroposophical knowledge of man, through three degrees of knowledge, through Imagination, through Inspiration, through Intuition understood in the deeper sense. And I believe I have made it clear in my description of what a person can experience in imaginative, inspired, intuitive life, that going through such a path of knowledge means that a series of inner experiences of destiny take place at the same time. , so that not only the content of knowledge approaches the human being in abstraction, but the image of the human being approaches direct human experience, that which sits within us as the experienced essence of our human dignity.

Imagination is the first step in penetrating the essence of the world as well as the essence of the human being. I have described how imagination can be cultivated through a kind of meditative life and a kind of concentration of the power of thought, in a completely healthy way that is the opposite of a pathological one. Now I would like to draw attention to what actually happens within a person when they strive for this imaginative level of knowledge. It is the case that through this meditative inner experience, through this methodically disciplined inner experience of concentrating thoughts and feelings, the soul forces are, as it were, gathered together, and they are permeated by consciousness more intensely than is otherwise the case. If we then observe what is actually growing when we meditate and concentrate in this way, we find that it is the same thing — only in its continuation — that has brought us to actual self-awareness in our ordinary experience, that has brought us to composure, to calm personality and which has brought us, if I may use the expression, to the actual egoity of the human being, to that in which the human being must find himself so that he can detach himself from the world in a level-headed way, so that he can come to self-awareness in the right way.

This is also the dangerous thing about this path, that first of all this egoity of the human being must be strengthened. That which has led people to egoity must be taken further. Therefore, what is striven for here can basically only be properly achieved if it is preceded by a corresponding preparation, the preparation that I have described truthfully in my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds”. There you will find a certain method for attaining true inner modesty, that inner modesty which may not always be openly displayed in outer life, owing to outer circumstances, but which must penetrate the life of the soul in depth. If this modesty is not thoroughly developed as an inner strength of the soul experience, then there is indeed the danger of human megalomania on the path to imagination, not pathological megalomania, but psychological, moral megalomania. Those who apply anthroposophical methods correctly cannot lapse into pathology because these methods run directly counter to what can lead people out of their natural state into pathological conditions. However, they may certainly face psychological dangers such as the megalomania referred to here. A certain inner stability, rooted in modesty and unpretentiousness, is necessary for the individual who aspires to that elevation and intensification of egoism which is necessary to achieve imaginative knowledge. In ordinary life and in ordinary cognition, our concepts are too pale, our highest ideas too abstract, to move from their own full saturation to the inner experience of that which actually pushes man towards egoity. That which otherwise lives in the power of forming concepts and shaping ideas must be elevated, must be intensified. Then, indeed, an experience occurs, and by the occurrence of this experience the one striving toward imagination can actually gauge the correctness of his striving. One has done exercises to increase one's egoism, one has done such exercises that one's pale concepts and ideas have been raised to the intensity one experiences when one has a sensory image before one's eyes or ears. One has thereby increased that power which, by its concentration, produces our composure, our sense of personality, our egoism. The experience one has is that from a certain point on, an increase in egoity no longer occurs, that from a certain point on, precisely because of the increase in egoity, in a sense because of the arrival of egoity at a point of culmination, this egoity actually dissolves. That is the significant thing, that our egoity, when it is increased, is increased correctly, does not increase into the excessive as egoity, but that it basically dissolves.

From this alone it can be seen that the experience we have as human beings in the outer physical world, and which, through its own nature, carries us to egoity, is necessary as a transition, that egoity in a healthy way the physical world and through sensory perceptions must be attained before one can turn to that increase that I mean here, which then leads to a dissolution, so to speak, of egoity, or rather, to an outflow of egoity.

Where does our egoity flow into first? In ordinary life, my dear audience, our egoity is actually banished into the moment. We can only say “I” to ourselves by feeling that we are a being experiencing the moment. That which we already experienced yesterday, which was intimately connected with our egoity yesterday, what we were immersed in yesterday, has become objective for us today in this moment. And to a certain extent, we see what we experienced yesterday, in contrast to our sense of self, as something external through memory, just as we see any external experience as external. One time, something objective rises from the depths of our own organization in memory; the other time, it approaches us by announcing itself to us through the external senses.

Of course, we distinguish the remembered experience from the external sensory experience; but at the same time there is something very similar between the two in the way they approach the ego, which can only be fully grasped in the moment. In the endeavor to advance to imagination, the I actually gradually flows out over our physical life on earth between birth and death, and we learn to be immersed in a past experience as we are immersed in the experience of the present moment. We learn to feel ourselves as I in the long-past experience as well as we otherwise do in the present moment. I draw your attention to the fact that you have certainly already experienced in a dream – which I certainly do not regard as some kind of valid source of knowledge, but only use here for clarification – that you have certainly already experienced in a dream that you felt like a person 20 years in the past , as a person 20 years younger, that you imagined your image from 20 years ago and behaved in the dream as if you were only 20 years old, that you did the same things as you did 20 years ago. I would like to remind you that in this dream image you actually objectify yourself in such a way that you feel yourself at the age you were at a distant point in time.

What appears in dreams in a semi-pathological way can be attained by the human being in full consciousness through imaginative knowledge, and can be developed in full consciousness. Then the human being experiences what he has ever experienced in this earthly life – he does not just experience it as an ordinary memory, which is contrasted with the experience of the present moment, he experiences it in such a way that his I, his egoity, fills the entire stream of his experience in this earthly life. He steps out of the moment and into the stream of his experience of time. The I does not flow out in a nebulous way; the I flows out into the stream of real experiences of this earthly life. But in this outpouring one grasps something different than in the ordinary consciousness of the moment, which, according to ordinary logic, must be filled with intellectual images in abstractions. In this outpouring of the life stream, one grasps images, images of the vitality of the life of the senses. That which otherwise stands before the soul as a memory of life becomes inwardly saturated and intense; one learns the nature of imaginative knowledge in oneself. At the same time, one penetrates into the essence of the human being by advancing in knowledge. But from this moment on, one knows that one has submerged with the ego not in a stream of abstract memories, but in a stream of real life forces, the same life forces that, from our birth, or let us say from our conception, are the forces that constitute our organism, that shape our organs, that work on us internally, in growth, in nourishment, in reproduction.

We now become immersed in the stream of those forces that otherwise only have to do with the mediation of our nourishment, that make us grow, and that make our reproduction possible. And now, instead of living in an abstraction, we are living with full consciousness in a concrete reality, and we are learning what the etheric body is. We are learning that our physical body, in which we normally live in our ordinary lives, is based on a body that is an inner formation of forces and that can only be seen in such imaginative knowledge. One becomes familiar with that which has been repeatedly sought by hypothesis by physical and biological science in recent decades, and which is even denied by others today in its existence. One becomes familiar with the real ether world in contrast to the ponderable physical world and learns to recognize how that which underlies our physical human form is really such an ether human being. But in grasping oneself as such an etheric human being, the ego of the earthly human being dissolves in an even higher sense. One cannot grasp this etheric human being without simultaneously seeing in all its individual parts and aspects what the cosmos, what the world, is. At the same time, one is led out of oneself by grasping oneself as an etheric human being, because that which works within us as an organizing etheric human being throws its rays in currents out into the cosmos, bringing us a connection between these or those inner organs, between this or that limb of our physical organism and the cosmos.

What is experienced does not appear in the form of abstract concepts, but in the saturated form of imagery, of imagination. But in that we have, in a sense, surrendered our egoity in the process of knowing, as I have described it, we grasp at the same time that which is now etherically outside of us in the world. We penetrate through our own etheric body into the etheric of the great world, from which we are, after all, born as human beings.

But then a new task arises. The world we now experience is quite different [from the physical one]; it does not have certain things that we rightly consider to be the defining characteristics of our physical world. It initially presents itself to us in a pictorial way, while we recognize our physical world in its true objectivity when we strip away the pictoriality. But when we now ascend from the grasp of our own etheric body to the ethericity of the world, we notice that precisely those senses that otherwise convey the external world to us in the most beautiful way lag behind in their effectiveness. We owe what we have of the physical external world to the eye, the ear and so on. These senses, as it were, recede at first, and the very senses that are ignored in ordinary physical life come to the fore in human experience as we become so attuned to the etheric world: the sense of balance, the sense of movement, the sense of life. These come to the fore. We are freed, as it were, from our own heaviness. We enter into an experience of the world's own equilibrium, into which we find our way. The movements observed through the eyes or those detected by instruments cease. But what can be inwardly experienced in the movement when the human being is in this movement is experienced in the imagination through the resting human being, in that the movement first increases. This is a living penetration into the etheric world. And here I would like to draw your attention, ladies and gentlemen, to the fact that it is really as I characterized it in my introductory words today, when I said that the path of anthroposophical knowledge means a series of inner soul experiences of destiny. For what occurs, so to speak, as a damping of the higher senses and as a spiritualization and strengthening at the same time of the senses usually regarded as low, is connected with such a fate. And, although I know what one is exposed to in such a description, I would like to mention what I want to say here with an example: I was once occupied with the internal mental processing of what a person actually experiences when they profess their soul to these or those worldviews, when they become a materialist, idealist, realist, spiritualist, positivist, skeptic, and so on. These things cannot be exhausted by what ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science produce about them, if one really strives to recognize them from within. Ordinary life and ordinary contemporary science are actually exhausted in the fact that the idealist rails against the realist, criticizes him, and that he refutes what the realist puts forward; the spiritualist becomes haughty, and nevertheless he is often a complete layman in that which can only be recognized in the material world, he indulges in the most disparaging criticisms of materialism, which nevertheless was a cosmic side effect of our modern, justly so praised scientificness. These things, why the human mind leans towards materialism on the one hand, and on the other, for example, towards spiritualism or idealism, these things lie deeper than one usually thinks.

When one seriously engages with these things, then one carries out an inner soul work that is connected with the thought process in a healthy, but also comprehensive sense. One experiences something at the same time as one thinks. If you think abstractly, you experience nothing. But if you experience what becomes an experience for the human being, whether you are a materialist or a spiritualist, a realist or an idealist, then you are led, as it were, into the direct existence of the human soul. In a completely different way, this human soul is grasped by a kind of thinking that I would call deeply introspective, than is the case with the ordinary sciences.

What one can experience in such thinking, which must be meditative and concentrated thinking, leads one further, releases certain powers of the imagination, and leads to the appearance of an inner image for individual concrete things, , but with the complete character of this thought-experience, an inner pictorial experience arises, which, however, is not a dreamt or fantasized pictorial experience, but which is connected with the cosmic, supersensible facts underlying external phenomena.

And so I lived at that time, after I had gone through this concentration, this meditation on what I have just described to you. I lived myself into the imaginative world in such a way that the whole person who emerged in the imagination suddenly became something that stood before the inner eye in a concrete world fact. It was formed out of what one had grasped as the essence of man, as an image of the cosmic, the zodiac, the zodiakus; but not as one has it in mind in its abstract form, but in such a way that the individual formations of the zodiac became truly essential, so that the spiritual essence of the zodiacal constellation emerged and revealed how it now came together with the individual elements of human nature: the world as an image, within a certain sphere as an image, the living out of inner thoughts, striving towards cosmic imagery.

The I not only flows out into this stream of one's own personal experiences for this earthly life, the I flows out into the cosmos. One learns to recognize what is really there in the undulating, surging ether of the cosmos. One does not enter into this undulating, surging life of the cosmos other than by increasing one's egoity to the point where it reaches its culmination, then dissolving oneself in the comprehension of the world and pouring out into the objective existence of the world.

What I am describing to you is basically the character of the etheric world. Experiencing yourself in this etheric world — you will now understand why I call it a destiny experience. Experiencing knowledge is at the same time a destiny experience. In this etheric world one can experience that which cannot be described in any other way than as I have described it in my “Occult Science”. It is the etheric experience of the world that has been presented in this “Occult Science”.

But at the same time, one's inner destiny takes such a turn that one feels the egotism into which one is placed in ordinary life between birth and death, I might say, continually expanding. The point then is that through the continuation of such exercises, as I have indicated in “How to Know Higher Worlds?” and in my “Occult Science” in its second part, that through the continuation of such exercises the I, which one has actually lost in a certain psychological sense, that this I is found again.

If you develop - everyone can develop this - you develop the power to carry your thoughts into the pictorial experience, and if you practice this carrying of your thought power into the etheric pictorial experience long enough - for the individual person it is so long, for the other person differently long - if you practice this long enough, one practices it so to speak until it has the necessary strength to fight against the persistent addiction to lose one's thoughts in images, one maintains the upper hand with one's composure, with the imbuing of one's etheric image experiences with the power of thought. Then the I-experience arises again. But it now appears in a completely transformed form, it now appears before the fully collected soul, before the soul that is as collected as one can only be in the solution of some mathematical problem. The experience of the I emerges from the world of ethereal images, but it emerges in such a way that we see it, so to speak, not as something that dwells in our physical corporeality, but as emerging from the cosmic etheric world, to the contemplation of which we have risen. One would like to say: While otherwise our ego, when it emerges, experiences and is viewed as if it came from the physical body, as if it came from a human center, we now experience it as if our ego radiates from the indeterminate periphery of the universe, as if it wants to converge in a center instead of diverging. And we notice: the world in which we are now placed with full inner reflection, with full inner power of knowledge, the world we actually only dream of in our ordinary life between birth and death when we apply a force that cannot initially be a force of knowledge, when we apply the power of feeling.

What we experience in our ordinary human life through feeling is not imbued with the power of thought to the same extent as our imaginative life. In reality, as I have often discussed, it is only imbued with the power of thought to the extent that our dreams are imbued with the power of thought. What we experience, so to speak, in the shadow of the world of personal feeling, we now experience in its true form: the I, as it descends from the periphery of the world, from the world of etheric substance, as it, instead of dissolving into the indefinite, pushes towards the center of its own being. And in this comprehension, which transforms the ordinary emotional experience into a real thought experience and thus into a real cognitive experience, in this experience we grasp what is called the astral body in anthroposophical knowledge of man. The astral body appears to us as given to us by the world when we look out from our center. We discover how, as it were, what is our astral body is exuded from the etheric force arrangements. It is as if we were suddenly not living in ourselves, but living in the air we breathe in — as if our body were standing there objectively and we were not in this body, but in the air we breathe in — and it is as if we felt that our external physicality was merely this body of air that penetrates into the human interior. It is as if we were looking into the human organs, as if we were approaching the human form in its externality.

Ascending from this breathing experience, Indian yoga philosophy aimed to achieve the experience that I have just described to you as the experience of the astral world. We in the West are not allowed to imitate this yoga experience in the East, due to the nature of our organization. But everything that we can experience in the immediate future, in which we actually experience ourselves outside our body in this way, presents itself in the same way as the world soul in the etheric body of the world. In fact, we never have a physical world body before us in a concrete realization, but in real realization we only reach an etheric world body in the way described, and in this etheric world body we experience the world soul in its configurations, one of which is our own soul, our own astral body, if I may put it this way.

In the same way as I have described in my “Occult Science” what one can see in the ether world, the surging and nature of this ether world in its concreteness, one can also describe the soul-like becoming and weaving of the cosmos. Perhaps it will be incumbent upon me, if it is to come to pass in this life, to show that what has been described in my “Occult Science” as the ether world can also be described as the astral world. It will be seen that then one must speak from quite a different spirit, that then something must be added to the descriptions of this “Occult Science”, which in its description, in its characterizations, must be quite different from the descriptions, the characterizations of this “Occult Science”. And I say to those who approach my writings in this way, that instead of having the will to penetrate into the matter, they quibble over words and look for contradictions. I predict that they will find will find between the book, which is created in this way through the description of the astral in relation to the etheric, that they will find an even greater portion of what they will state as contradictions in their way. These are the contradictions of life, and the one who wants to penetrate life objectively must familiarize himself with these contradictions in a living way, not in abstract logic.

But when what we come to know as our own astral, as our own soul, approaches us in this world, we actually feel like cosmic human beings, and we feel our own astral body, our own soul, only as a part of the cosmos. But we feel it as a member not of the etheric cosmos, but of the soul cosmos, and we now know: the cosmos has a soul. And by being able to present the astral body to our soul as something other than what appears to us only through our outer physical corporeality and through the etheric, a life that precedes our birth or our conception , a life accomplished in the spirit, in the soul world, is placed before this soul of ours, and a life that we enter as a spiritual-soul being when we pass through the gate of death. That which is called immortality, and also that which our civilization has lost and which should be called unbornness, becomes a fact, for one gets to know oneself from the whole world that outlasts the individual human life. One does not just grasp the part of the human being that is embodied in the body between birth and death, but one grasps the human essence that precedes birth and follows death; one grasps oneself as a link in the eternal spiritual world.

And still further can be continued that inner concentration, that inner meditation, whereby one must only see to it that the power one has attained to penetrate the world of images with thoughts is fully maintained with the power of reflection. One can penetrate even further in this penetration of the imagination with thought-content, and the penetration of inspiration with thought-content; one can always intensify that which is the level-headed thought-experience in imagination, in inspiration, and then one comes to the experience of the true form of the central human ego. Then one penetrates through the human astral body, which actually presents itself as developing from the periphery of the world towards our human center, and presents itself as a member of the entire astral cosmos. From there, one arrives at the true self, of which one has only a shadow in ordinary life, to which one says “I”; one arrives at that which one now objectively sees as one's self, in the same way that one otherwise objectively sees external things. For that which one undergoes on the path of knowledge has brought one out of one's own corporeality, and what now moves back into one's own corporeality is not the ego that one has in ordinary life, but a real ego.

This real self initially has nothing to do with much of what shapes us as a human organism from the cosmos, what works in us and lives from the world that we have gone through in the spiritual and soul realm before birth or before conception. This I presents itself as an objective reality, as that which, so to speak, represents the sum of all the I's we have lived through in our past earthly lives.

This is achieved at the level of the intuitive, the truly intuitive. There, that which can be described in anthroposophical knowledge of man as repeated earthly lives becomes wisdom. In fact, anthroposophical knowledge does not consist of formulating abstract insights based on existing facts, which are images of the facts, but rather consists of gradually and truly living one's way into the human essence. What one experiences of this human being, after one has first poured out one's I, one's egoity, into the stream of life between birth and death in the etheric realm, now stands as the subject opposite the I that has become objective on the path from our previous life to our present life. It is from such a path of knowledge that the one speaks who, from inner vision, not from theory, speaks about the existence of repeated human lives on earth. This view of repeated human lives on earth is not a theory, but something that arises as a realization at the same time as the view of the true self, which in our ordinary life we have before us in the same way as we have our soul life before us between falling asleep and waking up. Just as we are between falling asleep and waking up in a state that we do not see into, that is given to us only negatively as an empty part of our experience, so we must, as it were, leave out in our life stream what we have experienced while sleeping. When we look back and let our life appear before us, how for ordinary consciousness we actually only have those stretches of life that run from waking to falling asleep, how these are always interrupted by empty lengths of stream, stream members, so in ordinary life we look down into our ego, into our organization. We see, by experiencing the surging, weaving soul life, a kind of empty space that we oversleep as we oversleep our state of sleep, and to this empty space we say I, not to something really fulfilled. Anthroposophical knowledge of the human being, ladies and gentlemen, can indicate how it arrives at its content, can describe step by step how it advances inwardly to grasp that which it must present to the world as a teaching. And because true anthroposophical knowledge of man carries the thought everywhere - for you have seen that I had to place the main emphasis on this in the description of this anthroposophical method of knowing man, that in imagination, in inspiration, the thought experience has been carried into it with all its sharpness, that this thought experience also appears in the intuitive experience in the end; you have seen that I had to place the special emphasis on this must attach to this, and because the thought experience is everywhere within, because that which man has in the abstract thought experience, which he uses for ordinary science, is everywhere within in all that the spiritual researcher directs his soul and his spirit, his I, therefore everything that the spiritual researcher presents to the world can be relived and also verified by the mere thought experience. The human being must only have the opportunity to follow the spiritual researcher to the thought experience. He must not lose the thought experience immediately when he leaves the sphere of sensory experience. He must have the strength to develop the inner capacity for growth and reproduction that can still have the self-generating thought when the thought stimulated by the external sensory experience ceases to bear its actual character. This intense inner experience can be appropriated at first; then one will find: the spiritual researcher describes things that he has essentially experienced by carrying the thought into imagination, inspiration and intuition.

The thoughts that he incorporates into it can be followed and tested. For the thoughts that he forms in imaginative, inspired and intuitive life can be tested for accuracy by their very nature and essence when you hold them up to yourself. One must only not cling to the human prejudice, which in recent times has become all too strong, that a thought can only be verified if one can have an external sensual fact as proof. One must recognize that the thought itself, the same thought that is used in external science, has an inner life, that it can shape its inner organization. If one experiences only this inner self-fashioning of the power of thought, if one experiences it in a way that Hegel in his time could not yet experience — hence he only unravelled abstract thoughts in his philosophy — if one experiences this living movement of the thought, which I first tried to present in its form in my “Philosophy of Freedom”, then one can really examine every single thought that the spiritual researcher expresses. Those who do not undertake this examination will generally do so because they feel compelled to do so out of an inadequate will: 'I do not follow what you are thinking there, because what I know so far gives me no reason to do so.

Anyone who takes this view is simply not open to discussion about anthroposophy, and in particular about anthroposophical knowledge of the human being. It is not necessary to ascend to imagination, inspiration, and intuition oneself; it is only necessary to bring the thought life, which one already develops in ordinary science, vividly into the whole inner soul life, and from this living grasp of the thought, to follow what the spiritual researcher brings out of imagination, inspiration, and intuition. But, ladies and gentlemen, one must be determined to break away from dead thinking, which only arranges concepts in a linear fashion, just as the external sense world unfolds. This dead thinking proceeds in such a way that I form this concept from one piece of the external sense world, then I stick it to the concept that I gain from the other piece of the sense world, and so on. Only those who adhere to this method of gluing for a system of concepts will say that, from the point of view of ordinary thinking, they cannot verify what is given in anthroposophy. But anyone who grasps that the human being really carries within himself, within himself experiences thinking as a living organism — it is only overshadowed, it is only overshadowed by an illusion —, anyone who grasps this thinking that is alive in life, can verify from this thinking everything that the spiritual researcher presents about man and the world.

Thus you see from the whole meaning of what I have taken the liberty of presenting to you that when the spiritual researcher attempts to penetrate to knowledge of man, at the same time as he strives for this knowledge of man, knowledge of the world results. Knowledge of the true human being leads us beyond ourselves into the objective world. Real knowledge of the true objective world gives us, within its content, the human being, the truly outwardly and inwardly living human being, who can feel at home in the world, which he discovers in this way. And so it may be said: Just as it can already be sensed that world and human being must belong together in the most intimate way, as I have already emphasized in my Philosophy of Freedom, so spiritual science presents knowledge to the world that world knowledge must be attained through knowledge of the human being, because world existence can be experienced can be experienced in the innermost human being, that human nature can be recognized from knowledge of the world, because the human being with his innermost nature comes from the objective, true world; that knowledge of the world must be attained through knowledge of the human being [and knowledge of the human being through knowledge of the world].

In this, however, a contradiction or even a paradox can be found, for one might ask: Where should we begin? Should we start with knowledge of the world in order to gain knowledge of the human being from knowledge of the world , as the pantheist or some other philosophically or materialistically minded person would undertake, or should we, as the mystic often does, soar from knowledge of man to knowledge of the world?

But this is dead, this is not alive thought. Knowledge of man and knowledge of the world do not belong together like two dead limbs of an organism, so that one can start with one and move on to the other, but knowledge of man and knowledge of the world belong together like the living limbs of a being itself. And just as little as one can say that the head lives through the limbs or the limbs live through the head, so little can one say that one can start with knowledge of the world in order to arrive at the human being, or start with knowledge of the human being in order to arrive at knowledge of the world. Rather, one must say that both must arise in living unity, and both must mutually illuminate each other in living unity. And in this sense, in the sense of a living realization, a world knowledge gained from spiritual research through true knowledge of man, a true knowledge of man through true world knowledge, must arise for the great questions of our time.

The lectures that follow will be based directly on the observations I have made already. I do not mean by this that we can say anything of consequence about present-day social life just by thinking out social reforms from first principles, in an abstract and Utopian manner; but rather that the spiritual philosophy expounded here could, if transformed into impulses of the whole man, into a human attitude of mind, provide a framework within which we could understand social life and shape social forces. The succeeding lectures will have to demonstrate that a philosophy of this kind, orientated towards the spiritual, does not remain at the abstract and Utopian level, but instead is peculiarly well equipped to deal with immediate concrete reality. Today, however, I want to establish a link between the lectures I have given already and those I have still to give.

Anyone who has taken in the full significance of my lectures so far will agree that what has been expounded has not implied a conception of life for the hermitage, for contemplative existence in a quiet cell. The conception of life proposed has its social side too—it is one that leads not only into spiritual worlds as such, but also into the world of spirit and soul that surrounds us directly in our fellow-men. It is, of course, easier to speak of social questions today if you are identified with a particular political party. Then, you have a platform, you have ready-made ideas, and can say: This is our age! These are its needs! But we here certainly cannot start from any of these ready-made political programmes. In the first place, I am fully convinced that—to speak somewhat sweepingly—there is actually no party that is entirely mistaken in what it asserts. The only thing is that the parties usually fail to recognize the limits beyond which their assertions cannot hold. On the other hand, I do not believe that any party is completely right; in a sense, it must always be mistaken as well. The only thing is that, given the particular way men look at the world, we can understand this mistakenness well enough. A tree, too, can only be photographed adequately from several sides. All the claims normally made by political parties seem like photographs of life from different sides. Yet people treat these various standpoints exactly as if someone were to look at a photograph of a tree, taken from the right, and say: “This picture is completely wrong,” knowing only the view from the left. Thus, all the objections from a certain standpoint to the views put forward here are familiar to me, and if I had to expound them all, it would not, given the philosophy of life I am advocating, prove a very difficult task.

I must say this in advance, in order to show that it is only by approaching social life and social problems from the most varied directions, as is attempted in the lectures that follow, that we can form a life-like picture of them.

There is much talk nowadays of social needs. Looking back over the history of humanity with an open mind, however, we observe that this has been true for only a relatively short period of man's development. There have, of course, always been social needs and social endeavours. That they should be formulated, almost as an abstract theory, however, is a feature of very recent times alone. And when we try to discover why it is that almost everyone these days is talking about social needs, we realize that there has been no period perhaps with such strong anti-social impulses as ours.

When the urgent necessity of life presses and misery knocks at our door, we do meet the challenge to produce positive social impulses. But when people speak of social needs, they really mean something different; they mean man's feeling that he is not simply a separate being, but that he must move among other men, and work among and with other men, and that he exists for his own satisfaction and the good of others. In this respect, the men of earlier epochs were actually much closer to one another, paradoxical as it may sound, than we are today. And this was only natural, because we nowadays live in a historical epoch which, as the preceding lectures have already indicated, has summoned particular powers from the depths of man's nature, especially within the civilized world. These powers are specially adapted to the purposes I have described, but are less well suited to arousing in man the social instincts and social impulses that were present, if in a form no longer appropriate to the present time, in earlier epochs.

Looking back over man's development, we see that, in the course of three or four centuries, there has emerged from within the human soul a capacity, a soul-power, which we can regard as intellectual—the power of reason, of a more or less rational view of the world. This view has been splendidly successful in the field of natural philosophy. It can carry men a tremendously long way towards developing their intercourse, their traffic with external nature. But the problem arises whether this power, which represents the glory and triumph, so to speak, of very recent times, is also suited, as it stands, to facilitate the intercourse of man with man. Only a clear view of this problem can, ultimately, throw light for us on the social needs of recent times. These needs, as they are ordinarily formulated, can only express a superficial outlook, symptomatic of something lying much deeper in man. This is what stands out above all for a spiritually scientific approach.

Again, when we look with an unprejudiced eye at the way in which social configurations and groupings arose in earlier epochs and indeed, fundamentally, still arise today—right down to cartels and trusts—we must conclude: the dominant forces in them are ultimately not intellectualized ones, not those of a rational attitude to life, but are instincts, unconscious feelings. And if we were to create social configurations by means of the intellectualized power that reveals itself so splendidly in natural philosophy, they would probably have only very slight viability. For, after all, it is not without significance that this power of the intellect has shown itself to be particularly important in the observation of inanimate nature, and that a man who desires only natural philosophy and does not wish to move upward to an outlook on things in accord with spirit, finds himself faced by an insoluble riddle when he has to move over from the inanimate to the animate. It is not surprising that what is of great importance, precisely because of its inner structure, for the inanimate, the dead, is not as powerful and fruitful in relation to something that is not only alive, but must also develop into human social configurations informed by spirit.

We can say, therefore: In certain subconscious regions of the soul, the forces that have been formative in social configurations are still present. On the other hand, man owes two of his strongest and socially most effective impulses to the characteristics of the present epoch. And for these he has to find the proper place in social life as a whole.

One of the most important social questions of today became apparent to me thirty years ago, when I was trying to look at the problem of man's freedom within his social life. The experience of freedom is really just as old as intellectual life. Only when intellectual life raises man to the apprehension of pure thought, by which he then comprehends natural phenomena, does he become conscious of his freedom. To all mental activity, earlier ages added something that resulted simply from organic processes and had its roots instinctively in the unconscious regions of will or else unconsciously in the life of feeling. To perceive something as clearly as is possible when thinking rises to distinctly apprehended and mathematically formulated laws; to comprehend something so clearly that we are present in it with our entire substance: this has only been possible to man since he raised himself to the pure thinking that inspired Copernicus, Galileo and their successors to modern scientific research. The experience of freedom is thus explicitly connected with something that leads away from the instinctive forces that previously formed society.

If we are approaching the problem of freedom with complete seriousness, however, we are cast for a moment, by this discovery, into a kind of emptiness, which we experience with all the terror that emptiness, or rather nothingness, does inspire in men. What we discover is that, in earlier epochs, when mankind was more naive about the life of the soul and had not attained to the consciousness that prevails in modern times, there could exist attitudes that were more imaginal and did not inhabit pure, abstract thought. But we need such imaginal attitudes if we are to take our place within the complicated social life of man. The things that enable us to find our place in the world can never be determined by abstract thought.

Now, in the last few days I have shown how the development of spiritual science takes us from abstract, dead thought once again to vital thought, by which in fact we can penetrate not only into inorganic, lifeless nature, but also into the forms of living nature and into the heart of spiritual worlds. By understanding this most modern development, man thus re-approaches, with his consciousness, what in earlier epochs existed in an instinctive way. I know that many people today still shrink back when they are told: that which operated instinctively in earlier epochs, fertilizing the imagination from the unconscious, can be raised into consciousness by a development of the soul such as I have described. Immediately, people suspect that behind this demand there lurks a kind of philistinism and pedantry that would translate naïveté into self-consciousness. People will continue to shrink back from this path into consciousness so long as they do not realize that the naive experience that was originally instinctive to man is to be restored, despite the consciousness of vital thought. But this vital thought then also introduces us to the shifting concepts that play their part in social life.

Let me refer to just one example of this today, by way of introduction. People at present talk a very great deal about capitalism and the function of capital in the social order. There are countless definitions of capitalism, often politically coloured. Yet this absence of unanimity obscures another point. We must clearly understand that the function even of something that forms as much a part of the social structure as capitalism cannot be comprehended in sharply delineated concepts. Instead, we require those vital concepts that the nai've, instinctive life of the soul once had and the conscious life of the soul can again acquire today. People need only look, for example, at what capital meant in Central Europe, in Germany, where a particular social development began later than it did in England, and what it means in England itself. In England, simply because of the existence of earlier stages in the country's economic life, when this development did set in commercial capital was available to create something which, in Germany, had to be effected by raising capital in other ways. If we look at the rôle of capital in Central Europe and then in England, we very soon find that our concepts, intended as they are to comprehend social life even in its individual configurations, cannot be sharply delineated. We need, instead, concepts that take hold of immediate reality at a particular point, yet remain elastic, so that they can move on from this point to other configurations of the social structure. And since we live in an age that is specifically educated to intellectualism—which subsists only in sharply delineated concepts—it is necessary for us, if we are to reach an understanding of social needs, to find our way out of intellectualism into the world of vital thought. This in turn can transform itself into social impulses such as arose from instincts in the earlier stages of human development.

The philosophy I am here advancing is specifically intended not to be something theoretical. It is often accused of dogmatism; accused, when it has to pronounce on social life, of looking for Utopias (which are also dogmatic). The charge is without foundation. The point of this philosophy is not at all what people mean by any particular concept; it is a definite attitude to life as a whole, physical, mental and spiritual—an attitude directed towards apprehending this life in its individual concrete forms in accordance with reality.

Thereby, however, a certain perspective on extremely important social needs of our age is opened up:

When we contemplate human life itself by means of a spiritual outlook such as I have been developing, we find that, like the historical development of humanity in general, the life of an individual human being is subject to certain changes. The resulting phases, which are apparent even to a casual observer, reveal their true nature only when we can see into their spiritual ramifications. It then appears, for example, that neither the infant in its first years of life, nor the child of primary school age, nor even the adolescent below the age of twenty, lives fully within the intellectualized mode of thought that has emerged in the course of man's development. In the last analysis, we only comprehend intellectualism with an inner sympathy in the more mature period of our twenties, when we begin to experience it as a kind of mental bone-system. Until then, we actually feel, if only instinctively, as if our life still had to solidify within us along lines which eventually result in this mental bone-system. Yet our entire social life, which understandably is shaped by adults, is permeated by the influence of intellectualism, in spite of the fact that intellectualism itself cannot be socially creative. It floods into areas where the instincts have become uncertain. We thus have in our present-day social pattern an inorganic combination of the instincts, grown uncertain, with an intellectualism that seeks to enter social life but does not really fit into it.

The end-result of this is that we form ideas of what is going on in social life which are quite unlike the forces that are really present. Nowadays, we speak in rather inexact terms, for the most part, about what governs society. We, mankind that is, have educated ourselves, in these three or four centuries, to cast everything into intellectualized moulds. As adults we can do this, but not while we are children or while we are young people.

Youth develops powers other than intellectual ones. The infant develops first the powers which make it, I would say, a single sense-organ, similar to what I have called a “spirit-organ,” but at a more material level. Its whole being is engaged in perceiving its environment, and it transposes what it perceives into its own movements. It is an imitator. This imitation, which pervades the life of the child's psyche, is quite certainly nothing intellectualized. Next, the child enters an age—say from second dentition to puberty—in which it is called upon no longer to imitate, but to absorb the opinions and convictions proffered by the adults round about.

Please do not think that the man who wrote The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity is saying what he has to say now out of any reactionary instinct. What I have to say is in accord with a law of man's development. From second dentition to puberty, the young person evolves from within his being the need to listen to some person of natural authority and to what he or she offers him. Anyone who can look at life impartially will agree how fortunate it was for his inner harmony of soul throughout life if, at this age, he was able to look up to this or that person of authority with a proper respect. He did not now imitate this person; the relation was such that he felt: through this human individual is revealed to me what I myself ought to be and want to be; I listen to what he or she says and absorb the opinion into my soul.

The genuine psychologist will even discover something further. People continue to insist that, at this primary school age, a child should only take in what it already understands. In this way, only this one stage in the child's development is catered for. Not only this, but endless trivialities are piled up in an effort to present the child solely with what, it is believed, he “already understands.” The child certainly understands more than many people believe: not through intellectuality, however, but through its whole being. There is another point, too. We may reach the age of thirty, forty, fifty or sixty, and then something shoots up from the depths of our soul which is a reminiscence from our eighth year, let us say. We took it from authority; we absorbed it with respect. At the time, we did not understand it in an intellectual sense; but we came to feel at home in what we thus absorbed with our whole being. It was then drawn down into the depths of the soul. Decades later it reappears. We have become more mature. Only now do we understand it and bring it to life. It is enormously important to us in later years to be able to revive in this way what we have carried with us since childhood. This is something quite different from living among mere memories, untransformed.

This, too, then, can result from a vital art of education—one that seeks to give the child of this age, not sharply delineated concepts but vital ones. The former, it is true, have their uses in life. To the child, however, their effect is as if we seized his hand and clamped it so that it could not grow, had to remain small, and could not take on different shapes. We must move forward to an education which transmits vital concepts that will live on with the child as his limbs do, and are accordingly not sharply delineated but have an inner growth. Only then shall we give the child not only the right joy in life, but also the right strength in life. When the child experiences the sort of thing I have just indicated quite naively in his soul, his understanding and comprehension is not intellectualized. He is taking something from a respected authority, something that will instil in him vital powers.

Next, there follows an age when, essentially, all we can do is to approach the world with our concepts (which do not immediately take on sharp contours) all informed by the capacity for love. With this, we penetrate into things so as to emerge, sometimes, with quite illusory but all the more potent ideals, which fire our love.

Only when we have passed through all these can we move, without damage to our humanity as a whole, into the intellectual phase. Yet the material that in many cases the old generation nowadays presents to the young is really something appropriate only to a later age. It is no accident, therefore, that young people often fail to understand us as teachers: it springs from their very nature.

Older epochs developed in social life forces by which the old could be understood by the young in a quite different manner from today. Hence the social gulf that has opened between age and youth. It can be understood by those who comprehend our age as we must if we trace the development over the last three or four centuries. Not only through spiritual profundity, but through the animation of our spiritual life, we must restore the adult's capacity to reach complete understanding with youth.

But bridging the gulf between generations is only one side, only a very small area in fact, of present-day social needs. It can be brought about only by an extension of man's whole inner experience. Only those who strengthen the present intellectualized life of the soul by vital thought and spiritual vision, or at least accept the results of such thought and vision—for they too vitalize the whole soul—will regain the ability to look fully into the child's life. They will thus be able to draw out of the child's life itself the powers by which we can reach an understanding with him. But in indicating the gulf that has opened between age and youth in our time, we also indicate the whole series of gulfs separating man and man, man and woman, and class and class in our time. For just as merely intellectualized life separates us from the child, so too it ultimately separates us from other men. Only through vital thinking, which re-approaches certain instinctive conceptions of the cosmos, can we establish our position in the social order as firmly as the man of instinct did, to make social organisms possible for the first time. We find, too, that only through what we achieve with an empty consciousness—when we are inspired from the spiritual world with what spiritual entities reveal—can we really understand other people and see across the gulfs of class and sex.

This is the second stage in living together in society. The first is that of discovering imaginatively our own position. The second is that of finding a bridge across to someone else, someone who lives in a different social constellation. Nowadays, this is made very difficult for mankind; for when we take up a position in social life in line with our feelings, our judgment is not ultimately based on reality. In the last analysis, it is precisely when we think that our judgments are most in accord with reality that they are furthest away from it. You can see this by observing how even outstanding personalities today, who take up a position in life and would like to manipulate life, are fundamentally incapable of matching up to reality.

Let me give an example—not in order to say anything for or against the person concerned, but simply to characterize the phenomenon. A particularly striking personality among those socially active in recent times was Rosa Luxemburg. In personal acquaintance, you found a woman completely endowed with social graces: measured in movement and mode of speech, restrained in each individual gesture and phrase. A certain gentleness, even, certainly nothing tempestuous, was in her personality. Yet when you heard her speak from the platform, her way of speaking was ... well, I will quote an actual example. She would say, for instance: Yes, there were times when man believed he originated from some spiritual world or other, which had placed him within social life. Today—she said—we know that man once clambered about in the trees like an ape in an extremely indecent fashion, without any clothes on, and that from this ape-man there developed those who today occupy the most varied positions in society. And this was delivered in a manner that was fired, I would say, with a certain religious impulse. Not, indeed, with the fire of immediate personal impact, but in a manner that large proletarian masses can best understand: with a certain measured dryness, so that it could be received too with a certain dryness of feeling and yet call forth, for all its dryness, a certain enthusiasm. This because people felt: at bottom, then, all men are equal and all social distinctions are swept away! But none of this was spoken from an involvement in social life itself. It emerged from theory, though one that believed itself to be true to life. It created a reality that is ultimately no reality, no fruitful reality that is.

The standpoint of most people in social life today is like that of Rosa Luxemburg: they speak about society without the power in their words that comes from life itself, from experience of the social aspect of man. To speak of society is possible if, with the old instinctive power of looking at social forms, we can find our own place in life and also a bridge to men in other walks of life, other classes, or other generations, and to individual human personalities. This was achieved in earlier epochs out of extraordinarily deep-rooted human instincts.

These powers of cognition become conscious as man develops into the spiritual organism or “sense-organ” he becomes as a human whole, in the way I have described. As a result, he can live by choice, free of the body, in the spiritual world.

For sympathy with the other person is always an unconscious or conscious extra-physical experience of his being. It is dead theory to think that we look at someone, see that he has an ear shaped so, a nose, a face shaped so, and, knowing that we too have such a nose and a forehead shaped thus and so on, and that we have a self, assume unconsciously that the other person also has a self. This is not what we do. Anyone whose mind can take in what happens knows that we have an immediate perception of the life of the other person. This immediate perception, we might say, is simply the act of seeing, raised to the spiritual level.

Certain theories in present-day philosophy have even discovered this fact. Spiritual science shows that, by bringing the power that operates unconsciously and instinctively up into consciousness, man can project himself into the other human being: only thus can he really place himself within the context of social life. With the intellectualism attained at the educational level in human development to which we have been raised—or rather, with what can grow out of that intellectualism—we can point to this self-spiritualizing development of the human soul; and when this is possible, social perspectives too can be gained. Certainly, it is only by apprehending the spiritual in this way that we can gain the strength to cast aside old fears and achieve an immediate experience of the impulse of freedom in man.

Now the soul can only really apprehend this impulse of freedom out of a full human life. That this is so, I should like to illustrate once more with an educational example.

What, precisely, is the basis of the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, which was created from a view of life in accord with the spirit? It seeks to act as a social organism in the life of today in a way that present-day forces themselves require. Its aim is therefore certainly not to inculcate a philosophy in any way. It would be an entirely false conception of the principle of the School to think that it sought to impart to the children any particular philosophy of life. A conception of the world and of life that is held to be in accord with the spirit exists in fact for the staff. And what, in this conception, is not theory but life may also come out in the skill and tact of the teacher, and in everything that he does, in all the work of instruction and education.

The isolated statements that are often made about the teaching methods at the Waldorf School really miss the point. They may well lead someone or other to say: Of course, there are other methods of instruction and education with the same aim. In terms of abstract principles, it is true fundamentally to say that what can be stated about the methods of the Waldorf School is also found elsewhere. What is important in the Waldorf School is the immediate life that flows from a conception of the world which creates life and not merely concepts.

What does this achieve? Well, it is difficult to describe life in sharply outlined concepts. I shall therefore explain what I mean in this way: quite certainly, there are on the staff of the Waldorf School some teachers who are not unusually gifted; we can say this without hurting anyone's feelings. But even if the widest range of physical, mental and spiritual talents were represented in the teacher, we should still have to say: among the children he has before him, there may be some who will at some stage in life develop talents that go far beyond those the teacher himself possesses.

We must therefore create educational methods by which we can handle the children at each age not only in such a way that they acquire the talents we have ourselves, but also that they develop any latent talents we do not have at all. Even if no geniuses ourselves, we must place no obstacle in the way of the child's development towards genius. It is all very well to go on declaiming that the child's individuality must be developed, and that “education is a drawing out and not a putting in.” You can say this, and as an idea it all sounds wonderful, and you think of it as something fruitful in life. But what people often mean by it is simply that they will develop in the child what they think is capable of becoming something individual, but not anything that goes beyond the individuality of the teacher himself.

In the Waldorf School, everything is directed towards education in freedom. Man's inmost spiritual element remains essentially undisturbed by the Waldorf School. It is not disturbed, any more than a plant placed in the ground and allowed to develop freely in the light and air has all kinds of stakes applied to it, training it into a set shape. A child's spiritual individuality is something completely sacred, and those with a genuine experience of human nature know that it will follow, of its own accord, the influences exerted on it by everything round about. The teacher thus has to set aside what can hinder this tenderly protected individuality in its development. The hindrances, which can result from the physical, the mental and even the spiritual sphere, can be discerned by a genuine knowledge of man, if it is developed on the pedagogic and psychological sides. And when we do evolve such a knowledge, we develop a fine sense for any impediment to the free development of individuality. There is no need for violent interference. Any alien shaping of the personality should be avoided. When we see that there is an impediment we must set aside, we set it aside. The individual will know how to develop through his own power, and his talents may then go far beyond what the teacher possesses.

Here is true respect for human freedom! This freedom is what enables man to find within him the impulses that lead and drive him in life. In earlier periods, as he instinctively grew into his social environment, man absorbed from it something that then operated within him as moral and religious impulses. This process has been paralysed, I would say, by intellectualism. What can consciously produce the social impulses that were once instinctively attained, has still to be developed.

Two things thus confront modern man. On the one hand, he must now seek his ethical and religious impulses in his own personality, finding them only among his soul's innermost powers. On the other hand, in the course of the last three or four centuries intellectualism has come of age, so much so that it is now regarded as the sole authority. Yet it can afford no such direct spiritual experience, but only observe the life of nature and classify it.

We are thus confronted by what we as humanity can achieve—magnificent as it is—within natural processes. And here humanity as a whole is productive. We can see this productive aspect emerging in the last three or four centuries in the splendid instances of co-operation between natural observation and technology. Anyone who can follow what man achieves by understanding nature can also see how he has advanced technologically. You need only look at a straightforward example—how Helmholtz, let us say, a genius in some respects, invented his ophthalmoscope.

To appreciate this, you must take into account the fact that his predecessors—as if impelled by scientific progress—were already close to the discovery, and he had only to take the final step. We might say: scientific thinking as such enters into man and leads him onward. Subsequently, he is productive in the field of technology. For what he extracts from nature serves him as an inspiration. Right down to the most recent discoveries, we can follow how, in anyone who becomes a natural scientist, what he absorbs impels his spirit from one technical advance to another, so that the inspiration of nature still goes on. There's inspiration for you!

Modern man lacks such inspiration, however, when he comes to the ethical, the volitional, the religious—in short, to everything that starts from the soul yet leads at last to social forms and life. What we need here is a force that will operate in the spiritual sphere as purely natural inspiration does in our external technology. In the latter, we have gone an incredibly long way. What we have achieved there, we, the men of modern times, must pay for in the sense that our purely spiritual life has languished for a while, sustaining itself on old traditions, in the religious as well as the moral and social sphere. Today, however, we need to be able, out of the human personality, to arrive in the full experience of freedom at immediate moral impulses. Because we are faced with this social necessity, I was able, in my The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, to show that there must be such a thing as moral intuition. And, as I indicated then, the real moral impulses that man can find to give him ethical and moral strength, which operate more individually now in modern life, can only derive from a spiritual world. We are thus forced to rise to spiritual intuitions precisely because in our contemplation of the outside world we do not attain anything spiritually productive.

Anyone who can consciously experience the technical age from within is especially inclined to say, on the other hand: faced by the need to stick close to the ground in technology so as to survey its inanimate substance, we cannot, from what technology gives us, gain moral impulses as earlier men could. They beheld the spiritual in storm and wind and stream and star and experienced it as natural forces. We cannot do this, because our knowledge of nature has had all this refined away from it. We can only gain our moral world, therefore, by intuiting it in a directly spiritual and individual manner.

For this, however, we require a vital spiritual force within us. And this force can follow, I believe, if we are steeped in the implications of the philosophy of life I have put forward here. As a philosophy, it certainly does not wish to lay down the law in ideas and concepts. It seeks rather to present ideas and concepts only in order that they may become as vital within us, on the spiritual plane, as our life's blood itself, so that man's activity, not only his thinking, is stimulated. A philosophy of life in accord with spirit thus reveals itself as a social as well as a cognitive impulse.

In consequence, we may perhaps be justified in saying: present-day social needs, as they are often formulated in public life today, appear, to those who can dispassionately perceive the true nature of our times, to be symptomatic. They are symptomatic of the loss of the old instinctive certainties of social life and of the necessity to establish, consciously, a spiritual life that will give the same impulses as did the earlier instinctive one. Because we can believe that such a stimulation of man's innermost vital powers really corresponds to the social needs of today, we would wish, in this age of severe social tribulation, to speak of the age and its social needs in this sense.

Sometimes, today, people feel that the immediate distress of the day, the misery of the moment is so great that, fundamentally, we ought to devote ourselves exclusively to it, and look for wider horizons only when some relief has been afforded close at hand. Of all the objections put to me since, at the instigation of a circle of friends, I have been trying to speak about social life once more and to take an interest in various things connected with it, I have felt most strongly the force of the countless letters sent to me, especially two years or so ago, saying: “What is the point of all these social ideas? Here in Central Europe the most urgent thing is bread.” This objection was made over and over again. We can understand it. But in another sense we must also understand that the earth is incapable of withholding its fruitfulness at any period, if only men can find a social organization that will enable the earth's gifts to flow into society and there be distributed.

It is thus, I think, right to believe that to devote oneself to the immediate situation is a loving and noble task—in which no one is impeded by reflections such as I have set forth here. Yet, equally, it must be said: for the moment, what can be done in this way may be good; yet on the other hand, men must gain an understanding of society as soon as possible, in order to prevent the factors that bring men into such distress and misery from recreating themselves.

That we cannot get by in the social sphere with the old Utopian and intellectualized formulations should have become apparent to people when many of those who, only a short while before, were speaking with incredible confidence of what social life should be were then called upon to do something. Never was there a greater perplexity in a society than among those who reputedly knew with absolute certainty how social configurations should be organized, if only the old regime could be cleared away as rapidly as possible.

Experiment in this direction has indeed created, in Eastern Europe, the most terrible forces of destruction. And for men today to believe that, without fundamental social thought and feeling and experience, simply by continuing the old formulations, they can arrive at anything but destructive forces, is an illusion. The spectre of Eastern Europe gazes threateningly across to the West. Its gaze, however, should not leave us inactive, but should be a challenge to us to seek at every moment for vital social forces and a vital formulation of social needs, now that the abstract and Utopian ones have revealed their unfruitfulness.

How this can be achieved will be shown more fully in the lectures that follow. I have tried today simply to provide an introduction showing that, behind explicitly formulated social ideas, there lies something more profound, something that is linked with a transformation of the whole life of the soul.

In very recent times, this is beginning to be understood even among a wide circle of the working class. Anyone who looks about him knows that social needs, and in particular our reactions to them, are in the midst of a profound transformation. The unfruitfulness of the old slogans is already more or less recognized. And already it is being emphasized in many quarters that we must move to a spiritual sphere, and that moral and religious impulses must once again pervade social life. We have not yet, however, evolved the life we really need.

Our age thinks itself extremely practical and realistic, and does not know how theoretical it is in fact—especially in determining social needs. Our task today, we may perhaps observe in conclusion, cannot really be to set up completely new social or other ideals. We are not short of abstract expressions of ideals. What we need is something different: experience of the spiritual, not merely excogitation of the ideal. What we need is spirit, not in concepts merely, but with such vitality that it goes with us like a human companion in all our doings.

In apprehending the spirit as something vital in this way, we shall also be able to rise to something socially effective. On this point, we may say: today, we need not merely a formulation of ideals and social needs. We need something that will give us strength to follow the ideals, and give us inner life to make these ideals incandescent; something that impels our will to wholehearted enthusiasm, fruitful to the world, for ideals and for the life of the spirit.

The last time we gathered here I was able to speak to you of the deep foundations underlying the ideas of the Threefold Commonwealth. I was able to carry the lecture far enough for us to see in what sense one may say that we are living at the present time in a definite period of transition. You will not misunderstand that remark, for I have often told you that when I talk of a transition it is not meant in the trivial sense in which people often speak when they talk about living in a period of transition. Naturally as I have often said, every period is a period of transition from what went before to what is to follow. The essential thing is to direct our attention to what is changing. And from that point of view there are more important and less important moments in the great world evolution of mankind. And it is clear that beneath the surface, as it were, of outer events something is happening in our time with respect to enormously important impulses of human evolution. In my last lecture I drew your attention to the fact that one must see into the so-called unconscious, or subconscious, of the human being if one would recognize what is really vitally involved in the transition mankind is undergoing today. Not much in our consciousness today tells us about the evolution of mankind in general, although we are living precisely in that world-age in which a development of the consciousness-soul is normal for the individual. Mankind as a whole, as distinguished from the individual, is in this age passing through a development of inner soul and spiritual forces, and for that reason the development is more in the subconscious. For mankind as a whole we must look for the most important forces of transition in the subconscious; while for the individual, we will find the most important forces today in the tendency to develop complete consciousness. In the individual an instinctive, more naive soul-life is changing more and more to a conscious soul-life; in mankind as a whole, however, an important change is taking place unconsciously, without the individual often being aware of it unless he has deepened his vision by work in spiritual science.

This vital change, this most important happening, is not so easy to describe, for our language has been made fundamentally for the purpose of reproducing outer sense reality in the soul. This makes it difficult for us to describe precisely, or adequately, something that does not belong to sense reality, but to supersense existence. Often one has to make use of comparisons—not abstract ones but such as you are well acquainted with in spiritual science, where one phenomenon of life is placed by the aide of another so that one will throw light on another. If such comparisons are used it must at the same time be made very clear that only flexible thinking, thinking that does not stamp the concepts, the words, into a set shape, in really compatible with the sense of what is presented. If I want to characterize the most important thing that is happening to mankind as a whole at the present moment of world evolution (I have already pointed it out) I must compare it with the experience that an individual has (consciously, however) when he crosses the threshold, as it is called, into the supersense world. You all know from the description I have given of this individual experience in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment that the crossing of the threshold is an event of deepest significance for the human being. On this side of the threshold is the sense world for man's consciousness, and on the other, the supersense world. Truly, on that other side everything is different from things of the sense world here. And man experiences something there that is named by those who went through the same experience in the manner of former ages in the significant words, “passing through the gate of death”. Indeed, he who crosses the threshold has to learn to know death in its reality. He has to become acquainted with death in its meaning for humanity.

Now you know from the description which I have given in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds that in this crossing of the threshold the entire soul being of man goes through a transformation—but only, of course, for those times in which one remains consciously in the supersense world. The constitution of soul that one has here in the sense world, that is suited to life, to work and action, in the sense world: one cannot come into the supersense world with that. Here in the sense world our soul forces are as it were melted together, so that we never have the experience in our sense life of these soul forces being separated. Anyone who did not have a certain amount of willing in his soul at the same time that he was thinking, even though in a latent form, would not be really healthy physically. We are not in a position in our sense life to separate these three soul forces one from another, so that really we never develop a pure isolated thought, or a pure isolated feeling, or a pure isolated willing. In our conceptions, feelings, actions, and will, these three soul forces are still interwoven always, mixed up with one another. But as soon as we cross the threshold into the supersense world—that is, as soon as we get our soul to the stage where we are actually surrounded by supersense beings, by supersense deeds of these beings, just as formerly we were surrounded by a world of sense things and sense happenings—then, my friends, then there takes place in our soul an absolute separation of thinking, feeling, and willing. As you hove been able to gather from the description in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, a man must have so schooled himself that he is able then to summon sufficient power to hold together with his ego these three elements of the soul life, thinking, feeling, and willing:—otherwise he would split up into three persons.

Yes, my dear friends, one meets with a significant experience of inner activity when one has crossed the threshold; this finding oneself within in the most enhanced activity of the ego, in the highest manifestation of the ego, for the purpose of holding together the separated soul forces, thinking, feeling, and willing. And that accounts for the fear that a faint- hearted man today feels: fear of actual supersense knowledge, fear before the highest kind of inner soul activity. He would like all of his activity to be of such a kind as is aroused by the outer world and has effect in the outer world. Inner activity is not yet natural to him; more and more it must be developed by him for the future. And so, because at first this development is a task, because it is not actually already inherent, man is afraid, man is cautious about entering the supersense world. Unconsciously he is afraid of himself (if I may so express it) in face of the exertion necessary there to hold the separated soul forces together.

I am picturing this inner experience of the individual in order to have some way by which to characterize for you that which is happening in this age inside the soul life—and you know that one can speak of such a thing—of mankind as a whole. That which I have just described as an individual's experience when crossing the threshold into the supersense world is naturally a fully conscious experience for him, much more so then any conscious experience of his ordinary waking day consciousness. It is a heightened consciousness in which one crosses the threshold and in which one perceives in the supersense world the threefold nature of the human soul being. Something similar to that—but now not consciously—the whole of mankind is going through in the present age as a cosmic historical experience. It is not noticed, this unconscious process that is going on in all mankind, unless one in studying consciously in spiritual science. You know our age is the fifth since the great Atlantean catastrophe which made the configuration of our earth surface as it now exists. We are living in the fifth post-Atlantean period; and in this period mankind must go through in its evolution as a whole something similar to what the crossing of the threshold into the supersense world is for an individual. Mankind as a whole, I said, in its cosmic—or we can say if we like terrestrial—evolution, is crossing a threshold on one side of which, or in other words, for the time preceding which, an entirely different kind of world conception and knowledge was necessary for mankind as a whole than is necessary on the other side, or in other words, for the time afterward.

This process going on in the unconscious of all mankind today is what one must discover through spiritual science. It shows also how necessary spiritual science is to mankind today. For the crossing of this threshold must truly not remain in the unconscious. Men must become aware of it, otherwise they will sleep right through, or at least dream right through, an event that is very important for them. And this fifth post-Atlantean period is the very period in which we should be extending consciousness. But we cannot extend our consciousness of the most vital thing that is happening to mankind in any other way then by rising out of mere sense-science into spiritual science.

If you think about this, my dear friends, you will perhaps remember something that has been said again and again in the course of spiritual scientific, lectures which have been held now for such a long time in Stuttgart.

You remember I have had to emphasize this fact again and again: that Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, is not just something as it were to satisfy an individual's subjective thirst for knowledge. Spiritual Science is something that is connected with the taking up in thought, feeling, and will, of the fundamental impulse of mankind for our time. Therefore activity in spiritual science should not be a mere satisfying of an individual's longing for the newest thing, nor a mere satisfying of his desire, for knowledge. Spiritual Science should be the fulfilling of a certain duty that one has toward mankind as a whole, in order that it shall realize what is going on precisely at this moment in the depths of its evolution.

I showed you when I spoke to you last time that certain individuals who have a degree of external cleverness developed by the scientific training of the present day, are definitely aware of a phenomenon that is present in mankind in this epoch and that corresponds to something in the depths of mankind of which they are not aware. I showed you how such individuals as for example Fritz Mauthner, say that first and foremost in man is his sense perception; and that that is the only true reality of which one can speak. He reflects this reality in its highest form by his creation in art of the beautiful and the sublime. But it does not permit him to arrive at any satisfaction. He wants to penetrate things more deeply. If he tries to penetrate into the being of things through his inner self, then—Mauthner says—he does not arrive at a real contact with the true being of the world, but only comes to dreaming—dreaming which may be pleasing because he imagines it is connected with the central forces of the world, but which nevertheless, so far as knowing is concerned, is after all just dreams, just mysticism. Mysticism then is, for these persons, the second stage of man's inner soul-striving. Then they assert that mysticism is, from their point of view, dream knowledge, they are right, because they deny a supersense knowledge. The third stage, for Fritz Mauthner, is man's struggle to attain knowledge by busying himself with natural laws, historical laws, etc.; and he describes all that as docta ignorantia, on the ground that when we think we know something through science we are not merely dreaming, as in mysticism, but sleeping—sleeping as compared with what would be a real contact with the central forces of the world. Thus persons like Fritz Mauthner think that at the most man has a waking sense perception and can ennoble it through art; that he is doomed to dream when he attempts to connect himself with true reality in religion or mysticism through his inner nature; and that he is doomed to sleep when he believes he is connecting himself with things in any way through science and wisdom.

My dear friends, speaking in an absolute sense, that is all a mistake. But speaking relatively of the special soul-condition that mankind has evolved through the 19th century into the 20th century, speaking quite specifically of this mankind and not of mankind in general, it is a truth. With the means that natural scientific knowledge has made great, by which we have come to such a shipwreck of the social older, with those means the only possible soul life is what Fritz Mauthner has described; that is, the three stages—waking, in sense perception; dreaming, in mysticism; and sleeping, in science.

Such a man as Fritz Mauthner feels the crossing of the threshold by mankind as a whole. Whoever has read his Critique of Speech in which he criticizes not only concepts but speech itself -- or the two thick volumes of his Philosophical Dictionary, or even one or two of the articles in it (it is arranged alphabetically)—that person knows the soul condition he gets into as a result of this very work of Mauthner. I suggest especially—you will perhaps only be grateful for my suggestion from one point of view—that you read the article on “Christianity” in this Dictionary of Philosophy—or the article “Res Publican”, or “Goethe's Wisdom”, or “Immortality”. Everywhere you will have the feeling: first one reads a sentence; in the second sentence what one has just read is modified; in the third the modified statement is again modified; in the fourth one gets back to the first; in the fifth the entire thing is picked up again with all the assertions and modifications included. One undergoes a twisting of one's whole intellectual, rational, and soul system, and it is frightful what one experiences after such a reading. It is a frightful inner soul torture. And if one describes the inner soul torture that a man experiences after such reading—man, that is, who has sufficient courage to admit the final outcome of the present day condition of soul (there are many who have not that courage)—then in the exposing criticism that one would make, and such as I have just made, one will not be censuring Fritz Mauthner, for his very article is a confession that he suffers from the same condition of soul himself. For he says: With human knowledge one can come to nothing else than a kind of “spirit dance” in which one does not discover oneself. He mistakes the lack of knowledge that became necessary in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century for a supposed absolute incapacity for knowledge in all mankind.

What actually is the truth? Something quite different from what Mauthner believes.

In former ages, as you know, in the clairvoyance of Atlantean times, man did not dream in mysticism but had contact through mystic knowledge with reality. Also, he did not merely sleep in wisdom. We realize from what still remains of older wisdom, Plato, for instance—that they knew things to tell mankind. In Aristotle, that is already no longer true. Mankind of former ages did not have just a docta ignorantia; it had a wisdom in which it was connected with the central forces of he world, that are at the same time the central forces of the human being. But these faculties ebbed away. They had to, in order that man might then seek within himself for those strong powers that were previously given him by spiritual beings without any effort on his part. Today we are crossing the threshold, mankind as a whole; and we must develop out of our inner self the power with which to awaken mysticism, which otherwise by its very nature sleeps within us—by our own power to call mysticism from its dreaming to an experience of the spirit; and also by our inner activity, inner force, to raise what is otherwise dead abstract science to actual experience of supersense spiritual reality. Today, my dear friends, this is in our power. We must undertake the necessary training.

And men who are are willing to accept spiritual science will, like Fritz Mauthner, be obliged to experience the tragic soul condition that has been a necessary accompaniment to the evolving of man's inner forces. Men like Mauthner, who do feel such things and yet are not willing to accept spiritual science, will indeed have to despair of all possibility of contact with the central forces of existence which are at the same time the central forces of the human being. Therefore they will have to despair of the possibility of any knowledge of life. My dear friends, if you think earnestly of what I have just said, will you not have to say to yourselves: Man is confronted today in his evolution, through the fact of his unconscious crossing of the threshold, by a mighty test. It is that indeed. For if he will not develop activity of soul, intense activity of soul, then he is condemned to sink into inactivity, passiveness, and thereby into unbelief in existence—at the very least into some degree of uncertainty—when he considers his place in the whole current of world evolution. That is approximately the soul-condition of men of whom Mauthner is a type.

There are many such men in the present day; but Mauthner had sufficient inner courage to acknowledge it in many writings, while others are in the same condition of soul and do not acknowledge it. He finally had sufficient resignation to retire to Southern Bavaria after he had spent his whole life in journalism as a profession; and there he thought out the Critique of Speech, his book of bitter doubt of human knowledge; then afterwards he wrote his Philosophical Dictionary. He has withdrawn, but he still writes all kinds of articles that truly no more than his book tend to lead to a positive, forceful position within human evolution. They always show a kind of despair of the possibility of one's really comprehending existence, because as a matter of fact one cannot comprehend existence through knowledge. He has finally accepted the consequence, he has given in and withdrawn to a profession that to him is equivalent to journalism, and in which one can be a skeptic, a pessimist.

But there are pupils of Fritz Mauthner who have not been so resigned. Let us ask, what will become definitely, what will become of these pupils who subscribe wholeheartedly to Mauthner's conception of life? They will never be able to arrive at a living comprehension of reality at any comprehension that can penetrate reality fruitfully. They are unable to adapt themselves to life when they are placed in it. Fritz Mauthner got out of it. They only comprehend the sense life, and they believe that anything that goes on outside of that is only a dream or sleep. Look at one of these pupils of Mauthner—Gustav Landauer, for instance—noble, upright, but altogether useless or the social life of the present day. He is a real pupil of Fritz Mauthner. It is not enough today merely to judge life from the surface. We are confronted with tasks that can only be master- edit we are willing to go down into the foundations of life. We may not seek thought impulses today for a new social order—as do such men as I have described—out of whet the time has already brought. No we must seek even social impulses out of the age that is dawning, out of the impulses that are just arising, the impulses of spiritual knowledge. Otherwise we will not arrive at real social impulses. Then when they are found, they can be comprehended, like all spiritual scientific knowledge by a healthy human understanding. It is in such a sense that I wanted to speak of the Threefold Commonwealth.

Today it is essential that men learn to speak in all things with deepest earnestness, first for true self knowledge, secondly for true world knowledge.

Consider Spiritual Science, as it is meant here, from the most varied points of view. Certainly the need for self knowledge and the need for world knowledge are emphasized by it, just as in abstract mysticism and in much abstract occultism. But they are spoken of in a different way. And in that way I should like to write the very heart of our time: One can never attain real self knowledge without seeking this self knowledge through world knowledge. Brooding within oneself does not bring self knowledge. World knowledge must first discipline one so that one can then come to self knowledge. Also, one cannot attain world knowledge without making the way through one's self. World knowledge is not possible without self knowledge. The two things seem to contradict each other, perhaps, but this contradiction is living and fruitful. No world knowledge without self knowledge, no self knowledge without world knowledge. It is like the swinging of a pendulum back and forth. Man must seek continually in his life the swing of the pendulum from self experience to world experience, from world experience to self experience. That will give the strength of soul, that inner activity of soul, which becomes today, and in the future will become, ever more and more necessary to all mankind. Because it is so very easy today for men to brood within themselves, out of a certain egoism that is natural in this age of the development of the consciousness-soul; for that reason they have fallen in love with abstractions. They themselves cannot really judge correctly how strong their love is, in this age, for mere abstractions. For that reason it is all-important—in order to cross the threshold which I have described in the right way—that we arouse ourselves from a mere abstraction-necessity, a mere thought-necessity, to fact. From mere abstract knowledge to an experiencing of fact. To a thinking within ourselves that is not mere thoughts but that sinks us into the things, that thinks with the things and events of the world. Only then can we wake to the present.

I will give you an example of what I mean. But first I would say that, you should not interpret what I am going to say as if, when I have to characterize this or that world conception, I wanted also to take a stand against them. I only want to characterize, not criticize. What one calls “the natural scientific world conception”, or thinking orientated in the direction of natural science, has evolved in a way that I have characterized for you from most varied points of view. It has finally reached such an outlook as Mauthner's; and it has expressed itself in other variations. I wonder whether you remember a man whom I mentioned here once years ago in another connection: the man who wanted to describe the difficulty of self knowledge in one of his books called An Analysis of Experience. He wants to describe the external difficulty of self knowledge, and for that purpose gives two instances of his having been thoroughly illusioned with respect to knowledge of his own external self. Once, he says, he was walking up the street and suddenly someone was approaching him (the writer was a professor), and he thought to himself, “What a strange looking school master that is coming toward me! The person was very unattractive to him, he says. Then he noticed what actually had occurred: he cam in front of a show window and found he was facing himself in the glass. On another occasion he got into an onmibus. Opposite the door by which he entered was a mirror. He was extremely tired. He sw the image and said to himself:“What a funny looking tramp that is coming in the opposite door!” It took him a long time to realize that it was himself. There is the tale, and you will be able to judge that after all here is a man to be taken seriously: Ernst Mach, who from a natural researcher became a philosopher. He has various pupils. His world conception is not unlike Mauthner's except that he came less to uncertainty, less to skepticism; he simply believes in the play-quality of thought. The ego itself is merely a myth to him, as also to Mauthner, only Mach is content. One must study Ernst Mach, and then become acquainted with his life and his whole personality. I remember when I saw him for the first time, in the Vienna Academy of Science, where he was giving a special lecture on the Economy of Thinking, in the course of which he explained all thinking as merely an arrangement according to the principle of the smallest amount of force. I was greatly enraged at the time by this presentation of the thought process. Afterwards he elaborated the theory and wrote his books, and they had a great influence over many people. One who knows his life knows that he was undoubtedly a very excellent citizen, obedient to the city he served throughout his teaching career, and in his teachings a typical example of the thinking that has evolved in recent times.

I might name another similar thinker. Mach himself did not teach in Zurich, but a pupil of his, Adler—the same Adler who shot the Austrian minister Stürgkle. But there was even a much more abstract thinker in Zurich, and his world conception was very similar to the philosophy of Mach—Richard Avenarius. I shall not recommend that you read his books; You would throw them away after the second page. They are written in unintelligible language. And the most unintelligible thing for you would be, how it happens that so very many people have wormed their way into Avenarius's books and have formed a world conception out of his philosophy.

You see, these are extreme cases to show you the difference between a logic of mere abstract thoughts and a logic of fact. Avenarius was also in his life a good middle-class citizen, an excellent citizen of the state in the best sense of the word. But such people as Ernst Mach, his pupil Adler, in whom it was even more apparent, and Avenarius—let us take just Mach and Avenarius—they feel nothing of that logic of fact within which they stand through their on actions. For, look you, what became of the world-conception of this Ernst Mach, solid Bourgeois teacher? What became of it? It became the political philosophy of the Bolshevists; it is the world-conception that lies at the bottom of Bolshevism. Only it went through other human temperaments, through other human soul conditions. That is the actual consequence! The consequence according to fact-logic, of what Ernst Mach and Avenarius taught. It was not just by external chance that some gifted young Russians studied with Avenarius and then with Adler in Zurich; and that then this philosophy happened to be carried over into Russia. No, there is an inner spiritual connection there. It can only be grasped by one who does not think about things, but who thinks in things; he then knows that no system of abstract logical consequences leads from Avenarius and Mach to Lenin and Trotsky, but only a very living logic leads from one to the other. Those are the things upon which so much depends today. They are only comprehensible to one who has sufficient earnestness to study fro the inside how things become, how things metamorphose. We have come to a time when inner life is complicated: when anyone can believe, just as Mach and Avenarius did, that he is a law-abiding man who lives only “on the heights in spiritual serenity”, and does not for a moment suspect that his teachings are capable of becoming political dynamite when they are passed on to other minds.

The great call to men today is to develop in themselves a sense for the deeper connections of life. Without that sense we can go no further. If we want to arrive at fruitful social, ideas then we must not search, as Mach and Avenarius did, for the dead ruins of old self-annihilated world-conceptions. We must turn to the new structure, the world-conception that can only be found in Spiritual Science and that alone understands how to ask: That kind of social order must come, since from now on man, as he passes through the world, will be ever more and more threefolded in his inner nature—for that is how he is crossing the threshold. The external social order must also be threefold. Then outer and inner fact will correspond. This threefolding, if one will really examine it earnestly through Spiritual Science, is not something invented; it is something, that has been learnt from listening to the actual inner metamorphosis of mankind as it moves from the present into the future.

Among all the necessities confronting the man of the present day, is this one: that he develop the willingness to concern himself with the spiritual world; that he develop first of all the willingness so to observe himself—that he is able to see the spiritual man that is underneath. The materialism of natural science has not been worthless. It has been significant and useful even in the form of Haeckelism. That is all a test that must be undergone. It classes man with the animals, because with respect to practically everything that it considers important, man appears to be nothing more than a highly developed animal. However, as soon as we begin to consider man in his relation to the world with respect to self knowledge, then at once the thing is different. Then facts which before were of no importance become important, and vice versa. From a certain perspective a new light streams upon the whole being of man. We know it is a fact (and the exceptions only teach more bout the fact) that the animal walks about the earth with his backbone parallel to the earth's surface. Man makes himself erect in the very first period of his life; he places his body, or his backbone, at right angles with the earth's surface, and thereby forms a cross with the earth's surface and also a cross with the position of the animal's backbone. That fact expresses clearly man's relation to the outside world. It is different from the animal's relation. Of course you can read in Haeckel: Man has just as many bones and muscles as the higher animals. But there are other things to he compared which in an intuitive, or, better, an imaginative grasp of various relations between them, demonstrate the common form of the cosmos and the earth; and this manner of comprehension of the human form is more important than counting bones and muscles, more important than what comparative morphology has to say about man.

I could say a great deal in this connection that would show you,that where the old world conception which has ripened such thought-habits in man as have plunged him into his present misfortune—that where this thinking and these thought-habits end, now a new world conception must begin which, for instance, will comprehend the human form. Then it will give a spiritual view of the world that will fructify the independent spiritual member of the social organism. And at a still higher stage one will have a living knowledge of that existence which is always around us, the “open secret”, as Goethe called it. From there one will rise to an “awakening” such as I have described in my books, Human Riddles and Soul Riddles; one will rise beyond mere comprehension of the relation of the human form to the cosmos to the stage that is actual participation in the great rhythmic swing of the cosmos.

You know that man consists of these three members: nerve-sense system, rhythmic system, and metabolic system. He stands within his nerve-system in such a way as to be able to comprehend the relation of his form to the cosmos. With respect to his feelings—his rhythmics or breathings or breast-system—he stands with this rhythm within the rhythm of the whole world. We can only just touch upon this rhythm now from one angle—we could naturally do much more, but we have mentioned it often in the course of these years from the most varied points of view. I will only repeat what I have often said.

Look at our breathing. Normally, we take 18,breathe a minute. That makes about 25,920 breaths a day. So that in a day we breathe in and out alternately 25,920 times. That is the average number of breaths that a man takes. Now you know that the Old Testament puts the age of a patriarch at 70 years. Naturally one can grow older or die younger, but that is the average age of man. How many days of life is that? An average of 25,920 days. Now if you count that huge breath that we take when we enter in the morning with our ego and astral body into our etheric and physical bodies, so that in the morning we breathe in our spiritual psychic being, and in the evening we breathe it out again—if we count that as a a breath that is drawn every day, then our life-day which consists on the average of 71 years, draws 25,920 breathe. In other words, that great spirit that breathes when we are born and when we die, breathes in his life-day which includes our whole human life, the same number of inhalations and exhalations as we do in our day of 24 hours. So we are related with our human breath to that breathing of the the product of his breath in our waking and sleeping life. And the sun—which you can at least suspect to have some relation to our life—men observe how its rising moves back in the Zodiac a certain number of degrees every year, in such a way that if spring comes at a certain place in a certain constellation one year, the next year it shifts back a few degrees. So the rising of the sun circles around the whole ellipse in what is called a Platonic world-year, which consists of 25,920 years. A life-day for and death consists of 25,920 life-years. A life-day for us consists of 25,920 breaths; our life between birth and death consists of 25, 920 life-days; a great sun-year consists of 25,920 of our life-years. Thus we are brought to what is breathed in the whole sun-earth-process through a Platonic world-year. There you see into a world rhythm of which is a part within the cosmos.

Without at least the willingness to gain an active knowledge of man's relation to the cosmos you can attain no knowledge of man. You can comprehend nothing more through the natural science of today—however strangely this sounds—than man's life up to birth. After man is born something enters into his lie that natural science can no longer comprehend. Therefore natural science has to stay dallying in the method it especially loves, embryology. That is especially apparent today in the fact that the entire teaching of evolution is only an elaboration of embryology. All the rest is phantasy. As soon as man begins to live on earth the necessity immediately arises of contemplating him in imaginative and inspired knowledge. For that is the only means by which one can perceive what man experiences at death, and what death is. At the highest stage of knowledge, true Intuition, which you find described in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, one attains to that insight into being which is wonderfully indicated in the German language, for one says when a man dies—with a certain fitness—he verwest. (perishes) If today one could still feel something in words, one would truly feel that verwesen means ins Wesen übergehen, ins Wesen hineingehen, mit dem Wesen eine werden. (To go over into being, to go into being, to become one with being) When the language speaks of verwesen it truly is not talking of vergehen (to pass away) [Translator's Note: Although in English one says “pass away”, the German word vergehen which means that, is apparently never used in connection with death; verwesen is the word in common use.] And that mysterious process the deep knowledge of which will create a natural science of the future, the process that is only completed when the human body apparently perishes or is reduced to ashes, is not a destructing; it is a significant constructive part of the event.

Through this kind of consideration I should like to arouse a feeling for the inner connection that lies between what is the dying world-conception and scientific tendency of the old time, and the Spiritual Science that is still in the seed today, really just emerging, in the sense of what it will be in the future. But now the two things are roughly pushed together, and that is the deep tragedy of modern life which we must overcome by inner human power. What I call—one may perhaps be offended by it—the dying bourgeois conception of the world and of life, is at an end; it has brought about its on ruin. What is emerging today as proletarian longing—although still very far from what it will be—has other human foundations. While the bourgeois world-conception is dying in the ether body, what is evolving out of the proletarian world is springing to in the astral body. An extraordinarily significant symbol of the dying world-conception was the egoism of Max Stirner. You will find it described in my book Riddles of Philosophy. We live in an age when we must always try not to judge the thing that is just arising by its outside. However many mistakes it may be making here and there, we must be able to see that the social movement is evolving today among the proletariat out of man's spiritual outlook as the seed of the future. We must be able to see that mankind is passing over a threshold and has to enter into supersense knowledge. And the key that reveals this tendency to one who has supersense—spiritual—knowledge, is precisely the fact that the proletarian world is behaving itself very materialistically indeed, in this or that leader, this or that political boss, fighting against that which it will be someday. It fights against it. It has accepted the bourgeois way of thinking as a final bequest; but it is called in human evolution to cross the threshold consciously, to work its way out of materialistic delusion to real knowledge of the supersensible.

These things that we are considering must be studied by observing their spiritual foundations, so that they do not merely become abstract knowledge but, become an inner impulse for our will. Then we will be able to establish our position within this present social order at the right time and in the right way, with full consciousness.

My intention is to give a series of lectures which will enable you to understand the present time and the immediate future in some aspects at least. It should be a coherent whole, but it may sometimes be necessary to go a long way back. There will be a continuous thread through it all, but I would ask you to see the parts always in the context of the whole. I will sometimes go far and wide to collect the material we need to understand the present time, and some of it may seem remote.

When I say ‘the present time’ I mean quite a long period of time, going back several decades and also looking decades ahead. It is important to realize that it will be necessary to present truths based on the science of the Spirit that in many respects go utterly against current and generally accepted beliefs. The world holds opinions that not only differ but often are the direct opposite of the truths that have to be spoken out of anthroposophy. It is only to be expected, therefore, that people will consider these truths to be incredible, warped and downright foolish.

When truths which differed from generally accepted views had to be said in the past, in order to open up a road to the future, the difference between those truths and common opinion was probably never as marked as it inevitably is today. This may not be absolutely the case, but, relatively speaking, it is so, for people are tremendously intolerant in their hearts today and less able to accept views which differ from their own.

In the immediate future, people will feel more strongly than ever before that the new and different views presented to them are fanciful and absurd. Nevertheless, truths that until now were closely guarded by small groups of people, with strict silence demanded of anyone to whom they were made known, must increasingly be made public. It does not matter how public opinion and those who hold it react to these truths; nor do the prejudices and counter-currents matter that are provoked by them.

The reason for this will be discussed later on in these lectures. To begin with, I must speak of some of the ways in which people will react to truths today and in the immediate future. People believe they have long since outgrown the illusions and superstitions of the past, yet in some respects they are entirely given up to illusion. There is a growing tendency to live in illusion concerning some important and essential aspects of the great scheme of things, and this to such an extent that these illusions become powers that rule the world, nations and, indeed, the whole earth. It is important to realize this, for illusory ideas are a major element in the chaos in which we find ourselves today; in fact, they make it a chaos.

Let me tell you of one common illusion which exists today and is closely bound up with the materialistic trends of the age. It is the growing tendency to form utterly wrong opinions about what in the science of the spirit is called the physical plane. And the New Testament words that are fundamental in this respect: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’,¹ are increasingly less understood today. They are misunderstood in so far as the leading personalities of the outer world are caught up in the illusion that their kingdom should be very much of this physical world.

What do I mean to say? Anyone who is able to see the reality, and to see through it, knows that this world on the physical plane can never reach perfection. Yet people who think materialistically have the illusion that perfection can be achieved on the physical plane. This is the source of many other illusions, and particularly and characteristically the socialist illusion of the present age.

People's illusions come in all shades of meaning; they are coloured by party politics and so on. People who take a liberal view of the world and of life have constructed their own ideal of the physical world and believe that if they realize this we shall have paradise on earth. All that the socialists are able to think of is how to arrange things on this physical plane so that everybody can live what they consider to be the good life, the same for everybody, and so on. Their vision of the future on this physical plane is of a wonderful paradise. Do examine the programmes put forward by people who see themselves as belonging to the many different socialist parties and you will see for yourselves.

They are not the only people, of course, who have such views and opinions. Teachers also do, for instance. Today, every educational agitator and writer is absolutely convinced that it is up to him to establish the best possible educational system, the best principles of education one can think of. And in an absolute sense they really are the best, one cannot imagine anything better.

To go against such endeavours must seem sheer madness to people. The way things are today, people simply must consider anyone who does not want things to be the best possible in the world to be evil-minded. One can understand people feeling this way. Yet it is not evil-mindedness that stops us from thinking their way but a clear vision of the truth. It tells us that it is illusory to think such levels of perfection can be achieved in the physical world. And if it is a law that there never can be perfection in the physical world, just as it is a law that the three angles in a triangle add up to 180°, then people will simply have to face such a truth boldly and not shrink from it.

So there you have the kind of illusion which arises from entirely materialistic premises. Many say they believe in the world of the spirit, but with many of them this is mere words, nothing but hot air. In their innermost hearts, in their feelings and unconscious impulses, lives something different—the inclination to think materialistically. However much people may pretend to themselves that they believe in something else, in reality they believe only in the physical world. And since they do not believe in anything more than just the physical world around them, the only ideal they can possibly have is to arrange things in the physical world in such a way that it becomes a paradise; otherwise the whole world would make no sense to them. Until materialists are prepared to say that the world makes no sense at all, they can only live in the illusion that, however imperfect this physical world may be, it will be possible to create conditions that will put an end to imperfection and let perfection take its place.

Everything coming to the fore today in this respect—in general terms, with all kinds of political, social and other agitators making great words about it, or in specific instances, such as in education—is based on illusion because people are unable to see the connections between the physical world and the other spheres of the world. In no way can they gain an idea of what Jesus Christ meant when he said: ‘My kingdom is not of this world’, and why Jesus Christ did not want to bring a kingdom of perfection to realization here in the physical world. There is nothing in the gospels to show that Christ intended to reform this outer kingdom of the physical world and make it into one of perfection. He certainly did not cherish that illusion. But he made up for this lack of desire to establish paradise in the physical world by giving people something which is not of this world: to let impulses enter into their souls which are always alive in the world but are not of this physical world.

Illusions of this kind dominate the human race today in the widest possible sense, and this creates an unhealthy climate. People are free individuals and therefore free to live in illusion. In more down-to-earth contexts their illusions would immediately be seen to be illusions. When we are dealing with physical objects, fools who invent things which merely work in theory are instantly seen to be under an illusion. It is not immediately obvious, however, in the vast field of social and political life.

The following story is one I have told before. When I was a young fellow of 22 or 23, one of my fellow students came to me one day, his head aglow, absolutely fired with enthusiasm, and told me he had just made an important, epoch-making invention. Oh, I said, that is nice; what are you going to do with it? Well, he said, I'll have to go and see Ratinger—our professor of mechanical engineering at the university—and tell him about it. No sooner said than done, and off he went. Ratinger was not free at the moment and so the student came back; he had been given an appointment for later on. So I said to him: Why don't you tell me about it in the meantime? We have some time to spare. Tell me about your invention. It was a very clever thing. He had invented a steam engine that needed just a very small amount of coal to heat it up; after that no more coal would be needed, for a special mechanism kept it going of its own accord. One merely had to start it up. This was certainly epoch-making! You will be wondering why we do not have it today. I got him to explain it all to me and then told him: You know, that is really clever; but if one looks at the whole thing it is no different from wanting to get a railway truck going by getting into it and pushing as hard as you can from inside. Someone standing outside can, of course, get it to move, but anyone inside will not get it to move a millimetre, even if they apply the same amount of energy. This is what it all came down to.

Things can be extremely logical and clever, developed by applying all kinds of technical principles, and they may still be nonsense, having been thought up without taking account of reality. What matters is not to be merely clever, or logical, but to relate to reality. In the end the student never went to see the professor.

When one is dealing with physical matter and mechanics, such a thing will soon be obvious. But in social and political affairs, and with reference to what in its widest sense may be defined as making everyone happy, it will not be immediately obvious. You can easily put forward ideas of exactly this kind; people will be impressed and believe you. Yet it is all a matter of being inside the truck and pushing from there. A time will come when a certain basic characteristic of the present time may actually be labelled with a particular name, a name that will typify a way of thinking which at heart is utterly illusory and unreal. I am very sure that in future people will speak of early twentieth century ‘Wilsonianism’. For Wilson's ideas are typical of those of someone who wants to push a railway truck from inside.

All the basic ideas of ‘Wilsonianism’ which make such an impression today are utterly unreal, though they also have a major influence on people for other reasons. They are powerful for the very reason that they cannot be realized. Any attempt to implement them it would soon show them to be meaningless. But people are able to imagine they could be implemented. If we were able to implement Wilsonian ideas, world philistinism would be realized throughout the world. Woodrow Wilson² really deserves to be made the universal saviour of general philistinism. Of course, philistines would not actually do all that well in a world organized by Wilson, which anyway cannot be realized, but at least they imagine that if Wilson's ideas were to conquer the world we would be able to live according to our ideals.

A time will come when people say: At the beginning of the twentieth century a peculiar ideal arose, which was to make the world into a perfect image of philistine, or bourgeois, ideals. Wilson's ideas will be analysed one day and presented as typical of the early twentieth century.

You see, we have not only small but also big examples of illusory ideas in our time. These illusions and unreal ideas are held not by otherworldly sects, but by groups whose beliefs spread far and wide.

Important and vital genuine truths must now be proclaimed to the world. For the reasons and because of the kind of conditions we have been discussing, they will show little relationship to the general opinions of today. Different conditions have to be created to enable people to grasp the truth. The truths which must inevitably come up are repulsive to many people today; they are thoroughly uncomfortable. The truths people like and ask for are convenient truths, for that is the way people are today.

Some of these uncomfortable truths will have to be presented in the course of these lectures. They need to be made known out of a feeling of responsibility, and above all they must relate not only to the physical plane. They must cut across the illusions people have of the physical plane and offer reality rather than fantasy. The most unrealistic and fantasy-ridden people today are those who consider themselves to be more or less entirely realistic. One makes the strangest discoveries in this respect.

I was recently sent a kind of lexicon listing the names of writers.³ It purports to list the names of all writers who have a connection with Judaism and anything which seeks to bring Judaism to realization in this world. I am one of the writers listed in the book, the reason being that, according to the author of the lexicon, I have many similarities with Ignatius de Loyola who is stated to have founded the Jesuits precisely because of his Judaism. Furthermore, I come from a border region between Germans and Slavs—which is where I happen to have been born, though my family certainly do not come from there—and apparently the fact that I come from there indicates that I am Jewish in origin—I have no idea why. This does not really surprise me, for I think you will agree that even odder things are published today. But the lexicon also includes Hermann Bahr as someone who is promoting Judaism—I was merely leafing through the book. Yet he is an out-and-out Upper Austrian. It is really and truly impossible to think of any way in which he can be connected with Jewish blood or the like. Nevertheless, this literary lexicon quotes a well-known literary historian as saying that Hermann Bahr definitely had Jewish traits.

Well, when I was said to be Jewish on one occasion—these things are not new—I had a photograph of my certificate of baptism made. Hermann Bahr also had to jump through those hoops, because a literary historian had said he was Jewish.⁴ Bahr wanted to establish the truth. The literary historian then said: Well, his grandfather may have been a Jew. But it simply is not possible to find anything in Bahr's family which is not absolutely Upper Austrian German. This was of course an embarrassment for the literary historian, but he would stick to is opinion. He went so far as to say that if Hermann Bahr were actually to present the certificates of baptism for the last twelve generations to show that he did not have a drop of Jewish blood rom anywhere, then he, the historian, would believe in reincarnation if forced to do so. So you see, the reason for believing in reincarnation is a highly peculiar one in the case of this renowned and widely-read literary historian.

There are times today when it is really difficult to take what is said by famous people at all seriously. It is a pity, of course, that it is so difficult to convince the wider public of this. People are rather in the habit of believing in authority, despite the fact that modern people do not believe in authority at all, of course! Such, at least, is their opinion. Yesterday we were able to learn something about the opinions people have of themselves.

Today, when people's basic instincts sometimes take them so far from the truth, it is extremly difficult to accept the truths relating to the region which borders immediately on the physical world. To characterize anything relating to this region one has to appeal to healthy, incorrupt minds, and this presents the greatest difficulties one can imagine. For when it comes to the truths which must now be made known, the whole constitution of the human soul will be affected even if people merely get to know them, let alone gain direct perception of them.

External knowledge about the physical world has a certain effect—let us say on the human head. But truths which go deep, even if only to the depth where they relate to the world immediately next to the physical world, touch the whole human being and not only the head. To proclaim such truths one must be able to depend on a sound, incorrupt mind.

In many spheres of life today a sound, incorrupt mind is almost a rarity, whilst unsound, corrupt minds are far from uncommon. And the way individuals accept truths today strongly reveals the particular nature of their life of instincts and drives, the whole constitution of their souls, and their state of mind. People with corrupt instincts who are unwilling to apply some degree of discipline to their life-styles quickly tend to take an attitude which is completely determined by the base mind, particularly when the truths to be accepted relate to the world bordering on the physical world. This happens only too easily. If people do not take a healthy objective interest in what goes on in the world, if they are essentially only interested in anything that relates to themselves, this will often corrupt their mind and attitudes to such an extent that they do not have the right instincts for occult truths and particularly for truths relating to the world bordering on the physical world.

With respect to the physical world and anything relating to it, and to all the great advances humanity has made, I think I can say that physical nature makes sure this corruption does not go too far in human minds. People are confined within the Limits imposed by physical nature; they cannot get very far with their instincts and have to obey the laws of nature. When we move from the physical world into the one bordering on it, we are no longer on those leading reins; guidance has to take another form and a different, inner certainty is needed. This is only possible, however, if the mind is incorrupt as we go beyond the physical level; otherwise we lose all control in that other region where we are no longer controlled by physical nature, nor by social and traditional prejudices. We are suddenly quite free and cannot bear such freedom. For instance, the physical world has many ways of preventing people from lying: If someone were to say at 6 o'clock in the evening that the sun had just come up, nature would soon demonstrate this to be wrong. It is like this with many things relating to the physical world. If people insist on talking nonsense about things relating to the higher worlds, even if it is only the one immediately next to our own, the physical world will not immediately show them to be wrong. This, then, is the reason why people may lose all control if they rush to escape the discipline which is imposed in the physical world.

Here we have one of the great problems which may arise when truths relating to the non-physical world are presented. Yet the answer always has to be that it is simply necessary to present these truths today. We must not forget that truths relating to the non-physical world cannot be received in the same frame of mind as truths relating to the physical world. To take them in we must slightly loosen the etheric and astral bodies; otherwise we shall only hear words. The state of mind has to be such—and with reference to the phenomena of the subjective inner life it merely is a state of mind—that for any real understanding of the things of the spirit one has to loosen the etheric and astral bodies a little. This loosening should only be a means of gaining understanding of the world of the spirit. It must not become an end in itself; this would be a very serious matter.

Imagine—to take an extreme case—someone comes to an anthroposophical lecture, not in order to gain insight into the realms of the spirit, which would be the right thing, but because he thinks this is truly mystical. As he listened he would let the words flow through him, as it were, because this would slightly loosen the ether body and the astral body. People certainly do come to lectures of this kind, sometimes also to those on pseudospiritual science, and listen in a kind of sleepy ecstasy; they are not really interested in the content, but more in the feeling of voluptuous pleasure which comes when the ether body and the astral body go partly outside the physical body. There may be other situations in life when to be thus ‘given up’, or ‘warm’, is a good thing; it is no good at all when it comes to revealing the truths relating to things of the spirit.

This must be properly understood. If spiritual truths are rightly understood, and if people are in all seriousness following the lines of thought used to develop concepts which may make the world of the spirit accessible to our understanding, their humanity will be enhanced and they will learn the things which have to be known at the present time for the salvation and further development of humanity. People who take these truths into themselves in the right way will also find their drives and instincts ennobled and raised to a higher level. By merely listening to spiritual truths they go through a development that is for the good.

Anyone who is not willing to accept anthroposophical truths in this sense but is perhaps doing so from some kind of purely personal interest—let us say he wants to belong to a society and has not found another one which suits him as well as the Anthroposophical Society does—anyone who comes to this Society with personal interests may indeed find that spiritual truths will first of all activate low instincts, and perhaps even the lowest of the low. It therefore does not come as a surprise that people who really should not be members but nevertheless do come and hear such things, find their lowest instincts brought to life. It is something that cannot be avoided at this time, for these things have to be made public and it is difficult to draw the line. The right way will only be found if those who have the inner justification to be part of such a movement use their wide-awake judgement and take themselves to task. People who in any way bring personal interests to bear, before or after leaving the Society, merely show that they never should have been members. And I think it is not really difficult to distinguish between personal interests and interest in objective understanding.

But it is not surprising that in the situation which has arisen because it is now necessary to make things generally known, it happens again and again that some of the instincts of the lower human nature come to the fore. The potential dangers must be consciously and clearly considered and ways must be found to correct them. If we take the right attitude to these dangers we shall certainly be able to meet them. This is very much a time—it is part of the chaotic situation we are in—when aberrations of this kind are far from uncommon. The tragic situation of today makes tremendous demands on the powers of many people. It is true to say that people who were not in the habit of working hard in the general rather than merely personal interest really have learned to work hard in the last three years. Many people have learned to work and to acquire general interests.

People who rightly belong to our movement will have come to it out of more than personal interest. Nevertheless, the present age does offer enormous opportunities for a kind of lazy outsider attitude. The specific constellation created by the war means that some people have really nothing to occupy them. If they are part of our movement they will also be aware of it. Before the war we had many lecture tours; a whole raft of people would get together and travel from one lecture to the next. Outer interest may have been lacking, but excitement could be found, and if this did not come from outside, people created their own excitements. This has now become difficult. It cannot be done. However, some people have not found a way of occupying themselves usefully. And that is why a lazy outsider attitude is to be found in our ranks exactly at this time, with people whiling away the time by creating all kinds of opposition. Being unable to get the excitement of travelling from lecture cycle to lecture cycle they find other ways of entertaining themselves. This merely shows the true nature of the interest that formerly made them travel from lecture cycle to lecture cycle.

When there is an inner obligation to represent anthroposophical truths before the world, in all seriousness and with dignity, you also know that more than fifty out of an audience of a hundred may well become opponents. That is a law; it is the way it is. If these fifty per cent of such people do not actually become opponents, there will be a reason for this, but it will not be because they are consistent. For reasons which have already been given and others that will be given, this is how matters are. Someone who represents anthroposophical truths is therefore not in the least surprised if there is opposition. We might take up the points that these opponents keep coming up with all the time, things they generally know better than anyone else to be untrue—for they do of course know that they are not true—but it would be much more useful to consider the sources from which such Opposition has Sprung.

All kinds of peculiar things will happen when we do so, and we shall then no longer feel inclined to take up the points that our opponents want us to take up. Instead, we are going to discover their true reasons. This can sometimes be more of an effort than to take up the points the opposition is making. Think of all the years in which lectures have been given here and how it has been necessary over and over again to say the same things I am also saying today, though this is always pointed out. But it is necessary to consider them with profound seriousness and dignity, and to consider them in a way which is fitting for an anthroposophical movement.

Believe me, I have more important things to do, if I am to lead this movement and be fully responsible for it, than to take account of the fact that three or four people, or even more if you will, get together and invent all kinds of gossip. I have more important things to do and never feel the inclination to go into such matters. But unfortunately this is so little understood! Even within this Society, there is more interest in excitement and sensation than genuine scientific interest. From the scientific point of view it is, for instance, interesting to study not only useful but also poisonous plants, but one has to find the right point of view. Very few of those who profess to follow anthroposophical spiritual science have even the least notion of the immense seriousness and importance of what it really should be. Forgive me for saying this. If there were the right seriousness and if the importance of this were really understood, people's attitudes would in many respects be very different from what they are. Of course I am not saying that people should turn their attention elsewhere. Rather the opposite: We should not turn our attention away from the phenomena which go hand in hand with the will to destroy this anthroposophical movement. But we have to find the right approach.

People may, for instance, write volumes in the way in which I have contradicted myself in my written works and with reference to all kinds of other things. One way of countering this would be to say that Luther was shown to have contradicted himself in hundreds of ways, not just a few dozen. His answer was: These asses are talking of contradictions in my works. I wish they would make the effort to try and understand just one of the things that appears to be in contradiction to other things!⁵ So one way would be to point out something like this. But there is no need for this. For when people speak in opposition today it is not because they are interested in finding and revealing contradictions but for quite a different reason.

Someone⁶ offered a manuscript to Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag,⁷ for instance. The publishing house was unable to use it and therefore returned it to the author. From this moment the author, who until then had been running after me wherever I went, became an opponent. The real reason was not that he had found contradictions. If that were the real reason we might use Luther's words. But we cannot do that, for the individual concerned can only be seen in his true colours if we know he is giving vent to his spleen because the publishing house was not able to publish his book. This was the real reason. So if we simply listen to the things people say, we shall have little opportunity for getting at the truth—just as little, perhaps, as the literary historian who would convert to reincarnation if this allowed him to continue in the belief that Hermann Bahr had Jewish connections. Conversion would be necessary if he were to be shown certificates of Christian baptism for Hermann Bahr's ancestors down to the twelfth generation.

Much is said about the courage which people are showing today. To assert the truths humanity needs today, in the sense I have spoken of, will need quite a different kind of courage—inner courage. But the place where this courage should be in the soul is occupied by cowardice, reluctance to take action, and this is tremendously widespread. In many respects it is due to this cowardice that anthroposophical spiritual science finds it so difficult to make its way today. It will make its way. But one should not sit back and accept; one should not think that things will go the right way without human involvement. One thing you will have to get used to—and it will be different from what you have been used to so far—is that I myself will have to be a lot less lenient in some respects than I have been until now. Do not think this is because I have changed my will and intention; you must look for the reasons in the existing situation.

You will have to understand that I cannot let the movement which I have to represent before the world go to the dogs in any old way. Forgive the expression. Higher duties are involved than people may dream of. I cannot be involved in whatever excitements or sensations some group or set may be desiring. Consideration must be given to many general and more important interests and impulses than to the purely personal ambitions which rule one set of people or another. To find the right way of presenting anthroposophy we simply must be able to set aside the purely personal element which for many is about the only thing that interests them today.

And so I must conclude here today with something which I have also been saying in all the other places where I have been speaking these days. There are many members of our anthroposophical science of the spirit who are truly dedicated and who have a clear idea of the seriousness of our work. But again and again there are others who do not belong and who behave in a way that simply would not happen if membership of the Society were limited to those who rightfully belong to it. Things keep coming up among members which are far removed from what is really intended; some of these can only be said to relate to what is really intended if one takes a totally distorted view.

Things are said by groups of people who have to be ignored—for our real interests go far beyond giving one's attention to the ambitions which are alive in those groups—things are said there, and people are beginning to believe them, which have no more to do with our true intentions than a dung beetle has to do with a pendulum clock. It is quite impossible to see how they go together. Yet fantastic stories created out of base instincts that are left to run riot are set in circulation. And this despite the fact that the people who generate them know full well that not a word is true. Such things can be explained in natural science, but we must also draw the logical conclusion and take the necessary actions. In the first place I am going to impose two rules an myself. Anyone who is going to speak of the one rule without the other, will be saying something which is not true. I have made these two rules known in all the places where I have been giving lectures in recent months.

In principle, I shall no longer continue to give private interviews to members of the Anthroposophical Society. For all those private interviews have led to reports which are full of lies. I have better things to do than refute the tales told by people who let their imaginations run riot, and so there is no other way but to discontinue these private interviews. Some individuals have a true esoteric impulse, and I will find other ways of making sure they are able to progress; it will just take while. The measure should not prevent anyone from progressing in esoteric development. But, generally speaking, all private interviews must now stop. This, then, is the first rule. Do not come to me, as people have done in some local groups, and say it is a harsh rule. No, do not come to me, go to those who are responsible.

The second thing is that I release everyone who has ever had a private interview with me from the promise not to talk about it, if they wish to do so. Anyone can tell anything they like about what has happened or been said in those private interviews—that is, in so far as they wish to do so. I am not going to prevent anyone from telling the whole truth about anything ever discussed with me in a private interview.

These two rules go together. The one does not apply without the other. And, as I said, if you think they are harsh, go to those who are responsible. Unless I am less lenient in these matters than I have been until now, the problems I am speaking of will not stop. As I said, I shall find other ways to make sure this does not harm anyone's esoteric development. Ways and means will be found. But, people being as they are today, it is not possible to establish such a science without things going badly astray on occasion, with people always jumping to the wrong conclusions. This is why there will have to be these rules.

People who take a serious and dignified approach to our spiritual-scientific development may find it difficult to understand how such things could come about, but they will accept the two rules as inevitable. From now on, everything will be entirely in the open. For there is nothing there which needs to shun the light! This is what is so shameful about it all: The truth and the whole truth could be told by everybody without leaving the least stain on our movement. But people have grown attached to something which has survived in our work as a continuation of earlier practices: to have individual interviews. 1f talking to individuals had not resulted in lies, the rule would not have been necessary. But everything ever said to any member can be truthfully told. Our movement can only gain from the truth—go and tell as much as you like. The truth will not be affected by the lies which are told; but it must not even appear to be affected, for it is important for humanity that anything presented out of a background of spiritual science is presented in a serious and dignified way.

So let me repeat once more: Without causing any loss to those who are seriously seeking esoteric development, I will generally no longer give private interviews for members. Everyone is free to tell everything they want about the interviews which have been given, but it must be the truth. I release everyone from whatever vow of silence there may be. But it should only be because individuals want to tell others for their own sake; they do not have to do it for my sake. And I have no objection to people spreading it about far and wide that these rules exist and are characteristic of our movement. Then the world will realize the infamous nature of the things that are so often said, especially about our Society.

• 1. John 18:36. The German for ‘kingdom’ in this sense is Reich (Trans.).
• 2. Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), President of the United States 1913–1921. (Wilson propagated ‘open’ diplomacy but refused to permit publication of his discussions at the 1919 Peace Conference in Paris. His Fourteen Points were to be the basis for the armistice in November 1918. Trans.)
• 3. Semi-Kuerschner oder Literarisches Lexikon der Schriftsteller, Dichter, Bankiers, Geldleute, Schauspieler, Kunstler, Musiker, Offiziere, Rechtsanwlte, Revolutionre, Frauenrechtlerinnen, Sozialdemokraten usw. jdischer Rasse und Versippung, die von 1813–1913 in Deutschland ttig oder bekannt waren (Semi-Kuerschner or literary lexicon of authors, poets, bankers, financiers, physicians, actors, artists, musicians, officers, lawyers, revolutionaries, women's rights activists, social democrats, etc., who were Jewish by birth or marriage and were active or known in Germany from 1813–1913), published by Philipp Stayff, Berlin 1913. The passage about Hermann Bahr reads as follows: ‘It is said, and people have assured me over and over again, that Hermann Bahr is not a Jew, but I believe in the adage: ‘Tell me who your friends are’ (Bahr's first wife was Jewish), and would maintain that Bahr is of Jewish origin even if he were to show me the certificates of baptism of his forebears for the last ten generations, and indeed if really pushed into a corner I would rather subscribe to belief in the transmigration of souls.’
• 4. Adolf Barthels in his Kritiker und Kritikaster, Leipzig 1903.
• 5. Martin Luther (1483–1546) religious reformer who led the German Reformation. He translated the Bible into the vernacular to make it accessible to everyone and wrote many works, their vigour still much appreciated today. The actual quote is: ‘How can these asses form an opinion on contradictory elements in our doctrine if they don't understand any aspect of those contradictory elements?’ From Ricarda Huch, Luthers Glaube, 10. Brief (translates as ‘10th letter’).
• 6. Max Seiling (1852–1928), Austrian poet and writer.
• 7. Philosophisch-Anthroposophischer Verlag is the publishing house established by Marie von Sivers in 1913 in Berlin for the publication of Rudolf Steiner's works. It moved to Dornach in November 1923.

Today I would like to approach the subject from a different angle and consider the connections that exist between the human being as a microcosmic entity and the whole macrocosm of the world, of which the human being is a part, a member, an organ, as it were. These things can be considered from the most diverse points of view, and in doing so, the most diverse relationships will come to light, which sometimes seem to contradict each other; but the contradictions consist in the fact that the matter must always be viewed from different sides.

From certain considerations that we have been making in these days, you have seen that actually man, as he relates to the world around him, mixes something of himself into his view of the world, that he actually does not take the world of sense as it is; that, as I have tried to express it drastically, he mixes into his view of the world something that rises from within, that is formed from within and that is actually a kind of transformation of the sense of smell. It is what man combines about the world in the most diverse ways, what comes out when he applies his ordinary acumen, as it is called, which comes to him through his body; one could also call it a sense of intuition. What else would be given to man if he could easily make the attempt at all - he can't even do it easily, because he can't easily switch off his intuition - if man would simply take the sensory world as it presents itself to him, without his mind, his combining mind immediately interfering in all sorts of ways.

This touches on a subject that may perhaps present some difficulties for understanding. But you can get an idea of what is actually meant if you consider how nature, the essence of a sense, comes to you. It is the same with the other senses, but the matter does not become apparent with the same clarity to the external observer, not as clearly as when you consider what is actually meant here for the sense of sight, for the eye. Consider that this eye as a physical apparatus is actually located as a fairly independent organ in the human skull and is actually only extended backwards into the human body by the appendages, the appendages of the blood vessels, the appendages of the nerves. One can say: this is the human eye, here is the extension (see drawing); but as an eye it lies here in the bony skull cavity with a great deal of independence, insofar as it is a physical apparatus. Here the lens, the incidence of the light rays, the vitreous body, so everything that is a physical apparatus is actually very independent. Only through the optic nerve, the choroid, which extends into the body, does the eye itself extend into the body, so that one can say that this eye, as a physical apparatus, insofar as it perceives the external sensory world in its visibility, is an independent organism, at least to a certain extent.

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It is actually the same for every sense, it is just not so obvious for the other senses. Each sense as a sense is basically something independent, so that one can already speak of a sensory zone. It is actually surprising that the study of the senses is not enough to drive the scholars concerned to some spirituality. Because it is precisely this independence of the senses that could drive the scholars to some spirituality. Why? You see, what is experienced through the optic nerve, through the choroid, that would – and this could easily be proven with ordinary science – that would not be enough to make a person aware of what he experiences in his senses. The remarkable thing about the senses is that the etheric body projects into this purely physical apparatus, and it is a purely physical apparatus. In all our senses we are dealing with something that is outside the organism and is only experienced by the etheric body. You would not be able to unite what is caused in your eye by the incidence of light with your consciousness if you did not permeate the sense of the eye, and thus the other senses too, with your etheric body.

A ray of light falls into the eye. This ray of light has exactly the same physical effect in the eye as the ray of light in a camera obscura, in a photographic apparatus. And you only become aware of what is happening in this natural camera of the eye because your etheric body lines the eye and captures what is not captured in the mere physical apparatus by an etheric body. In the mere physical apparatus, in the mere photographic apparatus, only the physical process takes place; so that man, in the totality of his senses, really has a kind of continuation of the external world. As physical apparatus, the receiving senses, at least the majority of the receiving senses, belong more to the external world than to man. Your eye belongs much more to the external world than to your own body.

In animals, the eye belongs much more to the body than it does to humans. The fact that humans, as sensory beings, have senses that are less connected to the body than the senses of animals, makes them superior to animals. In certain lower animals, this can be demonstrated anatomically. There are all kinds of organic extensions; for example, the fan is inside in lower animals. These are very complicated formations, partly of the nerve, partly of the blood corpuscles, which the lower animals have more completely than the higher animals and especially than man.

The fact that in man the physical body takes so little part in his senses and leaves the part very much to the etheric body, that is what makes man a relatively so perfect being. So that we can say: Man is, first of all, this inner bodily man, considered physically, and the senses are inserted everywhere in him, but they are actually - as I once said in a public lecture in Zurich - like gulfs that extend into the outside world. It would be much more correct to draw it schematically like this. Instead of drawing: there is a sense, and there is a sense, and there is a sense (see drawing), it would be much more correct to draw it like this: there is the human body, and that is where the human world is built, for example the eye or the organ of smell, their continuation into the outside world, and their gulfs through the sense organs. The outer world intrudes through the senses, the eye and so on, and from the inside we only encounter it with the etheric body and permeate what the outer world sends in with our etheric body. It thereby takes part in the outer world. As a result, we are dependent on our etheric body to somehow grasp what the outer world sends in.

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The fact that what I have just said is not known has meant that for more than a hundred years philosophy has been talking about nothing more fantastic than the way in which man perceives the outside world through his senses. You can get an overview of all this basically fantastic stuff by reading the chapter “The World as Illusion” in my “Riddles of Philosophy”. Because of the belief that the senses can only be understood from the inside out, from the body out, people do not understand how man can actually know something about the world through his senses. They always talk about it in this way: the world makes an impression on the senses, but then what is caused in the senses must be grasped by the soul. The truth is that the external world itself builds into us, that we therefore grasp the external world at the tip, with our etheric body grasp the external world at the tip, when we perceive the external world as human beings with our senses. Everything that Locke, Hume, Kant, the neo-Kantian philosophers of the 19th century, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Wundt and all the rest, everything that people have said about sensory perception, has been said to the exclusion of knowledge of the true conditions. As I said, you can read about it in the chapter 'The World as Illusion' in my book 'Riddles of Philosophy'. There you will see, in philosophical terms, the calamity that has been caused by the fact that, with the exclusion of spiritual knowledge of the matter, a giant cabbage as sense physiology actually took hold in the 19th century.

Now it is important to really understand what I just said. If you want to check to some extent the truth of what I just called a giant cabbage, it is interesting that in a certain sense what Locke, Hume, Kant, Helmholtz, Wundt and so on said about the senses is true; but curiously enough it is true for animals. Nineteenth-century man, in his quest to understand the human being through science, cannot go beyond understanding the conditions in the animal world. It is no wonder that he also stops at the animal world when it comes to the origin of man! But this is connected to much more complicated conditions. For, as I said, the etheric body touches what is called the external world of the senses at one corner. But what is the ether body in the last analysis? The ether body is ultimately that which the human being now receives from the cosmos, from the macrocosm. So that, by cutting off its ether body from the macrocosmic relationship, the macrocosm takes hold of itself in the human being through the senses. We can feel ourselves as a son of the macrocosm, in that we are an etheric body, and grasp the earthly sense world with our macrocosmic part.

The fact that this only became the case relatively late can, in turn, be proven with external science, I would like to say, with pinpoint accuracy, only that this external science cannot see the real conditions if it is not oriented by spiritual science. I have already pointed out that the Greek language does not actually have the expression that we have when we say: I see a man coming to meet us. We say: I see a man coming. The corresponding Greek expression would be: I see a coming man. In the Greco-Latin era there was still a much stronger sense that one is actually doing something when one sees or hears something, that one is grasping something with one's etheric body when one is in the sensory world. This active element is lacking in the drowsy humanity of modern times. This drowsy humanity of modern times would actually prefer to sleep through world events altogether, that is, to let them approach it as dreams. It does not want to develop the consciousness to participate when sensory perceptions occur. That is why it is so difficult to understand the Greek way of thinking today, because the Greeks had a much more active concept of the human being. They felt much more active even in what we today call the passivity of sensory perception. The Greeks would not have invented the incomplete, one-sided theory that man sleeps because he is tired; but they knew that man becomes tired when he wants to sleep, that sleeping is brought about by essentially different impulses, and that tiredness then arises from the impulse to want to sleep.

But it is not only this theory of sleep that was actually invented out of the laziness of modern man. Modern man wants to be as passive as possible, to be an active being as little as possible. He can do that, and in a sense, modern man has trained himself to be a passive being. And it is with this passivity that I presented yesterday, perhaps somewhat abruptly, the superstition, the idolatry of modern times.

So the outermost post of the external world enters into us, I would say, the outermost post of this external world. Let us draw this again schematically. Let us assume that we draw the human body here (see drawing), the outermost post of the external world enters into our body; we reach over it with our etheric body (red and blue).

You know that we actually have twelve senses; these twelve senses are therefore twelve different ways in which the external world penetrates into our body. What is it that actually penetrates into our body? That is the big question. What actually penetrates into our body?

We actually see only one side of what is penetrating; without clairvoyance we cannot turn around and look at it from the other side. With his etheric body, the human being receives the incoming ray of light or the incoming sound vibration. But it does not run from the outside into the ear according to the tone; it does not run from the outside into the eye according to the light ray. If it did, the human being would run with the sound wave, with the light beam, with the heat evolution from the outside into his sensory apparatus, as far as the senses extend from the outside. And this area is the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form.

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So if you could turn around so that you could follow what is entering here through the senses (arrows), you would be in the realm of the exusiai, the spirits of form. You can see how the beings of the world are intimately intertwined. We walk through the world as human beings, opening our senses and actually carrying the exusiai, the spirits of form, within us, which reveal themselves to us as we open our senses to the external world. This world of exusiai, the spiritual world, is thus hidden behind the veil of the sensory world. But this world of the Exusiai, which is hidden behind the veil of the sensory world, the world that reveals itself in man, also has a universal cosmic side, because it permeates the cosmos. That which enters our senses vibrates and undulates throughout the cosmos. So that we can say, this area that projects into our senses is not only there in the senses, but also has its manifestation out in the world. What is it there? There are the planets that belong to our solar system.

Truly, the connection of the planets of our solar system forms a body that belongs to a spiritual being, and this spiritual being includes the exusiai, which are manifested in the revelations of our senses and which have their objective side out in the universe, in the planets. And embedded in all that is, embedded in this whole stream of exusiai activity, are other beings. They lie behind these Exusiai. I would like to say that other beings do not penetrate as far as the Exusiai do. They are out there in the same area, but they do not come close to us (see drawing): these are the beings of the hierarchy of the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi.

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They are all already present in that which is revealed in our senses, but man cannot take this up into his consciousness. It has an effect on him, but he cannot take it up into his consciousness. So you can say: Through our senses we encounter a world - the realm of the exusiai with the planetary system (red, blue, orange, see drawing on p. 97), and embedded in this whole realm is also the hierarchy of the archai, the archangeloi, the angeloi. These are, so to speak, the ministers of the exusiai. But the human being perceives only the outer appearance of all this; he perceives only the sensory tapestry spread out before him.

This is how it is with what is outside of us. It is different again with what is inside us, now also physically inside us. After hearing what is adjacent to our senses, you can go and ask: What is located directly behind our senses inwards? — We have seen: the eye continues inwards in the optic nerve. All the senses continue inward in their corresponding nerve. When the senses continue inward in this way, you get a wonderful structure from the twelve senses inward. It is very complicated. You could simplify it by saying: twelve strands to the inside, twelve sensory spheres; so on the outside the sensory zone, connected to it what the senses now send inward.

This is a very complicated structure. How does it come about when we look at the human being as a macrocosmic being? That which lies behind the senses inwards comes from the Dynamis, from the Spirits of Movement. So that, going further inwards, the deeds of the Dynamis, the Spirits of Movement, join the senses here (see drawing on p. 97). You could not think if the spirits of movement did not work on the thinking apparatus, which is the continuation of the sense apparatus. If you look outward, you see the Exusiai making the natural order. You see these Exusiai approaching people with their servants, the Archai, the Archangeloi, the Angeloi. But when you think of your inner being, you must remember that you owe this inner being to the spirits of the movement, who prepare the thinking apparatus for you as a continuation of your sense apparatus inwards; not the combining apparatus, which is a mere transformation of the sense of smell, but the thinking apparatus, which man does not use at all in ordinary physical life. For man uses the sense of smell, the sense of smell merely transformed. He has already ceased to use the sense sphere; he would think quite differently if he could really use the twelve inward continuations of the sense sphere.

In the brain, for example, the visual sphere lies behind the frontal lobe, which is essentially a reworked organ of smell. Man hardly uses it, he only thinks habitually through the olfactory sphere. He uses it in a reworked form by combining. If he were to use it directly, he would switch off his forebrain, this forebrain that is only prepared for the external sensory world, and think with the direct, with the four-hill section, with the visual section, where it enters the brain. Then he would have imaginations.

It is the same with the other senses. Man also has imaginations in the physical world, because one world always extends into the other. But man does not recognize these imaginations in the physical world as real imaginations: they are in fact olfactory imaginations. What a person smells is actually the only imaginative realm in the ordinary sensory life. But a much nobler imaginative realm could, for example, come from the sphere of vision and from other sensory spheres.

Looking inwards, we find the Spirits of Movement. And going further inwards, we come to the regions which do not dominate thinking but feeling, the organs of feeling, which are mostly glandular organs in reality. These organs are the deeds of the Spirits that we call the Kyriotetes, the Spirits of Wisdom. We are sentient beings because the Spirits of Wisdom work in us. We are volitional beings because the Spirits of Will, the Thrones, work in us. Located even further inward, the Thrones, the Spirits of Will, work on the organs of our will (see diagram on p. 97).

Just as the exusiai, the spirits of form, have their macrocosmic body in the planets, which, as it were, present the outer visible side to us for ordinary consciousness, so the spirits of movement have their outer side, strangely enough, but it is so, in the fixed stars. Only the dead person between death and a new birth can see their inner side; this is the spiritual side, seen from the other side. In contrast, the Spirits of Wisdom and the Thrones no longer have external visibility at all; they are spiritual in nature. It can be said that they lie behind the planets and behind the fixed stars. And as the deceased looks down on what affects the person in human feeling and human will, the deceased constantly looks at the Kyriotetes, at the Thrones. What I have told you, that the dead person has a connection with the people with whom he is karmically connected, is conveyed to him by the Kyriotetes and by the thrones. The dead person looks into the sphere that invisibly works outside in the objective world and actually only becomes visible in its creature, in human feeling and in human will. What people feel and will here shines up to the dead, and the dead says: In the body of Dynamis, in the body of Kyriotetes, in the body of the thrones, the thinking, feeling and willing of people shines. Just as we look up at the stars, the dead look down into the earthly sphere, into the human sphere. Only, we look at the mineral aspect of the stars, the external physical; the dead do not see the external physical of the glands, the organs of movement, and thus also of the blood, but instead see the spiritual side, the Kyriotetes, the thrones. Just as we look up at the sky, seeing its visible meaning from the outside, the dead person looks down to see the firmament of humanity. The spiritual of this firmament appears to him. That is the dead person's secret.

You see what reciprocity reigns in the universe. When you recognize this reciprocity, the human being takes on a strange countenance! Strangely enough, it takes on the countenance that you say to yourself: We look up at the stars, seek the spirits of form in their exterior in the planets, the spirits of movement in the fixed stars; then that in the distant perspectives fades into the spirit. From this sphere the dead person looks down, looks at that which the human being dreamily oversleeps here. But in that he sees his beyond; there the spirit stars shine up into his world. And the human being is embedded in this being.

What is said in the first scenes of the mystery “The Testing of the Soul” is given a peculiar illumination. Read these first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul', the words of Capesius, and you will see that from the ethical point of view everything is said there that is now being said, so to speak, from the point of view of celestial knowledge. The way in which this celestial knowledge can work in the consciousness of man is pointed out in the first scenes of 'The Test of the Soul'.

And then come the higher worlds, if one wants to apply the word 'higher', that which lies beyond the human being and this universe. I will try to present this schematically, but I must appeal to your goodwill to understand. We can say that if there is a kind of boundary here (see also the drawing on p. 97, yellow), the world of the planets, the world of the fixed stars, loses itself here into the spiritual – and from the other side it comes again. So that here we have the sphere of human will, the sphere of feeling, there the Spirits of Wisdom appear. There we have this order.

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But now you can think of an order that is common to both, where man and the universe are included, where we are embedded in such a way that on the one hand we, who shine up to the dead, and on the other hand the starry sky, which shines down to us, are embedded in it. Then we come to the hierarchies, which, if you want to use the word, are higher than the thrones: to the cherubim and seraphim. You can imagine that from this point of view, which has now been mentioned, one cannot speak of the physical exteriors of the cherubim and seraphim, because they are of course even higher spirits; but they are already so spiritual — here I really must appeal to your very good will to understand — they are already so spiritual, these cherubim and seraphim, that their effect comes from another, quite unknown side.

Is it not true that the exusiai, the spirits of form, can be perceived directly by the senses in the planets; that is simply the side they turn towards us. The spirits of movement are directly perceptible in the fixed stars; that is the side they turn towards us. But the cherubim and seraphim are not perceptible to the senses in such a way that they turn their other side towards us, so to speak. But they are so imperceptible that the imperceptibility itself becomes perceptible. So that which lives in the world through cherubim and seraphim is so imperceptible that imperceptibility itself is perceived. It withdraws so strongly from human consciousness that man notices this withdrawal from consciousness.

Thus we can say: the cherubim do in fact reappear, even if this is manifested in such a way that they are so deeply hidden that one perceives their hiddenness. The cherubim appear not only symbolically, but quite objectively in what takes place in the thundercloud, in what takes place when a planet is ruled by volcanic forces. And the seraphim truly appear in what flashes as lightning from the cloud, or in what manifests as fire in the volcanic eruptions, in such a way that their very imperceptibility in these gigantic effects of nature becomes perceptible.

Therefore, in ancient times, when people saw through such things, they looked up at the starry sky, which revealed the most diverse things to them: the secrets of the Exusiai, the secrets of Dynamis. Then they tried to reveal the higher secrets in what man today ridicules: from the interior of the human body - as one says trivially - from the bowels. But then they were aware that the greatest effects, which are really common to the solar system, announce themselves from a completely opposite side in the effects of fire and thunderstorms, in earthquakes and volcanic effects. The most creative aspect of the seraphim and cherubim is announced through its most destructive side, curiously enough. It is precisely the other side, it is the absolute negative, but the spiritual is so spiritually strong that even its imperceptibility, its non-existence, is perceived by the senses.

There you have placed man back into the macrocosm. And at the same time you can see that in this whole macrocosm there is something that begins with the cherubim and goes up to themselves, and that only, I would say, reflects, shadows itself in the gigantic effects that we have just mentioned. This gives you the perspective of a natural science that is at the same time a spiritual science; it gives you the perspective of a science that really sees the whole universe as spirit, that is not content with a vague pantheism and other “pantheisms”, but that really goes into what lies at the basis of the universe as spiritual.

These things will also make it clear to you that man must have a dual nature in a certain respect. Let us take man as he lives from waking to sleeping; he lives in his senses, in the sensual environment, if one perceives the outside as I have indicated. But the other part of a person lives between falling asleep and waking up. It is only so imperfect in the present human cycle that a person is not aware of what he experiences during sleep. But during sleep, a person experiences his being with the cosmos, with the extraterrestrial cosmos, just as he experiences his coexistence with the earthly cosmos with his senses while awake. The only difference is that he is unaware of the other coexistence, the coexistence with the extraterrestrial cosmos. The moment you fall asleep, you join in the movements of the cosmos spiritually, you enter into a completely different sphere. You make yourself ready when you wake up; you make yourself flexible in relation to the cosmos by falling asleep. You live the life of the cosmos by falling asleep; you tear yourself out of the cosmos by waking up. So that you can say: Man can recognize in his own nature, in his own being, a part that swims in the cosmos, that lives in the cosmos. If the ancient astrologer, in the sense in which it was meant in the last reflections, explored the cosmos with its secrets, he explored that in which man swims with that part of his being that sleeps. Man swims with that which the astrologer tries to explore, the real astrologer, not the merely calculating, mathematical one of modern times.

In the moment when the human being sees what he experiences with the part of his being that sleeps, in that moment he stands before what, roughly until the 15th century, was actually called nature. What the human being experiences there was called nature. The Greeks called the same thing that was called nature in the Middle Ages, Proserpina, Persephone. Of course, the mysteries of Persephone were described differently in Greece and in the Middle Ages. But you can see that the Middle Ages knew these things when you read descriptions of nature and its secrets as found in the works of Bernardus Silvestris. In the work 'De mundi universitate' by Bernardus Silvestris, the description begins of the experiences that man has when he awakens to the part that participates in the cosmos, which is otherwise overslept.

These things are particularly well described by Alanus ab Insulis, from the area we have mentioned several times; for in Alanus ab Insulis's 'Island', he means Ireland, Hybernia. In his work 'De planctu naturae' and in his 'Anticlaudianus', you will find parallels to the Proserpina myth and what he has to say about nature. And you will find that everything is resurrected in the great teacher of Dante, whom I once mentioned here, in Brunetto Latini. You will find the teachings of Brunetto Latini incorporated into Dante's own ideas. Read the parts of the Divine Comedy in which Dante describes the Matelda, the part that really resembles the Proserpina myth like two peas in a pod, which even the outer science has already noticed. You will acquire an awareness of it – from Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, from Brunetto Latini and from Dante, you can acquire an awareness, from many others as well - as until the times when the new era dawned, people had an awareness of that other world of the coexistence of man as a microcosm with the macrocosm.

On the one hand, there was nature, the human being's experience of the cosmos, which the Middle Ages called Natura and which antiquity called Proserpina. This was personified and distinguished from Urania, who rules over the celestial sphere just as nature rules over what the human being experiences from falling asleep to waking up. And these medieval people believed they saw a deep secret when they spoke of the marriage of nature in man with the nus, with the mind, with the intellect in man. And in a right and wrong way, these people tried to experience in man the marriage of nature with the Nus, with the mind or intellect, as a mystical wedding, which was contrasted with the alchemical wedding, as I described in the essay that is the first about Christian Rosenkreutz.

These are things that are not so infinitely far behind us. And Dante's haunting work - which on the one hand describes the world and man, the human secrets, with as much sublimity as humor - is like the work that wanted to preserve what has been known for centuries and millennia about man's connection to the macrocosm. In Brunetto Latini we find the same thing that Dante describes in his own poetic way, from the point of view of initiation, also linked to an external event.

The consciousness of the connection between man and these spiritual secrets had to be hidden for a time, so to speak, so that what man can experience when it is separated out from the universe and, as it were, dependent on itself, could be kindled in man. We are now living in the age in which, on the one hand, man is exposed to the radiations that permeate him from Pisces, but on the other hand, he is exposed to the radiations of the differently acting, opposite constellation of Virgo. But this age must find the way out of spiritual infertility. Of course, we can no longer simply take over what humanity once knew, because that knowledge was in a form that was useful for ancient humanity. Dante's “Divine Comedy” is, although a great revelation, more a testament of a bygone era. A new era needs the revelations of the spiritual cosmos from a different source.

But one thing is possible. When one considers that, I might say, people knew spiritual secrets until a few centuries ago, this has such an effect on the human mind that it can inspire him to seek the way to these secrets in a new way. Therefore, we can also draw impulses from historical observation; only we must take this historical observation in such a way that we go back to what is really historical. Consider what all the external events related in history are worth – in this history, with which, lamentably, our schoolchildren up to the oldest are pampered – what these stories, which are recorded as history, are worth compared to the facts that people like Bernardus Silvestris, Alanus ab Insulis, Brunetto Latini, Dante and so on, Pico de Mirandola, Fludd , and even Jakob Böhme, Paracelsus, if we take a certain sphere of wisdom, and right up to the 18th century we could cite the disciple of Jakob Böhme, Saint-Martin — what are the usual events recorded in history compared to the facts that there were people who carried such cosmic knowledge within them and worked with such cosmic knowledge! Yes, the present is often proud of what it has achieved. This present-day intelligentsia – I mentioned it in connection with the Christmas plays today – has always been quite dismissive of the spiritual content; even when this intelligentsia, as in Oberufer, where the Christmas plays were performed until the middle of the 19th century, consisted of a single personality, the schoolmaster, who was also the village notary, and thus the legal personality and at the same time the mayor. He was the intellectual, he was the only enemy of all the Christmas plays. In his opinion, they were stupid, foolish. Schröer still experienced this, that the intelligentsia of Oberufer was hostile to what was in the Christmas plays. It is very often the intelligentsia that is hostile to what is actually fruitful in human evolution.

It is a matter of encouraging that which may be called the enthusiasm of history by looking at real history, by really immersing oneself in what history is. The spiritual part of the event also belongs to history, and it proceeds differently than the external physical-material part.

Especially in the harsh present, we must try again and again to stimulate the spiritual impulses by making ourselves aware of how spirit has ruled in the historical development of humanity. Whether you can count the details on the fingers of one hand: That is how the Dynamis work, that is how the Exusiai work — that is much less important than awakening this overall consciousness, how it wants to bring the individual human being together with the spirit of humanity. For in the awakening of this consciousness lies that which is to bring salvation into the evolution of mankind. Sometimes it is good to realize how far removed what passes as world opinion today is from what moves human souls, or at least seems to move them. As a result, there is often no sense of the weight of the individual facts. The spirit weighs the facts correctly.

More important than many other things for the assessment of the present – just think about it with the help of what you have heard here – more important than many other things is the news that came in the last few days that the American state administration has taken the railways into self-government. For this is one of a number of symptoms that clearly point to things that are being prepared in order to divert humanity as far as possible from the path along which it can only be preserved if it becomes fully aware that without spirit reality can only be a dying reality. One can indeed choose to die; then life must flee from the areas for which one chooses to die to other areas. The field of truth already carries the victory. But one looks at a field where, so to speak, those who look deeper into the world are also confronted with such powers of a left and a right, as Dante at the starting point of his description of his “Divine Comedy”, or as Brunetto Latini at the beginning of his initiation.

Oh, it would be so necessary for the world to grasp thoughts of spirituality in the broadest sense! Instead of this, it is true, we are only faced with the necessity of having to emphasize again and again that we must look towards the spirit. Again and again we are faced with the longing to be able to emphasize the seriousness of the matter sufficiently. People do not want to see where germs are, but they want to be passive, to let things happen to them if possible, to sleep through the course of the world if possible. If many people did not sleep as they do in the present, oversleeping events, then one would see that behind what is now buzzing through the world in such an untrue way, there is a strange tendency. It may well be said, since Woodrow Wilson, the universal idol of modern times, of the present time, of the present, has boasted of such things himself, that four-fifths of humanity is facing one-fifth. This idol of modern humanity, who has been raised to the altar much more than one might think, has indeed boasted of this himself.

It will have to be said that it would be a shame if humanity were to oversleep what lies in such an ideal as the ideal of this idol, whose slogans, even those that are not copied from the brave Don Pedro of 1864 like its last manifestation, but rather grew in its own hollow—pardon me, I mean head—go back to what is actually inherent in it as a tendency. What is it then? The aim is to be able to say one day on earth: centuries ago there was a legendary humanity in the middle of Europe; they managed to wipe it out. They had to be wiped out because they were terribly proud. They descended from the gods and even called the main poet Goethe to suggest that they had received a spirit directly from the gods. Although we shall not express ourselves in such spiritual terms, the germ or tendency of Wilsonianism will be recognizable in this. It will only be a matter of whether this can be the path of humanity, whether this can be the future path of the earth, or whether we should not rather reflect on how the earth can be saved from the so-called ideals of Wilsonianism and similar things. One need not fall into nationalism or anti-nationalism with such things. The phrases of nations and the freedom of nations can also be left to Wilsonianism in modern times. But one cannot point out seriously enough what is actually behind the idol that is meant.

I know that present-day humanity will not give much credence to such things, but I also know that in the future many a voice will be raised in agreement with what has been said here. May the voices of the future always be added to those of the past: Humanity allowed itself to be led in all sorts of ways by a strange idol; thank the world spirits that the goals of this strange leader of humanity were not fulfilled, who, after all, also to the world by theoretically proclaiming, in grand words, the republic as the only true form of government and by copying out his own republican manifestos from the Brazilian emperor of 1864. The fact that one is actually standing here before a grotesque phenomenon is something that can be said within closed walls. Outside, truth is not the highest value, but is weighed on the political scales. One must not say what is true or not true, but what is prescribed. Until March 15, one was not allowed to say anything against tsarism in the various countries; since March 15, one is of course allowed to say anything against it.

Unfortunately, truth is not the highest standard. But to speak out against it is the only way to touch the conditions that are necessary to write into the soul today. It makes sense to add to the great views into the cosmos the small thoughts that passive, sleepy humanity has today, but which unfortunately have great effects on deeds. For humanity must awaken, and the spirit must be the awakener.

Bearing in mind what we sought to study yesterday, let us consider how matters actually stand in regard to what we call man's Saturn evolution.

If we remember the course of yesterday's lecture,¹ we know that there is concealed within us, within our human being, something that was first implanted in us during the Saturn period, namely, the first rudiments of our physical bodily nature. What we have acquired from the ancient Saturn evolution can be met with nowhere today in the external world. In primeval ages the Saturn evolution arose and again passed away; it possessed characteristics, forces, which seek in vain if we look around us today. For even if we look out to the stars in cosmic space we do not at first find what prevailed within the old Saturn evolution.

After this ancient Saturn evolution had died away, there came as you know, the Sun evolution and then the Moon evolution and today we are living in the Earth evolution. Three evolutionary periods have gone by. And all that formed their peculiar characteristics has passed away with them and is no more to be found in our field of vision. We can only find the characteristics of the Saturn evolution among the hidden occult activities which pulsate through the world. We can still, as it were, uncover the forces which at that time worked upon our physical body.

If you recollect what was shown in my book Outline of Occult Science you are aware that there was an active co-operation at that time between the Spirits of Will and the Spirits of Personality. This co-operation still exists today though it cannot be discerned externally. We find it if we look into what we call our personal karma. Please note, my dear friends, that our personal karma is woven in such a way that what befalls us in successive earth lives is connected as cause and effect. The forces active in our personal stream of destiny cannot be investigated by the official Natural Scientist. He will find nothing among the forces disclosed in the field of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Physiology etc., which calls forth the connection of cause and effect that comes to expression in our personal karma. The laws prevailing there are withdrawn from physical observation as well as from the historical observation pursued today by the so-called cultural-scientist of a materialistic colouring. The modern investigation of historical evolution, the history which is written nowadays of Persia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, up to our own time, contains laws which have nothing to do with the forces active in our karma. Thus the historian, the modern materialistic scientist studying civilization does not discover the laws dependent on man's personal karma.

History is looked upon as a continuous stream and no one considers to what extent historical evolution depends on the fact that human souls, for instance, who were personalities in ancient Roman times are present again today. The fact that they participate in current events and that the way in which they do so flows out of their personal karma finds no place in modern materialistically coloured history.

If we seek therefore for forces having something of the nature-forces of old Saturn we have to go to the law of our personal karma. Only when we learn to read what is in the surrounding cosmos and not merely to observe it, do we gain an insight into how the laws of ancient Saturn are still in a certain way active.

If we turn our attention to the ordering and out-streaming of the twelve Signs of the Zodiac as a cosmic script, and consider what radiating forces pour into human life from Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., we are then thinking in the sense of forces which were Saturn forces. And if we try to bring personal karma into connection with the constellations which relate to the zodiacal signs, we are then living approximately in the sphere of that world-conception which must be employed for the laws of the ancient Saturn epoch.

Thus nothing visible has remained, nothing that may be perceived, and yet there is still remaining an invisible element which may be interpreted out of the signs of the cosmos. Anyone who thought that Aries, Taurus, Gemini etc., made his destiny would be living under the same delusion as a man who had been sentenced by a certain legal passage and then conceived a special hatred of this paragraph in the law and believed that it had sent him to gaol. Just as little as a legal paragraph printed on the white page can sentence a man, can Aries, Taurus, or Gemini, bring about destiny. Yet one can read from the star-script the connection between the cosmos and human destiny. And thus we can say that what follows from the star script is a remainder of the ancient Saturn evolution, is indeed the ancient Saturn evolution become entirely spiritual, but leaving its signs behind in the star-script of the cosmos.

When we proceed from the Old Saturn evolution to the Moon evolution we must be clear that at first there is nothing so directly (I said; at first, so directly) in our surrounding field of vision; external nature contains in the first place in the main no forces which resemble those of the Old Moon evolution. These forces of the Old Moon have also drawn back into concealment, but they have not yet become spiritual to the same degree as the Old Saturn laws. The Saturn laws have become so spiritual that we can only investigate them in the laws of our personal destiny, that is to say, quite outside space and time. When we observe human life as a whole we still find today these ancient Saturn laws, still find what cannot be seen when we confront a man in the physical world.

We have said that in meeting man in the physical world, we have the physical body as coming from the Old Saturn evolution, the etheric from the Old Sun evolution; the astral body from the Old Moon, and the Ego. And when we look at man externally and observe his form it is solely this embodiment of the ego which is not a relic from other periods of evolution. It is the laws of Earth which prevail and are active when the ego fashions man for itself and embodies itself. The laws of the Moon evolution, the laws of the astral body have already withdrawn and are no longer outwardly active. Now if we encounter a man we shall say: “You, O Man, as you confront me as material man are an embodiment of the Ego. But deep in the background of your being lies your invisible personal destiny.” How this invisible human destiny is determined comes under the rule of ancient Saturn laws. There we are already appealing to something entirely spiritual when, from the earthly laws of the embodiment of the Ego, we look towards the ancient Saturn laws. If, however, we look from what stands before us in the human being towards what still prevails in him from the Old Moon laws we find something not so spiritual. But this too has withdrawn from the external activity of the world, this too is not directly under the active forces of Earth-existence.

Where then must we seek for what has remained behind from the ancient Moon activity? We must we seek it protected and embedded, veiled from Earthly existence. For it is active in the period before man enters Earth existence through his physical birth, it is active before the external physical ray of light can penetrate his eye, it is active before he can first draw breath. It is active from the conception to birth, active in the embryonic life. I beg you expressly to notice, however, it is not active in that which develops from the ovum to the external physical human being; in what grows from the ovum, becoming greater and greater through continuous division, the forces of the Earth are working. But it is active in what exists only in the mother and dies away during the embryonic development, in what is lost with the birth and perishes. In all that envelops the earthly human being and cares for its nourishment before it is born, in all that ensheaths the growing human being and then falls away from it—in that rule the ancient Moon laws. And with this we have something that goes beyond the single human life, that forms a connection between the individual man and his ancestors and is included in the concept of heredity.

Thus we see something that existed during the Old Moon evolution still playing an active part, though not in the external world. In the outer world it acts only, so to say, as a dying away in human development, as something that is overcome as soon as the human being draws the first active breath for earthly life.

If one would study the laws of the Old Moon existence—or at any rate a part of them—purely physiologically and not clairvoyantly, the only way to do so today would be to study the laws at work in the sheaths surrounding the human embryo before it draws the first breath, enfolding it and nourishing it. What is there enclosed in the mother's body, what can only thrive during earthly evolution within the protecting sheath of the maternal body was the whole nature during the Old Moon evolution; it filled the whole field of vision.

Thus there die not only beings in so far as they have a sheath-nature, but whole types of natural laws, and exist in succeeding ages solely as last remains. Now you will have to ask the question: How does it stand with what is derived from the Sun?

Let us look at yesterday's diagram. We have seen that through all complications that appear here, we have to do with the complete human being, with his physical body, etheric body, astral body, Ego,—etheric body, astral body, ego,—astral body, ego, and with the ego itself.

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All that is above the dividing line is really the hidden part of human nature. If we wish to study the laws underlying the foundation of the physical body we must look to super-sensible laws determining man's destiny. If we look towards that which rules in the astral body and finds its embodiment in the physical body, we have something that is not so spiritual, so super-sensible, but something that melts from the sense-perceptible into the super-sensible. For the part that falls away from the human embryo becomes so to say more and more atomistic. The nearer the human being approaches birth the more it dissolves materially and becomes increasingly spiritual. For that which is attached to the human being as astral body and etheric body has originated through the spiritualising of those parts of the embryonic sheaths which fall away.

The question could now arise: how does it stand with regard to the Sun part? Can we find the Sun portion somewhere in the world? This too withdraws from sense perception. Whereas what we call karma, personal destiny, or, one might say, the Saturn part of man, lies in lofty spiritual regions, we have seen that we need not ascend so high in the case of the Moon part, for we found it still ensheathed in the sensible. Nor in the case of the Sun part need we ascend so high as for the Saturn part. One can still apprehend it but it is not easily recognised.

I should like to give you an example of something where you can still recognise the Sun-part that is active, although attention can only be directed to it in a veiled way. Those of you who have acquainted yourselves with the new edition of my book, Riddles of Philosophy in Outline will have found that four periods in the development of Philosophy are distinguished. I have called the first period “The World-conceptions of the Greek Thinkers”. This lasted from 800 B.C.—in round numbers—or 600 B.C. to the birth of Christ, i.e. into the age of the origin of Christianity. A second period lasted from the rise of Christianity to about 800 – 900 A.D. up to the time of John Scotus Erigena. Then came a third period which I have called “the World-conception of the Middle Ages”, and which lasted from 800, 900 A.D. to 1600 A.D. And then there is the forth period up to our own time; we are just in this period. Eight-hundred year periods have been assigned to the history of philosophy, presented in such a way as was possible in a book meant for a public still quite unacquainted with Spiritual Science.

The intention was to give everything that could stimulate the mind and let the spiritual structure of these periods work upon one. The characteristic of the first period consists in the fact that a transition is found from a very remarkable ancient thinking to what one can call the life of thought in ancient Greece. Our age has not made much progress in the understanding of such differences, the difference, for instance, between the thought life of our own time and that of ancient Greece. Our clumsy thinking believes that thought lived in an ancient Greek head just as it lives today in the head of modern man. Thought lived in Socrates, Plato, even in Aristotle quite differently from how it lives in present-day mankind; this present thought-life first awoke in the 7th, 6th century B.C. Before that there was no actual life of thought. As my book sets out, one can speak of a beginning, of a birth of thought-life in this age of ancient Greece.

People have conceived that most curious ideas about the great philosophical figures of Thales, Anaxagoras, Anaximenes, etc. It has been pointed out, for instance, that Thales believed that the world originated out of water, Anaxagoras out of air, Heraclitus from fire. I have shown how these ancient philosophers formed their philosophies from the human temperament. They were not based on speculation, but Thales established water as the original ground of things because he was of a watery temperament; Heraclitus founded the fire-philosophy because he was of a fiery temperament and so on. You find that shown in detail in my book.

Then comes the actual thought-life. And in the epoch described here the thought-life is still essentially different from that of modern times. The Greek thinker does not draw up thoughts from the depths of his soul, but thought is revealed to him just as external sound or colour is revealed to modern man. The Greek perceives the thought; he perceives it from outside and when we speak of Greek philosophy we must not speak of such a mode of thinking as is normal today, but of thought-perception. Thus in the first period we are concerned with thought-perception. Plato and Aristotle did not think in the way the modern philosopher thinks, they thought as today we see, perceive. They looked out into the world, as it were, and perceived the thoughts which they expound to us in their philosophies just as much as one perceives a symphony. They are thought-perceivers. The world reveals to them a thought-work; that is the essential character of the Greek thinker. And this perception of the thought-work of the world was brought to the highest pitch of perfection by the Greek thinker.

If the philosophers of today believe that they understand what Plato and Aristotle perceived as a universal symphony of thoughts, that is only due to a childish stage of the modern philosopher. The modern philosophers have a long way to go before they can fully grasp what Aristotle represents as Entelechy, what he gives as the members of the human soul nature—Aesthetikon, Orektikon, Kinetikon etc. The inner activity of thinking, where one draws the thoughts out of oneself, where one must make subjective efforts in order to think, did not as yet exist in Greece. It is completely foolish to believe that Plato thought he perceived thoughts. To believe that Aristotle already thought in the modern sense, is nonsense ... he perceived thoughts.

Modern man can hardly imagine what that is, for he makes no concepts of actual evolution. He gets slight goose-flesh if one tells him that Plato and Aristotle did not think at all in the modern sense, and yet it is a fact. In order that thinking in the modern sense might take root in the modern human soul, an impulse had to come that seized its inmost part, an impulse that has nothing to do with the thought-symphony in the surrounding world but which grips man's inmost being. This impulse came from Christ and hence this period of philosophy lasts up to the time of Christ.

In the second period we are concerned with a thinking that is still not man's own individual thought, but is stimulated by the impulse coming from the external world. If you go through all the systems of thought of the philosophers of the second period up to the time of Scotus Erigena you will find everywhere how the Christ-Impulse rules in them. It is what has flowed out of Christ himself, one might say, that gives man the first stimulus to create thoughts from within outwards. This gave the stamp, the physiognomy of the patristic philosophy of the Church Fathers, the philosophy of Augustine and others up to Scotus Erigena. We can therefore say that we no longer have thought-perception, but thought-inspiration stimulated by the spirit.

It was different again in the third period when the inner impulse proceeding from Christianity began to be seized by men themselves. In this third period man begins to be conscious that it is he who thinks. Plato and Aristotle did not think, but they could as little doubt that thought has a fully objective validity as a man seeing green on a tree can doubt that it has a fully objective validity.

In the second period it was the intense belief in the Christ Impulse that gave certainty to the awakening thought. But then began the period when the human soul began to say: “Yes, it is actually you yourself who thinks, the thoughts rise up out of you.” The Christ-Impulse gradually faded and man became aware that the thoughts arose out of himself. It began to occur to him that perhaps he framed thoughts that had nothing at all to do with what is outside. Was it possible that the objective external world had nothing to do with his thoughts?

Think of the great difference between this and the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle: Plato and Aristotle perceived thoughts and therefore they could not doubt that the thoughts were outside. Now, in the third period men became aware: ‘One creates thoughts oneself ... well, then, what have thoughts to do with objective existence outside?’ And so the need arose to give certainty to thinking,—to prove thinking as was said. Only in this period could it occur to Anselm of Canterbury, for instance, to create validity for the idea of God;—for one did not see thoughts as perception. In the former Greek thinking that would have been a complete nonsense, because at that time thoughts were perceived. How can one doubt that God exists when thoughts of the Godhead are as clearly to be seen outside as the greenness of the tree? Doubt first began in the third period when men became aware that they themselves produced the thoughts. The need arose to establish the connection of that which one thinks with that which is outside. In essentials this is the epoch of scholasticism—the becoming aware of the subjectivity of thinking.

When you consider the whole thought-structure of Thomas Aquinas it stands entirely under the aegis of this epoch. The consciousness is present throughout; concepts are created within, concepts are linked together in the same way as the laws of subjectivity. Thus a support must be found for the idea that what is created inwardly also exists outside. There is still at first an appeal to traditional dogmatism, but there is no longer the same attachment to the Christ-Impulse as in the second period of philosophical development.

Then comes the fourth evolutionary period; the independent rule of thought from the external thought-perception, the independent creation of thought from within: free creation of thought, that free creation that comes to light so magnificently in the thought-structures of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Decartes, and their successors, Leibniz etc. If we follow up these edifices of thought we observe that they are produced entirely out of the inner being. And everywhere we find that these thinkers had an intense desire to prove that what they created in themselves had also real validity externally. Spinoza creates a wonderful ideal-edifice. But the question arises: Now is that all merely created within, in the human spirit, or has it a significance in the world outside? Giordano Bruno, and Leibniz create the monad which is supposed to be a reality. How does something thought out by man as monad exist at the same time as a reality in the outer world? All the questions which have arisen since the 16th, 17th century are concerned with the endeavour to bring free thought-creation into harmony with external world existence. Man feels isolated, abandoned by the world in his free thought creation. We are still standing in the midst of this.

But now what is this whole diagram?

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If we go back to the perception of thoughts which prevailed in the time of the old Greek philosophers then we must say: Philosophic thought in ancient Greece—in spite of the fact that it was the age of the intellectual or mind-soul in ancient Greece—was still a perceptive thinking, was still deeply influenced by the sentient soul, in fact by the sentient, the astral, body. It still clung to the external. The thinking of Thales, of the first philosopher was still influenced by the etheric body. They created their Water—Air—Fire—Philosophies out of their temperament, and the temperament lives in the etheric body. One can therefore say that the philosophy of the sentient body goes into the philosophy of the etheric body. Then we come into the Christian period. The Christ- Impulse penetrates into the sentient soul. Philosophy is experienced inwardly but in connection with what one can feel and believe; the influences of the sentient soul are present. In the third period, that of scholasticism, the intellectual or mind-soul is the essential element of philosophical development. Now the development of philosophy follows a different course from that of human evolution in general. And for the first time since the 16th century we now have philosophy coinciding with the general evolution of mankind, for we have the free thoughts ruling in the consciousness soul.—Consciousness soul! The magnificent example of how free thought prevails from the abstraction of existence up to the highest spirituality, how a thought-organism, leaving aside the world entirely, rules purely in itself, that is the philosophy of Hegel—the thought that lives solely in the consciousness.

If you follow this scheme it is actually the part that I could not show in my book for the public, though it lies in it. And if you read the descriptions given of the separate epochs you will, if you are proper Anthroposophists, very clearly connect them with what I have written here (see diagram). There is thus a development corresponding to that of man himself: from the etheric body to the sentient body, to the sentient soul, to the intellectual soul, to the consciousness soul. We follow a path like the path of man's evolution, but differently regulated. It is not the path of human evolution, it is different. Beings are evolving and they make use of human forces in the sentient soul, in the intellectual soul etc. Through man and his works pass other beings with other laws than those of human development.

You see—these are activities of the Sun-laws!

Here we need not ascend to such super-sensible regions as when we investigate human destiny. It is in the philosophical development of mankind that we have an example of what remains from the Sun-laws.

We had yesterday to write here Angeloi as corresponding to the etheric body (see diagram).

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Such Angeloi evolve. And while men believe that they themselves philosophise, Sun-laws work in them—inasmuch as men bear within them what the Sun-evolution laid down in their physical and etheric bodies. And the laws of the Sun-existence, working from epoch to epoch, cause philosophy to become precisely what it is. Because they are Sun-laws, the Christ, the Being of the Sun, could also enter them during the second period. Preparation is made in the first period and then the Christ, the Sun-Being, becomes active in the second period.

You see how everything is linked together. But inasmuch as the Christ, the Sun-Being, enters in, he comes into connection with an evolution which is not the human evolution, not man's earthly evolution, but actually Sun-evolution within Earth existence.

Sun-evolution within Earth existence! Just think what we have actually reached in these reflections. We are considering the course of philosophical development, philosophical thought since the time of ancient Greece, and when we consider how this has evolved from philosopher to philosopher we say to ourselves: there are active within not earthly laws, but Sun laws! The laws which at that time held sway between the Spirits of Wisdom and the Archangels come to light again on earth in the philosophical search for wisdom. Read in the book Occult Science how the Spirits of Wisdom enter during the Sun-evolution. Now during earthly evolution they enter again not into what is new but into what has remained from the Sun-evolution. And man develops his philosophy not knowing that in this development the Spirits of Wisdom are pulsing through his soul. The Old Sun existence lives in the evolution of philosophy; it really and truly lives within something that has stayed behind, something that is connected with the Old Sun-evolution.

Human beings, passing from generation to generation, evolve as external personalities in earthly evolution. But an evolution of philosophy goes through it from Thales up to our present time; the Sun-evolution lies within it. This gives opportunity for beings who have stayed behind to make use of the forces of philosophical evolution in order to carry on their ancient Sun existence; beings who remained behind during the Sun-evolution, who neglected at that time to go through the development that one can pass through in one's etheric body, sentient body, and sentient soul—in cooperation with Spirits of Wisdom and Archangeloi. These Spirits that missed their evolution during the Sun time can use man's philosophical evolution in order to be parasites within human evolution. They are Ahrimanic spirits!

Ahrimanic spirits yield to the enticement of creeping parasitically into what men strive for in philosophy and so of furthering their own existence. Men can thus evolve philosophically but at the same time they are exposed to Ahrimanic, Mephistophelean spirits.

You know that Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful spirits as long as one is not aware of them, as long as they work in secret. As long as they do not emerge and let men face them eye to eye spiritually Ahriman and Lucifer are harmful in one or another way. Let us suppose that a philosopher appears who develops thought of such a nature that one can grasp it in merely earth existence. He develops thoughts that can live through the instrument of earthly reasoning. That is Hegelian thought! It is pure thought, but only such as can be grasped with the instrument of the physical body and this as we know ends at death.

Hegel has achieved thought that is the deepest which can be thought in earthly life—but which must lose its configuration with death. Hegel's tragedy lies in the fact that he did not realise he grasped the spirit in logic, in nature, in soul-life, but only the spirit that exists in the form of thought and does not accompany us when we go through death. To have put this clearly before his mind he would have had to say: If I could believe that what goes through thought, that is to say what I think about abstract being by means of logic, thoughts of nature, thoughts of the soul and up to philosophy—if I could believe that this leads me behind the scenes of existence than I should be deceived by Mephistopheles!

This was realised by another: Goethe realised it and represented it in his Faust as the conflict of the thinker with Mephistopheles, with Ahriman. And in this fourth period of the evolution of philosophy we see how Ahriman presses into the Sun-evolution and how one has to face him consciously, really recognising and comprehending his nature.

Hence today we are also standing at a turning point of the philosophical thought of the outer world. In order to avoid falling prey to the allurements of Ahriman and becoming mephistophelean wisdom, philosophy must get behind this wisdom, must understand what it is, must flow into the stream of Spiritual Science.

Read the two chapters preceding the last one in the second volume of my Riddles of Philosophy. You will see that I tried to present the world concepts prevailing in the world, the philosophical concepts of the world, in order then in a concluding chapter to add A brief view of an Anthroposophy. There you will see how philosophy today in the free emancipated life of thought represents something which, to be sure, rises into the consciousness soul, but how this life, through the consciousness soul, must lay hold of what comes from Spirit itself, philosophically at first, otherwise philosophy must fall into decadence and die.

Thus you see at least one example of the working of the Sun-evolution in human earthly life. I said that one could encounter these sun-laws if one studied the course of philosophical evolution, though one does not always recognise that it is sun-law which is active in it. This must be recognised by Spiritual Science. Just reflect that in reality a Being is evolving which little by little acquires the same members as man himself.

If one were to go still farther back into ancient times one would find that not alone the etheric, but the physical body too gave rise to the forming of world concepts. It is difficult to give clear characteristics of the age that goes back beyond the 12th – 14th centuries B.C.; it lies before Homer, before historical times. But then something was evolving which is not man as man lives upon the earth.

Something lives in history which passes through the etheric body, the sentient body etc., a real, actual Being. I said in my book that in the Grecian era thought was born. But in modern times it comes to actual self-consciousness in the consciousness soul: thought is an independent active Being. This could not of course be said in an exoteric book intended for the public. The anthroposophist will find it however if he reads the book and notes what was the prevailing trend of its presentation. It is not brought into it, but results of itself out of the very subject matter.

You see from this that very many impulses of transformation as regards the spiritual life are coming forward in our time. For here we see something evolving that is like a human being except that it has a longer duration of life than an individual man. The individual man lives on the physical plane: for seven years he develops the physical body, for seven years the etheric body, for seven years the sentient body etc. The Being which evolves as philosophy (we call it by the abstract name ‘philosophy’) lives for 700 years in the etheric body, 700 – 800 years in the sentient body (the time is only approximate), 700 – 800 years in the sentient soul, 700 – 800 years in the intellectual or mind-soul and again 700 – 800 years in the consciousness soul. A Being evolves upwards of whom we can say: if we look at the very first beginnings of Grecian philosophy this Being has then just reached the stage of development which corresponds in mankind to puberty; as Being it is like man when he has reached the 14th – 16th year. Then it lives upwards to the time when a human being experiences the events between the 14th and 21st year; that is the age of Greek philosophy, Greek thought. Then comes the next 7 years, what man experiences from the age of 21 to 28; the Christ Impulse enters the development of philosophy. Then comes the period from Scotus Erigena up to the new age. This Being develops in the following 700 – 800 years what man develops between the ages of 28 and 35 years. And now we are living in the development of what man experiences in his consciousness soul: we are experiencing the consciousness soul of philosophy, of philosophical thought.

Philosophy has actually come to the forties, only it is a Being that has much longer duration of life. One year in a man's life corresponds to a hundred years in the life of the Being of philosophy. So we see a Being passing through history for whom a century is a year; evolving in accordance with Sun-laws though one is not aware of it.

And then only there lies further back another Being still more super-sensible than the Being that evolves as humanity except that a year is as long as a century. This Being that stands behind evolves in such a way that its external expression is our personal destiny, how we bear this through still longer periods, from incarnation to incarnation. Here stand the Spirits regulating our outer destiny and their life is of still longer duration than the life of those for whom we must say that a century corresponds to a year.

So you see, it is as if we look there into differing ranges of Beings, and how, if we wished, we might even write the biography of a Being who stands spiritually as much higher than man as a 100 years is longer than a year.

An attempt has been made to write the biography of a such a Being as had its puberty at the time of Thales and Anaxagoras, and has now reached the stage of its self-consciousness and since the 16th century has entered, so to say, into its ‘forties’. The biography of this Being has furnished a ‘History of Philosophy’.³

From this you see, however, how Spiritual Science gives vitality to what is otherwise abstract, and really animates it. What dry wood for instance, is the usual ‘History of Philosophy’! And what it can become when one knows that it is the biography of a Being which is interwoven in our existence, but evolves by Sun-laws instead of Earth-laws!

It was my wish to add these thoughts to what we have been considering lately about the life-forces which arise in us when we look at Spiritual Science not as a theory but seek it in the guidance to living. And it is just through Spiritual Science that we find the living. What is so unalive, so dry, and withered as the history of philosophy comes to meet us out of the mist as though we looked up to it as a Goddess who descends from divine cloud-heights, whom we see young in ancient times, whom we see grow even if with the slowness where a century corresponds to a year of human life. Yet all this becomes living—the sun rises for us like the Sun within Earth existence itself. For just as the sun rises on the physical plane, so do we see the ancient Sun still radiate into the earthly world in a Being that has a longer lifetime than man. As we follow man's development on the physical plane from birth to death so we follow the development of philosophy by seeing a Being within it. When in this way we look at what Anthroposophy can be to us we reach the point of seeing in it not only a guide to knowledge but a guide to living Beings who surround us even though we are unaware of them.

Yes, my dear friends, something of this was only felt by Christian Morgenstern. And by feeling this, feeling it in the deepest part of his soul, our friend Christian Morgenstern could put into writing a beautiful sentiment, a true anthroposophical sentiment which shows how a soul can express itself which in its inmost being knows itself to be one with our Anthroposophy—not merely as with something giving us various facts of knowledge—but as something that gives us life. In the wonderful poem Lucifer by Christian Morgenstern we have a wonderful example of this. The feeling of this poem lives entirely in the inspiration of which ones feels a breath when, as we have tried to show today, one finds the transition from the presentation of the idea in Anthroposophy to the grasping of living beings.

Lucifer

“I'll keep my light from light of your excluded,
I want you not, your light shall be precluded,
Until my light's my own and separated.

So do I bring the Evil to expression
As Spirit of negation, self-possession,
Yet is new world by ranks of mine created.

By off'ing to un-erring Beings resistance,
A race of err-ant gods has found existence
Who act on their—and not your—discretion.

Who have not walked in Truth from the beginning
Who only reach the Truth through suffering, sinning,
Who only read the truth through sin's transgression.”

Luzifer

“Ich will mein Licht vor eurem Licht verschliessen,
ich will euch nicht, ihr sollt mich nicht geniessen,
bevor ich nicht ein Eigenlicht geworden.

So bring ich wohl das Bose zur Erscheinung
Als Geist der Sonderheit und der Verneinung,
Doch neue Welt erschafft mein Geisterorden.

Aus Widerspruch zum unbeirrten Wesen,
Aus Irr-tum soll ein Gotterstamm genesen,
Der sich aus sich—und nicht aus euch—entscheidet

Der nicht vom Anbeginn in Warheit wandelt,
Der sich die Wahrheit leidend erst erhandelt,
Der sich dies Wahrheit handelnd erst erleidet.”

Christian Morgenstern

If the feeling in this poem leads you to reflect how alive something can becomes that is understood theoretically in Anthroposophy, so that, as it were, one can grasp the Beings who approach us out of the dark abyss of existence, if you take this poem, stimulated by feelings I wished to arouse through today's lecture, then you will see that this figure of Lucifer is really perceived, fashioned in a wonderful way. It is a model example of how what is brought to us by Anthroposophy can become alive and grip our whole soul.

• 1. “The Ego perceived externally as Speech and Song, as creative fantasy, as inner experience.” Dornach, 9th Jan. 1915 (Z69)
• 3. Riddles of Philosophy

Today, we want to talk about some peculiarities of the occult development of the human being, in order to then prepare for something else. We are allowed to speak of this occult development because, basically, engaging with spiritual science is the beginning of a real occult development. Even if most people do not recognize the fact that simply occupying oneself with spiritual science is really the first step towards occult development, it is nevertheless the case. And it has been emphasized time and again, and must always be emphasized, that spiritual science is not meant to merely convey knowledge to us, a theoretical knowledge, but that spiritual science is meant to give us something that transforms our whole being, that makes something different out of our whole being than the external culture of the present can do.

Now we will gain an insight into the difficulty that spiritual science has in impressing itself not only on our memory but also on our whole cultural life of the present, if we familiarize ourselves with the peculiarities of spiritual scientific research, with the way in which the results of spiritual scientific research relate to us humans. They relate to us differently than other knowledge that we acquire in life. We acquire knowledge through our experiences, through our experiences; because even if we acquire scientific knowledge, it is either through direct or indirect experience. Wherever we acquire knowledge, we acquire it first through experience and then we store it in our memory, in our recollection. We keep these results of life.

We have often made it clear what it means, in more intimate terms, to store something in our memory, especially in recent times we have talked a little more about what memory is. In any case, for life, memory is an extraordinarily important thing. Just think: if we did not have memory, if we could not remember what we experienced yesterday, the day before yesterday, a year ago or ten years ago, how very different our lives would have to be. It is inconceivable to us that the ordinary life of the soul, taking place on the physical plane, could take place without memory.

But compare the power that enables you to retain experiences of the physical plane in your memory with the much lesser power that enables you to retain dream experiences in your memory. Consider how much more easily you forget a dream than experiences in the physical world. One may initially ask the question: Why do we forget dream experiences more easily than experiences of the physical world? Well, the answer to this question will also give us an important point of view for higher knowledge.

How are dream experiences acquired? They are acquired by not being completely inside the physical body. When we are completely inside the physical body, we do not dream. Then we experience through the senses on the physical plane and through the mind bound to the senses. When we dream, we must at least be partially outside the physical body. What does the physical body do when it works through the power of memory? Yes, as difficult as it is for a person to think at first, it is nevertheless true: every time a person has an experience and stores this experience in their memory through a thought, an imprint, a kind of cliché of the experience, is formed in our etheric body. But – and I have already discussed this – it is not the case that this imprint would photographically depict the experience. Just as the letter of a writing has nothing to do with the sound, what exists in our body as an imprint has just as little to do with the experience itself. The imprint is only a sign. And this sign is strangely similar to the human form itself. And if you take the upper parts of the human form, the head and at most a little of the upper body and the hands, you have what can be observed in the etheric body every time a person forms a memory of an experience.

So, we can say: I experience something; the experience remains with me, whether it be a small or a great experience, as a memory. An impression is formed, something like this (see drawing). Something like this arises in your etheric body every time a memory is formed, and if it were to be extinguished, you would no longer be able to remember the experience.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Think of how many things you remember in life! You have just as many thousands and thousands of such ethereal images of people within you. Your etheric body, and also your physical body, allow so many different images to be there. If two were the same, you would not be able to distinguish the experiences. If you observe a person occultly, you will find thousands and thousands of such images of people within him. But they do not only arise in the etheric body; a fine impression of each such human image also arises in the physical body, and these impressions also all remain, insofar as the person has memories. So thousands upon thousands of such homunculi are present in a person.

Let us say you are listening to today's lecture. Just by listening to this lecture, hundreds and hundreds of such homunculi are forming in your soul. These also make impressions in your physical body when you remember them later, and these impressions also remain.

But what about dreams? Yes, you see, in a dream the homunculus is formed in the etheric body, but

but it does not leave an impression on the physical body. It leaves a weak impression, or sometimes no impression at all. Then the person is well aware that he has dreamt, but he cannot remember what he dreamt. Dreams leave a weak impression, much weaker than any experience on the physical plane. This is why it is so difficult to retain a memory of them.

The strength of the memory therefore depends entirely on how strong the impression is that the homunculus of the etheric body makes on the physical body. However, what the spiritual researcher finds, what he experiences in the spiritual world, is initially such that it cannot make any impression on the physical body at all. For if an experience can make an impression on the physical body, then it is no longer a purely spiritual experience; then it has already been acquired with regard to the physical body. This must be the peculiar thing about the spiritual experience, that at first nothing at all happens in the physical body, while the spiritual is being experienced.

What follows from this? It follows that the spiritual researcher has to understand that there is no memory for the results of spiritual research. The experiences of the spiritual researcher cannot be memorized. They pass away the very moment they arise.

This is the difficulty of knowing anything of the spiritual world while living in the physical world and wanting to live only through the physical body. Since man has a poor memory even for dreams, which still have a loose connection with the physical body, it shows how understandable it must be that man has no memory for what he really experiences occultly.

There are now people who begin to apply to themselves the rules of my writing “How to Know Higher Worlds,” the rules that are called the rules of occult development. They may apply them for a very long time; but then, after years, they come and say, “I have practiced over and over again, I have done all kinds of exercises; I see nothing, I hear nothing of the spiritual world. My sense for the spiritual world does not want to open up. Perhaps what these people say is completely wrong; it can be completely wrong. The people in question may have long since found entry into the spiritual world and may have perceptions in the spiritual world. But these perceptions disappear the moment they are made, because these perceptions cannot be incorporated into the physical memory. The fact that one can know something from one's spiritual experiences depends on something quite different from memory. And I would now like to make clear to you what it depends on.

Imagine that you make a toy for a child. The child can enjoy this toy. You can make it today and the child can enjoy it. You take the toy and put it in the cupboard. Tomorrow you give it to the child again, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. And the child can always enjoy the toy that you made today.

But something else can also happen. Let us assume that you are not interesting the child by making a toy, but that you are putting something together for him out of random things. Or you might even just make something up for him by imitating gestures or something similar. Let us assume that you attract the child's attention by imitating something with your hands or fingers in a very specific way, by pre-evolving something, for example. You cannot put this in the cupboard, take it out again tomorrow and the day after and give it to the child again and again like a toy. What is to make such an impression on the child must be done afresh each time. You can make a doll and keep it; the child can have it again and again. But if you use something you have done yourself, through gestures or the like, to attract the child's attention, you must do it freshly each time.

This is something that can explain to us the difference between what we acquire on the physical plane and what can become memory, and what we experience on the spiritual plane and what cannot immediately become memory. When we have experiences on the physical plane, something like a homunculus forms in our etheric body and an imprint of it is imprinted in the physical body. It remains, like a doll with a child. You can store it and find it in yourself again and again. This then points to the experience of the past. The experience you have in the spiritual world passes. But you had to do something to bring it about. You had to use the rules that you apply to the soul in the sense of “How to Know Higher Worlds” to put the soul in such a state that the occult experience could occur. You can evoke this state in yourself again and again, so that you can have the experience again and again, but you cannot store it like a memory image. For the physical plane, experiences become memories by preserving after-images, by being remembered. The re-occurrence, the re-memory - if we now use the word “memory” in a figurative sense - of occult experiences can only occur if we create the same conditions through which we experienced the event for the first time.

Let us be clear about one thing: we really have to be infinitely more active and engaged with experiences in the spiritual world than with experiences in the physical world. In contrast to experiences in the physical world, something really forms in us that, I would say, gradually acquires the greatest density. Something internally diverse and manifold is this in us. These many people that you have inside you go through life with you and are something complete. This makes life in the physical world easier for you, because you are spared the work that you have to do over and over again in the occult experiences in the spiritual world if you want to have the experience again. You can only remember the conditions under which you brought about the experience, so never the occult experience itself, but only the way in which it was brought about. And you have to bring about these conditions again to have the occult experience again.

If we – and I say this not comparatively but in the real sense – if we go down a path and there is a church or a house at the end of that path and we go back, we can carry the memory of this image of the church or the house with us on the whole way back. This is because the experience of the church or the house is an experience on the physical plane. If a spirit had stood there instead, and the spirit would only manifest itself at this place, then it would be necessary each time to go to the same place again to see this spirit. One must bring about the same conditions, for one can only remember by which route, through which conditions, one arrived at this experience.

That is the strange thing about these things, that a good memory is of no immediate use for retaining occult experiences, but that on the contrary, something that supports us in ordinary life in consciously developing a good memory can be a hindrance to us in the occult. Certain people are born with a good memory right from the start. Now they live and have a good memory. Others have a less good memory. This is based on very specific karmic conditions: A good memory is something that comes into the world from a previous incarnation in such a way that the soul's penetration of the whole body is as late as possible, and that certain parts of the physical body remain untouched by the soul for as long as possible. In this case it is possible that, without our doing anything, these impressions, these homunculi, which I have described, are formed.

But when someone enters life through physical birth and their personality is so inwardly disposed for their individual physical experience that the impressions take complete possession of their physical body as quickly as possible, then they will not be able to develop a particularly good memory because they fill their memory with themselves; and then it is too hard for so many impressions of such homunculi to enter it. Therefore, we will preferably find a good memory in those people who, I might say, have an otherwise vague egoistic interest in the experiences of the physical plane.

On the other hand, memory can also be developed to a certain extent. But it can only be developed by stimulating attention and interest. Interest, attention and memory belong together. If you try to take a very intense interest in some experiences, in some area of life, to be very much involved with it with your whole self, your memory, your recollection of these experiences will also become better and better. So if someone wants to develop their memory for something, the best way to do it is to sharpen their interest in the subject as much as possible. There is nothing we remember for which we do not create an intense interest. Thus, attention and interest are something that can help us to improve a poor memory in the physical world.

For the right approach to occult experiences, so that these experiences do not constantly flash past us like dreams and we are unaware of them, loving attention and loving interest for the spiritual in general is of the utmost importance. Without this spiritual interest, without this loving attention, we cannot have spiritual experiences again and again that we have had once. It is quite possible to have an occult experience. It flits by. Only through this will one be able to create not memories, but the conditions under which one can have the experience again and again, and again and again, by intensifying one's interest in the events in the spiritual world.

That is why it is so important that we do not just acquire as much knowledge as possible about the spiritual world by way of memory; that is actually the least important thing. The more important thing is that we never pursue these matters of the spiritual world without love, never without the most intense interest. If we absorb knowledge from spiritual science indifferently, perhaps just so that we can boast about it or for some other reason, as we so often absorb other knowledge of the world, then it has no significance. What is important is the degree of love, of sympathy for the spiritual world that we acquire. That is the important thing, that is the meaningful thing. And that is why we try to present the events of the spiritual world from so many points of view, again and again from different points of view; because this way we are more and more encouraged to actively approach the knowledge of the spiritual world, and not to come to the desire to understand this knowledge of the spiritual world in the same way as the knowledge of physical things. That is actually the most fatal thing for the real occultist: when the longing arises in a person to gain spiritual knowledge, but when one desires to gain this knowledge in a different way than physical knowledge.

People would prefer to have books about the spiritual world, just as they have books about the physical world; they would like to acquire knowledge about the spiritual world in the same way that they acquire knowledge about the physical world. But it is not at all possible to acquire knowledge of the spiritual world in this way; instead, books that deal with the spiritual world must stimulate our inner activity each time anew, setting our inner powers in motion. Therefore, it is not the same as when we acquire knowledge about the physical world, where we have to repeat it over and over again in order not to forget, when we acquire knowledge about the spiritual world. When we read a cycle again and again or a spiritual science book, then that is actually not a repetition, but an immersing ourselves in the activity through which we arrive at the knowledge. And that is the most important thing, that is the essential thing. You see, if someone were asked to pray when they went to church, you would look at them rather strangely if they said: I don't need to pray today; when I was seven years, three months and two days old, I read the prayer once. I will always remember that I have prayed it; I do not need to pray it again, because I know that I have prayed it; I will just remember it now. You would look at this person strangely, you would make it clear to him that it is not important to remember the prayer once it has been said, but to keep bringing it up because it is alive in every renewal. This is precisely how we should understand our experience in occult science. We should not say, as we do about ordinary science: Yes, we have absorbed it, we remember it - but we want to get used to delving into the subject again and again, to going through the activity again and again. But people of the modern age do not like this at all. Rather, people of modern times love to stop at what they have once attained. Isn't it true that one feels most happy when one has acquired some knowledge and then carries this knowledge in one's inner “backpack,” as it were, through life, and when one needs it, takes it out and remembers it again. This is something that modern humanity is increasingly in danger of falling into. But in modern times, I would say, there is an immediate need to transform this sitting on the acquired content so that human work, human striving, corresponds to the

Only he earns freedom and life who
must conquer them daily.

This beautiful saying from Faust.

And it is truly the case that nothing more than the Faust attitude, which we have often considered here, awakens and stirs in the human soul that which gradually leads to the occult, to the occult attitude.

Goethe wrote the first great monologue of Faust in the 1770s, in keeping with his mood at the time. Today it has become trivial for many, but it is something that, when viewed in its originality, weighs on the soul with all the tragedy of life:

I have now, alas! studied philosophy,
law and medicine,
and, unfortunately! theology,
with great zeal.
There I stand, poor fool that I am!
And I am as wise as before.

Goethe wrote this himself, from his own nature, from the depths of his soul, as a young man in the 1770s. Then came the time when a high point of human philosophical development was experienced in Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. But this high point of philosophical development was connected with legal development. Hegel wrote a natural law, Fichte wrote a natural law; Schelling published a medical journal. Something mighty and great has passed through the human soul, leading to Goethe's saying:

Have now, alas! Philosophy,
Jurisprudence and medicine,
And unfortunately! also theology,
studied thoroughly, with ardent endeavor.

But do you think that if Goethe had lived in 1840 and had begun his “Faust” only in 1840 instead of in 1772, do you think that because great and mighty things have been achieved in the cultural development of humanity, and that he had really searched in a truly philosophical way for what goes on in the human soul, do you think he would have said: “Now, thank God, I have found the answer!” studied philosophy, law and medicine and, of course, theology with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel: “There I stand now, I clever, wise man, and am no longer as foolish as before, but have become quite wise, as wise as one can only be”? Do you think that Goethe would have said that? Suppose it took much longer for the Earth's culture to develop, would this opening monologue of “Faust” have been written exactly the same way in 1840 as it was in 1772, exactly the same way? All these things are part of the real understanding of “Faust.” This great, gigantic idea cannot be understood if you do not grasp it in its details. And if Faust were to be started today, it would have to begin with the same words.

And once countless facts from the humanities have been brought to light, the following sentiment will no longer be shared: “Thank God I have studied philosophy, law and medicine, and thank God theology too, and of course theosophy as well, and am as wise as can be.” That would never be the true Faust mood! Only the one to whom the following applies would have the true Faust mood: “Only he earns freedom, like life, who must conquer it daily.” This is the mood that underlies “Faust” and at the same time shows us where the impulses lie that lead from the old, frozen culture to the new culture of humanity. Man must never cease to acquire something new and different, and I have also advocated this within the spiritual scientific movement to which we belong. It was truly terrible when one repeatedly heard in the old society: Yes, we need schemas, and when I presented this or that, then there should be schemas and tables hanging on the walls so that one has something to remember by. And people were dissatisfied when one came and basically reversed what was once there, what was established; since it always has to be acquired anew. Because it is this never-resting, never-ceasing striving forward that matters.

It can be said directly: By having driven out of itself a Faust, the newer culture has really built the bridge from the merely external materialistic culture to the new spiritual culture that must come over humanity.

But much, very much, in relation to the right view of life is connected with all this, with these peculiarities of the new knowledge, which must indeed be drawn from occultism, and which therefore makes demands on the active impulses of men. Thus it is connected with the principle of taking everything as it is finished, as it is complete, when people strive to preserve that which cannot be preserved. For example, something that I have really tried to explain for decades now, I can say, cannot be preserved; something that is called human freedom.

Freedom as an external institution, as an external condition in the human organization on earth, is something impossible, something unthinkable. Preserved in this way, as it was once conceived for a particular point in time, freedom would be a terrible fetter for man at the next point in time. Freedom is something that must constantly be unleashed as it arises, and man can only acquire freedom in each moment by developing within himself a sense of relating to the whole spiritual world. You can read about this in my book 'The Philosophy of Freedom'. There you will find that the whole mood is expressed there. There you can see that freedom is truly a key to that which leads into the spiritual world.

But it is obvious that freedom can only be understood by people who gradually develop the will to study spiritual science. Freedom cannot be understood by other people, because other people will always confuse certain peculiarities of external institutions with freedom, whereas freedom can only ever exist in the state that a person can acquire at any given moment.

We impair our freedom, namely, already through one thing by which we usually do not believe our freedom to be impaired: we impair our freedom already through our memory. For suppose, for a moment, that you have acquired certain sympathies and antipathies through the experiences you have undergone since your birth; then your freedom is already impaired by what has remained of these sympathies and antipathies. These acquired sympathies and antipathies, everything that is stored in the memory, impairs your freedom. And all knowledge that humanity strives for and that is then executed in order to become memory, that also distances us more and more from a real concept of freedom. On the other hand, with every acquisition of occult knowledge, one is brought closer to the true concept of freedom, genuine freedom.

But this whole thing is connected to something else: consider that with everything that takes root as memory, we are actually planting a homunculus within us. And everything that takes shape in us as a homunculus is really the case that by setting our inner life in motion, we do not get any further with our activity than this homunculus, than these impressions. We cannot get beyond them. If we could break through what has accumulated as memory, if we could really bring out of ourselves everything we have experienced since the time of our childhood, up to the time we can remember back to, we would break through something like a skin of life. But behind this skin of life is the spiritual world. There it is, right behind it! And by beginning to build up a picture of his own life from earliest childhood, by retaining from all his experiences that which makes up the content of his memory, he weaves a veil throughout his life, and this veil covers the spiritual world.

We could not stand in the physical world if we did not spin this web, for we are, insofar as we remember, this web itself.

But we arise as human beings in the physical world only by forming ourselves out of the veil, which we at the same time hold up before the spiritual world. It is really as if someone, well, I would like to say, wants to look at a stage and says: I want to look in there now. But he does it by hanging a curtain in front of it. In doing so, he covers up bit by bit what is behind it. That is what man does in life. The memories man stores up are a curtain that is hung over spiritual reality, woven before the spiritual world. This is a contradiction that we face in life, but it must not be blamed or criticized because it is the condition for our being in the physical life. It can only be characterized, but not blamed. If we did not spiritually weave the curtain before us, we would not be there in the physical world. And that is precisely what matters: that we know such a thing, that we do not mistake ourselves for a reality when we are only a curtain.

We immediately penetrate all deception by considering ourselves a curtain and not a reality, in the moments when we say to ourselves: You are actually only what stands before the true world, and your own form, what you yourself are, stands behind the form that you yourself weave throughout life. - When you keep this fact in mind, you stand in truth. Then you do not consider yourself to be reality, but only a curtain. But people are afraid of considering themselves a mere curtain. They want to consider themselves a reality in what they are. But that is why they cannot come to any clarity about the most important things in life.

All people thirst for preservation after death, for immortality, they all thirst to know something about the fact that they still exist after death. But they secretly think: if everything that is in me, that I have on the physical plane, perishes, what will then still be there? That this must go away after death, that the curtain not only tears, but must be dissolved, so that the human being can emerge: this is self-evident for the one who ascends in spiritual knowledge.

Thus we must accept such things, as they have been touched upon today, in such a way that we really say more and more to ourselves: For spiritual science, different human attitudes must be inwardly adopted than those in the culture up to now. There must arise a much greater striving for constant activity among people, for activity, for being there. The idea that one has grasped something and can retain it and carry it through life must disappear. If that disappears, all the other things that stand in the way of clear perception will disappear as well. I have often pointed out how people, even in science, have the most confused ideas about what is true. For example, you will often read in physiological works today that people sleep because they experience this or that in their waking state and become tired from it. Sleep would therefore be a result of fatigue. I have pointed out that the reindeer, which does not need to work very hard, should not have any need for sleep either. But if you listen to the reindeer, you will learn that if you do nothing at all, you feel most tired and you fall asleep without having done the slightest thing. From this you can see that fatigue has nothing to do with sleep, and sleep has nothing to do with fatigue, any more than day has to do with night.

At most, minds like Hume or Kant will have difficulties because they confuse what follows from each other. No one will consider the day as the cause of the night and the night as the cause of the day. Day and night arise one after the other. Day arises from the sun rising above the horizon, and night from the sun going below the horizon. The sun's standing above the horizon is the cause of day, and the sun's going below the horizon is the cause of night. Just as night is not the cause of day, or day the cause of night, so it is not essentially true that waking is the cause of sleeping or sleeping the cause of waking. Rather, it is rhythmic states that alternate, just as the positions of the sun above and below the horizon alternate, and these have nothing to do with a cause-and-effect relationship.

But just as it is true that the sun, when it goes below the horizon, causes twilight, and when it goes further down, causes darkness, so the truth is not that because we feel tired, we also want to sleep, but we feel tired because we want to sleep. We must have a desire for sleep, then we feel tired.

This seems to contradict everything that is thought today, but it is true, just as true as that day is not the cause of night and night is not the cause of day. So tiredness is not the cause of sleep. But just as night occurs when the sun goes down, so tiredness occurs because one wants to sleep. Here, cause and effect are completely confused and mixed up.

Today I want to draw attention to something else. There is an enormous difference between the relationship between day and night, the relationship between the sun and the earth, and the relationship between sleeping and waking in humans: you cannot imagine that the same thing can happen to the sun as can happen to humans. I mean, a person has a good meal and sleeps at the wrong time, or sleeps at the wrong time for some other reason. The sun does not do that. Because, think about what it would be like if the sun suddenly decided not to rise above the horizon at a certain time and everything that makes day into night happened all at once. You cannot possibly imagine that a constellation will arise in the universe that is analogous to man sleeping when he wants, arbitrarily arranging his waking and sleeping times. How far removed the sun is from that! It is impossible for the sun to overdo itself and stop shining in the middle of the day, so that night falls. As far as it is from anyone falling asleep during the day – it is easy, it just needs to be a little hot and one thinks that one has to sleep with the heat – so far away from freedom are natural necessity and natural law, so far away from the spirit is nature. But so far is the understanding that humanity has today, that the present time has, from the understanding that it will have to acquire through spiritual science.

We must always bear in mind that it is not only a serious but also a great task to find our way into the aspirations that spiritual science wants to bring to human culture. And there are many things that have not yet been overcome that will have to be overcome if spiritual science and its results are to be incorporated into the spiritual development of humanity.

Today, I would like to draw attention to two things – we will see more tomorrow – that must be acquired by anyone who wants to enter the field of spiritual science and make it fruitful for the spiritual life of the future: the first is a certain shyness, a certain reverence for the truth. One need only open one's eyes to see that, especially today, everything that happens in the world seems to be a revolt against this awe, against reverence for the truth. Those who have reverence for the truth will wait a long time before making an assertion about something or passing judgment on it. Today there is a tendency to do the opposite, to feel as little respect as possible for the truth, but rather to shape the truth to suit one's own convenience, to suit one's own feelings and perceptions. The ability to wait until the truth reveals itself as the chaste divinity of the human soul is a feeling that can be said to It is truly necessary for today's humanity to acquire it. But external culture resists this acquisition; it is a culture in which it is important to fabricate messages and to communicate all facts as quickly as possible, as today's journalism does. The opposite mood is present to that which our spiritual science must produce in us. The way in which the world is presented today through the press and the media is the opposite of what must be striven for by spiritual science, by those who mean well by humanity. This must be admitted by those who want to belong to the spiritual science movement. The first is reverence for the truth.

The second is reverence for knowledge. It must weigh heavily on the soul of those who recognize the impulses of the times and strive to introduce new impulses into the development of humanity that people do not take reverence for knowledge seriously enough. It is sad that people everywhere show that they do not have reverence for knowledge.

Particularly in our time, in view of the terrible events of the present, we do indeed see that people - most of all those who write and have it printed, but unfortunately the others do it too - judge as if the world were really created, say, in June or July 1914.

Strangely enough, when the events of the present are being discussed, one repeatedly hears the beginning of the story “In 1914” being repeated, and there the events are jumbled up and mixed up, and people believe that something can come of it. Nothing can come of it. One cannot understand why things are as they are in the present if one does not have the reverence for knowledge that leads to the times of the distant past and sees that the events of the present are the consequences of these distant pasts and are deeply connected with them.

The heart bleeds for those who are serious about the development of humanity when they see how thoughtlessly people judge the way cause and being are connected here or there. And these judgments are made by people whose judgments show that they basically do not know what is important.

Now one could object: You cannot demand that everyone should be able to judge. - Yes, certainly not. But what one can demand is reverence for knowledge, an awareness that one must first know something before judging.

This is something one would like to wish for people above all today: that they should not judge before knowing. It is one of the most terrible evils of the present day that people judge without knowing. It is what makes the products of contemporary culture so terrible, because you can see everywhere that they breathe exactly the opposite of what reverence for real knowledge is, what reverence for truth is.

Reverence for truth, reverence for knowledge, that is what we should acquire. I say: reverence for knowledge. I do not, of course, say reverence for scientific authority – so as not to distort things – but reverence for knowledge, especially for one's own knowledge. You have to acquire that first; then you can also have reverence for your own knowledge. As long as you do not possess it, you cannot, of course, have reverence for what does not exist. Then you also lack the necessary reverence in life.

But above all, it is important that we penetrate into our souls, that we experience new feelings and emotions, and that we do not try to make progress in the same way, now on the paths, on the paths of spiritual science, as has been attempted in material culture. Our serious task here must be to acquire the ability to distinguish.

To-day I should like to make some introductory remarks to what I am going to lay before you in the coming days. My reason for doing this is that you may know the purpose of these talks from the outset.

It will not be my task during the following days to deal with any narrowly defined, special branch of science, but to give various wider viewpoints, having in mind a quite definite goal in relation to science. I should therefore like to warn people not to describe this as an ‘Astronomical Course’. It is not meant to be that. But it will deal with something that I feel is especially important for us to consider at this time. I have therefore given it the title “The relation of the diverse branches of Natural Science to Astronomy,” and today in particular I shall explain what I actually intend with the giving of this title.

The fact is that in a comparatively short time much will have to be changed within what we call the sphere of science, if it is not to enter upon a complete decline. Certain groups of sciences which are now comprised under various headings and are permitted to be represented under these headings, in our ordinary schools, will have to be taken out their grooves and be classified from quite other aspects. This will necessitate a far reaching regrouping of our sciences. The grouping at present employed is entirely inadequate for a world-conception based upon reality, and yet our modern world holds so firmly to such traditional classification that it is on this basis that candidates are chosen to occupy the professorial chairs in our Universities. People confine themselves for the most part to dividing the existing, circumscribed fields of Natural Science into yet further special branches, and they then look to the specialists or experts as they are called. But a change must come into the whole scientific life by the advent of quite different categories, within which will be united, as in a whole new field of science, things that today are dealt with in Zoology or Physiology, or again, let us say, in the Theory of Knowledge. The older forms of scientific classification, often extremely abstract, must die out, and quite new scientific combinations must arise. This will meet with great obstacles at first, because people today are trained in the specialized branches of science and it will be difficult for them to find an approach to what they will urgently need in order to bring about a combination of scientific material in accordance with reality.

To put in concisely, I might say: We have today a science of astronomy, of Physics, of Chemistry, of Philosophy, we have a science of Biology, of Mathematics, and so on. Special branches have been formed, almost, I might say, so that the various specialists will not have such hard work in order to become well grounded in their subject. They do not have too much to do in mastering all the literature concerned, which, as we know, exists in immense quantities. But it will be a matter of creating new branches which will comprise quite different things, including perhaps at the same time something from Astronomy, something from Biology, and so on. For this, a reshaping of our whole life of science will of course be essential. Therefore, what we term Spiritual Science, which does indeed aim to be of a universal nature, must work precisely in this direction. It must make it its special mission to work in this direction. For we simply cannot get any further with the old grouping. Our Universities confront the world today, my dear friends, in a way that is really quite estranged from life. They turn out mathematicians, physiologists, philosophers, but none of them have any real relation to the world. They can do nothing but work in their narrowly confined spheres, putting before us a picture of the world that becomes more and more abstract, less and less realistic.

It is the change here indicated—a deep necessity for our time—to which I want to do justice in these lectures. I should like you to see how impossible it will be to continue the older classifications indefinitely, and I therefore want to show how other branches of science of the most varied kinds, which, in their present way of treatment, take no account of Astronomy, have indeed definite connections with Astronomy, that is, with a true knowledge of universal space. Certain astronomical facts must perforce be taken into account in other branches of science too, so that we may learn to master these other fields in a way conformable to reality.

The task of these lectures is therefore to build a bridge from the different fields of scientific thought to the field of Astronomy, that astronomical understanding may appear in the right way in the various fields of science.

In order not to be misunderstood, I should like to make one more remark about method. You see, the manner of presenting scientific facts which is customary nowadays must undergo considerable change, because it actually arises out of the scientific structure which has to be overcome. When today facts are referred to, which lie somewhat remote from man's understanding,—remote, just because he does not meet with them at all in his scientific knowledge,—it is usual to say: “That is stated, but no proved.” Yet in scientific work is often quite inevitable that statements must be made at first purely as results of observation, which only afterwards can be verified as more and more facts are brought to support them. So it would be wrong to assume, for instance, that right at the beginning of a discourse someone could break in and say, “That is not proved.” It will be proved in the course of time, but much will first have to be presented simply from observation, so that the right concept, the right idea, may be created.

And so I beg of you to take these lectures as a whole, and to look in the last lectures for the plain proof of many things which seem in the first lectures to be mere statements. Many things will then be verified which I shall have to handle at first in such a way as to evoke the necessary concepts and ideas.

Astronomy as we know it today, even including the domain of Astrophysics, is fundamentally a modern creation. Before the time of Copernicus or Galileo men thought about astronomical phenomena in a way which differed essentially from the way we think today. It is even extraordinarily difficult to indicate the way in which man still thought of Astronomy in, say, the 13th and 14th centuries, because this way of thinking has become completely foreign to modern man. We only live in the ideas which have been formed since the time of Galileo, Kepler, Copernicus; and from a certain point of view that is perfectly right. They are ideas which treat of the distant phenomena of universal space, in so far as they are concerned with Astronomy, in a mathematical and mechanical way. Men think of these phenomena in terms of mathematics and mechanics. In observing the phenomena, men base their ideas upon what they have acquired from an abstract mathematical science, or an abstract science of mechanics. They calculate distances, movements and forces. But the qualitative outlook still in existence in the 13th and 14th centuries, which distinguished Individualities in the stars, an Individuality of Jupiter, of Saturn ... this has become completely lost to modern man. I will make no criticism of the things at the moment, but will only point out that the mechanical and mathematical way of treating what we call the domain of Astronomy has become the exclusive one. Even if we acquaint ourselves with the stars in a popular fashion without understanding mathematics or mechanics, we still find it presented, even if in a manner suitable for the lay-mind, entirely in ideas of space and time, of a mathematical and mechanical kind. No doubts of any kind exist in the minds of our contemporaries—who believe that their judgment is authoritative—that this is the only way in which to regard the starry heavens. Anything else, they are convinced, would be merely amateurish.

Now, if the question arises as to how it has actually come about that this view of the starry heavens has emerged in the evolution of civilization, the answer of those who regard the modern scientific mode of thought as absolute, will be different from the reply which we are able to give. Those who regard the scientific thought of today as something absolute and true, will say: Well, you know, among earlier humanity there were not yet any strictly scientifically formed ideas; man had first to struggle through to such ideas, i. e., to the mathematical, mechanical mode of regarding celestial phenomena of the Universe, a later humanity has worked through to a strictly scientific comprehension of what does actually correspond to reality.

This is an answer that we cannot give, my dear friends. We must take up our position from the standpoint of the evolution of humanity, which in the course of its existence, has introduced various inner forces into its consciousness. We must say to ourselves: The manner of observing the celestial phenomena which existed among the ancient Babylonians, the Egyptians, perhaps even the Indian people, was due to the particular form which the development of the human soul-forces was taking in those times. Those human soul-forces had to be developed with the same inner necessity with which a child between the 10th and 15th year must develop certain soul-forces, while in another period it will developing other faculties, which lead it to different conclusions about the world. Then came the Ptolemaic system. That arose out of different soul-forces. Then our Copernican system. That arose from yet other soul-forces. The Copernican system did not develop because humanity had happily struggled through to objectivity, whereas before they had all been as children, but because humanity since the middle of the 15th century needed precisely the mathematical, mechanical faculties for its development. That is why modern man sees the celestial phenomena in the picture formed by the mathematical, mechanical faculties. And he will some day see them again in a different way, when in his development he has drawn up out of the depths of the soul other forces,—to his own healing and benefit. Thus it depends upon humanity what form the world-concept takes. But it is not a question of looking back in pride to earlier times when men were “more childlike,” and then thinking that in modern times we have at last struggled through to an objective understanding which can now endure for all future ages.

There is something which has become a real necessity to later humanity and has given color to the requirements of the scientific mind. It is this: Men strive on the one hand for ideas that are clear and easy to control—namely, mathematical ideas—, and on the other hand they strive for ideas through which they can surrender most strongly to an inner compulsion. The modern man at once becomes uncertain and nervous when he does not feel the strong inner compulsion presented, for instance, by the argument of the Pythagorean theorem, but realizes, let us say, that the figure which is drawn does not decide for him, but that he must develop an activity of soul and decide for himself. Then he at once becomes uncertain and nervous and is no longer willing to continue the line of thought. So he says: That is not exact science; subjectivity comes into it. Modern man is really dreadfully passive; he would like to be led everywhere by a chain of infallible arguments and conclusions. Mathematics satisfies this requirement, at least in most cases; and where it does not, where man have interposed their own opinion in recent times,—well, my dear friends, the results are according! Men still believe that they are being exact, while they hit upon the most incredible ideas.

Thus in mathematics and mechanics men think they are being led forward by leading-strings of concepts which are linked together through their own inherent logic. They feel then as if they had ground under their feet, but the moment they step off it they do not want to go on any further. Concepts which are easy to grasp on the one hand, and the element of inner compulsion on the other: this is what modern man needs for his “safety.” Fundamentally, it is on this basis that the particular form of world-conception, supplied by the modern science of Astronomy, has been built up. I am not at the moment speaking of the single facts, but merely of the world-conception as a whole.

This attitude towards a mathematical, mechanical conception of the world has so penetrated the consciousness of humanity, my dear friends, that people have come to regard everything that cannot be treated in this way as more or less unscientific. From this feeling proceeded such a phrase as that of Kant, who said: In every domain of science there is only so much real science as there is mathematics in it; one ought really to bring Arithmetic or Geometry into all the sciences. But this idea, as we know, breaks down when we think how remote the simplest mathematical ideas are to those, for instance, who study Medicine. Our present division of the sciences gives to a medical student practically nothing in the way of mathematical ideas.

And so it comes about that on the one hand what is called astronomical knowledge has been set up as an ideal. DuBois-Raymond has defined this in his address on the limits of the knowledge of Nature by saying: We only grasp truths in Nature and satisfy our need of causality inasmuch as we can apply the astronomical type of knowledge. That is to say, we regard the celestial phenomena in such a way that we draw the stars upon the chart of the sky and calculate with the material which is there given us. We can state exactly: There is a star, it exercises a force of attraction upon other stars. We begin to calculate, having the different things, to which our calculations apply, visibly before us. This is what we have brought into Astronomy in the first place. Now we observe, let us say, the molecule. Within the complex molecule we have the atoms, exercising a force of attraction on one another, moving around each other,—forming, as it were, a little universe. We observe this molecule as a small cosmic system and are satisfied if it all seems to fit. But then there is the great difference that when we look out into the starry sky all the details are given to us. We can at most ask whether we understand them rightly, whether after all, there might not be some other explanation than the one given by Newton. We have the given details and then we spin a mathematical, mechanical web over them. This web of thought is actually added to the given facts, but from a scientific point of view it satisfies the modern need of man. And now we carry the system, which we have first thought out and devised, into the world of the molecule and atom. Here we add in thought what in the other case was given to us. But we satisfy our so-called need of causality by saying: What we think of as the smallest particle, moves in such and such a way, and it is the objective counterpart of what we experience subjectively as light, sound, warmth etc. We carry the astronomic form of knowledge into every phenomenon of the world and thus satisfy our demand for causality. Du-Bois Raymond has expressed it quite bluntly: “When one cannot do that, there is no scientific explanation at all.”

Yes, my dear friends, what is here claimed should actually imply that if, for example, we wished to come to a rational form of therapy, that is to say, to understand the activity of a remedy, we should have to be able to follow the atoms in the substance of the remedy as we follow the movements of the Moon, the Sun, the planets and the fixed stars. They would all have to become little cosmic systems. We should have to be able to calculate how this or that remedy would work. This was actually an ideal for some people not so very long ago. Now they have given up such ideals. Such an idea collapses not only in reference to such a far off sphere as a rational therapy, but in those lying more within reach, simply because our sciences are divided as they are today. You see, the modern doctor is educated in such a way that he masters extraordinarily little of pure mathematics. We may talk to him perhaps of the need for a knowledge of astronomy but it would be of no use to speak of introducing mathematical ideas into his field of work. But as we have seen, everything outside mathematics, mechanics and astronomy should be described, according to the modern notion, as being unscientific in the strict sense of the word. Naturally that is not done. People regard these other sciences too as exact, but this is most inconsistent. It is, however, characteristic of the present time that the demand should have been made at all for everything to be understood on the model of mathematical Astronomy.

It is hard today to talk to people in a serious way about such thing; how hard this is I should like to make clear to you by an example.

You know of course that the question of the form of the human skull has played a great role in modern biology. I have also spoken of this matter may times in the course of our anthroposophical lectures. Goethe and Oken put forward magnificent thoughts on this question of the human skull-bones. The school of Gegenbauer also carried out classical researches upon it. But something that could satisfy the urge for a deeper knowledge in this direction does not in fact exist today.

People discuss, to what extent Goethe was right in saying that the skull-bones are metamorphosed vertebrae, bones of the spine. But it is impossible to arrive at any really penetrating view of this matter today, because in the circles where these things are discussed one would scarcely be understood, and where an understanding might be forthcoming these things are not talked of because they are not of interest. You see, it is practically impossible today to bring together in close working association a thoroughly modern doctor, a thoroughly modern mathematician,—i.e., one who is master of higher mathematics—, and a man who could understand both of them passably well. These three men could scarcely understand one another. The one who would sit in the middle, understanding both of them slightly, would be able at a pinch to talk a little with the mathematician and also with the doctor. But the mathematician and the doctor would not be able to understand each other upon important questions, because what the doctor would have to say about them would not interest the mathematician, and what the mathematician would have to say—or would say, if he found words at all,—would not be understood by the doctor, who would be lacking the necessary mathematical background. This is what would happen in an attempt to solve the problem I have just put before you. People imagine: If the skull-bones are metamorphosed vertebra, then we ought to be able to proceed directly, through a transformation which it is possible to picture spatially, from the vertebra to the skull. To extend the idea still further to the limb-bones would, on the basis of the accepted premises, be quite out of the question. The modern mathematician will be able, from his mathematical studies, to form an idea of what it really means when I turn a glove inside out, when I turn the inside to the outside. One must have in mind a certain mathematical handling of the process by which what was formerly outside is turned inward, and what was inside is turned to the outside. I will make a sketch of it (Fig. 1)—a structure of some sort that is first white on the outside and red inside. We will treat this structure as we did the glove, so that it is now red outside and white inside (Fig. 2).

But let us go further, my dear friends, and picture to ourselves that we have something endowed with a force of its own that does not admit of being turned inside out in such a simple way as a glove which still looks like a glove after being inverted. Suppose that we invert something which has different stresses of force on the outer surface from those on the inner. We shall then find that simply through the inversion quite a new form arises. The form may appear thus before we have reversed it (Fig. 1): we turn it inside out and now different forces come into consideration on the red surface and on the white, so that perhaps, purely through the inversion, this form arises (Fig. 3). Such a form might arise merely in the process of inversion. When the red side faced inward, forces remained dominant which are developed differently when it is turned outward. And so with the white side; only when turned towards the inside can it develop its inherent forces.

It is of course quite conceivable to give a mathematical presentation of such a subject, but people are thoroughly disinclined nowadays to apply to reality what is arrived at conceptually in such a way. The moment, however, we learn to apply this to reality, we become able to see in our long bones or tubular bones (that is, in the limb bones), a form which, when inverted, becomes our skull bones! In the drawing, let the inside of the bone, as far as the marrow, be depicted by the red, the outside by the white (Fig. 4). Certain forms and forces, which can of course be investigated, are turned inward, and what we see when we draw away the muscle from the long bone is turned outward. But now imagine these hollow bones turned inside out by the same principle as I have just given you, in which other conditions of stress and strain are brought into play;

then you may easily obtain this form (Fig. 5). Now it has the white within, and what I depicted by the red comes to the outside. This is in fact the relationship of a skull-bone to a limb-bone, and in between lies the typical bone of the back—the vertebra of the spinal column. You must turn the tubular bone inside out like a glove according to its indwelling forces; then you obtain the skull-bone. The metamorphosis of the bones of the limbs into the skull-bones is only to be understood when keeping in mind the process of inversion, or ‘turning inside-out’. The important thing to realizes is that what is turned outward in the limb-bones is turned inward in the skull. The skull-bones turn towards a world of their own in the interior of the skull. That is one world. The skull-bone is orientated to the world, just as the limb-bone is orientated outward, towards the external world. This can be clearly seen in the case of the bones. Moreover, the human organism as a whole is so organized that it has on the one hand a skull organization, and on the other a limb-organization, the skull-organization being oriented inward, the limb-organization outward. The skull contains an inner world, the limb-man an outer world, and between the two is a kind of balancing system which preserves the rhythm.

My dear friends, take any literature dealing with the theory of functions, or, say, with non-Euclidean geometry, and see what countless ideas of every kind are brought forward in order to get beyond the ordinary geometrical conception of three-dimensional space;—to extend the domain—widen out the concept of geometry. You will see what industry and ingenuity are employed. But now suppose that you have become an expert at mathematics, who knows the theory of functions well and understands all that can be understood today of non-Euclidean geometry. I should like now to put a question concerning much that tends in this direction (Forgive me if it seems as if one did not value them highly, speaking of these things in such trivial terms. And yet I must do so, and I beg the audience, especially trained mathematicians, to turn it over in their minds and see if there is not truth in what I say.) The question could be put as follows: What is the use of all this spinning of purely mathematical thoughts? What is it worth to me, so to speak, in pounds, shillings and pence? No one is interested in the spheres in which it might perhaps find concrete application. Yet if we were to apply to the structure of the human organism all that has been thought out in non-Euclidean geometry, then we should be in the realm of reality, and applying immeasurably important ideas to reality, not wandering about in mere speculations. If the mathematician were so trained as to be interested also in what is real,—in the appearance of the heart, for example, so that he could form an idea of how through a mathematical process he could turn the heart inside out, and how thereby the whole human form would arise,—if he were taught to use his mathematics in actual life, then he could be working in the realm of the real. It would then be impossible to have the trained mathematician on the one hand, not interested in what the doctor learns, and on the other, the physician, understanding nothing of of how the mathematician—though in a purely abstract element—is able to change and metamorphose forms. This is the situation we must alter. If not, our sciences will fall into decay. They grow estranged from one another; people no longer understand each other's language.

How then is science to be transformed into a social science, as is implied in all that I shall be telling you in these lectures? A science which leads over into social science is not yet in existence.

On the one hand we have Astronomy, tending more and more to be clothed in mathematical forms of thought. It has become so great in its present form just because it is a purely mathematical and mechanical science. But there is another branch of science which stands, as it were, at the opposite pole to Astronomy, and which cannot be studied in its real nature without Astronomy. It is however, impossible, as science is today, to build a bridge between Astronomy and this other pole of science, namely, Embryology. He alone is studying reality, who on the one hand studies the starry skies and on the other hand the development of the human embryo. How is the human embryo generally studied today? Well, it is stated: The human embryo arises from the interaction of two cells, the sex-cells or gametes, male and female. These cells develop in the parent organism in such a way as to attain a certain state of independence before they are able to interact. They then present a certain contract, the one cell, the male, calling forth new and different possibilities of development in the other, the female. The question is put: What is a cell? As you know, since about the middle of the 19th century, Biology has largely been built upon the cell theory. The cell is described as a larger or smaller, spherule, consisting of albuminous or protein-like substances. It has a nucleus within it of a somewhat different structure and around the whole is an enclosing membrane. As such, it is the building-stone for all that arising by way of living organisms. The sex-cells are of a similar nature but are formed differently according to whether they are male or female, and from such cells every more complicated organism is built up.

But now, what is actually meant when it is said that an organism builds itself up from these cells? The idea is that substances which are otherwise in Nature are taken up into these cells and then no longer work in quite the same way as before. If oxygen, nitrogen or carbon are contained in the cells, the carbon, for instance, does not have the effect upon some other substance outside, that it would have had before; such power of direct influence is lost to it. It is taken up into the organism of the cell and can only work there as conditions in the cell allow. That is to say, the influence is exerted not so much by the carbon, but by the cell, which makes use of the particular characteristics of carbon, having incorporated a certain amount of it into itself. For example, what man has within him in the form of metal—iron for instance—only works in a circuitous way, via the cell. The cell is the building-stone. So in studying the organism, everything is traced to the cell. Considering at first only the main bulk of the cell, without the nucleus and membrane, we distinguish two parts: a transparent part composed of this fluid, and another part forming sort of framework. Describing it schematically, we may say that there is the framework of the cell, and this is embedded, as it were, in the other substance which, unlike the framework, is quite unformed. (Fig. 6) Thus we must think of the cell

as consisting of a mass which remains fluid and unformed and a skeleton or framework which takes on a great variety of forms. This then is studied. The method of studying cells in this way has been pretty well perfected; certain parts in the cell can be stained with color, others do not take the stain. Thus with carmine or saffron, or whatever coloring matter is used, we are able to distinguish the form of the cell and can thus acquire certain ideas about its inner structure. We note, for instance, how the inner structure changes when the female germ-cell is fructified. We follow the different stages in which the cell's inner structure alters; how it divides; and how the parts become attached to one another, cell upon cell, so that the whole becomes a complicated structure. All this is studied. But it occurs to no-one to ask: With what is this whole life in the cell connected? What is really happening? It does not occur to anyone to ask this.

What happens in the cell is to be conceived, my dear friends, in the following way,—though to be sure, it is still a rather abstract way. There is the cell. For the moment let us consider it in its most usual form, namely the spherical form. This spherical form is partially determined by the thin fluid substance, and enclosed within it is the delicate framework. But what is the spherical form? The thin fluid mass is as yet left entirely to itself and therefore behaves according to the impulses it receives from its surroundings. What does it do? Well, my dear friends, it mirrors the universe around it! It takes on the form of the sphere because it mirrors in miniature the whole cosmos, which we indeed also picture to ourselves ideally as a sphere. Every cell in its spherical form is no less than an image of the form of the whole universe. And the framework inside, every line of the form, is conditioned by its relationship to the structure of the whole cosmos. To express myself abstractly to begin with, think of the sphere of the universe with its imaginary boundary (Fig. 7). In it, you have here a planet, and there a planet (a,a₁). They work in such a way as to exert an influence upon one another in the direction of the line which joins them. Here (m) let us say—diagrammatically, of course,—a cell is formed; its outline mirrors the sphere. Here, within the framework it has a solid part which is due to the working of the one planet on the other. And suppose that here there were another constellation of planets, working upon each other along the line joining them (b,b₁).

And here again there might be yet another planet (c), this one having no counterpart;—it throws the whole construction, which might otherwise have been rectangular, out of shape, and the structure takes on a somewhat different form. And so you have in the whole formation of the framework of the cell a reflection of the relationships existing in the planetary system,—altogether in the whole starry system. You can enter quite concretely into the formation of the cell and you will reach an understanding of this concrete form only if you see in the cell an image of the entire cosmos.

And now take the female ovum, and picture to yourselves that this ovum has brought the cosmic forces to a certain inner balance. They have taken on form in the framework of the cell, and are in a certain way at rest within it, supported by the female organism as a whole. Then comes the influence of the male sex-cell. This has not brought the macrocosmic forces to rest, but works in the sense of a very specialized force. It is as though the male sex-cell works precisely along this line of force (indicated by Dr. Steiner on the blackboard) upon the female ovum which has come to a condition of rest. The cell, which is an image of the whole cosmos, is thereby caused to relinquish its microcosmic form once more to a changing play of forces. At first, in the female ovum, the macrocosm comes to rest in a peaceful image. Then through the male sex-cell the female is torn out of this state of rest, and is drawn again into a region of specialized activity and brought into movement. Previously it had drawn itself together in the resting form of the image of the cosmos, but the form is drawn into movement again by the male forces which are, so to speak, images of movement. Through them the female forces, which are images of the form of the cosmos and have come to rest, are brought out of this state of rest and balance.

Here we may have some idea, from the aspect of Astronomy, of the forming and shaping of something which is minute and cellular. Embryology cannot be studied at all without Astronomy, for what Embryology has to show is only the other pole of what is seen in Astronomy. We must, in a way, follow the starry heavens on the one hand, seeing how they reveal successive stages, and we must then follow the process of development of a fructified cell. The two belong together, for the one is only the image of the other. if you understand nothing of Astronomy, you will never understand the forces which are at work in Embryology, and if you understand nothing of Embryology, you will never understand the meaning of the activities with which Astronomy has to deal. For these activities appear in miniature in the processes of Embryology.

It is conceivable that a science should be formed, in which, on the one hand, astronomical events are calculated and described, and on the other hand all that belongs to them in Embryology, which is only the other aspect of the same thing.

Now look at the position as it is today: you find that Embryology is studied on its own. It would be regarded as madness if you were to demand of a modern embryologist that he should study Astronomy in order to understand the phenomena in his own sphere of work. And yet it should be so. This is why a complete regrouping of the sciences is necessary. It will be impossible to become a real embryologist without studying Astronomy. It will no longer be possible to educate specialists who merely turn their eyes and their telescopes to the stars, for to study the stars in that way has no further meaning unless one knows that it is out of the great universe that the minute and microscopical is fashioned.

All this,—which is quite real and concrete,—has in scientific circles been changed into the utmost abstraction. It is reality to say: We must strive for astronomical knowledge in cellular theory, especially in Embryology. If DuBois-Raymond had said that the detailed astronomical facts should be applied to the cell-theory, he would have spoken out of the sphere of reality. But what he wanted corresponds to no reality, namely that something thought-out and devised—the atoms and molecules—should be examined with astronomical precision. He wanted the astronomical type of mathematical thoughts, which have been added to the world of the stars, to be sought for again in the molecule.

Thus you see, upon the one hand lies reality: movement, the active forces of the stars and the embryonic development in which there lives, in all reality, what lives in the starry heavens. That is where the reality lies and that is where we must look for it. On the other hand lies abstraction. The mathematician, the mechanist, calculates the movements and forces of the heavenly bodies and then invents the molecular structure to which to apply this kind of astronomical knowledge. Here he is withdrawn from life, living in pure abstractions.

These are the things about which we must think, remembering that now we must renew, in full consciousness, something which was in a certain sense present in earlier times. Looking back to the Egyptian Mysteries, we find astronomical observations such as were made at that time. These observations, my dear friends, were not used merely to calculate when an eclipse of the Sun or Moon would take place, but rather to arrive at what should come about in social evolution. Men were guided by what they saw in the heavens, as to what must be said to the people, what instructions should be given, so that the development of the whole social life should take its right course. Astronomy and Sociology were dealt with as one. We too, though in a different way from the Egyptians, must again learn how to connect what happens in social life with the phenomena of the great universe. We do not understand what came about in the middle of the 15th century, if we cannot relate the events of that time to the phenomena which then prevailed in the universe. It is like a blind man talking about color to speak of the changes in the civilized world in the middle of the 15th century without taking all this into account.

Spiritual Science is already a starting point. But we shall not succeed in bring together the complicated domain of Sociology—social science—with the observations of natural phenomena, unless we first begin by connecting Astronomy with Embryology, linking the embryonic facts with astronomical phenomena.

The original idea of any sacred festival is to make the human being look upward from his dependence on earthly things to those things that transcend the Earth. The Easter Festival especially can bring these thoughts near to man's heart. During the last three, four or five centuries humanity of the civilised world has undergone an evolution of soul and spirit which led man farther and farther away from the thought of his connection with Cosmic powers and Cosmic forces. Man became more and more restricted to those relationships alone which hold good between himself and the Earthly powers and forces. Indeed it is true to say that by the methods of knowledge recognised today, no other relationships can be considered. If a man who stood near to the sanctuaries of Initiation in pre-Christian times, or even in the first centuries of Christianity, could learn to know the character and trend of our present scholarship—if he could approach it with the mood of soul belonging to that ancient time—he simply would not understand how it is possible for man to live without a consciousness of his non-earthly, cosmic relationships.

I will now give a brief outline of certain facts, the precise details of which you will find in one or other of the Lecture-Courses. The purpose of these present lectures is to bring especially the Easter thought near to our hearts; I cannot therefore go into all the details now.

We may transplant ourselves in thought into one of the many different religious systems of antiquity. Take for example the one that is least far removed from the modern man—the Hebrew or Jewish system of religion. In such religious systems of antiquity—in so far as they are monotheistic—we shall find the reverence for, the worship of, the One God. It is the Divinity of whom we speak in the Christian conception as the First Person of the Godhead—the Father God.

Now all those religions in which this conception of the Father God was living were more or less aware—the Priests indeed were fully aware—of the connection of the Father God with the cosmic Moon forces—with all the forces that now flow down from Moon to Earth. Scarcely anything is left today of that ancient consciousness of man's connection with the Moon forces—unless it be the imaginative inspiration which the poetic mind still feels that it receives from thence, or again in Medicine the counting of the embryo period as ten lunar months. But the older world-conceptions had a clear consciousness of the fact that when man descends to this physical life from the spiritual world where he dwelt as a soul-spiritual being in his pre-earthly life, the currents of those forces and impulses which proceed from the Moon pour through him.

To understand what shapes him in the fulness of his life—what lives in him as the forces of nutrition, breathing and the like, in a word, as the general forces of growth—man must look not to the earthly forces but to forces from beyond the Earth. Man can indeed become aware, if he considers the matter truly, how the earthly forces are related to himself. If we did not hold our body together by forces from beyond the Earth—if our body did not receive its form through these what could the earthly forces do to hold our body together? The moment the forces from beyond the Earth have left it, this body is indeed exposed to the earthly forces. Then it disintegrates and dissolves; it becomes a corpse. Earthly forces can only make a corpse of man; they cannot form and mould him. But there are other forces in him which lift him out of the earthly realm. These forces make him a connected organism, a connected form and figure within the earthly realm between birth and death. They prevent him from falling a victim to the forces which take hold of him in death and destroy him. Throughout his earthly life they battle against the destruction of his form; indeed they must be battling all the time. For these forces man is indebted to the Moon influences.

While on the one hand, therefore, we may state this somewhat theoretic truth: The Moon forces contain the formative principle of the human body, we must realise on the other hand that the ancient religions revered and worshipped in these forces which guide man, so to speak, through birth into this physical existence, the forces of the Divine Father. The Initiates of the ancient Hebrew culture were clearly aware that the forces which guide man into this Earth-existence, which maintain him here, and from which—as physical man—he escapes when he passes through the gate of death, stream from the Moon.

To love the Divine Father forces with heart and mind, to look up to them and to express this reverence in sacred ritual, in prayer and praise—such was the content of certain monotheistic religions of ancient time. But the old religions were more consistent than we generally think. History describes these things quite wrongly for it only has the outer documents to go upon and is unaware of what can be observed by spiritual sight.

The religions which looked up to the Moon—to the spiritual Beings in the Moon—belonged really to a later period. The primeval religions possessed not only this conception of the Moon, but also had a clear idea of the Sun forces; nay more (as we may also mention at this point) of the Saturn forces. Here indeed we are entering a realm of history for which no outer documents exist. For the time we are now considering lies many thousands of years before the founding of Christianity. These are the epochs which I called in my Occult Science, the ancient Indian (since one must have a name and the civilisation of that first epoch existed on the soil that afterwards was India), and the ancient Persian. In those old civilisations man's evolution was very different from what it was in later times. Moreover his religious beliefs depended on this unfolding of his life.

Our lives today (and it has been so for more than two thousand years) unfold in such a way that a certain break in our earthly life and development escapes our notice. Indeed it is scarcely perceptible today. The inner change that takes place in the human being about the thirtieth year of life remains for present day humanity to a large extent in the subconscious, in the unconscious. But it was very different eight or nine thousand years before the Christian era. In those epochs man developed until about the thirtieth year of his life so that one might call this development continuous. But in the thirtieth year a far-reaching metamorphosis took place in him. I will describe it in a radical way. I admit it is radical, but this way of expressing it will serve to characterise the facts.

The following thing might well happen in those olden times. Before the thirtieth year of his life a man had made the acquaintance of another man, say, three or four years younger than himself. His friend would therefore undergo this metamorphosis about the age of thirty, a little later than he did. Now if the two had not seen one another for some time and then met once more—I am speaking in modern terms, which make it seem still more radical—it might well happen that he who had undergone the change, being addressed by the other, simply failed to recognise him. So deeply was the memory transformed.

The small communities of those very ancient times were connected with the Mystery Schools, and in these the lives of the young folk were registered. For they themselves, in that they underwent this revolutionary transformation, forgot their earlier life. They had to learn over again what they had experienced in life until about the thirtieth year. So they became aware, ‘In my thirtieth year I have become an altogether different man. I must go to the Registry (a modern expression, needless to say!) to learn what was the content of my life before this change.’ Yes, indeed it was so! And in the instruction which they then received, they learned that it was the Moon forces which had worked upon them exclusively until the thirtieth year, and that then the Sun forces had entered into the development of their earthly life. The Sun forces and the Moon forces work upon man in very different ways. What does the man of today know of the Sun forces? He knows only the outward and physical aspect. He knows—forgive me saying so—that the Sun forces make him perspire, that they make him warm. He knows, maybe, one or two other things. We have Sun baths and the like. Thus certain therapeutic properties are known and so forth; but all these ideas are quite external. The man of today simply does not conceive what the forces that are spiritually connected with the Sun are doing with him.

Julian the Apostate, the last of the pagan Caesars, had still received instruction in what was left of the ancient Mysteries, concerning these forces of the Sun. He wished once more to make this knowledge an influence in the world and for this very reason was murdered on his campaign into Persia. So strong were the powers in the first Christian centuries which intended that all knowledge of such things should disappear. No wonder if this knowledge cannot be attained in any ordinary way today!

Now the Moon forces represent that element in man which determines him, which fills him with an inner necessity, so as to act according to his temperament, his instincts, his emotions—in a word, according to the whole nature of his physical and etheric bodies. It is the spiritual Sun forces, on the other hand, which free him from this necessity. They as it were melt away the forces of necessity within him. Through the Sun forces, man becomes a free being.

In those ancient times the two things were sharply separated from one another in man's development. In the thirtieth year of his life he became a Sun man, that is to say, a free man. Until the thirtieth year he was a Moon man, that is to say, an unfree man. Today these things merge into one another. Today the Sun forces work already in childhood alongside of the Moon forces, and the Moon forces work on into a later age. Today, therefore, Necessity and Freedom are mingled; they work into one another. But it was not always so. In the pre-historic times of which I am now speaking, the Moon influences and the Sun influences were sharply separated in the course of human life. Hence in those olden times it was said: Man is born not once, but twice. This was said of the great majority of human beings—and it was considered abnormal, pathological, if a man did not experience this fundamental metamorphosis of life at the age of thirty.—This second birth was the Sun-birth of the human being; the first was called the Moon-birth. And when in the further course of evolution this Sun-birth became less clearly noticeable, certain exercises, sacred rituals and actions were applied to those initiated in the Mysteries. Thus the Initiates underwent what was no longer there for mankind in general. They were the “Twice-born”.

We can still find the term “Twice-born” in oriental writings, but the expression is already a derived one. Indeed I would like to ask any Orientalist or Sanskrit scholar (I believe our friend Professor Beckh is here and you may ask him whether these things are so according to his special studies)—I would like to ask any Sanskrit scholar whether modern scholarship can explain in clear terms what the expression “Twice-born” signifies. No doubt there are plenty of formal explanations, but of the substantial meaning of the term our scholars are quite unaware, for it can only be known by those who are aware of the real facts of life from which it is derived. Spiritual research alone can give information on these matters. But when spiritual research has had its say, I would ask any open-minded scholar who knows the available documents—who knows all that external scholarship can lay hands upon: Does not external scholarship subsequently confirm, piece by piece, the researches of spiritual science? It will do so indeed, if things are only seen in the true light. But I have to draw attention to matters which must take precedence of all documentary research; for by documentary research alone one simply cannot understand the life of man.

Thus we look back upon an ancient time when they spoke of a Moon-birth of man as of his creation by the Father. And as to the Sun-birth, they knew that in the spiritual rays of the Sun, the power of Christ the Sun is working; and this is the power that makes man free. Think for a moment: what does the spiritual Sun force bring about? We owe it to the Sun that we, as human beings upon Earth, are able to make anything of ourselves. We should be strictly determined, placed in an inexorable Necessity—a Necessity not even of Destiny but of Nature—if the liberating forces of the Sun, the impulses that melt away Necessity, did not come near to us.

In those ancient world-conceptions, as man gazed upward to the Sun he was aware of these things. “This Eye of the World, whence radiates the power of the Christ, this Eye of the World brings it about that I must not remain subject to the iron Necessity with which I was born out of the Moon forces. I need not remain, my whole life long, a human being evolving by Necessity. These Sun forces—these forces of the Christ, looking down upon me through the cosmic Eye of the Sun—bring it about that I, during my earthly life, by my own inner freedom, can make of myself something which I was not yet by virtue of the Moon forces when they placed me into this earthly life.”

The consciousness in man that he could transform himself, that he could make something of himself—this was attributed to the Sun forces.

In parenthesis and for the sake of completeness, I will add that they also looked up to the Saturn forces. In these they recognised all that maintains the human being when he passes through the gate of death—that is to say, when he undergoes the third earthly metamorphosis.

 Birth: the Moon-birth second Birth: the Sun-birth third Birth: Saturn-birth, earthly death 

In earthly death man was maintained by the forces holding sway at the outermost limit (as they conceived it) of the planetary system of the Earth—the Saturn forces. The Saturn forces hold man upright and carry him out into the spiritual world, preserving his being as a connected whole when the third metamorphosis takes place. Such indeed was the world-conception of an olden time.

But humanity evolves. There came a time when the ancient knowledge of how the Sun forces work upon man, was preserved only within the Mysteries. And it was preserved longest of all in the medical departments of the Mysteries. For the same Sun forces which in the normal course of man's development give him his freedom—give him the opportunity to make something of himself—the same Sun forces, the forces of the Christ, are also working in many different ways in certain plants upon the Earth, and in other earthly beings and earthly creatures. Here they represent medicaments and means of healing.

But mankind in general has lost this connection with the Sun. While the consciousness that man depends upon the Moon forces—the Divine Father forces—remained for a long time, the consciousness of his dependence on (or as we should rather say, his liberation by) the Sun forces was lost. What we today call the forces of Nature—the forces of which we speak almost exclusively in our modern world-conception—are indeed simply and solely the Moon forces, which have become abstract and all-powerful.

But the Sun forces were still known to the bearer of the Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, who not only knew them, but was able to direct his whole life by them. Indeed He had to know them; for the same Sun forces which had been attainable only in the ancient Mysteries by human beings looking upward to the Sun—this in their own down-pouring to the Earth, He was destined to receive into His own Body.

I described it yesterday. At the time of the founding of Christianity this was felt to be the essential point.—In the body of Jesus of Nazareth, in the thirtieth year of his life, a transformation had taken place. It was the same transformation which all human beings had undergone in primeval times, but with this difference: that in those olden times the rays of the spiritual Sun had entered into all men at this point in their life. Now the essence and Being of the Sun Himself—the Christ—descended into human evolution and took up His abode in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. This is the truth underlying the Mystery of Golgotha, as the primal foundation of all earthly life.

We shall recognise the full connection of these things by turning our attention now to the ancient Mysteries and the way in which men there celebrated the Easter Festival in its full human form, by which I mean the Act of initiation. For Initiation was in truth an Easter Festival. It took place, to begin with, in three stages. But before the candidate could attain true Knowledge or initiation, the first requirement was that through all that had come toward him out of the Mystery, he should have grown truly humble—so humble that no one today can have any real conception of such humility. True, the men of today think themselves very humble in respect of knowledge; but to anyone who can see through these things, they still appear possessed by the greatest arrogance.

At the starting point of his Initiation, this above all had to come over the human being, that he no longer considered himself a human being at all, but said: “I must first become a human being.” Of course we cannot expect the man of today at a given moment in his life no longer to consider himself a human being. But in those times it was the very first requirement. The candidate must in all truth, not consider himself a human being. He must say to himself: Certainly I was a human being before I descended into an earthly body. In the pre-earthly existence I was a human being in soul and spirit. Then the soul and spirit entered into the physical body which it received from the mother—from the parents. The soul and spirit—I will not say ‘clothed itself’, for that would be a wrong expression—the soul and spirit permeated itself with the physical body. But as to how the soul and spirit in the course of time permeates the physical—permeates the nerves-and-senses system, permeates the rhythmic system, permeates the system of metabolism in the limbs—of this the human being has no consciousness. He looks outward through the senses and becomes aware of the surrounding physical world. But what after all can a man do when at last he has so far penetrated his physical body with the soul and spirit that he considers himself a fully evolved and grown-up human being? What can he do? He can but look outward from his eyes, hear outward through his ears, feel outward with his skin, perceiving warmth and cold, roughness and smoothness. He cannot perceive inward, he cannot look through the eyes into himself. At most he can flay the physical corpse of man, and then imagine he is looking into himself. But he is not really doing so. It would be childish to believe that he is.

Suppose that I have a house before me here, and instead of looking in through the windows I pick up all manner of instruments and—if I am strong enough—break the house to pieces. There indeed I have the single bricks lying before me. I stare at the pile of bricks. This is what man does today. He flays the human being and dismembers him in the hope of knowing him. But he cannot; for it is not the human being that one learns to know in this way. If we would learn to know the human being, then even as we look outward through the eyes, so we must become able to look back again through the eyes, and to hear back again inward through the ears. All these things taken together—the eyes, the ears, the whole skin as an organ of touch, of warmth, the organ of smell, and so forth—all these together were called in the ancient Mysteries, the Gate or Portal to the human being. Indeed the starting-point of Initiation was this: Man came to realise that he knew nothing of the human being. Therefore, since he had no self-consciousness of man, he could not be one. He must first look inward through the senses, whereas in ordinary life he looked only outward.

Such was the first stage of Initiation in the ancient Mysteries. Now the moment the man learned thus to look inward he also experienced himself in the pre-earthly life. For then he knew: I am in my own being of soul and spirit.

We may draw it diagrammatically. Here is the head. Man looks outward. Now, instead, he learnt to look inward.

But in thus looking inward he became aware of what had entered into him as the pre-earthly life and being, which had entered in through eye and ear and skin, etc. Of this he now became aware. Here it was that he possessed his pre-earthly existence. Moreover it became clear to him that only now could he learn to know what we today should call Natural Science. When we study Natural Science today, how do we set about it? We are led to see the things of Nature, to describe them and so forth. But this is just as though I had known a human being for a long time; now I am about to see him again, and someone lays on me the strict injunction: “When you see him again you must forget all you had in common with him; you must not remember anything at all of what you had in common with him before.” Think of it! It is inconceivable what it would mean to husbands and wives, for instance, if on some occasion when they are about to meet again, they were strictly commanded to forget all that they had undergone together in the past. I can conceive that in some cases this might sometimes be not unpleasant to them! Still, life could not subsist under such conditions. Yet this is what is required of the modern man with regard to Nature through the very ordering of present-day civilisation. For he already knew the kingdoms of Nature—he knew them in their spiritual aspect—before he descended to the Earth. The human being of today is led to forget all that he learned of minerals and plants and animals before his descent to Earth. The ancient Initiate, on the other hand, was thus instructed in what was called the first Degree within the Mysteries: “Behold the crystal quartz!” Thereupon everything was done to make him remember what he had known of the quartz before he came down to the Earth, or again what he had known of the lily or of the rose. Recognition was taught as knowledge of Nature. And when a man had learned this Nature—lore recognition of what he had seen before he came down to earthly life—then he was received into the second Degree.

In the second Degree he learned Music; he learned the Architecture, the Geometry, the Mensuration of that time, and so forth. For what did the second Degree contain? It contained all that the human being perceives when he now no longer gazes into himself through the eyes, or hearkens inward through the ears, but when he actually enters into himself. At this stage it was said to the candidate: “Thou enterest the human Temple Grove”. He learned to know the Temple Grove of man—permeated physically by the forces of soul and spirit, of which man consisted before he descended into earthly life. Thus he entered into himself. And it was said to him: There are three chambers in this Temple Grove. The one was the chamber of Thinking. Seen from outside it is the head. It is but small, but when one sees it from within, it is great as the universe; one learns to know its spiritual nature. This was the first chamber. In the second chamber the candidate learned to know the life of Feeling, and in the third chamber the life of Willing. Moreover in discovering how man is organised in his organs of Thinking, Feeling and Willing, the candidates were learning to know what holds good on Earth.

The knowledge of Nature holds good not only on the Earth. Man already acquires it before he descends to Earth. Here on Earth he is only called upon to recollect it. But houses are not built in the spiritual world as they are built with earthly architecture. Music is yonder, it is true, but that is spiritual melody. Whatever is earthly music has been cast downwards into the earthly air; it is a projection of the heavenly Music, but in the form in which man experiences it, it is earthly. Likewise all that we measure is earthly. We measure earthly space: Mensuration, Geometry, is an earthly science. This in fact was the important thing for the candidate for Initiation in the second Degree: he became aware that all talk of knowledge by mere earthly methods is vague and void, save in so far as it be related to Geometry, Architecture and Mensuration. He saw that a real science of Nature must be pre-earthly knowledge, remembered, recognised; and that the true sciences of Earth are Geometry, Architecture, Music and Mensuration. For these can be learned here on the Earth.

Thus man descended into himself, and learned to know the three-chambered Man as against the single human incarnation which one perceives in ordinary life, when, without entering inside the human being, one merely knows him from outside.

And in the third Degree man learned to know the human being when he no longer dives merely down into himself and knows himself as a spiritual being, but when this spiritual being learns to know the body itself. Hence in all ancient Mysteries the path one had to take was through the Gate of Death. One became aware what man is like when he has laid aside the earthly body. Only there was a difference between the real death and the death of Initiation. I shall explain in the following lectures why there must be this difference; now I will only state the facts.

When man actually dies, he lays his physical body aside. He is no longer bound to it. He no longer follows the earthly forces, he is freed from them. But when he is still connected with the physical body—as was the case in the act of initiation in ancient times—then he must attain by dint of inner strength the freedom from the body which he has as a matter of course in real Death. That is to say, for a certain length of time, he must hold himself free. Hence for Initiation it was necessary to achieve the strong inner forces of the soul, whereby one could hold oneself in soul free from the physical body. And the same forces which gave man power to hold himself free from the earthly body, these same forces gave him the higher knowledge—knowledge of things which can never be seen by the senses nor conceived by the intellect. These forces transplant the human being into the spiritual world, just as his physical body transplants him into the physical world. At this stage the Initiate was able to know himself as soul-spiritual Man even during the earthly life. Henceforth, for the Initiate, the Earth was a Star—a Star external to the human being—while he himself (notably in the more ancient Mysteries) must live with the Sun instead of with the Earth. He knew now what man receives from the Sun. He knew how the Sun forces work within him.

This then was the third Degree; and it was followed by the fourth, which worked upon the candidate somewhat as follows.—When a man eats on Earth, he knows he is eating cabbage, wild-fowl, and so forth, and drinking all manner of things. He knows: These things are now outside me, and now they are within me. He breathes the air. First it is outside him, then it is within, and then it is outside again. So he stands in connection with the earthly forces; he bears within himself the forces and substances which are otherwise outside him on the Earth. “Before thou art initiated”—thus it was explained to the candidate for Initiation in ancient times—“before thou art initiated thou art an Earth-bearer, a cabbage-bearer, bearer of wild fowl, of veal, and so forth. But when thou hast been initiated into the third Degree, and art given what can be given to thee when freed from the body, then thou will be not a cabbage-bearer, a pork-bearer, a veal-bearer, but a bearer of that which the Sun forces give thee.” Now in many of the Mysteries that which the Sun forces spiritually give to man was called Christos. Hence he who had passed beyond the three Degrees was called a Christopher, or Christophorus. For he felt himself henceforth bearer of the Sun forces (even as on Earth he might feel himself as a cabbage-bearer and the rest). In most of the ancient Mysteries Christophorus was the name for those who attained the fourth Degree.

In the third Degree man had to understand certain things; above all he had to understand that for the moments of Knowledge the craving for the physical body must cease. He must perceive that while man in his physical body belongs to the Earth, yet in reality the Earth is only there to destroy the physical body, not to build it. Henceforth he learned to know the upbuilding forces, whose origin is in the Cosmos. But he learned something else besides when he became a Christophorus. Then above all he learned to know that spiritual forces are at work even in the substance of the Earth, only they are not visible to earthly sight. Speaking in modern words—though they spoke with the same meaning I can only tell you of these things in modern language, not in the words of that time—they explained to him: “If thou wouldst learn the science of substance—how the substances are combined and separated—thou must behold the spiritual forces which permeate the substance out of the Cosmos. Thou canst not know these things when thou art uninitiated. Thou must first be initiated into the fourth Degree and be able to see through the forces of the Sun-existence. Then thou canst study Chemistry.”

Just imagine, if we today required of a man wishing to take his degree as a chemist or pharmacologist that he would first feel himself in relation to the forces of the Sun even as he feels himself in relation to the cabbage of the Earth. What madness this would seem! Yet these were the realities. It became fully clear to men: With all the forces that are living in the body and that we make use of for ordinary knowledge, we can study only Geometry, Mensuration, Music and Architecture. With these forces we cannot study Chemistry; and if we do study it, we shall be talking in superficialities.

And so indeed it is. Since the time when the ancient Initiation Science was lost, all talk of Chemistry has been superficial. It drives anyone who is seeking for real knowledge to despair when he has to study the official Chemistry of today. For it rests only on external data, not on an inner penetration of things. If men only had an open mind they would say to themselves that something quite different is necessary. We must acquire a different mode of knowledge if we would truly study Chemistry. It is the present cowardice of knowledge which is instilled into the human being and prevents him from awakening to such an impulse.

When man had attained this stage he was ripe to become an Astronomos, which was a still higher Degree. To learn to know the stars outwardly by calculation and the like, was considered altogether meaningless. In the stars, spiritual Beings live. They can be known only if one has overcome bodily vision, nay, if one has even overcome Geometry and can live within the Universe, thus learning to know the spiritual essence of the stars. At this stage man was truly resurrected. And now he could behold how the Moon forces and the Sun forces work, even into the earthly man.

I have had to bring these things near to you from two sides today. In the ancient Mysteries—not at a certain season of the year but at a certain Degree in a higher development of man—Easter took place as an inner experience: Easter as the Resurrection of the man of soul and spirit, out of the physical body into the spiritual Universe. And in this way those who still had knowledge of the Mysteries at that time looked up to the Mystery of Golgotha. They said to themselves: What would have become of mankind if the Mystery of Golgotha had not taken place? In bygone ages there was the possibility of being initiated into the secrets of the Cosmos. For in very ancient times man had experienced as a matter of course his second birth, about the thirtieth year of his life; and in subsequent times there still remained at least the memories of this; there was a science of the Mysteries, preserving in tradition what had actually been experienced in former times.

But in the age when the Mystery of Golgotha took place, all these things had been wafted away and forgotten. Mankind would have fallen into utter decadence had not the Power to whom the Initiates in the Mysteries ascended when they became Christophorus, descended into Jesus of Nazareth to be present henceforward on the Earth; so that man might henceforward be united with this Power through Christ Jesus.

Thus what appears before our eyes in the Easter Festival today is connected with a certain chapter in the historic evolution of the Mysteries. Truly we only become aware of the content of the Easter Festival when we call this ancient sacred history to life again.

These things will be the subject of our further study. But you will now at any rate be able to draw near to what the candidate for Initiation in ancient times experienced. He could say to himself: Through my Initiation I have come to understand how the Sun and Moon work within me in their mutual and heavenly relationships. For now I know that I, as physical man, am shaped and formed in such and such a way; that I have such and such eyes and nose and other bodily forms both inwardly and outwardly throughout my body; that this bodily form could grow, and grows to this day in the process of nutrition—all this is dependent on the Moon forces. All that is Necessity depends on them. But that I can live and move as a free inner Being within my bodily nature—that I can transform myself, that I have myself in hand—this depends on the Sun forces, the forces of the Christ. These are the forces I must kindle in my inner being if I would mould with conscious knowledge, and attain by my own inner work, what the Sun forces would otherwise have to do within me, once more by a kind of Necessity.

In this way we shall also understand why man even today looks upward to the Sun and Moon and determines from their mutual constellation the time of the Easter Festival. For this alone has still remained. We calculate when is the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Spring Equinox. The Easter Festival of the year is fixed for the Sunday following the first full Moon, indicating (as I shall explain in greater detail tomorrow) that we recognise in the form and structure of the Easter Festival something that must be determined from above, out of the Cosmos.

But the Easter thought must be regained. And it can only be regained by looking back to the ancient Mysteries, where the human being was made aware how it is when he looks within himself and beholds—the Gate of Man! And when he actually enters into himself—the Three-chambered inner Man! And when he makes himself free—the Gate of Death! When he lives and moves freely in the spiritual world, he becomes a Christophorus.

The Mysteries themselves receded in the age when the free development of man had to take place. But now the time is come when they must be found again. Of this, my dear friends, we must be fully conscious. Institutions must be created today to find the Mysteries once more.

Out of this consciousness we held our Christmas Foundation Meeting. For it is an urgent necessity that there should be a place on Earth where the Mysteries can once more be founded. The Anthroposophical Society in its further progress must become the path to the Mysteries renewed. This will also be our task: out of a right and true consciousness to cooperate towards this end. And to this end the life of man will have to be considered according to the three stages: the stage where we turn our gaze into the human being; the stage where we strive to enter right within him; and the stage where we become, in consciousness, what in the outer reality we become only in Death.

Let us then take away with us these words as a solemn remembrance of this lesson which we have held today, and let us make them active in our souls:

 Stand in the porch at Man's life-entrance, Read thereon the World's writ sentence, Dwell in the soul of Man within, Feel in its pulsing, Worlds begin. 

In ordinary life we do not see the World's Beginning, but only this or that within the World.

 Think upon Man's earthly ending. Find therein the Spirit's wending. 

Let this then, be the extract from today's lesson:

 Stand in the porch of Man's life-entrance, Read thereon the World's writ sentence. Dwell in the soul of Man within, Feel, in its pulsing, Worlds begin. Think upon Man's earthly ending, Find therein the Spirit's wending. 

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 (original text) Steh' vor des Menschen Lebenspforte; Schau an ihrer Stirne Weltenworte. Leb' in des Menschen Seeleninnern; Fühl' in seinem Kreise Weltbeginnen. Denk an des Menschen Erdenende; Find' bei ihm die Geisteswende.