The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The title of the today's talk How Does One Disprove Theosophy? may appear strange at first. However, it seemed to me that it could be a good introduction to understand the theosophical or spiritual-scientific worldview to let our thoughts wander over this subject. If spiritual science wants to gain the hearts of many contemporaries, it is particularly necessary that it is not only a worldview but also that from this worldview and philosophy of life impulses originate which should give us strength, security, and hope for life.

Nothing is more dangerous for a worldview than fanaticism. This asserts itself just with the various worldviews; everybody knows this. If theosophy or spiritual science should give an impulse just in this direction, it has to be unfanatical, that means to understand its opponents and their objections completely. How easily does one regard an opponent as an illogical, maybe even as a bad person? Spiritual science should get itself into understanding the opponent and his reasons. It has every reason to do this. Indeed, it can satisfy some longings of life, but one must say on the other side, the way is rather far to the depths to recognise the validity of its assertions and teachings. The difficulties that face someone who wants to find the way conscientiously to theosophy from the everyday life are just the biggest ones.

Hence, I want to prepare the talk that I will hold on 25 March here and that shall introduce into the being of theosophy in positive way with a consideration of the possible and up to a certain degree entitled objections. However, to be able to speak about such objections, we have only to come to an agreement what theosophy—meant here—wants to be. Since it is sure that one cannot be successful with any theosophical book. Above all, I want to speak of theosophy as far as it claims to be taken seriously as science. What is now theosophy if we disregard everything that sticks to its heels in dilettantish way?

Theosophy wants to be a worldview that leads to the spiritual world. It wants to give scientific reasons of that view which states that behind everything that our senses say about the outside world that our mind engaged in the brain says about the outside world one can recognise a spiritual world. In this spiritual world, only the reasons of everything are that takes place in the sensory world and in the intellectual world.

With it, however, we would not differ as theosophists very much from supporters of this or that worldview. Since today more and more people, also of the outer science, are convinced that behind everything that the outer science can investigate something else is concealed that is unknown at first. Now it is not substantial for theosophy or spiritual science that one admits that something spiritual exists behind any physical, but the essentials are that the human being recognises to a certain degree and recognises in higher and higher measure—if he enables his own soul—what there is behind the physical world. Theosophy or spiritual science cannot agree with those who state that there are limits of human knowledge.—We have to confine ourselves, however, as human being to that which the senses recognise what methodical science can investigate. However, we can assume that one can extend these limits of human knowledge more and more, so that the human being develops his cognitive forces to be able to recognise worlds that are different from the world in which he is at first with his normal consciousness. From this viewpoint theosophy is inextricably connected with the requirement that the human being can develop spiritual senses, spiritual eyes and ears, higher organs, not higher physical organs, but higher spiritual-mental organs, so that for him at a certain time the great moment takes place. If this also happens on a higher level, nevertheless, you can compare it to the moment that a blind-born experiences if he can see after an operation. While before he had darkness around himself, now the world of light, of forms and colours presents itself to him. Thus, it is possible for every soul to experience the moment of awakening in another world, to behold different from in the world with the normal consciousness. In the characterised sense, one has to regard this new world as a higher, supersensible one.

Then theosophy shows the means to cause such a moment of awakening. About these means, I speak particularly in the next talk. Today I want only to outline the theosophical worldview.

Let us envisage the moment of falling asleep where all outer impressions stop, and where the reason that spreads out like a net about the sensory perception stops functioning. We may say, in such case the human being is in another form of existence; he can perceive nothing around himself if the impressions of the sensory world and the work of the reason stop. Of course, only the real experience can decide whether it is necessary that the human being always must get another condition if he receives no impressions of the sensory world which resembles the sleep, or whether there can also be another state. Only the experience of those can decide this who have gone through the intimate work of the soul by which they have developed such strong soul impulses so that something can happen to them that resembles the moment of falling asleep and, nevertheless, is radically different from it. It resembles falling asleep in this respect that all outer sensory impressions and intellectual activities stop. It is different because that who wants to become a spiritual researcher makes his soul active with exercises and gets such forces from its depth that he is not unconscious if he himself arbitrarily stops all outer sensory impressions and the intellectual activities, but he leads an inner conscious life. The soul orients itself, brings up abilities and forces from its depths of which the normal consciousness has no idea.

You can compare it with bringing up the eyesight of the blind-born after he was operated. From the depths of the soul, we can bring up forces which work if, otherwise, unconsciousness had to occur, and which work now in such a way that they connect the soul with a spiritual world that as really exists for the human being as our sensory world exists. Thus, that which leads the spiritual researcher to his science is, indeed, something subjective at first, still the observations of those who have done this experience got to according results.

At first, we want only to describe what refers to the human being how he faces us immediately. The human being appears to the immediate consciousness as physical body at first, with everything that one can touch with hands, can see with the eyes. However, theosophy shows us that the nature of the human being is not exhausted in that which we perceive with the senses, but that the physical body is embedded in supersensible, higher members that one can investigate only in the just mentioned way. Then there we speak of the fact that everything that causes the life phenomena in the human being is due to a supersensible member, to the so-called “etheric body” or life body. We speak of this etheric body in such a way that it can appear to the spiritual eye as the colour appears to the physical eye that it is an outer, indeed, only supersensible spiritual reality.

We further speak of the fact that except this etheric body another supersensible member exists—do not take exception to the term, it should be only a technical term—, the astral body. We call “astral body” the supersensible bearer of that which we experience, otherwise, only in our inside as our passions, as joy and sorrow, as pains, but also as the whole imagining surging up and down. Then we distinguish beside the etheric body and the astral body still the next supersensible member; since as the human being has a physical body in common with the entire mineral realm, he has the etheric body in common with all living beings, and the astral body with the entire animal realm. However, the human being still has a fourth member for himself by which he is the crown of the earthly creation that we call the ego-body or the ego being which the other earthly beings do not have.

Thus, theosophy says that we understand the human being completely if we consider him as consisting of these four members. It also shows that with the human being if he falls asleep a separation of his members takes place, while in the bed the physical body and the etheric body remain, and the astral body and the ego are separated from these and ascend to a higher world. As long as the astral body and the ego are separated from the physical and etheric bodies, the human being is so organised that his consciousness remains dark. Hence, the unconsciousness of sleep. Only the physical body and the denser part of the etheric body are subject to the temporal decay, the human essence consists of the ego, the astral body, and a part of the etheric body. This essence cast off the outer cover of the physical body and a part of the etheric body at death and goes through a life under other conditions in the spiritual world.

Then theosophy speaks of the fact that life does not only run between birth and death, but that the spiritual essence of the human being goes through repeated lives on earth in a physical body, while the forces which belong to the human being reach from that life to the other. Everything that we take up in our life as experiences between birth and death because we learn, everything that we do, everything that we accomplish while we burden ourselves with guilt or merit: all that develops forces in our souls. It does not die when the human being dies but remains united with the human essence. After the essence of the human being has processed these forces in a spiritual life between death and a new birth, he builds up a new bodily existence according to his destiny, so that we have the results and effects of former lives in this life on earth. We have created our physical body by our essence so that it has this or that ability now, can do this or that.

We call this law of cause and effect, which puts us at this or that place, in these or those conditions which our destiny develops after the former lives with the Indian word—because we have no suitable term in the western literature—the law of karma. With our essence of which we are not aware at first in the normal life, we have prepared our destiny. The human being experiences successive lives on earth. One could say that he experiences the chain of life that points beyond time and proves the eternity of the human being.

With it, I have today abstained from proving these things and have stated the knowledge only sketchily which forms the most elementary level of the theosophical worldview. What one can bring forward as documents, as proofs of reincarnation and karma, I want to treat that in the next talk. Today I wanted only to point out that it is hard for the scientifically educated human being of the present to find access to the just characterised truths of theosophy.

Now we want to discuss some of the possible serious objections that those persons can do who have only developed their worldview from the concepts and mental pictures of the present. For these persons it is exceptionally difficult at first to familiarise themselves generally with the idea that the soul can develop “spiritual senses”—if I may use this contradictory expression.

Let us assume that a person has done inner exercises, has tried to develop the willpower in such a way that he can imagine something if no outer impressions are there; that he has internalised himself so that he believes, even if he perceives nothing with the eyes and ears, that he sees and hears something. Why—somebody may ask—should one accept this generally as something entitled?—One has nothing at all to argue against the fact that a person gets by certain inner exercises to such experiences that have a certain liveliness, maybe even a higher liveliness than the outer sensory impressions and everything that our reason can attain. However—an opponent may say—does one not know illusions, hallucinations? Does one not know self-deceptions? Do not those swear who are subject to such self-deceptions and who are mentally ill that everything that they see is real that everything that they hear are real voices and regard them as real? Why should the visions that are artificially caused by soul exercises have another objective value?—We have to answer this at first

Spiritual science takes the view that they are not pathological states, but something that one attains by “artificial” soul exercises. What I have said now, is actually trivial. However, it does not matter that such a statement is more or less trivial or brilliant, but it matters what it releases in our souls how we position ourselves to it with our belief and our convictions. There one has to say, the conscientious researcher of truth has many reasons to speak about soul experiences this way, and we understand that serious research rejects them. We need only to imagine how evident it is for the human being of the present that serious scientific research could only have beneficial effects after all similar tendencies had been forced back as such which also seem to exist in spiritual science.

There we need only to go back to ancient times. Then we could prove how everywhere—even until the Middle Ages—in that which the human being perceived with his senses which he could investigate with the methods of his reason something was mixed that the human being believed to experience with inner mystic knowledge and how the sense percepts were interwoven with the inner experiences. You need only to look with the experienced eye into any natural-historical book of the Middle Ages. You see very odd fantastic animals there, and you soon recognise that any knowledge and view of that time were based on the fact that the human beings saw that inexactly which they had seen and then imagined it with that which they experienced in their souls. In what way did one overcome these deceits?—With the exact science that rests upon the experiences of the senses and on that which these senses teach our reason by observation and by experiment. We have sure scientific results only, since we have such a research by which every human being can check the results at any time. Today the human being is right if he wants to check everything.

Only spiritual science or theosophy can argue something against it. We look back at the times of the aurora of natural sciences, at a person like Kepler. In his mind not only those outer laws of the celestial mechanics lived which we can study today as Kepler's laws, but also a real spiritual-scientific view of the harmony of the universe. From the spiritual penetration of the universe he got his laws of the celestial mechanics only. There the spiritual scientist can say, look how fertile it is if we turn the spiritual-scientific view to Kepler. Nevertheless, Kepler's laws almost prove a spiritual world. Nevertheless, Kepler can persuade us of a spiritual world.

An opponent may say now, just with such a spirit like Kepler you can realise that he had, nevertheless, some weaknesses. With him, you could convince yourself how bad it is for the scientific security if in his soul such a thing lives like a certain mystic contemplation of the cosmic relations; since there you come again to the medieval mysticism and with it close to rather doubtful spiritual operations as, for example, astrology is with all its outgrowths.

This arose just because one developed the idea of the general celestial harmony in abstract way and said, nevertheless, there must be a connection of the big world of the macrocosm and of that which happens in the single human being. Then the medieval astrology arose from it. Now, however, astrology has a rather doubtful aspect. Nothing stirs up the human egoism as strong as just astrology if future events should be forecast using the constellations of the stars. If the human being wants to know them beforehand, it always has an egoistic reason. Kepler knew this and it distressed him very much that he had to cast a horoscope of a lord on order of his prince. In a letter to a friend, Kepler informs of his pain when he had to forecast particular things for a high personality. In this case, he said, it would be bad to inform the personality concerned of something and it would be better if this person did not know it because he would develop, otherwise, no care and no energy.—In another case he said, one had to call the person's attention to the possibility that a misfortune could approach.

An opponent may say, with Kepler the tendency of a doubtful morality also exists when he says, one must help in a way if one can determine the destiny of the human being from the spiritual world, one must not say the truth everywhere only, one has to consider whether the truth is good or harmful. Briefly, you can see with Kepler himself that a neighbouring area of spiritual science, astrology, just goes to the bad. Tragically can be experienced just with Kepler how a way that leads on one side to the highest areas of spiritual life can lead on the other side to the biggest superstition. Kepler himself had to fight with the crassest superstition of the Middle Ages to save his mother from the stake because she was charged to be a witch. Here we stand in a point where we can close the chain completely between beholding into the spiritual world and the crassest superstition. Who does not know how easily people who want to get to know the spiritual world also want to do this comfortably today and rather want to call the spirits in a doubtful spiritistic way and to make them manifest, than to rise by spiritual development into the spiritual world. Thus, an opponent may say, we see a proof with Kepler how the theosophical way of thinking can lead as the astrological one into doubtful areas. We could bring in many examples. We want to point only to an example that can be characteristic for others.

Someone who studied Hegel thoroughly, as I did, is also allowed to say the following: Hegel strove for a worldview that is independent of every sensory view. As long as one remains generally in a kind of blurred pan-theism, one can discuss about the authorisation of single things. However, if one pretends to know anything about the special constitution of that which arises from the supersensible world, then one has to be controlled by the facts. Now one of the areas which spiritual research enters first is the area of numbers and their harmony laws. Some philosophers have accepted such laws, Hegel too. Hegel tried to prove that a certain number rule forms the basis of our planetary system, and that according to this number rule we can know that our solar system must have so and so many planets, and that these move in certain distances. So Hegel meant, by reflection one must be able to control the planetary system. Hence, he supplied evidence that according to the number rules only so and so many planets are possible and except these no other planets were possible. Nevertheless, the planet Neptune was discovered later.

We could bring in many such examples, because they are knitted after the just characterised pattern. One just realises with it that not only the experiences are a source of evidence for the today's science, but that also a healthy control [must be there by the facts]. Where science accepts hypotheses, it accepts something only if the experience confirms the theories. Now the opponents of theosophy may say, science has positioned itself on a healthy ground; and now spiritual science comes and wants to mix something in science that comes from quite different sources, from a higher beholding, from karma laws and the like.

The spiritual researcher will maybe say, yes, but you could approach me so far that you admit that which I claim, for example, the teaching of karma and repeated lives on earth, as something that one calls a useful working hypothesis in science.—At that time when the so-called oscillation theory of the light originated, no one saw in it something else than “ether oscillations.” You can argue a lot against it; the whole theory was an invented system. One said, if we suppose that a world ether penetrates all material processes that everything is in motion, then these oscillations must take place according to the mathematically computable rules in such a way that this and that arises.—Then [the calculations] also turned out to be correct in the experience, for example, with light, heat et cetera. One calls this a useful working hypothesis if one says, this hypothesis even avails us to discover new facts; even if the hypothesis is wrong in itself, nevertheless, it led us just to the true.

Nevertheless, accept the ideas of karma or reincarnation as a working hypothesis, the spiritual researcher could say to the opponents of theosophy. Now against it one could argue: where it concerns so essential and important things that intervene so deeply in life, one cannot get involved with the possibility that the outer life can be explained if one does certain hypothetical requirements. Someone who has looked around a little more thoroughly in the logic knows that one can conclude correctly even from wrong requirements. Theosophy could be quite wrong, even if one supposes that the ideas of karma and reincarnation are right. The conclusions could be right concerning the outer life—even if the requirements were wrong.—However, a strict, succinct logic could say; with it, the theosophical ideas are rejected as useful working hypotheses.

It is even worse if one considers it epistemologically. There an opponent of theosophy may say, concerning knowledge it matters above all to investigate the objective validity. Now there is no possibility at all to distinguish truth and error of illusions, hallucinations and of any soul life generally than the control by experience. If one excludes experience and the soul life should proceed without [control by] experience, one gets into the area of absolute arbitrariness, of the uncontrollable. That means, a science that searches the principle of controllability has to consider the whole method of higher beholding as unjustified, and it has to agree with modern science that says, what one should consider as scientific, must be independent from all subjective experiences. It has to take place while we exclude everything that belongs to our soul life.

However, you say—the modern epistemologist may say to the spiritual scientist—that you want to remain just within your soul life and want to isolate it; that means that you enter an area which science has just excluded. Modern science has shown that it has found its sure results just because it has proceeded in such a way that it has excluded all subjective experiences. So one must say to the theosophists, do not mix anything into science that is warmed up old methods which one has overcome since the fifteenth, sixteenth, seventeenth centuries.

Thus, the mood, the sensation of someone may speak who faces spiritual science with the attitude of our time. However, one can penetrate even deeper and ask, is there any possibility generally to state that that which a human being beholds who has attained a higher beholding has a meaning also for other human beings?—There, however, spiritual science says, this higher beholding is necessary to visit the supersensible world and to investigate its truths. However, if the truths of the supersensible world have been found and are told, then they can be understood with any impartial logic and any natural sense of truth. As well as every human being cannot go to the laboratory to inform himself of the methods of biology and zoology and other fields and can still accept the results of these researches, one can also accept and understand—spiritual science says—what is investigated in the supersensible world.

Now one could ask, is such an assertion of spiritual research entitled? It would be entitled only if that which the spiritual researcher has to say could be understood by us after the pattern which we have formed for understanding in the usual scientific world. There the spiritual researcher says, for example, our current life between birth and death is an effect that arises from the causes of former lives; the former lives reach into our current life. I experience that which I experience now as good luck or misfortune, as my abilities, as my forces, my hopes, and my life security because I caused them in former lives. I must learn to consider the present life as an effect of those reasons that I caused in former lives. Against it, the opponent may say, we have such things also in the outer world that the effects go back to causes and that we recognise that something former lives on as effect in something later. Let us take an example that plays a big role in modern natural sciences. There we have the law that a being briefly experiences all those forms in its embryonic development that certain animals worked through in the course of their evolution from imperfect levels to more perfect ones. We know that the human being goes through a level during his embryonic development—possibly, from the eighteenth day after conception on—which copies the fish shape; then later he goes through other forms, so that he grows up gradually into the forms in which he is born. From that, natural sciences conclude that the outer, physical human being has descended from the more imperfect living beings, and that the figure of the more imperfect living beings has a lasting effect in that which is the human being before birth. There we see those forms working which we see in the lineage. You, spiritual researcher, have to show us that really in the life of the human being, in his mind and soul and in his destiny something lives with which one can recognise the origin of the former causes, as well as one just recognises the lineage by the embryonic development of the human being in which he accepts the animal forms.

However, spiritual research can now show that one cannot explain the certain soul processes which are individual with every human being as a product of heredity that his innermost essence gives something else than that which is the lineage. If then one pursues how the human life develops how the human being grows up gradually, then one realises how forces and abilities appear step by step. Then one can already recognise with outer means that heredity does not only give that, not only the education at first, but also that it has worked its way out of that which exists with every single human being. This is added to the inherited, and this must originate—if one does not regard it as miracles—from other causes that one can only lead back to a spiritual-mental life that the human being has already experienced earlier. One can find the causes neither in heredity nor in education. Such a conclusion is possible. The spiritual researcher may say, I can make people understand what I know from the spiritual beholding by such a logic as I have characterised it now.

The opponent may respond, something enters into life that would not be miraculous if you only consulted all usual conditions. Someone who looks with scientific methods deeper into life knows which big influence just the very first childhood experiences have on our souls. They are forgotten, remain concealed in the soul, but at the suitable opportunity they emerge, and we could easily believe if we see them emerging later that none of them lead back to education, also not to heredity, one has to explain them as originating from a former life. However, we do this only because we do not mind how the first childhood experiences take hold in the soul and that they have a much bigger significance than everything does later.

Hence, the outer science may say, we are not yet so far to investigate the life of the child sufficiently to be able to say how for the soul of the child the experiences of the first years develop. We have to wait, until we get deeper and deeper into this area, then we can explain something about which you, spiritual researchers, state that it comes from former lives, by things which happen in quite natural way.

Yes, the opponent can still go on further. He may say, for example, even those human beings who get by soul exercises to a spiritual beholding have to express what they perceive in a higher world—only to be understood—in the forms, in the symbols of physical reality. It is very strange: those people who have become clairvoyant, so to speak, express—the opponent would state - themselves in each case quite different. Around the turn of the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries nobody beheld something in the spiritual world that referred, for example, to electricity or to railways; now they behold the things which refer to electricity or railways in the spiritual worlds. Who would not doubt that unconscious things interplay in the soul which are transformed in such a way that these illusory spiritual experiences appear. Nothing could justify the pretensions of those who speak of ways to spiritual, supersensible worlds. The more exactly one investigates, the more the ideas of former lives, of karma dissolve. One should point repeatedly just to the first childhood experiences if such things are brought forward like the karma idea.

Spiritual science may probably say now, let us assume that a parental couple has three, four children—every child is endowed with other characteristics. If everything should be rooted in heredity, nevertheless, one cannot understand why the children of a parental couple do not have the same qualities because they originate from the same father and the same mother. Just this shows us, some defenders of spiritual science probably say, that in that which the human being has received as inherited an individual being was born, and from it, the difference explains itself.

Against it, the opponent wants only to argue, nevertheless, that which is handed down is handed down from both parents or also from the ancestors. The different qualities [of the ancestors] intermingle. Why should not different mixtures appear with the children and thus the most different individualities? If one could look once into the complex structures of heredity—the opponent may say—, all pretensions of the spiritual researchers would have be silenced which take the viewpoint of reincarnation. If—to support the idea of reincarnation—the theosophical literature points out particularly that even twins show different qualities, the opponent could reply, everything that one can show in such a way with children of different ages applies particularly to twins.

Others say—to prove the teaching of reincarnation—, the human being shows conscience, moral responsibility in his essence. If you consider yourself responsible for an action that you do, nevertheless, you must be able to have another opinion of your actions than to have done it only. You have to ascribe another origin to the human being than only that from the lineage. Certain theosophical authors understand conscience, responsibility and the like in such a way that they are evidence of the individual essence that goes through various lives on earth.

One only needs to point to the fact that already astute investigators explained conscience and responsibility in such a way that the human being developed slowly and gradually within the human society. For one can easily show in the case of conscience, for example, that the human being notices that certain actions bring him certain disadvantages. In his mind, he connects the concepts of the action with the resulting disadvantage. This settles down in him, so that he concludes, in the end: you are not allowed to do this.—Imagine that changed into an impulse and this impulse is handed down, and then we have conscience with the following descendants. However—the opponent may argue—it is superficial if you assume an inner essence of the human being that goes through various lives on earth from the fact of conscience.

Seen from without many a thing could appear to that who does not exactly look in such a way, as if one cannot prove it. Just a spiritual researcher has to watch out for the difficulties that just conscientious people have if they want to approach spiritual science. Since what I have said today is just for such people an obstacle; they do not get over it.

If we go on and investigate how an opponent can put the question, how does spiritual science behave in the area of morality - then theosophy normally says, which moral impulse that gives the human being if he hears that his current life is caused by reasons which the human essence, that is he himself, put in a former life, and that he prepares the causes for the next life with that which he does now. How are the moral views of such a human being designed? The opponent could ask that way.

He will say, such a human being will easily be persuaded to say about a not good action to himself, if I do it, I carry it into my next life and I myself get the punishment in my next life.—With such an impulse, he will omit certain actions. However, it is the most selfish impulse that there can be if the human being does the good because it brings effects in the next life which he wishes, and he refrains from the bad ones because they bring rather disagreeable and fatal effects. Hence, one appeals to the egoism of the human being if one refers him to the karma and says to him, by this or that action you cause bad effects in the next life!—

Where does remain there the great word that one acts morally if one does the good for the sake of the good? If anybody who believes in karma says to himself, I still do something that maybe brings disadvantage—then it brings an advantage in a later life, the good is not done in such a way for the sake of the good, but the human egoism is stirred up in the subtlest way. We take another case. We assume that a person believes that he experiences happiness or misfortune because he caused this in a former life to himself and he has to accept this without grumbling.—Such a disposition—so the opponent could say—turns out to be fatalism if the person ascribes everything that happens to his former actions. Instead of pulling himself up and intervening actively in life, he will rely simply on the principle: this you have let yourself in for that! Then this will cause that a theosophist if he is weak says, why should I pull myself up? My karma has made me weak; this has its good reasons in a former life.—In this way, a dreadful fatalism comes out. We can learn from it how the opponent can state egoism and fatalism as something that one can bring forward in the most substantial way against the theosophical principle of moral.

If we want to visualise now how theosophy has to work on the religious life, then we realise how leaders of the theosophical life define theosophy as a kind of religion of wisdom, as something that leads into the religious area from knowledge and cognition. Religion cannot exist without a spirit living in the world—no matter whether you imagine this spirit as many spirits or as one spirit. Without living spirit, that impetus of feelings and sensations cannot take place in the soul, which is necessary for a real religious life. This looking up at something spiritual—so the opponent could argue-, this devotion of an outer spirit which is the origin of the earthly events and the human destinies is clouded by the belief of a human individuality who goes from one life to the next. He has to come to terms with himself concerning the religious life; that means, to refer everything to himself. Thus, the heart cannot widen and the mind cannot open itself as it is, otherwise, the case if the human being not only looks into himself, but can also look up at something divine to which he belongs in which he has interest and with which he is in a living relationship.

If we want to summarise everything that one can argue against theosophy, an opponent could say, in moral and religious respects spiritual science leaves much to be desired. This appears in particular in the fact that people who are internally undisciplined or have a lax scientific conscience from the start, gradually develop quite strange impulses toward life. There one realises—and that applies to all followers of theosophy,—as it arises from observations—that people if they get involved with spiritual-scientific truths would lose the interest for the fresh, full life; one realises that they withdraw from the immediate problems of the outer world. They brood over that which has put them into life and even start despising the outer reality and feel fine only if they do no longer want anything from the outer world.

I want to speak only about that to which opponents of theosophy rightly could refer. They could point rightly to the fact that numerous theosophists with a more lax scientific truth feeling become useless for all performances which a strong, healthy life demands. For they do not stand in life, but are or become eccentrics; such people arise from theosophy!—The opponent could point to numerous examples. Furthermore, he could show how the lacking control by experience can become rather bad if the human being who wants to develop spiritual eyes, spiritual ears in himself has not developed a sense of truth and such an impulse of truth as the outer experience controls us. Then the spiritually beholding, the so-called clairvoyant human being loses the inner control that must be the more important if the outer control is absent. There it appears that a human being can get into untruthfulness—unaware at first—, into errors and finally into conscious untruthfulness, into lies whose consequences he does not figure out because he cannot distinguish illusion from truth.

Therefore, the need to behold into the spiritual world has to be founded on truth and morality. It turns out, why it could become such a big problem that, for example, Goethe expressed in his Faust. There Faust faces us, the typical human being, who wants to get into the spiritual world and to extend his individual life who, however, often has the possibility to stray, in spite of conscientious striving, and who says, after he has nearly completed his life: could I only remove magic from my path.—The confession of spiritual research can become so tragic.

However, we have to consider the human soul not only theoretically but also in the full life. There only the experience itself can give us the appropriate teachings. One may reason ever so much why our soul has this or that constitution if it wants to follow spiritual research—one can know for sure: theoretical sentences are the one side, mental impulses the other side. Everything may be theoretically quite logical, and the soul can stray, nevertheless, if it has not found security in itself. The opponents can rightly point to such a thing that exists in the most different forms. This can show us that we must not take objections easily because they are to be found easily.

You can find references in spiritual science or theosophy that an individual essence lives in the human being. One shows that only for the human being a biography is possible because only the human being has that characteristic, individual course of life that makes a biography possible. For the greatest as for the most unimportant human being, a biography is possible. We show the same interest for the single human being which we have for a genus of the animal realm. It is a superficial objection if anybody says, nevertheless, one could also write a biography of a dog or a cat. Indeed, one could do this. When I was a pupil, the teacher tormented us once to write the biography of our pen. One can transfer everything to everything, but one has to take the essentials of a thing into account. No spiritual researcher states that a dog or a cat cannot have a sum of individual qualities. One only says that we show the same interest, which we have as a human being for a single person, for the entire animal genus. Even the interest in an animal can be bigger than for a human being, but it is not the same interest. We consider every human being as an own type or genus.

A difference exists whether we face real opponents of theosophy or those who cannot overcome the difficulties that our whole thinking and feeling and our science give us. Today I wanted to tell such objections. Of course, we could go on talking until tomorrow morning, increase the objections, and go into details. I am aware that I have not even told the most important objections. I have only shown how one can consult epistemology, morality, religion and life security if one wants to deliver proofs against theosophy.

It is maybe the nicest result that can arise from spiritual science that one learns to practise true tolerance. One can have true tolerance only if one understands the various individualities, different thinking, and feeling. As long as we hear the proposed objections, they can stimulate us if we do not take them easily, but can find that which the opponent argues in ourselves. If we make, so to speak, a part of ourselves our opponent to cope with the entitled objections, then we practise theosophical tolerance.

In this characterised way, the spiritual researcher should always face all other objections that could be done from opposing side. The supporters as well as the opponents should consider facing the opponents with the counterpart of fanaticism that must be an impulse of the theosophical attitude so that you always ask yourself, which importance do their objections have?—Hence, no objection surprises the theosophist. Theosophy can advance only in right way if such an inner discussion can take place with every opponent.

The fact that this is a demand with which also our time struggles can appear if one believes repeatedly that the opponents could not estimate at all the weight and the importance of their objections. I have already pointed many a time to the viewpoint of Eduard von Hartmann that he represented especially in his Philosophy of the Unconscious which negative reception it had with his opponents, how he anonymously wrote a refutation that his opponents liked very much. Then he revealed that he had written the refutation himself and showed that he could very well do the same objections and nobody possesses the absolute truth.

However, the theosophists should not only know the objections [against theosophy], but it is also their duty as it were to deal with these objections. After we have today opened ourselves to these objections, we want to see in the next talk how this area appears from the other side from which we have shown the reverse more or less today. We want to see whether there are substantial reasons for the opponents if they state, leave us alone with your theosophy, because it is not only unscientific, but it also contradicts any higher morality, it founds inadequate ethics, it gives no life security, and it is religiously absolutely inadequate.

On the other hand, could anything be wrong that shows that all these objections are still wrong? However, we do not want to take these objections in such a way, as if we wanted to dismiss them simply as errors, but in such a way that we can learn from them. It is difficult for some contemporaries to find the way to theosophy. However, it could be also exemplary for some people who become light-hearted supporters of theosophy to confront themselves once with such difficulties. Since also the way to the stars could be rough, and it could be good unless we make ourselves too comfortable.

In the next talk, I show how the human being can familiarise himself with this world of the spiritual stars, and that he must not succumb to the objections characterised today but can overcome them.

Today we intend adding something to round off the many facts and views we have been studying here this winter. We have often emphasised the way in which spiritual science should take hold of human life, and how it can become life, action and deed. Today, however, we want to give a few concluding aspects on the subject of the great evolutionary processes of the cosmos, as these are expressed in man. And to start with I should like to draw your attention to a fact that can tell you a great deal about the nature of cosmic evolution, if only you are prepared to look at it in the right way.

Consider, in a purely external way to begin with, the difference between the evolution of the animal and that of man. You need only say one word and hold one idea before you, and you will soon notice the difference between the concept of animal and human evolution. Think of the word ‘education’. Actual education is impossible in the animal world. To a certain extent you can train the animal to do things that are foreign to its natural instincts and inborn way of life. But only an extremely enthusiastic dog-lover would want to deny that there is a radical difference between the education of a human being and what can be undertaken with animals. We need merely bear one particular anthroposophical insight in mind, and we shall understand the basis for this apparently superficial fact.

We know that man's development is a gradual and very complicated process. We have repeatedly emphasised that in the first seven years of his life, up to the change of teeth, man develops in quite a different way from the later period up to fourteen, and again from the fourteenth to the twenty-first year. We will only touch on this today, for you already know it. According to spiritual science man passes through several births. The human being is born into the physical world when he leaves his mother's body and frees himself of the physical maternal sheath. But we know that when this has happened he is still enclosed in a second maternal sheath, an etheric one. During the first seven years of his life the child's etheric body is completely enveloped in external etheric currents that come from the outer world, just as the physical body is enveloped until birth in a physical maternal sheath. At the change of teeth this etheric sheath is stripped off, and not until now, at the age of seven, is the etheric body born. Then the astral body is still enclosed in the astral maternal sheath that is stripped off at puberty. After this the astral body develops freely until the twenty-first or twenty-second year, which is the time when strictly speaking the actual ego of man is born. Not until then does the human being awaken to his full inner intensity and the ego that has evolved through the course of his earlier incarnations work its way free.

To clairvoyant consciousness a very special fact becomes apparent here. If you watch a very young child for several weeks or months, you will see the child's head surrounded by etheric and astral currents and forces. However, these currents and forces gradually become less distinct and vanish after a while. What is really taking place there? You can actually discover what is happening, even without clairvoyant vision, although clairvoyant vision confirms what we are about to say. Immediately after the birth of a human being his brain is not the same as it will be a few weeks or months later. The child already perceives the outer world, of course, but its brain is not yet an instrument capable of connecting external impressions in a definite way. By means of connecting-nerves running from one part of the brain to another, the human being learns by degrees to link together in thought what he perceives in the external world, but these connecting nerve-strands develop only after birth. A child will hear and see a bell, for instance, but the impression of the sound and the sight of the bell do not immediately combine to form the thought that the bell is ringing. The child learns this only gradually, because the part of the brain that is the instrument for the perception of sound and the part that is the instrument for visual perception become connected only in the course of life. And not until this has happened is it possible for the child to reach the conclusion: ‘What I see is the same thing that is making the sound’. Connecting-cords like this are developed in the brain, and the forces that develop these connecting-cords can be seen by the clairvoyant in the first weeks of the child's development as an extra covering round the brain. But this covering passes into the brain and subsequently lives within it, no longer working from outside but from within. What works from outside during the first weeks of the child's development could not go on working at the whole development of the growing human being were it not protected by the various sheaths. For when that which has been working from outside passes into the brain, it develops under the protecting sheath first of the etheric body then of the astral body and only when the twenty-second year has been reached does that which first worked from outside become active from within. What was outside the human being during the first months of his existence and then slipped inside, is active for the first time independently of sheaths in the twentieth to the twenty-second year; then it becomes free and awakens into intense activity.

Now let us consider the gradual development of the human being and compare it with that of the plant. We know that the plant only has its physical and etheric body here in the physical world, whereas its astral body is outside it; but only the physical and etheric body within it. The plant emerges from the seed, forms its physical body, and then the etheric body gradually develops. And this etheric body is all that the plant has in addition. Now we have seen that man's etheric body is still enveloped in the astral body until puberty, and that man's astral body is not actually born until then. But the plant, after reaching its puberty, cannot give birth to an astral body, for it has none. Therefore the plant has nothing further to develop after puberty. It has accomplished its task in the physical world when puberty occurs, and after it has been fertilised, it withers. You can even observe something similar in certain lower animals. In these lower animals the astral body has quite evidently not penetrated into the physical body to the same extent as in the higher animals. Lower animals are characterised by the very fact that their astral body is not yet entirely within their physical body. Take the may-fly; it comes into being, lives until it is fertilised, and then dies. Why? Because it is a creature which, like a plant, has its astral body for the most part outside it, and therefore it has nothing further to develop when puberty has occurred. In a certain respect man, animal and plant develop in a similar way until puberty. Then the plant has nothing else to develop in the physical world, and so it dies. The animal still has an astral body, but no ego. Therefore after puberty certain possibilities of development remain in the animal. The astral body becomes free, and as long as it develops freely and possibilities of development remain, further development continues in the higher animal after puberty. But the astral body of the animal has no ego within it in the physical world. The animal's ego is a group ego; it embraces a whole group and exists as group ego in the astral world, where its possibilities of development are quite different from those of the single animal here in the physical world. What the animal possesses as astral body has a limited possibility of development, and the animal already has this possibility within it as a natural tendency when it comes into the world. The lion has something in his astral body that expresses itself as a sum of impulses, instincts and passions. And this tendency continues to live itself out to the full until an ego might be born; but the ego is not there, it is on the astral plane. Therefore when the animal has just reached the stage when man attains his twenty-first year, its possibilities of development are all used up. The length of life varies according to circumstances, of course, for animals do not all live to be twenty-one. But up to the age of twenty-one, when the ego is born in man, his development is comparable to that of the animal. This must not lead to the conclusion that human development up to the age of twenty-one is identical to that of an animal, for that is not the case. The ego is already within the human being from the beginning, right from conception, and it now becomes free. Hence, because there is something within man from the beginning that becomes free at the age of twenty-one, he is from the outset no animal being, for the ego, although not free, is nevertheless working in him from the start. And it is essentially this ego that can be educated. For it is this ego, together with what it has accomplished in the astral, etheric and physical bodies, that passes from one incarnation to another. If this ego received nothing new in a further incarnation, man would not be able to take anything with him at his physical death, from his last life between birth and death. And if he were not able to take anything with him, he would be at exactly the same stage in the following life as he was in the previous one. Through the fact that you see man going through a development in life, and acquiring what the animal cannot acquire, because the animal's possibilities of development do not go beyond its inborn capacities, man is constantly enriching his ego, and reaches higher levels from one incarnation to another. It is because man bears within him an ego that has already been at work, although it only becomes free at his twenty-first year, that education is practicable, and something further can be done with him beyond his original possibilities. The lion brings its lion nature with it and lives it out. Man not only brings with him his nature as a member of the general human species, but also what he has attained as an ego in his Previous incarnation. This can be transformed more and more by education and life, and it will have acquired new impetus by the time man passes through the portal of death and has to prepare for a new incarnation. The point is that man acquires new factors of development and is constantly adding to his store.

Now let us ask what actually happens when man adds to his store from outside? To answer this we must reach three very important, rather difficult concepts. But as we have been working for some years in this group, we ought to be able to understand them. Let us start by taking a fully developed plant, for instance a lily of the valley. Here you have the plant before you in another form, as a small seed. Imagine holding the seed; there you have a minute structure. When you lay it in front of you, you can say: Everything that I shall see later on as root, stalk, leaves and blossom is in this seed. So here I have the plant in front of me as a seed and there as a fully grown plant. But I could not have the seed in front of me if it had not been produced by a previous lily of the valley. The case is different for clairvoyant consciousness. When clairvoyant consciousness observes the fully grown lily of the valley, it sees the physical plant filled with an etheric body, a body consisting of streams of light permeating it from top to bottom. In the lily of the valley, however, the etheric body does not extend very far beyond the physical body of the plant and does not differ from it very much. But if you take the small seed of the lily of the valley you will find that although the physical seed is small it is permeated by a wonderfully beautiful etheric body raying out all round in such a way that the seed is situated at one end of the etheric body like a comet with a tail. The physical seed is really only a denser point in the light or etheric body of the lily of the valley. When a spiritual scientist has the fully grown lily of the valley in front of him then, for him, the being that was hidden to begin with is developed. When he has the seed in front of him where the physical part is very small and only the spiritual part is large, he says: the actual being of the lily of the valley is rolled up in the physical seed. So when we look at the lily of the valley we have to distinguish two different states. One state is where the whole being of the lily of the valley is in involution: the seed contains the being rolled up, involved. When it comes forth it passes over to evolution, and then the whole being of the lily of the valley slips more into the newly developing seed. Thus evolution and involution alternate in the successive states of a plant. During evolution the spiritual disappears further and further and the physical grows great, whilst in involution the physical will disappear further and further and the spiritual become greater and greater.

In a certain respect we can speak of evolution and involution alternating in man to an even greater extent. In the human being between birth and death a physical body and an etheric body interpenetrate to form the physical, and the spiritual interpenetrates them too in a certain way, as an earthly being man is in evolution. But when man is seen clairvoyantly passing through the portal of death, he does not leave behind in physical life as much as the lily of the valley leaves in the seed; the physical disappears so completely that you no longer see it, it is all rolled up in the spiritual. Then man passes through Devachan, where he is in involution as regards his earthly being. For this earthly being of man, evolution is between birth and death, involution between death and a new birth. Yet there is a tremendous difference between man and the plant. In the plant we can speak of involution and evolution, but in the case of man we have to speak of yet a third factor. If we were not to speak of a third factor, we should not comprise the whole of human development. Because the plant always passes through involution and evolution, every new plant is an exact repetition of the last one. The being of the lily of the valley is perpetually going into the seed and out again. But what is happening in the case of man?

We have just realised that man receives new possibilities of development during his life between birth and death. He adds to his store. Hence it is not the same with man as it is with the plant. Each evolution of man on the earth is not a mere repetition of the previous one, but a raising of his existence on to a higher level. What he takes into himself between birth and death is added to what was there previously. That is why no mere repetition occurs, for what is evolving appears at a higher stage. Where does this new element actually come from? In what way are we to understand the fact that man receives and takes in something new? I beg you to follow very closely now, for we are coming to a most important and most difficult concept. And not without reason do I say this in one of the last sessions, for you will have the whole summer to ponder over it. We should ponder over such concepts for months if not years, then we gradually begin to realise their depth. Where does all that is constantly being added to man come from? We will make this comprehensible by taking a simple example.

Suppose you see a man standing opposite two other people. Let us take into consideration everything that belongs to evolution. Let us take the one who is observing the other two, and say to ourselves that he has passed through earlier incarnations and has developed what has been planted in him in these previous incarnations. The same applies to the other two people. Then let us suppose that the first man thinks to himself: The one person looks splendid beside the other. He is pleased to see just these two particular people standing together. Another person might not feel this satisfaction. The satisfaction the man feels in seeing the two standing side by side has nothing whatever to do with the possibilities of development in the other two, for they have done nothing that deserves the pleasure their standing together gives him. It is something quite different, and it depends entirely on the fact that it is he in particular that is standing opposite the two people. The point is that the man develops a feeling of joy over the two men in front of him standing together. This feeling is not caused by anything to do with development. There are things like this in the world that arise simply through coincidence. It is not a question of the two men being karmically connected. Our concern is the joy the man feels because he likes seeing the two people standing together.

Let us take a further example. Imagine a man standing here at a certain spot on the earth and looking up at the sky. He sees a particular constellation of stars. If he were to stand five paces away he would see something else. This looking at the sky creates in him a feeling of joy that is something quite new. Man experiences a number of totally new things that have nothing to do with his previous development. Everything that comes forth in the lily of the valley is determined by its previous development; but this is not the case with what works on the human soul from the environment. Man is concerned with a lot of affairs that have nothing to do with any previous development, but which are there because various circumstances bring him into contact with the outer world. Because he feels this joy, however, it has become for him an experience. Something has arisen in the human soul that is not determined by anything preceding it but which has arisen out of nothingness. Such creations out of nothingness are constantly arising in the human soul. These are experiences of the soul not experienced through given circumstances but through the relationships we ourselves create connecting the circumstances one with another. I want you to distinguish between the experiences produced by given circumstances and those produced by the relationships between the various circumstances.

Life really falls into two parts, with no distinguishing line between them: those experiences strictly determined by previous causes, by karma, and those not determined by karma but appearing on our horizon for the first time. There are whole areas in human life that come under these headings. Suppose you hear that somewhere someone has stolen something. What has happened is, of course determined by something karmic. But suppose you only know something about the theft and not the thief—therefore there is a particular person in the objective world who has done the stealing, but you know nothing about him. The thief is not going to come to you, though, and say: ‘Lock me up, I have committed a theft’, on the contrary, it is up to you to line up the facts so as to produce the evidence as to who is the thief. The ideas you put together have nothing to do with the objective facts. They depend on quite different things, even on whether you are clever or not. Your train of argument does not make the person a thief, it is a process taking place entirely within you that gets associated with what is there outside. Strictly speaking, any kind of logic is something added to things from outside. And all opinions of taste, as well as judgments we make about beauty, are additions. Thus man is constantly enriching his life with things that are not determined by previous causes, but which he experiences by bringing himself into a relationship with things.

If we make a rapid survey of human life and visualise man's development through ancient Saturn, Sun and Moon as far as our Earth evolution, we find that on Saturn there could be no question of man being able to relate to things in this way. Everything was pure necessity then. It was the same on old Sun and also on old Moon, and the animals are still in the situation today that man was in on the Moon. The animal experiences only what is determined by preceding causes. Man alone has entirely new experiences, independent of previous causes. Therefore in the truest sense of the word man alone is capable of education; man alone can continually add something new to what is determined by karma. Only on Earth did man attain the possibility of adding something new. On the Moon his development had not reached the point where he would have been capable of adding anything new to his innate capacities. Although not an animal, he was then at the stage of animal development. His actions were determined by external causes. To a certain extent this is still so today, for those experiences that are free experiences are only slowly making their way into man. And they appear to a greater and greater extent the higher the level at which man is. Imagine a dog standing in front of a Raphael painting. It would see what is there in the picture itself, in so far as it is a sense object. But if a man were to stand in front of the picture, he would see something quite different in it; he would see what he is capable of creating through the fact that he has already developed further in previous incarnations. And now imagine a genius like Goethe; he would see even more, and he would know the significance of why one thing is painted like this and the other like that. The more highly developed a man is the more he sees. And the more he has enriched his soul the greater his capacity to add to it the soul experiences from soul relationships. These become the property of his soul and are stored up within it. All this, however, has only been possible for humanity since Earth evolution began. But now the following will take place.

Man will develop in his own way through the subsequent ages. We know that the Earth will be succeeded by Jupiter, Venus and Vulcan. During this evolution the sum of man's experiences over and above those resulting from previous causes will become greater and greater, and his inner being become richer and richer. What he has brought with him from ancient causes, from the Saturn, Sun and Moon stages, will have less and less significance. He is developing his way out of previous causes and casting them off. And when, together with the Earth, man will have reached Vulcan, he will have stripped off all he received during the Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution. He will have cast it all off

Now we come to a difficult concept which shall be made clear by an analogy. Imagine you are sitting in a carriage that has been given or bequeathed to you. You are taking a ride in this carriage when a wheel becomes faulty, so you replace it with a new one. Now you have the old carriage but a new wheel. Suppose that after a while a second wheel becomes faulty. You replace that, and you now have the old carriage and two new wheels. Similarly you replace the third and fourth wheels, and so on, until you can easily imagine that one day you will actually have nothing left of the old carriage, but will have replaced it all with new parts. You will have nothing left of what you received as a gift or inheritance; you will still drive about in it, but strictly speaking it will be an entirely new vehicle. And now transfer this idea to human evolution. During the Saturn period man received the rudiments of his physical body, on the Sun his etheric body, on the Moon his astral body and on the Earth his ego, and he has been gradually developing these principles. But within the ego he is increasingly bringing experiences of a new kind into being and stripping off what he inherited, what he was given on Saturn, Sun and Moon. And a time will come—the Venus evolution—when man will have cast off all that the gods gave him during the Moon, Sun and Saturn evolution and the first half of the Earth evolution. He will have discarded all this, Just as in our analogy the single parts of the carriage were discarded. And he will have gradually replaced all this by something he has taken into himself from relationships, something previously nonexistent. Thus on reaching Venus, man will not be able to say: Everything from Saturn, Sun and Moon evolution is still in me—for by then he will have cast it all off. And at the end of his evolution he will bear within him only what he has gained through his own efforts, not what he was given, but what he has created out of nothingness. Here you have the third thing in addition to evolution and involution: creation out of nothingness. Evolution, Involution and creation out of nothingness are what we must have in mind if we are to picture the whole magnitude and majesty of human evolution. Thus we can understand how the gods have first of all given us our three bodies as vehicles, and how they built up these vehicles stage by stage, and then endowed us with the capacity to surmount them again stage by stage. We can understand how we may throw away the parts, piece by piece, because the gods wish to make us member by member into their image, so that we may say: The rudiments of what I am to become were given me, and out of them I have created for myself a new being.

Thus what man sees before him as a great and wonderful ideal in the far distant future, of having not only a consciousness of himself but a consciousness of having created himself, was already developed in earlier times by mighty spirits on a higher level than man. And certain spirits already engaged in the past in our evolution are developing at the present time what man will experience only in a distant future. We have said that during the Saturn evolution the thrones poured forth what we call the substance of mankind, and that into this human substance the spirits of personality poured what we call the forces of personality. But the spirits of personality, who at that time were sufficiently powerful to let the character of their personality flow into this substance poured out by the thrones, have since then ascended higher and higher. Today they have reached the point where they no longer need any physical substance for their further development. On Saturn, in order to be able to live at all, they needed the physical substance of Saturn which was at the same time the rudiment of human substance; on the Sun they needed the etheric substance that poured forth for man's etheric body; on the Moon they needed the astral substance, and here on Earth they need our ego. Henceforth, however, they will need what is formed by the ego itself, man s new creation out of pure relations, which is no longer physical, etheric or astral body or even ego as such, but that which the ego produces out of itself. This the spirits of personality will use, and they are already using it to live in today. On Saturn they lived in what is now our physical body, on the Sun in what is now our etheric body, on the Moon in what is now our astral body. Since the middle of Atlantean times they have begun living in the higher elements that man can bring forth out of his ego.

What are these higher elements man produces from out of his ego? They are of three kinds. First, what we call thinking in accordance with law, our logical thinking. This is something that man adds to things. If man does not merely look at the external world or merely observe it, or merely chase after the thief to find him, but observes in such a way that he sees the law inherent in the observation, availing himself of thoughts that have nothing to do with the thief and yet they catch him, then man is living in logic, pure logic. This logic is something that is added to things by man. When man devotes himself to this pure logic, the ego creates something beyond itself.

Secondly, the ego creates beyond itself when it develops pleasure or displeasure in the beautiful, the exalted, the humorous, the comic; in short, in everything that man himself produces. Let us say you see something in the world that strikes you as silly, and you laugh at it. This laughter has nothing whatever to do with your karma. A stupid person might come along, and the very thing you are laughing at could strike him as clever. That is something that arises out of yourself in that particular situation. Or, let us say, you see people attacking a brave man who for a time holds his own but eventually comes to a tragic end. What you witness was determined by karma, but the feeling of tragedy you have about it is something new.

Though necessity is the first thing, pleasure and displeasure are the second, and the third is the way you feel the urge to act under the influences of relationships. Even the way you feel compelled to act is not determined solely by karma, but by your relationship to the matter. Supposing two people are on the one hand so situated with regard to their relationship with one another that they are karmically destined to pay off something together, but at the same time one is further advanced in his development than the other. The more advanced one will pay up, the other will hold it back for later payment. The one will develop kindness of heart, the other's feelings will not be touched. That is something new coming into evolution. You must not look on everything as determined, rather it depends on whether or not we allow our actions to be guided by the laws of justice and fairness. New things are constantly being added to our morality, to the way we do our duty and to our moral judgment. Particularly in our moral judgment there lies the third element by means of which man goes beyond himself and then advances further and further. The ego puts this into our world, and what is thus put into the world does not perish. What men have introduced into the world from epoch to epoch, from age to age, as the result of logical thought, aesthetic judgment or the fulfillment of duty, forms a continuous stream, and provides the substance in which, in their phase of evolution, the spirits of personality take up their abode.

That is the way you live and evolve. And whilst you are evolving, the spirits of personality look down upon you, asking continually: Will you give me something, too, that I can use for my development? And the more man develops his thought content, his treasures of thought, the more he tries to refine his aesthetic judgment, and carry out his duty beyond the requirements of karma, the more nourishment there is for the spirits of personality; the more we offer up to them, the more substantial these spirits of personality become. What do these spirits of personality represent? Something which from the point of view of our human world conception we call an abstraction: the spirit of the age, the spirit of the various epochs. To anthroposophists this spirit of the age is a real being. The spirits of the age, who are actually the spirits of personality, move through the ages. When we look back into ancient times, the Indian, Persian, Chaldean-Babylonian, Greco-Latin times and right into our own time, we find that apart from the nations and apart from all the other differences among men, what we call the spirit of the age is always changing. People thought and felt quite differently five thousand years ago than they did three thousand years ago and from the way they do today. And it is the spirits of the age or, according to spiritual science, the spirits of personality who change. These spirits of personality are going through their evolution in the super-sensible world just as the human race is going through its evolution in the sense world. But all that the human race develops of a super-sensible nature is food and drink for these spirits of personality, and they benefit from it. If there were an age in which men were to spend their lives without developing any treasures of thought, without pleasure or displeasure, nor any feeling for duty beyond the limits of karma—in such an age the spirits of personality would have no nourishment and they would become emaciated. Such is our connection with the beings who are invisibly interwoven with our life.

As I told you, man adds something new to development, creates as it were something out of nothingness in addition to involution and evolution. He could not create anything out of nothingness, however, had he not previously received the causes into which he has placed himself as in a vehicle. This vehicle was given him during the Saturn evolution, and bit by bit he is discarding it and developing on into the future. He had to receive the foundation for this, however, and if the gods had not provided this foundation for him in the first place, he would not have been able to perform any action that can be created out of nothingness. That relationships in the surrounding world affect us in such a way that they really help our further development is due to this laying of a good foundation.

For what has become possible through the fact that man can create something new out of relationships, and that he can make use of the connections into which he is placed so as to form the foundation for something new that he himself creates? And what does it mean that man has become capable of extending his thoughts beyond the things he experiences in the surrounding world, and feeling more than what is objectively there in front of him? What has come about as a result of man being able to work beyond the dictates of karma, and live in duty towards truth, fairness and kindness of heart?

By becoming capable of logical thinking, of developing thought in accordance with its necessity, the possibility of error has been created. Because of the pleasure man can take in what is beautiful, the possibility has also been created for him to introduce the element of ugliness and impurity into world evolution. Because man is capable of both setting himself the concept of duty and of fulfilling it beyond the extent of karma, the possibility of evil and of resistance to duty has been created. So it is this very possibility of being able to create solely out of relationships that has placed man in a world in which he can also work on his own spiritual part, so that it becomes full of error, ugliness and evil. And not only had the possibility to be provided for man altogether to create out of these relationships, but the possibility had to be given for him by dint of struggle and striving gradually to create out of these relationships what is right, what is beautiful and those virtues that really further his evolution.

Creating out of relationships is called in Christian esotericism ‘creating out of the spirit’. And creating out of right, beautiful and virtuous relationships is called in Christian esotericism ‘The Holy Spirit’. When a man is able to create out of nothingness the right or true, the beautiful and the good, the Holy Spirit fills him with bliss. But for a man to be able to create in the sense of the Holy Spirit, he had first to be given the foundation, as is the case for all creation out of nothingness. This foundation was given him through the coming of Christ into our evolution. Through experiencing the Christ Event on earth, man was able to ascend to creating in the Holy Spirit. Thus it is Christ Himself Who creates the greatest, most profound foundation. If man becomes such that he stands firmly on the basis of the Christ experience, and the Christ experience is the carriage he joins for his evolutionary progress, then the Christ sends him the Holy Spirit, and man becomes capable of creating the right, beautiful and good in the course of his further evolution.

So we see the coming of the Christ to the Earth as a fulfillment as it were of all that had been put into man through Saturn, Sun and Moon. And the Christ Event has given man the greatest thing possible, the power that makes him capable of living on into the perspectives of the future and of increasingly creating out of relationships, out of all that is not predetermined, but depends on how man relates to the facts of the world around him, which is in the widest sense the Holy Spirit. This again is an aspect of Christian esotericism. Christian esotericism is connected with the profoundest thought in the whole of our evolution, the thought of creation out of nothingness.

Therefore no true theory of evolution will ever be able to leave out the thought of creation out of nothingness. Supposing there were only evolution and involution, there would be eternal repetition like there is with the plant, and on Vulcan there would be only what originated on Saturn. But in the middle of our development creation out of nothingness was added to evolution and involution. After Saturn, Sun and Moon had passed away, Christ came to Earth as the enriching leaven which ensures that something quite new will be there on Vulcan, something not yet present on Saturn. Whoever speaks of evolution and involution only, will speak of development as though everything were merely to repeat itself in circles. But such circles can never really explain world evolution. Only when we add to evolution and involution this creation out of nothingness, that adds something new to existing relationships, do we arrive at a real understanding of the world.

Beings of a lower order show no more than a trace of what we called creation out of nothingness. A lily of the valley will always be a lily of the valley; at most the gardener could add something to it from outside to which the lily of the valley would never have attained of itself. Then there would be something which with regard to the nature of the lily of the valley would be a creation out of nothingness. Man, however, is himself capable of including in his being this creation out of nothingness. Yet man only becomes capable of doing so, and advancing to the freedom of individual creativity through the greatest of all free deeds, and one which can serve him as an example. What is this greatest deed of freedom? It is that the creative and wise Word of our solar system Himself resolved to enter into a human body and to take part in Earth evolution through a deed unconnected with any previous karma. There was no preceding karma forcing the Christ to His resolution to enter a human body; He undertook to do it as a free deed entirely based upon foreseeing mankind's future evolution. This deed had no precedent, having its origin in Him as a thought out of nothingness, out of His pre-vision. This is a difficult concept, but it will always be included in Christian esotericism, and everything depends on our being able to add the thought of creation out of nothingness to those of evolution and involution.

When we are able to do this we shall acquire great ideals which, although they may not extend to what may be called cosmic dimensions, are essentially connected with the question: Why, for instance, do we join an anthroposophical society? To understand the purpose of an anthroposophical society we must return to the thought that we are working for the spirits of personality, for the spirits of the age. When a human being comes into the world at birth, to start with he is educated by all manner of circumstances; these influence him and form the first step of his own creative activity. If only it could be clearly understood that the place where a man is born is only the first step, and that the prevailing circumstances work upon him with overwhelming suggestive power. Let us try to imagine how different a man's circumstances would be were he to be born in Rome or Frankfurt instead of in Constantinople. Through his birth he would be placed in different circumstances, into different religious affiliations. Under these influences a certain fanaticism could develop in him for Catholicism or Protestantism. If, through a slight turn of the wheel in karmic connections, he had been born in Constantinople, might he not also have turned out to be quite a good Turk? Here you have an illustration of the suggestive force with which environmental conditions affect man. But man is able to extricate himself from the purely suggestive nature of conditions and unite with other people in accordance with principles he himself chooses and acknowledges. Then he can say: “Now I know why I am working with other people”. In this way there arise out of human consciousness those social groups in which material is created for the spirits of the age, the spirits of personality. And the anthroposophical society is a group of this kind in which this connection is created on a basis of brotherhood. This means nothing else than that each individual is active in the group in such a way that he acquires in himself all the good qualities that make him an image of the whole society. Thus all the thoughts, wealth of feeling and virtues he develops through the society he bestows as nourishment upon the spirits of personality. Hence in a society like this all that creates communal life is inseparable from the principle of individuality. Each single member becomes capable through such a society of offering what he himself produces as a sacrifice to the spirits of personality. And each individual prepares himself to reach the level of those who are the most advanced, and who, as the result of spiritual training have progressed to the point where they have the following ideal: “When I think, I do not do so for my own satisfaction, but in order to create nourishment for the spirits of personality. I lay upon the altar of the spirits of personality my highest and most beautiful thoughts; and what I feel is not prompted by egoism, I feel it because it is to be nourishment for the spirits of personality. And what I can practise in the way of virtue, I do not practise for the sake of gaining influence for myself, but in order to bring it as a sacrifice to provide food for the spirits of personality.” Here we have placed before us as our ideal those whom we call the masters of wisdom and the masters of harmony and feeling. For thus do they think and prepare for the development which will bring man nearer and nearer to the point where he will always be creating what is new until he will finally develop a world from which the workings of the old causes will have disappeared, and out of which new light will stream forth into the future. The world is not subject to perpetual metamorphosis into different forms, but the old is perfected and becomes the vehicle of the new. Then even this will be thrown off and will disappear into nothingness, so that out of this nothingness something new may arise. This is the tremendous idea of progress, that new things can perpetually arise.

But the worlds are complete in themselves, and you will have seen in the example given that we cannot speak of anything actually coming to an end. It has been shown how on the one hand the spirits of personality lose their influence over man, but on the other hand how they again pursue their own evolution. Thus ours is a world that is constantly being rejuvenated by new creations, yet it is also true that what is stripped off would hinder progress, and it is passed on so that others for their part can progress. Nobody should believe that he must allow something to sink into nothingness, for we have been given the possibility of creating out of nothingness. What on Vulcan will prove itself to be something new, will continually build new forms and discard the old, and what is thrown off will seek its own path.

Evolution, involution and creation out of nothingness are the three concepts we have to apply in order to understand the evolution of world phenomena as it really is. Only by this means shall we arrive at accurate concepts that both enlighten man about the world and engender in him inner warmth of feeling. If man had to admit his incapacity to do anything except create in accordance with impulses implanted into him, this would not steel his will nor kindle his hopes to the same extent as being able to say: “I can create my own life values and constantly add something new to what has been given me as a foundation. My ancient heritage will in no way hinder me from creating new blossoms and fruits which will live on into the future.” This, however, is part of what we can describe by saying that the anthroposophical conception of the world gives man strength, hope and confidence in life, for it shows him that he can, in the future, have a share in working at creations which, today, not only lie in the womb of causality but in nothingness. It shows him the prospect that, through his own efforts, he is working his way in the true sense of the word from being a ‘creature’ to being a ‘creator’.

Now that we can be together again, it will be my task in the coming days to speak about important but rather difficult aspects of human and world existence, and we shall certainly not be able to reach any conclusion about these in this lecture; we can only make a beginning. As we proceed we will see how tremendously important these very questions are if we are to connect ourselves inwardly with the soul-stirring events of our times. If I had to summarize in a few words what I am going to speak about, I would say “necessity in world events and in human actions” and “human freedom in these two domains.”

There is hardly anyone who is not more or less intensely concerned with these problems, and perhaps there are hardly any events on the physical plane that urge us as strongly to deal with these questions as the ones that are at present overshadowing the peoples of Europe and reverberating in their souls. If we look at world events and our own actions, feeling, willing, and thinking within these events, considering them for the moment in conjunction with what we call divine cosmic guidance, wisdom-filled cosmic guidance, we see that this divine guidance is at work everywhere. And if we look at something that has happened and that perhaps we ourselves have been involved in, we can ask afterwards “Was the reason for this event we were involved in so much a part of wise cosmic guidance that we can say it was inevitable for it to happen as it did, and we ourselves could not have acted differently in it?” Or, looking more toward the future, we could also say “At some time in the future one or another thing will happen in which we believe we may be playing a part. Ought we not assume of the wise world guidance we presupposed that what happens in the future will also come about inevitably or, as we often say, is predetermined?” Can our freedom exist under such conditions? Can we resolve to use the ideas and skills we have acquired to intervene in some way? Can we do anything to alter things through the way we intervene if we do not want them to happen in the way they would be bound to happen without our intervention?

If we look back on the past, we tend to have the impression that everything was inevitable and could not have happened differently. If we look more toward the future, we have the impression that it must be possible for us to intervene in the course of events with our own will as much as we can. In short, we will always be in a conflict between supposing an absolute and all-pervading necessity on the one hand and necessarily assuming that we are free on the other. For without this latter assumption we cannot maintain our world view and would have to accept the fact that we are like cogs in the huge machine of existence, governed by the forces ruling the machine to the point where even the duties of the cogs are predetermined.

As you know, the conflict between choosing one thing or the other runs to some extent through all our intellectual endeavors. There have always been philosophers called determinists who supposed that all the events we are involved in through our actions and our willing are strictly predetermined, and there have also always been indeterminists who supposed that, on the contrary, human beings can intervene in the course of evolution through their will and their ideas. You know too that the most extreme form of determinism is fatalism, which clings so firmly to the belief that the world is pervaded by spiritual necessity as to presuppose that not one single thing could possibly happen differently from the way it was predetermined, that human beings cannot do other than submit passively to a fate that fills the whole world just because everything is predetermined.

Perhaps some of you also know that Kant set up an antinomian chart on one side of which he wrote a particular statement and always set its opposite on the other side.¹ For example, on one side stood the assertion “In terms of space the world is infinite,” and on the other side “In terms of space the world is finite.” He then went on to show that with the concepts at our disposal we can prove one of these just as well as the other. We can prove with the same logical exactitude that “the world is infinite with regard to both space and time” or that “the world is finite, boarded-up, in terms of space and that it had a beginning in time.”

The questions we have introduced also belong among the ones Kant put on his antinomian chart. He drew people's attention to the fact that one can just as well prove positively, in as proper and logical a way as possible, that everything that happens in the world, including human action, is subject to rigid necessity, as one can prove that human beings are free and influence in one way or another the course of events when they bring their will to bear on it. Kant considered these questions to be outside the realm of human knowledge, to be questions that lie beyond the limits of human knowledge, because we can prove the one just as easily and conclusively as the other.

Our studies of the last few years will actually have more or less given you the groundwork to get to the bottom of this strange mystery. For it certainly is a mysterious question whether human beings are bound by necessity or are free. It is a puzzling matter. Yet it is even more puzzling that both these alternatives can be conclusively proved. You will find no basis at all for overcoming doubt in this sphere if you look outside of what we call spiritual science. Only the background spiritual science can give will enable you to discover something about what is at the bottom of this mysterious question.

This time we will deal with our subject in very slow stages. I would just like to ask in anticipation, “How is such a thing possible that human beings can prove something and also prove its opposite?” When we approach a matter of this kind, we are certainly made aware of certain limits in normal human comprehension, in ordinary human logic. We meet with this limitation of human logic in regard to other things too. It always appears when human beings want to approach infinity with their concepts.

I can show you this by means of a very simple example. As soon as human beings want to approach infinity with their intellects, something occurs that can be called confusion in their concepts. I will demonstrate this in a very simple way. You must just be a little patient and follow a train of thought to which you are probably not accustomed. Suppose I write these figures on the blackboard one after the other, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on. I could write an infinite number of them: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc., couldn't I? I can also write a second column of figures; on the right of each number I can put double the number, like this:

Again I can write an infinite number of them. Now you will agree with me that each number in the right-hand column is in the left-hand column too. I can underline 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on. Look at the left column for a moment; an infinite series of numbers is possible. This infinite series contains all the numbers included in the right column. 2, 4, 6, and so on are all there. I can continue underlining them. If you look at the figures that are underlined, you will see that they are exactly half of all the numbers together because every other one is underlined. But when I write them on the right-hand side, I can write 2, 4, 6, 8, and so on into infinity. I have an infinite number both on the left and on the right, and you cannot say that there are fewer on the right than on the left. There is no doubt that I am bound to have just as many numbers on the right as on the left.

And yet, as every other number would have to be crossed out on the left to make the left column the same as the right, the infinite number on the left is only half the infinite number on the right. Obviously I have just as many numbers on the right as on the left, namely an infinite number, for each number on the right has one corresponding to it on the left—yet the amount of numbers on the right cannot but be half that of the numbers on the left.

There is no question about it, as soon as we deal with infinity, our thinking becomes confused. The problem arising here also cannot be solved, for it is just as true that on the right there are half as many numbers as on the left as it is true that there are exactly as many numbers on the right as on the left. Here you have the problem in its simplest form.

This brings us to the realization that our concepts cannot actually be used where infinity is concerned, where we go beyond the sense world—and infinity does go beyond the sense world. And do not imagine this to apply only to unlimited infinity, for you cannot use your concepts where limited infinity is concerned either, as the same confusion arises there.

Suppose you draw a triangle, a square, a pentagon, a hexagon and so on. When you reach a construction with a hundred sides, you will have come very close to a circle. You will no longer be able to distinguish the small lines very clearly, especially if you look at them from a distance. Therefore you can say that a circle is a polygon with an infinite number of sides. If you have a small circle there are an infinite number of sides in it; if you have a circle twice the size, you still have an infinite number of sides—and yet exactly twice as many!

So you do not need to go as far as unlimited infinity, for if you take a small circle with an infinite number of sides and a circle twice the size with an infinite number of sides, then even in the realm of visible, limited infinity you can encounter something that throws your concepts into utter confusion. What I have just said is extremely important. For people completely fail to notice that there is only a certain field where our concepts apply, namely the field of the physical plane, and that there is a particular reason why this has to be so.

You know, at a place where people are attacking us rather severely—which is now happening in many places from a great many people—a pastor gave a speech opposing our spiritual science, and thinking it might be especially effective, he concluded with a quotation from Matthias Claudius.² This quotation says roughly that human beings are really poor sinners who cannot know much and ought to rest content with what they do know and not chase after what they cannot know. The pastor picked this verse out of a poem by Matthias Claudius because he thought he could charge us with wanting to transcend the sense world—after all, had not Matthias Claudius already said that human beings are nothing but sinners who are unable to get beyond this world of the senses?

“By chance,” as people say, a friend of ours looked up this poem by Matthias Claudius and also read the verse preceding it. This preceding verse says that a person can go out into the open and, although the moon is always a round orb, if it does not happen to be full moon, he sees only part of the moon even though the other part is there. In the same way there are many things in the world people could become aware of if only they looked at them at the right moment. Thus Matthias Claudius wanted to draw attention to the fact that people should not confine themselves to immediate sense appearance and that anyone who allows himself to be deceived by this is a poor sinner. In fact, what the good pastor quoted from Matthias Claudius reflected on himself.

The sense world—if we happen not to be just like that pastor—at times makes us aware that wherever we look we should also look in the opposite direction and adjust our first view accordingly. However, the world of the senses cannot supply this immediate adjustment with regard to what transcends the sense world. We cannot just quote the other verse. That is why human beings philosophize away and, of course, are convinced of the truth of their speculations, for they can be logically proved. But their opposite can also be logically proved. So let us tackle the question today, “Why is it that when we transcend the sense world our thinking gets so confused?” And we will now look at the question in a way which will bring us closer to an answer. How does it happen that two contradictory statements can both be proved right? We will find this has to do with the fact that human life is in a kind of central position, a point of balance between two polar opposite forces, the ahrimanic and the luciferic.

You can of course cogitate on freedom and necessity and imagine you have compelling evidence that the world contains only necessity. But the compelling force of this argument comes from Ahriman. When we prove things in one direction, it is Ahriman who leads us astray, and if we prove their opposite, we are misled by Lucifer. For we are always exposed to these two powers, and if we do not take into account that we are placed in between them, we shall never get to the bottom of the conflicts in human nature, such as the one we have been considering.

It was actually in the course of the nineteenth century that people lost the feeling that throughout the world order there are, besides a state of equilibrium, pendulum swings to the right and the left, a swing toward Ahriman and a swing toward Lucifer. This feeling has been totally lost. After all, if you speak nowadays of Ahriman and Lucifer, you are considered not quite sane, aren't you? It was not as bad as this until the middle of the nineteenth century, for a very clever philosopher, Thrandorff, wrote a very nice article here in Berlin in the middle of the nineteenth century in an attempt to refute the argument of a certain clergyman.³ This clergyman let it be known—and it should be alright to say this in our circles—that there is no devil and that it is really a dreadful superstition to speak of one. We speak of Ahriman rather than of the devil. The philosopher Thrandorff spoke out against the clergyman in a very interesting article, “The Devil: No Dogmatic Bogy.” As late as the middle of the 1850s he tried as it were to prove the existence of Ahriman on a strictly philosophical basis.

In the course of the public lectures I am to give here in the near future I hope I can speak about this extinct part of human spiritual life, about an aspect of theosophy that completely disappeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. Right up to that time people had still spoken about these things, even if they called them by other names. The feeling for these things has now been lost, but basically it was there in a delicate form right into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, until it had to recede into the background for a while in the natural course of things. We know of course, as I have often emphasized, that spiritual science does not in the slightest way deny the great value and significance of progress in the natural sciences. But this progress in science would not have been possible unless the feeling for this opposition between Ahriman and Lucifer, which can be discovered only on a spiritual level, had been lost. It now has to emerge again above the threshold of human consciousness.

I would like to give you an example of how things stood in regard to Ahriman and Lucifer in the days when people had only a feeling left that there are two different powers at work. Here is an example to illustrate this.

In the old town hall in Prague there is a remarkable clock that was made in the fifteenth century. This clock is really a marvel. At first sight it looks like a sort of sundial, but it is so intricately constructed that it shows the course of the hours in a twofold way: the old Bohemian and the modern way. In the old Bohemian way the hours went from 1 or rather from 0 to 24, and the other way only to 12. At sunset the pointer or gnomon—and there was a shadow there—always pointed to 1. The clock was so arranged that the pointer literally always indicated 1 at sunset. That is to say, despite the varying times of sunset the hand always showed 1.

In addition to this, the clock also showed when sun or moon eclipses occurred. It also showed the course of the various planets through the constellations, giving the planetary orbits. It really was a wonderful construction and even showed the movable festivals, that is to say, it indicated on what day Easter fell in a particular year. It was also a calendar, giving the course of the year from January to December, including the fact that Easter is movable. A special pointer showed on what day Easter fell, despite it being movable, and it also showed Whitsun.

This clock, then, was constructed in the fifteenth century in an extraordinarily impressive way. And the story of how it was constructed has been investigated. But apart from this story—and the documents are there for you to read, with lots of descriptions—there is a legend that also aims at giving an account of the marvelous quality of this clock: first regarding its wonderful construction, and then regarding the fact that the man who was gifted enough to make such a clock always wound it up as long as he lived. After his death nobody could wind it, and they searched everywhere for people who could put it in order and get it going. As a rule they only found people who damaged it. Then someone would be found who said he could sort it out and did so, yet time and again the clock went wrong.

These facts grew into a kind of folk tale, which runs as follows: Once upon a time through a special gift from heaven a simple man acquired the ability to make this clock. He alone knew how to look after it. The legend attaches great significance to the fact that he was only a simple man who acquired this ability through special grace; that is to say, he was inspired by the spiritual world. But it came about that the governor wanted to keep this clock specially for Prague and prevent any other town from having one like it. So he had the inspired clockmaker blinded by having his eyes plucked out. Thus the man withdrew from the scene. But just before his death he begged once more to be permitted a moment in which to set the clock to rights again, and according to the legend he used this moment to make a quick manipulation and put the clock into such disorder that nobody could ever put it right again.

At first sight this seems a very unpretentious story. But in the way the story is constructed there is a sure feeling for the existence of Ahriman and Lucifer and the balance between them. Think how sensitively this story has been formed. The same sensitive construction can be found in countless such folk tales; it grows out of this same sure feeling for Lucifer and Ahriman. The story begins with the position of equilibrium, doesn't it? Through an act of grace from the spiritual world the man acquires the ability to construct an extraordinary clock. There is no trace of egotism in it, though anybody can give way to egotism. It was a gift of grace, and he really did not build the clock out of egotism. Nor was there any intellectuality in it, for it is expressly stated that he was a simple man. This whole description of the skill being an act of grace with no trace of egotism, and of his being a simple man who was free of intellectuality, was in fact given in order to indicate that there was no trace of Ahriman and Lucifer in this man's soul, but that he was entirely under the influence of divine powers that were good and progressive.

Lucifer lived in the governor. It was out of egotism that he wanted to keep the clock exclusively for his own town, and this was why he blinded the clockmaker. Lucifer is placed on the one side. But as soon as Lucifer is there, he always allies himself with his brother Ahriman. And because the man has been blinded, this other power acquires the capacity to attack from outside through skillful manipulation. That is the work of Ahriman.

Thus the power for good is placed between Lucifer and Ahriman. You can find a sensitive construction like this in many of the folk tales, even the simplest of them. But it was possible for this feeling of the intervention of Ahriman and Lucifer in life to get lost at a time when a sense had to gain ground that positive and negative electricity, positive and negative magnetism, and so on, are the basic forces of the material world. This feeling for perceiving the world spiritually had to withdraw in order for scientific investigation to flourish.

We shall now look at how Ahriman and Lucifer intervene in what human beings call knowledge, in what people call their relation to the world in general, in a way that leads to the very confusion we were speaking about. This confusion is especially evident in the questions we have introduced. Let us take a simple hypothetical example. I could just as well have taken this from great world events as from everyday occurrences. Let us suppose that three or four people are preparing to go out for a drive. They plan to travel, let us say, through a mountain pass. This pass has overhanging rocks. The people are ready for the drive and intend setting out at an arranged time. But the chauffeur has just ordered another mug of beer which is served a bit too late. He therefore delays the departure by five minutes. Then he sets out with the party. They drive through the ravine. Just as they come to the overhanging rock it breaks loose, falls on top of the vehicle, and crushes the whole party. They all perish, or perhaps it was only the passengers who were killed and the chauffeur was spared.

Here we have a case in point. You could ask whether it was the chauffeur's fault, or whether the whole thing was governed by absolute necessity. Was it absolutely inevitable that these people should meet with this disaster at that precise moment? And was the chauffeur's tardiness just part of this necessity? Or could we imagine that if only the chauffeur had been punctual, he would have driven them through the mountain pass a long time before the rock fell, and they would never have been hit by it?

Here in the midst of everyday life you have this question of freedom and necessity which is intimately connected with “guilty” or “innocent.” Obviously, if everything is subject to absolute necessity, we cannot say that the chauffeur was guilty at all from a higher point of view, as it was entirely inevitable that these people met their death.

We meet this problem in life all the time. It is, as we have said, one of the most difficult of questions, the kind of question in which Ahriman and Lucifer interfere most easily when we try to find a solution. Ahriman is the one who appears first when this question is being tackled, as we shall see.

We will have to approach this question from a different angle if we want to get at an answer. You see, if we set about solving a question like this by starting with the thought “I can easily follow the course of events: the boulder fell—that happened,” and then ask “Is this actually based on necessity or freedom? Could things have happened differently?” we are only looking at the external events. We are looking at the events as they happen on the physical plane. Now people follow this approach out of the same impulse that leads them, if they have a materialistic outlook, to stop short at the physical body when contemplating the human being. Anyone who knows nothing about spiritual science will stop short at the physical body nowadays, won't he? He will say “The human being you see and feel is what exists.” He does not go beyond the physical body to the etheric body. And if he is a thoroughly pig-headed materialist, he will jeer and scoff when he hears people saying there is a finer, etheric body underlying the dense physical body. Yet you know how well-founded the view is that among the members of the human being the etheric body is the one most closely associated with the physical body, and in the course of time we have become accustomed to knowing that we must not just speak of the human physical body but also of the human etheric body, and so on.

Some of you, however, may not yet have asked yourselves “What kind of world is that other world outside the human being, the world in which the ordinary world events occur?” We have of course spoken of a number of things in this connection. We have said that to begin with when we perceive the external events of the physical plane with our senses, we have no idea that wherever we look there are elemental beings; it is exactly the same when we first look at the human being.

Human beings have an etheric body, which we have often also called an elemental body. Outside in nature, in external physical happenings in general, we have a succession of physical events and also the world of elemental existence. This runs absolutely parallel: the human being with a physical and an etheric body, and physical processes with events of the elemental world flowing into them. It would be just as one-sided to say that external processes are merely physical as to say that a human being has a physical body only, when we ought to be saying that he also has an etheric body. What we perceive with our physical senses and physical intellect is one thing. But there is something behind it that is analogous to the human etheric body. Behind every external physical occurrence there is a higher, more subtle one.

There are people who have a certain awareness of such things. This awareness can come to them in two different ways. You may have noticed something like the following either in yourself or in other people. A person has had some experience. But afterwards he comes to you and says—or it may be something you experienced and you may say, “Actually I had the feeling that while this experience was taking place externally, something quite different was happening to me as well, in a higher part of my being.” This is to say, deeper natures may feel that events not taking place on the physical plane at all can yet have an important effect on the course of their life. First, such people know something has happened to them. Others go even further and see things of this kind symbolically in a dream. Someone dreams he experiences this or that. He dreams, for instance, that he is killed by a boulder. He wakes up and is able to say, “That was a symbolic dream; something has taken place in my soul life.” It can often be proved true in life that something took place in the soul that was of far greater significance than what happened to the person on the physical plane. He may have progressed a stage higher in knowledge, purified part of his will nature, or made his feelings more sensitive or something of that kind.

In lectures given here recently I drew attention to the fact that what a person knows with his I is actually only a part of all that happens to him, and that the astral body knows a very great deal more, though not consciously. You will remember my telling you this. The astral body certainly knows of a great deal that happens to us in the supersensible realm and not in the realm of the senses. Now we have arrived from another direction at the fact that something is continually happening to us in the supersensible realm. Just as in the case of my moving my hand, the physical movement is only part of the whole process and behind it there is an etheric process, a process of my etheric body, so every physical process outside me is permeated by a subtle elementary process that runs parallel with it and takes place in the supersensible realm. Not only beings are permeated by a supersensible element, but so is the whole of existence.

Remember something I have repeatedly referred to and which even seems somewhat paradoxical. I have pointed out that in the spiritual realm we often have the opposite of what exists on the physical plane, not always, but often. Thus if something is true here for the physical plane, the truth with regard to the spiritual aspect can look quite different. Not always, as I say. But I have counted many cases over the years where one would have to say that on the spiritual level there is exactly the opposite result from what one would expect to happen on the physical plane.

With regard to supersensible occurrences running parallel with those of the sense world, this is occasionally, in fact very often, the case. So let us examine it. If we see a party of people setting off by coach and taking a drive, and a piece of rock falls and crushes them, that is the physical occurrence. Parallel with this physical event, that is to say, within it in the same way as our etheric body is within us, there is a supersensible occurrence. And we have to recognize that this may be the exact opposite of what is happening here on the physical plane. In fact it is very frequently the exact opposite.

This can also create great confusion if we do not watch out. For instance, the following may happen. If someone has acquired atavistic clairvoyance and has a kind of second sight, he or she may have the following experience: Supposing a party of people is setting out on a journey, but at the last moment one of the party decides to stay behind, the person who has second sight, let us say. Instead of going with the others, that person stays behind and after a while has a vision. In this vision any event can appear to that person. He or she could of course just as well see the party being hit by boulders as see, for instance—and this can be a matter of disposition—that some especially good fortune happens to them. He or she could very well see the party having a very joyful experience, and might subsequently hear that the party had perished in the way I described.

This could happen if the clairvoyant were not to see what was happening on the physical plane—which he might very well have seen—but had seen what was happening as a parallel event on the astral plane: for the moment these people left the physical plane they may well have been called to something special in the spiritual world, something that filled them with an abundance of new life in the spiritual world. In short, the clairvoyant person may have seen an event of the supersensible worlds going on in exactly the opposite direction, and this absolutely contradictory event could be true. It might really be the case that here on the physical plane a misfortune exists that corresponds in the supersensible world to some great good fortune for those same souls.

Now someone who thinks he is smarter than the wise guidance of the world (and there are such people) might say, “If I ruled the world, I would not do it in such a way that I call souls to happiness in the spiritual world and at the same time shower them with misfortune here on the physical plane. I would do it better than that!” Well, all one can say to people like that is, “Surely one can understand that here on the physical plane people can easily be misled by Ahriman. But cosmic wisdom always knows better.” It could be a matter of the following: The task awaiting the souls in the spiritual world requires their having this experience here on the physical plane, so that they can look back, so to speak, to this physical event of their earthly lives and gain a certain strength they need. That is to say, for the souls who experience them these two occurrences, the physical and the spiritual one, may necessarily belong together.

We could quote hypothetical examples of all kinds, showing that when something takes place here on the physical plane there exists, as it were, an etheric body of this event, an elemental, supersensible event belonging to it. We must not merely generalize like pantheists do and stop short at the general statement that there is a spiritual world underlying the physical, but we must give concrete examples. We must be aware that behind every physical occurrence there is a spiritual occurrence, a real spiritual occurrence, and both together form a whole.

If we follow the course of events on the physical plane, we can say that we get to the point where we link together the events of the physical plane by means of thoughts. And as we watch things happen on the physical plane we actually reach the point of finding a “cause” for each “effect.” That is how things are. People everywhere look for the cause belonging to each effect. Whenever anything has happened, people always have to find the cause of it. But this means finding the inevitability. If you look with sufficient pedantry at the simple example I chose, you could say, “Well now, this party had gathered and had fixed their departure for a definite time. But if I follow up why the chauffeur was tardy, I will go in several directions. First of all, I may look at the chauffeur himself and consider how he was brought up and how he became tardy. Then I will look at the various circumstances leading to his getting his mug of beer too late. All I will be able to find in this way is merely a chain of causes. I will be able to show how one event fits in with the others in such a way that the affair could not possibly have happened otherwise. I will gradually come to the point where I completely eliminate the chauffeur's free will, for if we have a cause for every effect, this includes everything the chauffeur does as well.” The chauffeur only wanted another mug of beer, didn't he, because he had probably not been thrashed sufficiently when he was young. If he had been thrashed more often—and it is not his fault that he was not—things would not have turned out as they did. Looking at it this way we can base the whole thing on a chain of cause and effect.

This has to do with the fact that it is only on the physical plane that we can use concepts. For just consider: if you want to understand something, one thought must be able to follow from another, that is to say, you depend on being able to develop one thought out of another. It lies in the nature of concepts that one follows from the other. That must be so.

Yet, what can be clearly and necessarily linked together through concepts on the physical plane immediately changes as soon as we enter the neighboring supersensible world. There we have to do not with cause and effect but with beings. This is where beings are active. At every moment one or another being is working on or withdrawing from a task. There it is not at all a matter of what can be grasped by concepts in the usual sense.

If you tried using concepts for what is happening in the spiritual world, the following could happen. You might think, “Well, here I am. Certainly I am far enough advanced to perceive that something spiritual is happening. At one moment a gnome approaches, then a sylph, and soon afterwards another being. Now all the beings are together. I will do my best to fathom what the effects will have to be.” On the physical plane this is sometimes easy to do, of course. If we hit a billiard ball in a certain direction, we know which way the other one will go, because we can calculate it. Yet on the spiritual plane it may happen that when you have seen a being and now know “Ah, that is a gnome, he is setting out to do something and will do such and such; he is joining forces with another being, thus the following is bound to happen,” you think you have figured it all out. But the next moment another being appears and changes the whole thing, or a being you were counting on drops out and disappears and no longer participates. There, everything is based on beings. You cannot link everything together with your concepts in the same way as you can on the physical plane. That is quite impossible. There, you cannot explain one thing following from the other on the basis of concepts. Things work together in an entirely different manner in the spiritual world, in the series or stream of spiritual happenings running parallel with physical happenings.

We must become familiar with the fact that underlying our world there is a world we must not only assume to be spiritual in comparison to ours, but we must also assume its events to be connected with each other in a totally different way than those in our world. For we can do nothing at all in the spiritual world, in the actual reality of this spiritual world, with the way we are used to explaining things in the world of our concepts.

Thus we see that two worlds interpenetrate; one of them can be grasped with concepts and the other cannot, but can only be perceived. I am pointing to something that goes very deep, but people are not aware how deep it goes. Just consider for a moment that if someone were to believe he could prove everything, and that only what has been proved is true, the following could happen. That person could say, “As a matter of fact, everything has to be proved, and what has not been proved is unacceptable. Therefore everything that happens in the course of the history of the world must be capable of being proved. So I only need to think hard and I am bound to be able to prove, for instance, whether the Mystery of Golgotha took place or not.” Indeed, people are so very inclined nowadays to say that if the Mystery of Golgotha cannot be proved, the whole thing is nonsense and there never was such an event.

And what do people think of proofs? They think that one starts with one definite concept and proceeds from this to the next one, and if it is possible to do this right through, the matter is proved. But no world other than the physical functions according to this kind of proof. This reasoning does not apply to any other world. For if we were able to prove that the Mystery of Golgotha had to take place of necessity, and this could be concluded from our concepts, it would not have been a free deed at all! Christ would then have been compelled to come down to the earth from the cosmos simply because human concepts prove and therefore dictate it. However, the Mystery of Golgotha has to be a free deed, that is to say, it has to be just the kind of deed that cannot be proved. It is important that people come to realize this.

It is the same thing, after all, when people want to prove either that God created the world or that he did not. There, too, they proceed from one thought to another. But “creating the world,” at any rate will have been a free deed of a divine being! From this it follows that we cannot prove the Creation as following of necessity from our series of concepts; rather, we have to perceive it to arrive at it.

So we are saying something of tremendous importance when we state that the very next world to ours—which, as a supersensible world, permeates ours—is not organized in a way we can penetrate by means of our concepts and their conclusiveness, but that there a kind of vision comes into its own in which events are arranged in a totally different way.

Today I would just like to add a few words about the following. When I was here at Christmas, I drew your attention to the fact that in our time especially, such contradictory things are emerging, that they are quite confusing for human thinking. Just imagine, a book has just been published by the great scientist Ernst Haeckel called Thoughts about Eternity,⁴ I have already mentioned it earlier. These Thoughts about Eternity contain exactly the opposite of what many other people have concluded as a result of living through recent world events. Just think, there are many people today (we shall come to speak of this fact in its particular connection with our present studies, but today I just wanted to give an introduction) who have experienced a deepening of their religious feelings just because world events are having such a terribly overwhelming effect on their souls; for they say, “Unless there is a supersensible world underlying our physical world, how can we explain what is happening in our time?” Many people have rediscovered their feeling for religion. I do not need to describe their train of thought; it is obvious and can be discerned in so many people.

Haeckel arrives at a different train of thought. He explains in his recently published book that people believe in immortality of the soul. However, he says, current events prove clearly enough that any such belief is ridiculous, for we witness thousands of people perishing every day for no reason at all. With these events in mind, how can any sensible person imagine that there can be any talk about the immortality of the soul? How is it possible for a higher world order to stand behind things of this sort?

These shocking events seem to Haeckel to prove his dogma that one cannot speak of immortality of the soul. Here we have antinomy again: A large proportion of humanity is experiencing a deepening of religious feeling, while the very same events are making Haeckel tremendously superficial where religion is concerned.

All this is connected with the fact that nowadays people are unable to understand the relationship between the world accessible to their senses and their brain-bound intellect and the supersensible world underlying it. No sooner do they approach these things than their thinking gets confused. Yet despite all the disillusionment it brings, our time will certainly in one way also bring about a deepening of people's souls, a turning away from materialism. It will be necessary that knowledge of the way supersensible events complement happenings in the world of the senses arise from a pure activity of the soul devoting itself to an impartial exploration of the world. It is necessary that there should be at least a small number of people who are able to realize that all the pain and suffering being experienced at present on the physical plane are, from the point of view of the whole of human evolution, only one side and that there is also another side, a supersensible side.

We have drawn your attention to this supersensible aspect from various points of view, and we will speak of still further ones. But when peace returns to Europe's blood-stained soil, we will again and again experience the need for a group of people capable of hearing and sensing spiritually what the spiritual worlds will then be saying to humanity in times of peace. And we must never tire of impressing the following lines upon our hearts and souls, for it will be proved over and over again how deeply true they are:

Out of the courage of the fighters,
Out of the blood of battles,
Out of the grief of the bereaved,
Out of the peoples' deeds of sacrifice
There shall arise spirit fruit
If only souls, in spirit-mindfulness,
Will reach out to the spirits' realm.

• 1. Immanuel Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher of the Enlightenment. For his antinomian chart see his book Critique of Pure Reason published in 1781.
• 2. Matthias Claudius, 1740-1815, German poet.
• 3. K. F. E. Thrandorff, 1782-1863. Wrote an open letter entitled “The Devil—No Dogmatic Bogy” to a preacher in Berlin in 1853.
• 4. Ernst Haeckel, 1834-1919, German scientist and philosopher. Adherent of Monism.

The day before yesterday I endeavored to show you the universal mystery of necessity and freedom in its two equally significant aspects: world processes and human action. I began by drawing your attention to the full significance and difficulty of this mystery that is both cosmic and human, and today we will continue along the same lines. I used a hypothetical example demonstrating this difficulty in regard to world events. I said, “Suppose a party of people had set out to drive through a ravine where there is an overhanging rock, and had arranged to go at a definite time. The chauffeur, however, is negligent and delays the departure by five minutes. Because of this, the party arrives at the spot beneath the rock at the very moment when the rock falls down.” According to external judgment, and I say “external” deliberately, one would have to say that all those people were buried beneath the rock because of the chauffeur's negligence, that is, because of a circumstance that was apparently someone's fault.

Last time I wanted mainly to emphasize that we should not approach a problem of this sort too hastily with our ordinary thinking and believe we can solve it that way. I showed that in the first place we use our thinking only for the physical plane, therefore it has become accustomed to dealing with those requirements only, and gets confused if we go a bit beyond these.

I would like today to go on to show the serious nature of the whole problem. For we shall not be able to approach any kind of solution in the lecture intended for Sunday, unless we also examine all the implications for human knowledge itself, unless we fully examine why we get lost in blind alleys of thinking precisely in life's most difficult problems, why we are, so to speak, lost in the woods and imagining we are making progress when we are really just going round in circles. We do not notice we are going round in circles until we realize we are back at our starting point again. The strange thing is that where our thinking is concerned, we do not notice that we return again and again to the same point. We will have more to say about this.

I have indicated that this important problem has to do with what we call the ahrimanic and luciferic forces in world events and in what approaches the human being in his actions and his whole thinking, feeling, and willing. I mentioned that as late as the fifteenth century people had a feeling that just as positive and negative electricity play a part in natural processes, and no physicist would hesitate to speak about them, so Ahriman and Lucifer could also be seen in events of the world, even if people did not use these names. I showed this by the apparently remote example of the clock in the old town hall of Prague that is so ingeniously constructed that in addition to being a clock it is also a sort of calendar showing the course of the planets and eclipses of the sun and moon. In fact, it is a great work of art created by a very talented man. I told you that there are documents showing that it was a professor of a Prague university who made this work of art, though this point is of no further interest to us, for those are only the processes that took place on the physical plane.

I explained that a simple folk tale grew out of the feeling that in an affair of this sort ahrimanic and luciferic forces play their part. The story tells us that this clock in the Prague town hall was made beautifully by a simple man who received the power to create it entirely through a kind of divine inspiration. The story then goes on to say that the governor wanted to keep this clock all for himself and would not allow anything like it to be made in any other town. So he had the clockmaker blinded and forced him to retire. Not until he felt death approaching was the clockmaker allowed to touch the clock again. And then, with skillful manipulation, he gave the clock such a jolt that it could actually never be put right again.

In this folk tale we feel that on the one hand there was a sensing of the luciferic principle in the governor who wanted to have sole possession of the clock that could only be constructed by a gift of grace from the good, progressive powers, and that as soon as Lucifer appeared, he was joined by Ahriman, for the clock-maker's ruining of the clock was an ahrimanic deed. The moment Lucifer is summoned—and the opposite is also the case—he is countered by Ahriman. It is not only in the composition of this story that we see people's feeling for Ahriman and Lucifer, we also see it in another aspect, namely in the form of the clock itself. We see that the clockmaker, too, wanted to include ahrimanic and luciferic forces in the very construction of the clock, for besides all that I have already told you of its artistic perfection, this clock included something else as well. Apart from the clock face, the planetary dial, and all the other things it had, there were figures on both sides of the clock, Death on one side and two figures on the other. One of these figures was a man holding a money-bag containing money he could jingle, and the other figure represented a man holding a mirror in which he could see himself all the time.

These two figures are exceptionally good examples of the person who gives himself up to external values: the rich miser, the ahrimanic person—and the luciferic person who wants perpetually to have his vanity aroused, the man looking at himself in the mirror. The clockmaker himself confronts ahrimanic and luciferic qualities and on the other side there is Death, the balancer (we shall say more about this later), put there as a reminder that through the constant alternation of life between death and birth and between birth and death human beings rise above the sphere in which Ahriman and Lucifer are active. Thus in the clock itself we see a wonderful presentation of the feeling still existing at that time for the ahrimanic and luciferic element.

We must bring a feeling for this element to life again in a certain way if we want to solve the difficult question we have introduced. Basically the world always confronts us as a duality. Look at nature. Mere nature always bears the stamp of rigid necessity. In fact, we know that it is the scientists' ideal to be able to calculate future occurrences mathematically on the basis of past ones. Ideally, scientists would like to deal with all natural phenomena in the same way as with future sun and moon eclipses, which can be predicted through calculations based on the constellations in the heavens. In relation to natural phenomena people feel they are confronting absolute rigid necessity. Ever since the fifteenth century people have grown accustomed to accepting rigid necessity as the model for their world outlook. This has gradually led to historical phenomena also being perceived as imbued with a similar rigid necessity.

Yet where historical phenomena are concerned we should also consider another aspect. Let us take an example quite apart from our own life situation, for instance, Goethe as a historical phenomenon.¹ In certain respects we also are inclined to regard the appearance of Goethe and all he produced as being based on a sort of rigid necessity. But someone might bring the argument “Goethe was born on August 28, 1749. If this boy had not been born into this family, what would have happened? Would we have had Goethe's works?” It might be pointed out that Goethe himself refers to the fact that his father and mother brought him up in a special way, each contributing something toward what he later became. Would his works have been created if he had been brought up differently? Again, let us look at Goethe's meeting with Karl August, Duke of Weimar.² If the duke had not called Goethe to him and given him the kind of life we know he had from the 1770s onward, would entirely different works have resulted? Or might not Goethe even have been quite an ordinary cabinet secretary if he had been brought up differently at home, and the poetic urge had not already been so alive in him? What would German literature and art after Goethe's time have been like if all these things had been different?

All these questions can be asked, and they show the very profound significance of this question. But we have not yet fully arrived at an answer which would be other than superficial. We can go deeper still and ask different questions. Let us return to the artist who made the old Prague town hall clock. He put on it the figures of the rich miser with the money-bag, the vain man and, opposite them, Death. Now it is possible to say that the man accomplished something by putting the figures there. But if we express it like that, we are naming a cause of countless possible effects. For just imagine how many people have stood in front of that rich miser, the vain man looking at his reflection, and Death. And how many people have also seen an even smarter thing the clockmaker arranged. Namely, every time the clock was about to strike, Death began to move first, accompanying the striking of the hour with a ringing apparatus, then the other figure moved. Death nodded to the miser and the latter nodded back. All these things were there to be seen, and they were important guides for life. They made a deep impression on the beholder.

We see this from the fact that the folk tale goes on to relate something unusual. Whenever the clock was about to strike, the skeleton, Death, opened its mouth and people saw inside it a sparrow that longed for nothing more than to break free. But just as it was about to do so, the mouth closed, and it was shut in again for an hour. People told an ingenious legend about this opening and shutting of the mouth, showing what a significant thing “time” is—what we so abstractly call “time” and “the marching on of time.” They wanted to give an indication that there are deep secrets hidden here.

Let us imagine that a person might have stood in front of the clock. I want to mention this folk tale as an indication of the thoughts a person might have about it, or rather the imaginations a person might see, for that sparrow was not mere invention. Some of the people who looked at the clock saw the sparrow as an imagination. I just wanted to mention that. Let us look at it rationally for a moment. A person in a state of moral uncertainty might observe the clock and see Death nodding both to the rich man, who has become dependent on his riches, and to the vain man. And the impression this has on him could divert him from the possibility of being misled in his own state of moral wavering.

We can also imagine something else. Taking this aspect into consideration we could say that the man who constructed this work of art through divine inspiration has done a great deal of good. For a lot of people may have looked at this work of art and improved morally in certain respects. It might be said what a favorable karma this man must have had, being able to have a good effect on so many people's souls! And one might begin to wonder just how many people's souls he had helped by means of this imagination. One might begin to think of the artist's karma. One might say that the making of that clock and placing Death and Ahriman and Lucifer upon it was the most wonderful starting point for a favorable karma. One might indulge in such an outlook and say that there are people who trigger off a whole series of good deeds by means of one single deed. So this series of good deeds must be put down in their karma. And one could begin to wonder how each of one's own deeds should be carried out so that a similar series of good deeds can arise.

Here you see the beginning of a train of thought that can go astray. An attempt to think out how to set about doing deeds that produce a series of good deeds would be nonsense when it comes to making it a principle of life, wouldn't it? Someone might suggest that a stream of good deeds does spring from what that man did. But someone else could argue “No, I have followed up the matter of this clock and am convinced that there has not been much in the way of such results.” That person might be a pessimist and say that times are too evil for such good effects. People do not believe it when they see things like that. He has seen something quite different happening in many cases. He has seen people looking at the clock who had a democratic frame of mind and a smoldering hatred of the rich. And when a person like that saw the clock, he noticed that it was only the rich man to whom Death nodded and who nodded back. “I will put that into practice” he said, looked for the first miser he could find and murdered him. Similar deeds of hatred were done by other people. The clock-maker brought all these about through his work of art. That is what will have to be put down in his karma.

And again, taking a shortsighted view, someone could say “Perhaps after all one should not make a perfect work of art, one that has great inner value, because it might have the worst possible effects; it might have countless bad effects on one's karma.”

This draws our attention to an immense temptation for the whole range of human soul capacities and knowledge. For one only needs to look at oneself a little to see that people have the greatest inclination to ask about everything, “What was the result of it?” and to estimate the value of what has been done in accordance with the results. But in the same way as we started to speculate when we tried to think out whether the double numbers in the right column were as many as those in the left column or half as many, which was the example I gave you last time—just as we became mentally confused then, we are bound to become confused in our thinking now if we want to judge our actions by asking, “What result will they have, what effect will they have on my karma?”

Here again the folk tale is wiser, even more scientific, in the sense of spiritual science. For it is a very trivial thing to say, of course, but the folk tale does say that the clockmaker was a simple man. He had no intentions beside the thought that inspired him; he made the clock according to that, and did not speculate on what the results of his deed might be in any direction.

True, it cannot be denied—and this is what is so tempting—that you really may get somewhere if you think along these lines and ask what the results of a deed will be. It is tempting for the very reason that there are such things as actions where you have to ask what the consequences will be. And it would obviously be one-sided to draw the conclusion from what I have said that we should always behave like that clockmaker and not consider the consequences of our actions. For you have to have the consequences in mind if you thrash a boy for having been lazy. There are obviously cases like this where we have to have the consequences in mind. However, here lies the very point we must take to heart and examine closely, namely, that we relate to the world in two ways.

On the one hand, we receive impressions from the physical plane, and on the other hand we receive impressions from the spiritual world, as indicated in the legend, when it tells us that the artist was a simple man inspired by a gift of grace from above. When we are given these impressions by the spiritual world, when our souls are stimulated to do a particular thing, those are the moments in life when we have a second kind of certainty, a second kind of truth—not in an objective but a subjective sense—when we are guided by truth, we have a second kind of certainty, which is direct, and which we cannot but accept as such. This is the root of the matter.

On the one hand we are in the physical world, and in this world it looks as though every event follows naturally from the preceding one. But we are also within the spiritual world. In the last lecture I tried to show that just as we have an etheric body within our physical body, there is also a supersensible element active in the whole stream of events of the physical world. We are also placed within this supersensible activity, and from this proceed those impulses that are absolutely unique and that we have to follow quite regardless of the results, especially those in the physical world. Because human beings are in the world, they acquire a kind of certainty when they examine external things. This is how people observe nature. Observing natural phenomena is the only way to come to any certainty about cause and effect. On the other hand, however, we can receive direct certainty if we want it, by really opening our souls to its influences. Then we have to stop and give our full attention to a phenomenon, and know to evaluate it on the basis of its intrinsic value.

This, of course, is difficult. Yet we are constantly being given a chance, a crucial one, by the very phenomena themselves, particularly historical ones, to appreciate events and processes according to their intrinsic value. This is always necessary. But if we go more closely into questions that would lead us very far if we understood them rightly, we find a sphere where confusion in thinking is very marked. As a rule this confusion cannot be controlled by the individual. Let us take the phenomenon of Goethe's Faust.³ It is an artistic creation, isn't it? There will be very few people in this hall, particularly as we have made a number of studies of Faust, who will not hold the opinion that Goethe's Faust is a great work of art, one that is tantamount to an inspiration of grace.

Through Goethe's Faust, German cultural life in a sense conquered the cultural life of other nations too. Even in Goethe's lifetime Faust had a strong influence on many people. They regarded it as an absolutely unique work of art. However, a certain German was particularly annoyed that Madame de Stael expressed such an extraordinarily favorable opinion of it.⁴ I would just like to read you this man's opinion, so that you see that about such things that have to be judged individually there can be different opinions from those you may consider at this moment to be the only opinions one can possibly have of Goethe's Faust.

This critical opinion was written down in 1822 by a certain Franz von Spaun.⁵ Here is his criticism of Goethe's Faust, which begins right away with the “Prologue in Heaven:”

[Right from the Prologue] we see that Herr von Goethe is a very bad versifier and that the Prologue itself is a true sample of how one ought not to write verse.

Past ages show nothing that can compare with this Prologue for presumptuous paltriness. ... But I must be brief, for I have undertaken a long and, alas, wearisome piece of work. I have to point out to the reader that this notorious Faust enjoys an usurped and unmerited renown that it owes only to the pernicious esprit de corps of an Associato obscurorum vitorum. ... It is not because I wish to rival this renown that I am compelled to vent the sarcasm of harsh criticism upon Goethe's Faust. I do not travel by his path to Parnassus, and should have been glad if he had enriched our German language with a masterpiece. ... Among the multitudes who applaud, my voice may be extinguished, yet it is enough for me to have done my best; and if I succeed in converting even one reader and recalling him from the worship of this atrocity, I shall not grudge my thankless labor. ... The wretched Faust speaks an incomprehensible gibberish, in the most atrocious rhyme of any fifth grade student. My teacher would have thrashed me soundly if I had made inferior verses such as the following:

Oh, broad bright moon, if this might be
The last of the nights of agony,
The countless midnights of toil and ache,
I've pass'd at this dreary desk awake!

Concerning the baseness of the diction, the paltriness of the verse, I will henceforth be silent; what the reader has seen is sufficient proof that the author, as far as the construction of his verse is concerned, cannot stand comparison with the mediocre poets of the old school. ...

Mephistopheles himself realized even before the contract was signed that Faust was possessed by a devil. We, however, think he belongs in a lunatic asylum rather than in Hell, with all his accessories—hands and feet, head and posterior. Of sublime galimatias, of nonsense in high-faluting words, many poets have given us samples, but Goethe's nonsense or galimatias might be called a popular galimatias, a genre nouveau, for it is presented in the commonest, most atrocious language.

The more I think about this long litany of nonsense, the more probable it seems to me that there must have been a wager to the effect that if a celebrated man permitted himself to patch together the dullest, most boring nonsense, a legion of literary simpletons and deluded readers would find deep wisdom and great beauty in this insipid nonsense and know how to expound upon it. Famous men have this in common with Prince Piribinker and the immortal Dalai Lama that their rubbish is served up as sweetmeats and revered as relics. If this was Herr von Goethe's intention, he has won the wager....

There may well be some intentions behind Faust, yet a good poet does not hurl them at his readers; he should know the art of presenting and illuminating them properly. A richer theme for poetry than this is not easy to find, and people will be cross with him for bungling it so miserably. . ..

This diarrhea of undigested ideas is not caused by an excessive flow of healthy fluids but by a relaxation of the floodgates of the mind, and is an indication of a weak constitution. There are people from whom bad verse flows like water, but this incontinentia urinae poeticae, this diabetes mellitus of lame verses never afflicts a good poet. ... If Goethe's genius has freed itself from all fetters, the flood of his ideas cannot break through the dams of art, for they have already been broken through. Yet although we do not disapprove of an author's breaking away from the conventional rules of composition, he must still hold sacred the laws of sound human reason, of grammar and rhythm. Even in dramas where magic plays a part, he is only allowed the machinery of hypothesis, and he must remain faithful to this. He must make a good plot with a knot to be unraveled and the magic must lead to grand results. In the case of Faust the outcome is to seduce the victims to dastardly crimes, and his seducer does not need magic; everything he does any matchmaking scoundrel could have done just as well without witchcraft. He is as stingy as a miser, not using the hidden treasures at his command.

In short, a miserable wretch who might learn something from Lessing's Marinelli. Therefore, in the name of sound human reason I quash the opinion of Madame de Stael in favor of the aforesaid Faust and condemn it, not to Hell, which might be cooled off by this frigid production that even has a wintry effect on the devil, but to be thrown into the sewer of Parnassus. And by rights.

As you see, this judgment was actually passed upon Faust at one time, and the context in which the man passed it does not at all prove him to be entirely dishonest, but someone who believed what he wrote. Now imagine what would have happened if this man, who said that his own fifth grade teacher would have kept him from writing such rubbish as Faust, had himself become a school teacher and passed on this nonsense to a great number of boys. These boys might in their turn have become teachers and remembered something of this verdict on Faust. Just think of all the speculations you can make regarding all the karmic damage this person might have done by means of his judgment.

However, I am less concerned about that than about the fact that it is difficult to form a true, permanent judgment concerning events possessing their own intrinsic value. I have emphasized in some of my lectures that many a great personality of the nineteenth century will no longer be considered great in centuries to come, whereas people who have been quite forgotten will by that time be regarded as very significant indeed. Time puts such things right. I only wanted to point out how extremely difficult it is to form a judgment about an event needing to be looked at on its own merit.

We must now ask why that causes us such difficulty. We shall begin our reflections by seeing the critic as a different person from the one who is being judged. Nowadays we would say that the people who even in those days considered Goethe's Faust to be a great work of art and in a certain way judged it objectively eliminated themselves, so to speak. The man who wrote what I have just been reading to you did not eliminate himself. How do we arrive at judgments that are not objective? People judge without objectivity so often that it never occurs to them to ask why they do this. They do it because of the forces of sympathy and antipathy. Without sympathy and antipathy our judgments would never be other than objective.

Sympathy and antipathy are necessary in order to obscure the objectivity of judgment. Does this mean they are bad, however, and that we ought immediately to do away with them? We need only reflect a little to find that this is not so. For no sooner do we engross ourselves in Goethe's Faust than we like it and develop more and more feelings of sympathy towards it. We must have the possibility to develop sympathy. And after all, if we were unable to develop antipathy we would not arrive at an absolutely correct judgment of the man whose opinion we have just heard. For I imagine some antipathetic feelings against the man may have arisen in you, and they could well be justified.

But there again we see that it depends on not accepting these things as absolute but considering them in their whole context. It is not merely that human beings are brought to feelings of sympathy and antipathy by outer things but that we carry sympathy and antipathy into life. We bring our sympathy and antipathy to meet the things themselves, so that they do not work upon us but upon our sympathy and antipathy. What does this mean? I approach an object or a process accompanied by my sympathy and antipathy. Naturally the man I was speaking about did not exactly bring along his antipathy to Faust but he brought the kind of feelings that made him see Faust as antipathetic. He judged absolutely according to his instincts.

What does this signify? It means that sympathy and antipathy, to start with, are only words for real spiritual facts. And the real spiritual facts are the deeds of Lucifer and Ahriman. In a certain way Lucifer is in every expression of sympathy and Ahriman in every expression of antipathy. By letting ourselves be carried through the world by sympathy and antipathy, we are letting ourselves be carried through the world by Lucifer and Ahriman. Only we must not fall into the mistake I have often described and say yet again “We must flee from both Lucifer and Ahriman! We want to become good. So we must avoid Lucifer and Ahriman, avoid them at all costs! We must drive them away, right away!” For then we should also have to leave the world. For just as there can be both positive and negative electricity and not only the balance between them, so we encounter Lucifer and Ahriman wherever we go. It all depends on how we relate to them. These two forces must be there. The important thing is that we always bring them into balance in life. For instance, without Lucifer art would not exist. What matters is that we create art that is not purely luciferic.

Thus it is a matter of becoming aware that when we confront the world with sympathy and antipathy, Lucifer and Ahriman are at work in us. That is to say, we must be able to allow Lucifer and Ahriman really to be active in us. But while we are conscious that they are at work in us, we must nevertheless acquire the capacity to confront things objectively. This we can do only if we consider not merely how we judge external things and events in the world outside us, but also consider how we judge ourselves in the world. And this “judging ourselves in the world” leads us a step further into the question and the whole complex of questions we started with. We can form a judgment of ourselves in the world only if we apply to ourselves a uniform method of consideration. We must now consider this problem.

We look out upon nature. On the one hand, we see rigid necessity; one thing arising from another. We look at our own deeds and believe that they are subject only to freedom and are connected solely with guilt and atonement and so on. Both views are one-sided. In what follows it will be shown that each view is one-sided because neither correctly estimates the position of Lucifer and Ahriman. If we look at ourselves as human beings existing here on the physical plane, we cannot look into our own souls and see only what is taking place in the immediate present. If each one of us were to ask ourselves what is taking place within us right now, it would certainly be a piece of insight into ourselves. Yet this insight would be far from giving us everything we required even for superficial self-knowledge.

Without hurting anyone's feelings, of course, let us consider all of us here: I who am speaking and you who are listening. I would not be able to speak as I do if it were not for everything that has previously happened in my present life and in other incarnations. Looking only at what I am saying to you now would produce a very one-sided kind of self-knowledge. But without hurting anyone's feelings it must be obvious that each one of you listens differently, and understands and feels what I say slightly differently. That goes without saying. In fact your understanding is in accordance with your life up to now and your previous incarnations. If each one of you did not grasp differently what is being said, you would not really be human beings.

But that leads much further. It leads to the recognition of a duality in ourselves. Just think for a moment that when you pass judgment, you do it in a certain way. Let us take a random example. If you see one thing or another, a play directed by Max Reinhardt, for example, you say, “It is charming!” while someone else says “That is the ruin of all art!”⁶ I am certainly not criticizing either opinion just now. It is possible for one person to say this and another that. On what does it depend that one person has a different opinion from another? That depends again on what is already in them, upon the assumptions with which they approach matters.

But if you think about these assumptions, you will be able to say “At one time these assumptions did not exist.” What you saw when you were eighteen, for instance, or learned at the age of thirteen, enters into your present judgments. It has become part of your whole thinking, resides in you, and contributes to your judgment. Everyone can of course perceive this in himself if he wishes to do so. It contributes to your judgment. Ask yourself whether you can change what is now in you, or whether you can tear it out of yourself. Think about it for a moment! If we could tear it out, we would be taking away the whole of our life up to now; we would be obliterating ourselves. We can no more get rid of our previous resolutions and decisions than we can give ourselves another nose if we do not like what we see in the mirror.

It is obvious that you cannot obliterate your past. Yet if you wish to rise early in the morning, you see, a resolution is always necessary. This resolution, however, is really dependent upon the prior conditions of your present incarnation. It depends on other things as well. If we say it depends on this or that, does that detract from the fact that I have to resolve to get up? This decision to get up may be so faint that we do not notice it at all, but at least a faint resolve to get up has to be there, that is to say, getting up must be a free deed.

I knew a man who belonged for a time to our Society and who is a good illustration of this, for he actually never wanted to get up. He suffered terribly because of it, and often deplored it. He said, “I simply cannot get up! Unless something occurs in the way of an external necessity to make me rise from my bed, I would stay there forever.” He confessed this openly, for he found it a terrible temptation in life not to want to get up. From this you can easily see that it really is a free deed. And although certain prior conditions have been laid down in us which suggest one or another motive, it does not prevent our doing a free deed in the particular instance.

In a certain way it is like this: Some people drag themselves out of bed with the help of strong determination, while others enjoy getting up. We could easily say that this shows us that the existing prior conditions signify that the one was brought up well and the other badly. We can see a certain necessity there, yet it is always a free decision. Thus we see in one and the same fact, in the fact of getting up, free will and necessity interwoven, thoroughly interwoven. One and the same thing contains both freedom and necessity. And I beg you to note well that, rightly considered, we cannot dispute whether a person is free or unfree in a certain matter, but we can only say that first of all freedom and necessity are intermingled in every human deed.

How does this happen? We shall not progress with our spiritual science unless we realize that we have to consider things both from the human and the cosmic standpoint. Why is this so? It is because what works in us as necessity—I will now say something relatively simple yet of tremendous significance—what we regard as necessity belongs to the past. What works in us as necessity must always be from the past. We must have experienced something, and this experience must have been stored up in our souls. It is then within our soul and continues to work there as necessity.

You can now say that everybody bears his past within him, and this means bearing a necessity within him. What belongs to the present does not yet work as necessity, otherwise there would be no free deed in the immediate present. But the past works into the present and combines with freedom. Because the past works on, freedom and necessity are intimately connected in one and the same deed.

Thus if we really look into ourselves, we will see that necessity exists not only outside us in nature but also within ourselves. When we look at this latter kind of necessity, we have to look at our past. This is an extremely important point of view for a spiritual scientist. He learns to understand the connection between past and necessity. Then he begins to examine nature, and finds necessity there. And in examining natural phenomena he realizes that all the necessities the natural scientist finds in nature are the result of past events. What is nature as a whole, the whole realm of nature with its necessity?

We cannot answer that unless we look for the answer on the basis of spiritual science. We are now living in earth existence, a condition which was preceded by the moon, sun and Saturn conditions. In the Saturn condition, as you see in Occult Science, the planet did not look like the earth does now but entirely differently.⁷ If you examine Saturn, you will see that then everything was still of a thought like nature. Stones did not yet fall to the ground. Dense physical matter did not exist as yet. Everything came from the activity of warmth. This state is similar to what goes on within the human being itself. Everything is soul activity, thoughts that divine spirits have left behind. And they have remained in existence.

All of present nature that you understand with its necessity was once in a state of freedom, a free deed of the gods. Only because it is past, because what developed on Saturn, sun, and moon has come to us in the same way as our childhood thoughts continue to work in us, the thoughts of the gods during Saturn, sun, and moon continue their existence on earth. And because they are past thoughts, they appear to us as necessity.

If you now put your hand on a solid object, what does that mean? It means that what is in the solid object was once being thought in the long distant past, and has remained in the same way as your childhood thoughts have remained in you. If you look at your past, regarding past activities as something living, you see nature in the process of becoming within you. Just as what you now think and say is not a necessity but is free, so earth's present state was once free in earlier stages of existence. Freedom continually evolves, and what is left behind becomes necessity. If we were to see what is taking place in nature now, it would not occur to us to see it as a necessity. What we see of nature is only what has been left behind. What is happening now in nature is spiritual, and we do not see that.

This gives human self-knowledge a very special cosmic significance. We think a thought. It is now within us. Certainly we might also not think it. But if we think it, it remains in our soul, where it becomes an activity of the past. It now works on as a necessity, a delicate, insubstantial necessity, and not dense matter like outer nature because we are human beings, not gods. We can perceive only the inner nature that remains in us as memory and is operative in what are necessities for us. But our current thoughts will become external nature in the coming Jupiter and Venus conditions. They will then be the external environment. And what we now see as nature was once the thoughts of the gods.

Nowadays we speak of angels, archangels, archai, and so on. They were thinking in the past, just as we are thinking today. And what they thought has remained as their memory, and it is this memory we now perceive. We can only perceive within us what we remember during earth existence. But inwardly it has become nature. What the gods thought during earlier planetary conditions has been externalized and we see it as external nature.

It is true, profoundly true, that as long as we are earthly human beings we think. We send our thoughts down into our soul life. There they become the beginning of a natural world. But they remain in us. Yet when the Jupiter existence comes, they will come forth. And what we are thinking today, in fact all that we experience, will then be the external world. The external world we will then look down upon from a higher level will be what is now our inner world. What is experienced at one time in freedom changes into necessity.

These are very, very important aspects, and only when we see the world in this way will we be able to understand the real course of historical events and the significance of today's events. For these lead us directly to the point where we always pursue the path from subjectivity to objectivity. Strictly speaking, we can be subjective only in the present. As soon as the present is over, and we have pushed the subjective elements down into our soul life, they acquire independent existence, though at first only within us. As we continue living with other thoughts, the earlier thoughts live on, only in us, of course. For the time being we still house them. But this covering will some day fall away.

In the spiritual realm matters are very different. So you must look at events, such as the hypothetical one I gave you, from this different point of view. Looked at from outside, a boulder fell and buried a party of people. But that was only the external expression of something that happened in the spiritual world, this latter event being the other half of the experience and existing just as objectively as the first one. This is what I wanted to present to you today, showing how freedom and necessity play into one another in world evolution and in the evolution in which we are involved as living beings; how we are interwoven with the world, and how we ourselves are daily, hourly, becoming what nature shows us externally. Our past, while within us, is already a piece of nature. We progress beyond this piece of nature by evolving further, just as the gods progressed in their evolution beyond their nature stage and became the higher hierarchies.

This is only one of the ways, of which there are many, that ought to show us again and again that nothing taking place on the physical plane can be judged solely according to its physical aspect, but should be judged based on the knowledge that it has a hidden spiritual content in addition to the physical one. As sure as our physical body has an etheric body in it, everything perceived by the senses has a supersensible part underlying it. Therefore, we must conclude that we are really regarding the world in a very incomplete way if we examine it solely according to what it presents to our eyes and according to what takes place externally, for while something quite different is taking place externally, inwardly something can be happening spiritually that belongs to the outer event and is of immensely greater significance than what is presented to our senses. What the souls of the people who were buried under the boulder experienced in the spiritual world may be infinitely more important than what happened physically. The occurrence has something to do with the future of those souls, as we shall see.

Let us interrupt these thoughts at this point today and continue them next Sunday. My aim today was to bring your thoughts and ideas into the direction that will show you that we can only acquire correct concepts of freedom and necessity, guilt and atonement, and so on, if we add the spiritual aspect to the physical one.

• 1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1749–1832, German poet, playwright, and novelist.
• 2. Karl August, Duke of Weimar, 1757–1828, Duke of Saxony and Weimar 1758–1828.
• 3. Faust, dramatic poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• 4. Madame de Stael (Germaine de Stael), 1766–1817, French writer and intellectual.
• 5. Franz von Spaun, 1753–1826, German essayist. The quotation from Faust is from Part I, “Night,” Translated by Sir Theodore Martin. Everyman's Library, (London: Dent, 1971).
• 6. Max Reinhardt, 1873–1943, director of the German theater in Berlin.
• 7. Rudolf Steiner, An Outline of Occult Science, (Spring Valley, N.Y.: Anthroposophic Press, 1972).

Now, I wish to approach the problem we are dealing with in these reflections from another point of departure. In spiritual science we must proceed so that we encircle the problem, in a sense, and approach it from various points and directions. When we observe a life such as Goethe's, one thing must strike us that may become a profound riddle in the evolution of humanity. This is so even when we take into consideration repeated lives on earth and include them in our deliberation of the molding of a human life. The problem is this: What is the reason that individuals such as Goethe are capable of creating something so significant out of their inner nature, as he did especially through his Faust, and through this exert so important an influence on the rest of humanity? How does it happen that certain individuals are separated from the rest of humanity and are summoned by cosmic destiny to do something of such significance? We compare such an important life and work with that of each individual and ask ourselves: What conclusion can be drawn from the difference between these individual lives and the lives of these preeminent persons?

This question can be answered only when we observe life somewhat more thoroughly with the tools provided by spiritual science. To begin with, all that a person can know, especially in our time, is intended to conceal and disguise certain things and to keep unprejudiced reflections out of touch with them. This often makes it necessary in the sphere of spiritual science to adapt what we say to what can be understood by others.

Now, the description we generally give in spiritual science is that man consists of physical body, etheric body, astral body, and ego. In explaining the alternation between waking and sleeping, we say that in the waking state the ego and astral body are within the physical and etheric bodies but, during sleep, the ego and astral body are outside. This is adequate for a primary understanding, and it corresponds exactly with the spiritual scientific facts. But the truth is that we give only a part of the full reality in this description. We can never encompass the full reality in just one description, and thus we exhaust only part of anything we describe. We always need to seek light from other sources in order to properly illumine the part of reality already described. Here it must be stated that, speaking generally, sleeping and waking are really a sort of cyclic movement. Strictly speaking, the ego and astral body are outside the physical and etheric bodies in sleep only in being outside the head. Because the ego and astral body in sleep are outside the physical and etheric head, they bring about a more vivid activity in the rest of the human organization. It is, indeed, during sleep, when the ego and astral body are working from without upon the human being, that everything in him that does not belong to the head but to other parts of his organization is subjected to a far stronger influence of the ego and astral body than when he is awake. It may even be said that the action that the ego and astral body bring to bear upon the head in the waking state is exerted upon the rest of the organism during sleep. We can, therefore, rightly compare the ego with the sun, which illumines our environment during the day but during the night, it not only is outside of us but lights the other side of the earth. So, likewise, is it day in the rest of our organism when it is night for our sensory perception, which is primarily connected with the head; reciprocally, it is night for the rest of our organism when it is day for our head; that is, the rest of our organism is more or less withdrawn from the ego and astral body when we are awake. If we wish to understand the entire human being, this is something that must also be added to illumine the full reality.

Now, it is important to grasp correctly the connection of the psychic with the physical in man if we wish to understand properly what I have just told you. I have often stressed the fact that the nervous system of the physical organism is a unified organization, and it is really sheer nonsense, impossible to prove anatomically, to classify the nerves as sensory and motor. They are organized as a unity and all have one function. The so-called motor nerves are distinguished from the so-called sensory only to the extent that the sensory nerves are arranged to serve our perception of the outer world whereas the motor nerves serve for the perception of our organism. It is not the function of a motor nerve to cause my hand to move, for example; this is sheer nonsense. It exists for the purpose of perceiving my hand's movement from within. The sensory nerves, however, serve in the perception of the outer world. This is their sole distinction. As you know, our nervous system is divided into three branches: those nerves whose main center is the brain, centered in the head, the nerves that are centered in the spinal cord, and the nerves that belong to the ganglionic system [autonomic nervous system]. These are, in essence, the three kinds of nerves, and the important point is to know how they are related to the spiritual members of our organism.

Which is the finest and most advanced member of the nervous system and which the least? Quite obviously, those who adhere to the ordinary scientific world conception will answer that the nervous system of the brain is naturally the noblest because it distinguishes man from the animal. But such is not the case. This nervous system of the brain is really connected with the entire organization of the etheric body. Obviously, additional relationships exist everywhere so that our brain system is naturally related to the astral body or the ego. But these are secondary relationships. Those between our nervous system of the brain and our etheric body are the primary, original ones. This has nothing to do with the view I once presented in which I explained that the entire nervous system has been brought into existence with the help of the astral body. This is something quite different and must be kept quite distinct. In its original potentiality, the nervous system was brought into existence during the Moon period. It has evolved further, however, and other relationships have been introduced since its first formation, so that our brain system really has its most intimate and important relationship with our etheric body. The spinal cord system has its most intimate and primary relationships with our present astral body, and the ganglionic system is related with the actual ego. These are the primary relationships as they now exist.

Considering all this, we shall readily see that an especially active relationship exists during the state of sleep between our ego and ganglionic system, which extends throughout the trunk of the body, ensheathing the spinal cord, etc. But these relationships are lessened during the waking life of day. They are more intimate during sleep, as are the relationships between the astral body and spinal cord nerves. We may say, then, that during sleep especially intimate relationships obtain between our astral body and the nerves of the spinal cord, and between our ego and ganglionic system. To a greater or lesser degree, we live during sleep, as regards our ego, in a strong connection with our ganglionic system. Someday, through a thorough study of the puzzling world of dreams, people will come to know what I am here pointing out on the basis of spiritual scientific investigation.

Taking this into consideration, you will arrive at a transition to another essential, important thought. Something significant for our life must be due to the rhythmical alternation that occurs in the living union between the ego and the ganglionic system, and between the astral body and the spinal cord system. This rhythmical alternation is identical with the alternation of sleeping and waking. Thus, you will not be surprised when the statement is made that, just because the ego is really so truly in the ganglionic system and the astral body is so truly in the spinal cord system, man wakes in relation to the ganglionic and spinal cord systems during sleep, and sleeps in this relationship while awake. Here we can only ask how it comes about that so little is known of that vivid state of waking that must really be developed during sleep. Well, when you consider how man has come to be, that his ego has taken its place in him only during earthly existence and is, therefore, really the baby among his human members, it will not then seem amazing that this ego life cannot yet bring to consciousness what it experiences in the ganglionic system during sleep, whereas it can bring into full consciousness what it experiences when it is in the head, which is primarily the result of all those impulses that were at work during the Moon, Sun, etc., periods.

What the ego can bring to consciousness depends on the instrument it can use. That used during the night is still comparatively delicate. As I have pointed out in previous lectures, the rest of the organism really developed later than the head, has only been added later, and is an appendage of the fully developed head organism. When we say that relative to his physical body, man has passed through longer or shorter stages beginning with Saturn, we are referring only to his head. What is attached to his head is in many ways a later formation of the Moon period, and even of the earth. It is for this reason that the vivid life that is developed during sleep, and that has its organic seat to a large extent in the spinal cord and ganglionic systems, enters consciousness at first only in a small degree. But it is not because of this a less significantly vivid life. One can say with equal justification that during sleep the possibility is offered to man to descend into his ganglionic system and that in the waking state the possibility is given to ascend to his senses and brain system. You will surely say, “How this complicates and confuses everything that we have acquired!” Man, however, is a complicated being and we do not learn to understand him when we fail to permit these complex complications to work upon us.

Now just suppose that what I have described regarding Goethe actually happens to someone and his etheric body is loosened. Then an entirely different relationship comes about during the waking life between his soul-spiritual and his organic-physical nature. As I expressed it yesterday, he is put on a sort of isolated pedestal. But such an effect can never come about without being followed by another. It is important to bear in mind that such a relationship does not occur one-sidedly, but brings about another. If one expresses what I characterized yesterday somewhat more crudely, we may even say that the loosening of the etheric body influences the entire waking life in a certain way, but this cannot happen without also influencing the sleeping life. The result is simply that the person comes into looser relationships with his brain impressions. Because of this, he enters into more intimate relationships during the waking state with his spinal cord nerves and ganglionic system. At the time that Goethe fell ill, he developed, as it were, a looser relationship with his brain but at the same time he experienced a more intimate relationship with his ganglionic and spinal cord systems.

What is actually happening as a result of this experience? What does it mean to say that a more intimate relationship comes about with the ganglionic and spinal cord systems? It means that the individual enters into an entirely different relationship with the external world. We are, of course, always in the most intimate relationship with the outer world, but we merely fail to observe how intimate the relationship is. But I have often called your attention to the fact that the air that you hold within you at one moment is, in the next, outside, and then different air is taken in. Thus, what is outside takes on the form of the body and unites with it when you inhale. It is only seemingly true that the organism is distinct from the external world. It is a member of it and belongs to it. If, therefore, such a modification in an individual's relationship to the external world occurs as has been described, it makes itself felt strongly in his life. Indeed, it may be said that in such a personality as Goethe's, the lower nature, which we generally connect with the spinal cord and ganglionic systems, must come to the fore all the more strongly through this process. As the forces draw back from the head, the ganglionic and spinal cord systems take possession of them in larger measure.

An understanding for what really happens here is acquired only when we permeate ourselves with the knowledge that what we call the intellect and reason is not really so closely bound up with our individuality as is ordinarily assumed. It is clear that contemporary basic conceptions of these things are completely wrong; in part, it is in these matters that contemporary views are least frequently right. This has been especially evident in the muddle-headed behavior by some people in our age, including members of the most learned circles, when they tried to interpret their experiences with so-called dogs, apes, horses, etc. As you know, reports came out of the blue and were circulated about educated horses that can speak and do all sorts of things, about a highly educated dog that made a great stir in Mannheim, and an educated monkey in the Frankfurt zoo that had been taught to do arithmetic, as well as other things that one cannot mention in polite society. The Frankfurt chimpanzee, in other words, has been trained in certain natural necessities to behave like humans rather than monkeys. I will not pursue this further, but all this caused the greatest astonishment, not only among laymen, but also among professionals. They were actually enraptured, especially when the Mannheim dog, after one of its beloved offspring died, wrote a letter telling how this dear puppy would be together with the archetypal soul, what it would be like and so on. That dog wrote a most intelligent letter.

Well, we need not elaborate on these specially complicated expressions of intelligence, but what stands out is that all these various animals performed feats of arithmetic. A great deal of attention was then given to the investigation of what such animals can achieve. Something quite unusual came to light in the case of the Frankfurt ape. It was possible to witness that when he was given a problem in addition to which he had to find a definite answer he pointed to the correct number in a series placed side by side. It was then discovered that this educated ape had simply formed the habit of being guided by the direction of the glance of his trainer. Then some of those who had previously been astonished said, “He has no trace of a mind; his training is everything!” In other words, the animal was taking his direction from his trainer and followed nothing more than a somewhat complicated training procedure. Just as a dog fetches a stone when it is thrown, so did the ape produce from the series of numbers the one indicated by the glance of his trainer.

Upon more thorough investigation, similar findings will undoubtedly be obtained in experiments with the other animals. Whatever, we cannot suppress our astonishment that people are so amazed when animals perform something that is seemingly human. How much more objective understanding, how much intellect, is actually associated with the so-called instinctual behavior in animals. As a matter of fact, the enormously important achievements and profoundly significant connections in the animal realm cause us to admire the wisdom underlying all happenings. We do not have wisdom merely in our heads; wisdom surrounds us everywhere like light, working everywhere, even through the animal kingdom. In the presence of such unusual phenomena as we have mentioned, only those people are astonished who have not seriously dealt with scientific developments. To all those who today are writing such learned tracts on the Mannheim dog and other dogs, on horses and the Frankfurt ape, along with much else because these are not unique—to all these I should like to read a passage from Comparative Psychology by Carus⁵⁹ that was published as early as 1866. Since they are not here, I will read the passage to you. Carus writes:

... When, therefore, the dog, for example, has long been treated with kindness and affection by his master, the human traits imprint themselves upon the animal quite objectively, even though it has no conception of goodness as such; they blend with the sensory image of this person that the dog has often seen and cause the animal to recognize him, even apart from the sense of sight, merely through scent or hearing, as the one from whom something good once came to him. If, therefore, some suffering befalls this man, if he is even deprived, perhaps, of the possibility of continuing his kindness to the dog, the animal feels this as something evil inflicted upon him and is moved thereby to rage and revenge; all this occurs without any abstract thinking whatever, but only through the succession of one sensory image after another.

It is certainly true that for the dog sensory image follows sensory image; however, intelligence and wisdom are at the bottom of the phenomenon per se. Carus continues as follows:

Yet is it strange how closely actual thinking is approached and may be resembled in its results by such a peculiar weaving together, separating and again joining together of the images of the inner sense. Thus, I once saw a well-trained white poodle (this was not the Mannheim dog because this book was written in 1866) that correctly picked out and placed together letters for words spoken to him. He also seemed to solve simple problems in arithmetic by bringing together figures written, as were the letters, on separate sheets of paper, seemed to be able to count how many ladies were present in the company, and did other similar things. Of course, if all this had depended upon a real understanding of number as a mathematical concept, it would not have been possible without actual reflection. It turned out, however, that the dog had simply been trained to pick up, on a slight gesture or sound from his master, the paper bearing the required letter or number from the series of sheets laid before him. Upon another indication through an equally slight sound, like the clicking of the thumbnail against the nail of another finger, he would lay the sheet down in another row, thus performing what seemed to be a miracle.⁶⁰

You see, not only the phenomenon, but also its explanation has long been known. Only now has this explanation been furnished again by the scientists because people pay no attention to what has been accomplished in the past. It is only for this reason that such things occur, and they bear testimony, not to our advanced science, but to our advanced ignorance!

On the other hand, certain objections have rightly been raised. If we had only these explanations (as we have heard them today) they might be considered equally naive, because Hermann Bahr⁶¹ has quite correctly reminded us of the following. Herr Pfungst⁶² demonstrated that the horses reacted to extremely slight cues made unconsciously and unperceived by their trainers. But Herr Pfungst was able to perceive these exceedingly slight gestures only after he had worked for a long time in his physiological laboratory constructing an apparatus to detect them. Bahr justifiably raises the objection that it was certainly most peculiar that only the horse should be clever enough to observe the gestures, whereas a university instructor had to work for years constructing an apparatus to do so—I believe it took him ten or more years. In all such things there is obviously a bit of truth, but we must simply view them in the right way.

With the proper perception, one can obviously explain such phenomena only when one thinks of objective wisdom and understanding as qualities that, along with instinctive behavior, have been instilled in things, and when one thinks of an animal as part of a complete system of interrelated objective wisdom permeating the world. In other words, they can be explained only when we are no longer limited to the idea that wisdom has come into the world through man alone, but recognize that wisdom is to be found throughout the universe. Man, by reason of his special organization, is able to perceive more of this wisdom than other beings, and is thus distinguished from them. Because of his organization, he can perceive more than they, but through the wisdom implanted in them, they can perform wisdom-filled tasks as he can. It is, however, a different kind of wisdom. The phenomena of these unusual expressions of wisdoms are really far less important to serious observers of the world than the phenomena that are always spread out before their eyes. These are far more important and, if you take this into consideration, you will no longer find incomprehensible what I am about to say.

An animal, far more intensely than man, fits into the universal wisdom and is quite intimately united with it. Its orders, so to speak, are far more compulsory than those of man. Human beings are much freer, and so it is possible for them to reserve forces for the cognition of interrelationships. The essential point is that the physical body of an animal—especially the higher ones—is fitted into the same universal interrelationships as man's etheric body. Thus, man knows more of the cosmic relationships, but animals are far more intimately united with them; they are far closer to, and more interwoven with, them. Therefore, if you take this objectively dominant reason into consideration tell yourself this: “We are surrounded not only by air and light but also by governing reason; we do not move merely through illumined space but also through the space of wisdom and governing reason.” You will then fully understand what it means for a person to be fitted into the world in regard to the finer relationships of his or her organs, and not just in an ordinary way. In normal life, a man, for example, is joined to spiritual cosmic relationship in such a fashion that the connection between his ego and ganglionic system, and between his astral body and spinal cord system, are greatly impaired during the waking life of day. But because these connections are subdued, he is not too attentive in ordinary, normal life to what is going on around him. It would be possible for him to observe this only if he really should see with his ganglionic system as he otherwise perceives with his head.

If, however, as in the special case of Goethe, the astral body is brought into a more vivid relationship with the spinal cord system and the ego with the ganglionic, because the ether body has withdrawn from the head, then far more vivid intercourse occurs with what is going on in our surroundings. But it is concealed from us in normal life because it is only while we are asleep at night that we enter into relationship with our spiritual environment. Here you arrive at an understanding of how the things Goethe has written were for him genuine perceptions, and although these could naturally not have been so clear as our sensory perceptions of the external world, yet they are clearer than the perceptions that an ordinary man has of his spiritual environment. Now, what did Goethe perceive in this way with special vividness? Let us grasp this point clearly through a special instance.

Through the complications of his particular karma, Goethe was destined to enter a life of scholarship and knowledge differently from an ordinary scholar. What did he experience through this? You see, for many centuries it has been so that a man who grows into intimate union with a life of learning has experienced a significant discord. To be sure, today it is more concealed than in Goethe's time, but it nevertheless is experienced because there is an enormous field in science that has been preserved from the fourth post-Atlantean epoch in the terminologies and systems of words that we are compelled to acquire. We trade more than we realize in words. All this has been obscured somewhat through the experimentation that has gradually been introduced since the nineteenth century, and a person now grows into his knowledge so that he sees more than he did earlier. Such sciences as jurisprudence, for instance, have descended somewhat from the specially lofty positions they previously occupied. But when jurisprudence and theology still occupied their specially lofty stations, the areas of learning man was trying to penetrate were really comprehensive systems of words, and the same is true of other things that had to be taken in as an inheritance from the fourth post-Atlantean period.

Along with this, what arises from the needs of the fifth post-Atlantean period made itself felt in an ever increasing way; that is, the life that arises from the great achievements of the new period. This is not realized by anyone who is simply driven from one lecture to another, but Goethe experienced it most intensely. I say that a person who is simply driven from one lecture to another does not sense it, but he passes through it nonetheless. He really passes through it. Here we touch the edge of a certain mystery of modern life. We can judge students who are enrolled in courses according to what they experience and what they are conscious of. But what they experience is not the whole story. Their inner nature is something quite different. If these individuals who are experiencing these overlapping layers of the fourth and fifth post-Atlantean epochs really knew what a certain part of their being is going through unconsciously, they would then have an entirely different understanding of what Goethe, even in youth, concealed mysteriously in his Faust. Countless persons who are finding their way into contemporary education are unconsciously sharing in this experience.

We must, therefore, remind ourselves that, by reason of all that Goethe had acquired because of his special karma, those with whom he came into close relationship during his youth were quite different to him than they would have been if he had not had this special karma. He sensed and felt how the people with whom he became intimately associated had to stupefy the Faustian life within them so that they no longer possessed it. He was able to sense this because what lived mysteriously in his fellow men made an impression on him such as is made by one person on another only when an especially intimate relationship, indeed when love, develops between them. In such a case of ordinary life, the connection of the ego with the ganglionic system, and of the astral body with the spinal cord system is highly active, although this is not consciously perceived as such. Something very special is activated. But what is otherwise active only in a love relationship came about in Goethe vis à vis a far larger number of people, so that he experienced a tremendous, more or less subconscious, compassion for the poor fellows—excuse the expression—who did not know what their inner natures were going through as they were driven from class to class and from examination to examination. This was felt by him and it gave him a rich experience.

Experiences become conceptions. Ordinary experiences become the conceptions of everyday life, but these particular experiences become the conceptions, the mental images, that Goethe poured tumultously into Faust. They were nothing but actual experiences that he gained from the most extensive environment because his ganglionic and spinal cord life was stimulated to more than normal wakefulness. This was the opposite from the subdued head life, but it was a potentiality in him even in his boyhood. We can see this from his description of what became active in him: not only what ordinarily engages people, say in piano lessons,⁶³ became active in him but also the entire being. Goethe partook much more in the happenings of real life as a whole person than others, and we must say, therefore, that he was more wide-awake during the day than they. During the time in his youth when he was working on Faust, he was more awake during the day, and because of this he also needed what I described yesterday as the time of sleep—the ten years in Weimar. This dampening was necessary.

This, however, is just what happens to a greater or lesser degree in every human being during the course of life, only in Goethe it took place more intensely. He was simply drawn somewhat more consciously than other men into the surrounding wisdom-filled and purely spiritual influences. He became aware of what lives and weaves mysteriously within men. What, then, is this really? When we are put into the world in our ordinary and brutal waking life together with our ego, we are bound up with the world through our senses and our ordinary perceptions. But you will agree that we are now much more closely bound with this world. Our ego is, indeed, in an especially intimate relation with our ganglionic system, and the astral body with the spinal cord system. Through this relationship, we have really a far more comprehensive connection with our environing world than through the sensory system of our head.

Now you must bear in mind that man needs the rhythmic alternation of his ego and astral body in his head during the waking life of day, and outside his head during sleep; because they are outside his head during sleep, they develop an inner active life in connection with the other systems, as I have indicated. The ego and the astral body need this alternation of sinking downward into the head and rising out of it. When man's ego and astral body are outside his head, he not only develops that intimate relationship with the rest of his organism through the ganglionic and spinal cord systems, but he also develops spiritual relationships with the spiritual world. Thus, we may say that an especially active, vivid connection with the spinal cord and ganglionic systems corresponds to an active psychic-spiritual life with the spiritual world. Since we are obliged to assume that the soul-spiritual is outside the head at night, and since this causes the development of an especially active life in the rest of the organism, we must then say that during the life of day, when the ego and the astral body are more within the head, we are in turn experiencing a spiritual symbiosis with the surrounding spiritual world. In a certain sense, we submerge ourselves in an inner spiritual world in sleep, but in a surrounding spiritual world when we awake.

This state of being one with the surrounding spiritual world is more pronounced in Goethe. He is, as it were, dreaming during a state of wakefulness—just as the ordinary person does not always fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. It is seldom that anyone dreams consciously in this way during the life of the day, but people like Goethe pass into a state of dreaming even during the waking life. The forces that remain unconscious in other people become, in a certain sense, dream-forms of life for people like Goethe.

We now have an even more exact description which might tempt you to entertain the arrogant notion that all of you could easily write a Faust poem since you are experiencing the Faust dilemma by ranging out into and by living in union with the surrounding world during your daytime life. The latter is indeed true. We do experience Faust, but only as the opposite pole is experienced in the night through the ego and astral body when we do not dream. But since Goethe not only experienced this unconsciously, but also dreamed it, he could express it in Faust. He dreamed this experience and in people such as Goethe the following takes place: what they create stands in the same relationship to what the rest of us experience unconsciously as does the dream to deep sleep on the other side of our lives. This is an actual reality; the creation of the great spirits are related to the unconscious creations of other men as dream to dreamless sleep.

Even so, much remains obscure. But bear in mind that you are thereby gaining a glimpse into something that is intimately connected with human life; it may be described somewhat as follows. We could really say quite a bit about the connection between our being and the surrounding world if we could awake just to the stage of dreaming. If we were able to awaken only to the stage of dreaming, we would experience tremendous things and would also be able to describe them. But this would have a grave consequence. Just think, if all men, to express it trivially, were so conscious that they could describe everything in their environment, if they would really describe experiences, for example, like those of Goethe's as set forth in his Faust, what would we come to? What would the world then come to? Strange as it may seem but so it is, the world would come to a stop and would make no further progress! The moment everyone were to dream the way Goethe dreamt Faust, which is an utterly different kind of dreaming—the moment everyone were to dream his connection with the external world, then such people would devote all the forces developed in their inner being to such an activity. They would pour them into such things and human existence would, in some sense, consume itself. You can form a faint idea of what would happen if you just look at the many ruinous effects that are taking place because many people, although not really dreaming, imagine that they are and babble or scribble reminiscences they have picked up elsewhere. This is associated with the fact that there are entirely too many poets. Where is there anyone today who does not believe he is a poet or painter or something! The world could not continue if this were so because all good things have also their dark side, truly their dark side.

Schiller was also an important poet who dreamed much in the way I have described. Just imagine, however, that all those who in their youth were trained like Schiller to become doctors had given up the practice of medicine as he did and later, thanks to an extensive patronage, had been appointed “professor of history” without any real preparation or serious study of history! As a matter of fact, Schiller did deliver interesting lectures at the University of Jena, but his students did not get from them what they needed to learn. He also gradually stopped giving these university lectures and was happy when he did not have to give them anymore. Imagine that things would be the same with every professor of history or every young physician! Obviously, everything that is good also has its dark side. The world must be protected, so to speak, from standing still. It seems trivial to say this, but it is nevertheless a profound mystery-truth: not all people can dream in this way. The forces with which they dream must first be applied in the external world to something different so that through it a foundation may be created for a further evolution of the earth. It would come to a standstill were all men to dream as I have indicated.

Now we have reached a point where an especially paradoxical fact comes to light. To what in the world are the aforementioned forces really applied? If we observe their application in a spiritual way, they are ultimately applied to deep sleep even though you may like them to be applied to dreams. More concretely, they are applied to all that is spread out over human evolution in the most varied kinds of vocational work.

Vocational work is related to the work that was done in creating Faust, or in Schiller's Wallenstein, as deep sleep is related to dreaming. But to say that we sleep during our vocational work will seem extraordinary to you, and you will say that here, in this, you are wide awake. The truth is that there is a grand illusion in this idea that one is awake during this kind of work because what really comes into being through vocational work is not something we do in full waking consciousness. Of course, some of the effects a person's profession has upon his or her soul do enter one's consciousness, but such a person really knows nothing whatever of all that is actually present in the web of vocational labor that men are continually spinning around the world.

It is, indeed, surprising how these things are connected. Hans Sachs⁶⁴ was a shoemaker and also a poet. Jakob Boehme⁶⁵ was a shoemaker and a mystical philosopher. There you have sleeping and waking alternating through a special constellation that we may also discuss. It is possible to pass from one state into another.

What, then, is the significance of this interplay and alternation of life between vocational labor for such a man as Jakob Boehme—he really did make shoes for the good people of Görlitz—and his mystical-philosophical compositions? Many people have strange opinions of these things. Allow me to review the experience we once had when we were in Görlitz.

One evening before a lecture I was to give on Boehme,⁶⁶ I got into a conversation with a high school teacher, in which we spoke about Boehme's statue that we had just seen in the park. The people of Görlitz, as we were often told, called his monument, the “park cobbler.” We remarked that it was most beautiful, but the school teacher said he did not think so. He thought it really looked like Shakespeare and one would not know from it that Boehme had been a shoemaker. He said that to represent Boehme it would have to show that he was a shoemaker. Well, one can disregard such an attitude. As Jakob Boehme was writing his great mystical-philosophical views, he was working from the results that could have come about only through the human being having evolved through the Saturn, Sun, Moon, and Earth times; that is, through the fact that a broad stream flows through these ages and finally comes to expression in these effects. This stream manifests itself in such a personality only in a way that is the result of special karmic relationships. But just as all that has traversed the Sun and Moon periods is necessary to every individual on earth, so it is also necessary, but in a special way, in order to bring out what was in Boehme.

But then, Jakob Boehme also made shoes for the worthy Görlitzers. How does all this hang together? To be sure, the fact that a man has been able to develop the skill of a shoemaker is also connected with this stream. But when the shoes are finished, they are separated from him and their function has then nothing more to do with skill but with protecting and warming feet. They go their own way in performing their functions and are separated completely from the one who makes them; what they bring about has its effects only later. In other words, this is only a beginning.

If the initial influence leading to the mystical-philosophical activity of Jakob Boehme were represented graphically, I should have to indicate the first potential toward shoemaking here at this point. This then flows on further and in the future Vulcan evolution will have developed a degree of perfection that has been reached already by what had flowed into his mystical-philosophical activity from the Saturn evolution. This is, in a sense, an end; his shoemaking is a beginning. We say, of course, that the earth is earth at present, but if we could trace things from Saturn still further back, we might then say that, relative to certain things, the earth is already Vulcan. We should then assume Saturn at this point.

We can thus take everything in a relative way. We may say that the earth is Saturn, and that Vulcan is, in a sense, earth. What happens on the earth in the vocational labor of a man like Jakob Boehme—not in his free creative work, but what he does as vocational labor—is the beginning of something that will be as far advanced on Vulcan as the happenings on Saturn are already advanced on the earth. For Boehme to write his mystical-philosophical books on earth, it was necessary for something to have happened on Saturn that was similar to what he has done on earth in making shoes. Likewise, Boehme's shoemaking here on earth has the effect that something may be done on Vulcan that will be similar to his writing mystical philosophy here on earth.

There is something extraordinary in all this. Here is an indication of how what is often given little value on earth is so little esteemed because it is the beginning of something that will be prized in the future. In their being, human beings are, of course, much more intimately bound up with the past since they must first familiarize themselves with what is a beginning. Therefore, they often care much less for something that is a beginning than for something that has come over to them from the past. From the scope of what we are yet to be involved in during the earth period, and so that something special may then come about when the earth shall have developed further through Jupiter and Venus to Vulcan—from all this a full consciousness will develop such as the one that exists for the philosophy of Jakob Boehme on the earth. It is for this reason that the real meaning of human external labor is enveloped now in unconsciousness, just as man was shrouded in unconsciousness on Saturn; sleep consciousness was developed on the Sun, dream consciousness on the Moon, and the present condition of waking consciousness on the earth.

The human being is thus really living in a profound sleep consciousness in his involvement with everything of his vocation. Through his vocation he is really creating, not through what gives him pleasure in it, but through what is developing without his being able to enter into it; thus does he really create future values. When a person makes a nail over and over again, it certainly does not give him or her any special pleasure. But the nail becomes detached from its producer; it has quite definite tasks. As to what then happens by means of this nail is not of further concern to the worker; he does not follow up every nail he has made. But what is enveloped there in his unconscious, profoundest sleep is destined to come to life again in the future.

We have thus been able to juxtapose what the ordinary person accomplishes: first the most insignificant work in a profession and then that which appears as the highest achievement. Superior achievements are an end; the most insignificant work is always a beginning.

I wanted to place these two concepts side by side because we cannot reflect upon how the human being is bound through his karma with his vocation until we first know how his labor, which is often connected quite externally with him, is related to the entire evolution of which he is a part. We will soon develop the real question of karma as it relates to vocation. But I had first to introduce these matters so we might attain a universal concept of what flows from a human being into his or her vocation.

These things are also exceedingly useful in forming our moral sentiments in the right way. Our judgments are incorrect because we do not focus our attention on things in the right way. A seed often appears quite insignificant beside the beautiful flower of the future. Using human work as a case in point, I wanted to show you today how seed and flower are bound up in the evolution of mankind.

• 59. The philosopher and physician Gustav Carus (1789–1869) wrote the book Vergleichende Psychologie oder Geischichte der Seele in der Reihenfolge der Tierwelt [Comparative Psychology or History of the Soul in the Order of the Animal World] (Vienna, 1866).
• 60. Cams concludes the passage with a note: “Horses have been observed to accomplish similar feats; in fact, I have seen canaries do the same thing, although not quite as completely.“
• 61. Herman Bahr (1863–1934) was a Viennese writer.
• 62. Oskar Pfungst, Das Pferd des Herrn von Osten [Mr. von Osten's Horse] (Leipzig, 1907).
• 63. Poetry and Truth, IV, 107.
• 64. Hans Sachs (1494–1576) was a shoemaker who became known as the foremost “Meistersinger“ in Nürnberg.
• 65. Jakob Böhme (1575–1624), a shoemaker in Görlitz, Silesia, is regarded to have been one of the most profound mystics in Germany.
• 66. Steiner lectured in Görlitz on December 3, 1908.

I spoke yesterday of the great Polish drama “The Undivine Comedy” by Krasinski and of its very special significance. One can truly say that it was consciously brought into the world as the outcome of a dialogue with the Spirits working in the evolution of humanity, who in the middle of the 19th century spoke to those who were willing to listen to them.

Let us for a moment hold in our minds the thoughts that came to us from the realisation that what was astir in the inmost depths of the evolutionary process made its way into the external literary culture of the time. From Gutzkow's novel “The Mahaguru” as well as from “The Undivine Comedy”—I chose only two particularly striking examples from many that might be quoted—we see that as it were behind the scenes of external happenings, significant impulses are at work in the cultural life of mankind. From many sources we have gained knowledge that directs our minds and hearts to the great moment of world-evolution in which we are living, the moment when it is essential to be mindful of the new element that must be received into the evolution of humanity—but with the co-operation of human souls who are able to understand it. There are different ways of characterising the importance of the present time, but perhaps one thing only need be said and this will be sufficient to bring home the significance of the point of time at which we are standing.

In ages of antiquity men received a heritage consisting of wisdom yielded by atavistic clairvoyance and of knowledge gained atavistically. But this heritage petered away and the tide of materialism arose—particularly since the last three or four centuries and reaching a peak in the 19th century. This tide of materialism veiled all possibilities of vision into the spiritual world—and a new path, a new method, is now appearing in spiritual science. As I have often said, this development ultimately becomes a natural process in the souls of men. The situation today still is that the vast majority of souls have yet to learn that there are many earthly lives. But when the souls now living are re-incarnated, for the most part they will know, not merely as a theory, that there are many earthly lives; they will live on into an age when it will be known quite as a natural matter of course: there are many earthly lives. Just as human souls now remember back to a certain point in childhood, and thoughts from childhood constantly arise, so it will be natural one day for the living impression to well up from within: “We have been here many times.” Human souls will evolve to this stage just as they have evolved from primitive stages of life. This development will come about of itself but the following is inevitable.—

The souls who have learnt nothing from spiritual science today will die and return in new incarnations. Then, having learnt nothing from spiritual science, they will not know what to make of the impression that will rise up from within them of the truth of repeated earthly lives, and they may well be driven to despair. For this inner impression that will arise quite naturally in the soul must be grasped through thoughts, and the thoughts that are necessary before it can be understood are those yielded by spiritual science. These thoughts should make the whole history of the Ego and the fact of its existence in man intelligible to us; and he alone who has within him the force of these thoughts will be able to understand the impression that will come of itself, as a kind of remembrance.

But the foundation for understanding this remembrance will from now onwards have to be laid through spiritual science; knowledge of the continued existence of the Ego will have to be acquired. And those who have not acquired it will have to admit, when these remembrances well up in them: “I do not understand my own self.” This will be a terrible cry of despair in future times. It must be realised that only through knowledge and understanding of what will inevitably come in the future can human souls be kept from falling into despair. When the Ego which passes from incarnation to incarnation asserts itself in the future—and this means in our future incarnations—men must be able to understand this Ego. And they will do so if they have worked on their souls through the thoughts of spiritual science.

The Mystery of Golgotha was fulfilled in order that the Ego might be fully understood, and this can never happen if—as in the case of the Polish Count described yesterday—men preserve in their souls nothing but feelings of the Past—sacred though these feelings may be and connected with the events centred in the Mystery of Golgotha. Such feelings will enable these events to be grasped as matters of history, but that cannot lead to any true understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. True understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha depends upon the fulfilment of the words; “Not I but Christ in me.” It will then be possible for Christ in His living activity within earth-evolution not to remain inaudible to men. He must be made audible through that which, under his inspiration, spiritual science has to say, no sentiments or feelings tied to remembrances, can lead mankind to future well-being. But neither can the interests of the future be furthered by one who lives only in and for the Present—the tyrant described in the lecture yesterday. The tyrant does indeed, assert the Ego, but not Christ within the Ego. A deep riddle is presented to us in this Polish drama: two personalities stand in contrast to one another, one of whom has the Christ of tradition, of history, but runs the risk of falling away from Him. And what comes to expression in the wife and in the child of the Count relapses into a purely atavistic connection with the spiritual world.

A great danger for our time is indicated here. It is that those who are not willing to assimilate in a new way the knowledge of mankind's connection with the spiritual worlds, although they feel that such connection exists, will cause part of their being to lose the requisite link with the spiritual world. Mankind would fall asunder into those who—like the old Count—must necessarily despair and die because they cling exclusively to the Past, and those who rise into the spiritual worlds in an atavistic way—like the Count's wife and child. Because they have not received the Christ into their inmost being in full reality, they pass into the spiritual world without finding in themselves a point of anchorage.

What is it that the members of the Count's family have not fully developed? They have not fully developed the Ego: they are remains from the age which in the regular course of the evolution of humanity has been at an end since the Mystery of Golgotha, but markedly so since the last few centuries. They are remains from an age of antiquity when the Ego had not yet completely taken root in man; they are Ego-less human beings who, because they cannot take the Christ into the Ego which has not developed into the necessary intensity, lose the Christ. And standing in contrast to them is the tyrant, who has developed the Ego and bears it in himself with all strength; without taking the Christ into the Ego, he desires to bring happiness to the world but is incapable of doing so. At the point of death—out of the vision which the tyrant understands as little as he understands how to resign himself to death—there breaks from his lips the cry: “Thou hast conquered, O Galilean!”—This is an indication of the fact that for those human beings who have, it is true, acquired the Ego but have not taken Christ into this Ego, there is one moment only when it is possible for them to come into relationship with Christ: it is the moment when they pass from this world into the other world. But because Christ came from that other world into this world in order there to find the way to human hearts, men must inevitably lose Him when, after the moment of death, they arrive in that other world. All the deeper impulses at work in our time belong to a sphere where momentous issues are at stake—I can say no more than that they “are at stake.”

But now we must go rather more deeply into things that are already known to us but must be studied in a certain setting if we are to understand them in the light of the conditions prevailing in our time. We know that, properly speaking, the evolution of the earth must be divided into an epoch preceding the Mystery of Golgotha and an epoch following the Mystery of Golgotha. We know, too, that in the epoch before the Mystery of Golgotha, Luciferic and Ahrimanic spirits also worked into the souls of men. Particularly in considering the ages before the Mystery of Golgotha it must be realised that foolish chatter about avoiding Ahriman and Lucifer at all costs will get us nowhere. For Ahriman and Lucifer were allowed by the normal, progressive spiritual Beings to work in the earthly evolution of men.

Now we know that there are spiritual Beings actually ranking higher than men but who during the Old Moon period of evolution did not reach the height that would have been possible for them; they did not reach it, but for all that they rank higher than men. So that bearing in mind the intervention of the Ahrimanic and Luciferic beings, we can now understand better what is called the ancient, primeval wisdom in earth-evolution. For example, the ancient wisdom that was misused in the Lemurian epoch and perished with the Lemurians; the wisdom that was then misused in the Atlantean epoch and brought about the destruction of Atlantis. What was it that was then among men? What was it, in reality? To say that the great wisdom then existing was misused, applied in practices of black magic and so forth, is a very abstract way of speaking and leads to no very definite idea. Let us think, for example, of the character of this wisdom in the last periods of the Lemurian epoch. Whence had it come? Spiritual Beings who had not completed their full development during the Old Moon epoch but who were nevertheless at a higher level than men, had mingled with the earthly evolution of humanity. Man was already there—but, as you can well imagine, in his most primitive state. What was subsequently developed by human beings during the Atlantean and Post-Atlantean epochs did not yet exist. In those Lemurian times, man was a being wholly devoid of intelligence, for intelligence was to develop only gradually during the course of earth-evolution. Man was primitive in his will, in his actions, in his soul-development—altogether like a child. Now had there existed only bodies of men with the higher members of those bodies that had been developed for them by the progressive spiritual Beings of the higher Hierarchies, men would not have been capable at that time of evolving any outstanding wisdom. But in that Lemurian age a very lofty altogether extraordinary wisdom existed. For example, among those primitive men there was widespread knowledge of how to handle a child during the period between birth and the seventh year so that as the result of a certain transformation of his etheric body which then worked back upon the brain, he could be made extremely clever. Radical educational methods have to be applied today if this result is desired—and everyone is aware how very often these efforts are unsuccessful. But in any case the art of affecting the brain itself by exercising a certain influence on the etheric body of the brain, so that the child in question becomes extremely clever, is entirely lost today. Furthermore—and I hasten to emphasise it—this art is in no circumstances whatever legitimate in our time, for if it became at all general, even in its most elementary form, it would lead to terrible abuses.

How is the existence of such an art in Lemurian times to be explained? It is explained by the fact that Beings who had not completed their development on the Old Moon, but had evolved only the first six of their seven members, incorporated in men who otherwise would have been utterly primitive. The spiritual Beings who on the Old Moon were at a higher level than men but had not attained the apex of their development, took on these primitive human bodies and went to work with arts which far transcended all earthly knowledge. You can imagine what such Beings in human bodies were capable of accomplishing,—Beings who at a level higher than the human had developed the sixth member—the Life-Spirit—entered into these primitive, flexible, pliant bodies. And they became terrible magicians, dread magicians!

And again, what kind of arts were general in the Atlantean epoch? First and foremost there was the wisdom which must be applied in order to cause talents in ancestors to be transmitted, purely through heredity, to their descendants and actually to be enhanced in these descendants. The Beings whose development had not been completed on the Moon but who for all that were of a higher rank than earthly man, were deeply versed in this art—with most significant effect. Let me put it like this: it was as if by methods connected with star-constellations and the like, one were to lead over the qualities of a genius to his descendants, but in such a way that these spiritual qualities were not merely inherited, but intensified, enhanced. These higher Beings working in human bodies were capable of mighty achievements. All this was swept out of existence. Very many things were connected with these particular arts. For example, it was possible by their means to observe the course of spiritual evolution and to guide the spiritual forces into the stream of heredity.

And so even superficial observation will show that there is a very great deal in world-evolution which in an earlier age had its justification but which in the form it now bears is no more than a relic that has been preserved. Both in unimportant and important domains it is so. In his novel “The Mahaguru” Gutzkow wanted to indicate something of the kind in an important domain. He wanted to give emphasis to the question: In what form does something that had great significance in ancient times—in the Atlantean epoch, when it was still possible for men to regulate the stream of heredity—in what form does it appear when it is carried over into an age and into a community where the traditions of it had indeed been preserved but where nothing more was known of the earlier art than an inferior form of it called in occultism “Occult Chemistry?” Gutzkow showed that something of the kind existed in Tibet. Naturally, the priesthood in Tibet had no knowledge of how through forces of heredity they could produce a body for the individuality whom they believed should pass from one body into another—but they preserved the old customs. So there we have an example of the external reality presenting an aspect utterly different from what it had been in conditions once prevailing in the evolution of humanity. Reading “The Mahaguru” makes one want to cry out: Oh, how reality itself can become a maya in face of the prevailing conditions!

And now think of something else.—You can well imagine that the men of Lemurian and Atlantean times did not resemble the men of today, for what developed, inwardly in the soul at that time also gave configuration to the outer form; the whole outer form of man was different—it was pliant and flexible. The human form in the times of Lemuria and Atlantis was not ape-like; the bodies of the actual ancestors of men were not ape-like.—It would seem, therefore, that world-evolution must have made an exception in the case of certain people who have written of themselves that they can remember having descended from apes!¹—But we will not go into that now.—Men did not resemble apes, but if you picture our children presenting a much, much more infantile appearance, with an elemental quality of being extending over the whole body, you may be able to get an idea of the character of the human body in those times. As you can read in the book “From the Akasha Chronicle,” because Beings surviving from the Old Moon evolution had incarnated in these pliant, flexible bodies, these bodies became animal-like rather than human. Distorted forms arose, with strangely contorted limbs.—And there you have the origin of the figures of gods to be found among certain peoples. These curious figures with non-human faces and huge limbs, originate from the knowledge that the incarnating Moon-Beings were united with human bodies.

If in the Atlantean epoch there had been painters and sculptors, they would have been able to portray or model these figures of Moon-Beings incarnated in human bodies. But in Tibet this was no longer possible. Hence the canon must be strictly obeyed, for the artists would otherwise have made figures with whatever terms they liked. If a man did not obey the canon but created something out of his own play of fancy, he incurred the death-penalty. Naturally, one may ask: Is there any justification for condemning to death someone who makes only one tiny change in the figure of a god? Is there really any justification for it? In Tibet, of course, there is no longer any justification, but once upon a time there was, for as you have heard, these Beings were actually present in bodies, and if they were not faithfully portrayed, any deviation amounted to a lie. In those ancient times a lie had infinitely greater power than it has nowadays. If at the present time everyone who tells a lie were to suffocate as the result—well, I prefer to leave it at that, for I think that the fear of suffocation would be too great to allow people to risk telling lies! I assume that nowadays people will not suffocate—but at that time a lie would have caused actual suffocation. For the thought expressed in the word contained a power to give form to the air in the larynx, and then suffocated the man—and anyone who had incorrectly portrayed on earth a Being who had not fully completed his development on the Old Moon would have suffocated, in other words, a process of nature would have caused his death.

The evolution of humanity is an exceedingly complicated matter and to understand it one must go deeply into spiritual science. To find the right approach to world-evolution it is essential to study what it is the mission of spiritual science to make known from spiritual worlds. For spiritual science is, as it were, a first impulse to which other impulses must increasingly be added, in order that humanity in the future may advance along the right path. You will have realised from what I have been saying recently² that a course must be steered between a Scylla and a Charybdis, that a very definite path must be laid down in spiritual science.—This must be taken with the deepest earnestness. Our modern natural science is developed by materialistic methods. During these last weeks I have tried to describe its characteristics to you. I have said that a materialistic method in natural science is fully justified. It can be characterized by saying that it is adapted to cloak the spiritual reality lying behind. Why, then, must this materialistic method be there in our present time?

In our present time an earlier knowledge of nature must be superseded by a new knowledge of nature. I have told you something about this earlier knowledge of nature. Just think what kind of knowledge it was! To be able to mould a human head into an instrument editable for genius, through specific measures applied scientifically in the old sense of the word—this signified colossal knowledge!—or again, so to regulate heredity that qualities of genius were transmitted to descendants—the knowledge required for this was even more penetrating and comprehensive, far, far surpassing all the theories of evolution, the physics, chemistry and so on, of today. But that ancient knowledge was to be veiled and obscured by the materialistic method employed in natural science today—which is fully justified in the purely physical domain. It must be remembered that at the time when that lofty knowledge of nature existed, man was not a free being; he was only at the beginning of the gradual evolution of freedom. He was led and guided and what came to pass in the process of his guidance was for the most part brought about by the higher Hierarchies. And it was single individuals who deviated from the regular course, who advanced too far along the path to freedom, who were responsible for the fall into the abyss and the inevitable destruction of Atlantis. But with the constantly increasing freedom of will, man would have been unfit for knowledge of this kind. To possess knowledge such as once existed on the earth is unthinkable today because man's will has attained freedom to an extent that would enable him still to misuse this knowledge. How, then, is this free will guided into the right channel?

From indications I have given recently you will have gathered that by adopting the method employed in natural science, with all its scrupulous exactitude, the free will is directed into the right channel; moreover, this method is a wonderfully effective pedagogical means for the development of the free will. We have therefore no cause whatever to quarrel with the method employed in natural science, the justification of which for our present time we fully acknowledge. You will find that what is contained in our lecture-courses and books completely refutes the allegations of individual opponents—to the effect, for example, that we repudiate natural science. It is sometimes necessary to take exception to the pretensions of certain investigators and so-called scientific authorities; but nothing derogatory to the achievements of natural science will ever be found in our literature. To say that anything in our literature is a repudiation of natural science would be sheer calumny, for among us there can be no question of such repudiation. But at the same time it must be realised that attacks upon us may well be made from the side of so-called natural science—and if necessary, we must then repel the attack. But true adherents of spiritual science must become more and more conscious of the necessity to understand the natural-scientific method and to protect this method from being tainted by all kinds of non-scientific concepts—for example concepts of the atom and movement of the atom, of which I have recently spoken. These are fantasies of natural science, and the difference must be clearly seen.

Efforts must be made to distinguish between genuine natural science and scientific fantasy. How often do we not hear it said today that one thing or another is scientifically established—whereas it is nothing of the kind, because words are simply accepted as facts. Never was blind belief in authority greater than it is at the present time in the domain of science, for everyone allows things to be determined entirely by those in whom they happen to believe. The purpose of the Mystery of Golgotha was that what came into the world through Lucifer might gradually be corrected in a certain way—it is indicated symbolically in the Bible: “Your eyes shall be opened and ye shall know good and evil”—that is to say, ye shall know good and evil from outside. But when in the sphere of perceptions one perceives from outside, it is impossible to receive from that world anything other than perceptions. As soon as one begins to reflect about the perceptions, to speculate about them and derive all kinds of ideas from them, one is on the way to finding what has been imbued into them by Ahriman and Lucifer. The ideas must come out of the spiritual world and be united with the perceptions: then these ideas are in the real sense divine! In human life there must be a marriage between the ideas which are given to men from out of the Spiritual and what he perceives in the outer world through his senses. But this union must first be achieved. How this principle applies in the scientific domain you can gather from my essay “Truth and Science.” The belief that in the scientific sense, ideas, thoughts, could also be found from outside, from the perceptions, is based on illusion, on illusion caused by Ahriman and Lucifer. But as long as the Powers associated with the words “Your eyes shall be opened and ye shall know good and evil” (which means to search for the ideas in the outer world) were sanctioned, that is to say, until the Mystery of Golgotha—as long as Lucifer and Ahriman were allowed to work in this sphere, there was no objection to be made. But that state of things is now over. Now, in the matter of the permeation of perceptions from outside, they are all the more unjustified.

This too was brought into evidence in the middle of the 19th century through a crisis of a particular kind. This crisis announced itself in great and outstanding achievements: spectral-analysis, for example, came on the scene, swept away the conception that when one looks upwards to the stars one has to do with spiritual Beings—and showed that substances to be found everywhere in the universe also exist on the earth. The old union between ideas and perceptions is no longer possible, for such discoveries make it essential that the ideas shall again find the spiritual path into our souls. The same applies to Darwinism. To reason entirely on the basis of what is found by outer perception—that is to say, to seek for the ideas in the outer world—can only lead to a purely materialistic conception and interpretation of the world. In short, the crisis is in evidence everywhere and there is also widespread rebellion against the fact that the ideas must flow out of the spirit-realm into the souls of men if humanity is to make progress. In other words: we must understand the nature of Ahriman and Lucifer and be on the alert when they try to make us continue the principle indicated in the words; “Your eyes shall be opened and ye shall know good and evil.” We must learn to observe both Ahriman and Lucifer. And we shall be able to do this if we permeate the Ego, as it has now unfolded, with Christ.

But something else too resounded through the world in primeval times, resounded from a different side, after man had acquired the power to distinguish good and evil, to direct his gaze outwards, that is to say, to use his senses and through them to acquire ideas based on sense-perceptions. The decree went forth: Man must be driven out of the spirit-realm in which he has hitherto been living, in order that he may not also eat “of the Tree of Life.” But Christ will forever give men to eat of the Tree of Life, and the ideas which stream directly out of the spirit-realm into human souls must be inwardly experienced. But they can be experienced in the real sense only when the human soul takes Christ into itself. Then we have something quite different from the concept of Knowledge; then we have the concept of Life. Just as a strict eye must be kept on Lucifer and Ahriman in order that when they allow knowledge derived from the outer world to penetrate into us we may perceive that this knowledge is coming from them, so we must realise that through the impulse given by the Mystery of Golgotha, ideas were to flow into men to be the substance of life—the substance not of knowledge alone, but of life. And when from this standpoint of life we study the different religions of the world, it will be far, far from our minds to investigate these religions with the object of discovering whether they are or are not in keeping with our own view of the world. To apply only the concept of knowledge to these religions is not our task; we must apply the concept of life.

There are definite forms of religion in the world. We should not set out to discover whether we can consider these forms to be true, but whether through their ritual and ceremonies they are able to give nourishment and life to the souls of men, and—as the souls of men differ—it follows that their life can be sustained by different forms of nourishment. If we grasp this truth we shall realise that we can never lend ourselves to quarreling with any form of religion but that we must endeavour to understand it in so far as it is life-nourishment for human souls to whom it is given as life not as knowledge only, but as very life. Then we shall see that the standpoint from which a religion begins to quarrel with some branch of science is entirely misplaced. We shall also realise that religion will inevitably adopt a hostile attitude towards progress in natural science and spiritual science alike. For the religions are still unwilling to get away from the old Tempter, they still want to invoke only that God Who said to man that He will give them life, that they themselves are not to eat of the Tree of Life. The representatives of religions do not want to invoke God alone but also the Luciferic Spirit and the Ahrimanic Spirit; they want the eyes for distinguishing good and evil to be opened through religion. Religion wants to be “knowledge.” But it cannot be “knowledge” because it is life-substance. And under the sway of this temptation which still whispers in their ears, the representatives of the different religions believe they possess facts of knowledge in their religions, whereas the question of knowledge cannot, in reality, come into consideration between religion and science. We have no cause whatever to combat religious bodies, because we ask them about the sustenance they provide for life, not about what knowledge they possess. Religious communities will always be tempted to ask whether science as it advances is in keeping with what they regard as knowledge. But because life is in process of constant evolution, advancing science can never be in keeping with religions which invariably tend towards conservatism.

And now you can picture the whole conflict which in the nature of things will ever and again be urged. I should like you to think rightly about this conflict and to realize that as a matter of course the representatives of religious bodies, because they are under the sway of temptation, will always, from their standpoint, combat spiritual science, just as they combat natural science. But you must also realise that these opponents fight because they lack understanding. This does not excuse them at all, but it must none the less be realised that they fight because of lack of understanding; they cannot take the right standpoint. As a sign and symptom, let me bring to your notice words written by a man who perceived the inevitable approach of the natural-scientific age and the natural-scientific way of thinking, and who was told by a friend that one should not be concerned with knowledge that is not contained in the Bible or preserved in the traditions of the Church. Since the 14th century, of course, things have changed in this connection.—Dante's “Divine Comedy” is a great, world-embracing poem. But Dante lived at the time when the epoch during which men confined themselves to purely historical Christianity was passing away. For Dante, Virgil was simply the exile banished to hell. Dante did not know much about anything that differed from the Christianity confronting him as a great system and régime. But in the case of Petrarch it was different, 1 century later, in the 14th century, Petrarch read Virgil with far greater credence. He turned not only to Greek but also to Roman spiritual culture. When one of his friends wrote to Petrarch saying that there had appeared to him in a dream a spiritual Being who exhorted him to avoid all non-Christian literature, he (Petrarch) gave a very significant answer. I stress the importance of this incident because it shows how the friend—and through him, Petrarch—was enjoined from the spiritual world to concern himself only with what the Christianity of that time regarded as truly Christian. Petrarch wrote the following beautiful words which held good at that time for the approaching epoch and still hold good today. Petrarch replied to his friend Boccaccio in momentous words, affirming his standpoint, why he read this non-Christian literature, and what it meant to him (Petrarch: Letter to Boccaccio (“Epistolae seniles” I. 5):

“Why then should we shun the pagan poets and writers who do not use the name of Christ simply because they have never heard it? Surely there is greater danger in the books of sceptics who speak of Christ and at the same time dispute Him—but those who claim to be the defenders of the true faith read these writings with the greatest eagerness. Believe me: much that is simply the product of sloth and timidity is attributed to thoughtful deliberation. Men often cast scorn on what is out of their reach; it is characteristic of ignorance to condemn what it cannot comprehend and nobody will concede to it strivings of which it is incapable.

“Here lies the root of the misguided judgments of what is unknown; it is not so much the blindness of those who pass judgment as their laziness that is in evidence. We, however, should not allow ourselves to be frightened away from the sciences by any pious admonitions, or by indications of the near approach to death. If the sciences are imbibed with inner sincerity they quicken the love of morality and take from us, or at least diminish, the fear of death; if we abandon them, this will excite the suspicion that disbelief lays claim to be knowledge. The sciences are not a hindrance to one who has the right mastery of them, but they are a help to him; they level his path of life and do not thwart him.

“For a diseased or weak stomach, many a food may be unwholesome which a healthy, hungry man digests at once; so too, that which would ruin a feebler nature may be rich in blessing for a sound and vigorous mind. ...

“I know well that many have achieved great sanctity without culture, but I know too that nobody has been kept from sanctity by culture. ... If I am to tell you my own opinion, it is this: The path to holiness via ignorance may possibly be smooth, but it is faint-hearted. All good things have a single goal but many paths lead thither and fellow-travelers along these paths differ greatly; the one moves more slowly, the other more quickly, the one in obscurity, the other visibly, the one bowed with humility, the other buoyant with exultation. All journeying is blessed; but the noblest is that which proceeds freely and openly before the world. The knowledge that has wrestled through to belief is far superior to naive simplicity, be it never so pious; and not one of the fools who have ever entered the kingdom of heaven has as high a place as a man of knowledge who has won the crown of blessedness.”

The same could be said about our spiritual science! And not only to X³ but to all the others who fight against us, one could rejoin with the words written by Petrarch to his friend; “For a diseased or weak stomach, many a food may be unwholesome which a healthy, hungry man digests at once; so too, that which would ruin a feebler nature may be rich in blessing for a sound and vigorous mind.”

And when people harp on the “contradiction in the first and third Gospels” and refuse to admit that the contradiction disappears as soon as the existence of two Jesus boys is taken into account; when they insist upon “simplicity” and say that the fantastic statements of “the one up there” (on the Goetheanum hill) can well be ignored; when they will not admit that all the forms of life are incorporated in our Building, but talk about “distorted, fantastic forms,” one must quote the words of Petrarch: “The knowledge that has wrestled through to belief is far superior to naive simplicity; be it never so pious, and not one of the fools who have ever entered the kingdom of heaven has as high a place as a man of knowledge who has won the crown of blessedness.”

Such thoughts make us realise that it can never be our principle to combat any religious body and that it is sheer calumny when anyone accuses us of being an enemy of religious Movements. The very fact of such an accusation proves that there is no willingness even to try to understand us. This at least we must know; and we must resist every tendency to adopt an aggressive attitude to any religious community just as we must keep ourselves free from the same kind of attitude to natural science because that will soon disclose its attitude to spiritual science! There is no reason whatever for us to combat any religious body. Combat cannot be begun by us because it does not lie in our nature to attack. And it must be taken as an axiom that if peace is denied us, it is because the hostile neighbour is not inclined for peace. Let the principle of leaving us in peace be put to the test and then see whether peace is maintained! Let it be put to the test! But naturally, we ourselves must be permeated with the right feeling and attitude. For example, much wrong is also done when from our side, too, dogmas or rites of one kind or another are attacked, often without having been understood; but if we rightly understand them, the principle referred to holds good. I would therefore enjoin you to understand the principle of peace. Just as I was obliged to enjoin you to have forbearance with conditions prevailing at the present time, so must I enjoin you to be alert and watchful, in order that we may do what is necessary to guard the holy treasure entrusted to us. For more and more we shall have to wend our way through the world with an unwavering inner strength if we are to stand firmly on the ground where spiritual science would have us stand.

The Mystery of Golgotha and the Christ Principle are intimately connected with the need to see spiritual reality in the world. Mere looking will never suffice even to understand the Mystery of Golgotha purely as an historical event. The Mystery of Golgotha must be comprehended spiritually; and those who devote themselves to knowledge where everything is derived from outside and will not open their eyes to the new revelations of the Mystery of Golgotha which can ever and again flow to us, will not grasp the import of a poem sung by yet another voice in the middle of the 19th century concerning that which—ever changing yet ever present—holds good in earthly humanity since the Mystery of Golgotha. Let me read you a section of this poem which describes how one who cannot grasp the meaning of the Mystery of Golgotha confronts this Mystery:⁴

Here is another example of how a human soul feels impelled to give expression to what has come to pass. And now that we have let these pictures pass through our souls, let me remind you of something that I have already said here: that we must change our mode of perception if we are to look with true vision into the spiritual world. We must not believe that the spiritual world can be seen as we see the material world of sense. We must even accustom ourselves to different modes of expression,—In the physical world we see trees, rivers, mountains. But of spiritual being we must say: they see us, they perceive us. To understand the Mystery of Golgotha truly, it is necessary to know this, because the Mystery of Golgotha can be understood only in the Spiritual. But that is how we aspire to understand it.

The time must come when through a true understanding of the words “Not I, but Christ in me,” it will be possible to rise into the spiritual worlds with the right knowledge. This epic poem “Ahasver” by Julius Mosen was published in the year 1838, and the fact that he was able to put the legend into such a form also indicates that the tragic destiny by which Mosen was overtaken profoundly affected him. He was bedridden nearly all his life, for his physical body was almost totally paralysed; this was precisely what enabled him to grasp such lofty ideas. We are reminded of the sinner in the novel “The Mahaguru” who, when he was already out of his mind, discovered the true nature of his art; and we are reminded, too, of the Count's wife in the Polish drama, who had to fall into a pathological state in order to find the connection with the spiritual world. It is the task of spiritual science today to help human beings to rise into the spiritual world in the healthy, normal state of consciousness.—All these things are signs of the task and of the value to be attached to the task of the spiritual-scientific Movement. Compressed into a few brief words, this is the truth that can inspire us as a source of strength: “The Mystery of Golgotha itself reveals that it must be understood spiritually, that we must seek for Christ as Spirit.” And then we must also say: “Christ is seeing us, Christ is perceiving us.”

We will inscribe this deeply in our hearts, keep it constantly in our minds, and our conscience must be satisfied when, in presenting our spiritual-scientific knowledge, we are saying with inner sincerity: May Christ be a witness of what we promulgate as Spiritual Science. We believe that this may indeed be so—and it can inspire us as men were once inspired by the cry of Bernard of Clairvaux: “It is God's Will!” These words became deeds. May it be the same among us—for we may believe that we understand Christ truly when we live under the inspiration of the words: Christ knows us.—And if you understand it aright, to a soul that sees our spiritual science in the true light, to a heart that feels it in its true light, I can impart no more esoteric saying than this: Christ is seeing us.

May these words live in our souls: “Christ is seeing us”—for so we may believe if we rightly understand spiritual science.—Christ is seeing us.

• 1. Statements to this effect are made in the book “Man: How, Whence and Whither” by Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater. (Theosophical Publishing Company)
• 2. See “The Occult Movement In the 19th Century”—notably Lectures IX and X.
• 3. A newspaper article had been written by a priest living in the vicinity of the Goetheanum.
• 4. Dr. Steiner now read part of the epic poem on Ahasver, or Ahasueris, the Wandering Jew, by Julius Mosen. The Wandering Jew is the legendary figure of a Jerusalem shoemaker who, taunting Christ on the way to the Crucifixion, was told by Him to “go on forever till I return.”—Note by Translator.
  
  In a lecture entitled. “Elemental Beings” (Berlin, 16th May, 1908), Dr. Steiner speaks as follows of the legend of Ahasueris, the Wandering Jew: “An important legend sets before us what a man must experience who descends too deeply into the temporary, transitory nature of the one incarnation. If we think of an extreme case, we can imagine it like this: ‘What is it to me that I should carry over something to later incarnations? I live in this incarnation, I like it, it suits me very well. I am not concerned with what I am supposed to make of it.’ Where does this thought lead? It leads to a man who sits at the wayside when a great Leader of humanity passes by. He, however, rejects the ideas of the Leader of humanity; he repulses him and thinks: ‘I will know nothing of thee, who wouldst guide the kernel of my being into future incarnations where mankind will be outwardly more perfect. I wish to remain united with my present form.’—A man who thrusts from him such a Leader of mankind will appear again in the same form. And if this attitude hardens, then he shall also thrust from him the Leader in the next incarnation. He will appear again and again as the same figure. ... Those who listen to the great Leader of humanity will preserve the soul with its eternal life-kernel. Mankind will have gone forward but they too will appear in an ever-progressive form. He, however, who thrusts the Leader of humanity from him must reappear again and again in the same form. This is the legend of Ahasueris who has thrust from himself the Christ, the Leader of humanity. ...”

Last time I spoke to you here, I spoke about an area of unconscious life, that is, of that life which remains unconscious for the ordinary consciousness of man as he has it today in his earthly existence. I spoke about the character of the life of sleep and tried to describe to you in detail and very specifically what the human soul experiences from falling asleep to waking up. Perhaps you have been able to recognize that these experiences of the human soul between falling asleep and waking up are clear revelations of the eternal, immortal life of the human soul, because you must have seen that what the soul goes through in the state of sleep are experiences from the spiritual world. And you know, of course, that the cognitions of such supersensible experiences can be gained through that which I have often explained to you verbally and which I have set forth in writing in my book How to Know Higher Worlds, in my Occult Science and so forth. You know that what is present as knowledge in the ordinary consciousness of man can be developed into so-called imaginative, inspired and intuitive knowledge. The experiences that the soul has unconsciously in sleep are, as it were, illuminated by the power that the cognizant human soul can acquire when it develops itself upward to imagination, inspiration and intuition. But by the same development it is also possible to fathom to a certain degree that part of man's unconscious experience of which sleep-life is but a reflection, the part from which the human soul emerges when it enters physical earthly existence through birth, or, let us say, conception, and which it enters again when it detaches itself from this physical earthly existence through death. And today I will at least give you a rough outline of some of the things that lie behind the events of birth or conception and death for the soul and spiritual life of man.

If a person first arrives at imaginative knowledge — I will not describe this here, I have often done so, as well as how it can be acquired — the first thing is that his physical life on earth lies spread out before him as a unity, as in a large tableau. In ordinary physical consciousness, a person has his earthly life only as a memory in his soul. What then are memories? They are something that consists of pictures, pictures that through their own inner essence point to the experiences that the person has gone through since birth or since a point in time somewhat later. But they are images that cannot be said to unfold an existence independently of the body, based on the knowledge of ordinary human life as it is today on earth. Today's physical science is absolutely right when it points out to people how these memory images are dependent on the constitution of the physical body. It is right when it points out that this memory is not yet present in the very first years of a person's life, how it develops with the physical organism, and how it also declines again when the physical organism of the person itself approaches its twilight. And it can also be established from certain symptoms of disease, from examinations of the physical organism of sick people after death, how the loss of memory is caused by certain physical organs. Of course, science has not yet come to a conclusion in such matters; but anyone who penetrates the spirit of the relevant physical scientific results can already see through how the time will come when it will be possible to show how ordinary memory images are connected to the physical human organism. But what we have as individual images of memory, as it were, surging up out of the stream of our experiences, when we look back over our lives, is not what is meant when it is said that imaginative knowledge has the earthly life of the human being, in so far as it is a spiritual-soul life, spread out before it in a great tableau. What one surveys in imaginative knowledge is truly not the abstract memory images that ordinary memory preserves. Rather, imaginative knowledge is preceded by an active, organic experience that not only has the passivity of memory images, but also an inner strength, like the growth forces that are active in our organism when we transform the substances of the external world that we take in as food in a – now, it is permissible to say – wonderful way into that which we need to constitute our organism. What lives and works in us, creating and generating, is something different from what is merely in our memory images in a more passive way. Look at the thoughts. They brighten our consciousness; certainly, we owe an infinite debt to the life of thought during our earthly existence. It is only through this that we actually become human and only through these thought images do we become fully aware of our human dignity. But these are fleeting images, bound to the physical human organism, like the flame to the fuel of the candle. That which the imaginative cognizer surveys as the spiritual-soul life that underlies physical earthly existence, that which he surveys as a wonderful, great tableau, is not something passive. It is an inwardly living alive, and one that, although it presents itself to us spiritually and soulfully, we know through direct soul perception just as we know through the eye what a red-colored external object is. And we can say in imaginative knowledge that we not only have thoughts that flash into our consciousness, but that we become truly aware of such forces at work in our organism.

I would even say that it has been taken amiss, as an absurdity, that I once said in my book “The Spiritual Guidance of Man and Humanity” that all the wisdom of the adult human being is not as capable as the wisdom of the young child, which, however, unconsciously in this little child; but look with the most developed, with the most learned human knowledge of the way in which a human brain, how a human whole organism is in the first human years of life, and look at how man actually forms himself inwardly. All the activity of even the most ingenious sculptor is insignificant compared to what is powerfully carried out by the child's inner spiritual soul through plastic activity, as it develops its brain in a plastic way. Only when we consider and understand this can we gain a true insight into the mysterious wisdom at work here, a wisdom that is a forceful one, not just one that is stored in a person's head to enlighten itself about the world, but of a wisdom that contains within itself a spiritual-soul organism of forces that, so to speak, penetrates the child's outer organization hour by hour and only makes it a full human being. Just try to form a fleeting mental image of what is working there, so full of wisdom and magnificent that the human being, with his intellect and intellectual wisdom, cannot possibly keep up with what is working in the child, what must work for many years out of the unconscious , for example, the miracle of human speech. Try to form a picture, albeit an abstract one, of this wisdom-filled work up to the point where the human being becomes conscious enough to be able to use his intellect. Then, I would like to say, this intellect creates an ephemeral wisdom according to that wisdom that first formed man out of the innermost forces of the world. But we must also be clear about the fact that when we develop the human intellectual mind, I would say, in the upper layers of our being, in the lower layers of our human beingness, that which continues to shape our organism in childhood, full of wisdom, as a wonderful sculptor, continues to do so. What lies at the basis as a system, as an organism of forces, is surveyed in a unified tableau by imaginative knowledge. This imaginative insight is not confronted with abstract memory images, which cannot be said to persist when the organism disintegrates into its elements because they are bound to that organism. Rather, this imaginative insight is confronted with the system of forces that builds this organism, that is, is not bound to it, that is bound to the material no more than the creative, ingenious power of the sculptor is bound to it. In order for the material to become what it becomes, the sculptor's formative power must first be applied to it. For the human being to become what he is in his earthly existence as a physical organism, these entirely non-physical, supersensible forces must underlie it as a spiritual-soul organization that governs the human being's physical existence.

This is the first thing we acquire as an insight when we ascend to imaginative knowledge.

But at the same moment that we are able to do so, that is, to see what it is that works in us as a spiritual-soul element during our earthly existence, which is not only independent of the physical organism but actually brings about the shaping of this physical organism itself . At the same moment that we are able to do this, we are also able to disregard our earthly existence, to abstract from it, as we can abstract from a thought in physical life. We must gain this power through those meditation exercises of which I have often spoken to you, not only to be able to refrain from a thought, not only to be able to suppress a thought, but to be able to erase from our consciousness that which we have only just acquired with great effort in our contemplation of the spiritual and soul in our physical existence on earth. But then, when we are in a position, I would say, in a knowing selflessness, in a knowing altruism, to be able to erase from our inner vision what we are spiritually-soulfully during earthly life, then, before our consciousness, our true spiritual-soul eternal appears before our consciousness, then what we were before we descended from spiritual-soul worlds into physical earthly existence appears before our consciousness as a concrete spiritual-soul being. We learn to look at ourselves as spiritual-soul human beings in our pre-earthly existence. And we learn to speak not only in general, abstract terms about this pre-earthly existence, but we learn to look at it in its development, and today I have described some of this development to you.

You see, when we are here on earth, when we speak of ourselves, we feel connected to our physical body; in our waking state we feel connected to this physical body. No matter how dull the feeling of connection with the physical body may be, it is there, and it becomes particularly apparent when something is wrong with this physical body. Then we feel not only the physical body in general in a dull sensation of life, but also its individual parts. We may feel our lungs, our stomach, our heart, our head organs. In ordinary life, all this is immersed in a dull sensation of life; but unless a person is exclusively healthy throughout his or her entire life, there will come a time when he or she has the opportunity to feel his or her individual organs. In short, man feels himself during his waking consciousness between birth and death in earthly life, in that he feels himself in his being, together with his physical body, with all that is enclosed within his skin. But in the moment when man is not connected with his physical life on earth, in those times when he has a spiritual-soul existence before entering his physical earthly existence, he does not feel as his inner self, of course, what his physical body or its limbs are, but he also has an inner self then. I had to hint to you how the soul experiences inner images between falling asleep and waking up, even if it is not conscious of these images. But in the state in which the soul was before it descended from the spiritual-soul existence into the physical earthly existence, it had the consciousness of a different inwardness. This consciousness of a different inwardness is only hidden, only veiled by the fact that in our physical earthly existence our physical body also becomes an organ of knowledge. And it obscures the soul's introspection, which is only present when the soul is free of the body. But what the soul then experiences as its inwardness is now not what is enclosed within the skin of the physical body, but what the organization of the cosmos is. And just as the human being here in this physical earthly existence is connected with his lungs, with his stomach, with his heart, with his other bodily organs, so in the supersensible existence he is connected with what otherwise appears to our eyes, to our other sense organs, as the outer world of the cosmos. What is the outer world for us in our earthly existence is the inner world for us when we are in our extra-earthly existence. And we look down on our earthly existence as on an outer world from the supersensible existence that we spend between death and a new birth. And just as we are, I might say, steeped in our lungs, our heart and so on here, we are embodied before we descend to physical life on earth in that which appears to us in the outer reflection in the planetary movements, in the constellations of the fixed stars, as forces that permeate and interweave the cosmos. That which is the cosmic external world during our earthly existence is our internal world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence.

You must not be misled by the thought that the external world is one for all earthly people with different bodies; it is precisely that which is significant, that we have a common world when we are in extra-terrestrial existence, that the same world that one person has is also the same world that another person has, and that people who are spatially separate from one another here on Earth, in that each is enclosed in his own skin, are then separate from one another through the inner strength of the soul. In the extra-terrestrial existence, everyone is also an individuality; but he is not separated from the other individualities by space, but by the inner strength of his soul, by the cohesive forces within him. But what flows into these cohesive forces is that which corresponds spiritually to the universe, which appears to us in the physical image of the sun, the moon, the planets, the fixed stars.

Just as we here on earth see a person with our outer senses, only the shape of his face, the shine of his eyes, the movements of his limbs, but we become aware that we ourselves are spiritual-soul beings, that in these formations of his face, in the shine of his eyes, in the incarnadine of his skin, in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is of his skin, and in the movements of his limbs, a spiritual-soul element is living itself out. Thus, the person who is able to view the world spiritually and soulfully recognizes that it is not true when it is claimed that the sun and moon, fixed stars and planets, and the movements of the planets are only that which our present-day physical astronomy describes. This description is actually similar to that which someone would give if they only wanted to describe the external movements of a muscle in our face, if they only wanted to describe the movement of the eyelashes, and did not want to see the expression of a spiritual soul in the movements of the facial muscles, in this movement of the eyelids. The one who is able to look at the world spiritually and soulfully sees the physiognomic expression of a cosmic spiritual-soul life in the phenomena of the moon and the sun just as we see the expression of a spiritual-soul life in the human face. In the movements of the planets, he sees expressions of spiritual-soul events, just as one sees in the movements of the limbs of human beings the revelations of spiritual-soul impulses. And in these spiritual-soul backgrounds of what appears to us in the physical image of the outer physical sun, the outer physical moon, the stars and their movements, in this spiritual-soul that corresponds in the cosmos to the spiritual-soul of the individual human being, the human being lives, if he is a supersensible being, before he descends into earthly existence. And just as I can say here as an earthly human being: I have lungs and a heart within me, so as a supermundane human being, before I descend into the sensual-physical existence in order to constitute my physical body, I can say: I have moon and sun within me. However, I must be aware that I do not mean the sensual earthly reflection of the sun and moon, but that which underlies them as spiritual-soul. The entire spiritual world of divinity interweaves and lives in me, in that I am in a supermundane human existence. Only when one sees through this does one get that deep reverence for all real world existence into which man has been woven. For one now sees through the wonderful connections that exist between man and the universe. One learns to look at man as he stands there in his physical earthly existence, and one learns to say to oneself: In that which is enclosed within the walls of the skin, not only what you see with your physical eyes, what the anatomist can look at and unravel on the dissecting table after death, but the ultimate goal of all cosmic activity lives within it. The wonderful saying of ancient religious times, that man is an image of God Himself, takes on a new meaning of infinite intimacy. And inspired knowledge teaches us to look at what man actually experiences in connection with the spiritual-divine powers that underlie the cosmos in his pre-earthly existence.

In scientific terms, when we survey earthly human life, we first speak of the human germ that develops from the mother's body into the physical human form of the growing child. We naturally address the germ as something small that gradually enlarges. In a kind of germ, the human being lives in his pre-earthly existence, only this germ is the experience of the entire spiritual-soul cosmos. In a sense, the human being has become one with the spiritual-soul cosmos; the divine spiritual forces live in him, they are active in him, they permeate him and they develop within him the great spirit germ, which contains within itself the forces that must pass through the spiritual existence until birth or conception, so that they then emerge again when the human being, as the inner sculptor, has to shape his physical organism in earthly life. The formation of the physical organism becomes clear; for this physical organism is the goal of that which the human being experiences in an immeasurably magnificent way in spiritual-soul, fully aware of himself as the cosmic germ of his inner life. The human being receives the physical germ from the physical world; the human being receives the spiritual germ from the spiritual world. And we are, so to speak, in a certain time before we have descended to the physical existence on earth, a huge spiritual-soul human germ that has poured out into the whole world, which then unites with the physical human germ that receives us here when we descend into earthly existence.

We look at our cosmic existence when we look through the inspired knowledge into the pre-earthly existence. Just as we know ourselves as one with our organism here, we know ourselves as one with the whole world through this looking. Here, in this world, the human being looks at the outer revelations of the spiritual in nature and in the human existence; he senses the divine-spiritual behind these physical-sensory revelations. In the pre-earthly existence, he is permeated, imbued and interwoven with this divine-spiritual existence, and this divine-spiritual existence lives itself out in him in such a way that it implants in him those forces that tend towards physical earthly existence. Just as we direct our eyes up to the marvelous starry sky here, so we direct our eyes from our extra-terrestrial existence to the marvelous structure of the physical human being as he lives here in his earthly existence. I would like to say that we look from the earth to heaven in our physical earthly existence, but we look from heaven to earth in our pre-earthly existence. There the earth becomes understandable to us as the work of the gods, as it should actually live in our soul. And all of this is direct experience, initially in the pre-earthly existence.

But after we have gone through this pre-earthly existence, after a certain time something happens: the divine spiritual beings withdraw from us human beings. We do not yet have nature around us, because in this spiritual-soul existence we also have no physical eyes, no physical organs, and so we could not see nature at all. We have around us something that is only like a shining in of the divine-spiritual. That is the great change in the pre-earthly existence, that we first experience an immediate being in, being permeated by and with the divine-spiritual existence, but that then a point in time comes when we look at the spiritual world that surrounds us, which is still a spiritual world, but we have to say to ourselves: before that we lived with the divine spiritual beings, now they show themselves to us through their actions, now their appearance is there. It is a spiritual-soul manifestation that we do not have only in our earthly life, but it is only a revelation of what we ourselves have experienced earlier. We enter from the sphere of experience into the sphere of revelation. And to the same extent that we enter from experience into revelation, we have to say to ourselves: The divine spiritual beings have withdrawn from us human beings for direct experience, we can now only look at them, they are certainly there for us human beings, but only for our spiritual-soul contemplation. In the same moment, in our spiritual-soul pre-earthly existence, that which I can compare to what lives in our physical organism as a desire awakens. Man is inwardly permeated by desire to the extent that the world becomes a revelation before birth. Only now do we actually feel ourselves as a self that is separate from the rest of the world. We move away from an experience that is at once a world experience and an experience of our own human nature. Between death and a new birth, we are not only human beings, we are world beings. World consciousness and human consciousness coincide. Then comes the time when world consciousness and human consciousness part, when we no longer experience the world but it reveals itself to us, when an inner life separate from the world arises in us. In the past, our inner life was one with the world; now an inner life separate from the world arises, and this first announces itself as an inner desire, as a wish, a will. A wish, a want, a desire is always directed at something. This wish and this want and this desire is directed at our future life on earth, to which we will descend after some time. We are filled with the visions of our future life on earth and we absorb those forces, which then become unconscious when we go through the embryonic life on earth. We are conscious there; but consciousness becomes more and more dimmed, and there comes a time when desire grows strong and even the revelation of the divine spiritual world, in which we previously lived and moved, becomes more and more obscured. As spiritual beings in the pre-earthly existence, we feel that we must say: The spiritual world around us becomes increasingly shadowy and shadowy. That which previously still shone brightly as divine revelation becomes increasingly shadowy. As the external world becomes increasingly shadowy, the inner desires become more vehement, the external world darkens within our spiritual existence, the inner world becomes more powerful, but after some time this powerful inner world completely takes away our awareness of future earthly life. For a time, not long before earthly conception, the view of earthly existence darkens. We used to look down on this earthly existence; it was, as it were, the target appearance, that magnificent, mighty world tableau in which we lived. Now our view of the earth is lost to us, but instead another view opens up to us. It is not long before we descend to the earth, but just as we descend, our view of the earth is lost to us and our view of the etheric world opens up. What the ether phenomena are that hold the light, that hold the forces of life, that are spread out in space, but not centrally from the earth up into space, but rather as if from the periphery of the world, pouring in upon the earth, the etheric becomes visible to us. As in a great cosmic fog containing the most diverse formations, an etheric world becomes spiritually visible around us, and from this etheric world we can, with the power that remains to us, with the power of desire, take from the general etheric cosmic fog our own etheric body, can shape it, and by shaping our own etheric form our own etheric body, we form with this etheric body an image of what we used to be in the spiritual-soul world, integrate this etheric body with what is brought to us from the evolution of heredity, what is brought to us by our ancestors in physical substantiality, and we descend to the earthly existence.

I have been able to sketch for you only what arises for imaginative and inspired knowledge when man expands his consciousness beyond ordinary earthly consciousness. In the course of earthly development, man has progressed to the consciousness he has today, which is bound in the narrowest sense to physical corporeality, and has lost an original consciousness. I have often pointed this out. I have pointed out how history actually only describes the external aspects of the earthly life of mankind, how we need a soul history, how this soul history shows us that people have not always had the same state of consciousness as today, when they can only combine with their intellect what the sensory organs perceive, and when they can only bring up what rises from the physical body to consciousness. The further we go back in time to earlier periods of human history, the more we see that people had a kind of original, if dreamlike, clairvoyance. What the human being acquires today in imaginative, inspired knowledge is a fully conscious realization, I would say, as fully conscious as mathematical realization; the people of an earlier time had a dull, dream-like clairvoyance, but it was no less imbued with wisdom. These people of an earlier time not only perceived what today's human being experiences with ordinary consciousness when he looks within, but they also saw something of what I have described to you now. If we go back even further, to the most ancient Egyptian times, and then still further back to still more ancient times, of which there are no records in the form of external history but only in the form of the kind of history I have described in Occult Science, we find men who did not have to acquire the power through such exercises as I have often described to you, but who could speak of this pre-earthly existence because something of this pre-earthly existence lived in their souls during their earthly existence, like a memory. Modern man has bought his freedom by only being able to have a memory in abstract thoughts of the events and experiences that he encounters during his life on earth. Mankind in earlier primeval times did not only have such memories living in the soul, but by looking into this soul, they brought forth, in addition to these memories of this physical life, images from the soul of what I have now told you. Just as one remembers today in the ordinary consciousness what one experienced on earth twenty or thirty years ago, so in a certain sense a person of older epochs remembered what he had experienced in his pre-earthly existence and what I have described to you today from spiritual science. But just as the human being of today is certain, through his memory, that he was not born this morning but was already here before this morning, so the human being of older epochs knew of his pre-earthly existence through what he experienced in his soul. But from this also arose the certainty that what he experienced as such already existed in a spiritual-soul world before he descended to physical earthly existence, that it goes through the passes through the gate of death and is not dependent on the physical organism, that just as it builds up the physical organism for earthly existence, it finds its further existence when the gate of death is passed.

But what goes out of physical earthly existence? What we experience here in physical earthly existence as thoughts is also bound to the physical organism; but what wells up as will in such a wonderful way from within the human being that he can actually grasp his volitional acts only in thoughts, only in images, and can only say: I will raise my hand or arm. But he does not know what happens between these thoughts and between the actual raising of the arm, the whole miracle that lies in between, the tensing of the muscle. All this is in the unconscious, just as the events of the life of sleep itself are for the soul. That which arises as will remains unconscious for the most part, that is, it is reflected only in the life of thought. But he who looks down into this life of will with inspired and intuitive knowledge makes tremendous discoveries within it. Here in our physical existence on earth, which we only view externally, we perform our actions, and a materialistic age could even believe that these actions are exhausted in the physical existence on earth, that they have no further significance.

But he who looks into the true nature of the human will, which remains unconscious to ordinary day-consciousness, sees there how, not out of thinking, but out of willing, to the same extent that man progresses in physical earthly existence, something is formed which is composed of the evaluation of his actions. In our physical existence on earth, we say: an action is good, an action is evil, we are satisfied or dissatisfied with some deed. We can perhaps believe that this is only an abstract judgment that we add to the deed. If we look into the human being's volitional existence with our truly true inspiration and intuition, we see how a real being weaves itself out of what is only a thought here, such as the judgment: I can be satisfied with an action — or: I must be dissatisfied —, inwardly, in accordance with our will, becomes a fact, how a whole being is woven in the depths of our human nature, a being that, if I may express it this way, has a countenance, depending on our actions here in our earthly existence. If we have done bad deeds, which we cannot be satisfied with while fully conscious of our humanity, then an entity with an ugly face develops within us; if we have done deeds that we can be satisfied with, then an entity with a sympathetic face develops. Indeed, the evaluation of our actions becomes an inner being in us, and to the same extent that our thoughts become more and more dependent on the physical organism - in the child they were not yet dependent on the physical organism, they worked on the physical organization, then they became abstract - the same measure in which, I might say, our thoughts become a corpse in our physical organism, for they are not alive, they are dead thoughts. In the same measure, the human being's moral being stirs down there, which he develops during his life. This moral being is there, and this moral being unites with his ego, and this moral being he now carries through the gate of death into the spiritual world. When the human being passes through the gate of death into the spiritual world, he has first laid aside his physical body, as described in my book Theosophy. He is now in his etheric body, and still has a consciousness of his earthly deeds. But this consciousness begins to be permeated by a cosmic world consciousness. That which is the etheric body dissolves into the general world ether; just as it was contracted hard before birth, it now dissolves into the world ether. With the astral body, which you will find in my book called 'Theosophy', the human being gradually reintegrates with the cosmos, but he still lives together with his newly formed moral-spiritual organism; he carries this out with him, and with it he lives out.

And now a task arises for him that is connected with what I already told you the last time I spoke to you about the life of sleep in humans: I explained to you how humans have the strength to re-enter their physical organism during sleep, that they have this strength through what can be described as lunar forces. The lunar forces are what bring the human being back into physical earthly existence, even every morning. Man is initially within this sphere of the lunar forces when he has discarded his physical and etheric bodies. But within these lunar forces he cannot receive the comprehensive world consciousness that I described to you earlier; rather, there the human being still has something that connects him to the earth through this moral earth organism. He must snatch himself from the lunar forces; he must leave behind in the lunar sphere that which he has woven for himself out of his moral actions, out of all that he has done as a moral or immoral act; he must leave that behind in the lunar sphere and must penetrate into the solar sphere, into the world of the stars. Now he must not only penetrate into the image, as I have described it for the state of sleep, but into the real world of sun and stars; he must snatch himself from the lunar sphere.

The clairvoyant consciousness of primitive man also had an experience of this, could speak of these things, which today man can only gain if he develops his spiritual and soul powers. Primitive man could speak of these things through the natural elementary powers with which he was endowed. But primitive man was at the same time always guided, just as man is today guided by science, just as he is guided by the various educational institutions (such as did not exist in ancient times). What human beings could see of the pre-earthly and post-earthly existence was, so to speak, oriented by what the initiates of the mysteries knew through their higher knowledge. And so the members of primitive humanity learned what became an inner experience for some of them, who were knowledgeable in the sense of the word at that time: that man cannot escape the lunar sphere through his own strength after death, that a spiritual being from the cosmos must come to meet him, of which the sun is the external physical reflection. That must come to meet him, that must snatch him from the lunar sphere. He must leave behind what he carries with him from the earth in the form of guilt; he must be led up into the guilt-free sphere of the cosmos by what the ancient initiates called the high being of the sun, which found a wonderful description in all the ancient mysteries. You need, as people said in those days, the power that comes to meet you from the heavens. But man was organized differently in those days. I have already indicated today how differently man was organized in those days. He had clairvoyant powers within him; he knew from inner vision that there is a supersensible world on earth. He had no real fear of death, for what was death? An experience in life. He saw that something within him was independent of death. He had that which was independent in his body, and because he had that in the body, he could see the sun being coming to meet him, he could accept the help after death.

But therein consists the earthly progress of men, that men have lost the natural way of looking at their Eternal. Mankind has acquired an intellectual consciousness that is completely bound to the physical body, that is dependent on the physical body; we have an earthly consciousness depending on the organization of the physical body. This earthly consciousness obscures the spiritual world for us, even before we are born and after we die. For today's man, it is not the same as for prehistoric man or even for man in the older Egyptian times, that he brings a certain light with him through the gate of death and can illuminate the space — if I may express it this way; it is only a figure of speech — of the supersensible world, and can, as it were, hasten towards the high solar being that comes to lead him out of the lunar sphere. Through what he had within him between birth and death, he was able to recognize this high being of the sun.

You see, you need not be offended by the expression; the old initiates, out of their knowledge, had the right to call this being the high being of the sun. But there came a time in the development of mankind when mankind would have lost the possibility of penetrating into those worlds after death, into which it must penetrate if it does not want to lose itself. On the other hand, mankind on earth had to penetrate to that consciousness in which one can only and alone acquire freedom as a human being. As a result, a terrible state would have occurred for mankind at a certain time. The terrible situation that would have arisen for humanity would have been that people would have been cut off from the supersensible world, that precisely because of the perfection they attain here on earth, which predestines them would have been deprived of the supersensible world, because they could no longer find the connection to that spiritual being that would snatch them from that which holds them together with the earth for life after death.

And what has happened to further real progress of mankind? Not an external abstract knowledge, not a theory could help. The only thing that could help was that being, which had previously only lived in the supersensible worlds and came to meet people when they were between death and birth in the supersensible, could only help if the being descended to earth, so that the earthly human being could have a connection with it already on earth. And this descent is the event of Golgotha. The Christ-Being has descended and has assumed an earthly existence in Jesus of Nazareth.

Within his earthly existence, the Meusch gains a connection with the Christ Jesus. What he adds to his earthly consciousness by looking to the Christ Jesus, by feeling with, sympathizing with the mystery of Golgotha, what he instills into his earthly consciousness by not only calling himself an ego that can be free, but by fulfilling Paul's words: “Not I, but the Christ in me,” could he make this word a truth in his earthly life by connecting his ego, which he attains here but which would at the same time cut him off from the supersensible world, by connecting this earthly consciousness with what has entered into earthly existence through the sacrifice of the Christ Being: this is what man carries through death. The ability that used to come to him only through the fact that he had elemental powers within him: since the Mystery of Golgotha, it is the connection of the earthly human being in his consciousness, in his soul life, with Christ, with the Mystery of Golgotha, which secures his life when he passes through the gate of death. For the consciousness that one attains through the physical body would have to be lost with the physical body; one would not find the way through the spiritual worlds. If one finds on earth the Guide, that is to say, the Christ, who has passed through the Mystery of Golgotha, and if one's spiritual powers are linked with those of humanity on earth in the sense of St. Paul's words: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me,” then one will find a living way through the gate of death. Therefore St. Paul's words can be taken in all seriousness: And if the Christ had not come to earth, that is, if He had not conquered death, then all would avail man nothing in his faith.

The old adepts told men: A supermundane Being will take up the thread of your consciousness, which you have here of your entire human nature, and will lead you out of your lunar existence into pure cosmic world existence. The more recently initiated must tell people: Look to what was accomplished by the Christ in the Mystery of Golgotha, take into your consciousness the substantiality of the Christ with all its power! This goes with you through death and leads you towards those worlds which you must pass through between death and a new birth. In the lunar sphere you will leave behind your moral being, only to find it again when you return to the lunar sphere. And in your earthly fate will appear the image of that which you first left behind and then will find again in the lunar sphere.

From what I can tell you now, human science, through the natural human science, only knows through those powers that came to humanity in the last third of the 19th century. In the past, these powers were more or less obscured in humanity. They were still there, but in the form of dreams from the ancient times that I described to you earlier. In the first centuries of Christianity, people did not have what we can achieve today through imagination, inspiration and intuition, but they had a natural, atavistic clairvoyance, and there were still old initiates at the time of the Mystery of Golgotha; they were able to tell their people who trusted them: The Christ, who was in that world, which you remember as the time of your pre-earthly existence, the Christ, who used to be only in extraterrestrial spheres, descended to Earth through the cross of Golgotha. Therefore, in the first four centuries of the development of Christianity in the West, the main focus was on the descended Christ. Everywhere you find descriptions from the first centuries AD (most of the literature has been destroyed) of how the Christ descended from cosmic and spiritual worlds and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. At that time, the greatest value was placed on this descent, on this leaning towards the earth. But when, with the fourth century A.D., the old initiates began to die out and the new science of initiation was not yet there, which could only come with the last third of the 19th century, when these old initiates had died out, then what had previously been a direct vision had to be hardened into the documents. It had to be handed down traditionally; in order to attain the consciousness of freedom, people had to forget the old, initiated science for a time. That is why, the more humanity approached the 19th century, the more was forgotten about how the supermundane Christ-Being descended into earthly existence and took on an earthly existence in the body of Jesus of Nazareth. In the end, people only looked at the historical event, and gradually they lost sight of the Christ in Jesus. We must begin again today to speak of the Christ as a supersensible entity. We must understand what it means for the Christ to keep the human soul alive, for the body has changed in the course of human evolution. Why did the ancients have clairvoyance? Because the body was softer and the glands within the human body were even more active. It is precisely the glandular activity that has approached a hardening, and the more this hardening progresses, the more the human body hardens, the glandular activity becomes a tougher one, that which can serve as a can serve as a hardened human body for intellectualism, which is becoming more and more developed, as the glandular activity in the human body hardens, the human body itself becomes extraordinarily useful for the intellect. But man must acquire the connection with the spiritual world all the more with the soul. The initiates of the early Christian centuries still knew all this, but they expressed it with a courage that is no longer spoken of today. They said that people would have gradually become physically sicker and sicker if Christ had not come and healed them from the soul. Therefore, in the first Christian centuries, Christ was not only revered in our abstraction, but above all revered as the healer, as the great world physician, as the savior.

Today, all these things must be achieved again; they can only be achieved if man can once more look into the secrets of birth and death. The ability to look into these secrets of birth and death can only be acquired through the path of imaginative, inspired and intuitive science. We must gradually receive knowledge of this, for the one who receives knowledge of it also acquires the vision of it in his soul.

This is what I had to say to you today about the connection between man and those worlds that he leaves through birth and reenters through death.

The lecture I am to give today puts me in a difficult position. I want to make some remarks which fall outside the way of thinking now called “scientific”. Since the views of most people are largely formed by the ideas generally current in scientific and popular-scientific circles, and since the subject-matter of this lecture will be far removed from any such ideas, the public at large may be inclined to regard my statements as mere fancies, derived from quite arbitrary cogitations, rather than for what they really are: the outcome of spiritual-scientific research.

I would ask you, therefore, to take this lecture as a sort of episode in our winter series, intended to point in a direction to which I am not likely to return this year, though it may occupy us further next year. The reason for touching on it now, is to show that what we are dealing with this winter as a science of the soul, branches out in many ways that lead from the immediate realm of human soul-life to the great connections we find in the wide universe, the whole cosmos.

Finally, I must ask you to remember that this lecture will deal only with one short chapter from a very large volume. It must be seen in strict relation to its title, “Something about the Moon in the Light of Spiritual Science”. It will not attempt to be in any way exhaustive.

In all sorts of popular books you will find this or that said about the moon from the standpoint of science today. But all you can learn from these sources or from the scientific literature will leave you quite unsatisfied as regards the real questions concerning this strange companion of the earth. As the 19th century advanced, the statements of science with regard to the moon became more and more cautious, but also less frequent; but today they will occupy us hardly at all. The picture of the moon's surface given by telescopes and astronomical photography, the descriptions of its surface-markings as crater-like formations, grooves, plains and valleys and suchlike, and the consequent impressions one can gain of the purely spatial countenance of the moon—all this will not concern us. The question for us today is a truly spiritual-scientific one—whether the moon has any special influence on or significance for human life on earth.

A significance of this kind has been spoken of from various points of view in the course of past centuries. And since everything that happens on earth, year in and year out, is related to the changing position of the earth relative to the sun, and is subject to the vast influence of the sun's light and heat, it was natural to wonder whether that other heavenly luminary, the moon, might not have some importance for life on earth, and especially for human life. In the comparatively recent past, people were inclined to speak of the moon as having a fairly powerful influence on earthly life. Quite apart from the fact that it has long been customary to attribute to the moon's attraction the so-called ebb and flow of the sea, the moon has always been regarded as affecting weather conditions on earth. Moreover, as late as the first half of the 19th century, serious scientists and doctors collated observations of how the moon in its various phases had a definite effect on certain illnesses, and even on the course of human life as a whole. It was then by no means a mere popular superstition to consider the influence of the moon in relation to the ups and downs of fever, of asthma, of goitre and the like; there were still doctors who recorded such cases because they felt compelled to believe that the phases of the moon had some influence on the course of human life and on health and disease in particular.

With the rise of that scientific way of thinking which had its dawn and sunrise in the middle of the 19th century, the inclination to allow the moon any influence on human life diminished continuously. Only the belief that the moon causes the tides of the sea survived. And there was one very important scientist, Schleiden,⁶⁵ who poured out the vials of his wrath on those who still believed in the influence of the moon, even if it were only on the weather or on some other terrestrial phenomena. Schleiden, who had done outstanding work in his own sphere by his discovery of the significance of the plant-cell, launched a vehement attack on another German natural scientist, Gustav Theodor Fechner,⁶⁶ notable especially for directing attention to certain subtle or frontier aspects of research. Thus in his Zend Avesta Fechner tried to show that the life of plants is endowed with soul, while in his Introduction to Aesthetics and his Elements of Psychophysics he achieved a great deal for the more intimate aspects of natural science. It may be better not to discuss this celebrated controversy about the moon without saying a little more about Fechner himself.

Fechner was an investigator who tried, with immense assiduity and great care and precision, to bring together the external facts in various fields of research; but he also used a method of analogies in order to show, for example, that all the phenomena of plant-life, and not only of human life, are ensouled. Starting with the phenomena of human life as it runs its course, he took similar facts and phenomena as they appear to observation in, let us say, the life of the earth, or of a whole solar system, or of the plant-world. When he compared these phenomena with those of human life, he found one analogy after another. Hence he concluded—to put it roughly—that in studying human life, with its ensoulment, we observe the occurrence of certain phenomena; and if in observing other phenomena we can establish certain similarities with human life, why should we not recognise the other phenomena as being also “ensouled”?

Anyone who stands on the ground of Spiritual Science, and is used to examining everything related to the spiritual in as strictly scientific a sense as the natural scientist applies to his studies of external phenomena, will feel that a good deal of what Fechner works out so cleverly is merely an ingenious game; and however stimulating a game of this kind may be, the greatest care must be taken in dealing with mere analogies. When a stimulating thinker such as Fechner employs this method, his work may be very interesting. But there are people of whom it can justly be said that they would like to solve the riddles of the world with as little knowledge and as much comfort as possible. And if they lean on Fechner and make his methods their own, we must remember that an imitator or a copyist does not by any means call forth in us the same feelings of satisfaction as does the man who was first in his own field—a man who we recognise as gifted and stimulating, even though we cannot credit him with anything more.

We have no need to characterise Schleiden any further than by saying that he discovered the significance of the plant-cell. Clearly such a man, who directed all his perceptive and cognitive faculties towards the immediately real—that is, towards what can be perceived with external instruments—will have little sympathy for analogies or with anything else that Fechner spoke of in his endeavours to show that plants are ensouled; for in Schleiden's view they are made up of single cells, and this fact naturally seemed to him, as its discoverer, a wonderful thing. So for Schleiden it was something of an outrage that speculations, with this brilliant model available as a starting-point, should prefer to deal with some even subtler relationships in nature. It was particularly Fechner's method of analogies that aroused Schleiden's wrath, and in this connection he touched on the question of the moon. With reference not only to Fechner but to all those who clung to the centuries-old tradition of attributing to the moon all sorts of influences on the weather, etc., he said that for these people the moon was like a cat in the house, held responsible for everything that cannot be otherwise explained.

Fechner naturally felt challenged as he was the main target of these attacks. He at once embarked on a work which—whether or not we agree with it—is highly stimulating. Although many details in it have since been corrected, Fechner's pamphlet, “Schleiden and the Moon”, published in 1856, is remarkably interesting. He had no need to go into the influence of the moon on the ebb and flow of the tides, for this was admitted even by Schleiden. It was the supposed connection of the moon with weather conditions that made the moon, for him, the cat of scientific research. Fechner therefore set out to investigate the very facts that his opponent brought against him, and from this material he drew some notable conclusions. Anyone who cares to check his procedure will find that in this investigation Fechner was an exceptionally cautious worker with a thoroughly scientific approach. His first conclusion from a mass of facts—which I need not repeat, for anyone can read them for himself—was that the quantity and frequency of rainfall were in many cases shown to be greater with a waxing than with a waning moon: greater when the moon approached the earth, smaller when it receded; and the proportion of rainfall during a waxing moon to that during the wane was 107:100. The recorded observations he used did not cover a few years only; some of them extended over many decades and concerned not a single locality but many parts of Europe.

In order to exclude chance effects, Fechner now assumed that some other condition, excluding the moon, might have produced this proportion of 107:100. He then studied weather conditions on the odd and even dates of the moon's phases, for he said that if the waning and waxing were not the cause, the odd and even days of the month would produce similar results. But that was not the case. Quite different figures emerged: the relationship was not constant but variable, so that here it could be attributed to chance.

Fechner himself realised that he had not achieved any world-shattering result; he had to recognise that the moon had no very great influence on the weather, but the facts did point to some influence. And he had, as you will have seen, proceeded quite scientifically, taking account only of observations carefully recorded for definite places. He made similar researches in relation to fevers and other bodily phenomena, and here too he obtained small positive results. It could hardly be denied that phenomena of this kind may take a different course under the waxing and under the waning moon. Thus the old view of the moon fought its last fight in the middle of the 19th century through the work of this highly gifted man, Fechner.

This example shows very well how wrong it is to accept the increasingly common assertion that science compels us to talk no more about the spiritual background of things, for science—we are assured—is on the verge of learning how to combine simple materials in such a way as to produce living substance. It is agreed that we have far to go before we can make protein from its constituents—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and so on—but the whole tendency of science is to make us admit that one day it will be done. When it has been done, the only tenable outlook—so we are told by those who make these assertions—will be a monistic one which holds that a living, thinking being is made up of nothing but an assembly of material elements.

Anyone who talks in this vein will have drawn on the latest aims and achievements of science to convince himself that we are not justified in postulating something spiritual behind what we perceive with our senses or are told by external science; for happily—he will feel—we are long past the days when it could be claimed that some kind of vague life-wisdom lies behind the sense-perceptible world.

At this point we may well ask. Is it really science that compels us to reject spiritual research? Is that a scientific conclusion? I want to remain entirely on the ground of those who believe that in the not too distant future it will be possible to produce living protein out of simple substances. Is there anything in that which compels us to say that life is materially constituted and that we must not look anywhere for the spirit?

An ordinary historical observation will show how unnecessary this conclusion is. There was a time when it was believed not only that carbon, hydrogen, etc., could be used to produce living protein, but that a whole man could be built up from the necessary ingredients in a retort. The worth of this belief need not concern us—you can read a poetical treatment of it in the second part of Faust. The point is that there were times when people really believed—however crazy it may seem to us—that Homunculus could be put together out of separate components. Yet in those times no-one doubted that behind the sense-perceptible was the spirit. Hence you can prove historically that no “science” can compel us to reject the spirit, for this depends on something quite different—on whether or not a capacity to discern the spirit is there. Neither the science of today nor the science of tomorrow can ever compel us to reject the spirit. We can take a perfectly scientific standpoint, but whether or not we reject the spirit does not depend on science. It depends on whether or not we are able to discern the spirit, and science cannot determine that.

So, without agreeing from the spiritual-scientific point of view either with Schleiden or with Fechner, we can understand that Schleiden, with his eyes fixed on the sense-world, rejected everything that might be sought as soul or spirit behind the phenomena. But it was not on scientific grounds that he took this attitude; he was simply so inured to looking at visible things that he had no sympathy for anything else. Fechner was a quite different sort of man; his outlook embraced the spiritual, and though he made one error after another he was a man of different quality, one who sought the spirit. Hence his tendency was not to reject but to clarify the significance of the subtler influences of the heavenly bodies on one another. He said to himself: When I look at the moon, it is not for me merely the slag-heap it looks like through a telescope; it is ensouled, as are all other bodies. Hence the moon-soul must have effects on the earth-soul, and these come to expression below the surface of ordinary life or in weather phenomena.

Now it is noteworthy, and has often been pointed out here, that the method of spiritual-scientific research is directed towards the practical, and that the best proofs of what it has to say can be found in everyday life. And that is just how Fechner set about defending his views. He suggested that the dispute between Schleiden and himself over the moon could perhaps be best settled by their wives. He said: “We both need rainwater for washing, and it could be collected in relation to weather conditions. Since Schleiden and I live under the same roof and can collect water at definite times, I suggest that my wife collects it during the waxing moon and Schleiden's wife during the wane. I am sure she will agree in order not to put her husband's theory to shame, the more so as she sets no great store by it. The result will be that my wife will have an extra can for every fourteen cans collected by Frau Schleiden, but for the sake of overcoming a preconceived opinion she will surely make this sacrifice.”⁶⁷

Here, then, we have drawn on the history of thought to show how the moon and its influence on the earth were regarded not very long ago. Nowadays one might say that people are more advanced in their scientific outlook—as they would call it—and so have gone a step beyond Schleiden in the sense that they would treat as a superstitious dreamer anyone who clung to the belief that the moon could have anything to do with weather conditions and the like. Even among quite sensible people today you will find no other opinion than that the moon has influence only on the tides; all other opinions having been superseded.

If we take the standpoint of Spiritual Science, we are of course not obliged to swear to everything that was once part of popular belief. That would be to confuse Spiritual Science with superstition. Quite often today we encounter a piece of superstition—which is really a misunderstood popular belief and are told it is part of Spiritual Science. A superstition about the moon can indeed be seen at every street-corner, for it is well known that an emblem of the moon is attached to our barbers' shops—why? Because it was once generally believed that the sharpness of a razor was connected with a waxing moon. In fact there were times when no-one would have cared to shear a sheep during the wane, for he would have believed that the wool would then not grow again. This is a superstition very easy to disprove, for anyone who shaves knows that the beard grows again during the wane. In this realm it is just as easy to mock as it is hard, on the other side, to see clearly. For we are coming now to a particular question where at last we touch on Spiritual Science. It concerns the ebb and flow of the tides, universally regarded as coming under the influence of the moon.

The flood-tide is thought to be obviously connected with the attractive force of the moon, and is looked for when the moon reaches its meridian. When the moon leaves the meridian, the flood is expected to change to ebb. But we need only remark that in many places ebb and flow occur twice, while the moon stands at the meridian only once during the same period. And there are other facts. You can learn from travel-books that in many parts of the earth the flood by no means coincides with the moon's meridian; in some places it occurs up to two and a half hours later. Certainly, science has thought up excuses to account for this: we are told that the flood is retarded. But there are also certain springs which show an indubitable ebb and flow; in some cases the well ebbs when the ocean tide is at flood, and vice versa. We are told that these cases, too, are examples of retarded ebb or flow in some cases so retarded as to run into the other phase. Of course this kind of explanation can explain almost anything.

One question has been rightly asked: whence does the moon get this power to attract the sea? The moon is much smaller than the earth and has only about a seventieth of the earth's attractive power, while to set the great masses of the sea into motion would require millions of horse-power. Julius Robert Mayer⁶⁸ made some interesting calculations on this question and it leads on to numerous other problems. Hence we can say: Here is something which is regarded as scientifically irrefutable, and yet, although no objections to it are heard, it is in fact highly vulnerable.

One very significant fact, however, remains. Although the position and influence of the moon are such that it is hard to speak of an immediate relation of cause and effect, it holds true that a definite flood occurs every day—in relation to the moon's meridian—about fifty minutes later than on the previous day. The regular sequence of ebb and flow does therefore correspond to the course of the moon, and that is the most significant fact of all. Thus we cannot speak of the moon at its meridian as having an actual influence on flow and ebb, but we can say that the course of the moon's orbit does stand in a certain correspondence with the course of the tides.

Now, to go a little way into the spiritual-scientific way of thinking, I would like to refer to a similar fact which gave Goethe a great deal of trouble. Most people know very little about the preoccupations of this great genius of modern times, but anyone who, like myself, has spent many years in the study of Goethe's scientific writings and has seen his manuscripts in the Goethe-Schiller Archives at Weimar, makes some surprising discoveries. He will, for example, come upon the preliminary notes which Goethe later condensed into a few pages as his meteorology.⁶⁹ He pursued these inquiries with enormous diligence and assiduity. Again and again he got his friends to collect facts and figures for him to tabulate. The purpose of these extensive studies was to show that the level of barometric pressure at various places is not due to chance but varies in some quite regular way. And Goethe did in fact assemble a great deal of evidence which indicated that in all sorts of places the rise and fall of the barometer were subject to a law which extended all round the globe. He hoped to disprove the assumption that air pressure depends entirely on external influences. He knew, of course, that densification and rarefaction of the air, resulting in pressure changes, were generally attributed to the moon, sun and other cosmic factors. He wanted to prove that whatever the positions of the constellations, whatever the effects of sun and moon on the atmosphere, a constant regularity in the rise and fall of air pressure prevails all round the globe. Hence he wished to show that in the earth itself lay the causes of the rise and fall of the barometer, for he believed that the earth is not the dead body it is usually taken to be, but is permeated by invisible elements from which all life flows, just as man has, in addition to his physical body, invisible elements which permeate him. And just as man has his in-breathing and out-breathing, where he draws in or releases air, so does the earth, as a living being, breathe in and out. And this in-breathing and out-breathing of the earth, as manifestations of its inner life, are registered externally in the rise and fall of the mercury in the barometer. Thus we have in Goethe a man who was convinced that the earth is a being imbued with soul and which behaves in ways that are comparable to the breathing process in human beings. Moreover, Goethe once said to Eckermann that he regarded the ebb and flow of the tides as a further expression of the inner vitality, the life-process, of the earth.⁷⁰

Goethe was by no means the only great thinker who looked with a spiritual eye on such things from this point of view. Materialistically minded people will of course find all this laughable; but among men who have a feeling for life, be it on such a particular level or more in general, there will always be those with ideas similar to Goethe's—for example, Leonardo da Vinci. In his outstanding book, where he sets out his comprehensive scientific views, the height of achievement for those times, we find him saying—and not meaning it merely as an analogy—that he really regarded the solid rocks as the skeleton of the earth, and that the rivers, streams and watercourses can truly be compared to the blood circulation in man.⁷¹ There you will find it stated also that ebb and flow are connected with a regular rhythm in the inner life of the earth. Kepler, too, spoke in a similar vein when he said that the earth could be regarded in certain respects as a gigantic whale and that ebb and flow were the in-breathing and out-breathing of this huge creature.⁷²

Let us now compare the facts mentioned earlier with such views as Goethe's on ebb and flow. Let us use the findings of Spiritual Science and our previous conclusions about the phases of the moon and the tides in relation, for example, to Goethe's views on the earth's inner life and breathing. For this we must build on the conclusions of Spiritual Science, which can be established only if researches are pursued by spiritual-scientific methods. Here we enter the highly dangerous realm where those who believe they have a firm foothold in modern science, will talk about the fantasies of Spiritual Science. Well, let them talk. It would be better if they were to take what is given as a stimulus; then they would be able to find proofs through a more intimate consideration of life.

In order to approach in the right way what the spiritual scientist has to say, let us consider man himself in relation to the world around him. As far as Spiritual Science is concerned, man has his origins not in the sense-world, but also in the spiritual foundations which lie behind the external physical world. Thus it is only as a being of the senses that man is born, from out of the sense-world. In so far as he is permeated with soul and spirit, he is born from out of the soul and spirit of the cosmos. And it is only when we find the way from man's soul and spirit to the soul and spirit of the cosmos that we are enabled to see something of the connection between the two.

In previous lectures we have discussed various phenomena of the inner soul-life of man. We found the soul to be not merely the nebulous something that it is for modern psychology. Among its members we distinguished, first, what we called the Sentient Soul. In this soul the ego, though dimly and scarcely aware of itself, experiences the impulses of pleasure and pain and everything that comes to it from the outer world through the sentient body. The ego is present within the life of the Sentient Soul, but as yet knows nothing of itself. Then the ego develops further and the soul advances to the stage of the Intellectual Soul or Mind Soul. And when the ego has carried still further its work on the soul, the Intellectual Soul gives rise to the Consciousness Soul. Thus in the structure of the human soul we distinguish three members: Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul.

The ego continues to work on these three members and brings man nearer and nearer to the peak of his developments. But these three members, since they carry out their work through man, have to live in his corporeal structure; in that way only can they accomplish their tasks. The Sentient Soul uses as its instrument the sentient body; the Intellectual Soul uses the etheric body. The Consciousness Soul is the first to use the physical body as bearer and instrument. Thus in man's corporeal structure we have first the physical body, which he has in common with the minerals. Next we have in man a higher part which he has in common with the plant world and everything that lives. The functions of growth, nutrition and reproduction in the plant are active also in man, but in man they are connected with the Intellectual Soul. The plant's etheric body is not permeated by the Intellectual Soul, as is the etheric body in man, just as the physical body is permeated by the Consciousness Soul. That which forms crystals in the mineral realm is permeated in man by the Consciousness Soul. In animals the astral body is the bearer of impulses and emotions; in man the astral body is inwardly deepened and is the bearer of the Sentient Soul. Thus the human soul, made up of Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, dwells in his threefold corporeality, in the sentient body, etheric body and physical body respectively.

That is man's condition while he is awake. During sleep it is different. Then, leaving his physical and etheric bodies behind in bed, he goes out from them with his ego and astral body, together with those parts of his soul which permeate his etheric and physical bodies as Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul. Thus during sleep he lives in a spiritual world which he cannot perceive, simply because here on earth he is obliged to use his physical and etheric bodies as instruments for perceiving the surrounding world. When in sleep he lays these instruments aside, he is unable to perceive the spiritual world, since in ordinary life today he lacks the organs for it.

Now there is something else to say about these states of waking and sleeping. Our waking life is directly connected with the course of the sun—though indeed this is no longer quite true of people today, especially in towns. But if we look at simple country life, where this relation between outer nature and human living still largely prevails, we find that for most of the time people are awake while the sun is up and asleep while the sun is down. This regular alternation of waking and sleeping corresponds to the regular action of sunlight on the earth and all that springs from it. And it is not merely a picturesque way of speaking but deeply true to say that in the morning the sun recalls into the physical body the astral body and ego, together with the Sentient Soul, the Intellectual Soul and the Consciousness Soul; and while he is awake man sees everything around him by means of the sun and its radiance. And when man has once more united all the members of his being in daylight consciousness, it is the sun which summons him to ordinary life. We shall now easily recognise, if we are not taking a superficial view of these things, how the sun regulates the relationship of man to itself and to the earth. Let us now look more closely at three aspects of this relationship.

With regard to his threefold soul-nature, comprising Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, man is inwardly independent; but he is not with regard to their bearers, the astral, etheric and physical bodies. These three sheaths are built up from the outer universe, and in order that they may serve man in his waking life, they are built up through the relationship between sun and earth.

As we have seen, the Sentient Soul lives in its instrument, the sentient body. The sentient body owes its characteristics to the region which a man calls his home. Everyone has a home somewhere, and it matters whether he is born in Europe or America or Australia. For the physical and etheric bodies it makes no direct difference, but it does matter directly for the sentient body. Although man is gradually becoming more free from these effects on his sentient body, we still have to say: human beings whose roots are in their native soil, human beings in whom a feeling for their homeland is particularly strong, who have not yet overcome by strength of soul the power of the physical and are drawn to their place of birth—if such human beings have to move to another region, they are not only apt to become bad-tempered and morose, but may actually fall ill. Sometimes, then, the mere prospect of returning home is enough to restore them to health, for the source of their illness is not in the physical body or in the etheric body but in their sentient body, whose moods, emotions and desires spring directly from the environment of their native land.

Through higher development, which enhances his freedom, man will overcome the influences which bind him to his native soil; but a comprehensive view shows that a man's situation on earth varies in accordance with the relation of the place where he lives to the sun; for the angle at which the sun's rays strike the earth varies from place to place. We can indeed trace in certain instinctive activities, which then become culturally assimilated, that they derive partially from the homeland of the people concerned.

Let us take two examples: the use of iron and the milking of animals for food. We shall find that it is only in certain areas of Europe, Asia and Africa that these two practices developed. In other areas they were unknown in early times. And where they came into use later on, they were introduced by emigrants from Europe. We can trace exactly how throughout Siberia the milking of animals dates from remote antiquity, and extends only as far as the Behring Sea; there is no record of it among the original inhabitants of America. It is similar with iron.

Thus we can see how certain instincts which exist in the sentient body are connected with a particular region where people live, and how they are therefore dependent in the first place on the relation of sun to earth.

A second dependence concerns the etheric body. As the bearer of the Intellectual Soul, the etheric body shows itself to be dependent in its activity on the seasons of the year; hence on the relation of sun to earth expressed in the course of the seasons. A direct proof of this can of course come only through Spiritual Science, but you can convince yourselves by external facts that this statement is correct. For example, it is only in regions where a balanced alternation of seasons occurs that the inner activity of the soul as Intellectual Soul can develop; this means that only in such regions can a necessary bearer or instrument of the Intellectual Soul evolve in the etheric body of man. In the far north we find that when elements of culture are brought in from elsewhere, the soul has great difficulty in struggling with the etheric body, which is having to live under conditions characterised by excessively long winters and short summers. The Intellectual Soul will then find it impossible to forge out of the etheric body an instrument it can easily handle.

If we go to the tropics, we find that the lack of regular seasons produces a kind of apathy. Just as the forces of plant life vary in the course of the year, so do the forces in man's etheric body: they find expression in the joy of spring, the longing for summer, the melancholy of autumn, the desolation of winter. These regular changes are necessary if a proper instrument for the Intellectual Soul is to be created in the human etheric body. Thus we see again how the sun affects human beings through its changing relation to the earth.

Now let us take the physical body. If the Consciousness Soul is to work right into the physical body, we must follow in ordinary life a rhythm similar to the alternation of day and night. Anyone who never slept would soon notice that he was unable to control effectively his thoughts about the world around him. A regular alternation of waking and sleeping builds up our physical body in a way that can provide an instrument for the Consciousness Soul. Thus we have now seen how man's three bodies, astral, etheric and physical, are built up by the sun.

But what external influences play into the human being while he is asleep, while he is living in the spiritual world and has left his physical and etheric bodies behind?

While we are asleep we get something from the spiritual world to replace the forces that have been used up by our activities during the preceding day. Is it possible in this case also to point to an external influence as we did with regard to the daytime waking hours? Yes, it is, and what we find is in remarkable accord with the length of the phases of the moon. I am not maintaining that this external influence coincides exactly with the moon's phases, or that the phases themselves produce corresponding effects, but only that the course of these effects is comparable with the course of the phases of the moon. I will give two examples to show what I mean.

You will be well aware that people who are given to creative thoughts and the free play of imagination are not equally productive at all times. Poets, for example, if they are honest with themselves, have to admit now and then that they are out of tune, unable to write anything. People who observe this in themselves know that the productive periods, for which a certain imaginative frame of mind and a warmth of feeling are necessary, alternate in a remarkable way with periods when nothing can be accomplished. They know, too, that the soul has a fourteen day period of productivity, after which anyone who has to do with creative thinking goes through an empty period, when the soul is like a squeezed out lemon. During this empty period, however, he can apply himself to working over what he has done. If artists and authors would take note of this, they would soon see how true it is.

This alternation of periods is influenced not by daytime conditions, but by the times when the soul and the ego are outside the physical and etheric bodies. And so, for a fourteen-day period, productive forces are, as it were, poured into the human being while he is independent of his physical and etheric bodies, and then, during the next fourteen days, no such forces are poured in. That is the rhythm. It applies to all human beings, but is more clearly evident in the sort of people we have just mentioned.

Much clearer still is the evidence from genuine spiritual research. This is not the kind of research that can be undertaken whenever one chooses, but it is dependent on a rhythmical pattern. This point has hardly ever been mentioned anywhere, but it is so. During spiritual research one is not sleeping—the world-spirit does not bestow its gifts in sleep! The physical body is inactive with regard to the outer world, yet one is not asleep, although the physical and etheric bodies have been left behind; Meditation, concentration and so on have strengthened the researcher's faculties to such a degree that consciousness is not blotted out when it goes forth from the physical body. Sleep does not supervene and the spiritual world can be perceived. For the modern spiritual researcher there are two periods: one of fourteen days when he can make observations: he feels particularly strong and communications from the spiritual world press in on him from all sides. Then comes a period during which he is particularly well able, thanks to the forces just received, to penetrate with his thinking the illuminations, the imaginations and inspirations that have come to him from the spiritual world, to work over them so that they may acquire a strictly scientific form. Inspiration and the technique of thinking follow a rhythmical course. The spiritual researcher does not need to bring about a co-ordination with external facts; he simply sees how these periods occur in alternation, as do full moon and new moon, with their intervening quarters. But it is only their rhythmical course that has a parallel in the alternation of full and new moon. The period of inspiration does not coincide with full moon or the working over period with new moon. All we can say is that a comparison is possible between the two periods and full and new moon. Why should this be so?

When we study our earth, we find that it has evolved out of an earlier state. Just as each one of us has come in soul and spirit from a former incarnation, so has the earth emerged from a former planetary incarnation. But our earth retains relics of events which occurred under earlier conditions during its previous incarnation. And these relics are to be found in the course of the moon round the earth, as we see it today. From a spiritual-scientific point of view the moon is reckoned as part of the earth. For what is it that keeps the moon circling round the earth? It is the earth itself, and here spiritual science and external science are in complete agreement. External science, too, regards the moon as having been split off from the earth, and having gained the force which keeps it in orbit through having once formed part of the earth. Thus the orbiting moon represents simply an earlier condition of the earth. The earth itself has retained in its satellite these earlier conditions because it needs to have them shining into the present. Can we find any reason for this need?

Let us take man himself and observe how he lives as a soul in his body and how he is exposed to the course of the sun. We then must say: For normal consciousness today, everything associated with the sun is restricted to the life between birth and death. This is something you can test—ask yourselves whether what normal consciousness experiences during waking hours, in its threefold dependence on native place, the changing seasons and the alternation of day and night, is not restricted to the life between birth and death. Man would have nothing else in his consciousness, nothing more would illuminate it, if there were only this action of the sun on the earth and only this relation between earth and sun. That which plays over from one incarnation to the next and appears again in a new life, must be sought in the soul-spiritual element which permeates man's outer body and during sleep passes as astral body and ego out of the physical and etheric bodies. At death also it leaves the body, and reappears in a new form at the next incarnation. Here there is a rhythm which directs our attention to a similar rhythm associated with the moon.

If now we consider human evolution, we see that the work of the ego on the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul has developed only on earth under the conditions that prevail between earth and sun. But the earth's relation to the moon reflects a former condition in its own evolution. Man's present phase of evolution, through Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, points to a period during which the bearers of the above soul-members, the astral, etheric and physical bodies, were being prepared. Then, just as the action of the sun is now still necessary for the proper development of these three bearers, the moon forces were at work in preparing them. Today the moon forces were once in harmony with man and prepared him to be what he is today; likewise the earth during its moon condition prepared our present earth. Thus we can say that the lower nature of man, on which are built the Sentient Soul, Intellectual Soul and Consciousness Soul, points back to earlier conditions which the earth has preserved in the orbit of the moon as we see it today.

We can see, too, how man's inner being, as he passes from one incarnation to the next, must have a rhythm corresponding to the moon's. During earlier stages of the earth's evolution, it was not the transitory physical that was associated with the moon, but the inner activity which was working on this physical, just as the external physical is today being worked on by the sun. The earth has preserved in the moon something of its earlier conditions, and so has man in his inner, eternal being. In this inner being he is now evolving those higher qualities which were formerly an external influence and which are now to be developed by his own inner capacities.

An essential point we must emphasise is that man grows out of these external influences. He becomes more independent all the time—e.g. he can sleep by day and stay awake at night. But he still has to order his waking and sleeping in accordance with the rhythm of the sun; he has to maintain the rhythm within himself. In earlier times, inner day and night corresponded closely to the sun's day and night; man was then more closely bound to his native soil. He becomes free and independent precisely by inwardly liberating the rhythm under which he lives; by retaining it as a rhythm, but no longer dependent on the outer world. It is as if we had a clock marked for 24 hours but set in such a way that it does not correspond with external time; e.g., when the clock says it is 12 o'clock, it is not 12 o'clock by the sun. Thus although the clock follows a 24-hour rhythm, the time it shows is its own, not that of the sun.

Thus man frees himself inwardly by making the external rhythm into an inner one. He has long since freed himself from the rhythm which connected his inner being with the moon. Hence we have emphasised that man lives through the phases of the moon inwardly, but these experiences are not caused by the moon in the sky. The course of the moon shows a similar rhythm because man has retained the rhythm inwardly, though outwardly he has made himself free and independent of it.

We are led in this way to regard the earth as a living being, but since it shows us only its physical body, with no evident signs of life or feeling or knowledge, its condition is nearer to that of the moon. Now we can understand why it is wrong, even taking only the external facts, to speak of a direct influence of the moon on the tides, and why we can say only that the ebb and flow of the tides corresponds to the phases of the moon. The tides, as well as the course of the moon are caused by deeper spiritual forces in the living earth.

Thus we see how Spiritual Science helps us to clarify external facts in a wonderful way. The tides correspond to an inner process in the living earth, which produces them and also the orbit of the moon.⁷³ If you take the findings of Spiritual Science and then go through all the books where the phases of moon and earth and tides are recorded, you will understand the true relations between moon and earth and moon and man.

You can easily see that if a man loses his independence and sinks from a fully conscious into a less conscious or unconscious condition, he will regress to earlier stages of evolution. Man advanced from unconsciousness to his present state of consciousness, from his earlier dependence on the moon and its influence to his present independence from the moon and his dependence on the sun.

Because man was once directly dependent on the moon, it follows that if his consciousness is damped down, its functioning will be ordered by the course of the moon. This is an atavistic effect which brings out man's old connection with the moon's phases. A characteristic of mediums is that their consciousness is so far lowered that they revert to an earlier stage of evolution, and the old influence of the moon makes itself felt in them. It is similar in certain cases of illness where the consciousness is lowered. If you bear in mind the principles of Spiritual Science, you will be well able to understand these phenomena. The evidence for what Spiritual Science has to say can be found in all aspects of life.

One thing more. When someone is to be born again on earth after his sojourn in the spiritual world between death and a new birth, then, during the embryonic period, he passes through conditions which recall an earlier state of the earth. The embryonic period is still reckoned by science as covering ten lunar months; thus we have here a rhythm which runs its course through ten successive moon periods. We find also that each week in the ten-month period—that is, each phase of the moon—corresponds to a particular condition in the development of the embryo. Here, too, man has retained in himself the moon rhythm, as we may call it.

We could indeed mention a whole series of other phenomena connected with man's embryonic existence, before he emerges from the depths of nature into the light of day; they are of course not caused by the moon and do not coincide with the moon's phases but reflect the same rhythm, because they go back to primary causes which were present while the earth was passing through earlier conditions of existence.

Now I have thrown light on a subject which cannot be further illuminated in public. Thoughtful people will see that here a perspective is opened up into realms of life where Spiritual Science can indeed point the way to a great clarification of much in man that is hidden from external sunlight, that lies behind it. They are realms which have to be explored by a light different from the light of knowledge we have acquired through the light of the sun; namely by faculties which are not dependent on the service rendered by the sentient, etheric and physical bodies under the influence of the sun. A clairvoyant faculty makes itself independent of these three bodies; it can sink itself in inwardness and see into the spiritual world, and thus can open up a capacity for knowledge of what lies behind external sunlight and yet is full of light and clarity. But I must again emphasise that on the question of the moon an even more intimate light is needed if we are to get to the heart of it.

In conclusion, I am reminded of some verses by the German lyrical poet Wilhelm Muller: we are here concerned only with the last stanza. The moon is addressed and all sorts of intimate words pass between man and moon; and then, because the soul has spoken to the moon in a wonderful way:

This little song, an evening round,
A wanderer sings in full moonshine;
Those who read it by candlelight
Will always fail to get it right,
Childishly simple though it is.⁷⁴

That is rather how we should take what Spiritual Science has to say, as shown in our treatment of the moon and its significance for human life. The song of Spiritual Science about the moon can indeed be sung only if we have some understanding of the more intimate ideas of Spiritual Science. People who try to read the song by candlelight, by which I mean the telescope, and employ photographs of the moon, for so-called research—these people will hardly understand our song. But those who are ready to go even a little way into what life can tell us in all its aspects will say to themselves: It is really not so difficult! Anyone who seeks to understand the song that Spiritual Science sings about the moon—not by the candlelight of the telescope, but by the living light of the spirit, which shines even when all sense-impressions are absent—he will find that this song about the moon, and therefore about an important aspect of life, is truly quite easy, even if not childishly easy!

• 65. Matthias Jakob Schleiden, 1804–1881, Professor of Botany at the University of Jena.
• 66. Gustav Theodor Fechner, 1801–1887, Professor of Physics at the University of Leipzig. See The Riddles of Philosophy, 1973 edition, pp. 279, 375ff., 376, 380, 383. Published by Anthroposophic Press, New York.
• 67. G. Th. Fechner, Professor Schleiden und der Mond, Leipzig, 1856, p.1 56.
• 68. Julius Robert Mayer, 1814–1878, doctor and physicist, discovered the law of conservation of energy in 1842.
• 69. Goethes Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, as note 27, vol. 11, book 3, Meteorology, pp.323–398.
• 70. Johann Peter Eckermann, Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of his Life, conversation of 11th April 1827.
• 71. Leonardo da Vinci, der Denker, Forscher und Poet, from the published manuscripts; selection, translation and introduction by Marie Herzfeld (Jena, 1906), p.61 and following chapters.
• 72. Johannes Kepler, 1571–1630. Cf. for example in Harmonices Mundi book IV, chapter 7.
• 73. The correspondence between the moon's orbit and the tides can be led back to a joint cause, but the former does not cause the latter, just as the hand moving round the clock corresponds to the path of the sun, although no-one would suggest that the sun caused the clock-hand to move round.
• 74. Wilhelm Müller, 1794–1827, known for the cycles of poems “Die Winterreise” and “Die schöne Müllerin” which were set to music by Franz Schubert. This poem is the last verse from “Mondlied”, from Liederder Griechen, 2nd edition, Leipzig, 1844.

The Spiritual Science Movement has often, since its inception, been confused with various other tendencies in existence at the present time. It has been accused, in particular, of desiring to implant one or another of the Oriental spiritual influences—for example the Buddhistic—into western culture. For this reason, the subject of to-day's lecture should have a special interest for spiritual research, for it will present certain observations concerning the respective significance of Buddhism and Christianity from the standpoint of Spiritual Science.

Anyone who has made himself in some degree acquainted with the nature of Buddhism, will be aware how its Founder, Gautama Buddha, evaded all questions concerning the evolution of the world, and the foundations of human existence. He would not speak of these. He would speak only of the means by which mankind could enter into a form of existence that was satisfying in itself. Therefore, one cannot, to begin with, regard Spiritual Science, which never avoids these questions concerning the source and origin of existence and the great facts of evolution, as being similar to Buddhism. But since it is the case that a certain trend of thought which exists within this sphere of Spiritual Science, is being more and more identified with Buddhism, namely, the conception of repeated lives on earth for the whole of humanity, and also the conception concerning that which passes onward from life to life as spiritual cause and effect,—one may as well say at once that it is really astonishing that this idea of Reincarnation should be designated as ‘Buddhism.’

The function of Anthroposophy, or of Spiritual Science is not to acknowledge allegiance to any particular name, but only to what is capable of investigation as a Truth, unconnected in our day with any names whatsoever. The fact that the teaching of Reincarnation, or repeated lives on earth, is also to be found in the teaching of Gautama Buddha, although in an entirely different form, is analogous, where present day Spiritual Science is concerned, to the fact that elementary geometry is also to be found in Euclid; and just as little as it is justifiable to accuse every teacher of geometry of perpetrating ‘Euclidism,’ so is it equally unjustifiable to accuse Spiritual Science, when it makes the teaching of Reincarnation its own, of being ‘Buddhism’ just because similar concepts were also taught by Buddha.

Nevertheless, it is necessary to point out that Spiritual Science is the instrument which we must use in order to penetrate into and to test the source of every religion, whether it be the religion which is at the foundation of the whole of our European culture—Christianity, or whether it be Buddhism.

If we would now, in the sense of Spiritual Science, enter thoughtfully and deeply into the spirit of Buddhism, so as to be able to compare it with the spirit of Christianity, we shall do better if we do not at once turn to the great doctrines—which can so easily be interpreted in different ways—but rather try to construct a picture of the immense significance and far-reaching results of Buddhism from various symptomatic facts which concern its whole disposition and presentment. This can best be done if we consider first of all a Buddhist scripture which is held in high esteem; and that is the questions which were put by King Milinda to the sage Nagasena.

Here we are given a conversation which draws out the very spirit of the whole trend of Buddhistic thinking. The powerful, spiritually-minded King Milinda desires to question Nagasena, the sage. The King, who has never been at a loss in the presence of any sage because he always knew how to evade anything that was said in opposition to his own ideas, comes to Nagasena to speak with him about the meaning of the ‘Eternal,’—the meaning of the immortal part of human nature which passes onwards from incarnation to incarnation.

Nagasena asks the King:—‘How dids't thou come hither? on foot, or in a carriage?’ ‘In a carriage.’ ‘Well,’ said Nagasena, ‘let us now consider what a carriage, is. Are the shafts the carriage? No. Is the seat you sat upon the carriage? No. Are the wheels the carriage? No. Is the yoke the carriage? No. And thus,’ said Nagasena, ‘one can enumerate all the parts of the carriage, but all the parts are not the carriage. And yet, all that is there enumerated is the carriage, only the carriage consists of all the parts put together; it is no more than a name for that of which all the parts make one whole. If we consider it apart from its separate constituents, it is nothing but a name!’

The sense—and the object—of what Nagasena said is this: that one must turn one's gaze away from everything that the eye can behold in the physical world. Nagasena wished to point out that actually nothing exists in the physical world which in itself constitutes what is collectively designated by a name, in order that he may thus reveal the worthlessness and meaninglessness of all the physical-material constituents of things. And, so as to make his use of this example clear, Nagasena says: ‘It is thus also with all that constitutes Man, and which passes onward from one earth-life to another. Are the hands, and the legs, and the head that which goes from life to life? No! What thou doest to-day, what thou doest tomorrow, is it these things which go from life to life? No! What is it then, which collectively is Man? It is Name and Form. But then, it is even so with the name and form of a wagon. If we gather the different parts together, we have only a Name. There is nothing there in particular except the parts!’

So that we may observe this still better, there is yet another analogy which the sage Nagasena showed to King Milinda. The King said:—‘Thou sayest, O wise Nagasena, that of that which stands before me as Man, Name and Form pass from life to life. Is it then the Name and Form of the self-same Being that appears again in a new embodiment upon the earth?’

And Nagasena replied: ‘See now,—the mango-tree bears a fruit. A thief comes and steals the fruit. The owner of the mango-tree says: “Thou hast robbed me of my fruit,” but the thief answers: “It is not thy fruit. Thy fruit was that which thou didst plant in the ground! it has transformed itself. That which was growing upon the mango-tree simply bears the same name—it is not thy fruit!”’ And then Nagasena continued: ‘It is true that it bears the same name and form; but it is not the same fruit. Still, one can punish the thief in spite of that! And so,’ said the sage, ‘it is even thus with what reappears in a later life on earth in relation to what was there in earlier lives. It is like the fruit of the mango-tree which was planted in the earth. But only because the owner had first planted the fruit in the earth was it possible for a fruit to grow upon a tree. Therefore we must say that the fruit belongs to him who buried the first fruit in the earth. Thus it is with man; his deeds and his destiny are the fruit and the effects of his earlier lives. But what appears is new, as the fruit of the mango-tree is new.’

So Nagasena showed how what is once there in any one earth-life strives to reappear transformed, as effects, in later lives.

It is easier to gain a sensitiveness towards the whole spirit of Buddhistic teaching by such examples as this, than by a study of the main principles, for the latter can be interpreted in various ways. If we let the spirit of these analogies work upon us, we see clearly enough that the Buddhist desires to wean his adherents from the idea of what may be regarded as the separate individuality, the definite personality, and to point out above all things, that that which reappears in a new embodiment, is—it is true—the result of this personality, but that one has no right to speak of an uninterrupted ‘I,’ in the true sense of the word, as extending from one incarnation to another.

Now if we turn from Buddhism to Christianity, we can—though such a comparison has never been selected before—use this instance of Nagasena in the Christian sense, and represent it somewhat as follows.

Suppose we imagine that King Milinda and the Sage are reborn, and that the conversation takes place now. Were it fully dominated by the spirit of Christianity it would necessarily have to proceed as follows. Nagasena would say:—‘Behold the hand! Is this hand a man? No, the hand is not the man. For if there were only a hand, there would be no man. But if you cut the hand off a man's body, it dries up, and in three weeks' time there would be no hand left. Whence then is a hand a hand? By reason of a man! Is the head a man? No! Is the heart anything by itself? No! Because if we remove the heart from a man in a very short time it ceases to be a heart, and the man ceases to be a man. Therefore the heart is a heart by reason of the man; the man is a man by reason of his heart. And moreover, man is only man upon the earth because he possesses the heart as an instrument. So the living organism has parts, which in themselves are nothing, but are only something by reason of their co-existence within us. And when we consider what the separate parts are not, we find we have to fall back upon something which is invisible behind them, which rules them, holds them together and uses them as its instruments. And even when we behold all the separate parts together, still we have not found the Man himself, if we only look for him as the sum of the separate parts.’

And then Nagasena could look back upon the old analogy of the carriage, and could now say, speaking of course, out of the spirit of Christianity:—‘True it is that the shafts are not the carriage, for with the shafts alone thou coulds't not be conveyed. True it is that the wheels are not the carriage, for the wheels could not carry thee. True it is that the yoke is not the carriage, for the yoke could not carry thee. True it is that the seat is not the carriage, for that also could not carry thee! Though it is true that the carriage is only a name for the assembled parts, yet thou art not conveyed by the parts, but thou art conveyed by something that is not the parts, for by their means thou canst not travel.’

But by the ‘Name’ something particular is denoted. And thus we are led to something which is non-existent in any of the parts!

Hence arises the striving of the Buddhistic spirit away, so to speak, from what is perceived, in order to surmount it and to deny the possibility that anything particular attaches to what is seen. The spirit which imbues the Christian way of thinking—and this it is that concerns us—perceives the separate parts of a carriage, or of any other object, in such a way that the tendency is to turn from the parts to a recognition of the whole. And because of this difference between the Buddhistic and the Christian conception of things, remarkable consequences arise out of each of them.

Out of the Buddhistic, and this is the conclusion we are naturally led to from the foregoing indications, the following arises:—

A man stands before us. He is constructed out of several parts. This man busies himself in the world, and performs various actions. And while he appears thus before us, his Buddhistic attitude of thought causes him to feel the worthlessness and unreality of everything around him. But he is led to free himself from his attachment to nothingness, so that he may rise to a higher existence in reality; to turn away from all that his eyes behold, and from everything that he can gain. by means of all possible human knowledge. Away from this world of the sense-perceptions! For everything that it offers, when it is conceived only as Name and Form, reveals itself in all its emptiness! There is no truth in anything belonging to the physical world!

Now whither does the Christian conception lead us? It does not regard the separate parts as separate, but regards them in such a way that one indivisible unity and reality is perceived ruling among them. It regards the hand in such a way that it is seen to be a hand only because a man, using it as a hand, makes it a hand. Therefore here is something (a man) which as it stands before us, immediately and inevitably suggests that which stands behind it.

Hence, something quite different from the Buddhistic arises from this way of thinking, so that we can say as follows:—‘Here stands a man. That which he is by reason of his different parts, and by means of his acts, can only be, because behind it all there stands, as Man, a Spiritual Being, who not only brings the parts into movement, but performs all the separate acts. That which is revealed in the separate parts, and lives itself out in them, has poured itself into all that is visible of the man; it is that which, within what is seen, will reap the fruits of actions and be able to draw out of the world of the senses something that we may call an ‘event’ and carry it onward into a later incarnation upon earth. There—behind the external appearance—stands the Doer—a Doer who does not spurn the outer world, but so handles it that its fruits are taken up and carried into a future life.’

When we, as knowers of Spiritual Science, consider Reincarnation from the Buddhistic standpoint, we must express it thus:—that that of which man is the unified expression in his earth-life, has no value, for his deeds alone have their effects in the following incarnation; while in the light of Christianity, that which makes man a unity in his earthly life is the fullness of his Ego. That has value; and that it is which carries the fruits of one incarnation onward into the next.

Thus we can see that a certain quite definite configuration of thought, which is far more important than theories and principles, cleaves these two great world-conceptions most powerfully asunder. If we were less prone in these days to depend so much upon theories, we should find that we could far more easily arrive at an understanding of the main characteristics of various spiritual tendencies by turning our attention especially to their symptoms, to their methods of presentation. And that holds good both for the Buddhistic and the Christian conceptions. In the conversation described we have the very core of the Buddhistic conception as expressed by the great Founder of Buddhism himself. The theme of the present lecture is certainly not intended to develop a line of opposition against the Founder of the Buddhistic world-conception, but rather to portray his world-conception quite objectively and in, accordance with its true characteristics.

The Buddha-legend describes clearly enough, even though in pictorial fashion, what the Founder of Buddhism intended. We are told that Gautama Buddha was born the son of King Suddhodana, and that he was brought up in a royal palace where he was surrounded by everything that could possibly serve to ennoble human life. During his early years he was not allowed to know anything at all of human sorrow and pain, but he lived in the midst of happiness, and joy, and distractions of all kinds. Then we are told how one day, when he was twenty-nine years of age, he left the palace, and for the first time in his life was confronted by sorrow and pain and all the dark shadows of existence. It is described how he met an old, old man whose life was ebbing away, and above all how he saw a corpse. And it dawned upon him that life must after all be utterly different from all that he had experienced in the palace, where he had known nothing but joy, where disease and death had never come near him, and where he had learned to believe that life could never ebb away nor cease. And now he discovered that life embraced both pain and sorrow. Heavily indeed, did this discovery weigh upon the great soul of Buddha! Life contained pain, sorrow and death. He had seen it for himself in the sick man, the aged man, and the corpse. ‘What is the value of life?’ he cried to himself, ‘if it bears sickness, old age, and death within it!’ And out of that cry there arose at last the monumental teaching of Buddha on the Sorrow of Life, which he gathered together in these words: ‘Birth is sorrow! Old age is sorrow! Sickness is sorrow! Death is sorrow! All existence is filled with sorrow!’ And as he later elaborated this theme still further:—‘That we cannot always be united with those we love, that is sorrow. That we must be joined to that which we love not, is sorrow. That we cannot obtain, in every circumstance of life, what we desire, is sorrow.’

Sorrow is everywhere, no matter whither we turn our gaze. And if Buddha's use of the word ‘sorrow’ has not quite the meaning that is imparted to it to-day, still it is intended to express that man is everywhere, and at all times, a prey to everything that comes against him, that assaults him from without, and that he is unable to unfold any active forces to meet it. ‘Life is sorrow,’ said Buddha, ‘therefore we must seek the causes of sorrow.’

There then arose before his soul the picture of what he called ‘the thirst for existence.’ Since we look out upon the world and see that sorrow is everywhere, we are compelled to say: Man is bound to have sorrow if he enters into this world of sorrow; but what is the cause of his suffering? The cause is this: that he desires, that he thirsts to be incarnated in this world. The passionate longing to forsake the Spiritual World and enter into a physical body, and in it to become aware of the outer material world—that is the cause of this sorrow-filled human existence. Hence there is only one way to escape from sorrow, and that is by conquering the thirst for life. And this thirst for existence can actually be overcome when, according to the teaching of Buddha, men can learn to unfold within themselves the so-called ‘Eight-fold Path,’ which, so it is generally said, consists of right judgment, right discrimination, right speech, right deed, right living, right aspiration, right thinking, right contemplation.

Thus through the right attitude towards life, according to the great Buddha, there arises by degrees within men's souls something which destroys the passionate longing for existence, something which brings them so far that at last they are no longer compelled to descend into physical incarnation, but are liberated from an existence which is overwhelmed by sorrow.

These things, according to Buddha, constitute the Four Noble Truths: viz., the knowledge of sorrow; the knowledge of the causes of sorrow; the knowledge of the necessity for liberation from sorrow; and, lastly, the knowledge of the means of liberation from sorrow.

These are the Four Holy Truths which Buddha, after his enlightenment under the Bodhi-tree, gave out in the great sermon at Benares, about the fifth or sixth century before Christ.

Liberation from the pain of existence! That is what stands in the forefront of Buddhism, and it is that which makes it possible to describe the religion of Buddha as a ‘religion of redemption’ in the highest sense of the words; a religion of redemption from suffering; and since all existence is bound up with suffering, a redemption above all, from the continuance of rebirth. That is entirely in accordance with the type of the presentation of Buddhism which is embodied in the Nagasena conversations. For in the moment that human thinking, which embraces the outer world of the senses, beholds its worthlessness, when that which is a mere gathering together of parts possesses for the thinker only Name and Form; when nothing passes from incarnation to incarnation save the results of existence, then it must be said that ‘true’ existence is only attained when man is able to overcome and transcend everything that is to be found in the external world of the senses.

Now it is not correct—and this can be perceived even by the simplest method of observation—to say that Christianity is a ‘religion of redemption’ in the same sense as Buddhism. If we place Christianity in its correct relation to Buddhism, we can speak of it as a ‘religion of re-birth.’ For Christianity proceeds from the knowledge that everything which in its totality represents man in a single life, is fruitful, and these fruits have importance and value for the innermost being of man, and are carried over by him into a new life and brought, in that life, to a higher state of perfection than in the previous one. Everything that we experience and absorb in a single life always appears again and grows ever more and more perfect until it is revealed at last in its true spiritual form. What is apparently worthless in our existence, when it is taken hold of by the spiritual, has its resurrection in a degree more perfect than before ; is spiritually embodied. Nothing in existence is worthless, because it rises again if the spirit has entered into it rightly.

The thought-content of Christianity is a religion of re-birth, a religion of the resurrection of the Best that we have experienced; a religion wherein no single thing that is round about us is a ‘nothingness,’ but wherein all things are building stones for the completion of a great edifice that is to arise through the gathering together of everything spiritual from out of the world of the senses.

Buddhism is a religion of liberation from existence; while Christianity is the opposite, a religion of Rebirth upon a more spiritual level. This is revealed in the least as well as in the greatest of the forms of its presentation, no less than in its fundamental principles. And if we look for the actual reasons of this difference between the two religions, we can say that they arise out of the entirely opposite nature of the character of oriental and western culture.

There is a very radical difference between the method of presenting things that spring from the culture that gave birth to Buddhism, and the method that springs from that culture into which Christianity poured itself. It is possible to describe this difference quite simply. It lies in the fact that all true oriental culture, which has not been fertilised by the West, is non-historical; whereas western culture is historical. That is the ultimate root of the difference between the Christian and the Buddhistic conceptions. The Christian conception recognises that not only are there repeated lives on earth, but that history rules in them; that is to say, that what to begin with, can be experienced at a higher and more perfect stage, can continue to become more and more perfect throughout the course of the succeeding incarnations.

Where Buddhism sees the liberation from earth-existence in the ascent to Nirvana, Christianity sees, as the goal of its evolution, that everything engendered, everything achieved, in each single earth-life, ascends to ever higher and higher degrees of perfection until, spiritualised and transfigured, it consummates its resurrection at the end of the world.

Buddhism is non-historical, precisely in accordance with the character of its cultural origin. It is non-historical for the simple reason that it merely places the external world in opposition to mankind, who acts within it. The Buddhist says:—‘We look back at past incarnations, or forward to future ones, but we stand opposed to the outer world!’ He does not ask: ‘Is it possible that man, in earlier days, was differently placed as regards the world? or may be perhaps differently placed in the future?’ Christianity does ask that question. But the Buddhist arrives at the conception that the relationship of man to the world in which he is incarnated is an unchanging one; that driven as he is by the thirst for existence into a physical embodiment, he enters a world of sorrow no matter whether he had been compelled to an embodiment in the past, or whether he is so compelled in the present. Always it is sorrow that the world brings to him. Thus the incarnations succeed each other, and there is no idea of evolution being brought under its true aspect as an historical conception. Thus the conception is clear that fundamentally the Buddhist finds his Nirvana, his state of bliss, solely in the relinquishing of repeated lives on earth; and thus also he sees that the source of misery itself is the external world. He says: ‘It is inevitable that if thou abandonest thyself to the physical world, suffering must be thy lot; for suffering comes from thence.’

That is not Christian. The Christian conception is through and through an historical, sequential one. It does not concern itself with the non-historical relationship of opposition to the physical world. But it says:—‘As man passes from incarnation to incarnation he is indeed placed in opposition to a physical world. But if this world brings him sorrow, if it offers him what does not satisfy him, what does not fill him with an inwardly harmonious life, that does not arise from the fact that earthly existence as a whole is such that suffering is inevitable, but it comes because man himself has brought with him a false relation to the external world, and does not place himself rightly within it.’

Christianity, and the Old Testament also, point to a definite occurrence whereby Man evolved something within himself that causes him, through his inner life, to make the world his source of sorrow. Hence it is not the external world in which we are ‘made flesh,’ not that which enters through our eyes, and echoes in our ears which brings us sorrow; it is that which the human race once unfolded within itself which placed it in a wrong relation to this external world. And this was an inheritance which passed from age to age, so that mankind to-day still suffers pain. Thus Christianity points out that this state of things arose when humanity itself was at the beginning of its earthly existence. We can enlarge upon these two aspects of the foundations of both religions. Buddhism for ever emphasises that the ‘world is Maya, is Illusion!’ Christianity asserts: ‘It is true that, to begin with, what man beholds of the world is illusion; but that arises from man himself, who has so formed his organs of perception that his vision cannot penetrate to the Spiritual World. The outer world is not the illusion, but the human outlook is the source of the illusion.’ Buddhism says: ‘Gaze upon all the events that surround you! They are illusion. Behold what flashes in the lightning, it is illusion I What roars as thunder—it is Maya, it is the Great Deception!’ ‘Not so,’ would the Christian spirit reply: ‘But until now the human race has not found it possible to open—(in Goethe's words)—the “spiritual eyes and ears,” for these would reveal the outer world in its true form!’

No; it is not that we are surrounded by Maya, but that man is so imperfect a being that he cannot perceive the true form of the world. And so Christianity seeks, in pre-historic ages, the event that made the human heart become incapable of creating the true conception of the physical world. Therefore, through many incarnations of development, we have—in the Christian sense—to re-attain the state of spiritual sight and hearing before the true form of the outer world can be perceived. Repeated incarnations are, therefore, not meaningless, but they are the way towards the perception, in the light of the Spirit, of that from which the Buddhist would escape: i.e. the way to the finding of the spiritual within the physical. To overcome this world, which appears to us now as a physical one, to overcome it with something which man does not yet possess, but which he can attain as a spiritual reality; to overcome human Error which sees the world as Maya—that is the inner impulse of Christianity.

And so the Teacher of Christianity is not One Who says: ‘The world is the well-spring of sorrow! Escape from it to another that is utterly different—attain Nirvana!’ But Christianity sets before us as the mighty Impulse for the forward evolution of the earth, the Christ, Who pointed, in the strongest possible way, to the inner being of man, where from he could unfold the power to use every incarnation that he has upon earth in such a way that he can carry the fruits of it forward to his future incarnations through his own strength. Not to bring the course of his incarnations to a close and enter Nirvana, but to use all he can of them, to work further upon their results, so that he can spiritually experience Resurrection.

There we have the great distinction which makes Buddhism on the one hand a non-historical, and Christianity on the other hand, an historical conception. The Christian idea seeks in the ‘fall’ the origin and source of man's pain and sorrow; and in a ‘resurrection’ the healing of them. ‘You will not be freed from pain and sorrow by departing from earth-existence; but you will be set free when you correct the Error which gives you a false relation to the world. The source of sorrow is in yourselves! If you perceive aright, you will know that the outer world indeed and in truth melts away like mist in the sun, but all the deeds that you have done in the world, all your experiences, it will bring to a resurrection in the Spirit!’ This is Christianity as a ‘religion of Re-birth,’ a religion of Resurrection. And only thus can it be placed beside Buddhism. That is to say, only in the sense of spiritual-scientific thought can these two be compared, and their deepest impulses understood.

What has been indicated here can be verified in the minutest particulars. For instance, one can find in Buddhism something like the Sermon on the Mount. He that hears the Law—i.e. what Buddhism communicates as the Law—is blessed. He that can live with all creatures and does no evil towards them, is blessed. We can regard the Buddhistic beatitudes side by side with the Sermon on the Mount as it is given in the Matthew Gospel; but we must understand them aright. Let us compare them for a moment with what we find in St. Matthew. First we hear the mighty words: ‘Blessed are the poor in Spirit,¹ for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ Here it is not only said ‘blessed are those who hear the Law,’ but another sentence is added: It is said, ‘Blessed are they who are poor in the Spirit, so that they must beg for the Spirit,—for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ What does that mean?

Now one can only correctly understand such a sentence when one brings the whole of the historically conceived teaching of Christianity before the mind's eye, and then one recognises that all human soul-capacities have passed through a ‘history,’—that they have all evolved. Spiritual Science clearly and truly understands the word ‘evolution’ in the sense that what is present to-day, was not always present. It tells us that what we possess to-day as our reason, our scientific thought, was not in existence in primeval times; but instead, there was present in humanity what might be called a dark, dim clairvoyance. Men did not come to their knowledge of external things in the way they do to-day, but something arose within them like an archetypal wisdom, far surpassing what we ourselves can achieve. Whoever knows history, knows that such a primeval wisdom existed. Though men did not know how to construct machines and railways, and rule the surrounding world by means of the forces of Nature, yet they had a knowledge of the divine-spiritual foundations of the world infinitely transcending our own. But it would be quite wrong to suppose that their knowledge was gained by thinking. On the contrary, it rose up in their souls as though bestowed upon them, as revelation, as dim inspirations rising within them without their co-operation, but so that they were there as real images of the Spiritual World, a really present archetypal wisdom.

Human progress, however, consisted in the fact that from incarnation to incarnation this shadowy clairvoyance, this wisdom, had to grow less and less, for it was necessary that it should be lost in order that man might learn at last to grasp the things of the world by his reason. In the future, man will be able to see clairvoyantly into the Spiritual World, and at the same time will possess the forms of his present knowledge.

To-day we are in an intermediate state. The old clairvoyance is lost, and what we now possess has been developed through long ages.

How has mankind arrived at a knowledge of the world through his reason, and from out of his own innermost self-consciousness? And when, more especially did self-consciousness appear?

It was at the time (though as a rule the evolution of humanity is not observed with such exactitude as this) in which Christ-Jesus came to the earth. At that time, humanity stood at a turning-point in evolution when the old clairvoyance had gone, and which was the starting-point of that which has brought about our greatest achievements. The entrance of Christ into the world-evolution was the turning point from the Old age to the New, from the old to the new world-conception! And there is, moreover, a technical expression for that stage of achievement which it was then possible for mankind to experience, when men had begun to know the outer world through their own self-consciousness; an expression which is used by John the Baptist when he proclaims that ‘The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!’ That means: ‘The knowledge of the world in ideas and concepts is at hand.’ In other words: ‘Man is no longer directed to the old clairvoyance, but he must, from out of his own being, learn to know and investigate the world.’ The tremendous impulse for that which man had to gain by means of his own Ego, and not through the Grace of Bestowal, that was given by Christ-Jesus.

Thus, there are great depths of meaning hidden even in the first words of the Sermon on the Mount, which might well be expressed as follows. Humanity stands to-day at that stage when it is a ‘beggar for the Spirit.’ Previously, men possessed clairvoyant vision and could behold the Spiritual World. That is now lost. But a time is coming, through the power of the Ego, through the inner revelation of the Word, when men will find a substitute for the old clairvoyance. Therefore—‘blessed’ are not only those who in ancient times attained to the Spirit through dim inspirations, but also those are ‘blessed’ who have no clairvoyance, because to lose it is the course of their evolution. Oh!—they are not unblest, they who are beggars for the Spirit, because they are ‘poor in the Spirit’! Blessed are they, for theirs is that which is revealed to them by their own Ego, is that which they can attain through their own Self-consciousness!

And further: ‘Blessed are they that mourn’; for even though the outer world causes suffering by reason of man's wrong attitude towards it, yet the time has now come when man, if he takes hold of his Self-consciousness, and unfolds the forces inherent in his Ego, will know the remedy for his pain. He will find within himself the possibility of comfort. The time has come when external means of comfort have lost their individual significance, because the ‘ I ’ is now to find the healing balm within. Blessed are they who can now no longer find in the external world what was once to be found there. And in this sense also, the fourth beatitude is to be understood: ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.’

The source of that righteousness which shall counterbalance the unrighteousness of the world, is now to be found in the Ego itself.

Thus Christ appears as the Guide to the human Self. The Guide who points directly to the Divine in Man, and therewith gives the indication—‘Take that which lives in Christ into your own inner self; then shall ye find the force necessary for carrying the fruits of earthly existence from incarnation to incarnation.’

To this also belongs an event which at first appears as a wholly painful one in the Christian doctrine, namely, the death of Christ-Jesus, the Mystery of Golgotha. This death has not the usual significance of other deaths. On the contrary, Christ reveals the truth that this death is to be the starting point for an immortal and unconquerable Life. It is not merely an event which releases Christ-Jesus from life, but it is an event passed through because it leads to an ascending process, and an eternal and infinite ‘living’ flows from it. This is something (and it was so accepted by those who lived in the first centuries after Christ) that will become more and more recognised when the understanding of the Christ Impulse will have grown greater than it is to-day. When that time comes, men will understand that, six hundred years before the Christian era, one of the greatest of human beings, leaving his palace and finding a corpse-finding Death—could conceive of it thus: ‘Death is sorrow!’ ‘Liberation from death is Redemption,’ and that he could have nothing to do with what lay under the dominion of Death.

Six hundred years pass, and we come to the time of Christ. And when yet another six hundred years have passed, a symbol is raised up for that which only the humanity of the future will understand. What is this symbol?

It is not a Buddha; it is not any ‘Chosen One.’ No—simple men passing by saw the symbol of the Cross, and upon the Cross, a dead body; and they did not say, ‘Death is sorrow!’ They did not turn away from it, but they saw in this dead body what became for them a bulwark of the eternal in life; they saw what conquers all Death, and points to the transcendence of earthly things.

The noble Buddha saw a corpse—and he turned from the material world with the judgment that all death is sorrow; while those men of simple nature who beheld the Cross and its dead burden did not turn away, but gazed upon it because they found in it a witness of the everlasting life that streams from the earthly death!

And so six hundred years before the Christian era, Buddha stands before the corpse; and six hundred years after the death of Christ, the simple man of the world beholds that symbol which expressed what had happened with the founding of Christianity.

Never in the whole history of human evolution has such a transformation taken place as this! And the more objectively these things are grasped, the more clearly will the great significance of Buddhism emerge.

We have shown how mankind once possessed a primeval wisdom, and how in the course of many incarnations, this wisdom gradually declined. The appearance of Buddha marked the close of the old development; it was a mighty world-historical indication that the ancient archetypal wisdom was lost. In the historical sense this explains the ‘turning away’ from life. Whereas Christ marks the commencement of a new development which sees this life as the source of the eternal. Hitherto, there has been no explanation of these immensely important facts of human evolution.

Therefore, and because these things are not yet understood, it sometimes happens that in our time there can be such beautiful and noble natures (as for instance, Theodor Schulze, who died at Potsdam in 1889) who, because they cannot find in any external concepts what truly fills their rich inner life, try to find satisfaction in Buddhism. And Buddhism reveals to them how, in a certain sense, the human being when he raises himself by developing his own inner forces above the world of the senses, can transcend his own nature. That, however, is only possible because the greatest impulse, the very essence of Christianity, is still so little understood.

Spiritual Science must some day become the means by which the core of the whole presentation of the Christ-Impulse can be more and more deeply penetrated. It is just the evolution-idea which Spiritual Science approaches so honestly that will lead humanity to an exact and intimate grasp of Christianity, so that Spiritual Science may rest in the hope that the rightly comprehended Christian teaching will be unfolded more and more as against that form of it which is incorrectly apprehended, and moreover, without any transplanting of Buddhism into our modern times. It would, in fact, be a very shortsighted policy that would seek to establish Buddhism in Europe! For anyone who knows the conditions of the spiritual life of Europe, knows that even those tendencies which are apparently ranged against Christianity, have borrowed from it its whole arsenal of weapons.

A Darwin, a Haeckel, would never have been possible—strange though this may sound—if it had not been for the educational systems of Christendom which alone made it possible for them to think the thoughts they did; if those particular forms of thought had not already been there which they, nourished in the Christian world, could then use, so to say, as weapons of offence against their own Mother. For what they and others, have to say, is often apparently directed against Christianity—that is, in the manner of its utterance. But the thoughts could never have been there without the Christian education. For this reason, a grafting of any oriental system upon our own culture would be of no avail; for it would oppose every condition of the spiritual life of the West. It is only necessary to think clearly about the fundamental teachings of the two religions.

If the spiritual life is sufficiently closely observed it will certainly be seen that because of the unclearness that exists about these things, there are souls who, feeling sympathy with Buddhism, and who stand even on the highest of philosophical watch-towers, would like to teach the ‘renunciation of existence.’

Such an one was Schopenhauer. The whole tenour of his life might be described as ‘Buddhistic.’ Thus when he says, for instance, ‘The image of the highest type of mankind stands before us in one whom we call a “saint” ... one who has overcome everything in life that the outer world can give; one who stands there merely as a physical body, who conceals nothing of the Ideal of the World-environment within him; who desires naught, who merely waits until the body itself is destroyed, so that every trace may be wiped out of all that connected him with this physical world; so that, renouncing what is of the earth, he annihilates earth-existence; so that at last, nothing remains that in life leads from desire to pain, from fear to terror, from enjoyment to grief.’

That is an interpolation of Buddhism into our western world. Such a thing happens because of our misapprehensions; because we do not understand clearly enough what the deepest impulses of Christianity are, and what its content and its form denote. What have we achieved through Christianity? If we regard the impulse alone, we have achieved just that which shows what intensity of cleavage can exist between Schopenhauer and one of the most significant personalities of our time. While Schopenhauer sees his ideal in some one who has overcome all enjoyment and pain that proceeds from the outer life, who merely exists waiting until the last threads that bind his physical body together are severed—we find the very opposite in Goethe's picture of the struggling Faust, who strides from desire to enjoyment, and from enjoyment to desire, who at length purges himself so that all his passions are transformed, and that which was to him the highest and holiest that can irradiate human life, became itself a passion. Such was Faust—who did not say ‘I wait until the last traces of my earth-existence are obliterated,’ but who proclaims the stupendous words: ‘The relics of my earthly sojourn are indestructible throughout the Æons of Time.’

That was how Goethe expressed in his “Faust” the meaning and spirit of what, in his old age, he once described to his secretary Eckermann: ‘At least you will admit, that the conclusion of “Faust,” where the redeemed soul ascends, was very hard to portray; so that in dealing with a subject so far above the earthly, and so transcending conception, I might easily have succumbed to mere vagueness, if I had not confined my poetical intentions within the sharp outlines of Christian and ecclesiastical figure and imagery, and so given them a healthy form and solidity.’

And so Faust is made to ascend a rung of the ladder of existence which has its origin in Christian symbolism—the step from the mortal to the immortal, from death to life.

In Schopenhauer we see unmistakable interpolations of the Buddhistic element into western thought-culture: ‘I wait till I have attained such perfection that with the death of my body the last traces of my earth-existence are obliterated!’ And he believed, also, that this world-conception would enable him to interpret the pictorial creations of Raphael and Correggio. Goethe, on the other hand, portrayed the upward-striving Individuality, that knew the sum-total of earthly achievements was permanent, was interwoven with Eternity: ‘The relics of my earthly sojourn are indestructible throughout the Æons of Time!’

That, indeed, is the true, the realistic, Christian impulse; for it leads to a re-awakening of earthly deeds as spiritual accomplishment. It is the re-awakening of the Best that can be achieved on earth. It is the Religion of Resurrection! It is in very truth a ‘realistic’ world-conception, which brings down out of spiritual heights, the loftiest content for existence into the world of the senses. Thus we can say that something like the light of a dawn shines out in Goethe—a self-comprehending Christianity of the Future, which, while acknowledging all the greatness and significance of Buddhism, yet negates its renunciation of earthly embodiments, and points upwards to a great acknowledgment of every single incarnation in the whole great sequence.

And so Goethe, in the sense of the true Christian of modern times, looks out over a past world from whose womb all have been born, and upon a present world wherein, if its true results are grasped, we achieve something which time cannot annihilate.

Thus, in linking mankind in true theosophical fashion with the Universe, he cannot do otherwise than forge the links on the other side which bind it to the true content of Christianity. He says therefore—

‘Wie an dem Tag, der dich der Welt verliehen,
Die Sonne stand zum Grusse der Planeten,
Bist also bald und fort und fort gediehen,
Nach dem Gesetz, wonach du angetreten.
So musst du sein, dir kannst du nicht entfliehen,
So sagten schon Sybillen, so Propheten.’

By expressing in this way man's connection with the outer world, he is inevitably pointing to this: that as man is born out of the constellations of existence, he becomes, in the world, what is not only indestructible but what must ultimately consummate his resurrection in a form that is spiritual. And so he had to add these words to the rest—

‘Und keine Zeit und keine Macht zerstuckelt
Gepraegte Form, die lebend sich entwickelt!’

And we can also add.—There is neither any Power nor any Time that can annihilate what is achieved in Time itself and which ripens as Fruit for Eternity.

• 1. Dr. Steiner gives this sentence as ‘Blessed are those who are beggars for the Spirit.’

Shortly after the death of Voltaire (pen name of François-Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) Lessing's (Gotthold Ephraim L., 1729-1781) writing The Education of the Human Race appeared (1780), and one would like to say that in this writing you can find the starting point of a historical consideration in the spiritual-scientific sense. I have mentioned this writing by Lessing repeatedly in these talks. It tries to find the causes for the view of the repeated lives from the consciousness of the eighteenth century.

Someone who tries to think Lessing's discussions through to the end in this testament of his intellectual work realises that by the ideas of this writing coherence comes into the whole structure of the human historical becoming. We see successive epochs in this historical becoming of the human being, which differ from each other. If we look back at ancient epochs, we realise that the human soul experiences other things, that it searched its ideals in other things than in later epochs. We can say as it were that the different epochs of the historical becoming differ sharply from each other by the character of that what they can give to the human souls. Sense and coherence come in this historical becoming if one considers that this human soul—which could participate in cultural blessings and impressions of one epoch after the belief that the human being lives only once—that this human soul appears for Lessing and the modern spiritual science in repeated lives on earth. Thus, it gets out from any epoch what it can give. Then it experiences a life between death and the next birth in a wholly spiritual world. It appears in the next epoch again, of course with some divergences in the individual lives, to carry over the fruits, the results, and the impressions of the former epoch to the next one. Therefore, we can say that the human soul participates in all epochs through the historical development. Thereby one can really speak taking up the idea of Lessing once again of a kind of education of the human soul by the spirits of the successive epochs. If one goes once spiritual-scientifically even more exactly into that what exists as elementary beginnings already in Lessing's ideas about the education of the human race, then one is in the field of the interpretation of history, where above all our souls develop only so far as one believes to be today in the wholly scientific field. Then only one will have history.

Only then, one brings sense and coherence in the historical becoming; one will recognise how an epoch builds itself up one after the other, what the souls gain from the different epochs, why they are positioned in the different epochs. Then that what spiritual science has to say no longer appears as something fantastic to many people. Then one smiles less about the fact that spiritual science assumes not only a physical-bodily cover of the human being, but that it must recognise an inner spiritual-mental being of the human being which one has to consider, however, in such a way that it develops its different formations and arrangements in the course of the epochs.

Spiritual-scientifically, we distinguish three parts in the human soul, as it has developed up to the present epoch. One may say that the most primitive part of this arrangement is that in which the blind passions work and the desires and emotions pulsate, on which, however, also that works what provides the perception of the physical outside world for us. We call this part the sentient soul. Then as distinct from the sentient soul we speak of another soul part that shows us the human being already with bigger inwardness, shows him in such a way as he can grasp himself if he turns away the look from the physical surroundings and rises above his more unaware desires, emotions, and passions. We call this higher member of the human soul the intellectual or mind soul in which the spiritual life of the human being turns already more inward. We call the highest member of the human soul the consciousness soul, that member in which, above all, the full self-awareness of the human being, the purest ego-consciousness appears.

If we speak about the three soul members—sentient soul, intellectual or mind soul and consciousness soul, we do not talk about abstractions or about arbitrarily constructed concepts and ideas; but we see at the same time how in the course of the historical development these three soul members gradually developing.

If we went far back in the historical becoming, behind the times in which Homer and Hesiod sung in which the Greek tragic poets lived and the Greek philosophy originated, we would find what we recognise in the echoes of the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean cultures even today. The outer research has already brought many things of them to light. Spiritual science, however, shows that in the epoch that dates back behind the eighth to tenth centuries before our calendar until the second and third millennia the human souls, that means our souls experienced something that one cannot compare at all with the modern life. At that time, our modern thinking that appears as something natural to us in the scientific worldview would have still been impossible. It would have also been impossible that the human soul felt isolated and strictly separated from nature at the most important moments of its life. All that was still impossible at that time. The human being felt his soul like living in the whole universe, in the whole nature, felt like a piece of nature, as the hand had to feel as a part of the organism if it could have consciousness. Only with the help of spiritual science, we can imagine the quite different soul life just today that reached possibly until the eighth to tenth centuries before our calendar.

If at that time the human being said, my desires drive me to put forward a foot, or if he said, I breathe—or if he felt hunger or saturation, he felt something in this transition of the inner experience into the movement of the body that he faced in such a way as he faced other experiences if he said to himself, it flashes, it is thundering, or, the wind blusters through the trees. The human being did not distinguish what he experienced emotionally from that what took action outdoors; he was with the whole inner life in nature. For it, however, that he felt himself still as a member in the big total organism, he had an original clairvoyance, he could behold in the spiritual world. He saw nature not in such a way as he sees her today, but ensouled by spiritual beings to which we work our way up again with the methods of spiritual science today. It was natural in those times that one experienced nature ensouled and spiritualised. However, one could not think such thoughts as we think the physical processes but one saw them like in pictures and the pictures were that what the physical principles are for us, and something of these pictures is preserved in the legends and mythologies of the nations, even in the real fairy tales until today. The human being had a pictorial imagination in ancient times.

We can gain these things today not only with the help of spiritual science, but I hope that I have succeeded in the new edition of my World Views and Approaches to Life in the Nineteenth Century (final title:The Riddles of Philosophy, CW 20) in pointing to the fact that one can consider the spiritual life completely philosophically. Then one can realise that a pictorial imagination existed in primeval times which went over to the Greek-Latin imagination only gradually, and that the human soul felt projected in the total organism of the world by the old pictorial imagination that was felt ensouled. This took place mainly in the sentient soul.

The Greek-Roman imagination lasting until the fourteenth, fifteenth centuries preferably demanded the intellectual or mind soul. I have already tried to show the quite different feeling and imagination of those times with the talks on Raphael and Michelangelo. I have explained how the Greek—later also the members of the Latin culture—felt completely one with his “soul body” because in the Greek world mainly the intellectual or mind soul was developed. He felt with his soul living within any single member of his body at the same time. While the preceding times of the sentient soul had a consciousness of the fact that the human being is a member of the whole nature, the Greek had a consciousness that that what lived in his whole body and what this body can give him is for him the immediate, true sight of nature at the same time.

This became different in modern times; also even today, one does not realise these matters with full thoroughness because one does not yet want to penetrate into spiritual science. It changed in particular since the aurora of modern thinking, since Copernicus, Kepler, Galilei, and Giordano Bruno. For at that time the consciousness soul started developing. It started developing in such a way that the human being became a riddle to himself, while he started now feeling separated with his independent soul from the whole nature, while he felt his soul as something particular beside the body at the same time. As strange as it sounds, nevertheless, it is right that the human soul felt more separated from nature when the more materialistic tendencies appeared in natural sciences. What a time arose in the western culture since the fifteenth century? At this time, a net of lawfulness spreads out as it were which extends to unlimited spatial widths.

It is great to see Giordano Bruno standing there in the aurora of modern times and imagining the power of physical laws extending into infinite widths. However, in these spatial widths one cannot find what the human being experiences in his soul. If the ancient Egyptian or Chaldean looked up at the stars, he felt that from the constellation of the stars a force arose which was connected with his own moral experience in this or that way. If the old astrologer looked up at the stars and felt the human destiny in them, this view of nature still allowed him to imagine the soul in the work of nature. Now, however, a time arose which made it to the human being more and more impossible to imagine the soul within nature. Since just with the appearance of modern natural sciences the human being had to struggle with the question: how have I to position myself to the work of nature from which no longer anything soul-like shines to me? The human soul had to get around to asking itself for the position of natural sciences to the own soul. With Giordano Bruno, we see this fight. He imagines the own soul as a monad. Although he imagines the world in the sense of modern natural sciences, he still imagines it as ensouled by monads.

Leibniz (Gottfried Wilhelm L., 1646-1710) also imagines the soul as a monad, and he imagines it in such a way that it can suitably relate to the world. Leibniz asks, how must the human soul be to be able to exist in my view of nature? He cannot answer it without formulating this view of nature in a particular way at the same time.

Leibniz considers everything as a combination of monads. If we look into anything of nature, we find the underlying ensouled monads. What we see is for Leibniz in such a way, as if we look at a swarm of mosquitoes which appears like a cloudscape; if we come closer, this cloudscape disintegrates in the single mosquitoes, and the swarm of mosquitoes appears to us first only in such a way because we do not look exactly at it. I have to imagine the view of nature, Leibniz said, in such a way that the human soul can exist in it. He was able to do this only if he imagined it as a monad among monads. Hence, he differentiates monads vaguely living from day to day, then sleeping, then dreaming monads, then those as it is the human soul. However, everything else that originates because everything that we see originating appears to us only in such a way as a swarm of mosquitoes appears to us as a cloud. We could enumerate the most brilliant spirits until our days. We would find that the fight for the knowledge of the human soul presents itself compared with the modern view of nature in such a way that the human soul feels, I must be able to get an idea of that what can arise as a view of nature, and what does no longer offer any ensoulment of nature. Compared with this fight is that what appears as a more or less materialistically coloured monism only an episode that will pass by. Nevertheless, the human soul that is separated from its view of nature will strive more and more to gain contents in itself, that means to arrive at that what it extracted from nature in old epochs.

Hence, we can say: since the age of modern natural sciences everything aims at deepening the human soul in itself, and everything points to the modern spiritual science, which I represent here, that the human soul can get around—experiencing itself in a spiritual world—knowing to be carried by spiritual-divine powers whose outer expression the outer nature is. As true as the human being when he still lived in his sentient soul recognised himself as a piece of the whole nature, as true as the Greek-Latin age, which experienced itself still in the intellectual or mind soul, did not yet feel separated from the bodily, the modern human being experiences himself in the consciousness soul. However, his soul knows itself separated from nature, since it must get an idea of it that no longer contains anything mental. The human soul had to strengthen itself to conjure up the wealth of spiritual experiences from itself, which can return to that assurance which it had when it still felt as a member of the ensouled universe.

Thus, the modern human soul experiences itself in the development of the consciousness soul since the fourteenth century. From the eighth, tenth pre-Christian centuries until the time of the fourteenth, fifteenth post-Christian centuries the development of the intellectual or mind soul lasted. We have to recognise that the spiritual life that the human soul conjures up from itself will be able to become wealthier and wealthier, so that it can live again in a spiritual realm. What we experience as the inner recognition of the consciousness soul began from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries on. We live for about four centuries in this period.

Voltaire lived in the middle of this period, in the middle between the emerging consciousness soul and us. You understand this spirit if you put him historically in this age of the self-experiencing consciousness soul. Since Voltaire with all his shining spiritual qualities, with his superior intellectual activity, with all the good qualities he had is a symptomatic expression of the pursuit of the consciousness soul, just as he is with all his bad, questionable qualities.

Two matters must face him in this age. One is that a glorious view of nature developed during the last century that got its shine only in the modern natural sciences, in which however no place was for the human soul grasping itself. Besides, the most brilliant spirits attempted to solve that riddle: how does the human soul attain an idea by which it can assert itself compared to this modern view of nature? The view of nature becomes more and more glorious; the striving in the human soul to assert itself to get inner assurance appears more and more in such a way that we see it like surging up and down. Since we see the human soul, as if it wants to attempt repeatedly to find itself compared with the view of nature, but shies away from it repeatedly because it is helpless to find that in itself what the consciousness soul has to conjure up in this time. Thus, we are still fighting and that is the most important reason why spiritual science has to position itself in the fight for the inner universe about which I have spoken in these talks and which the human beings have to search.

Thus, we see spirits like Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, and Locke attempting as it were to answer this riddle: what do I have to do with my soul compared with the view of the outside nature? One could link to each of these spirits who face us there. We want to link, for example, to Locke (John L., 1632-1704).

Locke—who is a symptomatic expression of that what one searched in the English cultural life at the beginning of Voltaire's age to understand the soul—appears to us in the following way. Locke feels, so to speak, completely defeated by the power of the view of nature, so that he must say, we can find nothing in our soul except that, what the soul has taken up only from the outer nature by the senses. The view of nature works so immensely, so impressively that Locke wants to limit all human soul life, in so far it develops knowledge, to that, what the senses induce in it and what the reason can combine as a world view. He faces the world in such a way that he says to himself, we find nothing in the human soul that does not isolate it that does not show it as a “tabula rasa,” as a blank slate, before from the outer nature the sensory impressions come which work on the soul. We realise that the power of the view of nature is so big and immense that Locke loses the confidence to find something in the human soul generally. One must consider the moral-spiritual aspect of Locke's standpoint above all. Indeed, old traditions, the religions connected the human being with the spiritual world. Nevertheless, up to the times of modern natural sciences one believed to be connected with the spiritual of the world, also with the help of spiritual links. There was a view of nature now that worked so overpowering that the human soul did not dare to think anything about itself. Now the soul stood there—and the view with which it stood there originated from spirits like Locke above all.

The human beings said to themselves, we can know nothing that is not delivered to us by the senses and by the reason limited to the senses. Now it mattered to develop so much mental force from the old traditions and emotions that one could recognise—beside that what one can recognise only as a picture of the outer nature—any spiritual-divine world from which one had to admit that one cannot attain it by knowledge, even if one believes in it. The view of nature assumed a form at first that cast off any cognitive connection of the human soul with the divine-spiritual primordial ground.

Thus, that worldview and that attitude towards life originated in which Voltaire was put in his youth at first. He stood at first before the spirit of his time so that it made a tremendous impression on him when he fled soon to England because he had been pursued in France and became familiar there just with that philosophy of Enlightenment. This philosophy limited any human cognition generally to the consideration of the view of nature and still cherished a divine-spiritual world only because of the temperament of the soul. Thus, Voltaire's core was occupied, so to speak, by this world experience, by this soul feeling, and in his so worried and, however, so clever soul the immediate conviction emerged that one stands on sure ground only on the ground of the overpowering physical laws. However, the religious temperament was strong in him. The soul did not give up its faith in a connection with a spiritual-divine world.

We see an infinitely extensive admiration of that originating what the modern natural sciences and the view of nature have brought on one side, and an admiration of the philosophical discussions that Locke, for example, raised. On the other side, we see the need originating in him to exert everything that the human spirit can exert as reasons for such a view of nature. Nevertheless, he adhered to the old idea of the immortality of the human soul, to a connection of the human being with the whole world existence, to the idea of freedom of the human soul in certain limits. Now a peculiar trait of Voltaire faces us that shows us how in him completely a symptomatic expression of that exists what lived in the whole time.

What we face there becomes maybe most vivid if I mention another work that appeared almost at the same time as Lessing's Education of the Human Race, namely theCritique of Pure Reason by Kant. Kant lived since his youth in quite similar conditions concerning the view of nature, as Voltaire did. Kant was devoted to the spirit of Enlightenment in the sense of the word. The dictum is due to him: Enlightenment means that the human soul has the courage to use its reason. It is contained in the nice essay What is Enlightenment? (1784). As to Voltaire Kant is like the fullest consequence of the impulses of Enlightenment. Kant faces like Locke and later Hume the power of the view of nature that showed how the world and the human soul come about. Since one cannot reject what has come up as a view of nature. This worked impressively! This view of nature worked so impressively on Locke that he rejected everything for knowledge that could not come from the sensory impressions and the reason. Kant goes forward “in principle.” He is the thorough, principal man who must lead back everything to the principles, and, hence, he writes his Critique of Pure Reason.

He shows in it how the human being can generally have knowledge only from the outer nature and how the human soul can get a practical but not deniable confidence that can arise from another side than that to which the outer knowledge is due. In the second edition of hisCritique of Pure ReasonKant betrayed his position in the preface: “I had to cancel the knowledge to make room for the faith.” Kant demands an area for the faith where the conscience projects where the categorical imperative speaks which does not give knowledge, however, an impulse to which the human being has to adhere, and leads to the idea of God and the idea of freedom. That is why Kant had to tackle with the matter in principle, while he put the question: if the human soul can attain no knowledge about itself already under the impulse of the modern view of nature, how can we receive a reasonable faith? He asserted a reasonable faith for the human being by the fact that he cast off the knowledge generally from the area where something is to be said about the human soul, while he limited the knowledge to the outer world.

Voltaire did not yet have what Kant had to reduce to a principle without which he could not live which then the whole future lives on. He had the logical side only which said that any cognition limits itself to the physical knowledge. He had to take out from the power of his personality what Kant took out in a principle, from something quite impersonal. Thus, we see Voltaire conjuring up from his temperament, from his ramble mind in his whole life that is identical with a side of the cultural life of the eighteenth century what Kant tried to derive from a principle, the categorical imperative. We see him repeatedly endeavouring in his long life to exert his wit and cleverness to say to himself, we can know nothing compared with the view of nature. But now human soul, step into the breach and try with wit and cleverness to bring all reasons whichever they may be whether good or bad to maintain what must be maintained compared with the view of nature!

Thus, in Voltaire's temperament and ramble mind that lived what had shrunk with Kant to an impersonal principle. Someone who wants to assess human souls must try to search into the structure of a soul with all its fights that as it were must maintain for a long life what can disappear from it by the power and importance of the view of nature perpetually. If we consider Voltaire in such a way and turn the glance at that which he created in detail, then he becomes understandable. Since as he stood there with his soul, he had a world against himself strictly speaking. Voltaire searched a spiritual worldview in which God, freedom, and immortality have space that can be up to the view of nature. Since Voltaire became a more and more ardent and biased confessor of the modern scientific view, and this striving lived and developed in him—because it was the basis of his nature with all the forms which assumed a surely unpleasant character sometimes in the course of his life.

Just at the time in which we recognise Voltaire as the most spirited expression of the struggle of the human soul to find itself as consciousness soul it was almost impossible to realise how this struggle of the human soul relates to an older struggle of the human soul in former epochs. Voltaire could not get to a pure, noble image of the Greek culture, for example. The scientific way of thinking appeared to him much more important and greater than that which the Greeks had intended with their view of nature that contained the picture of the mental-spiritual life at the same time. Therefore, Voltaire had to misjudge an epoch as it were in which in any form of culture the affinity of the human soul with the remaining world expressed itself. One can still recognise this in the figures of Homer and the great Greek tragic poets, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. As to Voltaire, one could not at all compare these Greek tragic poets to that which humanity reached in his time. To him the Greeks with their worldviews were human beings who had produced figments about nature; whereas the age of the great scientific researchers appeared as that which furthered the human beings in shorter time than all former epochs had done. Yes, in the age in which the human soul had to strive to maintain itself compared with the view of nature it had to become unfair compared with former ages in which the human soul could still extract its forces from the surrounding nature, so to speak, without its assistance.

Thus, we see the relation of Voltaire to former times gets a tragic character as it were; and we see him positioned in his surroundings in entire opposition to the world which he had grown out, actually.

If one surveys the French cultural life at the time of Voltaire, one can say that this world still cared less about the big riddles which the scientific way of thinking and the arising consciousness soul had to solve. This world still lived in those traditions that were given as it were to the world, so that it could develop in complete silence to the age of Enlightenment, to the age of the conception of itself. Voltaire saw himself surrounded with a world—and his French world was still filled with the most rigid intolerant Catholic principle—which wanted to extract anything mental-spiritual from the traditions, and which refused what was just dear to him: to be on his own towards the view of nature.

A tremendous aversion emerged in Voltaire against the cultural world surrounding him, an aversion that caused a life full of vicissitudes. He was twice in the Bastille, in 1717 and 1726; then he had to flee to England in 1726 where he stayed up to 1729. Next he returned to France and lived since 1734 a longer time secluded at the castle of the marchioness du Chatelet in Cirey in Lorraine. At that time, he became engrossed especially in scientific studies that should show him how the worldview can be grasped in the sense of modern natural sciences. From that, he got an insight of the necessary spiritual basic conditions of modern times. One may argue ever so much against him that he flattered, that he lied, that he deceived his friends, that he tried often to achieve something with the lowest means, all that was not nice. However, a holy enthusiasm was in him that expressed itself through the often cynical-frivolous form in such a way: the impulses of the human soul demand that the soul finds a worldview from itself, renews itself in a worldview that it can put before itself. At first, he could only have the view of nature. Hence, ardent hatred arose in him against Catholicism. He wanted above all to penetrate with his worldview into that which opposed him. He used any means at his disposal.

While he faced Catholicism that way, he found himself cut-off from everything that could connect him with it. For he hated the facilities and customs of Catholicism, its rites. He recognised no connection with that what resulted from his worldview that he wanted to support on natural sciences. The other matter was that he adhered to God, freedom, and immortality only because of his temperament, of his ramble and clever soul, however, only with abstract thoughts and ideas.

If the Greek looked up to those regions, where from the human being got his impulses, he saw something divine-spiritual prevailing there. Let us look at the works of the Greek tragic poets. We see in them the human world shown, adjacent to a divine-spiritual world, we see the divine world working on the world and the destinies of the human beings influenced by the destinies of the spiritual beings. We see above all in the images of the old times a lively consciousness of these spiritual beings existing in poetry. Exactly the same way as human beings could come to life in the tragedy, in the epic, these contents of consciousness could come to life in poetry. They came to life in the poems of Homer! We see in the age, when the human soul struggled out of the other co-creatures that the connection with such beings got lost to it! We can pursue how the supersensible figures still living in the Greek poetry become more and more abstract, already from Vergil until the modern times—with the exception of Dante who wrote his Divine Comedy on basis of a clairvoyant inspiration, and with whom these figures are alive again, indeed, in the form as he could see them.

Nevertheless, everywhere we see these figures growing paler and paler, and the human beings are left more and more to their own resources. We recognise that the poets must refrain more and more from a supersensible world that they do no longer face. Voltaire was too great to be able to refrain from the spiritual beings with his survey of life. His temperament was too big, too comprehensive. This was in his predisposition. Hence, the strange, the miracle which faces us as it were already in his youth epic, in theHenriade (1723) where he describes the destinies of King Henry IV of France. There we recognise that he cannot confine himself to what takes place in the outer world. However, we recognise on the other side that he feels restricted in his action everywhere, so that he is connected with the words from which he gets ideas of freedom, immortality and God only with abstractions. His soul had developed too far to show life in his Henriadein all the fights which were fought out at that time between the various religious and political parties like somebody who looks only as a human being with scientific view at it, and who grasps the other human life only as abstract ideas of God, freedom and immortality. His soul is too great for that. Hence, we see the longing projecting in Voltaire to connect the human soul with a supersensible world. However, we also realise that he cannot behold a humanly possible supersensible world from Catholicism that he hates. Since hagiography was only a collection of legends, and Christ was more or less a devout, good natured enthusiast to him.

However, Voltaire could not accept that the human life runs during its most important events only in such a way, as it happened around Henry IV of France as it looks if one investigates it with the outer senses and deduces with the reason. Thus, strange figures appear in the Henriade like the Discord(e). Why this figure of Discord with the representative of Enlightenment, with Voltaire? She looks at the events of France that do not happen in such a way, as she wants it. She wants more and more disagreement among the human beings, so that she can achieve her goal. With annoyance, she looks down at what happens against Rome, and, therefore, she takes to the road to Rome to come to an understanding with Rome.

Now one could say that all that is allegory. However, just from poetic impulses one has to say what I have just said: this Discord accepts completely realistic forms, so that one cannot consider her as mere allegory. Voltaire describes, for example, that she comes to the pope, that she is alone with him, and that she gets him around. There she behaves like a flirtatious person of the age of Voltaire; she carries out all possible arts of seduction. Just from the poetic impulses, I would like to say, I do not give an allegory credit for that it is able to sway the pope for the political party in France. With that what the pope can give her she returns to France, works as an agitator, appears in the figure of Saint Francis, as Augustine to the monks, goes from city to city, from village to village, and when she wants that Henry III does not win, she manages to seduce the Dominican monk Jacques Clement. Voltaire put everything into this portrayal what he had on his mind against Catholicism in the sense of his freethinking.

It is interesting to recognise how far Voltaire goes in the representation of this Dominican monk who should be seduced by Discord, so that he causes the doom of Henry III and Henry IV. A prayer is stated in the Henriade, which Clement, the monk, sends to heaven. I would like to read out this prayer, so that you get the feeling for that what lived in his soul against Catholicism from which he expected that one of his devout followers sends the following prayer to heaven:

O God! Whose vengeful justice should descend

To crush the tyrant, and thy faith defend

Is murder now, and heresy thy care

Thy wrath unjust, must we, thy children, bear?

Too long the partial trial we endure,

Too long a Godless monarch reigns secure.

Raise thy dread arm, o God! Thy people save,

Descend upon the king, thy anger gave;

Spirits of ruin his approach proclaim,

Ye Heav'ns announce his wrath in show'rs of flame!

Their trembling host, avenging lightnings blast,

Their chiefs, their soldiers perish to the last!

Let their two kings expire before my eyes,

Drive them like wither'd leaves, when storms arise;

Sav'd by thy arm, thy League its voice shall raise

And o'er their breathless bodies chant thy praise!

Stopp'd by these accents in her mid career,

Discord, in air suspended hung to hear;

The dropt to Hell, and from its dungeon drew

The fiercest fiend those fiery regions knew;

Fanaticism!—Nature abhors the name,

Unown'd the monster from Religion came;

Nurs'd in her bosom, arm'd for her defence,

His aim destruction, zeal his fair pretence.

The Dominican monk prays this to cause the death of Henry III and Henry IV, he prays to heaven, so that God sends death. Discord is attracted by this prayer of the monk, enters his cell, and calls “Fanaticism” as confederate from hell. Voltaire presents a figure again to us quite really! How does he speak of Fanaticism from which/whom he assumes that he finds his best support in the principles of the national disposition in modern times? He speaks about him:

'Twas he on Raba's plains, near Arnon's flood,

Taught Ammon's wretched race the rites of blood;

To Moloc's shrine, the frantic mother led,

To slay her infant which her womb had bred!

He form'd the vow which Jepthe's lips exprest,

And plung'd his #8224 in his daughter's breast!

'Twas he, at Aulis, Calchas voice inspir'd,

When Iphigenia's blood the priest requir'd;

Thy forests, France, were long his dark abode,

Where streams of blood to fierce Teutates flow'd;

Still does affrighted memory retain

The sacred murders of the Druid fane;

Rome, falling, own'd the God' mysterious birth,

From Pagan temples to the church retir'd,

The fiend, with rage, Christ's meck disciples fir'd;

Teaching the patient martyrs of his word,

To brandish persecution's bloody sword.

'Twas he, that furious sect in London bred,

By whom too good, too weak, a monarch bled!

Madrid and Lisbon yet his rites disgrace;

He lights those piles where Israel's hapless race,

By Christian priests, in yearly triumph thrown,

Their fathers' heav'n-taught faith, in flames atone!

Robed in Religion's vestments to our eyes,

Still from the church, he borrow'd his disguise ...

(Translation published by Burton and Co., London, 1797)

Discord fetches this guy from the gorges of Hell. From this guy Clement gets the #8224 with which he wounds Henry III, so that he dies.

We see spiritual powers working in Voltaire's poem that way. We realise that God sent down Louis the Saint, the ancestor of the kings, to encourage Henry IV, to instil wisdom into him as it were. Voltaire does not shrink back from putting words in the king's mouth what should happen in the history of France. We realise also that he links the time of Henry IV in an even worse sense to the fact that—after Henry had first advanced triumphantly and got tired then—he leads back this to the fact that Discord led him to the “temple of love” where he tired in unhappy love, until he is called again to a new fight. One reads this portrayal of the temple of love as he presents it as a kind of magic service that the adversaries of Henry IV are addicted to, as a kind of devil service with altars and rituals, which play a role with certain parties. One can say that Voltaire tends not by his reason, not by his intellect, not by that what he becomes from his fight for the consciousness soul but by his ramble temperament, by the sum of his emotions, to connect the whole human life with a spiritual world. However, in that struggle of the human soul, which takes place in the forecourt of the spiritual life, before one could think of spiritual science, is the tragedy of Voltaire that he must search the connection of the outer life with a spiritual world where he wants to show true experiences of the human life. Nevertheless, he can do it only insufficiently. Hence, the Henriade appears as an “unreadable” poem today because everything that Voltaire could exert along these lines is based on traditions which he hates because he feels unable to portray the secret forces anyhow which are working in the human evolution.

The agility of Voltaire's soul was necessary to keep up itself towards the fact that it can get inner contents less and less from the outer view of nature. Already in the Henriade, with those figures which are mythological figures and do not appear at all as mere allegories one notes Voltaire's soul fighting and looking for something that it can tie the human life to, and still finding nothing. One must consider this side of Voltaire and will properly appreciate what he did to understand the human development. Therefore, his marvellous characteristic of Charles XII and Louis XIV is so exemplary, in spite of all defects because for him the biggest riddle was how one experiences historical becoming. Which forces work in it, which work in the environment of the human becoming?

Because of the power that the view of nature exerted on him, he must express himself with all power and cynicism, besides, so to speak, kicking over the traces everywhere, for example, if he incriminates the Maid of Orleans of everything that he regards as superstition. But just Voltaire's soul is such by which one can recognise how souls feel which face the pulse of time in such a way that they do not hear it beating, but feel in the pulse of their own blood that an age comes to an end and a new age is not yet there.—One feels the tragic of this soul that asks, how do I find purchase compared with the new picture of nature? Today we would ask, how does the consciousness soul struggle out in the human being? We find the answer if we look at Voltaire who looks at everything that France could produce as outer culture and to whom the old traditional powers became abstract which are delivered from prehistory. He describes the heaven, the hell—the heaven even splendidly in a certain respect -, in which Henry IV is taken up by Louis the Saint. He describes how the spiritual forces divide the natural forces, how worlds work into each other,—and how all that gnaws, nevertheless, at the deepest subconscious soul grounds which search the hold where the soul can be anchored with its deepest divine being. However, Voltaire cannot find this anchor.

When the decade approached in which Voltaire died, a seed was put in a soul to search the primary source of knowledge in the human being that immerses itself not only in nature but that can also become engrossed in the spiritual universe. When Voltaire had died, Goethe bore the idea of his Faustin himself. Goethe gets out a figure, actually, of that what Voltaire would have called the most superstitious image, a figure which shows us how to search the deepest longing, the deepest wanting and the highest cognition of the human soul. Under the influence of this look into the deepest depths of the human soul, Goethe put a figure that is rather similar to Voltaire: Mephistopheles, save that Faust who searches the birth of the consciousness soul in another way says to Mephistopheles: “In your Nothingness I hope to find my All!” (verse 6256). Strictly speaking, these words sound to Voltaire from Goethe who searched the striving of modern times for the consciousness soul and its anchorage in the spiritual worlds in another way than Voltaire did. Voltaire is like the star of a declining world to which any striving is directed to achieve the consciousness soul and into which the scientific worldview shines which very strongly forces to the consciousness soul. Voltaire is still the greatest star of this declining world, although he cannot find what extends the human soul again to a spiritual world. Nothing is more typical for Voltaire than a quotation that he did about Corneille (Pierre C., 1606-1684, French dramatist) in his history of Louis XIV. There he says that Corneille edited a French translation of the booklet The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (~1380-1471), and he would have heard that the French translation would have had 32 editions. He cannot believe this and says: “for it seems to me so unbelievable that a healthy soul can read this book to an end only once.” There we see expressed how Voltaire could not find the possibility to open a source to the spiritual world in his inside.

Today we say that spiritual science is a real continuation of that to which the scientific worldview forces the human being, but also that this spiritual science is a real continuation of the Goethean worldview. We speak of the fact that in the human being a second human being lives who can experience himself emotionally, we speak with the words of Goethe: “Two souls live, alas, in my breast.” Nevertheless, we speak of it in such a way that the spiritual-mental of the human being searches its spiritual-mental native country and can find it. We talk again in spiritual science of a spiritual world to which the human being belongs with his spiritual being as he belongs with his bodily physical to the physical world. However, the view of nature overpowers Voltaire so that he has no feeling for the “second human being” in the human being. While soon after him Goethe lets his Faust strive with all power for that second human being who strives from the physical-bodily human being to the spiritual worlds, we realise with Voltaire that he can understand nothing of such a second human being. A quotation relating to this second human being is very typical: “So much I have endeavoured to find that we are two, nevertheless, I have found in the end that I am only one.” He cannot admit that this second human being is in him. He has taken care, but this is his tragedy: in the end, he can only find that he is only one who is bound to his brain. This was his deep tragedy about which Voltaire himself helped by his cynicism, even by his frivolity. Subconscious soul depths, the second human being in the human being in connection with a spiritual world,—the upper consciousness was not allowed to confess that to itself. The upper consciousness needed numbing. He could find that in the outer experience because the outer experience dedicated itself to the magnificent, clever worldview that he could create within the most inconsistent soul experiences.

 Thus, we can understand that Voltaire had a rather rough ride to manage with himself, and that he wanted many a numbing. One must already look at the greatness of this man to understand such paradoxical matter that he feigned a severe illness and called for the priest one day—it was in Switzerland where he did so many benefits—,so that the priest came along to give him the last rites. After he had received the sacraments, he jumped up and said that to the priest, it was only a joke, and mocked him. However, one must even live in such “derived” world that does not have the real connection of the human soul with the spiritual worlds as Voltaire lived in such a world and could not come to the connection to which he wanted to come.

If we look once again at Goethe, he takes a “vagrant”—Faust—to show how the deepest impulses arise in the human soul. If we pursue the whole life of Goethe, we realise how he tries to find the human character in its full juiciness in the simplest souls. Voltaire completely lives in a derived layer, in his educated class where everything is uprooted. There he cannot find what ties together the human soul with a spiritual world, and thus he can even speak to that derived layer. Today we can hardly understand that a spirit like Voltaire says: “I do not deign to write for shoemakers and dressmakers; to give those anything that they can believe in, apostles are good for that, not I.” He does not want his holiest conviction to be treated as we would want it today, namely that it penetrates into any human soul. However, he does the typical quotation that he writes only for the educated class because he grew out of it: “Only an upper class can understand heaven and earth which arise to my enlightened mind; the lowlife is in such a way that the silliest heaven and the silliest earth is just the best for it!”

In this respect, Voltaire lives within a dying cultural sphere. This is his tragedy. However, such cultural spheres also have the possibility to develop maturity concerning certain tendencies. Voltaire developed that maturity. It expresses itself in his clever, urgent judgement that does not confuse itself, even in the joke, it expresses itself in his healthy way—even if he is frivolous—to work on the world and to relate to the world in a way. Thus, one can also understand that a spirit who was so great in many a respect, as Frederick the Great (1712-1786), could feel attracted to Voltaire, could push off him again, allowed him to return after some time repeatedly, saying about him, this Voltaire deserves, actually, nothing better than to be a learnt slave, but I estimate what he can give me as his French. He could still give him even more than only the element of language. I have tried to indicate this today.

One can understand that the eighteenth century that had to put everything in the right light on one side what hampered the emerging consciousness soul what had to show a certain greatness, however, just in the downward spirit of the cultural current. One can understand that this had to be expressed in such a peculiar way just with Voltaire. You see Voltaire in the right light if you put that as a counter-image what we have found as the positive, as the continuing in the sense of Lessing or Goethe for the pursuit of the consciousness element. Indeed, what I have spoken about Voltaire today can serve only to cause a consciousness of how difficult it is to gain an objective picture just of this peculiar man: He fought for many things, he strove for live as something natural today in us—also in those who do not intend at all to read Voltaire's writings.

Yes, one can say just with Voltaire that humanity can outgrow his writings; but it cannot outgrow what he was as a force because it has to remain always as a part of the spiritual striving of humanity. Since what had to result as the liberation of the human soul is based on the fact that at first something had to be cleared away by such a decomposing, one would like to say, Mephistophelian spirit like Voltaire. One is not surprised that similar applies to the historical picture of Voltaire what happened to his mortal remains. In the honorary burial parts of the Pantheon in Paris they were buried first; when another political current got the power, it was exhumed again and dissipated; then when the third political current replaced the previous one, the bones were collected again and buried. Some people state now that these bones fetched back again are not the real ones. The historical picture of Voltaire will be right which is portrayed from the one side like that of a liberator from bondage, like an apostle of tolerance, on the other side, however, is denigrated so much. With the whole complexity of Voltaire's personality, it can easily happen if one considers the historical picture of Voltaire objectively that then some people maybe say that it is not right, as the bones buried in the pantheon are not the real ones. Nevertheless, I say, if spiritual science can fulfil its task in the present and future, the picture of the great destroyer, of that who abolished so much, can maybe arise before spiritual science in its full objectivity.Since Voltaire is a human being—he pronounced it even towards Frederick the Great—with all mistakes of a human being and, one would even like to say, a human being with all “miracles” of a human being who is well-suited to fulfil the poet's saying:

By the parties' favour and hatred confused,

His portrayal of character fluctuates in history. (Schiller in the prologue of “Wallenstein”)

His personality was such that his picture can only “fluctuate.” However, although it fluctuates, one has to confess compared with the picture of Voltaire with those to whom he is likeable as well as with those to whom he is unpleasant that he was, nevertheless, a great human being who filled a place in the ongoing education of the human race.