The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Today I want to interpolate a theme which may possibly seem to you somewhat remote, but it will be of importance for the further development of subjects we are studying at the present time. We have been able to gather together many essential details which are essential for a knowledge of man's being. On the one side, we are gradually discovering man's place in the life of the cosmos, and on the other, his place in the social life. But it will be necessary today to consider certain matters which make for a better understanding of man's being and nature.

When man is studied by modern scientific thinking, one part only of the being is taken into consideration. No account whatever is taken of the fact that in addition to his physical body, man also has higher members. But we will leave this aside today and think about something that is more or less recognized in science and has also made its way into the general consciousness.

In studying the human being, only those elements which can be pictured as solid, or solid-fluidic, are regarded as belonging to his organism. It is, of course, acknowledged that the fluid and the aeriform elements pass into and out of the human being, but these are not in themselves considered to be integral members of the human organism. The warmth within man which is greater than that of his environment is regarded as a state or condition of his organism, but not as an actual member of his constitution. We shall presently see what I mean by saying this. I have already drawn attention to the fact that when we study the rising and falling of the cerebral fluid through the spinal canal, we can observe a regular up-and-down oscillatory movement caused by inhalation and exhalation; when we breathe in, the cerebral fluid is driven upwards and strikes, as it were, against the brain-structure; when we breathe out, the fluid sinks again. These processes in the purely liquid components of the human organism are not considered to be part and parcel of the organism itself. The general idea is that man, as a physical structure, consists of the more or less solid, or at most solid-fluid, substances found in him.

Man is pictured as a structure built up from these more or less solid substances (see Diagram I). The other elements, the fluid element, as I have shown by the example of the cerebral fluid, and the aeriform element, are not regarded by anatomy and physiology as belonging to the human organism as such. It is said: Yes, the human being draws in the air which follows certain paths in his body and also has certain definite functions. This air is breathed out again.—Then people speak of the warmth condition of the body, but in reality they regard the solid element as the only organizing factor and do not realize that in addition to this solid structure they should also see the whole man as a column of fluid (Diagram II, blue), as being permeated with air (red) and as a being in whom there is a definite degree of warmth (yellow). More exact study shows that just as the solid or solid-fluid constituents are to be considered as an integral part or member of the organism, so the actual fluidity should not be thought of as so much uniform fluid, but as being differentiated and organized—though the process here is a more fluctuating one—and having its own particular significance.

In addition to the solid man, therefore, we must bear in mind the ‘fluid man’ and also the ‘aeriform man.’ For the air that is within us, in regard to its organization and its differentiations, is an organism in the same sense as the solid organism, only it is gaseous, aeriform, and in motion. And finally, the warmth in us is not a uniform warmth extending over the whole human being, but is also delicately organized. As soon, however, as we begin to speak of the fluid organism which fills the same space that is occupied by the solid organism, we realize immediately that we cannot speak of this fluid organism in earthly man without speaking of the etheric body which permeates this fluid organism and fills it with forces. The physical organism exists for itself, as it were; it is the physical body; in so far as we consider it in its entirety, we regard it, to begin with, as a solid organism. This is the physical body.

We then come to consider the fluid organism, which cannot, of course, be investigated in the same way as the solid organism, by dissection, but which must be conceived as an inwardly mobile, fluidic organism. It cannot be studied unless we think of it as permeated by the etheric body.

Thirdly, there is the aeriform organism which again cannot be studied unless we think of it as permeated with forces by the astral body.

Fourthly, there is the warmth-organism with all its inner differentiation. It is permeated by the forces of the Ego.—That is how the human as earthly being today is constituted.

Physical organism: Physical body

Man regarded in a different way:

Solid organism: Physical body
Fluid organism: Etheric body
Aeriform organism: Astral body
Warmth-organism: Ego

Let us think, for example, of the blood. Inasmuch as it is mainly fluid, inasmuch as this blood belongs to the fluid organism, we find in the blood the etheric body which permeates it with its forces. But in the blood there is also present what is generally called the warmth condition. But that ‘organism’ is by no means identical with the organism of the fluid blood as such. If we were to investigate this—and it can also be done with physical methods of investigation—we should find in registering the warmth in the different parts of the human organism that the warmth cannot be identified with the fluid organism or with any other.

Directly we reflect about man in this way we find that it is impossible for our thought to come to a standstill within the limits of the human organism itself. We can remain within these limits only if we are thinking merely of the solid organism which is shut off by the skin from what is outside it. Even this, however, is only apparently so. The solid structure is generally regarded as if it were a firm, self-enclosed block; but it is also inwardly differentiated and is related in manifold ways to the solid earth as a whole. This is obvious from the fact that the different solid substances have, for example, different weights; this alone shows that the solids within the human organism are differentiated, have different specific weights in man. In regard to the physical organism, therefore, the human being is related to the earth as a whole. Nevertheless it is possible, according at least to external evidence, to place spatial limits around the physical organism.

It is different when we come to the second, the fluid organism that is permeated by the etheric body. This fluid organism cannot be strictly demarcated from the environment. Whatever is fluid in any area of space adjoins the fluidic element in the environment. Although the fluid element as such is present in the world outside us in a rarefied state, we cannot make such a definite demarcation between the fluid element within man andr the fluid element outside man, as in the case of the solid organism. The boundary between man's inner fluid organism and the fluid element in the external world must therefore be left indefinite.

This is even more emphatically the case when we come to consider the aeriform organism which is permeated by the forces of the astral body. The air within us at a certain moment was outside us a moment before, and it will soon be outside again. We are drawing in and giving out the aeriform element all the time. We can really think of the air as such which surrounds our earth, and say: it penetrates into our organism and withdraws again; but by penetrating into our organism it becomes an integral part of us. In our aeriform organism we actually have something that constantly builds itself up out of the whole atmosphere and then withdraws again into the atmosphere. Whenever we breathe in, something is built up within us, or, at the very least, each indrawn breath causes a change, a modification, in an upbuilding process within us. Similarly, a destructive, partially destructive, process takes place whenever we breathe out. Our aeriform organism undergoes a certain change with every indrawn breath; it is not exactly newly born, but it undergoes a change, both when we breathe in and when we breathe out. When we breathe out, the aeriform organism does not, of course, die, it merely undergoes a change; but there is constant interaction between the aeriform organism within us and the air outside. The usual trivial conceptions of the human organism can only be due to the failure to realize that there is but a slight degree of difference between the aeriform organism and the solid organism.

And now we come to the warmth-organism. It is of course quite in keeping with materialistic-mechanistic thought to study only the solid organism and to ignore the fluid organism, the aeriform organism, and the warmth-organism. But no real knowledge of man's being can be acquired unless we are willing to acknowledge this membering into a warmth-organism, an aeriform organism, a fluid organism, and an earth organism (solid).

The warmth-organism is paramountly the field of the Ego. The Ego itself is that spirit-organization which imbues with its own forces the warmth that is within us, and governs and gives it configuration, not only externally but also inwardly. We cannot understand the life and activity of the soul unless we remember that the Ego works directly upon the warmth. It is primarily the Ego in man which activates the will, generates impulses of will.—How does the Ego generate impulses of will? From a different point of view we have spoken of how impulses of will are connected with the earthly sphere, in contrast to the impulses of thought and ideation which are connected with forces outside and beyond the earthly sphere. But how does the Ego, which holds together the impulses of will, send these impulses into the organism, into the whole being of man? This is achieved through the fact that the will works primarily in the warmth-organism. An impulse of will proceeding from the Ego works upon the warmth-organism. Under present earthly conditions it is not possible for what I shall now describe to you to be there as a concrete reality. Nevertheless it can be envisaged as something that is essentially present in man. It can be envisaged if we disregard the physical organization within the space bounded by the human skin. We disregard this, also the fluid organism, and the aeriform organism. The space then remains filled with nothing but warmth which is, of course, in communication with the warmth outside. But what is active in this warmth, what sets it in flow, stirs it into movement, makes it into an organism—is the Ego.

The astral body of man contains within it the forces of feeling. The astral body brings these forces of feeling into physical operation in man's aeriform organism.

As an earthly being, man's constitution is such that, by way of the warmth-organism, his Ego gives rise to what comes to expression when he acts in the world as a being of will. The feelings experienced in the astral body and coming to expression in the earthly organization manifest in the aeriform organism. And when we come to the etheric organism, to the etheric body, we find within it the conceptual process, in so far as this has a pictorial character—more strongly pictorial than we are consciously aware of to begin with, for the physical body still intrudes and tones down the pictures into mental concepts. This process works upon the fluid organism.

This shows us that by taking these different organisms in man into account we come nearer to the life of soul. Materialistic observation, which stops short at the solid structure and insists that in the very nature of things water cannot become an organism, is bound to confront the life of soul with complete lack of understanding; for it is precisely in these other organisms that the life of soul comes to immediate expression. The solid organism itself is, in reality, only that which provides support for the other organisms. The solid organism stands there as a supporting structure composed of bones, muscles, and so forth. Into this supporting structure is membered the fluid organism with its own inner differentiation and configuration; in this fluid organism vibrates the etheric body, and within this fluid organism the thoughts are produced. How are the thoughts produced? Through the fact that within the fluid organism something asserts itself in a particular metamorphosis—namely, what we know in the external world as tone.

Tone is, in reality, something that leads the ordinary mode of observation very much astray. As earthly human beings we perceive the tone as being borne to us by the air. But in point of fact the air is only the transmitter of the tone, which actually weaves in the air. And anyone who assumes that the tone in its essence is merely a matter of air-vibrations is like a person who says: Man has only his physical organism, and there is no soul in it. If the air-vibrations are thought to constitute the essence of the tone, whereas they are in truth merely its external expression, this is the same as seeing only the physical organism with no soul in it. The tone which lives in the air is essentially an etheric reality. And the tone we hear by way of the air arises through the fact that the air is permeated by the Tone Ether (see Diagram III) which is the same as the Chemical Ether. In permeating the air, this Chemical Ether imparts what lives within it to the air, and we become aware of what we call the tone.

This Tone Ether or Chemical Ether is essentially active in our fluid organism. We can therefore make the following distinction: In our fluid organism lives our own etheric body; but in addition there penetrates into it (the fluid organism) from every direction the Tone Ether which underlies the tone. Please distinguish carefully here. We have within us our etheric body; it works and is active by giving rise to thoughts in our fluid organism. But what may be called the Chemical Ether continually streams in and out of our fluid organism. Thus we have an etheric organism complete in itself, consisting of Chemical Ether, Warmth-Ether, Light-Ether, Life-Ether, and in addition we find in it, in a very special sense, the Chemical Ether which streams in and out by way of the fluid organism.

The astral body which comes to expression in feeling operates through the air organism. But still another kind of Ether by which the air is permeated is connected especially with the air organism. It is the Light-Ether. Earlier conceptions of the world always emphasized this affinity of the outspreading physical air with the Light-Ether which pervades it. This Light-Ether that is borne, as it were, by the air and is related to the air even more intimately than tone, also penetrates into our air organism, and it underlies what there passes into and out of it. Thus we have our astral body which is the bearer of feeling, is especially active in the air organism, and is in constant contact there with the Light-Ether.

And now we come to the Ego. This human Ego, which by way of the will is active in the warmth-organism, is again connected with the outer warmth, with the instreaming and outstreaming Warmth-Ether.

Now consider the following. The etheric body remains in us also during sleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking; therefore the interworking of the Chemical Ether and the etheric body continues within our being, via the fluid organism, also while we are asleep. It is different in the case of the astral body and feeling. From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking, the astral body is outside the human organism; the astral body and feeling do not then work upon the air organism, but the air organism that is connected with the whole surrounding world—is sustained from outside during sleep. And the human being himself, with his astral body and feeling, goes out of the body and passes into a world with which it is related primarily through the Light-Ether. While he is asleep man lives directly in an element that is transmitted to his astral body by the air organism during waking life. We can speak in a similar way of the Ego and the warmth-organism.

It is obvious from this that an understanding of man's connection with the surrounding universe is possible only as the result of thorough study of these members of being, of which ordinary, mechanistic thinking takes no account at all. But everything in us interpenetrates, and because the Ego is in the warmth-organism it also permeates the air organism, the fluid organism, and the solid organism, it permeates them with the warmth which is all-pervading. Thus the warmth-organism lives within the air organism; the warmth-organism, permeated as it is with the forces of the Ego, also works in the fluid organism.

This indicates how, for example, we should look for the way in which the Ego works in the circulating blood. It works in the circulating blood by way of the warmth-organism—works as the spiritual entity which, as it were, sends down the will out of the warmth, via the air, into the fluid organism. Thus everything in the human organism works upon everything else. But we get nowhere if we have only general, abstract ideas of this interpenetration; we will reach a result only if we can evolve a concrete idea of the constitution of man and of how everything that is around us participates in our make-up.

The condition of sleep, too, can be understood only if we go much more closely into these matters. During sleep it is only the physical body and the etheric body that remain as they are during the waking state; the Ego and the astral body are outside. But in the sleeping human being the forces that are within the physical and etheric bodies can also be active—on the aeriform organism and the warmth-organism as well.

When we turn to consider waking life, from what has been said we shall understand the connection of the Ego with the astral body and with the whole organism. During sleep, when the Ego and the astral body are outside, the four elements are nevertheless within the human organism: the solid supporting structure, the fluid organism, but also the air organism in which the astral body otherwise works, and the warmth-organism in which the Ego otherwise works. These elements are within the human organism and they work in just as regularly organized a way during sleep as during the waking state, when the Ego and the astral body are active within them.

During the sleeping state we have within us, instead of the Ego—which is now outside—the spirit which permeates the cosmos and which in waking life we have driven out through our Ego which is part of that spirit. During sleep our warmth body is pervaded by cosmic spirituality, our air organism by what may be called cosmic astrality (or world-soul), which we also drive out while we are awake.

Waking life and sleeping life may therefore also be studied from this point of view. When we are asleep our warmth-organism is permeated by the cosmic spirituality which on waking we drive out through our Ego, for in waking life it is the Ego that brings about in the warmth-organism what is otherwise brought about by the cosmic spirituality. It is the same with the cosmic astrality; we drive it out when we wake up and readmit it into our organism when we fall asleep. Thus we can say: In that we leave our body during sleep, we allow the cosmic spirit to draw into our warmth-organism, and the world-soul, or the cosmic astrality, into our aeriform organism.

If we study the man without preconceived ideas, we acquire understanding not only of his relation to the surrounding physical world, but also of his relation to the cosmic spirituality and to the cosmic astrality.

This is one aspect of the subject. We can now consider it also from the aspect of knowledge, of cognition, and you will see how the two aspects tally with each other. It is customary to call ‘knowledge’ only what man experiences through perception and the intellectual elaboration of perceptions from the moment of waking to that of falling asleep. But thereby we come to know man's physical environment only. If we adhere to the principles of spiritual-scientific thinking and do not indulge in fantasy, we shall not, of course, regard the pictures of dream-life as immediate realities in themselves, neither shall we seek in dreams for knowledge as we seek it in waking mental activity and perception. Nevertheless at a certain lower level, dreaming is a form of knowledge. It is a particular form of physical self-knowledge. Roughly, it can be obvious that a man has been 'dreaming' inner conditions when, let us say, he wakes up with the dream of having endured the heat of an intensely hot stove and then, on waking, finds that he is feverish or is suffering from some kind of inflammatory condition. In other ways too, dreams assume definite configuration. A man may dream of coiling snakes when something is out of order in the intestines; or he may dream of caves into which he is obliged to creep, and then wakes up with a headache, and so on. Obscurely and dimly, dreams point to our inner organic life, and we can certainly speak of a kind of lower knowledge as being present in dreams. There is merely an enhancement of this when the dreams of particularly sensitive people present very exact reflections of the organism.

It is generally believed that deep, dreamless sleep contributes nothing at all in the way of knowledge, that dreamless sleep is quite worthless as far as knowledge is concerned. But this is not the case. Dreamless sleep has its definite task to perform for knowledge—knowledge that has an individual-personal bearing. If we did not sleep, if our life were not continually interrupted by periods of sleep, we would be incapable of reaching a clear concept of the ‘I,’ the Ego; we could have no clear realization of our identity. We should experience nothing except the world outside and lose ourselves entirely in it. Insufficient attention is paid to this, because people are not in the habit of thinking in a really unprejudiced way about what is experienced in the life of soul and in the bodily life.

We look back over our life, at the series of pictures of our experiences to the point to which memory extends. But this whole stream of remembrances is interrupted every night by sleep. In the backward survey of our life the intervals of sleep are ignored. It does not occur to us that the stream of memories is ever and again interrupted by periods of sleep. The fact that it is so interrupted means that, without being conscious of it, we look into a void, a nothingness, as well as into a sphere that is filled with content. If here (Diagram IV) we have a white sphere with a black area in the middle, we see the white and in the middle the black, which, compared with the white, is a void, a nothingness. (This is not absolutely accurate but we need not think of that at the moment.) We see the black area, we see that in the white sphere something has been left free, but this is equally a positive impression although not identical with the impressions of the white sphere. The black area also gives a positive impression. In the same way the experience is a positive one when we are looking back over our life and nothing flows into this retrospective survey from the periods of sleep. What we slept through is actually included in the retrospective survey, although we are not directly conscious of it because consciousness is focused entirely on the pictures left by waking life. But this consciousness is inwardly strengthened through the fact that in the field of retrospective vision there are also empty places; this constitutes the source of our consciousness in so far as it is inward consciousness. We would lose ourselves entirely in the external world if we were always awake, if this waking state were not continually interrupted by sleep. But whereas dream-filled sleep mirrors back to us in chaotic pictures certain fragments of our inner, organic conditions, dreamless sleep imparts to us the consciousness of our organization as man—again, therefore, knowledge. Through waking consciousness we perceive the external world. Through dreams we perceive—but dimly and without firm definition—single fragments of our inner, organic conditions. Through dreamless sleep we come to know our organization in its totality, although dimly and obscurely. Thus we have already considered three stages of knowledge: dreamless sleep, dream-filled sleep, the waking state.

Then we come to the three higher forms of knowledge: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. These are the stages which lie above the waking consciousness and as states of consciousness become ever clearer, yielding more and more data of knowledge; whereas below the ordinary consciousness we come to those chaotic fragments of knowledge which are nevertheless necessary for ordinary forms of experience.

This is how we must think of the field of consciousness. We should not speak of having only the ordinary waking consciousness any more than we should speak of having only the familiar solid organism. We must speak to the effect that the solid organism is something that exists within a clearly demarcated space, so that if we think in an entirely materialistic way, we shall take this to be the human organism itself. We must remember that ordinary consciousness is actually present, that its ideas and mental pictures come to us in definite outlines. But we should neither think that we have the solid body only, nor that we have this day-consciousness only. For the solid body is permeated by the fluid body which has an inwardly fluctuating organization, and again the clear day-consciousness is permeated by the dream-consciousness, yielding pictures which have no sharp outlines but fluctuating outlines, for consciousness here itself becomes 'fluid' in a certain sense. And as well as the fluid organism we have the air organism, which during the sleeping state is sustained by something that is not ourselves, and hence is not entirely, but only partially and transiently, connected with our own life of soul—namely in waking life only; nevertheless we have it within us as an actual organism.

We have also a third state of consciousness, the dark consciousness of dreamless sleep, in which ideas and thought-pictures become not only hazy but dulled to the degree of inner darkness; in dreamless sleep we cease altogether to experience consciousness itself, just as under certain circumstances, while we are asleep, we cease to experience the aeriform body. (Diagram V)

So you see, no matter whether we study the man from the inner or the outer aspect, we reach an ever fuller and wider conception of his being and constitution. Passing from the solid body to the fluid body to the air body to the warmth body, we come to the life of soul. Passing from the clear day-consciousness to the dream-consciousness, we come to the body. And we come to the body in a still deeper sense through the knowledge of being within it through dreamless sleep. When we carry the waking consciousness right down into the consciousness of dreamless sleep and observe the human being in the members of his consciousness, we come to the bodily constitution. When we consider the bodily constitution itself, from its solid state up to its warmth-state, we pass out of the bodily constitution.

This shows you how necessary it is not simply to accept what is presented to biased, external observation. There, on the one side, is the solid body, to which materialistic-mechanistic thought is anchored; and on the other side there is the life of soul which to modern consciousness appears endowed with content only in the form of experiences belonging to the clear day-consciousness. Thought based on external observation alone does not go downwards from this state of consciousness. (See Diagram V: Ego), for if it did it would come to the body. It does not go downwards from the spiritual body (warmth-body), for if it did it would be led to the solid body. This kind of thinking studies the solid body without either the fluid body, the air body or the warmth-body, and the day-consciousness without that which in reality reflects the inner bodily nature—without the dream-consciousness and the consciousness of dreamless sleep.

On the basis of academic psychology, the question is asked: How does the soul-and-spirit live in the physical man?—In reality we have the solid body, the fluid body, the air body and the warmth-body. (Diagram V.) By way of the warmth-body the Ego unfolds the clear day-consciousness. But coming downwards we have the dream-consciousness, and still farther downwards the consciousness of dreamless sleep. Descending even farther (Diagram V, horizontal shading), we come—as you know from the book Occult Science—to still another state of consciousness which we need not consider now. If we ask how what is here on the right (Diagram V) is related to what is on the left, we shall find that they harmonize, for here (arrow at left side), ascending from below upwards, we come to the soul-realm; and here (arrow at right side) we come to the bodily constitution: the right and the left harmonize.

But fundamentally speaking, the externalized thinking of today takes account only of the solid body, and again only of this state of consciousness (Ego). The Ego hovers in the clouds and the solid body stands on the ground—and no relation is found between the two. If you read the literature of modern psychology you will find the most incredible hypotheses of how the soul works upon the body. But this is all due to the fact that only one part of the body is taken into account, and then something that is entirely separated from it—one part of the soul. (Diagram VI, oblique shading.)

That Spiritual Science aims everywhere for wholeness of view, that it must in very truth build the bridge between the bodily constitution on the one side and the life of soul on the other, that it draws attention to states of being where the soul-element becomes a bodily element, the bodily element a soul-element—all this riles our contemporaries, who insist upon not going beyond what presents itself to external, prejudiced contemplation.

From the whole tendency of these presentations of Anthroposophical Spiritual Science you will see how essential it is to understand that in the various spheres of existence there are different Spiritual beings who have inserted themselves therein, taking part in the work, giving force and direction. It is necessary that humanity in our present age should be permeated with the knowledge that different spheres of existence are guided and directed by different Spiritual beings; for our civilisation has in the course of recent years lost this consciousness of the presence of concrete spirit in life. In general people will willingly talk of the Divine permeating everything, but such talk does not help one to an understanding of the World which can provide a sufficient basis for life. It is, of course, quite true that, in the last resort, everything recognised as spirit must tend towards unity; but if one perceives that unity too soon, one simply loses all real insight into the course of world-happenings; therefore, it is necessary to leave off speaking in general in such an abstract way about the Divine, and learn to know the concrete Spiritual guiding beings in Nature and History, as we have over and over again tried to do. It is from this point of view that I should like to point to-day, to certain really important and significant things at the base of the constitution of our world.

I pointed out in the last lecture that certain Beings find themselves together when it comes to building up and animating man, they find themselves united in opposition in the world. We put the old truth of the opposition coming from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic Spiritual forces before our souls in the last lecture from a certain point of view, and now we will try to understand the matter from another aspect.

Just that, in our newest civilisation, which is now involved in such catastrophic events, and manifests in such decadent forces, just that which is so characteristic in our modern civilisation, is the extension of intellectual thinking throughout the whole of humanity. One must really try to acquire an insight into the quite different mood of soul of civilised Europe before the 7th and 8th centuries. It is just that intellectual thought, which to-day is so prevalent everywhere, which permeates the entire soul-life of man and, from a certain aspect, will still continue to permeate it. The point now is, that one must seek to grasp what is externally comprehensible, and try to unite that with a more psychic concept; for it is well if, from the aspect of the spirit, one really seeks to grasp and permeate external and material existence itself.

That which underlies our organism of thought consists in purely mineral processes occurring within us. Please understand me aright, my dear friends; those processes in us which are processes of our own human nature, and which we have in common with the animal and plant-nature, these are connected only indirectly but not directly, with the fact that we have become intellectual thinking human beings according to the modern idea of the development of man. The fact that we have in us a firmly consolidated mineral constitution gives us the capacity for intellectual thought. When we look at all those Kingdoms of Nature which are outside us in cosmic space, and which are also within us, we must say:—Let us first of all contemplate the sphere of warmth, of the Warmth-ether; we carry the effect of this Warmth-ether in our own blood, and the activity of our blood consists essentially in the fact that our blood, as the carrier of warmth guides these warmth-processes through our entire organism. Now our intellectual thinking does not depend on anything of what transpires in the sphere of warmth, it does not depend upon what transpires in us when we inspire and transmute the air in our organism. Thus, when we consider the warmth-processes in the Cosmos, we can say:—These warmth-processes are continued within the skin of our organism; but that which meets us in the Cosmos as warmth-processes, which specially meets one who regards the Cosmos in the condition when it showed itself exclusively in warmth processes, that which meets us in ourselves as warmth-processes, none of that stimulates us to intellectual thinking. Then if we look to the kingdom of the Air, there too we find events taking place; these processes are continued in our organism through our breathing process; everything we find represented thus is within us through air, but that again has nothing directly to do with our intellectual thinking.

As a third sphere we can look to the phenomenon of water; we see outside in the Cosmos the processes in the fluid-sphere. These too are continued in our digestion in so far as it occurs in the fluids. Outside in nature we see the circulation of Fluids and in ourselves we also see a kind of circulation of fluids. All that transpires in us in that way, has again nothing to do with what is our intellectual thinking. But when we look out into the Cosmos and see how water condenses to ice, how certain mineral substances deposited as sediments, form stones and crystals, in short when we consider the processes of the mineral sphere and their corresponding processes in our own organism, we find that what transpires as mineral processes has to do with all that finally culminates in our intellectual thinking. We therefore as human beings, are incorporated into the Cosmos in these various spheres; but if we only incorporated in these different spheres without being envolved to special degree with the mineral kingdom, with those forces which appear in crystallisation, and in the deposits of salts, and which thus meet us in the external world, we should never have become the thinking beings we have become, especially since the middle of the 15th Century. It is an absolute fact—that since the middle of the I5th Century, it is this working of the mineral forces in the human organism which has become predominant. Previous to that, other forces, those of water, of air, and so on, were dominant to a special degree in man. Hence man's intellectual thinking was not then the most significant element in the works of man.

Now, in everything which surrounds us in the various spheres in which we live, the realm of the solid Earth, of flowing water, of air and warmth, (for a moment we will look away from the higher spheres) in all these are working Divine Spiritual Beings. These spheres do not only consist in what we call material world-forces and entities, but all these spheres are permeated by various Spiritual beings. I will therefore make a diagram to represent an important fact in our connection with the Cosmos.

Suppose I draw the sphere of the mineral world (see Diagram) as white; I must then characterise the sphere of the water as red, the sphere of the air as blue, and then finally the warmth-ether above as reddish.

Now this is the remarkable characteristic; all those Spiritual beings which the pre-Christian age and especially the pre-Christian Judaism imagined as standing under the guidance of Jahve or Jehovah, and who were regarded by the Hebrew Initiates as belonging to the Realm of Jahve or Jehovah, extended their dominions over the three first Realms—Warmth, Air, Water. And so if I am to draw that sphere in the Cosmos which was under the rulership of Jehovah, I must say; It is this sphere—(the three upper layers). It was really the case that the Jehovah rulership embraced the spheres of Nature as we have them, with the exception of the physical-mineral sphere. It must be quite clear to you that when in the ancient Jewish writings, reference is made to the Divine, this always refers to the Jehovah sphere of Warmth, Air, and Water. That was a deep Initiation-Truth of the pre-Christian age, and is even Spiritually indicated in the story of Creation. It is clearly expressed there, and one has merely to understand the meaning of the Bible words aright to see how this is brought to expression. Jehovah devoted Himself, so to speak, to the Earth, and formed man out of the dust of the Earth. He took that which was not his own sphere, for the forming of external man. The Bible expresses that fact quite clearly. As I have said, in the pre-Christian Jewish Initiation knowledge, it was known as an Initiation-Truth, that Jehovah did not form external man out of His own sphere of power, but turned to the Earth, and from out of the earthly dust which was foreign to Him, He formed that human vessel which could not come from His own kingdom. Then He breathed that which comes from Him, the animal soul, the breath. That it is which He gave forth from Himself, and it came from the three spheres over which He ruled. It is the case that the superficial Bible investigator really does not for the most part, understand what stands in the Bible at all. If one understands the Bible, one sees that it speaks with extraordinary exactitude, one only has to take those sentences quite exactly: “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the Earth.”—That means out of the mineral sphere foreign to Him, and then He gave to that form from out of His own sphere, the breath of the soul. And so, that which lives in man as the Jehovah Outflow, is what is indicated when it is said that Jehovah breathed the living breath into man.

And so man developed, and while he developed himself further in the mineral kingdom, he developed an element foreign to Jehovah. That kingdom then, in the recent age, since the 5th Post Atlantean epoch, became especially dominant in man, because it formed the basis for his intellectual civilisation. So that we can say: As long as the intellectual civilisation was not predominant in man, so long could a rulership prevail such as that of Jehovah. Then, however, the mineral nature began to make itself felt, from the founding of Christianity up to the beginning of the 5th Post-Atlantean epoch. Humanity had then to be helped from another side. Now you can see how necessary it was for humanity at the time when the mineral Nature became essential, that it should receive the Christ Impulse; because the old Jahve Jehovah-impulse was no longer sufficient.

You must connect what I have just told you with certain definite facts. Just consider the fact that man would not think intellectually, with a fully waking consciousness, if he were merely subject to the Jehovah-influence, which has no influence on the mineral nature. And so, if we wish chiefly to consider the activity of Jehovah in man, we must not look to what is in our external intellectual culture, but simply to what expresses itself in our dreams. That which is dreamt, which does not pass into sharply contoured intellectual concepts which can be grasped by our soul but is dreamt,—that is our Jehovah-life. Everything which moves in the fluidic elements of the more fantastic or imaginative side, everything which can be compared externally with the Moon-influence on man, that is the, Jehovah-nature in man. Opposed to the Jehovah-nature is man's acute thinking; but that he owes to the circumstances that there are salt deposits in him; that there is in man, a mineral activity.

Now just consider the fact that, fundamentally, the old Jehovah religion lost its significance with the Mystery of Golgotha. It had lost its significance because the time had come in the evolution of man, when the mineral nature became predominant in him. But when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared there was still sufficient left of the ancient Dream-Wisdom wherewith to understand it. And those persons who had somewhat transcended the ancient Dream-Wisdom, and who through various kinds of Initiations had, like Saul-Paul, already attained some intellectual culture, for them a special influence was necessary, such as Paul received through the Event of Damascus, in order to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. It is of a great and deep significance, that in the Christian tradition we are told that, in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha it was necessary for Saul-Paul, who had in a certain sense been initiated before the Mystery of Golgotha, into the Hebraic Mysteries, for him it was necessary that he should be snatched into that knowledge which did not work in sharp contours, but which expressed itself in the more flowing element of the dream; and thus Paul experienced the certainty that Christ had been present in Jesus through the Mystery of Golgotha. With the old Dream-Wisdom it was still possible to grasp something of the Event of Golgotha, and if, through a special influence such as was the case with Paul, a man was snatched into that Dream-region, he could then understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the old Dream Wisdom decreased ever more and more; it only remained in man's dreams, and even there is found in utter decadence. As the I5th Century approached, the culture in Europe was tending more and more to the purely intellectual element; and, under the influence of this intellectual element, our modern natural Science developed.

Now, consider the following:—The old Jewish religion must not be grasped merely with reference to external worlds, that would only be a materialistic religious understanding; we must grasp it in its inner spirit. As an historical phenomenon—the point that strikes us is, that the Jehovah-god was simply the God of one tribe, and outside the limits of the Jewish race Jehovah was no longer the Jehovah-God. That is the essence of the Jehovah Divinity; he did not embrace the whole of humanity, but only one portion of mankind. Fundamentally this feeling of Divinity has passed over to our own age, and in particular one could see it again during the World-War, when every Nation spoke of how Divine Providence or, as many said, the Christ, was helping them! Each Nation wanted so to say, to go forth under the guidance of Christ, against every other Race. But because one utters the Name of `Christ,' that does not mean that one has met, contacted the Christ; for the Christ is only contacted when in one's whole feeling one turns to that Being Who has the Christ Nature. One may say a thousand times over: “We will fight in the name of Christ;” but as long as one is fighting for one Nation alone, one is giving a false name to that being of whom one speaks, one may call him Christ, but it is a false name. In calling that being Christ, one only means the Jehovah-God. In that War-Catastrophe all the Races fell back into a Jehovah-religion, only, there were a great many Jehovahs; every Race worshipped a God who was honoured quite in the character of a Jehovah; Christ completely disappeared from the consciousness of humanity. One could see in those catastrophic events how utterly Christ had disappeared out of the consciousness of man.

We can also see this in other things. A quite modern scientific civilisation has now grown up. Our modern scientific culture, how far does it extend? Fundamentally, it is limited to what is mineral-physical. Just consider how uncomfortable a modern scientist immediately becomes, if one asks him to speak of anything but what is mineral or physical. As soon as the conversation turns to anything else—for instance, to the principle of life, the modern scientist asserts that one can only explain the mineral and chemical processes in the living. He will not enter into the element of life itself and still less into the element of soul. Thus this modern Science has altogether developed within just that sphere which was not included in the Jehovah religion, in an element foreign to Jehovah,—that of the mineral—physical life. This Science, in order that it might become an element of civilisation, had, as it were, to depend on receiving the Divine Spiritual from quite another side.

In the old Jewish religion when man spoke of any sort of cognition, it was always a Dream-cognition. These prophets who had the very highest knowledge, are described as the Dreamers of prophetic dreams. That is all connected with just this very fact. It was through this Dream-Wisdom that men even comprehended the Mystery of Golgotha itself. But this Dream-Wisdom disappeared. The Mystery of Golgotha was indeed transmitted historically and spoken of in the traditional Church Communities, but a true understanding of it could no longer be found. In place of it, Modern Science grew up into an element which knew not Jehovah, a spiritual-less, God-less element; and, because its understanding could not yet expand to the Christ-element, it developed into that physical mineral element, utterly devoid of spirit.

Now this Science, must to its uttermost particle, again be permeated by a Spiritual element. It is spiritless because it can no longer be Jehovistic. External civilisation has attempted to carry on some sort of religious culture, by means of a religious `false coinage,' as when it gave the name of Christ to Jehovah during the War; but this religious element has been carried on through a sort of religious, `false coinage.' But Science has turned entirely away from the Spiritual; it only gives descriptions of the physical-sensible, because man has not yet been able to press forward to an understanding of the Christ, and at most the old Jehovah understanding still prevails, when men storm against each other as they did in the War; but not when they investigate facts of Nature, for then we have a Spiritless Science, and intellectual Science, devoid of spirit. Thus we are surrounded by a sphere in which the Jehovah element still rules. It permeates us; but we are not aware of it, because it permeates us chiefly through those conditions which are our sleeping-conditions. If, when we withdraw into the element of sleep, we could suddenly wake up outside our bodies, we should clearly perceive around us the spirit-nature under the leadership of Jehovah. Then, as it were, on the waves of a Jehovah-Sea, we should see our dreams coming to us out of this Jehovah element.

Again in our Will, of which I have often told you that we are asleep within it, there again the Jehovah Nature rules. In the whole assimilatory system of man, the Jehovah Nature rules, whereas the feelings arise out of the assimilatory system and permeates the rhythmic system, in like manner do certain feelings emerge, coming out of the Jehovah Sea on the waves like our dreams. But, when we live in that sphere which can become comprehensible to us through our understanding and reason, there Jehovah has no share. When the Moon slowly arises in a dream-like light and pours this dream-light over everything, one might say:—“Man has spread a Jehovah character over the fields of the world.” When however, the Sun arises, shining clearly on every stone, spreading itself outwardly on every object and giving it sharp contours, so that we are able to grasp it with our understanding, then the Sun-nature,—which is not a Jehovah-nature, expresses itself, and we can only permeate that with spirit if we can perceive the Christ-Being, if we so look into this world as to see the Christ-Being in it. Modern Science has had no eye for this Christ-Being, and that which is Not Jehovistic but Sun-illumined, and can be grasped in the sharp contours of the intellect, it has taken up and beheld as devoid of spirit.

Now see, that is the deeper connection. What kind of a sphere is it then, which meets man in the mineral? Now, I told you in the last lecture that on the one side within the sphere of Jehovah, because they have remained at an earthly stage of evolution, Luciferic beings appear when we are present in the Jehovah sphere let us say in sleep, then the Luciferic beings make themselves felt in our feelings and impulses of Will. That sphere which we must dominate with our intellect and which is spread out around us as the mineral spheres, that is a sphere foreign to Jehovah and into that those beings have penetrated, who belong to the Ahrimanic sphere. The Ahrimanic beings however, because Jehovah could not, so to speak, keep them away from Him, have penetrated into that mineral sphere. (lower part of Diagram, blue on white) And so, when we turn our gaze to this sphere, we are every moment in danger of being taken by surprise, to our confusion, because of the Ahrimanic beings. These Ahrimanic beings—I have tried to present an image of this in the wooden group which will stand in our Goetheanum—these Ahrimanic beings can in reality only feel at home in the sphere which surrounds us in the mineral world. These Ahrimanic beings are specially intellectually-gifted beings. That Mephistophelian figure which you see below in our wooden group, that Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic figure is extremely clever, utterly and wholly permeated with intellect. But that which is really Jehovistic, and which lives in the human metabolic system, in so far as it is not affected by the salts or altogether mineral,—with all that is of a fluid-nature, which lives in our breathing in our warmth condition, with all that, these Ahrimanic beings have no direct relationship.

Now, these Ahrimanic beings strive to get into man. Man was created of the dust of the Earth. The mineral element is the true sphere of Ahriman, he can enter that sphere, and feel comfortable there; he feels very comfortable whenever he can permeate us through that which is mineral in us. You secrete salts in your body, and thereby you are able to think; through the deposit of salt, through all the mineral processes valid and operative in you,—you become thinking-beings. Ahriman seeks to enter that sphere, but in reality he has only a part in the mineral. Therefore, he is fighting to get a share also in man's blood, in his breathing, and in his assimilation. He can only do this if he can inject certain characteristics into the soul of man; if for instance, he can inject into the human soul a tendency to a dry, barren understanding which seeks an outlet in materialism, and mocks all truths permeated by feeling. If he can permeate man with intellectual pride, then he can approach man's blood, his breath, his assimilation; then he can, as it were creep out of the salts and mineral in man and creep into his blood breathing and digestion.

That is the conflict being fought from the side of Ahriman in the world, through the very being of man. You see, when Jehovah turned to the Earth and created man out of the Earth in order to evolve him further than he could have done within His own body. He had to create man out of an element foreign to Himself, and only to inoculate, to inspire, his own element into him. In so doing, Jehovah had to take something to His aid, something to which these Ahrimanic beings have access; and Jehovah has thereby become involved, as regards earthly evolution, in this conflict with the Ahrimanic element, which with the help of man, seeks to get the world for itself by means of the mineral processes. As a matter of fact, much has been attained by the Ahrimanic beings in this sphere; because, when man is born into physical existence, or is conceived, he descends, he comes down from the Spiritual psychic worlds and surrounds himself with physical matter. But in the present state of our civilisation and according to the customs of all the traditional Churches, man would like to forget his existence in a Spiritual psychic sphere before Birth. He does not wish to admit it. He would like, in a sense, to wipe out of human life any pre-birthly existence. Pre-Existence is being gradually declared heretical in the traditional Confessions. It is wished to limit man to starting with physical birth or conception, and then to link on to that, what follows after death. If this belief in a mere post-mortem condition, in an after-death condition, were to be finally forced on man, the Ahrimanic powers would then win their conflict; because if man only regards what he experiences between birth and death, and does not look to a pre-existence, to a life before birth, the Ahrimanic element would gradually overpower man from out of his mineral processes. Thereby everything of a Jehovistic nature would be thrown out of earthly evolution, everything which has come over from Saturn, Sun, and Moon, would be wiped away. A new creation would thus begin with the Earth, which would deny everything which had preceded it.

For that reason, the perception which denies pre-existence must be fought with all possible energy. Man must realise that he existed before he was born or conceived into physical life. In all veneration and holiness, he must receive that which was allotted to him from Divine Spiritual worlds before his earthly existence. If he adds to the belief of the after-death condition a knowledge of pre-birthly existence, he can thereby prevent his soul from being devoured by Ahriman. It follows therefore, from what I have said, that (it is necessary that we should gradually take into our speech, a certain word which we have not yet got:—Just as we speak of immortality (Deathlessness) when we think of the end of our physical existence, so we must speak of un-bornness (ungeborenheit) for even as we are immortal, so also we, as human beings, are in reality unborn. But just seek everywhere in civilised language for a practicable word for “Birthlessness.” We have the word Immortal, everywhere, but “unborn” we have not got. We need that word;—it must be just as valid a word as the word immortal to-day. It is just in this that the Ahrimanising of our modern civilisation reveals itself; it is one of the most important symptoms of the Ahrimanising of modern civilisation, that we have no word for this “not-being born.” For, just as we do not fall a prey to death when we `die' as it is called neither do we first come into our so-called `birth.' We must have a word which points clearly to pre-existence. One must not undervalue the significance which lays in the word.

You see, my dear friends, no matter how acutely one thinks, there is something in you, something in man, of an intellectual nature, but the moment the thought is expressed in a word, even the moment the word as such in only thought, as in the words of a meditation, that same moment one word is imprinted into the ether of the Cosmos. Thought, as such, does not imprint itself into the ether of the Cosmos, otherwise we could never become free beings in the sphere of pure thought. We are bound the moment something imprints itself. We are not made free through the word, but through pure thought. You can read now about this in my ^“Philosophy of Freedom.” The word imprints itself into the ether.

Now just consider this. The Science of Initiation knows that it is true that in the whole Ether of the Earth, because in the civilised language there is no word for “Un-bornness” (ungeborenheit), this “Birthlessness,” which is so important for humanity, is not imprinted into the Cosmic ether. Now everything which in such important words is imprinted in the Cosmic ether, signifies for the Ahrimanic beings a terrific fear. The word immortality the Ahrimanic beings can very well bear to find inscribed in the World-ether; they are quite pleased, because immortality means that they can start a new creation, with man, and wander forth with humanity. It does not irritate Ahrimanic beings when they shoot through the Cosmic ether, to play their game with man, and they find that from all pulpits immortality is being spoken of; that does not irritate them, it pleases them. But it is a terrible shock for them if they find the word Un-bornness inscribed in the World ether; it extinguishes the light in which these Ahrimanic being move. Then they can go no further, they lose their direction, they feel as though they were falling into an abyss, a bottomless pit. You can see by this that it is an Ahrimanic deed which restrains humanity from speaking of un-bornness. No matter how paradoxical it may appear to modern humanity that one should speak of these things, modern civilization requires that these things should be spoken of. Just as Meteorology describes the Wind, or Geography the Gulf Stream, so one must describe what is going on around us Spiritually, and how these Ahrimanic beings are permeating our environment; and one must describe how well they feel in everything connected; and with dying, even a negation of death itself is not admitted; and how they are filled with a terrible fear of darkness when one speaks of anything connected with the negation of Birth, with growth and thriving. He must learn to speak scientifically of these things, just as that Jehovah-forsaken mineral-sphere can be spoken of scientifically in our modern Science.

You see, this is in reality, neither more nor less than the conflict with the Ahrimanic powers, which we ourselves must take upon us and finally, whether people like to know it or not, that which is so often brought against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science, is at the same time the fight of Ahriman against that which as Spiritual Science, must ever repeat more and more emphatically what is now necessary for modern humanity.

Of course, my dear friends, when one experiences such things as the recent attacks, is it not obvious that these people themselves do not approach Spiritual Science? I have spoken to you recently of the especially ruthless and ugly attack which appeared recently in Germany, in the decent paper, “Frankfurter Zeitung,” in which that paper indeed took up a really disgraceful attitude. It did indeed accept our rejoinder, but only in order to put before it a whole column of its own nonsensical remarks. These things are all part of those which it is either too lazy or not capable of studying.

You see, my dear friends, if you consider such attacks in the light of what I have told you, in connection with these Ahrimanic beings, you will see through them a little. In scientific circles to-day there are a great number of persons who can apparently think quite clearly. And why, my dear friends? Because Ahriman, who permeates the mineral world, permeates them; therefore, you need not be surprised that these people develop a great deal of intellect and power. That is Ahriman within them, it is far more comfortable to allow Ahriman to think in one, than to think for oneself. A man can pass his exams far more easily, he can become a tutor or University Professor with far greater facility if he allows Ahriman to think for him. And because so many people allow Ahriman to think in them, these attacks naturally come from an Ahrimanic side. These things have an inner Spiritual connection, which we must see through. Therefore, people must not be so foolish as to blame us over and over again, if we are forced with sharp words to beat back that which would fain nullify Spiritual Science from its very roots.

From the whole character of these presentations of anthroposophical Spiritual Science you will see how essential it is to understand that in the various spheres of existence different Spiritual Beings have inserted themselves, taking part in the work of those spheres, giving force and direction. It is necessary that humanity in our present age should be fully alive to the knowledge of this—that different spheres of existence are guided and directed by different spiritual Beings; for our civilisation has in the course of recent years lost this consciousness of the presence of concrete Spirit in life. In general, people will willingly talk of the Divine permeating everything, but such talk does not help to an understanding of the world which can provide a sufficient basis for life. It is, of course, quite true that in the last resort, every recognition of the spiritual must tend towards a unity: but if one perceives that unity too soon, one simply loses all real insight into the course of world-happenings. It is necessary, therefore, to leave off speaking in general in such an abstract way about the Divine, and learn to know the concrete spiritual guiding Beings in Nature and History, as we have done over and over again in the course of time. It is from this point of view that I should like to point today to certain really important and significant things at the basis of the constitution of our world.

I pointed out in the last lecture that certain Beings find themselves together in the world for the purpose of building up and animating man, but that they find themselves in conflict. The old truth of the opposition coming from the Luciferic and Ahrimanic spiritual forces—this we put before our souls in the last lecture from a certain point of view, and now we will look at the matter once more from another aspect.

If we take our modern civilisation, which is now involved in such catastrophic events and manifests in such decadent forces, we shall find that what is essentially characteristic of it is the extension of intellectual thinking throughout the whole of humanity. One must really try to acquire an insight into the quite different constitution of man's soul throughout civilised Europe seven or eight centuries ago. It is intellectual thought which today is so prevalent everywhere, which permeates the entire soul-life of man and, from a certain aspect, will still continue to permeate it. The point now is that one must seek to unite with what is externally comprehensible concepts that belong more to the soul and spirit; for it is well if, from the aspect of the spirit, one really seeks to grasp and permeate external and material existence itself.

That which underlies thought in our organism consists in purely mineral processes that take place within us. Please understand me aright; those processes in us which are specifically of a human character, and those which we have in common with the animal and plant-nature, these are all connected only indirectly, and not directly, with the fact that we have become intellectual thinking human beings according to the modern idea of the development of nan. The fact that we have in us a firmly consolidated mineral constitution gives us the capacity for intellectual thought.

When we look at all those kingdoms of nature which are outside us in cosmic space, and which are also within us, we must say: Let us first of all contemplate the sphere of Warmth, of the warmth-Ether; we carry the effect of this Warmth-Ether in our own blood, and the activity of our blood consists essentially in the fact that our blood, aa the carrier of warmth, guides these warmth-processes through our entire organism. Now our intellectual thinking does not depend in any way upon what happens in the sphere of warmth. Thus, when we consider the warmth-processes in the cosmos, we can say: These warmth-processes are also continued within the skin of our organism; but that which meets us in the cosmos as warmth-processes—and specially meets one who is able to regard the cosmos in the condition when it showed itself exclusively in warmth processes, during the Saturn evolution—none of that stimulates us to intellectual thinking. Then if we look to the kingdom of the Air, there too we find events taking place; these processes are continued in our organism through our breathing process; but that again has nothing directly to do with our intellectual thinking.

As a third sphere we can look to the phenomenon of water; we see outside in the cosmos the processes in the fluid sphere. These too are continued in our metabolism, in so far as it occurs in the fluids. Outside in nature we see the circulation of fluids, and in ourselves too we see a kind of circulation of fluids. All that takes place in us in that way has again nothing to do with what is our intellectual thinking. But when we look out into the cosmos and see how water condenses to ice, how certain mineral substances are deposited as sediments, how stones and crystals take form—in short, when we consider the processes of the mineral sphere and their corresponding processes in our own organism, then we find that the mineral processes in us have to do with all that finally culminates in our intellectual thinking. We, therefore, as human beings, are incorporated into the cosmos in these various spheres; but if we were only incorporated in all these different spheres without being involved in any special degree with the mineral kingdom, with those forces which appear in crystallisation and in the deposits of salts, and which meet us in these manifestations in the external world, we should never have become the thinking beings we have become, especially since the middle of the fifteenth century. It is an absolute fact that since the middle of the fifteenth century, it is this working of the mineral forces in the human organism that has become predominant. Previous to that, other forces, those of water, air and so on, were dominant to a special degree in man. Hence intellectual thinking was not then the most significant element in human activity.

Now, in everything which surrounds us in the various realms in which we live, the realm of solid earth, of flowing water, of air and of warmth—for a moment we will disregard the higher kinds of ether—in all these are working divine spiritual beings. These realms consist not only in what we call material world-forces and entities, but they are all permeated by different spiritual beings. I will therefore make a diagram to represent this important fact in our connection with the cosmos. Suppose I sketch here (see diagram) the realm of the mineral world (black); I will then here characterise the realm of the water (red), the realm of the air here (blue), and then finally the warmth-ether (reddish-violet).

Now this is the characteristic of all those spiritual beings whom the pre-Christian age—and especially pre-Christian Judaism—conceived as standing under the guidance of Jahve or Jehovah, and who were regarded by the Hebrew initiates as belonging to the Realm of Jahve or Jehovah. They extended their dominion essentially over the three first realms—warmth, air, water. And so if I am to draw that region in the cosmos that was under the rulership of Jehovah, I must say: It is this region (the three upper layers). It was really the case that the Jehovah rulership embraced the realms of Nature as we have enumerated them, with the exception of the physical-mineral realm. You must be quite clear that when in the ancient Jewish writings, reference is made to the Divine, this always refers to the Jehovah realm of warmth-ether, air and water. That was a deep initiation-truth of the pre-Christian age, and is very cleverly indicated in the story of Creation. One has merely to understand the meaning of the Bible words aright to see how this is plainly brought to expression. Jehovah betook himself, so to speak, to the earth, and formed man out of the dust of the earth. He took that which was not his own kingdom, for the forming of external man. The Bible expresses that fact quite clearly. As I have said, in the pre-Christian Jewish initiation, it was known as an initiation-truth that Jehovah did not form external man out of his own sphere of power, but turned to the earth, and from out of the earthly dust, which was foreign to him, he formed the human sheath which could not come from his own kingdom. Then he breathed into it that which comes from him—the animal soul, the Nephesch. That it is which he gave forth from himself and it came from the three realms over which he ruled. The superficial Bible investigators really do not, for the most part, understand what stands in the Bible at all. If one understands the Bible, one sees that it speaks with extraordinary exactitude, one only has to take its sentences quite exactly. “Jehovah formed man out of the dust of the earth,” that means out of the mineral kingdom foreign to him, and then he gave to man out of his own sphere the breath of the soul. Thus, what lives in man as an emanation from Jehovah is indicated when it is said that Jehovah breathed the living Odem into man.

Man developed, and as he evolved further in the mineral kingdom, he developed in an element foreign to Jehovah. And it was that kingdom which then, in more modern times, since the fifth post-Atlantean epoch, became especially dominant in man, because it formed the basis for his intellectual civilisation. We can say, therefore, that as long as the intellectual civilisation was not predominant in man, so long could a rulership prevail such as that of Jehovah. Then, however, the mineral nature began to make itself felt, from the founding of Christianity up to the beginning of the fifth post-Atlantean epoch. Humanity had then to be helped from another side. Now you can see how necessary it was for man at the time when the mineral nature became so important to him that he should receive the Christ Impulse, because the old Jahve or Jehovah-impulse was no longer sufficient.

You must connect what I have just told you with certain definite facts. Just consider the fact that man would not think intellectually, with a fully waking consciousness, if he were merely subject to the Jehovah influence, which has no influence on his mineral nature. And so, if we wish chiefly to consider the activity of Jehovah in man, we must not look to what is in our external intellectual culture, but to what expresses itself in our dreams. That which is dreamt, which does not pass into sharply contoured intellectual concepts such as can be grasped by the soul but is dreamt—that is our Jehovah-life. Everything which moves in the fluidic elements of the more fantastic or imaginative nature, everything which can be compared externally with the Moon-influence on man, that is his Jehovah-nature. Opposed to the Jehovah-nature is man's clear-cut thinking; but that he owes to the circumstance that there are salt deposits in him, that there is in him a mineral activity.

Now just consider the fact that, fundamentally, the old Jehovah religion lost its significance with the Mystery of Golgotha. It had lost its significance because the time had come in the evolution of man when the mineral nature became predominant in him. But when the Mystery of Golgotha appeared, there was still enough left of the ancient Dream Wisdom through which it could be understood. And those persons who had somewhat transcended the ancient Dream-Wisdom and who through various kinds of initiation had, like Saul (Paul), already attained some intellectual culture—for them a special influence was necessary, such as Paul received through the Event of Damascus, in order to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha. It is of great and deep significance, that in the Christian tradition we are told that in order to understand the Mystery of Golgotha it was necessary for Saul, who had in a certain sense been initiated before the Mystery of Golgotha into the Hebraic Mysteries—it was necessary for him that he should be carried away into that knowledge which did not work in sharp contours, but which expressed itself in the more flowing element of the dream; for it was in this way that Paul experienced the certainty that Christ had been present in Jesus through the Mystery of Golgotha. With the old Dream Wisdom, it was still possible to grasp something of the Event of Golgotha, and if, through a special influence ouch as was the case with Paul, a man was snatched into that Dream region, he could then understand the Mystery of Golgotha. But now the old Dream Wisdom more and more decreased; it only remained in man's dreams, and even there in a completely decadent form. As the fifteenth century approached, the culture of Europe was tending increasingly to the purely intellectual element; and under the influence of this intellectual element our modern natural science has developed.

Now consider the following. The old Jewish religion must not be grasped merely with reference to the external words—that would only be a materialistic understanding of religion; we must grasp it in its inner spirit. As an historical phenomenon the point that strikes us is that the Jehovah-God was simply the God of one people, and outside the borders of the Jewish people Jehovah was no longer the Jehovah-God. That is the essence of the Jehovah Divinity; he did not embrace the whole of humanity, but only one portion of mankind. In fact, this perception of God has passed over to our own age, and in particular one could, see it again during the World War when every nation spoke of how Divine Providence or, as many said, the Christ, was helping them. Each nation wanted, so to say, to go forth under the guidance of Christ against every other. But because one utters the Name of `Christ', that does not mean that one has met, has contacted, the Christ; for the Christ is only contacted when in one's whole feeling one turns to that Being Who has the Christ Nature. One may say a thousand times over: “We will fight in the Name of Christ”; but as long as one is fighting for one nation alone, one is giving a false name to the Being of Whom one speaks; one calls the Being Christ, but one means only the Jehovah-God. In the great catastrophe of the War (1914-1918) all the peoples fell back into a Jehovah religion—only, there were a great many Jehovahs; each people worshipped a God who was honoured entirely in the character of a Jehovah; Christ completely disappeared from the consciousness of humanity. One could see in those catastrophic events how utterly Christ had disappeared out of the consciousness of man.

We can see this also in other things. An altogether scientific civilisation has now grown up. Our modern scientific culture, how far does it extend? Fundamentally, it is limited to what is mineral and physical. Just consider how uncomfortable a modern scientist immediately becomes if one asks him to speak of anything but what is mineral or physical. As soon as the conversation turns to anything else—for instance, to the principle of life—the modern scientist asserts that one can only explain the mineral and chemical processes in the living. He will not enter into the element of life itself, and still less into the element of soul. Thus, this modern science has developed entirely within just that sphere which was not included in the Jehovah religion, in an element foreign to Jehovah—the element of the mineral physical. This science, in order that it might become an element of civilisation had, as it were, to depend on receiving the Divine Spiritual from another side.

When one spoke among the ancient Jews of any sort of knowledge, it was always a dream-knowledge. The Prophets who had the very highest knowledge are described as the Dreamers of prophetic dreams. It is all connected with just this very fact. It was through this Dream-Wisdom that men even comprehended the Mystery of Golgotha itself. But this Dream-Wisdom disappeared. The Mystery of Golgotha was indeed still transmitted historically and spoken of in the traditional Church communities, but a true understanding of it could no longer be found. In place of it, modern science has grown up in the element foreign to Jehovah, a spirit-less, God-less element; and, because its understanding could not yet expand to the Christ-element, it developed entirely within that physical mineral element—utterly devoid of spirit.

Now this science must, to its uttermost particle, again be permeated by a spiritual element. It is empty of spirit because it can no longer be Jehovistic. External civilisation has attempted to carry on some sort of religious culture by means of a religious `false coinage,' as when it gave the name of Christ to Jehovah during the War. But science has turned entirely away from the Spirit, it gives descriptions of the physical-sensible alone, because man has not yet been able to press forward to an understanding of the Christ. At most the old Jehovah understanding still prevails when men storm against each other as they did in the War; but not when they investigate facts of nature, for then we have a spirit-less science, an intellectual science devoid of spirit. Thus we are surrounded by a sphere in which the Jehovah element still rules. It permeates us; but we are not aware of it, because it permeates us chiefly through those conditions which are our sleeping conditions. If, when we withdraw into the element of sleep, we could suddenly wake up outside our body, we should clearly perceive around us a spiritual nature, under the leadership of Jehovah. Then, as it were, on the waves of a Jehovah-Sea, we should see our dreams coming to us out of this Jehovah element.

Again in our Will—I have often told you that we are asleep within it—there again the Jehovah nature rules. In the whole metabolism of man, the Jehovah nature rules. As feelings arise out of the metabolic system and permeate the rhythmic system, so do certain feelings emerge, coming out of the waves of the Jehovah-Sea—like our dreams. But when we live in that realm which can only become comprehensible to us through our intellect, our understanding, there Jehovah has no share. When the Moon rises slowly in a dream-like light and pours this dream-light over everything, one might say: “Man has spread a Jehovah character over the fields of the world.” When the Sun rises, shining clearly on every stone, spreading over every object and giving it sharp contours, so that we are able to grasp it with our understanding, then the Sun-nature—which is not a Jehovah-nature—expresses itself. We can only permeate the world with spirit if we can perceive the Christ-Being, if we so look into this world as to see the Christ-Being in it. Modern science has had no eye for this Christ-Being. That which is not Jehovistic but Sun-illumined and can be grasped in the sharp contours of the intellect—this has been seen by modern science as devoid of spirit. That is the deeper connection.

What kind of a realm is it, then, which meets man in the mineral? Now, I told you in the last lecture that on the one side, within the realm of Jehovah, because they have remained at an earlier stage of evolution, the Luciferic beings appear. When we are present in the Jehovah sphere, let us say in sleep, then the Luciferic beings make themselves felt in our feelings and impulses of Will. That realm which we must dominate with our intellect is spread out around us as the mineral kingdom. That is a kingdom foreign to Jehovah, and into it those beings have penetrated who belong to the Ahrimanic realm. The Ahrimanic beings, however, because Jehovah could not, so to speak, keep them away, have penetrated into that mineral realm (see diagram—green). And so, when we turn our gaze to this realm, we are every moment in danger of being taken by surprise, to our confusion, because of the Ahrimanic beings. These Ahrimanic beings—I have tried to present an image of this in the carved wooden Group which is to stand in our Goetheanum—these Ahrimanic beings can in reality only feel at home in the realms which surround us in the mineral world. They are predominantly intellectually-gifted beings. The Mephistophelean figure which you see below in our wooden Group, that Mephistophelian-Ahrimanic figure is extremely clever, utterly end wholly permeated with intellect. But with what is really Jehovistic—with what lives in the human metabolic system, in so far as it does not deposit salts or is of a mineral nature but of a fluid nature, consisting in the metabolism of fluids, with all that lives in our breathing and in our warmth condition—with all this the Ahrimanic element has no direct relationship.

These Ahrimanic beings strive, however, to get into man. Man was created out of the dust of the earth. The mineral element is the true sphere of Ahriman, he can enter that sphere, and feel comfortable there; he feels very comfortable whenever he can permeate us through whatever is mineral in us. You secrete salts, and through this you are able to think; through the deposit of salts, through all the mineral processes prevailing in you, you become a thinking being. Ahriman seeks to enter that sphere, but in reality he has a definite relation only to the mineral. Therefore he is fighting to get a share also in man's blood, in his breathing, and in his metabolism. He can only do this if he can inject certain characteristics into man's soul; if, for instance, he can inject into the human soul a special tendency to a dry, barren understanding which seeks an outlet in materialism and mocks all truths permeated by feeling. If he can permeate man with intellectual pride, then he can make the human blood, the breath and metabolism also inclined to him, and then he can, as it were, slip out of the salts and mineral in man and slip into his blood and breathing.

That is the conflict in the world being fought on the part of Ahriman through the very being of man. You see, when Jehovah turned to the earth and created man out of the earth in order to develop him further than he could have done within his own realm, he created man out of an element foreign to himself, and only implanted, breathed, his own element into him. But in so doing, Jehovah had to take something to his aid, something to which these Ahrimanic beings have access. Jehovah has thereby become involved, as regards earthly evolution, in this conflict with the Ahrimanic element which, with the help of man, seeks to get the world for itself by means of the mineral processes.

As a matter of fact, much has been attained by the Ahrimanic beings in this sphere, because when man is born into physical existence, or is conceived, he descends from the worlds of soul and spirit and surrounds himself with physical matter. But in the present state of our civilisation and according to the customs of the traditional Churches, man would like to forget his existence in a sphere of soul and spirit before birth. He does not wish to admit it; he would like, in a sense, to wipe out of human life any prenatal existence. Pre-existence has gradually been declared heretical in the traditional Confessions. It is desired to restrict man to the belief that he begins with physical birth or conception, and then to link on to that what follows after death. If this belief in a mere after-death condition were to be fully and finally forced on to mankind, the Ahrimanic powers would then have won their conflict; because if man regards only what he experiences from his earthly nature between birth and death and does not look to a pre-existence, to a life before birth, but only to a continuance of life after death, the Ahrimanic element in his mineral processes would gradually overpower him. Everything of a Jehovistic nature would be thrown out of earthly evolution, everything which has come over from Saturn, Sun and Moon would be wiped away. A new creation would thus begin with the earth, which would deny everything that had preceded it.

For that reason, the perception which denies pre-existence must be fought with all possible energy. Man must realise that he existed before he was born or conceived into physical life. In all veneration and holiness, he must receive that which was allotted to him from divine spiritual worlds before his earthly existence. If he adds to the belief of the after-death condition a knowledge of pre-birth existence, he can prevent his soul from being devoured by Ahriman. It follows therefore from what I have said that we need gradually to take into our speech a certain word which we have not yet got. Just as we speak of immortality (deathlessness) when we think of the end of our physical existence, so we must learn to speak of un-bornness, for even as we are immortal, so also are we, as human beings, in reality unborn, look where you will in the language of civilised peoples for a practicable word for “birthlessness!” We have the word “immortal” everywhere, but “unborn” we have not got. We need that word; it must be just as valid a word in civilised languages as the word “immortal” is today. It is just in this that the Ahrimanising of our modern civilisation reveals itself; for it is one of the most important symptoms of the Ahrimanising of modern civilisation that we have no word for “not being born.” For as we do not fall a prey to the earth with death, just as little do we first originate with our birth or conception. We must have a word which points clearly to pre-existence.

One must not undervalue the significance which lies in the word. For no matter how much and how clearly one thinks, that is something in yourself, something in man, of an intellectual nature. But the moment the thought is expressed in a word, even the moment the word as such is only thought, as in the words of a meditation, that same moment the word is imprinted into the ether of the cosmos. Thought as such does not imprint itself into the ether of the cosmos, otherwise we could never become free beings in the sphere of pure thought. We are bound, we are no longer free, the moment something imprints itself into the ether. We are not made free through the word, but through pure thought. You can read further about this in my “Philosophy of Spiritual Activity”; the word, however, imprints itself into the ether.

Now consider this. Initiation science knows it to be true that because in civilised languages there is no word for “unbornness,” therefore this “birthlessness,” which is so important for humanity, is not imprinted into the cosmic ether. Now everything which in great significant words is imprinted in the cosmic ether referring to originating, to all that concerns man in his childhood, youth, signifies for the Ahrimanic powers a terrific fear. The word “immortality” the Ahrimanic beings can very well bear to find inscribed in the world ether; they are quite pleased, because immortality means that they can start a new creation with man and carry it forward. It does not irritate the Ahrimanic beings when they shoot through the ether to play their game with man and find that from every pulpit immortality is being spoken of; that thoroughly pleases them. But it is a terrible shock for them if they find the word “unbornness” inscribed in the world ether; it entirely extinguishes the light in which these Ahrimanic beings move. Then they can go no further, they lose their direction, they feel as though they were falling into an abyss, a bottomless pit. You can see by this that it is Ahrimanic action that restrains humanity from speaking of unbornness. No matter how paradoxical it may appear to modern humanity that one should speak of these things, modern civilisation requires that they should be spoken of. Just as meteorology describes the wind, or geography the Gulf Stream, so one must describe what is going on around us spiritually, and how these Ahrimanic beings are moving through our environment; one must describe how well they feel in everything connected with death, even when dying is denied; and how they are filled with a terrible fear of darkness when one speaks of anything connected with being born, connected with growth and thriving. We must learn to speak scientifically of these things, just as that Jehovah-forsaken mineral sphere can be spoken of scientifically in our modern science.

You see, this is in reality nothing less than the conflict with the Ahrimanic powers which we must take upon ourselves. Ultimately, whether people like to know it or not, that which is so often brought against Anthroposophical Spiritual Science is at the same time the fight of Ahriman against what must be repeated ever more emphatically by Spiritual Science as necessary to modern humanity.

When one experiences such things as the recent attacks that have been made upon Spiritual Science, is it not obvious that these people themselves simply do not approach it? I have spoken to you of the especially ruthless and hateful attack which appeared recently in Germany, in the highly respected paper “Frankfurter Zeitung,” when that paper took up a really disgraceful attitude. It did indeed insert our rejoinder, but only in order to put before it a whole column of its own nonsensical remarks. These things are all characteristic of those people who would like the science of Anthroposophy to disappear, who are either too lazy to study or not capable of it. These people seize upon such attacks as the recent one in Germany in order to cast suspicions on what they cannot refute.

When you consider the matter in the light of what I have told you in connection with these Ahrimanic beings, you will see through things a little. In scientific circles today there are a great number of persons who can apparently think quite clearly, and why? Because Ahriman permeates the mineral world; and you therefore need not be surprised that these people develop a great deal of intellect. That is Ahriman within them; it is far more comfortable to allow Ahriman to think in one than to think for oneself. A man can pass his examinations far more easily, he can become a tutor or university professor with far greater facility if he allows Ahriman to think for him. And because so many people allow Ahriman to think in them, these attacks naturally come from an Ahrimanic direction. These things have an inner spiritual connection, which we must see through. Therefore, people must not be so foolish as to blame us over and over again if we are forced to strike back with very cutting remarks at what would fain nullify Spiritual Science from its very roots.

Today I want to bring up a theme which may seem somewhat remote, but it will be important for the further development of subjects we are studying. We have been able to gather together many essential details for a knowledge of the human being. On the one side, we are gradually discovering its place in the life of the cosmos, and on the other, its place in the social life. But it will be necessary today to consider certain matters which make for a better understanding of the human being and nature.

When the human being is studied by modern scientific thinking, generally only one part of the being is taken into consideration. No account whatever is taken of the fact that in addition to the physical body, there are also higher members. We will leave this aside today and consider something that is more or less recognized in science and has also made its way into the general consciousness.

In studying the human being, only those elements which can be pictured as solid, or solid-fluidic, are regarded as belonging to his organism. It is, of course, acknowledged that the fluid and the airy elements pass into and out of the human being, but these are not in themselves considered to be integral members of the organism. The warmth of the organism which is greater than that of the environment is regarded as a state or condition of the organism, but not as an actual component. We shall see what I mean by saying this. I have already drawn attention to the fact that when we study the rising and falling of the cerebral fluid through the spinal canal, we can observe a regular up-and-down oscillatory movement caused by inhalation and exhalation; when we breathe in, the cerebral fluid is driven upwards and strikes, as it were, against the brain; when we breathe out, the fluid descends. These processes in the purely liquid components of the human organism are not considered to be part and parcel of the organism itself. The general idea is that, as a physical structure, the human organism consists of the more or less solid, or at most, solid-fluid substances found in it. It is generally pictured as a structure built up from these more or less solid substances (Illustration I).

The other elements, the fluid element, as I have shown by the example of the cerebral fluid, and the airy element, are not regarded by anatomy and physiology as belonging to the human organism as such. It is said: Yes, the human being draws in the air which follows certain paths in his body and also has certain definite functions. The air is breathed out again.—Then people speak of the warmth-condition of the body, but in reality they regard the solid element as the only organizing factor and do not realize that in addition to this solid structure they should also see the whole organism as a column of fluid (blue), as being permeated with air (red) and as having a definite degree of warmth (yellow).(Illustration II) More exact study shows that just as the solid or solid-fluid constituents are an integral component of the organism, so the fluid should not be thought of as so much uniform fluid, but differentiated and organized—though the process here is a more fluctuating one—and having its own particular significance.

In addition to the solid components, therefore, we must bear in mind the 'fluid' and also the 'air'. For the air that is within us, in regard to its organization and its differentiations, is an organism in the same sense as the solid organism, only it is gaseous, airy, and in motion. And finally, the warmth in us is not a uniform warmth extending over the whole human being, but is also delicately organized. As soon, however, as we begin to speak of the fluid organism which fills the same space that is occupied by the solid organism, we realize immediately that we cannot speak of this fluid organism in the earthly human without speaking of the etheric body which permeates this fluid organism and fills it with forces. The physical organism exists for itself, as it were; it is the physical body; in so far as we consider it in its entirety, we regard it, to begin with, as a solid organism. (blue) This is the physical body.

We then come to consider the fluid organism, which cannot, of course, be investigated in the same way as the solid organism, by dissection, but which must be conceived as an inwardly mobile, fluidic organism. It cannot be studied unless we think of it as permeated by the etheric body.

Third, there is the airy organism which again cannot be studied unless we think of it as permeated with forces by the astral body.

Fourth, there is the warmth organism with all its inner differentiation. It is permeated by the forces of the Ego.—That is how the human as earthly being today is constituted.

Physical organism: Physical body

Regarded in a different way

1) Solid organism	Physical body
2) Fluid organism	Etheric body
3) Airy organism	Astral body
4) Warmth organism	Ego

Let us think, for example, of the blood. Inasmuch as it is mainly fluid, inasmuch as this blood belongs to the fluid organism, we find in the blood the etheric body which permeates it with its forces. But in the blood there is also present what is generally called the warmth-condition. But that ‘organism’ is by no means identical with the organism of the fluid blood as such. If we were to investigate this—it can also be done with physical methods of investigation—we would find in registering the warmth in the different parts of the human organism that the warmth cannot be identified with the fluid or with any other organism.

As soon as we reflect in this way we find that it is impossible for our thought to come to a standstill within the limits of the human organism itself. We can remain within these limits only if we are thinking merely of the solid organism which is shut off by the skin from the outside. Even this, however, is only apparently so. The solid structure is generally regarded as if it were a firm, self-enclosed block; but it is also inwardly differentiated and is related in manifold ways to the solid earth as a whole. This is obvious from the fact that the different solid substances have, for example, different weights; this alone shows that the solids within the human organism are differentiated, have different specific weights. In regard to the physical organism, therefore, the human being is related to the earth as a whole. Nevertheless it is possible, according at least to external evidence, to place spatial limits around the physical organism.

It is different when we come to the second, the fluid organism that is permeated by the etheric body. This fluid organism cannot be strictly demarcated from the environment. Whatever is fluid in any area of space adjoins the fluid element in the environment. Although the fluid element as such is present in the world outside us in a rarefied state, we cannot make such a definite demarcation between the fluid element within and the fluid element outside the human organism, as in the case of the solid organism. The boundary between the inner fluid organism and the fluid element in the external world must therefore be left indefinite.

This is even more emphatically the case when we come to consider the airy organism which is permeated by the forces of the astral body. The air within us at a certain moment was outside us a moment before, and it will soon be outside again. We are drawing in and giving out the airy element all the time. We can really think of the air which surrounds our earth, and say: it penetrates into our organism and withdraws again; but by penetrating into our organism it becomes an integral part of it. In our airy organism we actually have something that constantly builds itself up out of the whole atmosphere and then withdraws again into the atmosphere. Whenever we breathe in, something is built up within us, or, at the very least, each indrawn breath causes a change, a modification, in an upbuilding process within us. Similarly, a destructive, partially destructive, process takes place whenever we breathe out. Our airy organism undergoes a certain change with every indrawn breath; it is not exactly newly born, but it undergoes a change, both when we breathe in and when we breathe out. When we breathe out, the airy organism does not, of course, die; it merely undergoes a change; but there is constant interaction between the airy organism within us and the air outside. The usual trivial conceptions of the human organism can only be due to the failure to realize that there is but a slight degree of difference between the airy organism and the solid organism.

And now we come to the warmth organism. It is of course quite in keeping with materialistic-mechanistic thought to study only the solid organism and to ignore the fluid organism, the airy organism, and the warmth organism. But no real knowledge of the human organism can be acquired unless we are willing to acknowledge this membering into a warmth organism, an airy organism, a fluid organism, and an earth organism (solid).

The warmth organism is paramountly the field of the Ego. The Ego itself is that spirit-organization which imbues with its own forces the warmth that is within us, and governs and gives it configuration, not only externally but also inwardly. We cannot understand the life and activity of the soul unless we remember that the Ego works directly upon the warmth. It is primarily the Ego in man which activates the will, generates impulses of will.—How does the Ego generate impulses of will? From a different point of view we have spoken of how impulses of will are connected with the earthly sphere, in contrast to the impulses of thought and ideation which are connected with forces outside and beyond the earthly sphere. But how does the Ego, which holds together the impulses of will, send these impulses into the organism? This is achieved through the fact that the will works primarily in the warmth organism. An impulse of will proceeding from the Ego works upon the warmth organism. Under present earthly conditions it is not possible for what I shall now describe to you to be there as a concrete reality. Nevertheless it can be envisaged if we disregard the physical organization within the space bounded by the human skin, if we disregard also the fluid organism, and the airy organism. The space then remains filled with nothing but warmth which is, of course, in communication with the warmth outside. But what is active in this warmth, what stirs it into movement, makes it into an organism—is the Ego.

The astral body contains the forces of feeling; it brings these forces of feeling into physical operation in the human airy organism.

The constitution of the human as earthly being is such that, by way of the warmth organism, the Ego gives rise to what comes to expression when we act in the world as a being of will. The feelings experienced in the astral body and coming to expression in the earthly organization manifest in the airy organism. And when we come to the etheric body, we find within it the conceptual process, insofar as this has a pictorial character—more strongly pictorial than we are consciously aware of to begin with, for the physical body still intrudes and tones down the pictures into mental concepts. This process works upon the fluid organism.

This shows us that by taking these different organisms into account we come nearer to the life of soul. Materialistic observation, which stops short at the solid structure and insists that in the very nature of things water cannot become an organism, is bound to confront the life of soul with complete lack of understanding; for it is precisely in these other organisms that the life of soul comes to immediate expression. The solid organism itself is, in reality, only that which provides support for the other organisms. The solid organism stands there as a supporting structure composed of bones, muscles, and so forth. Into this supporting structure is membered the fluid organism with its own inner differentiation and configuration; in this fluid organism vibrates the etheric body, and within this fluid organism the thoughts are produced.

How are the thoughts produced? Through the fact that within the fluid organism something asserts itself in a particular metamorphosis—namely, what we know in the external world as tone. Tone is, in reality, something that leads the ordinary mode of observation very much astray. As earthly human beings we perceive the tone as being borne to us by the air. But in point of fact the air is only the transmitter of the tone, which actually weaves in the air. And anyone who assumes that the tone in its essence is merely a matter of air-vibrations is like a person who says: Man has only his physical organism, and there is no soul in it. If the air-vibrations are thought to constitute the essence of the tone, whereas they are in truth merely its external expression, this is the same as seeing only the physical organism with no soul in it. The tone which lives in the air is essentially an etheric reality. And the tone we hear by way of the air arises through the fact that the air is permeated by the Tone Ether (see diagram III) which is the same as the Chemical Ether. In permeating the air, this Chemical Ether imparts what lives within it to the air, and we become aware of what we call the tone.

This Tone Ether or Chemical Ether is essentially active in our fluid organism. We can therefore make the following distinction: In our fluid organism lives our own etheric body; but in addition there penetrates into it (the fluid organism) from every direction the Tone Ether which underlies the tone. Please distinguish carefully here. We have within us our etheric body; it works and is active by giving rise to thoughts in our fluid organism. But what may be called the Chemical Ether continually streams in and out of our fluid organism. Thus we have an etheric organism complete in itself, consisting of Chemical Ether, Warmth Ether, Light Ether, Life Ether, and in addition we find in it, in a very special sense, the Chemical Ether which streams in and out by way of the fluid organism.

The astral body which comes to expression in feeling operates through the air organism. But—still another kind of Ether by which the air is permeated is connected especially with the air organism. It is the Light Ether. Earlier conceptions of the world always emphasized this affinity of the outspreading physical air with the Light Ether which permeates it. This Light Ether that is borne, as it were, by the air and is related to the air even more intimately than tone, also penetrates into our air organism and it underlies what there passes into and out of it. Thus we have our astral body which is the bearer of feeling, which is especially active in the air organism, and is in constant contact there with the Light Ether.

And now we come to the Ego. This human Ego, which by way of the will is active in the warmth organism, is again connected with the outer warmth, with the instreaming and outstreaming Warmth Ether.

Thus we obtain the following relations:

Ego—Will—Warmth organism—Warmth Ether.
Astral body—Feeling—Air Organism—Light Ether.
Etheric body—Thinking—Fluid Organism—Chemical Ether.

Now consider the following. The etheric body remains in us also during sleep, from the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking; therefore the interworking of the Chemical Ether and the etheric body continues within our being, via the fluid organism, also while we are asleep. It is different in the case of the astral body and feeling. From the moment of falling asleep to the moment of waking, the astral body is outside the human organism; then the astral body and feeling do not then work upon the air organism, but the air organism—connected as it is with the whole surrounding world—is sustained from outside during sleep. And the human being, with astral body and feeling, goes out of the body and passes into a world with which it is related primarily through the Light Ether. While asleep we live directly in an element that is transmitted to our astral body by the air organism during waking life. We can speak in a similar way of the Ego and the warmth organism.

It is obvious from this that an understanding of our connection with the surrounding universe is possible only as the result of thorough study of these members of being, of which ordinary, mechanistic thinking takes no account at all. But everything in us interpenetrates, and because the Ego is in the warmth organism it also permeates the air organism, the fluid organism, and the solid organism; it permeates them with the warmth which is all-pervading. Thus the warmth organism lives within the air organism; the warmth organism, permeated as it is with the forces of the Ego, also works in the fluid organism.

This indicates how, for example, we should look for the way in which the Ego works in the circulating blood. It works in the circulating blood by way of the warmth organism—works as the spiritual entity which, as it were, sends down the will out of the warmth, via the air, into the fluid organism. Thus everything in the human organism works upon everything else. But we will get nowhere if we have only general abstract ideas of this interpenetration; we will reach a result only if we can evolve a concrete idea of our constitution and of how everything that is around us participates in our make-up.

The condition of sleep, too, can be understood only if we go much more closely into these matters. During sleep it is only the physical body and the etheric body that remain as they are during the waking state; the Ego and the astral body are outside. But in the sleeping human being the forces that are within the physical and etheric bodies are then also active on the airy organism and the warmth organism as well.

When we turn to consider waking life, from what has been said we shall understand the connection of the Ego with the astral body and with the whole organism. During sleep, when the Ego and the astral body are outside, the four elements are nevertheless within the human organism: the solid supporting structure, the fluid organism, but also the air organism in which the astral body otherwise works, and the warmth organism in which the Ego otherwise works. These elements are within the human organism and they work in just as regularly organized a way during sleep as during the waking state, when the Ego and the astral body are active within them.

During the sleeping state we have within us, instead of the Ego—which is now outside—the spirit which permeates the cosmos and which in waking life we have driven out through our Ego which is part of that spirit. During sleep our warmth-body is permeated by cosmic spirituality, our air organism by what may be called cosmic astrality (or world-soul), which we also drive out while we are awake.

Waking life and sleeping life may therefore also be studied from this point of view. When we are asleep our warmth organism is permeated by the cosmic spirituality which on waking we drive out through our Ego, for in waking life it is the Ego that brings about in the warmth organism what is otherwise brought about by the cosmic spirituality. It is the same with the cosmic astrality; we drive it out when we wake up and readmit it into our organism when we fall asleep. Thus we can say: By leaving our body during sleep, we allow the cosmic spirit to draw into our warmth organism, and the world-soul, or the cosmic astrality, into our airy organism.

If we study the human being without preconceived ideas, we acquire understanding not only of our relation to the surrounding physical world, but also of our relation to the cosmic spirituality and to the cosmic astrality.

This is one aspect of the subject. We can now consider it also from the aspect of knowledge, of cognition, and you will see how the two aspects tally with each other. It is customary to call 'knowledge' only what one experiences through perception and the intellectual elaboration of perceptions from the moment of waking to that of falling asleep. But thereby we come to know our physical environment only. If we adhere to the principles of spiritual-scientific thinking and do not indulge in fantasy, we shall not, of course, regard the pictures of dream-life as immediate realities in themselves, neither shall we seek in dreams for knowledge as we seek it in waking mental activity and perception. Nevertheless at a certain lower level, dreaming is a form of knowledge. It is a particular form of physical self-knowledge. Roughly, it can be obvious that a man has been 'dreaming' inner conditions when, let us say, he wakes up with the dream of having endured the heat of an intensely hot stove and then, on waking, finds that he is feverish or is suffering from some kind of inflammatory condition. In other ways too, dreams assume definite configuration. Another person may dream of coiling snakes when something is out of order in the intestines; or she may dream of caves into which she is obliged to creep, and then wakes up with a headache, and so on. Obscurely and dimly, dreams point to our inner organic life, and we can certainly speak of a kind of lower knowledge as being present in dreams. There is merely an enhancement of this when the dreams of particularly sensitive people present very exact reflections of the organism.

It is generally believed that deep, dreamless sleep contributes nothing at all in the way of knowledge, that dreamless sleep is quite worthless as far as knowledge is concerned. But this is not the case. Dreamless sleep has its definite task to perform for knowledge—knowledge that has an individualpersonal bearing. If we did not sleep, if our life were not continually interrupted by periods of sleep, we would be incapable of reaching a clear concept of the ‘I’, the Ego; we could have no clear realization of our identity. We would experience nothing except the world outside and lose ourselves entirely in it. Insufficient attention is paid to this, because people are not in the habit of thinking in a really unprejudiced way about what is experienced in the life of soul and in the bodily life.

We look back over our life, at the series of images of our experiences to the point to which memory extends. But this whole stream of remembrances is interrupted every night by sleep. In the backward survey of our life the intervals of sleep are ignored. It does not occur to us that the stream of memories is ever and again interrupted by periods of sleep. The fact that it is so interrupted means that, without being conscious of it, we look into a void, a nothingness, as well as into a sphere that is filled with content.

If here we have a white sphere with a black area in the middle, we see the white and in the middle the black, which, compared with the white, is a void, a nothingness. (This is not absolutely accurate but we need not think of that at the moment.) We see the black area, we see that in the white sphere something has been left free, but this is equally a positive impression although not identical with the impressions of the white sphere. The black area also gives a positive impression. In the same way the experience is a positive one when we are looking back over our life and nothing flows into this retrospective survey from the periods of sleep. What we slept through is actually included in the retrospective survey, although we are not directly conscious of it because consciousness is focused entirely on the pictures left by waking life. But this consciousness is inwardly strengthened through the fact that in the field of retrospective vision there are also empty places; this constitutes the source of our consciousness insofar as it is inward consciousness. We would lose ourselves entirely in the external world if we were always awake, if this waking state were not continually interrupted by sleep. But whereas dream-filled sleep mirrors back to us in chaotic pictures certain fragments of our inner, organic conditions, dreamless sleep imparts to us the consciousness of our organization as human—again, therefore, knowledge. Through waking consciousness we perceive the external world. Through dreams we perceive—but dimly and without firm definition—fragments of our inner, organic conditions. Through dreamless sleep we come to know our organization in its totality, although dimly and obscurely. Thus we have already considered three stages of knowledge: dreamless sleep, dream-filled sleep, the waking state.

Then we come to the three higher forms of knowledge: Imagination, Inspiration, Intuition. These are the stages which lie above ordinary waking consciousness and as states of consciousness become ever clearer, yielding more and more data of knowledge; whereas below the ordinary consciousness we come to those chaotic fragments of knowledge which are nevertheless necessary for ordinary forms of experience.

This is how we must think of the field of consciousness. We should not speak of having only the ordinary waking consciousness any more than we should speak of having only the familiar solid organism. We must speak to the effect that the solid organism is something that exists within a clearly demarcated space, so that if we think in an entirely materialistic way, we shall take this to be the human organism itself. We must remember that ordinary consciousness is actually present, that its ideas and mental pictures come to us in definite outlines. But we should neither think that we have the solid body only, nor that we have this day-consciousness only. For the solid body is permeated by the fluid body which has an inwardly fluctuating organization, and again the clear day-consciousness is permeated by the dream-consciousness, yielding pictures which have no sharp outlines but fluctuating outlines, for consciousness here itself becomes 'fluid' in a certain sense. And as well as the fluid organism we have the air organism, which during the sleeping state is sustained by something that is not ourselves, and hence is not entirely, but only partially and transiently, connected with our own life of soul—namely in waking life only; nevertheless we have it within us as an actual organism.

We have also a third state of consciousness, the dark consciousness of dreamless sleep, in which ideas and thought-pictures become not only hazy but dulled to the degree of inner darkness; in dreamless sleep we cease altogether to experience consciousness itself, just as under certain circumstances, while we are asleep, we cease to experience the airy body.

So you see, no matter whether we study the human being from the inner or the outer aspect, we reach an ever fuller and wider conception of its nature, and constitution. Passing from the solid body to the fluid body to the air body to the warmth body, we come to the life of soul. Passing from the clear day-consciousness to the dream-consciousness, we come to the body. And we come to the body in a still deeper sense through the knowledge of being within it through dreamless sleep. When we carry the waking consciousness right down into the consciousness of dreamless sleep and observe the human being in the members of its consciousness, we come to the bodily constitution. When we consider the bodily constitution itself, from its solid state up to its warmth-state, we pass out of the bodily constitution.

This shows you how necessary it is not simply to accept what is presented to biased, external observation. There, on the one side, is the solid body, to which materialistic-mechanistic thought is anchored; and on the other side there is the life of soul which to modern consciousness appears endowed with content only in the form of experiences belonging to the clear day-consciousness. Thought based on external observation alone does not go downwards from this state of consciousness. (See diagram I: Ego), for if it did it would come to the body. It does not go downwards from the spiritual body (warmth-body), for if it did it would be led to the solid body. This kind of thinking studies the solid body without either the fluid body, the air body or the warmth body, and the day-consciousness without that which in reality reflects the inner bodily nature—without the dream-consciousness and the consciousness of dreamless sleep.

On the basis of academic psychology, the question is asked: How does the soul and spirit live in the physical body?—In reality we have the solid body, the fluid body, the air body and the warmth body. (Diagram V.) By way of the warmth body the Ego unfolds the clear day-consciousness. But coming downwards we have the dream-consciousness, and still farther downwards the consciousness of dreamless sleep. Descending even farther (diagram V, horizontal shading), we come—as you know from the book Occult Science—to still another state of consciousness which we need not consider now. If we ask how what is here on the right (diagram V) is related to what is on the left, we shall find that they harmonize, for here (arrow at left side), ascending from below upwards, we come to the soul-realm; and here (arrow at right side) we come to the bodily constitution: the right and the left harmonize.

The externalized thinking of today takes account only of the solid body, and again only of this state of consciousness (Ego). The Ego hovers in the clouds and the solid body stands on the ground—and no relation is found between the two. If you read the literature of modern psychology you will find the most incredible hypotheses of how the soul works upon the body. But this is all due to the fact that only one part of the warmth body is taken into account, and then something that is entirely separated from it—one part of the soul. (Diagram VI, oblique shading.)

That Spiritual Science aims everywhere for wholeness of view, that it must build the bridge between the bodily constitution on the one side and the life of soul on the other, that it draws attention to states of being where the soul element becomes a bodily element, the bodily element a soul element—all this riles our contemporaries, who insist upon not going beyond what presents itself to external, prejudiced contemplation.

It could be called frivolous if we first tried to refute Theosophy and then tried to justify it, since the lecturer apparently does not believe in the refutation itself.

But I believe in it in all seriousness! It is not a matter of refuting refutations for me, but rather I would like to use it to point out important things about great riddles of knowledge. In a certain sense, I believe in the correctness and weight of the objections raised. To illustrate what I mean, I would like to tell you a little story.

In a village, the young son of a family was chosen to get the daily rolls needed for the family from the baker. He was always given [ten] kreutzers for the trip. This young son was not very good at math and therefore didn't care much about how many rolls he got for the six kreutzers. Now, however, a foster son came to live with the family for a while, and he was good at math. This foster son now started calculating how many rolls he could get for six. Since a roll cost two kreutzers in that town, he should have gotten five rolls. But the boy had brought six rolls. The foster son was surprised and said: “That's not right, two times five is ten. So he only gets five rolls.” But the next day there were six rolls again, despite the foster son's correct calculation. How did this fit together? It was customary in that place to give a roll for every ten kreutzers. There the puzzle was solved. So it was true, even though the calculation was correct. The result of the calculation had nothing to do with the correctness of the matter. Both were correct in themselves, although they did not agree with each other. Just as I myself believed in the correctness of the calculation as the little boy I was, so I also believe today in the correctness of the objections to Theosophy that I put forward. Objections and refutations have a certain quality, namely that they can be correct without the matter itself necessarily being wrong. Perhaps I will be reproached for one thing, namely, that I present some things in a lively way and speak with the same pathos for and against.

But if the things themselves are right, then they can also be presented with the same vivacity. It is generally easier and more convenient to criticize than to justify. I would like to illustrate this with an example.

The editor-in-chief of a major newspaper had the intention of publishing an interesting weekly supplement. However, there were only a few suitable editors for such a paper who could write in a witty and interesting enough way to really captivate the audience he was aiming for. But since he was a clever man, he knew how to help himself. A number of talented young gentlemen were employed to do nothing all week but sit in coffee houses and read newspapers, and then they simply had to refute every article that interested them. With what was collected, the man filled his weekly paper, and it was read with pleasure and sold well, because a witty critique is something that appeals to people. Something of a critic tingles in every soul. In this occupation, the young gentlemen have all become brilliant polemicists and some of them now hold respected positions.

This is to show that it is not at all difficult to refute something, to criticize it, if you don't want anything more.

Our task today is more difficult, because we want to show how to establish the theosophy.

Let us first address the objection that it is amateurish to assume that an etheric body should be added to the physical body. I would remind you of what has been said about the life force theory, which has long been scientifically overcome. When it became possible to assemble material structures in the laboratory, the way was clear for the displacement of the life force. And it may be said that a time will come when it will also be possible to chemically produce higher and highest organic structures in laboratories. Therefore, it can only be described as ignorance when, in the face of such scientific progress, Theosophy still talks about a completely superfluous ether or life body.

However, one point should be emphasized. Many people consider the great Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to be an especially enlightened mind. Furthermore, one would certainly subscribe to the following sentence today: No one can be considered enlightened who is not opposed to belief in ghosts. But now Lessing says the following:

We no longer believe in ghosts? Who says that? Or rather, what does that mean?

[...] In this matter, on which almost as much can be said for as against it, which is not decided and cannot be decided, the currently prevailing way of thinking has given the reasons against it the upper hand; a few have this way of thinking, and many want to ; they make the noise and set the tone; the greatest multitude remains silent and indifferent, thinking one way or another, hearing in broad daylight with pleasure about the ghosts mocking and telling with horror at dark night.

There is no evidence against it, only our thought patterns have changed. The same applies to the life force theory. Our thought patterns about it have changed. However, this does not provide any proof against it.

And the same applies to the scientific objection: we do not need an etheric body. That is also just a change in thinking, which can change again into the opposite, as we can see often enough. In the past, people even believed that they could artificially create a whole, small human being, the so-called homunculus. Nevertheless, the above objection would apply even more, since we see that it is precisely the homunculus-believing human race that completely believes in a supernatural world. In a room with a lot of dirt, there are usually a lot of flies. In the past, this was explained by assuming that the flies came from the dirt. Now we know that dirt only creates the conditions; it makes it easy for flies to enter.

In the same way, owing to different habits of thought, it was formerly easy for the supersensible to enter into the sphere of human activity.

By chance I bought a Freidenkerkalender (Freethinker's Calendar) the other day, in which I found an essay by a freethinking person. This man is not opposed to Theosophy, of which he hopefully knows nothing, but he is against teaching children from an early age to believe in a supernatural world. Before falling asleep, one prays with them that a divine spirit will protect them, and so on. This is nonsense, against which the man seems to be very much opposed. He rails against it and says that today we should not want to force things on children that children do not have of their own accord. — It can only be recommended that we draw the obvious conclusion from this. Children do not come up with language on their own either. Therefore, the man should actually be opposed to teaching children language. But why has the man not drawn such conclusions? The reason is that this man is simply extremely opposed to everything supernatural. He wants to prove everywhere the falsity of the supersensible and therefore does not pay attention to logical arguments. To condemn everything supersensible has become a habit of thinking that he cannot get out of, even if he wanted to - but he does not want to. This is often the case in life. In the end, it is not logical arguments that decide the matter, but habits of thinking.

This raises the question: Is there a way to develop such thinking habits that can be developed into justified habits? Real science posits the principle that only those things should be put forward by the scientist that can be verified by anyone at any time. According to modern science, this is precisely what Theosophy cannot do. For Theosophy refers to sources that the soul develops through itself through the means of meditation. Intimate inner processes transform the soul, and then spiritual eyes and spiritual ears awaken in it. One no longer judges with the ordinary sensory instruments that are accessible to everyone. But strict science must exclude precisely what has only subjective validity.

This is an objection that can only be decided through experience. It must therefore be determined, firstly, whether it is true that science only decides objectively. Secondly, is it true that spiritual science decides subjectively?

Now, the first requirement does not apply to scientific research everywhere. In mathematics, for example, not everyone can verify the matter at any time. Everyone knows that the Pythagorean theorem is correct. But not everyone needs to be able to verify it. However, those who cannot verify it because they do not understand enough mathematics do not prove anything against it.

Mathematics, however, only brings truths that relate to relationships. But whether the results of mathematical science also relate to and prove true in the objective world [...] depends on other things.

Mathematical structures do not occur in nature. There is no such thing as a triangle in itself, nor a mathematically correct circle, and so on. This can never be represented externally, but it can be calculated and imagined internally.

Does this not agree with clairvoyant experience? [Only the lowest levels of the soul experience appear subjective. Those who go further always come to the same experiences. Mathematics is regarded as a living factor in the supersensible worlds, as Plato and others felt.

It can be said that the human organism is “I-ized” in the same way that one can say that God “geometrizes”.

I would like to give you an example of the effectiveness of the supersensible in the physical body. If we observe a person who strives for knowledge - not just a scientist, but a searching, wrestling, internalized soul - when we see such a person again after not having seen him for ten years, we notice a change in his features. We see, then, how the relatively small amount of supersensible work is externally imprinted on his body. Such a change can even indicate a certain kind of inner struggle to the psychologist. But there is a limit to the elasticity of the body. When there is no more room for the outer transformation of the features, then the solutions to the riddles with which one has been struggling come to the person. This can be clearly stated. Inner experience first expresses itself in the outer sensory world of the human being, only then can it enter into consciousness.

How does this compare to the experiences of a student of spiritual science?

The clairvoyant training must create conscious sleep states. By making consciousness possible even during sleep, it can bring powers into consciousness that would otherwise be too weak to do so. So only will-ideas that are not stimulated by anything external. Such training can take a long time. But when it becomes effective, a certain experience can be determined. For the student, inner experiences come, at first like a dream that cannot be grasped. One then feels a resistance from one's own brain. This gradually gives way. Then comes the time when one can transform what one has sensed into concepts. At first it is like a child, one does not really know about it, then it gradually increases to a conscious experience. The clairvoyant then experiences things that present themselves through themselves inwardly as immediate certainty, as inwardly objective. And all clairvoyants experience the same thing in this.

So what is spiritual science based on? Not on something that can be verified by everyone, but on the fact that there is a possibility to grow into the spiritual being itself and thereby draw truth directly from our inner being. Once you have realized that there is a supernatural, then the objections to it are quite different. They are objectively correct objections that cannot be refuted.

Take, for example, the objection that the theosophical explanation for the sleeping state is not needed at all because the self-regulator theory explains the processes much more simply. But there are other self-regulators besides sleep. The clock, for example, is an excellent self-regulator, but – as no one will deny – it can only come about through the activity of thought, through the mind of the watchmaker. Why should the same not also apply to humans? We see, then, that the objection itself is correct, but that it is not at all applicable, since nothing can be decided by it.

But there are still the ethical and moral objections to Theosophy. What about them? The objection to the doctrine of karma, that it can lead to selfishness because good deeds are followed by reward and bad deeds by punishment, is in a way true. It can lead to someone not doing good for the sake of good, but for the sake of reward. Now Schopenhauer once said: “Preaching morality is easy, justifying morality is difficult.” With a mere moral sermon that man should do good, you won't achieve much in general. It's a bit like if someone were to say to the stove: “Dear stove, it is your destiny, your moral duty, to heat the room; so please, be so good and act accordingly.” If nothing else happens, it will probably remain cold inside the stove. But if you take wood and light a fire in the stove, you will achieve the purpose of the stove more quickly and effectively.

Of course, preaching helps people a little more than a stove, but usually not much more. Justifying morals – igniting the inner fire in people – is more important. So let the law of karma first quietly work on people's selfishness and thus ignite them for good. The main thing is that the purpose is achieved. One could also say of a couple that they only educate their children well out of selfishness. Should they therefore rather not do so? The main thing is that the children become well-behaved people as a result of the good education. Even if the parents have only thought of themselves and the personal comforts that well-behaved children can bring them, love for the educational work will come naturally. Thus, goodness can initially arise from selfish motives, and then, through the habit of doing good, selflessness will arise naturally from selfishness.

Now, let us take the case of someone who says, “We will come back anyway, so why bother now? I want to enjoy my life now, I still have time in later life to become a decent person.” If we believe in the law of karma, we must realize that such an attitude will have its consequences for the next life. The consequence will be that his present behavior, even his intention to become decent, will make it difficult for him.

Then we have other objections. It is said that the clairvoyant borrows his ideas only from the physical world, just as in hallucinations. These are only reminiscences of ordinary sensual things, but clothed in fantastically confused form, just as, for example, primitive religions derive their idea of God from man, and so on.

Now, however, a spiritual connection between three people can be proven by clairvoyance, one of whom is dead. There are many such well-attested experiences. I will tell you, as I always do, only one real event that happened exactly as it happened and can be verified.

A couple lived with their son, but the son became ill and died after one day. That was a heavy blow for the parents. They were therefore very busy with the son. After months, both parents dreamt the same dream. The son appeared to them and told them that he had been buried alive. They told each other about the dream the next morning, and it turned out that they had both experienced the same thing in their dream, that they had both had the same dream. They now wanted to be sure and have it dug up. Unfortunately, the authorities prevented the digging, but the fact remains that both had the same dream. Now a dream is not yet reality, but in such cases dreams are the realization of what shines into consciousness from the supersensible worlds.

How this is to be understood can be seen from the well-known dream of the farmer's wife who, in her dream, seems to hear an edifying sermon by the pastor and, upon awakening, hears the cock crow that has awakened her and thereby, in the returning consciousness of a sermon, has aroused the image of a sermon, since she had thought of the pastor's edifying words before falling asleep. Dream images are determined by our attitudes and experiences. From this it is clear that even clairvoyant descriptions, despite being given in everyday images, can contain correct, supersensible experiences. Otherwise one could also say: I see nothing in a book but black letters and printer's ink. What you read from it, I cannot find in it at all.

This may be true for someone who cannot read within, but in terms of content, it is out of the question for someone who has learned to read.

We now come to the religious objections: from the self-deification of man through theosophy. The fact that one transfers God into one's own inner being, while true religiosity requires devotion to an external God, leads to self-exaltation, in that it tempts man to say: I am a god myself.

This is again a not entirely unjustified objection. But we can also say what, based on a living feeling, expresses the theosophical truth. You have a divine spark within you, undeveloped, in a germinal state. You must develop this more and more. It is therefore a breach of duty against the God in you if you do not constantly strive for perfection.

It is not enough for the theosophist to passively surrender to God – as some pious Christians do – but he must demand active devotion, as the Pauline saying goes: “Not I, but the Christ in me”.

So then, deification looks somewhat different, because it constantly leads to impulses for perfection, transforming man's self-righteousness into an eternal imperative of duty.

Here again you see: the objection need not be refuted, nevertheless what Theosophy has to say stands on solid ground. For it is true: the seeking soul does not have to deny itself when it longs for immortality, but finds outside what lives within itself.

In this time where so many people have the comprehensible need to orientate themselves about the earth-shaking events you often hear, history “teaches” this or that. One means that one could judge about any fact of the present because of similar facts of history. If we ask ourselves, which possibilities present themselves to the human beings to judge this or that on basis of historical experience, then, however, you get to a somewhat dubious judgement about what history “teaches.”

I would like to point only to two things, but I could increase them a hundred times. I would like to point to the fact that at the beginning of this world disaster many people were of the opinion that these critical events would last four, in the extreme case six months. One regarded such a judgement as completely entitled. You cannot say that these human beings had not applied all logical precautions to deliver such a judgement. Now, the facts themselves have taught such people rather thoroughly the opposite of that what they have believed. Just at this example, one also sees how narrowly that which history should teach is associated with the judgement of the social or other world relations, so that you can expect from a consideration of the historical life of humanity that also some light falls on the judgement you have to exert for the social and economic living together of the human beings.

However, I would like to bring in another example of the limited validity of the sentence, that history “teaches” this or that. An ingenious personality received a professorship of history at a German university more than hundred years ago. Really, from a brilliant conception of that which history gives and which one can apply to the human life, this man spoke the following words approximately: the single nations of Europe have become in the course of the human progress, as history teaches, a big family whose single members are still feuding, but can never tear each other apart. - Really, a significant personality believed to be able to judge in such a way out of his insight into the course of history at his inaugural lecture. This man was Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). He spoke these words in the eve of the French Revolution which contributed so much to that what one can call the tearing of the European nations, and particularly if he could see what happens in our present. It seems to me that from such facts Goethe got the sensation, which he pronounced in a wonderful sentence: “The best that we have from history is the enthusiasm which it excites.” It seems, as if he did this quotation just to reject the other fruits of the so-called historical knowledge and to appreciate that only which can arise as enthusiasm, as a certain positive mood from the historical documents.

Today we want to examine which position spiritual science has to take towards two opinions: history can be the great master of life, and the other: the best what one can have from history is the enthusiasm that it excites. At first it will be interesting just in case of the consideration of the historical life of humanity and the consequences which can be drawn from this consideration for the judgement of the social life to which view one has come in the present about the historical evolution beyond spiritual science. Since the historical life of humanity is attached to that what goes through every single person because every human being is cocooned in the historical evolution. And really, just in the present it is important to look at this judgement of the contemporaries because the judicious viewers of history think that also the judgement is in a crisis how one should found history. I would like to talk not in abstractions, but to attach my considerations to realities. There one must comply with examples that of course are single examples out of many.

I would like to comply, for example, with the judgement about history, how it should be anew founded in the present, which the famous Professor Karl Lamprecht (1846-1915) has done. You can find that which one can feel from his monumental German History (1891-1909), in a comfortable way summarised in his lectures What is History? Five lectures on the Modern Science of History (1905) which Lamprecht held partly in St. Louis, partly in New York at invitation of the Columbia University. There he tries to summarise what has arisen to him about the kind how history should be taught out of the requirements of the present. It is even more comfortable to get an idea of that what this famous historian wanted to say, actually, by the fact that he treated a segment of the historical evolution of humanity exceptionally clear in the second of these lectures. Lamprecht briefly told the whole development of the German people from the first Christian centuries up to now to the Americans. He told that in such a way as he meant that science of history has to become according to the requirements of the present. Now you can judge such things, actually, only properly if you can compare them anyhow. There just a lecture by Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) offers itself which he held on the development of the North American life, so that you can compare two spirits who are emotionally and spatially far from each other how they look as historians at the history of their peoples in each case.

Forgive if I let—not by courtesy but for stylistic reasons—the considerations of Woodrow Wilson precede. None who knows me more exactly states that I overestimate Wilson. I am also allowed to point to the fact that I already made my judgement about Wilson in a series of talks, which I held in Helsinki before the war, indeed, at a time when Wilson was already president of the United States (1913). At that time I already said that it is very unfortunate that at a position from which so much depends for humanity a personality is who is so frightfully narrow-minded in his judgement. Since although in those days still numerous people worshipped Wilson enthusiastically, for example, because of his books The New Freedom (1913) and Mere Literature and Other Essays (1896), one could prove that his independent judgement flowing from his personality is very much limited internally. Without being swayed by the present political events, I stress what I said before the war about the so misjudged, that is overestimated personality. I have to say this in advance, so that one does not doubt the objectivity of that which I still want to say about Wilson as a historian.

It is very strange if one compares how Wilson considers the history of his people with that what Lamprecht says about the history of Central Europe. One detects that he finds out the most succinct point almost instinctively to answer the question: when have we become, actually, Americans, and how have we become Americans? How has this happened in history? There he makes an exceptionally appropriate distinction between all those who were sooner in the union whom he considers, however, as “Not yet Americans” but as “New Englanders” who are because of their whole disposition, their mood “New Englanders,” and the later “real Americans.” There he distinguishes to a hair's breadth a prehistory of the union and lets the union start its historical becoming when the population crowded together on a narrow space in the east expands to the west of America when the people develop that disposition which he calls the disposition of the frontiersmen. Now he shows how America's history consists externally and mentally of the fact that the east expands to the west, and he shows rather obviously how the regulation of the land distribution, of the tariff question, even the regulation of the slave issue which he ascribes not to some principles of humaneness but to the necessities which arose from the settlement and the conquest of the west. All these questions are put in the development of modern America. The essentials of this talk consist in the fact that he shows how the historical becoming has grasped a sum of human beings from an outer situation, and that that which goes forward with these human beings can be understood strictly speaking from that what they had to undertake under the influence of the described conditions.

Various things are interesting if one pursues just these considerations of Wilson, and that what Wilson has performed, otherwise, as a historian. Just to get some thoughts on various things that are associated with the topic of the today's talk, a comparison of that what Wilson says about the most different historical objects with that which the Europeans say is very useful.

It has exceptionally astonished me at the most different places of Wilson's explanations that there is a strange correspondence—to me already strange because I would have preferred it would not be this way—of the contents of sentences, of the contents of thoughts what Wilson explains about the most different objects, and of that what, for example, the spirited Herman Grimm, often mentioned by me, said about various things of the historical course of humanity.

If one considers Herman Grimm as brilliant as I do and Wilson as prudent, as I must do, it may be quite unpleasant to someone if he reads Wilson sometimes and says to himself: it is peculiar, there I read a sentence that I could also read with Grimm. Although this is in such a way, although I have tested it with judgements that Wilson and Grimm made about the same personalities, like Macaulay, Gibbon and others, nevertheless, in spite of the often almost literal accordance, without having any relation to each other, it is obvious that in reality the attitudes of both men are completely different. Just on such occasion it becomes obvious that two persons can say the same but they do this from quite different mental undergrounds. In this case, it is particularly interesting because the colouring that the judgement receives in the one and the other case is associated with the roots of the one or the other personality in his respective national character. Just while one notices such resemblances, one discovers that the one is American and the other is German.

It can strike you quite externally, which difference exists there. There is a volume of essays by Grimm that contains as frontispiece a picture of Grimm as this happens today so often. The German issue of Wilson's essays Mere Literature also contains a picture of Wilson. One can compare the portraits. Already this proves something quite strange to someone who knows to judge such a thing. If you look at Grimm's portrait, after you were engrossed in what he says as a historian, then you can realise that every feature of his face expresses that every sentence and every turn is connected intimately with everything that this man has wrested from his soul. Then you look at the portrait of Wilson, after you have also read his book first: it seems as if this man could not have been present at all with that what was judged there in the book; a certain foreignness appears. If you realise this, a riddle of the way dawns how in this case two persons consider history, and you can ask yourself in what way is this resemblance and the strongly felt basic difference caused? Then there appears something very strange. Just that what Wilson says about the American people makes sense immediately, so that you know, this is true of the historical development of this people as he wants to show it. However, you get on gradually—only the psychological observation can prove that—: Wilson has not grown together so intimately with his judgement as we imagine this within Central Europe. Another relation between judgement and human being exists there than we are used.

I know that I say something paradox, but it is intimately connected with that what I would like to explain about the historical development of humanity. If it did not sound so superstitious, I would say, you find out for yourself that somebody like Wilson himself does not judge if he makes such suitable judgements as in this interpretation of history and at other places, but he is possessed by something in his soul. I would like to express myself somewhat different:

With such a personality like Wilson, you have the impression that in the soul something is that suggests this judgement from the inside of the soul. You do not have the impression that the own individuality has completely developed it; you rather have the feeling that something like a second personality, a second being is in the soul, which has suggested it.

If one looks at Wilson's appropriate judgements about the character of the American people where he says:

• that already the outer appearance and behaviour shows the right American because he has the quickly movable eye

• that he is inclined to take up courageous, but also adventurous lines of thought quickly

• that he is little inclined, on the other hand, to be attached to his native country as other people are

• that he likes a lot to make plans which can be carried out everywhere,

if you envisage this characterisation of the Americans by Wilson, then they have something in themselves that oppresses them externally: not the sensibly looking, quiet eye—I could also adduce the other characteristics—, but the quickly movable eye is a sign of the fact that something oppresses the American from the inside, and such suggestions continue to have an effect if the judgement of Wilson is accurate.

We compare what I had to say with an interpretation of history, which is spatially and mentally somewhat far away, with that what Lamprecht puts as his ideas about the historical development of Central Europe. These are original ideas. He tries to realise how this being of the Central European people has developed in the course of centuries, since the third century up to now. One notices that he has internally worked for everything that he says. One has not to agree with many things, in particular as a spiritual scientist; we will immediately have to speak of it. However, he gained everything from his immediate personality. It would be complete nonsense to say, any inner force would suggest something. He does not have it so easy. He has to grasp a thought bit by bit, has to overcome thoughts to get to a judgement. Only then, he gets to a conception of the historical development that is relatively new, even in the view of Ranke (Leopold von R., 1795-1886, German historian) and Sybel (Heinrich von S., 1817-1895, German historian), new insofar that Lamprecht understands historical development as the development of the whole soul. Lamprecht tries to pursue the mental dispositions of the people as mental expressions as the psychologist pursues the soul development of every single person.

Up to the third century, the German people developed according to Lamprecht in such a way that one can say, this development shows a symbolising tendency. Also the outer actions, also the political development run in such a way that one realises that it comes from the desire to interpret the world phenomena as symbols, to realise symbols everywhere, even to make the heroes symbols and to revere them as living personal symbols. Then comes the period from the third century to the eleventh, twelfth centuries. Lamprecht calls it the categorising one. There is no longer the desire to use symbols, but to establish types. One revers those persons whom one reveres whom one obeys in such a way that they work not like single individualities, but as types of a whole clan, a whole city.

Then the time comes from the twelfth to about the thirteenth centuries in which knighthood develops particularly; Lamprecht calls it the conventional time in which one judges and feels his will impulses in such a way as the convention demands it from human being to human being, from state to state, from people to people, the time of conventionalism. Then follows—it is important that Lamprecht notices this, although he does not figure the consequences out—the individualistic age with the turn of the fifteenth century where people really feel as individuals within a community. This lasts about up to the middle of the eighteenth century. There begins the age of subjectivism in which we still live where the human being tries to internalise himself, to work out of the depths of his personality, to work, to think and to want out of the depths of the subject. Lamprecht divides this age into two parts: the first lasts until the seventies of the nineteenth century to which the great classical period of Goethe, Schiller, and Herder belongs, and then since the seventies our time follows.

It is strange now, that Lamprecht, as the maybe most significant historian of the present, is completely clear in his mind that he has to look for an impulse first to see how the course of history goes on, and he investigated incessantly how one should start lining up that which the documents, the monuments, and the archives give in such a way how to tell and describe them so that on can call it history. So the most important question of history, the question of existence, became topical to Lamprecht.

He said to himself, one can get only to history—for he did not regard the historiography of Ranke, Sybel and others as history—if one tries to describe the mental development of a nation or of the whole humanity. Then one must have the possibility to observe this mental development to find some laws in this mental development. There it is interesting that a strange contradiction faces us in his whole approach after the habitual ways of thinking of the present. After the habitual ways of thinking, Lamprecht said to himself, the former merely individualistic approach cannot remain. How can one put the facts in order generally? There he says to himself, you have to look at the soul development in such a way that you describe it social-psychologically. This arises to him from a necessary way of thinking of modern time to take the social life, the common being together of human beings into consideration. He says this to himself on one side. Now he has no possibility to look at the social in the soul life or at the mental in the social life following a set pattern. He turns to the psychologists, asks how the psychologists look today at the single individual souls. Here they see in the individual soul the thoughts associating, the feelings ascending, the will impulses developing. Then he wants to apply this to the historical events, wants to investigate how the thought of the one human being works on the whole clan how the thoughts associate externally, as, otherwise, in the individual psychology a thought associates with the other. Thus, he wants to consider history social-psychologically according to the model of individual psychology.

There arises, as I have already indicated, a very noteworthy contradiction. He wants to get away from the individual interpretation of history and to get to the social-psychological one; but he takes the means from the consideration of the individual psychology. A strange contradiction that he does not notice at all.

Something else: if one is engrossed with that which this modern historian performs describing so clearly:

• how a cultural age changes into the other,

• how the feelings of the human beings become explosive at such transitions,

• how there the thoughts associate with each other and separate,

• how they follow in rapid succession,

• how new feelings form,

• how the will impulses work,

one has the feeling that the man misses the trees for the forest. I do not take stock in the saying that one misses the forest for the trees. I would like to know how somebody wanted to do that while he is in the forest and wanted to see the forest! One has to go far away to see the forest. One has the strange feeling that Lamprecht cannot exactly work out the differences of the single periods. Briefly, one gets to the result that he is a researcher who has gained a view of the historical development for himself who, however, could not find the means to present the question to himself: what is now, actually, this historical development of humanity? Is that already history what one attains from the documents, from the archives, or do we still search anything quite different?

Here you have to start if you want to consider the historical life and its riddles spiritual-scientifically. You have to put the question to yourself: is the object of history already found in the usual consciousness? Does one know already what one wants to judge if one approaches history? To answer these questions, however, I have to adduce something from spiritual science that is attached to things, which I have said here in former talks.

The human soul life is within the change of being awake and sleeping. However, the alternating states of sleeping and being awake are normally considered one-sidedly, while one says, the human being spends two thirds or also more of his life awake and a third sleeping. However, the things are not so simple. It is only obvious that the sleeping state continues into the awake life that we are only partly awake in a certain sense from awakening to falling asleep. We are in reality consciously awake only with the percepts of the outside world and the mental pictures that we form from these percepts. Compare only how the feelings are experienced. Someone who gradually learns to observe how feelings arise in the human soul,—I will come back to this issue in the next talk on the Revelations of the Unconscious and say something fundamental now only—, learns to compare the emotional life, the affects and passions with the dreams.

The dreams put pictures before us that are not penetrated with logic and moral impulses that we have only in the awake life. The visions differ indeed from the feelings from the passions and affects surging up and down, but there is something in which both are similar concerning the soul: it is the degree of consciousness in which we are given away to the visions. We have the same degree of consciousness if we are given away to our feelings, save that we accompany our feelings with mental pictures at the same time. If we get an idea about a vision, the light of the mental picture falls on the dream; then the dream becomes completely conscious, then we integrate it properly into the human life. We are doing this perpetually with our emotional life. We integrate our feelings into life by the mental pictures running parallel, but one experiences these feelings are with similar intensity as the dreams, so that the dreams continue in our wake day consciousness and become our world of feelings. You can easily realise that, however, also the deep, dreamless sleep continues in our awake life, namely as our will impulses. We know in the usual awake consciousness about these will impulses only if they are accompanied by mental pictures. We probably imagine what we should do, but it remains unaware to our usual day consciousness how the mental picture changes into the will impulse and then into the action, as we remain unaware in the deepest sleep. Only because we can imagine our will impulses, we accompany these sleeping impulses with the awake life.

Thus, the sleeping life continues perpetually in our awake day life. Even if our feelings, our affects, our passions are only dreamt by us, nevertheless, our emotional life is connected with something objective spiritual-mental as with our own spiritual-mental, with our mental pictures and percepts. However, the connections of the contents of feelings and will impulses with the objective spiritual are in the subconscious. We oversleep this connection with the spiritual-mental, and only that towers above the sea in which we are embedded this way, which we experience by our mental pictures and percepts. If you learn to behold in the spiritual world, you know: indeed, with the usual consciousness you cannot perceive the world in which our feelings submerge just with that part of our soul, which remains unaware to our usual consciousness, but you can it perceive with the beholding one. Since the soul can develop pictures from the contact with this spiritual world by the strengthened will or by the mental capacity strengthened by the will impulses.

The Imaginative cognition forms in it. It is the first level of supersensible beholding by which you get to the real spiritual world. This Imaginative cognition is the completely conscious beholding in a spiritual reality, so that the Imaginations are no imaginations, but reproductions of spiritual reality, although the soul does not experience them denser than the visions, save that you know that the visions have no reality value that, however, the Imagination points to an objective spiritual reality beyond us. You learn to recognise that with which the world of human feelings is connected, which is only dreamt for the usual consciousness; you learn to recognise it in its reality with the Imaginative beholding of the world. In the same way, you learn also to recognise that on the second level of higher consciousness, with the Inspirative consciousness in which the will impulses are embedded. You get to know the spiritual world as far as the will impulses that usually remain subconscious are also embedded in an objective spiritual reality.

If you have figured these things out and if you ask yourself for the real object of the historical course, then you realise what, actually, the historical development is. You do not experience this as that development which is experienced in the everyday life, while we get into contact with the object personally. No, this historical development is something else in which something strange is contained as it is contained in that, which the human being experiences as a feeling, as a will impulse. As the human being dreams his feelings, he dreams the real stream of the historical development. This knowledge is the stupefying result of that observation which turns away from the human being to historical development, and it shows that we cannot use these mental pictures, which control the outer conscious life, to grasp history anyhow. Since that which you experience in the everyday consciousness as a single human being is experienced in the awake state. However, in this awake day life history is not included at all. The human beings do not consciously experience history, but they dream it. History is the big dream of the development of humanity, and history never enters into the usual consciousness.

You may have an astute usual consciousness, you may be the most significant naturalist with that reason which can arrange the things according to cause and effect, and you may have that attitude which is especially appropriate to look properly at nature and to show her lawfulness. If you learn to recognise the real stream of historical development, you say to yourself, with any mental capacity that can understand nature, you cannot look into the historical development. This is not experienced in the usual consciousness like nature, but only on that level of consciousness, which you have also in the dream. It will be once for the interpretation of history one of the most significant results if one gets on

• that one has to find the object of the interpretation of history first

• that the stream of historical development is not at all there as nature is there

• that also that which is there as nature, namely the facts which are registered in the archives as documents which one normally already calls history, are not at all history.

History is in reality only behind the facts; these facts emerge only from the historical development and are not the historical development.

Once Herman Grimm said to me, one could consider the historical life only if one pursued the developing imagination of the people. One can say that Herman Grimm was on the brink to doing a discovery, but he did not want to make the transition to spiritual science. Hence, it appeared to him to be the only fertile to look not only at the outer events and to line up them in such a way as the naturalist does it according to the laws of causality but to look at them in such a way that he saw through them really at the developing imagination of humanity. This was an imperfect expression of that which he could have recognised: the fact that the historical development also does not take place in that which imagination experiences, but is still much deeper in the subconsciousness in which the dreams are woven. As well as the depths of the sea surge up in the waves, the single events surge up in the course of history.

If we apply our usual reason to the historical development, we strangely meet the forces of decline only. Herman Grimm asked himself once why the historian Gibbon (Edward G., 1737-1794) portraying the first centuries of Christianity describes the decay of the Roman Empire only, but not the rise of Christianity. Grimm made a right aperçu, however, did not get on the reason. The reason is that Gibbon, although he is profound, applied that reason only to the interpretation of history, which one applies, otherwise, to the consideration of nature. There he could look only at the decline, not at the rise since one can only dream the rise. In the course of history that which is rising, growing, and sprouting is connected vividly with that what is declining, what is dying. That is why one can look with the usual reason only at the dead in the course of history. What does you need if you want to recognise the growing, the prospering element in the historical development, that what furthers the human being?

In ancient times, one looked deeper in this respect, but just in the ancient form. One did not tell history, one told myths and legends. These myths and legends that should describe the historical dreams of humanity were truer than the so-called pragmatic history. However, we cannot go back in the development of humanity to myths and legends, but we can do something else. We can make up our mind to bring up that what rests for the usual consciousness as dreams in the subconscious, while we apply the Imaginative knowledge to the historical development. With the historical development, humanity and science will recognise that it cannot even reach the object of consideration if it does not want to go over to the spiritual-scientific consideration. Below the consciousness, that remains which works in history, if one does not bring up the dream into the consciousness. Then, however, one has to bring up the dream in the supersensible consciousness that can imagine the spiritual. Imaginative cognition only will create history.

Then someone who can get to the heart of spiritual science and gets involved with the struggle of a man like Lamprecht, will realise that there a way is searched to a goal. However, where is this goal? Why does Lamprecht try to adduce everything to find history generally and, nevertheless, gets to nothing but to the usual psychology, although he believes that one has to apply social psychology? However, what the human being experiences as a social being what becomes his history, he dreams this, this also does not penetrate the individual psychology. There one has to apply that new psychology which spiritual science only can give. You find the demand with Lamprecht, you find the answer of the riddle of historical development in spiritual science. What will become, however, from all that for a conception of history? You see that Lamprecht does not get away from the intellectual consideration of the consecutive events. He considers that what happens up to the third, up to the eleventh centuries and so on even if he considers it brilliantly. But he does not get on to judge the events in such a way that he reaches that what the human being only experiences as a dream.

One can easily find proofs of that. I want to bring in one example only where Lamprecht advances to the modern time. Among the rest, he asks, which are the most significant cultural phenomena in these modern times? Consider that Lamprecht held the concerning talk in 1904! There he asks, which are the most significant cultural-historical moments that appear as achievements of humanity today? He wants to bring in the most significant soul phenomena of the beginning twentieth century. What does he bring in? The answer is very interesting, just for a man who attaches so much significance to the soul. First, he brings in the attempts to propagate unselfishness, an altruistic life of humanity, various societies for ethical civilisation that came especially from England and America to Europe in those days, and secondly, he brings in the peace movement as something especially outstanding. An approved historian of the present says this. Is such a conception of history on the right way, even if Lamprecht endeavours so much? About at that time I held a talk here about similar ideas and explained that the least of all typical ideas of the beginning twentieth century are just these both movements: the movements of ethical civilisation and especially the peace movement. At that time, I summarised my talk saying: this is just the typical that that time in which the peace movement appears especially loud will be the same time in which the biggest human wars will take place. However, a famous historian said the one thing, a crazy representative of anthroposophy said the other, and it goes without saying in the present to whom one listens.

The point is to recognise how one has to use the facts which one called history up to now so that it points you to the deeper currents of human development by this coherence between the human soul and that only dreamt spirituality which flows along as historical current. One can do this only if one replaces Lamprecht's and all other conceptions of history with that which I call symptomatic conception of history if one is aware that one has to use everything that one can find out in the archives, in the documents, briefly, with the usual conscious reason that one evaluates and appreciates it, while one relates it to something that is a symptom, an expression of it.

One does not consider the great men of history, their appearances, and actions, for their own sake if one wants to describe the historical development of humanity but only as symptoms. One is aware that one properly describes history if one is able to connect the right symptom with the underlying spiritual current of development. Symptomatic history will look quite different from history, which runs in such a way, that one only strings together the facts and tries to use individual psychology to the explanation and analysis of these facts as Lamprecht does it. Symptomatic history consists of the fact that one becomes aware of this attitude which Goethe had that one can approach, actually, a spiritual being only from all sides, that one can get to know it only by its symptoms if one realises that that at which one has looked as history up to now is only at the surface and positions itself quite strangely in life like dream contents.

Observe the dream contents, and you will realise that you often dream something quite different from what is directly attached to the most significant events of your day life. Nevertheless, it is anyhow associated as memory with your life, but in a much-concealed way, and it is associated with deeper forces of life. There is a reason why just this or that which works in the subconscious emerges symptomatically, while we do not dream anything significant that seems to be significant in the awake life, but maybe just something that appears to us as externally unimportant.

Symptomatic historical research has to consider events that control the situation for the outer reason as unimportant for the true history and apparently unimportant events as far-reaching symptoms. Only thereby, one will penetrate from the outside to the inside of the historical life. One cannot transfer the individual soul life to the historical development in such an external way. Of course, I can do here no enclosing interpretation of history to show how this symptomatic consideration grasps the essential in the development of humanity, but I can at least indicate something. I have said in a former talk, if the spiritual researcher learns to behold in the spiritual world and its development, then he notices that the results, as one expects them, normally do not happen this way. They happen as a rule different from one could expect them after the judgement that one has gained in the sensory world. I want to bring in an example:

One could expect that the historical events run in such a way that one could compare them to the childhood, youth, mature period, and old age of the human being. Indeed, some historians were under this illusion. These analogising considerations can be rather witty but have nothing to do with reality. However, something else appears. The result of which I have to inform you here is attained really with the same seriousness with which another scientific result is attained; I can state it, however, only as a result.

Lamprecht tries to find periods of historical development for the German people at first. I have already indicated: it is owed to a right impression that he determines a transition from an age to another around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It is also very typical that he calls this time the individualistic age. To spiritual-scientific research, an important incision likewise appears around the turn of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, while one spiritual-scientifically beholds in the current of the historical development, it becomes obvious that one has to go back further and has to disregard the borders of tribes or peoples. One has to envisage the general historical development of humanity. There the events combine for centuries, namely from the fifteenth century A.D. until the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. This age from the seventh century before the Mystery of Golgotha to the fifteenth century after it has its own character. This character changes from inner reasons in the fifteenth century more than modern people believe. Lamprecht recognises this, but he does not recognise the whole scope of this fact. Others have already pointed out from different viewpoints that one has to explain not for outer reasons, not even because of the emergence of Renaissance et cetera, but because spontaneously that significant reversal arises from historical life, from the souls of the human beings, which asserts itself in this time almost across the whole earth, but particularly across Europe.

It is remarkable that the most significant Germanist of the present, Konrad Burdach (1859-1936), has pointed to that in very nice essays. Burdach recognises from wholly literary-historical investigations that from the soul development of humanity something quite new has arisen in the spiritual configuration, in the activities of the human being.

Now we live in the period from the fifteenth century on. Spiritual science is able to go further back. Now there something very strange appears. If you look at the impulses that control the human beings since the fifteenth century historically, they are different from those, which controlled the human beings in the preceding period. However, one cannot say, the impulses of the preceding period relate to those of the following period in such a way as in the individual human life any life period relates to the following one. This is not the case. Rather the weird turns out that today the historical works in particular in that in the individual human nature, which develops until the twenties of life. The secret of our present development is that we develop those forces by the historical conditions, which belong to our individual life during the twenties. In the preceding age, the historical life of humanity especially grasped the thirties. One can show the matter also different. One can say, today our souls are organised so that we develop from childhood to the twenties, and that we carry that which we have developed during the twenties into the rest of life, so that the human being feels that his developmental period is finished after the twenties. One can prove this with wholly external things.

Scarcely anybody will state that somebody wants to learn earnestly today during his thirties, in a time where already the youngest people write essays in the newspapers. However, one will experience very easily that people say, one reads Goethe's Iphigenia, generally the classical writers, in the youth, nobody does that in his later life. One could still bring in other symptoms. However, if one goes back to the preceding period, one finds that the growing life lasted until the thirties. As paradox as it sounds today, it is in such a way, and one will once have this as a backed historical achievement. The Greek and Roman developed unlike the modern human being develops, and history happened in those days different because the human being remained longer able of development. Spiritual science shows that one gets, going back even further, to times where the human beings remained capable of development until the forties. So that one can say, one finds three consecutive periods in the historical life of humanity: one behind the eighth pre-Christian century in which we find human beings who feel young until the forties; then the period of the Greek and Roman cultures comes when the human beings remained young until the thirties; then the period in which they are capable of development until the twenties. If you reflect about that, you recognise that you cannot compare the historical development of humanity possibly with the course of the single individual life. In the individual life one grows older and older, humanity as such develops in reverse direction; it grows younger and younger, that is it remains younger and younger; it carries youth less and less into the later individual age.

Hence, the civilisation makes a younger and younger impression in the consecutive periods; that means, the human being carries that which he gains to himself in his youth more and more into the old age. One could have believed that in the time before the eighth pre-Christian century, if one had taken prejudices as starting point, one just finds a younger humanity, then an older one, and that we have now become much riper and older. One has to answer the question first what in the course of development, not in the single life, maturity and age do mean. However, you can consider this developmental process of humanity only in such a way as I have indicated now. You see, something quite different results from what one normally imagines as inner laws of cultural development if one looks really symptomatically at the historical development.

I want only to emphasise one thing in the end. One can also go into the whole attitude of the human beings in two consecutive periods. There you recognise that in the period which began with the eighth pre-Christian century another attitude was there than in the present period. If you consider the human soul spiritual-scientifically, you do not have the same comfort as the trivial psychology has it. Then you have to realise that there are three quite different shadings of the whole soul, and, hence, one distinguishes three soul members. I call one of them the sentient soul. In it the desires and passions are anchored, but it also connects the human being with the outer nature by his senses; then one distinguishes the intellectual or mind soul, and thirdly the consciousness soul in which the real self-consciousness is anchored. While now in the course of the historical development always other forces intervene in the human soul, the following turns out: during the period which lasts from the eighth pre-Christian up to the fifteenth post-Christian centuries where the European civilisation is coloured especially by the influence of the Greek-Latin culture particularly the intellectual or mind soul is working.

Hence, everything faces us that the human being accomplishes in the course of the historical development and in the outer life, in the social and economic life, as if his mind worked instinctively, as if he grasped the outer world with body and mind equally strongly. The human body and mind are balanced in this time, and the mind itself works instinctively. This becomes different with the big reversal in the fifteenth century. There the self-consciousness appears. There the consciousness soul becomes especially strong, there the human being does no longer have the mind instinctively, but he has to reflect everywhere. There the individuality starts forming. There he does no longer feel instinctively if he meets another human being: you have to behave to him this or that way. There he reflects, there he turns to the inside of his personality. So that we can say, the whole historical structure since the fifteenth century is characterised by the fact that the consciousness soul works since that time, while before the more instinctive intellectual or mind soul has worked. You cannot understand the Roman Law, nothing that comes from antiquity properly if you do not envisage this difference between the instinctive mind and that what in modern times works in intellectualistic way.

It arises that that which Lamprecht searches up to the fifteenth century is just the preparation of the consciousness soul in the German people. The German folk soul carried that into the coming period what flowed from the south, while it was just minded to further the stream of historical development from the intellectual or mind soul to the consciousness soul and its various nuances.

If one learns to recognise what really works there, then this shines into the details. Then you can ask yourself again, what is that, for example, what Wilson describes as the real nature of the American people? This is another nuance of the consciousness soul. The western nuance is experienced in its archetypal phenomenon, in its original characteristic here in Central Europe. Here the struggling egoity of the human being is really experienced which relates to the consciousness soul quite consciously which wants to penetrate with all forces of personality that what wants to enter life wholly consciously. This appears in another nuance in the American people where the human soul is like possessed by itself. It is sometimes disagreeable to face the truth. However, just the catastrophic events of our time necessitate a certain objectivity. Into the character of the historian Wilson, the light shines which spiritual science can spread.

Only in principle I could show which direction science of history has to take if it is fertilised by spiritual science in the same sense as I tried to show it for natural sciences eight days ago. Only if you consider history in such a way, you will realise how the human being is associated with that dreamt stream of the historical development that stirs him up. Then, however, it will appear that that which becomes known Imaginatively by the symptomatic interpretation of history is internally related to the human being as a historical being. Then you will realise that not the reason, but the subconsciousness, the dreamlike emotional life is connected with the historical development. Imagination will teach what works in the mood and in the will impulses of the human beings, while they are in the stream of the historical development. Then something else will arise than the belief that history can teach this or that. If it were able to teach as one normally imagines, then one would be able to find a connection between history and this usual reason. However, it does not exist. The connection is there with that what works in the depths of the soul, in the subconsciousness. The human being cannot learn, indeed, for his usual reason from history, but from the true history if he develops it more and more by the view of the spirit in history, then the historical impulses settle down in the feeling of the human being. If he faces a fact, if he is called for action or for the right feeling towards a fact within the social life, then his feeling will lead him properly. Then not his reason, but his whole soul is taught by such an interpretation of history.

With it let me summarise this consideration briefly. Goethe suspected that history, if it is recognised truly, works in the mood, in the feeling that it works if enthusiasm originates in the right way if antipathies or sympathies originate for what should be done or be omitted in a social situation. Briefly, Goethe said out of a right notion of that which spiritual science has to bring to light: the best that we can have from history is the enthusiasm, which it excites. Certainly, we cannot feel the intellectual judgement but the enthusiasm as a fruit of history if we can recognise the real historical development.

It might seem at first sight that in the centuries immediately following the Mystery of Golgotha mankind had not been touched by the light of spiritual illumination; that this was the normal condition of mankind and increasingly so up to the present day. This is not so, however. If we wish to see these things in perspective we must distinguish between the prevailing spirit of mankind and that which occurs here and there in the life of mankind and may play a decisive part in the different spheres of life. It would be most discouraging for many today to be told of the existence of a spiritual world, but that the doors to this world were closed to them. And there are many at the present time who have come to this depressing conclusion. The reason for this is not far to seek. Where there is a clear possibility of gaining insight into the spiritual world they refuse to commit themselves unreservedly. Nor have they the courage to pass an objective judgement on this issue. It may seem therefore—but in reality it is only apparently so—that today we are far removed from those early times when the spiritual world was revealed to the whole of mankind through atavistic clairvoyance, or from the later times when the few could find access to the spirit through initiation into the Mysteries. We must draw together certain strands which link early periods of human evolution with the present if we wish to arrive at a full understanding of the mystery of man's destiny and especially of those phenomena we have discussed in these lectures in connection with the nature of the Mysteries. I should like to select an example from recent times which is accessible to all and which will lend encouragement to those who are faced with the decision of choosing paths leading to the spiritual world. From the many examples at our disposal I would like to take an example which demonstrates at the same time how these phenomena are none the less misjudged from the materialistic point of view of the present day—and will also be misjudged in the immediate future.

No doubt you have all heard of Otto Ludwig (note 1) who was born in 1813, in the same year as Hebbel and Richard Wagner. Otto Ludwig was not only a poet—some may feel perhaps that he was not in the front rank of poets, but that does not concern us at the moment—but he was a man given to introspection, who sought self-knowledge and who succeeded in penetrating into the inner life which is veiled from the majority today. Otto Ludwig describes very beautifully what he experiences in the process of poetic composition or when he reads the poetry of others and surrenders to its appeal. He then realizes that he does not read or compose like other men, but that an extraordinary ferment is set up within him. And Otto Ludwig gives a beautiful description of this in a passage I will now read to you because it reveals a piece of self-knowledge of a typically modern man who, in the course of this self-revelation, speaks of things which our present materialistic age regards as the wildest fantasy. But Otto Ludwig was no visionary or idle dreamer. By nature he was perhaps introspective, but if we take into consideration the information we have about his life, we shall find that alongside this introspective tendency there was something eminently sane and balanced in his make-up. He describes his own creative experience and his response to the poetry of others in these words:

“I experience first of all a musical impression which is transformed into colour (note 2). Then I see one or more figures in various postures executing formalized gestures, singly or facing each other, the whole resembling a copper engraving on parchment, coloured paper or, more precisely, like a marble statue or sculptural group on which the sun falls through a veil of that colour. I experience this colour phenomenon after reading poetry which has stirred me deeply. If I put myself in the mood which Goethe's poetry evokes I see a deep golden yellow passing over into golden brown. When I read Schiller I experience a brilliant crimson; with Shakespeare every scene is a particular nuance of the particular colour I associate with the whole drama. Strangely enough the image or the group evoked is not usually a representation of the denouement, sometimes it is only a characteristic figure in some moving posture which is immediately joined by a succession of other figures. At first I know nothing of the plot or content of the drama, but ever fresh miming figures, seemingly three-dimensional, are rapidly added, now from the beginning, now from the end of the initial dramatic situation until I experience the whole drama complete with all its scenes. The whole passes before me in rapid succession; meanwhile I remain passive and a kind of physical anxiety grips me. I can then reproduce at will the content of the individual scenes as they unfold; but I find it impossible to condense the narrative content into a brief account. Next the gestures are accompanied by speech. I write down what I can recall, but, once the mood forsakes me, what I have noted down becomes a dead letter. Then I proceed to fill in the gaps in the dialogue, but for this purpose I must cast a critical eye over what I have written.”

Here then we have the remarkable case of a man who experiences crimson-red on reading Schiller, or golden yellow passing over into golden brown on reading the dramas or poems of Goethe, who experiences a colour sensation with every drama of Shakespeare; who, when he composes or reads a poem sees figures like those of a copper engraving printed on a parchment-coloured background, or three-dimensional miming figures on which the sun falls through a veil which diffuses the light that evokes the total mood.

Now we must understand this experience in the correct way. It is not yet a clairvoyant perception, but it is a step towards spiritual vision. In order to have a right understanding of this mood from the standpoint of Spiritual Science we must realize that Otto Ludwig was no stranger to spiritual vision. For if he were to advance further along this path he would not only experience these visions, but, just as physical objects are visible to the physical eye, spiritual beings would be visible to his spiritual eye and he would know them as an inner experience. Just as we see scattered light when we gently rub our eyes in the dark, light that seemingly radiates from the eye and fills the room, so from his inner life Ludwig radiates impressions of colour and tone. As he rightly says, he experiences them first as musical impressions. He does not exploit them in order to gain spiritual insight; but we perceive that he is mature enough spiritually to embark on the path leading to the spiritual world.

It is no longer possible to deny that there exist people who are aware that “spiritual vision” is a reality, the vision that the neophytes learned to develop in the Mysteries in the way described in earlier lectures. For the real purpose of these ceremonies was primarily to call attention to the eye of the soul, to awaken man to the fact of its existence. That the phenomena which I have just described to you are not rightly understood today is evident from the observations of Gustav Freytag (note 3). When speaking of Otto Ludwig, he says:

“The work of this writer and indeed his whole makeup, was akin to that of an epic poet of the time when, in the early dawn of nations, the poetic figures were visioned by the poet as living Imaginations imbued with colour and sound.”

This statement is perfectly correct, but has nothing to do with poetic composition. For the experiences of Otto Ludwig were not only shared by poets in ancient times, but by all men, and were shared in later times by those who had been initiated into the Mysteries irrespective of whether they were poets or not. These experiences have therefore no connection with poetic invention. Behind the barrier which the materialist of today has erected in his own soul there is to be found that which Otto Ludwig describes. It is found not only in the poet, but in every man today. The fact that he was a poet has nothing to do with the phenomenon of poetic vision, but is something that accompanies it. One may be a far greater poet than Otto Ludwig and that which one is able to describe may remain entirely in the subconscious. It is present in the substratum of the subconscious, but need not manifest itself. For poetry, indeed art as a whole today, is something other than the conscious fashioning of clairvoyant impressions.

I quote the case of Otto Ludwig as an example of a man—and men of his type are by no means rare today—who stands on the threshold of the spiritual world. If one practises the exercises given in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds, that which already exists in the soul is raised into consciousness, so that one learns to use it or to apply it consciously. It is important to bear this in mind. The problem is not so much that it is difficult to reach the hidden depths of the soul, but that people today lack the courage to embark upon a spiritual training; and that for the most part those who would willingly do so from a heartfelt need to know and to understand, none the less feel constrained to admit this need, albeit somewhat shamefacedly in their own intimate circle, but conceal it when they later find themselves in the company of contemporary intellectuals. What we should characterize today as the right path, perhaps because we live in the Michael Age since 1879, need not of necessity be regarded as the only right path. Looking back over the recent past it is possible that many may have attained a high degree of clairvoyance, genuine clairvoyance; there is no need for us therefore either to recognize fully or to accept this clairvoyance unreservedly, nor to regard it as something dangerous and to be rejected.

There are certainly many factors which for some time have undermined our courage to accept the validity of clairvoyance, and for this reason the assessment of Swedenborg (who has often been mentioned in your circle) has been so strange. He could act as a stimulus to many, in that people might see in him an individuality who had lifted to some extent the veils that concealed the spiritual world. Swedenborg had developed a high degree of Imaginative cognition which is a necessity for all who would penetrate to the spiritual world. It was indispensable to him; it was simply a kind of transition to higher stages of knowledge. And it was especially his clairvoyant sense for Imaginative cognition that he had developed. But precisely because this Imaginative cognition was stirring and pulsating in him he was able to make observations about the relations between the spiritual world and the phenomenal world, observations which are highly significant for those who seek to clarify their ideas about clairvoyance by studying the development of particular personalities. I should like to take Swedenborg as an example in order to illustrate how he came to self-understanding, how he thought and felt in order to keep his inner life attuned to the spiritual world. He was not motivated by egoism in his search for the spirit. He was already fifty-five years old when the doors of the spiritual world were opened to him (note 4). He was therefore a man of ripe experience; he had received a sound scientific training and had long been active in this field. The most important scientific works of Swedenborg have just been published in many volumes by the Stockholm Academy of Sciences and they contain material that may well determine the course of science for many years to come. But people today have learned the trick of recognizing a man such as Swedenborg (who was the leading scientist of his day) only in so far as they agree with him; otherwise they label him a fool. And they perform this trick with consummate skill. They attach no importance to the fact that from the age of fifty-five Swedenborg bears witness to the reality of the spiritual world—a man whose scientific achievement not only compares favourably with that of others—in itself no mean feat—but who, as a scientist, stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries.

Swedenborg was particularly interested in the question of the interaction of soul and body. After his spiritual enlightenment he wrote a superb treatise on this subject. The content was approximately as follows: In considering the interrelation of body and soul there are three possibilities. First, the body is the decisive factor; sense-impressions are mediated by the body and react upon the soul. The soul therefore is to some extent dependent upon the body. The second possibility is that the body is dependent upon the soul which is the source of the spiritual impulses. The soul fashions the body and makes use of the body during its lifetime. In this case one must speak not of a physical influence, but of a psychic influence. The third possibility is as follows: body and soul are contiguous, but do not interact; a higher power brings about a harmony or agreement between them just as two clocks which are independent of each other agree when they show the time. When therefore an external impression is made upon the senses, a thought process is set up within the soul, but both are unrelated; a corresponding impression is made upon the soul from within by a higher power, just as an impression is made upon the soul through the senses from without. Swedenborg points out that the first and third possibilities are impossible for those who are able to see into the spiritual world, that it is evident to the spiritually enlightened that the soul by virtue of its inner forces is related to a spiritual sun in the same way as the (physical) body is related to the physical sun. And he also shows that everything of a physical nature is dependent upon soul and spirit. He throws fresh light upon what we called the Sun mystery (when speaking of the Mysteries), that mystery of which Julian the Apostate had a dim recollection when he spoke of the sun as a spiritual being. It was this which was the cause of his hostility to Christianity because the Christianity of his day sought to deny Christ's relation to the sun. Through Imaginative cognition Swedenborg restored the Sun mystery as far as was possible for his time.

I have placed these facts before you in order to show what Swedenborg experienced inwardly in the course of developing his spiritual knowledge. His reflections upon the question I have just touched upon were embodied in a kind of philosophical treatise—the kind of treatise written by one who has insight into the spiritual world, not the kind of treatise written by the academic philosopher who is devoid of spiritual vision. At the conclusion of his treatise Swedenborg speaks of what he calls a “vision”. And by this vision he does not imply something he has conjured up, but something he has actually perceived with the eye of the spirit. Swedenborg is not afraid to speak of his spiritual visions. Furthermore he recounts what a particular angel said to him because he is certain of the fact. He no more doubts it than another doubts what a fellow human being has told him. He said: “I was once ‘in the spirit’; three Schoolmen appeared to me, disciples of Aristotle, advocates of his doctrine that attributes a physical influence to all that streams into the soul from without. They appeared on the one side. On the other side appeared three disciples of Descartes who spoke of spiritual influences upon the soul, albeit somewhat inadequately. And behind them appeared three disciples of Leibnitz who spoke of the pre-established harmony, i.e. of the independence of body and soul, of dissimilar monads existing and moving together in a state of absolute harmony pre-established by God. And I perceived nine figures who surrounded me. And the leaders of each group of the three figures were Leibnitz, Descartes and Aristotle, suffused in light”. Swedenborg spoke of this vision as one speaks of an event in everyday life. Then, he said, from out of the abyss there rose up a spirit with a torch in his right hand and as he swung the torch in front of the figures they immediately began to dispute amongst themselves. The Aristotelians defended, from their standpoint, the primacy of physical influences, the Cartesians defended spiritual impulses, and likewise the Leibnitzians defended, with the support of Leibnitz himself, the idea of preestablished harmony. Such visions may describe even the smallest details. Swedenborg tells us that Leibnitz appeared dressed in a kind of toga and the lappets were held by his disciple Wolf. Such details always accompany these visions in which such peculiarities are very characteristic. These figures, then, began to dispute amongst themselves. They all had a good case—and any and every case can be defended. Thereupon, after prolonged conflict, the spirit appeared a second time. He carried the torch in his left hand and lit up their heads from behind. Then the battle of words was really joined. They said: “We cannot distinguish which is our body and which is our soul.” And so they agreed to cast three slips of paper into a box. On the one slip was written “physical influence”, on the second, “spiritual influence” and on the third, “pre-established harmony”. Then they drew lots and drew out “spiritual influence” and said: “Let us agree to recognize spiritual influence.” At that moment an angel descended from the upper world and said: “It is not fortuitous that you drew out the slip of paper labelled ‘spiritual influence’; that choice had already been anticipated by the powers who in their wisdom guide the world because it accords with the truth.”

This is the vision described by Swedenborg. It is open to anyone to regard this vision as of no importance, perhaps even as naive. The salient question however is not whether it is naive or not, but that he experienced it. And that which at first sight seems perhaps extremely naive has profound implications. For that which in the phenomenal world appears to be arbitrary, the vagary of chance, is something totally different when seen symbolically from the spiritual angle. It is difficult to come to an understanding of chance, because chance is only a shadow-image of higher necessities. Swedenborg wishes to indicate something of special importance, namely that it is not he who wills it, but “it” is willed in him. This vision arises because “it” is willed in him. And this is an accurate description of the way in which he arrived at his truths, an accurate description of the spirit in which the treatise was written. How did the Cartesians react? They sought to demonstrate the idea of spiritual influence on purely human and rational grounds. It is possible to arrive at the spirit in this way but that seldom happens. The Aristotelians were no better than the Cartesians; they defended the idea of the spiritual influence, again on human grounds. The Leibnitzians were certainly no better than the other two for they defended the idea of “pre-established harmony”. Swedenborg rejected these paths to the spirit; he did everything possible to prepare himself to receive the truth. And this waiting upon truth, not the determination of truth, this passive acceptance of truth was his aim and was symbolized by the drawing of the slips of paper from the box. This is of vital importance.

We do not appreciate these things at their true worth when we approach them intellectually. We only appreciate them in the right way when they are presented symbolically, even though intelligent people may regard the symbol as naive. Our response to symbols is different from our response to abstract ideas. The symbol prepares our soul to receive the truth from the spiritual world. That is the essential. And if we give serious attention to these things we shall gradually understand and develop ideas and concepts which are necessary for mankind today, ideas which they must acquire by effort and which appear to be inaccessible today simply because people are antipathetic towards them—and for no other reason—an antipathy that springs from materialism.

The whole purpose of our investigations was to study the course of human evolution, first of all up to a decisive turning-point—and this turning-point was the Mystery of Golgotha. Then evolution continues and takes on a new course. These two courses are radically different from each other. I have already described in what respects they differed from each other. In order fully to understand this difference let us recall once again the following: in ancient times it was always possible for man without special training of his psychic life (in the Mysteries this was connected with external ceremonies and cult acts) to be convinced of the reality of the spiritual world through the performance of these rites and ceremonies and thereby of his own immortality, because this certainty of immortality was still latent in his corporeal nature. After the Mystery of Golgotha it was no longer possible for the physical body to “distil” out of itself the conviction of immortality; it could no longer “press” out of itself, so to speak, the perception of immortality. This had been prepared in the centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha. It is most interesting to see how Aristotle, this giant among philosophers, made every effort a few centuries before the Mystery of Golgotha to grasp the idea of the immortality of the soul; but the idea of immortality he arrived at was a most remarkable conception. Man, in Aristotle's opinion, is only a complete man when he possesses a physical body. And Franz Brentano, one of the best Aristotelians of recent time, says in his study of Aristotle that man is no longer a complete man if some member is lacking; how can he be a complete man when he lacks the whole body? Therefore, to Aristotle, when the soul passes through the gates of death it is of less significance than it was when in the body here on Earth. This shows that he had lost the capacity still to perceive the soul, whilst on the other hand the original capacity to accept the immortality of the soul still persisted. Now, strange to relate, Aristotle was the leading philosopher throughout the Middle Ages. All that can be known, said the Schoolmen, is known to Aristotle and as philosophers we have no choice but to rely upon him and follow in his footsteps. They had no intention of developing spiritual powers or capacities beyond the limits set by Aristotelianism. And this is very significant, for it explains clearly why Julian the Apostate rejected the Christianity that was practised by the Church during the age of Constantine. One must really see these things from a higher perspective. Apart from Franz Brentano, one of the leading Aristotelians of our time, I was personally acquainted with Vincenz Knauer, a Benedictine monk, whose relationship to Aristotle as a Roman Catholic was identical with that of the Schoolmen. In speaking of Aristotle he sought to discover at the same time what could be known of the immortality of the soul by purely human knowledge. And Knauer gave the following interesting summary of his opinion:

“The soul, that is, in this connection, the departed spirit—i.e. the soul of man that has passed through the gates of death—finds itself, according to Aristotle, not in a more perfect state, but in a highly imperfect state, inappropriate to its destiny. The image of the soul is by no means that which is often employed, namely, the image of a butterfly which after shedding its chrysalis takes wing. Rather does the soul resemble a butterfly whose wings have been torn off by a cruel hand and now crawls helplessly in the dust in the form of a miserable worm.”

It is very significant that those who are well versed in Aristotle admit that human knowledge could arrive at no other conclusion. And a certain effort therefore is demanded of us to resist the consequences of this attitude of mind. The materialism of the present time is unwittingly influenced by the Conciliar decree of 869 which abolished the spirit and declared that man consisted of body and soul only.

Modern materialism goes even further; it proposes to abolish the soul as well. That of course is the logical sequel. We need therefore both courage and determination in order to find our way back again to the spirit in the right way. Now Julian the Apostate who had been initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries was aware that a specific spiritual training could lead to the realization that the soul is immortal. This Sun mystery was known to him. And he now became aware of something that filled him with alarm. He was unable to grasp the fact that what he feared so much was a necessity. When he looked back to ancient times he realized that directly or indirectly through the Mysteries man was guided by Cosmic Powers, Beings and Forces. He realized that this may happen on the physical plane, that it is ordained from spiritual spheres because men have insight into these spiritual spheres. In Constantinism he saw a form of Christianity emerge which modelled Christian society and the organization of Christianity on the original principles of the Roman empire. He saw that Christianity had infiltrated into that which the Roman empire had intended for the external social order only. And he saw that the divine-spiritual had been harnessed to the Imperium Romanum. And this appalled him; he was unable to bring himself to admit that this was a necessity for a brief period. He realized that there was wide disparity between the mighty impulses of human evolution and what happened historically. I have often called attention to the need to bear in mind the golden age of the rise of Christianity before the era of Constantine. For at that time powerful spiritual impulses were at work which had been obscured solely because man's independent search for knowledge which he owed to the Christ Impulse had been harnessed to the Conciliar decrees.

If we look back to Origen and to Clement of Alexandria we find men who were open-minded, men still imbued with the Greek spirit: yet they were also conscious of the significance of what had been accomplished through the Mystery of Golgotha. Their conception of this Mystery and of the crucified Christ is considered to be pure heresy in the eyes of all denominations today. In reality the great Church Fathers of the pre-Constantine age who are recognized by the Church are the worst heretics of all. Though they were aware of the significance of the Mystery of Golgotha for the evolution of the Earth, they gave no indication of wishing to suppress the path to the Mystery of Golgotha, the gate to the Mysteries or the path of the old clairvoyance, which had been the aim of the Christianity of Constantine. In Clement of Alexandria especially we see that his works are shot through with great mysteries, mysteries which are so veiled that it is even difficult for contemporary man to make head or tail of them. Clement speaks of the Logos for example, of the wisdom that streams through and permeates the Universe. He pictures the Logos as music of the spheres fraught with meaning, and the visible world as the expression of the music of the spheres, just as the visible vibration of the strings of a musical instrument is the expression of the sound waves. Thus, in the eyes of Clement, the human form is made in the image of the Logos; that is, to Clement the Logos is a reality and he sees the human form as a fusion of tones from the music of the spheres. Man, he says, is made in the image of the Logos. And in many of Clement's utterances we find traces of that supernal wisdom that dwelt in him, a wisdom illuminated by the Christ Impulse. If you compare these utterances of Clement of Alexandria with the prevailing attitude today then the claim to recognize a man such as Clement of Alexandria without understanding him will appear as more than passing strange.

When it is said that the aim of Spiritual Science is to follow in the main stream of Christianity, to be a new flowering of Christianity to meet the needs of our time, then the cry is raised—the ancient Gnosis is being revived! And at the mention of Gnosis many professing Christians today begin to cross themselves as if faced by the devil incarnate. Gnosis for today is Spiritual Science; but the more developed gnosis of the present time is different from the gnosis known to Clement of Alexandria. What were the views of Clement of Alexandria who lived in the latter half of the second century? Faith, he says, is our starting-point—the orthodox Christian of today is satisfied with faith alone and asks no more. Faith, according to Clement, is already knowledge, but concise knowledge of what is needed; gnosis however confirms and reinforces what we believe, is founded on faith through the teaching of Our Lord and so leads to a faith that is scientifically acceptable and irrefutable. In these words Clement of Alexandria expresses for his time what we must realize today. Christianity therefore demands that gnosis, the Spiritual Science of today, must actively participate in the development of Christianity. But the modern philistine protests: “We must distinguish between science (which he would limit to sense experience) and faith. Faith must have no part in science.” Clement of Alexandria however says: To faith is added gnosis, to gnosis love, and to love the “Kingdom”. This is one of the most profound utterances of the human spirit because it bears witness to an intimate union with the life of the spirit. First we are nourished in faith; but to faith is added gnosis, that is, knowledge or understanding. Out of this living knowledge, i.e. when we penetrate deeply into things, there is first born genuine love through which our Divine inheritance operates. Mankind can only be the vehicle of the influx of the Divine as it was in the “beginning” if to faith is added gnosis, to gnosis love and to love the “Kingdom”. We must look upon these utterances as bearing witness to the deep spirituality of Clement.

Difficult as it may seem we must make the true form of Christian life once again accessible to mankind today. It is important to see certain things for what they are today and we shall then know where to look for the real cause of our present tribulations (i.e. the War of 1914). The effect of these calamities is such that, as a rule, no attempt is made to discover what really lies behind them. When, for example, an Alpine village is buried beneath an avalanche, everyone sees the avalanche crash down; but if we want to discover the cause of the avalanche we must look for it perhaps in an ice-crystal where the snow-slip began. It is easy enough to observe the destruction of the village by the avalanche, but it is not so easy to provide tangible evidence that the disaster was caused by an ice-crystal. And so it is with the great events of history! It is evident that mankind is now caught up in a terrible catastrophe; this is the conflagration that has overwhelmed us. We have to look for the sparks—and they are many—which first set the conflagration alight. But we do not pursue our enquiries far enough in order to ascertain where the conflagration first began. Today we are afraid to see things for what they are.

Let us assume that we wish to form an opinion about a certain field of science. Usually we rely upon the opinion of the specialist in that particular field. Why is his opinion accepted as authoritative? Simply because he is an expert in this field. Generally speaking it is the specialist or university professor who determines what is accepted as scientific today. Let us take a concrete case. I am well aware that it does not make for popularity to call a spade a spade, but that is no matter. But unless an increasing number of people is prepared to get to the root of things today we shall not overcome our present tribulations. Let us assume that a leading authority says the following: people are always talking about man in terms of body and soul. This idea of the dualism of body and soul is fundamentally unsatisfactory. That we still speak of body and soul today is due to the fact that we are dependent on a language that is already outmoded, which we have inherited from an earlier epoch when people were far more stupid than today. These people were so foolish as to believe that the body and soul were separate entities. When we speak of these matters today we are compelled to make use of these terms; we are victims of a language which belongs to the past. And our authority continues: we have to accept body and soul as separate entities, but this is quite unjustified. Anyone speaking from the present standpoint and wholly uninfluenced by the views of ancient times would perhaps say: let us assume here is a flower and here is a man. I see his form and complexion, his external aspect, just as I see that of the flower. The rest must be inferred.—Now someone might come along and object: that is true, but the man in question also sees the flower in his soul. But that is pure illusion. What I really receive from the perception of a flower or a stone is a sense-impression and the same is true of the man in question. The idea that an inner image persists in the soul is pure illusion. The only things we know are external relationships.

You will say that you can make nothing of this argument! And a good thing too, because it is a farrago of nonsense, it is the acme of stupidity. This crass stupidity is supported by all kinds of careful laboratory investigations into the human brain and sundry clinical findings and so on. In short the man is a fool. He is in a position to provide good clinical results because laboratories are at his disposal; but the conclusions which he draws from these findings are pure nonsense. Men of this type are a commonplace today. To say these things does not make for popularity. The cycle of lectures which has appeared in book form by the man I am referring to—strangely enough his name is Verworn, [original note 1] I take this to be pure coincidence—is called “The Mechanism of the Spiritual Life”. It would be about as sensible to write about the “ligneousness of iron” as about “the mechanism of spiritual life”.

Now if this is typical of the intellectual acumen of our most enlightened minds it is not in the least surprising that if those disciplines which are far from being accurate at least in relation to external facts—and in this respect Verworn is capable of accurate observation because he describes what he sees, but unfortunately muddies everything with his own foolish ideas—that if those disciplines which are unsupported by external evidence such as political science, for example, are exposed to the scientific mode of thinking, then the greatest nonsense results. Political science should be supported by thoughts that are rooted in reality, but lacks these thoughts for reasons I have indicated in my last lecture. And people are forcibly reminded of this fact.

I referred earlier in this lecture to Kjellén, one of the leading Swedish thinkers. His book The State as Organism is ingenious; towards the end of the book he puts forward a remarkable idea, but neither he, nor others today, can make anything of it. He quotes a certain Fustel de Coulanges (note 5), author of La Cité antique, who showed that when we analyse pre-Christian political and social institutions we find that they are entirely founded on religious rites and observances; the entire State has a social and spiritual foundation. Thus people are willy-nilly brought face to face with the facts, for I pointed out in my last lecture that the social order stemmed from the Mysteries and had a spiritual origin. In studying the body politic or political science people are faced with these questions but are at a loss to understand them. They can make nothing of what even history reports when they can no longer rely upon documents.

And still less can they make anything of the other idea which I indicated as a new path to the Christ. This idea which we find especially in the Mysteries and in Plato's writings, that remarkable echo of the Mystery teachings must arise once again. The central figure of Plato's dialogues is Socrates surrounded by his disciples. In the debate between Socrates and his disciples Plato unfolds his teachings. In his writings Plato was in communion with Socrates after the latter's death. Now this is something more than a literary device. It is the continuation, the echo of what was practised in the Mysteries where the neophytes were gradually prepared for communion with the souls of the dead who continue to direct the sensible world from the spiritual world. Plato's philosophy is developed out of his communion with Socrates, after the death of Socrates. This idea must be revived again and I have already indicated what form it must take. We must get beyond the dry bones of history, beyond the mere recording of external events. We must be able to commune with the dead, to let the thoughts of the dead arise in us once again. It is in this sense that we must be able to take seriously the idea of resurrection. It is through personal inner experience that Christ reveals Himself to mankind. It is by following this path that the truth of the Christ can be demonstrated. But this path demands of us that we develop the will in our thinking. If we can develop only such thoughts as are suited to the observation of the external world we cannot arrive at those thoughts which are really in touch with the dead. We must acquire the capacity to draw thoughts from the well of our inmost being. Our will must be prepared to unite with reality, and then the will which is thus spiritualised by its incorporation in our thinking will encounter spiritual beings, just as the hand encounters a physical object in the external world. And the first spiritual beings we encounter will, as a rule, be the dead with whom we are in some way karmically connected. You must not expect to find guidance in these abstruse matters from a set of written instructions which can be carried about in one's waistcoat pocket. Things are not as simple as that. One encounters well-intentioned people who ask: How do I distinguish between dream and reality, between phantasy and reality? In the individual case one should not attempt to distinguish between them in accordance with a fixed rule. The whole soul must be gradually attuned so that it can pass judgement in the individual case, just as in the external world we seek to pass judgement irrespective of the individual case. We must develop a wider perspective in order to form a judgement about the particular case. The dream may be a close approximation to reality, but it is not possible in the individual case to state categorically: this is the right and proper way to distinguish a mere dream from reality. Indeed what I am saying at the moment may not apply in specific cases, because other points of view must be taken into consideration. It is important to develop in ourselves the power to discriminate in spiritual matters.

Let us take the familiar case of a person who is dreaming or who imagines he is dreaming. Now it is not easy to distinguish between dream and reality. People who study dreams today follow in the footsteps of Herr Verworn. He says that one can undertake an interesting experiment. He quotes the following example. Someone taps with a pin on the window of a house where the occupant is asleep. He is dreaming at the time, wakes up and says he had heard rifle-fire. The dream, according to Verworn, exaggerates. The tappings of the pin on the window-pane have become rifle-shots. Verworn explains this in the following way: we assume that in waking consciousness the brain is fully active. In dream consciousness the brain activity is diminished; only the peripheral consciousness is active. Normally the brain plays no part; its activity is diminished. That is why the dream is so bizarre and why, therefore, the tappings of the pin turn into rifle-fire. Now the public is highly credulous. They are first told in the relevant passage in Verworn's book that the dream exaggerates and then, later on, they are told (not precisely in the words I have used) that the brain is less active and therefore the dream appears bizarre. The reader has meanwhile already forgotten what was told in the first place. He is unable to relate the two statements and simply says: the State has appointed an expert in these matters and so we must accept his word. Now, as you know, belief in authority is taboo today. He who does not hold these views about the dream may none the less feel that the following way of thinking might well be the right approach. Let us assume you are dreaming of a friend who is dead. You dream, or believe you are dreaming that you are sharing some situation in common with him—and then you wake up. Your first thought on awakening is of course: but he died some time ago! But in the dream it never occurred to you that he was dead. Now you can find many ingenious explanations of this dream if you refer to Verworn's book, The Mechanism of the Spirit. But if this is a dream, and a dream is only a memory of everyday life, you will have difficulty in understanding why the foremost thought in your mind, namely the death of your friend, plays no part in the dream when you have just experienced a situation which you know for certain you could not have shared with him when alive. You are then justified in saying: I have now experienced with X something I could not have experienced in life, something that I have not only not experienced, but which would have been impossible in our normal relationship. Assuming that the soul of X, the real soul, which has passed through the gates of death is behind this dream-picture, is it not self-evident that you do not share his death experience? There is no reason why X's soul should appear to be dead since it still lives on. If you take these two factors into consideration—perhaps in conjunction with other factors—you will conclude: my dream-picture veils a real meeting with the soul of X. The thought of death never occurs to me because the dream is not a memory of everyday life: in the dream I receive an authentic visitation from the deceased (i.e. X). I now experience the visitation in the form of a dream-picture, a situation which could not have arisen under the normal circumstances of everyday life. Furthermore the thought of death never occurs to me because the soul of the deceased persists. And then you have every reason for saying: when I experience this apparent dream I inhabit a realm where physical memory does not operate—and what I am about to say is most important—for it is characteristic of our physical life that our physical memory remains unimpaired. This memory does not exist to the same extent, nor is it of the same nature in the world of spirit which we enter at death. The memory which we need for the world of the spirit we must first develop in ourselves. The physical memory is tied to the physical body. Therefore anyone who is familiar with the super-sensible realm knows that the physical memory cannot enter there. It is not surprising that we have no memory of the deceased; but we are aware that we are in communion with the living soul of X.

Those who are acquainted with this fact maintain that what we call memory in the physical life is something totally different in the spiritual life. Anyone who has succumbed to the impact of Dante's great work, the “Divine Comedy” will never doubt, if he has spiritual discernment, that Dante experienced spiritual visions, that he had insight into the world of the spirit. He who comprehends the language of those who were familiar with the world of the spirit will find convincing proof of this in Dante's introduction to the “Divine Comedy”. Dante was well versed in spiritual knowledge; he was no dilettante in matters of the spirit; he was, so to speak, an expert in this field. He was aware that normal memory does not operate in the realm where we are in communion with the dead. He often speaks of the dead, of how the dead dwell in the “Light”. In the “Divine Comedy” you will find these beautiful lines on the theme of memory:

“O Light supreme, by mortal thought unscanned,
Grant that Thy former aspect may return,
Once more a little of Thyself relend.

Make strong my tongue that in its words may burn
One single spark of all Thy glory's light
For future generations to discern.

For if my memory but glimpse the sight
Whereof these lines would now a little say,
Men may the better estimate Thy might.”

(Paradiso. Canto XXXIII) [original note 2]

Thus Dante was aware that it is impossible with normal memory to grasp that which could originate in the spiritual world. There are many today who ask: why should we aspire to the spiritual world when we have enough to contend with in the physical world; the ordinary man seeks a practical answer to the problems of this life!—But have these people any reason to believe that those who were initiated into the Mysteries in ancient times were any less concerned with the physical world? The initiates knew that the spiritual world permeates the physical world, that the dead are unquestionably active amongst us even though people deny it. And they knew that this denial merely creates confusion. He who denies that those who have passed through the gates of death exercise an influence on this world resembles the man who says: “Nonsense! I don't believe a word you say”—and then proceeds to behave as if he did believe it. It is not so easy, of course, to give direct proof of the havoc that is wrought when the influx of the spiritual world into the physical world is not taken into account, when people act on the assumption that this interaction can be ignored. Our epoch shows little inclination to bridge the gap that separates us from the kingdom where the dead and the higher Beings dwell. In many respects our present epoch harbours a veritable antipathy towards the world of the spirit. And it is the duty of the spiritual scientist who is really honest and sincere to be aware of the forces that are hostile to the development of Anthroposophy. For there are deep underlying reasons for this hostility and they stem from the same sources which are responsible for all the forces which are today in active opposition to the true progress of mankind.

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Original Notes:

Note 1. In the German text there is a play upon the word. If pronounced with an open “0” and a rolled “R” it gives the word verworren, i.e. muddle-headed or confused.

Note 2. Translation by Dorothy L. Sayers and Barbara Reynolds, Penguin Classics, 1962.

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NOTES BY TRANSLATOR

Note 1. Otto Ludwig (1813–65). Best known for his realist novels Der Erbförster and Zwischen Himmel and Erde, genre painting with careful observation of detail. He coined the term “poetischer Realismus”. His “Shakespeare Studien” showed preoccupation with dramatic theory. During his process of poetic creation he experienced a spectrum of colours and forms, known as “synaesthesia”.

Note 2. “Synaesthesia” had first been foreshadowed by E. P. A. Hoffman in Kreisleriana. The hearing of a word or sound evokes a sensation of colour varying in accordance with the quality of the sound (cf. Baudelaire's sonnet “Correspondances”—“les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se repondent” and Rimbaud's sonnet “Voyelles” in which a definite colour-value is ascribed to each of the five vowels). F. W. H. Myers described synaesthesia as follows: “When the hearing of an external sound carries with it, by some arbitrary association of ideas, the seeing of some form or colour.”

Note 3. Freytag (1816–95). Author of realistic novels which extolled the virtues of the German middle class—Soll and Haben, Die Ahnen.

Note 4. Swedenborg (1688–1772), engineer, scientist, philosopher and theologian. In his Arcana Caelestia he wrote: “... it has been granted me now for some years to be constantly and continuously in the company of spirits and angels, hearing them speak and speaking with them in turn. It has been given to me to hear and see the wonderful things which are in the other life ... I have been instructed there in regard to different kinds of spirits; the state of souls after death ... and especially concerning the doctrine of faith which is acknowledged in the universal Heaven.”

Note 5. Fustel de Coulanges (1830–89). Originator of the scientific approach to history. His Cité antique showed that ancient institutions derived from religious beliefs common to primitive peoples. It was a study of the part played by religion in the political and social evolution of Greece and Rome.

There has hardly been a time in the development of humanity when it was as necessary as it is in the present to delve into the riddles of the supersensible life, although there has hardly been a time when there was as much rejection of this delving into supersensible problems as there is in the present. The questions that appear to be most remote must be of particular concern to the soul of the modern human being. And so today let us first consider what the materialistic attitude of the present day believes it must keep as far away as possible from human consciousness, but which is in fact infinitely close to human life. And to know that what is meant is infinitely close to human life is precisely one of the special tasks of our time. We want to start with a few remarks that are well known to us, in order to approach a subject that we have often considered from this or that point of view from a different point of view.

We all know that for spiritual scientific observation, it has a special significance to observe human life again and again according to its two great opposites, which play into everyday life, to observe it according to the special essence of the alternating states of sleeping and waking. It is precisely these polar opposites of sleeping and waking that we have had to consider again and again from the most diverse points of view in our spiritual scientific investigation.

Now you already know from the most diverse communications that this distinction, as it is usually made between sleeping and waking, according to which human life is divided up in such a way that one lives in an awake consciousness for about two-thirds or more of the day – or even less – and spends one-third in a sleeping consciousness, is at first only an external and superficial observation. Even if one continues to develop the matter as it is immediately given in this way, in order to get behind the character of sleeping and waking, it still remains somewhat superficial for spiritual-scientific views in relation to the depths that can be reached here. For we must be clear about the fact that the state of sleep is not only present in our soul life when we sleep in the superficial sense, not only in the time that passes between falling asleep and waking up, but that our soul also carries the state of sleep to a certain extent into the so-called waking state. In truth, even when we are awake for ordinary consciousness, we are only partially awake. We are never fully awake in this ordinary state of consciousness. And if we ask ourselves from a spiritual scientific point of view: to what extent are we fully awake? — then we have to give ourselves the answer: we are awake with regard to everything that we call perception of the external sense world, as well as the processing of these perceptions of the external sense world through the ideas. In our life of perception and imagination, in our thinking life, we are undoubtedly awake. We would not even think of speaking of our waking state if we did not want to describe as such a waking state a certain inner state of mind that is present when we perceive the external world in a fully conscious state and think about it, forming ideas about it.

But we cannot say that we are awake for our emotional life in the same sense as we are for our perceptual and imaginative life. It is only an illusion if one believes that one is as awake with regard to one's emotional life, one's affective life, one's emotional life from waking up to falling asleep as one is with regard to one's perception and thinking or imagining. Those who surrender themselves to this illusion do so because we always accompany our feelings with images. We not only imagine external things, we not only imagine chairs and tables and trees and clouds, but we also imagine our feelings; and by imagining our feelings, we wake up in the images of our feelings. But the feelings themselves surge up from the subconscious depths of the soul. For the one who can observe the inner soul processes, the feelings, the affects, the emotions, and the passions do not arise in a greater inner wakefulness than the impressions of the dream. The impressions of the dream are pictorial. We know how to distinguish them quite precisely for the ordinary consciousness of the external perceptions. Our consciousness is no more alert to the real feelings than it is to the dream. If we were to add an image to every dream as soon as we wake up, without being able to distinguish between the dream and the presentation of the dream, just as we always add a thought, an image, to our feelings, we would also consider our dreams to be the content of an awake experience. In themselves, our feelings are not experienced in a more awake state than our dreams.

And even less are our volitional impulses experienced in a waking state. With regard to the will, man sleeps continually. He imagines something when he wills something; he has an idea when he — let us take a simple volitional impulse — stretches out his hand to grasp something. But what actually happens in the life of soul and body when we stretch out a hand to draw something near remains in the unconscious, like dreamless sleep. While we dream our feelings, we oversleep our will impulses in reality. As a person of feeling we dream, as a person of will we also sleep in the so-called waking state, so that actually even when we are awake, that is, from waking to falling asleep, we are only awake with half of our being, while we continue to sleep with the other half of our being. We are awake in relation to our perceptions and our thoughts, but we continue to sleep and dream in relation to our will and our feelings. Such things can hardly be proved or corroborated more strongly than by what has just been said in the way of suggestion. For the recognition of such things depends on whether one can properly observe the life of the soul. He who can properly observe this life of the soul will unerringly discover the inner psychic equality of feelings, affects, passions and dreams. There is a very beautiful essay by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the so-called V-Vischer, who is particularly well known in this city, about “Dream Fantasy”, in which he emphasizes this correct observation of the relationship between the emotional and passionate life and the dream world in a very beautiful way.

So we also go through life in a waking state, not only surrounded by the world we perceive through our senses, by the world we think, but also surrounded by a world that we can only dream of in our feelings, of which we, as with our will impulses standing in it, no longer experience more than we experience of our surroundings in our sleep, namely actually nothing. But a world that we do not experience when we are asleep is still just around us. Just as the tables and chairs and the other objects are in the room where there is a sleeper who, however, is unaware of them while he sleeps, so man is unaware of the world from which his emotional and volitional impulses come because he is constantly asleep with regard to this world. But this world, in relation to which we are constantly asleep, is the one that we have in common with human souls that are no longer embodied in the body.

We have tried from a variety of perspectives to build a spiritual bridge between the so-called living and the so-called dead. We can also build this bridge conceptually by becoming aware that we are connected to people in their physical bodies in our ordinary waking state because they are accessible to our perception and our thought life. We are not connected to the so-called dead in our ordinary waking state because we are constantly asleep to part of the world around us. If we were to penetrate into this world, which we so oversleep, we would no longer be separated from the world in which man lives between death and a new birth. Just as we are surrounded by the air, so we are surrounded by the world in which man finds himself between death and a new birth, only we know nothing of this world, precisely for the reason given: because we oversleep it. The clairvoyant consciousness, in the way we have often characterized it, leads to the recognition of this world, which is otherwise overslept, this world in which man finds himself between death and a new birth. To enter into this world in such a way that one can be certain that one's soul passes through the gate of death, enters another world and returns in a new earthly life, is not difficult in itself, if one carefully considers what is contained in the book 'How to Know Higher Worlds' or in similar books.

It is much more difficult to penetrate into this world, which man passes through between death and a new birth, in such a way that concrete, definite relationships can be established between the person here in the physical body and concrete dead people. These relationships are always there to a certain extent, at least between certain living people and certain dead people. But the reasons why a person is not aware that relationships always exist between him and certain so-called dead people can be seen in what I have already said today. And precisely that which the seeing consciousness experiences when it can relate to individual dead people can teach us why man in ordinary waking consciousness learns nothing of his relationships with the dead, which, as I said, are always present as real relationships. If such conscious relations are to be established between the seeing, awakening consciousness and certain dead, one must appropriate certain soul experiences that are quite different from the soul experiences to which we have become accustomed in waking consciousness. It is precisely in this area that it becomes apparent how one must discard all habits that one has developed for the purpose of knowing the physical environment and replace them with others if one wants to penetrate with a seeing consciousness into the concrete spiritual world. When the seer is confronted with a very specific individual so-called dead person, then he can indeed communicate with him properly, but he must just get beyond certain soul habits. The way one experiences the soul in such a case naturally causes bewilderment in someone who is not accustomed to such visions.

When we stand here in the physical world and converse with another person, we know that When we say something to the other person, it comes from our own vocal organs, so to speak, radiating out from us and going to the other person. And when he answers us or in turn communicates something to us, it radiates out from his vocal organs and over to us. —- It is quite different when one has concrete relationships between the seeing consciousness and a very specific dead person. In that case, one has to completely change one's habits. When we ourselves communicate something to the dead, when we ask the dead, when we tell him something, then we must — as strange as it may sound — have acquired the ability to perceive what we ourselves say as coming from him, as emanating from him and radiating to us. In order to be able to convey a message to a dead person, we have to be able to tune out ourselves and live in him in such a way that he actually speaks when we ask him, when we convey a message to him. And again, when he answers us, when he wants to convey a message to us, it comes from our own soul, it announces itself in such a way that we know: it radiates from us, so to speak. So we have to turn around completely, turn back, if we want to come into a real relationship with a specific dead person. This is, even if it can be characterized in a simple way, an extraordinarily difficult thing to do in our emotional experience. To behave in an almost opposite way to the world around us, as we are accustomed to in the physical world, is something that is extremely difficult to acquire. But genuine communication with the so-called dead is only possible under these conditions.

On the other hand, if you consider that you have to completely change your inner attitude, you will understand that relationships between the so-called living and the so-called dead are always possible, but that the so-called living will show little inclination to recognize these relationships. For the living are accustomed—and such an habit means more than one usually thinks—when they say something, to perceive it radiating from themselves; when the other says something, to perceive it radiating from the other. And anyone who is completely rusty in the prejudices of the physical world will, from the outset, have to find something like what I have just said quite foolish. But it is like this: you cannot penetrate into the spiritual world if you do not familiarize yourself with the fact that in the spiritual world, much - I say much, not everything - is exactly the opposite of the habits we have acquired here in the physical world. And what I have just discussed is one such thoroughly opposite experience. Only when one has familiarized oneself with such unusual things through very intimate practice can one form an opinion about the nature of the ordinary relationships that each person has with certain dead people, and how these relationships develop.

As I said, these relationships are constantly present. We just have to bear in mind, if we want to take a look at these relationships, that in addition to the polar opposites of the day's experiences, waking and sleeping, we have two others that are particularly important for the relationships between the so-called living and the so-called dead, but which, when consciously experienced, go against the usual habits of human beings. In addition to the usual waking and sleeping, there is also the process of falling asleep and waking up. These fleeting moments of falling asleep and waking up are just as important for the overall spiritual life of a person as the long periods of sleeping and waking, but they pass by in a flash. The reason a person does not experience the moment of waking up is because the full awakening follows immediately afterwards, and the person is not inclined to perceive as quickly as they would have to perceive if they wanted to grasp the fleeting moment of awakening; it is drowned out, deafened, by the waking life that follows. In more naive human conditions, where people knew a lot about such things, they also hinted at what it means for the human soul in this respect. But little by little, as materialism progresses, these things are being lost. Among naive, primitive people in the countryside, you still often hear it said that when you wake up, you shouldn't look straight into the bright window, you shouldn't open your eyes right away. Such talk arises from a very deep instinct, from the instinct not to immediately deafen the moment of waking through the waking day life, in order to be able to hold on to something that is there in the moment of waking.

But the moment of falling asleep is equally important, only that usually one falls asleep immediately afterwards. Then consciousness ceases. And so the moment of falling asleep is not properly observed by the ordinary consciousness.

What is important for the relationship between a person embodied in the physical world and the dead, however, is what can be experienced and is actually experienced in the moments of falling asleep and waking up. Such things can, of course, only be observed with the seeing consciousness. But when the seeing consciousness has brought about a state in which it can establish such relationships with certain dead people, relationships that can only be established through the complete transformation and readjustment of the soul's state that I have mentioned, then it can also judge what the real, but unconscious, relationships of the so-called living to the so-called dead are like. The most favorable moment to bring to the dead all kinds of relationships we ourselves have developed in our souls to certain dead people is when we fall asleep. And the most favorable moment to receive answers, messages from the dead into physical life on earth is when we wake up.

You do not have to be put off by the fact that what I have just said requires the person to address a question to the dead person when falling asleep, to send a message to the dead, and only to receive an answer or a return message at the moment of waking up. With regard to the supersensible world, the time conditions are quite different. What is separated by hours here for the physical world does not necessarily have to be separated in real supersensible life. One can definitely say: While here in physical life, when one asks someone, one expects an answer immediately, there one perceives the relationship in such a way that when one addresses questions to the dead while falling asleep, one receives the answer upon waking up. This relationship really always exists between the living and the dead. In fact, every person who has lost their loved ones to the physical plane by crossing the threshold of death has such relationships, which experience their most important development when falling asleep and waking up. They are not brought up into consciousness only because these favorable moments flit by quickly and man is not accustomed to taking into consciousness what approaches his soul in these quickly fleeting moments. To hold on to what approaches us in such fleeting moments, there is nothing more suitable than to occupy oneself with the finer, more subtle thoughts of spiritual science. If someone appropriates spiritual science in such a way that it is not mere head knowledge, but an inner substance of the soul itself, something that is grasped not only with cleverness but with love, so that it passes completely into the soul, if someone does not just cling to the thoughts of spiritual science with scientific curiosity or curiosity, but pursues them with love, to such a person this love sinks into the soul with such power that, with a little attention, he gradually becomes aware of the great significance of the moments of falling asleep and waking up. And the more spiritual science will sink into the souls of men, the more men will take up into real life not only what they experience when awake, but also what comes to them from a supersensible world when they fall asleep, but especially when they wake up. We must only be clear about the fact that we can only establish such real relationships, as I mean them now, with those dead with whom we are somehow connected karmically. But we are connected karmically with many more souls than we realize. For the conscious or unconscious communication between the living and the dead, however, the karmic connection is as necessary as it is necessary to direct the eye to a sense object in order to perceive it. Just as the sense relationship must be established, so it is a prerequisite for communication between the living and the dead that certain karmic relationships exist between them, or at least be established.

If we now consider the moment of falling asleep, it is the moment that is particularly favorable for us to bring up the relationships we have developed with someone who has passed away and who was dear and precious to us, who was otherwise karmically connected to us. The moment of falling asleep is particularly good for this. We naturally develop our relationships with the dead, with whom we are karmically connected, in the waking day life from waking up to falling asleep. We commemorate the dead. Everything we think in relation to the dead, that we would like to bring to them, that we would like to tell them, is then compressed in the moment of falling asleep and, even if it remains unconscious to us, reaches the dead for the ordinary consciousness. Only a certain state of mind is particularly favorable for these communications, another state of mind unfavorable.

You see, mere dry, cold thinking about the dead is not very suitable for really reaching the dead, for getting a message through to them. If we want the moment of falling asleep to become, as it were, a gateway through which our own experiences of soul that are related to the dead can reach the dead, then we must occupy ourselves with the dead in a different way while we are awake than by thinking cold, dry thoughts. We must try to stir up thoughts that connected us with the dead person while he was still living among the so-called living. But we must then put particular thought into what can establish a connection through the heart. Thinking of the dead person indifferently does not help much. But everything that keeps us connected to him through our hearts is good to call to mind: how one was with the dead person here or there, how one just talked with him, by developing an active interest in something that particularly interested him, out of one's own feelings; or to recall a situation in which one was once dead man here in life and something that touched him also touched you, or vice versa; how you were tempted to share something you had experienced with the other person because you liked him, to experience it together with him. Not dry thoughts, but thoughts permeated with love, with feeling! These thoughts then remain in our soul until the moment we fall asleep. And that is when we find the gate through which they can safely reach the dead person as a message.

We should not deceive ourselves about these things. We dream of the dead. When we dream of the dead, in a great many cases – not all, of course – it is because of a real relationship with the dead person. But what we dream, in so far as it follows the moment of falling asleep, is actually only a dream-like, pictorial transformation of what we want to communicate to the dead person. We do not experience the moment of falling asleep as the moment when thoughts, as just characterized, really go over to the dead, because this moment of falling asleep passes by so quickly. But this moment of falling asleep actually resonates in the following sleep, resonates in the dream. If we understand the matter correctly, we will not interpret dreams of the dead as messages from the dead. They could be, but usually are not. They are half-remembered impulses that tell us the following. If we dream of a dead person, it means that on a previous day we addressed such a thought to the dead person, either voluntarily or involuntarily, as I have characterized it. This thought has found its way to the dead person, and the dream indicates to us that we were actually speaking to the dead person. What the dead person then answers us, what the dead person communicates to us, these messages from the dead come in particularly easily at the moment of waking up. And they would come much more easily to the so-called living if they only had time in our present time, if they had the inclination to pay a little attention to what comes up between the lines of life from deep within their consciousness.

Yes, today's man is vain and selfish, and when something arises in his soul, he is usually clear about the fact that it is his genius that has caused it to arise. Being modest is an admonition put into life; being modest in the depths of one's being is not so easy for a person. Being modest also means that one really learns to distinguish between what arises from one's own soul and what arises from one's own soul from foreign, supersensible impulses. Just as the one who has the seeing consciousness feels and perceives the dead person's answer rising up from his or her own soul, so these answers from the dead, these messages from the dead in the waking period, from waking to falling asleep, come up from the depths of the soul. However, one can say: Just as a person does not see the stars during the day – although they are constantly in the sky – because sunlight drowns them out, a person is just as unaware of what is constantly coming up from the depths of his soul in his ordinary consciousness because the external life, which is caused by the impressions of the senses, drowns it out. When we become familiar, I would say, with our own soul, when we learn to distinguish between that which originates from ourselves and that which sounds from our own soul as something foreign, then, little by little, we also learn to recognize messages from the dead in our waking daily life. But then one connects something extraordinarily important with this knowledge. Then one says to oneself: We are actually not separated from the dead, the dead live among us. They do not announce themselves in the same way as other sensual beings, who send their impulses to us from outside, but they announce themselves from within, they speak to us through our own inner being, they carry us.

However, humanity in the present and near future will find it difficult to get used to the idea that the impulses under which they act come only from the sensual world around them, to recognize that in what we call our social, our other life, not only the so-called living lives, but also the so-called deceased, that the dead are always there and work in us and with us. In mythical form, the ancients knew this. When the ancients revered the deceased as tribal lords, as ancestral gods, it was because the ancients had atavistic knowledge that the dead are always there, that they are always at work through the living. This awareness had to be lost for good reasons for humanity, but it must come back! We must know again that the dead are in our midst, that the dead speak through our soul, that we have fellowship with the dead. We must recognize that spiritual science must be asked how life is actually constituted and that external science about life must be misleading because it does not know how to distinguish between what comes from the sensual world and what comes from the supersensible world. Our historiography has gradually become something grotesquely absurd. People speak of ideas that are supposed to live in history as if the ideas flew in like hummingbirds or other birds, whereas in truth the impulses that are often present as historical impulses are precisely the impulses of the dead.

This awareness of communal life with the dead must be developed. And as this awareness develops, and as human soul life becomes more refined through the concepts of spiritual science, which only then do not refine human life when they are conceived theoretically and not lovingly, all this will, so to speak, make the dead present for the consciousness of humanity as well. Then the great part of reality that today remains unconscious and unconsidered will also be considered. Only then will one live with the full reality and in the full reality. This is a task for humanity from this time on. For humanity is presently living in a great catastrophe. The deeper reasons why this catastrophe has arisen are that people have forgotten how to live in reality. Through their materialistic consciousness, people are far removed from reality. They believe that they are close to reality because they only accept one part of reality, the sensual reality, and consider the other to be mere fantasy. But it is precisely by not recognizing one half of reality that one separates oneself from reality. This does not lead to a deeper understanding of reality. If only people would realize that what I have just said is very, very practical for the present day!

Our children and young people are learning history today. In modern times, and for a long time already, people have become accustomed to learning history, that is, what they regard as history. But how much have people learned from history? Well, people today are very often called upon to ask themselves in the face of events that occur as elementary events every hour: What does history teach us about this? The phrase can be read again and again: one can learn this or that from history. People just don't learn anything from reality. Never before could one have learned so much from reality as in the last three and a half years. But countless people are oversleeping this infinitely meaningful reality. When these catastrophic events began, very clever people who believed that they had learned a great deal from history expressed their opinions about how long these war events, as they called them, could last. With the reasons they could have, they were also able to substantiate what they had expressed; they said: Four to six months; according to the knowledge one can have, this war catastrophe cannot last longer than that. They were experts who spoke in this way. Well, the facts turned out differently. And one truly does not need to be an insignificant person to judge in this way, seduced by what we call history in more recent times. In 1789, a truly significant person took up his professorship in history at the university and gave an inaugural address in which this truly significant person said at the time that history teaches that it is very likely that in the future the peoples of Europe will have all sorts of quarrels with each other, but that they will no longer be able to tear each other apart; after all, humanity is too advanced for that. In 1789, a not insignificant person, Friedrich Schiller, made this statement when he took up his professorship, based on his study of history, to which Schiller himself could devote himself. But what followed what Schiller said? The French Revolution; the great wars at the beginning of the 19th century. And if it were a lesson of history that the people of Europe, as members of one great family, could never again tear each other apart, then all the events of the present would be all the more impossible.

However strange it may sound, it is necessary to change our thinking about these things. What has been called history is not history at all. The forces that are supersensible are at work in the historical life of mankind. The dead have an influence on historical life, and a judgment based on history will only emerge when this judgment is made on a spiritual-scientific basis. Until this happens, history will never teach anything, history will never become a practical science, and it will never be suitable for providing maxims for what is to happen. This is why people today are so helpless in the face of events, because it is necessary in our time that spiritual maxims become the practical basis of life. As long as this does not happen, catastrophic events cannot truly be overcome.

I have said: thoughts that arise from an emotional relationship with the dead person and that are remembered in such a way that one also remembers this emotional relationship are particularly favorable for getting in touch with the dead. It is particularly favorable to get an answer from the dead, particularly favorable for the dead to influence our lives, if we really know the dead, if we have the opportunity to delve into his being. Spiritual science will also be able to provide the impetus to delve into the nature of other people. Because today, due to the materialistic state of mind, it is hardly possible for people to know each other in life. They think they know each other, but they just pass each other by, talk past each other. Today, you can be married to someone for thirty or more years and know very little about them. It requires a certain refinement of soul to know the nature of another. If one can know the nature of the other as one's own, then the prerequisite is to call one's nature before the soul. If we call the nature of a dead person to whom we want to ask questions before our soul by visualizing something that connects us emotionally with him, and if we imagine his nature quite vividly, then we are sure to get surely receive an answer; then it is only for us to develop the necessary attention for the interplay of what we address to the dead, with what is sure to come back from the dead when the emotional relationships mentioned are recalled. It is then possible that what we bring to the dead will find its answer from the dead if we can vividly imagine what we have truly understood of his nature.

The consciousness that sees can provide information about many other specific relationships with the dead. Today I will speak of one more. You see, those who pass through the gateway of death as our relatives or friends or otherwise karmically related to us, they either pass away as children or young people or as older people. If you observe with the seeing consciousness what the relationships are like with the various dead, then you can say the following with regard to this passing away at different ages. When children or young people pass through the gate of death, the relationship they maintain with those left behind can be described as follows: those who were their relatives here do not lose their children or younger people; they actually remain right there in the vicinity. And that, which we feel as pain, as grief, takes on its character through this. When a human being endowed with consciousness observes the pain of soul that a mother or father feels over a child who has passed away, this pain of soul is quite different from the pain felt as a young person when an older person dies. Of course, on a superficial, external level, these experiences of the soul are more or less the same, but if you look at them more intimately, they are fundamentally different. The people who have died younger do not go away, they actually remain – that is how you can describe the relationship – and they live on with our souls, live on in our souls. And actually the pain we feel, the grief we feel, is what the younger deceased experience in us. This is transferred into our pain, into our grief. They stay with us. It is a transference of their own pain, which does not have to be pain, but then becomes pain for us when it is transferred into our souls.

The grief we feel for an older person is actually a personal pain. I would say it is less a pain of sympathy and more of selfishness, our own selfish pain. For if we want to describe the relationship of the younger person left behind here to the older deceased from the point of view of the observing consciousness, we can say: the older deceased does not lose us. We do not lose the younger deceased; the older deceased does not lose us, those left behind, but to a certain extent takes the soul with him, carries it with him in its forces on his further path. He does not lose those who remain behind. And so our relationship to such an older deceased person is quite different from that to a younger deceased person. The older deceased does not tend to live in the soul of the person who remains behind, because he takes with him the inner being, the imprint of the inner being.

What I just said is not insignificant in life, because what we call the memory of the dead is given a very specific light through it. In younger people it is good to cultivate this memory – I would say the cult of the dead – in such a way, to develop it, that we remain more general, that we arrange the thoughts or the cultic actions or other things that are intended to cultivate the memory in such a way that we do not go into the individual, the personal side of the dead person, but have great world feelings and thoughts in view of the dead. In this way, the one who died young and remains with us feels at home. In the case of someone who died older, it is especially good if one can go into his individuality, if the thoughts one addresses to him are shaped in such a way that they have something to do with his personality, are shaped towards his personality. For someone who has died more recently, it is particularly good if the funeral service is arranged in such a way that a kind of cult, a generally established cult that has a symbolic meaning, is developed. For people who have died more recently, the Catholic funeral service is particularly suitable, which in most countries is less concerned with individual circumstances or not at all, but is a symbolic general funeral service for everyone. For souls who have died young, who of course remain there, it is best to develop general world symbols, general world feelings with regard to them, with rites that apply equally to everyone. For those who have died older, the Protestant funeral service, where more attention is paid to the individual course of life and more reference is made to the personal side of the deceased, is better. And also in the individual memory that one dedicates to such a deceased person, that which is personally connected with him, which is not applicable to every deceased person, but only to him, is to be preferred.

If one knows these things, then our emotional life with regard to the deceased will also be graded and differentiated. We know how to distinguish how the soul should behave towards a younger or older deceased. Life is enriched in its most intimate relationships when one absorbs the idea from spiritual science that not only the souls living in physical bodies belong to one another, but also the disembodied souls. Only then does man enter into full reality. It must be said again and again: to speak of the spirit in general does not lead very far. To speak of spiritual life in general, as certain philosophers do, or as people do who today also believe that they can overcome materialism by speaking in general of spirit and spirit and spirit: that does not lead very far. We muster the courage to penetrate into the concrete spiritual life. We muster the courage to unreservedly confess such conditions, as we have discussed them again today, before the world, no matter how great the mockery of materialistic thinkers may still be at present. Today one cannot see how much that is infinitely fatal for humanity, infinitely disastrous, is connected with the fact that people know nothing about these things in the most important parts of the world and therefore do not think about them, and are therefore so far removed from reality, which must then devastatingly befall them. The present earth catastrophe will be ascribed to all possible impulses, only not to those in which it really originates in the deepest sense.

This is the place to reflect on the full significance that an anthroposophically oriented spiritual-scientific worldview must have in European intellectual life, as we understand it here. How people relate to the spirit and to spiritual content will be of great importance in the not-too-distant future. For important and significant things are preparing themselves in the life of mankind on earth. One cannot help but, if one comes even a little out of the sleepy state in which, unfortunately, so many people are, think more deeply about certain things than has been thought in Europe for centuries. The times urge people to learn to rethink. Actually, you can see that people are rethinking; the only question is whether they are doing so in a truly profound way or whether they are refraining from doing so altogether, or whether they are doing so in the way that very many people are doing now. You can see that people are rethinking, it's just that sometimes it comes out in a very strange way. You could give not hundreds, but thousands of examples.

You see, one of those people who have changed their thinking terribly over the last three and a half years is the former French socialist and journalist Gustave Herve. He publishes a newspaper, he calls it 'Gloire', which has also been renamed from a less provocative name. This Herve is actually one of those who currently write in the spirit of the most furious French jingoism. One can say that even compared to a tigerish, bullish chauvinist like Clemenceau, Herve is actually even more French-chauvinist – and he has changed his views. Four years ago, he was still quite a cosmopolitan, who laughed at anyone who was somehow, I won't even say, French-chauvinist, but who was just somehow French-nationalist. He was a true cosmopolitan, this Herve. Now what he writes is so vitriolic that one can read between every line one reads of his: he would actually prefer that the French tricolour become an instrument to slay everything opposed to the French. Nevertheless, Herve did make a significant statement, though it was before this war. This saying is the following: The tricolor belongs on the dunghill! — So little was this man, who is now one of the most chauvinistic Frenchmen, nationally minded as a Frenchman, that he rose to say: the tricolor—he means the French tricolor—belongs on the dunghill. So he despised everything national. He has already relearned, rethought, only of course in a way that is not very profound. What should happen in a time happens – it is important to note this; the only question is how it turns out for one or the other, how one or the other really pays attention to their task for humanity. Above all, it is necessary in this re-education that the European man does not oversleep the significant things that are currently being prepared for all of humanity on earth. Over in Asia, especially in the Orient, a sum of judgments is being prepared about Europe, namely about Central Europe – we are particularly interested in Central Europe at the present time – judgments are being prepared that will gradually actually combine to form historical impulses. The Oriental, the Japanese, the Indian, the Chinese, are gradually feeling challenged to develop certain impulses within themselves. And to a high degree, such impulses have already been formed. To a certain degree, there are judgments, especially among leading Orientals, about Central European, about German nature, which should certainly be heeded, because what lives in these impulses will become history in the not too distant future. It may seem very strange, but today one should develop a fine sensitivity for such things; one should know that today it is necessary to foresee a little of what must come in order to keep pace with reality. The Orientals who are preparing to enter into a relationship with Europe, who are forming their judgments, which will become world politics in the future, these Orientals have their age-old views about spiritual life. They see what has been going on in Europe for centuries, but they see it only in a one-sided way, because this Europe, namely this Central Europe, shows them their own nature in a one-sided way. Yes, what do the leading Orientals believe, for example, about this Central European nature? They believe what they must believe from what they actually see. They believe that Central Europe is particularly skilled at organizing state, commercial and other relationships; that Central Europe is particularly skilled at submitting to the external science taught in schools in Europe and surrendering to the authority of this science. These Orientals cannot particularly appreciate what comes from this organization or from science, because they are aware that they have an ancient spirituality that is based on completely different impulses than we Europeans can have. The leading Oriental, in particular, will never be impressed by what European natural science, for example, has to offer; he will never be impressed by what European industry produces, even if he, like the Japanese, will accept it in an external way; he will never be impressed by what European organization is able to achieve. For he is aware that none of this establishes a relationship to the real essence of things. He feels that this relationship exists between his soul and the soul of the universe. He feels spiritually akin to the soul of the universe. Let us be quite clear about this. The Oriental would approach what corresponds to such a way of looking at things, as we have practiced here or elsewhere today, quite differently than he would approach the European machine, the European organization, the European external science of the mind. And however strange it may seem, we may well ask ourselves what the Orient would say if it could know that from the fruits of the spiritual life in Europe, as expressed by Herder, Schiller, Goethe, and the Romantics, , a true, concrete spiritual contemplation of the world, which adds something special to the oriental contemplation of the spirit that the Oriental cannot find through his disposition, but which he could appreciate and with which he could agree? Of course, you may say: Goethe is sufficiently known throughout the world, and the leaders of Oriental intellectual life can also get to know Goethe, and Goethe is a source, an infinite source for the intellectual life of Central Europe. All this is true, absolutely true. But has Central Europe already come to truly recognize Goethe as such a source? One could talk about this point at length. The Oriental looks at what Central Europe has been able to make of Goethe. Much could be said about this, but I will give just one example: Central Europe has known how to pass over the most important impulses of Goethe in silence, but it has a Goethe Society. This Goethe Society was founded at a truly propitious moment. The starting point was an excellent one. It may be said that few constellations were as favorable for such things as this one at the end of the 1880s. When the last descendant of Goethe handed over the estate to a princess, everything could have been well initiated, would have been well tackled, and would have given an initial impulse from which one could have believed: now the spiritual sources will be drawn from Goethe! Much has happened, and the Goethe Society was also founded at that time. But let us take the Oriental who asks: In the Orient we have a life that connects the soul directly to the world soul. Over there they have organizations of state and social conditions, over there they have machines and industry, they have a science that is taught in school and weighs on the soul with tremendous authority; but they have no relationship of the soul of the human being to the soul of the universe. If he knew what relationships were lying latent, if he knew what could be his after what could be experienced in Goethe, he would speak and think and feel differently. But what does he see? Well, he may ask himself: Yes, this Central Europe has managed to found a Goethe Society to honor one of its greatest minds. But it has also managed to have a former finance minister as the president of this Goethe Society today. - It is only symbolic of much more. One can say: there must live in our soul the impulse to make the world aware that from the source of the German spirit can emerge the impulses of spiritual science. They will not be overlooked in the Orient. If they were overlooked, then the judgment would have to form in the Orient as a historical impulse: This Central European culture is actually harmful to humanity. — And this judgment has become established to a high degree. It would certainly be corrected if it were known that this Central European spiritual life is capable of transforming even the most mechanical of mechanisms into beauty, into soul, through those impulses that it has within itself and that it can develop into real knowledge and real processing of the supersensible. So it could actually work in one direction.

And if we look at the other side: in the West, in America, not only the Central European way of life but the whole of Europe is seen in the same way as one can only get to know it from the outside, because of course not only the Goethe Society, with the former finance minister at its head, but also the other things are seen in a similar way, but not what can live in souls as what has passed through our souls today. While in the Orient they say: This Europe, this European life is harmful – in America they find it superfluous. Because the Americans can build machines, organize industry, and found Goethe Societies with people who understand Goethe scholarship as much as what is needed to put together financial budgets. But what flows from Goethe as the deepest source of spiritual life, the Americans cannot do that; they can only have it if they take it from the Central Europeans.

It is not just some mystical eccentricity, my dear friends, it is a question deeply connected with the practical necessities of life in the present, how we relate to the impulses to let the world know and feel, as much as is possible in us, what could live in European culture in terms of spirituality, which paths it could currently have to the supersensible. Today more than ever it is necessary to remember that spiritual science in our sense is not just something with which we want to do good to our own soul, but that spiritual science must become something through which we as human beings in the right sense, as human beings of Central Europe, can fulfill our task in the development of humanity.

A few days ago, I had a dream. I dreamt of an editorial in the "Zukunft". I read very clearly a sentence about Kant in an argument about the justification of the Farmers' Union, Stirner, Nietzsche and the monarchical feeling. I couldn't believe my eyes, but this sentence literally said: "the category of the imperative". I was - in a dream - very surprised, because Maximilian Harden doesn't give himself any such airs. He once wrote a sentence in an editorial in the "Zukunft" in which he showed that he had no real concept of Kant's "Categorical Imperative"; but that he even wrote "The Category of the Imperative" instead of "The Categorical Imperative": that astonished me - even in my dream. I woke up, rubbed my eyes and said to myself: oh, you dreamer, that came again from such anger about writing. You are so terribly annoyed by all the nonsense you see every day in the "Knights of the Pen" that the anger haunts you in your sleep. But my dreams exaggerate. It is not true that "The category of the imperative" ever appeared in an editorial in the "Future".

They will probably be right, my dreams. Because Alfred, my Kerr, once told me: I don't really want to get down to business and rant to my heart's content. It must be the bitter resentment that haunts me in my sleep as a nightmare.

I got dressed, drank some coffee, and then I had to get something from a store on Potsdamer Strasse. I saw the two sculptural "works of art" erected on the Potsdamer Brücke for the first time. A staid, jovial man sits there with mild features. I could take him for a well-behaved foreman of a factory where cable ropes and electrical appliances are manufactured. He is supposed to be Werner Siemens, the greatest electrical engineer. As I had not gone out to study the secrets of the plastic arts, I passed by, not particularly dissatisfied at not having found them. C. Moser had made the monument.

I reached the other end of the bridge. There sits another man. A schoolmaster who is thinking about how to teach the children their ABCs. But no - it's supposed to be Hermann Helmholtz. I have always believed that a sculptor should pass on a man's significance to posterity along with his external features. And in Helmholtz's case, it doesn't seem so difficult to me. Anyone who delves into his writings will get a clear idea of this man's personality. And anyone who compares this idea with the features of his face will recognize the harmony of his physical and mental physiognomy, which was so striking in him. And Helmholtz also wrote memoirs. Anyone who has ever seen him must think of the researcher's outward appearance with every line. The man who, sculpted by Max Klein, is supposed to adorn one end of the Potsdam Bridge is in no way reminiscent of the writer of this memoir.

But even more. Like few researchers, Hermann Helmholtz is a type within a certain scientific movement of the present day. He is not a genius like his great teacher Johannes Müller. He did not provide the initial impetus for the discoveries and inventions that are associated with his name. If you don't want to believe me, read about it in the memoirs I mentioned. With great perspicacity and tireless work, he drew the conclusions from the achievements of his predecessors. I would like to single out the invention of the ophthalmoscope. When Helmholtz began the investigations that led him to this invention, the work carried out by his predecessors had progressed so far that only a small detail was needed to construct the important instrument, a final step on a path that had been precisely mapped out. And it was the same in the other fields in which Helmholtz worked. He lived in a time that was ripe for very specific scientific discoveries, because there was an abundance of preparatory work for them. This time demanded precise scientific workers who, through astutely constructed tools, careful laboratory work and tireless experimentation, carried out the scientific ideas of a previous era in detail. Johannes Müller, Purkinje and others gave leading ideas in the first half of the century; Helmholtz, Brücke, Ludwig, Du Bois-Reymond came to epoch-making individual discoveries from the points of view they adopted. The keen eye for the details of natural phenomena, for experimental research, for tireless observation are the characteristics of the type of natural scientist that Helmholtz represents. If you want to visualize this type by its contrast, you need only remember Ernst Haeckel. He is quite different from those belonging to this group. He too drew the consequences of a great predecessor. But he not only went beyond Charles Darwin in detail. He constructed a building for which his predecessor had provided the substructure; Helmholtz and the others mentioned provided the furnishings for a finished building, albeit one that was still empty inside. This typical significance of Helmholtz should be illustrated by the pictorial representation of his figure.

But to do so, the artist who was given such a task would have had to study the scientific nature and significance of Helmholtz from his works. I am naïve enough to believe that every artist does this before depicting a man. However, the Helmholtz monument on Berlin's Potsdamer Brücke convinced me of the opposite.

There were books at the researcher's feet, on top of which was a book on the spine - O physicist, quickly turn your eye away before it gets too offended - "The Physiology of Optics." So the visual artist didn't even get as far as the title page - or even the spine of a bound copy - of Helmholtzens "Physiological Optics".

What my dream of a writer only led me to believe: a visual artist turned it into reality. Because saying "The physiology of optics" instead of "Physiological optics" is just like saying "The category of the imperative" instead of "Categorical imperative". But not even an editorial writer does that. We writers are better people than that.

But "The Physiology of Optics" is not the only thing that characterizes the "education" of a visual artist. Beneath this "Physiology of Optics" lies another book. This one is about four centimeters thick. On its spine it says: "The Conservation of Force." Helmholtz wrote a treatise of only a few pages on this concept that dominates modern physics. Mr. Max Klein did not even glance at Helmholtz's existing works, but he saw a non-existent one in his mind.

The scholars of the Berlin newspapers have rebuked the sin against the spirit of all education; and therefore the - one of the mistakes has been made good. I do not know whether the words that were to be read at the Helmholtz monument for a few days to the annoyance of passing educated people in order to conceal the disgrace have been changed to the correct reading at nightfall. Today, however, we read the corrected version: "The physiological optics." On the other hand, a benevolent proofreader will have to make another effort because of the second "mistake". It will not be possible to make this second book thinner; but you can ask a better newspaper reader, and he will advise you to go for this work: "Tonempfindungen", because a better newspaper reader knows that Helmholtz wrote a "Lehre von den Tonempfindungen".

Whoever calls me a petty grumbler for writing this, I reply: I don't really care what is written on the monuments on the Potsdam Bridge, but to me it seems like a sad symptom. What must the "education" of visual artists be like if such "mistakes" happen to them? And what image can an artist pass on to posterity of a man whom he knows as well as the creator of the Helmholtz monument knows his writings?

Just listen to them, the visual artists, when they are amused by the omissions that writers make about their works. And if you are a writer walking across the Potsdamer Brücke in Berlin, take comfort in the fact that a "writer" is unlikely to write the same kind of nonsense about a "visual artist" as a "visual artist" has written about a "writer" here. Yes, yes, we writers are better people, and it cannot happen to any of us that, however thoroughly ignorant we may be of Kant's philosophical views, we write "The category of the imperative" instead of "Categorical imperative". Only a wicked, malicious dream can make us believe such a thing.

[ 1 ] In the study of Anthroposophy, sleeping and waking have been dealt with often and from varied points of view. But our understanding of these facts of life must be deepened and refreshed again and again, when other points in the constitution of the world have been considered by us. Our previous explanation, showing how the Earth is the seed of a newly arising macrocosm, will give us fresh possibilities for a deeper understanding of sleeping and waking.

[ 2 ] In the waking state, man lives in the Thought-shadows cast by a dead and dying world, and in the Will-impulses into the inner nature of which, with his ordinary consciousness, he can no more penetrate than into the processes of deep, dreamless sleep.

[ 3 ] Where sub-conscious impulses of Will flow into the shadows of Thought, the free dominion of self-consciousness arises. In this self-consciousness, the human ‘Ego’ lives.

[ 4 ] While man experiences his environment in this condition, his inner feeling is permeated by extra-earthly, cosmic impulses, entering from a remote and cosmic past into the present time. He does not become conscious of this fact. For a being can only become conscious of things in which it partakes with its own, dying forces, and not with the growing forces that are the creative kindlers of its life. Thus man experiences himself in consciousness while that which lies at the basis of his inner being is lost to the eye of his mind. And by this very fact he is able, during the waking state, to feel himself so entirely within his shadowed Thoughts. There is no glimmer of life to hinder the full absorption of his inner being in the dead and dying. But from this his ‘life in the dead and dying,’ the essential being of the earthly sphere conceals the fact that it is in reality the seed of a new Universe. Man in the waking state does not perceive the Earth in its true nature. The cosmic life that is germinating in the Earth escapes him.

[ 5 ] Thus man lives in what the Earth gives to him as the basis of his self-consciousness. In the age of unfolding of the self-conscious Ego, the true form both of his inner impulses and of his outer environment is lost to his mind's eye. But as he thus hovers over the true being of the world, he experiences in consciousness the being of the ‘I’: he experiences himself as a self-conscious being. Above him is the extra-earthly Cosmos; beneath him, in the earthly realm, a world whose true essence is hidden from him. But in between, the free ‘I’ manifests itself, its essence radiating out in the full light of knowledge and of free volition.

[ 6 ] It is different in the sleeping state. In sleep, man lives in his astral body and Ego in the germinating life of the Earth. The strongest ‘urge into new life’ is there in the environment of man in dreamless sleep. His dreams too are permeated by this life, though not so intensely as to prevent him from experiencing them in a kind of semi-consciousness. Gazing half consciously upon his dreams, man witnesses the creative forces whereby he himself is woven out of the Cosmos. Even while the dream lights up, the Astral—kindling man to life—becomes visible as it flows into the etheric body. In this lighting-up of dreams, Thought is still alive. It is only after man wakens that Thought is gathered up into the forces whereby it dies and becomes a shadow.

[ 7 ] This connection between our dream-conceptions and our waking thoughts is of the greatest significance. Man thinks within the sphere of those very forces whereby he grows and lives. Yet he cannot become a thinker until these forces die.

[ 8 ] At this point there dawns in us a true understanding of why it is that man takes hold of the reality of things in Thought. For in his thoughts he possesses the dead picture of that which, working from the fully living reality of the world, builds and creates him.

[ 9 ] It is the dead picture. But this dead picture proceeds from the work of the greatest painter—from the very Cosmos. It is true that the life remains out of it. If it did not, the Ego of man could not unfold. Nevertheless, the full content of the Universe, in all its greatness, is contained within this picture.

[ 10 ] So far as was possible at that time and in that context, I indicated this inner relation of Thought and World-reality in my ‘Philosophy of Freedom.’ It is in the passage of that book where I say that there is indeed a bridge leading from the thinking Ego's depths to the depths of Nature's reality.

[ 11 ] Sleep extinguishes the ordinary consciousness because it carries us into the germinating life of Earth—the Earth as it springs forth into the new, living Macrocosm. When the extinction is overcome by Imaginative consciousness, there stands before the human soul—not a sharply outlined Earth in mineral, plant and animal kingdoms of Nature—but a vital process, kindled to life within this Earth and flaming forth into the Macrocosm.

[ 12 ] It is thus: In the waking state man must lift himself with his own Ego-being out of the being of the world, in order to attain to free self-consciousness. And in sleep he unites with the being of the world once more.

[ 13 ] Such is the rhythm in the present moment of cosmic time the rhythm of man's earthly existence outside the inner being of the world while he experiences his own being in consciousness, and of his existence within the inner being of the world where the consciousness of his own being is extinguished.

[ 14 ] In the condition between death and a new birth, the human Ego lives within the Beings of the Spirit-world. Then, everything that was withdrawn from man's consciousness during his waking life on Earth comes into it again. The macrocosmic forces emerge from their full state of life in a far distant past to their dead and dying nature in the present. And there emerge the earthly forces—the seed of the new living macrocosm. Then the human being looks into his sleeping states as clearly as in his earthly life he looks forth upon the Earth that glistens in the sunlight.

[ 15 ] The Macrocosm, as it is today, has indeed become a thing of death. Yet it is through this alone that between death and a new birth man can undergo a life which signifies, compared to the waking life on Earth, a loftier awakening. For it is indeed an awakening, whereby he becomes able fully to control the forces that light up so dimly and fleetingly in dreams. These forces fill the Cosmos, they are all-pervading. From them the human being derives the impulses through which, as he descends on to the Earth, he forms this body—the greatest work-of-art of the Macrocosm.

[ 16 ] That which lights up so dimly in the dream—deserted, as it were, by the clear light of the sun—lives in the Spirit-world where the spiritual Sun flows through and through it, and where it waits until the Beings of the Hierarchies or man himself shall summon it to the creation of a new existence.

Further Leading Thoughts issued from the Goetheanum for the Anthroposophical Society

[ 17 ] 156. In Waking life, to experience himself in full and free Self-consciousness, man must forego the conscious experience of Reality in its true form, both in his existence and in that of Nature. Out of the ocean of Reality he lifts himself, that in his shadowed Thoughts he may make his own ‘I’ his very own in consciousness.

[ 18 ] 157. In Sleep, man lives with the life of his environment of Earth, but this very life extinguishes his consciousness of Self.

[ 19 ] 158. In Dreaming, there flickers up into half-consciousness the potent World-existence out of which the being of man is woven and from which, in his descent from Spirit-world, he builds his body. In earthly life this World-existence with its potent forces is put to death in man; it dies into the shadows of his Thought. For only so can it become the basis of self-conscious Manhood.