The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The name ‘Rosicrucian’ has an indefinite, vague air for anyone who studies the theosophical literature, as if there were a secret behind it. Many consider it to be a term for people who involved themselves in possible and impossible magic in the 18th century. Reading the works of people who want to study the Rosicrucians scientifically and historically one feels the kindly shrug of the shoulders when they write such things as: ‘There was a kind of brotherhood once that had noble ideals and ideas of moral progress.’ They may also refer to their symbolic formulas. But it is emphatically stated again and again in learned works that the Rosicrucians are degenerate. If the Rosicrucians had ever been what those people say they are, Rosicrucianism would be something that is utterly wrong. In reality it is one of the greatest treasures humanity has. Their secrets have never appeared in books. If something did come out, it was due to betrayal or the like, and such things might then easily be taken for foolishness or superstition. Such a view has nothing to do with what Rosicrucianism actually was. Rosicrucianism may be found encompassed in a book published in 1616. The author was called Johann Valentin Andreae. The title of the book was The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶² It describes the progress of someone who was becoming a Rosicrucian. Later Andreae published a book where it was impossible to tell if it was meant to be serious, a joke or a retraction.¹⁶³

Today we shall discover the things that may be said in public about the true nature of Rosicrucianism. There has always been initiation. People are at different stages of development. Some are far advanced and initiated into the most profound secrets of the world, people who know something about the way worlds evolve, how the earth evolved, and how human beings gradually reach higher and higher levels of development. When it is said that an initiate ‘has the knowledge’, this is often taken too lightly. To know the real secret of man, to know the future of man, is the greatest thing anyone can learn. Yes, there is a knowledge that actually has a deadly effect on someone who is unprepared. If it were simply told today, humanity would be lost. It would be split, with the greatest part destroyed, whilst a smaller part would benefit from the knowledge. The secret can never be elicited from initiates by anyone who does not have the right to know; not even if you were to torture them and make them into martyrs. No initiate would ever reveal the ultimate secret of the world to anyone who does not have the right to know. The very thought of having to reveal the secret would drive him mad or kill him. Let me give you a picture that gives the whole development connected with this secret in perspective—it is of an avenue that gets narrower and narrower, seemingly, though one day the great secret will be revealed to all humanity.

Rosicrucianism is one way of gaining initiation. It was established by Christian Rosenkreutz.¹⁶⁴ There are different ways of initiation. One was taught by the ancient Rishis in India; it is the Oriental yoga way. Then there was the gnostic Christian way, and the Rosicrucian way is the third. All three ways take people to the summit of initiation. But it is not usually taken into account that the mental and physical constitution of Indians and Europeans is utterly different. It would in fact be impossible for a European body to take the Indian way. People also fail to realize the difference in external influences. It is possible to see that in India, for example, some diseases—cholera, smallpox—take a very different course; they are different in hot compared to cold countries. The environment is completely different and therefore has a different influence on all the enveloping bodies of man. It was peculiar to think, therefore, to say that Europeans could go through yoga training. It was an error. People did not know, however, that the Rosicrucians had followed a way of development from the 14th century.

The Rosicrucian way is certainly not un-Christian. For many people who are firm and ardent Christians the gnostic Christian way is the right one they will reach the highest peaks by this route. But the number of such people is getting less. Rosicrucianism holds the most profound secrets of Christianity but also makes it possible to remove all the doubts raised in human minds today by popular or also less popular views. No one is protected from the most dreadful doubts today, which are coming to people from every direction. Christian training would not enable them to meet these doubts in the right way, protect and defend themselves from them. Do not take this lightly. If someone were to say, for instance, that he does not read Haeckel but stays firmly in the confines of his Christian view of the world, this would not achieve anything. We live in a world where people are full of our civilization. We are using natural laws when we go by train or use the newly developed sources of light.¹⁶⁵ However much a person may shut himself off—the thoughts that live in the spiritual environment come to him from every railway engine, every artificial flame. If someone were to limit himself entirely to reading the Bible, his astral body, his soul body, would nevertheless be surrounded by all kinds of destructive inner feelings during the night. You would not know what was making you nervous. Someone who knows the thoughts that reach us at an unconscious level does know. It is not a matter of materialistic science as such, but the whole atmosphere of mind and spirit in which we live. In the 12th century people still felt religious ardour, with the Church the spiritual and external focus of their lives. Having laboured hard, people would seek refuge in the house of the spiritual powers and find peace there. This has now changed. Rosicrucian training takes account of these facts, of everything modern man has to face.

What does Rosicrucian training consist in? You will meet high ideals in it. Anyone wishing to take up this training must turn to someone who has the requisite knowledge. Even as he takes the first steps the pupil will realize what really matters. Rosicrucian training completely transforms the human being. It is only by gaining the faculties for the higher world that he can be a citizen of it.

Seven elements, activities, are part of Rosicrucian occult training: 1) proper study; 2) acquiring imagination; 3) learning the occult script; 4) finding the philosopher's stone; 5) gaining knowledge of man himself, the small world or microcosm; 6) gaining knowledge of the macrocosm; 7) knowing godliness. The sequence may vary, with a teacher perhaps taking 5) as the fourth step, for instance, to suit the pupil's individual nature. You will ask if genuine Rosicrucianism still exists today. Yes, it does, and it will achieve its greatest significance in the future. The Rosicrucian brothers also have signs of identification. Not many of them are able to present themselves in public; some work entirely in secret. Anyone who seeks them will find them; and if someone does not find them he may assume that the time is not yet right for him. It [the meeting] will inevitably happen, however. It may often seem to be pure chance. It may happen, for instance, that you have to sit in a railway waiting room for 3 hours because snow is blocking the line. A stranger approaches you seemingly quite by chance. You have found your teacher. This is just one instance which I mention to you.

1) Proper study. What does this involve? You will be taken into worlds of which ordinary people have no idea. It will be necessary to gain your bearings in those worlds. It is not for people who are divorced from reality, lacking a firm basis to their thinking. Absolute certainty in one's thinking is a precondition. The individual has to look around, endeavouring to look about him with sound eyes, and must also be able to shut off his senses. This is something not everyone appreciates, not even the greatest philosophers. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, said over and over again: ‘Something coming from the senses is always present when we think; thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible.’¹⁶⁶ It is unbelievably arrogant to say that thinking without anything relating to the senses is impossible. Methods of developing a way of thinking free from sensory elements are now presented in the spiritual scientific literature and in lectures.

People who are found to be suitable are guided towards deeper knowledge. The elementary part of this knowledge is in fact open to many people. The way of study presented today, leaving aside the sense-related aspects of the world, consists in training one's thoughts. These then have nothing to do with the world we perceive around us through the senses. Wanting to enter even more deeply, one must put one's mind to more powerful thought training. I have endeavoured to give directions for such a way of thinking in the two books The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity - A Philosophy of Freedom and Truth and Knowledge. It is like this—when he begins to study these books at some depth, the reader will find that one thought follows another in a sequence that is determined by necessity. All people seeking to gain higher things are thus given the means for genuine growth in the spirit.

2) Developing powers of imagination. Here the way ideas are formed differs from ordinary thinking. Think of Goethe's words ‘All things corruptible are but a parable’. When you see someone with a smiling or worried face you'll not say ‘a crease is developing in that face’, or ‘a tear runs down his cheek’. What you'll say is that this shows a cheerful and this a sorrowful soul. The outer reveals the inner aspect; it is a simile, a likeness of what lives in the soul. Anyone will accept this in the case of human beings. Everyone knows the difference between a human head and a picture of it. A geologist may describe the earth for you, concerning himself only with its purely physical structure. People do not know that the earth's body is the body of a living entity, and that particular plants reflect the happy and the sad earth spirit. Goethe knew to tell of this; he knew how to see the earth as a body and knew what lived in it. In his Faust, he made the earth spirit say:

In life like a flood, in deeds like a storm
I surge to and fro,
Up and down I flow!
Birth and the grave,
an eternal wave,
Turning, returning,
A life ever burning.
And thus I work at Time's whirring wheel,
God's living garment I weave and reveal.

Everything on earth is a likeness of what is happening in the inner earth. People walk about on the earth's body. From my body, the earth may say, grows the seed that gives human beings their bread. The words in John's gospel, ‘He who eats my bread has lifted up his heel against me’, speak of one of the most profound mysteries in the way we look at the world.

Imagination is gained by seeing everything as a likeness. It is, however, necessary to learn logical thinking first. But in Rosicrucian training no one will choose a different image. Each feels that everything is in the image of the eternal. Here I must use dialogue to speak of something that lies behind an image that was taught in medieval temples and then in the Rosicrucian schools. The teacher would say to the pupil: ‘Look at the plant putting its root down in the soil and turning its flower, the seat of its organs of fertilization, to the light of the sun. The calyx is given a chaste kiss by the sunbeam and a new entity comes into existence.’ Even Darwin said that the root of a plant may be compared with the head.¹⁶⁷ Man is an inverted plant. His organs of reproduction are turned towards the centre of the earth in shame. The animal is between man and plant. These three realms of nature are shown in the image of a cross (Fig. 5).¹⁶⁸

Plato said: ‘The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body.’/p>

The Rosicrucian teacher would then ask his pupil to compare matter as it exists in flesh with the chaste matter of a plant, telling him that a time would come when human beings would be cleansed of their passions and desires, maturing to a stage and shining out towards the sun of the spirit where they will be as chaste and without desire as the chaste plant. With this ideal they will cleanse their flesh, so that fertilization becomes chaste and pure. Medieval schooling represented this ideal in the holy grail. The chalice is a sacred symbol of what human sensuality must become if it is to be like the calyx of a plant. It will then receive the kiss of the white dove—the chalice is shown with the dove above it.

To make the world thus spiritual, seeing man's environment in such images, raises him to the point of vision in astral images. Imagination is developed out of heart and mind and out of feeling.

3) Learning the occult script. The occult script reflects the inner currents in nature. One such sign is the vortex. If you were able to see the whole of the Orion nebula you would have two sixes intertwined. You see a world that is dying and one that is becoming in the nebula. Things are like this everywhere. When a plant sheds a new fruit, nothing from the old plant passes on to the new one. Nothing but powers cause a new plant to develop. And once again you would only see the vortex swirling inwards and out. In the same way you might see an old civilization spiralling into itself and a new one snaking out. This spiritual process can help us understand such a sign that is part of the script (Fig. 6).

800 years before Christ was born the sun entered into the sign of the Ram or lamb. Every spring it moves on a distance. The spring equinox is now in the constellation of the Fishes. At that earlier time people thought the Ram brought all that was good, new strength and power in spring. They even connected the redeemer with this. In early Christian times, the cross and the lamb were their symbol for this. Before the sun was in the sign of the Ram in spring, it was in the sign of the Bull. The Egyptians venerated the sacred bull Apis at that time, the Persians the Mythras bull. After the Flood, the sun was in the sign of Cancer. Cancer was given this occult sign: (Fig. 6).

And so there are many such lines, and also colours. And so one learns the signs that take us into the forces and powers of nature. One learns to develop the will in the occult script.

4) Finding the philosopher's stone. This was felt to be a secret in the 18th century. Someone then also published something about it. It is something everyone knows. The philosopher's stone is at the same time the noblest thing man can attain to, can make of his organism in order to achieve higher development.

Let me give you a story from Vedanta philosophy for this.¹⁶⁹ People once wanted to see if man could also live without eyes. After a year the individual concerned said: ‘Yes, I have lived, but as a blind person? He then tried to live without ears and a year later reported: 'Yes I have lived without ears, but as a deaf person.’ The voice was taken away and he lived as a mute person. Then his breath was to be taken away as well and that proved impossible. He could not live without breathing. Our breathing gives us the air we need to live. ‘And god breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.’¹⁷⁰ We take in oxygen with every breath and release carbon dioxide. In the plant, the cycle goes the other way round. The plant uses carbon to build its body. This is why we find fossilized plants in coal after thousands of years. Man has carbon in him; he breathes in oxygen, and the carbon dioxide which is produced is removed. Animals do the same. The Rosicrucian school teaches a special way of breathing, so that the person learns the process which the plant carries out in itself. One day man will be able to transform his carbon himself; he himself will transform the blue blood that is streaming back into red blood. Now he takes in plant nature; one day he himself will do what the plant does today. The Rosicrucian says: ‘Today your body is made of flesh; one day you will create it yourself through the breath. Plant nature will appear in you, but you'll not sleep the way plants do but will be clairvoyant with it.’

This is the ideal man is moving towards—to build his body of carbon. Ordinary coal is the philosopher's stone. When man's body has become star-like it will not be black coal but transparent carbon, clear as water. These are not just chemical processes but sublime ideals. The Rosicrucian goes through it in stages, and later the whole of humanity will ascend to this level.

5) Knowing the human being as microcosm. In all the rest of nature, the world is spread out; man is an extract of it. Everything is spread out in the world in letters, and man is the word. In the early 19th century Oken¹⁷¹ and Schelling¹⁷² presented the basic ideas of this, which were quite correct. They sought to gain understanding of the essence that lies in an organ. Oken got a bit grotesque when he said the tongue was a cuttlefish. Goethe said: ‘The eye is created by the light for the light.’¹⁷³ We only come to recognize the true nature of light when we find the principle in man that corresponds to light.

The teacher gives his pupil a leitmotiv, asking him to concentrate on a point, the organ that lies behind the root of the nose, and he comes to know the nature of dream consciousness in addition to his wide-awake conscious awareness. The human being gets to know the whole world when he deeply considers the spleen, liver and other things. When he has expanded his conscious awareness by thus entering into himself—it is dangerous to go broody—he will become one with the whole world.

6) Coming to know the macrocosm. Having perceived what I have just described, he will also perceive the creator behind all creation.

7) Getting to know godliness. At the 7th stage the individual reaches a point that calls forth universal feeling from the depths of the human soul and something he only has a right to know at this stage—the feeling of blessedness. It is only by gaining insight into macrocosm that he learns to enter into universal feeling. Entering into every individual thing in a clear and living way is godliness. There he discovers the soul that lies at rest behind nature. Someone once said to me: ‘I never thought a stone would feel anything if I split it.’ The spirit of the mineral world feels the greatest voluptuousness when a stone is split, a feeling of bliss. It may seem to us that the marble quarry is going through martyrdom; yet for the spirit of the stone is it the greatest bliss. Now you might ask why people are not told such details. Someone once said it would be most useful for people to know them. My reply was: 'People would want to gain things for themselves from this, and this secret must only be used in utterly selfless service to humanity.’

The Rosicrucians knew this secret, as do those who now walk this earth and serve human progress. They tell the things that will serve progress, they who know how the ‘chymical wedding’ may proceed.

• 162. Andreae, Johann Valentin (1586–1654), German protestant theologian. ‘The chymical wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, Anno 1459’, written in 1603. was published anonymously in Strassburg in 1616. See Steiner R. A Christian Rosenkreutz Anthology, essay written in 1917 (in GA 35); P. M. Allen compiler and editor. Blauvelt: Rudolf Steiner Publications 1968.
• 163. Andreae's later works, including the allegorical Die Christburg (1626), were more pietistic.
• 164. See lectures Rudolf Steiner gave in Neuchatel on 27 and 28 October 1911. In Esoteric Christianity and the Mission of Christian Rosenkreutz (in GA 130). Tr. P. Wehrle. London: Rudolf Steiner Press 1984.
• 165. New York had the first electric street lighting in 1882.
• 166. von Hartmann, Karl Robert Eduard (1842–1906). His Philosophie des Unbewussten (1869) was translated into English by Coupland , with a new edition in 1931. At the beginning of the second volume (1882) we read: ‘We think either in images, in which case we rake sensory impressions and transformations and combinations of them directly from memory, or we think in abstract terms. Abstract notions have, however, merely been abstracted from our sensory perceptions, and we may discard as much as we like in the process of abstraction, so long as something actually remains. This has thus been part of the whole before from which the abstraction was made. Abstract notions thus are merely residues of sensory impressions and therefore take sensory by nature.’
• 167. Darwin, Charles (1809–1882). ‘Surely it is no exaggeration to maintain that a root tip which has the capacity for achieving movements of adjacent parts performs a function similar to that of the brain of a lower animal.’ Darwin C., assisted by Darwin F. The Power of Movement of Plants. New York 1892.
• 168. Plato (c. 427–c. 347 BC) Greek philosopher. After living for a time at the Syracuse court, Plato founded the most influential school of the ancient world, the Academy, in Athens. The world's soul has been crucified on the cross of the world's body. Rudolf Steiner would frequently refer to these words from Timaeus (chapter 8), but always in the form given by the Viennese philosopher Vincenz Knauer, who was a personal acquaintance, in his Die Hauptprobleme der Philosophie in ihrer Entwickelung und teilweisen Lösung von Thales bis Robert Hamerling. Vienna 1892, S. 96 (the passage is underlined in the copy of the work in Rudolf Steiner's library): ‘We know from mythology, in Timaeus, that god placed this world soul in the universe in the form of a cross and stretched the world's body upon it.’ The passage in Timaeus says that god split the world's soul in two halves, ‘brought the two parts together in the form of the Greek letter chi (Χ) and made each into a circle, so that the two met with their ends opposite to the middle, and each also met itself. He gave both parts the uniform movement of the circular orbit that took place in that same space, but made one of these circles the inner one, and the other the outer one’ (quoted from German translation by Otto Apelt, Der philosophischen Bibliothek Band 179. Leipzig 1919). See also Rudolf Steiner's discussion of this in Christianity as Mystical Fact (GA 8) (1902).
• 169. It has not so far been possible to trace this.
• 170. Genesis 2: 7.
• 171. Oken, Lorenz (1779–1851), German naturalist and natural philosopher, professor of medicine at Jena, later at Munich and then Zurich. The quote: ‘The tongue is a cuttlefish’ was freely rendered by Rudolf Steiner, basing on Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie. Jena 1831. Friedrich Frommann, 14. Buch: Zoologie, S. 424,466,496.
• 172. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von (1775–1854). German philosopher.
• 173. ‘The eye owes its existence to light. Light creates an organ for itself from indifferent accessory animal organs, an organ to be like unto itself Thus the eye is created in the light for the light, so that the inner light may come to meet the outer.’ From the introduction to Goethe's Theory of Colour, An Outline. See Rudolf Steiner's Goethe the Scientist (GA 1).

Iron, Sodium, Carbon, Chlorine

(Dr. Steiner asks if anybody has a question.)

Questioner: I believe that we are expecting Dr. Steiner to make some further remarks about the stars.

DR. STEINER: Well, I will just try to connect my remarks with what I said last time and then build further on it. I will go over it again very briefly. We heard that everything which takes place with regularity in the universe, for instance, day and night, the course of the sun or the sequence of the seasons, is all connected with what is necessary in human life. The regular intake of food is necessary within the rhythm of sleeping and waking; the regular rhythm of breathing, circulation of the blood, and so on, is necessary. When we consider all this, we see that it is connected with what can be calculated through Astronomy. On the other hand, all that which happens less regularly—which certainly can be calculated but still happens less regularly, for example, comets and meteors—all these phenomena are connected with what is free will in man, with what gives rise to free will in man.

First and foremost we must turn our attention to a substance which is particularly important, which is abundant on the earth and indeed in the universe, and is present in the meteors which fall on the earth. This substance is iron. Iron exists in such abundance on the earth that the whole of our modern culture and civilisation may be said to be based on it. Just think of all the purposes for which iron is used! It is only quite recently that people have begun to manufacture all sorts of things from substances other than iron. During the last two centuries all the great advances, as well as our social conditions, have been due to iron. We must assume that iron is everywhere present in the universe because when anything falls to the earth from the heavens, it is found to be of iron.

Now let us consider the iron in our own bodies. It is very remarkable that at the beginning of his earthly life the human being drinks a substance which contains practically no iron—namely, milk. The mother's milk contains hardly any iron. So we can say: it is only in the course of his life that man begins to take in iron with his food. What does this mean!

Think of a baby: it kicks a lot and certainly dreams; but it has neither independent thought nor any free will in the real sense. In the measure that it attains freedom of will, its instincts call for iron. Iron is really necessary for free will. And if you come across a man who is hoarse or has a very weak voice and you want to know what is really the cause of it, you must above all find out if he is getting enough iron, for a man who gets too little iron shows this in the lack of will as expressed in speech. When you come across a man who can literally bellow when he is talking, you need not worry whether he is getting enough iron. But in the case of a man who can hardly make himself heard, you are perfectly right to consider how far iron is lacking. Man's need of iron for his free will is shown outwardly. We can therefore easily understand that the iron which is everywhere present in the universe and in the earth is connected with man's free will.

Now everything that happens influences everything else and we must be clear that iron alone does not form us or the universe—otherwise we should be iron men ... which would certainly make for strength, but if we were iron men we could not do many other things. So we must look for something which can form compounds with iron.

I told you recently that soda is especially important for everything in us that has to do with thinking. For soda is sodium carbonate and sodium carbonate has a stimulating effect upon the head. Everything that is connected with our thinking, with our head, with our inner light, has to do with soda. You will remember that I recently explained this.

In order that a substance like soda may be present in us, we must take in the oxygen contained in the air. This we do in breathing, for the air consists of oxygen and nitrogen—of many other things too but they play a less important part. We take in the oxygen with our breathing. What about the carbon? We form carbon in ourselves out of the food we take. Carbonic acid is formed and we then get carbonate of soda. Soda is very important for our heads. We have sodium carbonate—soda—within us, and it is all the time passing into our heads. In propagation, too, it has its part to play as I once told you. So you see soda is of great importance to us.

And now I will tell you something else. I spoke to you once—it was some time ago—about colours. The chief colours are to be seen in the rainbow: violet, blue, green, yellow, then orange and then red, in order. These are the colours of the rainbow. Nature creates these colours in the rainbow, but man can also create them by admitting just a tiny shaft of light through the window of a dark room. (Sketch.) Here is a window, here a small hole where the shaft of light enters. Here you place a glass prism so that the light passes through it and in this way you can get the colours as in the rainbow. You can then project them on a wall.

Now this succession of colours, this spectrum which appears here in the prism, as in the rainbow, has this peculiarity: it is only properly shown when one uses a glass prism, or sunlight. When one uses other bodies, one does not get this sequence of colours but only single colours. For example, under certain circumstances it can be dark everywhere, except for a fine yellow line in the middle. How is this? If you put sodium into a flame and let it burn in the flame, then you get this yellow line, not the red line, but the yellow. Thus when you take a flame, let the light pass through a small hole and take a prism, you do not get a spectrum of the sun, but a yellow line. When you take a tiny bit of sodium and bring it into this large space (sketch) you get the fine yellow line. There need not be much sodium—everywhere there are these fine yellow lines—even the very tiniest amounts of sodium give these yellow lines. ... Sodium is widely, very widely spread in the universe. If you ask yourselves, why is sodium so widespread, then you must answer: in order that this sodium carbonate, this soda, can come into existence. It is spread everywhere in order that human heads can exist. Iron is everywhere present in the universe in order that we can have free will. Sodium is everywhere in order that we can have heads. Were sodium not present in the universe, it would be quite impossible for us to have heads.

Now what must be present in order that we, as human beings, can have heads? There must be carbonic acid, that is to say, carbon and oxygen; and there must be sodium. Sodium, as I have told you, is present everywhere in the universe. Carbon we have in ourselves. It is all the time being created in us from our food; only it is transformed because we do not want to be dead carbon men, but living men, who destroy substance and then re-create it. And especially we create carbon. Thus we have the carbon ourselves, we take the oxygen from the air and the sodium from the universe. These must be present, in order that we may have heads.

You see now that in this way, if these things were present which I have described, we could have heads and we could have our free will. But how would this free will help us as earth-men if we had not arms and legs so that we could use it? We must also be able to nourish ourselves. In order that we can be built up from the materials of the earth, we must be able to take in food. This depends on the fact that we have in our lower organs something similar to what we have in our breathing. We breathe in oxygen; we breathe out carbonic acid gas. If we did not breathe out this carbonic acid, then the plants would not have carbon, for it is taken from the carbonic acid of men and animals. Thus plants are formed by what is breathed out by men and animals. Moreover, the oxygen takes our carbon away—it combines with our carbon. But first we must produce the carbon, we must first have it. To this end we must take food. Oxygen is frightfully greedy for carbon. If we did not give up our carbon to the oxygen, we should at once get fits of suffocation when the carbon cannot get out—that is to say, when the carbonic acid cannot get out. We should suffocate at once. Oxygen is really greedy. Our stomach must also take in food. Just as the oxygen takes up carbon and carbonic acid is formed, so must our stomach greedily take in carbon. Our stomach literally craves for food.

Now we might imagine that if oxygen were in our stomach, it could get out through the mouth and nose. The oxygen is there inside: it absorbs the carbon. There must thus be something in the stomach which also serves the process of the taking of nourishment. And so there is: a substance very like oxygen is in the stomach and is continuously being secreted, namely, chlorine.

I have told you already that soda is used for bleaching and especially for washing. But chlorine is also used for bleaching, is in fact, contained in washing blue. It also is a material which has light in itself, which carries light. Chlorine is very similar to oxygen.

In the breathing organs it is the oxygen of the air which continuously extracts the carbon from our bodies. In the stomach there is chlorine which, because it is greedy, frightfully greedy, similarly attracts to itself all hydrogen. And together with the hydrogen it forms hydrochloric acid.

This hydrochloric acid flows about in our stomach and it is greedy for food. When we take food into our mouths it must first be dissolved by the acid in the saliva—ptyalin. This ptyalin is similar to hydrochloric acid. Then, when the food gets to the stomach, there is pepsin, which is somewhat similar to hydrochloric acid. But pepsin is hydrochloric acid which is alive. It absorbs food greedily. If a man has too little hydrochloric acid he has a bitter taste in his mouth. Why? Because hydrochloric acid takes up all foodstuffs greedily and dispatches them to all parts of the body. So when the hydrochloric acid does not work properly, the food which a man has eaten remains in the stomach. Then he has a bitter taste in the mouth when it comes up as gas, and a coated tongue. Some hydrochloric acid must always be active inside us, especially if we are to build up our limbs.

And so we can say: Iron would not really help us unless we could use it in the operations of free will. We must build up our limbs. In order to do this, chlorine and hydrogen must combine to form hydrochloric acid. We must have this in us.

Now consider: Apart from all else, you have everywhere in your bodies hydrochloric acid, and carbon, and much else. You must look at man like this. If this is a man (sketch), there is hydrochloric acid everywhere. This must take up tiny particles of iron from the blood. Then a man can develop a free and powerful will. So much depends upon how a man combines the iron in himself with what comes from the hydrochloric acid, from the chlorine. This process must always take place in the right way. Now it can happen that young girls at puberty have to expend so much energy that they have not enough left to combine the hydrochloric acid with the iron. Then, on the one hand, there is iron which makes them heavy and cannot combine with what comes from the chlorine because there is not enough energy to make this possible. It is useless simply to give iron to such a girl; for very likely she has enough iron already. She has anaemia, which young girls get, not because they have too little iron, but because the iron cannot combine with the chlorine. So you see this power to combine the iron with the chlorine must be developed in us.

Now think of iron and then look out into the cosmos. Iron is connected with Mars. Mars is really the creator of iron in our planetary system. Man is related to Mars and the forces of Mars in many ways. I have already spoken about these things and shall do so again. Iron is connected with Mars. When we ask: What is it that has a great influence on a man when he does not properly produce his hydrochloric acid, when his stomach does not function properly, we find that it is Mercury, the planet Mercury, which is connected with chlorine. So that in the case of a young girl who is anaemic, we can say: the Mercury forces (which should work on the stomach and its appendages) and the Mars forces are not working well together. Mars creates in us those forces which make it possible for us to have iron. Mars must be there in order that we may have the power to use iron. And iron must be there in order that we may have the power to exercise free will. Mars gives us the power of the iron; meteors, since they are all the time giving up iron to the air, supply the substance of iron. Mars is that body in the cosmos which enables us to use in the proper way that iron which the meteors and comets bring to us in an irregular manner. It is actually the force of Mars together with that of the comets and meteors which enables us to speak. ... People just take human speech casually, and see nothing special in it. They do not really think, indeed they cannot really think, because they turn their attention to something which is not reality. Quite trivial matters are evidence of this. Just recently we have had a fire alarm test here. Naturally in such tests everything is done as it would be in the case of an actual fire. The Catholic Sunday paper announced that there had been a real fire here which was soon extinguished. You see, people are willing to think about something that didn't happen but not about something that did! That is just what is peculiar to-day: people think about all kinds of things that have never happened and have no inclination to think about what did. But a man who is always thinking about things which haven't happened loses all sense of reality. And that is so general nowadays. It is crippled thinking ... after all, when people continuously lie what is it but crippled thinking!

Thus free will in man is produced by the Mars force and comet force. This, however, must work properly with the Mercury force within him. It is Mercury which causes in our stomach the right hydrochloric acid combination. Just as we make use of soda in our heads, so in our stomachs we use what comes from hydrochloric acid. Soda gives light to the head, and also to the embryo which is, for the most part, head. When the human being reaches puberty, the hydrochloric acid is taken over by those parts which are connected with the stomach. And if the hydrochloric acid combines with the soda which is everywhere present, we get ordinary salt. In our heads we need soda, with which we also bleach. In our stomachs we need ordinary salt. This is not only taken in with the food but is always being created, so that down there in the body too there may be light. For both soda and salt are carriers of light, are transparent to it.

Now it is not without purpose that we add salt to our food. We salt our food in order to adjust ourselves properly to nature because we always secrete rather too little of our own salt. Thus the Mars force and the Mercury force must work together properly; if this happens, the iron that is necessary in our limbs will be at the disposal of our will, and we shall be able to use them with healthy, free will.

You can see in the case of an anaemic girl, for example, that what comes from the stomach and depends on hydrochloric acid does not properly combine with the iron. Now we must investigate, and perhaps it will be found that the fault lies with iron—perhaps there is too little iron (which may well be the case in anaemia); or perhaps there is too little chlorine (which may also be the case). Then we must try to remedy this. But the trouble in most cases is that the two do not combine: Mars and Mercury in the human being do not combine. That is usually the cause of anaemia.

In modern medicine people always want to find a single cause of disease ... but diseases may look identical outwardly and inwardly be quite different! If a girl has anaemia we must not only ask: has she too little iron? too little chlorine? ... but we must also ask: or do they not combine properly? If the girl has too little iron, we must see to it that she is given iron in the appropriate form. Well and good, but that is not so easy as it seems. For if, as usually happens, iron is introduced into the stomach, the chlorine must have the inclination to combine with this iron, otherwise the iron is left in the stomach, passes away through the bowels and does not get into the organism. Thus a way must first be found of bringing the Mercury force, the chlorine force, into the human being. And so it is of great importance not simply to give the iron as iron, but to introduce the iron into the stomach in such a form that it may somehow be taken up by the chlorine. But for that purpose a special medicine must be prepared, for example from spinach. Spinach contains iron. One can also make a medicine from other things, for example from aniseed and so on; but especially from spinach—not as ordinary spinach though it may also help if eaten just as it is. ... A medicine must be prepared from the iron in spinach, for it is then in a form in which it can be properly taken up by the blood. So, in a case where one finds that there is too little iron, one must try in this way to introduce more. But the disease may also be due to the fact that there is too little fat in the stomach to create hydrochloric acid. A certain scientist has discovered that in anaemia too little chlorine is created and so the disease has also been given the name of Chlorosis. But the real connection is not understood. One must not just try to introduce hydrochloric acid into the stomach for perhaps there is already enough of this, especially if it is brought in from outside. But what is important is that the chlorine should be produced in the stomach itself, that the stomach should have the capacity to produce chlorine. Man needs his own chlorine, not that which is introduced from outside. And for this it is necessary to introduce into the stomach something prepared in a special way from copper. This will make the stomach more capable of creating chlorine. ... So you see, things must be looked at from all sides. Usually in anaemia it is not the iron which is lacking, or the chlorine, but the trouble is due to the fact that the two cannot combine. Mars and Mercury in man cannot come together.

In the cosmos, between Mercury and Mars, stands the Sun (diagram). Just as Mars is connected with iron, so is Mercury connected with quicksilver or with copper. If when there is a lack of chlorine one needs the Mars forces, and when there is a lack of copper the Mercury forces, so when the two cannot come together one needs to strengthen the working of the Sun forces which lie between them. For it is the Sun force in man which brings chlorine and iron together. And this Sun force can be stimulated by giving gold in tiny quantities. When one tries to cure with gold—naturally in specially prepared forms because otherwise it lies in the stomach and is not absorbed—one can bring Mars and Mercury together again.

So you see, in illnesses of this character three kinds of medicine come into consideration. One cannot cure the disease merely from its name, but one must give a preparation of copper or of iron taken from a plant, from spinach for example. Or gold—in the appropriate form—may be necessary to bring them together. It amounts to this—when one only knows what happens here on the earth, one can know nothing essential about man ... and things that outwardly appear to be identical are called by identical names. But that is just as if we wanted to use a razor for cutting meat, simply because it is a knife. ... Anaemia's are not always the same. One form is due to poverty of iron, another to poverty of chlorine; and a third form is due to the fact that they do not harmonize properly ... there are different kinds of anaemia, just as there are different kinds of knives—razors, table-knives, pen-knives. But people always tend to mix everything up. A man may say of the condiments on the table that they are all additions to food, and so he salts his coffee, since salt is a condiment and so is sugar! This is on a par with the people who proclaim to the world: anaemia is anaemia. It is just as nonsensical as saying: condiment is condiment. For when one tries to cure an anaemia that is due to disharmony by means of iron, one does the same as when one salts coffee.

You see, it is a matter of looking for something which is not just at the end of one's nose. It can be said with truth that our science has progressed a nose's length, for when one looks in a microscope, one always knocks one's nose! In life it is not so simple. It is said of a man who does not see something that he sees no farther than his nose. (Those people to-day who are always looking through microscopes, they also see no farther than their noses). ... But one must look up to Mars if one wants to see what is important in ordinary iron. Why? The connections can only be discovered by looking out into the cosmos. It is not poetical fiction to say that Mars has this or that power. It is not that one develops a sort of dim, vague clairvoyance which looks up to Mars, but one must get to know many things: one must learn to understand the Mars force in man and then one can really speak of Mars; otherwise not. And so it is with the other planets. We can for example say: it will always be found that when something is inwardly lacking in a human being—as in the case of anaemia when the iron cannot be assimilated—this is connected with an irregular working of Mercury in the organism. If something is outwardly lacking, this is connected with an irregular working of Mars.

There are, for example, girls who suffer from anaemia at puberty—this means that something is inwardly not as it should be. The Mercury force is too weak and we must strengthen it by means of the gold forces.

There are also boys—you know, with boys at puberty something happens outwardly, namely the change of voice; sometimes a hoarseness appears; while with girls something happens inwardly—the periods commence. This hoarseness corresponds to the anaemia of girls—boys of course may suffer from it too and in that case there is also something wrong inwardly. But when the change in the voice does not take place properly and a certain hoarseness appears, as is often the case, then the real culprit is not the Mercury force, but the Mars force. Although iron comes not only from Mars but from the meteors, one must in any case strengthen the Mars forces—and this may be possible with gold. You see, the onset of puberty expresses itself in quite different ways: with girls, in that they come more under the Mercury forces; with boys, in that they come more under the Mars forces and are inclined to get hoarse; or if they are not always hoarse they become so every winter.

These things must be investigated by Spiritual Science to-day. The other sciences have no idea at all of these things. When anaemia is caused by a poverty of iron, for example, it is a matter of introducing into the stomach in the appropriate way that which, in the plant, brings about the right divisibility of iron. We only really get to know the nature of man when we relate it to the whole of the cosmos. This is infinite, but we must realise that all the stars of heaven have their particular influence on man. This is of the utmost importance.

We will deal with other matters next time. Perhaps something will occur to you in connection with these things. You might also ask yourselves: How is the people's food related to their health? Something may have occurred to you in connection with prevalent epidemics, and so forth. We might speak about this. Think it over and perhaps by next time you will have found something you would like to hear about in connection with nutrition.

The last time we met I told you that we need to use allegory if we are to put things clearly in occultism.¹¹¹ The world we have around us has only been like this for a relatively short period of time. Our forebears lived under utterly different conditions in Atlantean and Lemurian times. Today people cannot have any idea of this. However, if we want to understand today’s world rightly, we must rise to the concepts and ideas... [gap in notes]. Speech and language is not very old; it only developed in Atlantean times. Our Lemurian forebears did not have speech, they had a kind of singing, producing sounds with great magical powers. They might perhaps sound unarticulated to people today, but went beyond anything we can find in the highest animals today as far as beauty and melodiousness were concerned. These sounds could make flowers grow faster, for instance, or set dead objects in motion. We cannot compare them with our ordinary speech today. We are therefore unable to speak in our language of something which is among the most sublime things.

In the occult schools people therefore always used an allegorical language and alphabet. Those allegorical signs are regular formulas which one must first learn to understand. One formula, for example, is the book of ten pages. What is this book of ten pages?

The book of ten pages is something very real. Its content is great, and the formulas only appear to be simple. It is something very real for the occult student, but it is read in a different way from other books, where the human being, with his ordinary understanding, must create a word from letters and a sentence from words. The occult investigator thinks differently. His thinking grasps wholes, getting a complete overview of major complexes; it is empirical living experience, a vision of higher realities. People develop a common idea on the basis of individual details. The occult investigator gains an intuitive idea all at once from inner experience and does not have to depend on learning many individual details. It is just the way someone being able to have the ‘lion idea’ once they have seen a lion, for instance.

The occult investigator thus also gains the concept of astral and mental spirits in one go, for he sees these things together. There are archetypes for all things of the spirit. Just as a painter may have a particular intuitive image in his head and is able to paint a hundred pictures based on it, so there are archetypal images for all things on the higher planes, and clairvoyants see them. Reading the archetypes of things, in the spiritual ground and origin, is in occult terms called ‘reading in the book of ten pages’. People were able to read in this book of ten pages in every occult school; everyone was able to read in it even at the time when humanity did not yet have the vestment of a physical body.

Let us go back to Lemurian times when the human being vested himself in physical matter. He then lived in ideas that were all images. He did not see these outside but inside himself; he would feel a degree of warmth, or bright colour images arising in his soul as he approached another human being, for instance. It was like a lively dream, in images, but not conscious. Only the teachers and leaders of humanity had a real overview of the things which others only felt surging up and down in a twilit soul. Their vision was not limited, everything lay spread out before them as in a tableau; they only had to turn their attention to it. This is the idea of that all-encompassing oneness which presented itself to the initiate and the occult student. Today we cannot see everything at once because we use our senses as instruments of perception. People would have seen no difference between New York and Berlin at that time, for instance. Anyone who sees things outside his physical body, finds that spatial differences present themselves only through the senses. The whole of modem science consists of individual details which are put together. Anything that happens in the world of the spirit is not discovered bit by bit. Once a particular level of higher insight has been gained, it all lies open before one.

There are ten levels, and they are the ten pages of the book. Let me give you an idea of them.

What does it say on the first page? There is a lot there, but it has to be gained through living experience. Think of a flower. If we planted it this year, we’ll see that it has produced a root, and that stem, branches, leaves and flowers develop and finally the seed which we put in the soil again. We don’t see anything of the plant in the seed, but it is there inside it, contracted into a point. Look at a tulip, how it is contracted to a point and then spreads out again. We see essential tulip nature alternate between tremendous expansion and contraction into point-nature, as if squeezed together to make a nothing. This is something we can see everywhere in the world, in nature and in the human being. A whole solar system will also unfold, go through a sleep state, and then wake up again. In theosophy, we call the two states manvantara = expansion, and pralaya = shrink down to a point. There is no difference for external perception between seed of solar system and of flower; they do not exist in that case. Our present cosmic system will also contract to such a point one day; but the whole of life will be condensed in this, and it will well forth again from it. If we enter in our minds into this manifold life of the cosmos condensed to a point, we have an idea of the divine creative power which creates out of nothing. Anyone wishing to penetrate the secrets of the universe must learn to concentrate his thoughts in a point, not a dead but a living point which is nothing and everything at the same time. It is not easy to enter into this general dormant state of nature which is zero life and at the same time also all life; one must have felt, thought and willed it. One must have thought this through before one is able to read the remaining pages.

Reading the first page is to grasp this oneness of time, space and energy and immerse oneself in it. A truly wonderful description is given in a verse in the Dzyan book.¹¹²

The second page shows us the duality everywhere in the world. You find this wherever you go in the natural world—light and shade, positive and negative, male and female, left and right, straight and not straight, good and evil. Duality is deeply rooted in the nature of all evolution, and anyone who wishes to understand nature must be very clear in his mind about this duality. We only come to understand the world when we see the duality in our own lives. The occult student must make it an obligation for himself to learn to think in such dualities. He should never think of only the one, but always the two together. If he thinks of his relationship to the divine principle, for instance: ‘a divine I lives in me’, this is only one thing, and a second thing belongs to it: ‘and I live in the divine I.’ Both are true. The occult student must say to himself: ‘The human being is a sensual nature but he will be a spiritual entity; I was a spiritual entity once and had to become a sensual one.’

We can only perceive all truth if we make it an inner obligation never to think of just one but always of two. People who learn to think in such dualities are thinking in the right, objective way.

This is reading the second page in the book of ten pages. You will find this duality presented many times in the mythology of ancient Germanic gods and also in Gnostic works.¹¹³ Some crude ideas have ... [gap in notes], seeing above all the duality between the male and female principle and ascribing everything to it. In reality, however, the male and female principle is just a special case of a much higher duality. To make this special case the explanation for everything is to blindfold yourself, to shut out the spiritual reality and cling to the lowest aspect.

The third page presents the triad. Threefold ideas may be found anywhere. The human being is threefold, consisting of body, soul and spirit. Gnostics speak of Father, Word and Spirit. In Egyptian culture we have the three deities Osiris, Isis and Horus. The triad holds an important secret. Anyone who gets in the habit of translating duality into the triad gains something that leads to understanding the whole world. To think the world through in its threefold nature is to penetrate it with wisdom.

Fourth page. Pythagorean square. I perceive the human being as fourfold, consisting of body, soul and spirit, with the fourth principle, self-awareness, dwelling within them. Pythagoras therefore said ... [gap in notes]. Human nature which is at a lower level develops higher nature out of itself. This is the secret of the four evolving from the three. We find this fourfold nature in all entities. To the all-encompassing eye of the great initiate who surveys all periods of time, all entities are alike. The human being is a fourfold entity living on the physical plane. The lion does not live on the physical plane with its fourfold nature; here it has only its threefold nature—physical body, ether body and astral body; its I, as fourth principle, lives in the world of the spirit.

Higher nature only appears as sensual nature on a lower level. When human beings will be able to govern their physical bodies in every fibre, they will be atman; when they govern the ether body they will be budhi; when they govern the astral body, manas. That is fourfold nature: the three principles of lower nature which will one day be transformed into higher nature. Four-foldness is to be found in all entities existing in this world. To the eye of the great initiate who surveys all periods of time, all entities are alike, only different to [gap in notes]. How does a lion differ from a human being? To the human eye, a lion is lower than a human being, and this is because human beings have limited vision. They live on the physical plane today, whereas the lion has left its spirit in the mental and its soul in the astral sphere.

Plants and minerals also have fourfold nature. The plant has only its physical body and ether body on the physical plane. Plants and minerals have the other parts of their fourfold nature in the world of the spirit. But human beings, animals, plant and minerals all have fourfold nature. The student of occultism must always live this inwardly if he wants to read the fourth page. Fifth page.

On reading the fifth page, everything becomes manifest which the human being projects into the world like a shadow image. This is more than just four-foldness. He begins to venerate. It is called ‘idolatry’. The human being is able to think and form ideas. When he begins to reflect on things, he ascribes divine causes to them. Myths arise in which the human being relates the supersensible to the sensible. The world of myth and legend presents ancient cultures in many different ways. The whole process lies open before the initiate, and the moment comes when he begins to perceive the thread which runs through all myths.

The horse, for instance. What is its meaning? It is an entity which has remained behind on a particular level, whilst the physical human being has gone beyond this in his evolution. There was, however, a moment in Hyperborean times when the human being had first of all to develop the potential for intelligence. Potentials evolve a long time in advance. I have told you that all higher development has a price, and this is that something else remains behind. If one wants to rise, another has to go down. At that time, when the human being developed the potential for intelligence, this was only possible because human nature eliminated something which later developed the horse nature. The horse evolved in Atlantean times, and human beings instinctively knew that their evolution was connected with the horse. Later this instinct became a myth. The Atlanteans had instinctive awareness of their intelligence being related to the horse, and the horse was therefore venerated as a symbol of intelligence during the first post-Atlantean period. Intelligence had to evolve in the early post-Atlantean periods. In Revelation, horses appear therefore when the seven seals have been removed. Ulysses invented a wooden horse.

Three things are needed if we want to understand myths. Firstly the myth must be taken literally, secondly it must be taken in an allegorical sense—which happens in religions—and thirdly we have to take them literally again in a higher sense. When this marvellous connection presents itself to the intuitive eye it is called ‘reading the fifth page’.

Sixth page. This contains the secrets of what human beings perceive to be the supersensible and which they seek. The ideals human beings create out of their own nature appear on this sixth page, for instance the great ideals of freedom, equality and brotherhood. On this sixth page, human nature comes together with something which does not yet exist, something human beings must struggle to gain—going beyond themselves in their activity and active will. ‘I love someone who asks the impossible.’ One learns to look to future states of humanity, to see the seeds of the future in the present. An initiate can read the sixth page the way John described the future states of humanity in Revelation.

Seventh page. The student comes to understand the secret and significance of the figure seven. Things evolve in seven stages because the three, on which the seven is based, is repeated, and they themselves are the seventh. The human being must learn to say to himself: ‘I am threefold, from this three a higher three must arise; that is the six.’ Starting from the three, he returns to a higher three, which is the six. He himself is the seventh. To understand this process is to read the seventh page.

We will speak of the eighth, ninth and tenth pages the next time.¹¹⁴ The book of ten pages is an allegory, summing up in a few words what would otherwise need many words to describe. The principle of comprehensive life in abbreviation. Paracelsus said that a physician must read the whole of nature, he must pass nature’s examination, finding the word from the individual letters and not gain his wisdom only from books.¹¹⁵

In our time, the spiritual principle had to move into the background; this had to be so that the great conquests of the physical plane would be possible, and perfection could be achieved in controlling the world perceived through the senses. Now the time approaches when humanity needs to go more deeply into the spiritual again. At present human beings are rushing towards a stage on the physical plane that could not be borne if spiritual life did not develop again. An image of how necessary it is for humanity to deepen their spirituality: You know the tremendous advances made for example in the theory of electricity. A tremendous power lives in these energies, and this means there is a possibility that humanity will abuse them. Humanity will master terrible powers which will be put into effect on the physical plane, and this in the not too far distant future.¹¹⁶ They will be able, for instance, to cause detonations, explosions by remote control, with no one able to determine the originator. Humanity will have power. Woe, however, if they have not reached a high moral level and use those terrible powers for other than only good purposes! The masters who guide humanity foresaw that this time would come. It is the mission of theosophical teaching to prepare hearts and minds for what is coming, to warn them, and to show them the way and the goal.

• 111. Lecture of 27 March 1905 on symbols reflecting original wisdom.
• 112. Verse I, in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine.
• 113. See G. R. S. Mead, note 81.
• 114Rudolf Steiner never spoke of the 8th, 9th and 10th pages as he then went on a lecture tour and had to give a public lecture in Hamburg the following Monday. Below is Saint-Martin’s description of the book of ten pages.
  ‘These unutterable benefits were connected with the possession and understanding of a most precious book, one of the gifts humanity had received as part of existence. Although this book had only ten pages, it held all insights and all knowledge of what has been, what is and what will be, and human beings were able at that time to read in all ten pages of the book at once, taking it all in with just one look.
  In his case, the book was still there for him, but he had lost the ability to read it easily, and could no longer get to know all its pages at once, but only one after the other. Yet he will never be wholly restored to his rights until he has studied them all; for although each of these ten pages contains specific knowledge belonging to that page only, they are nevertheless interrelated in such a way that it is impossible to have one of them perfectly in mind unless one has learned to know them all; and although I said that human beings could no longer read them except one after the other, each of their steps would lack certainty unless they had gone through them all in one, above all the fourth, which is the point of unification for them all.
  This is a truth to which people have paid little heed, and yet it would be infinitely necessary for them to take them to heart and understand them; for they are all born with the book in their hand; and since the study and understanding of this book is the mission they must fulfil, we can judge how important it is for them not to take a wrong step with this.
  However, they have been utterly remiss in this point; you find hardly any who may have noticed the essential connection between the ten pages of the book, so that they are inseparable in all ways. Some have stopped half-way, others on the third page, others on the first; hence atheists, materialists and deists have come forth; some had an inkling of the connection, but they did not understand the important distinction which had to be made between each of these pages, taking them to be all the same and of one kind, being pages of the one book.
  What has been the consequence of this? It is this. Those who limited themselves to the one part of the book beyond which they did not have the courage to go, nevertheless maintained that they spoke according to the book, thinking to themselves that they understood it; and led astray by this, they considered themselves infallible in their doctrine, doing everything possible to make the world believe this. But these isolated truths, cut off from all nourishment, soon wilted in the hands of those who had thus isolated them, and nothing remained for these ignorant people but a vain spectre of knowledge, something they could not pretend was something solid or the truth unless they resorted to deceit.
  This is indeed the source of all the errors we will have to examine in this treatise, and all the errors we have already touched on concerning the two opposite principles, the natural world, the laws of bodily entities, the different abilities of human beings, and the principles and origin of their religion and worship.
  It will also be apparent to which part of the book the errors mainly relate; however, before we come to this, let us first consider the idea we must have to this incomparable book in its fullness, and to this end refer fully to the different kinds of knowledge and the different qualities of which each of its pages holds the knowledge.
  The first had to do with the general principle, or the centre, from which all central points flow without cease.
  The second with the occasional cause of the universe; of the dual bodily law on which it is based; with the law which is understood in two ways and functions in time; with the dual nature of the human being; and altogether with everything made up and evolved from two actions.
  The third with the foundation of the body; with all the results and productions of all kinds; and here we have the number of the immaterial spirits that do not think.
  The fourth with everything which is active; with the principle of all languages, both in time and outside time; with religion and worship; and here we have the number of the immaterial spirits that do think.
  The fifth with idolatry and decay.
  The sixth with the laws of generation and development in the temporal world, and with the natural division of the circle by the radius.
  The seventh with the cause of the winds and with ebb and flood; with the geographical measure of man; with his true insight, and with the source spring of his intelligent or sensual productions.
  The eighth with the temporal number of the element which is the only support, the only strength and the only hope of man, that is with the real, physical entity that has two names and four numbers, in so far as it is both active and intelligent, and extends its action over the four worlds. It was also concerned with justice, and the whole of legislative power; which encompasses the rights of princes and the authority of generals and judges.
  The ninth with the evolution of the physical human being in the woman’s womb, and with the resolution of the general and specific triangle.
  The tenth finally was the way and the complement of the nine that went before. It was without doubt the most essential and really the page without which none of those that went before would be known; for if you arrange all ten in circumference, in their numerical order, you find the most relationship between it and the first, from which all flows; and if you want to judge its importance, you must know that the originator of things is invincible exactly because of this page, for it is a barricade of wagons around him which no entity can cross.
  Since this work therefore contains all knowledge which the human being may seek and the laws set for him, it is evident that he will never be able to gain any insight, nor ever fulfil his true mission unless he draws on this source; we also know now the hand which must guide him there, and that, if he is not able to walks the steps to this fruitful source by himself, he may nevertheless be certain to get there if he forgets his will and lets the will of the active and intelligent cause take effect, the cause which alone must act for him.’
• 115. See the lecture given in Berlin on 26 April 1906 [in German] in GA 54.
• 116. See also the lectures given in Berlin on 9, 16 and 23 December 1904, in The Temple Legend (note 22).

The time has now come to make known in wider circles that which has been spoken of throughout the history of the evolution of mankind under the name of the Mysteries or Mysticism, the so-called Esoteric Wisdom.

For in the soul of man, behind what comes to the light of day lies a deeper wisdom which has hitherto remained unknown to mankind in general.

Let us be quite clear what it is men have always understood by the term “Mysteries” or the “esoteric.” All that has been brought about in the world through civilisation goes back ultimately to a few great personalities, a few leading individuals. For example, a construction like the Simplon tunnel can be traced back to the mental work of great individuals, who were not themselves directly concerned with the building of the tunnel but who made it possible, by their Intellectual discoveries, for others to build it.

The “practical” man would perhaps be of the opinion that such things are accomplished by an activity that is purely external. It would be the very greatest mistake to accede to such an opinion. Neither the engineers who conceived the plan, nor the workmen who carried it out, are the spiritual originators. If it were not for what is called Higher Mathematics as elaborated by Leibnitz, Newton and others, such works could never be there at all. These thinkers were necessary in order to bring into being what is called “technics.” If we go to the root of the matter, we shall find that such works could never have been achieved, nor any goods have been manufactured, without the soul of the Thinker.

If this is so with regard to the outer materialistic culture, it is true in still greater measure of the spiritual currents that flow through human history.

All the Religion and all the Art that has ever been brought to mankind, all the Justice that has ever borne rule in states, all the order and Morality that has lived among men leads back to great Initiates, leads back to hidden sources of Wisdom. This is what we find when we set out to look for the deeper origin of things.

Consider the works of Art which have succeeded each other through the centuries, and you will find that they can all be traced back to deeper sources. Whether we take a poet like Dante, or a mind and spirit like Goethe's, or a painter such as Raphael, or again some great religious event in history—all moral and religious streams, all art and all science, lead back into the hidden places, where was cultivated in secret that which is known as Mysticism or Esotericism.

And as with all other religions so with Christianity too we find its foundations in the esoteric. It is only an evidence of shortsightedness when the objection is raised, that Christianity is for simple hearts and should speak to the feelings and be comprehensible for all. That is a very shortsighted view. All religions, it is true, ultimately clothe their truths in sentences so full of power and impulse that no soul is too simple to receive them. What emerges finally, however, in this simple form, has its origin in the heights, with the so-called Initiates.

Throughout history there have always been Initiates. In ancient India it was the Rishis who taught a primeval Wisdom. In Persia Zarathustra was the teacher of Wisdom. We look to Greece, to Egypt, to Rome, everywhere we find to begin with, a religion of the people, but standing in the midst of the people are always those who may be called spiritual “Giants,” unknown to mankind by name. These are they who formed themselves into occult brotherhoods. Whosoever wished to be accepted into such a brotherhood had to undergo a strict and severe probation. The probation had no immediate relation to the intellectual life. It was far more a question of a man's wrestling his way through to an inner freedom of character, where feelings and passions had no power with him. Then he had to learn not to misuse his knowledge. Men who had passed through severe trials and tests of this nature became missionaries to the rest of mankind. They were not allowed to have any other feeling or purpose in their heart, save only this—to serve and help mankind. They had to be men who would make real the words—“He who would be first among you, let him be the servant of all”—And in intellectual striving also they must never lag behind but always press on to find the Higher Truths.

Today it is frequently said to one who believes in the possibility of knowing the Spiritual Worlds: But we human beings have boundaries to our knowledge. But inside the Mystery circles it was said: Thou has capabilities which slumber in thee; if thou develop them, then canst thou strive through to a Higher Knowledge.

The development a man was enabled to undergo by the training of his inner talents and capacities was called in the Mystery Centres a Second Birth. It was said that such a one experienced on a higher plane what a man born blind experiences here in the world of the senses when he has undergone an operation and can see. This “operation” on the soul, the re-birth in the Spirit, was performed for the Mystics in the Mysteries.

That which was called in the Mysteries the Kingdom of Heaven, into which the Mystic was led, was not in some other place. The Kingdom of the Spiritual World is here where man is. As many worlds are around us as we have ability to realize and grasp. It was no dry and abstract Wisdom that was received in the Mysteries, but a Wisdom which was at the same time Religion and Art.

In the Mysteries of Greece the spiritual eye of the Mystic was opened. It was shown to him how once in primeval times man had been half animal and how the soul had striven upwards to that stage of humanity upon which he now beheld himself. Three stages were shown to him. He saw first forms as they lived in a very distant evolution of mankind, then forms half animal and half man, and finally perfect human forms. These three types of the evolution of mankind stood before him in the Greek Mysteries and they found their expression in Greek sculpture. There was (1) the Zeus type, with the straight nose and with the eyes rounded out upwards; (2) the type of the God Mercury with woolly hair and snub nose; and (3) the type of the Satyr, with quite different eyes, different nose and different corners to the mouth. These three types stand before us in Greek art as an image of the stages of the evolution of mankind. At another time it was shown to the Mystic how the God himself descended into nature, how he evolved upwards through the mineral kingdom, plant kingdom and animal kingdom to the human kingdom and was then born anew out of the human heart. That was called the descent of the God, his Resurrection and his Ascension. The whole process was represented in the Greek drama. All that was represented in the drama came originally from the Mysteries.

Just as the trunk of the tree divides itself into different branches, so did religion, science and art become divided in the Mysteries. The ancient Mysteries which were celebrated in Greece—the Eleusinian—and the Mysteries of the Egyptian Priest-wisdom were called Mysteries of the Spirit. Those who stood high in these Mysteries as teachers and leaders had attained to the spiritual worlds; they associated with Spirits, they had intercourse with Spiritual Beings. Iamblichus shows us how the Gods descended in the Mysteries. Only after moral purification, and only when the intellect had been made clear and lucid, could one obtain admission into these places of wisdom.

This is how it was in the ancient heathen times, in the times of the Mysteries of the Spirit. Never without the most wonderful enthusiasm and the most inward devotion did the Mystics speak of that which could be experienced in the Mystery-schools. Aristides speaks thus: “I thought I touched the God and felt him near, I myself being at the time in a condition between waking and sleeping. My spirit was light, so as none can describe or realise who has not himself been initiated.” And in another passage he says: “It was as if the Spiritual World flowed and poured around me.” Plutarch says, “He who had received initiation in these Mysteries greeted the Godhead with the greeting of eternity.” Whoever had had this experience was called “re-born.”

We must now say a little about what formed the last act in every such Initiation into the Mysteries of the Spirit.

There had first to be the moral purification and the clarifying of the intellect. Then the pupil must learn to see with the eyes of the Spirit. Behind the consciousness which accompanies us through the waking condition, there is another consciousness. This consciousness does not sink into complete darkness when man falls asleep. Man remains conscious at night, he is there present. But the consciousness which accompanies him from morning until evening, that does not remain. There is however a way of overcoming the unconsciousness man has in sleep; there are methods whereby this end can be attained. By a culture of the soul which brings about certain intimate processes in the innermost being of the soul, man can win through to the possibility of finding new revelations in his dream life; he can experience things which he recognises in another way than with the eyes and ears of the senses. It is immaterial whether a man recognizes the truth in sleep or by day when awake; in either case he must learn to carry over into reality the world which he there experiences. When in this way he has come into the position of being able to see the Spiritual in the whole world, then he has attained the first stage of initiation.

At the second stage he has an experience which is like living in a flowing ocean of colour. At this stage there is a higher initiation; a consciousness is developed wherein is revealed to him a still higher Spiritual world. Today in ordinary life man is not capable of awakening the consciousness which lies behind the physical world.

In the last act of the Mysteries of the Spirit the pupil was put into a kind of sleep. Care had been taken in the preparation that when the day consciousness sank down, consciousness did not cease. For three days and three nights the man lay in another state of consciousness in the Mystery temple, citizen and participator in another world. Then he was awakened by the Priest. He received a new name. He was an Initiate, he had been “born again.” One could say of the Mysteries of the Spirit: “Blessed are they who have experienced them, blessed are they who now behold in the Mysteries of the Spirit.”

At the time of Christ Jesus, to the Mysteries of the Spirit were added the Mysteries of the Son, and these have been ever since the time of Christ. The Mysteries of the Father—the Mysteries of the Future—are only cultivated in a very small circle. The Mysteries of the Son are cultivated in the Rosicrucian Mystery which is also Christian, for those who require a Christianity that is armed to meet all Wisdom.

Today we will concern ourselves with the Mysteries of the Son, and see how they differ from the ancient heathen Mysteries. If we would grasp what a mighty step forward has been taken by the coming of Christianity, we must learn to understand two important utterances. The one is: “Blessed are they who believe, even when they do not see,” and the other: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” If we comprehend these utterances in all their depth, then we understand the very foundation of Christianity.

Whilst to the world at large Paul spoke in powerful kindling words, he also gave teachings to his intimate pupils which were transmitted first by word of mouth and then in writing, teachings that are connected with the name of Dionysius, who was known as Dionysius “The Areopagite.” We have here to do with something founded by Saint Paul himself, wherein was proclaimed the deepest wisdom. These teachings of Saint Paul were written down for the first time in the sixth century, in the writings of the so-called Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not so much the historical fact, but the content of these documents which is of interest for us.

An esoteric Christianity does exist. This is not admitted in certain circles, with the result that a peculiar place has been assigned to the Saint John Gospel. The Saint John Gospel is looked upon by theologians as a book which emanated out of poetic genius. They have however no understanding for what the Saint John Gospel means.

Whereas the three other evangelists relate the exoteric. Saint John relates what he experiences as an initiated seer, who could look into the Spiritual worlds. The writer of the Saint John Gospel wrote from the point of view of an initiate. Whoever looks upon it as a book that one should read and understand in the same way as one reads and understands any other book knows nothing of the Saint John Gospel. He alone has knowledge of it who can experience it. Most translators do not render the Spirit of it at all.

The first words of this Gospel, rightly translated, sound as follows:

1. In the primeval beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and with God was the Word.

2. The same was in the primeval beginning with God.

3. All things were made by Him, and without Him was not anything made that was made.

4. In Him was the Life and the Life was the Light of men.

5. And the Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not.

6. There was a man sent from God whose name was John.

7. The same came for a witness to bear witness of the Light, that all might believe on it.

8. He was not the Light, but a witness of the Light.

9. For the true Light which lighteth every man, was to come into the world.

10. It was in the world, and the world was made by It, but the world knew It not.

11. It came into each individual man (even into the ‘I’ man It came) but the individual man (the ‘I’ man) did not receive It.

12. Those who did receive It, through It they could reveal themselves as Children of God.

13. They who trusted in His Name were not born of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of human will, but of God.

14. And the Word became Flesh and dwelt among us and we have heard His Teaching, the Teaching of the only Son of the Father, filled with Grace and Truth.

These words with their mighty content—one should not take them and speculate over them, but rather allow them to work upon one in the same manner as countless human beings have done through the centuries. Early in the morning when the soul was still virginal, they have let these words resound in their soul, up to the passage: “And the Word become Flesh and lived among us ...” as above.

When a man does this day by day, then something shows itself in the soul which gives him new life, he is reborn, he is spiritually transformed. He sees around him a spiritual world of which he had previously no idea.

Everyone who takes the first verses of the Saint John Gospel and lets them work upon him for the education and training of his soul, experiences the Saint John Gospel itself in mighty pictures.

There before his spiritual sight stands John the Baptist, as he baptises the Christ; there he sees the picture of Nicodemus, as he has his conversation with the Christ. He sees how Christ cleanses the Temple, he has before him all the following scenes of the Saint John Gospel, he experiences the “stations” from the thirteenth chapter onwards.

In order for the pupil to receive aright the influence of these words and find the ‘word’ which is proclaimed by the Saint John Gospel, the teacher spoke as follows: “Thou must fill thy soul for weeks at a time with this one feeling. Think of the plant. It is rooted in the dead stone. If it had consciousness, it would have to bow down to the dead stone and say to it: ‘Without thee I could not live; out of thee I drew nourishment and strength: I owe to thee my being, I thank thee.’ The animal would have to speak in similar words to the plant: ‘Without thee I could not live, I incline myself towards thee in thankfulness, because out of thee I draw that which I require for my existence.’ And it is the same with all the kingdom. Man, who has attained to a higher stage of evolution, must also bow down, as the plant to the stone, to those who work for him, and thank them.” He who would become a Christian Initiate must develop this feeling during a period of many weeks—the feeling that he owes gratitude to him who stands beneath him. Then he experiences in the spirit the thirteenth chapter of the Saint John Gospel where this feeling is given sublime and eternal expression by Christ in the Washing of the Feet. Christ means to say: “Without you I could not be, I incline myself to you as the plant to the stone.” As an outer symbol the Initiate experienced at this stage a feeling as if water were flowing around his feet. It continued for a long time.

When he had gone through this, the Christian Mystic could experience the next stage of initiation. For this he must cultivate the power to endure all the storms and stresses of life. Then he experienced a second picture. He saw himself scourged, and could feel in his own body something like pain at certain points. This went on for many weeks. He experienced the scourging.

Now he could rise to the third stage. The teacher said to him: “Thou must cultivate a feeling which can endure that all thou holdest highest should be treated with scorn and derision.” The scorn and derision must be for him nothing, in comparison with his own inner strength and certainty. Then the pupil experienced two symptoms of Christian initiation. He experienced the crowning with thorns; spiritually he saw himself with the crown of thorns and experienced a kind of pain in the head which is the sign of this stage of initiation. Afterwards, as a fourth experience he had to develop the feeling that his body was no more for him than any other object in the world. He carried the body with him only as an instrument. In many Mystery-schools one learned to accustom oneself to speak in the following way: “My body goes through the door,” and so on. In this way the mystic experienced in himself the Crucifixion. He saw himself crucified. The outer symbol was that during the meditation stigmata appeared at the places of the wounds of Christ—in the hands, in the feet and in the right side. This is the blood-trial of the Mystic, the fourth stage of initiation.

After this the pupil rose to the fifth station which is called the mystic death, a sublime experience of a spiritual nature, of which no more than an indication can be given. There are moments for a pupil when the whole of the physical world surrounds him as with a black veil. In these moments he learns to know the origins of evil. This was called the descent into hell. Then came a strange and wonderful feeling as if the whole curtain were torn asunder. The mystic death—followed by the mystic awakening!

The sixth stage is the so-called Laying in the Grave. All that the earth bears must become as precious to man as his own body. The physical body of man could not exist separated from the earth. If it were removed even a few miles from the earth it would wither, as the hand would wither when separated from the body. What my body is for my finger, that the earth is for men. The independence man attributes to himself is an illusion. And just as man is dependent physically on the earth, so is he dependent spiritually on the Spiritual World. When man comes to feel his unity with the whole planet—then is he “laid in the earth,” then does he undergo the “burial.”

Hereon follows the seventh stage, the “Resurrection” and the “Ascension.” Man experiences here the Eternal. This stage does not admit of description. The Egyptian Priests (who were also their Wise Men) did not make use of the symbols of writing to describe such things. The Mysteries must find a way to tell what cannot be expressed in words. Through the power and might, through the magical power of the Saint John Gospel itself, these things can be experienced.

Such an initiation is the initiation of the Son. It has only been possible since Christ came to earth. The outward Christ who walked in Palestine is related to the inward Christ whom the mystic experiences, as the sun is related to the eye. If there were no eye, then could the sun not be perceived. But the sun produced the eye. Where there is no light, the organ for the light is also lost. The eye was gradually created by the Sun. The eye was created for the light by the light, says Goethe. Whosoever allows the Saint John Gospel to work upon him, develops the inner eye. But, as without the sun the eye would never have come into being, so would spiritual seership never have been there if Christ, the Spiritual Sun, had not walked the earth in person. No Christianity without the personal Christ Jesus: that is the essential and all-important fact.

All other founders of religion could say of themselves: “I am the way and the truth.” All were teachers. Christianity has brought no new teaching. But that is not important. The important thing is that Christians feel themselves bound together with the personal Christ Jesus, as in a family. That is what matters—that He was there, and has lived and has said: “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”

Oriental teachers of religion have exoteric teaching and esoteric, in the same way as Christianity has. Christianity differs from them in that exoteric Christianity is more simple and popular, it speaks to the heart, to the feelings; while esoteric Christianity is essentially deeper than all oriental esoteric. The truth is, the Christian esotericism is the most profound which has ever been brought to mankind.

Christian esotericism was brought to the earth by that very Being Himself with whom one must be united. It is a question of belief in the divinity of Christ. In the ancient Mysteries one had to behold personally during the three days of initiation. What formerly was only present in the Mysteries—that is, in the Mysteries of the Spirit—has in Christianity become an historical fact. The events in Palestine are historical fact and at the same time symbol. Christianity is of such a nature that the simplest heart can grasp it; and yet the wisest man will never outgrow it. For the deepest teachings of Wisdom lie therein.

If we understand the Saint John Gospel as a Book of Life, so that we wish to live with it, and let it come to life within us, then we shall come to know esoteric Christianity. Such esoteric Christianity has always existed, it has always been active wherever Christianity has been able to manifest in a worthy and noble way, wherever Christianity has brought the blessings of culture and civilisation to mankind.

Into all those who had experienced union and fellowship with Christ Jesus there streamed such strength as enabled them to know that life will always gain the victory over death, and that death is never a reality.

Goethe said that the great World Powers invented death in order to have “much life” in the world. Christianity is a proof that there can arise in the soul a consciousness of the fact that Life is continually and always the Victor in the world.

Many of the things that have to be said on the subject of the connection of man's being with the universe must necessarily seem difficult and complicated. People may ask themselves: Whatever more is there to be said about the being of man? But the fact remains that the birth of the human being from the cosmos is an exceedingly complicated process and must in some way become intelligible to us.

In the present age above all, light must be thrown on this fact, because otherwise it would be too late. This is a grave statement but it must be made. At the present time human beings are living through incarnations in which they can get along without actually knowing very much about the complexities of the being of man. They can manage now without this knowledge but times will come when their souls will be incarnated again and when knowledge of these things will be absolutely essential. It will be a vital necessity for souls incarnated upon the earth to know in what sense the being of man is connected with the universe. Let me put it in this way: We ourselves are still living in an age when it is not as yet left entirely to the human being to hold together certain members of his being. In our time these members are held together without our intervention. Nowadays, easy-going minds can still speak with irritation about the complicated nature of anthroposophical wisdom. They can still keep reiterating that truth is always simple and that what is not simple is not the real ‘truth.’

On all sides we hear people saying this. But they say it under the influence of the Luciferic temptation and have no inkling of the fact that when they speak of this ‘simplicity of Truth’ they are clouding their minds and are altogether labouring under a delusion. Times will come when knowledge, and knowledge alone will enable man to hold together certain of the inner principles and members of his being. But the future has always to be prepared and it is the task of anthroposophical thought to prepare earthly culture and civilisation for that age in the future when the human being will have to know how to maintain the cohesion of the different parts of his being himself.

And now let us think of a fundamental truth to which reference has been made in recent lectures, namely, that man's being is essentially twofold. Man is a twofold being inasmuch as the structure and nature of his head differs essentially from the structure and nature of the rest of his organism. The head of a human being living at the present time is, in essentials, the product of the metaporphosis of the body of the preceding incarnation. The body of the present incarnation, that is to say, the body with the exclusion of the head, will become the head of the next incarnation, after we have lived through the period stretching from death to a new birth. We can therefore picture man's progress through incarnation as follows: He has his head, and the other part of his organism. After death we may say that the head disappears, and the rest of the body is then transformed into the head of the next incarnation. Once again he will receive the body of the next incarnation from the Earth. The head disappears, but when I say this, you must remember that it is the forces connected with the head that disappear. The substance of the head and of the rest of the body too also disappear, but the physical substance itself is not the essential. The substance is Maya in the real sense. The forces are the reality. The forces contained in the body of man, with the exclusion of those of the head, are transformed during the period between death and a new birth into the forces underlying the head of the new incarnation. In our present incarnation we have, in our head, the forces that were connected with our body in the previous incarnation. It is this basic idea which we have been considering in detail in recent lectures.

And now we will turn to certain other thoughts in order to understand these matters more fully.

To begin with, let us ask ourselves: By what means are the forces contained in our present body transformed in such a way that they can become a head in the next incarnation? At the outset it is difficult to conceive of the body being transformed into a head. What is it, exactly, that makes this transformation possible? That is the question we must ask ourselves.

In order to answer this question we must think about what has been said in many lectures on the subject of the nature of cognition, of knowledge, of truth, of wisdom. In the ordinary way we imagine that the only purpose of the knowledge we acquire is to enable us to have mental pictures of the external world, to know something about the external world. There are philosophical psychologists who are constantly bringing forward theories about the mysterious connection that exists between the nature of a concept or an idea and the object that is pictured by the idea. These theories all suffer from one common error. I can only make this error clear to you by means of a picture. Suppose a botanist or an horticulturist wished to make investigations into the nature of a grain of wheat. He would probably say to himself: ‘I will use chemistry and investigate the grain of wheat from the point of view of the food-value of wheatmeal. I will try to find out the constituents that are required for man's nourishment.’ He would, in other words, be investigating the nature of the grain of wheat from the point of view of wheat as a means of nourishment. He would be trying to discover the reason why certain constituents are contained in the wheat. Anyone who imagines that it is possible to find out something about the real nature of wheat by investigating to what extent it is valuable as a foodstuff, would be making a curious mistake. A grain of wheat comes into existence in the whole sphere of plant life as the fruit of the wheat-plant and we can only discover why the nature of the grain is as it is, by studying the process of the growth of a new wheat-plant out of the grain. The fact that a grain of wheat contains constituents of nutritive value for the human being, is an entirely secondary consideration so far as the real nature of the grain is concerned. Those who look at everything merely from the utilitarian standpoint and want to make this the essential aim of science will investigate the grain of wheat from the chemical point of view and find that here we have in Nature something that is of value as a foodstuff. But this has nothing whatever to do with the innermost purpose of the grain of wheat. If it were possible to ask the grain of wheat what its innermost and primary purpose is, it would not answer that it is there in order to nourish human beings but rather in order to make it possible for a new wheat plant to come into existence.

To those who have real knowledge of these things, the philosophers and theorists are exactly like men who investigate a grain of wheat from the point of view of its value in the nourishment of human beings. There is a fundamental error here. The primary purpose of what lives within us in the form of knowledge, idea, truth, wisdom, is not that of enabling us to form mental pictures of the things of the external world. The process of forming mental pictures of the external world is just as secondary a purpose of knowledge as it is a secondary purpose of the grain of wheat to nourish human beings. Knowledge lives within us for another purpose altogether. It is there primarily in order that it may work and weave in our being. During our life between birth and death we accumulate wisdom, little by little. And at the same time we apply the wisdom thus accumulated in such a way that it can mirror the external world, just as we use grains of wheat for the purpose of nourishment. But remember, every time we use grains of wheat for food, we are depriving them of their essential and original purpose, namely that of bringing forth a new plant. In the same way, the wisdom we apply to the grasping of the world outside is a deviation from the real task of wisdom. It is a deviation because the forces of the True, the forces of Knowledge are not primarily there for this purpose.

What, then, is the function and purpose of what we call the True?—I mean, in the sense in which the primary purpose of the grain of wheat is to bring a new plant into being? The primary purpose of the forces of Knowledge within us, of our efforts to get hold of truth, is to develop forces within us between birth and death whereby our organism will be transformed after death—that is to say, the forces underlying the body in this incarnation, for it is these forces that will be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. This is the remarkable connection which becomes clear to us when we study the existence of the human being on the one side between birth and death and on the other side between death and a new birth. The knowledge we acquire serves to make it possible for the body to be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. You will say: ‘Yes, but there are so many who acquire no knowledge at all, who remain simpletons all their life, only a very few have really learnt anything.’ And those who make this remark generally include themselves among these few! But remember, several thinkers have rightly said, quite independently of each other, that during the first three or four years of life the human being learns more, assimilates more wisdom than in the three years spent in later life at the university. This is literally true. In the first three years of life we learn a very great deal; we learn what can only be learnt on Earth, namely the knowledge that is essential in order to be able to speak, to understand what is spoken, and a great deal more besides. In those first three years we learn very much, and what we thus learn forms part of what is known as the substance or content of wisdom.

This wisdom that is innate in man and in respect to which human beings do not differ so very much from one another—this wisdom is the weaving force which transforms our organism into a head during the period lying between death and a new birth. It is, as a matter of fact, an exceedingly intricate complex of forces that we take into our being in our life of knowledge and cognition. It is only now and then in dreams that human beings have a fleeting vision of what is weaving and surging between the ideal and inner pictures of which they are fully conscious. The forces that are weaving and working in us in this realm of our being will begin to manifest in their essential form after death and to transform our organism. Everything that is acquired in the way of knowledge accumulates for the purpose of transforming our organism—everything, that is to say, with the exception of the knowledge we apply in order to grasp the external world. The forces of knowledge we apply in order to grasp and comprehend the external world are lost, in a certain respect, so far as our own evolution is concerned. They are diverted from the onward stream of evolution. Just as the grains of wheat that are used as food for human beings are diverted from the stream of wheat-development taken as a whole, so, during our present epoch of civilisation, when knowledge is so universally applied for the purpose of grasping the phenomena of the outer world, we divert from the stream of our evolution, many more forces than we retain.

And now think of the days of antiquity, when man's knowledge was acquired through faculties of inner clairvoyance. Man did not then expend his forces upon the outer world to anything like the same extent. The people of ancient Egypt and ancient Chaldea acquired their knowledge through atavistic clairvoyance and not nearly so much by observation of the external world. Our own age is, in a sense, exactly the opposite in this respect. Nowadays a very great deal of knowledge is absorbed from the world outside and very little is added from the inner being of man. The Greeks were the outstanding example of the ‘golden mean’ in this respect. That they were able to hold this ‘golden mean’ was not due alone to their special qualities. They did, of course, possess these special qualities, but the self-contained glory of their civilisation was also due to the fact that the area of the Earth inhabited by the Greek people was relatively small. Moreover they had comparatively little knowledge of the rest of the world. What knowledge had the Greeks of countries other than Asia Minor and a little further Eastwards into Asia? They knew little of Africa and of America, and of the rest of the Earth they knew absolutely nothing at all. Plato's knowledge concerning the inner nature of the Good and the function of certain inner parts of the human organism was very largely due to the limited area of the world to which Greek knowledge could be applied. For this reason it was possible in Greece to preserve man's spiritual forces for the purpose of his inner development. But even the Greeks applied less of their powers for the purpose of inner development than the ancient Egyptian and Chaldean peoples—not to speak of the ancient Persians and Indians. In our age, when practically the whole Earth has been explored, everyone is bent upon acquiring as much knowledge of the external world as he possibly can! If all this knowledge of the external world were as intensive as it extensive then people would have very few powers left over for the work of transforming the physical body into the head of the next incarnation. And the most learned would have far fewer powers than the simple peasants! One can only be thankful that when the majority of people travel about the world today, they are content with simply turning over the pages of Baedeker or some other book of travel, and really do not take in very much! So you see, they are not, after all, depriving themselves of very much inner power; If it were otherwise, those human beings who are always hunting for sensation, who only want to get their knowledge from the outside world, would be facing a grave danger. The danger would be that in their next incarnation they would return with a head produced from a body that had undergone very little transformation. The head would be exceedingly animal-like in appearance. This is bound to happen, when, in the previous incarnation, comparatively few formative forces were preserved for the work of transformation.

Analogies which are taken from the realm of Imagination, my dear friends, can be multiplied over and over again. And now let us ask ourselves a question. we have heard that the powers we apply in order to build up a science of the outer world, are diverted from their primary, original purpose—just as the grain of wheat that is used as substance for nourishment is diverted from its primary purpose as wheat. What analogy is there between the acquisition of knowledge of the outer world and the use of wheat as a foodstuff for human beings? There is an inner analogy here which we must try to discover.

Consider once more the curious fact that numbers and numbers of grains of wheat do not go to the producing of new wheat plants but are given over to the purpose of supplying human beings with food. These grains of wheat, as we have heard, are diverted from their direct line of evolution as grains of wheat. Some grains of wheat, on the other hand, bring forth other grains of wheat, and these again others. But numberless grains of wheat are split off, as it were, and diverted to another sphere of activity altogether. They are used for the purpose of food for human beings and this has nothing directly to do with the onward course of their own stream of evolution.

Nature herself will help us here to understand something which it is most essential to bear in mind if we wish to unfold a true picture of the world. Modern science has little by little instilled into us the dreadful maxim that the later is invariably to be regarded as a product of what has preceded it. Effect follows directly upon cause—so it is said. There is nothing more foolish than to generalise in this way about things in the world, saying that effect directly follows cause, and that cause gives rise to effect. There are always subsequent effects which have no direct connection whatever with a preceding cause. For how can it possibly be said that the cause of wheat being used as a foodstuff lies in the grain of wheat itself? It is true that during the 18th century a loose kind of thinking led people to explain the presence of certain cork-like substances for the ultimate purpose of producing corks for champagne bottles! It is impossible to imagine a more erroneous line of reasoning. The truth is that when wheat is used as a foodstuff, the grains of wheat pass over into another sphere of working altogether.

Now it is exactly the same with the knowledge we acquire about the things of the outer world, of outer Nature. The knowledge we thus acquire passes over into a different sphere of working. I beg you to take this truth in the deepest earnestness. In our efforts to understand the outer world it is possible for us to deprive ourselves of many of the forces that are necessary to the process of the transformation of our present body into the head of the next incarnation. As we acquire knowledge of the outer world, we deprive our being of a very great deal, and an adjustment must be brought about by providing that this knowledge passes over into another sphere. Just as the grains of wheat receive in a sense a nobler function when they are used as foodstuff for human beings, just as they receive compensation in this way for having been diverted from their original evolution, so too, knowledge of the outer world must be given over to a nobler purpose as compensation for having been deprived of its primary function. All the truth that a human being makes his own, all the knowledge he acquired of the outer world must be given into the hands of the Gods. We ought always to be inwardly conscious that the knowledge thus diverted from the onward stream of evolution must be placed in the service of the Gods, must, as it were, become an act of divine worship. All the knowledge we acquire without making it a holy offering to the evolutionary process of humanity, without consciously offering it to those Higher Spirits who receive their nourishment from it—all the knowledge we receive without thought of giving it over to this higher purpose, is like the grains of wheat which fall into the soil and decay—fulfilling neither their original purpose nor the other purpose of serving as nourishment for human beings.

At this point, my dear friends, we must surely realise how essential it is that a definite and absolutely practical result shall emerge from our strivings in the domain of Spiritual Science. It is not a question merely of learning the teachings of Spiritual Science, nor of making them into a body of knowledge, but of receiving them in such a way that a fundamental feeling is laid into the soul. We must associate with the acquisition of knowledge the realisation that this knowledge must be an act of divine worship and that it is a transgression against the divine purpose of evolution to profane knowledge, to divert it from its divine mission.

As I have said, the possibility of amassing a great deal of knowledge of the external world has arisen for the first time in the modern age. Among the Egyptians it was nearly all an inner and not an external form of knowledge. During the Graeco-Latin epoch of civilisation it became possible to acquire more knowledge of the outer world and at that very time it was also made possible for man to discover how they might place their knowledge in the service of the Divine, by the coming of Christ with His message to the Earth.

Here again is a connection which history makes clear to us. At the very moment in the evolution of humanity when knowledge became preeminently a knowledge of the external world—at that very moment the Christ came down from the spiritual world and enabled those men who directed their knowledge to Him in the true sense, to place it in the service of the Divine. It is quite true that this feeling has not as yet developed in humanity to any great extent, but as human beings begin to understand the sense in which Christ has made the Earth holy, they will also learn how to place their knowledge in the service of the Divine.

And so a small store of the forces connected with the head is preserved in order that our body may be transformed into the head of the next incarnation. And if the remaining forces are accompanied by the right kind of feeling, they can become the means of nourishing higher Spiritual Beings. Our concepts become food for these higher Spiritual Beings. In other words, we must try to acquire knowledge for the sake of the Gods, just as wheat also grows in order that human beings may find nourishment.

The substance which man receives as nourishment, however, must be for him. And in the same way, our knowledge must be rendered fit for the Gods by our attitude towards it. Indeed the healthy evolution of mankind depends very largely upon whether this kind of feeling is developed.

In the ancient Mysteries and Mystery Schools, knowledge was kept holy as a matter of course. One of the main reasons why everyone was not admitted to the Mysteries was that whoever sought admittance must prove that to him knowledge was really a holy thing, conceived as an offering to the Gods. Moreover this feeling was actually present. It was born from an atavistic instinct in man. In our own day this feeling is something that we must acquire once again. For good reason, human beings have been living through an age during which they have grown into materialism. But they must heal themselves of this materialism by associating their knowledge once again with the feelings that it must be offered up to the Gods. In the future ahead of us, however, this attitude will have to be acquired consciously and the only possibility of fulfillment will be if Spiritual Science grows and spreads among humanity. Knowledge must not be like a grain of wheat which falls into the Earth and decays. Knowledge that is placed only in the service of outer utility, in the service of mechanical, utilitarian purposes in the outer world—such knowledge is like the seeds which decay. Knowledge that is not placed in the service of the Divine, disappears and is lost. It can be used neither for the purpose of helping us in our next incarnation, nor for the nourishment of higher Spiritual Beings. The decay of a grain of wheat is a very real process. The dissipation of knowledge that is not made into an offering to the Gods is also a real process. It would lead too far afield to-day if I were to tell you what is really signified by the decay of the numberless grains of wheat that are sown in the soil. But Knowledge that is not placed in the service of the Divine is seized by Ahriman. It passes into his service and constitutes his power. Through the Spiritual Beings who are his servants, Ahriman then incorporates it into the world-process and sets up more hindrances to this world process than are justifiably and of necessity there. For Ahriman is the God of hindrances.

In this way, then, I have given you some idea of the significance of all that lives in our being in the form of knowledge and of truth.

If we wish to know the nature of the spiritual forces powers active in the different kingdoms of nature in the heavenly bodies, we must first become acquainted with these spiritual beings themselves, as we have already begun to do in the three lectures which have been given. We tried to characterise the so-called nature-spirits, and then ascended to the beings which stand immediately above man and which we can find in the higher world to our own. We will continue these considerations to-day, and must therefore link them to what has already been said on the way in which we can link ourselves to the beings of the Third Hierarchy. As shown in the last lecture, it is possible for man to rise above himself, to subdue all his own special ego interests in order, by that means, to rise into a sphere which he first of all finds his own guide, who can give him some idea of those beings called, in the sense of western esotericism, Angels, Angeloi.

We then pointed out how further progress along the path leads to knowledge of the Folk or Nation-Spirits, of whom we have spoken as Archangels, Archangeloi; and how, in the course of cultural civilisation we find the so-called Spirits of the Age, the Archai. If a man follows the path roughly indicated yesterday, he gains a certain feeling of what is meant by these beings of Third Hierarchy, but even if he goes through an occult development, he will for a long time only have a sort of feeling. Only if he goes in patience and persevere through all the feelings and perceptions mentioned yesterday, can he pass over to what may be called clairvoyant vision of the beings of the Third Hierarchy. If, therefore, we progress further along this way, we shall find that gradually we educate ourselves, developing in ourselves a different state of consciousness, and then we can begin to have a clairvoyant consciousness of the beings of the Third Hierarchy. When a man follows this way further he will find that he gradually trains himself to another condition of consciousness and that then a clairvoyant perception of the Third Hierarchy can begin.

This other condition of consciousness can be compared with the sleep of man, because in this condition a man with his ego and his astral body feels freed from his physical and etheric bodies. We must have a perception of this feeling of freedom. We must gradually learn what it means not to see with our eyes, hear with our ears, or think with our intellect, which is connected with the brain. Again, we must distinguish this condition from that of ordinary sleep, inasmuch as in it we are not unconscious, for we have perceptions of the spiritual beings in our environment;—at first, only dimly sensing them, and then, as has been described, clairvoyant consciousness lights up within us, and we get a living view of the beings of the Third Hierarchy and of their off-spring, the nature-spirits. If we wish to describe this condition more accurately, we may say that he who raises himself through occult development to this condition actually perceives a sort of demarcation between his ordinary consciousness and this new condition of consciousness. Just as we can distinguish between waking and sleeping, so to him who has gone through occult development, there is at first a distinction between the consciousness in which he sees with his ordinary eyes, hears with his ordinary ears, and thinks with the ordinary intellect—and that clairvoyant condition in which he has nothing at all around him of what he perceives in the normal consciousness, but has instead another world around him, the world of the Third Hierarchy and its offspring. The first achievement is learning to remember in ordinary consciousness what one has experienced in this other condition of consciousness. Thus we can accurately distinguish a certain stage in the occult development of man, when he can live alternately in his ordinary consciousness, when he sees, hears, and thinks like other men, and in the other condition of consciousness which he can, in a sense, produce voluntarily, and in which he perceives what is around him in the spiritual world of the Third Hierarchy. And then just as we remember a dream, so can he, in his ordinary consciousness, remember what he experienced in the other, the clairvoyant condition. He can talk about it, can translate into ordinary conceptions and ideas what he experiences in the clairvoyant state. Thus if a seer in his ordinary condition of consciousness, himself wishes to know something of the spiritual world, or to relate something about it, he must call to mind what he experienced in the other, the clairvoyant conditions of consciousness. A clairvoyant having reached this stage of development, can only know something of those beings whom we have described as the beings of the Third Hierarchy and their offspring; he can at first know nothing of higher worlds. If he wishes to know of these he must attain a still higher stage of clairvoyant vision

This higher stage is reached by continually practicing those exercises described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and How to Attain It and especially going through those exercises there described as the observation—let us say—of the plant, of the animal, etc. If a man continues his exercises in this way, he attains a higher stage of clairvoyance. This consists not only in his having two alternate conditions of consciousness and being able to remember his clairvoyant experiences in the normal condition; but having attained this higher stage of clairvoyance, he can also perceive spiritual worlds, spiritual beings and spiritual facts when in his ordinary condition of consciousness, looking at the things of the external world through his eyes. He can then, so to speak, carry his clairvoyant vision over into his ordinary consciousness, and can see behind the beings around him in the external world, the spiritual beings and forces everywhere more deeply concealed, as though behind a veil.

We may ask: “What has happened to a clairvoyant, who is able not merely to remember the experiences of another condition of consciousness, but who can have clairvoyant experiences in his own everyday consciousness?” If a man has only ascended to the first stage, he can only make use of his astral body in order to look into the spiritual world. Thus the body which a man makes use of at the first stage of clairvoyance is the astral body; at the second stage of clairvoyance which has just been described, he learns to make use of his etheric body. By means of this he can even in ordinary, normal consciousness, look into the spiritual world. If a man learns to use his etheric body in this way as an instrument for clairvoyance, he gradually learns to perceive everything in the spiritual world belonging to the beings of the Second Hierarchy.

Now, however, the clairvoyant must not stand still here, only perceiving his own etheric body, so to speak; but on attaining this second stage of clairvoyance he has a very definite experience. He has the experience of seeming to go out of himself, and as it were, of no longer feeling enclosed within his skin. When he—let us say—encounters a plant or an animal, or even another human being he feels as if a part of himself were within the other being; he feels as if immersed in the other being. In normal consciousness and even when we have reached the first stage of clairvoyance, we can still say, in a certain sense, “I am here; and that being which I see is there.” At the second stage of clairvoyance, we can no longer say this; we can only say, “Where that being is which I perceive, there am I myself.” It is as though our etheric body stretched out tentacles on all sides and drew us within the beings into which we, perceiving them, plunge our own being. There is a feeling belonging to our ordinary normal consciousness which can give us an idea of this clairvoyant experience; only, what the clairvoyant of the second stage experiences is infinitely more intense than a feeling; it amounts to a perception, an understanding of, an immersion in another being. The feeling to which I refer, which can be compared to this experience of the clairvoyant, is sympathy, love. What does it really imply when we feel sympathy and love in ordinary life? If we ponder more closely on the nature of sympathy and love—this was slightly touched upon yesterday—we find that sympathy and love cause us to detach ourselves from ourselves and to pass over into the life of the other being. It is truly a wonderful mystery of human life, that we are able to feel sympathy and love. There is scarcely anything among the ordinary phenomena of normal consciousness which can so convince man of the divinity of existence, as the possibility of developing love and sympathy. As human beings we experience our existence in our own selves; and we experience the world by perceiving it with our senses or grasping it with our reason. It is not possible for any intellect, for any eye, to look into the human heart, to gaze into the human soul; for the soul of another keeps enclosed in its innermost chamber what it has within it of joy or sorrow, and truly it should appear as a wonderful mystery to anyone, that he can, as it were, pour himself into the being of other souls—live in their life and share their joys and sorrows. So just as we with our normal consciousness can by means of sympathy and love plunge into the sorrows and joys of conscious beings, so does the clairvoyant learn, at the second stage of clairvoyance, not only to plunge into everything conscious, into everything that can suffer and rejoice in a human way or in a manner resembling the human; he learns to plunge into everything that is alive. Mark well, I say everything living;—for at this second stage one only learns to plunge into living things, not yet into that which is without life or which appears lifeless, dead, and which we see around as a mineral kingdom. But this immersing oneself into living things is connected with a view of what goes on in the inner nature of those beings. We feel ourselves there, within the living beings; we learn to live with the plants, the animals, and with other human beings, at this second stage of clairvoyance. But not only this; we also learn to recognize behind all living things a higher spiritual world, the beings of the Second Hierarchy. It is necessary that we should form a clear idea of these connections for if one only enumerated what sort of beings belonged to the various hierarchies that would seem but a dry theory. We can only gain a living idea of what lives and weaves behind the sense-world if we know the path by which clairvoyant consciousness penetrates it.

Now, beginning once more from man, we will try to describe the beings of the Second Hierarchy. We saw yesterday, that the beings of the Third Hierarchy are characterised by the fact that in place of human perception, they have manifestation of their own being, and instead of human inner life they have what we may call “being filled with the spirit.” In the beings of the Second Hierarchy we experience when we plunge into them, that not only is their perception a manifestation of their being, not only do they manifest their own being, but that this manifestation remains, as something independent, which separates from these beings themselves. We can gain an idea of what we thus perceive if we think of a snail, which separates off its own shell. The shell—so we understand—consists of a substance which is at first contained in the body of the snail. The snail then detaches it. Not only does the snail manifest its own being externally, but detaches something which then becomes objective and remains. So it is with the actual nature, with the selfhood of the beings of the Second Hierarchy. Not only do they manifest their self-hood as do the beings of the Third Hierarchy, but they detach it from themselves, so that it remains as an independent being. This will be clearer to us, if we picture on the one hand, a being of the Third Hierarchy, and on the other hand a being of the Second Hierarchy. Let us direct our occult vision to a being of the Third Hierarchy. We recognize this being as such because it manifests its selfhood, its inner life externally, and in this manifestation it has its perception; but if it were to change its inner perception, its inner experience, the outer manifestation would also be different. As the inner condition of these beings of the Third Hierarchy changes, and their experiences vary, so do the external manifestations continually change. But if you look at a being of the Second Hierarchy with occult vision, it is quite different. These beings also perceive and experience inwardly; but what they experience is detached from them like a sort of shell or skin; it acquires independent existence. If the being of the Second Hierarchy then passes on into another inner condition, has a different perception and manifests in a new way, the old manifestation of the being will still exist; it still remains and does not pass away, as in the case of a being of the Third Hierarchy. So then, what appears in the place of manifestation in a being of the Second Hierarchy, we can call a self-creation, a sort of shell or skin; it creates, as it were, an impression of itself, makes itself objective, in a sort of image. That is what distinguishes the beings of the Second Hierarchy. And if we ask ourselves what appears in these beings in the place of the “being filled with the spirit” of the beings of the Third Hierarchy, it is shown to occult vision that every time the being detaches such a picture, or image of itself, life is stimulated. The stimulation of life is always the result of such a self-creation.

Thus, in the beings of the Third Hierarchy we must distinguish their external life in their manifestation, and their inner life in their “being filled with spirit.” In the beings of the Second Hierarchy we must distinguish their external side as a creating of themselves, a making of themselves objective in images, in pictures; and their inner activity as the stimulation of life, as if fluidity continually rippled in itself and congealed as it detached its image externally. This approximately represents to occult vision the external and internal fulfilment of the beings of the Second Hierarchy. Whilst to occult vision the “being filled with the spirit” of the beings of the Third Hierarchy appears in picture and imagination, as a sort of spiritual light, so is the fluidic life, the stimulation of life which is connected with an external separation, perceived in such a way that occult perception hears something like spiritual tone, the Music of the Spheres. It is like spiritual sound, not spiritual light as in the case of the Third Hierarchy.

Now in these beings of the Second Hierarchy we can distinguish several categories just as we did among the beings of the Third Hierarchy. To distinguish between these categories will be more difficult, for the higher we ascend the more difficult it becomes. We must in the course of our ascent, first of all gain some idea of all that underlies the world surrounding us, in so far as the world around us has forms. I have already said that as regards this second stage of clairvoyance, we need only consider that which lives, not that which appears to us lifeless. What lives comes into consideration, but what lives has in the first place, form. Plants have forms, animals have forms, man has a form. If clairvoyant vision is directed with all the qualities described to-day, to everything around us in nature which has form, and if we look away from all the other parts of the being and only see the forms, considering among the plants the multiplicity of the forms, as also in the animals and in man, this clairvoyant vision then perceives from the totality of the beings of the Second Hierarchy those which we call the Spirits of Form— the Exusiai. We can, however, turn our attention to something besides the form in the beings around us in nature. We know indeed, that everything which lives changes its form, in a certain respect, as it grows. This change, this alteration of form, this metamorphosis, strikes us more particularly in the plant-world. Now if we direct, not the ordinary vision but the clairvoyant vision of the second stage, to the growing plant-world, we see how the plant gradually gains its form, how it passes from the form of the root to the form of the leaf, to the form of the flower, to the form of the fruit. If we look at the growing animal, at the growing man, we do not merely consider a form as it exists at a given moment, we see the growth of the living being. If we allow ourselves to be stimulated by this contemplation of the growth of the living being; reflecting how the forms change, how they are in active metamorphosis—then, the clairvoyant vision of the second stage becomes aware of what we call the category of the Spirits of Motion—Dynamis.

It is still more difficult to consider a third category of such beings of the Second Hierarchy. For we must consider neither the form as such, nor the changes of form, nor the movement; but that which is expressed in the form. We can describe how a man may train himself to this. Of course it does not suffice to train the ordinary normal consciousness in such a way as has just been described, he must he helped by the use of the other exercises which raise man to occult vision. He must perform these; and not educate himself by means of his ordinary consciousness but by clairvoyant consciousness. This must first train itself as to how man himself becomes, in his outer form, the expression of his inner being. As we have said, that can also be done by the normal consciousness, but in that way one would attain to nothing but conjecture, a supposition of what may lie behind the bearing, gestures, and the facial expression of the human being. But when the clairvoyant vision which has already been trained to the second stage of clairvoyance, allows the physiognomy, gestures, and facial expression in man to work upon him, it produces stimulations through which he can gradually train himself to observe the beings of the third category of the Second Hierarchy. But this cannot take place—please take note of this—if he merely observes the gestures, imitative expression, and physiognomy of man; if he remains at this stage very little can really be gained. He must pass on—occult education is carried on in this most rational way in this realm—he must pass over to the plants. The animals can be left out, it is not very important to study them, but after one has trained oneself a little, clairvoyantly, to learn the inner being of his soul from a man's physiognomy and gestures; it is important to turn to the plant-world and educate oneself further by means of this. Here someone clairvoyantly trained can have very remarkable experiences; he will feel profoundly the difference between the leaf of a plant which—let us say—runs to a point (diagram a.) and the leaf of a plant which has this form (diagram b.); between a blossom which grows upwards in this way (c.) and one which opens outwards. (d.) (See Figure 2) A whole world of difference appears in the inner experience if one directs the occult vision of the second stage to a lily or to a tulip, if one lets either a panicle of oats or a wheat or barley stalk work upon one.

You can realise from this that only to the occult vision of the second stage are those beings which we call the group-souls, actually perceptible. Only for those occultly developed individuals who can extend their own etheric body as tentacles, is it possible to know the beings of the Second Hierarchy and also the group-soul-beings which exist in the various kingdoms of Nature. Still more difficult is the ascent to the beings of the First Hierarchy, and to those beings which are their offspring in the kingdoms of nature. We shall speak further about these in the next lecture.

It is natural, though it is usually ignored by science, that man as he is simply cannot know one part of his being. As he looks out upon the world it shows itself, roughly expressed, as an ascending scale from the mineral kingdom through the plant and animal kingdoms up to man. It goes without saying that man must assume some creative force behind all the forms he perceives around him in the kingdoms of nature. The point is, however, that man gains knowledge of the world he lives in just because the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms are outside him and he can observe them. As to all man has within himself, however, he can only gain knowledge of that insofar as the same forces are at work in him as are active in the three kingdoms of nature outside him. The forces active within him which transcend those three kingdoms he cannot know by the usual methods of knowing nature—not in the least. It is just what man has within himself over and above the kingdoms of nature that enables him to build up systematically a knowledge of those kingdoms outside him. Just as little as the eye, whose purpose it is to see outwardly, can see itself, just so little can man gain knowledge of what in himself is there in order that he may acquire knowledge. This is a very simple idea, but sound.

It is impossible for the eye to see itself because it is there to see out, and it is impossible for those forces in man that are there to acquire outer knowledge, to acquire knowledge of themselves. Further, it is these very forces that represent what it is in man that makes him something more than an animal. Materialistic Darwinism disposes of this fact easily by simply leaving out of account the fact that this special human power of acquiring knowledge itself cannot be known by man's usual instrument for knowledge. Recognizing that this power is unknowable, science denies its existence and accordingly considers man only insofar as he is still animal. You see on what the peculiar fallacy, the illusion of materialistic Darwinism rests. Man cannot know in himself those forces that are the actual means of knowledge. But the eye can see another eye, and for this reason, other things being equal, it can believe in itself. With the faculty of knowledge this is not the case. It would be logically possible for a man to confront another man and perceive in him the knowing faculty that raises him above animals. Logically, that is. But even that is actually impossible, for the very reasons implied in what we have described previously about the effects of thinking.

What does ordinary knowledge involve in the external world? We saw that it involves a perpetual destruction of the nerve structures in the brain. This is an actual external process. The creative forces on the other hand—those that really distinguish man from the animal—cannot develop at all in our waking life when we normally acquire knowledge. In this life they must behave so as not to interfere with the wearing away of the nerve structures. Therefore in waking life these forces are at rest. They sleep.

We have recognized a great truth if we can thoroughly enter into the thought that all that would have to be known to realize the full fallacy of materialistic Darwinism, even on the physical plane, is actually asleep in our waking life; that what raises man above the animal is at rest and a destructive process is taking place. The creative forces that bring forth the animal organism are not so far perfected as those at work in the organism of man. In our waking life the latter are inactive, and the process that takes their place is perpetually destroying just what in man transcends the animal. These very creative forces are destroyed during waking life. They are not present at all, but during sleep they appear and begin building up again what has been destroyed. These creative forces that raise man above the animal can really be perceived in a sleeping man. So we should have to say that whatever it is that repairs in sleeping man the forces he spends in his waking life, must be the forces that raise him above the animals.

These forces are still unknown to external natural science, which is only beginning to surmise them. Science, however, is on the way and one day will reveal these forces by purely external methods. Indeed, there are already exceptions to the statement that the forces leading man out beyond the animal nature are ordinarily unobservable in him. When science once learns to distinguish these forces in man it will discover in the sleeping human body the physical evidence of man's transcending the animal kingdom. When it distinguishes the regenerative forces in man from what is present in the animal kingdom also, it will recognize how the creative forces active in the earth's life to raise man beyond the animal are awake only when man sleeps. From all this we can gather that in self-knowledge man's creative forces, the real human forces, can only be perceived by man when he becomes clairvoyant during sleep; that is, when in a condition otherwise like sleep he awakes clairvoyantly. In the fifth lecture we already indicated this fact.

Today I have said that to some extent, from the processes observable in sleeping man, science will after a time find indications of the forces whereby man transcends the animal, but they will only be indications. These forces, when they appear to clairvoyant consciousness today, are seen to be of such a nature that they cannot be revealed externally to the senses in their true form. It will be possible to indicate their existence by deductions from scientific facts. Apart from their not being perceptible in their essence there is quite another reason why it will become possible to discover them if not to perceive them. These human creative forces have a very special relation to all the other forces of nature. We are here approaching a difficult subject, but it may be possible to make it clear in the following way.

Let us imagine we have here the receiver of an air-pump, say a glass bell-jar, and suppose we succeed in making a really perfect vacuum inside it. That is very nearly possible ordinarily. Everyone whose intellect is bound to the world of sense will now say, “Inside there is no air, only an empty space; we cannot go any farther, there cannot be less than no air inside.” Actually that is not true. We can pump until no air at all is left, then go on pumping until we get a space still more empty of air than a vacuum. People dependent on the material will find it difficult to imagine this “less than nothing.” Or, suppose you have ten shillings in your pocket. You can gradually spend them until you have nothing left. In this domain of life there is a real “less than nothing.” It is often one of the strongest realities—you can go into debt for a few shillings. In practical life less-than-nothing is often more intensely real than the reality of possession.

It is remarkable what things are sometimes accepted as axioms, as obvious truths. Thus, you can read in many Western philosophic books that there can nowhere be less than nothing, that there is no such thing. Even more, it is sometimes said that nothing itself cannot exist. Yet, what exists in our illustration about debt exists also in the universe. All philosophic dicta about “nothing,” however pretentious the form they take, are really rubbish. They are themselves a kind of ill-defined nothingness. It is true that the physical something that surrounds us can be reduced to nothing, and then still further to less than nothing. This “nothing” actually is a real factor on all sides. We must imagine the world that surrounds us, which we know in the forces of nature throughout the mineral, plant, and animal kingdoms, reduced down to nothing, then down to below nothing. Then it is that those forces arise that are creatively active in man when he sleeps. Natural science knows only the external side of these forces. In fact, it holds fast to a mere abstraction about them and therefore cannot enter into or appreciate them because ordinary science is to the reality in the forces of nature as the abstract number ten, for example, is to ten beans or ten apples. If we eliminate quality and say that all these are “ten” and nothing else, we are doing what natural science does, making no distinctions, touching only the surface of things. Suppose it gains the idea that regenerative forces must be present building up the organism again in sleep, then it will treat these forces as does a man who, when someone meets him saying, “I have fifteen shillings in my pocket,” replies, “Not so, you have fifteen.” The man leaves out of account the very thing that matters. Consequently science will confuse these forces with the ordinary natural laws, and will fail to recognize that higher laws are at work in them.

I mention all this to show what difficulties external science has and must have in getting to know the truth. It will draw certain conclusions and thus come near the truth. For some persons this will not be necessary, because science will gradually be supplemented by clairvoyant perception that does experience the difference between these forces and those active out in the three kingdoms of nature. At present I cannot deal fully with the superficial objection that animals also sleep. Such objections have little logical value but people do not notice it, nor their superficiality, for they judge according to concepts instead of the real nature of things. By introducing animal sleep into the argument one would speak the same fallacy as if someone were to say, “I sharpen my pencil with a knife and I also shave with a knife,” and another person replied, “That is impossible, knives are there to cut meat.” People are always making that kind of judgment. They think that a given thing must have the same function in different realms of nature. Sleep is an altogether different function in man from what it is in the animals.

I wanted to call your attention to forces at work in man's nature that we find at first in the regeneration of his organism as he sleeps. Now these forces are closely related to other forces, those that also develop in man with a certain unconsciousness. I mean the forces having to do with the propagation of the race. We know that up to a certain age man's consciousness is filled with a pure and straightforward unconsciousness of these forces; the innocence of childhood. Then at a certain age this consciousness awakens. From that time onward the human organism is permeated by an awareness of the forces afterward known as sensual sex-love.

What in earlier life lives as a sleeping force and only wakens with puberty, seen in its original and essential form is the very same as those forces that in sleep regenerate the outworn forces in man. Only they are hidden by the other parts of human nature in which they are mingled. Invisibly in man there are at work forces that can become capable of either good or evil only when they awaken, but that sleep, or at most dream, until the time of puberty. Since the forces that manifest themselves afterward must first be prepared, they are intermingled, though not yet awake, with the remaining forces in man even from birth onward. All this time his nature is permeated by these sleeping forces. This is what meets us in the child as such a wonderful mystery. It is the sleeping generative forces that only waken later on. One who is sensitive to these things feels something like a gentle breath of God in the activity of these forces withdrawn into reticence in childhood, whatever the naughtiness, obstinacy and other more or less unpleasant characteristics a child may have. These innocent qualities of the child are those of the grown-up person, but in childlike form. One who recognizes them as among the generative forces feels the breath of divine powers. While in later life they appear in man's lower nature, they are so wonderful because they really breathe the pure breath of God so long as they work in unconscious innocence. We must feel these things and be sensitive to them, then we shall perceive how wonderfully human nature is composed. The generative forces, sleeping during the most tender age of childhood, waken around the time of puberty, and from then on are still active in innocence when at night man sinks back into sleep.

Thus man's nature falls into two parts. In every human being two persons confront us—the one that we are from the time we waken until we go to sleep, the other, from going to sleep to waking again. In our waking state we are continually at pains to wear and worry our nature down to the animal level with all that is not pure knowledge, pure spiritual activity. What raises us above humanity holds sway like a pure, sublime force within the generative powers as they were during innocent childhood, and then in sleep it is awakened in the regeneration of what is worn away in waking life. So we have in ourselves one person who is related to the creative forces in man, and another who destroys them.

The deeply significant thing in the double nature of man is, that behind all that the senses perceive we have to surmise another man, one in whom the creative forces dwell. This second man is really never there in a pure, unmixed form; not during waking life nor even in sleep because in sleep the physical and etheric bodies still remain permeated by the after-effects of waking life, by the disturbing and destructive forces. When at last the latter have been removed altogether, we wake up again.

So it has been since what we call the Lemurian Age, the beginning, strictly speaking, of present-day mankind's evolution. At that time, as is described in greater detail in my Occult Science the Luciferic influence on man set in; and from this influence there came, among other things, what today compels man continually to wear and tear himself down to the animal nature. The other element that exists in human nature, which man as he is now does not yet know—the creative forces in him—all this came into play in the early Lemurian time before the Luciferic impulses entered. Thus we rise in thought from man ‘become’ to man ‘becoming;’ from man created to man being re-created. In so doing we have to look out into that distant Lemurian time when man was as yet wholly permeated by the creating forces. At that time man came into being as he is today. If we follow the human race from that epoch onward, we have this double nature of man continually before us in all that has happened since. Man then entered a kind of lower nature.

At the same time, as we can see clairvoyantly by looking back into the Akashic record, there appeared beside ordinary people, who themselves were permeated by the human creative forces, something like a brother- or sister-soul; a definite soul. It was as though this sister-soul was held back, not thrown into the current of human evolution. It remained permeated through and through by human creative forces only, and by nothing else. Thus, a brother- or sister-soul (in that ancient time there was no difference)—Adam's brother-soul—remained behind. It could not enter the physical process of mankind's development. It lived on, invisible to the physical world of man. It was not born as men are born, in the flowing stream of this life, because if it had entered into birth and death it would have been in the processes of physical human life. It could only be perceived by those who rose to the heights of clairvoyance, who developed those forces that awaken in the state we otherwise know as sleep. In that state man is near to the forces that live and work in purity in the sister-soul.

Man entered his evolution, but holding sway above this life there lived, in sacrifice, a soul that throughout all the processes of human life never came down in bodily form. It did not strive like ordinary human souls for birth and death in successive incarnations, and it could only show itself to them when in their sleep they attained clairvoyant vision. Yet it worked on mankind wherever they could meet it with special clairvoyant gifts. There were men who either by nature or special training in schools of initiation had this power and were able to recognize the creative forces. Wherever such schools are mentioned in history we can always find evidence that they were aware of a soul accompanying mankind. In most instances it was only recognizable in those special conditions of clairvoyance that expand man's spiritual vision into sleep consciousness.

When Arjuna stood on the battle-field with the Kurus and Pandus arrayed against each other, when he felt all that was going on around him and deeply realized the unique situation in which he was placed, it came about that this soul we have mentioned spoke to him through the soul of his charioteer. The manifestation of this special soul, speaking through a human soul, is none other than Krishna. For what soul was it that could instill into man the impulse to consciousness of self? It was the soul that had remained behind in the old Lemurian age when men entered his actual earthly evolution.

This soul had often been visible in manifestations before, but in a far more spiritual form. At the moment, however, of which the Bhagavad Gita tells us, we have to imagine a kind of embodiment, though much concealed in Maya of this soul of Krishna. Later on in history a definite incarnation takes place. This soul actually incarnated in the body of a child. Those of our friends to whom I have spoken of this before know that at the time when Christianity was founded two children were born in different families, both from the house of David. The one child is mentioned in St. Matthew's Gospel, the other in St. Luke's. This is the true reason for the external discrepancies between the two Gospels. Now this very Jesus Child of St. Luke's Gospel is an incarnation of that same soul that had never before lived in a human body but is nevertheless a human soul, having been one in the ancient Lemurian age. This is the same that revealed itself as Krishna.

Thus we have all that the Krishna impulse signifies incarnated in the body of the Luke Jesus child. What was there embodied is related to the forces that are asleep in every child in their sublime purity and innocence, until they awaken as the sex-forces. In this child they can manifest themselves and be active until the age of puberty when man ordinarily becomes sexually mature. But the body of this child that had been taken from common humanity would no longer have been adapted to the forces related to the innocent sex-forces in the child. Thus the soul in the other Jesus child, which was the soul of Zarathustra, that had passed through many incarnations and reached its eminence by hard work and special striving, passed over into the body of the Luke Jesus child, and from then on dwelt in that body.

We touch here upon a wonderful mystery. We see how into the body of the Luke Jesus child there enters the soul of man as he was before he descended into the course of earthly incarnations. We understand that this soul could hold sway in the human body only until the twelfth year of its life. After that another soul must take possession, the Zarathustra soul that had gone through all the transformations of mankind. This wonderful mystery is enacted, that the innermost essence and self of man, which we have seen hailed as Krishna, permeates the Jesus child of the Luke Gospel. In this child are the innermost forces of humanity, the Krishna forces, for indeed we know their origin. This Krishna root takes us back into the Lemurian time, the very primeval age of man. At that time it was one with humanity, before ever the physical evolution of mankind began. In later time this root, these Krishna forces, flowing together and uniting in the unknown and unseen, worked to bring about the unfolding of man's inner being from within. Concretely embodied, this root is present within a single being, the Luke Jesus child, and as the child grows up it remains active beneath the surface of life in this special body after the Zarathustra soul has entered it.

In the thirtieth year, in the moment the Bible describes as the Baptism in Jordan, there comes toward this special human body what now belongs to all mankind. This is the moment indicated in the words, “This is my well-beloved Son, this day have I begotten Him.” Christ now comes toward the physical body from the other side. In the body that stands before us there, we have in concrete form what yesterday we thought of abstractly. What belongs to all mankind comes to the body that contains what, through another impulse, has brought the inner being of man to the highest ideal of individual strength, and will carry it to yet greater heights.

I think when you consider all that has been said today, leading up as it does to a certain understanding of that great moment pictorially represented as the baptism by St. John, you will have to admit that our anthroposophical outlook takes nothing away from the sublime majesty of the Christ-Idea. On the contrary, by shedding the light of understanding upon it much is added to all that can be given -to mankind exoterically. Today I have endeavored to present the matter in such a way as to give it sense and meaning for those who can consider it with an open mind, in the light of external human history. That is not the way, however, by which this secret was found. Someone might ask, in view of the lectures about St. Luke's Gospel I delivered years ago in Basel, when for the first time I drew attention to the different genealogies of the two Jesus children, “Why did you not explain then all you have added to it now?” That depends on the whole way these things were discovered. Actually, this truth has never yet been found in one single and complete whole by the human understanding. It was not discovered in the form I have tried to convey it today. The truth itself was there first, as I indicated in a lecture a few days ago, and the rest followed of its own accord, adding itself to the main body of this piece of knowledge about the two Jesus-children. From this you may gather that in the Anthroposophical Movement for which I am permitted to stand before you, there is nothing of the nature of intellectual or logical construction. I do not mean to lay this down as a general rule for everybody, but I do regard it as my own personal task to say nothing that is given by the intellect as such but to take things in the way they are directly and immediately given to occult vision. Only afterward are they permeated with the power of understanding, The truth about the two Jesus-children was not discovered by external historical research, but from the beginning it was an occult fact. Afterward the connection with the Krishna mystery was revealed.

You see in this how the science of man will have to work into the occult realm in the age we are entering; how the fundamental impulses of earthly evolution will gradually be understood and realized by individual persons, and how this will throw more and more light on all that has happened in the past. True science will not only speak to the intellect, but will fill the whole soul of man. It is just when we make ourselves acquainted with occult facts that we have a feeling for the real majesty, the greatness and wonder of these facts. Truly, the more deeply we penetrate the world of reality the more we have this feeling of wonder. Not only our intellect and reason but our whole soul is illumined when we let the truth come to us in this way. Especially at such a point as this, that wondrous event when the whole inwardness of humanity lived in a human body; when a soul that had developed upward to this point through the whole course of earthly life took possession of this body; then from outside there came into this body during three years of its life something that was vouchsafed to all mankind from the great universe beyond. Truly this can stir our souls to their depths. The spiritual age that is dawning will in time make it possible to deepen points like this still more.

One thing is essential to the coming spiritual age. We must learn to take a different attitude toward the great riddles and secrets of the cosmos, to approach them not as in the past with reason and intellect alone, but with all the faculties of our soul. Then we shall ourselves become partakers in the whole of human evolution. It will be for us like a fountain of sublime, all-human consciousness. We shall have fullness of soul. We shall feel that we may belong to that humanity that over all the earth is to develop such impulses as have been the subject of our thoughts today.

The theme of this cycle of lectures was not chosen because it is traditional within academic or philosophical disciplines, as though we thought epistemology or the like should appear within our courses. Rather, it was chosen as the result of what I believe to be an open-minded consideration of the needs and demands of our time. The further evolution of humanity demands new concepts, new notions, and new impulses for social life generally: we need ideas which, when realized, can create social conditions offering to human beings of all stations and classes an existence that seems to them humane. Already, to be sure, it is being said in the widest circles that social renewal must begin with a renewal of our thinking.¹ Yet not everyone in these widest circles imagines something clear and distinct when speaking in this way. One does not ask: whence shall come the ideas upon which one might found a social economy offering man a humane existence? That portion of humanity which has received an education in the last three to four centuries, but particularly since the nineteenth century, has been raised with certain ideas that are outgrowths of the scientific world view or entirely schooled in it. This is particularly true of those who have undergone some academic training. Only those working in fields other than the sciences believe that natural science has had little influence on their pursuits. Yet it is easy to demonstrate that even in the newer, more progressive theology, in history and in jurisprudence—everywhere can be found scientific concepts such as those that arose from the scientific experiments of the last centuries, so that traditional concepts have in a certain way been altered to conform to the new. One need only allow the progress of the new theological developments in the nineteenth century to pass before the mind's eye. One sees, for example, how Protestant theology has arrived at its views concerning the man, Jesus, and the nature of Christ, because at every turn it had in mind certain scientific conceptions that it wanted to satisfy, against which it did not want to sin. At the same time, the old, instinctive ties within the social order began to slacken: they gradually ceased to hold human life together. In the course of the nineteenth century it became increasingly necessary to replace the instincts according to which one class subordinated itself to another, the instincts out of which the new parliamentary institutions, with all their consequences, have come with more-or-less conscious concepts. Not only in Marxism but in many other movements as well there has come about what one might call a transformation of the old social instincts into conscious concepts.

But what was this new element that had entered into social science, into this favorite son of modern thought? It was the conceptions, the new mode of thinking that had been developed in the pursuit of natural science. And today we are faced with the important question: how far shall we be able to progress within a web of social forces woven from such concepts? If we listen to the world's rumbling, if we consider all the hopeless prospects that result from the attempts that are made on the basis of these conceptions, we are confronted with a dismal picture indeed. One is then faced with the portentous question: how does it stand with those very concepts that we have acquired from natural science and now wish to apply to our lives, concepts that—this has become clearly evident in many areas already—are actually rejected by life itself? This vital question, this burning question with which our age confronts us, was the occasion of my choosing the theme, “The Boundaries of Natural Science.” Just this question requires that I treat the theme in such a way that we receive an overview of what natural science can and cannot contribute to an appropriate social order and an idea of the kind of scientific research, the kind of world view to which one would have to turn in order to confront seriously the demands made upon us by our time.

What is it we see if we consider the method according to which one thinks in scientific circles and how others have been influenced in their thinking by those circles? What do we see? We see first of all that an attempt is made to acquire data and to order it in a lucid system with the help of clear concepts. We see how an attempt is made to order the data gathered from inanimate nature by means of the various sciences—mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc.—to order them in a systematic manner but also to permeate the data with certain concepts so that they become intelligible. With regard to inanimate nature, one strives for the greatest possible clarity, for crystal-clear concepts. And a consequence of this striving for lucid concepts is that one seeks, if it is at all possible, to permeate everything that one finds in one's environment with mathematical formulae. One wants to translate data gathered from nature into clear mathematical formulae, into the transparent language of mathematics.

In the last third of the nineteenth century, scientists already believed themselves very close to being able to give a mathematical-mechanical explanation of natural phenomena that would be thoroughly transparent. It remained for them only to explain the little matter of the atom. They wanted to reduce it to a point-force [Kraftpunkt] in order to be able to express its position and momenta in mathematical formulae. They believed they would then be justified in saying: I contemplate nature, and what I contemplate there is in reality a network of interrelated forces and movements wholly intelligible in terms of mathematics. Hence there arose the ideal of the so-called “astronomical explanation of nature,” which states in essence: just as one brings to expression the relationships between the various heavenly bodies in mathematical formulae, so too should one be able to compute everything within this smallest realm, within the “little cosmos” of atoms and molecules, in terms of lucid mathematics. This was a striving that climaxed in the last third of the nineteenth century: it is now on the decline again. Over against this striving for a crystal-clear, mathematical view of the world, however, there stands something entirely different, something that is called forth the moment one tries to extend this striving into realms other than that of inanimate nature. You know that in the course of the nineteenth century the attempt was made to carry this point of view, at least to some extent, into the life sciences. And though Kant had said that a second Newton would never be found who could explain living organisms according to a causal principle similar to that used to explain inorganic nature, Haeckel could nevertheless claim that this second Newton had been found in Darwin, that Darwin had actually tried, by means of the principle of natural selection, to explain how organisms evolve in the same “transparent” terms. And one began to aim for just such a clarity, a clarity at least approaching that of mathematics, in all explanations, proceeding all the way up to the explanation of man himself. Something thereby was fulfilled which certain scientists explained by saying that man's need to understand the causes of phenomena is satisfied only when he arrives at such a transparent, lucid view of the world.

And yet over against this there stands something entirely different. One comes to see that theory upon theory has been contrived in order to construct a view of the world such as I have just described, and ever and again those who strove for such a view of the world called forth—often immediately—their own opposition. There always arose the other party, which demonstrated that such a view of the world could never produce valid explanations, that such a view of the world could never ultimately satisfy man's need to know. On the one hand it was argued how necessary it is to keep one's world view within the lucid realm of mathematics, while on the other hand it was shown that such a world view would, for example, remain entirely incapable of constructing even the simplest living organism in thought of mathematical clarity or, indeed, even of constructing a comprehensible model of organic substance. It was as though the one party continually wove a tissue of ideas in order to explain nature, and the other party—sometimes the same party—continually unraveled it.

It has been possible to follow this spectacle—for it seems just that to anyone who is able to view it with an unprejudiced eye—within the scientific work and striving of the last fifty years especially. If one has sensed the full gravity of the situation, that with regard to this important question nothing but a weaving and unraveling of theories has taken place, one can pose the question: is not the continual striving for such a conceptual explanation of phenomena perhaps superfluous? Is not the proper answer to any question that arises when one confronts phenomena perhaps that one should simply allow the facts to speak for themselves, that one should describe what occurs in nature and forgo any more detailed accounting? Is it not possible that all such explanations show only that humanity is still tied to its mother's apron strings, that humanity in its infancy sought a kind of luxury? Would not humanity, come of age, have to say to itself: we must not strive at all for such explanation; we get nowhere in that way and must simply extirpate the need to know? Why not? As we become older we outgrow the need to play; why, if we were justified in doing so, should we not simply outgrow the need for explanations?

Just such a question could already emerge in the most extraordinarily significant way when, on August 14, 1872, du Bois-Reymond stood before the Second General Meeting of the Association of German Scientists and Physicians to deliver his famous address, “The Boundaries of Natural Science” [“Grenzen des Naturerkennens”], an address still worthy of consideration today. Yet despite the amount that has been written about this address by the important physiologist, du Bois-Reymond, many still do not realize that it represents one of the important junctures in the evolution of the modern world view.

In medieval Scholasticism all of man's thinking, all of his notional activity, was determined by the view that one could explain the broad realms of nature in terms of certain concepts but that one had to draw the line upon reaching the super-sensible. The super-sensible had to be the object of revelation. They felt that man should stand in a relation to the super-sensible in such a way that he would not even wish to penetrate it with the same concepts he formed concerning the realms of nature and external human existence. A limit was set to knowledge on the side of the super-sensible, and it was strongly emphasized that such a limit had to exist, that it simply lay within human nature and the order of the universe that such a limit be recognized. This placement of a limit to knowledge was then renewed from an entirely different side by thinkers and researchers such as du Bois-Reymond. They were no longer Schoolmen, no longer theologians, but just as the medieval theologian, proceeding according to his own mode of thinking, had set a limit to knowledge at the super-sensible, so these thinkers and researchers set a limit at the sensible. The limit was meant to apply above all to the realm of external sensory data.

There were two concepts in particular that du Bois-Reymond had in mind, which to him established the limits natural science could reach but beyond which it could not proceed. Later he increased that number by five in his lecture, “The Seven Enigmas of the World,” but in the first lecture he spoke of the two concepts, “matter” and “consciousness.” He said that when contemplating nature we are forced, in thinking systematically, to apply concepts in such a way that we eventually arrive at the notion of matter. Just what this mysterious entity in space we call “matter” is, however, we can never in any way resolve. We must simply assume the concept “matter,” though it is opaque. If only we assume this opaque concept “matter,” we can apply our mathematical formulae and calculate the movements of matter in terms of the formulae. The realm of natural phenomena becomes comprehensible if only we can posit this “opaque” little point millions upon millions of times. Yet surely we must also assume that it is this same material world that first builds up our bodies and unfolds its own activity within them, so that there rises up within us, by virtue of this corporeal activity, what eventually becomes sensation and consciousness. On the one hand we confront a world of natural phenomena requiring that we construct a concept of “matter,” while on the other hand we confront ourselves, experience the fact of consciousness, observe its phenomena, and surmise that whatever it is we assume to be matter must also lie at the foundation of consciousness. But how, out of these movements of matter, out of inanimate, dead movement, there arises consciousness, or even simple sensation, is a mystery that we cannot possibly fathom. This is the other pole of all the uncertainties, all the limits to knowledge: how can we explain consciousness, or even the simplest sensation?

With regard to these two questions, then—What is matter? How does consciousness arise out of material processes?—du Bois-Reymond maintains that as researchers we must confess: ignorabimus, we shall never know. That is the modern counterpart to medieval Scholasticism. Medieval Scholasticism stood at the limit of the super-sensible world. Modern natural science stands at the limit delineated in essence by two concepts: “matter,” which is everywhere assumed within the sensory realm but nowhere to be found, and “consciousness,” which is assumed to originate within the sense world, although one can never comprehend how.

If one considers this development of modern scientific thought, must one not then say to oneself that scientific research is entangling itself in a kind of web, and only outside of this web can one find the world? For in the final analysis it is there, where matter haunts space, that the external world lies. If this is the one place into which one cannot penetrate, one has no way in which to come to terms with life. Within man one finds the fact of consciousness. Does one come at all near to it with explanations conceived in observing external nature? If in one's search for explanations one pulls up short at human life, how, then, can one arrive at notions of how to live in a way worthy of a human being? How, if one cannot understand the existence or the essence of man according to the assumptions one makes concerning that existence?

As this course of lectures progresses it shall, I believe, become evident beyond any doubt that it is the impotence of the modern scientific method that has made us so impotent in our thinking about social questions. Many today still do not perceive what an important and essential connection exists between the two. Many today still do not perceive that when in Leipzig on August 14, 1872 du Bois-Reymond spoke his ignorabimus, this same ignorabimus was spoken also with regard to all social thought. What this ignorabimus actually meant was: we stand helpless in the face of real life; we have only shadowy concepts; we have no concepts with which to grasp reality. And now, almost fifty years later, the world demands just such concepts of us. We must have them. Such concepts, such impulses, cannot come out of lecture-halls still laboring in the shadow of this ignorabimus. That is the great tragedy of our time. Here lie questions that must be answered.

We want to proceed from fundamental principles to such an answer and above all to consider the question: is there not perhaps something more intelligent that we as human beings could do than what we have done for the last fifty years, namely tried to explain nature after the fashion of ancient Penelope, by weaving theories with one hand and unraveling them with the other? Ah yes, if only we could, if only we could stand before nature entirely without thoughts! But we cannot: to the extent that we are human beings and wish to remain human beings we cannot. If we wish to comprehend nature, we must permeate it with concepts and ideas. Why must we do that?

We must do that, ladies and gentlemen, because only thereby does consciousness awake, because only thereby do we become conscious human beings. Just as each morning upon opening our eyes we achieve consciousness in our interaction with the external world, so essentially did consciousness awake within the evolution of humanity. Consciousness, as it is now, was first kindled through the interaction of the senses and thinking with the outer world. We can watch the historical development of consciousness in the interaction of man's senses with outer nature. In this process consciousness gradually was kindled out of the dull, sleepy cultural life of primordial times. Yet one must only consider with an open mind this fact of consciousness, this interaction between the senses and nature, in order to observe something extraordinary transpiring within man. We must look into our soul to see what is there, either by remaining awhile before fully awakening within that dull and dreamy consciousness or by looking back into the almost dreamlike consciousness of primordial times. If we look within our soul at what lies submerged beneath the surface consciousness arising in the interaction between senses and the outer world, we find a world of representations, faint, diluted to dream-pictures with hazy contours, each image fading into the other. Unprejudiced observation establishes this. The faintness of the representations, the haziness of the contours, the fading of one representation into another: none of this can cease unless we awake to a full interaction with external nature. In order to come to this awakening which is tantamount to becoming fully human—our senses must awake every morning to contact with nature. It was also necessary, however, for humanity as a whole to awake out of a dull, dreamlike vision of primordial worlds within the soul to achieve the present clear representations.

In this way we achieve the clarity of representation and the sharply delineated concepts that we need in order to remain awake, to remain aware of our environment with a waking soul. We need all this in order to remain human in the fullest sense of the word. But we cannot simply conjure it all up out of ourselves. We achieve it only when our senses come into contact with nature: only then do we achieve clear, sharply delineated concepts. We thereby develop something that man must develop for his own sake—otherwise consciousness would not awake. It is thus not an abstract “need for explanations,” not what du Bois-Reymond and other men like him call “the need to know the causes of things,” that drives us to seek explanations but the need to become human in the fullest sense through observing nature. We thus may not say that we can outgrow the need to explain like any other child's play, for that would mean that we would not want to become human in the fullest sense of the word—that is to say, not want to awake in the way we must awake.

Something else happens in this process, however. In coming to such concepts as we achieve in contemplating nature, we at the same time impoverish our inner conceptual life. Our concepts become clear, but their compass becomes diminished, and if we consider exactly what it is we have achieved by means of these concepts, we see that it is an external, mathematical-mechanical lucidity. Within that lucidity, however, we find nothing that allows us to comprehend life. We have, as it were, stepped out into the light but lost the very ground beneath our feet. We find no concepts that allow us to typify life, or even consciousness, in any way. In exchange for the clarity we must seek for the sake of our humanity, we have lost the content of that for which we have striven. And then we contemplate nature around us with our concepts. We formulate such complex ideas as the theory of evolution and the like. We strive for clarity. Out of this clarity we formulate a world view, but within this world view it is impossible to find ourselves, to find man. With our concepts we have moved out to the surface, where we come into contact with nature. We have achieved clarity, but along the way we have lost man. We move through nature, apply a mathematical-mechanical explanation, apply the theory of evolution, formulate all kinds of biological laws; we explain nature; we formulate a view of nature—within which man cannot be found. The abundance of content that we once had has been lost, and we are confronted with a concept that can be formed only with the clearest but at the same time most desiccated and lifeless thinking: the concept of matter. And an ignorabimus in the face of the concept of matter is essentially the confession: I have achieved clarity; I have struggled through to an awakening of full consciousness, but thereby I have lost the essence of man in my thinking, in my explanations, in my comprehension.

And now we turn to look within. We turn away from matter to consider the inner realm of consciousness. We see how within this inner realm of consciousness representations pass in review, feelings come and go, impulses of will flash through us. We observe all this and notice that when we attempt to bring the inner realm into the same kind of focus that we achieved with regard to the external world, it is impossible. We seem to swim in an element that we cannot bring into sharp contours, that continually fades in and out of focus. The clarity for which we strive with regard to outer nature simply cannot be achieved within. In the most recent attempts to understand this inner realm, in the Anglo-American psychology of association, we see how, following the example of Hume, Mill, James, and others, the attempt was made to impose the clarity attained in observation of external nature upon inner sensations and feelings. One attempts to impose clarity upon sensation, and this is impossible. It is as though one wanted to apply the laws of flight to swimming. One does not come to terms at all with the element within which one has to move. The psychology of association never achieves sharpness of contour or clarity regarding the phenomenon of consciousness. And even if one attempts with a certain sobriety, as Herbart has done, to apply mathematical computation to human mental activity [das Vorstellen], to the human soul, one finds it possible, but the computations hover in the air. There is no place to gain a foothold, because the mathematical formulae simply cannot comprehend what is actually occurring within the soul. While one loses man in coming to clarity regarding the external world, one finds man, to be sure—it goes without saying that one finds man when one delves into consciousness—but there is no hope of achieving clarity, for one swims about, borne hither and thither in an insubstantial realm. One finds man, but one cannot find a valid image of man.

It was this that du Bois-Reymond felt very clearly but was able to express only much less clearly—only as a kind of vague feeling about scientific research on the whole—when in August 1872 he spoke his ignorabimus. What this ignorabimus wants to say in essence is that on the one hand, we have in the historical evolution of humanity arrived at clarity regarding nature and have constructed the concept of matter. In this view of nature we have lost man—that is, ourselves. On the other hand we look down into consciousness. To this realm we want to apply that which has been most important in arriving at the contemporary explanation of nature. Consciousness rejects this lucidity. This mathematical clarity is entirely out of place. To be sure, we find man in a sense, but our consciousness is not yet strong enough, not yet intensive enough to comprehend man fully.

Again, one is tempted to answer with an ignorabimus, but that cannot be, for we need something more than an ignorabimus in order to meet the social demands of the modern world. The limit that du Bois-Reymond had come up against when he spoke [about] his ignorabimus on August 14, 1872 lies not within the human condition as such but only within its present stage of historical human evolution. How are we to transcend this ignorabimus? That is the burning question.

• 1. “... that social renewal must begin with the renewal of our thinking.” The original German (“... dass die soziale Erneuerung vom Geiste ausgehen musse”) might be translated alternately “that social renewal must proceed from the spirit.” The German word “Geist”—bane of all who would translate German into English—embraces two meanings that remain in English quite distinct “mind” and “spirit.” The translator must choose one, even though the German always implies both. If he chooses the former, he runs the risk of seriously distorting the author's intentions (as did the man who translated Hegel's Phanomenologie des Geistes as The Phenomenology of Mind). If he chooses the latter, he flies in the face of the dubious connotations that “spirit” and “spiritual” convey—no doubt as a result of the basically empirical cast of English thought. Although “Geist” as Steiner uses it should almost invariably be translated “spirit” (which of course comprehends “wind”), here the context has led us to choose the more restricted meaning.

We have seen that one arrives at two limits when one seeks either to penetrate more deeply into natural phenomena or, proceeding from the state of normal consciousness, to penetrate more deeply into one's own being in order to uncover the essential nature of consciousness. Yesterday we showed already what happens at the one limit to knowledge. We have seen that man awakes to full consciousness in coming into contact with an external, physical world of sense. Man would remain a more-or-less drowsy being, a being with a sleepy soul, if he could not awake in confronting external nature. And what has happened in the spiritual evolution of humanity, in man's gradual acquisition of knowledge about external nature, is actually nothing other than what happens every morning when we awake out of sleep or dream-consciousness by confronting an external world. This latter is a kind of moment of awakening, and in the course of the evolution of humanity we have to do with a gradual awakening, a kind of long, drawn-out moment of awakening.

Now, we have seen that at this frontier a certain inertia on the part of the soul very easily comes into play, so that when we come up against the extended world of phenomena we do not proceed in the manner of Goethean phenomenology by halting at this frontier and ordering the phenomena according to the representations, concepts, and ideas we have already gained, describing them in a systematic, rational manner, and so forth. Instead, we roll on a bit farther beyond the phenomena with our concepts and ideas and thereby create a world, for example a world of metaphysical atoms, molecules, and so forth. This world, when it is so constituted, is merely a fabrication of the mind, a world into which there enters a creeping doubt, so that we have to unravel again the theoretical web we have spun. And we have seen that it is possible to guard against such a violation of this frontier of our knowledge through phenomenalism, through working purely with the phenomena themselves. We have also had to show that at this point in our striving for knowledge something emerges that commends itself to our use as an immediate necessity: mathematics and that part of mechanics that can be comprehended without any empirical observation, i.e., the entire compass of so-called analytical mechanics.

If we call to mind everything comprehended by mathematics and analytical mechanics, we have before us the system of concepts that allows us to enter into phenomena with the utmost certainty. And yet, as I began to indicate yesterday, one should not deceive oneself, for the whole manner in which we call forth the notions of mathematics and analytical mechanics, this process within our souls, is entirely different from that employed when we experiment with or observe sensory data and then seek to comprehend them, when we try to gather knowledge from sensory experience. In order to arrive at the fullest clarity regarding these matters one must bring all one's mental energy to bear, for in this realm full clarity can be attained only with the greatest mental exertion.

What is the difference between accumulating knowledge from sensory experience in a Baconian manner and the more inward mode of apprehension we find in mathematics and analytical mechanics? One can sharply differentiate the latter from those modes of apprehension that are not inward in this way by formulating clearly the concepts of the parallelogram of motion and the parallelogram of forces. One theorem of analytical mechanics states that two angular vectors proceeding from one point result in a third vector. To say, however, that a vector of a specific force here [see diagram: a] and a vector of a specific force here [b] result in a third force, which can also be determined according to the parallelogram—that is another notion altogether.

The parallelogram of motion lies strictly within the province of analytical mechanics, for it is internally consistent and demands no external proof. In this it is like the Rule of Pythagoras or any other geometrical axiom, but the existence of the parallelogram of forces can be determined only by experience, by experimentation. In this case, we bring something into that which we work through inwardly: the force that can be given only empirically from without. Here we no longer have a pure, analytical mechanics but an “empirical mechanics.” One can thus differentiate sharply between that which is still actually mathematical—as we still conceive mathematics today—and that which leads over into conventional empiricism.

Now one stands before this phenomenon of mathematics as such. We comprehend mathematical truths. We proceed from mathematical phenomena to certain axioms. We weave the fabric of mathematics out of these axioms and then stand before an architectonic whole apprehended by the mind's eye [im inneren Anschauen]. If we are able by means of energetic thinking to differentiate sharply this inner apprehension from anything that can be experienced outwardly, we must see in this fabric of mathematics something that arises through an activity of soul entirely different from that which underlies our experience of the outer objects of sensation. Whether or not we arrive at a satisfactory comprehension of the world depends to a tremendous extent on our being able to make this clear distinction out of inner experience. We thus must ask: where does mathematics originate? Nowadays this question is still not pursued rigorously enough. One does not ask: how is this inner activity of the soul that we need in mathematics, in the wonderful architecture of mathematics—how is this inner activity of the soul different from that whereby we grasp external nature through the senses? One does not pose this question and seek an answer with sufficient rigor, because it is the tragedy of the materialistic world view that, while on the one hand it presses for sensory experience, on the other hand it is driven unawares into an abstract intellectualism, into a realm of abstraction where one is isolated from any true comprehension of the phenomena of the material world.

What kind of capacity is it, then, that we acquire when we engage in mathematics? We want to address ourselves to this question. In order to answer this question we must, I believe, have reached a complete understanding of one thing in particular: we must take fully seriously the concept of becoming as it applies to human life as well. We must begin by acquiring the discipline that modern science can teach us. We must school ourselves in this way and then, taking the strict methodology, the scientific discipline we have learned from modern natural science, transcend it, so that we use the same exacting approach to rise into higher regions, thereby extending this methodology to the investigation of entirely different realms as well. For this reason I believe—and I want this to be expressly stated—that nobody can attain true knowledge of the spirit who has not acquired scientific discipline, who has not learned to investigate and think in the laboratories according to the modern scientific method. Those who pursue spiritual science [Geisteswissenschaft] have less cause to undervalue modern science than anyone. On the contrary, they know how to value it at its full worth. And many people—if I may here insert a personal remark—were extremely upset with me when, before publishing anything pertaining to spiritual science as such, I wrote a great deal about the problems of natural science in a way that appeared necessary to me. So you see it is necessary on the one hand for us to cultivate a scientific habit of mind, so that this can accompany us when we cross the frontiers of natural science. In addition, it is the quality of this scientific method and its results that we must take very seriously indeed.

You see, if we consider the simple phenomenon of warmth that appears when we rub two bodies together, it would be utterly unscientific to say, regarding this isolated phenomenon, that the warmth had been created ex nihilo or simply existed. Rather, we seek the conditions under which this warmth was previously latent and now appears by means of the bodies. We proceed from the one phenomenon to the other and thus take seriously this process of becoming [das Werden]. We must do the same with the concepts that we consider in spiritual science. So we must first of all ask: is that which manifests itself as the ability to perform mathematics present in man throughout his entire existence between birth and death? No, it is not always present. It awakes at a certain point in time. To be sure, we can, while still remaining empirical regarding the outer world, observe with great precision how there gradually arise out of the dark recesses of human consciousness faculties that manifest themselves as the ability to perform mathematics and something like mathematics that we have yet to discuss. If one can observe this emergence in time precisely and soberly, just as scientific research treats the phenomena of the melting or boiling point, one sees that this new faculty emerges at approximately that time of life when the child changes teeth. One must treat such a point in the development of human life with the same attitude with which physics, for example, teaches one to treat the melting or boiling point. One must acquire the ability to carry over into the complicated realm of human life the same strict inner discipline that one can acquire by observing simple physical phenomena according to the methods of modern science. If one does this, one sees that in the course of human development from birth, or rather from conception, up to the change of teeth, the soul faculties enabling one to perform mathematics manifest themselves gradually within the organism but that they are not yet fully present. Now we say that the warmth that manifests itself in a body under certain conditions was latent in that body beforehand, that it was at work within the inner structure of that body. In the same way we must be entirely clear that the capacity to perform mathematics, which becomes most evident at the change of teeth and reveals itself gradually in another sense, was also at work beforehand within the human organization. We thus arrive at an important and valuable insight into the nature of mathematics—mathematics taken, of course, in the very broadest sense. We begin to understand how that which is at our disposal after the change of teeth as a soul faculty worked previously within to organize us. Yes, within the child until approximately its seventh year there works an inner mathematics, an inner mathematics not abstract like our external one but full of active energy, a mathematics which, if I may use Plato's expression, not only can be inwardly envisioned [angeschaut] but is full of active life. Up to this point in time there exists within us something that “mathematicizes” us through and through.

When we ask at first entirely superficially what can be seen by looking empirically at this “latent mathematics” in the body of the young child, we are led to three things resembling inner senses. In the course of these lectures we shall come to see that one can indeed speak of senses within as well. Today I want only to indicate that we are led to something that develops an inward faculty of perception similar to the outward perception developed by the eyes and ears, except that the former remains unconscious within us during these first years. And if we look within, look into our own inner organization not like nebulous mystics but with all our powers of apprehension, we can find within three functions similar to those of the outward senses. We find inner senses that exercise a certain activity, a certain inner mathematics, just in those first several years. One encounters first of all what I would like to call the sense of life. This sense of life manifests itself in later years as a perception of our inner state as a whole. In a certain way we feel either well or unwell. We feel comfortable or uncomfortable: just as we have a faculty for perceiving outwardly with the eyes, so also do we have a faculty for perceiving inwardly. This faculty is directed toward the whole organism and is for that reason dark and dull; yet it is there all the same. We shall have more to say about this later. For the moment I want to anticipate this later discussion only by remarking that this sense of life is—if I may use a tautology—especially active in the vitality of the child up until the change of teeth.

Another inner sense that we must consider when we look within in this way is that which I would like to call the sense of movement. We must form a clear conception of this sense of movement. When we move our limbs, we are aware of this not only by viewing ourselves externally but also by means of an internal perception. Also when we walk: we are conscious that we are walking not only in that we see objects pass and our view of the external world changes but also in that we have an internal perception of the movements of the limbs, of changes within ourselves as we move. Normally we remain unaware of the inner experiences and perception that run parallel to the outer because of the strength of the external impressions, much as a dim light is “extinguished” by a bright one.

And a third inward-looking faculty is the sense of balance. The sense of balance is what enables us to locate ourselves within the world, to avoid falling, to perceive in a certain way how we can bring ourselves into harmony with the forces in our environment. We perceive this process of bringing ourselves into harmony with our environment inwardly. We thus can truly say that we bear within ourselves these three inner senses: the sense of life, the sense of movement, and the sense of balance. They are especially active in childhood up to the change of teeth. Around this time of the change of teeth their activity begins to wane, but observe to take but one example, the sense of balance—observe how at birth the child has as yet nothing enabling it to attain the position of balance it needs in later life. Consider how the child gradually gains control of itself, how it learns at first to crawl on all fours, how it gradually achieves through its sense of balance the ability to stand and to walk, how it finally is able to maintain its own balance.

If one considers the entire process of development from conception to the change of teeth, one sees therein the powerful activity of these three inner senses. And if one can attain a certain insight into what is happening there, one sees that there is at work in the sense of balance and the sense of movement nothing other than a living “mathematicizing” [ein lebendiges Mathematisieren]. In order for it to come to life, the sense of life is there to vitalize it. We thus see a kind of latent realm of mathematics active within man. This activity does not entirely cease at the change of teeth, but it does become at that time considerably less pronounced for the remainder of life. That which is inwardly active in the sense of balance, the sense of movement, and the sense of life becomes free. This latent mathematics becomes free, just as latent heat can become liberated heat. And we see how that which initially was woven through the organism as an element of soul becomes free. We see how this mathematics emerges as abstraction from a condition in which it was originally a concrete force shaping the human organism. And because as human beings we are suspended in the web of existence according to temporal and spatial relationships, we take this mathematics that has become free out into the world and seek to comprehend the external world by means of something that worked within us up until the change of teeth. You see, it is not a denial but rather an extension of natural science that results when one considers rightly what ought to live within spiritual science as attitude and will.
We thus carry what originates within ourselves beyond the frontier of sense perception. We observe man within a process of becoming. We do not simply observe mathematics on the one hand and sensory experience on the other but rather the emergence of mathematics within the developing human being. And now we come to that which truly leads over into spiritual science itself. You see, that which we call forth out of our own inner life, this “mathematicizing,” becomes in the end an abstraction. Yet our experience of it need not remain an abstraction. In our time there is, to be sure, little opportunity for us to experience mathematics in a true light. Yet at a certain point in the development of Western civilization there does come to light something of this sense of a special spirit in mathematics. This comes to light at the point where Novalis, the poet Novalis, who underwent a good mathematical training in his studies, writes about mathematics in his Fragments. He calls mathematics a grand poem, a wonderful, grand poem.

One really must have experienced at some time what it is that leads from an abstract understanding of the geometrical forms to a sense of wonder at the harmony that underlies this inner “mathematicizing.” One really must have had the opportunity to get beyond the cold, sober performance of mathematics, which many people even hate. One must have struggled through as Novalis had in order to stand in awe of the inner harmony and—if I may use an expression you have heard often in a completely different context—the “melody” [Melos] of mathematics.

Then something new enters into one's experience of mathematics. There enters into mathematics, which otherwise remains purely intellectual and, metaphorically speaking, interests only the head, something that engages the entire man. This something manifests itself in such youthful Spirits as Novalis in the feeling: that which you behold as mathematical harmony, that which you weave through all the phenomena of the universe, is actually the same loom that wove you during the first years of growth as a child here an earth. This is to feel concretely man's connection with the cosmos. And when one works one's way through to such an inner experience, which many hold to be mere fantasy because they have not actually attained it themselves, one has some idea what the spiritual scientist [Geistesforscher] experiences when he rises to a more extensive grasp of this “mathematicizing” by undergoing an inner development of which I have yet to speak and which you will find fully depicted in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment.² For then the capacity of soul manifesting itself as this inner mathematics passes over into something far more comprehensive. It becomes something that remains just as exact as mathematical thought yet does not proceed solely from the intellect but from the whole man.

On this path of constant inner work—an inner work far more demanding than that performed in the laboratory or observatory or any other scientific institution—one comes to know what it is that underlies mathematics, that underlies this simple faculty of the human soul which can be expanded into something far more comprehensive. In this higher experience of mathematics one comes to know Inspiration. One comes to understand the differences between what lives in us as mathematics and what lives in us as outer-directed empiricism. In this outer-directed empiricism we have sense impressions that give content to our empty concepts. In Inspiration we have something inwardly spiritual, the activity of which manifests itself already in mathematics, if we know how to grasp mathematics properly—something spiritual which in our early years lives and weaves within us. This activity continues. In doing mathematics we experience this in part. We come to realize that the faculty for performing mathematics rests upon Inspiration, and we can come to experience Inspiration itself by evolving into spiritual scientists. Our representations and concepts then receive their content in a way other than through external experience. We can inspire ourselves with the spiritual force that works within us during childhood. For what works within us during our childhood is spirit. The spirit, however, resides in the human body and must be perceived there through the body, within man. It can be viewed in its pure, free form if one acquires through the faculty of Inspiration the capacity not only to think in mathematical concepts but to view that which exists as a real force in that it organizes us through and through up until the seventh year. And that which manifests itself partially in mathematics and reveals itself as a much more expansive realm through Inspiration can be inwardly viewed, if one employs certain spiritual scientific methods about which—as I have said—I plan yet to speak. One thereby gains not merely new results to add to those acquired through the old powers of cognition but rather an entirely new mode of apprehension. One acquires a new “Inspirative” cognition.

The course of human evolution has been such that these powers of Inspirative cognition have receded with the passage of time, after having been present earlier to a very high degree. One must come to understand how Inspiration arises within the inner being of man—that same Inspiration that survives in the West only in the diluted, intellectual experience of mathematics. The experience can be expanded, however, if only one comprehends fully the inner nature of that realm; only then does one begin to understand what lived in that earlier consciousness transmitted to us actually only from the East, from the Vedanta and the other Eastern philosophies that remain so cryptic to the Western mind. For what was it that actually lived within these Eastern philosophies? lt was something that arose through soul faculties of a mathematical nature. It was an Inspiration. It was not merely mathematics but rather something attained within the soul in a way similar to that in which one performs mathematics. Thus I would say that the mathematical atmosphere emanating from the Vedanta and similar ancient world views is something that can be understood from the perspective one attains in rising again to enter the realm of Inspiration. If one can raise to vivid inner life that which works unconsciously in mathematics and the mathematical sciences and can carry it over into another realm, one discovers the same mathematical element that Goethe viewed. Goethe modestly confessed that he did not have proficiency in mathematics in any conventional sense. Goethe has written on his relationship to mathematics in a very interesting series of essays, which you can find in his scientific writings under the heading “Relationship to Mathematics.” Extraordinarily interesting! For despite Goethe's modest confession that he had not acquired a proficiency in the handling of actual mathematical concepts and theories, he does require one thing: he calls for a phenomenalism such as he employed in his own scientific studies. He demands that within the secondary phenomena confronting us in the phenomenal world we seek the archetypal phenomenon [Urphänomen]. But just what kind of activity is this? He demands that we trace external phenomena back to the archetypal phenomenon, in just the same way that the mathematician traces the outward apprehension [äusseres Anschauen] of complex structures back to the axiom. Goethe's archetypal phenomena are empirical axioms, axioms that can be experienced.

Goethe thus demands, in a truly mathematical spirit, that one inwardly permeate phenomena with mathematics. He writes that we must see the archetypal phenomena in such a way that we are able at all times to justify our procedures according to the rigorous requirements of the mathematician. Thus what Goethe seeks is a modified, transformed mathematics, one that suffuses phenomena. He demands this as a scientific activity.

Goethe was able, therefore, to suffuse with light the one pole that otherwise remains so dark if we postulate only the concept of matter. We shall see how Goethe approached this pole; we modern must, however, approach the other, the pole of consciousness. We must investigate in the Same way how soul faculties manifest their activity in the human being, how they proceed from man's inner nature to manifest their activity externally. We shall have to investigate this. It shall become clear that we must complement the method of investigating the external world offered by Goethean phenomenology with a method of comprehending the realm of human consciousness. It must be a mode of comprehension justifiable in the sense in which Goethe's can be justified to the mathematician—a method such as I tried to employ in a modest way in my book, Philosophy of Freedom.³

At the pole of matter we thus encounter the results yielded by Goethean phenomenology and at the pole of consciousness those attained by pursuing the method that I sought to establish in a modest way in my Philosophy of Freedom.

Tomorrow we will want to pursue this further.

• 2. Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der hoheren Welten?, Berlin, 1909 (Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. Anthroposophie Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., reprinted 1983).
• 3. Die Philosophie der Freiheit, Berlin, 1894 (The Philosophy of Freedom, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y., 1964). Earlier translations of this book (1922, 1938, and 1963) bore the title The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, following a suggestion given by Steiner himself. The English word “freedom” connotes a passive state; the German “Freiheit” (as is clean from the following lecture), an objective basis for moral action achieved through intense inner activity.

Yesterday's considerations led us to conclude that at one boundary of cognition we must come to a halt within phenomena and then permeate them with what the phenomena call forth within our consciousness, with concepts, ideas, and so forth. It became apparent that the realm in which these ideas are most pure and pellucid is that of mathematics and analytical mechanics. Our considerations then climaxed in showing how reflection reveals that everything present in the soul as mathematics, as analytical mechanics, actually rests upon Inspiration. Then we were able to indicate how the impulses proceeding from Inspiration are diffused throughout the ancient Indian Vedanta: the same spirit from which we now draw only mathematics and analytical mechanics was once the source of the delicate spirituality of the Vedanta. We were able to show how Goethe, in establishing his mode of phenomenology, always strives to find the archetypal phenomenon while remaining within the phenomena themselves and that his search for die archetypal phenomenon that underlies complex phenomena is, inwardly, the same as the mathematician's search for the axiom underlying complex mathematical constructs. Goethe, therefore, who himself admitted that he had no conventional mathematical training, nevertheless sensed the essence of mathematics so clearly that he demanded a method for the determination of archetypal phenomena rigorous enough to satisfy a mathematician. It is just this that the Western wind finds so attractive in the Vedanta: that in its inner organization, in its progression from one contemplation to the next, it reveals the same inner necessity as mathematics and analytical mechanics. That such connections are not uncovered by academic studier of the Vedanta is simply a consequence of there being so few people today with a universal education. Those who engage in pursuits that then lead them into Oriental philosophy have too little comprehension—and, as I have said, Goethe did have this—of the true inner structure of mathematics. They thus never grasp this philosophy's vital nerve. At the one pole, then, the pole of matter, we have been able to indicate the attitude we must assume initially if we do not wish to continue weaving a Penelope's web like the world view woven by recent science but rather to come to grips with something that rests upon a firm foundation, that bears its center of gravity within itself.

On the other side there stands, as I indicated yesterday, the pole of consciousness. If we attempt to investigate the content of consciousness merely by brooding our way into our souls in the nebulous manner of certain mystics, what we attain are actually nothing but certain reminiscences that have been stored up in our consciousness since birth, since our childhoods. This can easily be demonstrated empirically. One need think only of a certain man well educated in the natural sciences who, in order to demonstrate that the so-called “inner life” partakes of the nature of reminiscences, describes an experience he once had while standing in front of a bookstore. In the store he saw a book that captured his attention by its title. It dealt with the lower form of animal life. And, seeing this book, he had to smile. Now imagine how astonished he was: a serious scientist, a professor, who sees a book title in a bookstore—a book on the lower animals at that!—and feels compelled to smile! Then he began to ponder just whence this smile might have come. At first he could think of nothing. And then it occurred to him: I shall close my eyes. And as he closed his eyes and it became dark all around him, he heard in the distance a musical motif. Hearing this musical motif in the moment reminded him of the music he had heard as a young lad when he danced for the first time. And he realized that of course there lived in his subconscious not only this musical motif but also a bit of the partner with whom he had hopped about. He realized how something that his normal consciousness had long since forgotten, something that had not made so strong an impression on him that he would have thought it possible for it to remain distinct for a whole lifetime, had now risen up within him as a whole complex of associations. And in the moment in which his attention had been occupied with a serious book, he had not been conscious that in the distance a music box was playing. Even the sounds of the music box had remained unconscious at the time. Only when he closed his eyes did they emerge.

Many things that are mere reminiscences emerge from consciousness in this way, and then some nebulous mystics come forth to tell us how they have become aware of a profound connection with the divine “Principle of Being” within their own inner life, how there resounds from within a higher experience, a rebirth of the human soul. And thereby vast mystical webs are woven, webs that are nothing but the forgotten melody of the music box. One can ascribe a great deal of the mystical literature to this forgotten melody of the music box.

This is precisely what a true spiritual science requires: that we remain circumspect and precise enough to refrain from trumpeting forth everything that arises out of the unconscious as reminiscences, as mysticism, as though it were something that could lay claim to objective meaning. For it is just the spiritual scientist who most needs inner clarity if he wishes to work in a truly fruitful way in this direction. He needs inner clarity above all when he undertakes to delve into the depths of consciousness in order to come to grips with its true nature. One must delve into the depths of consciousness itself, yet at the same time one must not remain a dilettante. One must acquire a professional competence in everything that psychopathology, psychology, and physiology have determined in order to be able to differentiate between that which makes an unjustifiable claim to spiritual scientific recognition and that which has been gained through the same kind of discipline, as, for example, mathematics or analytical mechanics.

To this end I sought already in the last century to characterize in a modest way this other pole, the pole of consciousness, as opposed to the pole of matter. To understand the pole of matter requires that we build upon Goethe's view of nature. The pole of consciousness, on the other hand, was not to be reached so easily by a Goetheanistic approach, for the simple reason that Goethe was no trivial thinker, nor trivial in his feelings when it was a matter of cognition. Rather, he brought with him into this realm all the reverence that is necessary if one seeks to approach the springs of knowledge. And thus Goethe, who was by disposition more attuned to external nature, felt a certain anxiety about anything that would lead down into the depths of consciousness itself, about thinking elaborated into its highest, purest forms. Goethe felt blessed that he had never thought about thinking. One must understand what Goethe meant by this, for one cannot actually think about thinking. One cannot actually think thinking any more than one can “iron” iron or “wood” wood. But one can do something else. What one can do is attempt to follow the paths that are opened up in thinking when it becomes more and more rational, to pursue them in the way one does through the discipline of mathematical thinking. If one does this, one enters via a natural inner progression into the realm that I sought to consider in my Philosophy of Freedom. What one attains in this way is not a thinking about thinking. One can speak of thinking about thinking in a metaphorical sense at best. One does attain something else, however: what one attains is an actual viewing [Anschauen] of thinking, but to arrive at this “viewing of thinking,” it is necessary first to have acquired a concrete notion of the nature of sense-free thinking. One must have progressed so far in the inner work of thinking that one attains a state of consciousness in which one recognizes one's thinking to be sense-free merely by grasping that thinking, by “viewing” it as such.

This is the path that I sought to follow—if only, as I have said, in a modest way—in my Philosophy of Freedom. What I sought there was first to make thinking sense-free and then to present this thinking to consciousness in the same way that mathematics or the faculties and powers of analytical mechanics are present to consciousness when one pursues these sciences with the requisite discipline.

Perhaps at this juncture I might be allowed to add a personal remark. In positing this sense-free thinking as a simple fact, yet nevertheless a fact capable of rigorous demonstration in that it can be called forth in inner experience like the structure of mathematics, I flew in the face of every kind of philosophy current in the 1880s and 1890s. It was objected again and again: this “sense-free thinking” has no basis in any kind of reality. Already in my Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception,⁴ however, in the early 1880s, I had pointed to the experience of pure thinking, in the presence of which one realizes: you are now living in an element that no longer contains any sense impressions and nevertheless reveals itself in its inner activity as a reality. Of this thinking I had to say that it is here we find the true spiritual communion of humanity and Union with reality. It is as though we have grabbed the coat-tails of universal being and can feel how we are related to it as souls. I had to protest vigorously against what was then the trend in philosophy, that to which Eduard von Hartmann paid homage in 1869 by giving his Philosophy of the Unconscious the motto: “Speculative Results Following the Method of Scientific Induction.” That was a philosophical bow to natural science. I wrote to protest against this insubstantial metaphysics, which arises only when we allow our thinking to roll on beyond the veil of sense as I have described. I thus gave my Philosophy of Freedom the motto: “Observations of the Soul According to the Scientific Method.” I wished to indicate thereby that the content of a philosophy is not contrived but rather in the strictest sense the result of inner observation, just as color and sound result from observation of the outer world. And in experiencing this element of pure thought—an element that, to be sure, has a certain chilling effect on human nature—one makes a discovery. One discovers that human beings certainly can speak instinctively of freedom, that within man there do exist impulses that definitely tend toward freedom but that these impulses remain unconscious and instinctive until one rediscovers freedom in one's own thinking. For out of sense-free thinking there can flow impulses to moral action which, because we have attained a mode of thinking that is devoid of sensation, are no longer determined by the senses but by pure spirit. One experiences pure spirit by observing, by actually observing how moral forces flow into sense-free thinking. What one gains in this way above all is that one is able to bid farewell to any sort of mystical superstition, for superstition results in something that is in a way hidden and is only assumed on the basis of dark intimations. One can bid it farewell because now one has experienced in one's consciousness something that is inwardly transparent, something that no longer receives its impulses from without but fills itself from within with spiritual content. One has grasped universal being at one point in making oneself exclusively a theater of cognition; one has grasped the activity of universal being in its true form and observed how it yields itself to us when we give ourselves over to this inner contemplation. We grasp the actuality of universal being at one point only. We grasp it not as abstract thought but as a reality when moral impulses weave themselves into the fabric of sense-free thinking. These impulses show themselves to be free in that they no longer live as instinct but in the garb of sense-free thinking. We experience freedom—to be sure a freedom that we realize immediately man can only approach in the way that a hyperbola approaches its asymptote, yet we know that this freedom lives within man to the extent that the spirit lives within him. We first conceive the spirit within the element of freedom.

We thereby discover something deep within man that weaves together the impulses of our moral-social actions—freedom—and cognition, that which we finally attain scientifically. By grasping freedom within sense-free thinking, by understanding that this comprehension occurs only within the realm of spirit, we experience that while performing this we are indeed within the spirit. We experience a mode of cognition that manifests itself simultaneously as an inner activity. It is an inner activity that can become a deed in the external world, something entirely capable of flowing over into the social life. At that time I sought to make two points absolutely clear, but at that time they were hardly understood. I tried above all to make clear that the most important thing about following such a cognitional path is the inner “schooling” [Erziehung] that we undertake. Yes, to have attained sense-free thinking is no small thing. One must undergo many inner trials. One must overcome obstacles of which otherwise one has hardly any idea. By overcoming these obstacles; by finally attaining an inner experience that can hardly be retained because it escapes normal human powers so easily; by immersing oneself in this essence, one does not proceed in a nebulous, mystical way, but rather one descends into a luminous clarity, one immerses oneself in spirit. One comes to know the spirit. One knows what spirit is, knows because one has found the spirit by traveling along a path followed by the rest of humanity as well, except that they do not follow it to its end. It is a path, though, that must be followed to its end by all those who would strive to fulfil the social and cognitional needs of our age and to become active in those realms. That is the one thing that I intimated in my Philosophy of Freedom.

The other thing I intimated is that when we have found the freedom that lives in sense-free thinking to be the basis of true morality, we can no longer seek to deduce moral concepts and moral imperatives as a kind of analogue of natural phenomena. We must renounce everything that would lead us to ethical content obtained according to the method of natural science; this ethical content must come forth freely out of super-sensible experience. I ventured to use a term that was little understood at the time but that absolutely must be posited if one enters this inner realm and wishes to understand freedom at all. I expressed it thus: the moral realm arises within us in our moral imagination [moralische Phantasie]. I employed this term “moral imagination” with conscious intent in order to indicate that—just as with the creations of the imagination [Phantasie]—the requisite spiritual effort is expended within man, regardless of anything external, and to indicate on the other hand that everything that makes the world morally and religiously valuable for us—namely moral imperatives—can be grasped only within this realm that remains free from all external impressions and has as its ground man's inner activity alone. At the same time I indicated clearly in my Philosophy of Freedom that, if we remain within human experience, moral content reveals itself to us as the content of moral imagination but that when we enter more deeply into this moral content, which we bear down out of the spiritual world, we simultaneously enter the external world of the senses.

If you really study this philosophy, you shall see clearly the door through which it offers access to the spirit. Yet in formulating it I proceed in such a way that my method could meet the rigorous requirements of analytical mechanics, and I placed no value on any concurrence with the twaddle arising out of spiritualism and nebulous mysticism. One can easily earn approbation from these sides if one wants to ramble on idly about “the spirit” but avoids the inner path that I sought to traverse at that time. I sought to bring certainty and rigor into the investigation of the spirit, and it remained a matter of total indifference to me whether my results concurred with all the twaddle that comes forth from nebulous mystical depths to represent the spirit. At the same time, however, something else was gained in this process.

If one pursues further the two paths that I described on the basis of actual observation of consciousness in my Philosophy of Freedom, if one goes yet further, takes the next step—then what? If one has attained the inner experiences that are to be found within the sphere of pure thought, experiences that reveal themselves in the end as experiences of freedom, one achieves a transformation of the cognitional process with respect to the inner realm of consciousness. Then concepts and ideas no longer remain merely that; Hegelianism no longer remains Hegelianism and abstraction no longer abstraction, for at this point consciousness passes over into the actual realm of the spirit. Then one's immediate experience is no longer the mere “concept,” the mere “idea,” no longer the realm of thought that constitutes Hegelian philosophy—no: now concepts and ideas transform themselves into images, into Imagination. One discovers the higher plane of which moral imagination is only the initial projection; one discovers the cognitional level of Imagination. While philosophising, one remains caught within a self-created reality; now, after pursuing the inner path indicated by my Philosophy of Freedom, after transcending the level of imagination [Phantasie], one enters a realm of ideas that are no longer dream-images but are grounded in spiritual realities, just as color and tone are grounded in the realities of sense. At this point one attains the realm of Imagination, a thinking in pictures [bildliches Denken]. One attains Imaginations that are real, that are no longer merely a subjective inner experience but part of an objective spiritual world. One attains Inspiration, which can be experienced when one performs mathematics in the right way, when this performance of mathematics itself becomes an experience that can then be developed further into that which one finds in the Vedanta. Inspiration is complemented at the other pole by Imagination, and only through Imagination does one arrive at something enabling one to comprehend man. In Imaginations, in pictorial representations [bildhafte Vorstellungen]—representations that have a more concrete content than abstract thoughts—one finds what is needed to comprehend man from the point of view of consciousness. One must renounce proceeding further when one has reached this point and not simply allow sense-free thinking to roll on with a kind of inner inertia, nor believe that one can penetrate into the secret depths of consciousness through sense-free thinking. Instead one must have the resolve to call a halt and confront the “external world” of the spirit from within. Theo one will no longer spin thoughts into a consciousness that can never fully grasp them; rather, one will receive Imagination, through which consciousness can finally be comprehended. One must learn to call a halt at this limit within the phenomena themselves, and thoughts then reveal themselves to one as that within cognition which can organize these phenomena; one needs to renounce at the outward limit of cognition and thereby receive the spiritual complement to phenomena in the intellect. In just this way one must renounce in the process of inner investigation, one must come to a halt with one's thinking and transform it. Thinking must be brought inwardly to a kind of reflection [Reflexion] capable of receiving images that then unfold the inner nature of man. Let me indicate the soul's inner life in this way [see illustration]. If through self-contemplation and sense-free thinking I approach this inner realm, I must not roll onward with my thinking lest I pass into a region where sense-free thinking finds nothing and can call forth only subjective pictures or reminiscences out of my past. I must renounce and turn back. But then Imagination will reveal itself at the point of reflection. Then the inner world reveals itself to me as a world of Imagination.

Now, you see, we arrive inwardly at two poles. By proceeding into the outer world we approach the pole of Inspiration; by proceeding into the inner world of consciousness we approach the pole of Imagination. Once one has grasped these Imaginations it becomes possible to collate them, just as one collates data concerning external nature by means of experiments and conceptual thinking. In this manner one can collate inwardly something real, something that is not a physical body but an etheric body informing man's physical body throughout his whole life, yet in an especially intensive manner during the first seven years. At the change of teeth this etheric body takes on a somewhat different configuration [Gestalt], as I described to you yesterday. By having attained Imagination one is able to observe the way in which the etheric or life-body works within the physical body.

Now, it would be easy to object from the standpoint of some philosophical epistemology or other: if he wishes to remain logical, man must remain within the conceptual, within what is accessible to discursive thinking and capable of demonstration in the usual sense of the term. Fine. One can philosophise thus on and on. Yet however strong one's belief in such an epistemological tissue, however logically correct it may be, reality does not manifest itself thus; it does not live in the element of logical constructs. Reality lives in pictures, and if we do not resolve to achieve pictures or Imaginations, man's real nature shall elude our grasp. It is not at all a matter of deciding beforehand out of a certain predilection just what form knowledge must take in order to be valid but rather of asking reality in what form it wishes to reveal itself. This leads us to Imagination. In this way, then, what lives within moral imagination manifests itself as the projection into normal consciousness of a higher spiritual world that can be grasped in Imagination.

And thus, ladies and gentlemen, I have led you, or at least sought to lead you, to the two poles of Inspiration and Imagination, which we shall consider more closely in the next few days in the light of spiritual science. I had to lead you to the portal, as it were, beforehand, in order to show that the existence of this portal is well founded in the normal scientific sense. For it is only upon such a foundation that we later can build the edifice of spiritual science itself, which we enter through that portal. To be sure, in traversing the long path, in employing the extremely demanding epistemological method I described to you today—which many may feel is difficult to understand—one must have the courage to come to grips not only with Hegel but also with “anti-Hegel.” One must not only pursue the Hegelianism that I sought to depict in my Riddles of Philosophy;⁵ one must also learn to give Stirner his due, for in Stirner's philosophy there lies something that rises out of consciousness to reveal itself as the ego. And if one simply gives rein to this ego that comes forth out of instinctive experiences, if one does not permeate it with that which manifests itself as moral imagination and Imagination, this ego becomes antisocial. As we have seen, Philosophy of Freedom attempts to replace Stirner's egoism with something truly social. One must have the courage to pass through the instinctive ego Stirner describes in order to reach Imagination, and one must also have the courage to confront face-to-face the psychology of association that Mill, Spencer, and other like-minded proponents have sought to promulgate, a psychology that seeks to comprehend consciousness in a bare concept but cannot. One must have the courage to realize and admit to oneself that today we must follow another path entirely. The ancient Oriental could follow a path no longer accessible to us, in that he formulated his experiences of an inner mathematics in the Vedanta. This path is no longer accessible to the West. Humanity is in a process of constant evolution. It has progressed. Another path, another method, must be sought. This new method is now in its infancy, and its immaturity is best revealed when one realizes that this psychology of association, which seeks to collate inner representations according to laws in the same way one collates the data of natural phenomena, is nothing but the inertia of thinking that wants to break through a boundary but actually enters a void. To understand this one must come to know this psychology of association for what it really is and then learn to lead it over through an inner contemplative viewing [Schauung] into the realm of Imagination. Just as the Orient once saw the Vedanta arise within an element of primal mathematical thought and was able to enter thus into the spirituality of the external world, so we must seek the spirit in the way in which it tasks us today: we must look within and have the courage to proceed from mere concepts and ideas to Imaginations, to develop this pictorial consciousness within and thereby to discover the spirituality within ourselves. Then we shall be able to bear this spirituality back out into the external world. We shall have attained a spirituality grasped by the inner being of man, a spirituality that thus can bear fruit within the social life. The quality of our social life shall depend entirely on our nurturing a mode of cognition such as this, which can at the same time embrace the social. That this is the case I hope to show in the lectures yet to follow.

• 4. Grundlinien einer Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung, Berlin and Stuttgart, 1886 (A Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethes World Conception, Anthroposophic Press, Spring Valley, N.Y.,1968).
• 5. Die Rätsel der Philosophie in ihrer Geschichte als Umriss dargestellt, Berlin, 1914 (Riddles of Philosophy, Anthroposophie Press, Spring Valley, N.Y, 1973).