The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The course of the year has its own life. With this life the human soul can unfold a feeling-unison. If the soul opens itself to the influences that speak so variously to it week by week, it will find the right perception of itself. Thereby the soul will feel forces growing within that will strengthen it. It will observe that such inward forces want to be awakened—awakened by the soul's ability to partake in the meaningful course of the world as it comes to life in the rhythms of time. Thereby the soul becomes fully aware of the delicate, yet vital threads that exist between itself and the world into which it has been born.

In this calendar a verse is inscribed for each week. This will enable the soul to participate actively in the progressing life of the year as it unfolds from week to week. Each verse should resound in the soul as it unites with the life of the year. A healthy feeling of “at one-ness” with the course of Nature, and from this a vigorous “finding of oneself” is here intended, in the belief that, for the soul, a feeling-unison with the world's course as unfolded in these verses is something for which the soul longs when it rightly understands itself.

—Rudolf Steiner
Foreword to the Second Edition

On the Corresponding Verses by Hans Pusch

It is apparent that the Calendar of the Soul is composed of corresponding verses which divide the year into two halves, from Easter to Michaelmas, and back again to Easter. For the translator, the most important task is to bring the corresponding verses into harmony with each other. By printing them side by side, each verse can be experienced with its ‘octave’ of the corresponding one.

But something else comes to expression in letting them speak side by side. Their relationship follows a certain law of evolution. Out of the whole evolve the parts, and this is the meaning of subtraction. We number the verses from 1 to 52 according to the weeks of the year, Easter to Easter. And now a double subtraction has to take place. We have one verse, say Number 5 for the fifth week; to find its correspondence, we must subtract 1 from our 5, which leads to 4 ... and then subtract the 4 from 52, resulting in 48, the verse we are looking for. It is necessary each time to subtract from the verse number and then from the whole.

This tracing of the related weeks is a gesture akin to the process of evolution. Out of the majestic un-folding of macrocosmic forces, the microcosmic worlds came into being. We ourselves followed this same process of subtraction by evolving by degrees the consciousness of self. It was a process of diminution by which we slowly exchanged our ancient clairvoyant vision, embracing totality, for our present earth-bound sight and mind, geographically conditioned by the existence in a physical body.

Subtracting means, therefore, on the one hand a diminishing, but on the other it creates a new principle of evolution, that of polarity. Not only are the parts a contrast to the whole, but also the parts themselves form opposites. There is no better description of the process than the one Emerson gave in his essay “Compensation:”

“Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; in the systole and diastole of the heart; in the centrifugal and centripetal gravity ... If the south attracts, the north repels. To empty here, you must condense there. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation ... Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law.” What lived in Emerson's mind underlies the style and composition of these weekly verses. And it is the human being who must reach a stage of compensation, of balance between the opposites, enhancing the polarities to forces of inner growth and maturity. It is a most invigorating development when it is practiced year after year in faithful succession. By combining the two corresponding verses in the mind, we gain a new insight into the workings of that which is outside and that which lives within.

These instructions are for those ignorant of the dangers of the lower IDDHI.¹

He who would hear the voice of Nâda,² "the Soundless Sound," and comprehend it, he has to learn the nature of Dhâranâ.³

Having become indifferent to objects of perception, the pupil must seek out the râja of the senses, the Thought-Producer, he who awakes illusion.

The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real.

Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.

For: —
When to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams;

When he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE — the inner sound which kills the outer.

Then only, not till then, shall he forsake the region of Asat, the false, to come unto the realm of Sat, the true.

Before the soul can see, the Harmony within must be attained, and fleshly eyes be rendered blind to all illusion.

Before the Soul can hear, the image (man) has to become as deaf to roarings as to whispers, to cries of bellowing elephants as to the silvery buzzing of the golden fire-fly.

Before the soul can comprehend and may remember, she must unto the Silent Speaker be united just as the form to which the clay is modelled, is first united with the potter's mind.

For then the soul will hear, and will remember.

And then to the inner ear will speak —

THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE

And say: —

If thy soul smiles while bathing in the Sunlight of thy Life; if thy soul sings within her chrysalis of flesh and matter; if thy soul weeps inside her castle of illusion; if thy soul struggles to break the silver thread that binds her to the MASTER; ⁴ know, O Disciple, thy Soul is of the earth.

When to the World's turmoil thy budding soul ⁵ lends ear; when to the roaring voice of the great illusion thy Soul responds; ⁶ when frightened at the sight of the hot tears of pain, when deafened by the cries of distress, thy soul withdraws like the shy turtle within the carapace of SELFHOOD, learn, O Disciple, of her Silent "God," thy Soul is an unworthy shrine.

When waxing stronger, thy Soul glides forth from her secure retreat: and breaking loose from the protecting shrine, extends her silver thread and rushes onward; when beholding her image on the waves of Space she whispers, "This is I," — declare, O Disciple, that thy soul is caught in the webs of delusion.⁷

This Earth, Disciple, is the Hall of Sorrow, wherein are set along the Path of dire probations, traps to ensnare thy EGO by the delusion called "Great Heresy".⁸

This earth, O ignorant Disciple, is but the dismal entrance leading to the twilight that precedes the valley of true light — that light which no wind can extinguish, that light which burns without a wick or fuel.

Saith the Great Law: — "In order to become the knower of ALL SELF ⁹ thou hast first of self to be the knower." To reach the knowledge of that self, thou hast to give up Self to Non-Self, Being to Non-Being, and then thou canst repose between the wings of the GREAT BIRD. Aye, sweet is rest between the wings of that which is not born, nor dies, but is the AUM ¹⁰ throughout eternal ages.¹¹

Bestride the Bird of Life, if thou would'st know.¹²

Give up thy life, if thou would'st live.¹³

Three Halls, O weary pilgrim, lead to the end of toils. Three Halls, O conqueror of Mâra, will bring thee through three states ¹⁴ into the fourth ¹⁵ and thence into the seven worlds,¹⁶ the worlds of Rest Eternal.

If thou would'st learn their names, then hearken, and remember.

The name of the first Hall is IGNORANCE — Avidyâ.

It is the Hall in which thou saw'st the light, in which thou livest and shalt die.¹⁷

The name of Hall the second is the Hall of Learning.* In it thy Soul will find the blossoms of life, but under every flower a serpent coiled.¹⁸

[*The Hall of Probationary Learning.]

The name of the third Hall is Wisdom, beyond which stretch the shoreless waters of AKSHARA, the indestructible Fount of Omniscience.¹⁹

If thou would'st cross the first Hall safely, let not thy mind mistake the fires of lust that burn therein for the Sunlight of life.

If thou would'st cross the second safely, stop not the fragrance of its stupefying blossoms to inhale. If freed thou would'st be from the Karmic chains, seek not for thy Guru in those Mâyâvic regions.

The WISE ONES tarry not in pleasure-grounds of senses.

The WISE ONES heed not the sweet-tongued voices of illusion.

Seek for him who is to give thee birth,²⁰ in the Hall of Wisdom, the Hall which lies beyond, wherein all shadows are unknown, and where the light of truth shines with unfading glory.

That which is uncreate abides in thee, Disciple, as it abides in that Hall. If thou would'st reach it and blend the two, thou must divest thyself of thy dark garments of illusion. Stifle the voice of flesh, allow no image of the senses to get between its light and thine that thus the twain may blend in one. And having learnt thine own Ajñâna,²¹ flee from the Hall of Learning. This Hall is dangerous in its perfidious beauty, is needed but for thy probation. Beware, Lanoo, lest dazzled by illusive radiance thy Soul should linger and be caught in its deceptive light.

• 1. Pali word Iddhi, is the synonym of the Sanskrit Siddhis, or psychic faculties, the abnormal powers in man. There are two kinds of Siddhis. One group which embraces the lower, coarse, psychic and mental energies; the other is one which exacts the highest training of Spiritual powers. Says Krishna in Śrîmad Bhâgavatam: —
  "He who is engaged in the performance of yoga, who has subdued his senses and who has concentrated his mind in me (Krishna), such yogis all the Siddhis stand ready to serve."
• 2. The "Soundless Voice," or the "Voice of the Silence." Literally perhaps this would read "Voice in the Spiritual Sound," as Nâda is the equivalent word in Sanskrit, for the Sen-sar term.
• 3. Dhâranâ, is the intense and perfect concentration of the mind upon some one interior object, accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external Universe, or the world of the senses.
• 4. The "great Master" is the term used by lanoos or chelas to indicate one's "Higher Self." It is the equivalent of Avalokiteśvara, and the same as Âdi-Budha with the Buddhist Occultists, Âtman the "Self" (the Higher Self) with the Brahmins, and Christos with the ancient Gnostics.
• 5. Soul is used here for the Human Ego or Manas, that which is referred to in our Occult Septenary division as the "Human Soul" (Vide the Secret Doctrine) in contradistinction to the Spiritual and Animal Souls.
• 6. Mahâ Mâyâ "Great Illusion," the objective Universe.
• 7. Sakkâyaditthi "delusion" of personality.
• 8. Attavâda, the heresy of the belief in Soul or rather in the separateness of Soul or Self from the One Universal, infinite Self.
• 9. The Tattvajñânin is the "knower" or discriminator of the principles in nature and in man; and Âtmajñânin is the knower of Âtman or the Universal, One Self.
• 10. Kala Hamsa, the "Bird" or Swan (Vide No. 11). Says the Nâda-Bindu Upanishad (Rig Veda) translated by the Kumbakonam Theos. Society — "The syllable a is considered to be its (the bird Hamsa's) right wing, u, its left, m, its tail, and the Ardha-mâtra (half metre) is said to be its head."
• 11. Eternity with the Orientals has quite another signification than it has with us. It stands generally for the 100 years or "age" of Brahmâ, the duration of a Kalpa or a period of 4,320,000,000 years.
• 12. Says the same Nâda-Bindu, "A Yogi who bestrides the Hamsa (thus contemplates on Aum) is not affected by Karmic influences or crores of sins."
• 13. Give up the life of physical personality if you would live in spirit.
• 14. The three states of consciousness, which are Jâgrat, the waking; Svapna, the dreaming; and Sushupti, the deep sleeping state. These three Yogi conditions, lead to the fourth, or —
• 15. The Turîya, that beyond the dreamless state, the one above all, a state of high spiritual consciousness.
• 16. Some Sanskrit mystics locate seven planes of being, the seven spiritual lokas or worlds within the body of Kala Hamsa, the Swan out of Time and Space, convertible into the Swan in Time, when it becomes Brahmâ instead of Brahma (neuter).
• 17. The phenomenal World of Senses and of terrestrial consciousness — only.
• 18. The astral region, the Psychic World of super-sensuous perceptions and of deceptive sights — the world of Mediums. It is the great "Astral Serpent" of Éliphas Lévi. No blossom plucked in those regions has ever yet been brought down on earth without its serpent coiled around the stem. It is the world of the Great Illusion.
• 19. The region of the full Spiritual Consciousness beyond which there is no longer danger for him who has reached it.
• 20. The Initiate who leads the disciple through the Knowledge given to him to his spiritual, or second, birth is called the Father guru or Master.
• 21. Ajñâna is ignorance or non-wisdom the opposite of "Knowledge," jñâna.
• 22. Mâra is in exoteric religions a demon, an Asura, but in esoteric philosophy it is personified temptation through men's vices, and translated literally means "that which kills" the Soul. It is represented as a King (of the Mâras) with a crown in which shines a jewel of such lustre that it blinds those who look at it, this lustre referring of course to the fascination exercised by vice upon certain natures.
• 23. The inner chamber of the Heart, called in Sanskrit Brahmapura. The "fiery power" is Kundalinî.
• 24. The "Power" and the "World-mother" are names given to Kundalinî — one of the mystic "Yogi powers." It is Buddhi considered as an active instead of a passive principle (which it is generally, when regarded only as the vehicle, or casket of the Supreme Spirit Âtma). It is an electro-spiritual force, a creative power which when aroused into action can as easily kill as it can create.
• 25. Khechara or "sky-walker" or "goer." As explained in the 6th Adhyâya of that king of mystic works the Jñâneśvari — the body of the Yogi becomes as one formed of the wind; as "a cloud from which limbs have sprouted out," after which — "he (the Yogi) beholds the things beyond the seas and stars; he hears the language of the Devas and comprehends it, and perceives what is passing in the mind of the ant."
• 26. Vînâ is an Indian stringed instrument like a lute.
• 27. The six principles; meaning when the lower personality is destroyed and the inner individuality is merged into and lost in the Seventh or Spirit.
• 28. The disciple is one with Brahmâ or the Âtman.
• 29. The astral form produced by the Kâmic principle, the Kâma rûpa or body of desire.
• 30. Mânasa rûpa. The first refers to the astral or personal Self; the second to the individuality or the reincarnating Ego whose consciousness on our plane or the lower Manas — has to be paralyzed.
• 31. Kundalinî is called the "Serpentine" or the annular power on account of its spiral-like working or progress in the body of the ascetic developing the power in himself. It is an electric fiery occult or Fohatic power, the great pristine force, which underlies all organic and inorganic matter.
• 32. This "Path" is mentioned in all the Mystic Works. As Krishna says in the Jñâneśvari: "When this Path is beheld . . . whether one sets out to the bloom of the east or to the chambers of the west, without moving, O holder of the bow, is the travelling in this road. In this path, to whatever place one would go, that place one's own self becomes." "Thou art the Path" is said to the adept guru and by the latter to the disciple, after initiation. "I am the way and the Path" says another Master.
• 33.

Today we shall speak about the Fourth Earth Round. In the course of our whole evolution we have seven Planetary conditions: Saturn, Sun, Moon, Earth, Jupiter, Venus, Vulcan; and in connection with each Planet we must consider seven Rounds. The passing through a Round may also be called a Kingdom, and the Fourth Round on the Earth we call the Mineral Kingdom. We are now on the Fourth Planet, in the Fourth Round and within this Round in the Fourth Condition of Form or Globe. The Fourth Round is always physical.

Thus we stand exactly in the middle of our Earthly evolution. This is frequently felt to be something extraordinarily important for man. We have behind us three Planets, three Rounds, three Globes and the same number still lie before us. But if we were standing on the Old Moon, we should see yet another Planetary condition before Saturn; if we were standing on future Jupiter we should no longer see Saturn, but in its place a Planet beyond Vulcan. The exact middle of our present evolution was with the Fourth Sub-Race of the Fourth Root-Race, with the original Turanians, the Fourth Atlantean Sub-Race.

A kind of spiritual darkness came about at a certain moment of evolution. Humanity entered into a dark age. This dark age is called Kali Yuga. What man knows today he still knows from the standpoint that was his in earlier epochs of his development. At the end of the Fifth Round mankind will once again be able to see spiritually, having the capacity of looking both backwards and forwards.

The Fourth Earth Round began with the emergence of the first Arupa Earth Globe from the darkness of Pralaya, in which everything had been dissolved. Then all that exists on the Earth today was present in a formless state as thoughts. We can gain a right concept of this when we limit ourselves as far as possible to what is physical and imagine this as thought seeds. The forms were not yet present, but only the thoughts preceding their manifestation. If we ask: Who then had these thoughts, we receive as answer: These were the thoughts of spiritual beings who are in connection with the Earth. Such spiritual beings as, for example, Jehovah and his hosts, who accomplished everything around us on the earth. At that time all thoughts were present as thoughts of the spiritual beings in the Arupa-Globe.

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What was it then that caused the Gods to have as their aim just this thought of man? What was it that gave them the model? It was the Monads which were already present, but not yet connected with human beings. Slowly men developed as thoughts of the Gods.

Now the Arupa-Sphere densified; everything emerged as thought-forms. The whole Earth was filled with these; it was as though one were looking into a great model filled [with] small crystals. Present within it as models were all the forms of human beings, animals and plants. Spiritual beings worked on these as a master builder works on his models. They were put together from outside. The whole then passes over into astral substance. The astral Earth-Globe came into being. In between there were short Pralayas. Now again we have to do with the outwardly-working divine powers who poured forth the astral substance, filling the forms with light and colour. Here are to be found all the astral forms of human beings and animals, as well as the whole plant kingdom, in a great astral sea. This then densified ever more and more and the physical Earth arose as the Fourth Globe.

Until then, until the beginning of the Fourth Round, Sun and Moon were still united with the Earth; they formed one body with the Earth. During the great Pralaya preceding the First Earth Round, they had again merged with the Earth; and during the first three Earth Rounds the three remained together. There then arose a kind of biscuit form. In the Third Earth Round, out of the Earth-Sun-Ball, on one side the Earth protruded like a swelling, on the other side the Moon. At that time the main body actually trailed around with it two such sacks. Only in the Fourth Earth Round did the body regain its spherical form; then however there again arose the sack-like formations in the ether, protruding from both sides.

Thus here we have to do with an Earth that is still united with the Sun and also with the Moon. At that time most life was in the region between the Moon and the Earth. This has been correctly preserved in the Mohammedan Paradise saga.

Now the following occurred. When the Second Root-Race of the Fourth Earth Round approached, the Sun separated itself off, and in the Third Root-Race the Moon did so also. Everything evolved physically which previously had only been present on the astral Globe. Now too man appeared physically, but organised in such a way that he could take the Monad into his progressively purified astral body. Had man taken the Monad into himself earlier, he would have received with it Manas, Buddhi and Atma. He would have become very wise, but the wisdom would have been a kind of dream wisdom.

At first man had no power over the physical body and the etheric body. He could also do nothing about the lower passions coming over to him from the Moon; these appeared of necessity until the time when he entered upon the Earth epoch. If man had simply taken up the Monads into the ennobled animality he could not have fallen into error. He would have become what Jehovah had intended, endowed that is to say with all wisdom, but at the same time formed into a living statue. Then those beings intervened, who on the Moon had developed more quickly than in the ordinary course of Moon evolution. Lucifer is a power who has enthusiasm for wisdom which is as intense as the sense life of animals. He is equipped with all those things that come over from the Moon. If Lucifer alone had taken responsibility for evolution a battle would have arisen between him and the old Gods.

Jehovah's aim was the perfection of form. Lucifer would have been able to develop in astral substance his passion for premature spirituality. The result would have been a violent battle between the Jehovah-spirits and the hosts of Lucifer. There was the danger that through Jehovah some human beings would become living statues and that others would be too quickly spiritualised through Lucifer. Means of bringing about equilibrium would have to be obtained elsewhere. In order to annul the battle between Jehovah and Lucifer, the White Lodge, which was just in its beginning, had to obtain material from one of the other planets. This differed essentially from the astral substance that had come over from the Moon, from the astral-kamic animal substance. The possibility arose of leading over substance from other planets: new passions, less vehement but conceived on the basis of independence. The new material was brought over from Mars.⁶⁹ Thus in the first half of our Earth evolution astral substance from Mars was introduced. A great advance was brought about through the introduction of this astral substance from Mars.

External civilisation on the Earth arose through the fact that hardening on the one side and spiritualisation on the other side were prevented. Lucifer made use of what had been given by the Mars forces. The new state of the Earth was given the name of Mars. Things continued in this way until the middle of the Atlantean Race. Then a new question arose. Man had absorbed wisdom, but in the future it would not be possible for wisdom alone to manifest in a form-creating way. One would have been able to build up the mineral kingdom through Lucifer, but Lucifer could not have given it life. Man could never have imparted life under the influence of the other powers. This was why a Sun God had to come, a higher being than Lucifer. There still existed what are known as the Solar Pitris. The most exalted among these is Christ. As Lucifer represents the Manas element, so the Buddhi element is represented by Christ.

The human astral bodies had still to receive a third impact. This was brought down from Mercury. Christ united his sovereignty with that of Lucifer. If one has the will to ascend the heights in order to find the way to the Gods one needs Mercury, the Divine Messenger. He is the one who prepared the path of Christ from the middle of the Atlantean Root-Race onwards in order later to enter into the astral bodies, which had received the mercurial element.

All our present metals have only gradually become what they are now. Gold, silver, platinum and so on all pass through certain conditions. When they are heated they become first hot, then liquid, then gaseous. This latter was once the condition of all metals in the gaseous Earth. Gold too first densified with the Earth: at one time it was entirely etheric gold. When we go back to the time when the Earth was still united with the Sun, there was as yet within it no solid gold. The particles of the white Sun-Ether became first fluid and then solid. These are the veins of gold which are now in the Earth. Gold is solidified sunlight. Silver is solidified moonlight. All mineral substances have gradually solidified. When human beings become ever more spiritualised, quicksilver will also become solid. At one time gold and silver formed drops just as water does now. The fact that mercury is still fluid is connected with the whole process of Earth evolution. It will become solid when the God Mercury has fulfilled his mission. In the middle of the Atlantean Root-Race quicksilver was brought down from Mercury in etheric form. Had we not had quicksilver we should not have had the Christ-Principle. In the drops of quicksilver we have to see what was incorporated in the Earth in the middle of the Atlantean epoch.

When the Mars Principle (Kama-Manas) was incorporated into the Earth, iron was brought down to the Earth from Mars. Iron originates in Mars. It was at first in astral form and later densified. When we trace the Earth to that period of time we find ever fewer warm-blooded animals. It was only in the middle of the Lemurian Age that warm blood made its appearance together with the Mars impulse. Iron came into the blood at that time. It is iron that in all occult writings is brought into connection with Mars, quicksilver with Buddhi-Mercury. Certain people learned this from the Adepts. The Earth was therefore understood as Mars and Mercury. Everything that did not originate from Mars and Mercury has come over from the Moon.

The days of the week are an image of planetary evolution. The sequence of the planets is inscribed in a wonderful way in the days of the week.

In the saying that Christ trod on and crushed the head of the serpent⁷⁰ we find a profound expression of esotericism. The serpent's head is mere wisdom; this must be overcome. True wisdom lies in the heart; this is why the serpent's head must be trodden underfoot. In the Hercules-Saga⁷¹ the same truth has already been expressed. He kills the Lernaean Hydra, whose head always grows anew. Mere Manas will always come again. Hercules must keep the blood at a distance (Kama), then the Hydra will be conquered. Blood came into the Earth with the Mars-Wisdom (Kama-Manas).

Deep meaning lies in many other things. The separation of the Moon preceded the Mars-Age. The Moon contains silver. Still earlier took place the separation of the Sun. Gold is condensed sunlight, hence the Golden Age; Moonlight and silver: the Silver Age; Mars and iron: the Bronze Age.⁷²

We are now in the middle, in the Fourth Globe. On the Fifth Globe there will arise the faculty of organising oneself from within outwards. Then the Earth will be transformed into a sphere on which man will create his form from within outwards. The Earth will then be a “Plastic” Globe. The Sixth Globe is the one on which the human being not only works plastically on his form, but will be able to place his own thoughts into the form. On the Fifth Globe man will be able, for instance, to form a hand; on the Sixth Globe he will be able to send his thoughts out into the surrounding world. On the Seventh Globe everything will again become formless. Everything will pass over once more into the seed condition.

We will now consider our present Ego. There are within it a multitude of mental images and concepts. When we observe the civilised world today we say: It is out of the Ego that the civilised world has arisen. All this was once within a human head; it was contained within the ego. From out of all this it was put together. All the things constructed by human skill have been born out of the Ego. In the middle of the Lemurian Age the Ego was still empty; man could as yet do nothing. Only gradually did he learn in the most primitive way to know the world from outside. His Ego was at that time like a hollow soap-bubble. When he saw a stone, it was reflected into him; perhaps he saw a sharp edge on it and with it he began to chip other stones. In this way he started to work formatively on the mineral world. What was in his surroundings reflected itself more and more into what was at first his empty Ego. At the end of the physical Globe everything will be present as reflected image in our Ego. When at last we have all this within us we will form it from within outwards. This will be the “plastic” condition on the next Globe. The master-builder of Cologne cathedral gathered his impressions into his ego. This content of his Ego will be vivified by Buddhi and later, on the Fifth Globe he will give all this form. On the Sixth Globe all this will be present as thought and on the Seventh Globe everything will be drawn together into the atom. In the next Round man will create the new plant kingdom out of the Ego.

In the middle of the Lemurian Age the Ego was like a hole bored into matter. All our Egos were at that time such holes in matter which since then we have filled up. In the next Round their content will issue in plant form, for in this Fifth Round there will take place with the plant kingdom what is now taking place with the mineral kingdom. The whole Earth will then be an immense, single living Being. Man will have achieved a conscious life of feeling and perception, and will then give it form outside himself. In the Sixth Round there will no longer be a plant kingdom; man will then allow living thoughts filled with feeling and perception to go out from himself as pure intellectual formations. In this Sixth Round on the Sixth Globe, in its Sixth Stage of development, corresponding to the Sixth Race, an important decision will be taken. Everything will have reached the Devachanic condition that has been able to develop out of all the kingdoms. If anyone has not progressed to the point that he can be raised to the stage of Devachan, he will remain in the animal state. This will take place according to the number 666, the number of the Beast.

In the Seventh Round humanity will be completely purified. The human kingdom will then attain its zenith. This Round is the quickest. The human being, when he emerges from it, will have become a God and will carry his development over to Jupiter.

In every Round the first Globe, or condition of form, is of such a nature that in fact we have not yet to do with a form, but the form is only present as incipient plan. This is why esotericism does not reckon the Arupa-Globe among the conditions of form, but with the conditions of life; this is the case also with the Seventh Globe, the Archetypal. Thus we have only five conditions of form. The first and the last Globes of each Round are conditions of life. All the conditions of the Rounds are also called conditions of life, because passing through a Kingdom represents a condition of life.

In the First Round life was in the First Elementary Kingdom, in the Second Round in the Second Elementary Kingdom, in the Third Round in the Third Elementary Kingdom, in the Fourth Round in the Mineral Kingdom. In the Fifth Round life will be in the Plant Kingdom, in the Sixth Round life will be in the Animal Kingdom and in the Seventh Round life will be in the Human Kingdom.

When one considers life in the Human Kingdom in the Seventh Round, this sheds its light into the next Round when man will have passed over into another condition of consciousness. The purpose of a Round consists in achieving a new stage of life. The purpose of the Seventh Round is to lead over into a new stage of consciousness. Thus the esotericist only reckons six conditions of life, counting the Seventh Round as a new condition of consciousness.

If we wish to write down in numbers the conditions of life, form and consciousness we get five Globes or conditions of form, six Rounds or conditions of life, ten Planets or conditions of consciousness. If we count the whole evolution from Saturn to Vulcan, we have expressed what we find with Helena Petrovna Blavatsky as the number of the Prajapatis 1065, that is to say, 10 – 6 – 5.

• 69. See further in lecture 15.2.1908 in The Influence of Spiritual Beings upon Man.
• 70. Luke Chapter 10 verse 19.
• 71. See lecture 7.10.1904 in Greek and Germanic Mythology
• 72. The Golden Age – Krita Yuga = about 20,000 years
  The Silver Age – Treta Yuga = about 15,000 years
  The Bronze Age – Dvapara Yuga = about 10,000 years
  The Dark Age – Kali Yuga = about 5,000 years
  Our Age comprises a future 2,500 years
  Compare with the lectures The True Nature of the Second Coming 1910.

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 ...

...

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 ...

...

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 ...

...

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 ...

...

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.

Dear friends, once again let us first of all remember those are out there at the front, in the great arena of present-day events:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

And for those who because of those events have already gone through the gate of death:

Spirits of your souls, guardian guides,
On your wings let there be borne
The prayer of love from our souls
To those whom you guard here on earth.
Thus, united with your might,
A ray of help our prayer shall be
For the souls it seeks out there in love.

May the spirit we are seeking as we work towards spiritual knowledge, the spirit who has gone through the Mystery of Golgotha for the good of the earth, for the freedom and progress of man, be with you and the hard duties you have to perform!

Last week we gave some detailed consideration to souls who, if we want to look for them now, have to be looked for in the spiritual worlds. And we considered souls who are close to us, letting them tell us one thing or another that can illumine for us the time a soul entity spends in the spiritual world. Today I want to consider more the path the human soul may take to enter into the spiritual worlds While dwelling in a body here on earth, there to find the spiritual realms we spoke of last week, where what are called ‘dead’ souls may be found. It has to be stressed over and over again that the path into the spiritual worlds appropriate to the soul of modern man in the light of the whole evolution of mankind is a path with many preparatory stages, some of them difficult indeed, stages that have to be won through. Today I intend to speak of some aspects of the path to insight and I shall do so from a point of view that may be called imaginative perception.

Dear friends, you know very well already that in the spiritual world the human soul is really and truly able to learn and observe only in a Way that does not make use of the body as an instrument. Everything We are able to gain by using the body as our instrument can only provide knowledge and experience relating to the physical world. To experience the spiritual worlds we must find a way of doing so outside the physical body. That way is indeed open to modern man, though it is not easy to achieve observation of the spiritual world by going outside the body. Another point is that anyone not able to make such observations himself will be able to evaluate observations achieved in the spiritual world, once they have been achieved, on the basis of a genuinely sound common sense, that is not just the common sense generally called sound, but a genuinely sound common sense. Today, however, our subject will be the path as such, the way the human soul on the one hand comes out of the physical body, as we might put it, and on the other enters into the spiritual world. As I said, I want to use the approach of imaginative perception today. Last week we took another approach. Many things will have to be presented in the form of images and it will be up to you to pursue these further In meditation. In doing so you will find that this path is one of very special significance.

It is possible to enter into the spiritual world through three doors, as it were. The first may be called the Door of Death, the second the Door of the Elements and the third the Door of the Sun. Anyone Wishing to follow the path to knowledge in its entirety will have to take the road to knowledge through all three doors.

The Door of Death has always been very fully considered wherever the mysteries were taught. This Door of Death cannot be reached unless we seek to reach it through meditation, a term by now thoroughly familiar, which means by giving ourselves up to certain thoughts or feelings that are exactly the right ones at the time for our individual personality. We make them the absolute centre of our conscious minds, identifying with them completely. It is very easy for human effort to flag when this path is taken, for lack of ease and the overcoming of obstacles are part of this and are essential. So it will be necessary again and again to make those quiet, deeply personal efforts, endeavouring to give ourselves up to those thought contents, those feelings, in such a way that we forget the whole world and live only in those thoughts, those feelings. When we learn to achieve this over and over again we shall finally be in a position where we perceive something that is like a kind of independent life within the thought on which our conscious mind is focused. We shall get the feeling that until then we had merely been thinking that thought, making it the focus of our conscious mind; now, however, this thought will be felt to be developing a life of its own, an inner activity of its own. It is as though we found ourselves in a position where we are truly able to produce a distinct entity within us. The thought begins to take shape as an inner structure. That is an important moment, for we realize that this thought, this feeling, has a life of its own and we feel ourselves to be the enveloping form holding this thought, this feeling. We are then able to say to ourselves that our efforts have made us the arena where something has been able to develop that is now achieving a life of its own through us.

It is an important moment in the life of a person practising meditation when he awakens to himself and the thought held in meditation comes to life. He will then realize that spiritual objectivity has come to him, that the spiritual world is paying attention to him, that it has drawn close. Of course, it is not easy to reach this level of experience, for before it is reached we have to live through feelings and sensations for which the human being has a natural aversion. A certain feeling of isolation has to be experienced for example; a feeling of loneliness, an experience of being abandoned by the physical world as it were, the feeling that this physical world does many things that wear us down, threatening to crush us. It is through this feeling of isolation that we finally reach the point where we are able to bear the strong inner life to which our thought awakens, into which it is born, as I should like to put it. There is much indeed that goes against the grain. There is much in man that goes against him and this can lead to a real experience of thought coming to life within him. There is One particular feeling that comes up, an inner experience that comes up, which is one we really do not want to have. At the same time we will not admit to ourselves that we do not want to have it, saying instead: ‘Oh, I'll never do it! I'll go to sleep in the process. My ability to think will go, for this goes beyond my inner strength.’ In short, We will automatically come up with all kinds of excuses, for the experience to be gone through is that thought, in thus becoming enlivened, really becomes a distinct entity. It assumes reality, taking on a form of identity. Then the vision arises, and not merely the feeling, that the thought is like a small seed to begin with, a round seed one might say, and that it then grows and develops into something that has definite form, extending into the head from outside. Then a challenge is presented: ‘You have identified with the thought and now you are inside the thought and growing into your own head with the thought. Essentially, however, you are still outside.’ The thought assumes the form of a winged human head that continues into indefiniteness and then extends into one's own body through the head. The thought thus develops into something like a winged angel's head. That is what we must actually achieve. It is difficult to have this experience, and you will really believe you are losing all ability to think at the moment when the thought grows to assume that form. One feels one will be taken from oneself at that moment. And what so far has been the body we have known, into which the thought is now reaching, will feel like an automaton that has been left behind.

There are also a great many obstacles in the objective spiritual world to prevent this becoming visible to us. The winged angel's head truly becomes an inner vision but there are all kinds of obstacles against it becoming visible. Above all, the point reached is the actual threshold of the spiritual world. If we succeed in standing firm within ourselves the way I have described, we are then on the threshold of the spiritual world, truly on the threshold of the spiritual world. There, however,

stands the potentate we have always been calling Ahriman, though at first he will be quite invisible to man. We do not see him. And it is Ahriman who makes sure we do not see the thought entity taking the form I have described to you. He does not want us to see it. He wants to prevent that. The best way of reaching that point is by the path of meditation, of course, and this always makes it easy for Ahriman to bring to nought, as it were, what we want to achieve, so long as we cling to the prejudices of the physical world. And I really has to be said that people have no idea how much they cling to prejudice with regard to the physical world. They cannot imagine that there is another world with different laws from those of the physical world. It is not possible for me today to discuss all the prejudices we carry with us when we come to the threshold of the spiritual world, but let me present one very major prejudice, one of a fairly subtle nature.

You see, speaking of the physical world people speak of monist philosophy, of there being only one ultimate substance or principle, frequently saying to themselves: ‘I can only understand the world if I see the whole of it as a unity.’ We have had some strange experiences particularly in this respect. When we started our spiritual movement here in Berlin with just a few members—that is quite a few years ago now—people found their way to us who then discovered that after all they could not feel they belonged to us in every fibre of their being. There was a lady, for instance, who after a few months came and told us that what spiritual science had to offer was not really the right thing for her, for it meant one had to do a great deal of thinking and thinking wiped out exactly the things that were important to her. She said she always sort of went to sleep when thinking. She also felt that really there was only thing that counted, and that was unity! It became evident that in her case the unity of the world which monists look for in all kinds of spheres—and not only the materialists among monists—had become a fixed idea: Unity, unity, unity! She wanted to look only for unity. In the intellectual life of Germany, one particular philosopher, Leibniz, was very much a monadologist. He sought not unity, but the many monads⁴⁵ which for him were ensouled entities. He therefore knew quite clearly that as soon as one enters into the spiritual world it can be a matter only of plurality, not of unity. And so there are monists and pluralists. These views are considered philosophies. The monists fight the pluralists who are speaking in terms of plurality; they themselves only speak of unity.

For you see, it is like this: Unity and plurality are concepts that only apply to the physical world. And now people are thinking these things must also apply to the spiritual world. But there they do not apply. There we have to be prepared to see a unity at one moment and then having to overcome this unity the next moment, and that it will show itself to to be a plurality. It is unity and plurality at one and the same time. Nor is it possible to transfer ordinary arithmetic, physical mathematics, to the spiritual world. It is one of the most powerful, and at the same time also most profound, Ahrimanic Prejudices—wanting to apply concepts we have acquired in the physical world just as they are to the spiritual world. We really must arrive on its threshold without bag and baggage, unencumbered with all we have learned in the physical world. We have to be prepared to leave things behind on the threshold. All concepts and ideas, and, indeed, especially the concepts we have made great effort to achieve, have to be left behind. We have to be prepared to accept that in the spiritual world something quite new is given. Man has an enormous tendency to cling to what is given in the physical world. He wants to take his achievements from the physical world into the spiritual world. Yet it must be possible for him to face a clean slate, face utter emptiness, where his only guide will be the thought that is beginning to assume life. This entry into the spiritual world has been called the Door of Death because it is really much more of a death even than Physical death. In physical death people are convinced they put aside their physical body. On entry into the spiritual world we must resolve really to put aside our concepts and ideas and to allow our essential nature to be rebuilt.

Now we come to stand before the winged thought entity that I have spoken of. We shall come to stand before it if we really make every effort to live within a thought. All we need to know then is that when the moment that lies ahead makes-different demands on us from those we have envisaged we must truly stand fast, we must not turn back as it were. The turning back tends to be an unconscious reaction. We flag, but our flagging merely indicates that we are not willing to leave behind bag and baggage. We are not prepared to do this because it means that the soul has to die in a way, with all it has acquired on the physical plane, before it can enter into the spiritual world. This door therefore has to be called the Door of Death, such being its nature. Then we shall be able to use the winged thought as a spiritual eye we have acquired, or also a spiritual ear, for it is exactly through this thought entity that we hear, sense, perceive what is there in the spiritual world.

Dear friends, it is possible to speak of specific experiences we may gain that allow us the enter into the spiritual world. Nothing else is required if we wish to gain these experiences but to persist in meditation using the prescribed method. Above all, it must be clearly understood that certain feelings with which we approach the threshold of the spiritual world will have to be put aside beforehand. These feelings arise because we usually want the spiritual world to be different from the way it presents itself to us.

This, then, is the first door, the Door of Death.

The second door is the Door of the Elements. It is the second door to be gone through by all who practise meditation with true devotion. It is, of course, also possible for people to have the benefit of a constitution that lets them reach the second door without having gone through the first. This is not a good thing from the point of view of true insight, but it is possible to get to that point without having gone through the first door. Full and proper insight will be gained only by going through the first door and then approaching the second in conscious awareness. This second door comes about in the following way. You see, having gone through the Door of Death one first of all finds oneself in specific conditions which one can see are really similar to sleep if looked at externally, considering their effect en man and the way they are apparent in the life of man. Inwardly, however, they are quite different. Externally, man is as though in a sleep state when in these conditions. It is exactly at the point when his thought has begun to live, when it begins to stir, to grow, that external man is in a sleep-like state. He need not be lying down—he may be sitting on a chair—but he is in a kind of sleep state. Outwardly this state cannot really be distinguished from the ordinary sleep state; inwardly, however, it is very different. Returning to the normal state we have in life we then realize that we were not asleep but within the life of thought, just as we are now in a condition where we have woken to the physical world, as usual, and are looking through our own eyes at things which are luminous. Yet we also know that now when we are awake we are thinking, producing thoughts, putting them together. Just before, however, when we were in that other state, the thoughts were producing themselves out of themselves. One thought approached another; they illumined one another; one thought moved away from another—and what we usually do ourselves when thinking has there been doing itself. We know that whilst we are normally an ego that attaches one thought to another, we float first to the one thought and then to another, when in this other state we are united with them; then we are off and within a third thought and afterwards Come floating back again. We get the feeling that space has ceased to exist.

I think you will agree that in physical space the position is that if we feel drawn to a point and look back on it, then move away from it and finally want to approach it again, we would first have to make our way back again; we would have to make our way there and back. This does not apply in the other state. Space is not like the space we know then, and we jump through space, as it were. One moment we are at one point, the next we have gone. We do not pass through space. The laws of space have ceased to exist. Here we are alive and active within thought itself. We know that the ego has not died. It is active within the life of thought, but we are not immediately masters of the thoughts within which we now live. The thoughts produce themselves—we are drawn along. We are not actively swimming in the currents of thoughts; instead the thoughts are taking us on their shoulders as it were, carrying us along. This state has to come to an end. It does so when we go through the Door of the Elements. Then We gain control of it all and are able to create a particular line of thought quite deliberately. Then our will is alive within the whole of thought life. This again is a tremendously important moment. I have even spoken of it exoterically in my public lectures.⁴⁶ The second goal is reached by identifying with our own destiny. This will enable us to bring the will into the world of living thought.

When we have first gone through the Door of Death we come to a point where various things are done with us in the spiritual world. We come to do things ourselves in the spiritual world by identifYing with our destiny. This is only achieved gradually. Then our thoughts assume a character identical with our own essential character- The deeds of our essential nature enter into the spiritual world. To do this properly it will be necessary to go through the second door. when we begin to use the power we derive from identifying with our destiny to take active control in our thoughts—not merely going along With a thought as though it were a dream picture but able to erase one thought or another as occasion arises and call up another—when we come to a point where we begin to be able to use our will in handling things, then we shall indeed have to go through an experience that may be referred to as going through the second door. It will be found that the will-power we shall now require presents itself to us as a fearsome beast. In the mystical tradition this has for many thousands of years been known as 'meeting the lion' . This encounter with the lion has to be gone through. It consists in a feeling of abject terror concerning what has to be done in the thought world, great fear of entering into a living union with the thought world. This terror must be overcome, just as the sense of isolation has to be overcome at the gate of death. We feel terror. This terror may present itself in all kinds i of ways, as a sensation that is not at all like fear or terror, yet it s essentially fear of what one is getting into there. It is important that we genuinely find a way of controlling the lion. The Imagination paints a very vivid picture of the beast opening its huge jaws ready to devour us. The will-power we want to use in the spiritual world is threatening to devour us. All the time the overriding sensation is that we must use our will, we must do something, we need to take hold of one thing or another, and at the same time another feeling arises in connection with all these elements of will activity into which we are entering. It is the feeling that they will devour us if we take hold of them, extinguish us in the world. That is the lion devouring us. What we literally must do—if we are to stay with the metaphor—is not to give in to fears that the will elements may take hold of us there in the spiritual world, devour us and strangle us; no, we must mount the lion and take hold of those will elements, using them to effect our deeds. That is the crux of the matter.

Your can see, of course, what this is all about. Having first of all gone through the gate of death we are then outside the body, and out there we can only use the forces of the wilt. We must fit into the cosmic harmonies. The forces to be used out there are also within us, it is only that they function at an unconscious level—the forces that make the blood move, make our hearts beat, derive from spiritual entities. And we become immersed in these when we immerse ourselves in the element of will. These forces are within us. If someone is taken hold of by the element of will without having followed the regular esoteric path, without having gone through the gate of death, he is taken hold of by the forces that normally circulate in his blood, beat to his heart. He is then not using the forces that exist outside his body but the forces present within his body. This would be ‘grey magic’. It would induce a person to intervene in the spiritual world of his Own accord with forces we should not use to intervene in the spiritual world. So it is important that we see the lion at this point, that we truly have this beast before us and know: That is what it looks like, that is how the forces of will want to take hold of us, and we must lay hold of it out there outside the body. If we do not go up to the second door we shall not see the lion and shall then be in permanent danger of wanting to rule the world out of human egotism. The right Path to knowledge is the one that leads first of all out of the physical body and existence as a human being, after which we approach the relationship we will need to form with the entities of the spiritual world.

Now, of course, most people are inclined to look for an easier way to the spiritual world than through genuine meditation. It is possible, for instance, to avoid the Door of Death and approach the second door if one's inner constitution permits this. This is achieved by giving oneself up to specific mental pictures, particularly of the fervent type, that are supposed to suggest general surrender to the whole universe. Mental pictures suggested by some mystic or other with only partial knowledge, suggested in good faith. But they mean we pass over thought effort as though in a dream, with feelings being stimulated directly. Feeling are whipped up, the emotions are enthusiastified. It will indeed be possible to reach the second door by this method, and one will also be given over to the will forces, but instead of controlling the lion the person is devoured by it and the lion will do as it likes with him. This means that things will occur that fundamentally speaking are occult, but in the main are egotistical. Despite a certain inherent risk it is therefore necessary from the point of view of the true esoteric teaching of today again and again not to draw attention to any kind of mysticism that merely whips up feelings and emotions. Such an appeal to elements that whip up the inner life of man, cracking the whip to drive him out of his physical body whilst keeping him in the context of his blood and heart forces, the physical forces active in the blood and the heart, will lead him to perceive the spiritual world iii a way; this cannot be denied and may indeed have much to be said for it that is good. But it makes man feel his way about in uncertainty in the spiritual world, so that he is not the least able to differentiate between egotism and altruism.

One finds oneself in a difficult situation having to stress this, for present-day minds are still very apt to got to sleep during proper meditation and anything relating to it. They prefer not to tighten uP their thinking to the point where it is possible to identify oneself with the thinking process. They much prefer to be told: Give yourself up to all-loving devotion, to the universal spirit, or something like that. The result is that thinking is avoided and the emotions are whipped up. People are indeed guided to spiritual perception in that way; but they are not in full conscious awareness and are unable to tell if the things they experience there, things they experience for themselves, arise from egotism or do not arise from egotism. Yes, parallel to selfless meditation there has to be enthusiasm brought into all our feelings, but the point is that this must run parallel to thought. Thought must not be excluded. Certain mystics are, however, seeking to achieve something exactly by the method of suppressing thought and giving themselves up entirely to the glow of whipped-up emotions.

This is a difficult point, for it does work and people who whip UP their feelings like that do progress much faster. They do enter the spiritual world and they have all kinds of experiences there, and that is what most people want. For most people it is not a question of entering the spiritual world in the right way but rather of getting there altogether. The uncertainty arises because if we do not first go through the Door of Death and instead approach the Door of the Elements directly, Lucifer will prevent us from actually perceiving the lion. We are then devoured by it before we see it, as it were. The problem is that we are no longer able to tell what relates to us and what is Part of the world out there. We come to know spiritual entities, elemental spirits. It is possible to get to know quite an extensive spiritual world without going through the Door of Death, but on the whole these are spiritual entities whose function it is to maintain the human circulation and human heart action. Such entities are of course always present in the spiritual, the elemental, world around us. These are spirits whose sphere of life is the air, the warmth flowing around us, and also light.

Their sphere of life also lies in the music of the spheres our physical organs are unable to hear. They are spiritual entities active and present in all that lives. That is the world we would then enter. It all gets very seductive because it really is possible to make the most marvellous spiritual discoveries in this world. You know, when someone who has not gone through the Door of Death but has marched straight up to the lion gate, failing to see the lion, perceives an elemental spirit whose function it is to maintain heart activity, such an elemental spirit—which also has to maintain the hearts of other people—may on occasion give news of other people, even of people from the past; or it may offer prophetic tidings relating to the future. So the business may bring great successes but it still is not the right path, for it does not give us free mobility in the spiritual world.

The third door to be passed is the Door of Sun. Again there will be a specific experience as we approach this door. At the Door of Death we must perceive a winged angel's head, at the Door of the Elements a lion. At the Door of the Sun we must perceive a dragon, a wild dragon. And we must take a proper look at this wild dragon. But now Lucifer and Ahriman will together make every effort to make the dragon invisible, to hide it from our spiritual vision. If we do perceive it we shall find that, fundamentally speaking, this wild dragon has above all to do with ourselves. It is the tissue of the instincts and feelings fundamentally relating to what in ordinary life we call our lowest nature. The dragon has within it all the forces we need for the process of digestion and many other things—if you'll forgive my reference to such base functions. The principle within us that enables us to digest food and perform a number of other functions linked to what strictly speaking is our lowest nature appears to us in the t-07. of a dragon. We must look at it as it emerges from us coil upon coil. It is far from beautiful, that dragon, and this makes it easy for Lucifer and Ahriman to influence our unconscious soul life and get us to a point where unconsciously we do not want to know about seeing the dragon. It is a tissue also of all our idiocies, all our vanities, our pride and self-seeking and also of our basest instincts.

The Door of the Sun is given that name because it is the forces dwelling in the sun that also weave the very tissue of which the dragon is composed. Sun forces make it possible for us to digest our food and perform those other organic functions. This truly comes about through living with the sun. If we do not perceive the dragon at the Door of the Sun the dragon will devour us and we shall become one with it in the spiritual world. We shall then no longer be different from the dragon; we shall actually be the dragon going through experiences in the spiritual world. And the dragon can experience things of great significance, it can learn magnificent things as it were. Those are experiences more enticing, I'd say, then those made at the Door of Death or after passing the Door of Death. The experiences made at the Door of Death are colourless to begin with, shadowy and subtle, so slight and subtle that they easily escape us and we are not much inclined to develop the degree of attention needed to take hold of them. And again a certain pitch must be reached in order that something so delicately coming to life in our thought may be able to expand. In the end it will expand into a world. But it calls for long term active effort and endeavour to reach the point where it shows itself as a reality full of colour, sound and life. We must let those forms that are without sound or colour take on life from all corners of infinity, as it were.

If for example we want to use what may be called ‘head clairvoyance’—meaning the type of clairvoyance that arises when thought is enlivened—to detect the simplest spirit of the air or of water, this spirit of the air or the water will initially be something so slight and shadowy as it flits across the horizon that it will not catch our interest. If it is to assume colour or to sound forth, colour has to come to it from the whole periphery of the cosmos. That however will only happen after a long period of inner effort. It will only happen if we watt for this to be given to us. Just think, if you have such a small spirit of the air, metaphorically speaking. and it is to come out in colour, to appear in colour, then the colour has to radiate in from a mighty part of the cosmos. It will be necessary to have the strength to make it radiate in. Such strength however can only be achieved through devotion. The radiant forces have to come in from out there through devotion. If we are all of a kind with the dragon, if we are One with it, and we see a spirit of the air or the water, the inclination will be to let the powers radiate out that are within us, specifically in the organs which in ordinary life are called lower organs. That Is much more easily done. The head is in itself a perfect organ, but the astral body and the ether body of the head do not have much colour to them. The colours have been used to form the brain, for instance, and particularly the cranium, the bony skull cap. If therefore you used head clairvoyance on the threshold of the spiritual world to lift your astral body and ether body out of the physical body, there would not be much colour to it. Colours are used to form the perfect organ, the brain. If on the other hand you use, shall we say belly clairvoyance, to lift the astral body and ether body out of the stomach. the liver, the gallbladder and other organs, the colours have not been used in the same way to form perfect organs. These organs are only on the way to perfection. What comes from the astral body and ether body of the belly is beautifully coloured; it glitters and glistens in all kinds of sun colours. Lifting your astral body and ether body out of that region you will bestow the most marvellous colours and hues upon the forms you are seeing. It is therefore possible for someone to see marvellous colours and paint pictures in gorgeous colours.

It is of course interesting to study the spleen, the liver and the gut. Anatomists find this interesting and for science it is indeed necessary. Yet if someone with knowledge goes into this, the beautiful and colourful pictures which appear represent what lies at the back of the digestive process two hours after a meal. There can be no objection to this being investigated. Today anatomists find it necessary to study these organs; one day science will gain a great deal from investigating them and knowing what the ether body is doing when the stomach is digesting food. One thing has to be clearly understood however—if we do not have conscious awareness as we go through the Door of the Sun, we will not know that we are offloading everything mere is in the ether and astral bodies of our bellies onto the dragon, separating it out. Letting this radiate out into the forms seen clairvoyantly we do indeed perceive a marvellous world. The beautiful result is also the one most easily achieved, but it does not in the first place arise through higher powers, out of head clairvoyance' but through belly clairvoyance. It is very important that we know this. For the cosmos nothing is low in the absolute sense, only relatively speaking. The cosmos needs to work with tremendously significant forces to bring about what is needed for the digestive system. The point, however, is that we must not fall into error, not deceive ourselves, but know things as they are. To know that something presenting itself from a truly marvellous aspect is nothing but the digestive process, that is something really important. If on the other hand we believe, say, that a special angelic sphere is revealing itself to us in such a picture, then we are indeed in error. A reasonable man will therefore not be against a science being nurtured on the basis of such knowledge but merely against such things being put in a false light. That is the real point. It may happen, for instance, that some process in the course of digestion results in someone always lifting out a specific part of his ether body at a specific stage in the digestive process; he may then be a natural clairvoyant. It is however important to know what is going on there.

Man will find it difficult therefore to use head clairvoyance—i.e. a sphere where all colour present in the ether and astral bodies has been used to bring about the marvellous structure of the brain—and make forms that are without colour or sound assume full colour and to resound. With ‘belly clairvoyance’ on the other hand he will find it relatively easy to see the most marvellous things in the world. This belly clairvoyance does of course also involve powers which man must learn to use. The powers used there for the digestive process are after all merely transformed power. We will experience them in their right form if we get better and better at identifying with our destiny. In this field, too, it will teach us to draw up not just the winged angel s head that came up first but the other part that follows, and it is important to draw up not just the powers that serve digestion but also those of a higher kind. Those are the powers that lie in our karma, in our destiny. Identifying ourselves with these we shall be able to send forth the spiritual entities we see around us, entities whose tendency is such that sounds and colours flow inward from the universe. Then, of course, the spiritual world will have its full content, it will be concrete, so real and concrete that we find ourselves within it the same way we find ourselves in the physical world.

A particular problem arises at the Door of Death. We really have the feeling—and this, too, has to be overcome—that we will lose ourselves there. Having made a real effort, however, to identify with the thought element we can also be aware that we may have lost ourselves but will find ourselves again. That is an experience one has there. We lose ourselves on entering into the spiritual world, but we also know that we shall find ourselves again. The step has to taken of reaching the abyss, losing ourselves in the abyss, but trust that we shall find ourselves again over there. That is an experience to be gone through. Everything I have described refers to inner experiences that have to be gone through. It is important to know what really happens to the soul there. It is just the same when we are supposed to see something; it is easier if a friend points it out than if we try and work it out for ourselves. But everything I have described can be achieved if you practise true devotion in giving yourself up again and again to your inner work and to inner overcoming through meditation. This has been described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in the second part of Occult Science.

This is especially important—that such different kinds of experience are met with beyond the threshold of the spiritual world. If we desire—and this is only natural—to see a continuation of the physical world in the spiritual world, a duplicate of it; if we think everything is bound to look the same in the spiritual world as it does here in the physical world, we cannot enter that world. It will indeed be necessary to go through something that feels like a reversal of everything we have known here in the physical world. Here in the Physical world we are used to open our eyes, for example, and see light, to gain the impression of light. If we expect to be able to open a spiritual eye in the spiritual world and gain an impression of light, we cannot enter that world for we will have the wrong expectations. Something like a mist will be woven which veils the spiritual senses, hiding the spiritual world from us the way a sea of mist hides the mountains from view. It is not possible, for instance, to see objects illumined by light in the spiritual world. It must be understood that in the spiritual world we ourselves shine forth with the light. When light falls on an object in the physical world the object becomes visible to us. In the spiritual world we ourselves are inside the ray of light, touching the object with the light. One therefore knows one is swimming with the ray of light in the spiritual world; one knows oneself to be within the radiant light. This serves to indicate how we can acquire ideas that can help us get on in the spiritual world. It is extremely useful, for instance, to visualize the following: What would it be like if you were inside the sun now? Not being inside the sun you are seeing objects when they are illumined by the sun s rays, because they reflect the light. Imagine now you are inside the sun's rays and touching the objects with them. This contact is an experience we have in the spiritual world; in fact, experience in the spiritual world consists of our knowing ourselves to be alive within it. We know ourselves to be alive within the weaving of thoughts. It is just when this state begins, where we consciously know ourselves to be within the weaving of the thoughts, that there is an immediate transition to the state of knowing oneself to be within the bright radiance of light. For thought arises from light. Thought weaves in the light. But it will only be at that point that we experience ourselves as becoming immersed in light when we are within the weaving of thoughts.

Mankind is now at a stage where such concepts have to be acquired. Otherwise men will find themselves in completely unfamiliar worlds when they go through the gate of death and enter the spiritual world. The capital resources men were given by the gods at the very beginning of earth evolution have gradually been used up. Men now no longer take with them through the gate of death the remnants of past inheritance. They now need to acquire ideas bit by bit here in the physical world that will enable them to pass through the gate of death and see the entities that come to meet them there offering the dangers of temptation and seduction. It is because of these great cosmic schemes that spiritual science has to be made known to man now, that spiritual science must come among men. And today in particular, in these fateful days, we can observe transitions really being made. People are presently going through the gate of death at a young age, as the great destiny of the age demands. They may be said to have consciously allowed death to approach them whilst still young. I am not so much speaking of the moment just before death occurs, say on the battlefield. In that situation many elements of enthusiasm and so on may be present and these make the moment of death far less elevated or far less a moment of utter concentration than we are Inclined to think. But when death has occurred it leaves an ether body that has not yet been used up, leaves an unspent ether body in our time. The dead individual can look at this and he will perceive this Phenomenon, this fact of death, with much greater clarity than he would see it when death has ensued due to illness or old age.

Death on the field of battle is an event of much greater intensity and has much powerful effects than death occurring in another way. It therefore has an effect on the soul that has gone through the gate of death, for it is instructive. Death is terrible—or at least can be terrible—to man whilst he is within his body! However, once he has gone through the gate of death and looks back to his death, death will be the most wonderful experience ever possible in the human cosmos. Looking back to his entry into the spiritual world through death is the most marvellous, the most glorious, magnificent and beautiful event on which the dead individual can ever look back during the time between death and rebirth. Birth has left little real trace in our physical awareness, for no one equipped with ordinary, undeveloped faculties will recall his physical birth. But death is certainly always there for a soul which has gone through the gate of death, from the moment consciousness develops. Death will always be present and present as the most beautiful, the one who brings resurrection into the spiritual world.⁴⁷ And death is the most marvellous kind of teacher, a teacher truly able to prove to a receptive soul that there is a spiritual world, because by its very own nature death destroys the physical and only lets the spiritual come forth. This resurrection of the spiritual element, with the physical completely cast aside, is an event that is always present between death and new birth. It lends strength, a marvellous, great event, and the soul gradually grows into understanding of this. It grows into this in a completely unique way if the event is to some degree one we have chosen, one might say; not a death we lave sought, of course, but nevertheless found of one's own free will by joining the ranks of one's own free will. This again brings greater clarity to that moment. Someone who otherwise has not thought much about death, who has concerned himself little or only to some extent with the spiritual world, can now find death a marvellous teacher once he has died, particularly in our time. This particular war can reveal something of tremendous significance for the relationship between the physical and the spiritual world. I have already drawn attention to this in a number of lectures given in these difficult times: what we are able to do by teaching merely by the word is not enough; but in future people will receive tremendous instructions because so many deaths have occurred. These deaths have an effect on the dead, and the dead in turn intervene in the process of the future civilization of mankind.

I am able to give you the words of one who has gone through the gate of death as a young man now in the present time. His words have come through to me and they really come as a surprise, one might say, because they show how this dead individual who is experiencing death with great clarity as something he went through on the field of battle is now finding his way into the different kind of experience one has after death. They show him working his way out of earthly ideas and into spiritual ideas. Let me communicate these words to you. They were picked up, if I may call it this, when one of those who died on the field of battle tried to let them reach those he left behind.

Here all is light
And I feel
Power of life.
Death has woken
Me from sleep,
From spirit slumber.
I shall abide,
And power of light
Arising in me
Will become deed.

That, as it were, is what the dead individual learned by looking on the death he went through, as if his essential nature was taking In all it must learn to live after death; and it also wants to make this known, wants to reveal it.

Here all is light and I feel power of life.

He feels that he is more alive now where his comprehension of the spiritual world is concerned than he was before his death. He experiences death as one who awakens us, as a teacher:

Death has woken me from sleep,
From spirit slumber.

And he feels that he will be one who does things in the spiritual world. But he feels the it is the radiant powers within him that do the doing, he feels light coming to life within him:

I shall abide,
And power of light
Arising in me
Will become deed.

It really is possible to see everywhere, and to see rightly, that anything perceived in the spiritual world will again and again provide absolute confirmation of the things that can also become generally known out of the spiritual world through what is called imaginative perception. And it is this one so much wants to see come to life through our spiritual movement: that we do not merely have knowledge of the spiritual world but that this knowledge really comes to life in us so strongly that we learn new ways of feeling with the world, share In the experience of the world as the ideas of spiritual science come to life within us. As I have said so often, fundamentally we are asked to bring inward life into the thoughts of spiritual science; this is the contribution we are asked to make to the further development of the world, that the spiritual thoughts born out of spiritual science may stream together and soar up into the spiritual world as powers of Illumination that are given back to the radiant universe; that the universe may unite with the element which those who have gone through the gate of death in these fateful times are making part of the movement of spiritual culture for mankind. Then the words will come true which again shall conclude our talk today:

Out of courage shown in battle,
Out of the blood shed in war,
Out of the grief of those who are left,
Out of the people's deeds of sacrifice
Spirit fruits will come to grow
If souls with knowledge of the spirit
Turn their mind to spirit realms.

• 45. According to Leibniz, monads are the ultimate substantial constituents of the world and these must be unextended and therefore mental or spiritual by nature. God and human souls are considered monads in this philosophy. (Translator).
• 46. Rudolf Steiner, Geist-Erkenntnis in gliicklichen und ernsten Stunden des Lebens. Berlin, 15 January 1915. In Aus schicksaltragender Zeit (GA 64). In English, extract in Anthroposophical News Sheet 14:37-8.
• 47. In the second of the available records (very detailed notes), this passage reads:
  

In an equally difficult position like already last time, when I spoke about the concept of the “hell,” I am today where I want to summarise the different considerations and results of the winter talks in a consideration of the concept “heaven.”

We face a concept there the true meaning of which the faith of the different confessions have already largely lost even if these adhere to the concept due to an absolutely right and suitable spiritual instinct. At the same time, however, we face a concept that those people mock and reject in the strictest way who not only want to be regarded as leading in the today's spiritual currents but also are regarded as such by many people. The goal and contents of the deepest longing is enclosed for many human beings in the concept “heaven” even today; the basis of this concept forms the contents of the devoted faith of many souls. It is something that gives them comfort in the most difficult problems of life, while many people understand this concept as something in which the deepest superstition expresses itself. We only need to call our attention, just in our days, to spiritual phenomena much discussed in certain circles and we see very soon which immense obstacles stand in the way of understanding if people want to come to a pure, unprejudiced view of that what shall occupy us today.

Nobody needs to be surprised, and at least that who speaks about these matters in such a way as I want to speak today if a big part of that what I say is regarded as the model of empty speculative fiction and mystic daydreaming. In spite of that, just the today's consideration will show that it is very necessary just in our time to point again to the bases of such concepts as strongly as possible.

Many of you know a man with whose name some people connect the concept of real enlightenment, a man whose works made a great stir within the German cultural life just in the last time. Of course, it is abstruse to disparage the great service even in the slightest that this man has rendered to his narrower field of natural sciences. You have also realised in the other talks that my concern was just to talk about the spiritual-scientific research in accordance with the scientific results of the present and in full harmony with them. At different places one could listen to August Forel's (Auguste-Henri F., 1848–1931, Swiss myrmecologist, psychiatrist, philosopher) talk about Life and Death (1908). To someone who wants to inform himself only a little about how one can misunderstand thoroughly what spiritual science puts forth about these matters, I can only recommend to study this talk by Forel thoroughly. The viewpoints of spiritual science concerning such phenomena are explained in my magazine Lucifer-Gnosis where you also find something about the relation between spiritual science and natural sciences. Forel's talk about Life and Death is fulfilled with refusal, namely of a thorough refusal of this concept which is the contents of our talk today.

Immediately at the beginning of Forel's talk, our attention is called to the fact how someone who wants to establish a worldview from the wholly scientific facts gets to the following thoughts. There he says, the natural sciences have brought big progress to the human beings, they can illuminate the world edifice beyond the stars that are next to us in space. The natural sciences are able to look into the smallest parts of the cells of the living body, at least up to a certain degree. The natural sciences have succeeded in overcoming space and time in the field of technology to a certain degree. They achieve the most unbelievable things like wireless telegraphy and telephony over almost all continents. They have succeeded in demonstrating the components of the sun, of the moon, the stars etc. They have succeeded in liquefying the air. They have succeeded in showing how the single parts of the brain co-operate when the human being thinks, feels, and wills. Of course, everything up to a certain degree; but this degree is rightly called admirable.

However, the author of this talk continues: nevertheless, the natural sciences, in spite of their admirable results, nowhere discovered anything that one calls “paradise,” a spiritual world. Everything that humanity has dreamt of a heaven or hell originates from its imagination. The natural sciences have discovered nothing of them, in spite of their admirable results.—Then he boldly concludes as many people echo today: because the natural sciences have not found them, we must abandon all these concepts. We have to stand on the ground that nothing at all can be true that once people dreamt of an immortal essence in the human being that outlives the decay, which the natural sciences experience in such a miraculous way.—And then the consideration is attached like an outpour of feelings that, nevertheless, it is much nicer, greater and more tremendous to know that the human being, before he has come to this personal, individual existence, has lived completely only in his physical ancestors, and that he will keep on living in his physical descendants only. The entire existence is condensed in the physical world.

Then the author has a real outpour of emotions and says, is it not nicer that that which the human being has created is connected with his physical ancestors and keeps on working in the physical descendants, than that there is a world in which beings of all kinds outranking the human being are, a world in which angelic choirs are to be heard and the like?—He insinuates that it is unworthy of a scientifically thinking human being to adhere to a worldview that even in the least deals with such concepts.

This talk can remind one of that which I heard one of the leaders of the modern progressive movement saying many years ago. This person said almost the following. The human being speaks of any supersensible heaven—and then he made clear that our earth is a ball which freely hovers in the space, and that it also applies to the other planets that the space is the heaven, and that the soul does not need to be in another heaven, because we are in heaven. Such persons do not understand much of the deep feelings out of which Schiller (Friedrich Schiller, 1759–1805, German poet) formed the all too justified dictum To the Astronomers:

Do not chat so much of nebulae and suns to me!
Is nature only great, because she gives you something to count?
Indeed, your object is the most elated one in space,
But, friends, the elated does not live in space.

From all these remarks, someone can recognise who has taken up something that was discussed in the course of these winter talks here which deep misunderstanding forms the basis of such things. It is a deep misunderstanding, and we can express this deep misunderstanding best of all saying: if spiritual science once spoke of that what these persons declare as superstition, daydreaming, as speculative fiction, then all these persons would be right. However, the fact is that the modern spiritual science is young and that its message has not yet come to a big part of humanity, above all not to those who speak in such a way, as I have indicated. These persons form mental pictures of the supersensible worlds that are only the outflow of their fantasy and their own daydreams. They fight against these things of their own daydreaming, their own fantasy. However, they also know nothing at all of that, what the true spiritual science has to say about these things. Thus, a big part of the enlightened people fights a battle against their self-created windmills like Don Quixote. Someone who understands this thoroughly will find in that what is said nothing but words, which are quite appropriate to battle the phantasm that these people have in mind. However, this has to do nothing with that what spiritual science understands by it. We could prove a weird logic in the course of these talks, namely where one refuses theosophy, apparently on the ground of the natural sciences, although one knows nothing of its contents. I want to inform of something only.

You know how deeply I appreciate Haeckel's (Ernst H., 1834–1919, German naturalist, philosopher) scientific works. However, what he brings forth as refusal of the ideas of heaven and hell that he himself has formed stands on weak logical feet. One can easily prove this weakness. It is rather nice for numerous persons who want to be enlightened if Haeckel says: “There is a faith of the old time that points to the heaven and asserts, there above lives God! Who speaks in such a way does not know that this “above” is somewhere else if the earth turns, and if it has completely turned round, one would have to point downward instead of upwards.” This seems to be rather appropriate. If you still want to become engrossed somewhat logically, his conclusions stand on no other feet, as if anybody wanted to state that one goes with the head down and not upwards if the earth has turned. The gentlemen start from the fallacy that it concerns spatial things, and not the relationship to the spiritual to the physical. I have to say all that repeatedly because just the object of our today's considerations is something very significant.

We go back to what I have said in the last talk. If we imbue ourselves with the spiritual-scientific attitude and turn to that what develops gradually from the growing up child, then we have the sensation that increases more and more to bright and clear knowledge that something appears in the increase, in the transformation of the childish body that gets its existence in this world, coming from the supersensible worlds. We attain the mental picture which spiritual science can completely ascertain that the essence of the human being entering the physical existence by conception and birth already existed before conception and birth, and that the physical body is the dress of the supersensible spiritual essence.

There we come to the question: where is that what enters the physical existence only by conception and birth?—We have also further explained the thought, and this has made us recognise that this physical existence of the human being is not the first, but that we have to speak of repeated earth-lives that the human being enters the physical existence repeatedly in the course of evolution. We have recognised the thought that that what the human being experiences in his life what he goes through in thinking, feeling and enjoyment, in love and desire, wish and action has not died down, but that the fruit remains and continues, and that the next earthly existence takes up this fruit of the former earth-life. If the child reveals its dispositions, abilities, and actions gradually, this represents the result of former earth-lives. The human being has struggled through many stages of existence, and what he has gone through in the former life has transformed itself into the germ and has become contents, so that his new life is more perfect, seems to be more complete than his preceding life.

This is the ascent of the human being. We speak in spiritual science of the fact that that of the human being entering by conception and birth in the physical existence and leaving it at death again is in the interim, between death and new birth, in a spiritual, supersensible world. We have discussed a part of the spiritual, supersensible world in the last talk about the “hell.” We have to discuss a big part today under the concept of the “heaven.” Thus, the heaven is in spiritual science not anything that is far away and dreamt of, anything transcendent, but it is something that is there where we are also. We have to answer the question now, why can the heaven, the supersensible existence be where we are also if the human beings do not perceive it with their physical eyes if it is true that the physical science that has achieved such big and tremendous progress could discover this paradise, this heaven nowhere?

However, I have also drawn your attention to the fact that every human being can really attain the full view of the supersensible world and the heaven. In the essays How Does One Attain Knowledge of the Higher Worlds?, I have pointed to the methods, by which the human being penetrates into the supersensible world. Today it should be indicated only briefly, what it depends on. You have only to visualise repeatedly what it means to perceive this sensuous-physical world around you. You have read certainly that the completely developed human ear developed from an indifferent organ. Look at the primitive organs of the animals, consider that round these imperfect animals the world of the tones, the physical harmonies, the melodies and the world of the other sounds exist. Remember what was necessary for the fine arrangement of a human organ up to its today's height, so that the human being could become acquainted with the field of the tones surrounding him. You can also look at the other organs in the same way.

Look at the eye how it developed gradually so far, that the wonderful world of the light and the colours can light up. As much of our surroundings exists as our organs are able to perceive these surroundings. Would the organs of the human being be on a less perfect stage—imagine the human auditory organ on an imperfect stage—what would be a world of the sounds, the harmonies and melodies for such beings with undeveloped hearing? A world that they could not perceive, a “transcendent” world! As this relates to the sensuous human being in the world, the spiritual world relates to that what one usually calls world. And as well as imperfect beings with imperfect senses have developed to bigger perfection and have attained new fields of their perception, the today's human being can also develop as the human being of the prehistoric time was able. In all details the methods are given by which the human forces and abilities can be raised to a higher level. It occurs to nobody, to call “heaven” what Forel refused. Spiritual science only says this: if the human being has the renunciation, the energy, and perseverance to develop the ability slumbering today in him, he perceives the spiritual worlds.—One understands by the spiritual world what lies inside of every human being. If he develops the organs, the transcendent world also becomes his surrounding world as the world of the tones becomes a perceptible world. This happens to such an extent more and more, the more the physical organ is perfected.

However, no one is allowed to imagine that this development is something similar as the present methods of development of a physical sense. This would be a misunderstanding. One can be easily asked as a spiritual scientist, how does this sixth sense form?—The human beings possibly imagine that it must grow out like an eye from the organism. However, the higher, supersensible senses are not of that kind. They relate to our physical senses quite different. I characterise briefly how these higher senses—the word does not well meet their being, but never mind—relate to the physical senses. The way of development by which the human being raises himself to the supersensible worlds is not an exterior, tumultuous, but an inner, intimate one. What the human being has to experience, so that the spiritual world shines into his present existence, happens in all silence and subtlety. The three basic forces of the soul, thinking, feeling and willing, are capable of a higher development. If we briefly ask ourselves, what the human being has to do with thinking, feeling and willing if he wants to become a citizen of the supersensible world, the heavenly world, already within this existence, we get the answer that this is a fine, subtle work. You can read up in my magazine, starting from number thirteen, how the human being settles in a world cultivating his world of thinking, feeling, and willing in particular.

Remember everything that penetrates our souls from the morning to the evening when our consciousness sinks in an uncertain darkness. Consider how different it would be in our soul if we lived not in our time and at this place of Central Europe but hundred years ago and at another place of our earth. Then we understand how much of that what flows through the human soul from the morning to the evening is the result of the outside world changing permanently. Subtract what flows through the soul, try to remove everything that is given by the age, by the place, and all thoughts from the soul, which anyhow go back to place and time, and ask how much then is left of such contents. All thoughts, feelings, and will actions that flow through the soul and are determined by place and time are inappropriate for a higher spiritual development, for the experience of a supersensible world. Do not understand these things in such a way, as if I want to say anything against the life of the human being at that place where he is positioned. However, he must find so much time to tower completely above that what faces his soul in the everyday life. He must dedicate himself, even if only for minutes, to such thoughts and feelings that are independent of place and time that are everlasting. Such thoughts and feelings are given. They are there; they are developed with that who has gone through the training of the higher spiritual life. If the human being lets such thoughts of eternity live in his soul repeatedly, then they are effective forces in his soul that awake the slumbering abilities.

Then read up the immense transformation if the human being dedicates himself to the thought of eternity with strictly prescribed methods if he knows to live in subtle way with such eternity thoughts. I describe this for the thought life at first. Who may deny that there are such thoughts? The human thoughts, as they are today, which special nature do they have? They have the nature that the human being lives with them most intimately, since, what lives more intimately in our soul than our thoughts and mental pictures?

However, these thoughts and mental pictures, as far as they refer to the external world, are the most ineffective, the most passive in relation to this “real” world of the trivial. But a deep wisdom is concealed in it if one says, for example, may anybody adhere to his figures ever so much which express the thought of a bridge, the thought of a bridge in all details may be quite correct—the thought may be right, however, the bridge is not there. The thought is the most intimate that lives in the soul. However, in this world in which we spend the physical existence the thought is the most ineffective. It has an inner existence. However, when the human being starts—he must start with patience—dedicating a quite low part of his time at least to the thoughts of eternity, he learns to come to know something he would not have dreamt of. He gets to know a world that is different concerning the thought from our physical world. If in our physical world the thought is the most intimate and, nevertheless, at the same time the most ineffective, the most passive, we are introduced by a training in thoughts of eternity which we experience in the physical life, in a world in which the thought itself is creative. That is the point. Then another world starts living around the human being. He learns to know from his experience: if we see in the physical world, we see the light; it flows from the sun; we see the plants withering and dying if we take away the light from them; we see the light working creatively on the plants. The thought becomes such strength, which flows through the space, which is reality, as only a sensuous thing can be reality, for that who penetrates by the training into the supersensible world. The thought that has an ineffective existence in the darkness of the inside is recognised due to the training as something that flows through the space creatively that is much more real than the sunlight.

The human being notices now if this light of the thought about which he then speaks as a real world which spreads out around him, flows into his soul that is animated by creative forces as the physical plant is penetrated by the sunlight. Thereby we learn how the space that is round us is filled with a reality that the human being, as long as he does not have the necessary abilities, cannot perceive, as well as somebody who has no ears does not perceive tones. However, there are also certain feelings in the supersensible world that originate different from the feelings of the everyday, usual life. How do the feelings of the everyday life come into being? The human being turns his attention to an object. He likes it. The feeling of desire ascends in him. The feeling of desire appears by means of the external object. We feel elated because of the impression of a nice outside world, we feel full with revulsion if we face something ugly in the outside world. Thus, the feelings surge up and down in the human soul. Spiritual science has to lead the human being deeper into the true, real.

If the human being wants to awake the inner abilities of the supersensible world, he must make himself able for the feelings that are not stimulated by the outside. By a method, he settles down into a feeling world where the feelings surge up and down in him, without needing the external sensation. The feelings that are stimulated by the outside can be woken in the human being by the perception of the outer things. If he learns to develop particular feelings in himself, the excitement of such feelings works as a force that awakes slumbering abilities again. He knows now from experience what the initiate can see: the world of the light is active in the spiritual world as in the physical world. It tiers itself also in the spiritual in manifold colours as the physical light; he knows that there is a world in which the spiritual colour lives. We call it the astral world. It puts itself in this physical world for the human being who wakes the abilities and forces slumbering in himself if he develops a feeling of a particular kind more and more only by spiritual experience, which is not stimulated within the sensuous world by any outer sensation. Who is able to wake this feeling of love, an innermost experience, has attained the connection with the spiritual world.

Then still another world is added to the described element. To the colours, still another world is added. The love that the physical objects produce can never lead to the spiritual. That love which is satisfied, even if the object of this love only exists in the spiritual, that love which remains in the deep inner experience is a creative force for a higher kind of elements which penetrate the spiritual space. This love is the real love. The preliminary stage of it is that which the artist feels in his creating. He has it only if he produces spiritual works from his soul. That love transforms the before dumb and colour-filled spiritual space of light into a world of tones, a world speaks to us in spiritual tones.

Thus, you see the human being developing gradually to another world. Here is nothing else than a real continuation of that what also exists in the natural existence of the human being, in the natural events. As the ears have arisen from indifferent vesicles and thereby the world of the physical tones originated from the toneless, that world arises from the uncertain which I have just described. Those do not speak of these worlds who fight against wind mills as I have mentioned at the beginning of the talk. He who says, the heavens were nowhere found, does not know that he has to search them not anywhere else; for the heaven is where we are. It only matters that one does not adhere to the assertion: what I cannot perceive does not exist, and if another states that there is something that I cannot perceive, he is a fool, a dreamer, or a swindler.—This sentence is the logically wrongest sentence that there is at all, because nobody is allowed to assert that the border of his percipience is also the border of existence. Otherwise, the dumb one could regard the entire world of tones, of harmonies and melodies as daydreaming and fantasy.

If one speaks in spiritual science of the heaven, one speaks of it in this way as I have did. One has also not spoken different in the primary sources of the confessions when one still understood them. In this visible world, a non-sensuous world exists, as for the dumb human being the world of the tones.

We ask ourselves now, why does the human being not perceive this supersensible world in his present developmental state? He does not perceive it, because just the sense-perception which was a necessity of the human development, spreads like a cover, a veil about the supersensible world. I did not mean it different when I described what someone has to experience who aims at the supersensible world. He must lift out himself from the sense-perceptible world; he has to quieten the sensuous world for a while. Then he comes to that what is behind this sensuous world, and then he perceives how the sensuous world spreads out like a cover about the supersensible one. He who towers above his body in the true sense can perceive what is behind this veil.

We must know for what one uses the forces in the usual human life, which can become abilities to enter the supersensible world. One cannot understand this different than if one considers the fact of the matter: what is, actually, the physical world, what is the most imperfect physical body, and what is the perfect physical body which faces us as human body? All physical beings are creations of the spirit. The spiritual forms the basis of any physical thing. We have emphasised this in manifold way in the course of these talks repeatedly. As the ice hardens from the water, any physical hardens from the spiritual. It is as it were a compression of the spirit. Look at the physical ear of the present human being. What does form the basis of this physical thing? Spiritual creativity forms the basis of it! The tone that lives as a physical tone in our surroundings is something that belongs to the physical world and has the spiritual tone behind itself. In the same world that flows to our physical ear, we hear the physical tone, and in the same world, the supersensible spiritual tone lives. What is the spiritual tone? This spiritual tone is the creator of our ear just as the spiritual light, concealed in the physical light, is the creator of our eye. Therefore, Goethe says who pronounced so many deep spiritual truths: “The eye is formed in the light for the light.” The force that flows out from the sun to us, which enables our eye to see the objects in their borders in the light-filled space also contains those beings that have formed the wonderful construction of the eye. Thus, what the eye sees and the ear hears would mean the same as penetrating into what is behind them, rising to the spiritual forces. In a certain case, we do it already, looking at the young child developing its abilities gradually in the physical body. We see these abilities appearing from a world concealed behind the sensuous world, we see them dashing into matter and creating an existence in the matter for themselves.

We go back to spiritual science and ask ourselves, where was this being before it has accepted a physical existence by conception and birth, where was it between its last death and its last birth? It was not in a dreamt spiritual world but in the same world in which we are too. The only difference between this being, before it enters the material existence by conception and birth consists of the following. Before birth, this being consists of such elements that one can only behold if the just described spiritual abilities are developed. It is invisible, as long as this supersensible ability is not developed. As for anybody the water is not visible, as long as it is liquid, but becomes visible, as soon as it freezes, the human being becomes invisible if he becomes like water—and visible if he “freezes,” that is he becomes physical.

Thus, we speak of two conditions of the human being, of a state between death and new birth, only visible to the spiritual senses, and of a state in which he has woven a dress around himself, so that he is visible for the physical senses. Thus, we realise that the human being is connected in the interim between death and new birth with the creative forces flowing through the space. Someone who develops his supersensible abilities gets to know them as the heavenly forces already here. The human being is connected with these creative forces. Here in the physical world he lives with the physical forces, with the physical tones, with the physical light; in the spiritual world, he lives in the spiritual-creative behind the tone, behind the light. He lives in a world that is different from the physical world. Here in the physical world, the eye sees by the light. In the spiritual world, the human being perceives what has created his eye.

He lives in the spiritual light, he lives in the spiritual world of tones, he lives in that what builds up his physical body with the help of birth and conception, he lives where our physical world is built up which spreads like a cover about the spiritual one. This cover flows into the spiritual world itself. The human consciousness flashes in another state. The only difference between the disembodied and the embodied human being is that the disembodied one lives in another state of consciousness, and that he perceives the creative forces. Now we understand what it means: the human being is taken up in a supersensible world at death. It is no dream world, no world of lower reality than our world; it is a world of denser and stronger intensity and reality, because in it the creative beings are for our physical world. Now we understand what works there between death and new birth.

We saw last time when we discussed the retarding forces that when the human being passes the gate of death a memory tableau of the entire last life appears before him. We saw that this tableau is taken up like an essence and remains with the human being for all following times. We saw him going through the kamaloka time, the time of purification. After he has gone through this purification, he becomes something that he has taken from the last life, something particular, and something new. We know that the human being going through the gate of death comes into the spiritual supersensible world. Regard it as a field, as a fertile ground and regard what he brings from the last life as a fruit of his thinking, feeling and willing, the fruit of the last life as a sprouting seedling. Thus, the fruit of the last life sprouts in the spiritual ground, and the human consciousness notices and perceives this sprouting, this developing of the germ of the last life.

Everything that the human beings have taken from the life of their time impregnates itself in this last fruit of life. Everything that approached the human being from the outside increases and grows like a germ. This becomes the world of perception and consciousness between death and new birth. One can make clear that to someone who cannot perceive the supersensible only by a comparison. With deeper contemplation, you understand the comparison. One rightly calls bliss what the human being feels unfolding the germ of the last life. It is the converse feeling of that what the human being can perceive if he feels the objects. Now he feels them unfolded, before they flow out; now, however, the being flows out and he is penetrated by a feeling which one can compare with that of a chicken hatching an egg. This bliss causes that the human being develops that in the spiritual what chains him to the physical birth what brings him in the physical existence. Because he has collected new experiences which he adds to the basic core, every life becomes—with the exception of the ways going up and down which must also be—more complete.

Thus, we must get clear about the fact that the state of consciousness is different from that in the supersensible world. By a comparison, we can still bring to our mind how the state of consciousness is different between the physical world and the supersensible world. Imagine a human being who listens to a symphony. He lets the tones approach him from the outside. He enjoys them. Imagine now, it would be possible that a human being creates this symphony spiritually without touching a text without sounding an instrument, that he creatively composes tone by tone of his own accord in spirit. As the perception of the former relates to that in which the symphony budded, the physical world relates to the perception in the supersensible. Hence, we must say, in order to perceive the heaven, the human being has to refrain from something that faces him spiritually in the physical world. As long as he has not refrained from that, he cannot behold.

However, the spiritual world does not appear to us as a world to which also the logical thinking could not rise. The human being normally argues only that he cannot perceive it.

Thus, the concept of the “heaven” gets a significance for the future human being again. It is no concept of a dream world in which we shall be. The creative consciousness is much brighter and more intense than in the physical world. Hence, we have to imagine the life, the consciousness of the human being in the creative world also as more intense than in the physical world.

How does the physical world relate to the supersensible world? It is a matter of course that the human being is interested in this relationship first. I would like to express this with the counter question: knows the human being anything in the supersensible world about those who are near and dear to him? Will that what happened here continue in any way? It will! You can understand this properly if you contemplate what I have just said making clear that an intimate coherence exists between the physical and the supersensible worlds. That which is laid here as a germ rises there and becomes fruit. Nothing in the world is without spiritual background.

In the physical world, the human being already works for the supraphysical world. An example: we assume that a mother is attached to her child with love. This love develops; one would like to say, on the physical basis at first. Then, however, this love changes into spiritual love. To such an extent, in which the love is transformed into a spiritual motherly love, the human being grows into the spiritual love. This love becomes truer in the spiritual. As the earthly cover drops from the human being, the physical-earthly drops from the spiritual being. The whole net that is woven from human soul to human soul exists already in the supersensible world. The spiritual, the essence of the human being settles in the supersensible world, and everything that the human being has tied on here in this physical world, is continued as something spiritual in the spiritual world. Everything that is connected here spiritually is found in full consciousness, in an even brighter consciousness again in the spiritual world. Depending on how it is found, a tie forms again with a new life, so that those who meet in often strange sympathy have to explain this to themselves that they themselves have spun it in former lives.

Thus, we realise that our entire sensuous world is embedded in this supersensible, invisible world. As the human being is a citizen of the sensuous world between birth and death, he is a citizen of the supersensible world after death; he does only not know it in our time between birth and death.

We have shown the concept of the “hell” in the last consideration and the concept of the “heaven” today which contain all spiritual influence on the human being. Last time we have gone into the hardening forces, while that appears as the opposite what I have described today: the principle of development. Life advances from existence to existence, and the more is transformed by the last life into creative forces, the higher rises the next existence. While the human being wants to enjoy what he takes up in himself not only, but enjoying it he also wants to penetrate to that what transforms itself into spiritual forces, he is perpetually in the heavenly world. All that can help the human being is contents of the heavenly elements; all that restrains the progress is the contents of the infernal worlds.

Someone who wants to harmonise such a concept of the heaven with that what the natural sciences have performed can easily do it. He can harmonise it completely. Our contemporaries only do not want to get involved in these higher worlds. Our age is tired of the consideration of the supersensible world, and, hence, this age is very gullible toward those who put up the sentence: what I cannot perceive is not true, and if anybody asserts, it is true, he is a poor devil or a fool.—Too many people become believers of such an opinion in this age. Even if we also realise which big and immense progress our age has performed concerning the physical science, nevertheless, we also see on the other side how little the predominating part of our contemporaries is inclined to penetrate into the supersensible world. One means that the penetration in the supersensible world makes the human being weak and foreign towards the sensuous world. This is a prejudice. If anybody has a piece of iron and says: this iron has magnetic force; touch it with another iron and you have a magnet—another may come and say, nonsense! The piece of iron is good for hammering down nails.—These are the true daydreamers who take the sensuous, the practical only in such a way as that man who hammers down nails only with the magnet.

The realists, the monists, the utilitarians, and others are the true daydreamers. They know the forces of the physical world only and triumph if the immense progress is done by merely revealing the forces of the physical world. Spiritual science has to argue nothing at all against this physical world. However, it also knows that it is high time that the human beings learn again that in the physical the spiritual is concealed, and that just the human beings become dreamy when they close their spiritual eye to the spiritual world. Today true realists, apostles of reality are those who point to the spiritual forces! What do these truthful realists want? They want that the real forces slumbering behind the sensuous are introduced in this world that they settle down in our whole development that we do not only introduce the telegraph, the telephone and the railway, the usual forces but also the spiritual forces.

If anybody goes into these matters, he is still twitted today; he does not care this twitting. He knows that even the great naturalists found few followers once; also, those who tell something of the spiritual worlds have to find the ways just in the big world. Even if only few people can create telegraphs, telephones and railroads, the other can use them, nevertheless. However, everybody must gain the spiritual world on his own accord.

The great physicists Thomson (William T., first Baron Kelvin, 1824–1907, British physicist), Clausius (Robert C., 1822–1888, German physicist and mathematician) and others have their successors who can recognise the physical principles. One of the biggest physical principles is at the same time that what the human being pushes to the spiritual world. For those who have dealt a little with physics I say nothing unknown if I draw the attention to the fact that there is a principle of entropy, this is due to Carnot (Nicolas Léonard Sadi C., 1796–1832), the uncle of the French president (Marie François Sadi C., 1837–1894).

What does it mean? It pronounces one of the most certain principles, which we have in the physical world, namely how the physical forces of the world change into each other. Hit with the hand on the table and measure the effect on the table with a sensitive thermometer. You will find that the place has become warm. You see the heat of the railroad engine being transformed into locomotion and this again into heat. A big principle forms the basis of all that, the principle of entropy. From the consideration of the world, it becomes clear that this conversion of energy shows, nevertheless, a certain guideline, a certain sense. The entropy principle shows that all energy must change into heat at last, and this heat scatters in the space. Today one has proved by the physical principle that the earth, our physical world, once experiences the heat death. This principle exists. That has to deny this principle who asserts that in our world only physical forces are; for this would have to say if he recognised the principle: then everything is over.

Therefore, also Haeckel takes the view that this principle of entropy is nonsense because it contradicts his principle of matter. It is a physical principle that the things are transformed perpetually. A Russian physicist has proved in a writing how firmly founded just this principle is which shows the physical end of our present world. Just in this writing of Professor Chwolson (Orest Ch., 1852–1934, Russian physicist), the “twelfth commandment” was put up (Hegel, Haeckel, Kossuth and the Twelfth Commandment, 1906). You can realise there how competent a physicist can be in the physical field, just as you can also realise how unknowing such scholars can be concerning the spiritual fields. The “twelfth commandment” is “you should never write about anything that you do not understand.” Chwolson obeys it in his field where he speaks about physics, but he does not obey it in the spiritual field. Everything that he says concerning the physical is excellent; however, what he says concerning the spiritual matters is of little value and a big sin against the principle: “you should never write about anything that you do not understand.”

A passage follows that the stenographer did not write down apparently in which Rudolf Steiner probably explained that Chwolson did not understand Hegel. However, Rudolf Steiner admits that Chwolson is correct concerning his remarks about an article by Kossuth in a scientific magazine. Kossuth claims that the law of mass conservation is nothing else as the sentence: the whole is like the sum of its parts, and the principle of energy conservation is nothing else than the sentence: the cause is like the effect.—With reference to the discoveries of Lavoisier Rudolf Steiner continues:

Someone who knows something of the spiritual research knows what it means that one has shown that if substances combine chemically with each other the weight is that of the sum of the parts. If one says then: this law contains nothing else than the old mathematical law: the whole is equal to the sum of its parts, one would already have to get clear about the fact that it concerns only the weight of the whole that is equal to the sum of the weight of its parts. Kossuth just forgets that if one proceeds to the spiritual the law does not apply at all there. So short is the thinking. Chwolson says, Mr. Kossuth may only take his pocket watch and crush it in the mortar; then he can see whether the whole is equal to the sum of its parts. Goethe also already pronounced the thought that is often repeated:

To understand some living thing and to describe it,
the student starts by ridding it of its spirit,
he then holds all its parts within his hand,
except, alas!, for the spirit that bound them together.

(Faust, Verses 1936–1939)

The fewest people who believe to stand on the ground of certain facts know that the natural sciences are often nothing else than taking no account of the spiritual tie. On one side, we realise if we survey all the circumstances and connect them with that what I have stated about the supersensible world that in many human souls the longing lives to penetrate into the supersensible world. However, they suspect those details of which someone has to speak who really knows something of these matters. We see the longing for the supersensible world stirring; but we do not see the strength and the energy to penetrate into these supersensible worlds according to the instructions of spiritual science. On the other side, we have the facts in our time. We have a competent physical science in our time: Thomson, Clausius, and Carnot have found good successors. If the development advances in spiritual science in the same spirit, the researchers in the spiritual field will find also capable successors like Thomson, Clausius and Carnot have found. Then the result will be that from this humanity which has almost shut itself off today from the heavenly world, another arises which draws the strength of the supersensible world into the sensuous one. Spiritual science does not want to alienate the human being from the world but to make him strong, energetic, and vigorous for existence, while it enriches reality.

We only need to join two things, and this will fit together: in the same strict way as now in the physical science, a big part of the human beings will have the possibility to satisfy the need of their hearts out of the spiritual world. It is the task of spiritual science as a cultural stream to bring together these two spiritual streams, the satisfaction of the sensuous needs by the natural sciences and the satisfaction of the longing for the spiritual.

These talks are continued in the same sense in the next winter. We shall further pursue what has remained sketchy and penetrate deeper into it. The most enclosing, the most significant concept should be the object of the last talk. Indeed, a wisdom will once be there which can be a religion again, which can satisfy the deepest religious needs of the heart. There will come up a spiritual current that satisfies all needs of the logical thinking like the longing for the supersensible life. It is this longing to which spiritual science talks. If the way is found to that what exists in this anticipating, then wisdom flows out, it introduces in this supersensible world and flows into the human soul so that our culture experiences a spiritual rebirth that goes back to the fire, which lives in many people and wants to penetrate to the supersensible worlds. From this fire, the spiritual-scientific wisdom will penetrate into the supersensible world, because this is its true ideal.

It should be owed to the great ideal that wants to spark the wisdom of this supersensible by the fire of the enthusiasm for the supersensible; since this will always be the course of the spiritual culture that the light of wisdom develops from the fire of love and enthusiasm.

[ 79 ] The "Young Germany" and revolutionary poetry around the middle of the century strove for an intimate interpenetration of the general cultural ideas of political interests with artistic creation. The demands of the time found expression in the works of the poets. In the fifties, a literary movement emerged that took a different stance towards art. People now asked less what they wanted to express in poetry; they focused first and foremost on the most perfect way in which a process, an idea, a feeling could be shaped. What must a drama, a novel, a novella and so on be like? These were questions that preoccupied the consciousness of the time. Strict demands were made with regard to the technical perfection of the individual art forms. Two theoretical works by creative poets are clear testimony to this school of thought: Gustav Freytag's "Technik des Dramas" (1863) and Friedrich Spielhagen's "Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik des Romans" (1883). All the details of both types of poetry are carefully discussed in these two writings. In the creations of Friedrich Spielhagen, this basic trait of the artistic attitude is particularly clear. This poet has the most lively need to deal with all the questions and ideas that move his time; but the demands of art are more important to him than this. He strives for inner harmony and organic structure in all his works. In his first major novels "Problematische Naturen" (1860), "Durch Nacht zum Licht" (1861), "In Reih und Glied" (1866), "Hammer und Amboß" (1868), this striving for the pure art form still takes a back seat to the social goals that the poet sets himself. It appears at its most pronounced in "Sturmflut" (1876). In the former novels, the aim is to show the contrasts in the views and lifestyles of different classes and social strata or to portray the relationship of the individual to the whole. In these works, Spielhagen's interest in cultural history and his enthusiasm for freedom and progress have an equal share with his artistic intentions. In "Sturmflut", the phenomena of natural and human life are no longer juxtaposed as they appear to direct observation, but as the purpose of art demands. In the past, the poet was concerned with illustrating which currents in life are capable of defeating others; now he is primarily concerned with creating exciting conflicts and satisfying solutions. Spielhagen has remained true to this direction in his work to the present day. "Plattland" (1879), "Uhlenhaus" (1884), "Ein neuer Pharao" (1889), "Sonntagskind" (1893) are poems that still make a significant impression on those who do not take offense at the fact that art is in a certain sense alienated from real life. To an even greater degree than to Spielhagen, the above is applicable to Paul Heyse. He brought the form of the novella to its most mature development. He is a master in the artful interlinking of mental processes and relationships. He knows how to give the simplest conflicts a highly exciting development by giving them unexpected twists and turns. For him, art has become an end in itself. Heyse does not face reality like an impartial observer, but like a gardener of the plant world, who asks himself with every natural species: in what way can I refine it? He succeeds equally well in portraying the immediate life of the present ("Die kleine Mama") and the sensibilities and perceptions of past times ("Frau Alzeyer", Troubadour-Novellen); his tone sounds with perfect beauty, whether it is serious ("Der verlorene Sohn") or humorous ("Der letzte Centaur"). Heyse is not a creative nature in the highest sense of the word, but a perfecter of inherited artistic vision and outlook on life. The novel with which he achieved great success in the seventies, "Children of the World" (1873), grew out of the movement of thought that Hegel's successors (see page 48 ff.) had aroused. How the children of the world, who seek to satisfy their religious needs through the free views of the present, find their way in life is portrayed here by a poet in whom this new faith has taken on a worldly form. A calm, serene beauty is the basic character of this and the following novels by Heyse: "Im Paradiese" (1875), "Der Roman der Stifisdame" (1886), "Merlin" (1892). A luxuriant sensuality that is able to present itself gracefully, a wisdom that gives no thought to the hardships of existence, confront us everywhere in Heyse's creations, especially in his Iyric poems. Dramatic art is not suited to such a way of looking at things. The lively movement that drama needs can only emerge from the essence of a personality that descends deep into the abysses of life. This is why Heyse was unable to make an impression with his numerous dramas. Adolf Wilbrandt and Herman Grimm move along similar lines. Although the former loves powerful motifs and strong passions that unfold in glaring contrasts, he softens them both as a playwright and as a narrator through the softness of his lines and the dull colors. Herman Grimm is a personality whose whole soul is absorbed in aesthetic contemplation. He is only interested in nature and cultural development to the extent that they can be viewed with the judgment formed by art. His novel "Insurmountable Powers" (1867) and his "Novellas" depict reality as if it had been shaped not by the laws of nature but by the educated taste of a world artist. The pursuit of formal beauty reached its peak with Conrad Ferdinand Meyer. With him, the external artistic perfection of his creations corresponds to a significant content. His imagination deals with the strong passions and drives of the soul, and he is able to portray personalities on a characteristically drawn historical background. A novel such as "Jürg Jenatsch" (1876) or novellas such as "The Temptation of Pescara" (1887) and "Angela Borgia" (1890) shine a light into the abysses of the soul and are at the same time of sublime beauty. His Iyrian achievements "Ballads" (1867) and "Poems" (1882) were often marred by his imagination, which was always focused on great contrasts. He was all the more able to express himself in the illumination of heroic natures, as can be seen in his poem "Huttens letzte Tage" (1871). The poems of the Austrian Robert Hamerling are also based on similar points of view. He strives for the perfection of formal beauty as well as for a deep understanding of the world. In his "Ahasuerus in Rome" (1866), he contrasts the eternal, restless struggle of striving humanity, which longs for peace and redemption, with the passionate urge to live; in the epic "The King of Sion" (1869), a cultural-historical poem that combines the classical verse form of hexameter with a colorful, glowing style of depiction, he deals with the urge for a humane existence. In the novel "Aspasia" (1876), he seeks to present us with a picture of the Greek world, drunk with beauty and full of life, and in "Homunculus" (1888) he castigates the excesses of his time in a grotesque manner. His poetry presents itself less as that of a directly feeling poet and more as that of a contemplative, pathetic poet. A pessimistic streak runs through Hamerling's entire oeuvre. The poetry of Hieronymus Lorm (Heinrich Landesmann) is completely dominated by such a world-wearied mood. He combines the ability of a witty feuilletonist with that of an interesting storyteller and a moving lyricist. A hard personal fate has given his gloomy world view an individual character.

[ 80 ] While poets such as Spielhagen, Grimm, Meyer, Heyse and Hamerling differ from the naive view only in their artistic treatment, this is also the case with Hermann Lingg, Felix Dahn and Georg Ebers with regard to the subject matter of their works. In addition to their impulsive imagination, the traditional artistic education of the latter also played a part in their work, while in the latter the learned culture of their time also played a role. In his epic poem "Die Völkerwanderung" (1866-68), Lingg incorporates a wealth of historical ideas and scientific insights, and the tendency towards historical images is also noticeable in his poetry. Felix Dahn searched for content for his poetry in Germanic prehistory and in the events of the migration of peoples, Georg Ebers in the ancient Egyptian world. Neither the one nor the other can deny that arduous study is one of the roots of their works. Dahn's "Kampf um Rom" (1876) and "Odhin's Trost" (1880) as well as Ebers' "Eine ägyptische Königstochter" (1864) are large-scale cultural paintings, but not the result of direct poetic power.

[ 81 ] A poet, on the other hand, who is rooted in real life with all his feelings and thoughts, is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from Galicia. The glaring contradiction between the baseness of human instincts and passions and the noble ideals that the mind dreams of occupies his imagination. Man wants to be a god and yet is only a plaything of his animal desires: this confession speaks from Sacher-Masoch's works. Idealism is a pious delusion that dissolves into nothing when nature is seen in its true form. In order to express this basic sentiment, this poet has at his disposal an imagination directed towards the piquant and garish, which revels in sumptuous images and does not shy away from depicting the wildest processes. Since Sacher-Masoch, in the course of his development, gave in to the latter tendency of his nature and to sensationalist prolific writing, the promising attempts he made in works such as "The Legacy of Cain" (1870) remained without effect. Influenced by him and Hamerling, the Viennese poet Marie Eugenie delle Grazie attempted to portray the idealistic dreams of humanity in their worthlessness in the face of the blind, base forces of nature in artistic poems and in a comprehensive epic "Robespierre" (1894).

[ 82 ] An art that cares little for the great questions of existence, but instead seeks to accommodate an educated taste that penetrates little into the depths of things in a virtuoso manner, can be found in Julius Wolff and Rudolf Baumbach. The former's "Wilder Jäger" (1877) and "Tannhäuser" (1880) and the latter's "Zlatorog" (1877), as well as his "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen" (1878) met the needs of a large audience in the 1980s. For Catholic circles, the Westphalian Friedr. Wilh. Weber provided a historical epic in his "Dreizehnlinden" (1878).

[ 83 ] The poetry of Theodor Storms grew out of the Romantic view of art. This view, however, is in close harmony with a pithy mind firmly rooted in the life and nature of his native Schleswig-Holstein and a gift for observation that sees the outside world in soft, often misty shapes, but always in a healthy, natural way. He is a master at drawing atmospheric pictures. His depictions appear like a landscape covered in a delicate mist. A lyrical undertone speaks from all his creations. The novella "Aquis submersus" (1877) is of shattering tragedy; a powerful art of representation speaks from the "Schimmelreiter". Storm also has a gift for humor. As a lyrical poet, he is a master of expression, finding all tones from the most tender mood to pithy, sharp characterization. Related to Storm in his whole disposition is Wilhelm Jensen. His thinking is rooted in the social, liberal views of the present; his style of depiction is reminiscent of the fantastical spirit of Romanticism. He needs exciting scenes, bright lights to express what he wants. His novels "Um den Kaiserstuhl" (1878), "Nirwana" (1877), "Am Ausgange des Reichs" (1885) depict historical events in such a way that atrocity scenes and gruesome human destinies appear in comfortable breadth. Jensen's poems are characterized by lyrical verve, an artistic language, but also often a peculiar way of feeling.

[ 84 ] As Heyse and Grimm stand by Goethe's conviction of art, Storm and Jensen by that of the Romantics, so the humorist Wilhelm Raabe by that of Jean Paul. Like the latter, Raabe interrupts the course of the narrative and speaks to us in his own person; like his predecessor, he does not develop the plot according to its natural course, but anticipates things or returns to them. His choice of subject matter is also reminiscent of Jean Paul. He moves in a circle of quiet, modest, idyllic sufferings and joys. He always seeks humor in the inner contradictions of human characters. He draws people and situations in sharp outlines, with a decided tendency towards the bizarre. Whether he is depicting nerdiness, as in "Hungerpastor" (1864), or philanthropy, which appears comical because it takes unsuitable paths, as in "Horacker" (1876), Raabe always succeeds in creating clear, distinct physiognomies. Original characters and social contrasts are his field. Hans Hoffmann's importance also lies in the humorous portrayal of characters. The main character in the novel "Ivan the Terrible and his Dog" (1889), a grammar school teacher, is comical because of everything about him: his appearance, his movements, his helplessness towards his pupils. The collection of novellas "Das Gymnasium zu Stolpenburg" (1891) reveals the jovial, serious artist on every page. Fritz Mauthner made a name for himself as a satirist. His talent for parody led him to caricaturingly imitate the style and sensibilities of others in his book "Nach berühmten Mustern" (1879). In his "Villenhof" (1891) he castigates discord in Berlin social life. Among the humorists must also be Friedr. Theod. Vischer, who in his novel "Auch einer" (One too) portrayed the comic type of a person whose mental state is thrown off balance every moment by the small, random disturbances of life. What is interesting about Vischer is the constant interplay between the theoretical results of his aesthetic studies and speculations and an unmistakable original poetic natural disposition. Because he has explored all types of artistic representation, he displays a rare fluency of form and style in many areas in his "Lyrical Walks" - because he is a poet by nature, he captivates us with the expression of his feelings and the bold sweep of his imagination. Vischer's treatises "Kritische Gänge" and "Altes und Neues" are gems of German literature due to the profundity of their ideas, the courage of their thinking that does not shy away from consistency and no less due to their mastery of the essay style. He is a universal mind that reaches out in all directions. He follows the philosophical, artistic, religious and scientific phenomena of the time and comments on them with critical judgments that make him appear as a leader of the intellectual movement of his time and at the same time as a pithy character who follows his own sure path. Vischer's development clearly reflects the turnaround that has taken place in German intellectual culture in recent decades. He started out from the idealistic convictions of Hegel's philosophy. He wrote his "Aesthetics" in the 1940s and 1950s based on this and then retracted important principles of these views in a self-criticism.

[ 85 ] Like Vischer himself, Hegelian philosophy as a whole retreated from new views in the second half of the century. The great scientific results obtained by careful observation of natural facts and by experiment shook the faith in pure thought by which Hegel and his disciples had erected their proud edifice of ideas. Thus it came about that the consciousness of the time opted for philosophical directions that were characterized less by rigour and consistency of thought than by external means such as an easy, popular way of presentation and a spirited approach to things. Schopenhauer, with his dazzling, piquant, coarse style, prepared the ground for this trend. Only in such a mood could philosophical presentations such as Eduard von Hartmann's "Philosophy of the Unconscious" (1869) or Eugen Dühring's writings be applauded. It was not the undoubtedly valuable ideas contained in these works that made an impression, but the way in which they were presented. In the seventies and eighties, the philosophical spirit steadily disappeared from German education. This can be seen very clearly in the writing of literary history and in literary criticism. The subtle literary-historical observation of Hermann Hettner, which was directed through the facts to the driving ideal forces, the kind of Julian Schmidt, Gervinus et al, who searched for the causes of literary phenomena, were abandoned, and they were replaced by the approach of Wilhelm Scherer, who in his "History of German Literature" (1883) confined himself purely to the grouping of facts and to the visible parts of historical development.

[ 86 ] It is understandable that in a period in which the educational materials gained in long intellectual struggles are in the process of dissolution, a wealth of literary products appears that is as unequal in value and effect as possible. Busy prolific writing, which only aims to satisfy the public's need for light entertainment, appears alongside unclear ideological literature; there are writers with a light, witty gift for presentation, as well as serious spirits who are unable to go their own way and cannot find a firm point of reference in the confusion of contemporary trends. Of the latter type is Eduard Grisebach, who uses Heine's style to express Schopenhauerian ideas in his poems "Der Neue Tannhäuser" (1869) and "Tannhäuser in Rom" (1875). Something similar can also be said of the highly ambitious Albert Lindner, who created dramas in a pathetic style, which nevertheless clearly bear the stamp of an epigonism striving for originality. More fortunate was Ernst von Wildenbruch, who created a long series of dramas with a certain poetic verve and excellent skill in scenic construction. A noble enthusiasm for heroic grandeur and an idealizing style of representation are characteristic of Wildenbruch, and in his short stories and poems an intimacy of feeling and a sympathetic disposition come to the fore. Richard Voß is a spirit who, out of an unhealthy nervousness, searches for stirring, strongly arousing motifs and lets them work in a blatant, often bloodcurdling way. But he also has the ability to depict intimate states of mind, which he, however, associates with all too stormy events, as in the dramas "Eva" and "Alexandra". That he also understands the pulse of the present is shown in his drama "Die neue Zeit", in which a pastor's son, who has grown into the free-spirited views of our time, comes into conflict with his father, who clings to the prejudices of the old world. Rudolf Gottschall, who sticks to the academic-aesthetic templates as a playwright and lyricist, Julius Grosse, who has proven himself to be a tasteful but uninspiring artist in drama, novels and poetry, and finally Hans von Hopfen, whose achievements hardly rise above mere light fiction,

[ 87 ] A personality who deserves the highest respect is Adolf Friedrich Graf Schack, a poet who strives for depth and makes the highest demands on form. His ethical and artistic seriousness is admirable. This is expressed not only in his witty essays on literary history and in his self-biography "Half a Century", but also in the generous support he gave to artists and artistic endeavors. Heinrich Leuthold is also a master of strict artistic form, whose melancholy tones are partly the expression of agonizing personal experiences, but also of a deeply pessimistic view of the world. A reflective poet in the fullest sense of the word is the Swiss Dranmor (Ferdinand von Schmid), who is very similar to Leuthold in his passionate, restless manner and his gloomy view of the world. Schack, Dranmor and Leuthold are primarily lyric poets. Isolde Kurz with her "Florentinische Novellen" (1890), which emerged from a refined taste and a vivid imagination, can be seen as a pupil of Conrad Ferd. Artur Fitger appeared as a lyricist and dramatist. The gloomy view of the world that we have found in so many poets of the seventies and eighties is also a basic feature of his lyrical creations. His powerful drama "The Witch" (1876), although not very original in its structure, met with the liveliest applause for a time. The poems of Martin Greif were born out of a tender spirit in which the finest impulses of nature tremble harmoniously. He succeeded in writing songs of genuine Goethean simplicity and naturalness; for dramatic art, in which he also tried his hand, this soft and delicate spirit lacks creative power and sharpness of characterization. The South German Johann Georg Fischer is a sharply characterized poetic physiognomy. With him, one senses healthy strength and a joyful zest for life everywhere, which emerge in splendid language, often with unsought pathos, often with the simplest folksiness. He too is not up to the demands of the dramatic structure.

[ 88 ] A genuine North German poet of austere beauty is Theodor Fontane. As a lyric poet, he is reserved in his feelings and extraordinarily succinct in his expression. He juxtaposes the impressions that arouse his feelings and then leaves us alone with our hearts. His imagination creates in monumental images and has a simple grandeur, which comes into its own in his "Ballads" (1861). Similar peculiarities also characterize him as a storyteller. His style is almost sober, but always expressive. Prussian life and North German nature have found a classic actor in him. He paints equally well in broad strokes as in the smallest details. His novels "Adultera", "Irrungen - Wirrungen", "Stine", "Stechlin" are equally appreciated by the public seeking only interesting reading and by the strictest critics. The Austrian Ludwig Anzengruber is a true dramatist of admirable accuracy in characterization and the ability to portray events in vivid development. His dramas are rooted in the intellectual life of the Austrian peasantry and middle class in the 1970s. In particular, he knew how to portray the striving for a free-minded view of religious ideas and the struggles that the peasant mind had to endure as a result of such goals, for example in "Pfarrer von Kirchfeld" (1870) and "Kreuzelschreibern" (1872). In "Meineidbauer" (1872), "G'wissenswurm" (1874) and "Fleck auf der Ehr" (1888), he showed how deeply he was able to draw motifs from the peasant soul. Ludwig Ganghofer, who wanted to treat Upper Bavarian folk life in plays such as "Der Herrgottschnitzer von Ammergau" and "Der Geigenmacher von Mittenwald" in a similar way to Anzengruber's treatment of Austrian folk life, did not hit the "true-to-nature" notes like Anzengruber did. In contrast, Lower Austria has an epic writer in Joseph Misson, who in his unfortunately unfinished poetic tale "Da Naz, a Niederösterreichischer Bauernbui, geht in d'Fremd" (1850) expressed the mood, imagination and behavior of his people in an incomparable way. The Styrian Peter Rosegger achieved the same to a high degree with his compatriots in a series of prose works that were born of a sensible mind, a brave character and a cozy narrative gift. In the second half of the century, folk poetry, which in most cases also seeks to intimately reflect the form of expression and way of looking at things of the people in the form of dialect poetry, blossomed beautifully. Franz von Kobell and his pupil Karl Stieler produced precious gems of folk poetry in the Upper Bavarian dialect. Franz Stelzhammer created poems in Austrian dialect that are so natural that they seem to have arisen from the spontaneity of the people. The dialect poetry of the Viennese J.G. Seidl is inspired by warm feelings, but of a much lesser power and originality. The Silesian dialect has found a poet of naive, humorous expression in Karl von Holtei, whom we have already mentioned (p. 58) as a storyteller and dramatist. The North German dialect was cultivated by Klaus Groth and Fritz Reuter. Groth, the singer of "Quickborn" (1852), writes like an educated man who has grown out of folk life, but his love of his homeland and his striving to make his dialect heard make up for what he lacks in originality. Fritz Reuter's poems stem entirely from the soul of the people, from their most intimate thoughts and feelings. He is a first-rate character painter. Reuter's first collection of poems, "Läuschen un Rimels" (1853), immediately won him a large circle of admirers. His brilliant narrative talent is at its best when he weaves his own experiences into the narrative, as in "Ut mine Festungstid" (1862) and "Ut mine Stromtid" (1863 to 1864). He vividly depicts the mood of the people before the events of 1812. It is the urge for the primal sources of poetry that is expressed in the rich applause that poems such as Anzengruber's, Rosegger's, Groth's and Reuter's found in almost all circles. People believed that they could find in the simple popular mind what they had distanced themselves from in the highly developed art poetry of the Heyses, Meyers and Hamerlings. At the same time as this trend, there was another, which renounced higher artistic demands and sought satisfaction in amiable wit, in brisk, if not very profound depiction. This direction found its field particularly in the lightly thrown feuilleton and in the skillfully constructed, sensationally exciting drama. Paul Lindau, Oskar Blumenthal, Hugo Lubliner, Adolf l'Arronge, Franz v. Schönthan, Gustav v. Moser, Ernst Wichert and others. were responsible for this taste, which gradually took hold in such wide circles that protests such as that of Hans Herrig, who in his essay "Luxustheater und Volksbühne" (1886) wanted to recapture the theater of true art, were initially ineffective. Above all, Herrig wanted to win over the people to his ideas, and this was also the goal of his Luther Festival.

[ 89 ] However, even in the 1970s and 1980s, a strong receptiveness to genuine art remained clearly perceptible in individual circles. Proof of this is the steadily growing recognition that Gottfried Keller has received. However, the creations that he added, after a long intervening period, to those we had already acknowledged earlier (p. 62) were on a par with them. The "Seven Legends" (1872) represent a reform of the legendary style on a completely new, realistic basis. The "Sinngedicht" (1881) is a warmly felt, mature creation. The "Züricher Novellen" (1878) are cultural pictures from Zurich's past, painted with simplicity and grandeur; "Martin Salander" (1886) depicts the political situation in Switzerland with superior humor. While each new creation by Keller also testified to a higher level of artistry, Gustav Freytag continued to cultivate the style he had once acquired. Neither his "Pictures from the German Past" (1859-67) nor the series of novels "The Ancestors", which appeared after 1870, represented any artistic progress. One personality who reflects the true character of the last four decades in poetry is Wilhelm Jordan. Unfortunately, he lacked the poetic power to give artistic expression to his world view, which was fully in tune with the times. In his "Demiurgos" ($.65), he prophetically proclaimed Darwin's world view in advance; when it was scientifically substantiated, it also appeared with full clarity in his poetic products. The characters in his rewriting of the German heroic epic "Nibelunge" (1868-74) grew out of this view, and his novels "Die Sebalds" (1885) and "Zwei Wiegen" (1887) were written entirely in the spirit of contemporary scientific thought. If Jordan must be described as a genuinely modern spirit because of his world view, it was he who saw the truly poetic in going back to the simple, primitive conditions of cultural development. He wanted the last form of the Song of the Nibelungs that has come down to us to be regarded only as an attenuation of an older, much grander form. This is why he did not base his work on the later German Nibelungenlied, but on the older Nordic sagas. In such striving for the original sources, one can clearly see an echo of Goethe's and Herder's way of looking at things, which sees the root of the poetic in the naive and childlike world of imagination. Wilhelm Jordan's restoration of the stave rhyme can also be traced back to such a view.

[ 90 ] In the 1980s, the younger generation of German poets became convinced that the paths that poetry had taken up to that point were no longer fruitful. They no longer wanted to solve the artistic tasks set by the views of Herder, Goethe, Schiller and the Romantics. After all, life and the circles of ideas had changed considerably since the times in which those minds had formed their thoughts. Scientific discoveries had led us to see the processes of the outside world and their relationship to man in a new light. Technical inventions had changed the way of life and the relations of the various classes of people. Entire classes that had previously not taken part in public life entered into it. The social question with all its consequences was at the center of thought. In the face of such a change in culture as a whole, it was felt impossible to hold on to old traditions in poetry. The new life should bring forth a new poetry. This call grew ever stronger. In 1882, the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart led the way with their "Kritische Waffengänge", in which they used harsh language against the traditional, the outdated. They were then followed by other poets of the younger generation. In 1885, a selection of poems entitled "Modern Poetry Characters" was published, in which the striving for a new style of art was resolutely asserted. In addition to the Harts, Wilhelm Arent, Hermann Conradi, Karl Henckell, Arno Holz, Otto Erich Hartleben, Wolfgang Kirchbach participated in the new movement. In the same year, Michael Georg Conrad founded the "Gesellschaft" in Munich, a "Realistische Monatsschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben", which was guided by the same goals, and Karl Bleibtreu issued a strong rejection of everything traditional in his "Revolution der Literatur". Alongside much immaturity, many a pleasing gift appeared within this movement. Karl Henckell's social songs often pulsate with true passion, despite his preference for party slogans. Hermann Conradi's phrase-like novels vividly reflect the ferment of the times, and in his Iyrian creations one finds the heart-warming tones of a man who unreservedly expresses himself, with all the faults and sins of human nature. Julius Hart's poems also express a genuine empathy with everything that arouses the times. In 1885, Arno Holz published his "Book of the Times", in which he found effective words for social hardship. Above all, it was the artificial, the life in ideas that had lost their connection with life, to which war was declared. They did not want to work according to old templates, according to the artistic sensibilities of a bygone era, but according to the needs and inspirations of their own individuality. Under the influence of such sentiments, a poet came into his own who, however, developed completely independently of the conscious, deliberate striving for something new: Detlev v. Liliencron. He is a nature full of vitality and artistic creativity, a fine connoisseur and depictor of all the charms of existence, a poet who has all tones at his disposal, from the wildest exuberance to the delicate depiction of sublime natural moods. In 1883 he drew attention to himself with his "Adjutant's Rides", and since then he has proved himself to be one of the most outstanding contemporary poets in a series of lyrical collections. Following in his footsteps were Otto Julius Bierbaum and Gustav Falke, the latter in particular having achieved something worthy of recognition through his striving for perfection of form. Karl Busse also made a good impression on his first appearance, but was unable to maintain the same level. Richard Dehmel is an energetic lyricist who, however, cannot find harmony between abstract thought and immediate feeling. The search for new goals generates the most diverse directions in the present. In contrast to idealism, which placed the spirit too high and forgot that sensuality underlies all spirituality, a counter-current emerged which indulged in the latter and sought only the raw animal instincts in every expression of life. Hermann Bahr celebrated true orgies in this area in his stories "Die gute Schule" (1890) and "Dora" (1893). In his drama "Toni Stürmer" (1892), Cäsar Flaischlen also sought to portray the idealism of love as contradictory and to show that only natural passion brings the sexes together. The social movement also had an impact on poetry. Works such as "Schlechte Gesellschaft" (1886) by Karl Bleibtreu, "Die heilige Ehe" (1886) by Hans Land and Felix Holländer and in Max Kretzer's "Die Betrogenen" (1882) and "Die Bergpredigt" (1889) are sharply critical of existing social conditions and the prevailing moral views. In his dramas "Hanna Jagert" (1893), "Erziehung zur Ehe" (1894) and "Sittliche Forderung" (1897), Otto Erich Hartleben shows the self-dissolution of social ideas and depicts human weaknesses with great satirical power in his novellistic sketches. As a lyric poet, he is characterized by a beautiful sculpture of expression and a simple, tasteful naturalness. John Henry Mackay gives expression to the striving for complete liberation of the individual, which has found a philosopher in Max Stirner (p. 5o), in his cultural painting "The Anarchists" (1891), in stories such as "The People of Marriage" (1892) and in his poems, which place the ideal of personal independence above all else (collected and published in 1898). Hermann Sudermann deals with the clash between the moral concepts of different classes in his dramas "Die Ehre", "Die Heimat" and "Glück im Winkel". In his more recent stage works "Johannes" and "Die drei Reiherfedern", he has set himself higher tasks. He portrays the tragedy inherent in human nature itself, a goal he also pursued in his stories "Frau Sorge" and "Der Katzensteg". The influence of the modern scientific world view on the human soul is illustrated by Wilhelm Bölsche in his novel "Mittagsgöttin" (i8g91). The most recent drama strives for the truth of nature in that it does not allow the development of events in poetry to proceed according to higher, artistic laws, but seeks a photographically faithful depiction of reality. Johannes Schlaf and Arno Holz led the way in this direction with their dramas "Meister Olze" and "Familie Selicke", in which the truth of nature is exaggerated to the point of merely copying external events. They were followed by Gerhart Hauptmann, who in his first works "Vor Sonnenaufgang" (1889) and "Das Friedensfest" (1890) still created entirely in this style, but in "Einsamen Menschen" (1891) rose to the level of depicting significant emotional conflicts and cohesive dramatic composition. In his "Colleague Crampton" (1892), he then delivered a character painting that was as true to nature as it was artistic. In "Hanneles Himmelfahrt" and "Versunkene Glocke", his style becomes idealistic and romantic despite its fidelity to nature. In "The Weavers" (1892), the depiction of reality becomes a complete dissolution of all dramatic form; in "Henschel the Carriage Driver", Hauptmann shows that he can unite fidelity to nature and poetic composition. Max Halbe was much acclaimed for his romantic drama "Jugend" (1893) with its atmospheric depiction of youthful passions. When he set himself higher goals, as in his character dramas "Lebenswende" and "Der Eroberer", he was unable to break through. Ludwig Jacobowski set himself a great task in his "Loki" (1898), the "novel of a god", in which he shines a light deep into the abysses of human nature and illustrates its eternal striving through the battle of the destructive Loki against the creative Asen. With his lyrical collection "Shining Days" (1899), he joined the ranks of the most outstanding modern poets. He combines simple beauty of expression with a harmonious view of the world and life. In the last decade, Friedrich Nietzsche exerted an incomparable influence on contemporary thought. Through a radical "revaluation of all values", he sought to portray the entire path that Western culture has taken since the foundation of Christianity as a great idealistic error. Humanity must discard all belief in the hereafter, all ideas that go beyond real existence, and draw its strength and culture purely from this world. Man should not see his ideal in the likeness of higher powers, but in the highest enhancement of his natural abilities up to the "superman". This is the meaning of his main poetic and philosophical work "Thus Spoke Zarathustra".

[ 91 ] In France, literature in the last third of the century initially continued along the same lines as before. Through Emile Augier, Alexander Dumas the Younger and Victorien Sardou, drama developed into a morality play and social drama. In the latter, the main aim was to illustrate a moralizing tendency through exciting entanglements and corresponding solutions. Alongside this, a dramatic genre developed that placed the main emphasis on witty dialog and social satire. It has its main representative in Edouard Pailleron. The training in skillful scene direction blossomed in Labiche, Meilhac, Bisson. The truth and probability of events play no role in them, only the development of the plot, which is calculated for effect and must be rich in surprising twists and turns. In poetry, the striving for correctness of form, for smooth, pleasing expression prevails in the "school of the Parnassiens". Frangois Coppée, R. F. A. Sully-Prudhomme and Charles Leconte de Lisle particularly cultivated this style. Anatole France also belongs to it with his lyric poetry, which strives for a classical style of representation. In contrast, Charles Baudelaire is a genuinely Romantic poet who prefers to be in a state of intoxication of the soul and loves to depict the uncanny, demonic forces of the human interior. He wants to expose all dark instincts. He literally revels in feelings of fear and lust. A healthier sense can be found in Gustav Flaubert and especially in the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, who strive to restrain the artistic imagination through the objective spirit of science. Under their influence, a naturalism emerged that did not want to shape reality according to subjective arbitrariness, but rather to make use of the objective laws of knowledge for the poetic depiction of things. It does not want aesthetic laws, but only those based on the mere observation of facts. This direction found its perfect expression in Emile Zola. He no longer wants to shape things and processes artistically. Just as the scientific experimenter brings substances and forces together in the laboratory and then waits to see what develops as a result of their mutual influence, Zola experimentally juxtaposes things and people and seeks to continue the development as it would have to result if the same things and people stood opposite each other in the same way in objective reality. In this way he develops the experimental novel. In doing so, he leans on the achievements of modern science. Alongside this Zolashian naturalism, another of the Balzacian type continues, which has its main representative in Alphonse Daudet. Guy de Manpassant is a storyteller with a brilliant power of perception that penetrates the depths of the soul. Important cultural phenomena of our time are recorded in his novels and in stylistically masterful novellas. As a draughtsman of character, he portrays people with sharp contours, and his depiction of actions is as much characterized by natural truth as by artful composition. In France, Victor Cherbuliez, Hector Malot and Georges Ohnet satisfied that part of the public which in Germany found its satisfaction in Lindau, Blumenthal and others. A subtle artist with a refined technique is Pierre Loti, who, however, cultivates a style of art that is more suited to the artist's developed taste than to a wider circle.

[ 92 ] In the Dutch language, under the name "Muliatuli", Eduard Douwes Dekker created narrative poems and philosophical works of ideas, which from a bold, out of a bold, free spirit, they make powerful accusations against everything in contemporary culture which, seen from the vantage point of true humanity, is ripe for destruction, but which is preserved by brute force and robs the valuable and noble of the space for free development. Multatuli does not shy away from any sharpness, even one-sidedness of expression, when he wants to hit what he considers necessary for persecution. A kind of leading spirit of Dutch folklore in Belgium is Hendrik Conscience, who made a great impression with his intimate depictions of modest living conditions and has also found imitators in his homeland. The Belgian M. Maeterlinck takes a mystical view of nature and the human soul. He is less interested in clear thoughts and perceptible processes than in the dark forces that we sense in the events of the outside world and in the depths of our unconscious soul. He depicts them in his dramas and seeks to approach them philosophically in his subtle essays.

[ 93 ] The English poetry of this period is characterized by the works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. He is of a romantic nature, a fiery depictor of sensuality, a draughtsman of great passions, but also of the tender vibrations of the soul and atmospheric images of nature. The sea with its manifold beauties is a favorite area for him. His lullabies are characteristic of his sensuous mind. In the dramatic field ("Atalanta in Calydon") he strove for Greek perfection of form. In addition to him, Matthew Arnold and Dante Gabriel Rosetti also come into consideration. The former is reminiscent of Byron in his world view and expression, while the latter seeks to achieve a simple style through ancient artistic means. William Morris is an original nature with a powerful gift for depiction. From close observation, Rudyard Kipling depicts Indian-English life in captivating novellas, novels and popular-sounding poems.

[ 94 ] In America, a literature independent of the English mother country has developed since the middle of the century. A universal spirit and strong artist is Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. As a lyric poet he has achieved recognition throughout the educated world. His poems speak of a noble, great character. Those of his creations in which he movingly sings of the fate of slaves are characteristic of his humane view of the world. He is also an excellent storyteller with a soft, heartfelt and humorous tone. In "Hiawatha" Longfellow has described the ancient cultural conditions of the Indian people, in "The Golden Legend" he deals with the eternal poetic problem, the striving and wandering man as a symbol of the whole human species. Contemporary English prose has found an outstanding master in Washington Irving. His humor has a sentimental streak. Francis Bret Harte, the author of the world-famous Californian tales, and the thoughtful humorist Mark Twain differ most in style from the mother country. In Walt Whitman, the American imagination and sensibility found a particularly characteristic expression. From the thoughts he expresses to his treatment of language, everything is modern in the most genuine sense.

[ 95 ] In recent decades, the change from old to new views has been most rapid in northern Europe. It developed under the influence of a merciless, unsparing criticism of tradition. Georg Brandes, the intellectual Dane, led the way. A bold, enthusiastic free spirit gave him the broadest impact. His intellectual horizon is of rare greatness. He was able to familiarize himself with the various cultures of Europe with a keen sense and thus acquired a breadth of vision that enabled him to follow the intellectual currents of all countries in their essential characteristics. By seeking out fruitful ideas everywhere and instilling them into the education of Denmark, he became the reformer of the entire world view of his fatherland. In the field of poetry, the lyric poet Holger Drachmann and the great stylistic artist J. P. Jacobsen, who is both a thorough and profound connoisseur of the human soul, and who is able to depict inner processes and abysses of the mind in an atmospheric way, were active in Denmark.

[ 96 ] In Norway, Björnstjerne Björnson, Henrik Ibsen and Arne Garborg are the creators of a type of poetry whose influence can be felt everywhere in Europe today. They were preceded like prophets by Jonas Lie and Alexander Kjelland, the former as an important psychologist and depictor of popular life, the latter as a sharp satirist in the field of moral views and social grievances. Björnson is a poet who serves the liberal ideals of his fatherland with his art. He is a political spirit who always has the progress of culture in mind in all his work and who is able to give his characters clear, clear outlines from his firm convictions. A revolutionary spirit is Henrik Ibsen. He has incorporated everything that is revolutionary in modern culture into his personality. He is a rich, versatile nature. His works therefore show great differences in style and in the means with which he presents his world view. He traces the germs of decomposition that lie in the views, customs and social orders of the present ("Stützen der Gesellschaft" 1877), the lies of life ("Volksfeind" 1882), the position of the sexes ("Nora" 1879, "Ghosts" 1881), the position of the sexes ("Nora" 1879, "Ghosts" 1881), he depicts demonic forces in the human soul as a deep psychologist ("Frau vom Meere" 1888, "Hedda Gabler" 1890, "Baumeister Solneß" 1892), he characterizes the mystical in the soul ("Klein Eyolf" 1894). Ibsen's basic theme is the tragedy of human life in "Brand" (1866) and "Peer Gynt" (1867). Pastor Brand is intended to portray the Faustian struggle of man living in the imaginative and emotional mode of the present. The hero knows only one love, that of his rational ideals, and does not allow the language of feeling to come into its own. Instead of taking possession of human hearts in order to achieve the fulfillment of his demands through them in a benevolent manner, he pursues them with ruthless harshness. He becomes intolerant out of idealism. Therein lies the tragedy of his personality. In contrast to him is Peer Gynt, the man of fantasy, whose ideas are not rooted enough in reality to inspire their bearer with the kind of energy that enables people to assert themselves in life. The versatility of Ibsen's art is revealed particularly clearly when we consider the "Comedy of Love" (1862), which shows us the poet as a doubter of life's goals, alongside the "Crown Pretenders", written just one year later, in which certainty and confidence are expressed in the creator's world view. The dependence of man on the external environment, on views within which he lives and which he receives as tradition, is depicted in "Bund der Jugend" (1869), while "Kaiser und Galiläer" (1873) illustrates the determination of the will through the unalterable, natural necessity of all things. "The Wild Duck" (1884) and "Rosmersholm" (1886) are paintings of the soul from which the deeply penetrating psychological connoisseur speaks.

[ 97 ] In place of Greek fate and the divine order of the world, he sets natural law as the driving force of the drama, which does not punish the guilty and reward the good, but governs people's actions as it rolls a stone down a slippery slope ("Ghosts"). Arne Garbor does not, like Ibsen, have the art of depicting broad lines, but he paints the life of the soul faithfully and is a sharp accuser of social institutions. Sexual life is at the center of his approach. The two Swedes August Strindberg and Ola Hansson are also powerful painters of the soul, but they like to take their material from unhealthy nature. Strindberg's pessimism, which, however, stems from deeply painful life experiences, presents itself almost like the distorted image of a healthy world view.

[ 98 ] Russian intellectual life also underwent great spiritual upheavals during this period. While the older Russian literature proved to be an imitator of Western European culture in its ideas and conceptions as well as in its means of expression, the national spirit now deepened and sought to build its views from the depths of its own national essence. Here, too, criticism leads the way. In W. Belinskij Russia has an aesthete and philosopher of great spiritual vision and high aims. From a purely logical point of view, his critical activity lacks consistency; Belinsky is a constant seeker who wants to bring clarity to the confused ideas and dark impulses of his people. In doing so, he is guided more by his sure feelings than by any abstract ideas. The creations of Nicolai Gogol, who hurls the most terrible accusations against his fatherland, but accusations that speak of a deep, heartfelt love, prove how unfathomably deep and at the same time how dreamy and confused the spirit of the people is. A mystical sense underlies his imagination, which drives him restlessly forward without him seeing any clear goal before him. In N. Nekrasov, Ivan Turgenev, Ivan Goncharov and in F. M. Dostoyevsky, this dark urge gradually works its way into clarity. Turgenev is, however, still strongly influenced by Western European ideas. In delicate images, he mainly depicts suffering people who somehow cannot come to terms with life. Goncharov and Pissemsky are depictions of Russian social life, without any further outlook on a world view. Dostoyevsky is an ingenious psychologist who descends into the depths of the soul and reveals the innermost depths of man in brilliant, albeit sometimes gruesome, images. His "Raskolnikov" was regarded throughout Europe as a model of psychological representation. Count Leo Tolstoy is a representative of Russian intellectual life as a whole. He developed from a powerful storyteller ("War and Peace" 1872, "Anna Karenina" 1877) to a prophet of a new form of religion that sought its roots in a somewhat violent interpretation of primitive Christianity and elevated complete selflessness to the ideal of life. Tolstoy also sees all art that is not aimed at human compassion and the improvement of coexistence as a superfluous luxury that a selfless person does not indulge in. In Hungary, we encounter the imaginative storyteller Maurus Jókai and the playwright Ludwig Doczi, as well as Emerich Madách, who provided the Hungarian Faust in his "Tragedy of Man".

[ 99 ] The most successful of the more recent Italian poets is Giosuè Carducci, who strives for classical and beautiful expression. A singer of fiery sensuality is Lorenzo Stecchetti, and the playwright Pietro Cossa is an important characterizer. Giovanni Verga deals with Sicilian peasant life in lively stories. Italy has its social poets in Guido Mazzoni and Ada Negri. In the field of drama, the idealist Felice Cavallotti and the naturalist Emilio Praga stand opposite each other. - From Spain, José Echegaray briefly captured the attention of European audiences, to whom he delivered a much-discussed drama in his "Galeotto", whose structure is reminiscent of the abstract consistency of a calculus.

Jakob Hugentobler: Dear Sirs and Madams! I warmly welcome you to our lecture event. The intention of this lecture is to present you with something positive from anthroposophical spiritual science in contrast to the mostly negative criticism that is so widespread today.

Anyone who keeps their eyes open today, who opens themselves to a deeper understanding of their environment, sees newer phenomena emerging in all cultural fields - in the fields of science, religion and art. They see beginnings that look like something that wants to break through, that has not yet found the actual path for this breakthrough. In anthroposophical spiritual science, an attempt is now being made to show the roots for everything that shows itself as a healthy new thing here in its beginnings - to show how one can penetrate to a deeper spiritual realm and how something can grow out of this spiritual realm, which must again become a union of all that is making itself felt today in so many separate movements. It is because of this possibility of a deeper knowledge that anthroposophical spiritual science claims to extend to all areas of life, to penetrate all areas of life with its new knowledge. This spirit, which wants and must be active as a fertilization of today's entire cultural life, is to be spoken of here. Therefore, we must no longer speak with indignation, amazement, and astonishment about the fact that anthroposophical spiritual science is spreading to all areas of life, as was so often the case in the past. The fact is that it wants to claim to be a truly comprehensive world view. This lecture will be based on such a real world view.

You will have the opportunity to take part in specialist eurythmy courses here – eurythmy, this new art of movement that was inaugurated by Dr. Rudolf Steiner. It is based on anthroposophical spiritual science, and so this new art of eurythmy will be taught in individual courses. Likewise, there will be opportunities to delve more deeply into anthroposophical spiritual science by attending introductory courses, which will also be held here in Zurich. If you are interested, you can write down your name and address. You can see the rest from the programs that have been distributed.

Rudolf Steiner: Dearly beloved! When a distorted image of anthroposophy is so often created and this distortion is then fought, so that in this fight little of what anthroposophy really represents is actually encountered, it is probably because that today many people still understand anthroposophy as something that stands, as it were, in the middle between science in the strict sense of the word on the one hand and the various religious views on the other.

In order to draw attention to the fact that the judgments that assign such a fluctuating position to anthroposophy, as it is meant here, are inaccurate, I would like to discuss the sources, the actual origins of anthroposophical research, in this introductory lecture today. And here I must first draw attention to the following. However much it is the case that what comes to light through anthroposophy touches people's religious feelings and religious sentiments, anthroposophy itself did not arise from any religious impulse, but rather it emerged from the natural science of our time, from a natural scientific world view. This may at first seem paradoxical from some points of view, but in order to characterize the scientific spirit of anthroposophy in the right way, this origin from a scientific basis must be emphasized particularly strongly.

In turning to anthroposophy, one is thoroughly imbued with the idea that the more recent development of humanity owes its greatest achievements and strongest forces to what are today called scientific insights. And I myself would like to admit that, in my opinion, no other spirit should prevail in anthroposophy than that which has been trained through the scientific research of modern times, which, above all, has come to know the conscientious, exact methods of observation, experimentation and scientific thinking of the present day. However, when we speak of a kind of scientific preparation for anthroposophy, we are less concerned with the results - I would even say triumphant results - of modern science than with the spirit of training that which a person acquires when he learns to work scientifically, that is, experimentally and observantly, to gain a scientific view of the entities and facts of the world in a serious way.

Now it has come about that in the course of the development of natural science in recent times, so to speak, more and more has been drawn into this research the sense of the exclusive significance of the world of sensual facts – of that which is based on certain facts that can be observed through the senses and whose observation can be intensified by instruments. Only what can be based on this is considered a true foundation of modern scientific research. And the more progress was made, the more this was abandoned, in thinking, in methodical reflection, to rise above this world of facts. One has more and more proceeded to regard the facts, so to speak experimentally, in such a way that they express themselves through their own mutual relations, and in this way one arrives at the laws of nature, as they are called.

Of course, not so long ago, when dealing with facts, one did not shy away from going from these facts to more or less bold hypotheses. In more recent times, these have developed into systems of concepts. And so insights have been gained, for example about the universe. We are now living in a time, however, in which some doubt has been cast on hypotheses that appear so plausible in their own way, for example, on the Kant-Laplace hypothesis of the origin of the world. It is certainly regarded as somewhat uncertain, although on the other hand it is admitted that if one wants to arrive at a satisfactory overview of the world of phenomena, such hypotheses cannot be entirely dispensed with. This characterizes one aspect of it. Well, I could only hint at what confronts someone who really goes into the field of natural science today with a sense of inquiry.

But perhaps the second aspect is even more important today. This is that today, in view of the exactitude that has been assumed in natural science, one will no longer be able to get by - not even in the descriptive natural sciences - without a certain basic mathematical education. Indeed, in the natural science of the most recent times a definition has emerged that may seem somewhat paradoxical, somewhat extreme, but which shows the spirit that actually inspires this natural science thinking. The definition has emerged: Being is that which can be measured. Such a definition indicates how much the natural scientist today feels in his element when he has mastered the art that lies in geometry and in the exact measurement that geometry produces, in arithmetic and in the other branches of mathematics. This mathematical training is, so to speak, something that must be brought along today as a basic condition for beneficial scientific research.

What I want to say about anthroposophy today is less about what can be achieved as individual results of scientific research through measurement, counting and so on, but rather about the peculiar state of mind in which the researcher finds himself when he — equipped with the transparent weave of arithmetic, geometric or algebraic concepts, concepts from the world of differential or integral calculus or even synthetic geometry and so on, when he, equipped with the whole weave of these concepts, which are, after all, concepts generated entirely in the human personality itself, approaches the external world of phenomena and then finds: With what you have gained from your own inner being, with what you have formed into formulas and images from your inner being, you can delve into what the senses present to you. And he feels: with what you have, so to speak, spun out of yourself, you can embrace and interweave all that appears to you as completely alien from the external world of facts. This confluence of the mathematical, which is obtained in full clarity, with free, all-encompassing inner volition as a structure, as formulas, this confluence of the mathematical with what confronts us externally, so to speak, from the outside, that is what constitutes the special state of mind of someone who approaches nature in the sense of today's exact natural science.

Now, I would like to draw the attention of those present to what one learns in this way when mathematizing, that is, when forming algebraic or other formulas or geometric structures. I would like to point out that it is indeed possible for a person to observe themselves, as it were, by looking backwards, to see how they behave in this mathematization, how they come to an initially formal certainty in this mathematization, an certainty of the inner truth of these formulas and structures. He can do this on the one hand, and in doing so he gains a kind of insight into the psychological process that takes place when he mathematizes. Certainly, in the emergence of natural science, one has, I would say, been satisfied with the application of the mathematical. One has paid little attention to this psychological process. But if we want to get to nature, if we want to progress from mere scientific research, then it will be necessary to take a really close look at the processes that actually take place in the soul, at what takes place when we develop the mathematical. Because why? When we consider the process that takes place in observation or in controlled experimental observation, when we penetrate the external world with mathematics by observing this process of scientific research, so to speak, observing this scientific research process in one's own personality, one comes to not only conduct scientific research, but also to be able to educate oneself in a conscious way to that kind of grasping of truth that can be grasped through such research. Now, my dear audience, you see, what can truly be called Anthroposophy, as it is meant here, has its origin in such studies - first of all in such a scientific method of research and in such a view of the researcher's activity, the inner researcher's activity. And all that presents itself as Anthroposophy should be measured against this view, this inner view. I freely admit, ladies and gentlemen, that there is an original sense of truth in man, so that numerous personalities, when they hear about the results that appear in the field of Anthroposophy, are inwardly convinced to a certain extent. But, however true it may be that this feeling of truth is based on a certain elementary sense of truth, it is equally true that only those who have undergone the training and self-observation that I have just mentioned, based on natural scientific research, are capable of forming a judgment and, if I may use the term, of “research” in the field of anthroposophy. It is so easy, because of the attractiveness of the anthroposophical results, to lapse into a kind of amateurism that in turn attracts amateurs. But this dilettantism is not at all to be found at the origin of that which, as Anthroposophy, is to present itself to the world today. On the contrary, Anthroposophy seeks to keep every trace of dilettantism out of it, and to be able to give account, so to speak, to the strictest scientific mind of the present time, of its results, and especially of the way in which it has arrived at them. That is why I do not call what occurs in anthroposophy just any kind of religious belief, but something that can stand alongside contemporary science and permeate it. The spirit that has been trained in what is demanded by science today, which underlies today's recognized science, is the same scientific spirit that underlies anthroposophy.

But precisely when one is imbued with this scientific spirit, when one looks back from the mere mathematizing indulgence in external facts to the living research, to what is becoming, when one carries this science in one's soul - leaving the outer facts - then, when one looks back, especially when one looks back on what remains for one as a human being from this science, then one is immediately confronted with a problem that stands out as a major central problem. Only someone who has been educated in the scientific way of thinking can truly grasp the full magnitude of this: this is the problem of human freedom.

Natural science and the philosophy dependent on it – today's dependent philosophy – cannot but start from what is so interwoven in things that we have to speak of necessity. It is impossible for us to start from anything other than necessity with the spirit that prevails in natural science today. And it is virtually the ideal of science to see through what confronts us in the external world as a system of internally necessary, interrelated entities and facts. When you engage in scientific research in this way, you do not come close to what confronts you in the inner fact of human freedom as an immediate experience. You do not come close to it. And so we are confronted with the significant question that leads us to a cognitive abyss: freedom as an immediate experience is given to you! Why then, by stretching out your mathematical web of knowledge over scientific facts and in this way creating a world view, cannot you approach what cannot be denied as an immediate experience: freedom!

If I may interject something personal here, I would like to point out that, as early as the 1880s, my spiritual scientific research confronted me with the scientific necessity, on the one hand, the significance of which for objective research should not be denied in the least at first, but fully recognized, and on the other hand, the problem of freedom. And in my Philosophy of Freedom, published in 1893, I tried to deal with philosophy in the way that a scientifically minded person in the present day had to do.

Now, if we already had a psychology or theory of the soul that was developed and suited to our scientific needs – we don't have it, of course – it would be easier to talk about what I have to talk about at this moment. In recent times, the doctrine of the soul has undergone a peculiar development. Whenever I want to characterize the fate of psychology, of the doctrine of the soul, I always have to refer to an outstanding thinker of recent times, who died here a year ago on the Zürichberg, Franz Brentano.

At the beginning of the second half of the 19th century, Franz Brentano was completely immersed in natural science thinking, and when he first formulated his theses for his professorship in Würzburg, he included among them the main thesis that in the science of the soul no other method may be applied than that which is applied in the external sciences. In 1874, Franz Brentano published the first volume of his “Psychology on an Empirical Basis,” and he promised that when this volume of “Psychology” appeared in the spring of that year, he would deliver the second volume in the fall and, in rapid succession, the next four volumes in the following years. Franz Brentano has since died – no continuation of the first volume has appeared!

Anyone who reads this first volume of Brentano's psychology without prejudice will understand, I would say from the way in which this psychology is presented, why such a continuation has not been published. In this first volume, Franz Brentano frankly and freely states that if one were to stop at where he stopped, one would first have to admit to oneself that one actually knows nothing. If you look at the connection of ideas and their relationship to memory, the socialization of ideas, as it is usually called, and so on, if you apply the purely scientific method to that, then that is no substitute for the kind of psychology that Plato and Aristotle had hoped for. It would not be a substitute for a psychology that can also deal with what can be described as the eternal in man, or – as Franz Brentano puts it – that can deal with the part of man that remains when the temporal life falls away from him as a body. Franz Brentano wanted to solve this problem, which in the popular sense could be called the problem of immortality, in a scientific-psychological sense. He wrestled with it. I would like to make it clear that he did not want to enter the field that I have to refer to here as anthroposophy; it did not seem scientific enough to him. But because he was an honest researcher, he simply could not continue writing. Combining honesty in the field of the doctrine of the soul with a scientific spirit of research is only possible if one is able to develop that continuation of scientific thinking along the way, which is precisely what anthroposophical spiritual science demands.

I would like to say that Franz Brentano's unfinished business with psychology is living proof that we do not have a proper psychology today. If we had a psychology, a proper psychology, then we would be able to look at certain things differently than we usually do today. And here I would like to point out one thing in particular. When we indulge in natural science, when we express natural scientific facts in laws and then incorporate these laws into our intellect, so that we carry within ourselves what has been revealed to us through external observation and experimentation, we notice that the The more we distance ourselves from external facts, the more we work inwardly with the intellect, which proves itself so excellently when guided by experiment and observation, the more we continue to work with this intellect, the more we - in other words - enter the realm of hypothesis, the realm in which we seek to formulate, with the aid of the intellect, the principles underlying these phenomena, we feel more and more distinctly that we are entering a realm in which we cannot, in the long run, satisfy ourselves. The more one, I might say, freely indulges at first in the kind of thinking that can be quite well applied in scientific research, the more one indulges in this thinking, in this forming of thought hypotheses, the more one comes to something unsatisfactory. And this unsatisfactory state is basically evident in the whole course of scientific development.

It is evident from the fact that we see how the most diverse hypotheses have been put forward - hypotheses about light, about the phenomena of electricity, about gravity, and so on. We see how these hypotheses are always replaced by others. And anyone who does not want to completely accept the point of view that we have “come so gloriously far” today must, from these feelings that he may have about this building of hypotheses, say: the hypotheses that have been developed recently will in turn be replaced by others. We are, so to speak, in the middle of replacing the old light hypothesis with another, taken from electrical phenomena. And we have to say to ourselves: we are entering an area where we form hypotheses based on the laws of nature that the mind can gain from external observation and through external experimentation in relation to the sensory world. We come into a region where this mind, so to speak, encounters a fluid, a something that cannot evoke in us the feeling that we can actually approach a being with these mental constructs that we hypothetically form and that, if they are to have a value, can only have this value if they point to something real, to something that exists.

And anyone who, in genuine inner empiricism, that is, equipped with unprejudiced observation of the inner facts of the soul, especially of the will, now considers the element in the soul that includes the fact of freedom, finds this in wonderful harmony with the impossibility of arriving at hypotheses in which there is still the same necessity that we have when we classify and systematize natural phenomena with our thinking. One then feels: if one approaches the soul life with this thinking and only wants to develop hypotheses in the soul life, one swims, as it were, in a liquid. One encounters nothing solid in the soul life. And this harmonizes wonderfully with the fact that the impulse is rooted in the soul life, which can be active without necessity prevailing in it, which can therefore move freely.

I would like to say that through external scientific research we come to a region of our soul life that shows us: if we want to extend the area of necessity into it, it also fails theoretically; it does not satisfy us theoretically either. We come across something in our soul life where freedom is rooted, where freedom can be fully experienced. And we will only be able to properly distinguish this area of freedom from the rest of the world that we can see, when we realize that, as long as we are in the necessity of the world that we can see, we cannot use this necessity to approach what is experienced inwardly when we are in the realm of freedom. I believe that a psychology that is equal to today's scientific exactitude would point to the special kind of inner satisfaction that one has in the game of hypotheses and in the harmony with what one now experiences inwardly, in one's soul, by experiencing the fact of inner freedom.

I would like to make it very clear that I am not talking here about some method or other or some theory or other about freedom, but about the fact of freedom, which we simply discover by deepening unselfconsciously into our own soul life. And then, when we are in a position to do so, when we, equipped with a genuine scientific spirit, so to speak, go against ourselves — not going outwards, but against ourselves — to the limit where we can still reach with scientific thinking and where we can move on to what can be experienced in us as freedom, then we come close to sensing the possibility, the justification of anthroposophy. For, in setting forth its scientific character, Anthroposophy must first start from this experience of the impossibility of approaching freedom through the medium of that which has led outwardly to such great theoretical and practical triumphs – namely, natural science.

Now we stand in this experience of freedom. But if we do not stand in it with abstract concepts, but rather stand inwardly before it, as before an intimately experienced inner fact, then we also know, in a sense, by inwardly experiencing the soul, by being permeated and pulsating with what is experienced as freedom: We cannot enter it with the thoughts that the external laws of nature give us, but if we as human beings really want to engage with life, if, for example, we have ideals, if we are familiar with the true demands of life, in order to take hold of it here or there - we do not enter this sphere of freedom thoughtlessly. We stand in the sphere of freedom by developing free thinking, and we can get to know thinking that moves in the element of freedom, free thinking, which is initially only an inner soul activity, which does not have external observation as a guide, does not have external experiment as a guide. As a progressive inner impulse, it is, so to speak, self-created and rooted in the soul. In my Philosophy of Freedom, I call this thinking pure thinking.

This thinking forms, as it were, the content of consciousness when we have trained this consciousness as I have just indicated. But then, when we move in this thinking, we can remember the concept of being, the concept of reality that we have appropriated from the outer world, especially from the scientifically researched outer world as presented to us by natural science. On the one hand, we take this concept of reality. It need not be particularly clear at first; it can simply be the idea that takes root in us through our direct and scientific contact with the external world. We take this concept, this idea of reality on the one hand, and on the other hand we take what we consciously experience when we engage in free thinking, then something occurs in our soul – yes, I could call it a basic law, I could call it an experience – something occurs to which one must inwardly confess to oneself by saying: I think, but I am not in thinking, that is, I am not as I have come to know existence in the outer world. And the momentous sentence appears before us: I think, therefore I am not.

That is the first thing one has to grasp for one's consciousness, my dear audience. And that is why it is so difficult to deal with the present, which is actually the starting point for the scientific nature of anthroposophy, because, as perhaps most of you know, more recent philosophy still more or less consciously or unconsciously starts from Descartes' sentence: Cogito ergo sum – I think, therefore I am. So one starts from the great error that in thinking one grasps something of a reality, of a reality such as one has initially formed it as a reality in one's mind. We must first admit to ourselves: Whatever arises as I think, I think freely. This is the experience of non-reality, which is an experience that is at the same time a thinking experience and a will experience, a pure will experience, a desire experience.

Dear attendees, this experience is of tremendous importance for the life of the soul. One should actually spend a long time meditating on this experience until we feel, as it were, that we have hollowed out our ego when we admit to ourselves: I think, and in this thinking my ego lives. It is as if I were looking at a colored wall with a black circle in the middle. There is darkness, there is no light. Nevertheless, I see the black circle. I see the black circle within the light. When I become self-conscious in ordinary life and confess to myself: in that I think, I do not look into a reality, I look, if I may express it this way, into the black circle; I look into the non-light, which is darkness. I believe that I actually see myself, because within the content of my consciousness, the ego is left out. It is precisely because there is a nothing within the content of my consciousness and I see this non-being in the being that I initially consider myself to be an ego in ordinary thinking. This is a fundamental fact of psychology and philosophy. However, it may take a while before philosophers are willing to engage with the analysis that is necessary to do this. I can only hint at it here, I can only point to what is there. Much can still be discussed in very long psychological-philosophical expositions before such an analysis is finally done.

You see, my dear audience, once you have realized that when you think you are actually looking into the emptiness of the inner world, once you have realized that something of a volitional nature is at work there, then you are at the right starting point for what can now occur in inner methodological anthroposophical research. And this inner, methodical, anthroposophical research consists of the following: starting from what one has inwardly experienced in the sphere of freedom in the nature of thinking, and what one has then investigated in the 'I think, therefore I am not' in the sense of the being of the beings outside, by letting it take effect on oneself, by, I would like to say, inwardly grasping this atom of will-being, one can then be in the soul mood from which that meditation starts, which one needs to come to a real inner insight.

May people condemn as heresy what appears as an anthroposophical method and thereby distort it in a certain way before humanity, by presenting it as if it were something inferior in a bad sense, as one often calls it so “inferior” in the field of experiments, pragmatism and so on - in all the fields of manifold superstition, people may, may, as I said, distort all that the spiritual researcher develops there, by starting from a fixed philosophical basis. The methods and meditative techniques developed there, ladies and gentlemen, are nothing other than a further development of those inner soul forces that we have when we do mathematics and whose application in external natural science has yielded such great and significant results. Once we have learned what is present in the soul as an activity when we mathematize, once we have familiarized ourselves with this peculiar, scientifically formed form of creation, we can develop it further by, so to speak, recreating what arises in our memory, so that we have a kind of guiding impulse for our lives from this memory. We have these impulses for our lives as guiding impulses because what occurred as external experiences at a certain point in our childhood is transformed into inner experiences. We can, so to speak, always bring up images from the unfathomable depths of the soul of what we have experienced. But we can also distinguish between the living experience of being inside the experience, as we had it ten years ago, and the act of bringing up what was experienced back then. And no matter how vivid the images may be, the essential thing in this memory life is that we make what we are experiencing temporarily into a lasting one in us through imagination, although it is a lasting one that we cannot immediately determine as to what is going on down there in the soul life - or perhaps also in the organic life. But we can determine what we have before us if we bring up from these depths what we have experienced.

If we now immerse ourselves in the way we have a memory picture, how we have a memory picture vividly within us when we remember something we have experienced over a long period of time, we learn from this 'having' of a memory picture what is necessary for meditation, for the fundamental meditation of the anthroposophical research method. It is necessary for us to place a readily comprehensible idea at the center of our consciousness, and it does not matter whether it refers to something external or whether it is formed only internally, even if it comes from the imagination. The truth of the idea is not important at first, but it is important that we can easily grasp it. I have described all this in relation to this anthroposophical research method in my books “How to Know Higher Worlds,” in “Occult Science” and in other books; there I have described the way in which one enters into this form of meditative imagination in the soul in exactly the same way as one does in mathematizing.

You will then find it absurd if someone compares this activity of the soul, which goes beyond mathematization and is thoroughly permeated by the will, with something hallucinatory or with something subconscious. That is precisely why so much is given to a mathematical preparation for anthroposophy, because it teaches one to recognize how one has a free hand in creating and holding on to ideas in consciousness. And anyone who says that the inner will that anthroposophy aims to achieve could be hallucination, either deliberately or because they are unable to do so, does not fully appreciate the way in which this meditative life is actually pursued, how it is maintained by first placing easily comprehensible ideas into one's consciousness so as not to bring up reminiscences from the subconscious. But by doing so, one exercises an activity - through inner strength, with effort of the will - that one otherwise exercises only on the basis of external facts, because otherwise one proceeds on the basis of external facts and experiences and allows the life of ideas to develop on the basis of these external facts and experiences. But now you free yourself from those external facts and experiences - I can only hint at the principle here, you can find more details in the books mentioned - now it is a matter of holding on to the ideas through inner will and thus constantly evoking an activity of the soul, which otherwise only ignites at external facts and runs in the inner being of man, bound to external existence. But by developing such meditation further and further, by practicing for years to make ideas that are easily comprehensible permanent, by learns to know that soul activity which tears thinking, raised above ordinary existence, away from the bodily, one rises to that which I have presented in the books mentioned as imaginative knowing.

Not fanciful images, not fantastic notions! Imaginative cognition is a state of consciousness filled with images that are present in the soul in the same way as mathematical configurations and formulas. And in this free handling of supersensible reality, which one distinguishes from every [physical] reality just as one distinguishes the triangle drawn with chalk on the blackboard as a mere symbol with full inner consciousness [from the purely spiritual concept of the triangle]. By being able to remain in this imaginative life of the soul for a while, one comes to know the life of the soul as something that can be torn away from the body. We are so used to our life being bound to the nervous system and the rest of the organism that we only really recognize this when we do such exercises. We see that, independently of the organism, the soul-spiritual runs in itself, and that the soul-spiritual can be filled with images. Only through this does one get to know the meditative life. These images are quite like the memory images - not like hallucinations. It is not true that one is filled with something like hallucinations or visions when doing anthroposophical research, but one gets to know the novelty, the new kind of content, through the existence of the memory being, in which the images of imaginative cognition or imaginative consciousness appear. But one also knows that one can no longer say when these images occur: I imagine, therefore I am not – as one can say about thinking.

Now, as I ascend to imagination, I encounter in a strange way what I first encountered in the external world – I encounter necessity. I can form my images in imagination, but I cannot throw them back and forth in any old way in relation to a new world that is now emerging. I see myself gradually forced to relate these images that arise in my imaginative life to a new world that I am getting to know, to a spiritual world. I learn to recognize: I must confront this image, which I have prepared, as a question of some fact of the spiritual world, and through this image, which I have built up, I enter into a connection with this world. I gain access to the spiritual world through the consciously created images of the imagination, just as I come into contact with the sensory world through the images created by my eyes or the sound images created by my ears. These latter images, which are created in the eye and ear, are produced without my arbitrariness. What is produced in the imagination as a world of pictures is, however, attained after such thorough schooling as I have just described in the books mentioned, “How to Know Higher Worlds” and so on. But in this way one acquires the possibility of holding out something to the spiritual world in the way of inner activity, just as our senses can hold out something to the outer, natural world in the way of eye activity, ear activity, so that we receive pictures from it. What spiritual knowledge of the world is to open up for us must first be developed in us, it must first be brought up from the depths of the soul. And that happens in the first stage of supersensible knowledge, in imaginative consciousness. But it is significant that we enter into this state as if by necessity. And now we learn all the more to recognize what freedom actually is.

You see, someone who hallucinates or has visions creates images from his body. He is simply following an inner necessity, an inner compulsion. Someone who lives in fantasy creates images from his soul. He is more or less aware of how he creates these images. And if he is a healthy person and not a lunatic, then he knows that he lives in an unreal fantasy world. What one produces in the imaginative consciousness, one knows – because the ordinary, normal consciousness, the consciousness that experiences itself in freedom, remains present – that in the imaginative consciousness one forms the images oneself, just as in mathematics one forms the formula oneself, through which one comprehends reality. But one also knows that when one enters into the spiritual world, one grasps a spiritual world through these images. So one can see that as human beings with ordinary external consciousness, we can grasp this process. In our ordinary lives and in ordinary science, we have the opportunity to gain freedom – and that is because, with mere pictorial imagining, which is not in reality, one must say: I think, therefore I am not – cogito ergo non sum. If one develops one's freedom with this thinking and then looks back into the spiritual world, one looks back into a world in which the same necessity reigns that one first encountered in the external world. In the external world, one starts from the necessity of facts. One advances into a thinking in which, so to speak, freedom repels the certainty of inner thinking.

One proceeds from this free thinking to imagination, which also claims to have an existence, and thus one comes again into a world of necessity. One comes into this necessity again in an inner way. In this way one learns above all to really see through that which is spoken about so often, but which actually always confronts one in a certain nebulous, poorly mystical way. If one learns to recognize the imaginative consciousness of which I have spoken, then self-observation becomes possible for the first time. I would like to say that what used to be the starting point of the I, when one looked at the non-I, begins to brighten up a little. The will penetrates into it and begins to grasp something. And one also feels oneself again in a world of necessity. This is how one arrives at self-awareness.

If you continue your exercises, you will come to an exercise in particular where you can make the images disappear just as you feel them coming up. And this must be done, otherwise one does not remain master of it, but becomes a visionary and not a spiritual researcher. When one is able to erase the images from one's consciousness, one arrives at the complete inner exercise of will in this world of images, so that one can also erase the image whose becoming one has experienced in the soul. What I have called the second stage - the inspired consciousness - occurs. Please do not be put off by the expression. After all, we have to use expressions as technical aids. It was used in an analogous sense, in reference to old expressions, but it is definitely a new fact, a self-explored fact, that is meant by it; the new, the inspired consciousness is meant by it. And with this one now stands in the spiritual reality. And when one is so immersed in spiritual reality that one is surrounded by it, really surrounded by it, by a world of spiritual beings, then one also beholds one's own soul in its true essence. Then what anthroposophy describes as repeated earthly lives becomes an immediate fact. And one sees more and more of the soul as it passes from life to life, with the intervening life between death and a new birth — one sees this journey of the soul. One has, so to speak, expanded one's imagination so that it can, in principle, when directed inward, move in the opposite direction to which the imagination normally moves.

Let us ask ourselves: How does imagined thinking move? As I said, we first have the experience of being connected to the outside world; we live ourselves into some event in the outside world with our whole being. This speaks to our will impulses, or rather, it speaks to our feelings; it also speaks to our thoughts. We live in it with our whole being. We may even make a physical effort in having the experience. In short, we live in it with our whole being. In this way, this soul, in having our ideas, plunges down into the depths, and in the image we can bring it up again. We can say: in ordinary experience, we proceed from the external experience to ordinary memory in that the external images undergo a certain inner metamorphosis. In meditation, which is available in anthroposophical research, we go the other way. We first learn to have an image that is not allowed to link to an external experience, not to subconscious reminiscences, and learn to progress — now not to an external experience, but to a supersensible experience, also to those experiences that lie before our birth or before our conception. In this way we get to know the pre-existence of the soul, the spiritual being of the soul, in a way that we otherwise only get to know what external experiences have brought us up to a certain point in our childhood. It is the reverse experience, but one that leads us to spiritual experience, where we start from the image and ascend to the experience. And if at the same time we practise a certain self-discipline, namely a self-discipline that increasingly leads us to act out of what we know in ordinary life as the feeling of love, then we learn to recognize objectively where we can develop our activity in love from the tasks that the outer world gives us. If we get to know this life in the outer world, then after much practice, the progression from image to reality will gradually be such that we progress from the imaginative consciousness through the inspired to the intuitive consciousness. This means that we learn to stand within the inner objectivity, within the inner necessity of the spiritual world.

You see, dear attendees, in nature research we start from necessity. In a sense, we approach the human being in such a way that we can only contribute something to thinking if we can inwardly preserve and say to ourselves, in order to be a human being in the right sense, you carry within you something that is connected with the nature of the whole world. But by making the attempt to approach man with that thinking, which is extraordinarily well suited for use in the study of nature, in outer life, one comes to a point – I have characterized this, you can read about it in my Philosophy of Freedom – where one can go no further. The hypotheses become uncertain.

But if you develop what can be experienced in the realm of freedom, you will penetrate the objectivity of the mind in a reverse way. And here you can be helped if you use thinking, in the Goethean sense (as explained in his scientific writings), not to spin out hypotheses, but only to put together phenomena.

By assembling phenomena, one learns to recognize how to approach this world. One does not arrive at the realm of atoms - not at atoms, not at electrons and so on, which are justified to a certain extent, as far as external appearance is concerned. One only comes to the outer appearances in this physical-scientific way of looking at and researching. If, on the other hand, one presents these purely as phenomena, then one can penetrate to what lies behind the phenomenon - to which we ourselves belong in our eternal core - by ascending into the imaginative, inspirational, intuitive. And in this way, ladies and gentlemen, we also arrive at a certain self-knowledge, at realizing what we demand in self-observation. By developing the imaginative consciousness, we learn to look into ourselves. What is memory based on? It is based, so to speak, on the fact that we absorb what we experience in the outside world in our imagination. Not in the way it is the case, for example, in the first days of our childhood — there it is transferred down into the organization — but in such a way that it is mirrored, that it has, as it were, a mirror wall on our organization and that we absorb it by remembering, in the memory image of the experience. By developing the memory that we need for a healthy social and scientific life in this way, we overcome the bond to the physical organization through anthroposophical research. However, ordinary consciousness must always be present; it must not be as in hallucination. Rather, anyone who ascends to imaginative consciousness is always a rational human being at the same time, always has ordinary consciousness alongside. This is precisely what distinguishes imaginative envisioning, inspired envisioning, from hallucination. Hallucinations and visions live in what the body produces, so that when we develop physical images from the body, we are dealing with visions and hallucinations. When we compose images from the soul, we are dealing with imaginative creations; when we compose images from the spirit, which we grasp by learning to work freely from the body, purely in spirit and soul, we are dealing with spiritual reality. So, it is the body that produces the images by coming to hallucinations and visions. The soul composes images by coming to fantasies, not to visionary images. The spirit within us composes images by approaching spiritual realities.

But when we look back into ourselves, we see, as it were, through the looking-glass, just as we should see through an actual looking-glass if we were to pierce it or take away some of the coating. And there we do not encounter in our inner being what the nebulous mystics talk about; we encounter something quite different, because the soul has experienced many things before it believes it unites with some deity in its inner being. They speak of divine manifestations in the ego. They speak of something they dream up. But anyone who penetrates into their inner being with genuine spiritual science comes to something quite different. He comes to see materially that which is otherwise given to him spiritually. Otherwise, his thinking, feeling, willing, desiring and coveting are given to him spiritually; now, however, he sees through everything that he feels, which is more or less connected with memory, and he sees into the actual inner laws of his organism. He gets to know his organism. He will not prattle and ramble on about nebulous mysticism, but will speak of the actual nature of the liver, lungs and stomach, which he gets to know through inner vision. He can add his inner vision to what conscientious external-physical anatomy provides. There you see the possibility of ascending to a real science of pathology. There you see how spiritual science, which does not turn to nebulous, rambling mysticism but which starts from exact methods, can really enter into the whole field of science. Yes, you get to know much more. Above all, one recognizes that even with the mystics who, of course, sound so magnificent, even with St. Therese or Mechthild of Magdeburg, that basically physical abnormalities are involved. One learns to recognize how abnormal liver, spleen and so on functions can arise from an imperfect, inharmonious functioning, from which arise the images that we otherwise so admire in mysticism.

Dear attendees! Knowledge is one thing that cannot be grasped by means of life prejudices, no matter how beautiful they may be. I believe that for those who can immerse themselves in knowledge without prejudice, there is a deeper insight into the foundations of existence, because they know how the human organism “boils” such beautiful things as they encounter in the noblest forms, namely in a Saint Therese or even in a Mechthild of Magdeburg, when they mystically indulge in raptures in the mist and dream of all kinds of things that are supposed to arise from the soul and spirit within. That is the remarkable thing: that we are progressing to the materiality of the human organism through self-observation. This will increasingly distinguish exact anthroposophy from all the ramblings and ramblings of inner mysticism, namely that it does not lead into the nebulous, but into realities. It teaches that which cannot be developed through external anatomy, because what can be learned from external physiology and anatomy is only one side; in this way it shows that the soul is pre-existent. She shows how this soul works down from its more comprehensive being to shape what is formed in the mother's womb from the spiritual. Thus, the real arises out of the spiritual world. We delve into the realm of reality by meditatively penetrating forward.

In science, we approach the human being from the outside world, whereas in anthroposophy, the full knowledge of the human being extends to the realm of nature. This is how we arrive at the harmony of spirit and matter that the human being must experience if they are to be fully human in the appropriate sense. He arrives at the point where, out of an inner urge, he passes directly from inner feeling and will to direct knowledge. It follows that without this knowledge we are always compelled to appeal to an atomistic world, and that we do not really get to the heart of the material. When we learn to recognize more and more of the material, then we also learn to recognize the nature of the spiritual outwardly. We really learn to build that bridge that leads us cognitively from spirit to matter, from matter to spirit. We need not believe that it is possible to solve all the riddles of the world at once. Weak-minded natures may perhaps say: The life of today's man must be a tragic one, since he inevitably comes up against the limits of knowledge, which make the riddles of the world appear insoluble to him. But it is not so. When we ascend in this way and get to know the spiritual life as it really is, when it suddenly flashes into us and when, on the other hand, we encounter the material world again when we approach the world with real powers of perception, , we learn, in essence, by ascending to such knowledge, not to experience something that carries us into the slumber from the outset in relation to knowledge, but we learn to recognize the struggle in which we are interwoven as human beings. Man sees how he lives outside in the struggles of spiritual worlds and beings, how he participates in this struggle through the moral world, the religious world, how he brings social life out of this struggle. He gets to know something that does not, so to speak, superficialize the inner soul state in solving the riddles of the world, but on the contrary, deepens it.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what anthroposophy basically wants. It is the way to meet natural science. Anyone who wants to fight anthroposophy from a scientific point of view or, following on from science, from a philosophical point of view, is tilting at windmills, because anthroposophy addresses everything that science legitimately brings up; it can only accommodate what can be achieved through such science and philosophy through full knowledge. But this full realization was not wanted. Over a long period of time, the newer spiritual life and the newer life of civilization has brought about what has become known in recent times as agnosticism. Again and again, those thinkers who did not want to come to a further development of thinking, who did not want to enter into the world of the imaginative, inspired and intuitive, spoke of an ignoramus and thus presented something to people - which is significant - that must be considered as something unrecognizable and incomprehensible. But because man always knows that he is spirit, he should actually be able to distinguish the spiritual origin from nebulous mysticism and the like. The cause of all that is literally superstition in the various areas of life does not lie in anthroposophy, which strives for clarity and exact natural science, but the origin of it lies in ignorabimus, in agnosticism. These created the “foggy” mysticism. It is precisely the ignorabimus that leads to agnosticism, because man must continually seek the spirit. All nebulous movements emanate from the ignorabimus and agnosticism.

Anthroposophy does not want to be fog, Anthroposophy wants to be light, Anthroposophy wants to be the continuation of the light that it itself recognizes in modern science as a truly spiritual light that carries humanity forward. This is how it itself sees the relationships between modern science, modern philosophy and itself as Anthroposophy.

I wish to give you in three lectures a survey of what Anthroposophy has to say concerning the Human Being and his relation to the Universe. The universe and man are undoubtedly the two most important problems, for they embrace every question dealing with science and life, every problem of greatest and smallest importance.

It lies in the nature of these problems that in regard to these things I must limit myself to the anthroposophical horizon, that is to say, to the things connected with the great life-problems of human existence which transcend the knowledge gained through sensory perception and which lie beyond the sphere of ordinary science.

In regard to the human being, self-knowledge is undoubtedly a problem which must appeal to us most of all. For in order to gain a foundation and a firm standpoint in life, we must first obtain a conception of our own nature. And it must be said that at all times people have sought to gain a knowledge of the universe, for they knew that the mysteries of the world's evolution are connected with man's own being; they knew that they could only learn something about man's being by seeking to know what the universe is able to give them, the universe of which the human being forms part.

Moreover, it cannot be denied that in connection with a knowledge of man and of the universe modern people show a deep interest for everything which transcends ordinary science, and we may say that innumerable attempts are now being made to transcend the spheres of ordinary science in order to investigate what lies beyond birth and death, beyond the world which can be fathomed by ordinary sense-perception and by the understanding which is based upon it.

In recent times we can observe above all that there are scientific investigators who in many ways endeavour to transcend the spheres indicated above, and as an introduction let me mention a few striking conceptions of modern investigators, examples which prove that the keen interest in the problems which will form the subject of my three lectures really exists, but which prove at the same time how very difficult it is, even in the case of people well grounded in science, to penetrate into the sphere of the soul and of the spirit. As I do not wish to speak in abstract terms, let me proceed immediately from concrete examples.

A German scientist who worked very hard to discover how to penetrate into the super-sensible nature of the soul, and how to investigate the influence exercised by the soul's super-sensible nature upon the body's physical nature, tried to give many examples taken from his medical and scientific experience, showing the soul's influence, the influence of an unquestionably psychic essence upon the body. A marked example contained in one of the books written by this physician and scientist named Schleich, who was personally well known to me, is the following. He describes a patient, who came to him in a great state of excitement, because in the office he had pricked his skin with an inky nib. The doctor could ascertain that it was quite an insignificant scratch. But the patient was under the delusion that this prick with an inky nib had given him a blood poisoning and that he would have to die unless his hand was amputated, and he begged the doctor to amputate his hand, his arm as quickly as possible.

The doctor could only tell him to be calm, that he would be quite well again in a couple of days and that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a responsible doctor he had to tell him this and could not, of course, amputate his arm.

But the patient was not satisfied He went to another doctor who told him exactly the same thing and also refused to amputate his arm. Schleich was nevertheless nervous, for he was acquainted with soul-moods, and so he enquired the next day how the patient was feeling and he was told that the man had died.

The autopsy did not reveal any trace of blood-poisoning, or similar symptoms. This was out of the question. Yet the patient had died.

In connection with this case, Schleich remarks: Death caused by radical auto-suggestion.

The patient had the fixed idea that he had to die; it was an extremely radical auto-suggestion and he really did die under its influence.

This is the statement of an investigator well acquainted with all the natural-scientific methods, with all the medical methods. He reports this case in order to show a purely psychical influence, i.e. the influence of a thought, upon bodily processes, an influence showing, according to Schleich, that death set in as a result.

Schleich mentions many other cases, less marked and radical, in order to prove that it is possible to observe the soul, living in thoughts, feelings, sensations and will-impulses, and that the soul can really influence the body. He wishes to describe, as it were, the influence of the super-sensible upon the physical.

Another case is described by a far more conspicuous scientist, by Sir Oliver Lodge. Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son Raymond in the last war. He fell on the Belgian-German frontier, and Oliver Lodge, who had long ago felt the inclination to build a bridge leading from the sensory-natural-scientific sphere to the super-sensible sphere, was deeply stirred by the loss of his beloved son. Through many incidents, which are not directly connected with this matter and which I need not relate, he was induced to use the mediumistic power of a certain person, in order to enter into connection with the departed soul of his son, Raymond.

When such a case arises in ordinary spiritistic circles, it is not necessary to consider it seriously, for one knows how unscientific these meetings are, and how amateurishly and unscientifically such cases are judged and investigated in them. But the matter must be taken more seriously when we have to do with one of the greatest of modern scientists, with a man so thoroughly at home in the sphere of external, natural scientific research and so well acquainted with scientific methods. That is why Oliver Lodge's book on his spiritual intercourse with his son Raymond, made such a deep impression on the world.

On reading this book, we immediately feel that it is written by a man who does not approach the investigation of such things superficially, but by a conscientious and responsible scientist. Even in other things, which I will not mention here, one can see that Oliver Lodge applies to this sphere the same way of thinking, the same scientific method which he is accustomed to apply in his physical laboratory. The real facts which he relates, and which, one might say, rightly produced such a deep impression upon all those who read Sir Oliver Lodge's book, are as follows :

Through the medium in question, Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that his son, that is, the soul, the spirit of Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. It was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose from that on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photographs, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium, or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, “experimentum cruris.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen the photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one shows a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.

The two radical cases I have described to you, show that the longing, the great desire of unquestionably serious modern scientists lead them to seek a knowledge which goes beyond the facts revealed by ordinary external scientific research.

But one who speaks of the foundations of anthroposophical research, one who speaks from an anthroposophical standpoint, must draw attention to the fact that the methods of this investigation differ from those adopted even by such serious minded scientists. For, in regard to a scientific way of thinking and a scientific mentality the foundations of anthroposophical research (I hope that my three lectures will make things clear to you from every aspect) should be stricter and more conscientious than any other, even in comparison with such strict scientists as the above. And one who ventures to criticize such great scientists is perhaps first called upon to judge and to explain the far greater certainty constituting the foundation of Anthroposophy, which is so often accused of advancing fantastic notions; this certainty given by Anthroposophy is far greater than that transmitted by the most conscientious scientific investigators of the present time. In order to indicate the critical attitude, the earnest and truly scientific character of Anthroposophy and its foundations, let me first bring forward the critical objections which can be raised against the scientific interpretations given in the two above mentioned examples.

Let me now begin with these things, for in connection with to-day's subject my last two lectures already contained many [25th November. The Reality of the Higher Worlds. 26th November. Paths to the Knowledge of Higher Worlds.] explanations, so that the essential facts are known to the great majority of those who are now present; allow me therefore briefly to illumine the things already explained to you from another angle.

The following objection must be raised in regard to Schleich and his case of “death through auto-suggestion.” Please accept this, to begin with, as a simple critical objection showing how matters might also be viewed! Let us suppose that the man who pricked his hand with an inky nib and who believed that he had blood poisoning, really had some unknown inner defect, so that sudden death through a natural cause would have arisen in any case during the night after the accident. Such cases of sudden death really exist. On the other hand, all those who seriously investigate what can be achieved by a strengthening and intensification of the human cognitive powers, in the direction which I tried to indicate during the last few days, know that certain undefined soul-forces may be driven to a special climax through some abnormal conditions, through—one can really say—abnormal pathological conditions. Such cases undoubtedly exist and are critically described in books, so that everyone can test them, whenever the human will (and we shall see how this is possible) becomes transformed and thus attains cognitive power. Since the human will is directed towards the future, it is able, under certain pathological conditions, to have a premonition of events which prepare themselves, of events which will take place in the future out of the whole connections of a person's life. It is a matter of indifference whether we call this a foreboding, or whether we give it any other name. But it is a fact that under certain pathological conditions of a lighter nature, which do not clearly appear in the form of illness, a person may foresee, in the form of a picture, that he will, for instance, in fourteen days be thrown from his horse. All precautions will be useless, for he cannot perceive the accompanying circumstances. He has simply had a foreboding, he has simply foreseen an event about to take place.

The critical objection which must be raised by one who really knows the spiritual connections of man in a deeper sense, is that in the case of Schleich's patient, the factors which brought about his sudden death on the following night, can simply have already existed and that he had had an inner presentiment of his approaching death. Such a presentiment need not be fully conscious; it can quite well remain in the subconscious depths of the soul. But its influence upon consciousness manifests itself in symptoms which can be designated as nervousness and restlessness. One does all manner of unpremeditated things, and it is quite possible to prick one's finger with an inky nib under the influence of the nervousness arising from such a premonition. The person in question therefore simply knew unconsciously (let me use this paradoxical expression) that he would die. He did not clothe this in the statement that he had a presentiment of his death, but he grew nervous, pricked his hand with the nib and clung to the belief that he would have to die through blood poisoning. Thus it was not a case of death through auto-suggestion, but the man in question had had a presentiment of his coming death and all his actions were determined by this. In that case Schleich simply mistakes cause and effect, there is no auto-suggestion, as Schleich supposes, to the effect that a conscious thought exercised so strong a suggestion that death ensued; but death would have arisen in any case and the death-presentiment was the cause of the patient's fixed idea.

You see, even such things can be viewed critically, if another, undoubtedly possible thing is borne in mind; namely, that certain subconscious conditions which always exist in the soul, faintly rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness, but masked. In the unconscious depths of the human soul many conscious manifestations have quite a different aspect, and ordinary consciousness simply gives them a different interpretation.

Let us now turn to the other case, that of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this experimentum crucis in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which second sight works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterised as follows:—

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures, that is to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it can no longer be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane, that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify the belief that a soul from beyond the threshold manifested itself in the séance room.

I mention these two examples and the objections against them, in order to awaken in you a feeling for the conscientiousness and for the critical attitude of anthroposophical spiritual research. The spiritual investigation practised in Anthroposophy does not at first proceed from any abnormal phenomena (the two last lectures proved this), but from completely normal conditions of human life, which appear in the forces of cognition, of the will and of feeling. Anthroposophical research seeks to develop these forces which enable one to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, in order to be, as it were, inwardly entitled to this knowledge, and in order to gain the true conscientiousness required in a training which strengthens thought.

Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises which I have already mentioned to you, and which will be characterised more fully in these lectures. Will-exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life, we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

A short time ago, a scientist published a brief resume of the science of Anthroposophy inaugurated by me. This man is in no way a blind believer. He briefly recapitulates what I have been giving you as Anthroposophy, a material which already constitutes a voluminous literature. He recapitulates it, at the same time declaring that he is neither for nor against Anthroposophy, but then he makes a remark which has the semblance of being that of a strong opponent, although the author is neither an opponent nor a follower. I must confess that this cutting remark pleased me exceedingly, particularly if seen in the light in which Anthroposophy appears in comparison with the rest of modern culture. The writer remarks that in the light of ordinary consciousness many of my statements produce an irresistibly comical effect. I must admit that I like this remark for the following simple reason: When things are mentioned, such as Sir Oliver Lodge's case, or the other case reported by me, people prick up their ears, because in a certain way this appeals to their sensationalism and because it differs from what they are accustomed to hear.

This does not seem irresistibly comical to them. But when an Anthroposophist is obliged to establish a connection with altogether normal and human things, with human memory, or with the ordinary expressions of the human will, and explains that through certain exercises human thought may be intensified and that through self-education the will can be developed so that one changes and is able to penetrate as a transformed human being into the super-sensible world—and because he uses ordinary words designating things which ordinarily surround us, words which people do not like to apply to anything else—then he may produce an “irresistibly comical effect.” Many things therefore have such an irresistibly comical effect on people who only wish to apply the words to things to which they are applied in ordinary life. To an anthroposophical spiritual investigator, such views on Anthroposophy frequently appear like a letter which some one is supposed to read, but instead of reading it begins to make a chemical analysis of the ink with which it is written. I must confess that many statements on Anthroposophy really appear to me as if a person were to analyse the ink used in writing a letter, instead of reading it.

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is that one starts from completely normal human experiences, that one has a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and develops these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must of course have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must pay attention to thoroughly ordinary normal experiences, which, however, we are not very much interested in observing carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. And here already begins for many people the “irresistibly comical effect,” that is, when one begins to say: The questions connected with man's alternating conditions of waking and sleeping must above all be looked upon as enigmas.

During our life, we continually change over from the condition of waking to that of sleeping, but we do not take much notice of this pendulum of life, swaying between the conditions of waking and sleeping. The strangest theories have been advanced in this connection. I might talk for a long time, were I to mention some of these theories relating to the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. But let me mention only one, the most well-known and usual one, namely that one simply takes for granted that when the human being is awake he gets tired and when he is sufficiently tired goes to sleep, and that sleep in its turn counter-balances fatigue. Sleep (this can be described in one or the other way, more or less materialistically) eliminates the causes of fatigue.

I should like to know if radical supporters of this theory can really say that fatigue is the cause of sleep, when for instance, they observe a person who really has no cause whatever for getting tired during the day—let us say, a fat gentleman living on private means, who goes to a more or less solid concert or to a lecture, not late in the evening, but in the afternoon, and who falls asleep not after the first five minutes, but after two minutes!

These things at first may really present a slightly comical aspect, but if they are viewed from every side, their earnest enigmatic character must stand before our soul. Those who believe that the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping can be studied with the aid of the ordinary scientific methods applied to-day, will never reach a satisfactory solution of this problem. Even such completely normal questions of life cannot be approached with the ordinary cognitive forces, but with a thinking intensified by meditation, concentration and other soul-exercises described in my book Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and in my Outline of Occult Science, and also with transformed forces of the will.

What is attained when we try to strengthen thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by strengthening thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul-life is healthily connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory-pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of being able to place before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise by our more and more bringing meditation concepts into our consciousness, and thus strengthening the soul-faculty of thinking, just as a muscle is made strong through exercise. We must reach the point of strengthening thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense-experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence, it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense-perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many, it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy which aims through its methods at penetrating into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense-perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see Red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense-perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory-thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory-process the soul simply dives down into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by imagination we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the will how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.

In ordinary life, the will only acquires a certain value when it passes over to external action; otherwise it remains mere desire, even though we may cherish the highest ideals, the most beautiful ideals, even though we may be true idealists. The highest ideals will remain mere desires, if we are not able to take hold of the external physical reality.

What characterises a desire, a wish? It has the peculiar quality of being abstracted and withdrawn from the world of reality. Symbolically one might say: When we only have desires, this is like drawing back the feelers of the soul. We then live completely within our own being, within the soul-element. But we also know that desires are, to begin with, tinged by the human temperaments. A melancholic person will have desires which differ from those of a sanguine person. The physical foundation of desires could soon be discovered by those who investigate these matters conscientiously with the aid of natural-scientific methods. The etheric foundation of desires can therefore be seen in the temperament, but their physical conditions can be perceived in the special composition of the blood or in other qualities of the bodily constitution.

This calls for that critical attitude mentioned at the beginning of my lecture; such a critical attitude shatters, I might say, many a pleasant dream. Allow me to give you a few indications which show how such pleasant dreams can be dispelled.

I certainly do not mean to be irreverent, nor do I destroy any ideal through lack of reverence, for I have a deep feeling for all the beauty contained, for instance, in the mysticism of a St. Theresa or of a St. John of the Cross. Do not think that I am second to anyone in admiring all the beauty contained in such mystical expressions. But those who have some experience of the special way in which, for instance, St. Theresa or St. John of the Cross produced their visions, know to what extent human desires have a share in these visions. They know that desires which live in the soul's depths have a share particularly in mystical experiences, and these desires may lead a spiritual investigator to study the bodily constitution of these mystics. Nothing is desecrated when a spiritual investigator draws attention to such things, when he indicates that in certain organs he discovers an inner state of excitement, that the nerves exercise a different influence on certain organs, thus producing a certain effect in the soul, which may even take on the beautiful aspect of the visions described by St. John of the Cross or by St. Theresa, or by other mystics of that type. We are far more on the right track if we seek the foundation of such visions, which are so beautiful and poetic in the case of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross, in certain bodily conditions than in the beholding of some nebulous mystery.

As I have said I do not wish to pull to pieces something which I revere as much as any other person in this room, but the truth must be shown, and also the critical attitude derived from an anthroposophical foundation. It must be shown that an anthroposophist above all should not fall a prey to illusions. Above all, he should be free from illusion in regard to human desires which are rooted in the human organism, desires rooted in the physical human organism which flare up, come, so to speak, to boiling point, if I may use this expression, and lead to the most beautiful visions.

A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical sense, should not only strengthen his thinking through meditation, but he should also transform his desires through self-training.

This can be done by taking in hand systematically that which otherwise takes place as if of its own accord. Let us honestly admit that during our ordinary life we allow events to guide us far more than we ourselves guide the course of our life. In ordinary life this or that thing may influence us, and if we look back ten years into our past earthly existence, we find that the external conditions and the people whom we met, unfolded within us a side of our character which now presents a different aspect from what it was like ten years ago.

A person who earnestly strives to become an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must, in this connection, also make exercises which influence the will. The ordinary will in life acquires a meaning when directed towards external actions. But an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must apply the impulses of the will to his own development, to his own life. He should be able to pursue the following aim: “In regard to this or that characteristic or expression of life, you must change, you must become different from what you were.” Though it may seem paradoxical, it is a great help if we begin to change something within us through our own initiative, through our own impulse; if we change some strongly rooted habit, or even a small trifle. I repeat that it can be something quite insignificant, for instance, one's handwriting. If someone really strives with an iron will to change his handwriting, the application of energy required for the transformation of a habit may be compared with the strengthening of a muscle because the will is strengthened. By growing stronger and by being applied inwardly instead of outwardly, the will begins to exercise certain influences in man. The transformations in the external world once produced by the effects of the will, now become transformations within human nature.

If we do exercises of the will, as described in detail in anthroposophical books, we reach the point of transforming our life of desire, so that this becomes emancipated from the human organisation, even as our thinking emancipates itself from the body through meditation.

During the moments in which we live in anthroposophical research, we are no longer in a condition which may be described by saying that the wish is father to the thought. When we exercise this self-training, this application of education of oneself at a maturer age, our wishes and desires become an inner power which unites with the emancipated thinking. This leads us to a real perception of the true nature of the will-impulses in ordinary life, and to a perception of the true nature of thoughts in ordinary life. Even as we ordinarily perceive red or blue, or hear C sharp or C, so we now perceive thoughts as realities; we learn to know the will-impulses objectively, that is to say, separated from our own being.

In this way we reach the point of having a right judgment of the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Only by rendering thought objective through exercise, as objective as a sense-perception, so that we are no longer connected with our body as in the case of a remembered thought, only with this thinking developed in free meditation, can the act of falling asleep be rightly grasped and perceived.

A person who seeks to gain insight into the normal act of falling asleep, with the aid of the ordinary cognitive forces, may set up one hypothesis after the other, but he will not be able to recognise the true nature of sleep.

This strengthened thinking which we acquire, and on the other hand our transformed desires, are those which show us that when we fall asleep we can, in a certain way, still follow the moment in which sleep takes hold of us; we look, as it were, upon the act of falling asleep and we learn to know that when we go to sleep we do not simply have before us a changed bodily condition, but that we really slip out of our body with our independent soul-life; we go out of our body and we leave something behind—namely, our thoughts.

We can leave our thoughts behind consciously, when we fall asleep, only because our thinking has been intensified. The thoughts remain behind with the body and fill it in the shape of formative forces. We notice that we have abandoned our body only with our feeling and with our will. But by perceiving with what part of the soul we leave the body, we obtain at the same time an objective certainty that we have an independent soul-essence and that we go out of the body with this independent soul-essence.

And now we know that what we leave behind on the bed on falling asleep, is not only something which can be investigated by physiology, anatomy and biology, but that it is permeated by the web of thoughts, This web of our thoughts must first be made strong enough, so that we can abandon it consciously, in the same way as we consciously turn our face away from colours and leave off looking at them. Through this strengthened thought we know that we leave behind on the bed our physical body and a body of forces containing thoughts which act like forces; we leave these bodies behind so that they may exist independently between falling asleep and waking up.

These thoughts, these morphological thoughts described to you in recent lectures, exist in our ordinary consciousness only as reflected images. They too have a reality, and with this reality they fill out our physical body as a special etheric body.

Now we know that when we fall asleep we abandon our sensory body and our thought body. (I might also say, the physical body and the etheric body, or the physical body and the body of formative forces). We abandon these bodies with our will and with our feeling. In ordinary life our constitution does not enable our consciousness to remain clear, it is not strong enough to maintain consciousness unless it is filled out by thoughts. Consciousness, such as we have it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must unite with the body and experience within the body the thoughts of the body; only then it is fully conscious. But when the soul goes out of the body as mere feeling and will, we ordinarily become unconscious.

But a person who attains to the imaginative thinking referred to here recently, experiences the moment of falling asleep consciously, and he can produce conditions which resemble ordinary sleep, except that they are not unconscious, but that forces are at work within him and that he can really experience the organism of feeling and of the will; that is to say, he really experiences that part of his being which can emancipate itself from the body.

If we thus learn to know the moment of falling asleep, we also learn to know the moment of waking up. We now learn to judge that the moment of waking up really consists of two parts: Our attitude on waking up is the same as when a sense-impression is produced. Whenever we wake up, something must stimulate the soul. This need only be our own body, which has slept long enough and which produces this stimulus in its changed condition. But even as there is a stimulus in every sensory impression, so there is always a stimulus when we wake up, and this stimulus works upon our feeling, which left the body when we fell asleep. Even as the eyes and the ears perceive colours and sounds, so the emancipated soul now perceives through feeling something which is outside; the moment of waking up is a perception through feeling; we take hold of the body when we wake up. The independent will takes hold of the physical organism in the same way in which we ordinarily move an arm or a leg. Waking up really consists of these two acts.

In regard to falling asleep and waking up, we have now learned to know the alternating connection between the independent soul which leaves the body every night with its feeling and with its will, and the conditions in which the soul lives from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when it is united with the body. Anthroposophical investigation is therefore based upon a strengthening of the capacities of thinking and of the will, so that we are able to observe and really perceive things which we ordinarily cannot perceive. And if in this way we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, we are then capable of passing on to something else.

For if we continue more and more in the exercises described in the recent lectures and indicated in detail in the books already mentioned we come to the point that we do not always fall asleep when we leave the body, but that we can at will draw out of the body our feeling and our will and really look back upon the body. Then the human body is as objective as a desk or a table in ordinary life. We learn to know a thing only because we are no longer connected with it, no longer penetrated by it subjectively, because it stands before us as an object.

The object which stands before us when we go out of the body with the will and with the feeling is above all the physical body. To-morrow we shall see that this perception outside the body gives us a new aspect of man's physical being. We perceive, above all, the body of formative forces, consisting of a web of thoughts, but active thoughts. We look back upon it as if it were a mirror. And then we are confronted by the strange fact that whereas formerly we were subjectively or personally connected with our thoughts, we now face this world of thoughts as if it were a photographic plate; in looking back upon our body our thoughts stand before us like a photographic plate. This is the same as the miniature reflection of the world which we ordinarily have in our eye. Even as the eye is an organ of sight through the fact that it can reproduce the world within itself, so the etheric and the physical body which remained behind, become a reflecting apparatus, where something becomes reflected through the soul and spirit, whereas the eye only gives us a physical reflection of something outside. By leaving our thoughts behind in the physical body, we see through this mirror not only the web of thoughts, but also the world.

The course of soul-spiritual events can therefore be described in detail, when the cognitive forces are intensified through meditation and a self-training of the will, in order to gain knowledge of the super-sensible worlds. Such a training enables us to develop certain conditions in which we are outside our body, but which do not resemble sleep; they constitute something which is indicated in my books as the continuity of consciousness. In higher knowledge we really go out of the body with our emancipated soul-being. We can recognise that we have left the body through the fact that the mirror of thoughts is now no longer within us, but outside. We go out of the body, yet we remain completely self-conscious, as already explained.

We are able to return into the body whenever we like; we do not fall a prey to hallucinations or visions, but we can follow the whole process with mathematical precision. Since the whole process can be observed in this way, we are also able to judge the ordinary events of earthly life when we return into the body. Now we know what it is like to dive down into the body with the emancipated soul. We not only learn to know the act of falling asleep, when we abandon the body, but now we also learn to return at will into our body with the emancipated soul.

It leaves a special impression upon us when we once experience this emancipated soul and then dive down again into the body, so that the soul becomes imprisoned by the body. The soul-spiritual world which was round about us when we were outside the body, now ceases to exist for us. We feel as if this world had vanished and that the body absorbs us as we dive into it. We also learn to know what it is like to abandon the body; we see how the thoughts go away from us, for they remain with the body, and how we abandon the body with the feeling and willing part of our soul. But in abandoning our body we feel at the same time that the spiritual world begins to rise up before us.

What knowledge have we now gained? Through the processes of waking up and of falling asleep, we have learned to know birth and death. We have experienced how the human being unconsciously abandons his physical and etheric organism with his feeling and with his will and how he returns into the body when he wakes up in the morning.

When we have made the above-mentioned exercises, we grow conscious where formerly we were unconscious, upon leaving our body. In full consciousness we now experience in advance a process which takes place when we die. And when we dive down into our physical body on returning from the spiritual world, when the thoughts outside vanish and once more appear as mere images, asserting themselves within the personality as something which is not real, then we learn to know the process of birth.

Whereas the ordinary scientific methods content themselves with the ordinary understanding, with ordinary thoughts which are applied to external observations and experiments that remain connected with us, anthroposophical investigation transforms the personality by rendering thought objective and by using the body as an all-embracing sense-organ. I might say that the body becomes one large eye. This eye, however, is outside and it is simultaneously a photographic plate.

The world into which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us also to attain an inner vision of the soul-world, we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether what Professor Schleich designates as death through autosuggestion was merely an unconscious representation, or whether what was described by Sir Oliver Lodge, was “second sight.”

We can now recognise the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose independent soul is thrust out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this may be quite sufficient to cause the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision to be driven out of the physical body not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of the abnormal observations which are interesting those people to-day who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognising the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavours to rise up to the super-sensible worlds. And since the human being is connected with the super-sensible worlds with the innermost, immortal kernel of his being, spiritual investigation alone can recognise man's mortal and immortal essence. This will be explained more fully in tomorrow's lecture.

Through the fact that the human being dives down into his eternal part, that he does not only build up an anthropology transmitting a knowledge which can only be gained through the physical body, but through the fact that he builds up an Anthroposophy, transmitting a knowledge which man as independent being, obtains through his soul and spirit, through this fact the human being really learns to know the world in its true aspect.

The task of my next two lectures will be to describe the true being of man, his immortal, everlasting being, and the true aspect of the universe, from the stand-point indicated to-day.

I wish to give you in three lectures a survey of what Anthroposophy has to say concerning the human being and his relation to the universe. The universe and man are undoubtedly the two most important problems, for they embrace every question dealing with science and life and every problem of greatest and smallest importance.

It lies in the nature of these problems that in regard to these things I must limit myself to the anthroposophical horizon; that is to say, to the things connected with the great life problems of human existence which transcend the knowledge gained through sensory perception and which lie beyond the sphere of ordinary science.

In regard to the human being, self-knowledge is undoubtedly a problem which must appeal to us most of all. For in order to gain a foundation and a firm standpoint in life, we must first obtain a conception of our own nature. It must be said that at all times people sought to gain a knowledge of the universe, for they knew that the mysteries of the world's evolution are connected with man's own being; they knew that they could only learn something about man's being by seeking to know what the universe is able to give them, the universe of which the human being forms part.

Moreover, it cannot be denied that in connection with a knowledge of man and of the universe modern people show a deep interest for everything which transcends ordinary science, and we may say that innumerable attempts are now being made to transcend the spheres of ordinary science in order to investigate what lies beyond birth and death, beyond the world which can be fathomed by ordinary sense perception and by the understanding which is based upon it.

In recent times we can observe above all that there are scientific investigators who in many ways endeavor to transcend the spheres indicated above, and as an introduction let me mention a few striking conceptions of modern investigators, examples which prove that the keen interest in the problems which will form the subject of my three lectures really exist, but which prove at the same time how very difficult it is, even in the case of people well grounded in science, to penetrate into the sphere of the soul and of the spirit. As I do not wish to speak in abstract terms, let me proceed immediately from a few concrete examples.

A German scientist who worked very hard to discover how to penetrate into the super-sensible nature of the soul, and how to investigate the influence exercised by the soul's super-sensible nature upon the body's physical nature, tried to give many examples taken from his medical and scientific experience, showing the soul's influence, the influence of an unquestionably psychic essence upon the body; a marked example contained in one of the books written by this physician and scientist named SCHLEICH, who was personally well known to me, is the following: He describes a patient, who came to him in a great state of excitement, because in the office he had pricked his skin with an inky nib. The doctor could ascertain that it was quite an insignificant scratch. But the patient was under the delusion that this prick with an inky nib had given him a blood poisoning and that he would have to die unless his hand was amputated, and he begged the doctor to amputate his hand and his arm as quickly as possible.

The doctor could only tell him to be calm; that he would be quite well again in a couple of days and that there was nothing to be afraid of. As a responsible doctor he had to tell him this and could not, of course, amputate his arm.

But the patient was not satisfied. He went to another doctor who told him exactly the same thing and also refused to amputate his arm. Schleich was nevertheless nervous, for he was acquainted with soul moods, and so he inquired the next day how the patient was feeling and he was told that the man had died in the night.

The autopsy did not reveal any trace of blood poisoning, or similar symptoms. This was out of the question. Yet the patient had died.

In connection with this case, Schleich remarks: Death caused by radical auto-suggestion. The patient had the fixed idea that he had to die; it was an extremely radical auto-suggestion, and he really did die under the influence of this auto-suggestion.

This is the statement of an investigator well acquainted with all the natural-scientific methods, with all the medical methods. He reports this case in order to show a purely psychical influence; i.e., the influence of a thought, upon bodily processes, an influence showing, according to Schleich, that death set in as a result.

Schleich mentions many other cases, less marked and radical, in order to prove that it is possible to observe the soul, living in thoughts, feelings, sensations and will impulses, and that the soul can really influence the body. He wishes to describe, as it were, the influence of the super-sensible upon the physical.

Another case is described by a far more conspicuous scientist, by Sir Oliver Lodge: Sir Oliver Lodge lost his son Raymond in the last war. He fell on the Belgian-German frontier, and Sir Oliver Lodge, who had long ago felt the inclination to build a bridge leading from the sensory, natural-scientific sphere to the super-sensible sphere, was deeply stirred by the loss of his beloved son. Through many incidents, which are not directly connected with this matter and which indeed are not related, he was induced to use the mediumistic power of a certain person, in order to enter into connection with the departed soul of his son, Raymond.

When such a case arises in ordinary spiritistic circles, it is not necessary to consider it seriously, for one knows how unscientific these meetings are, and how amateurishly and unscientifically such cases are judged and investigated in spiritistic circles. But the matter must be taken more seriously when we have to do with the greatest modern scientist, with a man so thoroughly at home in the sphere of external, natural-scientific research and so well acquainted with scientific methods. That is why Sir Oliver Lodge's book on his spiritual intercourse with his son Raymond, made such a deep impression on the world.

On reading this book, we immediately feel that it is written by a man who does not approach the investigation of such things superficially, by a conscientious and responsible scientist. Even in other things, which I will not mention here, one can see that Sir Oliver Lodge applies to this sphere the same way of thinking, the same scientific method which he is accustomed to apply in his physical laboratory. The real facts which he now relates, and which, one might say, rightly produced such a deep impression upon all those who read Sir Oliver Lodge's book, are as follows:

Through the corresponding medium, Sir Oliver Lodge and a few other people who were present at the seances, were told that Raymond Lodge; that is, the soul or the spirit of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, wished to describe a scene enacted on the Belgian-German frontier shortly before his death, and the medium related that Raymond Lodge had a photograph taken and described this act in detail. In was expressly stated that two photographs were taken; these two photographs were carefully described and attention was drawn to the fact that upon the second photograph Sir Oliver Lodge's son had a somewhat different pose than on the first one.

When these communications were made in London through the medium (Sir Oliver Lodge describes it so that one can really see—I emphasize this expressly—that he took every possible scientific precaution), at the time when these experiments were made, no one in London knew anything about these photos, nor that they had been taken. After examining all the facts, Sir Oliver Lodge came to the conclusion that if this message were true, it could only come from his son, from the departed son himself.

In fact, after two or three weeks, the photographs which no one had seen before really arrived in London. They corresponded with the description given by the medium or, as Sir Oliver Lodge believed, with the description given by the soul of his son. Even a scientist could see in this fact, to begin with, one might say, an “experimentum crucis.” Nobody in London could possibly have seen those photographs. It appeared that the description was correct even in regard to the fact that two photographs were taken and that the second one showed a difference. The photographer had taken the photograph of the group which included Raymond Lodge twice, and for the second photograph he had shifted his camera a little. All this had been described exactly. A conscientious scientist could not find the slightest reason for questioning the medium's communication.

The two radical cases described to you just now, show that the longing, the great desire of unquestionably serious modern scientists leads them to seek a knowledge which goes beyond the facts revealed by ordinary external scientific research.

But one who speaks of anthroposophical research from an anthroposophical standpoint, must draw attention to the fact that the methods of anthroposophical investigation differ from those adopted even by such serious-minded scientists. For, in regard to a scientific way of thinking and a scientific mentality the foundations of anthroposophical research (I hope that my three lectures will make things clear to you from every aspect) should be stricter and more conscientious than any other, even in comparison with such strict scientists as the above. And one who dares to criticize such great scientists is perhaps called upon to judge and to explain the far greater certainty constituting the foundation of Anthroposophy, which is so often accused of advancing fantastic notions; this certainty given by Anthroposophy is far greater than that transmitted by the most conscientious scientific investigator of the present time. In order to indicate the critical attitude, the earnest and truly scientific character of Anthroposophy and its foundations, let me first bring forward the critical objections which can be raised against the scientific interpretations given in the two above-mentioned examples.

Let me now begin with these things, for in connection with today's subject my last two lectures already contained many explanations, so that the essential facts are known to the great majority of those who are now present; allow me therefore to illumine the things already explained to you from another angle.

The following objection must be raised in regard to Schleich and his case of “death through auto-suggestion.” Please accept this, to begin with, as a simple critical objection showing how matters might ALSO be viewed! Let us suppose that the man who pricked his hand with an inky nib and who believed that he had blood poisoning, really had some unknown inner defect, so that sudden death through a natural cause would have arisen in any case during the night after the accident. Such cases of sudden death really exist. On the other hand, all those who seriously investigate what can be achieved by a strengthening and intensification of the human cognitive powers, in the direction which I tried to indicate during the last few days, know that certain undefined soul forces may be driven to a special climax through some abnormal conditions, through—one can really say—abnormal PATHOLOGICAL conditions. Such cases undoubtedly exist and are critically described in books, so that everyone can test them … whenever the human will (and we shall see how this is possible) becomes transformed and thus attains cognitive power. Since the human will is directed towards the future, it is able, under certain pathological conditions, to have a premonition of events which prepare themselves, of events which will take place in the future out of the whole connections of a person's life. It is quite indifferent whether we call this a foreboding, or whether we give it any other name. But it is a fact that under certain pathological conditions of a lighter nature, which do not clearly appear in the form of illness, a person may foresee, in the form of a picture, that he will, for instance, be thrown by his horse. All precautions will be useless, for he cannot perceive the accompanying circumstances. He has simply had a foreboding, he has simply foreseen an event about to take place.

The critical objection which must be raised by one who really knows the intensification of spiritual conditions, is that in the case of Schleich's patient, the factors which brought about his sudden death on the following night, already existed and that he had had an inner presentiment of his near death. Such a presentiment need not be fully conscious; it can quite well remain in the subconscious depths of the soul. But its influence upon consciousness manifests itself in symptoms which can be designated as nervousness and restlessness. One does all manner of unpremeditated things, and it is quite possible to prick one's finger with an inky nib under the influence of the nervousness arising from such a premonition. The person in question therefore simply knew unconsciously (let me use this paradoxical expression) that he had to die. He did not clothe this in the statement that he had a presentiment of his near death, but he grew nervous, pricked his hand with the nib and clung to the belief that he would have to die through blood poisoning. Thus it was not a case of death through auto suggestion, but the man in question had had a presentiment of his near death and all his actions were determined by this. In that case Schleich simply mistakes cause and effect; there is no auto suggestion, as Schleich supposes, to the effect that a conscious thought exercises so strong a suggestion that death ensued; but death would have arisen in any case and the death presentiment was the cause of the patient's fixed idea.

You see, even such things can be viewed critically, if another, undoubtedly possible thing is borne in mind; namely, that certain subconscious conditions which always exist in the soul, faintly rise to the surface of ordinary consciousness, but masked. In the unconscious depths of the human soul many conscious manifestations have quite a different aspect, and ordinary consciousness simply gives them a different interpretation.

Let us now turn to the other case of Sir Oliver Lodge. Undoubtedly you are all acquainted with the phenomenon known as “second sight.” Through an intensification of the human cognitive forces, it is possible to perceive things which cannot be perceived by the ordinary sound senses; it is possible, as it were, to see things in a way which is not in keeping with the ordinary conditions of environing space, so that this perceptive faculty can, so to speak, transcend space and time. This fact supplies the critical objection which must be raised even against the conscientiousness of an Oliver Lodge. For Sir Oliver Lodge uses this “experimentum crucis” in order to prove that his son's soul and none other must have spoken to him from the Beyond. But those who know the fine and intimate way in which “second sight” works, and that under certain abnormal conditions the intimate character of such a perceptive capacity is really able to overcome space and time (mediums always possess this perceptive faculty, though in the great majority of cases this is not to their advantage) those who are acquainted with this fact, also know that a person endowed with second sight can go to the point of giving a description as in the case of Sir Oliver Lodge's son, a description which may be characterized as follows:

The two photographs arrived in London two or three weeks after the séance. The attention of the people who were present at the séance was turned towards these pictures; that is, to something pertaining to the future. And this fact pertaining to the future could be interpreted by a kind of second sight which the medium possessed.

In that case, it cannot be said that Raymond Lodge's soul shone in supersensibly into the room where Sir Oliver Lodge was making his experiments. Here, we simply have to do with something enacted completely upon the physical plane; that is to say, with a vision of the future surpassing the ordinary perceptive capacity, but which does not justify us to admit that Raymond Lodge's soul manifested itself from Beyond in the séance room.

I mention these two examples and the objections against them, in order to awaken in you a feeling for the conscientiousness and for the critical attitude of anthroposophical spiritual research. The spiritual investigation practiced in Anthroposophy does not at first proceed from any abnormal phenomena (the two last lectures proved this), but from completely normal conditions of human life, which appear in the forces of cognition, of the will and of feeling. Anthroposophical research seeks to develop these forces which enable one to gain a knowledge of the super-sensible worlds, in order to be, as it were, inwardly entitled to this knowledge, and in order to gain the true conscientiousness required in a training which strengthens thought

.Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

Meditation exercises, such as those recently described to you, strengthen our thought to a high degree, so that our way of thinking becomes just as alive and intensive as sensory perception. Then there are the will exercises already mentioned to you, which will be characterized more fully in these lectures. Will exercises require above all an intensive observation of normal life; we must become quite familiar with the conditions in which we normally live.

A short time ago, a scientist published a brief resume of the science of Anthroposophy inaugurated by me. This man is in no way a blind believer. He briefly recapitulates what I have been giving you as Anthroposophy, a material which already constitutes a voluminous literature. He recapitulates it, by declaring that he is neither for nor against Anthroposophy, but then he makes a remark which has the semblance of being that of a strong opponent, although the author is neither an opponent nor a follower. I must confess that this strong remark pleased me exceedingly, particularly if seen in the light in which Anthroposophy appears in comparison with modern culture. The writer remarks that in the light of ordinary consciousness many of my statements produce an irresistibly comical effect. I must admit that I like this remark for the following simple reason: When things are mentioned, such as Sir Oliver Lodge's case, or the other case reported by me, people prick their ears, because in a certain way this appeals to their sensationalism and because it differs from what they are accustomed to hear.

This does not in any way seem comical to them. But when an Anthroposophist is obliged to establish a connection with altogether normal and human things, with human memory, or with the ordinary expressions of the human will, and explains that through certain exercises human thought may be intensified and that through self-education the will can be developed so that one changes and is able to penetrate as a transformed human being into the super-sensible world—when an Anthroposophist uses ordinary words designating things which ordinarily surround us, words which people do not like to apply to anything else—then he may produce an “irresistible comical effect”. Many things in Anthroposophy have such an irresistible comical effect on people who only wish to apply words to things in ordinary life. To an anthroposophical spiritual investigator, such views on Anthroposophy frequently appear like a letter which someone is supposed to read, but instead of reading it he begins to make a chemical analysis of the ink with which it is written. I must confess that many statements on Anthroposophy really appear to me as if a person were to analyze the ink used in writing a letter, instead of reading that letter!

The essential point in the foundations of Anthroposophy is to go out from completely normal human experiences, to have a good knowledge of modern scientific truths, of modern ethical life, and to develop these very things more intensively, so that one can penetrate into the higher worlds through an intensification of the cognitive forces which already exist less intensely in ordinary life and in science. One must, of course, have an understanding for these ordinary human experiences. One must bear in mind the ordinary normal experience, which falls out of what one likes to observe carefully. Things must, so to speak, become enigmas and problems. Although they form part of ordinary life, one easily fails to see their enigmatic character. For many people the “irresistible comical effect” begins at this point, where one begins to say: The questions connected with the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping, these above all must be looked upon as enigmas.

During our life, we constantly change over from the condition of waking to that of sleeping, but we do not take much notice of this pendulum of life, swaying between the conditions of waking and sleeping. The strangest theories have been advanced in this connection. I might talk for a long time, were I to mention some of these theories relating to the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. But let me mention only one of these theories, the most well-known and usual one; namely, that one simply takes for granted that when the human being is awake he gets tired and as a result goes to sleep, and that sleep in its turn counter-balances fatigue. Sleep (this can be described in one or the other way, more or less materialistically) eliminates the cause of fatigue.

I would like to know if radical upholders of this theory can really say that fatigue is the cause of sleep; for instance, when they observe a person who really has no cause whatever for getting tired during the day—let us say, a fat gentleman living on private means, who goes to a more solid concert or to a lecture, not late in the evening, but in the afternoon, and who falls asleep not after the first five minutes, but after two minutes!

These things at first may really present a slightly comical aspect, but if they are viewed from every side, their earnest enigmatic character must stand before our souls. Those who believe that the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping can be studied with the aid of the ordinary scientific methods applied today, will never reach a satisfactory solution of this problem. Even such completely normal questions of life cannot be approached with the ordinary cognitive forces, but with a thinking intensified by meditation, concentration and other soul exercises described in my book “Knowledge of the Higher Worlds” and in my “Outline of Occult Science,” and also with transformed forces of the will.

What is attained when we try to intensify thought by earnest meditation? I already explained to you that meditation must begin by intensifying thought to such an extent that it becomes a transformed memory. Our ordinary memory contains inner pictures which reproduce the experiences of our ordinary earthly life since our birth. Through memory, the picture of some real event stands before the soul, and that our soul life is soundly connected with the external world in which we live, is guaranteed by the fact that we do not somehow mix up things fantastically, but that our memory pictures indicate things which really existed.

We must therefore come to the point of placing before our soul, in the imaginative understanding described in the last few days, pictures which resemble our ordinary memory pictures. These pictures simply arise through the fact that we place them into our consciousness, and by filling consciousness with an ever greater amount of meditative representations we strengthen the soul capacity of thinking in the same way in which a muscle is ordinarily strengthened by exercise. We must reach the point of intensifying thinking to such an extent that it can live within its own content, in the same way in which we ordinarily live within our sense experiences through our senses.

When such exercises have been made for a sufficiently long time, when we really attain to such a living way of thinking, then something develops which may be designated as a plastic, form-giving, morphological way of thinking. Our thinking then contains a living essence; it has a living content which can ordinarily only be found in sense perception. In that case we begin to notice something new: What modern natural science brings to the fore, is a source of regret to many; it constitutes materialism. But Anthroposophy, which aims through its methods to penetrate into the super-sensible worlds, must in a certain sphere become thoroughly “materialistic,” stimulated in the right way by modern science.

This is the case if we learn to strengthen our thinking in the right way, if we can have before us, in imaginative thought, images which are just as alive as sense perceptions and with which we deal just as freely as with sensory perceptions. When we perceive something through our senses we know unmistakably that we see red or hear the note C sharp and that these are impressions which come to us from the external world, not impressions which rise out of our own soul. In the same way we know through imaginative thinking that the images which rise up before us are not empty phantasms produced by the soul, but that they are a living essence within, resembling sensory perception.

When we inwardly experience this emancipation from the body, this freedom which also exists in sense perception, we also know what constitutes memory in ordinary life. When we remember something, we always plunge into our physical body; every memory thought is connected with a parallel physical or at least etheric bodily process. We learn to know the material importance of that life which constitutes the ordinary life of memory. We then no longer ascribe the contents of memory to the independent soul, as does Bergson, the French thinker, but we know that in the ordinary memory process the soul simply dives into the body and that the body is the instrument which conjures up our memories. Now we know that only by IMAGINATION we reach the stage of being able to think independently of the body, of being able to think in ordinary life only with the soul, which we never do otherwise. In ordinary life we perceive through our senses, we abstract our thoughts from the sensory perception and retain them in our memory. But this process of retaining the thoughts in memory implies that we dive down into our body.

Imaginative knowledge alone shows us the true process of memory and that of sensory perception. Imaginative knowledge shows us what it means to live in free thoughts, emancipated from the body. It also shows us what it means to dive down into the physical organism with our thoughts, when we remember something. Even as we learn to know these things through an intensification of thinking, through an enhancement and strengthening of thought by meditation, so we may learn to know through the WILL how to pass through a kind of self-training which leads to similar results.

In ordinary life, the will only acquires a certain value when it passes over to external action; otherwise it remains mere desire, even though we may cherish the highest ideal, the most beautiful ideals, even though we may be true idealists. The highest ideals will remain mere desires, if we are not able to take hold of the external physical reality.

What characterizes a DESIRE, a WISH? It has the peculiar quality of being abstracted and withdrawn from the world of reality. Symbolically one might say: When we only have desires, this is like retracing the feelers of the soul. We then live completely within our own being, within the soul element. But we also know that desires are, to begin with, tinged by the human temperaments. A melancholic person will have desires which differ from those of a sanguine person. The physical foundation of desires could soon be discovered by those who investigate these matters conscientiously with the aid of natural-scientific methods. The etheric foundation of desires can therefore be seen in the temperament, but their physical conditions can be perceived in the special composition of the blood or in other qualities of the bodily constitution.

This calls for that critical attitude mentioned at the beginning of my lecture; such a critical attitude shatters, I might say, many a pleasant dream. Allow me to give you a few indications which show how such peasant dreams can vanish.

I certainly do not mean to be irreverent, nor do I destroy any ideal through lack of reverence, for I have a deep feeling for all the beauty contained, for instance, in the mysticism of St. Theresa or of St. John of the Cross. Do not think that I fall back behind anyone in admiring all the beauty contained in such mystical expressions. But those who have some experience of the special way in which, for instance, St. Theresa or St. John of the Cross produced their visions, know to what extent human desires have a share in these visions. They know that desires which live in the soul's depths have a share particularly in mystical experiences, and these desires may lead a spiritual investigator to study the bodily constitution of these mystics. Nothing is desecrated when a spiritual investigator draws attention to such things, when he indicates that in certain organs he discovers an inner state of excitement, that the nerves exercise a different influence on certain organs, thus producing certain effects in the soul, which may even take on the beautiful aspect of the visions described by St. John of the Cross or by St. Theresa, or by other mystics of that type. We are far more on the right track if we seek the foundation of such visions, which are so beautiful and poetic in the case of St. Theresa and of St. John of the Cross, in certain bodily conditions. This leads us far more on to the right track than if we seek some nebulous mystery as an explanation for these visions.

As stated, I do not wish to pull to pieces something which I revere as much as any other person in this room, but the truth must be shown, and also the critical attitude derived from an anthroposophical foundation. It must be shown that an anthroposophist above all should not fall a prey to illusions. To begin with, he should be free from illusion also in regard to human desires which are rooted in the human organism, desires rooted in a part of the physical human organism which flares up, comes, so to speak to a boiling point, if I may use this expression, and which leads to the most beautiful visions.

A person who wishes to become a spiritual investigator in the anthroposophical meaning, should not only strengthen his thinking through meditation, but he should also transform his desires through self-training.

This can be done by taking in hand systematically that which otherwise takes place as if of its own accord. Let us honestly admit that during our ordinary life we allow events to guide us far more than we ourselves guide the course of our life. In ordinary life this or that thing may influence us, and if we look back ten years into our past earthly existence, we find that the external conditions and the people whom we met, unfolded within us a side of our character which now presents a different aspect from what it was like ten years ago.

A person who earnestly strives to become an anthroposophical investigator must, in this connection, also make exercises which influence the will. The ordinary will in life acquires a meaning when directed towards external actions. But an anthroposophical spiritual investigator must apply the impulses of the will to his own development, to his own life. He should be able to pursue the following aim: “In regard to this or that expression of life, you must change, you must become different from what you were.” Though it may seem paradoxical, it is a great help if we begin to change something within us through our own initiative, through our own impulse, if we change some strongly-rooted habit, or even a small trifle. I repeat that it can be something quite insignificant; for instance, one's handwriting. If someone really strives with an iron will to change his handwriting, the application of energy required for the transformation of a habit may be compared with the gymnastic exercises for the strengthening of a muscle. By growing stronger and by being applied inwardly instead of outwardly, the will begins to exercise certain influences upon the human being. The transformations in the external world once produced by the effects of the will, now become transformations within human nature.

If we do exercises of the will, as described in detail in anthroposophical books, we reach the point of transforming our life of desires, so that these become emancipated from the human organization, even as our thinking emancipates itself from the body through meditation.

During the moments in which we live in anthroposophical research, we are no longer in a condition which may be described by saying that the wish is father of the thought. When we apply this self-training and these pedagogical impulses at a maturer age, our wishes and desires become an inner power which unites with the emancipated thinking. This leads us to a real perception of the true nature of the will impulses in ordinary life, and to a perception of the true nature of thoughts in ordinary life. Even as we ordinarily perceive red or blue, or hear C sharp or C, so we now perceive thoughts as realities; we learn to know the will impulses objectively; that is to say, separated from our own being.

In this way we reach the point of having a right judgment of the alternating conditions of waking and sleeping. Only by rendering thought objective through exercise, as objective as a sense perception, so that we are no longer connected with our body as in the case of a remembered thought, only with this thinking developed in free meditation, can the act of falling asleep be rightly grasped and perceived.

A person who seeks to gain insight into the normal act of falling asleep, with the aid of the ordinary cognitive forces, may set up one hypothesis after the other, but he will not be able to recognize the true nature of sleep.

This intensified thinking which we acquire, and on the other hand our transformed desires, are those which show us that when we fall asleep we can, in a certain way, still follow the moment in which sleep takes hold of us; we look, as it were, upon the act of falling asleep and we learn to know that when we go to sleep we do not simply have before us a changed bodily condition, but that we really slip out of our body with our independent soul life; we go out of our body and we leave something behind; namely, our thoughts.

We can leave our thoughts behind consciously, when we fall asleep, only because our thinking has been intensified. The thoughts remain behind with the body and fill it in the shape of formative forces. We then notice that we abandoned our body only with our feeling and with our will. But by perceiving with what part of the soul we leave the body, we obtain at the same time an objective certainty that we have an independent soul essence and that we go out of the body with this independent soul essence.

Now we know that what we leave behind on the bed on falling asleep, is not only something which can be investigated by physiology, anatomy, and biology, but that it is permeated by the woof of thoughts. This woof of our thoughts must first be made strong enough, so that we can abandon it consciously, in the same way in which we consciously turn our face away from color and in the same way in which we turn away from a perception. Through this strengthened thought we know that we leave behind on the bed our physical body and a body of forces containing thoughts which act like forces; we leave these bodies behind so that they may exist independently between falling asleep and waking up.

These thoughts, these morphological thoughts described to you in recent lectures [Lectures given on the 25^th and 26^th of November, 1921.] exist in our ordinary consciousness only as reflected images. They, too, have a reality, and with this reality they fill out our physical body as a special etheric body.

Now we know that when we fall asleep we abandon our sensory body and our thought body. (I might also say, the physical body and the etheric body, or the physical body and the body of formative forces. We abandon these bodies with our will and with our feeling. In ordinary life our constitution does not enable our consciousness to remain clear; it is not strong enough to maintain consciousness unless it is filled out by thoughts. Consciousness, such as we have it in ordinary life and in ordinary science, must unite with the body and experience within the body the thoughts of the body; only then it is fully conscious. But when the soul goes out of the body as mere feeling and will, we ordinarily become unconscious.

A person who attains to the imaginative thinking mentioned in these days, experiences the moment of falling asleep consciously, and he can produce conditions which resemble ordinary sleep, except that they are not unconscious, but that forces are at work within him and that he can really experience the organism of feeling and of the will; that is to say, he really experiences that part of his being which can emancipate itself from the body.

If we thus learn to know the moment of falling asleep, we also learn to know the moment of waking up. We now learn to judge that the moment of waking up really consists of two parts: Our attitude on waking up is the same as when a sense impression is produced. Whenever we wake up, something must stimulate the soul. This need only be our own body, which has slept long enough and which produces this stimulus in its changed condition. But even as there is a stimulus in every sensory impression, so there is always a stimulus when we wake up, and this stimulus works upon our feeling, which left the body when we fell asleep. Even as the eyes and the ears perceive colors and sounds, so the emancipated soul now perceives through feeling something which is outside; the moment of waking up is a perception through feeling; we take hold of the body when we wake up. The independent will takes hold of the physical organism in the same way in which we ordinarily move an arm or a leg. Waking up really consists of these two acts.

In regard to falling asleep and waking up, we now learned to know the alternating connection between the independent soul which leaves the body every night with its feeling and with its will, and the conditions in which the soul lives from the moment of waking up to the moment of falling asleep, when it is united with the body. Anthroposophical investigation is therefore based upon a strengthening of the capacities of thinking and of the will, so that we are able to observe and really perceive things which we ordinarily cannot perceive. In this way we are able to perceive the alternating conditions of sleeping and waking, and we are then capable of passing on to something else.

If we continue more and more in the exercises described in these days and indicated in detail in the above mentioned books, we come to the point that we do not always fall asleep when we leave the body, but that we can at will draw out of the body our feeling and our will and really look back upon the body. Then the human body is as objective as a desk or a table in ordinary life. We learn to know a thing only because we are no longer connected with it, no longer penetrated by it subjectively, because it stands before us as an object.

The object which stands before us when we go out of the body with the will and with the feeling is above all the physical body. Tomorrow we shall see that this perception outside the body gives us a new aspect of man's physical being. We perceive, above all, the body of formative forces, consisting of a woof of thoughts, but active thoughts. We look back upon it as if it were a mirror. And then we are confronted by the strange fact that whereas formerly we were subjectively or personally connected with our thoughts, we now face this world of thoughts as if it were a photographic plate; in looking back upon our body our thoughts stand before us like a photographic plate. This is the same as the miniature reflection of the world which we ordinarily have in our eye. Even as the eye is an organ of sight through the fact that it can reproduce the world within itself, so the etheric and the physical body which remained behind, become a reflecting apparatus, where something becomes reflected soul-spiritually, whereas the eye only gives us a physical reflection of something outside. By leaving our thoughts behind in the physical body, we see through this mirror not only the woof of thoughts, but also the world.

The course of soul-spiritual events can therefore be described in detail, when the cognitive forces are intensified through meditation and a self-training of the will, in order to gain knowledge of the super-sensible worlds. Such a training enables us to develop certain conditions in which we are outside our body, but which do not resemble sleep; they constitute something which is indicated in my books as the continuity of consciousness. In higher knowledge we really go out of the body with our emancipated soul being. We can recognize that we have left the body through the fact that the mirror of thoughts is now no longer within us, but outside. We go out of the body, yet we remain completely conscious, as already explained.

We are able to return into the body whenever we like; we do not fall a prey to hallucinations or visions, but we can follow the whole process with mathematical precision. Since the whole process can be observed in this way, we are also able to judge the ordinary events of earthly life when we return into the body. Now we know what it is like to dive down into the body with the emancipated soul. We do not only learn to know the act of falling asleep, when we abandon the body, but now we also learn to return at will into our body with the emancipated soul.

It leaves a special impression upon us when we once experience this emancipated soul and then dive down again into the body, so that the soul becomes imprisoned by the body. The soul-spiritual world which was round about us when we were outside the body, now ceases to exist for us. We feel as if this world had vanished and that the body absorbs us as we dive into it. We also learn to know what it is like to abandon the body; we see how the thoughts go away from us, for they remain with the body, and how we abandon the body with the feeling and willing part of our soul. But in abandoning our body we feel at the same time that the spiritual world begins to rise up before us.

What knowledge have we gained? Through the processes of waking up and of falling sleep, we learned to know birth and death. We experienced how the human being unconsciously abandons his physical and etheric organism with his feeling and with his will and how he returns into the body when he wakes up in the morning.

When we have made the above-mentioned exercises, we grow conscious where formerly we were unconscious, upon leaving our body. In full consciousness we now experience in advance a process which takes place when we die. And when we dive down into our physical body on returning from the spiritual world, when the thoughts outside vanish and once more appear as mere images, asserting themselves within the personality as something which is not real, then we learn to know the process of birth.

Whereas the ordinary scientific methods content themselves with the ordinary understanding, with ordinary thoughts which are applied to external observations and experiments that remain connected with us, anthroposophical investigation transforms the personality by rendering thought objective and by using the body as an encompassing sense organ. I might say that the body becomes one large eye. This eye, however, is outside and it is simultaneously a photographic plate.

The world in which we penetrate through spiritual investigation, the soul-spiritual world, now reflects itself in the external world as thought. An insight into completely normal processes, such as sleeping and waking, or birth and death, now enables us to attain a vision of the soul world; we perceive everything that pertains to the soul. Now our own experience enables us to distinguish whether the process which Professor Schleich designates as death through auto-suggestion, or the “second sight” described by Sir Oliver Lodge, are mere unconscious representations, or not.

We can now recognize the attitude of a person who is not a conscious spiritual investigator, but whose soul is pushed out of the body by some abnormal conditions. This may be due to some illness of the physical body. Let us suppose that there is a lesion in an organ; this alone may suffice that the soul-spiritual being of a person not yet capable of independent spiritual vision is pushed out of the physical body, not because he falls asleep, but owing to a pathological condition of the body, so that he now obtains an imperfect perception of things which a spiritual investigator perceives consciously and methodically.

We need not deny the truth of abnormal observations which interest those people who wish to go beyond the sphere of ordinary, trivial facts. But we can look upon such abnormal observations critically, and such a critical attitude is due to the fact that the spiritual science of Anthroposophy is not the caricature which many people suppose it to be, but by awakening special spiritual forces and by fully recognizing the scientific conscientious method acquired by humanity in the course of the past centuries, it endeavors to rise up to the super-sensible worlds. Since the human being is connected with the super-sensible worlds with the innermost, immortal kernel of his being, spiritual investigation alone can recognize man's mortal and immortal essence. This will be explained more fully in tomorrow's lecture.

Through the fact that the human being dives down into his eternal part, that he does not only build up an anthropology transmitting a knowledge which can only be gained through the physical body, but through the fact that he builds up an Anthroposophy, transmitting a knowledge which can be obtained through the soul and spirit as independent parts, through this fact the human being really learns to know the world in its true aspect.

The aim of my next two lectures will be to describe the true being of man, also his immortal, everlasting being, and the true aspect of the universe, for the standpoint indicated today.