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| GA 230. Man as Symphony of the Creative Word — Lecture X |
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| We have also quite small circulatory processes within us. Take any mineral substance, gold, let us say, or copper. Every such substance when induced into man — by the mouth, by injection, or in any other way — is endowed with the power of causing something to be formed or altered in the circulation, so as to work in a curative way, and so on. |
| From the very way one handles a lethargic child one gains the faculty to perceive the whole working of the head-processes, and their relation to the processes of the abdomen. And further, when in mineralogy one studies the processes which take place in copper when it gives rise to this or that formation in the earth, then what copper does in becoming one or another kind of copper ore makes one say to oneself: The copper-force in the earth actually does what you as teacher do with a boy or a girl! |
| There he may see, for example, how, wherever harmful results might ensue from some lime-process, a copper-process is introduced into it. Yes, in these copper-processes, in these ore-forming processes, which have their place within the other processes of the earth, remedial effects are continually present. |
| GA 230. Man as Symphony of the Creative Word — Lecture X | |||||||||
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| In the lectures which I have given recently you will have seen that everything was directed towards so bringing together world-phenomena that eventually a really comprehensive knowledge of man might result. Everything we have been studying here has had the knowledge of man as its goal. Such a knowledge of man will only become possible when it begins with the lowest forms of the world of phenomena and relates them to everything that is revealed to man as the material world. But what begins in this way with the study of the entire world of matter must end with the study of the world of the hierarchies. It is in proceeding from the lowest forms of material up to the highest forms of spiritual existence that we must seek to discover what will eventually lead to a true knowledge of man. For the present we will use the lectures I am now able to give you to make a kind of sketch of such a knowledge of man. We must be quite clear about the fact that what we now recognise as man is a product of that long cosmic evolution which I have always synthesized as the Saturn-Sun-Moon-and-Earth-evolution. The Earth-evolution is not yet completed. But let us be clear about what man owes to this Earth-evolution in the narrower sense, to the epoch, that is to say, which is subsequent to the evolution of old Moon. You see, when you move your arms and stretch them out, when you move your fingers, when you carry out any kind of external movement, everything in your organism which enables you to move your arms and legs, your head, your lips, and so on — and the forces upon which man's external movements depend enter into the most inward parts of the human organism — all this was vouchsafed to man by Earth-evolution in the narrower sense. If, on the other hand, you look into everything connected with the development of the metabolism, which is enclosed by man's outer skin, if you look at all the metabolic functions within the physical body, here you have a picture of what man owes to the Moon-evolution. And you have a picture of what man owes to the old Sun-evolution when you look into everything within him which involves some kind of rhythmic process. Breathing and blood-circulation are of course the most important of these rhythmic processes, and these man owes to the old Sun-evolution. Everything comprised in the system of nerves and senses, which in men of today is distributed over the whole body, this man owes to the old Saturn-evolution. In regard to all this, however, you must bear in mind that the human being is a whole and that world-evolution is a whole. When today we draw attention to the old Saturn-evolution in the way I did in my “Occult Science”, we mean the period of evolution previous to the primordial epochs of the Sun-Moon-and-Earth-evolution. But this is only one Saturn-evolution, that from which the Earth resulted. But during the period in which the Earth was evolving, a Saturn-evolution also came into being. This Saturn-evolution is included in the Earth-evolution; it is, so to speak, the youngest Saturn-evolution. The one that did not reach the Earth-evolution is the oldest. The Saturn-evolution which was inserted into old Sun is younger; the one inserted into old Moon is younger still. And the Saturn which today imbues the Earth, and is actually responsible for certain aspects of its warmth-organization, this Saturn is the youngest of all. We, with our human nature, are a part of this Saturn-evolution. Thus are we placed into cosmic evolution. But we are also placed into what surrounds us spacially on the earth. Take, for example, the mineral kingdom. We live in a state of reciprocal action with the mineral kingdom. We take the mineral element into ourselves through our food. We absorb it in other ways, too, through our breathing, and so on. We assimilate the mineral element. But all evolution, all world-processes, are different within man from what they are outside him. I have already mentioned that it is a real absurdity when people today study chemical processes in laboratories, and then think that when a person eats certain foodstuffs these processes will simply continue inside him. Man is not some kind of confluence of chemical actions; inside him everything is altered. And from a certain standpoint this alteration appears in the following way. Let us suppose that we take into ourselves something of a mineral nature. Every such mineral substance must be so far worked upon within the human being that the following result is brought about. You know that we have our own individual temperature; in the healthy person this is about 98 degrees Fahrenheit (37° centigrade). In the warmth of our blood we have something which exceeds the warmth outside us. Everything which we take in as mineral substance must, however, be so transformed, so metamorphosed in our organism that, where the warmth of our blood exceeds the average warmth of its external environment, where it rises above the average external warmth of our surroundings, this excess of warmth absorbs with satisfaction the mineral element within us. If you eat a grain of cooking-salt, this grain of salt must be absorbed by your individual warmth, not by the warmth which you have in common with the outside world. It must be absorbed with satisfaction by your own individual warmth. Everything mineral must be transformed into warmth-ether. And the moment a person has something in his organism which prevents any kind of mineral from being changed into warmth-ether, at that moment he is ill. Now let us proceed to the plant-substances which man takes into himself. Man takes in plant-substances; he, too, belongs to the plant kingdom inasmuch as he develops the plant-element within himself. He contains what is of a mineral nature; this, however, continually has the tendency to become warmth-ether. The plant element continually has the tendency in man to become airy, to become gaseous. So that man has the plant element within himself in its aspect of air. Everything of a plant nature which enters man, or whatever he himself develops as inner plant organisation, must become airy, must be able to assume the form of air within him. If it does not assume the form of air, if his organization is such that it hinders him from letting what is of a plant-nature within him pass over into the form of air, he becomes ill. Everything of animal-nature which man takes in or develops within himself must — in time at least — assume the fluid, the watery form. Man may not have what is of an animal nature within him, whether inwardly produced or absorbed from outside, unless at some time it submits to the process of becoming fluid. If man is not in a position to liquidize either his own or foreign animal substance so as to transform it further into the solid, then he becomes ill. Only that in man which is indigenous to the purely human form, which arises from his nature as a being who walks upright, having within him the impulses to speak and think, only that which gives man his real humanity, which raises him above the animal — and this is at most a tenth of his whole organism — may enter into solid formation, into actual form. If anything of animal or plant nature invades the human solid form, man is ill. Everything mineral must eventually become warmth-ether in man. Everything vegetable must undergo a transitional airy stage in man. Everything animal must pass through an intermediate watery stage in man. Only what is human may always retain within itself the earthly-solid form. This is one of the secrets of the human organization. And now to begin with let us leave aside everything that man has from the Earth-epoch — thereby making our further studies of this all the more fruitful — and let us take the metabolic system as such, which, though certainly developed as an Earth-organization, nevertheless received its germinal beginnings from the epoch of old Moon. Let us therefore take digestion in the narrower sense of what takes place inside the human skin — in which we must of course include the excretory processes — and we shall find that all substances become altered in the intake of food. The food-substances, which at first are outside man, enter into him, and merge themselves with the digestive system. This digestive system now converts what belonged to man's surroundings into what is essentially human. Everything mineral begins to assume the condition of warmth-ether, everything vegetable the gaseous-airy-vaporous condition, everything animal, including what is self-produced, begins to assume the fluid condition; and all begin to build what is now essentially human into a firmly organized structural form. All this is inherent in digestion. And digestion is consequently something of remarkable interest. If we ascend from digestion to breathing, we notice that man produces carbon out of himself, and that this is to be found everywhere within him. This is sought out by oxygen, becomes changed into carbonic acid, and is then exhaled. Carbonic acid is the combination of carbon and oxygen. The oxygen, which is drawn in through breathing, masters the carbon, absorbs the carbon into itself; carbonic acid, the product of oxygen and carbon, is then exhaled. But before exhalation occurs, the carbon becomes the benefactor, so to speak, of human nature. This carbon — in that it combines with the oxygen, in that it combines to a certain extent what the blood-circulation brings about with what the breathing produces — this carbon becomes the benefactor of the human organization, for, before it leaves the human organization, it disperses through it an out-streaming of ether. Physical science merely states that carbon is exhaled with carbonic acid. This, however, is only one side of the whole process. Man exhales the carbonic acid; but in the process of this exhalation something of the carbon taken up by the oxygen is left behind in his whole organism, namely ether. This ether penetrates into man's etheric body, and it is this ether, continually being produced by the carbon, which makes the human organization capable of opening itself to spiritual influences, of absorbing astral-etheric forces from the cosmos. This ether, which is left behind by the carbon, attracts the cosmic impulses, and they in their turn work formatively upon man, so preparing his nervous system, for instance, that it can become the bearer of thoughts. This ether must continually permeate our senses, our eyes, for example, so that they may see, so that they may receive the outer light-ether. Thus we are indebted to carbon for the supply of ether within us which enables us to come into contact with the outer world.  All this is already prepared in the metabolic system. But the metabolism as a human system is so placed into the whole cosmos that it could not exist for itself alone. Isolated in itself the digestive system could not exist. This is why it was the third system to have its rudiments implanted in man. The rudiments of the system of nerves and senses took form in the epoch of old Saturn; the second system, the rhythmic system, was laid down during the epoch of old Sun. Only after these other systems had come into being could the metabolic system be produced, because in and for itself this system could not exist. The metabolic system, if at first we omit its involuntary movements, is intended, in its cosmic connection, to provide for human nutrition. But these processes of nutrition cannot function independently. Digestion is necessary to man, but in and for itself it cannot exist. For if we study the human metabolic system in isolation — in the forthcoming lectures you will again see how necessary it is for the whole human organism — we find it constantly imbued with every kind of tendency towards illness. And the origin of internal illnesses — not those caused by external injury — must always be looked for in the metabolic system. Anyone, therefore, who wishes to put forward a rational observation of illness must start with the metabolic system; and in regard to every metabolic phenomenon he must really ask: Now where did you come from? When we consider all the phenomena, from the taking of food into the mouth, from the way the food is worked upon so that we transform certain substances into starch, sugar and so on, when we take the enveloping action of ptyalin in the mouth, when we go further and take the pepsin process in the stomach, and the assimilation of the products in digestion, following all these as far as their passage into the lymphatic vessels and into the blood — then we realize that each single one of these processes must be investigated — and their number is legion. The mingling of the products of digestion with the secretions of the pancreatic glands, the further mingling of these substances with the secretions from the gall-bladder, and so on — to each single process the question must be put: What is it that you really want? And it will answer: If I am alone I am a process which always makes man ill. No digestive process in human nature may be carried to its conclusion, for every digestive process which is carried to its conclusion makes man ill. The human constitution is only healthy when the metabolic processes are checked at a certain stage. It might at first seem a folly in world-organization that something should begin in man which, if not checked halfway, would make him ill; but in the next lectures we shall learn to recognize this as something of the utmost wisdom. For the time being, however, let us study the actual facts, and discover what the answer of the separate digestive processes would be if we were to question their inner nature. We are always on the way to making our whole organism ill. Every digestive process, if unchecked, causes illness in the organism. If, therefore, digestion is to exist at all in man, other processes must exist whose germinal beginnings date from earlier times. These are the processes which are present in circulation, the circulatory processes. The circulation continually produces the processes of healing. So that we may really describe the human being by saying: During the old Moon evolution man was born as patient, and the doctor within him was already sent in advance during the epoch of old Sun. In regard to his own organism man was already born as doctor during the evolution of old Sun. It shows great foresight on the part of world-evolution that the doctor came into existence before the patient, for the patient in man himself was only added on old Moon. And if we are to describe man rightly, we must work backwards from the digestive to the circulatory processes, including, of course, all those impulses which underlie the circulatory system. Speaking broadly one substance induces quicker, another substance slower circulation. We have also quite small circulatory processes within us. Take any mineral substance, gold, let us say, or copper. Every such substance when induced into man — by the mouth, by injection, or in any other way — is endowed with the power of causing something to be formed or altered in the circulation, so as to work in a curative way, and so on. And what one must know, in order to gain insight into the essential healing processes in man, is what each single substance in his world-environment releases in man through alterations in his circulation. Thus one may say that circulation is a continual process of healing. You can if you wish work this out for yourselves. Recall how I told you that on an average man draws eighteen breaths a minute. Here we find a remarkably regular agreement with the cosmos, for the number of breaths man draws in a day equals the number of circulatory rhythms carried out by the sun in its course through the solar year. As regards its rising, point at the vernal equinox the sun traverses the entire zodiac in the course of 25,920 years. In middle life man draws on an average 25,920 breaths a day. The pulse-beats are four times as many. The other circulation, the circulation which is concentrated more inwardly, is influenced by the digestion. Breath-circulation brings man into outer intercourse with the surrounding world, into reciprocal relationship with it. This breath-rhythm must continually restrain the rhythm of blood-circulation, so that it remains in its proportion of one to four, otherwise man would come into a quite irregular rhythm, not reaching the number 103,680. This corresponds to nothing in the cosmos; it would completely sever man and cosmos. His digestion tears him out of the cosmos, estranges him from the cosmos; the rhythm of his breathing continually pulls him back into it. In this holding the rhythm of circulation in control by the rhythm of breathing, you see the primal healing process which is continually at work in man. In a certain delicate way, in the case of every internal cure, we must assist the breathing process, continued as it is into the whole body, and this in such a manner that everywhere in the human being the process of circulation is held in control, is brought back into the general relationships of the cosmos. Thus we may say: We pass over from nutrition to healing inasmuch as from below upwards man always has the tendency to become ill, and therefore in his central organism, in his organism of circulation, he must continually develop the tendency to remain well. And in that in our central organism healing impulses continually arise, they leave something behind in the head-nerve-senses system. Thus we are brought to the third part of our organism, the system of nerves and senses. What kind of forces do we find in the nerve-senses system? We find those forces which, so to speak, the doctor in us leaves behind. On the one hand he works down into the metabolism in a health-giving way. But through this curative working upon the digestive process he actually does something which affects the whole cosmos. What I am saying is nothing fantastic, but an absolute reality. This process, which continually works downwards in us in a healing way, calls forth a feeling of pleasure in the higher hierarchies. It constitutes the joy of the higher hierarchies in the earthly world. They look down and continually feel the uprising of illness out of what streams upwards in man from the earthly, from what remains of the earthly attributes of the substances. And they also see how the forces which work away from the earthly, the forces which lie in the encircling air, and the like, are continually active as processes of healing. This arouses satisfaction in the higher hierarchies.  And now try to gain an idea of what may be studied in regard to that cosmic body which, as the spiritual object most deserving of study, is situated at the outer boundary of our planetary system. In the centre of this body we find those forces concealed which, if you think of them as concentrated upon the earth, are the illness inducing forces, and surrounding this same body the encircling forces reveal themselves as the forces which bring about healing. Anyone sensitive to such things will see encircling health in the rings of Saturn, and this in a more distinct way than it can be perceived in what surrounds the earth, because there we stand in the midst of it. A Saturn ring is something essentially different from what astronomers have to say about it. It is encircling health, where-as the inner part of Saturn develops illness; it is the illness-inducing element seen in its most radical concentration. Thus we see in Saturn, which is situated at the outer-most boundary of our planetary system, the very same process at work which we continually bear within ourselves through our digestive and circulatory organism. But we also find, when we look at all this, that our spiritual gaze is directed further to the worlds of the first and second hierarchy, to the beings of the second hierarchy, Kyriotetes, Exusiai, Dynamis, and to the beings of the first hierarchy, Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones. If with our spiritual eye we are attentive to Saturn and its ring, we shall be led to these upper hierarchies, as they survey with satisfaction the illness-inducing and health-restoring processes. And this satisfaction is in itself a force in the universe. It streams through our system of nerves and senses and forms within it the forces of the spiritual evolution of mankind. These are the forces which blossom forth, as it were, from the healing-process which is continually at work in man. Thus in the third place we have the forces of spiritual evolution.
And if we now describe man in the epochs of Saturn, Sun and Moon, we must say: In the first place man is born out of the cosmos as spirit, he then develops within himself the “healer”, and thus enables himself to deal with the cosmic “patient”. And through the inter-working of all these activities man came into being upon the earth possessed of full freedom of movement. Every single branch of human knowledge must in a certain sense be inspired by what I have said here. Let us suppose that someone wishes to found a system of healing, a really rational system of healing. What would this have to contain? In the first place, naturally, the processes of healing. But these healing-processes, from where must they take their start? They must take their start from the metabolic processes; and everything else can at most be supposition — we shall have something further to say about this later — anatomy too, even in a delicate form, can at most be a starting point, because it is concerned with the formed and solid. This immediately expresses the human element. But it is the digestive processes which must be studied in the first place by a rational system of medicine, and this in such a way that one always perceives in them tendencies leading towards the inducement of illness. A modern system of medicine must always take the metabolic system, that is to say the normal processes of digestion, as its point of departure; and starting from there it must deduce how internal illnesses, in the widest sense, can arise from the metabolism. Then, through an intimate knowledge of the action of the rhythmic processes, the true nature of therapy must be discovered. A modern system of medicine must, therefore, be founded on a study of the metabolic processes, and then, from this initial study, the transition must be made to everything which can make its appearance in the sphere of the rhythmic processes in man. Further, a kind of crowning of the whole will be attained in that one shows how a sound development of man's spiritual possibilities presupposes a knowledge of what arises from the healing forces. Today you will find no true pedagogy — no art, that is to say, of the sound development of man's spiritual nature — if you do not take your start from the processes of healing; for these healing processes are nothing other than applying to the central nature of the human being what must already be made use of in pure thinking when developing the spiritual processes of man. The artist in education must work in a spiritual way with the forces which, whether concentrated in the physical or concentrated in the etheric, are processes of healing. Whatever I may do to a child in the sphere of education is a process which has something spiritual as its basis. If I transpose this process, so that what was an activity in the spirit I now carry out in such a way that I make use of some kind of substance or physical process, then this process or substance becomes a remedy. So that it may really be said that medicine is the treatment of man in the spiritual sphere metamorphosed downwards into the sphere of the material. If you call to mind the way in which I dealt with things in the teachers' course held some time back for English visitors, [* See Lectures to Teachers, a report by Albert Steffen.] you will see how I everywhere drew attention to the fact that the work of the teacher is the beginning of a kind of general therapy, and I showed how this or that set of educational ideas can be the initial cause of unhealthy conditions in the excretory processes or of digestive irregularities in later life. So that what the teacher does, projected downwards, gives us therapy. And the antithesis of this therapy — what works from below upwards — this is brought about by the process of digestion. Here you also see why a system of medicine today must be born out of a knowledge of man as a whole. And this is possible. Many people feel it. But nothing can really be achieved until such a system of medicine is actually developed. Today this must be counted among the most urgent of necessities. If you look at modern text-books of medicine, you will see that, with the rarest exceptions, they do not take their start from the metabolic system. But this must be the point of departure, otherwise one does not learn to know the real nature of illness. You see, the whole matter proceeds in such a way that the processes of human nutrition can pass over into processes of healing, these again into spiritual processes; and, working backwards, spiritual processes can pass over into healing processes. If, on the other hand, spiritual processes are the direct cause of digestive disturbances, these spiritual processes must again enter into a condition in which they must be cured by the central system of man. All these things pass one into the other in man, and the whole human organization is an example of continual and wonderful metamorphosis. Take, for example, the processes inherent in the whole marvelous circulation of the human blood. What kind of processes are these? To begin with, separating it entirely from the rest of the organism, let us gain an idea of the human blood, how it flows through the veins; and let us consider the human form, the system of veins, the muscular system in its connection with the bony system, all the solid structure of the body and what flows through it as fluid. And first let us confine ourselves in the fluid condition to the blood. There are, of course, other fluids present, but let us confine ourselves to the blood. Now what are the processes which are continually happening in this streaming fluidity? These processes in the flowing blood can seize hold, in one direction or another, on the walls of the organs, on the bony structure, on anything which can take on a solid formation in man: then what belongs to the blood enters into the walls of the vessels, into the muscles, into one or another of the bones, or into any containing organ. What does it become there? It becomes the impulse towards inflammatory conditions. What we find here or there as impulses towards inflammatory conditions is continually to be found as normal processes in the flowing blood. What appears as inflammation is something in the wrong place; that is to say processes which must always be present in the fluid blood have trespassed into the solid structure. A perfectly healthy normal process, displaced, transferred to another situation where it does not belong, becomes a process which induces illness. And certain illnesses of the nervous system consist just in this, that the nervous system, which in its whole organization is the polar opposite of the blood-system, is subjected to invasion by processes which are normal in the blood. If these processes which are normal in the blood-channels invade the paths of the nerves even in the slightest degree, then the nerves are attacked by inflammation in its initial stages; and this can develop into the most diverse forms of illness in the nervous system. I mentioned that the processes in the blood are entirely different from those in the nerves; they are the antithesis of each other. In the blood-processes the urge is towards the phosphorizing element. When these phosphorizing processes take hold of what encloses or is adjacent to the blood, they lead to inflammatory conditions. But if the processes in the paths of the nerves themselves deviate into the adjacent organs and even into the blood, then impulses towards every kind of swelling arise in man. When these processes are carried over into the blood so that they affect the other organs in an unhealthy way, the formation of swellings or tumours makes its appearance. Every swelling or tumour is a metamorphosed nerve-process wrongly situated in the human organism. What has its course in the nerve must remain in the nerve, and what has its course in the blood must remain in the blood. If what belongs in the blood trespasses into what is adjacent to it, inflammatory conditions arise. When what belongs in the nerve trespasses into what is adjacent to it, all kinds of formations arise which can be grouped together under the designation of swelling-formations. The aim must be to establish the correct rhythm between the processes in the nervous system and the processes in the system of the blood. Not only have we in general the rhythm of breathing contrasted with the rhythm of the blood, but we have delicate processes in the circulation of the blood, which, when they depart from the blood, become the causes of inflammation. These delicate processes must also enter into a certain rhythmic connection with what is proceeding in the adjacent nerves, just as breathing must stand in a certain connection with the circulation of the blood. And the moment something is disturbed between blood-rhythm and nerve-rhythm it must once more be brought into adjustment. Here again, you see we come into the domain of therapy, of healing. All this serves to show you how everything must be present in man, how above all an element of illness must be present so that in another situation it may become an element of health; it has only been brought into the wrong situation through an incorrect process. For if it were not there at all man could not exist. Man could not exist if he were unable to get inflammations, for the inflammation-inducing forces must continually be present in the blood. This was my meaning when I often said that everything one gains in the way of knowledge must be won from a real knowledge of man. Here you see the reasons why an education carried out in an up-in-the-air, abstract fashion is really something absurd. Education must in fact be so carried out that everywhere the start is taken from certain pathological processes in man, and from the possibility of curing them. If one understands a brain-illness and the means by which brain-illness may be cured, then, to put things bluntly — from a certain point of view this is of course also a subtle matter, but I put it “bluntly” because we are dealing with a physical process — then, in the treatment of the brain, we are concerned precisely with what must be applied in the art of education. It is therefore the case that, if we ever came actually to founding a training college for teachers we should have to introduce the pathological-therapeutical aspect to the teachers, and here their thinking should be schooled by means of more perceptible things, because these are more rooted in the material, so preparing them to grasp things concerned with actual education. On the other hand, nothing is of greater assistance in therapy, particularly in the treatment of internal illnesses, than to know the effect produced by the way in which this or that aspect of the art of education is handled. For if one finds the bridge from this to the material, then, from the very way in which one should act in education, the remedy is also to be found. If, for example, one discovers the right educational means of treating certain lethargic conditions in the children, arising from certain disturbances in the metabolic system, one develops quite remarkable inner faculties. It is necessary, of course, really to immerse oneself in the education, and not have such an external approach that, when school is over, one prefers to spend all the evening in a convivial club and forget all about what happens in the classroom. From the very way one handles a lethargic child one gains the faculty to perceive the whole working of the head-processes, and their relation to the processes of the abdomen. And further, when in mineralogy one studies the processes which take place in copper when it gives rise to this or that formation in the earth, then what copper does in becoming one or another kind of copper ore makes one say to oneself: The copper-force in the earth actually does what you as teacher do with a boy or a girl! In what is accomplished by copper one sees an image of what one carries out oneself. And it is extraordinarily fascinating for a teacher to develop an instinctive, an intuitive clarity of feeling in regard to what he himself does, and then to have the delight of going out into nature in order to see what nature accomplishes in the way of education on an immense scale. There he may see, for example, how, wherever harmful results might ensue from some lime-process, a copper-process is introduced into it. Yes, in these copper-processes, in these ore-forming processes, which have their place within the other processes of the earth, remedial effects are continually present. If somewhere or other one finds pyrite-ores, or the like, it is fascinating to be able to say: Yes, this is exactly the same as when a patient receives the right treatment. But here the treatment is accomplished by the spirits of nature, from the hierarchies down to those elemental spirits about which I have spoken to you, in their capacity as healers of all the destructive, illness-inducing processes which can appear in life. This is in fact nothing more than reading from nature. For if one sees what is happening outside, if one accepts this or that substance as a remedy or prepares it as such, one has only to ask oneself: Where do the foodstuffs grow? Where does this or that metal appear in the veins of the earth? Study their environment and you will always find that, wherever some form of metal appears here or there, which has been dealt with by nature in one or another way, a remedial process is at work within it. Only appropriate this and continue it on into the human organism and you will create a therapy which nature has demonstrated to you in the world outside. Yes, all the goings-on of the world are in reality a true education in all questions of nutrition, of healing, of the spiritual; for in nature illness is continually being induced and is continually being cured. They are there outside, the great cosmic processes of healing. We must only apply them to man. This is the wonderful inter-working of the macrocosm with the microcosm. What I have said to many of you in one context or another is profoundly true:
You can, however, apply this to everything. Wouldst thou heal man, look into the world on every side, see how on every side the world evolves processes of healing. Wouldst thou know the secrets of the world in the processes of illness and healing, look down into the depths of human nature. You can apply this to every aspect of man's being, but you must direct your gaze outwards to the great world of nature and see man in a living relationship with this great world. People today have accustomed themselves to something different. They depart as far from nature as possible. They do something which shuts their own sight off from nature, for what they wish to examine they lay beneath a glass on a little stand — the eye does not look out into nature, but looks into the glass. Sight itself is cut off from nature. They call this a microscope. In certain connections it might as well be called a nulloscope, for it shuts one off from the great world of nature. People do not know, when something under the glass is magnified, that for spiritual knowledge it is exactly as though the same process were to take place in nature herself. For only think, when you take some minute particle from the human being for purposes of observation under a microscope, what you then do with this minute fragment is the same as if you were to stretch the man himself and tear him apart. You would be an even worse monster than Procrustes if you were to wrench man and tear him asunder in order to enlarge him as that minute particle is enlarged under the microscope. But do you believe that you would still have the person before you? This would naturally be out of the question. Just as little have you the reality there under the microscope. The truth which has been magnified is no longer the truth; it is an illusory image. We must not depart from nature and imprison our own sight. For other purposes, this can of course be useful; but for a true knowledge of man it is immensely misleading. Knowledge of man in the true sense must be sought in the way we have indicated. Starting from the processes of nutrition, it must be followed through the processes of healing to the processes of human and world education in the widest sense. Or we can put it thus: from nutrition, through healing, to civilization and culture. For all that is concentrated in the nourishment of man is the groundwork, as it were, of his physical processes; the healing processes are derived from what continually encircles man, they are concentrated in the rhythmic system; and what comes from above is concentrated in man in the processes of the nerves and senses. Thus world-structure is erected on three levels. This is what I wished to give you in the first place as a kind of foundation. We can now build further upon it. We shall see how, from such points of departure, we can actually progress to the business of practical affairs; and from thence we can lead over to a knowledge of the hierarchies. |
| GA 312. Spiritual Science and Medicine — Lecture VI |
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| Moreover, the conception I have given leaves, as you will perceive, ample room for other substances than the six most distinctive metals (lead, tin, iron, copper, quicksilver and silver) to come into being through the combination of planetary forces. This joint action of planetary forces means that various other planetary influences combine with the typical ones which we indicated. |
| The ancients believed that lead was formed in the manner described above, but lead — like gold or copper — contains all three principles, salt, mercury and phosphorus. So, in order that we may be able to treat man with one or all of these, we must be able to extract or separate it in some way, from the substances with which it is united. |
| In the opinion of these physicians, the specific action of the remedies they obtained depended on the matrix from which they had been extracted. What was obtained from lead acted differently from what was obtained from copper, for example. They laid most stress on origin: salt derived from lead was essentially different from salt derived from copper. So that when they spoke of salt, they knew that in it they had something common to all salts. |
| GA 312. Spiritual Science and Medicine — Lecture VI |
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| I am somewhat anxious about what I have to say today, for if I could spare three months in which to develop the aspects of my subject, it could not easily be dismissed as fantasy. But I must offer you a mere cursory introduction, within the limits of an hour, in order to make the following special problems of healing quite clear. Therefore much will seem without foundation. Nevertheless I will try to show in the presentation of the subject, that these matters are indeed well-founded — even better-founded than those on which the natural science of today has been built. Let us first consider the formative process of plants as such, in its relationship to the cosmos. We have already pointed out that in man the opposite process to that of plant formation is active in a functional sense. Therefore, in order to find the direct correspondence in man, we must at least indicate in outline the formative process of plants As is apparent, there are two distinct and quite opposite tendencies in this process. One tendency is earthwards, and I have already suggested that in trees the main stem forms a sort of excrescence of the earth, so that the flowers and leaves are rooted in the trunk, just as herbs and plants of lower types are rooted in the earth. There is this tendency of the plant towards the earth; but on the other hand, the plant has an impulse upwards, away from the earth. The plant strives to escape from the earth, not merely mechanically by virtue of a force opposed to the pull of gravity but also in its whole formative process, internal as well. The processes in the flower become different from those in the root; they become far more dependent on extra-terrestrial or extra-telluric forces than the root. This dependence of the flower formation upon forces originating outside the earth must first be considered and we shall find that the same forces utilised by the plant to initiate the formation of flower and seed are also necessary to the human hypogastrium, because of the functional reversal of the plant process in man. They are utilised through the abdomen as well as in all functions of evacuation secretion and the physical base of sex. So if we examine the complementary relationship of man and the plant, we find special correspondences to the extra-telluric as well as to the telluric. Please notice here that what I maintain has not been derived from the medical works of the past, but is based entirely on contemporary spiritual-scientific research. I only try to use sometimes the terms of the old literature of medicine, as modern literature contains no suitable vocabulary. But it would be a complete mistake to suppose that any item of my course here is simply derived from archaic sources. Observe the growth of the plant as it rises upwards out of the earth. You must take note of the spiral sequence in the actual formation of the leaves and of the flower. You might say that the formative forces follow a spiral course around the central stalk. This spiral course cannot be explained by internal forces of tension in the plant. No; its origin is to be sought in the influence that works from the extra-telluric sphere, and chiefly in the influence of the sun's apparent path through the heavens. (Let us say “apparent,” for the respective motions of earth and sun can only be taken relatively.) There are indeed points of view better than the mathematics of Galileo, from which to study the paths of the heavenly bodies; they trace themselves in the sequence of formative processes in the plant. For what the stars do is faithfully copied by the plant.  It would be quite mistaken, however, to reckon only with the vertical upward impulse in plants, that depends upon the sun. The stars co-operate in a resultant with movements caused by the sun. If the sun's action were the sole operating force, it would take complete possession, so to speak, and the plant would be drawn upwards into the infinite. (See Diagram 9). The solar force is, however, counteracted to some degree by that of the outer planets, in their spiral courses. For planets as a matter of fact, do not move in an ellipse; their orbits are spiral. It is time today that the whole Copernican system was re-examined and superseded by another. The so-called outer planets are Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. (Uranus and Neptune are only members of the solar system in an astronomical sense; they do not really belong to it by origin; they are foreign bodies that have become attracted and attached to our system. They are guests, invited to our planetary system, and we are right to omit them.) The forces of the superior planets deflect the plant's upward tendency, so as to bank up the formative forces which cause the formation of flower and seed. So if you consider the plant's upward development, from the region of formation of the foliage, you must ascribe it to the combined action of of the Sun's influence and that of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. There are not only these two elements in co-operation. Marshalled against them are the influences from the Moon and the so-called inferior planets, Mercury, and Venus. The Moon, Mercury and Venus cause the earthward, downward tendency in the plant, which manifests itself most characteristically in the formation of the root. Thus all that seems essentially earthy is really a joint product of the action of the Moon, and that of the inferior planets. So I would say that the plant expresses and bears the imprint of our whole planetary system. Until we know this, and learn also how to recognise the planetary manifestations in man as well we cannot thoroughly understand the relationship between the plant structure and the human structure. Now consider the fact that plants with a prevailing tendency towards root-formation leave much more ash when they are burnt than is left by plants that tend towards the formation of blossoms or even by mistletoe and, tree-plants. This difference is caused by the greater influence of the inner heavenly bodies, Moon, Mercury and Venus, on plants with great root development. And if you search in their ashes, iron, manganese, and silicon will be found, all of them substances with direct remedial qualities, as is shown when any portion of the plant is used. But if plants of the opposite type are exposed to the action of fire, there is but little ash. And in these different results of the same process of incineration, we have something I would describe as an external document of the plant's relation to the whole cosmic order, and not to forces ruling on earth alone. Now consider the plant world more closely. In the case of annual plants, growth stops abruptly at a certain season of the year with the formation of seed. As we have seen, seed formation is mainly governed by extra-terrestrial forces. But its course is interrupted and it is given over to the earth again. It must, as it were, continue at a lower stage in the new year, what had reached a higher stage in the old year The course of plant life and growth is a remarkable one. Take the earth's surface; the plant emerges from the soil, reaching out to its fullest extent towards the extra-terrestrial spheres. But then what has developed extra-terrestrially is sown again in the soil, and the cycle begins anew. (See Diagram 10). Thus every year the heavenly forces sink into the ground, mingle with the forces of the earth, and again complete their course. Year by year the seed of the flower is returned again to the root region, to complete the rhythmic cycle to which all plant life is subject.  This rhythmic cycle is proof that what we term the flora of earth is in truth a manifestation of the whole earth's interaction with the extra-terrestrial cosmos. This interaction, therefore, is not restricted to the form of our planet, but extends to its internal chemistry and its whole system of organic life. Just as what is earthly in the mechanism in the form is overcome by the cosmic forces, so also is the terrestrial chemistry in plants overcome by the forces outside the earth; and when this overcoming has reached a certain point, the process must return again to earth and display earthly chemistry. From these facts it is not a farfetched conclusion that the specific chemistry of the earth is revealed in the ashes; it is represented in the refuse, the dross of the living sphere. This dross and ash is subject to gravity, whereas the upward urge and growth of the plant is a continual conquest of gravity, and of other earth-bound forces, so that we may properly speak of a polar opposition between gravity and light. Light is that which continually overcomes gravity. And the plant is so to speak set into the tension of this combat between light and weight, between that which strives towards ashes and that which strives towards fire. And this polar contrast between what becomes ashes and what is revealed in flame, is the opposition of ponderable and imponderable elements. There we have revealed the cosmic place and role of plant life. What of man? We have already maintained that we shall not understand him aright, unless we recognise his polar orientation also. I have pointed out that the part that grows upwards from below, in man grows downwards from above; the sexual and excretory processes in man correspond to the flowers and seed vessels, whereas his root formation points upwards. In man, however, it remains in the realm of functions; in plants it becomes a material process. So man presents us with manifestations that are the direct opposite of those of the plant. In him we have not only the manifestations, but the bearer of them. So you must distinguish in man the functions sending their roots upwards, and the functions tending downward; and as surrounding sheath of both, his material body, which in its turn has an upward tendency. That which happens artificially and externally in respect of plants — the removal from the upper sphere and implanting into the lower level — in man becomes a continuous process. In him there is a constant double current in every process from above downwards and from below upwards, and the relationship of these currents is the core of health and disease. We cannot begin to understand the complex processes in man, if we do not consider the facts I have just described. On the one hand is a material carrier working upwards from the earth, and on the other, something else, working from above downwards, is inserted into the carrier. It is easy to see that the interaction of these forces determines health or disease in man, especially when, half in despair, so to say, one meets the most important fact, that the human organism has to be treated quite differently according to whether the upper region or the “sub-cardiac” regions are affected. They must be viewed according to quite different principles. Let us cite an example; the relationship of common rickets to cranio-tabes, which to many people is quite mysterious. These two afflictions seem so closely related if the human individual is viewed as a unity, whereas in truth they should be considered in the in the light of perfectly different principles, as they originate in regions of man that are polar to one another. This has an important bearing upon the healing process. Medical men who obtain certain favourable results in cases of rickets, through some form of phosphoric application, will probably fail completely in cases of cranio-tabes, which require an opposite therapeutic method, probably an application of some form of carbonate of lime. But this is a mere illustration of a truth that is quite general; though its statement is apt to be unwelcome. Where the treatment of human beings is in question in the domain of medicine, it is a fact that whatever remedy is prescribed, and whatever rule is laid down, their exact opposites may also be true and efficacious in certain cases. A very annoying circumstance! It is perfectly possible to prescribe a thoroughly sound and effective method of treatment for such and such a case; and then if it is applied to what appear to be the very same symptoms, to find that it proves no remedy, and that the exact opposite must be applied. Thus it is always possible to meet, and even beat, one theory of treatment with another on the medical field; for most people are not aware that only one part of man can be treated remedially according to any one method, and that another region requires a different method, this is the point we must grasp here. Now let us carefully examine the sphere that in plants appears visibly separated in two, whereas in man it forms one aspect of his whole constitution. I referred to the three formative impulses which are in some degree inherent in external nature; the impulse to saline formation the impulse to mercurial formation and the tendency peculiar to certain substances such as phosphorus and sulphur to conserve within themselves the imponderable forces to become their carriers. What is the difference between these formative impulses of external nature, in so far as our present subject is concerned? All that is saline in its process tends to saline formation, leading our internal processes in to the realm of gravity. Those who study the medical works of the past would do well to keep in mind, wherever they find references to the “salification” of substances, that by this process the substance in question is subjected to the force of gravity, and by the opposite process, the light process, it is liberated from gravity; that is, the imponderables are so liberated. Accordingly if we accept light as the representative of all other imponderable forces, we must conceive the whole of external nature as involved in the struggle between light and gravity, between the force that strives towards the extra-terrestrial and the force that makes earth's substances tend towards the centre. We have here the polarity between light and gravity; and in between, that which perpetually seeks the balance between the two and manifests mercurially For the mercurial element is simply something that continually seeks to maintain a state of equilibrium between light and gravity. We have to visualise the place and office of the imponderables working between the saline, the phosphoric, and the mercurial elements in the whole cosmic scheme, i.e., in gravity, in the light forces, and in that which ever seeks an equilibrium midway between them. Now into the very centre of these mighty forces and tensions is placed in a remarkable way the whole activity of our human heart. It is an appalling feature of the current natural scientific view, that quite apart from the pump-theory, which is untenable, as I have already demonstrated, all heart functions are thought to be enclosed within the limits of the individual being's skin. It is assumed that the heart is somehow connected with the substances that pulsate rhythmically within the limits of the body. But in truth, man with his organic system is inserted into the whole process of the universe, and the human heart is not merely an organ pertaining to his organism, but belongs to the whole world process. That tension of opposite forces which we have traced in the plant, that alternation and interplay of super-solar and infra-solar forces, is also manifest in man in the movements of the heart. The heart movements are not only an imprint of what takes place in man, they are also an imprint of extra-human conditions. For in the human heart you may see reflected as in a mirror, the whole process of the universe. Man is individualised merely as a being of soul and spirit. In other aspects of being, he is inserted into the universal process, so that, for instance, the beats of his heart are not only an expression of what takes place within man, but also of that contest between light and gravity that fills the whole cosmic stage. I have often had occasion to put this cosmic-human interaction before laymen, in a rough and obvious way, by means of the following calculation. Let us assume that the human being draws breath eighteen times in the course of one minute. In one day of twenty-four hours, this will amount to 25,920 breaths. Now take one day of human life and note further that there are 360 or 365 days in the year assume that the human individual attains average old age, that of seventy-one years (one may, of course, become much older). In that case we shall find as many days in the course of life, as there are breaths in one day of twenty-four hours: namely 25,915. Now take the path of the sun through the constellations of the Zodiac, the platonic year, namely, the time necessary for the point of sunrise to return to Aries at the Vernal Equinox; this amounts to 25,920 of our terrestrial years. Here you have a remarkable example in numbers of the human relation to the whole universe. The course of the sun through the heavens in the platonic year is expressed by the same number as the days of a human life. This is easily reckoned, but it points the way into profound depths of the foundations of the world. Bear in mind — as we have had occasion to stress in Anthroposophy — that in sleep the ego and the astral body of man leave the physical and etheric bodies, and that on awakening, they return to them again. Visualise these exits and re-entries as exhalations and inhalations of the soul and spiritual element by the physical body; you will find that there are 25,915 or 25,920 of such “breaths” in the course of a normal life (the difference of five is due to leap-year days), which obviously must represent a “day” in relation to some other rhythm. And again there must be something in the cosmos which is inserted according to the same numerical terms into the solar revolution. Here is a rhythm in world occurrences that manifests on a large scale; it manifests also in an individual human life, and in the function of respiration during the day. You will no longer find it unaccountably strange that the ancient world, out of their old clairvoyance, spoke of the days and nights of Brahma, the in-breathing and out-breathing of the world; for these ancients had found the breathing of heaven reflected in the mirror of the everyday life-process of man. Because of these concrete facts, and not because of any sympathies or antipathies, we arrive at a true reverence for primeval wisdom. I can assure you that I should not reverence the ancient wisdom, had I not had the proof in countless cases, that we can re-discover today things already contained in it, things that had been lost and forgotten between the knowledge accumulated of old and that which we are now able to attain. The reverence for ancient wisdom that grows on the seeker after real knowledge is not the result of any vague general inclination, but springs from the comprehension of certain quite concrete conditions and facts. If we are in quest of the forces akin to light, we must turn to the outer planets of our system, to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. And as all that happens on earth is in some degree the effect of extra-terrestrial agents, we must look here for the effects of what happens in the cosmos. This leads us to examine the various substances in the earth, but not to look for the causes of their configuration or general consistency in the abstract and fantastic manner of the molecular physics and molecular atomic chemistry of today. This atomic chemistry which looks, as it were, into what is impenetrable to our vision, into the inmost recesses of the constitution of matter. devises all kinds of fine guesswork about atoms and molecules. It then proudly talks of “astronomical recognition” of what goes on in the interior of material structure: or rather, it did so twenty years ago, and does so perhaps less often today. That was a subject of discussion some time ago; today these processes are photographed, as I mentioned in a recent public lecture, and in spiritualistic circles photography is also called in to depict spirits! Just as scientific investigators are disinclined to believe in “spirit” photography, so must they permit us, who see through these things from another angle, to reject their atomic photography as well. For the same delusion is at work here also. In plants, it is not forces bound to atoms and molecules that we have to consider, but those that affect the earth by their impact from without, and permeate its substances. Not those tiny demons, the molecules and atoms, but the cosmic forces, shape the internal and external structure of matter. Let us take an example. Suppose that a planet in extra-terrestrial space is in an especially favourable position for working on a certain portion of our sphere. Assume Saturn to be the planet in question and that Saturn can best exercise its full influence when the direction of other planetary influences strike the earth as far away as possible from its own, and do not mingle with nor deflect them; (See Diagram 11) i.e., when the Sun, Mars, and other bodies are not in or near a line from Saturn to the earth. Then the Saturnian force impinges directly on our planet. And if conditions are favourable in the portion of earth directly under Saturn's influence, that Unmixed and undeflected Saturnian influence causes a structure to he formed there differing from that due to the action of Mars under similar conditions.  Earth's substances are the combined result of forces from the stars In the case cited as illustration, the effect of such action is shown in the production of lead. This is why we must associate certain substances in the earth — especially metals — with certain planetary positions in the extra-telluric universe. What the ancient wisdom of mankind offers us, can only be truly understood when it is discovered afresh. It is impossible for anyone accustomed to think in modern chemical and physical terms to read the ancient writings. This is shown by the following example. In a history of alchemy an extremely clever Norwegian scholar described a process, which, as he quite truly remarks, is mere nonsense according to modern chemical concepts, for it gives no result. It is a process concerned with lead. But he failed to see that this process explained the process of seed formation! He referred the statements to a laboratory experiment, which, of course, made nonsense. He did not realise that the terminology of archaic alchemy must be transferred, so to speak, to another plane, and that many of its expressions must be read in a wholly different sense. Therefore he made nonsense of the passage. His opinion was, of course, both right and wrong. Thus we cannot but assume a relationship between terrestrial substances and the forces impinging on the earth from the surrounding world. The study of metals in particular, on the lines indicated, leads to concrete relationships, so that we must ascribe their formations as follows. Lead results from the unimpeded action of Saturn, tin from that of Jupiter, iron from Mars, copper from Venus, and what is now termed quicksilver from Mercury. Similarly we must recognise a relationship between everything of the nature of silver, all that is silvery — I use this term with intention — and the unimpeded action of the Moon. It is pleasantly amusing to read in contemporary books that the reason why the ancient world associated silver with the Moon, was because of the Moon's silvery radiance — merely because of this external appearance! Anyone who is aware how careful and minute were the studies made of old as to the properties of the various metals — along their own lines, naturally — will not fall into such error. Moreover, the conception I have given leaves, as you will perceive, ample room for other substances than the six most distinctive metals (lead, tin, iron, copper, quicksilver and silver) to come into being through the combination of planetary forces. This joint action of planetary forces means that various other planetary influences combine with the typical ones which we indicated. In this manner, the less representative metals originate. And in any case, earth's wealth of metals is the result of forces acting on the earth from without. Here is the link between the workings of metals and the formation of plants. If you summarise the agencies contained in lead, tin and iron, you have there everything connected with flower and seed formation in plants; inasmuch as these processes take place extra-terrestrially above the surface of the earth. And all that is of the nature of copper, silver or mercury, must be related to everything connected with the formation of plant roots. As on the one side, the mercurial element acts as an equalising agent, you will certainly look for a corresponding equilibrium on the other side. The mercury element is the balancing factor between the telluric and that which is to some degree supra-telluric. But our whole universe is permeated with spirit. Thus another polarity arises. The terrestrial and extra-terrestrial poles represent the polar opposite of gravity and light. This offers only one possibility — the existence of a state of balance between the terrestrial and the extra-terrestrial elements. But there is another state of equilibrium between that which permeates all matter equally, whether it be terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, and matter itself; an equilibrium between the spiritual and the material, whether the latter be ponderable or imponderable. At every point of the material world, the balance must be held between it and the spiritual, and equally so in the universe. For us, the first and nearest agency that holds the balance in the universe, is the Sun itself. The Sun holds the balance between the spiritual in the universe and the material in the universe. Thus the Sun has a twofold aspect; as a heavenly body it establishes order in the planetary system, but at the same time it maintains order among the forces that permeate the material system. Just as we are able to link the individual planets with the metals as I have already described, so can we also establish the relationship of the Sun to gold. The ancients actually prized gold, not for its material value, but on account of its relationship with the Sun, and with the balance between spirit and matter. We should recognise that all that we divide and separate on earth, both in our thoughts and in our actions, in nature is actually united in some way or another. In our thoughts we separate what is subject to gravity, and therefore tends to salt formation, from that which bears the light and is therefore akin to the workings of light; and we separate both these categories from what is contained in the state of equilibrium between the two. But in nature there are no such absolute divisions. All these ways of working are connected one with another, adjusted to one another, so that they form highly intricate constructions, and one of these intricate structural systems is shown in the lustre of the metal gold; for it is through gold that the spiritual realm looks, as it were, right into the external world. This directs your attention to possibilities with which I will deal parenthetically — for you may be able to do fruitful work, by utilising in contemporary literature suggestions obtainable from ancient literature. In doing the scientific papers suggested yesterday, you will be able to make use of indications in the ancient literature, if you can understand it aright. Thus it is most important to notice how in old writings all these primary principles, salt, mercury and phosphorus, were seen to be in every substance in different combinations, and to note the diligence with which it was sought to liberate and extract these three principles from a given substance. The ancients believed that lead was formed in the manner described above, but lead — like gold or copper — contains all three principles, salt, mercury and phosphorus. So, in order that we may be able to treat man with one or all of these, we must be able to extract or separate it in some way, from the substances with which it is united. In the chemistry of ancient times, the most meticulous care was devoted to this process. It was found to be particularly difficult in the case of gold, hence the Roman proverb which may well lead us to reverence the ancients: “Facilius est aurum facere quam destruere” (It is easier to make gold than to destroy it). For they held that in this metal, the three primary natural constituents, salt, mercury and phosphorous, were so firmly united that to extract them from gold was hardest of all. Now we must readily admit that we should not get much further in the matter today, if we took the very same measures as the men of old times. But let us leave them, for we are dealing with the methods and medicine of today, and only occasionally referring to the light thrown by the past. Consider what we are now in a position to investigate. In order to extract the requisite amount of the three primary principles characterised yesterday and today, from the raw materials of nature, it will be necessary to subject these to combustion, in order first, to isolate the fire-bearing, light-bearing parts, then to try to extract the mercurial portions so that the portions with a saline tendency remain. These can be treated with some acid substance, which extracts them and produces an effective saline therapeutic remedy, whether of vegetable or mineral derivation. I shall give further details later on. Thus we shall either have to seek for the light-bearing substances in nature, in order to get extra-terrestrial factors, or try to remove the extra-terrestrial from earthly substances, and to retain the telluric; then we shall have a genuinely saline residue. Or finally we can try to attain something midway between the two poles. Here we have a choice of two paths, each different in kind, and each taking us part of the way to our goal. We can take the standpoint of the ancient physicians, who always began by extracting the essentially phosphoric, saline or mercurial from various substances, and then made use of the result. In the opinion of these physicians, the specific action of the remedies they obtained depended on the matrix from which they had been extracted. What was obtained from lead acted differently from what was obtained from copper, for example. They laid most stress on origin: salt derived from lead was essentially different from salt derived from copper. So that when they spoke of salt, they knew that in it they had something common to all salts. Because it was salt, it was of the earth, yet because salt derived from the various metals is something extra-telluric, it has relationships to the most diverse parts of man. This we can consider in more detail in the next lecture. This method is a possible choice, for instance, for the production of saline material in therapeutics. But there is the other way, chosen after the ancient method had ceased to work, and chosen in definite awareness of the fact that man is something more than a chemical apparatus. This way simply tries to take the substances as found in nature and to make available through “potentising” the forces hidden in them. This is the way chosen by Hahnemann's school, representing a new departure in the whole of man's medical researches. It left the archaic way, now blocked because of the ignorance concerning the extra-telluric and other relationships. This is what causes — I would almost say — the despair of modern medicine; that people have ceased to pay attention to the extra-terrestrial that is really the basis of the earthly elements. The extra-terrestrial sphere is ignored and the earthly sphere is treated as all-sufficient. The homeopathic system strives to get beyond this; so does the “open-air treatment,” which uses light and air directly, because it has lost the secret of how to make right use of the light-bearer, phosphorus, and the air-carrier mercury. That of course is a third possibility. But a genuinely favourable and hopeful way will only be found when mankind has learnt, through spiritual science, the respective inter-relationships of the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms to extra-telluric forces. And as I indicated yesterday, the animal sphere is near — dangerously near to mankind. The ancients, knowing this, set a boundary which we will investigate anew in the light of our later knowledge. They thought as follows: plants remain within the realm of the planetary system; minerals are also within that sphere: but with the animal kingdom we leave the planetary system, and deal with something much more serious. We may not deal here with things as though we were still within the planetary extra-telluric domain. Those forces that lead to the formation of animals, and further to that of mankind, lie scattered farther and wider in the universe than do those that shaped minerals and plants. And so the ancients, knowing this, set a boundary which we will investigate anew in the light of our later knowledge. They thought as follows: plants remain within the realm of the planetary system; minerals are also within that sphere: but with the animal kingdom we leave the planetary system, and deal with something much more serious. We may not deal here with things as though we were still within the planetary extra-telluric domain. Those forces that lead to the formation of animals, and further to that of mankind, lie scattered farther and wider in the universe than do those that shaped minerals and plants. And so the ancients traced the Zodiac in the heavens as a warning not to seek remedial forces beyond the boundary of minerals and plants; or at least to be aware that beyond is perilous ground. But this perilous ground has been entered upon, as I have already begun to tell you in outline. This must be elaborated when we come to deal with pathology and serotherapy. The methods in question often bring startling results in individual cases, and arouse illusory hopes, completely masking the danger in the background. |
| GA 200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century — Lecture IV |
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| And what Schiller characterizes abstractly as the middle condition, Goethe portrays in the building of the temple in which rule the King of Wisdom (the Golden King), the King of Semblance (the Silver King), the King of Power (the Copper King) and in which the Mixed King falls to pieces. Goethe wanted to deal with this in a pictorial way. And we have, in a certain sense, an indication — but in the Goethean way — of the fact that the outer structure of human society must not be monolithic but must be a threefoldness if the human being is to thrive in it. |
| Of course, the threefold social order does not yet exist but Goethe gives the form he would like to ascribe to it in these three kings; in the Golden, the Silver, and the Copper King. And what cannot hold together he gives in the Mixed King. But it is no longer possible to give things in this way. I have shown this in my first Mystery Drama which, in essence, deals with the same theme but in the way required by the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas Goethe wrote his Fairy-tale at the end of the eighteenth century. |
| But, fundamentally, the whole of Central European civilization wavers in the whirlpool in which East and West swirl and interpenetrate one another. From the East the sphere of the Golden King; from the West the sphere of the Copper King. From the East, Wisdom; from the West, Power. And in the middle is what Goethe represented in the Silver King, in Semblance; that which imbues itself with reality only with great difficulty. It was this semblance-nature of Central European civilization which lay as the tragic mood at the bottom of Goethe's soul. |
| GA 200. The New Spirituality and the Christ Experience of the Twentieth Century — Lecture IV |
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| As early as 1891 I drew attention to the relation between Schiller's Aesthetic Letters and Goethe's Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. I would like today to point to a certain connection between what I gave yesterday as the characteristic of the civilization of the Central-European countries in contrast to the Western and Eastern ones and what arises in quite a unique way in Goethe and Schiller. I characterized, on the one hand, the seizure of the human corporality by the spirits of the West and, on the other hand, the feeling of those spiritual beings who, as imaginations, as spirits of the East, work inspiringly into Eastern civilization. And one can notice both these aspects in the leading personalities of Goethe and Schiller. I will only point out in addition how in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters he seeks to characterize a human soul-constitution which shows a certain middle mood between one possibility in the human being — his being completely given over to instincts, to the sensible-physical — and the other possibility — that of being given over to the logical world of reason. Schiller holds that, in both cases, the human being cannot come to freedom. For if he has completely surrendered himself to the world of the senses, to the world of instincts, of desires, he is given over to his bodily-physical nature and is unfree. But he is also unfree when he surrenders himself completely to the necessity of reason, to logical necessity; for then he is coerced under the tyranny of the laws of logic. But Schiller wants to point to a middle state in which the human being has spiritualized his instincts to such a degree that he can give himself up to them without their dragging him down, without their enslaving him, and in which, on the other hand, logical necessity is taken up into sense perception (sinnliche Anschauen), taken up into personal desires (Triebe), so that these logical necessities do not also enslave the human being. Schiller finds this middle state in the condition of aesthetic enjoyment and aesthetic creation, in which the human being can come to true freedom. It is an extremely important fact that Schiller's whole treatise arose out of the same European mood as did the French Revolution. The same thing which, in the West, expressed itself tumultuously as a large political movement orientated towards external upheaval and change also moved Schiller — but moved him in such a way that he sought to answer the question: What must the human being do in himself in order to become a truly free being? In the West they asked: How must the external social conditions be changed so that the human being can become free? Schiller asked: What must the human being become in himself so that, in his constitution of soul, he can live in (darleben) freedom? And he sees that if human beings are educated to this middle mood they will also represent a social community governed by freedom. Schiller thus wishes to realize a social community in such a way that free conditions are created through [the inner nature of] human beings and not through outer measures. Schiller came to this composition of his Aesthetic Letters through his schooling in Kantian philosophy. His was indeed a highly artistic nature, but in the 1780s and the beginning of the 1790s he was strongly influenced by Kant and tried to answer such questions for himself in a Kantian way (im Kantischen Sinne). Now the Aesthetic Letters were written just at the time when Goethe and Schiller were founding the magazine Die Horen (The Hours) and Schiller lays the Aesthetic Letters before Goethe. Now we know that Goethe's soul-configuration was quite different from Schiller's. It was precisely because of the difference of their soul-constitutions that these two became so close. Each could give to the other just that which the other lacked. Goethe now received Schiller's Aesthetic Letters in which Schiller wished to answer the question: How can the human being come inwardly to a free inner constitution of soul and outwardly to free social conditions? Goethe could not make much of Schiller's philosophical treatise. This way of presenting concepts, of developing ideas, was not unfamiliar to him. Anyone who, like myself, has seen how Goethe's own copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is filled with underlinings and marginal comments knows how Goethe had really studied this work of Kant's which was abstract, but in a completely different sense. And just as he seems to have been able to take works such as these purely as study material, so, of course, he could also have taken Schiller's Aesthetic Letters. But this was not the point. For Goethe this whole construction of the human being — on the one hand logical necessity and on the other the senses with their sensual needs, as Schiller said, and the third, the middle condition — for Goethe this was all far too cut and dried, far too simplistic. He felt that one could not picture the human being so simply, or present human development so simply, and thus he wrote to Schiller that he did not want to treat the problem, this whole riddle, in such a philosophical, intellectual form, but more pictorially. Goethe then treated this same problem in picture form — as reply, as it were, to Schiller's Aesthetic Letters — in his Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily by presenting the two realms on this and on the far side of the river, in a pictorial, rich and concrete way; the same thing that Schiller presents as sense-life and the life of reason. And what Schiller characterizes abstractly as the middle condition, Goethe portrays in the building of the temple in which rule the King of Wisdom (the Golden King), the King of Semblance (the Silver King), the King of Power (the Copper King) and in which the Mixed King falls to pieces. Goethe wanted to deal with this in a pictorial way. And we have, in a certain sense, an indication — but in the Goethean way — of the fact that the outer structure of human society must not be monolithic but must be a threefoldness if the human being is to thrive in it. What in a later epoch had to emerge as the threefold social order is given here by Goethe still in the form of an image. Of course, the threefold social order does not yet exist but Goethe gives the form he would like to ascribe to it in these three kings; in the Golden, the Silver, and the Copper King. And what cannot hold together he gives in the Mixed King. But it is no longer possible to give things in this way. I have shown this in my first Mystery Drama which, in essence, deals with the same theme but in the way required by the beginning of the twentieth century, whereas Goethe wrote his Fairy-tale at the end of the eighteenth century. Now, however, it is already possible to indicate in a certain way — even though Goethe had not himself yet done so — how the Golden King would correspond to that aspect of the social organism which we call the spiritual aspect: how the King of Semblance, the Silver King, would correspond to the political State: how the King of Power, the Copper King, would correspond to the economic aspect, and how the Mixed King, who disintegrates, represents the 'Uniform State' which can have no permanence in itself. This was how, in images, Goethe pointed to what would have to arise as the threefold social order. Goethe thus said, as it were, when he received Schiller's Aesthetic Letters: One cannot do it like this. You, dear friend, picture the human being far too simplistically. You picture three forces. This is not how it is with the human being. If one wishes to look at the richly differentiated inner nature of the human being, one finds about twenty forces — which Goethe then presents in his twenty archetypal fairy-tale figures — and one must then portray the interplay and interaction of these twenty forces in a much less abstract way. Thus at the end of the eighteenth century we have two presentations of the same thing. One by Schiller, from the intellect as it were, though not in the usual way that people do things from the intellect, but such that the intellect is permeated here with feeling and soul, is permeated by the whole human being. Now there is a difference between some dry, average, professional philistine presenting something on the human being in psychological terms, where only the head thinks about the matter, and Schiller, out of an experience of the whole human being, forming for himself the ideal of a human constitution of soul and thereby only transforming into intellectual concepts what he actually feels. It would be impossible to go further on the path taken by Schiller using logic or intellectual analysis without becoming philistine and abstract. In every line of these Aesthetic Letters there is still the full feeling and sensibility of Schiller. It is not the stiff Königsberg approach of Immanuel Kant with dry concepts; it is profundity in intellectual form transformed into ideas. But should one take it just one step further one would come into the intellectual mechanism that is realized in the usual science of today in which, basically, behind what is structured and developed intellectually, the human being has no more significance. It thus becomes a matter of no importance whether Professor A or D or X deals with the subject because what is presented does not arise from the whole human being. In Schiller everything still has a totally personal (urpersönlich) nature, even into the intellect. Schiller lives there in a phase — indeed, in an evolutionary point of the modern development of humanity which is of essential importance — because Schiller stops just short of something into which humanity later fell completely. Let us show diagramatically what might be meant here. One could say: This is the general tendency of human evolution (arrow pointing upwards). Yet it cannot go [straight] like this — portrayed only schematically — but loops round into a lemniscate (blue). But it cannot go on like that — there must, if evolution takes this course, be continually new impulses Antriebe) which move the lemniscates up along the line.  Schiller, having arrived at this point here (see diagram), would have gone into a dark blue, as it were, of mere abstraction, of intellectuality, had he proceeded further in objectifying what he felt inwardly. But he drew a halt and paused with his forms of reasoning just at that point at which the personality is not lost. Thus, this did not become blue but, on a higher level of the Personality — which I will colour with red (see diagram) — was turned into green. Thus one can say: Schiller held back with his intellectuality just before that point at which intellectuality tries to emerge in its purity. Otherwise he would have fallen into the usual intellect of the nineteenth century. Goethe expressed the same thing in images, in wonderful images, in his Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. But he, too, stopped at the images. He could not bear these pictures to be in any way criticized because, for him, what he perceived and felt about the individual human element and the social life, did simply present itself in such pictures. But he was allowed to go no further than these images. For had he, from his standpoint, tried to go further he would have come into wild, fantastic daydreams. The subject would no longer have had definite contours; it would no longer have been applicable to real life but would have risen above and beyond it. It would have become rapturous fantasy. One could say that Goethe had to avoid the other chasm, in which he would have come completely into a fantastic red. Thus he adds that element which is non-personal — that which keeps the pictures in the realm of the imaginative — and thereby came also to the green. Expressing it schematically, Schiller had, as it were, avoided the blue, the Ahrimanic-intellectuality; Goethe had avoided the red, excessive rapturousness, and kept to concrete imaginative pictures. As a human being of Central Europe, Schiller had con-fronted the spirits of the West. They wanted to lead him astray into the solely intellectual. Kant had succumbed to this. I spoke about this recently and indicated how Kant had succumbed to the intellectuality of the West through David Hume. Schiller had managed to work himself clear of this even though he allowed himself to be taught by Kant. He stayed at the point that is not mere intellectuality. Goethe had to do battle with the other spirits, with the spirits of the East, who pulled him towards imaginations. Because at that time spiritual science was not yet present on the earth he could not go further than to the web of imaginations in the Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. But even here he managed to remain within firm contours. He did not go off into wild fantasy or ecstasies. He gave himself a new and fruitful stimulus through his journey to the South where much of the legacy from the Orient was still preserved. He learnt how the spirits of the East still worked here as a late blossoming of oriental culture; in Greek art as he construed this for himself from Italian works of art. It can therefore be said that there was something quite unique in this bond of friendship between Schiller and Goethe. Schiller had to battle with the spirits of the West; he did not yield to them but held back and did not fall into mere intellectuality. Goethe had to battle with the spirits of the East; they tried to pull him into ecstatic reveries zum Schwärmerischen). He, too, held back; he kept to the images which he gives in his Fairy-tale of the Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily. Goethe would have had either to succumb to rapturous daydreams (Schwärmerei) or to take up oriental revelation. Schiller would have had either to become completely intellectual or would have had to take seriously what he became — it is well known that he was made a 'French citizen' by the revolutionary government but that he did not take the matter very seriously. We see here how, at an important point of European development, these two soul-constitutions, which I have characterized for you, stand side by side. They live anyway, so to speak, in every significant Central-European individuality but in Schiller and Goethe they stand in a certain way simultaneously side by side. Schiller and Goethe remained, as it were, at this point, for it just required the intercession of spiritual science to raise the curve of the lemniscate (see diagram) to a higher level. And thus, in a strange way, in Schiller's three conditions — the condition of the necessity of reason, the condition of the necessity of instincts and that of the free aesthetic mood — and in Goethe's three kings — the Golden King, the Silver King, and the Copper King — we see a prefiguration of everything that we must find through spiritual science concerning the threefold nature of the human being as well as the threefold differentiation of the social community representing, as these do, the most immediate and essential aims and problems of the individual human being and of the way human beings live together. These things direct us indeed to the fact that this threefolding of the social organism is not brought to the surface arbitrarily but that even the finest spirits of modern human evolution have already moved in this direction. But if there were only the ideas about the social questions such as those in Goethe's Fairy-tale and nothing more one would never come to an impetus for actual outer action. Goethe was at the point of overcoming mere revelations. In Rome he did not become a Catholic but raised himself up to his imaginations. But he stopped there, with just pictures. And Schiller did not become a revolutionary but a teacher of the inner human being. He stopped at the point where intellect is still suffused with the personality. Thus, in a later phase of European culture, there was still something at work which can be perceived also in ancient times and most clearly, for modern people, in the culture of ancient Greece. Goethe also strove towards this Greek element. In Greece one can see how the social element is presented in myth — that is, also in picture form. But the Greek myth, basically, Is image in the same way that Goethe's Fairy-tale is image. It is not possible with these images to work into the social organism in a reforming way. One can only describe as an idealist, as it were, what ought to take shape. But the images are too frail a structure to enable one to act strongly and effectively in the shaping of the social organism. For this very reason the Greeks did not believe that their social questions were met by remaining in the images of the myths. And it is here, when one follows this line of investigation, that one comes to an important point in Greek development. One could put it like this: for everyday life, where things go on in the usual way, the Greeks considered themselves dependant on their gods, on the spirits of their myths. When, however, it was a matter of deciding something of great importance, then the Greeks said: Here it is not those gods who work into imaginations and are the gods of the myths that can determine the matter; here something real must come to light. And so the Oracle arose. The gods were not pictured here merely imaginatively but were called upon (veranlasst) really to inspire people. And it was with the sayings of the Oracle that the Greeks concerned themselves when they wanted to receive social impulses. Here they ascended from imagination to inspiration, but an inspiration which they attained by means of outer nature. We modern human beings must certainly also endeavour to lift ourselves up to inspiration; an inspiration, however, that does not call upon outer nature in oracles but which rises to the spirit in order to be inspired in the sphere of the spirit. But just as the Greeks turned to reality in matters of the social sphere — just as they did not stop at imaginations but ascended to inspirations — so we, too, cannot stop at imaginations but must rise up to inspirations if we are to find anything for the well-being of human society in the modern age. And we come here to another point which is important to look at. Why did Schiller and Goethe both stop at a certain point — the one on the path towards the intellectual (Verstandiges) and the other on the path to the imaginative? Neither of them had spiritual science; otherwise Schiller would have been able to advance to the point of permeating his concepts in a spiritual-scientific way and he would then have found: something much more real in his three soul-conditions than the three abstractions in his Aesthetic Letters. Goethe would have filled imagination with what speaks out in all reality from the spiritual world and would have been able to penetrate to the forms of the social life which wish to be put into effect from the spiritual world — to the spiritual element in the social organism, the Golden King; to the political element in the social organism, the Silver King; and to the economic element, the Bronze, the Copper, King. The age in which Goethe and Schiller pressed forward to these insights — the one in the Aesthetic Letters and the other in the Fairy-tale — was not yet able to go any further. For, in order to penetrate further, there is something quite definite that must first be realized. People have to see what becomes of the world if one continues along Schiller's path up to the full elaboration (Ausgestaltung) of the impersonally intellectual. The nineteenth century developed it to being with in natural science and the second half of the nineteenth century already began to try to realize it in outer public affairs. There is a significant secret here. In the human organism what is ingested is also finally destroyed. We cannot simply go on eating but must also excrete; the substance we take in has to meet with destruction, has to be destroyed, and has then to leave the organism. And the intellectual is that which — and here comes a complication — as soon as it gets hold of the economic life in the uniform State, in the Mixed King, destroys that economic life. But we are now living in the time in which the intellect must evolve. We could not come to the development of the consciousness-soul in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch without developing the intellect. And it is the Western peoples that have just this task of bringing the intellect into the economic life. What does this mean? We cannot order modern economic life imaginatively, in the way that Goethe did in his Fairy-tale, because we have to shape it through the intellect (verständig). Because in economics we cannot but help to go further along the path which Schiller took, though in his case he went only as far as the still-personal outbreathing of the intellect. We have to establish an economic life which, because it has to come from the intellect, of necessity works destructively in the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. In the present age there is no economic life that could be run imaginatively like that of the Orient or the economy of medieval Europe. Since the middle of the fifteenth century we have only had the possibility of an economic life which, whether existing alone or mixed with the other limbs of the social organism, works destructively. There is no other way. Let us therefore look on this economic life as the side of the scales that would sink far down and therefore has to work destructively. But there also has to be a balance. For this reason we must have an economic life that is one part of the social organism, and a spiritual life which holds the balance, which builds up again. If one clings today to the uniform State, the economic life will absorb this uniform State together with the spiritual life, and uniform States like these must of necessity lead to destruction. And when, like Lenin and Trotsky, one founds a State purely out of the intellect it must lead to destruction because the intellect is directed solely to the economic life. This was felt by Schiller as he thought out his social conditions. Schiller felt: If I go further in the power of the intellect (verständesmassiges Können) I will come into the economic life and will have to apply the intellect to it. I will not then be portraying what grows and thrives but what lives in destruction. Schiller shrank back before the destruction. He stopped just at the point where destruction would break in. People of today invent all sorts of social economic systems but are not aware, because they lack the sensitivity of feeling for it, that every economic system like this that they think up leads to destruction; leads definitely to destruction if it is not constantly renewed by an independent, developing spiritual life which ever and ever again works as a constructive element in relation to the destruction, the excretion, of the economic life. The working together of the spiritual limb of the social organism with the economic element is described in this sense in my Towards Social Renewal (Kernpunkte der Sozialen Frage). 6 See Towards Social Renewal, 1919, (GA 23). For what follows on here, see Chapter Two. If, with the modern intellectuality of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, people were to hold on to capital even when they themselves could no longer manage it, the economic life itself would cause it to circulate. Destruction would inevitably have to come. This is where the spiritual life has to intervene; capital must be transferred via the spiritual life to those who are engaged in its administration. This is the inner meaning of the threefolding of the social organism; namely that, in a properly thought out threefold social organism, one should be under no illusion that the economic thinking of the present is a destructive element which must, therefore, be continually counterbalanced by the constructive element of the spiritual limb of the social organism. In every generation, in the children whom we teach at school, something is given to us; something is sent down from the spiritual world. We take hold of this in education — this is something spiritual — and incorporate it into the economic life and thereby ward off its destruction. For the economic life, if it runs its own course, destroys itself. This is how we must look at things. Thus we must see how at the end of the eighteenth century there stood Goethe and Schiller. Schiller said to himself: I must pull back, I must not describe a social system which calls merely on the personal intellect. I must keep the intellect within the personality, otherwise I would describe economic destruction. And Goethe: I want sharply contoured images, not excessive vague ones. For if I were to go any further along that path I would come into a condition that is not on the earth, that does not take hold with any effect on life itself. I would leave the economic life below me like something lifeless and would found a spiritual life that is incapable of reaching into the immediate circumstances of life. Thus we are living in true Goetheanism when we do not stop at Goethe but also share the development in which Goethe himself took part since 1832. I have indicated this fact — that the economic life today continually works towards its own destruction and that this destruction must be continually counterbalanced. I have indicated this in a particular place in my Towards Social Renewal. But people do not read things properly. They think that this book is written in the same way most books are written today — that one can just read it through. Every sentence in a book such as this, written out of practical insight, requires to be thoroughly thought through! But if one takes these two things [Goethe's Fairy-tale and Schiller's Aesthetic Letters], Schiller's Aesthetic Letters were little understood in the time that followed them. I have often spoken about this. People gave them little attention. Otherwise the study of Schiller's Aesthetic Letters would have been a good way of coming into what you find in my Knowledge of the Higher Worlds — How is it Achieved? Schiller's Aesthetic Letters would be a good preparation for this. And likewise, Goethe's Fairy-tale could also be the preparation for acquiring that configuration of thinking (Geisteskonfiguration) which can arise not merely from the intellect but from still deeper forces, and which would be really able to understand something like Towards Social Renewal. For both Schiller and Goethe sensed something of the tragedy of Central European civilization — certainly not consciously, but they sensed it nevertheless. Both felt — and one can read this everywhere in Goethe's conversations with Eckermann, with Chancellor von Müller , and in numerous other comments by Goethe — that if something like a new impulse from the spirit did not arise, like a new comprehension of Christianity, then everything must go into decline. A great deal of the resignation which Goethe felt in his later years is based, without doubt, on this mood. And those who, without spiritual science, have become Goetheanists feel how, in the very nature of German Central Europe, this singular working side by side of the spirits of the West and the spirits of the East is particularly evident. I said yesterday that in Central European civilization the balance sought by later Scholasticism between rational knowledge and revelation is attributable to the working of the spirits of the West and the spirits of the East. We have seen today how this shows itself in Goethe and Schiller. But, fundamentally, the whole of Central European civilization wavers in the whirlpool in which East and West swirl and interpenetrate one another. From the East the sphere of the Golden King; from the West the sphere of the Copper King. From the East, Wisdom; from the West, Power. And in the middle is what Goethe represented in the Silver King, in Semblance; that which imbues itself with reality only with great difficulty. It was this semblance-nature of Central European civilization which lay as the tragic mood at the bottom of Goethe's soul. And Herman Grimm, who also did not know spiritual science, gave in a beautiful way, out of his sensitive feeling for Goethe whom he studied, a fine characterization of Central-European civilization. He saw how it had the peculiarity of being drawn into the whirlpool of the spirits of the East and the spirits of the West. This was the effect of preventing the will from coming into its own and leads to the constantly vacillating mood of German history. Herman Grimm 8 Herman Grimm (1828–1902). The quotations are from his essay Heinrich von Treitschke's German History (Heinrich von Treitschhes Deutsche Geschichte) in Contributions to German Cultural History, (Beitrage zur Deutschen Kultur-geschichte) Berlin, 1897, page. 5 puts it beautifully when he says: 'To Treitschke German history is the incessant striving towards spiritual and political unity and, on the path towards this, the incessent interference by our own deepest inherent peculiarities.' This is what Herman Grimm says, experiencing himself as a German. And he describes this further as 'Always the same way in our nature to oppose where we should give way and to give way where resistance is called for. The remarkable forgetting of what has just past. Suddenly no longer wanting what, a moment ago, was vigorously striven for. A disdain for the present, but strong, indefinite hope. Added to this the tendency to give ourselves over to the foreigner and, no sooner having done so, then exercising an unconscious, determining (massgebende) influence on the foreigners to whom we had subjected ourselves.' When, today, one has to do with Central European civilization and would like to arrive at something through it, one is everywhere met by the breath of this tragic element which is betrayed by the whole history of the German, the Central European element, between East and West. It is everywhere still so today that, with Herman Grimm, one can say: There is the urge to resist where one should give way and to give way where resistance is needed. This is what arises from the vacillating human beings of the Centre; from what, between economics and the reconstructing spirit-life, stands in the middle as the rhythmical oscillating to and fro of the political. Because the civic-political element has celebrated its triumph in these central countries, it is here that a semblance lives which can easily become illusion. Schiller, in writing his Aesthetic Letters, did not want to abandon semblance. He knew that where one deals purely with the intellect, one comes into the destruction of the economic life. In the eighteenth century that part was destroyed which could be destroyed by the French Revolution; in the nineteenth century it would be much worse. Goethe knew that he must not go into wild fantasies but keep to true imagination. But in the vacillation between the two sides of this duality, which arises in the swirling, to and fro movement of the spirits of the West and of the East, there is easily generated an atmosphere of illusion. It does not matter whether this illusionary atmosphere emerges in religion, in politics or in militarism; in the end it is all the same whether the ecstatic enthusiast produces some sort of mysticism or enthuses in the way Ludendorff did without standing on the ground of reality. And, finally, one an also meet it in a pleasing way. For the same place in Herman Grimm which I just read out continues as follows: 'You can see it today: no one seemed to be so completely severed from their homeland as the Germans who became Americans, and yet American life, into which our emigrants dissolved, stands today under the influence of the German spirit.' Thus writes the brilliant Herman Grimm in 1895 when it was only out of the worst illusion that one could believe that the Germans who went to America would give American life a German colouring. For already, long before this, there had been prepared what then emerged in the second decade of the twentieth century: that the American element completely submerged what little the Germans had been able to bring in. And the illusionary nature of this remark by Herman Grimm becomes all the greater when one finally bears in mind the following. Herman Grimm makes this comment from a Goethean way of thinking (Gesinnung), for he had modelled himself fully on Goethe. But he had a certain other quality. Anyone who knows Herman Grimm more closely knows that in his style, in his whole way of expressing himself, in his way of thinking, he had absorbed a great deal of Goethe, but not Goethe's real and penetrating quality — for Grimm's descriptions are such that what he actually portrays are shadow pictures, not real human beings. But he has something else in him, not just Goethe. And what is it that Herman Grimm has in himself? Americanism! For what he had in his style, in his thought-forms, apart from Goethe he has from early readings of Emerson. Even his sentence structure, his train of thought, is copied from the American, Emerson. Thus, Herman Grimm is under this double illusion, in the realm of the Silver King of Semblance. At a time when all German influence has been expunged from America he fondly believes that America has been Germanized, when in fact he himself has quite a strong vein of Americanism in him. Thus there is often expressed in a smaller, more intimate context what exists in a less refined form in external culture at large. A crude Darwinism, a crude economic thinking, has spread out there and would in the end, if the threefolding of the social organism fails to come, lead to ruin — for an economic life constructed purely intellectually must of necessity lead to ruin. And anyone who, like Oswald Spengler, thinks in the terms of this economic life can prove scientifically that at the beginning of the third millenium the modern civilized world — which today is actually no longer so very civilized — will have had to sink into the most desolate barbarity. For Spengler knows nothing of what the world must receive as an impulse, as a spiritual impulse. But the spiritual science and the spiritual-scientific culture which not only wishes to enter, but must enter, the world today still has an extremely difficult task getting through. And everywhere those who wish to prevent this spiritual science from arising assert themselves. And, basically, there are only a few energetic workers in the field of spiritual science whereas the Others, who lead into the works of destruction, are full of energy. One only has to see how people of today are actually completely at a loss in the face of what comes up in the life of Present civilization. It is characteristic, for instance, how a newspaper of Eastern Switzerland carried articles on my lectures on The Boundaries of Natural Science during the course at the School of Spiritual Science. And now, in the town where the newspaper is published, Arthur Drews , the copy-cat of Eduard von Hartmann, holds lectures in which he has never done anything more than rehash Eduard von Hartmann, the philosopher of the unconscious. 13Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), Philosophie des Unbewucsten: Versuch einer Weltanschauung (Philosophy of the Unconscious: An Attempt at a World-View), Berlin, 1869. In the case of Hartmann it is interesting. In the case of the rehasher it is, of course, highly superfluous. And this philosophical hollow-headedness working at Karlsruhe University is now busying itself with anthroposophically-orientated spiritual science. And how does the modern human being — I would particularly like to emphasize this — confront these things? Well, we have listened to one person, we now go and listen to someone else. This means that, for the modern human being, it is all a matter of indifference, and this is a terrible thing. Whether the rehasher of Eduard von Hartmann, Arthur Drews, has something against Anthroposophy or not is not the important point — for what the man can have against Anthroposophy can be fully construed beforehand from his books, not a single sentence need be left out. The significant thing is that people's standpoint is that one hears something, makes a note of it, and then it is over and done with, finished! All that is needed to come to the right path is that people really go into the matter. But people today do not want to be taken up with having to go into something properly. This is the really terrible and awful thing; this is what has already pushed people so far that they are no longer able to distinguish between what is speaking of realities and what writes whole books, like those of Count Hermann Von Keyserling, in which there is not one single thought, just jumbled-together words. And when one longs for something to be taken up enthusiastically — which would, of itself, lead to this hollow word-skirmishing being distinguished from what is based on genuine spiritual research — one finds no one who rouses himself, makes a stout effort and is able to be taken hold of by that which has substance. This is what people have forgotten — and forgotten thoroughly — in this age in which truth is not decided according to truth itself, but in which the great lie walks among men so that in recent years individual nations have only found to be true what comes from them and have found what comes from other nations to be false. The disgusting way that people lie to each other has fundamentally become the stamp of the public spirit. Whenever something came from another nation it was deemed untrue. If it came from one's own nation it was true. This still echoes on today; it has already become a habit of thought. In contrast, a genuine, unprejudiced devotion to truth leads to spiritualization. But this is basically still a matter of indifference for modern human beings. Until a sufficiently large number of people are willing to engage themselves absolutely whole-heartedly for spiritual science, nothing beneficial will come from the present chaos. People should not believe that one can somehow progress by galvanizing the old. This 'old' founds 'Schools of Wisdom' on purely hollow words. It has furnished university philosophy with the Arthur Drews's who, however, are actually represented everywhere, and yet humanity will not take a stand. Until it makes a stand in all three spheres of life — in the spiritual, the political and the economic spheres — no cure can come out of the present-day chaos. It must sink ever deeper! |