The Rudolf Steiner Archive

Many souls are sleeping their lives away without a glance toward the spiritual world, without any connection, through prayer or otherwise, with the spiritual world. Think of a sleeping city where the souls have all gone out of their bodies. Whatever these souls took in of a spiritual nature during the day now lives on in them. If they took in nothing, nothing can live on in them during the time between falling asleep and waking up. But if something spiritual is experienced while awake, or if something is raised to the spiritual through prayer or meditation, then this will be for the dead, when it has been carried over into sleep, just what the cornfields are for living persons. If nothing thrives in the cornfields, people starve. What people take with them into sleep is like seeds for the fields where the dead sojourn. What we bring with us in the way of spiritual thoughts, of devotion to the world of soul and spirit, is what the dead live on, nourish themselves with, consume. And as famine ensues here on earth if the fruits do not thrive, so a sort of famine ensues when souls live materialistically and carry nothing with them into sleep. This is the connection between life in the spiritual world and life on earth.

Now someone might say: Maybe there will be a great number of deaths over there. That cannot happen. The dead souls can experience hunger and the pangs of hunger, but the dead cannot die. This brings us to an important question.

You see, death is something known only in the physical world. It is present only in the physical world, and not at all in the supersensible world.

Let me point out something to you. If you go through all the sciences here, you will find that they have worked out all sorts of laws. But science has one ideal, an ideal that one would have to say was fantastic, even if it could be attained; and that is to know life directly. Chemical and physical laws can be investigated any time, but to investigate life is an ideal. Life can never be understood by means of physical laws, because it flows into the physical world from the higher worlds.

Thus, life is something that is not known here, while death is something that is not known in the higher worlds. It is senseless to think that death could occur in the higher world. Pain and suffering have a meaning in the supersensible world, but not death. The beings of the higher hierarchies know nothing about dying.

The angels veil their faces before the mystery of man's creation, they know nothing of it ... They can learn about it only through what they are told by beings who enter the physical plane; they cannot know it directly. This is true of all the beings of the higher hierarchies. Only one of them learned to know death, the Christ. This is the profound significance of the Mystery of Golgotha, that a being became acquainted with death through terrible suffering.

If one thinks this over, meditates on it, one may come to understand the Mystery of Golgotha and to see Christ as the only being that learned to know death.

So, what happens to the souls who are starving over there for the reasons we have described? They feel their connection with the earth fading away. They are living in a world where they must say to themselves: The earth is being withdrawn from us, it no longer enters into our existence. And for the disembodied persons this means great pain, terrible suffering. It means that these souls begin to long for death. But since there is no death there, their hunger causes endless pain as they long for death.

Thus, we see how spiritual science works as seed for the dead, filling them with the proper nourishment. Only if we know things like this can we form a right opinion of spiritual science and see that it is not a theory but an elixir of life, and that it bridges the gulf between the living and the dead. We must see that: through it our souls can build a living bridge to the dead. And because this is so, we must shape the anthroposophical work in the branches in such a way that we learn what a living person can do for one who has died before him. The simplest thing he can do for him is to read to him, read ideas, concepts, notions that are related to the supersensible world. Spiritual science is a language that can be understood by the dead as well as the living. And it can be of service not only to those who occupied themselves with anthroposophy while they were alive, but also to those who would have nothing to do with it. Those who were already anthroposophists here will feel it as an especially good deed if we read to them.

It is often objected that the dead, being already in the supersensible world, must know all about it and thus have no need of what we read to them on the subject.

My dear friends, the earth is not only a vale of tears, it is something that has a real efficacy. The dead can look at the supersensible world, but they cannot form ideas and concepts from merely looking. After all, there are animals on earth. They can look at things, but they cannot form concepts as men do. If the earth had never come to be, the human soul would live in higher worlds but it would never attain concepts about the higher worlds. Men have to go through life on earth if they are to form concepts and ideas. So, a soul that goes through death without an inkling of the spiritual world will live there without experiencing any of the concepts and ideas that we are able to study here through spiritual science. It would have to return to earth to do this.

Thus, a soul can be helpful on earth by reading to the dead, because it can be understood by the dead. And even if the dead persons took in nothing of spiritual science while on earth, we need not assume that they will reject it after death. On the contrary, many who raged against anthroposophy and wanted to know nothing of it are now yearning to hear about it. Not only the things around us are entangled in Maya. There can be a Maya that overcomes a person who rages against spiritual science. What happens in the depths of the soul is often very different from what is on the surface. A person may work up a rage in his daily consciousness, yet have a great longing in him. It is quite hopeless to try to bring such a person to anthroposophy, but in his soul, he may be a better anthroposophist than others. After he dies, however, the Maya is lifted. Then we see what was in the depths of the soul. Here the soul raged, but now the longing comes to the fore. It may be that our reading is in vain, but this we must risk ...

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We come into closer connection with the dead if we devote ourselves to anthroposophy in the right way. We must fill ourselves with understanding for the necessity that spiritual science should make an impression at the present time.

The more we work with spiritual science, the more we notice that the dead also work back upon the living. For example, in educating children who have lost their fathers at a very early age, we must take this into account. Often one can feel the father sending an influence from the spiritual world. I once had to tutor children whose father had died early. I tried to train them in my own way, but it would not work, simply would not work. But when it occurred to me to allow for the influence of the father from the spiritual world, then it went very well ...

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If you work out something about incarnations in a clever theoretical way, it will usually be wrong. It must seem strange that Raphael was the same person as a thorny character like John the Baptist.

How could it happen that this thorny man, who had to pave the way for the Mystery of Golgotha in such a violent way, reappeared as the gentle, pliable, charming Raphael? But look at this. Raphael's father, Giovanni Santi, died when Raphael was eleven. He was a painter. He was not a great painter so far as external achievements go, but he had great ideas in his head, although he could not put them on camas because he had no technical skill. He was also a poet. There was a great deal of fantasy in him, but the physical capacities simply were not there. He went early through the portal of death, and then his forces worked into his son. In Raphael's hands and imagination worked all that his father could send into the physical world. One can say that the old Giovanni Santi was a painter without hands in the supersensible world, for in a wonderful karmic relationship he supplied, in combination with the Christ-filled individuality of the Baptist, what came to expression in Raphael. The supersensible world had to work with the physical world to achieve this result. It shows how the so-called dead are able to influence those who have been left behind ...

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Life on earth has another important mission. When we have gone through the portal of death, if we are not to be lonely, if we are to know something of other souls, we must meet these other souls. We could be together with them there, yet know nothing about them. We must make some connection with the souls here in order to be acquainted with them over there. In the spiritual world souls can walk through each other and know nothing about each other. It is important for those over there that they be read to by persons whom they have known here. The connections we make here are also connections over there. We found societies and build up friendships on a spiritual basis in order to establish connections that will endure beyond death. Not as a mere whim, but as a need that extends beyond death, we are trying to bring our spiritual life into a sort of societal form. Thus we see that, by building up connections with other souls here on earth, we make sure that we will not be hermits in the world between death and a new birth, that we will have a sociable life there as well as here. We will have understanding for the other souls after death only if we try to see into them now.

Therefore, in order not to be shut off from more remote souls, we interest ourselves in their life. For instance, we study religions because we cannot know much about other souls if we are not familiar with their beliefs. We build a close tie with the souls that are near to us. But we can also have some connection with the people whose religious beliefs we study. We must learn to understand seers and to perceive that they cannot do otherwise than bring to other men what they themselves see, in order that what is needed may come to pass in the world and the mission of the earth may be fulfilled.

It must be conceded that over there only those souls who have taken in something spiritual here can have a full consciousness of their influence on the physical world. And since we should learn more and more about these matters, I will mention a fact that is important even if it is not easy to understand. Let us take a soul that never bothered about the supersensible world while it was here. This soul can work on the physical world with its intentions. But although this soul can see the souls that have remained behind—at least, if they know something about the spirit—it is not aware that its intentions are working on the physical world. This knowledge is lacking. There is after all a certain difference between living in immediate communion with your fellow men and being hindered from having such communion so that your intentions reach them only invisibly. You would see everything as in a mirror. The dead person who entered the spiritual world without spiritual knowledge sends down his intentions, but he is not conscious of doing so. This is far less satisfying for him than if he knew: Now you have this intention and you are sending it down.

This direct knowledge of the connection with the living is available only to those who had some kind of spiritual life here or to those who are instructed by the reading of spiritual ideas after death. The reading can replace the knowledge. And it will more and more be the case that men here on earth will achieve consciousness of the influences of the dead, so that there will not be a one-way influence by persons here working on the spiritual world, but persons here, as they learn more about the supersensible world, will be aware of what is coming from over yonder.

We are only at the beginning of anthroposophical development. Therefore, what is being said now will be little heeded. But it will be heeded more in the future. One will have moments when one sees quite clearly how the dead are working. Not every moment of our lives is favorable, but people who fill themselves with spiritual science will base such moments. We really experience very little of what is going on around us. We experience only what happens near us from hour to hour. But that is the least of what is really there, or could be there. Take the following example. Someone goes to work at eight o'clock every morning. His way leads through an old garage. One day he is delayed in starting, and when he comes to the garage he sees that it has collapsed. This happened just at the moment when he would normally be passing through.

Such a case shows how much does not happen that really could happen in our lives. How do you know what would have happened to you if you had crossed the street three minutes earlier than you did? Admittedly there are karmic necessities here, but there are also thousands of possibilities that do not become facts. What actually occurs is one of innumerable possibilities. Just these moments when something could have happened but did not do so because we, so to speak, missed the opportunity. Just these are the right moments for glimpsing the spiritual world. Take another example: You miss a train through being delayed. You should accept this calmly because there may be karma behind it. You should cultivate calmness, and if you do, you will notice a shadowy thought arising in such moments when some accident could have occurred but did not. This thought will be something that a dead person is saying to you, something that may be an important communication from over yonder.

In order to receive a direct communication from the spiritual world, we need a certain soul-training. Spiritual science can furnish such a training. This can go so far that through someone who has died before us we experience, for example, that he is continually concerned about us. If he died very young, he has conserved certain forces that he had in his life. These forces are still available to him and, if the conditions are favorable, he can project them into earth-life. Perhaps the dead person loved us and wants to send us his forces. And we use these forces, although we are not conscious of this. Then it happens that we avoid an accident, by missing a train or something of the sort. Then we see, like a living dream-picture, the imagination of the person who loved us and is sending us his forces. We have an inkling of him, and he shows us that he is concerned about us. We will know how to understand this.

Think how the love that souls have for one another can be increased if one knows that one is not torn away from those whom one leaves here, but can still work for them. And this working will gradually reach the point where a bridge can be built to the souls. If one thinks in this way of the souls that feel themselves close to the dead and strengthen their love through the possibility of further active loving, then the love between soul and soul will be kindled through what spiritual science can give, and this can really be something very substantial when compared with what usually exists as love today. Souls will be brought together in the right way for the first time when people realize that the dead and the living belong to one world.

To bring people to understand that life here and life yonder are only changes of form, this is part of the mission of anthroposophy in our time. And we understand this mission only if we see that through spiritual science we tear away the wall that now seems so threatening because materialistic attitudes are spreading so widely over the earth ...

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In the life between death and a new birth the soul is no less occupied than here. The circumstances over yonder are not the same as here, but they are prepared here in earth-life ... Continually flowing into the physical causes are forces that come from the powers of the higher worlds. If one has had no conscience here, he will have to go through something terrible. He will become the slave, the servant, of the beings who have to bring illness and early death into the world.

There are persons who generate enthusiasm and love, zeal for their work; who do gladly what they must do in accordance with their capacities and their karma. There are also many vocations in which people really cannot work with any enthusiasm, and this will be the case more and more. Therefore, it is necessary that souls who, in spite of it all, punctually discharge their duties, should have something else to which they can turn with enthusiasm. Through spiritual science one can have something that he can do with love and enthusiasm, and through which forces will develop in one's soul. Thus, we can become the servants over yonder of those beings of the higher hierarchies who pour freshness, growth, and health into earth-life.

All these connections enable us to look beyond death and know that we belong to the macrocosm, that we are not living for physical existence alone while on earth but are developing important forces that will come into their own between death and a new birth. We become able to live in such a way that we do not hinder the fruitful development of mankind, but rather generate forces that can further it. We can regard this as the mission of anthroposophy.

Answers to Questions

It should be a selfless service that one does with the reading. The dead understand our speech for 4 or 5 years after dying. Our thoughts for a longer time.

Photographs are of no use in finding the dead. Handwriting is better. You will not succeed in finding them with photographs. The connection is achieved much better by quietly concentrating on their handwriting.

Our task here is to talk about some things that will lead to an understanding of our own era. We know that the development here on earth takes place in such a way that man can undergo new experiences and gain new insights in each of his embodiments on earth. Therefore, the events of our earthly development are arranged in such a way that man does not encounter the same conditions twice in two successive incarnations; that is to say, the earth changes in the epoch between the two incarnations. But external knowledge does not look at this in sufficient depth to see how everything changes fundamentally over long periods of time. But from this we can also conclude that we can only understand ourselves thoroughly if we know what the age of the development of the earth is in which we live, and if we can form a picture of the near future of the earth. We will have to take into account that man, as he faces us in life, having developed over infinitely long periods of time, is a very complicated being.

The human being as a waking being is fundamentally different from the human being in a state of sleep. We know that during sleep the four elements of his being are split into two groups, so that the physical and etheric bodies lie in the repository and the astral body and the I move out into the spiritual world to live according to the laws of that spiritual world. We have already learned that the physical and etheric bodies could not exist in their present form if they were completely abandoned by the astral body and the I, without something else being able to replace them. Without this possibility, the sleeping human being would be of no more value than a plant. A plant is indeed capable of life as a self-contained organism, but not the sleeping human being, because the latter has arranged his physical and etheric bodies in such a way that they must be permeated by his astral body and his ego. So while the human ego and the astral body leave the person, during this time another entity of the same value, a divine spiritual astral body and a matching ego, permeates the physical and etheric body at night. That which remains dormant in the human being is left to the external spiritual powers of the world. That which is in the physical world is thus incorporated into the great spiritual powers of the macrocosm, and all spiritual beings belonging to it work unimpaired by the human ego and astral body.

Today we want to get to know some of these forces of the great world that affect human beings. These conditions are intricately complicated in their interaction between the spiritual forces of the world and the human being. The latter is indeed a small world, and during sleep something flows from the great world into this small world like a mirror image. We can only understand all this if we penetrate into the deep secrets of the world.

In today's humanity, this or that truth is found by science, and one then believes that one possesses this truth as such securely. But the anthroposophist should also develop a feeling for the weight of this or that truth, whether one or the other is essential or inessential, whether it is a cheap, obvious truth or whether it leads us deep into the secrets of the world. This lack of understanding can be seen when undoubted truths are presented that are supposed to be decisive for important conclusions, for example, in the number of bones and muscles of humans in comparison to higher animals. Whether this truth is important or unimportant for the position of humans in relation to animals is not readily apparent from the fact itself. Another important truth, which we should actually come across directly every day, is that, in comparison to all other creatures on earth and in contrast to them, man can look freely into space with his face in the physical sense, to raise himself with his thoughts, his ideas, to what does not belong to the earth. The animals cannot rise from the earth, cannot free themselves from it. And no matter how much the similarity of the development of apes to that of man is emphasized, it is immediately apparent that the ape has not succeeded in straightening its posture when walking and standing. Therefore, we must regard this rising of man from the earth as a very important truth in a spiritual sense. Everything we find in man is a microcosmic imitation of the great world. Man's free elevation is expressed in the relationship of the head to the other limbs of the human being, as a relationship in a microcosm. But the same thing can be found outside in the great world, namely in the relationship between the sun and the earth. By letting this sink in, we get the feeling that the animal is already determined in its organization by the earth alone, but that the sun has determined man in his free outlook, in his feeling and thinking. This contrast cannot be understood at first go, so let us approach it slowly.

We feel our belonging to the universe when we know that it is the sun that sends certain forces to the earth so that man could develop into the organization he now has. From the forces of the sun, he is directed with his head upwards, while the earth pulls him downwards with his limbs. The limbs receive their orders from the head, just as the earth receives its guidance from the sun.

Today we want to highlight another contrast. In what has been said so far, all people are equal. There is no distinction between women and men. But the human organism does show the contrast between man and woman. In view of the analogies we have indicated, we ask: Is there in the great universe a contrast such as that between man and woman, just as there is between the head and the limbs? It must be particularly emphasized here that spiritual science has nothing to do with the representations that would like to extend the contrast between the masculine and the feminine to the whole great world. These are emanations of a schematic materialism of our time. Our present remarks are not meant that way; it is only a naughtiness of our present science. What is meant here is that the opposition between man and woman is only the lowest expression of an opposition in the macrocosm. In earthly existence, we must first point out that when we speak of the opposition between man and woman, we can only speak of the two outer covers, the physical and etheric bodies. For the astral body and I have nothing to do with this opposition, and therefore nothing to do with the following discussions.

Let us first note the fact established by clairvoyant insight, that basically only the head and limbs can give a true impression of a person. Since the spiritual is involved in everything physical, we must pay attention to the extent to which the physical can be an expression of the spiritual, and whether a true or false picture is given. Only the head and limbs give a true picture. Everything else does not correspond to the spiritual; this also applies to the male and female in man. Only the head and the limbs are recognized by the spiritual researcher as a true reflection of the spiritual; everything else is distorted. This is due to the fact that the separation into man and woman can be traced back to the Lemurian period, when a single form united within itself all that we now see as separate. This separation occurred in order to make it possible to connect an ever more material becoming with further development. Thus, man has increasingly materialized his form from an original spiritual form. For in the form of the neutral sex, he was still a form closer to the spirit. With the further development that then occurred in the direction of the feminine, this retained, as it were, an earlier form in which man was still more spiritual. The female form retained this more spiritual form and did not descend as deeply into the material as would have corresponded to the normal development. Thus woman has retained a more spiritual form from an earlier stage of development. She has thus preserved something that is actually untrue. She is also supposed to be the image of the spiritual, but she is distorted in the material sense. It is exactly the opposite with man. He has skipped the normal point of development, thus reaching beyond it, and forms an outer shape that is more material than the shadowy shape behind him, which corresponds to the normal mean.

Woman stands before this true mean; man has gone beyond it. Neither of them represents the true human being. Therefore, it is not the highest, most perfect thing we find in the human form. That is why people tried to add to it what is formed in the old priestly robes to make the human form, especially the male one, appear more true than it is by nature. They had a sense that nature can also record something. The female form leads us back to an earlier stage of existence on earth, to the old lunar age. The male form leads us beyond the earth's time into the Jupiter existence, but in a form that is not yet viable for it.

Now there is also an opposite in the macrocosm that corresponds to the opposite of the masculine and feminine, namely in what we see in the cometary and lunar, which shows itself as the opposite between the comets and the moon. The moon is a piece of the earth that separated from it later than when the sun broke away. What the earth could not use was eliminated, because otherwise the human form would have ossified and become woody in its development. The moon would have closed human development too quickly. It now represents, completely withered and frozen, that which will only be viable again later as a Jupiter being, but which is now as good as dead.

The comet represents something that protrudes from the old moon existence into our earth existence, something that is held back in its development and thus has not developed as far as the earth, something that remained at a higher, more spiritual level. The moon, on the other hand, emerged from our earth and went beyond it. The earth itself stands between the two. Thus, comets and moons, like female and male forms, are to be regarded as having remained behind and progressed beyond the normal process of development. In a certain sense, the comet behaves like the female nature in the human being. We can make ourselves still more clearly understood by comparing what the comet means for the development of the earth. If we realize that this follows the development of the moon and precedes the existence of Jupiter, we must be aware that the laws of nature on the old moon were different from those on the earth, and we can see this to some extent in the comets. Incidentally, it should be mentioned that the existence of comets is an example of how science later confirmed what I said in my lecture at the Theosophical Congress in Paris in June 1906: that comets preserve the earlier natural laws of the old moon. Among other things, certain carbon compounds, cyanic and prussic acid compounds, played a role on the old moon. It should therefore be possible to detect these cyanic and prussic acid compounds in the comet. And indeed, spectral analysis has since proved that there are prussic acid compounds in the comet. Thus the indications of spiritual science agree with the facts found by material science.

What does the cometary existence mean for the earth? What mission is associated with it? The answers to these questions should at least be given comparatively, and it should be pointed out that two different lives take place on earth in the contrast between man and woman. First, there is the course of everyday events in the family from morning to evening, with a regularity like summer and winter, like sunshine and storms and weather and hail. This can go on for a while. But then something happens that makes a significant and lasting change, and that is when a child is born. This interrupts the conventional course of things, and something new remains in the lives of the man and woman. We can compare this with the task that the comet has as a task for life on earth. It brings into our earthly life what comes from the female element of the cosmos. When the comet appears, it causes a jolt in the further development of humanity. Not so much in the actual progress itself, but in everything else that is instilled into humanity. We can observe this in Halley's Comet, in the spiritual forces behind it. Something new for the development of the Earth has always been associated with its appearance. At present it is about to reappear. With this, a new stage in the materialistic sense will be initiated and born. This can be seen from the last three appearances in the years 1682, 1759 and 1835. In 1759, the forces and spiritual powers that brought the spirit of materialistic enlightenment were at work. What had developed in this sense, at the suggestion of the spirits and powers behind Halley's comet, was what, for example, so annoyed Goethe about the “Système de la nature” by Baron von Holbach and the French encyclopedists. When Halley's Comet reappeared in 1835, materialism was quite conspicuously reflected in the views of Büchner and Moleschott, and these were then adopted in the materialism of the second half of the 19th century in the widest circles. In the present year, 1910, we are witnessing a new apparition of the old comet, and that means a year of crisis with regard to the view just discussed. All the forces are at work here to give birth to an even more superficial, worse sense in the human soul, a materialistic swamp of world view. Humanity is facing an enormous test, a trial in which it will be a matter of humanity proving that, in the face of the threat of the deepest fall, the impulse to ascend is also strongest in all respects. Otherwise it would not be possible for man to overcome the resistance that materialistic views place in his way. If man were not exposed to materialism, he could not overcome it by his own efforts. And now the opportunity arises to make a choice between the spiritual and the materialistic direction. The conditions for this year of crisis are being sent to us from the cosmos.

Spiritual science is something that is read from the great signs of heaven and brought into the world by those who know how to interpret these great signs, these mighty characters. So that humanity is warned against taking the materialistic path, which is outwardly recognizable in the appearance of Halley's Comet, a counter-impulse must be given by spiritual science. Thus, the forces for the upward path are also sent to us from the cosmos through other signs.

At the time of the event of Golgotha, the vernal point of the sun had been in the sign of Aries for some time. This point moves through all twelve constellations of the zodiac in the course of 25,920 years. The advance has now occurred in such a way that we have now entered the constellation of Pisces with the vernal point. By the middle of the twentieth century, we will have reached a certain point in this constellation. The constellation of Aries now marks the end of the Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, which, according to Oriental philosophy, began in 3101 BC. At that time, the vernal point of the sun passed through the constellation of Taurus. This event was depicted in the Persian Mithras bull and the Egyptian Apis bull. We find depictions of the passage through the constellation of Aries in the legend of the Argonauts with the Golden Fleece, and then in Christ as the Lamb, as the first Christians usually depicted him at the foot of the cross.

The age of Kali Yuga came to an end in 1899. It lasted from 3101 BC to 1899 AD, for 5000 years, during which time people had to rely on their physical senses alone to observe what was happening on the physical plane, without the ability to use clairvoyance to help them. Now the abilities are beginning to prepare themselves, which will be able to lead human nature back to spiritual development. It was only in the Kali Yuga that the ego could and had to develop into the consciousness that is its own, in the only way possible during this time. From now on, a clairvoyant consciousness can join this sense of self, which will develop within the next 2500 years, whereby a spiritual grasp of the world will then be added to the physical-sensual one. To make this possible, the powers will be sent to us around the middle of the 20th century, so that people will then begin to see the etheric and astral bodies, and in such a way that this will already occur as a natural ability in some exceptional people. When a person then wants to carry out a preconceived plan, an intention of some kind, a kind of vision will appear to him, which is nothing other than a preview of the karmic fulfillment of the deed that has been done. In the meantime, humanity can plunge into the quagmire of materialistic worldviews and views of life. But then it will easily happen that the weak abilities of clairvoyance that show up during this time will be ignored as such, and people who already possess them will be regarded as fools and fantasists. For anyone who has never heard of spiritual science will not recognize these delicate abilities. But nevertheless these signs are true. However, if the spiritual world view triumphs, humanity will carefully cultivate the abilities hinted at, so that the persons endowed with them will be able to bring spiritual truths down from the spiritual world.

Under such circumstances, we can say: We are standing before an important point in the evolution of the world, which we must prepare, so that in its arising, our Earth will not be trampled to death with rough feet, when it wants to cover itself with a new faculty. What will then be seen as the spiritual world, with spiritual organs, as a spiritual atmosphere, is something that today only the initiated can recognize. But it will take a considerable time before the first tender abilities have developed to this degree or even to the height at which ancient humanity knew them in their ecstatic states, albeit only in their dream-like clairvoyance. But like a spiritual shell, this constantly developing ability will be spread around our earth. The Oriental scriptures, especially the Tibetan, speak much of a land which has disappeared, and they speak with sadness of Shamballa, a land which disappeared in the age of Kali Yuga. But it is rightly said that the initiates can withdraw to Shamballa to get from there what they need to further humanity in their development. All Bodhisattvas draw strength and wisdom from the land of Shamballa. For the average person, it has disappeared. But there are prophecies that this land of Shamballa will return to humanity. When the delicate powers of clairvoyance show themselves and become more and more intensified and widespread, and when these, as the good forces that come from the sun's existence, are received and allowed to work instead of the forces from Halley's Comet, then Shamballa will return. We are in the period of preparation for Humanity for this unfoldment of a new clairvoyance, which will take place during the next 2,500 years, a preparation which will steadily continue both in the time between birth and death and in the time between death and a new birth. What will then take place will be the subject of the next lecture.

I

[ 1 ] The life of an age finds its most intimate expression in poetry. What the spirit of an epoch has to say to the heart of the individual is expressed in his songs. No art speaks such an intimate language as lyrical poetry. Through it we become aware of how intimately interwoven the human soul is with the greatest and the smallest processes of the universe. The mighty genius who walks on the heights of humanity becomes the friend of the simplest mind through his song. How man is drawn to man is revealed with perfect clarity in poetry. For we feel that we have no less claim to the spiritual gifts of our fellow men than to their lyrical creations. What the spirit achieves in other fields seems to belong to all mankind from the outset, and they believe they have a right to share in its enjoyment. The song is a voluntary gift whose communication springs from the selfless need not to possess the secrets of the soul for oneself alone. This basic trait of lyrical art may explain why it is the most beautiful means of reconciliation between the most diverse attitudes of people. The religious mind and the atheistic free spirit will meet sympathetically when the latter sings of his God and the latter sings of freedom. And poetry is also the field in which today the bearers of old, mature artistic ideals and the spirits of a nascent, nascent world view communicate most easily.

[ 2 ] The German sense of art in the second third of our century presents itself as an after-effect of the classical and romantic intellectual currents. The relationship that Goethe, Herder, Schiller and their successors had with nature and art was regarded as exemplary. They set high standards for themselves, but first asked their predecessors whether these standards were the right ones. This way of thinking continues to this day. Gradually, it became second nature to the creative spirits. They were under its spell without being aware of it.

[ 3 ] One such spirit is Theodor Storm. A naive view of nature, a simple, healthy sense are combined with a highly developed feeling for artistic form. Storm owes this feeling to the fact that his youth began soon after Goethe's death. The intellectual atmosphere of his age instilled in him a sense for perfect art forms as if it were innate. Storm poured the atmospheric Iyrian views into these forms, which his sense of nature and his deep feelings brought him.

[ 4 ] The classical sense of art bore different fruit from that of the North German Storm in two Swiss poets, Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and Gottfried Keller. Natures like Meyer can only flourish in times that were preceded by cultural peaks. They have inherited the need for the highest goals in life and at the same time an artistic seriousness that is not easily satisfied by their own achievements. Meyer wants to experience everything he experiences with dignity. His ideals are so distant that he is in constant fear of never reaching them. He wants to constantly indulge in festive feelings that others only allow themselves at certain times. What he has achieved always falls short of what he desires, so that an incessant alternation of longing and renunciation pervades his soul. He sees pathetic symbols in natural phenomena. He passes by the obvious relationships between things; instead he searches for rare, hidden connections between beings and phenomena. He becomes aware of the strongest contrasts everywhere, because his whole perception strives for the great line.

[ 5 ] Gottfried Keller is an essentially different personality. For him, the attainable is the standard he applies to everything. His whole outlook on life has something bourgeois and unaffected about it. A sound, simple mind and free, receptive senses alone determine his existence. He does not love his homeland out of an ethical instinct, but because he feels most comfortable in his homeland. He strongly emphasizes all the good things about his homeland and benevolently overlooks the unpleasant. He enjoys things as they are and never worries about whether something could be different. His description of nature reflects things as they are; he is not interested in symbols and parables such as those created by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. It is not in his nature to spiritualize feelings and sensations. For him, love always has a sensual trait. But this sensuality is a chaste, coarse and healthy one. He does not love the soul alone, he also loves the mouth; but his love remains childishly naïve.

[ 6 ] The southern German poet Johann Georg Fischer is of a similar nature. He is extremely content with life and its pleasures. He loves his existence so much and knows how to derive so much bliss from it that he only desires the hereafter if it is as beautiful and good as this life. He always feels his healthy strength and is never in doubt that it will lead him safely through life. He also knows how to find something pleasant in the shadows of life. His description of nature is not as simple as Keller's; it has something meaningful and pictorial about it. When he sings of female beauty, we admire the purity of soul that lies in his tones.

[ 7 ] In stark contrast to these southern German poetic natures is the austere beauty of Theodor Fontane's poetry. Meyer, Keller and Fischer never hold back how they feel about things. Fontane meaningfully juxtaposes the impressions that arouse his feelings. He conceals what is going on inside him and leaves us alone with our hearts. He is a brittle person who likes to hide his own ego. Our soul trembles at his descriptions; he never tells us that his soul trembles too. The images his imagination creates have something monumental about them. The seriousness, the majesty of life speak to us from his poems. He sings of significant situations, strong contrasts, proud human characters.

[ 8 ] The poetry of Paul Heyse is post-classical in the truest sense of the word. He has everything from his predecessors: the purest sense of form, the ennobled view, the cheerful artistic spirit directed towards the eternal harmony of existence. Everywhere he dissolves the seriousness of life into the serenity of art. It is his conviction that art should lead man beyond the burdens and oppressiveness of reality. Without doubt, such a view is that of a true artist. But there is a huge difference between a person who has fought his way through the hardships of life, through the dissonances of existence, to the view of harmony that underlies the world, and one who simply accepts this view as tradition. The artist's serenity is only uplifting in the highest sense if it has its roots in the seriousness of life. Goethe, at the time of his perfection, looked at the world with the blissful calm of a sage, having acquired this calm in fierce battles; Heyse jumped unprepared into the field of balanced beauty. He is an epigone through and through. He has a sure eye for the genuine beauties of nature; but his eye has been trained to Goethe's way of looking at things. Heyse knows how to follow the most marvelous paths and make the most wonderful observations; but one always has the feeling that he is following paths blazed by others, and that he is rediscovering what someone else has already found.

[ 9 ] The lyrical poems of Martin Greif are born out of a tender soul, in which the finest impulses of nature and the human soul tremble nobly. He is not moved by the whole of an impression, but only by the soulfulness of it. A pious, devout spirit passes over to us from Greif's creations. Greif brings to life the quiet, modest melodies that rest in things as if enchanted. When we give ourselves over to his poetry, it is as if all the loud, demanding sounds of the world fall silent and a quiet music of the spheres enters our ears. The pious calm of the soul that Goethe loved so much has found a singer in Martin Greif.

[ 10 ] The Viennese Jakob Julius David is a poet whose entire oeuvre is like a single cry for this blessed peace, combined with the painful feeling that the gates to it are closed to him. His imagination paints gloomy pictures that speak vividly of the bitter suffering of a proud soul. The passionate desire, the ardent longing is abruptly replaced by wistful renunciation. As a strong nature, David cannot unlearn desire. A note of displeasure runs through all his poems, which abruptly stands out from the beauty of form that is characteristic of them. He is the representative of those contemporary poets who may have modeled their art on the great role models, but who are not at the same time able to wrestle their way through to the harmonious world view of these role models. David knows that disharmony is not the deepest meaning of life, but harmony does not reveal itself to him. That is why he cannot sing of joy and pleasure, but at best of oblivion and resignation. He is not able to lift anyone up from their suffering, but only to comfort them and exhort them to surrender.

[ 11 ] We see another Viennese poet in a steadily ascending development: Ferdinand von Saar. He is not a distinct personality who shows himself direction and goal out of inner strength. He found himself relatively late in life. By appropriating the unfamiliar, through wise self-education, he reached the point where genius sets in. In the "Nachklänge", which appeared recently, noble artistry and wise contemplation of the world emerge in equal measure. Pictures of noble beauty convey a profound view of nature and people. But nowhere do they bear the stamp of the inspiration of a brilliant imagination; they have gradually matured in a life that has tirelessly striven towards perfection. It is not rapturous enthusiasm that compels Saar's creations, but serious reverence. Saar is one of those artists who have the strongest effect on us when they do not reveal to us the individuality of their own heart, but when they make themselves the spokesperson for what moves all of humanity.

[ 12 ] The same is probably true of another contemporary poet, even if he is as far removed from Saar as possible in many respects: Emil Prinz von Schoenaich-Carolath. Schoenaich-Carolath must be conceded a certain degree of originality; but there is no doubt that he could only reach the artistic heights to which he attained in an epoch in which aesthetic education had reached such a level as in his own. Spirits such as his are only possible within the late culture of a people that had allowed great things to develop from it shortly before. They give back in a refined form what they have received. Schoenaich-Carolath has tones for all human feelings, for all processes of nature. His vision penetrates deep behind the phenomena. He has battles to fight in life, but one notices that during the struggle he never doubts his ultimate victory. If one has called him a Byronic nature, one should not have overlooked the fact that his Byronic restlessness is mixed with a happy confidence.

[ 13 ] In the truest sense of the word, Ernst von Wildenbruch is an afterbloom of classical German art. When he speaks to us, we always hear a great predecessor speaking along with him. It is fair to say that he learned to write poetry, certainly learned it very well. He is more a chosen one than a called one. And that can be said of many today. For this time it can only be applied to Alberta von Puttkammer. She is able, perhaps with just a little too many words, to paint moods of nature with unspeakable beauty. Life seems to her like a blissful elegy. Existence has thorns for her too; but she never lets us forget that the thorns are in rose gardens.

II

[ 14 ] A young generation of poets came onto the scene in Germany at the beginning of the 1980s. It included spirits who were as different as possible in terms of outlook on life and talent. However, they were united in the conviction that a revolution in artistic feeling and creativity was necessary. The rebellion against the prevailing taste of the time, in which Julius Wolff and Rudolf Baumbach were regarded as serious artists, was justified. The principle: "Life is serious, art is cheerful" had been distorted into a caricature in shallow minds. Virtuoso poetic 'dalliance' was no longer distinguished from the noble, beautiful form born from the depths of the soul. The time was struggling for a new world view that wanted to reckon with the great scientific results of the nineteenth century and for a social design that would give those left behind in the struggle for happiness their rightful place. The leading poets knew nothing of such upheavals. This realization brought forth the words of anger in the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart, with which they declared war on contemporary taste in their "Kritische Waffengänge" in 1882. The poets who came together in 1884 to form the collection "Moderne Dichtercharaktere" were inspired by the same sentiment. And this initial rush was followed by the founding of journals and the publication of almanacs, in which disgust at outdated ideas found just as strong an expression as the boldest hopes for the future. Such sentiments gave rise to the recognition that for the past decade and a half has been increasingly accorded to a poet who, unlike many others, does not deliberately follow modern paths, but who naively embraces the circle of emotions that excite contemporary man with a vivid imagination: Detlev von Liliencron. He is a man full of life, who walks through life as a carefree enjoyer and is able to describe all its charms with vivid power. He is capable of all tones, from the most exuberant exuberance to the most fervent adoration of sublime works of nature. He is able to sing hymns of joy to frivolity and carelessness like a child of the world, and he can become pious like a priest when the heath spreads out its silent beauty before him. Liliencron is not a poet who looks at life from one point of view. You will search in vain for a unified world view that could be expressed in clear ideas. At every moment, he is completely absorbed in the impressions to which he has given himself. He does not worry or think about what lies beyond the things of the world. Instead, like a true bon vivant, he savors everything that lies within things. And he always finds the characteristic tone and the most perfect form to express the wealth of perceptions that impose themselves on his senses, which thirst for the whole breadth of reality. He has no need to distinguish between the valuable and the insignificant in this reality, for he is able to draw from the sight of an "old, discarded, torn, half-rotten, abandoned boot" a sentiment whose expression is worthy of a mood that the poet arouses in us. Liliencron draws natural scenes and experiences with rough, masculine lines; he juxtaposes sharp, telling contrasts of color. The strength of his personality is particularly evident in his song lyrics. No intimacy of feeling, no bitter pain is capable of alienating his secure sense of self from himself even for a moment.

[ 15 ] Under Liliencron's influence stands Otto Julius Bierbaum. However, he lacks a secure sense of self; he is a soft, dependent nature that always loses itself in the impressions of the outside world. Nowhere in his work is there any sign of a world view, of a conception that penetrates into the depths of beings. But while Liliencron's sharply defined personality physiognomy compensates for the same lack, Bierbaum's creations are devoid of higher interest. His amiable powers of observation know how to see little meaning in things. His mind is not burdened with the slightest urge for knowledge; what he copies from nature with a careless glance, he depicts in graceful, but sometimes rather uncharacteristic colors. He succeeds in creating charming images of nature; he is able to depict the small impulses of the heart in a magnificent way. Where he aims higher, he becomes unnatural. The big words, the powerful tones to which he often stoops, sound hollow because they have nothing shocking or exciting to communicate. Bierbaum appears like a walker who would like to play a hiker. When he pretends to be boldly and exuberantly pilgrimaging through life, it can't be particularly interesting because he avoids the abysses and dangers.

[ 16 ] Another poet dependent on Liliencron, Gustav Falke, arouses almost opposite feelings. He seeks out life in its mysterious depths, where it raises doubts and poses riddles. He is characterized by a highly developed artistic conscience. In his imagination, the events of the world are transformed into beautiful images. He searches in a serious way for harmony between desires and duties. He strives for the pleasures of existence; but he only wants them if his own merit wins them for him. Victory after a hard struggle is to his liking; he cannot particularly appreciate an easier one. Many an anxious question to fate springs from his serious spirit; a firm belief that man can be content if he adapts himself to the conditions of life leads him out of doubts and puzzles. There is something heavy in Falke's poetry; but this is only a consequence of his conception, which searches for the weighty qualities of things.

[ 17 ] Through serious artistic endeavor, Otto Ernst has worked his way up from a sentimental patheticist to a poet worthy of respect. Although his expression lacks immediacy and independence and his sensibility lacks moderation, there is much in his collections and among his poems published in magazines that reveals a true poetic personality. Especially where he remains in the modest circle of domestic happiness, of everyday events, Otto Ernst succeeds in creating atmospheric creations of a coherent art form. He becomes highly attractive when he lets his humor prevail, which has nothing worldly, but rather something philistine and mischievous, but which hits the nail on the head for those who are able to take the things in question seriously enough. One often has the feeling that Otto Ernst would accomplish far more if he naively abandoned himself to his original feelings and ideas and did not almost always do violence to them through the strict view he has of the tasks of art; he destroys many a charming feeling, many a meaningful image through an added, clever comparison, through a doctrinaire twist, through a philosophical observation that is supposed to say a lot but is usually only trivial.

[ 18 ] Poets of less distinctive character are Arthur von Wallpach, Wilhelm von Scholz and Hugo Salus. Wallpach's feeling for nature and his trust in life are reminiscent of Liliencron. Enchanting mood painting, sometimes in briskly applied, sometimes in intimately graded tones, is characteristic of him. Wilhelm von Scholz is one of those poets in whom every feeling, every idea is distorted when it is to be transformed by the imagination into an image. The word always strives to transcend that which the emotion encompasses. If it has a beautiful image in mind, it spoils it by emphasizing the content twice. His imagination is not content to say what is necessary; it overwhelms us with all the accidental ideas that come to it apart from what is necessary. Hugo Salus sometimes expresses the simple in too strange a way. Anyone who knows how to draw as much pleasure from nature as he does is surprised when he illustrates this pleasure with ideas that are often quite far-fetched. Salus does not focus his eye directly on things, as it were, but seeks out an altered reflection of them.

[ 19 ] The lyrical poems of Otto Erich Hartleben are born of a pure sense of beauty and highly developed taste. His style is characterized by a rare plastic power. Transparent clarity and perfect vividness is a basic trait of his imagination. This is the case despite the fact that his imagination is only slightly fertilized by images taken from external nature. It almost exclusively shapes the inner experiences of his own personality. This poet, who as a novelist and dramatist seeks out the contradictions of reality as objectively as possible and mercilessly reveals the humor inherent in the processes of life, holds a dialogue with his soul in his poetry, making intimate confessions to himself. One has the feeling that these are the most important, the most meaningful moments of his soul's life in which he expresses himself as a lyricist. He is then completely alone with himself and with little that is dear to him in the world. His most beautiful poems were written at turning points in his life, at moments when decisive events were taking place in his heart. And they speak of their creator's sense of calm, simple beauty, style and artistic harmony. Otto Erich Hartleben is more of a contemplative than an active nature. There is nothing impetuous in his nature. He is less a creative than a creative spirit. He prefers to let the content come to him, and then he takes pleasure in shaping it; that is where his productivity unfolds. He lacks Liliencron's verve, but he possesses the quiet grandeur that Goethe claims in his "Winckelmann" is the hallmark of true beauty. In the midst of the Sturm und Drang of the present, Otto Erich Hartleben, the lyricist, can be described as one of those who approach classical artistic ideals. His entire personality is attuned to an aesthetic-artistic view of the world. He only understands the problems of life to the extent that mature taste is called upon to decide them. Philosophy only exists for him insofar as he has a personal relationship to its questions. He can strike soft, intimate tones, but only those that are compatible with a proud, self-assured nature. All pathos is as alien to him as possible.

[ 20 ] Ferdinand Avenarius knows how to harmonize a certain classical-academic form and conception with modern sensibilities. His poetry has grown up on the foundation of theoretical ideas. His feelings do not emerge directly, but allow the ideas of reason to shine through everywhere. He has created a poem "Live!" in which he does not communicate his feelings, but an objective personality communicates his own. This kind of objective poetry will never be cultivated by a completely original spirit. It requires artistic conviction to serve as a support for the artistic imagination.

III

[ 21 ] What we so sorely lack in many of our most important contemporary poets, the prospect of a great, free world view, we encounter in the most beautiful sense in Ludwig Jacobowski. With his recently published collection "Leuchtende Tage", he has placed himself at the forefront of contemporary poets. In this book, the entire scope of human spiritual life is laid out before us as if in a mirror. The sublimity and perfection of the world as a whole, the relationship of the soul to the world, human nature in its most diverse forms, the sufferings and joys of love, the pains and bliss of the cognitive instinct, the mysterious paths of fate, social conditions and their repercussions on the human mind: all these elements of the great organism of life find their poetic expression in this book. Every single thing that this poet encounters, he grasps with receptive senses and with fertile imagination; but again and again he also finds access to the essence of the world that lies behind the flow of individual phenomena. The title of his book "Shining Days" seems to us like a symbol of his whole way of thinking. Like "eternal stars", the "shining days" of life console him for all the suffering and hardship with which the path to our life's goal is covered. Jacobowski formed this sunny world view out of hard struggles. It gives his creations a liberating undertone. His feelings are driven by the highest interests of life with a warmth and intimacy that are personal and immediate in the most beautiful sense. Just as the philosopher's reason distracts him from the individual experience and points him to those bright regions where the transience of everyday life is only a parable for the eternal powers of nature, so his immediate feelings push this poet in the same direction. He is an inventor of the world, just as the philosopher is a thinker of the world. He sees things with childlike, lively senses in their full, fresh tones of color; and he shapes them in the sense of harmony, without the contemplation of which the more deeply inclined person cannot live. Whoever possesses such poetic power, the highest wisdom works like the most loving naivety. The three most monumental forms of the life of the soul are revealed by Jacobowski in their innermost relationship: the childlike, the artistic and the philosophical. Weiler unites these three forms in himself in an original way and succeeds in striking poetic sparks from life everywhere. Unlike so many contemporary poets, he does not need to search for shells in order to extract precious pearls from them; the seed he reaches out for is enough for him. Jacobowski is far removed from anything artificial or elaborate. He uses the closest, simplest, clearest means. Just as the folk song always finds the simplest expression for the deepest emotional content, so does this poet. He has a feeling for the broad, simple lines of the world's context. He is understood by the naive mind, and he has the same effect on the philosopher who struggles with the eternal riddles of existence. Whether he speaks to us of the experiences of his own soul or describes the fate of a person who is transplanted from the country to the big city to be crushed by life, it will affect us to the same extent. In Jacobowski's nature, there is tenderness alongside substance. He has a firm trust in the direction of his soul. He spurns all the buzzwords of the time, all the favorite ideas of individual currents of the present. What flows from the strength of his personality is the only thing that determines him. In him, we encounter none of the abstruse oddities of those who today turn away from the healthy hustle and bustle of the world and search for all kinds of aesthetic and philosophical-mystical quirks in lonely corners of existence; he can hear the noise of the day because he feels the security within himself to find his way.

[ 22 ] A lyricist whose greatest power lies in the design, in the plastic rounding of the image, is Carl Busse. Within the framework of this image there is rarely anything significant in terms of content, but usually a meaningful mood. This poet is characterized by a fine sense of style for the appearance of form. He knows how to let the basic feeling of a poem come to life in the turns of language, in the harmony of expression. He is not concerned with the deepening of a feeling, but with its vivid, colorful imprint. When Busse paints us a mood, we will not miss a color tone that makes it a rounded whole, nor will we be easily disturbed by a foreign tone. The effervescence of emotion, the urge of passion never appears directly in his work, but is always subdued by artistic moderation. When he speaks of nature, he keeps himself in the middle between the naïve and the pathetic; when he communicates his own emotions to us, they do not come at us in a storm, but in measured steps. Buss's similes and symbols are not meaningful, but concise; his ideas move freely and swiftly from thing to thing; but the poet always knows how to firmly delimit the perimeter within which they are allowed to unfold. Thus Busse's poetry will satisfy those in particular who value external form above all else in poetry; the deeper natures who seek the great, the meaningful content, will not receive any strong impressions from his creations.

[ 23 ] In a most amiable manner, Martin Boelitz finds the expression for the most intimate moods of nature. Transient phenomena, which demand a careful eye if their fleeting, delicate beauty is to be captured, are his domain. His images of nature do not become vivid, but meaningful parables. And he clothes abstract ideas in a sensual garment, so that we may not be able to grasp them, but we believe we can feel them. Thus he lets "all wishes stand still" and "dream the day away"; thus he personifies "longing" and "loneliness". He sings less about the soul that lies in things than about the soul that spreads like a delicate fragrance between things and above them in an ethereal way. When he speaks of himself, he does so in a tone of spirited, serious cheerfulness. His view of life is a cheerful one; but it does not spring from deep thinking, but from a naïve carelessness. He does not overcome the difficulties of life; he takes his paths where there are none. It is not in the possession of strength that he feels happy, but in dreaming of such strength.

[ 24 ] Paul Remer draws on two sources: subtle thinking and a symbolically effective imagination. He is always based on a sentence, a thought; but he knows how to weave it into a symbolic process in such a way that we forget the mystery and are led to believe that he has extracted the symbolic from the process. Whether he depicts the experiences of the human soul symbolically in this way, whether he speaks of natural phenomena or of human actions: he is equally attractive. As he says in a poem about a blind woman: she listens to "the secret confidences of things", so he does it himself. He does not tell us what effects things have on each other, but what their souls have to say to each other. Remer does not describe the bright colors or the loud sounds of nature, but rather the deeper meaning of the colors and sounds.

[ 25 ] The poetry of Kurt Geuckes has sharp, characteristic lines. He does not offer us a unique, individual world of feeling. Thousands felt and feel like him. He is animated by an idealism that is universally human. But he possesses a rare poetic power to express this idealism. Strictly closed, artistic forms do not express an original, but a solid world view. The poet's fiery imagination depicts the darker sides of life in deep, poignant images. However, hope always spreads above the suffering and pain, appearing in a form that can only emerge from the conviction of a true idealist. He also reaches for the symbol when he wants to depict the meaningful in nature, and the symbols always have something masculine about them. But he is also no stranger to the mystical mood, and he always finds a healthy pathos to express it. His mind is turned towards the beautiful and great in the world, for the sake of which he gladly endures the small, ugly and depressing.

[ 26 ] A noble sense of nature and a soul in need of freedom speak from the poems of Fritz Lienhard. But these two traits of his personality are not very pleasing due to the one-sidedness with which they appear. The poet repeats in a rather monotonous way the healthy nature of simple, rural conditions and the depravity of the big city. The magnificent Wasgau forest and the "Venusberg" of Berlin: his love and his hate are enclosed in these two images. His enthusiasm for the fresh country also corresponds to a naive technique that works with the simplest of means.

[ 27 ] Whoever wants to calculate the driving forces of cultural development in recent decades will undoubtedly have to put a high figure on the proportion of women in public life. But perhaps in no other field is this share as clear as in poetry. For while in other fields women appear as fighters and wrestlers, here they are givers and communicators. Otherwise she tells us what she wants to be; here she expresses what she is. This has given us great insights into the female soul. Because the woman felt compelled to shape her inner life artistically, she herself has first become clearly aware of it. Books such as Gabriele Reuter's "Aus guter Familie", Helene Böhlau's "Halbtier" or Rosa Mayreder's "Idole" appear to men like insights into a new world.

[ 28 ] It is understandable that the most intimate art, poetry, also reveals to us the deepest secrets of a woman's heart. The most striking characteristic of modern women's poetry is its frankness about the nature of women. The present age, which has made unreserved truth a requirement of genuine art, has also opened women's mouths. What she once carefully guarded as the sanctuary of the heart, she now entrusts to art. She has gained faith, confidence in her own being, and while the important women of earlier times unconsciously pursued the ideals and goals of men when they wanted to form a view of life, today's women are building one of their own accord.

[ 29 ] The poetic creations of Ricarda Huch show us how clear and inwardly stable such a view of life can be. She has conquered a high, free point of view from which she surveys the phenomena of the world. Although she is not able to see this world in the sun's glare from her height, but only to resign herself to the nothingness of existence, she nevertheless finds in this resignation the inner freedom that an independently inclined person needs in order to find their way in life. Even if she finds the ship of life hurtling towards death, towards annihilation, she draws satisfaction from the awareness that she is allowed to set her sights firmly on the goal. It is not surprising that the female Faustian nature does not know how to create satisfaction for her striving in the first rush, since the male nature has hardly progressed beyond doubtfulness despite thousands of years of struggle. How could a female Nietzsche today elevate the life-affirming "Überweib" to an ideal, since we have experienced Schopenhauer's enthusiasm for nirvana in this century and Novalis' view that death is the true, higher purpose of life?

[ 30 ] The lyrical creations of Anna Ritter are not born out of the great questions of existence, not out of deep doubts and torments, but also out of a genuinely feminine feeling. Something graceful and musical is poured over her poetry. Nowhere does she struggle with form, but she sometimes achieves a perfection in this direction that must silence any critical doubts. Her talent for rhythm and the euphony of language seems so natural that the originality of many a praised nature poet looks like stiltedness in comparison. Love appears in the light that only the true, open-hearted woman can lend it. Sensuality speaks tenderly and chastely from Anna Ritter's songs; feminine desire expresses itself warmly and intimately. The poetry of the mother appears in graceful magic; the life of nature does not emerge powerfully, but all the more sweetly from this poet's soul. Her genuinely feminine disposition comes to the fore in the "Storm Songs". It is not the great male storm that rages in them, but the mysteriousness of the female soul. They are storms that are not overcome by the eternal, but by a happy, spirited optimism of life.

[ 31 ] Marie Stona is gifted with a clear awareness of the nature of women and their relationship to men. The contrast of the sexes and the effect of this contrast on the nature of the feeling of love: these are the ideas that tremble through her soul. Does the man give as much to the woman as she gives to him, that is an anxious question for her. And must not woman give man more than he can return, if she is to increase his strength and not destroy it? How can woman preserve her pride, her self-confidence, and yet sacrifice her self on the altar of love? These are the eternal cultural questions of woman that this poet explores and which she seeks to shape from a mind that is as rich as it is deep.

[ 32 ] The poems of Thekla Lingen express the moods to which the woman of the present day succumbs, who, because of a highly developed sense of freedom and personality, finds the social position offered to her by traditional views uncomfortable. They contain none of the thoughts and tendencies that come to light in modern women's issues. Thekla Lingen only expresses what she thinks and feels individually. But it is precisely this individuality that appears as the elementary content of the cultural struggle of women, which only comes to light in an intellectual way in the emancipation efforts.

IV

[ 33 ] Modern intellectual culture does not make it easy for people with a deep soul to find their way in life. The natural science reformed by Charles Darwin has brought us a new world view. It has shown us that living beings in nature, from the simplest forms up to the most perfect forms, have developed according to eternal, iron laws, and that man has no higher, purer origin than his animal fellow creatures. Furthermore, our intellect cannot close itself to this conviction. But our heart, our emotional life, cannot follow the intellect quickly enough. We still have within us the feeling that thousands of years of education have implanted in the human race: that this natural kingdom, this earthly world, which according to the new view has brought forth from its mother's womb like all other creatures, including man, has a lower existence than what we call "ideal", "divine". We would like to feel like children of a higher world order. It is a burning question of our spiritual development to follow the truth recognized by reason with our hearts. We can only return to peace when we no longer find the natural contemptible, but are able to revere it as the source of all being and becoming. Few of our contemporaries feel this as deeply as Friedrich Nietzsche did. For him, the confrontation with the modern and scientific world view became a matter of the heart that shook his entire emotional life. He began by studying the ancient Greeks and Richard Wagner's philosophical world of thought. And in Schopenhauer he found an "educator". This man of fine mind felt the suffering at the bottom of every human soul to a special degree. And he believed that the ancient Greeks up to Socrates, with their drives and instincts not yet faded by intellectual culture, were particularly afflicted with this suffering. In his view, art had only served them to create an illusion of life within which they could forget the pain that raged within them. Wagner's art, with its high, idealistic impetus, seemed to him to be the means to similarly lead us moderns beyond the deepest suffering of life. For the basic mood of every true human being is tragic. And only the artistic imagination can make the world bearable. Nietzsche had found the tragic human being described in Schopenhauer's philosophy. It corresponded to what he had gained from his studies of the world view in the "tragic age of the Greeks". He approached modern natural science with such attitudes. And it made a great demand on him. It teaches that nature has created the sequence of stages of living beings through development. It has placed man at the pinnacle of development. Should this development stop with man? No, man must continue to develop. He has gone from animal to man without his intervention; he must become superhuman through his intervention. This requires strength, the fresh, unbroken power of instincts and drives. And now Nietzsche became an admirer of everything strong, everything powerful that leads man beyond himself to the superman. He could no longer reach for artistic illusion to deceive himself about life; he wanted to implant as much health, as much strength into life itself as was necessary to achieve a superhuman goal. All idealism, he now believed, sucks this strength out of man, for it leads him away from nature and presents him with an unreal world. Nietzsche now makes war on all idealism. He worships healthy nature. He had tried to absorb the conviction of natural science into his mind. But he absorbed it into a weak, sick organism. His own personality was no carrier, no nursery for the superman. And so, although he could present it to mankind as an ideal, he could speak of it in enthusiastic tones, but he felt the glaring contrast when he compared himself with this ideal. The dream of the superman is his philosophy; his real life of the soul, with its deep dissatisfaction with the inadequacy of his own existence in the face of all superhumanity, generated the moods from which his Iyrian creations sprang. With Nietzsche there is not only a dichotomy between intellect and mind; no, the rift runs right through the life of the mind itself. Everything great comes from strength: that was his confession. A confession that not only his reason recognized, but to which he clung with all his feelings. And the strong man seemed to him like the opposite of himself. The unspeakable pain that overcame him when he looked at himself in relation to his world of ideas, he expressed it in his poems. A soul divided within itself is expressed in them. You have to feel the deep tragedy of Nietzsche's soul if you want to let his poems have an effect on you. One then understands the gloom in them, which cannot come from the joy of life for which he found such beautiful words as a philosopher. Because Nietzsche made the modern world view of natural science his personal cause, he also personally experienced nameless suffering under its influence. He, the thinker of the affirmation of life, who exultantly proclaims that we do not live our lives only once, that all things experience an "eternal return": he became the lyricist of the dying life. He saw the sun setting on his own existence, he saw the weak organism rushing towards a terrible end, and he had to preach the joy of life from within this organism. For him, life meant enduring suffering. And even if existence returns countless times, it can bring him nothing but a never-ending repetition of the same torments.

[ 34 ] The career of Hermann Conradi as a poet began promisingly. A youthful poetry is all he created in the short span of time he was granted to live. It looks like the dawn before a day that is as rich in stormy, exciting events as it is in sublime and beautiful ones. Two things weigh heavily on the bottom of his soul, which thirsts for all pleasures and knowledge. One is the realization of the painful fate of all mankind, whose gaze wanders out to the most distant stars and which would like to embrace the whole world with its life, and yet is condemned to see its existence bound to a small star, to a speck of dust in the universe. The other is the feeling that his own self is too weak to make his own possession of the little that is allotted to man in his limited existence. Man must lag far behind what his mind's eye sees as a distant goal; but I cannot even reach the near goals of mankind: this idea speaks from his poetry. It stirs up feelings in his mind that correspond to the eternal longing of all mankind, and also those that give deeper expression to his personal destiny. These feelings storm through his soul with demonic force. The urge to reach the heights of existence creates in Conradi a boundless desire; but this boundlessness never occurs without a serious longing for harmony of thought and will. The poet's world of thought strives towards the regions of the "great understanding of the world". But again and again he feels himself transported back to banal, worthless life and has to give in to dull resignation. Meagre symbols of the future paint themselves in the soul when it is seized by an ardent urge for satisfaction in the present. Such a change of moods is only possible in a spirit in which the high side of human nature dwells, and yet which also courageously admits to itself that it is not free from the low side of this nature. Conradi had a boundless sincerity towards the instincts in his personality that drew him down from the noble and beautiful. He wanted to bring his own self with all its sins up from the abysses of his inner self. The greatness that lies in the confession of his own misguided feelings and emotions is characteristic of him. Neither the memory of the past nor hope for the future can satisfy him. The former evokes an agonizing feeling of lost innocence and lust for life, the latter becomes a dreamlike nebulous image that dissolves into nothing when he tries to grasp it. And Conradii knows how to speak of all these feelings in his soul in bold and at the same time beautiful poetic forms. He has an extraordinary command of expression. He combines the power of feeling with true artistry. He has an extensive imagination that knows how to fetch ideas from everywhere in order to portray an inner life that wants to traverse all the spaces of the world.

[ 35 ] Richard Dehmel's poetry has its origins in a similar school of thought. He too wants to encompass the whole wide world with his feelings. He wants to penetrate the secrets that rest in the depths of beings like enchanted creatures, and at the same time he longs for the pleasures that are bestowed upon us by the things of everyday life. He is actually a philosophical nature, a thinker who refuses to walk the paths of reason, of the ideal world, because he hopes to pick better fruit in the field of poetry, of the sensual, figurative life of the imagination. And the fruits he finds there are indeed often exquisite ones, even though one notices that they were gathered by someone who would have found others more suited to his nature even easier. He could have the thought in its purest, most transparent form, but he does not want it. He strives for contemplation, for the image. That is why his poetry appears like a symbolic philosophy. It is not the images that reveal to him the essence, the harmony of things, but his thinking that reveals them to him. And then the images spring up around the thought, like the substances in the formation of a crystal in a liquid. But we can seldom stop at these images, at these views, for they are not there for their own sake, but for the sake of the thought. As images, they have something vague about them. We are happy when we see through the image to the thought. Dehmel appears at his most outstanding when he expresses his ideas directly in the meaningful manner of expression that is characteristic of him, and does not first struggle for visualizations. Where he presents ideas in their pure, thought-like form, they appear large and weighty. He also succeeds at times in expressing his ideas in splendid symbols, but only when he puts together in the simplest form a few characteristic ideas of the senses; as soon as he reaches for a richer abundance of such ideas, the strangeness of his imagination, the unpictorial nature of his intuition leaps to the eye. But what reconciles us with him even then is the great seriousness of his will, the depth of his emotional world and the proud height of his points of view. His paths always lead to interesting, captivating destinations. One is happy to follow him even if one is already convinced at the beginning of the journey that it is a wrong path. Dehmel the man always shows himself to be greater than the poet. His grand gestures may often be distracting, indeed they can sometimes seem like posturing, but there can never be any doubt that there is a powerful feeling behind the loud tone.

[ 36 ] A pithy nature is Michael Georg Conrad. The wholesome and folksy lives in his work. He combines strength with naivety. He succeeds in the simple song in a perfect way. He can speak to the heart in a powerful way. A noble enthusiasm for the truly sublime and beautiful can be heard in his creations. His real significance, however, lies in the field of the novel and in the powerful impulses he was able to give to German intellectual life when it was in danger of becoming bogged down in traditional forms. The future historian of our literature, who will not only look at phenomena according to their completed manifestation, but who will also trace the causes at work, must give Conrad a wide berth.

[ 37 ] A poet whose sensations swirl around the world like an uncertain factor is Ludwig Scharf. He knows how to strike warm, touching notes; one must respect the impulses of his wandering soul; but one cannot escape the feeling that he himself is at ease in the labyrinths, that he likes to wander in the labyrinth and does not want the saving thread to lead him out. Scharf is an eccentric of the emotional life. He feels lonely; but his creations lack what could justify his loneliness: the greatness of a personality founded in himself.

[ 38 ] Christian Morgenstern strives for the high points of view, from which all small peculiarities of things disappear and only the meaningful features are visible. His imagination seeks meaningful images, expressive content and saturated tones. Where the world speaks of its dignity, where man feels his self elevated by uplifting sensations: that is where this imagination likes to dwell. Morgenstern searches for the sharp, impressive characterization of feeling. You rarely find simplicity in his work; he needs resounding words to say what he wants.

[ 39 ] The poetic physiognomies of Franz Evers', Hans Benzmanns and Max Bruns' are less pronounced. Franz Evers still lacks his own content and form. It is clear from many of his creations that he strives for the depths of existence and for a proud, self-confident freedom of personality. Yet everything remains nebulous and unclear. But he feels himself to be a seeker and a struggler, and he carries within him the conviction that the riddles of the world can only be solved by those who approach them with holy devotion. Max Bruns is still stuck in the imitation of foreign forms. That is why his sensuous poems, which bear witness to a beautiful feeling for nature, cannot make a significant impression for the time being, but they arouse the best hopes in many quarters. Hans Benzmann is not an independent individuality, but a pleaser who likes to surround the simple with all kinds of colorful decoration, and who seeks the poetic not in the straightforward, the simple, but in the cumbersome. He succeeds in creating many a beautiful image, but he is almost never able to express himself without the superfluous and trivial.

V

[ 40 ] John Henry Mackay is called the "first singer of anarchy" with the publication of his poems "Tempest" in 1888. In the book in which, in 1891, he described the cultural currents of our time with a clear view and from a deep knowledge, he emphasized in "The Anarchists" that he was proud of this name. This lyrical collection is one of the most independent books ever written. The Anarchist view of life, much maligned but little known, has found in Mackay a poet whose powerful feeling is fully equal to its great ideas. "In no field of social life" - he himself says in the "Anarchists" - "is there today a more hopeless confusion, a more naive superficiality, a more dangerous ignorance than in that of anarchism. The very utterance of the word is like the waving of a red scarf - most people rush at it in blind rage, without allowing themselves time for calm examination and reflection." The view of the true anarchist is that one man cannot rule over the actions of another, but that only a state of social life is fruitful in which each individual sets for himself the aim and direction of his actions. Everyone usually believes he knows what is equally pious for all people. Forms of community life - our states - are thought to be justified, which seek their task in supervising and guiding the ways of men. Religion, state, laws, duty, justice and so on are concepts that have arisen under the influence of the view that one should determine the goals of the other. Concern for one's "neighbor" extends to everything; only one thing remains completely unconsidered, namely, that if one person prescribes the ways to another's happiness, he deprives the latter of the possibility of providing for his own happiness. It is this one thing that anarchism regards as its goal. Nothing should be binding on the individual but what he imposes on himself as an obligation. It is sad that the name of the noblest of world views is misused to designate the conduct of the most learned disciples of violent domination, those fellows who believe they are realizing social ideals when they cultivate the so-called "propaganda of action". The follower of this school of thought stands on exactly the same ground as those who try to make their fellow human beings understand what they have to do by means of inquisition, the cannon and the penitentiary. The true anarchist fights against the "propaganda of action" for the same reason that he fights against communal orders based on violent intervention in the circle of the individual. The free, anarchist mode of imagination lives as a personal need in Mackay's emotional life. This need emanates as a mood from his lyrical creations. Mackay's noble feeling is rooted in the basic feeling that the personality has a great responsibility towards itself. Humble, devoted natures search for a deity, for an ideal that they can worship, adore. They cannot give themselves their value and therefore want to receive it from outside. Proud natures only recognize in themselves what they have made of themselves. Self-esteem is a fundamental trait of noble natures. They only want to contribute to the general value of the world by increasing their value as individuals. They are therefore sensitive to any foreign interference in their lives. Their own ego wants to be a world unto itself so that it can develop unhindered. Only from this sanctification of one's own person can the appreciation of another's self emerge. He who claims complete freedom for himself cannot even think of interfering in the world of another. One may therefore assert that this anarchism is the way of thinking that necessarily flows from the nature of the noble soul. He who appreciates the world must, if he understands himself, also appreciate that part of existence in which he directly intervenes in the world, his own self. Mackay is a noble, self-assured nature. And anyone who descends into the abysses of his own soul with such seriousness as he does awakens passions and desires in him of which the unfree have no idea. From the solitary point of view of the free soul, man's view of the world expands. "There the soul rises from brooding dreams to wander the paths of the world as the chosen one." When the gaze penetrates deep within, it also has the gift of wandering over the infinite spaces, and the human being enters the mood that Mackay expresses in his poem "Weltgang der Seele" ("The Soul's World Walk") in the words that the soul's "trembling wings were waved by courage for flight in the eternal spaces".

[ 41 ] How deeply Mackay is able to feel with every human personality is demonstrated by his poignant poem "Helene". The love of a man for a fallen girl is portrayed here by a poet whose feeling and imagination have given him the warmth of expression that can only have its origin in the perfect freedom of the soul. If one pursues the human ego into such abysses, then one also gains the certainty of finding it on the heights.

[ 42 ] Mackay has been called a tendentious poet. Those who do so show that they neither judge the nature of tendency poetry correctly nor know the relationship of the poet Mackay to the world view he represents. His ideals of freedom form the basic mood of his soul in such a way that they appear as an individual expression of his inner self, just as the sounds of love or the glorification of the beauties of nature do for others. And it is certainly no less poetic to give words to man's deepest thoughts than to his inclination towards women or his joy in the green forest and birdsong. To the eulogists of so-called "unintentional creativity", who are quick with their doctrinaire objections when they sense something like a thought in poetry, it should be borne in mind that man's most precious asset, freedom, does not arise in the dullness of the unconscious, but on the bright heights of developed consciousness.

[ 43 ] About fifteen years ago, Karl Henckell turned the great question of contemporary life, the social question, into the basic motif of his poetry out of the stormy fire of an idealistic soul. He wanted to counter the poems of the 1970s, which comfortably proclaimed inherited ideas in new ways, with a "morning wake-up call of the victorious and liberating future". A hopeful idealism shines out of the gloomy feelings that compassion for the longings, aspirations and struggles of his time formed in Henckell. He did not want to serve the mendacious "old beauty", but the new truth, which creates an image of the suffering of the struggling contemporary human being. Plasticity of expression and harmony of tone cannot be the character of this poetry, which oscillates between indignation at the social experiences of the present and vague expectations of the future. The exaggerated hyperbole takes the place of the calmly beautiful metaphor. A stinging glow sprays from the verses, not soothing warmth. Freedom in all its forms becomes the idol to which the poet pays homage. He incorporates science, which allows the spiritual to emerge from the material, into his way of imagining so that it can free him from the bonds of religious bondage, the mythological way of looking at things. But the idea of freedom can also become a tyranny. If it shapes sharply defined life goals, it kills the truly independent life of nature. A heart that constantly cries out for freedom can perhaps mean nothing other than new shackles instead of the old ones. It is a higher development in Henckell's individuality that he also wanted to free himself from freedom again. He found the way to the inner freedom that says: "Let schools and parties teach and shout, you can only flourish as an artist and free yourself alone." The "Tambour", who wanted to serve the free spirit with a loud drumbeat, has transformed himself into the violinist who has found beauty and sings of it. And thus Henckell has also been granted the happiness that can be enjoyed by natures that are strong enough to create a purpose in life from within that meets the stormy desire, the longed-for ideals. It is not the trivial happiness that nourishes a fleeting existence from the superficial pleasures of life; it is the harsh happiness that rises like a proud castle above the steep rock of painful experiences, the happiness that Goethe meant when he had Tasso say: "And when man falls silent in his agony, a god gave me to say what I suffer." Bruno Wille called his Iyrian collection, published in 1897, "Einsiedelkunst aus der Kiefernheide". With this title, he made a significant reference to the basic character of his personality. He sought what his soul thirsted for in people: happiness and perfection. But he could not find them there. That is why he returned to where he had come from, to the hermitage of his soul, and chose nature as his companion, which keeps the loyalty that people talk so much about but do not know how to keep to one another. What he has striven for in vain in alliance with men is granted to him through the friendship of nature. It is not an innate trait of Wille's mind that drove him to hermitage. His soul would not have called out to him from the outset like Nietzsche's: "Flee into your solitude! You live too close to the small and wretched. Flee from their invisible revenge! Against you they are nothing but revenge." Although a rich inner life and a developed sense of nature were always present in Wille and he had developed a certain self-sufficiency in himself, he threw himself into the hustle and bustle of social community life. What in Nietzsche stems from the hypersensitivity of the organism, from its peculiarity of smelling the many impurities in the souls of people, as it were, was brought about in Wille through rich experience within the hustle and bustle of the "flies of the market". This experience gave rise to a desire that appears in Nietzsche like a prejudice: "Worthy know the forest and the rock to be silent with you. Resemble again the tree you love, the broad-headed one: silent and listening, it hangs over the sea." And Bruno Wille not only knows how to be silent with the forest and the rock, but also how to hold an intimate conversation with them. He knows how to loosen nature's tongue. The silent plants, the mystical blowing of the wind, they reveal to him the intimate secrets of nature, and the distant stars entrust him with great revelations. His gaze rises to the red Mars, whose surface is covered not by naïve popular belief but by serious science with its legendary inhabitants, to spy out where the poor, imperfect children of the earth can find redemption from the old woe. The longing of his soul sucks in the sublime sounds of eternal nature in order to live together with the universe, to weave his own self into the infinite soul of the world. "Endless hosts of worlds shall you, the soul, travel..." And this own self is not the empty, insubstantial self of the enthusiast who seeks outside what he cannot find within himself; it is the full self that longs for a fulfillment that brings him just such riches as it holds within itself. The poor self gives itself away because it is needy; the rich self pours out its abundance into its surroundings. A poetic pantheism speaks to us from Wille's poetry. What Goethe desires and expresses in "Künstlers Abendlied": "How I long for you, nature, to feel you faithful and dear!.... You will cheer up all my powers in my mind, and extend this narrow existence to eternity", that lives as the keynote in Wille's poetry.

[ 44 ] In Julius Hart's soul too, as in Bruno Wilde's, the individual spirit marries with the All-Spirit. But this All-Spirit is not the natural spirit resting blissfully in itself; it is a world spirit ravaged by all the storms of human passion. Its feelings float back and forth between drunken enjoyment, proud joy in eternal becoming and dull renunciation. Birth and death, which nature only shows in its outer shell, which revolves around the deep, eternal, never dying life: we encounter them again and again in Hart's poetry. In this poet we find a sense of nature that does not bring up the noble harmony of the gods from the depths of things, but instead sees its own soul moods embodied in the processes of the outside world. What is going on in his heart is proclaimed to him by nature in large-scale symbolism. And the rhythms with which he sings of this symbolism are captivating. The primordial in the human being, the great, gigantic destiny that does not act from the outside, but which from the abysses of the soul drives individuality demoniacally onwards through good and evil, through truth and error, through joys and pains: Hart finds words for this that resound fully and weigh heavily on our souls. Understandably, such a poet also had to find tones for the feeling that comes from the region of the soul that is most developed in modern man, the social one. This social feeling has awakened feelings in his own heart, as they appear in his poem "On the Journey to Berlin", which provides a reflex image of the unsparing, great world events of the present from a strong, deeply excitable soul. There is a philosophical streak in Hart's personality. It lends his poems seriousness and depth. And this trait is thoroughly Iyrical. Even where he could be philosophical, Hart becomes lyrical. This can be seen in his book "The New God", in which he sets out his world view. What he has in mind as such is not laid out in thought, but sounds out of a lyrical mood.

[ 45 ] Clara Müller has earned the right to be counted among the social poets with her collection "Mit roten Kressen". The appealing thing about these poems is that the social imagination and thinking is thoroughly personal. The poet's own suffering and renunciations have opened her eyes to those of others. And how rich her life was in instructive experiences is also beautifully attested to by the poetry, which appears in form with noble simplicity.

[ 46 ] Gustav Renner and Paul Bornstein may be mentioned when speaking of the personalities on whom one places hopes for the future. The simple, natural tones of the former and the pathos of the latter, which seems to be truthful. The simple, natural tones of the former and the warmth of the latter, which seems like truth, certainly arouse such hopes.

[ 47 ] In his first poems, we encounter more maturity in Emanuel von Bodman. His style evokes an impression reminiscent of Rembrandt's paintings. He loves to juxtapose significant perceptions that form sharp contrasts, so that together they have great expressive power. The epigrammatic brevity that is characteristic of him is heightened in its effect by such juxtapositions.

VI

[ 48 ] "In a truly beautiful work of art the content should do nothing, but the form everything; for through the form alone the whole of man is acted upon, while through the content only individual forces are acted upon. The content, however sublime and far-reaching it may be, therefore always has a restrictive effect on the spirit, and true aesthetic freedom can only be expected from the form. This, then, is the real secret of the master's art, that he extinguishes the material through the form; and the more imposing, presumptuous, seductive the material is in itself, the more arbitrarily it pushes itself forward with its effect, or the more the viewer is inclined to engage directly with the material, the more triumphant is the art that forces it back and asserts its dominion over it." With these words, Schiller described an artistic goal in his letters "On the Aesthetic Education of Man", as envisioned by the poet Stefan George. The sensation, the feeling, the image that tremble in the artist's soul must first be shaped and formed if they are to have artistic value. Every fiber of these primal elements of the soul's life must have been seized by the creative power and made into something other than its natural state. For this only excites man, it is no concern of the artist. He is not concerned with the individual colors, the individual sounds, the individual ideas, but with the way in which they are put together in the work that we enjoy aesthetically. Schiller evidently saw an ideal in this cult of form, but felt that it could easily fall into loneliness, and therefore added that the more imposing and powerful the content, the material, and the more powerful the form that has to cope with it, the more valuable the form is. The more captivating what one has to say is, the greater the skill required to say it in a way that is pleasing as such. In poetry, the artist has to deal with his own soul; his feelings, his emotions are the material. The art will not lie in the fact that these sentiments and feelings have greatness, but that greatness appears in how these emotions of the soul are expressed. Whoever remains within Schiller's mode of conception will, however, have to admit that the more significant the content that is expressed, the more highly the mode of expression, however artful it may be, is to be valued. In poetry, it is the artist's own soul that provides this 'content, the personality. The greater the personality we see through the lyrical work of art, the more valuable it will appear to us. Robert Zimmermann, who as an aesthete radically carried out the view that it is form alone that arouses artistic pleasure, said in order to make this clear: one and the same thing, for example a statue, is a stone to the naturalist, especially the mineralogist, and a demigod to the aesthete. The former is merely concerned with the material, the latter with what has been artistically made from the material. With regard to poetry, one would have to say in the sense of this view: the emotions of the soul of another may be attractive or repulsive to man, they may cause his participation or his antipathy; to the aesthete they can only be harmonious or inharmonious, rhythmic or unrhythmic.

[ 49 ] Stefan George now lives entirely in the element of artistic expression, of form. When the vibrations of his soul emerge, they should no longer cling to anything that merely interests the human being; they should be completely absorbed in the artistic element of form. The world only gains value for this personality insofar as it is rhythmically moving, harmoniously shaped, insofar as it is beautiful. And if others see beauty in the fact that the eternal, the elemental forces of existence appear to us in the transient, Stefan George denies the eternal entities any value if they are not beautiful. His three collections of poems: "Hymns, Pilgrimages, Algabal" - "Books of Pastoral and Prize Poems, of Sagas and Songs of the Hanging Gardens" - the "Year of the Soul", they are the world as rhythm and harmony. The world is my rhythm and my harmony, and what does not flow into this golden realm, I leave behind in the chaos of the worthless: that is George's basic mood.

[ 50 ] One might call this mood drunk with beauty. And Hugo von Hofmannsthal is also drunk with beauty. But if one can say of Stefan George: he forces beauty to come to him, then one must say of Hofmannsthal: this beauty forces him to himself. Like a bee, he flies through the world; and there he stops, where there is the honey of the spirit, the beauty, to collect. And just as honey is not the blossom and fruit itself, but only the juice from it, so Hofmannsthal's art is not a revelation of the eternal secrets of the world, but only a part of this whole. One gladly accepts this part and enjoys it in solitary hours, just as the bee feeds on the collected honey in winter. The Viennese poet's art is as sweet as honey. But the power that gigantically creates the things of the world and animates them is missing in this art. It is not stormed by the power and passion of the elements; it blows in it and weaves a harmony of the spheres that resounds at the bottom of the world's soul. And it must become quite still and silent around us, the storm of world events must cease, the wild will must die for a moment if we want to hear the quiet music of this poet. The strange similes of this lyric poet, his peculiar paraphrases and word combinations only impose themselves on the mind that seeks exquisite beauty. Those who seek the eternal forces of nature in their characteristic manifestations will pass these beauties by. For they are like the revelations of the eternal in the luxury of nature. And yet, even in Hofmannsthal's oddities, one senses the necessity of world phenomena. One will not be able to fend off the accusation of a philistine mode of imagination if one rejects this luxurious art; but it must be conceded that few human creations are such seducers of philistinism as the poems of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

[ 51 ] The mood of devotion, standing in adoration before the eternal riddles of nature, resounds to us from the lyrical poems of Johannes Schlaf. So great, so lofty, so mysterious are the riddles before him that he can only look at them with half-open eyes because he is afraid to allow the fullness of existence to penetrate him. The anticipation pours into his soul enough of the blissful delight of the glories of the world; he wants to avoid full vision, the brightness of perception. He, too, resorts to rare imaginings in order to clothe the imagined in words; but not as a spirit drunk with beauty, but because of his passionate devotion to the truth, whose majesty he does not want to bring too close to the sober senses through the garb of everyday life. This poet, who is one of the prophets of radical naturalism in the field of drama: as a lyric poet, he has made himself a singer of the eternal essences that are hidden deep within things.

[ 52 ] Arno Holz took a different path of development. He turned away from the beautiful, naturalistic poetry to which he was devoted at the beginning of his career. The naturalistic doctrine has gained the upper hand over naturalness. For it is natural that feeling in art rises above direct experience. The style that gives a higher form to perceptions: it springs from a natural longing. From that which feels most satisfied when man finds means of art which stand without precedent in life, which are the soul's own free creation and yet revelations of the eternal elemental forces. Goethe describes this satisfaction by characterizing the impression of music. "The dignity of art is perhaps most eminent in music, because it has no substance that needs to be accounted for. It is entirely form and content and elevates and ennobles everything it expresses." For every inner experience, when it emerges from the depths of the soul, should, in Holz's opinion, bring its own individual form into the world; and only this form, born simultaneously with the content, should be the natural one. Holz does not want to accept the path from the experience to the completed artistic form. It is not, as Schiller says, in the conquest of the material by the form that the true artistic secret of the master lies; rather, the master is the one who is able to eavesdrop on the form lying within the material. In this way, Holz has turned from the inspiring singer, who was moved when he expressed the fate of misery, the longing for a better future, into the careful recorder of immediate impressions, which only give satisfaction to the aesthetic feeling when they are accidentally artistic. However, they very often are, because the poetic spirit lives in wood despite its theory, which is hostile to poetic art in the higher sense.

[ 53 ] The poems of Cäsar Flaischlen are effective due to the deep, cozy personality that expresses itself in them. He is a personality who is not able to take life lightly. He has to fight against the passionate strivings of the soul. It thirsts for satisfaction. Pride wants to conquer it, which keeps it away from its goals. But in the end, it is not unlimited power that she trusts, but a bit of modesty that sets herself manly goals when she sees that the distant ones are unattainable. For Flaischlen would rather be a full man within the narrower circle than half a man within the wider one. To be whole in accordance with his own soul fund, inwardly harmonious and based on himself: that is the basic character of his personality. The things of the world pass before his eyes with dignified simplicity, and his verses and his particularly charming poems in prose flow just as simply, often all too unpretentiously.

[ 54 ] Richard Schaukal has a gift for observation that focuses on the expressive in the world. Things and events are stylized for his gaze. He transforms the sublime into the sublime, and the beautiful into the simply beautiful. For his eye, the slender expands completely into a straight line; the transitions from one thing to another cease, and contrast abruptly replaces contrast. But all this in such a way that we have the impression that in his art things clarify themselves through sharp contours and contrasts; they make their indeterminacy disappear and emphasize their characteristic features. A colorful language is on a par with this way of looking at things. He is able to say meaningfully what he has seen meaningfully. He is at the beginning of his artistic career. It seems to be a meaningful beginning.

[ 55 ] The imagination of Rainer Maria Rilke is wonderfully sensitive to the intimate relationships of natural beings and human experiences. And he has an accuracy of expression that is able to present all the subtle relationships between the things that the poet discovers to us with full, rich tones. This is not the accuracy of the great characterizer, this is that of the nature-loving wanderer who loves the things he encounters on his wanderings and to whom they tell many of their quiet secrets because they too love him and have gained his trust.

[ 56 ] Hans Bethge has sonorous colors of expression and a great capacity for impressing the solemn tones of the outside world. However, neither evokes the feeling that it comes from the poet's very own soul, but appears as an expression of what is felt. This impression is heightened by the coquetry with which this poetry approaches us. It is likely, however, that this strangeness in the poet's personality is only a precursor to his own beautiful achievements, the forerunners of which can be heard in his current creations.

The situation of someone who wants to say something about the nature of the soul on a spiritual scientific basis, insofar as it can be described as immortal, is perhaps characterized for a very long time by the fact that I am talking about the publication of a book as an introduction. This book is entitled “Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul”.

I would like to make it clear, so as not to be misunderstood, that today's spiritual research cannot consider this book as written in the spirit of this spiritual research. Spiritual research in the modern sense did not yet exist at that time, as I was able to sufficiently demonstrate in many lectures that I have given here. However, I would like to say that, in view of the fate that has befallen all those long-standing disputes that push towards what today wants to develop into spiritual science, I believe that what happened with the publication of this book is not without significance. So in 1827 a book entitled 'Athanasia or the Reasons for the Immortality of the Soul' was published. The person who published this book wrote a remarkable introduction to it, a remarkable preface, as they say. He writes that he was with a dying person and found the manuscript of this book at his bedside, that he then took over this manuscript with the consent of the dying man, that it could no longer be said to him exactly how the dying man came by this book, which apparently had a great, profound significance for his soul in the last days of his life. Then the person who publishes the book waited because the content seemed so significant to him, seemed to contain such important information about the soul's life after the detachment of the physical body that he could not imagine that this book would not be destined to make its content accessible to wider circles. But since he had waited long enough and had not seen the content published anywhere, he decided to publish the book himself.

What can legitimate research into the origin of this book tell us? There is the strange fact that the person who published this book, with this preface in which he recounts the book's remarkable fate, wrote this book himself, from beginning to end and published it without his name; that he only found it necessary, if one may say so – it is meant in the very best sense of the word – to invent a fairy tale about the book, as it has just been mentioned. It becomes somewhat more understandable why the writer of this book resorted to this fairy tale when one knows that he was a well-known personality in the broadest philosophical circles of his time, a philosopher who dealt with the most profound questions of philosophical thought : the Prague philosopher Bernard Bolzano, who had a large number of students, students who worked for many decades at Austrian universities, who always confessed what a profound influence they had drawn from Bolzano's teachings. So, a famous, influential philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, publishes a book in which he discusses the reasons for the immortality of the human soul, and in this book he has to present himself to the public in the manner described. Why did he do this? Well, the reasons are very obvious. In this book it is not merely stated, as it is so often the case in philosophical writings, that the human soul is immortal for these or those reasons that are derived from human logic. Rather, this book speaks of how man finds within himself a being that can perfect itself between birth and death, perfecting itself in terms of its thinking, perfecting itself in terms of its feeling , perfects itself in relation to its volitions; how this being, when it is rightly grasped by man, shows, however, that it not only bears within itself the powers that lead to its perfection up to death, but that it bears within itself powers that further perfect this soul-being, further develop it, that can be further filled with content even after the human being has passed through the gate of death. This book then explains how one must imagine, when one grasps the human soul, that the human soul must live in a certain environment when it has passed through the gate of death. It also indicates how this human soul, after its death, associates with other spiritual entities, which cannot be perceived as long as the human being dwells in the body. It is hinted at what relationship the human soul, after passing through the gate of death, can have with the relatives and friends left behind, with the souls attached to it in love. As already mentioned, all these details of the soul that has passed through the gate of death are not spoken of from the standpoint of today's spiritual science, but with fine, delicate reasons that a philosopher has developed who not only philosophizes with abstract concepts, but who is involved with his whole soul, with his whole human being, when he develops thoughts, especially the thoughts about that weaving and being in the human being himself, which we call the soul. But Bolzano knew only too well that as long as one remains a logician and discusses how one concept is linked to another, what logical reasons there are for the truth or probability of a judgment, as long as one discusses how attention in the human soul, possibly even the reasons for memory and for the will; in short, as long as one expresses everything that the soul performs while it dwells in the body, one can have the reputation of a scientific philosopher. But if one speaks about the human soul as Bolzano did in his Athanasia, then one's reputation as a philosopher is ruined. Then one is an unscientific person. Then you are a person who talks nonsense and can no longer be taken seriously by those who understand how to think scientifically. Even those who have not learned to think scientifically but swear by the authority of those whom they have heard of or of whom it has been publicly stated that they can think scientifically believe that they can thoroughly dispute the scientific value of such a personality. If Bolzano wanted to save his reputation as a philosopher, he had to resort to the maneuver described above, and then leave it to later researchers to recognize that the book was written by him. And no Bolzano expert today doubts, for the very best reasons that can be proven scientifically and historically, that the book in question is by Bolzano himself. This shows something that was true then and is true today: if you want to openly and frankly advocate something that does not belong to the physical-sensory world or cannot be said about the physical-sensory world, you have to expose yourself to being seen as a completely unscientific person. And as a rule, the 'fact' does not apply either, that one could recognize from the way such things are spoken about, that the person speaking is not an unscientific person.

And yet, just as spiritual science has to speak about the question of immortality today, so this speaking, as I have often emphasized here, is in the fullest sense a continuation of that human spiritual work which, especially in the field of natural science, has led to such great results of human life and striving, which are fully recognized by spiritual science.

Therefore, today I would like to begin by hinting at some of the things that can show how the study of immortality is approached from the point of view of spiritual research, so that everything that can be called spiritual research in this sense today is in fact the direct, immediate continuation of what scientific thinking has contributed to a world view in the course of the nineteenth century and up to the present.

In my book “The Riddles of Philosophy” you will find a chapter entitled “The World as Illusion”. This chapter is not intended to show that the world as it presents itself to the outer senses and to human thinking, which is connected to the brain, should be seen as an illusion, but it does show how many thinkers of the nineteenth century have come to the conclusion that everything perceived by the senses, and also what thinking has to say about the perceptions of the senses, does not flow into the human soul from the outside, but is, as it were, first constructed within the human soul. As far as it can be done in a popular way, I would like to touch on these thoughts in my introduction, even though they may be far removed from many of the esteemed listeners.

We see with our eyes, we hear with our ears, we perceive the world with our sense organs in general. Now, someone who is grounded in the latest natural science and physiological research says that what the senses perceive actually arises only through an interaction of the senses with something completely unknown in the external world. The researcher says: When the eye perceives a color, when the eye receives some impression of light, one must consider that what acts on the eye from the outside remains completely unknown to perception. With his soul, the human being experiences only the effect that the external world has on his soul. That is why, when we go through the world in our ordinary lives, we see things in color, as an expression of their light effects. But if, for example, we strike the eye, we may also have an impression of light in the eye, even if it is vague. Or if we can somehow otherwise evoke that which can occur internally in the eye, say, somehow with an electrical device, then we also get a light impression. That is to say, the eye responds to everything that acts on it from the outside with a light impression. So whatever happens out there, if it somehow acts on the eye, a light impression arises in the eye. The eye creates the impression of light from the effect of a completely unknown external world. It is the same with the ear. It is the same with the other senses. Therefore, for example, the philosopher Lotze, an outstanding philosopher of the nineteenth century, is in complete agreement with Schopenhauer when he says: Everything that we perceive as the effect of light, as color, has actually only come into being in our eye through the effect of an unknown world. What we hear as sounds is created by the effect of an unknown world in the ear. If there were no people with eyes and ears, the world would be dark and silent, and one could never say that something similar to what eyes see and ears hear prevails in this dark and silent, unknown world.

In other words: In the nineteenth century, under the influence of Kant's philosophy, it was concluded that in order for man to gain knowledge and perceptions of this environment, he must engage in an inner activity, and that only through this inner activity does that which he calls his environment come into being in his mind. In reality, one can say that for these people, who are genuine thinkers grounded in natural science, the world is like an illusion. For if out there, where we see pillars and all kinds of pictures on the walls, there is something completely unknown that affects the eye and from which the eye creates colors and shapes, then one can only say that what appears to us as our environment is an image created out of man's own being. And what is behind it can only be constructed by hypothesis, as modern physics does, which assumes all kinds of vibrations in the ether and the like behind our perceptions. So that man, as he goes through the world, in interaction with an unknown external world, simply by the nature of his being, builds up what he calls his world.

Taken as it has just been explained, there is absolutely nothing, absolutely nothing to be said against this line of thought. This train of thought is completely in line with everything that scientific research has delivered in the nineteenth century. One can say: Such a statement as that made by Hermann Helmholtz, the famous physiologist and physicist, is perfectly understandable: by perceiving an external world, man does not perceive what is, what is really happening, but only perceives signs. Not even images, says Helmholtz, are perceived of what really is, but only signs. For what our eyes and ears create of the external world are only signs for the external world. As I said, there is nothing to be said against the seriousness and logic of this line of thought. Taken directly, as they present themselves, that is so.

You have to go much, much deeper into the nature of man if you want to know what is actually behind this train of thought. I have tried to show the philosophical world what is behind this train of thought and how it offers the possibility of finding one's way with it in relation to the human concept of reality. I have attempted to show the way to do this in a lecture I gave at the last philosophers' congress. But these arguments today only lead to general misunderstandings, if not to something much worse. The one who has the task of finding his way in the train of thought just outlined must indeed advance to spiritual science. And then it certainly becomes apparent that one can truly say: The human soul creates by perceiving through the senses that which it must initially call its world. It creates this. It really does create it. But why does it create it, despite the fact that creation prevails in the real? Well, it creates it for the reason that the human soul, that which is the human soul, is not connected to the human being in such a way that one can say: There is the human body, and in this human body the immortal soul dwells within, just as any person dwells in his dwelling and influences the outside world in some way from his dwelling or looks at the outside world through windows. The connection of the human soul with the human body must be imagined quite differently. It must be imagined in such a way that the body itself, as it were, holds the soul in itself through a process of knowledge. In the sense that colors and light, like sounds, are outside of us, in the same sense the human soul itself is outside of the body, and in that the reality carries colors and sounds in through the senses, in the same sense the contents of the soul live, as it were, on the wings of sensory perception. The soul must not be imagined as just a finer physical being that dwells in the coarser outer body, but as a being that is so connected to the body that the body exercises the same activity that we otherwise exercise in cognition when holding on to the soul. Only when we understand how, in a certain sense, that which we call our ego, the bearer of our self-awareness, is outside the body in the same way as sound or color, only then do we understand the relationship between the human soul and the human body. By pronouncing “I”, the human being, as a bodily human being, perceives this “I” from the same side of reality from which it perceives colors and sounds. And the nature of the body consists in being able to perceive precisely this I, that is, the soul's own nature. In order to fully experience the reality of what has just been said, it is necessary for the human being to carry out the exercises that have often been discussed here, that is, to perform inner acts with his soul.

Today, too, I will not repeat what I have said so often, since everyone can read it in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” “Occult Science,” or in the brief sketch at the end of “Theosophy.” Today, too, I shall not describe these inner soul-searchings in detail, but rather I should like to give again certain points of view which can show what man arrives at when he, in the sense often described here and in the books concerned, undertakes inner work with his soul , so that what otherwise takes place in the soul as thinking, feeling and willing develops further through inner impulses given by the soul in the meditative life; that it becomes something other than what is in the ordinary life of the body.

When a person undertakes the mental processes – this too has already been discussed in the last lectures – that lead thinking beyond the kind of thought life that one has to have in ordinary life and also in ordinary science, then one comes to think, that is, to perform the inner activity of thinking, but no longer to have a specific thought. Meditation consists in the fact that, while one otherwise thinks, as it were, under the influence of the external world and reflects on things, one evokes thinking as an inner arbitrary activity of the soul, that one does not direct one's attention to what is being thought, but to the activity of thinking, to that fine activity of the will that is exercised in thinking. I have already described this in the last lecture. In a sense, one thinks with a thought-content that one has moved into one's consciousness, into one's soul, through one's own will. One thinks so intensely, so strongly, so powerfully inwardly that one really achieves what one does not want to achieve at first, but what is achieved under the influence of such inner thought-work: thoughts fall away and one lives only in the inner weaving and working of an - well, let the expression be used - an ethereal world. The word “ethereal” is used here in a different way than modern physics uses the term. One lives in a weaving, in a pulsating, and one knows, if one has pursued this experience long enough: What one has discovered in one's thinking, what one has detached from one's thinking, just as the chemist separates hydrogen from water so that he can show the properties of hydrogen that cannot be shown while the hydrogen is still in the water, - one knows, when one has detached the activity of thinking from thinking, that one is now really in an experience outside the body. By continuing such inner soul work, one must then become clearer and clearer about what the experience actually is that one has evoked in this way in the soul. When we perceive colors and sounds in our ordinary life — as I said, this can already be considered a result of natural science — then we know through natural science: an unconscious activity is carried out in our human being; because the fact that the world of color and sound is evoked through the eye and the ear is an unconscious activity. An unconscious activity is carried out through which something that is outside speaks into the soul and reveals itself to the soul. What one experiences in the inner grasping of thinking when one does the corresponding soul exercises is not experienced in the same way as if it were rising up from our muscles, from our blood, but it is experienced as if it were coming in from the whole surrounding cosmic space , as if it were a spirit-being entering us and having a certain attraction to our body, so that it recognizes our body as the vehicle through which it wants to reveal itself to the sensory world. By meditating as described, one steps into the external world itself. One immerses oneself in this external world, from which colors and sounds come to us. That is to say, one frees one's experience from the body. This freedom of experience from the body must be inwardly experienced, must be lived. Through soul exercises, the human being must come to know that he is living and pulsating in an element that is not bound to his body as an instrument. But will, inner arbitrariness, is now present in everything, which thus leads the human being to freedom from the body – inner activity, but inner activity on a higher level. Let us just consider for a moment what it would mean for the human being: suppose – assuming the truth of what I have presented to you as a result of more recent physiology, of more recent natural science – the human being were aware: there must be something unknown, a silent, dark world. I stand in it, I open my eyes. Through my eyes I create color, through my ears I create sound. I place the sounds and the colors into the world. What would a person have to say? He would say: Well, then the whole world is a dream, of course it is a dream. Then nothing of what I see and hear is real. Only because this inner activity, which is there, remains unconscious, because one does not know that one does it — evoke colors through the eye, evoke sounds through the ear — only because of that, one is at all undisturbed in one's outer experience. For if human beings were always aware that they do what recent natural science ascribes to them, then they would certainly speak about the whole world of the senses in exactly the same way as they now speak about what way, and what human thinking, trained in this way, experiences through a world that is just as real as the sense world, but which must be voluntarily placed before ourselves through the effort of free will born of thinking. One might say that it is good for most people that they are blessed with not knowing how they create colors and sounds for themselves, otherwise they would already be able to speak about this colored and sounding world exactly as they speak about the world that the spiritual researcher presents to them. For that is indeed the characteristic of the world that the spiritual researcher presents to the soul: that one now exercises the activity, which one otherwise performs unconsciously for the sensual world, consciously, fully consciously, on this higher level of the act of will, which is detached from thinking. Otherwise, however, there is no difference at all in relation to the sense world. But people are not strong enough to hold to that, to have confidence in that which they must first call into existence inwardly. One would like to say that it is good that a kind God has withheld from people the knowledge that they create the light of the sun for themselves, otherwise they would deny it, as they deny the essence of the spiritual world. People depend on the outside world, on the authority of the outside world, to dictate what is, what is inherent in being. If they are to do something to allow this being to come to the fore, then they are not strong enough, not trusting enough in this inner activity of theirs to allow what they now have to co-create themselves to be recognized as a reality, as a truth.

When, through the indicated exercises of thinking, one has truly grasped the will in thinking, that reality which does not express itself in thoughts of a sense world, then at first – and this too has often been hinted at from a different point of view – — one does not have a spiritual reality before one, but one has only an experience that consists of a weaving and being and becoming; one has, so to speak, an expanded self before one, a self that now knows itself connected to the whole world, from which sounds and colors otherwise reveal themselves to it. But one weaves and lives in this becoming. One only knows that the way one lives in this becoming is reality, spiritual reality, spiritual reality free from the body.

One cannot be careful enough in describing such things, because it can, of course, be objected lightly by someone who believes they are allowed to think they are very scientific: So the spiritual researcher claims that he is immersed in the world through the result of this one exercise; he must actually know everything when he lives in that weaving element. Now, what works from within instead of approaching the person from the outside does not have to reveal all the secrets it contains. One can say that it can be compared to the fact that a person also eats and drinks and yet truly does not know the processes that take place in his body. One gets to know another world in its nature and essence, but naturally one does not get to know all the secrets of that world, which in turn must first be explored in detail, a research that requires exactly the same care and seriousness as the exploration of the physical-sensual world, yes, more. But this experience of living in a weaving world can be compared to when a physical person in the body has acquired the ability to grasp all kinds of things, but cannot grasp anything when he reaches out. In that case, one would know that one has organs to grasp, to make grasping movements, but one does not grasp anything. One would be in this situation if one only had the practice results that have just been described. One would live and weave inwardly in the spiritual element, but one would feel as if one were stretching out the spiritual organs in all directions, and it would be certain: you have grasped yourself in the spirit — but one would still perceive nothing of a spiritual environment. It would only be a general living and weaving and becoming of one's own self in the spirit. A tremendous loneliness, even a sense of apprehension, could seize a person if he only came to these conclusions. Therefore, the exercises that the soul performs when they are taken from true spiritual research are designed not only to develop the life of the mind, leading to such experiences as have been described, but also to develop the life of the will. And this training of the life of the will is something that arises in the most natural way from the ordinary life of the will in man. You can find more details in the books mentioned. But I will again characterize the effect, the results of the exercises of the will, which are already interwoven into meditation in proper meditation, from a certain point of view. Exercises of the will lead a person to the point where he can observe his own volition. Ordinary self-observation, even that which is called self-observation in trivial mysticism, does not yet lead to the point where one really observes the content of one's own volition as one otherwise observes external natural phenomena. It certainly does not lead to the point where one could, as it were, become one's own spectator. But the real exercises that spiritual research can indicate allow the human being to see what otherwise takes place as will in his life and flows into actions or even just lives in desires as otherwise things and processes around us can be observed; that man can truly put himself outside of himself, that he observes himself by wanting this or that, by setting goals in life. One only acquires this ability – and this, of course, cannot fill the whole life, but only claim very short, snatched moments of meditation on life – by so directing one's volition – and every true meditator already directs the volition by doing the right meditations – by so directing one's volition that one does not merely will as one wills in ordinary life. In ordinary life some desire arises. It is prompted by some inner bodily disposition, or it is prompted by an external impression, or the will performs this or that action, and thereby something is brought about in the external world. This volition that lives there can indeed be observed, but observation is made easier if one tries to will that – and as I said, it is willed in meditation – which advances the soul itself; if one makes oneself, so to speak, the object of one's volition, if one want something so that, through what one does in the soul, one gradually becomes a different person; that the soul is organized more finely, that the soul becomes more receptive when one carries out acts of will in such a way that one develops, that one consciously advances in life. Anyone who does meditation exercises knows how, after years of doing meditation exercises, the whole way he thinks about the world becomes different from what it used to be. He knows how he connects passion with desires, and these in turn with thoughts, and so on. He knows that he has become a different being, albeit in a more subtle way, and that this must be perceived. Otherwise, the I is always the center of will. The rays of will emanate from the I, as it were, and pour into the feelings and into the actions. In this kind of willing, the person effectively places himself outside of his ego and advances the ego itself through willing. Therefore, true meditation is particularly suitable for becoming the spectator of one's own willing, for knowing how to place oneself outside of one's own will and, just as one learns to observe natural processes, to observe one's own willing with composure. Otherwise, one is completely absorbed in one's desires, with all one's passions, all one's wishes, all one's emotions. One overcomes this for certain moments in life, and one learns to become a spectator of one's desires.

Let us just consider: when we want something else, we are present in what we want, we are so immersed in it that we instinctively defend it, at least inwardly, as our own. In any case, we do not look at wanting in the same way as we look at, say, the formation of a rainbow. But this is the path that the soul can follow: to observe the activity of the will, as one observes the formation of a rainbow or the rising of the sun; to become so objective, so calm. At first, one strives out of oneself in thought – for at first it is a mental striving out of oneself – in order to become a spectator.

But then one makes a discovery that one must take into account if one wants to become immersed in the reality of these things. One makes the remarkable discovery that although one must strive for what one strives for, one achieves something completely different. And with that I characterize an essential aspect of the spiritual research path in general. On the path of spiritual research, one must, if I may say so, set out on the path. One sets out on the path with the first exercises that I have described by meditating, by putting thoughts into the soul. But if one were to believe that holding on to these thoughts, drilling oneself into these thoughts, is also the goal, then that would be wrong. For the goal consists precisely in overcoming what one has initially undertaken: that thoughts cease to be thoughts in the strict sense, that the activity of thinking, free of the thought, now takes hold of us in becoming and weaving. That is the characteristic of the spiritual research path: that something must be undertaken and something else comes out. And precisely because something is undertaken, something else comes out.

And so it is with this second one I have to describe. You make an effort in the way described—but as I said, you can find details in the books mentioned—you make an effort to become your own spectator, that is, to step out of yourself in your imagination and watch your own volition as you would watch external natural phenomena. But the result of these exercises is different from what it would be if you were to follow a straight line. One might think that one would now become such a being by making a being out of oneself that looks at its currents of will. This is not the case. Rather, the result is that the more one goes out of oneself in this way, the more that which goes out disappears within oneself. In the development of thinking, one becomes more and more inwardly absorbed. The self expands, becomes more intense, more powerful. In the process I have just described, one does not enter into oneself, but one's own self is, in a sense, laid aside. Instead, however, a will remains in the spiritual field of vision, an act of the will. And as it were, out of the plane of these acts of the will, rising up from below, through the acts of the will, there rises a real being, which is a higher human being in the human being. That which one has always carried within oneself through one's whole life, but has not carried in consciousness, that rises through the will, that breaks through it. Just as the depths of the sea would appear if they were to break over the surface, so now a being appears, a conscious being, a being of higher consciousness, which is an objective spectator of all our acts of will, a real being that always lives in us and that breaks through the will in this way. And this being, which one discovers in the currents of will, this being connects with what one has made out of thinking. These two beings, which one has found in oneself, unite with each other. And through this one is now not only in a working and weaving, but in a real spiritual world with real spiritual entities and facts. In it now stands one's own being, which is also born out of the will - but in the company of other spiritual beings - and which goes through birth and death. The human being who, through birth or conception, has connected himself with what materially descends from father and mother, the human being who sustains himself when he steps through the portal of death, is discovered in such a way that what lives and works in us is brought to life in himself from two sides.

In the thinking that one gradually develops, the main thing is that in this thinking we really develop something different from what lives in our ordinary soul, and that is precisely what is difficult. Man is so attached to the habits that he has acquired in his soul through his dealings with the sensual world. Therefore, all these qualities that he acquires through this spiritual path, as it has been described, actually initially unsettle him. A sense of apprehension, loneliness, and restlessness can come over him. If everything is done correctly, as indicated by true spiritual science, this does not happen. I spoke about this a few weeks ago in the lecture I mentioned, 'A Healthy Soul Life and Spirit Research'. But everyone knows that when you enter into the spiritual world in the way I have described, a certain restlessness can arise, a certain inner anxiety, and even distinct feelings of fear towards the spiritual world that want to overwhelm you. And to avoid this, there are already enough clues in true meditation. But if someone expects that what his soul then does in these newly evoked abilities is directly similar to what the soul does in relation to the external physical world, which it must have around it all day, then he is subject to the most severe deceptions and also disappointments. Then he becomes restless because he says to himself: “I am living in something indefinite and unfamiliar. I have always thought in a different way. My thinking was so secure in the other way; it clung to a certain being that was given to me. Now my thinking is supposed to live in a becoming and not, so to speak, forget itself.

But in the true spiritual path this is avoided by the fact that this true spiritual path brings with it — it brings it with it quite naturally when it is followed in the right way — that what we can call interest, inner soul interest, manifests itself for the human being in a completely different way than the soul interest usually manifests itself in the physical world. It is really true: one acquires a new interest, a quite new kind of interest, when one leads a meditative life. It must be emphasized again and again: one does not want success for the inner life alone. Those spiritual exercises are of no value from the start and must be decidedly rejected, which make man unfit for the outer life. A person who practises true spiritual exercises remains as firmly rooted in the outer life as he was before. No, he will become even more firmly rooted in this outer life. If he has to pursue a particular occupation wherever fate has placed him, he will fulfil this occupation no worse than before if he has true spiritual science. And one can be sure – forgive the trivial expression – that the person who gets all kinds of raisins into his head by going through spiritual exercises, and then thinks he is too good for what he was before, is most certainly on the wrong track. But through that in the soul which is the actual spiritual research activity, one acquires new interests, which take the soul in a different direction, in addition to the old interests, which become even more intense for the outer world.

I will give an example of what it is like for someone who is a philosopher. Perhaps it is useful to give this example for the very reason that most philosophers believe from the outset – well, that they can judge everything from spiritual science much better than the spiritual researcher himself. But those who are not philosophers themselves become restless when faced with the many philosophies that exist. Isn't it true that one should just take a look at all the “ians” (Kantian, Hegelian, Schopenhauerian, Hartmannian) just once, all of them, and then one will see, even if one adds others to that, that one should not allow oneself to be unsettled: Well, everyone thought differently, but I want something certain in my thinking! This tendency will then take on a different expression in the philosopher. The philosopher who wants to be a “ianer” himself now develops a certain train of thought; he then swears by it, and the others are of course all fools, whom he can refute, or at least people who are going astray. But the person who has developed his thinking in the way described, who has included the process of thinking in thinking, reads Hartmann with the same interest as Schopenhauer, as Hegel, as Schelling, as Heraclitus. He does not even get around to refuting one and becoming a follower of the other, because he takes a certain interest in the movement of thinking, in being inside thinking itself, because he takes a certain joy, a certain pleasure simply in the act of thinking and because he knows that this thinking does not lead to reality in such a way as is usually believed — that thoughts can simply be reflections of reality — but that one only comes into a life and weaving in the work of thinking. Yes, when one can do this, then one can take the standpoint: Certainly, the one philosopher has viewed the world from one point of view, the other from another! And the philosophical world view that one then gets cannot be seen any differently than a tree that has been photographed from different sides, where one also does not say: I declare the one photograph to be wrong, that is not at all true with the other, that is a completely different tree! Because it is only a different tree because it has been photographed from a different side. If you look at the activity of photographing, and not at the abstract reproduction, then you will see for yourself what is right. And so it is with thinking. You become interested in the mobility of thinking, and you know that you live in spiritual reality when you live and move in thinking itself. And there is something else that is introduced into your development through the exercises of the will, and this goes much deeper. It can disturb many people, and would even appear very disturbing if you were not sufficiently prepared, as is the case in every true schooling of the spirit. I would like to say again: for ordinary life, people are familiar with the fact that what lies within their will actually only appears to them in such a way that when they have done something they call good, they rub their hands together; then they are very satisfied with themselves. If they have done something they call bad in some way, they reproach themselves. But it remains with these inner soul processes. Man oscillates back and forth between rubbing his hands together out of satisfaction with what he has done and blaming himself. But when the volition is trained in such a way that the inner spectator emerges, then a greater seriousness permeates the matter. Then it is no longer just reproaches or inner satisfaction that arise, but you get to know a very real being in what permeates the will as a spectator and shoots up through its surface. You get to know: That which otherwise appears to you as reproach and as inner satisfaction is a real power. This real power is there in the world, it will continue to have an effect. In the further course one learns to recognize how this power develops into a further destiny and influences the next life on earth as a fact, after one has passed through the life between birth and death. What one experiences there as will, would follow the one who is not well prepared like a shadow, like something one always drags along, like one's shadow, like a real being. Everything depends on whether one also learns to understand the full significance of these things; that one learns, for example, to recognize: what follows one around as a shadow need not lead one to hypochondria, but one must look at it calmly. For it is not at all what has significance for the present life, but what passes through the gate of death with us, what is among the forces that will help determine the configuration, the nature, of our next life.

In short, the interests associated with these developed inner soul activities are different from the interests of the outer life, but they do not detract from these interests of the outer life at all. They merely put everything in its proper place, so to speak. When someone comes to an awareness of what goes through birth and death, what is immortal about the soul, as I have described it, then he will not become less interested in the external physical facts that directly surround him, but rather he will come to the conclusion that there is a spiritual world. In this spiritual world there are just as many concrete spiritual processes and entities as there are in the physical world, and he can see them. But that which exists as a physical world can only be seen in the physical world. What surrounds us as a physical world naturally ceases to exist after death. Only because we carry an immortal being within us, which is a reality in itself and belongs to a reality that goes beyond the physical, do we carry something through the gate of death, enter into a spiritual world, into a world that we live through between death and a new birth, and then enter into yet another earthly life.

Especially when one knows, not in the abstract but in a living sense – and it is only through spiritual research that one really gets to know this – that one can only get to know this sensual world in its full inner essence through one's senses and through the mind that is connected to the brain – then, under this life-filled self-development — not through some theory, but through what life absorbs, under the influence of the exercises that awaken our lively interest in everything that is obvious; the interest for the smallest details in the world is increased. Only one particular interest, and this we must take with us, grows ever smaller and smaller: the interest in that which is already able to appear in the sense world as so-called 'spiritual' and to reveal spiritual reality in and out of the phenomenon itself. It is known that spiritual things can be grasped when the organs, the spiritual eyes and spiritual ears, are developed first, to use Goethe's expression. It is known that one must rise to the spiritual world, and it is known that in the world of the senses, this world of the senses must be grasped out of itself, that it stands as that which must be grasped through the world of the senses. Therefore one loses interest in all those events that seek the spiritual out of the world of the senses itself. And while interest in everything that takes place in the spiritual world increases, especially in true spiritual research, interest in the sense in which it exists for many in the spiritual world is purely sensational and all kinds of superstitions and belief in miracles disappears completely. Interest, let us say, in spiritualistic events, in mediumistic performances, completely fades away. The spiritual researcher is not interested because he knows that only something abnormal can come to light in these things, which is indeed based in the sense world, but which cannot lead beyond the sense world into the true spiritual world. Of course, he can take an interest in it, as one takes an interest in some theatrical performance, in some experiment that otherwise appears in the world. Nothing should be said against such events, provided, of course, that they are not frauds, in that they allow a variety of otherwise inexpressible natural connections to be expressed. But they are natural phenomena, and we know that we do not live in these things in any other way than we live and move with our ordinary senses, however abnormal it may seem. For everything that belongs to this area, which I have just touched upon, interest wanes, as I said. It becomes a mere witnessing — well, of all sorts of events. And it is the duty of every true spiritual researcher not to allow superstition to grow in him, but to uproot superstition completely.

It would be very easy to believe – and because it is possible, it must be emphasized – that a person who experiences spiritually what I have indicated, and who basically experiences nothing less than what he can call his immortal soul, and that he is actually experiencing life after death; that he is already experiencing what will be experienced after death. In this abstract form it is not the case, and one must think very carefully about these things if one wants to get an idea of them. What the soul experiences after death, or let us say, from death until birth, is experienced in much the same way as a plant would consciously experience everything that is in its germ, which represents all the forces for the new plant. One experiences everything that must necessarily be gone through in the spiritual world after death in order to prepare one's entire life with the new body and the new experiences as a new destiny in the coming earthly existence. It is the germinal being in us that is suited to experience in the spiritual world between death and new birth that which then prepares a new life on earth, so that we then have the body that we need to have the abilities that we have previously prepared within us, so that we put ourselves in the position in which we need to be when our destiny is to be fulfilled according to our previous life on earth. That this potential lies within us, we experience that. But to have this experience before us, to have the spiritual world before our own soul, for that it is necessary, of course, to go through the experiences ourselves between death and a new birth, which one can at most look at and develop in knowledge, but in a living knowledge that is an inner reality, while the knowledge of the external world, of the physical external world, is only mental images.

You see, I would of course need a great deal of time to discuss in more detail what I have only touched upon. This will be possible in the coming lectures. But, as you can see, there is a certain path that can be described as the path of spiritual research, which leads to the development of a life that is inwardly different from the life of the soul in the external, sensual reality. And in this experience, the soul takes hold of itself in such a way that it lives and breathes in the inner power that passes through the gate of death.

Fichte only sensed the truth when he said: Immortality is not only there when we have passed through the gate of death, but it is there when we are still living in the body. For the being that passes through death can be attained by human knowledge while it is still alive in the body. How is it attained? In a remarkable way, we have to form ideas ourselves from spiritual science as to how it is attained.

You may well ask how can a person achieve all that has been described as a result of soul exercises? How can soul exercises lead to something like this? You see, people very often complain – especially when they have a keen cognitive drive – that you can't really see through reality, that there are limits to knowledge. How often have I pointed out in these lectures the famous Ignorabimus of Da Bois-Reymond, where it is said that man can indeed come to an observation of the processes of the world and their limits, but cannot penetrate into the interior of matter; that he cannot, as it were, submerge himself in the interior of matter with his thinking. It is said of all knowledge that all these powers of knowledge are actually insufficient to fully penetrate nature.

When one begins to strengthen the soul inwardly as it has been described, one notices something very definite. One notices how tremendously good it is that there are such limits to external knowledge. For if the powers that one has for external knowledge were to make one see through all nature through themselves, these powers would prevent one from attaining spiritual knowledge. Only because one cannot use everything that is in the soul for external knowledge is something left that can be developed in the way I have explained it. Only because the full, immortal soul does not enter into bodily life, but still retains something, whereby not everything is transparent in the outer bodily life, are inner forces preserved, which can then be developed in the way described. By connecting ourselves with the physical material given by our ancestors through birth or, let us say, through conception, we retain so much of the immortal soul that, on the one hand, we are prevented from seeing through the full nature in the bodily life, and have to make hypotheses and all sorts of things about what lives in nature. But as a result we have in the background of our being forces that we can develop within us and that allow us to enter into a spiritual world in a spiritual way. The immortal soul lives in man. In order for it to live, some things must be taken away from man in a sensual way. This, in turn, is such an important connection that one must look at it.

There is therefore a spiritual research that introduces us directly to the immortal being of man. This spiritual research is different from the external research. In the external research, one can remain as one is. That is exactly what suits people. The same abilities that they have acquired once, they retain when they go into the laboratory, when they do experiments, and can learn something about the external nature. And then these people also demand that the spirit should be explored in the same way, by retaining the same abilities. One cannot approach the spirit without first making oneself spiritual, that is, seeking out that which is in every human soul but which must first be raised to consciousness in the manner described. But there is much, much that, I might say, still thwarts people's paths to spiritual science in the present time. That is why the chapter 'immortality question and spiritual research' is still so little recognized today, one that people are so reluctant to get involved in.

You can already see from what I have said that it is necessary for man to learn to think and live in a subtle inner way. That is to say, when he becomes a spiritual researcher, he must not become a lesser thinker than those who believe, let us say, that they have mastered thinking, who claim that they stand on the firm ground of external natural science, which is not to be challenged in the slightest. They do not love that in the present. In the present, one loves to develop, I might say, that very tangible thinking that does not even broach the subject of the finer things that live and move in the world.

I do not like to do this: to make personal references. Those of you who have been to these lectures often will know that I actually avoid going into all the opposition from the outside world and all the misunderstandings regarding what I am presenting here as spiritual science. I would prefer to ignore it and not talk about it at all. But when things keep coming up that do have an effect and are believed, they do harm to the cause. Personally I would prefer not to talk about these things at all, but harm is done to the cause because printed paper still has tremendous authority today, because it still has a tremendous effect. And so, for the sake of the cause, one must sometimes, when occasion is offered by some topic, go into what stands in opposition to spiritual science. If coarse thinking is opposed to it, which, because it cannot engage in the finer weaving in the life of thought, can see nothing but fantasy, nothing but a form of madness in what spiritual science indicates as the right path for spiritual research. Let me give you an example. And, as I said, please excuse me if it is a personal example, but I only mention it in so far as it is opposed to spiritual science, which is expressed in it as a typical phenomenon.

I gave a lecture in a certain city about the relationships that prevail in the nature of the individual European peoples, relationships that, as many listeners know, I had already presented long before this war gave rise to talk about them; insights that were found quite independently of this war, but which, as they are presented, should actually be obvious. For when it is said in the course of the lectures, which are now often combined with the lectures on spiritual science, that the peoples of the West, the peoples of the European center, the peoples of the East differ in this or that, one should believe that no reasonable person could actually be led to say anything other than: Well, yes, he may be mistaken about individual characteristics, but there really are differences. There really are different character traits, different ones in the Germans, different ones in the Russians. To deny this can only arise from the crudest thinking. And yet, as I said, I also gave a lecture on this in a certain city. In a daily paper of the town in question, this was discussed and said in the most derogatory way, that these differences were constructed only out of the war, as it were. But one could ignore that, following the example I gave recently, for what is being achieved in this area. But now think, that was not enough for one man, but the man even turned to a magazine, and in a magazine what appeared in the newspaper at the time was printed, and the following nice comment was attached to it: “The accusation of the speaker” - that is, the critic of the Tagblatt of the city in question - “of having reconstructed opposing cultures from the current constellation of powers, rightly applies to Steiner. With the best will in the world, I am unable to perceive, as Steiner does, a difference in essence between Central European and Western and Eastern European culture. In my opinion, European culture is completely the same in essence.” And so it continues. This appeared in a Central European journal. You can see from it what a crude thinking is confronted with spiritual science as such. For what I have read to you here is further developed in a detailed article that extends over several issues. The thought — well, I need only hint at it, then you will see how crude such a person's thinking is: “Intellectual life, too, has developed in this direction and is absorbed in this pursuit. The wild greed of the European cultured man for the possession of earthly goods would degenerate into a predatory struggle of all against all, were individuals not forced into iron state forms.” So this crude thinking does not even notice how these ‘iron state forms’ are initially more involved in what is happening in this war. It is thinking like this that one has to deal with. Such thinking is in contrast to what must be demanded in the light of an understanding of such a question, and so also of the question of the immortality of the soul. And such a thing does not appear in a materialistic magazine, but in a magazine - it even bears the heading “42nd year” - that calls itself “Psychical Studies”. That I am not speaking out of personal resentment, I can prove to you from the magazine itself. You know, or at least many people know, that I have dealt with the main ideas which this gentleman here attacks in such a way in a small pamphlet. This pamphlet is called “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this pamphlet, though perhaps in a popular way, are exactly the same thoughts, written at least from the same spirit, from the same attitude. In the same issue as the article from which I have just read the characteristic passages, there is a review of this work, “Thoughts During the Time of War”. In this review, the work is highly praised and it is shown how meritorious it is to express such thoughts. It goes without saying that I am just as indifferent to being praised as I am to being criticized. But I must characterize what already lives in the formation of the times, so that it is not believed again and again when diatribes appear here and there, simply through the suggestive power of what is daubed with printing ink on dirty paper, since that always forms a kind of obstacle for those who might otherwise find their way to spiritual research. One must point out the grotesque nature of the experience that can be had in our time in such a way. And it is only for this reason that spiritual science must be kept free, so to speak, in the context in which it is found, in the light in which it must appear as true, genuine, honest spiritual science. In order to keep it free in this light, I must also touch on other matters.

I have already pointed out in the lecture before last, where I spoke about misunderstandings regarding spiritual science, also in the lecture “Healthy Soul Life and Spiritual Research”, that spiritual research is not only opposed by what comes from the more or less materialistically minded side. On this side it is extremely difficult to achieve something for the reason that the things that are put forward from this side are so terribly plausible. When I have to characterize something, such as this magazine, I do it reluctantly. When I seriously oppose something, I turn to those whom I actually hold in high esteem. So I also hold in high esteem the actual father, I might say, of modern materialism, Lamettrie. He is an astute man, and his reasons are plausible. But one can acknowledge the plausibility of these reasons, one can assert them and one should still, when the spiritual research path is asserted alongside them, acknowledge the significance and essence of this spiritual research path alongside the validity of what comes from the materialistic side. Lamettrie is, as I said, an astute man, and in his book 'Man a Machine' he has put together everything that can prove how man is dependent on his physicality. Now it might seem as if spiritual science would have every reason to contradict such things. No, it agrees with everything, as I even proved in my last lecture, in a more forceful sense than materialism itself. For it is indeed easy to understand and irrefutable when Lamettrie points out how man's mental state depends on what he is. Of course it is very easy to prove, because it is so terribly obvious that man depends on whether he likes something or whether something agrees with him. Think of the mood of the soul that results from it. Lamettrie describes all this, and in doing so, he basically anticipated everything that can be said about this matter. Isn't it extremely interesting – especially in this day and age – to read what Lamettrie said in his book 'Man a Machine', because if you read it somewhere else, it would not make a good impression. But here in Central Europe, this passage can perhaps be read with greater composure than in Western Europe. Lamettrie wants to prove what man actually is - really prove how man, in terms of his mental state, indeed in terms of his character, in terms of what lives in him in terms of soul, depends on what he eats, what his food is. And there Lamettrie says – but as I said, it was more than a century ago since it was said – in his book 'Man a Machine', Lamettrie says: 'Raw meat makes animals wild; humans would become wild from the same food. How true this is,” says Lamettrie, the Frenchman, ”can be seen from the fact that the English nation, who eat meat less cooked than we do, eat it entirely raw and bloody, and show a wildness that is partly brought about by these foods, but partly also by other causes, which only education can suppress. This savagery engenders in the soul arrogance, hatred, contempt for other nations, unruliness and other feelings that corrupt the character, just as coarse food produces a heavy and clumsy mind, whose main characteristics are laziness and dullness.” It is perhaps not uninteresting, especially in Central Europe, to hear the judgment of a Frenchman, even if it is more than a hundred years old, about the English, so that one can see how circumstances change and how people have not always felt and thought in the same way from one place to another and from there to there. This same Lamettrie also says other things that are quite natural, for example, he says - and he believes that this is enough to refute everything that can be said from the spirit about the spirit - he says, for example: “A small fiber would have made two fools out of Erasmus and Fontenelle.” One can, of course, admit this and still stand on the ground of spiritual science, as it has been characterized today. For there is much more that can be admitted and that will not shake spiritual research. Let us assume, for example, that if only a small fiber were different in the case of Erasmus, then, from the point of view of pure materialism, this would mean that his life would perhaps have become that of a drip instead of that of a genius. But now, if it had happened that the mother, before he was born, had been murdered by a bandit and Erasmus had been killed before he was born, what would have become of Erasmus' soul? Only a true spiritual researcher is able to see through such things. For it seems even more compelling that man is dependent on matter; for it would only have been necessary for him to have died as a small boy, then he would not have been there.

That spiritual research has anything to deny that comes from this side should not be believed by those who, with their blunt considerations, want to stand in the way of spiritual research. But even today, on this ground, one still sees much that is unclear and imprecise. The characterized coarse thinking is primarily to blame for this; but there is more to it than that: spiritual science has to suffer not only from those who oppose it, but it also has to suffer from those who often want to be seen as adherents of a certain spiritual-scientific direction and who, in turn, are connected with all kinds of strange social elements of the present day. And as a result, spiritual science is lumped together with all kinds of stuff by those who do not know how to distinguish — I have already pointed this out, but I have to go into it in more detail today with reference to something else. Spiritual science does not build — as you can see from a characteristic of my lectures, which is often criticized, namely that they are too difficult — spiritual science does not build on the gullible crowd, does not build on those who, in a comfortable frame of mind, want to gain some kind of conviction, does not build on those people who, as if in a 'dream, go through life and believe everything that is conveyed to them through their certainly subjective power of persuasion. Spiritual science does not build on that which lives in the world of superstition, and because certain things are rightly discussed in public on the materialistic side as nonsense, a sharp line must also be drawn in spiritual science itself between honest, true spiritual research, which follows only the truth, and that which so often likes to its coattails and what comes from a side where one counts on the superstition of mankind, which is present as well as insisting on one's own judgment; where one pretends to people all sorts of things, because even today one finds enough people who believe everything possible, if it is only proclaimed to them from an alleged spiritual world - unknown whence. What can be confused with spiritual science from this side – as I said, it must be pointed out in order to shake it off – true science, and that is spiritual science, has little to do with it.

I will only point out a few things, because these things are now being discussed publicly on the materialistic side and, certainly under the influence of the serious and serious events of the times, there will be more and more discussion. I want to show how wrong those are who associate spiritual science with some form of ordinary or higher superstition, that higher superstition that pursues all kinds of goals in the world and actually only works in such a way that it first puts people into the world who are said to have higher abilities, a clairvoyant gift. True clairvoyance consists in what has often been described and is again described today. But what people call clairvoyance today is actually subconscious, but is often also just a fraud. But we are not reckoning with what is in the subconscious, but with the effect. Therefore, one must reckon with what the fraudulent clairvoyance is able to do with superstition. And there it is possible that all kinds of dishonest endeavors and currents arise, where one wants to achieve something completely different from what lies in the realm of truth. What people need to know, what is achieved by this, is that first of all — allow me to use a harsh expression — people are made stupid, befogged, by showing them all kinds of occultism, which has an effect on their superstition, and then, with the people made stupid, all kinds of things are carried out that do not belong in the realm of sincerity and honesty. Spiritual science has the same duty and necessity to point out these excesses of modern life as materialism does. And if it proves materialism right in its field in such cases, as I have shown with Lamettrie, then it may also prove it right when it turns against all excesses of an apparent spiritual experience, which is nothing more than life in blind superstition.

In 1912, an almanac was published, a yearbook, edited by a personality who is revered in a city in the West as a higher clairvoyant by many who are clouded in the way just described. This yearbook appeared in 1912 for 1913, in advance. In it, the following note appears about Austria: “The one who is destined to govern in Austria will not govern. A young man who has not yet been appointed to the government will govern.”

And with even greater clarity, the almanac for 1914, which was published in 1913, returns to this matter. There may be gullible people who believe nothing more and nothing less than that a great prophecy has been fulfilled, and it is impossible to make clear to them in their blind faith that dishonest currents living in the European world have been at work here, using superstition and all kinds of dark occultism to bring something into the world. How this is connected with all kinds of underground currents can be seen by considering that a Parisian newspaper, “Paris at Noon,” long, long before the current turmoil and at about the same time as the appearance of the aforementioned note in the aforementioned almanac of an alleged clairvoyant in – a Parisian newspaper that makes no claim to be occult in any way, but can be compared to other newspapers that appear at noon – that this newspaper also expressed its wish long months before that the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand would be murdered. One can see certain underground connections. And this same paper wrote at the time of the three-year anniversary of his term of office: “Among the very first to be murdered if mobilization occurs will be Jaurès.

The same personality who publishes this almanac travelled to Rome in the first days of August 1914 to influence certain people who are open to such influence, in a direction that I will not say is linked to the main causes of Italy's position, but which had already taken effect in this matter.

I only discuss these things because they are discussed by others, from a materialistic point of view. But they must be discussed so that it can be seen that true spiritual science has nothing to do with such things, with superstition in general that relies on the credulity of the masses, and with what is done under the guise of superstition, both in large and small matters. Spiritual science will only appear as a real science that can be placed alongside other sciences when it is kept free from everything that can still be easily confused with it today and that is often confused with it, not only under the influence of limited judgment, which simply cannot distinguish, but also out of ill will. And in the literature that is thrown at spiritual science, a lot of work is done precisely with the fact that what one has to lie about when one wants to characterize spiritual science is so lied about that spiritual science is thereby put on the same ground as those things that spiritual science must of course fight as fiercely as they are fought by materialistic science.

But just as we recognize such things, spiritual science will emerge ever more clearly in its purity in what it can be for the human soul. Does not the latest book by Ernst Haeckel, that is, by a serious researcher, “Thoughts on Eternity”, shows how utterly at a loss mere natural science is in the face of such great events that have such a profound impact on the development of humanity, since it knows of nothing better to say than this:

Not that such a time would provide the reasons for spiritual science, but one must recognize what spiritual science can become for human life in the spiritual realm: that which sustains the human being, which holds the human being, because it makes him acquainted with that with which no natural science makes him acquainted. Natural science can only make man acquainted with that through which his body is connected with the sensual universe. Spiritual science makes man familiar with this through the fact that it shows him, by means of research, that he has an immortal soul, so that one can know: This soul of man is connected with eternal becoming. Man is anchored in eternity through his soul and spirit, as he is anchored in temporality through his body.

If one asks whether man needs something like this, it must be said that there can be no proof for it, any more than there can be for the fact that he needs to eat and drink. But just as man experiences through hunger and thirst that he must eat and drink, so he experiences over and over again in his soul that he must know. And the more one demands knowledge and not mere belief, one will recognize that he must know about the immortality of his soul. One can deny that man demands this knowledge, but the denial is only a theoretical one. The time will come more and more – and we are already at its beginning – when, just as hunger asserts itself in the healthy human body, the thirst for knowledge of the spiritual world, for knowledge of the immortal character of the soul itself, will assert itself in the human being who lives beyond himself into the time that begins with the present. And it will be an unquenched thirst if there is no spiritual science. This will show in the effects. Theoretically it will be possible to deny it – but it will show in the effects. It will show in the fact that people will find themselves desolate in their souls, will not know what to do with their lives, that they will perform their external tasks but will not know what the meaning of life is, and that they will thirst for this unraveling of the meaning of life. Little by little it will extend to the intellect; little by little it will show how man's thinking becomes coarser and coarser. We have already found enough coarseness in one example today. In short, the development of man would experience a descent if it could not be fertilized by spiritual science.

May the times we are living through today, which call upon man to be earnest in so many fields, also be a sign that the time is beginning when people must have knowledge of immortality and that spiritual research is the way to achieve it. The spiritual researcher himself knows that he is in harmony with all those who, even if they have not yet done spiritual research, have nevertheless been living and breathing in the spiritual world through the very nature of their soul activity. The spiritual researcher knows himself to be in harmony with those who simply knew what it means to live in the spiritual world. When Goethe was asked why he wanted to recognize the plant through ideas, since ideas are something abstract, he said: “Then my ideas, which I believe I experience within myself, are direct reality, because I do see my ideas within reality.” Therefore it was Goethe who, even when he had not yet spiritual science, knew what to say in a poetic but accurate way about the character of the spiritual world, where he was spiritually and soulfully transported by the poetic genius.

Today we have to say: the person who, through the development of his thinking, lives into the spiritual world, lives and moves in the emerging soul entities. And when man is freed from the body, he is also a spiritual-soul entity that lives in the becoming. That which has become, that which is solid, exists only in the outer sensual world in which man lives as long as he is in the body and then only when he perceives through the body. As soon as man ascends to the spiritual being, he is seized by the becoming. Goethe knows this. He also knows that just as man, through his own feeling, lives into his inner well-being, he can also live into a feeling that may well be called love. That is the surprising thing and always will be when one comes to spiritual people, that they even know how to say the right thing with the right word from their life in the spiritual world. That is why Goethe also says: one lives in the becoming. And when one develops oneself into this becoming, then the thoughts live in this becoming itself. Not the ordinary thoughts — these must first be overcome, they can only be incorporated into the world of becoming as something lasting, something enduring. Only when that which can be grasped in the process of becoming is held fast in thought, can the thought become fixed and we can carry it with our immortal soul through the portal of death. That is why, towards the end of his prologue in Heaven, written at the height of his life, Goethe speaks the beautiful words with which I want to conclude these reflections today, because in them, in a time that lies before the development of spiritual research as we understand it today , a poet speaks of the spiritual world out of poetic genius in a way that one must speak of it out of realization, by first pointing, or having the Lord point, to that which man needs as long as he lives in the sensual body. So that he does not degenerate into comfort and convenience, the Lord points out to Mephisto those who are spirit beings. And when free of the body, the human being is such a spiritual being. Goethe points out the peculiarity of the spiritual world with words that are sure to hit the mark. For you will recognize in these words what I myself had to recognize in them. After I had developed everything that I have presented today, I was surprised by the wonderful correspondence of these Goethean words, which I had not recognized before, the wonderful correspondence of these few Goethean words with the fundamental character the world to which the immortal human soul belongs: “But you, the true sons of the gods” - spiritual beings are meant, just as man is a spiritual being as an immortal soul -,

“But you, the true sons of the gods,
Rejoice in the living, rich beauty!
Embrace with love's sweet barriers what is becoming, what lives and works eternally,
And what floats in a wavering appearance,
Secure with lasting thoughts.”

Attention is drawn to that which lives in the pure spirit as its very own, but which is recognized in the human soul as its immortal part. In these words, which are directly a characteristic of that which can be grasped in the human soul, even when it is still living in the body, as the immortal, and of which one can know that it passes through the gate of death, when it enters the realm of the developing and takes with it to the pure realm of the spirit that which it has experienced here in a fluctuating appearance, in order to transform it into thoughts that can then become permanent and be taken through the gate of death. And what lives in fluctuating appearance affirms the soul, which passes through the gate of death, as an immortal, as an eternal being, in lasting thoughts, which henceforth make up its life in the same way that the body makes up the soul's life in the physical world.

Our present age, inartistic as it is, shows little awareness of the fact that recitation stands midway between speaking, or reading, which are not artistic, and artistically developed singing. In many circles there is a feeling that really anyone can recite – and this, of course, is not unconnected with the fact that in these same circles everyone flatters himself that he can also write poetry. It would not so easily enter anyone's head that someone could be a musician, or a painter, without having previously undergone any sort of artistic training. When we consider current views on the art of recitation, we are obliged to admit that, just as in people's ideas about the real nature of poetry, there is also a certain lack of clarity as to the nature of the art of recitation. As to how this art of recitation must use its instrument – the human voice in connection with the human organism – even for this there is no clear understanding. This is undoubtedly connected with the fundamental absence, in our present age, of any earnest feeling for the true nature of poetry. There is no doubt that poetry stands in a relationship with the whole being of man quite different to that of ordinary prose, of whatever kind this may be; everything that man must recognize as that higher world to which he belongs with the soul and spiritual parts of his being poetry must also stand in a certain connection with all this. Along with the lack of clarity which gradually invaded ideas concerning man's relationship with the super-sensible world, there also came about another partial lack of clarity, concerning man's relationship with that world which is expressed in the art of poetry. I should like to draw attention to two facts – things which resound to us from ancient times, though from quite different peoples, with quite differently evolved characters.

One fact, though one which today is passed over so lightly, is something to which Homer, the great writer of Greek epic, draws our attention at the beginning of both his poems: namely, that what he wished to convey to the world as his poetry did not come from himself.

‘Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...’

It is not Homer, but the Muse who is singing. Our age can no longer take this seriously – for the understanding that lies hidden behind the opening of the Homeric poem had, in fact, already been extinguished by the eighteenth century, with its intellectual conceptions. When Klopstock began his Messiah, he did indeed look at the beginning of the Homeric poems; but in this respect he lived entirely in abstract ideas, intellectualistic ideas, and these could only lead him to say: the Greeks still believed in gods, in the Muses – modern man can replace this only by his own immortal soul. Thus, Klopstock begins with the words:

‘Sing, immortal soul, of sinful man's redemption.’

Now this opening of the Messiah, for anyone who can see into these things, is a document of the very greatest significance. And in the nineteenth century, too, all feeling had been completely lost for what Homer meant to convey – that when I reveal myself in poetry, it is really something higher that is revealed in me: my “I” withdraws, my ego withdraws, so that other powers make use of my speech-organism; divine-spiritual powers make use of this speech-organism in order to reveal themselves. One must, therefore, regard what Homer placed at the opening of his two poetic creations as something worthy of more serious consideration than is usually accorded to such things today.

It is remarkable how something similar, and yet quite different, resounds to us from a certain period in the development of Central Europe, a period to which the Nibelungenlied points – although it was not written down until a later date. This begins in a manner similar to, yet quite different from Homer:

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told’

“In olden maeren” – what are maeren, for those who still have a living feeling and perception for such things? I cannot go into all this in detail, but I need only allude to the real meaning of this expression, maer – Nachtmar (nightmare): for this same expression is used to describe certain dreams which are caused by being oppressed, as it were, by an Alp – by a nightmare. In this nightmare, this Alp, we have the last atavistic traces of what is indicated in the Nibelungenlied, when it says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told…”; something is here related which does not come out of normal day-time ego-consciousness, but from a kind of perception which proceeds in the manner of the consciousness we possess in an especially vivid dream such as the nightmare, the maeren. Here again our attention is directed not to ordinary consciousness, but to something which is revealed, through ordinary consciousness, from super-sensible spheres. Homer says: “Sing, O Muse, of the anger of Peleus' son Achilles ...”; and the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told.” What is referred to in the first instance? To that which is, in reality, brought forth by the Muse, when she makes use of the human organism, begins to speak through the human organism, to vibrate musically; our attention is directed to something musical which permeates the human being, and which speaks from greater depths than are reached by his ordinary consciousness. And when the Nibelungenlied says: “To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told …” – it is something which permeates human consciousness as a perception similar to seeing, as something like visual perception, to which we are referred. The Nibelungenlied indicates something plastic and formative, something imaginative; in the Homeric epic we are given something musical. Both, however, from different sides, show us what wells up in poetry from the profounder depths of human nature, something which takes hold of the human being and finds utterance through him. One must have a feeling for this, if one is to experience the way in which true declamation gives expression in poetry, and takes hold of the human instrument of speech – though, as we shall see later, this involves the entire human organism.

The manner, the whole way in which a human being is built up is an outcome of the forces of the spiritual world. And again, the whole manner in which a human being is able to bring his organism into movement when he declaims or recites poetry – this, too, must be the result of a spiritual force holding sway in the human organism. One must learn to trace this working of the spirit in the human organism when the art of poetry is expressed through recitation or declamation. Declamation then becomes what the human organism can be, when it is tuned in the most various ways. In order to gain a practical, artistic realization of these things in some detail, we would now like to show you what must live in declamation when something more of the nature of folk-poetry, or folk-song, is taken into consideration; we shall then proceed to something which is more definitely art – poetry. We hope to show you how fundamentally different the effect of declamation must be, depending on whether it sounds forth from those depths of human nature from which earnestness, or tragedy, resound; or whether it comes from those surface realms of the human organization from which gaiety, satire and humour emanate. Only when we have learned to apprehend these things quite concretely today will I permit myself to give certain intimations of the connection between poetry and recitation and declamation. From these, we will then show how there results an exact method of educating oneself in artistic recitation and declamation.

We will ask Frau Dr. Steiner to declaim a poem of Goethe: a folk-poem in its whole tone and mood – Goethe's “Heidenröslein”.

HEIDENRÖSLEIN

Sah ein Knab' ein Röslein stehn,

Röslein auf der Heiden,

War so jung und morgenschön,

Lief er schnell, es nah zu sehn,

Sah's mit vielen Freuden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Knabe sprach: Ich breche dich

Röslein auf der Heiden,

Röslein sprach: Ich steche dich,

Dass du ewig denkst an mich,

Und ich will's nicht leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Und der wilde Knabe brach

's Röslein auf der Heiden;

Röslein wehrte sich und stach,

Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,

Musst' es eben leiden.

Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,

Röslein auf der Heiden.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[Comparable in English in many respects is:

MY HEART'S IN THE HIGHLANDS

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North;

The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth:

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

The hills of the Highlandsfor ever I love. –

Farewell to the mountains high cover'd with snow;

Farewell to the straths and green valleys below:

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods. –

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;

My heart's in the Highlandsa-chasing the deer:

Chasing the wild deer, and following the roe;

My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go. –

Robert Burns (1759-1796.]

We will now ask Frau Dr. Steiner to recite to us “Erlkönigstochter”, which gives opportunity for a quite special style in the rendering of folk-poems.

Herr Oluf reitet spät und weit,

Zu bieten auf seine Hochzeitleut':

Da tanzten die Elfen auf grünen Land,

Erlkönigs Tochter reicht ihm die Hand.

‘Willkommen, Herr Oluf, was eilst von hier?

Tritt her in den Reihen und tanz mit mir.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Zwei güldne Sporen schenk' ich dir;

Ein Hemd von Seide, so weiss und fein,

Meine Mutter bleicht's im Mondenschein.’ –

‘Ich darf nicht tanzen, nicht tanzen ich mag,

Frühmorgen ist mein Hochzeittag.’ –

‘Hör’ an, Herr Oluf, tritt tanzen mit mir,

Einen Haufen Goldes schenk' ich dir.’ –

‘Einen Haufen Goldes nahm’ ich wohl;

Doch tanzen ich nicht darf, noch soll.’

‘Und willt, Herr Oluf, nicht tanzen mit mir,

Soll Seuch' und Krankheit folgen dir.’ –

Sie tät einen Schlag ihm auf sein Herz,

Noch nimmer fühlt er solchen Schmerz.

Sie hob ihn bleichend auf sein Pferd:

‘Reit heim zu deinem Bräutlein wert.’

Und als er kam vor Hauses Tiir,

Seine Mutter zitternd stand dafür.

‘Hör’ an, mein Sohn, sag’ an mir gleich,

Wie ist dein' Farbe blass und bleich?’ –

‘Und sollt’ sie nicht sein blass und bleich?

Ich traf in Erlenkönigs Reich.’ –

‘Hört an, mein Sohn, so lieb und traut,

Was soll ich nun sagen deiner Braut?’ –

‘Sagt ihr, ich sei im Wald zur Stund’,

Zu proben da mein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Frühmorgen als es Tag kaum war,

Da kam die Braut mit der Hochzeitschar.

Sie schenkten Met, sie schenkten Wein.

‘Wo ist Herr Oluf, der Bräutigam mein?’ –

‘Herr Oluf, er ritt in Wald zur Stund’,

Er probt allda sein Pferd und Hund.’ –

Die Braut hub auf den Scharlach rot,

Da lag Herr Oluf, und er war tot.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803).

[Comparable in style in English is:

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has wither'd from the Lake,

And no birds sing.

O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel's granary is full,

And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew;

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful – a faery's child,

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She look'd at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long;

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna dew,

And sure in language strange she said –

‘I love thee true’.

She took me to her elf in grot,

And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,

And there I shut her wild wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep

And there I dream'd – Ah! woe betide!

The latest dream I ever dream'd

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

Who cried – ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!’

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid darning gaped wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge has wither'd from the lake,

And no birds sing.

John Keats (1795-1821).]

Now we will present Goethe's two poems “Olympos” and “Charon”, where we shall find an opportunity to demonstrate recitation or declamation as the case may be. In the Poem “Olympos”, which is drawn more from the pictorial element, we have the art of declamation; while the more metrical “Charon” is drawn more from the musical element.

OLYMPOS

Der Olympos, der Kissavos,

Die zwei Berge haderten;

Da entgegnend sprach Olympos

Also zu dem Kissavos:

‘Nicht erhebe dich, Kissave,

Turken – du Getretener.

Bin ich doch der Greis Olympos,

Den die ganze Welt vernahm.

Zwei und sechzig Gipfel zähl ich

Und zweitausend Quellen klar,

Jeder Brunn hat seinen Wimpel,

Seinen Kämpfer jeder Zweig.

Auf den höchsten Gipfel hat sich

Mir ein Adler aufgesetzt,

Fasst in seinen mächt'gen Klauen

Eines Helden blutend Haupt.’

‘Sage, Haupt! wie ist's ergangen?

Fielest du verbrecherisch?’ –

Speise, Vogel, meine Jugend,

Meine Mannheit speise nur!

Ellenlänger wächst dein Flügel,

Deine Klauen spannenlang.

Bei Louron, in Xeromeron

Lebt' ich in dem Kriegerstand,

So in Chasia, auf'm Olympos

Kämpft’ ich bis ins zwölfte Jahr.

Sechzig Agas, ich erschlug sie,

Ihr Gefild verbrannt’ ich dann;

Die ich sonst noch niederstreckte,

Türken, Albaneser auch,

Sind zu viele, gar zu viele,

Dass ich sie nicht Ahlen mag;

Nun ist meine Reihe kommen,

Im Gefechte fiel ich brav.

CHARON

Die Bergeshöhn, warum so schwarz?

Woher die Wolkenwoge?

Ist es der Sturm, der droben kämpft,

Der Regen, Gipfel peitschend?

Nicht ist's der Sturm, der droben kämpft,

Nicht Regen, Gipfel peitschend;

Nein, Charon ist's, er saust einher,

Entführet die Verblichnen;

Die Jungen treibt er vor sich hin,

Schleppt hinter sich die Alten;

Die Jüngsten aber, Säuglinge,

In Reih' gehenkt am Sattel.

Da riefen ihm die Greise zu,

Die Junglinge, sie knieten:

‘O Charon, halt! halt am Geheg,

Halt an beim kühlen Brunnen!

Die Alten da erquicken sich,

Die Jugend schleudert Steine,

Die Knaben zart zerstreuen sich

Und pflücken bunte Blümchen.’

Nicht am Gehege halt’ ich still,

Ich halte nicht am Brunnen;

Zu schöpfen kommen Weiber an,

Erkennen ihre Kinder,

Die Männer auch erkennen sie,

Das Trennen wird unmöglich.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

[A similar contrast is presented within the work of Donne, between the vivid, declamatory style of “The Sunne Rising” and the more sustained, metrical “Elegie: His Picture”:

THE SUNNE RISING

Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?

Must to thy motions lovers seasons run?

Sawcy pedantique wretch, goe chide

Late schoole boyes, and sowre prentices,

Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,

Call countrey ants to harvest offices;

Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

Thy beames, so reverend and strong

Why shouldst thou thinke?

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke,

But that I would not lose her sight so long:

If her eyes have not blinded thine,

Looke, and to morrow late, tell mee,

Whether both the ‘India's of spice and Myne

Be where thou leftst them, or lie here with mee.

Aske for those Kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, All here in one bed lay.

She'is all States, and all Princes, I,

Nothing else is.

Princes doe but play us; compar'd to this,

All honor^'s mimique; All wealth alchimie.

Thou sunne art halfe as happy’as wee,

In that the world's contracted thus;

Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

To warme the world, that's done in warming us.

Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

This bed thy center is, these walls, thy spheare.

ELEGIE: HIS PICTURE

Here take my Picture; though I bid farewell,

Thine, in my heart, where my soule dwels, shall dwell.

‘Tis like me now, but I dead, 'twill be more

When wee are shadowes both, than 'twas before.

When weather-beaten I come backe; my hand,

Perhaps with rude oares torne, or Sun beams tann'd,

My face and brest of hairecloth, and my head

With cares rash sodaine stormes, being o'rspread,

My body'a sack of bones, broken within,

And powders blew staines scatter'd on my skinne;

If rivall fooles taxe thee to 'have lov'd a man,

So foule, and course, as, Oh, I may seeme then,

This shall say what I was: and thou shalt say,

Doe his hurts reach mee? doth my worth decay?

Or doe they reach judging minde, that hee

Should now love lesse, what hee did love to see?

That which in him was faire and delicate,

Was but the milke, which in loves childish state

Did nurse it: who now is growne strong enough

To feed on that, which to disused tasts seemes tough.

John Donne (1573-1631).]

We will now pass on to a more highly-wrought verse-form – the sonnet; and sonnets by Hebbel and Novalis will now be recited.

DIE SPRACHE

Als höchstes Wunder, das der Geist vollbrachte,

Preist ich die Sprache, die er, sonst verloren

In tiefste Einsamkeit, aus sich geboren,

Weil sie allein die andern möglich machte.

Ja, wenn ich sie in Grund und Zweck betrachte,

So hat nur sie den schweren Fluch beschworen,

Dem er, zum dumpfen Einzelsein erkoren,

Erlegen wäre, eh' er noch erwachte.

Denn ist das unerforschte Eins und Alles

In nie begrifftnem Selbstzersplitt‘rungsdrange

Zu einer Welt von Punkten gleich zerstoben:

So wird durch sie, die jedes Wesenballes

Geheimstes Sein erscheinen lässt im Klange,

Die Trennung vollig wieder aufgehoben!

Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863).

ZUEIGNUNG

I

Du hast in mir den edeln Trieb erregt,

Tief ins Gemüt der weiten Welt zu schauen;

Mit deiner Hand ergriff mich ein Vertrauen,

Das sicher mich durch alle Stürme trägt.

Mit Ahnungen hast du das Kind gepflegt,

Und zogst mit ihm durch fabelhafte Auen;

Hast als das Urbild zartgesinnter Frauen,

Des Jünglings Herz zum höchsten Schwung bewegt.

Was fesselt mich an irdische Beschwerden?

Ist nicht mein Herz und Leben ewig dein?

Und schirmt mich deine Liebe nicht auf Erden?

Ich darf fier dich der edlen Kunst mich weiten;

Denn du, Geliebte, willst die Muse werden, –

Und stiller Schutzgeist meiner Dichtung sein.

II

In ewigen Verwandlungen begrusst

Uns des Gesangs geheime Macht hienieden,

Dort segnet sie das Land als ew'ger Frieden,

Indes sie hier als Jugend uns umfliesst.

Sie ist's, die Licht in unsre Augen giesst,

Die uns den Sinn für jede Kunst beschieden,

Und die das Herz der Frohen und der Müden

In trunkner Andacht wunderbar geniesst.

An ihrem vollen Busen trank ich Leben:

Ich ward durch sie zu allem, was ich bin,

Und durfte froh mein Angesicht erheben.

Noch schlummerte mein allerhöchster Sinn;

Da sah ich sie als Engel zu mir schweben,

Und flog, erwacht, in ihrem Arm dahin.

Novalis (1772-1801).

[The following three poems show some characteristics of the English sonnet:

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET

The poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,

And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run

From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;

That is the Grasshopper's – he takes the lead

In summer luxury, – he has never done

With his delights; for when tired out with fun

He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,

The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

John Keats

SONNET

O Nightingale, that on yon bloomy Spray

Warbl'st at Eve, when all the Woods are still,

Thou with fresh hope the Lovers heart dost fill,

While the jolly hours lead on propitious May,

Thy liquid notes that close the eye of Day,

First heard before the shallow Cuckoo's bill,

Portend success in love; O if Jove's will

Have linkt that amorous power to thy soft lay,

Now timely sing, ere the rude Bird of Hate

Foretell my hopeless doom in som Grove ny:

As thou from year to year hast sung too late

For my relief; yet hadst no reason why:

Whether the Muse or Love call thee his mate,

Both them I serve, and of their train am I.

John Milton (1608-1674).

SONNET

\

My galy charged with forgetfulnes

Thorrough sharpe sees in wynter nyghtes doeth pas

Twene Rock and Rock; and eke myn ennemy, Alas,

That is my lorde, sterith with cruelnes;

And every owre a thought in redines,

As tho that deth were light in suche a case.

An endles wynd doeth tere the sayll apase

\

Of forced sightes and trusty ferefulnes.

A rayn of teris, a clowde of derk disdain,

\

Hath done the wered cordes great hinderaunce;

\

Wrethed with errour and eke with ignoraunce.

The starres be hid that led me to this pain;

\

Drowned is reason that should me consort,

And I remain dispering of the port.

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542).]

And now, in order to show how another, the very opposite mood must be drawn from quite different realms of the human organization when this serves as the instrument for poetry and declamation, we will end with something humorous and satirical – choosing a poem by Christian Morgenstern.

ST. EXPEDITUS

Einem Kloster, voll von Nonnen,

waren Menschen wohlgesonnen.

Und sie schickten, gute Christen,

ihm nach Rom die schönsten Kisten:

Äpfel, Birnen, Kuchen, Socken,

eine Spieluhr, kleine Glocken,

Gartenwerkzeug, Schuhe, Schürzen...

Aussen aber stand: Nicht stürzen!

Oder: Vorsicht! oder welche

wiesen schwarzgemalte Kelche.

Und auf jeder Kiste stand ‘Espedito’, kurzerhand.

Unsre Nonnen, die nicht wussten,

wem sie dafür danken mussten,

denn das Gut kam anonym,

dankten vorderhand nur IHM,

rieten aber doch ohn’ Ende

nach dem Sender solcher Spende.

Plötzlich rief die Schwester Pia

eines Morgens: Santa mia!

Nicht von Juden, nicht von Christen

Stammen diese Wunderkisten –

Expeditus, o Geschwister,

heisst er und ein Heiliger ist er!

Und sie fielen auf die Kniee.

Und der Heilige sprach: Siehe!

Endlich habt ihr mich erkannt.

Und nun malt mich an die Wand!

Und sie liessen einen kommen,

einen Maler, einen frommen.

Und es malte der Artiste

Expeditum mit der Kiste. –

Und der Kult gewann an Breite.

Jeder, der beschenkt ward, weihte

kleine Tafeln ihm und Kerzen.

Kurz, er war in aller Herzen.

II

Da auf einmal, neunzehnhundert-

fünf, vernimmt die Welt verwundert,

dass die Kirche diesen Mann

fürder nicht mehr dulden kann.

Grausam schallt von Rom es her:

Expeditus ist nicht mehr:

Und da seine lieben Nonnen

längst dem Erdental entronnen,

steht er da und sieht sich um –

und die ganze delt bleibt stumm.

Ich allein hier hoch im Norden

fühle mich von seinem Orden,

und mein Ketzergriffel schreibt:

Sanctus Expeditus – bleibt.

Und weil jenes nichts mehr gilt,

male ich hier neu sein Bild: –

Expeditum, den Gesandten,

grüss’ ich hier, den Unbekannten

Expeditum, ihn, den Heiligen,

mit den Assen, den viel eiligen,

mit den milden, weissen Haaren

und dem fröhlichen Gebaren,

mit den Augen braun, voll Güte,

und mit einer grossen Düte,

die den uberraschten Kindern

strebt ihr spärlich Los zu lindern.

Einen güldnen Heiligenschein

geb’ ich ihm noch obendrein

den sein Lacheln um ihn breitet,

wenn er durch die Lande schreitet.

Und um ihn in Engeiswonnen

stell’ ich seine treuen Nonnen:

Mägdlein aus Italiens Auen,

himmlisch lieblich anzuschauen.

Eine aber macht, fürwahr,

eine lange Nase gar.

Just ins ‘Bronzne Tor’ hinein

spannt sie ihr klein Fingerlein.

Oben aber aus dem Himmel

quillt der Heiligen Gewimmel,

und holdselig singt Maria:

Santo Espedito - sia!

Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914).

[An excerpt from “The Rape of the Lock” shows the great English satirist in a comparatively rare mood of good humoured and friendly mocking. It comes from Canto II:

But now secure the painted vessel glides,

The sun-beams trembling on the floating tides;

While melting music steals upon the sky,

And soften'd sounds along the waters die;

Smooth flow the waves, the Zephyrs gently play,

Belinda smil'd, and all the world was gay.

All but the Sylph – with careful thoughts opprest,

Th' impending woe sat heavy on his breast.

He summons strait his Denizens of air;

The lucid squadrons round the sails repair:

Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe,

That seem'd but Zephyrs to the train beneath.

Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold,

Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;

Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,

Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light.

Loose to the wind their airy garments flew,

Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew,

Dipt in the richest tincture of the skies,

Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes,

While ev'ry beam new transient colours flings,

Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings.

Amid the circle, on the gilded mast,

Superior by the head, was Ariel plac'd;

His purple pinions op'ning to the sun,

He rais'd his azure wand, and thus begun.

Ye Sylphs and Sylphids, to your chief give ear,

Fays, Fairies, Genii, Elves, and Daemons hear!

Ye know the spheres and various tasks assign'd

By laws eternal to th' aerial kind.

Some in the fields of purest Aether play,

And bask and whiten in the blaze of day.

Some guide the course of wand'ring orbs on high,

Or roll the planets thro' the boundless sky.

Some less refin'd, beneath the moon's pale light

Pursue the stars that shoot athwart the night,

Or suck the mists in grosser air below,

Or dip their pinions in the painted bowl

Or brew fierce tempests on the wintry main,

Or o'er the glebe distil the kindly rain.

Others on earth o'er human race preside,

Watch all their ways, and all their actions guide:

Of these the chief the care of Nations own,

And guard with Arms divine the British Throne.

Our humbler province is to tend the Fair,

Not a less pleasing, tho' less glorious care;

To save the powder from too rude a gale,

Nor let th' imprison'd essences exhale;

To draw fresh colours from the vernal Flow'rs;

To steal from rainbows e'er they drop in show'rs

A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,

Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs;

Nay oft, in dreams, invention we bestow,

To change a Flounce, or add a Furbelow.

This day, black Omens threat the brightest fair

That e'er deserv'd a watchful spirit's care;

Some dire disaster, or by force, or slight;

But what, or where, the fates have wrapt in night.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744)]

Now the art of recitation must undoubtedly follow the poetry. Recitation introduces the human element into poetry, for the human organization itself furnishes the instrument of artistic expression. How this instrument is used in singing and in recitation – that is something which has indeed been much investigated: we have already taken the opportunity here of pointing out, in response to certain questions, how many methods (one method after another!) exist in our present age, to singing and recitation. For in a certain sense we have entirely lost the deeper, inner relationship between poetic utterance or expression and the human organization. I will take as_. a starting-point next today something apparently quite physiological – and next time, after our detour through physiology, we shall be able to show you what poetry, as expressed in recitation and declamation, really demands.

Let us look first at something which has been frequently mentioned during the lectures of the last few days: the human rhythmic system. The human being is organized into the system of nerves and senses – the instrument for the thought-world, for the world of sense-representations, and so on; the rhythmic system – the instrument for the development of the feeling world, and for all that is mirrored from the feeling-world and plays into the world of mental representations; and the metabolic system – through which the will pulsates, and in which the will finds its actual physical instrument. [Note 4]

First, let us look at the rhythmic system. In this rhythmic system, two rhythms interpenetrate each other in a remarkable way. In the first place, we have the breathing-rhythm. This is essentially regular – though everything living is different in this respect, and it varies from individual to individual – so that in the case of healthy people, we are able to observe 16-19 breaths per minute. Secondly, we have the pulse-rhythm, directly connected with the heart. Naturally, when we take into account that in this rhythm we are dealing with functions of a living being, again we cannot cite any pedantic number; but, generally speaking, we may say that the number of pulse-beats per minute, in a healthy human organism, is approximately 72. Hence we can say that the number of pulse-beats is about four times the number of respirations. We can thus represent the course of the breath in the human organism, and how while we take one breath, the pulse intervenes four times. Now let us devote our minds for a moment to this interaction of the pulse-rhythm and the rhythm of the breath to this inner, living piano (if I may so express myself) where we experience the pulse rhythm as it strikes into the course of the breathing-rhythm. Let us picture the following: one breath inhaled and exhaled; and a second inhaled and exhaled; and, striking into this, the rhythm of the heart. Let us picture this in such a way that we can see that in the pulse-rhythm, which is essentially connected with the metabolism, which touches on the metabolic system, the will strikes, as it were, upwards; thus we have the will-pulses striking into the feeling-manifestations of the breath-rhythm. And let us suppose that we articulate these will-pulses, in such a way that we follow the will-pulses in the words, inwardly articulating the words to ourselves. Thus we have, for instance: long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short – one breath-stream; then we make a pause, a kind of caesura, we hold back; then, accompanying the next drawing of the breath, we have the heart-rhythm striking into it: long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short.

¾ È È ¾ È È ¾ È È || ¾ È È ¾ È È ¾ È È ||

Then, when we allow two breaths to be accompanied by the corresponding pulse-beats, and between them we make a pause, a pause for breath – we have the hexameter. [Note 5] We can ask: what is the origin of this ancient Greek verse metre? It originated from the harmony between blood-circulation and breathing. The Greek wished to turn his speech inward, so that, having suppressed his “I”, he orientated the words according to the pulse-beats, allowing these to play upon the stream of breath. Thus he brought his whole inner organization, his rhythmic organization, to expression in his speech: it was the harmony between heart-rhythm and breath-rhythm that resounded in his speech. To the Greek, this was more musical – as if it resounded up from the will, resounded up from the pulse-beats into the rhythm of the breath.

You know that what remained as the last, atavistic remnant of the old clairvoyant images – the Alp, the nightmare – found expression in pictures, and is connected with the breathing-process: and there is still a connection between the pathological form of the Alpdruck and breathing.

Now let us assume – for me it is more than an assumption – that in those primaeval times when his experience was more closely connected with the internal processes, man went out more with the breath; the movement was more from above downwards. And then he put into one breath:

¤ ¤ ¤

‘To us in olden maeren'

Again, three high-tones: three times the perception of how the pulse beats into the breathing, and how this brings to expression an experience that is more visual, finding expression in the light and shade of the language, in the high and low tones. In the Greek we have something metrical long, short, short; long, short, short; long, short, short; whereas in the Nordic verses we have something with more declamatory impetus – high-tone and low-tone:

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

‘To us in olden maeren is many a marvel told

¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤ ¤

Of praise-deserving heroes, of labours manifold ...'

It is the interaction of the breathing-rhythm and the rhythm of the heart, the rhythm of the pulse. Just as the Greek experienced a musical element and expressed this in metre, so the Nordic man experienced a pictorial element, which he expressed in the light and shade of the words, in the high-tones and low-tones. But there was always the knowledge that one was submerged in a state of consciousness where the “I” yielded itself up to the divine-spiritual being which reveals itself through the human organism – which forms this human organism so that it may be played upon as an instrument through the pulsation of the heart, through the breathing-process, through the stream of exhaled and inhaled breath:

È ¾ È ¾ È ¾ È || ¾ È ¾ È ¾

You know that many breathing-techniques have been discovered, and much thought given to methods of treating the human body to facilitate correct singing or recitation. It is much more to the point, however, to penetrate the real mysteries of poetry and recitation and declamation: for both of these will proceed from the actual, sensible-super-sensible perception of the harmony between the pulse, which is connected with the heart, and the breathing-process. As we shall see next time, each single verse-form, each single poetic form including rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, may be understood when we start from a living perception of the human organism, and what it does when it employs speech artistically. This is why it was quite justified when people who understood such things spoke, more or less figuratively, of poetry as a language of the gods: for this language of the gods does not speak the mysteries of the transient human “I”; it speaks in human consciousness, speaks musically and plastically the cosmic mysteries – it speaks when the super-sensible worlds play, through the human heart, upon the human breath.

An excellent contribution to the history of German dramaturgy was recently made by Heinrich Bischoff. (Ludwig Tieck als Dramaturg. Bruxelles, Office de publicite). Tieck's relationship to dramatic literature and the theater requires an objective appraisal. Bischoff has summarized the reasons for this well in his introductory chapter. "I do not know," wrote Loebell to Tieck's biographer R. Köpke in 1854, "whether there is a second example in the whole of literature of a hatred against an author that so dominates the criticism than against L. Tieck. - For example, the Low German word "Schrullen", which otherwise hardly occurs in the written language, has been found for Tieck's critical opinions. The Bremen-Lower Saxon dictionary explains Schrulle as "an attack of nonsense, evil, foolish mood. And G.Schlesier accuses Tieck in the "Allgemeine Theater-Revue, (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1st year, S.3 f.), he has broken the German theater, blocked its path and its development, misled the poets and actors and cheated them of a happy development of their talent". Tieck's critical masterpiece, the "Dramaturgische Blätter, would like to banish Schlesier for a few hundred years; there is poison on every page of it."

Bischoff cites a variety of reasons for this unprecedented underestimation of Tieck. Tieck was regarded as the head of the Romantic school. This is why opponents of this literary movement hated him from the outset. Personal envy was also a factor among his contemporaries. "We know for certain that Tieck fought a hard battle in Dresden, where he developed his main dramaturgical activity, against a small-minded, ill-intentioned party that envied his intellectual superiority. The Young Germans, Heine, Laube, Gutzkow, to whom Tieck was opposed in a series of his novellas: Reise ins Blaue, Wassermensch, Eigensinn und Laune, Vogelscheuche, Liebeswerben, were also ill-disposed towards him."

In more recent times, finally, little effort has been made to study Tieck's dramaturgical writings. The judgment of his contemporaries and immediate successors is taken without much scrutiny. "A striking example is provided by the recently published work by E. Wolff, "Geschichte der deutschen Literatur in der Gegenwarv. In his overview of the history of German dramaturgy, Wolff not only makes no mention of Tieck, but also ascribes to O. Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" the merit that is due to Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter". The "clarifying reckoning with Schiller was carried out by Tieck almost half a century before O. Ludwig. The conclusion reached by O. Ludwig that true historical tragedy must return from Schiller to Shakespeare is, so to speak, the pivotal point of Tieck's dramaturgical writings. Just as Lessing settled accounts with the French, Tieck settled accounts with Schiller, with full recognition of his talent and merits, and, like Lessing, pointed to Shakespeare. This is why it is not Ludwig's "Shakespeare-Studien" but Tieck's "Dramaturgische Blätter" that stand out as a landmark in the history of German dramaturgy."

The fact that he did not present his views in a closed system, but rather occasionally, has also contributed greatly to Tieck's misunderstanding. They can be found scattered throughout his various writings. Bischoff gives an overview of the writings that come into consideration: (a) the preliminary reports to his poetic works, (b) the conversations about art and literature in "Phantasus", (c) the satirical outbursts in the fairy tale comedies and Schwänken, especially in "Zerbino" and "Puss in Boots", d) the "Unterhaltungen mit Tieck" contained in the second volume of Köpke's biography, e) as the main source the "Kritische Schriften", which Tieck published in four volumes with Brockhaus in Leipzig from 1848-1852, f) the "Nachgelassene Schriften" published by Köpke can be considered as an appendix.

Ludwig Tieck was not fond of aesthetic studies. He was of the opinion that theory could never be used to make the fine distinctions that come into consideration in art. One must theoretically exaggerate the truth in some direction in order to arrive at a precise definition. That is why such theories remain stuck in half-truth, if they do not have to resort to the completely untrue.

Bischoff proves himself to be a good psychologist by establishing the difference between Tieck the dramatist and Tieck the dramatist. Anyone who overlooks this must underestimate Tieck. In Tieck's dramas an unclear fantasy prevails; nowhere does the poet know how to restrain the creations of the imagination by critical reason; there is little to be found of orderly composition, and yet Tieck, the dramaturge, demands artistic deception from the drama first and foremost. This can never be achieved with such an overgrowth of fantasy as prevails in his own dramas. Tieck the dramatist demands an image of life; Tieck the playwright gives a fantastic play. Furthermore, Tieck, the dramatist, seeks his material in the Middle Ages; at the same time, as a dramatist, he demands the immediate presence of the action. As a critic, Tieck frowned upon mood-painting in drama; as a poet, he inserted ottavas, tercinas, stanzas and canzonas into his dramas, which serve nothing but to lyrically paint the mood.

In his "Karl von Berneck", Tieck drew the true archetype of a gruesome tragedy of fate; yet as a critic he condemns this dramatic genre in the harshest terms.

Bischoff explains this dichotomy in Tieck's personality in a plausible way. One must distinguish between two periods in his work: a Romantic period, which lasts until around 1820, and a period which is characterized by a turning away from all Romanticism and a return to a more realistic view of the world. The dramas belong to the first period, the dramaturgical studies fall into the time after the change in his basic aesthetic convictions. "Tieck concludes his Romantic production with "Fortunat" before turning to modern life in his novellas, a long series of which he began in 1820, and depicting it in a predominantly realistic manner." "The sharp contrast between his dramatic and dramaturgical production is thus explained by a complete change in his aesthetic views; his dramaturgical activity only began when his dramatic work was finished."

Tieck's "Letters on Shakespeare" were published in 1810. At this time, the views of the Romantics were also his own. But over time, he turned away from these views completely. He expressed this clearly to Köpke: "They wanted to make me the head of a so-called Romantic school. Nothing has been further from my mind than that, just as everything in my entire life has been party-oriented. Nevertheless, people never stopped writing and speaking against me in this way, but only because they didn't know me. If I were asked to give a definition of the romantic, I would not be able to do so. I don't know how to make a distinction between poetic and romantic." "The word romantic, which one hears used so often, and often in such a wrong way, has done a lot of harm. It has always annoyed me when I have heard people talk about romantic poetry as a special genre. People want to contrast it with classical poetry and use it to describe a contrast. But poetry is and remains first and foremost poetry, it will always and everywhere have to be the same, whether you call it classical or romantic." - For Tieck, the greatest, the typical dramatist is Shakespeare. At first, this enthusiasm for Shakespeare may well have been of romantic origin. But in his mature years he reproaches Romantic Shakespeare criticism for detaching Shakespeare from the general course of development of his time and presenting him as a miracle that had fallen from the sky. Nevertheless, there is no great difference between Tieck's view of Shakespeare and that of Schlegel. It is not his opposition to Romanticism that is particularly clear. Rather, this is the case with his judgment of Calderon. Tieck sees Calderon's powerful influence on German drama as a pernicious one: "Soon Calderon had become our nation's favorite poet without further criticism. The accidental, the strange, the conventional, which his time imposed on him, or which he elevated to artificiality, was not only equated with the essential, the great dramatic in his works, but often preferred to the truly poetic. People forgot for a long time what they had recently admired in both Germans and Englishmen, and, however unequal the two poets might be, Calderon and Shakespeare were probably regarded as twin brothers; and others, still more enthusiastic, thought that Calderon began to speak where Shakespeare left off, or performed those difficult tasks in a grand manner which the colder Northerner did not feel equal to; even Goethe and even Schiller took a back seat to the drunks at that time, those intoxicated people who truly and seriously believed that true salvation for poetry could only come from the Spaniards and especially from Calderon. "

The critic Tieck detested most was the German tragedy of fate. He turned against the blind, demonic fear of fate, which played such a large role in the world view of Romanticism, in the sharpest way and with biting derision, although the same power plays a terrible role in his youthful dramas. "Karl von Berneck" is, as far as I know, the first time an attempt has been made to introduce fate in this way. A ghost who is to be redeemed by the fulfillment of a strange oracle, an old guilt of the house that must be purged by a new crime, which appears at the end of the play as love and innocence, a virgin whose tender heart forgives even the murderer, the ghost of an unforgiving mother, everything in love and hate, except for a sword itself that has already been used for a crime, must serve a higher purpose without it being able to be changed, without the characters knowing it. I realized even then how different this fate was from that of Greek tragedy, but I deliberately wanted to substitute the ghostly for the spiritual". He later condemned such dramatization: "Instead of debts and financial hardship, a crime, kidnapping, adultery, murder, blood; instead of the uncle, stern father, strange old man or general, heaven itself, which is even more stubborn than those family characters and cruel to boot, because it knows no other development than fear of death and burial."

The contrast between Tieck, the dramatist, and Tieck, the playwright, becomes clear in Tieck's harsh condemnation of the dramas of the mature Schiller. It seems like a mockery of his own production when Tieck bitterly rebukes the workings of fate in the "Bride of Messina". For Schiller attempted to give the dark rule of fate a semblance of necessity; while Tieck himself, in his "Abschied" and "Karl von Berneck", grants it a desolate reign in the form of chance.

Tieck's rejection of the Romantic as opposed to the natural, the human, is expressed most harshly in his criticism of Schiller's and Goethe's anticizing tendencies. He is generally an enemy of humanism, which carries ancient education and views into modern life. He believed that art could only flourish if it drew its content from the soil of the national. In "Goethe and his time" he speaks out against humanism: "It would be desirable that a mind as brilliant as Rousseau's or Fichte's should show, with the same sharp, perhaps even sharper one-sidedness than they wrote about the closed commercial state and the harm of the sciences, what a disadvantage knowledge of the ancients has brought us. How everything that was still remembered has sunk into contempt, how all new, good and correct endeavors have been inhibited, how the peculiar, patriotic has often been destroyed by a wrong worship and half-understanding of the ancients." And in his dramatic fairy tale "The Life and Deeds of Little Thomas, Called Thumbelina", he mocks by ironically depicting objects borrowed from folk tales, for example the seven-league boots, in an antique light: "Believe me, I can see from these boots that they have come down to us from ancient Greece; no, no, no modern artist does such work, so secure, simple, noble in cut, such engravings! Oh, this is a work by Phidias, I won't let that be taken away from me. Just look at it, when I place one of them like this, how completely sublime, sculptural, in quiet grandeur, no excess, no flourish, no Gothic addition, nothing of that romantic mixture of our days, where sole, leather, flaps, folds, tufts, jizz, everything must contribute to produce variety, splendor, a dazzling being that has nothing ideal; the leather should shine, the sole should creak, miserable rhyming being, this consonance in appearance; . .I have modeled myself after the ancients, they will not let us fall in any of our endeavors." Tieck has the court cobbler Zahn say this.

The modern world and modern life are fundamentally different from those of the Greeks, Tieck believes. This is why he condemns the dragging of ancient ways into modern drama, as demanded by Goethe, Schiller and the two Schlegels. Tieck also valued above all that which approached the modern in its presentation and conception, such as the dramas of Euripides, while the Graecomans were more attracted to Sophocles and Aeschylus, in which the specifically Greek is expressed more purely. The praise that Goethe and Schiller bestowed on Aristotle was thoroughly repugnant to Tieck. He sees a fundamental difference between the living conditions of Greek and German drama. For the Greeks, it was the shaping of the fable, the plots that mattered; for the moderns, the main thing is the development of the characters. "The newer drama is obviously essentially different from the old; it has lowered the tone, motives, character sketches, the contingencies of life are more prominent, the emotional forces and moods develop more clearly, the composition is richer and more varied, and the relationship to public life, the constitution, religion and the people is either silenced or stands in a completely different relationship to the work itself. The meaning of life, its aberrations, the individual, the strange, have been given more prominence; and those authors who have sometimes tried to strike the round, full tone of the old tragedy have almost always lapsed into bombast and the tone of Seneca."

Tieck contrasts the modern character drama with the old situation drama. At the center of his dramaturgical explanations is the idea that modern drama has the task of cultivating characterization and realism. He therefore turns against Schiller's idealism and never tires of opposing it with Shakespearean realism.

Consistent with these statements are Tieck's following comments on Goethe: "I admired Goethe immensely in his youthful poems and still admire him; I have spoken and written so much in his praise that, when I now hear so many uncalled-for panegyrists, I could still be tempted in my old age to write a book against Goethe for a change. For there can be no mistake about the fact that he, too, has his weaknesses, which posterity will certainly recognize." "We must never concede," is another statement, "that Goethe later stood higher in his enthusiasm, poetic power and opinion than in his youth... His striving for the many-sided has fragmented his powers, his consciously looking around has caused him doubt and at times removed his enthusiasm."

In contrast, Tieck emphasizes the stamp of the German spirit and the truly modern character in the dramas of the Sturm und Dränger. His judgment of Heinrich von Kleist gives us a good insight into Tieck's view. His deep penetration into the characters portrayed and his truthful realism cannot be emphasized often enough. His comments on the "Prince of Homburg" are particularly characteristic. He rebuked the public, who had become accustomed to seeing all heroes drawn according to a certain template. The general concept of a hero has clouded the view that an individual heroic figure can also be like the Prince of Homburg. According to this general concept, a hero should above all despise death and hold life in low esteem. But Kleist once drew a hero whose fear of death is understandable from the nature of his soul.

Bischoff correctly describes Tieck's relationship with Lessing. This relationship also illustrates Tieck's attitude towards naturalism. Lessing, according to Tieck, had turned with zeal against the eccentricity and silliness of conventional idealism. But he fell into the error of wanting to depict nature as such. In this way, he became the inventor and creator of domestic, natural, sensitive, petty and thoroughly untheatrical theater. For Tieck, despite his realistic creed, never wanted to see mere naturalness on the stage, but rather a deepened naturalness recognized in its essence. This is why Kleist's characters, who reveal their souls, seemed more dramatic to him than Lessing's characters, who are assembled from individual observations.

One result of Tieck's views on drama is his comments on the art of acting. In the great battle between the Hamburg and Weimar schools, he took the side of those who defended and practised the former. He did not want declamation, but character portrayal, not the beautiful, but the meaningful. He is said to have spoken harshly against Goethe's view of the art of acting. He probably made derisive remarks about the rules as defended by the Weimar poet and theater director: that everything should be beautifully portrayed, that the spectator's eye should be stimulated by graceful groupings and attitudes, or that the actor should first consider not working out the natural, but presenting it ideally. In this respect Tieck is much closer to modern views than Goethe. He had no understanding of the fact that the actor must always turn three quarters of his face towards the audience, never play in profile, nor turn his back to the spectators. Tieck called such acting artificial declamation and false emphasis. In contrast, he praises Schröder: "It is simplicity and truth that characterized Schröder, that he did not adopt a captivating manner, never rose and fell in tones in declamation without necessity, never pursued the effect merely to excite it, never struck up that singing lament in pain or emotion, but always led the natural speech through correct nuances and never abandoned it."

Tieck is said to have been a captivating reader. He proved precisely how highly he valued a stylistically perfect form of speech despite his demand for naturalness.

In general, Tieck's aspirations should not be confused with demands for a complete stripping away of everything that the stage demands by its very nature. He had a keen sense of the possibilities of the theater. Characteristic is what he says about the decorations: "Why should the stage not be decorated where it suits, amuse with dress and dance? Why should a thunderstorm not be represented naturally? There is only talk of this not becoming the main thing and displacing the poet and actor." The ideal that Tieck had in mind for the stage was a middle ground between the old English stage with its lack of ornamentation and the modern development of all kinds of refined means, which only blunt the receptivity for the actual poetry. In 1843, he staged Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with the help of the three-storey Mystery Stage, because this arrangement avoids the countless transformations that destroy all coherence and destroy a sensation that was just in the making.

Devrient, the author of the "History of German Dramatic Art", was the most enthusiastic in his recognition of Tieck's services to German dramaturgy. While working on this work, on March 24, 1847, Devrient wrote to Tieck: "The History of German Dramatic Art, which I have undertaken to edit, brings everything I have ever heard from you about the nature of our art back to my mind, the further and deeper I research, and makes so much that I otherwise doubted become a complete conviction. I feel more and more in agreement with what you have said here and there in your works about the development of the German stage - unfortunately it is far too little for my needs - so that I have come to recognize your views as the most infallible."

To me it seems fitting today to speak of something that concerns us very closely; this our home for anthroposophical work in Stuttgart. Perhaps for all of you who have entered this room, and then with a kind of inner vision try to survey the feelings which come to you here, there is a word which may describe what we should like to indicate as the special characteristic of our experience today, namely, mood, feeling; we have doubtless a special feeling, an exalted frame of mind when we are gathered together in this hall. If one follows this feeling further occultly, one may from their standpoint look into the foundation of our life. The most noticeable thing is that we are surrounded by a certain shade of colour which has been used for this room a deep ultramarine. The fact that in many respects combinations of colour play a great part with us, you will also have seen from the way in which we have tried to present the Mystery Plays, and also from the colours of other rooms which we have been able to dedicate to anthroposophical work.

Now it is by no means a matter of indifference to a person in a certain frame of mind what kind of colour he is surrounded by. And further, it is not immaterial what principle shade of colour acts upon a person of this or that temperament, intellectual nature of character. It is also not immaterial for the whole human organisation whether a certain shade of colour acts upon him by being repeated again and again for a long time, or whether it acts only temporarily. You will remember that we covered the hall which served us for the 1907 Congress with a certain shade of red; but from this the conclusion must not be drawn that red is always the right colour for a lecture room. The room here we have covered with a different colour, and if one enquires the reason for these different procedures, the answer is that the hall at Munich was used for a few days for a particular festive occasion, and event which was over in a few days, and was intended to arouse the frame of mind appropriate to this occasion. But here we have a workroom in which our Stuttgart friends will do their anthroposophical work and carry on their classes again and again from week to week. Essentially we are dealing with a room which will be used for oft-recurring classes.

You will best realise the importance of colour if we describe how it affects occultists. For this it is necessary that a person should free himself completely from everything else and devote himself to the particular colour, immerse himself in it. If the person who devotes himself to the colour which covers these physically dense walls were one who had made curtain occult progress it would come about that after a period of this complete devotion the walls would disappear from his clairvoyant vision; the consciousness that the walls shut off the outer world would vanish. Now what which first appears is not merely that he sees the neighbouring houses outside, that the walls become like glass, but in the sphere that opens up there comes a world of purely spiritual phenomenon, spiritual facts and beings become visible. We need only reflect that behind everything around us physically there are spiritual beings and facts. That which lies at the foundation of the physical objects outside in a certain way become visible, what becomes visible is not the same if there are different surroundings. The worlds which surround us spiritually are of many kinds, many different kinds of elementary beings are around us, These elementary beings are not enclosed in boxes or in such a state that they live in various houses. The law of impenetrability only applies to the physical world; penetrability is the law for the higher worlds. But they cannot all be seen in the same way; according to the capacity of clairvoyant vision there may be visible and invisible beings in the same space. When spiritual beings become visible in any particular instance, depends upon the colour to which we devote ourselves. In a red room, other beings become visible than is a blue room, when one penetrates to them by means of colour. We may ask: what happens if one is not clairvoyant? That which the clairvoyant does consciously is done unconsciously by the etheric body of a person if it is not clairvoyantly trained; it enters into a certain relation with the same beings. The consequence of this is nothing less than that, according to our surroundings, we come in touch with one or another kind of spiritual beings. Now, further, it is a case of being able to establish a favourable or unfavourable connection with the beings that surround us. Let us suppose that we use a colour for the room which brings us into connection with beings who disturb us in what we do in this room, then the colour is unfavourable. Conversely, our etheric body may be assisted by spiritual beings though using the corresponding colour; this is then, of course, favourable. Now this room is devoted to repeated study through which we desire to progress in our knowledge. If we have to work in such a room as this, it is necessary that we should be able fully to devote ourselves with our entire human organisation to what is brought before us. We do not wish to be disturbed by anything, we wish to work under the best conditions so that we may take in these things as well as possible; naturally one person will take then in better, another not so well, but the best possible conditions are to be made, so that each one can devote himself—so far as it is possible in accordance with his inner organisation—to the studies which are here brought forward. The colour surrounding us here, brings us in touch with beings in our spiritual environment who come to help us in our etheric body in the spiritual truths within us. In such a building and such a room as this, we are least disturbed, our etheric body is not burdened with fighting against prejudicial influences of certain elementary beings, but the forces of our etheric body are able to work more easily.

Thus we see that for work which is continually repeated and for which there must be a certain calmness of soul as a foundation, exactly this surrounding must be chosen. Let us suppose that we have to deal with something particularly earnest, but which is temporary; in this case if we consider the occult law it is very advantageous—if we are to have not only a festive spirit but also inward strength—to surround ourselves with red. If we have to make a strong decision of the will, we must overcome the spiritual beings which penetrate in. That is to say, on festive occasions we must become strong, so that what we may become a permanent impulse; and unsympathetic weakness of disposition and does not allow earnest decisions of the will to be made, which although roused in a short time, are to remain permanently. The effects of colour are extremely important.

Now you know that under certain circumstances in the general state of our cosmic environment, we see a fundamental colour outspread above us; the blue sky. This blue of the sky is very important to the people of our age, for though the blue expanse of space working upon our souls they continually receive the call to come into touch with the beings in the great world, these beings act upon us through this colour and call upon our etheric body to think of the spiritual. With regard to the blue sky it was not always with man as it is now. The people of the present day think that men have always been as they are now, but the entire constitution of man has changed in the course of time. In those ancient days when man possessed an original clairvoyance there was no blue sky such as exists for present humanity, but at that time when he gazed out into the expanse of space, it was not limited by the blue sky, but he saw into the spiritual worlds which lie out there in space. When our ancient ancestors spoke of heaven beginning there above, that is to say, that the spiritual beings of the Hierarchies are to be found there, they expressed the literal truth.

With these colours which appear transparent (the coloured windows) it is again different from what it is in the case of a colour which is on a wall which we cannot see through. When we observe this shinning bright colour we have to say: Just as through the colour which is on the opaque walls we enter into relation with certain beings, so through the transparent shining colour, we enter into relation with other beings. While the beings with whom we come in touch through the opaque walls are primarily outspread in space, but really have nothing to do with the three kingdoms below us, the mineral, vegetable and animal kingdoms, through shining colours we come in touch with the beings who are directly occupied with bringing the objects of the three kingdoms of nature into being. When we look particularly through shining red, we come in touch with quite a particular type of beings within the kingdom of nature. When shining red forms a kind of window through which to look clairvoyantly into the kingdom of nature, we meet with beings whose work forms the best forces for the future of our earth existence. They have to be there in the kingdoms of nature, so that inner forces may develop in man which make him more and more chaste in his blood, that is to say, in his passion life, and when we look into the kingdom of nature in this way, we are looking upon those beings which, although we may not be aware of it, incite us the most to rouse up and push forward in the purification of our passions.

Besides being surrounded here in this room by certain shades of colour, we see all kinds of tokens and symbolic figures. These are filled with meaning, although I do not mean the meaning which can be found by the intellect. Ingenious persons may discover in them all sorts of curious things, but to occultists explanations such as these mean nothing. The chief point is that these figures are actually here, and if we turn our physical eyes to any one of them, it is not merely the physical eye, but the whole organization, above all, it is the currents of the etheric body which come into motion in quite a special way, they are roused by the course of the lines and by the forms of these figures, so that the etheric body has different movements within it, according as one looks at one figure or another. This means that within the world of etheric substance, which surrounds us, with all the beings incarnated in it, the forms which we see here, are actually present, There are beings who really have these forms in the etheric world; and when we look at one of these figures our etheric body arranges itself in such a way that in its own movements it builds up forms according to these lines, that is, it produces a thought-form which then proceeds from it; and according to the thought-form, will our etheric body be able to make a real union with one or another kind of being. These figures are the means by which this may be accomplished, for when we look at them, we produce within ourselves the thought-forms, that is, the movement-forms in our etheric body. Now these figures are chosen in such a way that when looked at in a rhythmic consecutive order they yield something which is a whole, namely, something which corresponds to a certain stream of development in the outer etheric world, something which through a particular circumstance is favourable to our etheric body; our etheric body has within it the tendency to change, in a certain way it will be different when it is more perfect. The series of forms corresponding to the gradual perfecting of our etheric body will be developed in the consecutive order shown in these figures. When we display these symbolic figures, which are in accordance with certain occult facts, and can let our vision penetrate more deeply, this is a help towards what we are aiming at, and if we produce the corresponding thought-forms in the right consecutive order, we assist our inner being which is to open our understanding for the rhythm which exists when you are speaking of the seven principles of man. We have not placed these figures there merely for decoration, but because they are inwardly connected with what we wish to accomplish here.

We are placed in touch with the surrounding etheric world by means of the thought-forms which we ought to build up in the manner just described; by means of music we are placed in touch with the astral part of our surrounding world. Music acts directly upon our astral body, so that we are made receptive—because this works from within on the etheric body—to all that is incarnated in the astral word, not in the sense in which one speaks of the astral world as contained in kamaloka, but the universal astral world into which the devachanic world also streams down. The revelation through music is a more direct one than when the higher worlds clothe themselves in the forms around us in space; but that which is outspread in space, if it is in accordance with occult results, leaves us independent, whereas music constrains us.

We now come to a kind of action on human beings which affects the etheric body by first stimulating the astral body, also by means of the element of space, and we may also study an example of this in this room. Up above you see two pictures which were contributed to this special occasion by our friend, Stockmeier. These two pictures will later be painted differently, and they will then produce the full effect intended. The effect of these two pictures together, not of each one singly, is somewhat as follows; when first one picture works and then the other afterwards, under all circumstances, whether it is wished or not, the one picture and afterwards the other will together rouse up thought-forms particular formations in the astral body. This remains in the sub-consciousness, and because it is contained in the intention of the pictures—it is only reproduced in an abstract way by means of ideas. Our feeling may perhaps render somewhat more perceptible the thought-forms which our actual body will produce perfectly under all circumstances from these pictures, if Mr. Stockmeier, succeeds in painting them in the right way. The picture on the right; a certain astral form, an kind of dragon is vanquished by a great being who belongs to the higher Hierarchies (Raphael) merely by his magnetic gaze; and when through the development of his will man comes to receive the power of this being into his own will we shall have the powers of which the Greeks thought in connection with the divine powers of Aesclepius with which he healed. All that is contained in the spiritually magnetic gaze, which can have curative effects when it is suitable trained, may be called forth in thought if immediately afterwards we pass over to what belongs to this feeling in the other picture. The optical effects must be conveyed to the phantom, so that with the help of the phantom-forces of the physical body, the effect is strengthened which proceeds from the dragon which is then overcome by the power of Michael. When we acquire the power to feel this thought out of the forces of the universe and think how through the physical body it may receive a vehicle through the will-forces being strengthened, so that a person need no longer say in regard to such forces that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, when we have these consecutive feelings and formations of the astral body, we have something which subconsciously can strengthen the moral nature very much. Thus we can draw moral power directly from the consecutive consideration of the two pictures, and still more from three. But it must be expressly pointed out that this applies only to the united notion of such themes, not to one single theme. If it were to depend upon one picture it would have to be differently formed, the two motives would have to act together, as for example, in the Sistine Madonna; in that instance there is a crossing of two motives which can strengthen the moral nature to the highest degree. Up above the clouds out of which the angels heads are formed, and when we look at the child Jesus in the arms of the mother we perceive that it has originated through the consolidation of the same forces which bring the angels only to a cloud existence. That is one motive, in which we perceive the origin of the pure light-being of man out of the cloud-light of the universe, as it were. This motive meets that which in expressed in the mother; she is full of innocence and love, and from that which appears to us as the body, the face, the lines of the mother, we see coming forth, as it were the warmest love. Light from above, condensing into the pure light-body of the child Jesus, and warming love from below, meeting and touching in the position of the arm—the two motives blending together—this gives subconsciously to our astral body, whether it wishes it or not, if a person only has the patience to devote himself to it, the feeling: It is thy duty to bring thy love towards that which can reveal itself to thee from divine heights, so that thou takest it into thine own arms and realisest it in the world, that thou bringest impulses in life from the spiritual world. The Sistine Madonna is an alter picture in which this thought-form works together with a congregation. We have here to do with two motives which are to rouse in us the frame of mind in which we may become capable of holding fast in thought the laws and the principles of action of the spiritual world. That is the essential point in our anthroposophical work. Spiritual things are always in motion and to the untrained seer they are like dreams. It is difficult to hold fast in thought these moving, fleeting peculiarities of being, and, conversely, it is also difficult in thought to give thought itself such an inner consistency that ont receives the feeling: Thou art thinking a reality of the true spiritual world. We can receive this feeling if we allow these pictures to act upon us in the manner described, not be apathetic towards these things, but look at them repeatedly. Then the forces of the astral body are obliged to experience the effect which may be described by saying, that we come more and more to perceive the true content of anthroposophical thought. We are not coerced unawares, but this recognition is quite free; the co-operation of two motives is something which liberates the free powers of man.

Thus you see that in what surrounds us here all the laws are fulfilled which so-called white magic uses, not to work by means of any overruling force upon modern humanity, but to consider that which is to be worked upon in another human being as a sacred thing which must not be touched, which is to allow the forces of the spiritual world to come forth out of itself. If you bear in mind what has been said in this lecture you will realise how important it is to anthroposophical work that it should have its own home, for you will have received the feeling that such a home must be built and arranged within according to the laws of occultism itself, and indeed, according to laws of occultism which at first are somewhat remote. You will also understand what it means on the whole when we possess no such home and are obliged to give our lectures on Anthroposophy and carry on our studies in the ordinary rooms usually at our disposal. Our age has, indeed, very little talent in the domain which has been touched upon today, and the greatest sins are committed in the realms of form and colour. For instance, the way people dress and the colours they use are outrageous, and when one goes through the streets of a large town and looks at the shop-windows with a vision sharpened by occultism, he will be obliged to decide for himself the question whether what he sees comes from sound reason or from something else. And if the judgment as regards colour is bad, it is still worse with form. But this limited talent also exists in regard to the decoration of rooms, and when it takes place in full consciousness it is frightful to be obliged to hold our anthroposophical lectures in conventional rooms. When this fact is considered and then compared with our present surroundings, with all this which has proceeded from our intentions, which surrounds us not in any way from caprice, but as we must be surrounded, if we wish to work under favourable conditions, then we shall be able to realise the importance of what has been done here; and the words that I have said to you today are intended to help us to realise it.

[ 1 ] It is impossible to make real progress in penetrating to the higher worlds without going through the stage of imaginative knowledge. This by no means implies that during occult training the human being is compelled to remain for a certain time at the imaginative stage as though it were something like a class to be attended at school. In certain instances this may be necessary, but by no means as a general rule. It depends entirely upon what the occult student has experienced before entering upon his occult training. It will be shown in the course of this discussion that the spiritual environment of the occult student is important in this regard, and that depending on his orientation to this spiritual environment diverse methods have been instituted for treading the path of knowledge.

[ 2 ] It can be of the utmost importance to know what follows if one is preparing to undergo occult training. Not merely as an interesting theory does this come into consideration, but as something by which manifold practical points of view can be gained if one is to succeed on the “path to higher knowledge.”

[ 3 ] It is often said by those striving toward a higher development: I wish to perfect myself spiritually; I wish to develop the “higher man” within me; but I have no desire for the manifestations of the “astral world.” This is understandable when one takes into consideration the descriptions of the astral world found in books dealing with such things. There, to be sure, appearances and beings are spoken of that bring all sorts of dangers to men. It will be said that under the influence of such beings a man may easily suffer harm to his moral disposition and mental health. It will be brought home to the reader that in these regions the wall dividing “the good from the evil path” is as “a spider's web” in thickness, and that the plunge into immeasurable abysses, the fall into utter depravity, lies all too near.—It is, of course, impossible simply to contradict such assertions. Yet the standpoint taken in many cases as to treading the occult path is in no way a correct one. The only reasonable point of view is the one that says, rather, that no one should be deterred from traveling the way of higher knowledge because of dangers, but that in every case strict care must be taken to weather these dangers. It may happen that one who asks an occult teacher's guidance will be counselled to postpone actual training for a time, and first undergo certain experiences of ordinary life or learn things that can be learned in the physical world. It will then be the task of the occult teacher to give the seeker the right instructions for accumulating such experiences and learning such things. In most cases, by far, the occult teacher will be found to proceed in this way. If then the student now is sufficiently attentive to what happens to him, after he has come into contact with the occult teacher, he will be able to observe many things. He will find that henceforth things happen to him as if “by accident,” and that he can observe things that he would never have been exposed to without this link with the occult teacher. If the student does not notice this and becomes impatient, it is because he has not paid sufficient attention to what has happened to him. It is not to be believed that the influence of the teacher upon the student will show itself in distinctly visible “tricks of magic.” This influence is rather an intimate matter, and he who would explore its nature and essence without having first reached a certain stage of occult training will surely err. The student injures himself in every case in which he becomes impatient over the waiting time prescribed for him. His advance will be none the less rapid on this account. On the contrary, his progress would be slowed down if he were to begin too soon the training he often impatiently awaits.

[ 4 ] If the student allows the waiting time or the other advice and hints given to him by the occult teacher to influence him rightly, he will be actually preparing himself to hold his ground before certain trials and dangers that approach him when he encounters the unavoidable stage of Imagination. This stage is unavoidable for this reason: Everyone who seeks communication with the higher world without having passed through it can only do so unconsciously and is condemned to grope in the dark. One can acquire some dim sense of this higher world without Imagination; one can without it certainly attain to a sense of being united with “one's God” or “one's higher self,” but one cannot in this way come to a true knowledge in full consciousness and bright, luminous clarity. Therefore, all talk about coming to terms with the “inferior spiritual worlds” (the astral and the devachanic) being unnecessary, that the one thing needful is for man to awaken the “God within him,” is no more than illusion.—Whoever is satisfied with this approach should not be interfered with in his strivings, and the occultist would not so interfere. But true occultism has nothing at all to do with such strivings. It makes no demand upon anybody to become a pupil. But in him who seeks its discipline it will awaken no mere dim perception of himself as “godlike,” but will also try to open his spiritual eyes to what actually exists in higher worlds.

[ 5 ] Of course, the “divine self” is contained in every man. It is in every created being. In stone, plant, and animal, the “divine self” is also contained and active. But it does not so much matter to feel and know this in general as to enter into a living connection with the manifestations of this “divine self.” Just as one can mutter over and over again that this world contains the “divine self” veiled within it and know nothing thereby of the physical world, so does he who seeks the “divine kingdom of spirits” only in blurred and indeterminate generalities know nothing of higher worlds. One should open the eyes and behold the revelation of deity in the things of the physical world, in the stone, in the plant, and not merely dream away all these as only “appearances” with the true form of God somehow “concealed” behind them. No, God reveals Himself in His creations and whoever would know God must learn to know the true essence of these creations. Therefore one must also learn to behold what really goes on and is living in the higher worlds, if one would know the “divine.” The consciousness that the “God-man” dwells within one can at most provide a beginning. But this beginning experienced in the right way, rises to an actual lift into the higher worlds. But this is possible only for one in whom the spiritual “senses” have been developed. Any other view arrives only at the standpoint, “I will stay as I am and attain only what is possible for me to attain in this way.” But the aim of the occultist is to become a different human being, in order to behold and experience other things than the customary ones.

[ 6 ] It is precisely for this purpose that passage through imaginative knowledge is necessary. It has already been said that this stage of Imagination need not be conceived of as a school class that must be gone through. It is to be understood that, particularly in present-day life, there are persons who bring with them pre-conditions enabling the occult teacher to call forth in them inspired and intuitive knowledge simultaneously, or nearly so, with the imaginative. But it is not at all to be understood that any person could be spared passage through the imaginative stage.

[ 7 ] The cause of danger inherent in imaginative knowledge has already been pointed out in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. This cause is that upon entrance into that world the human being in a certain sense loses the ground under his feet. The source of his security in the physical world is for the moment to all appearances entirely lost. Upon perception of something in the physical world it is asked: Whence comes this perception? This is mostly done unconsciously. But it is quite “unconsciously” clear that the causes of the perception are objects “outside in space.” Colours, sounds, odours go out from these objects. Colours would not be seen floating free in space, nor sounds heard, without consciousness arising as to the objects to which these colours pertain as qualities, and from which these tones come. This consciousness that objects and entities cause physical perceptions gives to them, and thereby to man himself, his security and sure hold. Anyone having perceptions without outward causes is spoken of as abnormal and morbid. Such causeless perceptions are called illusions, hallucinations, visions.

[ 8 ] Now first of all, viewed entirely outwardly, the whole imaginative world consists of such hallucinations, visions, and illusions. It has been pointed out [in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds] how, through occult training, such visions, etc., are artificially produced. By focusing the consciousness on a seed or a dying plant, certain forms, which to begin with are nothing but hallucinations, are conjured up before the soul. The “flame formation,” spoken of as appearing in the soul through observation of a plant or the like, and that after a time completely separates itself from the plant, is, outwardly viewed, to be regarded on the same level as an hallucination. It is the same in occult training when the imaginative world is entered. What was customarily regarded as going forth from things “outside in space,” or “clinging to them” as properties—colours, sounds, odors, etc.,—now float free in space. Perceptions break loose from all outer things and swim free in space, or fly around in it. Yet it is known with strict accuracy that the things before us have not brought forth these perceptions, but rather that they are self-induced by the human being. So it is that one thinks one has “lost the ground under one's feet.” In ordinary life in the physical world those inner picturings that do not proceed from things must be guarded against and are without ground or foundation. But to call forth imaginative knowledge, the prime essential is to have colours, sounds, odours, etc., fully torn loose from all things, “floating free in space.”

[ 9 ] The next step towards imaginative knowledge is to find a new “ground and foundation” for the picturings that are thus adrift. This must occur in that other world that is now about to be revealed. New things and entities take possessions of these inner picturings. In the physical world, for instance, the color blue stays on a cornflower. In the imaginative world likewise it must not remain “free floating.” It streams, as it were, towards some being, and whereas it floated unattached at first, it now becomes the expression of a being. Something speaks through it that the observer can only perceive in the imaginative world, and so these “free-floating” picturings gather around definite centers. It becomes clear that beings are speaking to us through them. And, as in the physical world there are corporeal things and beings to which colours, sounds, odors, and so forth, are attached or from which they are derived, so now spiritual beings speak out through them. These “spiritual beings” are, in fact, always there; they hover continually around human beings. But they cannot reveal themselves to them if the occasion is not given them to do so. They are given this opportunity when one calls forth the capacity to let sounds, colours, and so forth, arise before one's soul, even when occasioned by no physical object.

[ 10 ] The “spiritual facts and beings” are entirely different from the objects and entities of the physical world. In ordinary speech it is not easy to find an expression that even remotely describes this difference. Perhaps it can best be approached by saying that in the imaginative world everything speaks to man as if it were directly intelligent, whereas in the physical world intelligence can only reveal itself in a roundabout way through corporeality. Exactly this makes for mobility and freedom in the imaginative world—that the medium of the outer object is missing, and the spiritual lives itself out with full immediacy in the free-floating tones, colours, etc.

[ 11 ] Now the basis of danger threatening the human being in this world lies in the fact that he perceives the manifestations of “spiritual beings”, but not the beings themselves. This is the case as long as he remains only in the imaginative world and rises no higher. Only Inspiration and intuition lead him gradually to the beings themselves.—If, however, the occult teacher should awaken these faculties prematurely, without having thoroughly introduced the pupil to the realm of Imagination, the higher world would have for him only a shadowy and phantasmal existence. The whole glorious fullness of the pictures in which it must reveal itself when one really enters into it, would be lost. Herein lies the reason why the occult student needs a “guide.”

[ 12 ] For the student, the imaginative world is at first only a “picture world” of which mostly he does not know the meaning. But the occult teacher knows to what things and entities these pictures pertain in a still higher world. If the student has confidence in him, he can know that later connections will be revealed to him, which he cannot yet penetrate. In the physical world, the objects in space were themselves his guides. He was in a position to prove the accuracy of his inner picturings of them. The corporeal reality is the “rock” upon which all hallucinations and illusions must be shattered. This rock disappears into an abyss when the imaginative world is entered. Therefore the teacher must serve as another such rock. From what he is able to offer, the student must sense the reality of the new world. From this it can be judged what great confidence in the teacher must exist in any occult training worthy of the name. When he can no longer believe in the teacher, it is exactly the same in this higher world as if in the physical world everything on which his faith in the reality of his perceptions had been built were suddenly taken from him.

[ 13 ] Apart from this fact, there is yet another through which the human being might be thrown into confusion if he were to enter the imaginative world without guidance, for the occult student has in the first place to learn to know himself as distinct from all other spiritual beings. In physical life man has feelings, desires, longings, passions, ideas, and so forth. True, these are all caused by things and beings of the outer world, but the human being knows quite definitely that they form his inner world, and he distinguishes them from the objects of the outer world as what is happening within his soul. But as soon as the imaginative sense is awakened, this ease of differentiation completely ceases. His own feelings, ideas, passions, and so forth, literally step outside him and take on form, color and tone. He stands before them now as before wholly strange objects and beings in the physical world. It will be understood that the confusion can become complete if it is remembered what has been said in the chapter, “Some Results of Initiation,” in my book, Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and Its Attainment. The way in which the imaginative world appears to the observer is described there. All appears there reversed as in a reflected image. What streams out from man appears as if it were coming toward him from outside. A wish that he cherishes changes into a shape—for example, into the form of some fantastic looking animal, or again into an entity resembling a human being. This appears to assail him, to make an attack on him, or to cause him to do this or that. So it can happen that the human being appears to himself as surrounded by a wholly fantastic, often charming and seductive, often also horrible, world of fluttering forms. In reality these are nothing other than his thoughts, wishes, and passions, transformed into images.—It would be a great error to believe it easy to distinguish between this self transformed into images on the one hand and the real spiritual world on the other. At first it is downright impossible for the student to make this distinction. For the identical picture can come from some spiritual being that speaks to men or from something in the interior of the soul, and if one's development is unduly precipitate at this point, there is danger of never learning to separate the two in an orderly fashion. The greatest caution is to be the rule in this regard.—Now the confusion will be still greater in that the wishes and desires of the soul clothe themselves in images of an exactly opposite character from what they really are. It may be assumed, for instance, that vanity clothes itself in a picture in this way. It may appear as a charming shape promising the most wonderful things if its dictates are carried out. Its pronouncements seem to set goals thoroughly good and worth striving for; if followed, they plunge one into moral and other kinds of ruin. Conversely, a good soul quality can clothe itself in unprepossessing garb. At this point only the real knower can differentiate, and only a personality unsusceptible to weakening in respect to a right aim is steady in face of the seductive artifices of his own soul's imagery.—From these considerations it will be recognised how necessary is the guidance of a teacher who, with a sure sense, makes the pupil attentive to what in this realm is phantasm and what is truth. There is no need to believe that the teacher must always stand just behind the pupil. The presence of the teacher close to the occult student in space is not what matters most. Certainly there is the moment when such spatial presence is desirable, and also when it is absolutely necessary. But on the other hand, the occult teacher finds means of remaining in touch with the pupil even when spatially far removed. Besides, it must be observed that much of what takes place between teacher and pupil in this sphere when they meet can go on working often for months and perhaps for years afterward. But there is one thing that must surely destroy the necessary link between teacher and pupil. This happens if the pupil loses confidence in the teacher.—It is particularly bad if this bond of confidence is broken before the pupil has learned to distinguish the illusory reflections of his own soul from true reality.

[ 14 ] Now it could perhaps at this point be argued that if a connection with the teacher occurs in this way, the occult student loses all freedom and independence. He gives himself, so to speak, wholly into the hands of the teacher. This is in truth, however, not at all the case. The various methods of occult training certainly differ from one another with respect to this dependence upon the teacher. This dependence can be required to be a greater or a lesser one. It is relatively greatest in the method that was followed by the Oriental occultists, and even today is taught by them as their own. This dependence is already proportionately less in the so-called Christian initiation, and, properly speaking, its complete omission comes on the path of knowledge that, since the fourteenth century, has come to be advanced by the so-called Rosicrucian occult schools. On this path the teacher can by no means be disregarded; that is impossible. But all dependence on him ceases. How this is possible will be presented in the continuation of these thoughts hereafter. Therein we shall explain precisely how these three paths of knowledge differ: the oriental, the Christian, and the Rosicrucian. In the Rosicrucian approach there is nothing at all upsetting in any way to a modern man's sense of freedom. It will also be described in this continuation how one person or another as an occult student, even in present-day Europe, may travel, not the Rosicrucian, but the Oriental path, or the old Christian; although today the Rosicrucian is the most natural. This way, as will be seen in due course, is not at all unchristian. A man can go this way without endangering his Christianity, as can also he who supposes himself to stand at the pinnacle of the modern scientific world-conception.

[ 15 ] But perhaps one other explanation is needed. One might feel tempted to ask whether the occult student could not be spared going through the delusions of his own soul. But if this happened, he would never attain to that independent discernment so desirable for him. For by no other means can the singular nature of the imaginative world be so well grasped as by the observation of one's own soul. To begin with, man knows the inner life of his soul from one side. He is immersed in it, and this is just what the occult student has to learn—not only to look at things from outside, but to observe them as if he himself were within all of them. If his own thought world now meets him as something foreign, and he already knows a thing from one side, he can still learn to know it from another. He must himself become to a certain extent the first example of such knowledge. Here in the physical world he is accustomed to something quite different. Here he looks upon all other things only from outside, but he experiences himself only from the inside. As long as he remains in the physical world, he can never see behind the surface of things. He can never go outside himself, “slip out of his skin,” as it were, to observe himself from outside. This objective observation of himself is literally his first obligation in occult training, this helps him learn also to look beneath the surface of outer facts and beings.

by Joseph Weizenbaum

History often provides insight into the present. Consider the American South one hundred and fifty years ago, for example. There human rights and economic servitude were compressed into a single domain for black Americans. They became a means of production that could be bought and sold as a commodity. In many parts of the South it was forbidden to teach blacks to read. Control by law of education, part of culture, was found necessary to subordinate human rights to economics. The domain of rights and economics thus also engulfed culture.

Today we recognize rights which are independent from economic power, at least in principle. Modern workers must accept the authority of their superiors but only in matters directly related to their employment. Human beings no longer can be treated as mere means of production. We have separated economic power from civil rights at least to the extent of making slavery illegal.

If we can perceive how law, economics, and culture grew independent of one another relative to their nearly complete interdependence one hundred and fifty years ago in the South, then we can imagine the possibility of their even greater separation. This greater separation of the three domains - economics, law, and culture-forms the core of Steiner's social thought. Written in 1919, the essays contained in this volume address the reconstruction of a shattered Germany. They call for a proper separation of these three spheres of activity arguing that only this would allow each to express its essential nature and thereby enable human society to revitalize itself.

To understand this separation we must understand the component activities. For law the essential characteristic is human equality. Law both guarantees and limits rights, and it does this equally for each person. It governs the democratic political process in which each person's vote carries equal weight. Inasmuch as rights must be protected and the law enforced, it encompasses both the police and the military. The state is its administrative body. The modern national state, however, oversteps its essential boundaries, creating a kind of social indigestion in its attempts to legislate both in the domains of economics and of culture. Economic interests, in turn, influence legal judgments, often making a sham of human equality.

In the United States an important barrier to this overstepping is the constitutional doctrine of the separation of Church and State. The reasoning behind this doctrine has received considerable interpretation by legal experts and by the Supreme Court. Part of the discussion revolves around the ways in which people are considered equal. Thomas Emerson¹ argues that we are equal in one way through our need for self-fulfIllment or self-development, a fundamental aspect of which is belief formation. Consequently each individual has the right to form his or her beliefs without government interference. From this follows the separation of Church and State.

Religion is one pan of cultural life; another part is education. The separation of the three activities of society implies that education should be as independent of the state as is religion. In “The Separation of School and State” Stephen Arons presents a legal argument for this separation in the context of U.S. Constitutional law. He states that the case would have “for its central principle the preservation of individual conscience from government coercion. The specific application of this principle to education is that any state-constructed school system must maintain a neutral position toward parents' educational choices whenever values or beliefs are at stake. If schools generally are value-inculcating agencies, that fact raises serious constitutional questions about how a state can maintain a sufficiently neutral posture toward values while supporting a system of public education:”² In other words public schools as a matter of course tend to transmit those values deemed appropriate by the majority of the public. This implies choices among such conflicting values as competitiveness and cooperation, intellect and wisdom, and the status of manual work vis-a-vis intellectual work. Parents not accepting the majority view have the right to alternatives.

Current rulings protect the existence of private schools and their right to determine their own curricula with minimal state interference. These rulings exclude “any general power of the state to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only.”³ Arons feels that their implications go further than is generally accepted. First, they can be interpreted as prohibiting state financing systems from favoring those who are in agreement with public school values. In effect every child has the right to the same educational support at the school of his or her parents' choice, whether public or private. Otherwise constitutional rights are reserved for the rich. Second, state regulation of private schools cannot effect value transmission unless there is legally compelling justification given by the state. Putting these implications into effect would increase the separation of school and state.

Steiner argues for separation of culture and state in order that the essential nature of each can find a healthy form. To understand the essential nature of the state we must recognize that people may differ among themselves with respect to musical and other talents, but that the same people are equal with respect to voting rights. The state will be healthy when it concerns itself strictly with those matters wherein people are equal. This human equality is fundamental to the state.

Freedom is the quality fundamental to the life of culture. It is interesting that freedom is often thought to be the characteristic of the political system. On reflection, however, it becomes clear that what is usually meant by freedom is equality under the law. Indeed, by majority consensus absolute freedom is limited. For example, a person is not free to murder or steal. A little reflection also reveals that people are not equal culturally. Few would deny the cultural superiority of Mozart, Hilbert, Schweitzer, or Emerson. Thus superiority does not effect the essential equality of all before the law. It does suggest that the highly gifted ought to be given more space and time than the merely moderately gifted to unfold their capacities for the benefit of society.

To understand Steiner's thinking consider briefly what is involved in a cultural creation, be it KeKule discovering the benzene ring, Saul Bellow writing a novel, or Joan of Arc planning a battle. Each of these activities originated in the creative depths of a unique individual. It issued forth from soul and spirit under the guidance of his or her own volition and intentionality. No external compulsion can bring forth inner creative activity. The individual does it freely or not at all.

Steiner's thinking about cultural life was directed more toward this inner activity than to its result or product. For him culture is that realm of society in which people acquire inner activity and mobility through interaction with others who have developed this mobility. In the essay “Cultivation of the Spirit and Economic Life” he says that cultural life

“aims at a form of cooperation among men to be based entirely on the free intercourse and free association of individualty with individuality. Here human individuality will not be forced into an institutional mold. How one person assists another, how one helps another advance will simply arise from what one, through his own abilities and accomplishments, is able to be for the other. It is no great wonder that presently many people are still able to imagine nothing but a state of anarchy as a result of such a free form of human relations in the social order's spiritual-cultural branch. Those who think so simply do not know what powers of man's innermost nature are hindered from expanding when man is forced to develop in the pattern into which the state and economic system mold him. Such powers, deep within human nature, cannot be developed by institutions, but only through what one being calls forth in perfect freedom from another being.”

As Steiner mentions above, real freedom in culture need not result in chaos. He provided an example of this in the Waldorf School, which he founded in Stuttgart in 1919. Based on that impulse the Waldorf Schools have grown in number to a worldwide confederation of over 350 independent private primary and secondary schools. The teachers in these schools retain complete control of the activities within their own classrooms, as well as of the operation of the school as a whole through a collegial administrative body. The heart of the pedagogy is a developmental picture of the child compatible with that of Piaget, whom Steiner predated. The developmental phases that are outlined in the essay “The Pedagogical Basis of the Waldorf School” provide a context for the Waldorf teacher's interaction with children of different ages. This interaction follows a structured curriculum, where subjects are chosen to assist the developmental process of each child. The curriculum and the concept of the developmental phases can be compared to an instrument that the teacher creatively plays in order to help the students actualize their potentials. In this way the schools provide an example of free creative activity within a structure. It is not chaos. Being personally acquairited with a number of Waldorf students, I can say that they come closer to realizing their own potentials than practically anyone I know.

This is in striking contrast to what one finds in the public primary and secondary schools in the United States. A recent study points to a catastrophic situation. The report titled A Nation at Risk⁴ literally states that if a foreign power had imposed our current educational system on us, we would have taken it as an act of war. Just how bad conditions are can be deduced from the results of an English proficiency exam, given this September to incoming freshmen at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with a standard of passing which was embarrassingly low. Of 1131 students who took the exam, about 800 failed. Considering that MIT is among the highest quality institutions in the country, receiving applications only from top students and accepting only the best of them, it is clear that standards of mastery of their native language among average students in our secondary school system must be very low indeed.

The report goes on to urge that something must be done to improve this situation, giving two compelling reasons. The first is that without a better educated public the United States will be unable to compete with foreign economies in the struggle for markets. This is an economic reason. The second is a political one. Lacking an educated public America will not be able to keep up its military strength. In Steiner's terms the report suggests that we nurture the germ which is the underlying cause of the problem. It should be clear that if these two are the primary reasons for improving the educational system, then they will influence how it is “improved.” In reality it is exactly such influences from the state and from economics that have caused the current catastrophe.

Unhealthy connections and influences among the several activities of society have caused catastrophies in economic life as well. Two cases which illustrate this are developments in the American rail and steel industries since the second world war. At the beginning of the war the U.S. railroad system was quite superb. It covered the entire country and was fast and comfortable. But then companies like New York Central started examining themselves and decided the business they were really in was making money and providing dividends for their shareholders. On this basis they took their surplus funds and bought companies which were unrelated to railroading but which were judged more profitable than rail. Today we call this diversification. The deterioration of the railroads' infrastructure was the consequence. Within a decade the system was in disarray. Similar events took place in the U. S. steel industry. American steel became uncompetitive. Those foreign steel manufacturers who had decided that making steel was their business, and who consequently invested in renewal and improvement of their plant, became even more efficient while the American steel-making plant deteriorated.

The decline of American rail and steel can be traced to neglecting the essential nature of economic life: meeting human needs. They turned, instead, to the rights of owners, myopically pursuing shareholder profit and probably management compensation. This is the “pig principle.” The net impact on society can be found by adding the shareholder's gain to the external effects, such as the cost of finding and using alternatives to rail transportation, which are costs to society. The net, a big negative, is the logical outcome of economic activity losing its primary focus of meeting needs.

To be healthy economics must start from and keep this primary focus. Those at work in economic life concern themselves primarily with the production and circulation of commodities. What is produced is usually not consumed by those who produce it. The product serves the needs of others. For this reason Steiner used the term “brotherliness” (and we should add sisterliness) to characterize economic activity. He stressed that this applies only to economies in which the division of labor is the norm.

But to characterize actual economic life with the term “brotherliness” is to contradict much of modern economic thinking. Human economic activity is more usually characterized by terms like selfishness, personal gain, and survival. Steiner insists, however, that these ideas are inconsistent with fundamental economic realities. Since the division of labor, few individuals have really provided for themselves. We all rely on the efforts of thousands, indeed millions of others to produce the car we drive, the food we eat, and the clothes we wear. The reality of modern economic life is that we take care of one another, i.e., true brotherliness. Thinking that overlooks this fundamental reality is likely to misguide economic decisions, as in the two examples cited.

The proper separation of the three activities of society-economics, law, and culture-would make it possible for economic life to keep its focus on human needs and maintain its true brotherly character. Steiner envisioned this coming about through the working of motivational forces different from those to which we are accustomed. Self interest, profit, and personal gain could be replaced by the satisfaction of knowing one is working for the community good. Steiner argued that this is not a utopian dream; rather it is a motivation suitable to true human dignity. He also described new ways of working with wages, capital, and credit that would aid the advent of this new motivation. The key to its possibility and practicality is again the proper separation of the three activities.

He explains in the essay “Ability to Work, Will to Work, and the Threefold Social Order” that this socially responsible motivation would not arise from the economic life at all, because purely economic work has become inherently uninteresting since the division of labor became the norm. This was not the case for the medieval craftsman who produced his product in its entirety and then, taking pride in it, received thanks from his customer. The modern worker is confined to a task that, taken by itself, i.e., out of the macroeconomic context into which it fits, is meaningless. The existing economic motivation, money, leads people to do whatever is necessary to get paid. But it does not activate their interest in a task that is inherently uninteresting, with the consequence that absenteeism, alienation, and poor performance have reached alarming levels. Steiner recognized that socially responsible motivation could arise only from an independent cultural and political life. In the above mentioned essay he says that within the cultural life the individual

“learns in a living way to understand this human society for which one is called upon to work; a realm where one learns to see what each single piece of work means for the combined fabric of the social order, to see it in such a light that one will learn to love it because of its value for the whole. It aims at creating in this free life of spirit the profounder principles that can replace the motive of personal gain. Only in a free spiritual life can a love for the human social order spring up that is comparable to the love an artist has for the creation of his works.&rdquo

From a separate democratically ordered life of law there would also arise motives to work for society.

“Real relationships will grow up between people united in a social organism where each adult has a voice in government and is co-equal with every other adult: it is relationships such as these that are able to enkindle the will to work ‘for community.’ One must reflect that a truly communal feeling can grow only from such relationships, and that from this feeling the will to work can grow. For in actual practice the consequence of such a state founded on democratic rights will be that each human being will take his place with vitality and full consciousness in the common field of work. Each will know what he is working for; and each will want to work within the working community, of which he knows himself a member through his will.&rdquo

If we attempt to fInd examples of this type of motivation operative in contemporary society, we often fInd negative instances. This is nowhere better exemplified than at the highest levels of computer research at MIT. This research is paid for almost entirely by the military. While it is possible to view it, if one wears just the right kind of glasses, as a pure science and as “value free,” it is, in fact, in the service of the military. Scientific results are swiftly converted to the improvement of implements of mass destruction and of death. Young men and women work in these fields trying to maintain the illusion that they are doing abstract science, a “value free” science. They ultimately have to come to believe that they are not in any way responsible for the end use of their labor. It is often said that the computer is a tool having no moral dimension. Clearly this position can be maintained only if one thinks of human society in abstract terms, i.e. if one denies the concrete historical and social circumstances in which one lives and works.”

The effect of this situation on the researcher needs emphasis. It takes enormous energy to shield one's eyes from seeing what one is actually doing. The expenditure of this energy on the part of individuals is expensive in emotional terms. Ultimately this is the real tragedy, for it reduces the person to a machine.

There is a sort of irony involved, a chilling irony. A fear is often expressed about computers, namely that we will create a machine that is very nearly like a human being. The irony is that we are making human beings, men and women, become more and more like machines. For it is human to find the motive for work, consciously and with conscience and compassion, in the concrete historical and social context in which one lives. When this is not possible human beings are robbed of essential humanity.

The quest for a motive to work befitting human dignity extends from research scientist to factory worker. One might think, for example, that the steel worker, if he were educated to picture the use of the product of his work, would find in the pictures the motivation to work for social good instead of merely for a living. This presumably could be measured in higher quality work and reduced absenteeism. On closer inspection, however, it is doubtful that a look at the actual American context could bring about such motivation. A large percentage of steel manufactured in America is used for nothing but trivia. For example, there are on the order of ten million new automobiles produced in this country every year. If we restricted ourselves to a replacement market without model changes and alterations that are purely cosmetic, then we might easily get by, building, say, half a million cars a year. It is difficult to believe that the steel worker could be proud of his contribution to society if underneath he knew that the car his neighbor bought was unnecessary and that it might have been better to put the resources it required into feeding the 600 million people on the planet who are malnourished.

In a volume to be published subsequently to this one Steiner's concept of “unnecessary production,” i.e., trivia, planned obsolescence, etc., is introduced. With that discussion and much of what is presented in this volume it should be evident that Steiner's ideas will be of interest to those who concern themselves with issues of ecology and stewardship of the earth. In the broader context ecology must also encompass a social dimension, making it a social ecology that considers questions such as right motivation to work. In this sense Steiner's work also relates to the efforts of E.F. Schumacher, who read Steiner, and who tried to introduce us to ideas of appropriate scale and healthy approaches to post industrial society. These connections should help dispel any thought that this volume is dated. Rather, Steiner was far ahead of his time.

Joseph Weizenbaum
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1984

• 1. Toward a General Theory of the First Amendment (New York: Random House, 1966).
• 2. “The Separation of School and State: Pierce Reconsidered,” Harvard Educational Review, 46 (February 1976):1, pp. 96–97.
• 3. United States Supreme Court, Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 U.S. at 535 (1925). 4. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform; A Report to the Nation (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983).
• 4. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform; A Report to the Nation (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983).

[ 1 ] Through Hegel, the “I think, therefore I am” seems to spring up again in the evolution of German world views like a seed, fallen into the earth, arises as a wide-branching tree. For, what this thinker created as a world view is a comprehensive thought-painting or, so to speak, a many-membered thought-body, consisting of numerous single thoughts that mutually carry, support, move, enliven, and illuminate one another. What is meant here by thoughts does not stem from the sense impressions of the outer world, nor even from the everyday experiences of human feeling life (Gemüt); what is meant is thoughts that reveal themselves in the soul when the soul lifts itself out of its sense impressions and out of the experiences of its feeling life and makes itself into an onlooker of the process by which a thought, free of everything of a non-thought nature, unfolds into further and ever further thoughts. When the soul allows this process to occur within itself, it is then supposedly lifted out of its usual being and interwoven with its activity into the spiritually supersensible world order. Then it is not the soul that thinks; the world-all thinks within the soul; the soul becomes a participant in a happening outside man into which man is merely interwoven; and in this way the soul experiences within itself what works and weaves in the depths of the world.

[ 2 ] Looking at this more closely, one can see that Hegel seeks his world view from a completely different viewpoint than from Descartes's “I think, therefore I am.” Descartes wants to draw certainty about the existence of the soul from the soul's thinking. With Hegel it is a matter of saying nothing at first about the thinking of the individual human soul. but of shaping the life of this soul in such a way that its thinking becomes a revelation of world thinking. Then. Hegel believes, what lives as thought in all world existence will reveal itself; and the individual soul finds itself as a part in this thought-weaving of the world. From this point of view the soul must say: The highest and deepest thing that is and lives in the world is the creative reigning of thoughts, and I find myself as one of the ways this reigning element reveals itself.

[ 3 ] In this turn away from the individual thoughts of the soul and toward world thoughts above and beyond the soul. there lies the significant difference between Hegel and Descartes; Hegel made this turn; Descartes did not.

these thoughts; he seeks a form of thought-life that lies above and beyond this field.

[ 4 ] If Hegel did in fact remain in the region of thoughts and found himself therefore to be in opposition to Fichte and Schelling, he did so only because he believed he felt, in thoughts themselves, the inner power needed to penetrate into the supersensible realm. Hegel was an enthusiast with respect to the experience man can have when he gives himself over entirely to the primal power of thoughts. In the light of a thought raised to an idea, the soul, for him, extricates itself from its connection with the sense world. One can feel the power lying in this enthusiasm of Hegel when one encounters in his writings—in which for many people there reigns such a repellent, knotty, yes, it seems, horribly abstract language-passages that often show so beautifully the heart's tones he can find for what he experiences with his “abstractions.” Just such a passage, for example, stands at the end of his Phenomenology. There he calls the knowing that the soul experiences when it lets world ideas hold sway within it “absolute knowing.” And at the end of this book he looks back upon those spirits who have striven for the goal of “absolute knowing” in the course of mankind's evolution. Looking back from his era, he finds the following words to say about these spirits: “The goal—absolute knowing, or the spirit knowing itself as spirit—has as its path the memory of spirits, as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the organization of their kingdom. Their preservation of their free existence, on the one hand, appearing in the form of chance happening, is history; but their preservation of their comprehended organization, on the other hand, is the science of manifest knowing; both together—comprehended history—constitute the memory and the Golgotha (Schädelstätte) of the absolute spirit, the reality, truth, and certainty of its throne, without which the absolute spirit would be lifeless and alone; only—

From the cup of this realm of spirits
Foams for it its infinitude:”

[ 5 ] This inwardly powerful element of a thought-life that wants to overcome itself within itself in order to lift itself into a realm where it is no longer living in itself but where the infinite thought, the eternal idea, is living in it: that is the essential element in Hegel's seeking. Through this, higher striving in knowledge receives a far-reaching character with him that wants to guide toward one goal directions in this striving that are often separated and therefore proceeding one-sidedly. In Hegel one can find a pure thinker who wants to approach the solution to the riddle of the world only through a human reason free of mysticism. One can speak of ice-cold abstract thoughts by which alone he wants to comprehend the world. Thus one will be able to see in him the dry, mathematically inclined man of intellect. But where does living in the ideas of one's reason lead him? It leads him to the surrender of the human soul to the supersensible world powers holding sway in the soul. Living in these ideas becomes a true mystical experience. And it is absolutely not nonsensical to recognize mysticism in Hegel's world view. One must only have a sense for the fact that what they mystic expresses can be experienced in Hegel's works in connection with the ideas of one's reason. It is a mysticism that removes the personal element—which for the mystic of feeling is the main thing, and the only thing he wants to speak about—as in fact a personal matter for the soul itself, and that expresses only that to which mysticism can lift itself when it struggles up out of personal soul darkness into the radiant clarity of the world of ideas.

[ 6 ] Hegel's world view has its place in the course of mankind's spiritual evolution through the fact that in it the radiant power of thoughts lifts itself up out of the mystical depths of the soul, and through the fact that in Hegel's seeking, mystical power wants to reveal itself with the power of the light of thought. And this is also how he sees his place in the course of this evolution. Therefore he looked back upon Jakob Böhme in the way expressed in these words (to be found in his History of Philosophy): “This Jakob Böhme, long forgotten and decried as a pietistic visionary, has regained his rightful esteem only in recent times; Leibniz revered him. His public has been greatly reduced by the Age of Enlightenment; in recent times his profundity has been recognized again. ... To declare him a visionary means nothing. For if one wants to, one can call every philosopher so, even Epicurus and Bacon. ... But as to the high esteem to which Böhme has been raised, he owes this particularly to the form of his contemplation and feeling; for, contemplation and inner feeling ... and the pictorial nature of one's thoughts the allegories and so on—are partly considered to be the essential form of philosophy. But it is only the concept, thinking, in which philosophy can have its truth, in which the absolute can be expressed and also is as it is in and for itself.” And Hegel finds these further words for Böhme: “Jakob Böhme is the first German philosopher; the content of his philosophizing is truly German. What distinguishes Böhme and makes him remarkable is ... that he set the intellectual world into his own inner life (Gemüt), and within his own consciousness of himself he beheld, knew, and felt everything that used to be in the beyond. This general idea of Böhme proves on the one hand to be profound and basic; on the other hand, however, he does not achieve clarity and order in all his need and struggle for definition and discrimination in developing his divine views about the universe.”

Such words are spoken by Hegel, after all, only from the feeling: In the simple heart of Jakob Böhme there lived the deepest impulse of the human soul to sink itself with its own experience into world experience—the true mystical impulse—but the pictorial view, the parable, the symbol must lift themselves to the light of clear ideas in order to attain what they want. In Hegel's world view Jakob Böhme's world pictures are meant to arise again as ideas of human reason. Thus the enthusiast of thoughts, Hegel, stands beside the deep mystic, Jakob Böhme, within the evolution of German idealism. Hegel saw in Böhme's philosophizing something truly German, and Karl Rosenkranz, the biographer and independent student of Hegel, wrote a book, Hegel as the German National Philosopher, for the celebration of Hegel's hundredth birthday in 1870, in which these words occur: “One can assert that Hegel's system of thought is the most national one in Germany, and that after the earlier dominion of the Kantian and Schellingtan systems, none has reached so deeply into the national movement, into the furthering of German intelligence, into the elucidation of public opinion, into the encouraging of the will ... as that of Hegel.”

[ 7 ] With such words Karl Rosenkranz does in fact, to a high degree, speak the truth about a phenomenon of German spiritual life, even though, on the other hand, Hegel's striving had already encountered the most bitter and scornful opposition in the decades before these words were written—an opposition whose beginnings were described in significant words by Rosenkranz himself soon after Hegel's death: “When I consider the fury with which Hegelian philosophy was attacked, I am surprised that Hegel's expression, that ‘the idea in its movement is a circle of circles,’ has not moved people to call his philosophy Dante's funnel into hell, which narrows toward the end and finally brings one up against Satan incarnate” (Rosenkrantz: From My Notebook. Leipzig 1854).

[ 8 ] There can be very different viewpoints from which a person seeks to describe the impression he gains of a thinker personality like Hegel. In another place (in his book Riddles of Philosophy) the present author attempted to show the view one can attain about Hegel when one fixes one's eye on his work as a stage in the philosophical evolution of mankind. Here this author would like to speak only of what comes to expression through Hegel as one of the strengths of German idealism in world views. This is trust in the carrying power of thinking. Every page in Hegel's works strengthens this trust which finally culminates in the conviction: When the human being fully understands what he has in his thinking, then he also knows that he can attain entry into a supersensible spiritual world. Through Hegel, German idealism has accomplished the affirmation of the supersensible nature of thinking. And one can have the feeling that Hegel's strengths, and also his weaknesses, are connected with the fact that one time in the course of the world a personality had to stand there for whom all life and work are ensouled by this affirmation. Then one sees in Hegel's world view a source from which to draw what can be gained from this affirmation in the way of strength for life, without perhaps accepting the content of the Hegelian world view in anyone point.

[ 9 ] If one relates in such a way to this thinker personality, one can receive a stimulus from him, and along with it the stimulus of one strong element of German idealism; and from this stimulus one can gain the strength to form a completely different picture of the world than that painted by Hegel himself. As strange as it may sound: Hegel is perhaps best understood when one directs the power of cognitive striving that held sway in him onto paths that he himself never took at all.

Hegel felt the supersensible nature of thinking with all the power available to man in this direction. But he had to expend so much human strength in conducting this feeling through a complete thinking process for once, that he was not able himself to lead the supersensible nature of thinking up into supersensible realms. The exemplary psychologist, Franz Brentano expresses in his Psychology how modern psychology does indeed investigate the ordinary life of the soul in a strictly scientific way, but, in these investigations, has lost all perspective into the great questions of soul existence. He says: “The laws of mental association, of the development of convictions and opinions, and of the germinating of pleasure and love, all these would be anything but a true compensation for not gaining certainty about the hopes of a Plato and Aristotle for the continued existence of our better part after the dissolution of the body ... if the modern way of thinking really did signify the elimination of the question of immortality, then this elimination would have to be called an extremely portentious one for psychology:” Now one can say that in many people's view not only the scientific approach of psychology but the scientific approach altogether seems to signify the elimination of such questions. Over Hegel's world view there seems to hover like an evil fate the fact that, with its affirmation of the supersensible nature of the thought-world, his world view has walled off the entrance into a real world of supersensible facts and beings. [ 10 ] In someone who is a student of Hegel in the sense Karl Rosenkranz is, for example, this fate seems to work on. Rosenkranz wrote a psychology (Psychology or Science of the Subjective Spirit, 1837; third edition, 1863). There, in the chapter on “Old Age,” one can read (p. 119): “Psychology touches here on the question of immortality, a favorite theme of lay philosophers—often with the preconceived intention of guaranteeing a reunion after death, as one usually expresses it. If the spirit, as a self-conscious idea-entity, is qualitatively different from its organism, then the possibility of immortality makes sense. But as to the how of actual immortality, we are unable to gain the slightest inkling with any objective value. We can see that if we continue to exist as individualities, our being is still unable to change, after all, with respect to having to live within the true, good, and beautiful; but the modality of an existence separated from our organism is a riddle for us. Why should we not then acknowledge here the limits of our knowing? Why should we either flatly deny the possibility of immortality or offer for speculation fantastic dreams of a soul sleep, of a soul body, and of other such dogmas? Where true knowing ceases, faith enters; and we must leave it up to faith to depict a not impossible hereafter.” Rosenkranz airs an opinion like this within a psychology completely permeated with the conviction of having a knowledge about what the supersensible world-thought brings to earthly reality within the being of the human soul. This is a science—wishing to weave entirely within the supersensible—that comes to an immediate halt when it notices the threshold to the supersensible world. One can deal with this phenomenon only if one feels in it something of the destiny that is cast over man's striving in knowledge—and that seems so inextricably interwoven with Hegel's world view—through the fact that, by focussing with all its strength upon the supersensible nature of thinking, and, in order to achieve maximum effect with this focus, his world view loses the possibility of a different focus upon the supersensible.

[ 11 ] Hegel at first seeks to find the circumference of all the supersensible thoughts that arise in the human soul when the soul lifts itself up out of all observation of nature and all earthly soul life. He presents this content as his Logic. But this logic contains not one single thought leading out of the region encompassed by nature and earthly soul life.

Then Hegel seeks further to present all those thoughts which, as supersensible beings, underlie nature. Nature becomes for him the revelation of a supersensible thought-world that hides its thought-being within nature and presents itself as the opposite of itself, as something of a non-thought kind. But here also there are no thoughts that non-thought kind. But here also there are no thoughts that I do not express themselves within the circumference of the sense world.

In his philosophy of the spirit, Hegel depicts how world I ideas are holding sway in the individual human soul, in associations of human souls (peoples, states), in the historical evolution of mankind, in art, religion, and philosophy. Everywhere in his philosophy is also the view that the supersensible thought-world absolutely expresses itself within the soul element as this stands with its being and working within the sense world, and that therefore everything present in the sense realm is of a spiritual nature with respect to its true being. Nowhere, however, is there a start in the direction of penetrating with knowledge into a supersensible region for which no configuration in the sense realm is present.

[ 12 ] One can acknowledge all this to oneself and yet not seek to judge the expression of German idealism in Hegel's world view negatively just because Hegel, in spite of his supersensible idealism, remained stuck in observation of the sense world. One can arrive at a positive judgment and can find the essential thing about this world view to lie in the fact that it contains the affirmation: Whoever observes in its true form the world spread out before our senses recognizes that it is in reality a spiritual world. And German idealism has expressed through Hegel this affirmation of the spiritual nature of the sense-perceptible.

[ 13 ] Otto Willmann has written an excellent book dealing with The History of Idealism. With a far-reaching knowledge of his field, he points out the weaknesses and one-sidednesses that have come into the evolution of world views in the nineteenth century through the continuing effects of the Kantian formulation of questions and direction in thought. The depictions I gave in this present book sought within the life of the world views of the nineteenth century to find those impulses and streams through which thinkers have freed themselves from Kant's formulation of questions and direction in thought, and through which they have taken paths to which precisely they could do justice who judge the matter according to just such a far-reaching view as that underlying Willmann's book. Many views that wish to attach themselves to Kant in modern times, without sufficient insight into the preceding evolution of world views, revert in fact to views characterized correctly in the following words by Willmann to the effect “that according to Aristotle our knowledge begins with the things of the world and on the basis of sense perceptions only then forms the concept ... that this forming of concepts occurs through a creative act, in which the human spirit grasps the thought-element within the things ... One still always has to indicate to certain sense-bound and banal people that perceiving can never enhance itself to the point of being able to think, that sensations and feelings cannot bunch together into concepts, and that, on the contrary, perceiving and sensing must themselves be constituted by something, and constituted, in fact, on the basis of the thoughts existing in the things; ... only thoughts can grant us any necessitated and universal knowledge.” Someone who thinks in this way—if he frees himself from certain misapprehensions holding sway, understandably, among the adherents of Willmann's kind of thinking—can speak with comprehension and appreciation, even from Willmann's standpoint, of Schelling's and Hegel's direction in thought and of much that, like them, rums away from “sense-bound banality.” A time will also come when Willmann's kind of thinking will be judged with less bias in this direction than is now the case. This kind of thinking will then be just as correct in its appreciation of what, in the evolution of modern world views, has broken free of “sense-bound banality” as it is correct now in condemning views that have fallen prey to this and many other “banalities.”!